The topic du jour

Religion, morality and faith do seem to be the topic of the day don't they?

Chris Nolan has a good post over on his blog on this topic.

I think one thing that might help this discussion is if we were to agree to clearly distinguish matters of religion from matters of faith and matters of morality. Perhaps we should blame it on the media, who have a tendency to favor simplified explanations, but the lines between these matters has become increasingly blurred in the last decade or so. As I said in my previous post on this topic, faith and religion are not equivalent topics. One can have faith without being religious(1).

Many on the left who openly mock faith do so, I suspect, out of a mistaken conflation of their worst experiences of religiosity with all matters of faith. They need to learn the difference. But it would also help matters if people on the religious right understood that those people on the left who feel that way may actually have just cause for their feelings.

It's in the nature of a dialog that each side needs to learn to look through the eyes of the other side. If we don't, all of us, right and left, will live to regret it.

(1. One could be religious without necessarily having faith. This would include those people who have attended church regularly all their life but do so more out of habit then out of personal conviction.)