Ross Douthat: preference

Transcript context

…That makes me very suspicious about our particularist intuitions. If you just showed up and said, “Tyler, I will save your soul. You should be a deist,” we’d have a very different conversation. But when someone puts forward a very specific claim, I just don’t trust their specific intuitions. They seem so tied to society, conformist pressures, family, what they learned as a kid. I just think we should look at all of Sri Lanka and figure, “Hey, these people ended up where they did because of how they grew up.” That’s fine. It’s maybe good for social cohesion, but then move on to just thinking about it more abstractly. Why is that wrong? Well, right. This is where I’ve been saying to some of my religious friends that this is my most liberal book in a certain way, in that I go a certain distance with that argument. I do think that the diversity of religious traditions strongly suggests that some form of connection to God is available in a lot of different places. This is the official teaching of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. It’s not some radical, controversial opinion, but it is on the liberal side of potential theological interpretations. Absent any other indication of what kind of religion you should be, what sort of religious perspective you should have, a default to the one that works in your culture is, I think, by no means, crazy. I guess my question for you — as you know, since you read my responses — is, what to you makes religion distinct from other forms of knowledge, belief, and belonging? Because everything that you just said about religious belief obviously applies to politics. But much less.…

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