Different Levels of Credibility Between Religions?

Published on May 12, 2010

Hunter Baker blogs at First Things that he is not entirely happy with the way his email interview with Sarah Harland-Logan of Harvard Political Review was excerpted in the final article, "Is Godless Good?" Baker is author of the 2009 book The End of Secularism ("The provocative assertion of the book is that secularism is of little value as a public philosophy and should be discarded as a failed experiment.") and a professor at Houston Baptist University. So he's decided to publish the entire interview himself.

Hunter Baker blogs at First Things that he is not entirely happy with the way his email interview with Sarah Harland-Logan of Harvard Political Review was excerpted in the final article, “Is Godless Good?” Baker is author of the 2009 book The End of Secularism (“The provocative assertion of the book is that secularism is of little value as a public philosophy and should be discarded as a failed experiment.”) and a professor at Houston Baptist University.  So he’s decided to publish the entire interview himself.

Yet, he rather sets up the same old secular v. religious argument that many secularists do:  The other guys are the bad guys set on dominating the public square (whatever that really is); we Christians just want to avoid totalitarianism (the secularists say theocracy and have a few more examples to cite than Hitler, Stalin and Mao).  The entire interview is a fun read but hardly provocative; until you reach the last paragraph:

I do wish, though, that secularists would differentiate better between religions.  There are a number of critical differences.  When Paul spoke to the men of Athens (the philosophers) at the Areopagus, he defended Christianity on the basis of the resurrection of Christ as a public event in time, space, and history.  He said God furnished evidence.  That’s a different [sic] from pure revelation.  So, there’s the issue of different levels of credibility between religions.  And secondly, of course, they have different track records.  I am often shocked that many American secularists resort to the type of hyperbole where they compare conservative Christians to members of the Taliban.  How can I take someone who says something like that seriously?

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