Reader Cathy Fasano put the point so colorfully that I thought I’d quote it:
You can certainly disagree with . . . [any] conclusion[s] that moral theologians of whatever faith come up with in gazillions of particular cases. But . . . [f]orests worth of trees have been felled, herds of sheep slaughtered, great pits of clay have been quarried, all so that several millenia of humans can write down their reconsiderations of deific decrees. Up until a few hundred years ago, theology was more or less the only intellectual discipline out there. . . .
I’m not terribly interested in most theological arguments myself; they don’t speak to me and my concerns. But I imagine that many deeply religious people feel the same way about utilitarianism or objectivism or a wide range of other secular moral philosophies. (Naturally, not all — there are surely religious thinkers who are intellectually interested in secular philosophies, and vice versa, whether out of intellectual curiosity, a desire to borrow from other philosophies, or just a desire to better understand others’ views.) One doesn’t have to agree with theological debates, though, to recognize that religious people spend a lot of time trying to get others, both within their traditions and outside thos traditions, to reconsider their understandings of divine decrees — and in many instances succeed.
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