In the last posting I described a student encounter during which he objected not to the content of my gospel presentation. Rather he objected me making any truth claims about religion at all.
It struck me then, and has proven true since, that what was missing in this student and in many others was any personal experience of true religious conviction. If one only experiences religious ideas as opinion arrived at by the shallow exercise of personal preference, then one lacks the ability to imagine that someone else's religious ideas are constituted in a different way. The starting assumption is that all religious ideas are merely expressions of opinion and everyone who makes truth claims about their religion are knowingly foisting "opinion" upon others in a coercive way.
So in conversation about religion I have since found it necessary to first introduce the concept of true religious belief. It often goes like this. "If you were standing in the middle of the road and a truck was barreling down on you from behind I would yell 'get out of the road, there's a truck!' I would not then be trying to impose my view on you. I would be trying to save your life. I hold my religious ideas in much the same way. I am convinced that they are in fact true and that, being true, they are of absolute importance in my relationship to others. We can discuss the reasons why they might be true or not true, but understand that I am only talking about this because I believe it is truly true."
We'll explore later how we might relate "true truth" to "hope" for much that we hold to be true we hold as a hope and not as a realized reality.
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