Thursday, January 8, 2009

What Can We Talk About?

I found a great quote today in the Economist, in an article on conversions of Muslims in Kosovo to Christianity. In the reader's comments, someone very perceptively wrote the following:

Discussing large things is now a capital offense, we must only debate
trivialities. You may oppose a man's opinion on transportation policy, but you
must not oppose his view of the world - even if he wishes to see that world burn
in an act of suicidal violence.

1 comment:

rod said...

though this is a much broader statement than mine, I had a thought today after reading several bits concerning overcoming sin. The first was by John Piper, and I resonated greatly with it. In fact, it affirmed some things I'd written on my blog about 5 years ago. Later though, I was reading someone's thoughts and I just couldn't be sure about what they meant by "sin." I'm wondering if we intentionally use the word "sin" so as not to be specific enough to elicit disagreement. Certainly everyone agrees that "sin" is bad. But if we were actually to say what we mean by that, perhaps some of our closest friends would disagree.