With apologies for gross oversimplification, let me posit that those of us who post on the Religion channel can be divided roughly into two camps: Not believers and non-believers, but those of us who appreciate our own biases and limitations and those of us who missed that memo. You can find believers and non-believers in each camp.
It’s not that the one camp is any less confident in its beliefs than the other; it’s more that the one camp seems to have a lesser tendency to mistake their beliefs for facts. I’ll call these two camps the “In my opinion (IMO)” camp and the “In fact” camp.
I am firmly a non-believer. I can have delightful and instructive conversations with “IMO” believers and non-believers alike. With the “in fact” crowd, if I engage at all, it tends to mostly be talking past each other.
Questions for discussion:
- Do you see yourself in the IMO camp or the In Fact camp?
- Have you moved from one to the other–and if so, can you describe the how and/or why of that transformation?
- Do you prefer conversing with one or the other?