Thank you to Anthony Esolen of Mere Comments for linking to the new Christendom Review. Its first article, by Lydia McGrew, is The Irrational Faith of the Naked Public Square. It’s all good, but this, near the end, was downright arresting. She’s speaking to those who say, out of some vaguely held religious or moral sentiment, “I personally believe it (abortion, homosexual relations, racism, or whatever) is wrong, but I wouldn’t want to push my opinions on others” …
This approach encourages a lazy and debilitating contentment with irrationality. The believer who takes the “personally opposed, but…” line is acquiescing in the notion that it is perfectly all right for him to hold beliefs that are silly and irrational so long as he keeps them to himself. But not only is it not all right to believe irrational things, it is also not all right to keep our beliefs about vital questions to ourselves. Murder is not a private matter, and if you think your reasons for considering an act to be murder are so poor and subjective as to make your conclusion merely private, then you would do well to start thinking hard and to decide, on more carefully considered grounds, whether we are talking about murder or not. The issue is too important for woolly thinking.
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