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I don't accept Sklansky's characterization of me. What I tend to object to - and I've told this to David - is what I percieve to be "in the box" type thinking when there is a lot going on outside the box. Such thinking can be arrogant or dismissive but not necessarily. It is the unbalanced, narrow, and unfair nature of such thinking I object to. I am not even arguing against the ideas from in the box so much as saying look, there's more to the picture. For your ideas to be robust they need to reflect the other side of the story. How many times have you heard one person's description of a conflict she was in with somebody else and wonder how on earth the other person could have been such a villian? Until you talk to the other person and get her side of the story.

Yes, I was impressed with John Paul II's side of the story and I was especially impressed with his statements about how the Catholic Church is not in conflict with science. A refreshing stance considering that of American Fundamentalists these days.

The topic of this thread does not imply a need to defend the Catholic Church for its past mistakes, although if I'm to get into a discussion of its mistakes I would like to hear its side of the story. The topic of this thread is to present something that seems to be out of the box thinking for a lot people. That is that there is a thing called Liberal Christianity. It is not a radical fringe but a vital part of many Mainline Protestant denominations, and elements of it can even be found in possibly the most Mainline of all Christian bodies, the Roman Catholic Church.

I guess I will say what I want to say regardless of what Sklansky thinks about it, and I hope you will too.

Sincere regards,

PairTheBoard

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well i dont know why u think im coming at this from inside the box or with too narrow a perspective or whatever. i think that science(finding knowable truths) as well as spirituality, religon or whatever should both play a role in many peoples lives and society at large. i merely have a problem when either one tries to impede on the others turf. regretfully it is allmost exclusivly religon which oversteps its bounds. i was merely commenting on the specific galileo incident which i think is illustrative of my general problem with science and religon mixing.

paul phillips wrote about intelligent desigen in his blog the other day and a couple sentances on the science vs religon debate i thought were interesting...."The details change but the battle is always the same. One group wants to find the truth and one group wants to protect their idea of the truth, and these approaches will forever be irreconcilable." liberal christianity i think falls in between somewhere.

getting both sides of the story and having a balanced view of everything is all fine and dandy but sometimes its merely an attempt to justify 2 irreconcilable beliefs.