Thursday, February 10, 2005

Soft Evangelism, plus

Moderate evangelicals say that the "evangelical" part of their name is from their devotion to the principle of outreach, of seeking to convert. Mainline churches in fact say that they do the same thing, but do even less of it. It sounds potentially offensive, but, on the other hand, it's epistemologically similar to the paradox of aesthetic judgment: everyone is always seeking to universalize judgement, otherwise why bother expressing opinions? There's no difference between saying "X is good" and "In my opinion X is good", since everybody knows that, in the latter case, it's just one person talking. The difference is only of rhetorical strategy, how hard you're trying to sell. So the "evangelicals" who never try to push Christ are actually just doing a really soft sell.

Plus, I can't believe North Carolina didn't get a shot off against Duke at the end of last night's game. Morons. I tuned in at the very end, and I thought, from the way we were holding the ball, that we were up. Whoops. A team for the ages, my friends were telling me. OK.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I disagree with the evangelical point. Religious Jews would probably say that their religion is a good and proper way of viewing things; however, they don't give a rat's ass if anyone converts to Judaism and in fact would be happy to discourage non-Jewish blooded people from entering the faith. (in my humble [or not-so-humble] opinion) So I think just putting something out there is not actually (three year old Adam's favorite expression these days--wonder where he gets it from?) the same thing as wanting others to believe it too.

Anna S.