Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.
Interpretation
Understanding a religion requires both immersion and a detached perspective.
Julian Baggini emphasizes the importance of fully understanding a religion by not only immersing oneself in its beliefs and practices but also by adopting an objective viewpoint. This dual approach allows for a deeper appreciation of the complexities and nuances of religious systems, suggesting that a comprehensive understanding requires a balance between subjective experience and critical analysis.
In practice
In a discussion about religious tolerance, one might say, 'As Julian Baggini noted, understanding a religion requires both immersion and an objective view.'
The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
So far as this argument is concerned nonhuman animals and infants and retarded humans are in the same category; and if we use this argument to justify experiments on nonhuman animals we have to ask ourselves whether we are also prepared to allow experiments on human infants and retarded adults; and if we make a distinction between animals and these humans, on what basis can we do it, other than a bare-faced - and morally indefensible - preference for members of our own species?
Consequently, Christian meditation is entirely trinitarian and at the same time entirely human. In order to find God, no one need reject being human personally or socially, but in order to find God all must see the world and themselves in the Holy Spirit as they are in God's sight.
Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.
Faith in the resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being; the cry for unending life which is a part of the person is indeed answered... God exists: that is the real message of Easter. Anyone who even begins to grasp what this means also knows what it means to be redeemed.
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
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