Larry,

This post does humanity a great service by foregrounding the importance of Philosophical worldviews and their interrogation.

Nevertheless, the implied conclusion that Christian youth are intrinsically less violent due to their adherence to a Christian worldview, I think, hazards toward a sort of infallibility inappropriate to our station. What must be added to a recognition of the importance of worldviews is attention to the contexts from which they arise.

Worldviews, it must be remembered, are not only expressed by individuals, but also by institutions made by aggregates of individuals. Just as in Saudi Arabia the prevailing worldview is not Christian, in Germany, where this study was conducted, the prevailing institutional worldview is most certainly not Muslim. The consequence of this fact is that minority believers are placed morally at odds with a number of dominant institutional and social practices.

From being placed morally at odds with the practices of one's community (as surely Christians can sometimes appreciate) a practical problem arises for one's own moral conduct. The central question is this: "What should I do, given that I take my community to be immoral and that such immorality bears serious implications for my own moral life?"

While some will advocate pacifist resistance as the only appropriate response to immorality, a quick glance at the diversity of theologies reveals that pacifism is not clearly the only or even necessarily 'most moral' reply to this dilemma. Much, of course, turns on what one makes of our material existence and the nature of divine intentions. Though there is not space to work through this complex problem here, I will point out, that just as a great many Christians follow Augustine in endorsing morally justified physical interventions into the conduct of others (and Just War by extension), a great many Muslims by way of the same form of reasoning, believe there is moral justification for intervening physically in what they take to be objectively immoral practices.

If we can recognize this much, we can easily see how the conclusion that Christians are less violent in a largely Christian institutional context is somewhat trivialized by the extent to which their worldview harmonizes with the practices of the community. When one lives in a community that one takes to be closer to sainthood rather than the fires of hell, the moral obligation to confront the practices of others is simply weakened.

In a Christian context, we can think of non-Pacificist believers who find abortion morally objectionable and who intervene, sometimes violently, to stop this practice. Such physical interventions (interpretable either as 'violence' from a liberal perspective or as a form of 'moral discipline/just war' from some Christian perspectives) would not occur in a context within which abortions are not being performed. Thus, we can see how to some extent the context, plus one's moral worldview determines what one takes to be morally permissible conduct and intervention.

What I am not saying is that both Christianity and Islam can be true where they make competing claims. This must be sorted out by lucid demonstration of which faith we ought to live by.

What I am trying to check against is the ease with which we can forget the need to be humble and charitable in the search for the Truth. By decontextualizing the Islamic youth criticized in the German study, this entry too easily removes Christians from History, dislocating our role as Believers into a position more appropriately occupied by the concept of God.

So long as we are not all-knowing and perfectly good ourselves, we must remember, as Christians, Muslims and Humans, that it is possible that we've failed to consider something relevant in believing in the validity our worldview, we must recognize that it is possible that our faith is misguided and that even our most deeply held beliefs could be wrong.

We must also recognize that they could also be correct.

In fact, as post-moderns often forget, there could be no error, no sense of contingency without this possibility.

This is what I love and cherish about Fixed Point, this regard for this common process and common ethos amongst believers--theist, atheist and agnostic alike. All of us are engaged in the process of trying to figure this stuff out and stand to benefit morally from discerning the correct answers--those that would correspond to what would be seen from an infallible view.

Let us not forget ourselves and the importance of this project of inquiry when vanity tempts us to proclaim ourselves more finished, more final and infallibly closer to God (let me remember this too!)

Thanks for all of your work,

-Nick