Atheist Fundamentalism

[genkaus]

That’s a fair question. I think the same rules apply to religious instruction as they do to all other topics. Based on our own judgment and those of people we trust, we study known experts. Generally, we defer to their opinion until we feel sufficiently educated to challenge those opinions. Of course even experts disagree and we generally defer final judgment on an issue we feel is questionable until we have given them a fair reading.

That's the problem with religion, isn't it? The question of who are the known experts and how do you know it? In other fields when experts disagree, we have real world experiments and tests to help determine who is right - what is the test in religion?

I believe having a consistent hermeneutic matters more than a consistent results. The criticism that believers are cherry-picking is valid only to the extent that they do not have an overall methodology for determining how things should be “rightly divided.” This applies to all holy writ and sacred texts regardless of tradition.

The practice of "I'll pick what I feel is right" is an overall methodology for determining how things should be “rightly divided.”