Spring Bookclub - Why do “Good” people disagree?

After a hiatus of 2 years forced on us by the coronavirus pandemic, Spring Bookclub reconvened this afternoon at our church.  30+ of us gathered at the church to discuss the question using Jonathan Haidt’s book as a basis for discussions.  We include additional material such as loads of practical examples familiar to us, such as the recent encounters with wild boars in Hong Kong.  We also include relevant input from the Bible and discussions on authoritarianism in addition to liberalism and conservatism.  Finally, having note the gulf of differences between the groups, what can we do to move forward?

The bookclub had started in 2013.  We meet once a month, whenever possible.  We do have to skip some months when the church calendar is extremely busy, such as Christmas, and when I am away on service-learning projects, typically in summer.  We read books on history, religion, science, philosophy, …, anything that pose challenges to our faith.  We want to understand the world, its affairs, and how we should respond.  

This time, we discuss how we make moral decisions.  How we think fast and slow.  How emotion dominates reason in our decision making.  How we make judgements quickly with intuition, then use reasoning to amend our judgments.  How our judgements affect others, whose judgements, in turn, affect us.  How we make decisions intuitively first, and then use reasoning to justify our decisions later.  How we think as a group, rather than as independent individuals.  …

We also discuss how we do what we know we should not, and not do what we should.  How the academic world avoids the spiritual domain.  How reason and faith should go hand in hand, rather than separately or even against each other. 

The discussion induced lots of sharing, and generated challenging questions. Much of which cannot be answered easily and quickly. For example, do we make decisions about faith intuitively and then use reason to justify them?  Are we condemned to let emotion dominate reason in our decisions?  That is just natural.  If these questions are easy to answer, then the world would not be in such a mess now.  But we should have the courage to face these questions head on.  They challenge us to go and study and think a lot more, both about the world, and with our faith.  But not to retreat into a shell and avoid having to face hard questions.  

Today we had a lively first session, out of a planned set of three.  We plan to convene again in January.  We are looking forward to it already.  God bless us all.