{"id":349,"date":"2007-03-31T09:57:08","date_gmt":"2007-03-31T13:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=349"},"modified":"2007-05-06T09:03:40","modified_gmt":"2007-05-06T13:03:40","slug":"religious-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=349","title":{"rendered":"Religious life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Arguing that one cannot study religion academically, <a href=\"http:\/\/select.nytimes.com\/2007\/03\/31\/opinion\/31fishs.html\">Stanley Fish<\/a> writes:<\/p>\n<p>>The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociology or chemistry might get a bad grade or, at the worst, fail to be promoted. Those are real risks, but they are nothing to the risk of being mistaken about the identity of the one true God and the appropriate ways to worship him (or her). Get that wrong, and you don\u2019t lose your grade or your job, you lose your salvation and get condemned to an eternity in hell.<\/p>\n<p>But Professor Fish has a comparison problem.  The penalty for getting questions wrong <strong>about<\/strong> religion on a test is a failing grade; the penalty for getting a chemistry question wrong <strong>in real life<\/strong> is death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arguing that one cannot study religion academically, Stanley Fish writes: >The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociology or chemistry might &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=349\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Religious life<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,62,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academics","category-stanley-fish","category-weak-analogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}