Making trade-offs: The balance sheet for Christianity

Here's another recent piece by Alan Jacobs:

Presumably the problem with violence is that it brings physical (and often emotional and psychological) harm to people. But of course we do many things that bring physical and other kinds of harm to people. We drive cars, for instance. Yet hardly anyone says, "Driving cars harms people, so driving cars should be eliminated." Instead, people bring in the concept of the trade-off: they argue that the violence produced by the misuse of automobiles is compensated for by the various benefits of automobiles. And people calculate trade-offs when they consider the desirability or otherwise of almost anything we human beings do that has some dangerous component to it. Notice, though, how rarely the famous critics of religion do this.

Books & Culture, November/December 2007