Word: unbeliefs
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According to Chesterton, tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything. Chesterton meant that as a critique of tolerance. But it captures nicely the upside of unbelief: where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution. When it is believed that on your religion hangs the fate of your immortal soul, the Inquisition follows easily; when it is believed that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes easily. After all, we don't persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods...
Might a robust conception of heaven be the victim of an unbelieving era? Perhaps, but if so, unbelief is selective. Lynn Garrett, religion editor at Publishers Weekly, who has tracked the recent popular vogues for angels and miracles, observes that there is almost no corresponding interest in the place where angels live and from which miracles erupt into our lives. Perhaps the biblical heaven is too big to be marketable. Perhaps it is a victim of its own, centuries-long hype: so much has been claimed for it, much of it contradictory, that our literal-minded age overloads and calls...
...conventionalism as Peninsula would have you believe. There are sources of great and invigorating wisdom in the old antheap, and we should take such counsel wherever we can get it. In our foraging, however, we must be careful, unlike our fellows over at Peninsula, not to mistake irreverence for unbelief...
...this context that Blomberg, given his position on the religious/political spectrum, makes a remarkably friendly assessment of the Jesus Seminar. "People like Crossan," he ventures, "see themselves, though we might disagree, as holding out one way of salvaging something of Christianity lest the whole thing deteriorate into pure unbelief...
...third, we are witnessing the end, or at least the decline, of an age of unbelief and beginning what may be a new age of faith...