Experience

My friend holdingonforahoyos1962 and I were having a running joke about the term experience... I think he sums up his objection to it very well:

I was having a discussion about this in the pub on Friday and I’m coming to the conclusion that the separation of experience and reason is the ultimate ineptitude. All experience is rational and so to speak of experience in an objective sense rather than a subjective sense is what we need to establish. Unfortunately, the problem is that the term “experience” has been adopted exclusively by liberals to denote various conflicting and diverse views which cannot be reconciled with objective truth. One man’s experience is not necessarily another man’s and hence if we continue to speak of experience or rest our arguments upon it we are at the mercy of relativism cutting us down in one fell swoop by saying… “that’s your experience, not necessarily mine. Let’s agree to disagree.” This leaves us with a society where the common good is the pursuit of choice rather than truth…

I came to appreciate this in full yesterday when I was with a group of people delivering a day of talks about peace; I've never felt so embarrased to be a Christian in all my life. More of this soon.