AKMA discusses something with which we are faced today )at least this is the predicament of which I am reminded when I read his treatment)
That is, the “forcing of one’s “truth” on others; as the Phillip Dick quote I posted just prior to this states: the truth stands on its own. But aside from the problem of so blindly following what one is convinced is the truth, (and often to the detriment of much larger truths) that we see happening among the nationalistic religious leaders, and the imperial leaders who gladly sound the refrain and appropriate it for their own ends, aside from this there is the means of communicating those things which we consider most vital to such BASIC things as SURVIVAL and an approach to nukes that is the ultimate case for the unquestioned use of “Abstinence Only” as the best approach (that of Nukes)
AKMA suggests that …Christans (since I don’t presume to dictate theology to non-Christians) identify those theological claims to which they will adhere, and humbly and peaceably live out the consequences of those claims. Coercion falsifies claims about the character of a God of peace; it’s no cop-out, then, to strive for cooperative neighborliness among our dissenting sisters and brothers, so long as we do not back away from the robustness of our truth-claims. “Nonviolence is not only an ethic about power but also an epistemology about how to let the truth speak for itself” (John Howard Yoder, The Wisdom of the Cross); “Truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power” (Pope Paul VI, Dignitatis Humanæ). That’s no less the truth — but we relinquish the temptation to force others to live by a truth that they do not acknowledge