ABSTRACT
The believer and the secularist are not cut off from one another. But this consideration may not alleviate the concern of philosophers who, like Annette Baier, still perceive religious trust as infantile and dangerous. A Christian may interpret the tradition very differently than Kierkegaard does; regrettably most of them do, and we have not established, for those outside of a religious frame of reference, why we should trust Christians. Kierkegaard draws a sharp distinction between true and false believers, but that distinction does not help, since, on his view, one will have to be a true Christian in order to know the difference, or at the least she would have to be very familiar with the Christian framework. Furthermore, religious traditions, perhaps especially Kierkegaard's Christianity, depict bloody and inglorious acts as sanctified by God within their holy scriptures. To read the scriptures or any collection of literature, one makes judgments aesthetic and moral.
