'The sacred and sacrilege—ethics not metaphysics'.

When I tell my colleagues in both the School of Philosophy and the School of Government that I am writing on blasphemy and sacrilege most of them meet me with blank stares and I have a distinct feeling that they think I have crawled out of the seventeenth century. And yet, in this world beset more each day with religious tension between faiths and between adherents of the same faith it becomes increasingly more urgent to find an adequate cross-cultural, multi-faith way of addressing questions of blasphemy and sacrilege. I haven't crawled out of the seventeenth century so there must be another explanation for this dichotomy of attitude. My teenage son has found the perfect explanation for any disputes or dichotomies which occur between us. He has learned some of the language of my world view so instead of shouting 'you don't understand me' and slamming out of the room he fixes me with his big brown eyes and says, 'either our paradigms are different, or you have made a category error'. Perhaps this is the explanation here. Either my paradigms are different from those of my colleagues or they have made a category error.