Six Things I Believe In

Six Things I Believe In

Ribbit. Long and rambling, like all my lists.

6. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

5. The children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. I’m sorry, but this lyric bothers me, because it presents something obvious as being a belief. The children are our future? Duh. Who else is it gonna be? The geriatrics? The children are our future… way to go out on a limb, Whitney. I believe that 2 + 2 = 4. I’m wild and crazy like that.

4. I believe in absolute truth. This is completely independent from religion. I just believe that philosophically and logically, there is such thing as absolute truth, therefore it’s sensible to talk of such things as right as wrong, to say that society or the world is getting better or worse, that different ideas can be more and less meritorious.

3. There are intelligent and informed critics of Christianity, and there are unintelligent and uninformed critics of Christianity, and the vast majority of critics belong to the second camp. I strongly believe that philosophically, Christianity provides the only rational explanation to a lot of conundrums. Like, some people have problems with predestination and judgment. It’s somewhat valid. The problem is, the same issue exists in secular philosophy. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time, maybe I will someday. But modern science and law tells us that we are firmly not in control, that there is no free will. Doesn’t matter if you believe in nature or nurture, either way you believe that your behavior is out of your hands, the inevitable result of either genetics or childhood environmental influence. This is true of a lot of issues: there are conundrums in Christianity, but they are mirrored by parallel conundrums in secular philosophy, and the unintelligent critic fails to recognize this, seeing it as a weakness of Christianity as opposed to a fact of life.

I also get annoyed when critics say stuff like how Christians have always held back progress, they were supposedly Hitler’s biggest supporters, yadda yadda yadda. Totally ignorant. Forget the fact that evangelicals in Germany were the Nazis’ greatest opponents (like, to the extreme, Bonhoeffer and the confessing church). Or that the abolishion of slavery was led by evangelicals. Also civil rights in the 60s. Evangelicals today are perhaps the most significant force moving to act for AIDS relief in Africa. Unintelligent. Uninformed. Wait, which list am I doing again?

2. Assuming a certain baseline level of ability, ambition and drive are more important in achieving worldly success than intelligence. I have little drive and almost no ambition, so I will therefore not achieve worldly success.

1. “This too shall pass”. The great universal truth that applies to just everything in life, and to not recognize this is to be in denial. Whether it’s something I’m going through, the Republican majority in the Federal government, the Bay Area housing bubble, the postmodern world’s fascination with relativism, the very existence of the United States, whatever, it will eventually be gone. So it’s best to keep a loose grip on things. Not wise to put your faith in trust in something that will not last forever.