Thursday, September 18, 2014

A certain segment of the population would be scandalized.

A certain Christian leader has a more complicated relationship with God than simple 100% certainty 100% of the time.

I find it refreshing that the leader of some large Christian group is willing to discuss openly the interplay of doubt and faith for a modern audience, since I am quite certain that it was not problematic to have this sort of posture in the distant past (it would be expressed somewhat differently), but in the modern era any sort of intellectual questioning in some circles became completely subversive and was repressed. In many corners of Christendom, this leads to an official fideism with a large number of, say, teenagers running off to college to find that the pat religious instructions about faith which do not admit any sort of "doubt" cause them to abandon God because they can't stop the questions. And questions mean you are doubting, so you have no faith. This is an unfortunate conclusion. But uncertainty is scary and it takes quite a lot of courage to admit uncertainty and unknow what you know. It is terra incognita. But the sane people have learned to deal with it. But there are no easy answers.

Or maybe the world began 7522 years ago and we do have all the answers. The real problem of doubt is how do we crucify the mind so that we ignore everything that appears to be true about the world. Answer: faith!

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