Purify Your Bride

The problem is people believe things and refuse to question it. If Hitler was willing to consider he was wrong, he might not have gone on the killing spree.

This comes from Samuel Skinner’s comment on the last post. It says in a few words what Steve Palvina says in many. That is that there is some sort of advantage to not holding to any particular belief system. That you can dismiss all religions without even asking if they are true. They are just inherently bad because they cause you to believe things. Here is Steve:

One of the worst mistakes you can make in life is to attach your identity to any particular religion or philosophy, such as by saying “I am a Christian” or “I am a Buddhist.” This forces your mind into a fixed perspective, robbing you of spiritual depth perception and savagely curtailing your ability to perceive reality accurately. If that sounds like a good idea to you, you’ll probably want to gouge out one of your eyeballs too. Surely you’ll be better off with a single, fixed perspective instead of having to consider two separate image streams… unless of course you’ve become attached to stereo vision.

Notice how Steve has not forced his mind into a fixed perspective at all. He is totally open to Buddhism or Christianity. It is the typical modern tendency to be skeptical of everything and think that somehow makes you intelligent. It is like looking for a wife. If you date one woman then you limit your perspective. You say “no” to everyone else so you can explore the one option. If you marry her you make that a permanent rejection of everyone else to pursue that one relationship. That allows you to have a family and experience a depth of love that would not be possible without making that commitment. Now if you marry the wrong person that can be a very bad thing. Steve and Samuel seem to think it is always a bad thing just because you have closed yourself off from so many other options. They can only see what you lose and nothing of what you gain.

With religion and marriage you only have really one chance. You are giving yourself totally and you can only do that to one religion and one spouse. So how do you choose which faith is true? Well, they seem to have a definite bias against comprehensive systems of thought. They seem to much prefer to create their own belief system. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to attack the Catholic church. Again they seem to want to dismiss it not based on a lack of truth but just on the very fact that you are accepting something from outside yourself.

But what are you looking for? Are we not seeking the meaning and purpose of life? Certainly we can’t find that in ourselves. We didn’t decide to come into existence. If we are here for a reason that reason must come from some intelligence beyond humans. That means God. So if there is a God and humans have been trying to connect with him and perhaps He has been trying to connect with us then it makes sense that those efforts might have produced some fruit. To think that there is nothing to learn from others who have contemplated God is quite strange. Why think you can succeed where others have failed?

Maybe they would say you can learn something from others but somehow accepting it as a true and complete belief system is going to far. But that introduces a fuzzy line of how much you can take from one faith before you have become a de facto adherent. There is just no logical reason to think one faith would not be basically right. Why rule that out before you start?

The other thing to consider is that God is trying to reveal Himself to us. If He is then we should see evidence of that. It might well take the form of a religion that goes back to antiquity and is based around certain supernatural events and revelations. Of course, this is the claim Christianity makes for itself. That is that God revealed Himself through Abraham and through Moses and most especially through Jesus. So how can a claim like that be tested? Well, you would expect a long and consistent revelation. You would expect signs and miracles. You would expect this teaching to change the world and change it for the better. The point is there can be and should be a way to think about claims that somebody is revealing God to us. We should not just accept it. Still, it could be true. There is no logical reason why it could not be. If it is true we need to respond. Can we explain to the God of the universe that we don’t want to force our lives into a fixed perspective? No. Once we have found the person who has created us and gives our lives meaning and purpose then we give ourselves to Him. If that means also giving ourselves to a religion than so be it.