There are a lot of interesting debates out there. The most interesting and volatile are the ones which involve politics and/or religion. You know the old saying - don't talk about either if you want to avoid an argument. My dear old dad, God rest his soul, had some very strong opinions and avoided debate about them. Equally explosive are the ones which involve religion and science. Hmmm . . . Maybe religion is the actual powder keg in this whole mess. Pick an issue and find a way to incorporate religion into it and one of two things will happen. It will either explode or the other person will totally dismiss you. Sometimes both things happen.
For a person on a faith journey, this sometimes explosive nature of religion causes a problem. You don't know how to handle it. You don't even know if you SHOULD handle. Depending on where you are in your journey, you might find yourself debating abandoning the journey instead of the issue itself. All because you find yourself trying to reconcile two or more different starting points. Sometimes you have to choose one and accept the end result.
I'll never forget being in a college math class and the professor "proved" some things that were totally contrary to all my assumptions about how the world worked geometrically. But the proofs were completely valid. Despite their apparent illogical nature, their validity was an outcome of their starting points. In our "normal" flat world, we accept without question that you can draw one and only one straight line through any two points. However, pull a globe out and take a look at what our world really looks like. If you put one finger on the North Pole and one finger on the South Pole (two points), you can trace an infinite number of straight lines of longitude that connect these two. Suddenly, everything has changed!
So, back to the real purpose of this blog. Everybody's faith journey has a starting point. In fact it has multiple types of starting points. It has a starting point in time. You might not be able to identify that point, but at some point in your life, you began a conscious journey to explore matters of faith. Your journey has a philosophical starting point. That's the fun one because it can change. As you journey, you find yourself changing routes because your current road leads you to a dead end. Or you take a fork in the road somewhere that connects you to a set of ideas that are totally brand new and you realize that they are part of some other system and you are not even sure how you got there. You might even find yourself in one of those hot topic debates with seemingly irreconcilable positions and you have to choose a starting point so you can decide on one or the other positions.
There's a lot more to be said about starting points that I'll say later. I'd love to hear about the starting points of others - whether they be starting points in time or ideas. What are the starting points of your faith journey?
When is the right time?
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This past week I had coffee with the pastor of the church we're now
attending. I talked for about an hour straight, telling my story. All the
while he prov...
15 years ago
1 comment:
Interesting you should bring up the age of the earth. evolution vs. creation, etc. issue. This is definitely one of those that can even split a church if everyone participated in the debate.
Why I find it interesting is that just about an hour ago I was sorting through some old magazines in a filing cabinet. It was the Sept 1993 issue of a magazine put out by a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. In it were two articles about the whole age of the earth thing. One, written by a science professor from one of the denomination's colleges, promoted the standard science perspective of millions and billions of years. The other article was also written by a college science professor. This article supported the much younger figure of less than 10K years with some fairly good logic and reasoning. The interesting paradox in this whole matter is that she taught at a secular state university? Now if that ain't irony, I don't know what is.
If you read the two articles, it seems that both authors have the same starting point in their reasoning. But their conclusions are very different, so they deviated from one another at some point.
dlucks raises an important issue above. Are there issues that are good debates but not necessarily crucial in terms of our faith journeys? That question alone will spark a good debate. Maybe one day we'll see if we can the online audience to participate in such revelry.
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