Wasn't it easier when you still believed that Santa came down the chimney, and that the Tooth Fairy wasn't the dentist across the street? We are all raised in certain faiths and mindsets that govern our bias and pinions. It is the transition from said beliefs that cause the most friction and agitation with those of similar "bent" because they may feel a betrayal and insecurity from ones departure. However if their is a basic truth, it should be worth preserving and defending.
"Some respected Christian leaders, famous for defending the fundamentals of the faith against compromise, were guilty of their own compromise."
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles...When I was young my parents taught us our church was the only one. Because of the brutality that I endured at such hands, it was those very ideals that became solidified into a militancy within me... when it should have been the opposite because of the hypocrisy I witnessed. All I know that when those beliefs were challenged... with truth, it shook my core and the very fabric that I thought was holding me together... when in reality it was setting me free from my illusions of control. Regardless if what we believe, even if it is the truth... challenge only allows us to see if indeed we are truly believers.
Could it be that there are no absolutes... and compromise and tolerance is the only way we will come to agreement? Truth by definition leaves no room in certain circumstances... would we want a Pilot to be "open minded" in landing a plane... and follow the whims of his/her peers? The same could be said for doctors, engineers and designer of any critical works that involve the safety of the public. Social "engineering" is no different... designing and controlling the masses with a workable model that keeps chaos from happening. At the base of these sciences are core beliefs and fundamental "give-ins" that make the whole mess run... it is at this level that there is always conflict.
Our world view is our fundamental operating system. As the word connotates, our world-view may take some world-changing events to change the way we see things. I guess the similarity between one "belief" or the other is they can primarily be changed by more information... to the negative or positive. The sole difference between let's say, a religion or a relationship, is that one changes your mind... and the other your heart. It is the heart that being changed, can over-ride even logic... but that being said doesn't mean that all directions of the heart won't make sense. And it is here that there is a departure from what can easily be measured, controlled and predicted... the unforeseen possibility of a most likely improbable crossing of the intellectual line... where outside forces intervene the logical direction of all visible information, with the very reality of the unobservable facts... our quantum existance or experiencing God.
All it would take if for one to experience God, to throw a wrench in to all we "know" ...and one experience with God to change the way we view everything from there on in. The person who truly does experience God will no longer have ignorance as a defense, indifference as an option... rather they at that point become literally free from all prior illusions (even the Dawkins illusion). Many, like the "unbeliever" ...in truth a pre-believer, find themselves changed to the core at the discovery of God and never return to the "sanity" of ignorance ever again. Unlike like those who have constrained their paradigm to only allow certain "logic" ...WILL NOT perceive outside information, these in fact CANNOT perceive the absence of God after their experience. One could logically say they were in fact born again as a new creature.
It is not semantics that separate the religious experience with God, and the relationship or relational experience with God... it is a welcomed intervention outside of the individuals control that keeps them as they have become... and the failure of such would be the very evidence of the absence of this partnership with God. It is not then the mere belief in God that saves, but the willing trust in God. If God existed and failed to reveal Himself, we would have no obligation... however God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and furthermore still does to any seeking soul... the overwhelming evidence is all around us in those very believers, changed forever by an outside force called God.
I was a champion of evolution, militant religion, transcendental meditation and philosophy; to those who remained I am no more than a traitor to THEIR fundamental beliefs... and to the rest of the world, I am a traitor because of MY fundamental beliefs. But, these "beliefs" are not my own, they are implanted if you will, into my very being. A crude analogy is IF you upgrade your Windows operating system with software, that is one thing; but if you change the operating system to Ubuntu, that is totally a different matter. We still have all the basic hardware... but our operating systems have been changed.
It was easier being mindless, heartless adherents to a fundamental belief... where we could do all the damage we wanted in the name of science, religion and politics!
But someone had to come along and take the "fun" out of fundamentalism...
with talk of love and forgiveness, right and wrong...
it just happened to be Jesus Christ.