Faith: September 2017 Archives

tragic -- Live Right. Love Well.

"As I sit in my quiet, still house, I realize how much time and emotional energy has been spent dress rehearsing tragedy. So much. It makes me angry and sad all at once because I realize it is a distraction from the enemy that works every stinkin' time. Why? Because no matter what my head knows, my heart still struggles to believe that He is for me. That He is perfect in all of His ways, even when those ways hurt my heart. I wrestle with the truth that He is a good, good father. I still fight the tension of hearing His voice and believing His words. I'm still human.

"God is God and I am not. My delusion of self-sufficiency is broken all over again and I land on this truth. And then a wave of relief follows. I don't have to know it all or figure it out. Good! Because my way is exhausting."

How Oxford and Peter Singer drove me from atheism to Jesus - The Veritas Forum - The Veritas Forum

"Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion; a premise which needs to be agreed upon before any conversation can take place.

"I remember leaving Singer's lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo; I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism.  But I knew from my own research in the history of European empires and their encounters with indigenous cultures, that societies have always had different conceptions of human worth, or lack thereof.  The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent.  I began to realise that the implications of my atheism were incompatible with almost every value I held dear."