To scoff at what you don’t understand.
I had a very brief conversation with a guy at work about the negative mentality some individuals hold against religious people. Scoffing, laughing, just plain stomping on things that mean everything to a lot people. It’s horrible. Disheartening.
I’ve been around people like that. People who snicker behind someone’s back, razzing so-called friends for getting up early to go to church or mass or whatever. Though I have to admit, I used to be one of those people. I tried to be tolerant, but I didn’t fare well 100% of the time. Looking back on it, it’s quite embarrassing. Why did I do that? Why was I so heartless?
Maybe it was because I couldn’t understand how someone could believe in a god you can’t see. How someone could put so much faith into something without any proof. Proof. What is proof? Something you can see? Touch? Think? Is science, so steeped in theory and belief itself, is that proof?
Now that I’m older and in a different position in my life, I find that I’ve changed. I don’t want to just tolerate people anymore; I wish to accept. I want to accept people and learn about the things they know, to have them share the things that are important to them. I want to feel and love and experience alongside them, to see things in a new light.
Religion can be a beautiful thing and there is so much of it to learn. So many personal experiences to share. Just with being friends with this one guy at work I feel inspired and more fulfilled and it’s great because he doesn’t judge me either. We’re two very different people… who may not be so different after all.
So many people in my life have taught me so many different things. I give thanks every day for meeting each and every one of them. I’m lucky to know them all. There are so many stories I now know and so many more I have yet to hear.
And that… it’s really, really awesome.
Thank you.
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:40 am
Your thingy ate my post, so i’ll attempt to summarize what i previously had written:
I feel like that about Scientology. I don’t necessarily agree or practice their belief system, but that doesn’t give me the right to mock them just because they were founded by a Sci-Fi writer. Jesus was supposedly the son of God, and if you ask me, that sounds A LOT crazier to believe in.
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:43 am
Forgot one thing: As far as i am concerned, the only difference between Scientologist and Christians, or Muslims, or Jews (et al.) is that they don’t have 2000+ years worth of followers to back them up. It all sounds equally crazy as far as i am concerned.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Hi Nichole,
Great post. If only we could get people to take your viewpoint on tolerance and apply it to all sorts of debates within our society, we’d be better off. People need to move away from conflict and look toward understanding others — even if they don’t necessarily believe what the other believes — whether its religion or politics or public policy.
Enjoy the blog,
Chris
February 25th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Scientology and Christianity don’t really have 2000 years apart if you think about it. Christianity, in a nutshell, has four parts: Creation, the Fall, Redemption (Christ), Glorification. Lets look a little closer in between ‘Creation’ and ‘the Fall.’
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,3but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.5“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” – Genesis 3:1-6
What happened here at the end? In short, the 2nd oldest religion in the world was founded: the worship of man instead of God! You see, man decided that the wisdom that God gave them wasn’t that great any more, and thus removed God as their top priority and replaced Him with themselves! Seeking to server their new god, they sought the wisdom from the tree and ate of it, but the fall actually happened before that first bite.
This is not so different from the beliefs behind scientology:
“The main Scientology religious practice is spiritual counseling called “auditing.” It is a unique form of personal counseling intended to help an individual look at his own existence and improve his ability. Through viewing his own existence, an individual attempts to walk an exact route to higher states of awareness.” – http://www.religioustolerance.org/scientol1.htm
Sound familiar? Well, it should. It’s just the fallen man continuing the quest to serve his favorite god: himself!
And there you have the biggest difference between scientology and christianity. It’s all about who you want to worship: yourself or the actual Creator of the universe.
Tolerance. An interesting idea. Let me ask you guys a question: Do your views tolerate a religion whose central figure says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)? In other words, do you tolerate an intolerant religion? (yeah, I’m saying Christianity is intolerant. Not of people, but of ideas
)
Enjoy
February 25th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
It’s Ben!
Not sure if this was for me or for Jenn, but oh well. I don’t want to be tolerant. I want to accept, and I can accept that for some a religion (even an intolerant oner) like that is right for them. It makes them full. It makes them whole. It doesn’t necessarily mean it fills me in the same way, but I will acknowledge and accept that it works for a lot of people.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
The point isn’t ‘what works.’ It’s what is true. If Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” that’s an absolute. He didn’t say “… except through me, and these other ways are good too!” It’s the law of non-contradiction. If you accept that Jesus is the only way, then it means the other ways are not valid.
Dodge around it however you like, but truth is always going to be looking you in the face
February 26th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
But this is where we will differ when I say truth is subjective.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
If truth is subjective, then morality is subjective. If morality is subjective, there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Therefore, I should be able to go out and lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc, and no one should be able to say anything about it being good or evil.
I’ll take a example from Voddie Baucham: Lets say I come up to you and roundhouse kick you in the face, Chuck Norris-style. After you wake up from being kicked into next week, what would you say to me? I’m guessing something along the lines of “That was wrong!” DING! You’ve defined an absolute truth: Chuck Norrs-ing someone in the head is wrong.
Truth is not subjective. You may think that there’s many ways to God, but you can’t say there’s both ONLY ONE way to God and at the same time MANY ways to God. It’s not a logical statement.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
But that is where you assume. I would not say, “That was wrong,” but rather, “That was not a nice thing to do,” or “That was just mean.” It’s not wrong. Maybe I deserved it. Who is to say?
Just like roundhouse kicking someone in the face who raped your sister might be considered the “right” thing to do by someone in that a given situation.
EDIT:
Also, it is society that dictates what is “right and wrong” or rather “legal and illegal” in a community, which is where your roundhouse kick to the face would fall if someone were to file a police report on it. It’s sort of like… how fireworks were illegal or “wrong” to blow off in Indiana until a few years ago. If you were caught doing it, because it was “wrong”, you were fined. But now this once “wrong” is now a “right?” It’s not absolute truth but rather a change in society.
You and your Chuck Norris analogies… haha.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Is a society of cannibals justified for eating people b/c it’s within their own society?
What about the senator deciding not to fund education in order to fund his own endeavors? That’s legal. What about OJ getting off on a technicality? That was legal. What about all the wrong things that happen behind the guise of the law?
Society might change, but the line between right and wrong doesn’t. Society just decides which side of that line they want to fall on.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Within the bounds of that society of cannibals, yes, it is justified to them. But when they venture into our society where they have to play by our rules, that’s where it gets gray. If someone killed someone to eat them, I personally wouldn’t like it and our society would throw that person in jail, but for murder not cannibalism. But if I died naturally and they wanted to eat me up, sure why not?
Regarding the senator, it’s sad that he would do something like that and I would hope he realized that it would be more beneficial to fund education, but it does not make his decision wrong.
Regarding OJ, we just live in a society where we tote the whole mindset of “innocent until proven guilty” and the jury couldn’t point all the fingers at him. Is that mindset “wrong” then? I would think people would vouch that to be the “right” way to think.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
What would Ravi say? I know!
https://www.rzim.org/slice/slicetran.php?sliceid=85
‘Lewis latched onto this. He said, “The frightful thing about Gaius and Titius is that they are telling me mathematics is real; therefore, my brain is real. Food is real; therefore, my stomach is real. But the absolute moral order is not real. It is purely within me.” Says Lewis, “If I take these men in their arguments, they will produce a generation of men with brains, men with stomachs, men with no heart, men without chests.”‘
If there’s no absolute, then there’s no right or wrong, no good or evil. Clearly there are good and evil, therefore there must be an absolute.
Let’s put the idea of absolutes to something more concrete: How was the universe created? Everyone may have an idea of how it happened, but it only could have happened ONE way. Just because we believe it to happen ___ way, doesn’t change the fact that it actually happened ___ way.
The same idea applies to morality. Just because we believe something is good or evil doesn’t make it so.