I never accept what people say at face value. I do not think this makes me a cynical person nor does this make me an ass. You may say: "But you gotto trust someone. How can you live like that?" Quite well, thank you. That is not the point, I trust my husband. The point is he is a human being and he might be wrong and frequently is. I am wrong a lot too so don't just accept everything I have to say because I am so impressively intelligent and silver fingered. If you do the next thing you know you will be in some jungle drinking poisoned kool aid. I will start a cult, if I can't get people to think for themselves. There is good money in cults.
Good people, honest people, trustworthy people, intelligent people are often wrong. Remember back when e-mail was the thing and people sent forwards? Remember the" Hotmail will start charging", " they will deactivate your account if you do not forward this", "SUNSCREEN CAUSES BLINDNESS, wont somebody think of the children!!!!". Now we have similar things on facebook too but let’s use the e-mails as examples. All these were false. All these were sent to me by honest and trustworthy people yet they were false. These people assumed because they got them from honest, trustworthy and even intelligent people that they must have been true. After all honest people would not forward these. The people who sent these to them thought based on the exact same principle and all quickly pressed the forward button without looking it up and verifying it. After realizing how the chain worked I started to look stuff up.
There are people out there who knowingly deceive people. Are they evil? I don't know. I do know they are sometimes looking just for a little fun at our gullible expense. Sometimes they want our money and at other times they are trying to do something good and will lie to achieve it.
People tell little white lies for ideological reasons all the time. This very much includes Christians. I do not trust Christians at face value. They spread misinformation sometimes because they just heard it from someone they trust other times they think a little white lie will bring glory to God better than the truth. Here are a few examples: condoms don't prevent HIV, abstinence only (condoms are great at preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, so is abstinence, but abstinence is preferable to ideologues so they outright lie). Darwinists (term for a group of people who do not exist in reality) believe life started from nothing (if they mean evolutionary biologists, they lie. Evolutionary biologists do not officially care where life came from, just how it changed overtime). So there are some, of many lies, perpetuated by Christians for good causes. I picked a few obvious ones.
Don't trust in humans without question. I only trust in God fully because he is the only one worthy of it.
"Don't trust in humans without question. I only trust in God fully because he is the only one worthy of it."
ReplyDeleteWell this puts you in an interesting bind, doesn't it? For example, you can claim that you receive your information from God by his illumination of your mind, in which case no-one can say otherwise.
Or you can take a more traditional route and say that God's communications (the ones that you outright trust) are recorded in 67 manuscripts we call the 'Bible.' In which case, you are trusting the words of people who allegedly penned the words of God. And the only thing you have to assure you that they did receive the written word from God are the words they wrote (which are allegedly from God).
Thus, you end up with a dilemma: you don't trust people at face value, only God; but people penned the words of God, and the only way you can believe that honestly is by trusting the people who claim that they penned the words of God. And you can't do anything but accept their claims at face value because they're not around to cross-examine.
So now what?
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ReplyDeleteHey there, again!
ReplyDeleteJust thought I'd keep you up to speed. I changed the name of my blog. Again. I've settled on Kane's Eye View because it better describes my intentions for the blog.
Hope you're well.
Sorry it has taken so long to get back here. To answer your question. I have recieved communication from God directly, or so I beleave. I also interprite God's word trough the lens of divine revalation. This does not mean I pearcing column of light shoots down from heaven into my brain and I am enlightened, as I read my Bible. It just means I try to question particular verses in the Bible based on the over all spirit of the Bible. Some verses and passages seem awfully contridictory. I have written about my confusion extensively which is partially due to the interpritations of the human scribes, I think. I also pray and allow God to shape my understanding of the parts in the way he chooses and being a flawed humanbeing I don't feel like I always get it right but the more I learn the closer I hope I get.
ReplyDeleteHope that answers the question Kane. The question has no definite answer and is liable to change as I keep considering it.
Also I visited your blog, and am reding the enrtries I missed while doing other things right now after I post this. That does not seem grammatically correct.
Note, I edited the title today, having noticed the spelling mistake in it.
ReplyDelete