In the past, I wrote this post on assumptions, presuppositions, basic beliefs, whatever you want to call them — the basic conceptual lenses I see the world through. And now it seems time for an update.
1) There is a God, and he is, more specifically, the kind of God the knowledge of whom has been passed down to us generations by generations, first through personal experience, then through Judaism, and then through Christianity.
2) Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God. He was sent to earth, God in human flesh, a carpenter’s son, the savior of the world. The doctrine of the Trinity, passed down as it traditionally has been in over the centuries, cannot explain everything about God to us, but the God-in-three-persons view as traditionally taught is true.
3) The story of Jesus Christ as expressed in the gospels and the ancient creeds, is true and non-negotiable. He was born of a virgin, he preached the good news on earth, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, he was crucified, he was buried, he was dead in the ground, and on the third day he rose, having conquered Death, he spoke to his disciples for forty days, he ascended into heaven, and he will return as the Scriptures tell us.
4) After leaving his disciples, Christ gave the Church his Holy Spirit to guide his followers into all truth. Through all the chaos in the world, God is nevertheless leading his people towards himself.
5) God left for us the Bible, which speaks to us and continues to guide us into all truth. It is a gift of God, and speaks to us even today. It is perfect and filled with insight. It ultimately has no errors, although it is true that it has been handed down by fallible men and taught by fallible men and developed over time. I do not claim to understand this process completely.
6) God has left the Church upon the earth as a community of all believers worldwide, in order to pass on his message and fill his earth with communities who believe in and worship him, and lead others into a relationship with both God and others. God is doing this because he wishes to restore humanity.
7) God does not reject thinking; rather, he gave it to us. Any group, Christian or not, which encourages its members to take all their thinking and information only from inside its own narrow sources is lying to itself and its followers. Coercion in thinking, whether scientific or religious or otherwise, is an enemy of the truth. A group which maintains ideas through coercion, physical, monetary, or otherwise, no matter how intelligent its spokesmen may seem, must forever be held in extreme suspicion, until its ideas are able to be challenged in the open.
8) We cannot simply use logic to produce beliefs out of a vacuum, nor can we suppose that if we merely use the right thought-techniques we will necessarily be right all the time about everything. That’s arrogant nonsense. Instead, the formation of our worldview and beliefs is a constant accumulation and selection process as we assign differing weights to various ideas we take in from tradition, from community, from logical examination, and from the careful comparison of contradictory ideas to see which hold weight. Caution and care must be applied, and we must recognize just how tentative our ideas have.
9) It is the worst kind of foolishness to pretend that we can plan out on our own the lives of other people, or that we can comprehend enough to forcibly direct other people’s activities. It is also absurd to imagine that we can control other people in a world where God has created free will. Any such attempts will result in disaster; and thus I dismiss as silliness any societal engineering.
10) People are profoundly depraved, and they will almost always act and think in their own selfish interests, even when they think they are being unselfish. To analyze the incentive systems people exist under will go quite far toward allowing understanding of what they do.
11) Things don’t just happen randomly. Patterns are everywhere. Everywhere. And it’s our job to find them.
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