Descending to Grey

As far as I know, I'm fairly orthodox in my Christian beliefs. I believe that Christian theology is coherent, intellectually defensible, and is validated by the evidence of what is actually in the world. Thorough, rigorous examination usually strengthens my faith, and reassures me that I have good reasons for believing what I believe.

There are clear realities which are meaningful, and are meaningfully described by words we use: goodness, righteousness, courage, envy, hatred, wickedness. There's black and white. There's also green, red, blue, yellow, teal. (Teal was my favorite color to use when I was Protoss... just saying.)

When I don't really think through these things though and I just go through life unthinkingly, there's a sort of decay that occurs. I find myself thinking, "well, really? Is this or that really so wrong? What makes that action 'better' than this other action? Why must I live this way and not that way? Is God really real?"

The problem is that these questions are not really driven by any good intellectual reason. It's important to reexamine beliefs, sure. But these questions at those times are simply a result of belief decay, in the same way that I sometimes think "what if I am the only real person and everyone else is a robot and this is a giant test or lab experiment? Did we really go to the moon? If I lost control of the wheel, my car would hit that lampost, crumple around it, and my life would really change, but I wonder what it would be like."

I think it's like eyeball atrophy, as if you didn't exercise your eyeballs and then your whole vision gets more and more blurry. There's a mug in front of you with a clear border between it and the table, the mug is white and the table is brown -- but everything blurs and it becomes a blob. I think the belief decay I've been trying to describe is kind of like this, because substantiated firm belief (not just in God, but in anything) requires substantiation. And good thinking, like exercise, reaffirms (or, destroys) the substantiation necessary for firm belief.

Ah, well, sorry if that wasn't very clear, just something I've been thinking about, since I've been descending to grey recently. Eyeball atrophy, haha. I guess the moral of the story, though, is that you should exercise your eyeballs in the metaphorical sense.

Reason is not King

Ah, I have been not blogging for very long time! I blog later. For now, short post. I'm reading Anna Karenin right now by Leo Tolstoy. Really good! One thing that comes clear is that our own powers of reasoning are not king. We have a strong propensity to use reason to justify our own ways, and what seems to as plain reason is often just emotion or desire defended by intellect.

"Passion and prejudice govern the world, only under the name of reason." - John Wesley

Ah, also, one really cool thing that comes through clear in the book is that the protagonists are often the antagonists in other situations. This isn't the postmodern view that there are no good guys and bad guys, but only better and worse people, no black and white only shades of gray. There is good, and there is bad. However, what it illustrates is...

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. " - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

OK, that's all. Is tells yous peoples whats is thes happenings ins mys lifes laters.