“The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.” -G. K. Chesterton

Thanks for saying that Gilbert. Liberal or conservative, people get picked on the most when they have a strong opinion about…. anything. It bothers me that a wishy washy man who works to please everyone with his perspective gets more credit than a convicted, passionate man. I would rather completely disagree with someone rather than have them look me in the eyes and say “I don’t know, and no one can know what the right answer is.”

I hope you understand that you answer incredibly vague but extraordinarily important philosophical questions every morning when you wake up. That’s right, we are all philosophers. Those big life questions such as “how did we get here?”, “what is the purpose of us being here?”, and “what happens when we die?” are answered every day, whether you willingly sat down to think them through or not. Because if you genuinely thought you had no purpose being here and everything is left to chance then you wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning and you certainly wouldn’t try to do anything remotely productive if you did. Instead of answering these major life questions obliviously, sit down and exercise your freedom to make a conscious decision about why you live your life the way you do. “I’m not really a religious person” is an invalid answer, you have taken up a religious world view whether you realize it or not.

Be open minded, not absent minded. You can’t ask me to leave my biblical world view at home. It’s not something I came up with yesterday. It’s not something I latched onto when I was eight and haven’t thought about since. I see a real effort on many evangelical Christian’s part to meet other religions and world views in the middle; to dialogue and co-exist with cooperative mercy. From my perspective, the militant “hell fire and brimstone” attitude has more recently been an export of the skeptic, not the Christians. I am willing to hear you out. I am even willing to have many of my convictions adjusted by a combination of knowledge, revelation, and experience. But don’t ask me to stand on the fence with you, as if you can step outside of all opinions and say that no one can know anything. That’s the most arrogant position of them all. Doubt is humility, but skepticism is pride. 

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes… You can almost be as stupid as cabbage as long as you doubt.” - Dallas Willard