Get Ready for a Wild Ride | Apologetics - Intro
So many people these days seem to view religion as a social construct. It's viewed by a lot of society as a coping mechanism, an organization for those lesser people who can’t face up to the harshest realities of life. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint; if mankind originally developed with psychological weakness, it would need a mechanism to counterbalance this in order to survive. But if we're going to look at religion and the existence of God in search of truth, we have to throw out all our assumptions and leave only our perceptions, the apparent state of things, intact.
Plenty approach the debate over religion, be it Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, etc., with their mind already made up. To a certain extent, this is unavoidable. I'm not going to pretend I don't have any bias here. I believe that God exists and that He has given us insight through His Word (the Bible) and provided a means of salvation via the death and resurrection of Christ. That's where I'm coming from. You might agree or disagree with me and that's perfectly fine. I want to help people employ reason to discover the truth so, in order to do that, we have to agree to set aside some things.
We're going to start from scratch in this discussion. That means that before we can bring something like evolution into the discussion we have to prove it's validity. So, to save myself some time at the outset of this blog, I'm going to start with more philosophical and emotional arguments, since they don't rely that much on hard evidence. I'll probably dip a toe or two into the scientific world, but I'm just a high-schooler, so I don't want to presume I know better than the PhD's on either side of the battle line. And before you rant that I can't use emotions in a seemingly logical debate, I have to make a little disclaimer.
I don't know where you're coming from. You could be some upper-class person reading this on his yacht or an inner-city kid surfing the web, who just happened to stumble across this blog. I just don't know. All I have is where I'm at and that's what I'm going to present to you. I'm going to be writing quite a few different arguments in support of Christianity, some very intellectual and philosophical, some very experiential and down-to-earth. I don't expect you to agree with all of my arguments; you might feel that emotional experiences shouldn't be brought up in this sort of discussion, preferring hard evidence and maybe a little philosophy. But, at the same time there might be a kid who couldn't care less about evidence, but is moved deeply by his emotions, or someone who's highly philosophical and doesn't even believe that matter exists. Thus I have to present plenty of arguments in the hopes of reaching as wide an audience as possible.
All I ask at the beginning of this series is that you read it with an open mind. Actually, I guess that's all I'm ever going to ask. Feel free to debate me in the comments or via email, but please don't just dismiss the things I say and walk away. I want to learn from this just as much as I want y'all to and if you just walk away from the conversation neither of us will get anything out of it. So get ready for some deep stuff over the coming weeks. It's gonna be quite the ride.
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