Yesterday, did I say that Christianity is 5% brains and 95% emotion?
What I was thinking?
Let’s change that to 95% brains, and 5% emotion.
Here’s why that formula also works: You would have to be one drool-stained moron to commit your heart, mind and soul to any faith or belief system that isn’t obviously, and in every last possible way, logically coherent and rationally defensible.
There may be a God. There may not be. People can screech about it until their eyes pop, but the fact remains that (um … as of this writing) it is exactly as reasonable to guess one as the other. (Doubt it, Thomas? That can only mean you haven’t read my brilliant, revolutionary, illuminating, tolerably cohesive piece, Logically There’s No Arguing It: We Can’t KNOW If There’s a God or Not)
For me personally, I think it’s more reasonable—and certainly more fun, which for me pretty seriously matters—to choose to believe that there is a God.
Given all the God Options in the world (and discounting, as I do, the dumb hassle of making up my own religion), I find that none makes as much raw, logical sense as Christianity.
God loves us; he wanted to alleviate us of the guilt and pain that’s a necessary result of our free will without at the same time violating that will; he became human so we’d know how utterly he gets us; he told anyone who would listen exactly why he was going to do exactly what he did; he did it; and then he left the entirety of himself available ever afterwards to anyone who simply and sincerely asked for it.
And voila: I’m all in.
I’m a smart guy. (At the very least, I promise, smart enough to realize what a hopelessly lame thing that is to say.) I didn’t become a Christian and then immediately jam a fork into an outlet in order to irreparably short-circuit my brain. Instead, I became assiduous about understanding and then evaluating Christianity’s core assumptions and prescriptions in terms that were rigorously and exclusively logical.
I spent some 30 years despising Christianity. (And three studying formal logic with one of the world’s premier logicians—but whatever.) I wasn’t about to jump that ship without being perfectly sure that, of all things, it was rationally defensible to do so.
Christianity passed every test with which I could think to hammer it. Logical. Emotional. Historical. Even literarily—which, you know. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving.
Like millions upon millions of people before me much more discerning and scrupulously intelligent than I, I did not find the system of Christianity (as opposed to its trillion iterations) in any way wanting.
God become man is still on the cross.
And without question I’m still all in.
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