“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet and they have to touch it to be sure.”
George Carlin
There are two assumptions in the above statement. One is merely wrong. The other is dangerous. When I was young, my friend Gronk painted on the cave wall, “When you assume, you make an…out of u and me.” As the joke proves, a great many “old” truths still apply today.
It takes a giant leap of faith to consider that everything Christians believe is handed down to them by ecclesiastical authority. It takes an even greater leap, to think that they accept it as true without personally testing and trying what they hear. It is true that scripture says faith comes by hearing. It is equally true that the message is meant to be put to the test in real-life situations. If the message produces no positive results after a post-trial evaluation, it is quickly discarded.
Christianity is experimental by nature. Like learning to walk, there is often much trial and error encountered on the way to running your first marathon. God’s invitation to the hearers is: “come now, let us reason together” … “prove me hereby”… and “taste and see, the Lord is good.”
The idea that a person hears a sermon, swallows it whole, and without testing it, or taking time for deeply introspective sound reasoning, then declares himself a believer, stretches the truth beyond the limits of my rather extensive imagination. Yet, those outside Christianity have no trouble believing it of us. To then think that a Christian stumbles blindly through life from that point on led only by church doctrines he is handed, is a delusion only those outside the faith are capable of believing. Christians know better. And we’re supposed to be the mentally weak ones?
There is no step in modern scientific method that is not employed by those who have a real interest in a relationship with God (Christian or not). Well, except maybe the step where someone pays them to reach a predetermined conclusion—that only happens in “real” science. To assume Christians do not base their faith on the evidence they gather is to willfully turn a blind eye to any conclusion that does not support the critic’s hypothesis.
On the other hand, those who think it’s reasonable to accept, on authority, that the paint is still wet are the duped believers. They are the same folks who in blind obedience donned masks, hid in their homes, and had “emergency vaccines” injected into their bodies because politicians and talking heads told them it was the right thing to do. If you cannot see the danger in that scenario, then you are in for bigger trouble than you know.
To those who would point out to me that churches closed because they were told to. I will tell you this, judgment begins at the house of God and except they repent, they shall not escape unpunished. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”
Maranatha
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