the·ol·o·gy /THēˈäləjē/ noun
log·i·cal /ˈläjək(ə)l/ adjective
the·o·log·i·cal /THēˈäˈläjək(ə)l/
Before we get started I am compelled to offer a promise and a warning.
If you read with an open heart and an open mind, you will be presented with an opportunity to experience joy as you never knew possible. I will allow it to be a surprise for you, as it was for me, I will only say that if you are seeking truth with a pure heart, you will be rewarded with an unimaginable joy in this life... as well as eternal life in the next.
“More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.” Psalm 19:10
My promise is that I will provide a logical and “segmented biased” approach where I will always tell you which lens I am looking through as we explore existence.
Secondly, I will keep my chapters short and not expound on things more than I think necessary. This means that some concepts will only be approached at a high level. My aim in this book is to keep it as short as possible, so I recommend that you investigate concepts for yourself more fully.
“Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.”
If you already believe there is intelligent design, you need not read further in this book but instead I have a second book that would be more useful to your journey. If you do decide to read further, pray to your Creator that your mind is guarded and that you are given discernment.
Moreover, I urge all to understand the seriousness of reading these words. If you wish only to inflate your knowledge to inflate yourself, you will endure extreme anguish as I have experienced.
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Ecclesiastes 1:18
What’s more, once you have awakened to the light, you must choose how to spend your day...
My motivation is multifold, one of privilege, one of obligation and one of selfishness:
Privilege: If you watch a really good movie, or read a really good book, or meet a really interesting person, you have this impulse to share that experience with others. It is my privilege and excitement to share what I have learned, what I have personally experienced and want others to share in this as well. Obligation: I also feel a sense of obligation to share the good news! I will let the words of the self-proclaimed atheist Penn Jillette speak for me here:“How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate someone to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? If I believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe it, that that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point that I tackle you, and this is more important than that.” - Penn JilletteSelfish: My final motivation is rooted in a feeling I experienced in childhood. If you can remember back to a childhood sleepover, as the night fades to morning there comes a time when you may be the only one still awake, you are excited to still hang out and talk but everyone else is asleep. The potential of what fun you could still have together, the conversations and activities, eats away at you and you want to wake all of your friends up to talk and play. It is my desire to build an engaged community with those who have experienced what I have, it is lonely being awake in a sea of people hypnotized by reality TV, sports, internet & pop culture trends… polarized by manufactured political or religious extremes created to divide, or those who seem awake but treat themselves as a deity. My hope is to join or attract a group who have deciphered existence and the meaning of life and engage with them to fulfill our purpose.
This is a story of my journey to rethink thinking. I do not want to blindly accept anyone else's thoughts for my own, as I do not want you to blindly accept what I say as truth. For this reason, rather than sharing the conclusion of what I have learned, I instead first want to share the framework for how I went about deconstructing and reconstructing my reality in order to arrive at the conclusions that I did; Similar to a student in math class is required to “show their work” not only their answer.
The main reason for this is because my conclusions, or my beliefs, are not something that I can share directly anyhow. I doubt I will ever fully convey to you what I feel or what I have experienced in a way that you can experience the same level of intensity of how it has impacted me. The same way that it is unlikely that a mother could share with me what the experience of childbirth is like in a way that I could feel it for myself. Hopefully, however, you find value in sharing the framework I used on my journey to discard my bias and think logically for myself.
The journey started when I joined the military, it was the first time I was surrounded by people who had vastly different perceptions of reality, most of which I came to find were inherited from their parents or influential figures in their life. I was surrounded by anecdotal scholars who convincingly stated opinions as fact but when I asked them to provide more information on their source or how they came to that conclusion, they the conversation usually lead to a “well, that is what I was told anyway”, or “I have to look it up” or some other statement of concession. I have always been bothered by people who do not form opinions on their own, who just blindly accept what they are told by their parents, the educational system, the media, the church they were born into or wandered into. Even more dangerous in my mind are those who seem to have taken a few story lines from different philosophies, mixing together evolutionary theory with parts of the bible with parts of pagan lore and stirred it all together to form “their truth”.
My immediate instinct was to educate them on what I was convinced was the truth, but how was my truth any truer than theirs? The more I thought about it, the more I started to feel like a hypocrite as much of my learning was based on the foundation of what I was told from my parents, from my church, my school or from the news on TV. It was then that I knew I needed to start from the ground up. I wanted to conduct my own research to understand the objective reality, the origins of world religions, dissect doctrines and ultimately understand religion as a science, not an art.
This turned out to be far more intensive than I had imagined it to be as I did not look for shortcuts instead I took the time to understand what factors go into the decision making process of every thought, which ultimately has made my life more complicated than it could/should have been. As I shed my beliefs like skin, removing each lens that I was looking through, spending several years intensely discovering myself, pattern matching correlations between emotions and reactions, questioning my purpose and generally becoming more self aware. In the process of stripping away preconceived ideas and beliefs, opening myself up to all possibilities, I experienced darkness that is impossible to convey and emptiness and loneliness that I do not wish to recall. When exploring, I encountered times where I was in an endless void, no light to orient or guide my path, no axis to harness myself to, stability was gone, chaos rampant. I never fully appreciated how many degrees exist in emptiness or how many pathways that could exist. The more I let go, the faster my mind spun. What I initially found was that error is more prevalent than truth. By stripping away my foundation of beliefs so I could explore my reality in an unbiased way left me incredibly vulnerable, and at times mentally exhausted and unstable.
The only way for me to return from this void was to develop theological decision trees, weighting the probability of countless existence scenarios and experimenting in what I now realize to be dangerous thought exercises. My hope is that I am able to share a framework for others who wish to take a similar journey of understanding that I took; but with some resources that I wish I had to act as a guard rail to providing you with a less painful journey to logically explore our existence.
a·pol·o·get·ics /əˌpäləˈjediks/ noun
While I have not read the works or reasoning of other apologetics, I suppose I would have to place this book and myself in the category of those who wish to provide a logical justification of my faith through a systematic discourse.
I ask only that you give yourself permission to think like a child again, search for yourself, allow yourself to be curious but stay humble.