I am a Christian with a brain.
My Faith is anything but blind.
Here are some of the high points:
-Looking back on my life so far and observing the world around me solidifies the gift of faith that I have been given.
"...as if the universe ain't enough, as if the volcanoes ain't erupt, as if the birds don't chirp, as if a trillion nerves don't work in the human body. Shit, who would I be? Without the Creator of this theater beside me to gently guide me?..." -j cole
-I am a theist because it’s more coherent than atheism. The idea of a supreme intelligent Being explains more things that we know and experience than does the absence of that Being.
-It makes more sense to me that if a God exists, that God would be capable of doing things, and would be interested in doing things, as opposed to merely existing and doing nothing. It makes sense to me that if God has intelligence, then He would have desire to use that intelligence.
-God seems a good candidate for the external cause to the material creation, and that is quite independent of what one thinks about Genesis.
-Christianity has the perfect being becoming incarnate in imperfect flesh (i.e., it could bleed, age, and die) to communicate to imperfect people that he had come to pay the penalty his own demands had placed on them (after all, he has the right to make demands of his own creatures. You do that if you have kids, and I’m guessing you don’t think it’s unreasonable). In other words, God, through Christ, becomes the solution for a problem we cannot solve. His motive? John 3:16. The requirement to have that applied to us? Faith — Trust the solution and don’t presume it needs your assistance or suggestions. That’s it. No endless and futile effort to appease an angry deity. The deity solves the problem himself on your behalf. That’s pretty nice of him, especially when you’re helpless to fix the problem yourself.
-Most churches today are more about perpetuating their denominational subculture or keeping those who attend adequately entertained than making them think.
-While I’m not anti-creedal or opposed to denominations, I am opposed to using creeds and denominational preferences to filter the Bible. Creeds are selective, historically-conditioned, limited by their context and the resources available to their formulators, and often agenda-driven.
-Every post-first century religious context is foreign to the Bible, and therefore is not the context of the Bible.
-The right context for interpreting the Bible is the context that produced it — the worldview and cognitive frame of reference of the biblical writers.
That's it for now. Let me know if you ever want to discuss this...I'd love to!
-John