Tuesday, April 17, 2007
a moment with david's privileged life
It is almost 2:30 AM, I just destroyed a T-Bell grilled 'stuft' burrito, and I'm reading (and enjoying) Friedrich Nietzsche in my dormroom while listening to Explosions in the Sky. This is a college moment to remember. I'd thought I'd share this simple, silent happiness with you.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
This blog is long and boring
So for Spring Break, I took the NAFTA tour, hitting up Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. I swung up to Canada for a weekend to see a couple good-looking guys and Michelle Heimowski (who's not a very good-looking guy, but a very pretty girl). From there, I flew to my parents' near the Bay via Sea-Tac where I stayed for a day. After that, I was off to Juarez, Mexico with my parents to see my sister Katia and bro-in-law Micah - who is teaching some classes at Mexican seminary as part of year-long internship in order to complete is tenure at Calvin Seminary. He graduates in May, and then they're off to either Cal-Berkley, Columbia in New York, Yale, Emory in the ATL, or University of Michigan for at least two years as my sister attends grad school to get a Master's in Public Health. She also applied to the U-Dub, U of Washington located 10-15 minutes away from me, but unfortunately was rejected because of a lack of experience in the field of public health. This was disappointing because I'm pretty sure she would've come up here, and it would've been nice to have an incredibly good vegetarian cook nearby. Oh, and I love my sister, blah blah blah. But it's mostly about the food.
Anyways, while it was great to see the fam and it was really fun, its always fairly challenging spiritually for me to spend a significant amount of time around family, particularly my parents. This stems from my inclination to rebel against the way in which I was immersed and saturated in Christianity during my childhood and adolesence, which was always one of the biggest sources for any type of skepticism or rebellion against my Christian faith. So, being around my parents remind me of this and all the Christianese that gets tossed around in pre-dinner prayers and the like kinda bothers me.
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that if governments were to intervene and prevent parents from teaching religion to their children and instead let them decide when they were older teenagers, then this would result in a quick end to theism. I think there's a lot of rational soundness to that argument. If I didn't believe in the Holy Spirit and his/her active work on earth (which I do, often earnestly and whole-heartedly), I'd buy this argument in a heartbeat.
So I've been on a little bit of one my regular skeptical kicks, doubting things and whatnot, mainly ignited simply by being around my parents. (My parents are awesome by the way- I know this is a cliche, but in getting older and being away from them a lot more, i even like hanging out with them for short periods of time once in awhile. Crazy.) One of the things I've been playing with and trying to figure out where I stand on is the idea of the infallibility of the Bible, which is kinda a pretty fundamental Christian truth. Lately, I've been less confident in this notion -quite simply, because there's so much humanity involved: Human writers, human readers, humans canonizing and deciding what IS scripture, human historians, human scholars, human translators. There's a lot of context that's involved and makes me question how applicable all this is to us. It leaves a lot of doubt in my mind of how much and how well the present-day Christian church truly understands about..um..well..everything. I have faith that the most important and essential doctrines have been preserved, but other 'filler' questions I'm not completely sold on. What I have been leaning towards, however, is using the examples and teachings set by Jesus as a lens through which to view the rest of Scripture. This has a couple problems (like it assumes the accuracy and infallibility of the Gospels - written decades after Jesus' life), but its the option I like the best.
Anyways, I'm getting kinda tired and bored and this is long, but I have some more thoughts I want to run with related to this.
Anyways, while it was great to see the fam and it was really fun, its always fairly challenging spiritually for me to spend a significant amount of time around family, particularly my parents. This stems from my inclination to rebel against the way in which I was immersed and saturated in Christianity during my childhood and adolesence, which was always one of the biggest sources for any type of skepticism or rebellion against my Christian faith. So, being around my parents remind me of this and all the Christianese that gets tossed around in pre-dinner prayers and the like kinda bothers me.
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that if governments were to intervene and prevent parents from teaching religion to their children and instead let them decide when they were older teenagers, then this would result in a quick end to theism. I think there's a lot of rational soundness to that argument. If I didn't believe in the Holy Spirit and his/her active work on earth (which I do, often earnestly and whole-heartedly), I'd buy this argument in a heartbeat.
So I've been on a little bit of one my regular skeptical kicks, doubting things and whatnot, mainly ignited simply by being around my parents. (My parents are awesome by the way- I know this is a cliche, but in getting older and being away from them a lot more, i even like hanging out with them for short periods of time once in awhile. Crazy.) One of the things I've been playing with and trying to figure out where I stand on is the idea of the infallibility of the Bible, which is kinda a pretty fundamental Christian truth. Lately, I've been less confident in this notion -quite simply, because there's so much humanity involved: Human writers, human readers, humans canonizing and deciding what IS scripture, human historians, human scholars, human translators. There's a lot of context that's involved and makes me question how applicable all this is to us. It leaves a lot of doubt in my mind of how much and how well the present-day Christian church truly understands about..um..well..everything. I have faith that the most important and essential doctrines have been preserved, but other 'filler' questions I'm not completely sold on. What I have been leaning towards, however, is using the examples and teachings set by Jesus as a lens through which to view the rest of Scripture. This has a couple problems (like it assumes the accuracy and infallibility of the Gospels - written decades after Jesus' life), but its the option I like the best.
Anyways, I'm getting kinda tired and bored and this is long, but I have some more thoughts I want to run with related to this.
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