One of the challenges which face people of faith on individual and group levels is granting themselves an easy exit during a given argument with non-believers, or people of contradicting views. In other words, shunning criticism proposed by friends, enemies, frien-emies or a generation in the learning as belonging to individuals who are hopeless or with evil agendas.
The "labeling" exit over time resutls in degenerate believers who suffer a lacking of agility and full realization of self. While choosing assumable protection of values, failure to engage with the other leads a given faith to weather in and possibly to be extinct.
There comes a point in the life cycle of a given faith when arguing on the non-believer’s side needs not only be accepted, but rather saught as an exercise of knowledge and a mean to mend limitations. An opportunity for the discovery of self and others. A growth spurt amidst terminal options...
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Intelligence can be measured in the ability to have a multitude of conflicting ideas within a single mindframe.
The same goes with faith, and that the more trained, the more experienced and weathered are your faith muscles, the more resilient it stands against conflict of ideas.
If a faith is a generic copy of what the masses concur with, it's unlikely that it would fit a lot of individually processed beliefs. The process that can make or break a faith. The process that only very few people can sustain for long without jumping the cognitive ship, shutting down with what's safe and familiar.
Your post triggered thoughts of Emerson's writings. His topic was self-reliance.
"[T]hese are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs."
* * *
"Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn."
I often engage in "dialogue" with Muslims to force them to address serious problems in Islamic ideology. Generally, they refuse to discuss ideology or write me off as an Islamophobe or something worse. There is a Proverb: "As iron sharpens iron, so men sharpen men."(Prov. 27:17) To insist that Islam is beyond discussion is to condemn it to stagnancy and obsolesce.
Hning, Please tell me you're majoring in psychology or at least sociology!!
AGA, I LOVED THIS QUOTE. Deep and thorough.
ChrisLA, I totally agree.
miss your blog entries, where are you?
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