Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Childish Analogies Producing Childishness
RANT TIME!
The latest post at Out of Ur is just irritating.
I have gained quite a bit of understanding from dissecting frogs, and am left with many wonderful mysteries yet to solve. I can readily see the path that a purloined fly takes through the frog, but how, oh how does the frog extract nutrition from that fly? Disecttion does not reveal this - a further mystery. And how does what goes in looking like a fly come out looking like...well, you know. Another mystery!
So there you have one fallacy evident in this little analogy, but there is another.
Simply put, there is life and there is mystery in religion when it is properly done. Religion, properly done, serves as the guide to the living God. Liturgical utterance may be void and lifeless, unless you take the time to understand what they are talking about. Consider the Apostle's or the Nicene Creed. Oh how I love to recite them, not because of themselves, but because of how very much they mean, each phrase, each syllable packed with meaning - if only we would take the time to learn and to understand.
You want mystery? What better mystery can there be than the doctrine of election? Oh but what a sweet mystery, for it lies, square and center, at the heart of a sovereign God. Not mysterious? - real understanding of doctrine can only show how deeply mysterious God really is, how uncomprehendible, how utterly beyond us only He can be.
I'm sorry, but this Out of Ur post is just ignorant tripe, designed to appeal to the emotions, but not the intellect; calculated to give people a reason to have faith, but not to pursue it. It makes an excuse for immaturity; it is guilty of that which it seeks to critize.
God wants ALL OF US. Not just our emotions, or our intellect, or our behavior - He wants it all and He wants to transform it all. That means we have to dig deep, look hard, study diligently, and do so with the same energy and enthusiasm of that easily distracted 8-year-old.
Related Tags: Christianity, maturity, faith, understanding, tripe, rant, childishness
The latest post at Out of Ur is just irritating.
In a few moments the frog lay dead, his inner secrets uncovered. But to my surprise we didn't gain any greater understanding of Froggie when we opened him up. We had lost something. The interest that had charged the air during the hunt completely disappeared when he lay open and lifeless before us. Dead things aren't nearly as attention-grabbing as things that are alive. Only in the presence of life does mystery exist.That analogy may be true when you have the attention span of an 8-year-old, but we are adults for crying out loud. The lack of interest he finds in the dissected frog lies in a general lack of inquisitiveness, an obvious absence of analytical capability and that certain kinetic quality young boys have that prevent them from looking at anything for very long.
I have gained quite a bit of understanding from dissecting frogs, and am left with many wonderful mysteries yet to solve. I can readily see the path that a purloined fly takes through the frog, but how, oh how does the frog extract nutrition from that fly? Disecttion does not reveal this - a further mystery. And how does what goes in looking like a fly come out looking like...well, you know. Another mystery!
So there you have one fallacy evident in this little analogy, but there is another.
I think Christianity is supposed to be the unreligion. That's because the strictness and predictability of religion causes simple, pure faith to become diseased. If not stopped, religion can even kill living faith. And dead things just aren't very interesting.Religion does not kill faith, religious practiioners do! You know the real reason they found their frog disecction uninformative and unenlightening? They did it wrong! They failed to properly prepare the specimen. The probably opened it sloppily and destroyed as much as they revealed. They failed to take notes, make drawings, and find signposts along the way. They tore into the frog like a child tears into a Christmas present.
Simply put, there is life and there is mystery in religion when it is properly done. Religion, properly done, serves as the guide to the living God. Liturgical utterance may be void and lifeless, unless you take the time to understand what they are talking about. Consider the Apostle's or the Nicene Creed. Oh how I love to recite them, not because of themselves, but because of how very much they mean, each phrase, each syllable packed with meaning - if only we would take the time to learn and to understand.
You want mystery? What better mystery can there be than the doctrine of election? Oh but what a sweet mystery, for it lies, square and center, at the heart of a sovereign God. Not mysterious? - real understanding of doctrine can only show how deeply mysterious God really is, how uncomprehendible, how utterly beyond us only He can be.
I'm sorry, but this Out of Ur post is just ignorant tripe, designed to appeal to the emotions, but not the intellect; calculated to give people a reason to have faith, but not to pursue it. It makes an excuse for immaturity; it is guilty of that which it seeks to critize.
God wants ALL OF US. Not just our emotions, or our intellect, or our behavior - He wants it all and He wants to transform it all. That means we have to dig deep, look hard, study diligently, and do so with the same energy and enthusiasm of that easily distracted 8-year-old.
Related Tags: Christianity, maturity, faith, understanding, tripe, rant, childishness
