A Case for Deeper Thinking
May 25th, 2009 by ljkim
Everyone comes with default beliefs, things you believed since you were little (probably because it’s what your family believed). Everyone seems to have default beliefs about God, or priests or church or religion, whether good or bad. Most people get along just fine living with and even defending their default beliefs…until something happens that forces them to reconsider. At which point rather than reasoning we tend to adopt another set of default beliefs.
So if you grow up in a devout Catholic family and one day you go to college and really want to have sex, it’s easy to take up a different set of beliefs…you can call yourself an agnostic or non-practicing Catholic. Or you can grow up in a church youth group, and then someone dies in a car accident and in your grief you decide that Christianity was just a fairy tale. The switch doesn’t happen overnight, but it tends to come as preset packages. A conflict prompts you to drop one set of default beliefs and take up another (set). But I think God wants something better for us: to know, to reason, to understand…to question everything even (especially) your motives for questioning.
Part of what makes us god-like as animals is our ability to questions these default beliefs and assumptions. We are philosophers at heart. If you take that away, or if you simply ignore it an don’t hone those critical reasoning skills, we become a little less human. Like a monkey that can’t climb trees, or birds that can’t fly, dogs that can’t run and bark, we become a little less of what we truly are.
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