Rationalists/Atheists: Don't Too Readily Dismiss the Believer
- Updated Dec 14, 2008
It's certainly no challenge for a rationalist/atheist to dismiss out of hand those who believe in God.
The Christian, scoffs the rationalist, is weak-willed: superstitious, deaf to logic, incapable of independent thought, intellectually and even morally lazy.
Okay. We believers can take that sort of criticism. We can (or certainly should) even acknowledge the ways in which we too often facilitate non-believers reaching such conclusions about us.
But, to be fair, rationalists and atheists should consider the validity of the believer's way. A clear context in which to understand the whole of one's life, as opposed to just that realm of it apprehensible to the rational mind, is a beautiful thing.
The logical mind can do and cover a lot -- but not all. Before love, for instance, it can only surrender in baffled awe.
The bottom line is that when the white knight of the rational mind reaches the dense forest of human emotion, it must pull its horse up short, turn around, and trot back home. It has no business inside that forest; a few trees in renders it lost and helpless.
For all his shortcomings, the believer possesses one thing the non-believer lacks: a clear, dependable context by which to understand, process, and experience all of his emotions. That's not nothing.
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