Saturday, September 14, 2013

World Views

As a future pastor of the Seventh - day Adventist church, part of my job and life calling is going to involve converting people to my religion. Showing them Christ and the only way to be truly saved. I believe with all my heart that I have had the privilege of being called by the Divine Creator to this mission, that Jesus Christ is the only path to true happiness and fulfillment, that only through Him we are truly justified from our sins. But I also realize that I will face many atheists who do not believe the same way, maybe whoever is reading this right now does not agree with my views and says that the Christian religion just doesn't make sense and cannot be proven. Well, to all of you who are atheists I will say this: I respect the fact that you dare to question! I respect your rational thinking and how you always try to uncover the truth, discarding whatever is not worthy of credibility. I only ask this of you, in the same way that I respect your views, respect mine and any other person's views as well. It is the easiest thing in the world to summarize someone as an ignorant buffoon just because he doesn't share your "100% correct" view of the world! There are many people in my own church who say the same thing about atheists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons and everyone else who doesn't agree with them. This attitude disgusts me! It is highly unlikely that all the intelligent people in the world just so happen to share your view! Now, a lot of people might argue with me saying, "Yeah, but if someone is truly intelligent, they will come across the truth and agree with my vision cause I'm already on the hill of total comprehension!” There are too many world views for us to just hug the first one that appears and say it's the absolute truth. Now I'm not saying that all these world views are right all at the same time, that is an extremely relativist way of thinking, it's just that these views were all developed by intelligent people who, most of the time, deserve credibility. Going back to what I said about me respecting you atheists, I believe that every single person who really wants to find out the truth about the world and how it all came to be, should study and search for the answers as much as he can with that same attitude of looking for credible facts and logical explanations. We shouldn't just accept what a doctor in philosophy or a pastor says just because he said it, we should ask questions, research for ourselves and analyze the answers we get and subjecting them to comparison with other world views and theories, always looking for the most logical and credible one. That is why we need to respect each other’s world views, because that person that you think is ignorant could be right and you could be wrong. And that is the definition of having an opened mind, accepting that fact that you may be wrong, so you investigate to find out.


Before I finish here, I would like to leave you with this quote from the philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal: "That men may at least learn what faith they reject, before rejecting it."

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