Don't Go for Blood with Your Comments, Please!

K.....if you're not a Mike Cope blog reader, then click here and read this recent entry by him. IF you take the time to read all the comments to the blog (which are interesting in themselves) you'll have found my comment which I'm about to post right here; however if you didn't see it, you're about to. But with such a thought-provoking blog as his, I couldn't help but leave a response (though it took me ALL day to figure out what I wanted to say and whether to say it or not, fearing the wrath of all his blog readers). In the end I posted it and am posting it here for those of you who don't know Mr. Cope or read his blog (though I don't really know him either, I mean I did live in Abilene for 4 years and never once attended Highland, however I still read his blog daily, for this reason exactly...i LOVE thought provoking "stuff").

Sooo...read my comment and let me have yours! You know you want too... ;)

Though fearing the attack of the some what thousands of readers Mr. Cope’s blog has, I will post this comment anyways as a thought looking for open-minded responses:

So if the born-into-Christianity Christian is “right” and the Morman born-into-a-Morman family is “right” and the Hindu born-into-Hinduism is “right”…then can they all be right? Would that mean that the atheist born-into-atheism is “right?”

I know most of the readers of this are thinking at this point, “well of course, not. CofC is ‘right.’” I mean as Mike mentioned…there is that “exclusivistic version of some churches.” But as I suggested earlier, this comment is for the “open-minded” readers; the ones willing to imagine themselves in the others positions. Imagine yourself as the “Hindu born-into-Hinduism” or, if you are Hindu, the Morman “born into-a-Morman family.” In those cases, it’s just as easy to say you are “right” and CofC is not “right.”

I don’t know, but the gist of this just makes me think this is some religious form of ethnocentrism. Is there a term for that that I’m just ignorant of? Religocentrism works for me!

I think it is in the college years that one can not help but question their religion and their up-bringing. Whether one comes from Christianity or an Islamic background, it is during the college years that one is faced with the questions of “who am I?” and “what is my purpose?” And in answering those questions and searching for an identity, questioning one’s faith is almost a MUST.

I find it interesting to see how many people, college-aged specifically, actually do “throw up [their] hands in complete agnosticism” during this identity-crisis when asking themselves questions such as “Was I really that lucky . . . to be born into the one small little group that happened to nail interpretation?”

So I don’t know. I don’t know which religion is “right.” Maybe the uncertainty does make me “throw up my hands in agnosticism”…but having said that I’ll end with this thought…

A friend once said to me, “how can you (or anyone for that matter) say there is no God, and be ‘right,’ when there have been for years millions of God-believers around the world?” To that I would have to respond with this, “Look at all the people that thought the world was flat for many years versus the people that thought it was round. Just because one group outrageously out-numbers another doesn’t mean they are “right.’”


P.S. Mike, for someone who wrote “I've been braindead recently” only 24 hours earlier you, sure went above and beyond the “deep-thought-provoking blog” today! Thanks for the GREAT discussion piece!