Originally posted by
Muffit
Hi Bombadil! And thanks! I apologize if I went off on a rant - your words were so eloquent I guess I got carried away :shy:
Aww
Anyway, I don't think you were ranting. Just sharing what you were thinking.
You are so very right - we ought not to be ashamed if we believe in God in the present day, anymore than we should feel shame at showing affection (tactfully! ) in public.
Right. It’s maintaining the distinction between being not being ashamed (or afraid) to mention God, and being too eager to stir things up by ramming one’s opinions down other people’s throats. Isn’t it funny how even BSG fans can perform that particular trick? It isn’t the specific faith or opinion that is the cause of the problem, it is the character of the person sharing his/her opinion.
What you said mirrors what my older brother tried to tell me when I was young; respect for another's faith, no matter how different it might be from my own. I did not understand back then because I was young and let people whose influence I admired cause me to feel that exclusivity was the nature of Faith. Many years and many hundreds of conversations later, I finally see what he saw.
If I have a right to my beliefs, and we all are entitled to the same equality, so too contrary beliefs have every bit as much right to be held. It's a big world, and our hearts can be even bigger, if we would only look outward whenever we look inward...
Affectionately,
Muffit
One thing I would add to that: with the kind of faith portrayed in BSG TOS (which had many parallels with Mormonism and with generic Christianity) the faith was a positive source of good for society. That which benefits individual people, one at a time, inevitably benefits society as a whole. Just as one example: in our real world, Christians have often been founders of hospitals. Christians care about healing, the spending of effort to rescue the weak and the incapacitated. That’s quite a bit different from a Darwinian world where the strong survive and the weak provide food for the strong, and the universe itself does not care who wins and who dies because impersonal matter cannot care about anything. Believing in a personal God who actually cares about me yields results drastically different from believing in an impersonal universe which does not care whether I am good or evil, strong or weak, dead or alive.
Am I “proselytizing” for my faith? Naw, I don’t think so. Just talking about what I care about. Plus I like the often-used description that a Christian is like a beggar who has found bread, and is eager to let other people know where it can be found. Anybody who’s not hungry doesn’t have to come, but there are lots of spiritually hungry people in the world. . .
