Ronald V. Huggins

Last night a stream of conversation was running through my dream on the subject of Faith and Reason. I found it interesting. The upshot of it was that statements like “I live by faith and you live by reason,” or “I live by reason and you live by faith,” are not ultimately meaningful in themselves. Faith and reason always have an object, a point of reference, a realm of activity. The large majority of what people on either side of the equation believe to be true based on reason is actually based on faith, often on the assumption that they think it “reasonable to believe” this or that because some authority has said it that they trust more than others. Very often the real foundation of this sense of “reasonableness” is nothing more than the fact that “most people” think the same way for the same reason. In addition the true definition of “most people” in such cases is usually “most right-thinking people,” which may or may not amount to a majority. Which may i...

"As Christians we must understand that when the world shouts its morality at us and insists we are not good Christians unless we fall in line behind it as it pursues its endless and ever-shifting sequence of causes, we must remember that this is just what the world does, that people need to be saved from the world's false moralities as much as they do from its sinful pleasures. And this precisely because the pursuit of false moralities is a kind of sinful pleasure." Moses recalls the reason Israel at first refused to enter the Promised Land: "It was because the LORD hated us that he brought us out of Egypt to hand us over to the Amorites to be wiped out." (Deut 1:27). Attributing sinister motives on God is one of humanity's oldest pastimes. For that generation of Israelites it meant they all died in the desert. In our time we often hear that there is no such thing as a "privileged" narrative. Actually to whatever exten...