Unfortunately, time doesn't stop. As a consequence of which I have 2500 words of my dissertation still to complete and 2 essays and only 6 weeks. In this vein, yesterday I sat to try and do some dissertation work and found that my brain didnt want to play. I thought talking it through would help and so started a discussion with my mother. Now, hence the blog...



You may or may not be aware that for my dissertation I am looking into the issue of suffering and evil. Because that is so huge I am looking at it from a particular angle- So, as part of talking around this issue we got onto the matter of original sin. Now, I don’t believe in original sin. The reason I don’t is because it doesn’t actually say anywhere in Genesis that all from that point on will be born inherently sinful and because the whole discussion is just annoyingly frustrating. Some man a more than a thousand years ago came up with this theory that sperm infected babies with sin and the church went- oh yes, sounds good, and now a thousand years later it has seeped into the Christian consciousness. I was talking to my mother yesterday about this and she threw original sin into the equation- I asked her to show me how that was true- and she couldn’t. (This is not purely a rant about o.s or my mother, just so I don’t lose you!)



And all this got me thinking, how many other pieces of Christian ‘fact’ have people heard and swallowed without actually thinking it through? When a man or a woman stands on a platform and starts speaking, do we run the risk of not making them accountable for what it is they preach? How many times do we or should we challenge those who minister to us?

Don’t get me wrong- you can believe me or not when I say this- but it isn’t that I want church to become a place of scepticism and suspicion. It just worries me, especially in this modern climate of 'fear of fanaticism', that we would accept what someone tells us about God as true without questioning it. That we would lay down and let, at times I fear, illogical arguments become our foundations. I know I often speak in generalised terms and I feel I should make it clear that I am not assuming that those who read this do not question things they are told or that what we are being told is wrong. It's just that I’m all too aware that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.



I am, I am often reminded by my nearest theology buddies, a bit of a heretic. You could, fairly accurately at times, accuse me of being cantankerous. But i think its important. I think it is important that you know what it is you believe. I think it is important that know where what you believe came from. I think it is important that you understand what it is that leads you to believe these things. I think it is important that when someone tells me that christianity is wrong because of this, this and this, I can say yeah, i know what you're talking about but have you thought about that, that and that.



I think it is important that we don't watch ourselves, like lemmings, being thrown off the cliff of intellectual debate with no hope of saving ourselves. I know that faith isnt rational. I know that logic fails where God wins, I know that my heart and my head can simultaneously walk in two separate directions and both be right but I also know that I can't be accused of following along blindly.

"When faith becomes blind, it dies." Gandhi