Like A Million Pieces
Sometime over the summer, I came to a website called “American Atheists” in my internet travelings. I was reading an article challenging the reliability of the authorship of the Bible, and I realized that it was basically true, from their perspective. The Bible (whatever else you want to say about it) in the simplest terms, it is a record of God’s interaction with humanity. Well, if you are convinced that there is no God, then he can not possibly interact with people, therefore any writer who claims that He has is obviously unreliable. That case practically proves itself before even looking at any evidence.
It occurred to me that you can’t possibly win- it’s like arguing with a blind man about rainbows. Using pure logic, you will never convince him that you are looking at something that he can not see. Likewise, he will never convince you that what you think you see is just a hallucination.
The trouble with this “online theology” that I have been trying to do is that there are no objective websites out there. Everyone has an agenda. Even if they did not start off with one, I believe that by the time they get around to actually telling you about it, they have already reached a conclusion that they are now trying to sell you on. No web page that I have ever come across honestly presents all the sides.
That is when a little voice in my head declared, “It’s you dude, it’s all you!” As if my humble, barely-updated page could actually capture the whole picture. For I too only relate certain bits of information, from a certain point of view. If you want to see the whole picture, you have to use all of the pieces. This echoed around in my head for a few days, perhaps even a couple of weeks:
To see the whole picture, you have to use all of the pieces…
… You have to use all of the pieces…
…ALL OF THEM.
I don’t think that anyone really wants to look at all of the pieces. I am sure that we all have things that we have stuffed away somewhere that we never want to see, admit, or think about ever again. Barring that, I do not think that I could even remember all the pieces, even if I want to.
Then began a rather odd two week period in which I repeatedly either was reminded of or actually encountered a number of people from the past whom, all other things being equal, I prefer not to think about. So the pieces are all there, but then next issue that I discovered is that it is very difficult to fit them together because I find that I really only seem capable of looking at one piece at a time…