There were no huge epiphanies this month. We discussed Christianity in the car, after a Christmas musical, around the table and spent some time doing research individually. D’alice probably learned the most as, true to her nature, she spent 20+ hrs making a presentation. She reached out to friends and pastors and her dad when she was stuck or had questions. You can see her presentation here . I think she did a pretty great job on it. There was an attempt to make it a full animation since that is what I do for work but I wasn’t up to the task unfortunately, so it was abandoned.





While D’alice focused on the details of the Christian religion, Tai made it clear that this topic did not interest him, Gage played along and listened and Brittany both asked and answered questions. I spent the time pondering questions like, “What are the differences between Beliefs and Values?” and more interestingly, at least to me, “What are the differences between a prophet and a philosopher?” Both questions were pretty quick for me to answer but the implications of the answers took up most of my free-thinking time in December. So, for this blog post I am going to quickly summarize those threads and where they took me.





Beliefs vs. Values





It’s simple really, beliefs are something that you trust is true. I believe the earth is round. I haven’t walked it but the evidence is compelling enough for me to have faith that this is in fact true. Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah, come to earth to redeem mankind for our sins. This belief is based on faith. We have compelling evidence that Jesus was an historical figure. That he traveled and taught people the good news. These teachings, have been documented in the Bible as well as other documents. The teachings focus on a set of values that one should live by. A value is not so much a belief as it is a moral construct. Jesus taught that we should love, forgive, serve, be faithful, honest, kind, and charitable. Now I ask myself, “Hank, (I call myself Hank) is it possible to believe in Jesus and not hold all of these values?” That’s a tough question. My instinct was, no. I argued that failure to mirror the values Jesus taught meant that the belief was not complete. It was a fake belief. I struggled with faking my belief for nearly 10 years so eventually I came to the conclusion that I was projecting my own disbelief onto others and that’s not fair.





So that brought up another question, “Is there such a thing as a good Christian and a bad Christian?” This took me down a political rabbit hole for a week or so. Conservative Christians that think Liberal Christian is a euphemism for “bad Christian” and Liberals in general that can’t see how any Christian could support Trump or even have a wall in their house. These arguments, while kind of fun in a guilty pleasure kind of way, were not that helpful and certainly weren’t productive. It became a vicious cycle leading toward animosity and I needed to get out of it. In the end I decided that there is no such thing as a good Christian or a bad Christian. I get around these adjectives by creating my own definition of a Christian. Here it is. Someone who accepts Jesus as their Savior and is trying to follow his teachings. The word trying is the life preserver here. It implies a certain amount of failure. I didn’t set a threshold for the amount of failure. You could fail most of the time, but if you are trying I’m counting you. How do I, the arbiter of who is Christian and who is not, know if you are trying? It’s easy, I don’t. I can’t. It’s not my problem.





It is liberating to not care if someone is trying to follow Jesus or not. I don’t have to ask why evangelicals voted for Trump? I don’t have to ask why some Christians are pro-choice and others are not. An individual’s beliefs are not nearly as important to me as their values are. While their values stem from their beliefs and I probably don’t share many of the same beliefs, our values line up on most things.





Prophet vs. Philosopher





The definitions are simple here too. A prophet is the mouthpiece of God. When he speaks, he is speaking for God and that is powerful stuff. If you believe the man is a prophet, then you are compelled to do your best to follow what he says. If he says something that sounds strange because it goes against what you thought was right, then you change your ways. This is pretty much the entire new testament. Jesus would point out some ritual, practice or belief that was part of Jewish life and teach the new law. He came as the Messiah to fulfill the law. Seems easy now but that was revolutionary at the time. During his life some accepted him as a prophet and started to make these huge changes. It wasn’t easy but it’s kind of an all or nothing type of deal. If he is a prophet you can’t really be like, “Well, I guess animal sacrifice was strange so we’re cool getting rid of that, but this lady really deserves a good stoning so let’s keep that part.”

A Philosopher on the other hand, is just a person that is thinking and throwing those ideas out there for others to think about too. Their ideas are dissected, built up, torn down and are far from sacred. Even philosophers change their mind at times or hold ideas that are antithetical to each other. It is not uncommon to find a philosopher that has many really good ideas that you identify as valuable to your own view of how things are only to find a comment, idea or even book that you reject completely. This is where the important difference lies for me. A philosopher is not speaking the word of God, so if they say something I don’t like, I can discard it and keep the things I do like. I am not compelled to accept that slavery was ok at the time because some of our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence AND many owned slaves. I can discard the bad (while learning from it) and hold tight to the good. Many great philosophers throughout time had some pretty bad ideas mixed in with some great ones. Some of the more controversial examples are Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Galileo, Dawkins, Chomsky and Descartes to name a few. These thinkers had ideas I like and ideas I don’t. In some cases, they had ideas that were so bad they led to the most horrific events in history. That doesn’t make their good ideas bad. If they were prophets I would have a much harder time with this but since they aren’t I can discard any bad ideas.





This a la carte method is my approach to religious thought at this point. I don’t accept anyone as a prophet but as philosophers I see good and bad. There are a lot of good values taught in the new testament (I’m fine without the old). I love Jesus as a philosopher because I love the values he taught. As a philosopher he is possibly the most influential in history. His parables transcend time and teach anyone how to be a better person. So, while I may not share your beliefs we can both hopefully take comfort in the knowledge that we share many of the same values and that is a great place to start.