"You never step in the same river twice." - Heraclitus
As an army brat, change has always been something of a favorite concept of mine. Change has been the defining feature of my life in a way that exceeds the experience of most people, and it's always been a kind of obsession for me. What is change, and if it is as constant as all evidence suggests, and if it is, as the saying goes, "the only constant," why do we regard it as change to start with, when it would seem that stasis is the abnormality?
These are questions too big for a blog post, and not really my purpose here.
What I'm about here is a project, perhaps in a sense at once the simplest and the most ambitious I've ever undertaken:
I want to tell you what I believe. Or, at least, what I believe now.
Before I went to college, I was a politically conservative, theologically conservative Southern Baptist. Some time, somewhere in there, I became a Free Methodist, then a Catholic. Then I unbecame a Roman Catholic. I'm not sure how, when, or by what degrees, but I became what most would call a "bleeding heart liberal."
Now, as a political liberal and a man who finds himself awash in a sea of perspectives, at once holding, bemoaning, mocking, and worshiping perspectives that are a mix of functionally identical, mutually exclusive, outright irrational, reductionist, pretentious and over all, angst-ridden, I feel it may be a good idea for myself and for those who know me and interact with me if I make a project of saying, in clear terms, just what I believe on a number of important matters. Mostly, these will encompass theology, philosophy, politics and what little I know about economics.
I do not promise that they will be presented in that order, nor that they will be sequentially organized in a way that seems rational to anyone other than myself. Nor can I ever hope to provide truly comprehensive perspectives on anything that you read here. When one is talking about matters like the basis of morality (and, for that matter, if morality is a concept worth talking about,) the existence of God, the minutia of apologetics and the arrangement of labor systems, a man without a Ph.D cannot even begin to hope that he might be comprehensive in his presentation.
I do promise that I will be honest and unapologetic, and that as much as possible I will try to write what I do believe, not what I'd like to believe, and that I will try to provide at least a brief sketch of why I believe those things.
My perspectives will change over time, and it's possible that mere months from now I will believe that the positions I hold now are idiotic, but for here and for now, for those who read this and for myself when I look back on this, I will do my best to be clear and to tell you clearly, What I Believe.
What I Believe: Speaking the Words
There really is something about getting an opinion out there. The formation of the words that we will use, and the way we implement those words can help us cement in our own minds just what it is that we mean to say. Of course, the act of expression is a kind of intentional vulnerability, an instance in which we give up a piece of what we call our 'interior' and expose it to the reactions of others, whether positive or negative. My friends can never laugh at my opinion, or point out its flaws, or de-contextualize and misappropriate parts of it, if I do not express it.
By way of contrast, the moment of communication is a moment of surrender, a point at which we remove ourselves from the calm interior where we hold our ideas like a warm blanket, in which we throw open the doors of our hovels and surrender whatever pieces we will allow the the possible mockery and derision of those to whom we have opened the doors.
As such, the act of communicating, the crucial moment in which we open the door and invite the light of criticism, is not self-contained.
If we are careful, we will tidy up our hovels, straightening a line here, dusting off a panel there and making sure that the air is light and airy or dark and heavy as is appropriate to the context in which we find ourselves. Much like a host, we clean our interior before we present it, we clear the things we do not like and we refine our space until we can present it as, waht seems to us at first, what it really is, the way that we want to see it.
After the communication we are open to criticism, or to a lack thereof, but there is a sense in which this is irrelevant, or relevant only insofar as it informs the process of communication.
I write this, and I am trying to tell you wat I believe, because I believe that the only way I can understand what I believe is to try to put it together in such a way that others can see it, feel it, digest it and accept or reject it.
Until I allow another in, until I at least try to present my ideas at their best, I may not know what they really are, or worse yet, I may allow them to persist in a state of decay or disrepair.
So, come on in. Enjoy the hovel and mind the warm blanket. I am telling you this so I can tell myself this.
Tomorrow: What I Believe about believing
