| I heard an interesting thing recently: The main difference between a person who believes in something and a person who doesn't is that the believer focuses on what's known, while the non-believer focuses on what's unknown. As an analogy, consider Christianity. It's a religion with lots of beliefs, and along with those beliefs come a bunch of holes. There are some pretty reliable knowns (Jesus existed, he claimed to be God, his early followers were willing to die for their belief in him as the Christ) as well as some potentially show-stopping unknowns (existence of God, infallibility of the Bible, creation/evolution/big-bang/monkeys). If we think of the whole thing as a puzzle, the knowns are puzzle pieces in their proper place and the unknowns are [obviously] missing pieces from the puzzle. The analogy I heard had to do with a painting of the Mona Lisa. If an average person saw the painting with a few puzzle pieces missing, he/she would easily be able to identify the painting even though it wasn't complete. The same can be true of Christianity. Even though we don't have all the puzzle pieces, we can still believe in it by focusing on what's there instead of focusing on what's not there. I definitely don't have all the answers. If anything, I have the same number of doubts as the standard person. The only difference between me and the standard person is that I choose to focus on what's known instead of what's unknown. #religion |