Quote Originally Posted by LutheranHusker View Post
This I can understand and agree with. I believe I have been given promises about what will happen after we die, that we have been given pictures and metaphors to help try to describe it, but I can't know for sure. And that's where I see many of my Christian brothers and sisters getting tripped up...faith isn't assent to a set of intellectual propositions...it's simply trust. And frankly, I put much more trust in the Bible as a series of writings that came together over hundreds of years by different people in different circumstances with different aims in different styles and most likely after years of oral tradition before anything was even written than I would if someone tried to claim that it was divine dictation or miraculously discovered in a cave or something. I have faith in a God who inspired these writings, but intellectual responsibility in trying to learn all I can about their original languages and context and literary style and history and such.

Faith may be separate from reason, but it ought not to force one to abandon reason, either. Each ought to inform the other, be in conversation with the other.

I fully believe that while reason will never lead straight into faith, it absolutely can and does point to it.
I appreciate the sentiment, but to me, that's too risky a proposition.

Again, going back to my first post, I acknowledge and appreciate one's adherence to a personal faith. I often times wish I could generate the same internal ability to feel this way. But it's the manifestation of that into an organized practice that claims to be a truth I just cannot take seriously. At least intellectually.