Some time back I put a
Christian Wiman quote on Twitter. “Faith is the movement of a soul toward God.”
An atheist Tweeted in
reply: “There is no evidence for soul or God. Faith is belief without evidence.
How can that ever be good?”
The first thing I realized
is that the people who respond to my tweets the most are atheists. The second
thing I realized is that Twitter is not a very good mode for discussing weighty
ideas. 140 characters per tweet does not lend itself to nuanced thinking. [280
isn’t going to make this sort of discussion any easier.] Our own President has
led the way in helping us to understand this.
The world will be won or
lost not just by who has the best story, but by who tells their story best and
widest. There really are only two stories, the Christ story, which is about
love and inclusion, and the Anti-Christ story, which is about fear and
exclusion.
There is a lot of fear and
exclusion on the unsocial media. But in this time and place, the stories are
told through social media. We who tell the Christ story, by whatever name, need
to flood said media with hope and inclusion, so that it will actually be social
instead of unsocial.
Old people don’t have much
energy, but we can tweet. Every old person should be working Twitter, to create
a Christ inclusion movement, 280 characters at a time, flooding the
Twitterverse with mature wisdom. I have faith that the world will be a better
place if we convince everybody to stay home on Saturday nights and watch
Lawrence Welk reruns on PBS. You know it’s true…
I tweet as yooper1721.
JRMcF
The Wiman quote is from
his penetrating book, My Bright Abyss.
The atheist quoted above
asked how can belief without evidence ever be good. For the answer, read Neal
F. Fisher’s excellent AN INTRODUCTION TO
CHRISTIAN FAITH: A Deeper Way of Seeing.
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