The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

I am brand new at blogging.  I often find that putting words down in writing helps me clarify my thought processes, but I am a raw beginner. Maybe there is someone out there that will be interested in what I have to say now or at some future point.  I understand that I might be mistaken in some points along the way, or that someone else might disagree with what I have to say even when I don't think I am mistaken.  I hope that this blog can become a place for people with diverse viewpoints to communicate on equal footing in a reasonable way.   In the words of Carroll Quigley, one of my favorite historians, the essence of Western Civilization (mentioned in my previous blog post ) can be summed up in the phrase "Truth unfolds in time through a communal process."  That is also what I hope this blog can become - a place for me and others to search for truth and learn from differing perspectives, though united by a faith in Christ.  Where I am wrong in my as...

What were you taught about Christianity in school?  For me (at a public high school in Wisconsin in the late 1990s) the narrative in world history and literature classes was generally dismissive and quite negative.  To exaggerate only a little, the narrative was something like this:  “Whether or not there actually was a Jesus, some people started a religion about him 2000 years ago.  Constantine decided to rally his troops around this new religion, and killed a bunch of pagans to successfully gain power in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.  Later, when there weren't as many pagans around, Christians decided to go kill some Muslims in the Crusades.  Then with Islam in retreat, Christians decided to split into 2 groups and kill each other for 150 years. Fortunately, Christianity was proved wrong by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes monkey trial so now we can finally progress to a new brighter age of reason.” Without a solid background in history or philosophy...

We are all born with a tremendous curiosity, and a need to explore and understand the world around us - to understand how and why things work, and how we fit into it.  It is so fun to watch babies and toddlers and young children go through this process.  I suspect that my sense of curiosity was partially stunted through 16 years of formal education.  But when I was in graduate school (Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Madison) around 2008 I started to follow politics, having a vague sense that something different was happening and things were changing in the word. I felt my curiosity drive began to resurface, and I opened a new chapter in my intellectual life.  (Maybe it had something to do with developing and practicing critical thinking techniques in a new way as a graduate student.)  Politics then gave way to the main question that planted itself in my mind, which was "How did the world come to be the way it is now, from how it us...