Good News Quote #35

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

Questions ought to have a place in our hearts, because asking questions is a way of seeking the truth and the love of truth is an important virtue. [...]


It's not just idle curiosity or intellectual pride. Above all, it shouldn't be confused with the obnoxious desire to be right all the time, which is a vice, not a virtue. The people who love the truth are not the ones who are always trying to prove they're right and everyone else is wrong. They're people who are glad to discover when they're wrong, because that gets them one step closer to the truth. And that shows how rare and difficult this virtue is. It's close kin to repentance, because it undermines our desire to justify ourselves and put others in the wrong, and thereby makes us more fair and just in our relationships. Without it morality is just a sham, a game we play to impress people or to persuade ourselves that we're good Christians.

Good News Quote #34

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

One last unit in that army of cultural stereotypes fighting against people who think too much is what I call the "God makes no sense" move. My students make this move a lot. They say things like "I can't explain it, it must be God" or "It makes absolutely no sense, you just have to believe it" or "Faith means you have to let yourself believe in something crazy and illogical that you can't understand." These are the cliches of people who have taken to heart the warning that they'd better not think too much. It looks to me like they're trying to preserve their faith by not even admitting to themselves that they have questions about it.


And this is sad. It treats Christian faith as if it were make-believe. If you're a child trying to hang on to your belief in Santa Claus, then you really do need to keep yourself from thinking about it too much. Critical thinking really will kill your faith in Santa Claus. But the Christian faith is true, so it can stand up to serious questioning.

Good News Quote #32

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

This goes against an old stereotype about reason or rationality (I'll use these two terms equivalently). The stereotype is that in order to be rational, you have to deny your emotions. But that's never made sense to me. Reason is about finding the truth, whereas denying your emotions means telling lies to yourself about what you're feeling. There's no rationality in that. Some psychologists call it "rationalization," but that doesn't mean it's rational. In fact, "rationalization" is a technical term in psychology for a certain kind of irrationality, precisely because it refers to an attempt to avoid realizing the truth about ourselves.

Denial of reality is not what reason is for. And getting in touch with reality is one of the most important things our emotions are for. That's why reason and emotion -- thinking and feeling -- belong together: they both help us get at the truth about reality. But they get at the truth in different ways, which is why they need each other.

Good News Quote #31

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

I've never heard anyone warn people about splitting their head from their heart when they're in the grip of strong, raging emotions that obliterate their capacity to think straight. No, it's always when you're thinking a lot that people warn you about splitting your head from your heart. And what seems to make them especially nervous is when you think too much about your feelings. [...]

There's nothing in the Bible to suggest that there's any such thing as thinking too much. And since there's no such thing, it's not something to worry about. We should all go ahead and think as much as we need to, just as we should feel as much as we need to. You can't really do too much of either. What you can do -- and this is what we should be concerned about -- is think dishonestly carelessly, uninsightfully, just as we can also have feelings that are dishonest, malicious, arrogant, and so on. There are evils to watch out for in both our thinking and our feeling, but sheer quantity is not the problem. The problem is not too much thinking or feeling but evil thoughts and feelings.