16 Sept 2017 - Have You Read Anything Good Lately?

A Practicing Christian ch 16 - Have You Read Anything Good Lately?

"There are times when each spouse needs to escape from the world by relaxing with a magazine or  book or a game. There is nothing wrong with that. You just need to be careful that it doesn't get out of control. It becomes wrong when all your other responsibilities are no longer priorities."

I can attest to this. Just this last week, I used amounts of time that should have been reserved for studying to take "reading breaks" to try and finish a book I was reading. As a result, while I am not behind, I am definitely more pressed to try and finish my work by the deadline.

"You become what you read and consume. ... If we are only reading things that are detrimental to our Christian walk, we will struggle to be practicing Christians."

What you sow is what you reap. If you are constantly filling your mind with ungodly concepts and items, then that's what's going to come out - and I don't mean just pornography. We need to be careful even when reading philosophy, science, economics, politics, etc. If the writer is an unbeliever, he or she will be speaking from a very worldly perspective, often with some very convincing arguments and it's easy to compromise our faith in favour of  these rational arguments.

 Questions

1. Why do we need to make the Bible part of our daily reading?
1. We need to do as the psalmist wrote: "I have hidden your word in my heart that I may not sin against You." We cannot obey God, we cannot know His voice if we do not spend time in His word.
2. How can some non-Biblical reading hurt our walk with Christ?
1. It can fill us with ungodly images or thoughts that can lead us to sin.
2. It can teach us ungodly manners of thinking that can lead us to trust in our own understanding and can lead us to ungodly premises and conclusions.
3. What does Mark 9:14 mean in the context of what we read?
1. I'm not sure that this is the passage the author intended, but I'll run with it. If we're not careful in how we read what we read, we can end up like the disciples within our own minds, surrounded by a crowd of spectators and debating with learned scholars, conflicted in the thoughts and ideologies we should use or ascribe to.

1 Timothy 6:11-16

"But you, man of God, run from these things, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness." - v. 11

It's interesting to me how these two segments have come together at the same time and when they've come together. I've just finished reading a rationality Harry Potter fanfic, called Harry  Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR). I have a decently strong history with rationality, logic, and logical debate/argument and have maintained a fairly strong interest in these things, wanting to learn the various aspects of philosophy and applied reasoning that contribute to ethics, metaphysics, origins, and epistemology, particularly in the public sphere and how we, as Christians, can better address the zeitgeist of modern society.

As I mentioned above, it can become very dangerous and tempting to drink deeply from the humanistic leanings of the rationality community, but it is important to remember that man is not the source of all wisdom, that all wisdom is God's wisdom and that, in learning the varying bits of jargon, thought experiments, and arguments, I need to remember that many of these authors do not appear to believe in God. In many ways, many of these thought experiments seek to provide deeper nuanced answers to things many believers take for granted, because we sometimes put them under the blanket explanation of "God made it that way," or "all of mankind is innately depraved and sinful." As such, many of these arguments unintentionally  seek to supplant God while they intentionally refuse to consider the existence of God as any contributing factor.

In addition, there can be a negative attitude towards the general society by some modern internet rationalists as "sheeple", unable to think and see clearly the deceptions and realisations of the governments, religions, etc., meanwhile thinking of themselves as the saviours of humanity, separate from the crowd and clear-sighted, sometimes blind to their own inabilities and faults. This, of course, stands in contrast to the word of God that all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God, that no-one is righteous, that Christ is the way, the truth, and the light, the only way to God, and that the attempts of man to reach Godhood, as evidenced by the tower of Babel, will ultimately fail.

So, then, the reminder to pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness stands as a reminder to keep Christ as the focus and to measure the degree to which I buy into the arguments and explanations given, as some, but not all, may contradict with what God has written and I will need the God-given discernment to see what ideas fall into which camp.