An Interesting Interpretation

Well, I'm back to traveling. I just finished a missions conference in Grand Junction, Colorado, and am on my way to visit a church in DeKalb, Missouri. I love to travel, but I will admit that I also like having a few days between presentations and driving to cool down a bit (and post blog entries). Right now, I am taking a short break in Denver before heading off tomorrow for Missouri.

While I am traveling, I still get updates from the office and our supporters. One such update proved particularly interesting: apparently there was an article in a magazine that referenced an article that I wrote for the Room For Doubt website.

Now, I remember writing the article: I was asked to write a series of introductions to several web articles that people might be interested in reading. The articles in question were not articles produced by Room For Doubt (a Christian website), but by several atheists and agnostics, who were talking about their understanding of ethics, morality, and life in general. The hope was that the Christian readers of the Room For Doubt (I'm going to call it RFD from now on), site would be able to see how outsiders to the faith through about and understood our world. As such, I was asked not be as unbiased in my presentation as possible, allowing readers to think about what these alternative views and their implications (both good and bad).

One of the readers, apparently, was Kent B. True (the nom de plume of Harold Orndorff) for the Restoration Herald. It seems I was a more successful than I had intended in my neutrality, as Kent was under the impression that I was endorsing the content of the articles, not simply the reading of them. Kent's article was sent to us by one of our supporters, who was curious about the interesting position Kent claimed I was taking. Unfortunately, I have tried to find where these articles got posted, but have failed to do so. This means that I have only my recollection of my comments (as my original comments are buried in some deep, dark corner of one of my computers), so it may be that the framing of my comments by the site, or even the comments themselves indicated a position I had not intended to take. So, both for our supporter's and Kent's sake, let me clarify my position.

To be fair to Kent, most of his analysis was of the content of the articles I was recommending. These articles were largely existentialist in nature, and Ken (to brutally shorten a much longer and more complex argument) believed existentialism to be untenable as a source of ethics.

I agree.

There: point clarified. Now this is not to say I was just blowing smoke in my recommendations for these articles, I genuinely believe that the authors are intelligent people making the best case they can for their position. That's why I recommended other people read them; it is important to understand other positions, not just our interpretations or caricatures of other positions. This does not, however, mean I agree with them. Certainly, there are parts of what many of the authors said that I think are legitimate, but I tend to agree with (as well as find fault with) parts of what nearly everyone says. Just because I agree with a point, that doesn't mean I agree with the main point or conclusion of a position or argument.

I believe existentialism to be a valiant effort, but ultimately futile. That is, really, one of the big reasons I am not an existentialist. To me, it looks like someone trying to cross a vast chasm by holding out two boards...then trying to walk across them. The idea of putting out boards to cross is good, and the idea of crossing on the boards is good, but when you put all the ideas together, they just don't work.

So my apologies to anyone who believed I was an existentialist. I know I am amazing, and everyone wants me in their corner, but that's not the case here. Also my apologies to whoever might have been confused by the misunderstanding. Finally, I apologize to anyone who really didn't care about any of this, and read through this article hoping I would eventually move on to something more interesting.

If anyone is interested in Kent's views and opinions, he also has a blog called The Clubhouse. While I do not endorse all of his ideas (or anyone else's, really), I do think he has some interesting points, and endorse reading them.