George and Darren
George Lippert
Darren Bell
George Lippert and Darren Bell.
A creative and an engineer, both who happen to be friends of mine, and today I’d like to introduce you to a new feature of Martyholman.com. Both George and Darren are really really smart. Now I wouldn’t tell them this, but when I see them write on facebook or their blogs or when I chat with them, their insight and thoughts have inspired me to think more, so as a connector, I had an idea.
Why not get them to help more people think in a gentleman’s dual of intellect.
So I asked George and Darren, as two men who think very different from one another in some ways, and very much alike in others, to answer a question that I would ask via email, and then chat back and forth about their answers. Along the way, Jeff Campbell gets involved in the conversation, and he makes things even more interesting. Because this conversation was so lengthy, these posts will last most of the week. I trust you’ll be inspired to think thorugh their conversation and ask questions to all the participants. So I’d like to introduce you to George (GL) and Darren (DB).
MH: So tell us a bit about yourselves.
George Lippert: I’m a full time CG artist and part-time writer currently haunting the suburbs of St. Louis. Between being a husband, a father of two awesome little kidlets, paying taxes, cooking Mexican food, mowing the lawn, keeping my 100-year-old house from falling down, and playing lots of racing video games, I formulate lots and lots of “controversial” opinions. Some of them I will surely share below.
Darren Bell: I’m Darren Bell. I’m a Chemical Engineer living in Philadelphia that lived for 6 years in New England mostly going to college and one of those years attending Fellowship Church. Spiritually I’ve been all over the spectrum from an Ayn Rand-esque athiest to going through 40 Days of Purpose. The last couple years I’ve been away from the church and Christianity, in the past 6 months I’ve found a church I really like in Philadelphia. Although aesthetically something appeals to me in Christianity and also I find it helpful to be reminded of certain morals I tend to forget I am pretty much agnostic.
MH: In a world full of opinions and thoughts and gray, as opposed to previous eras of black and white, it can be tough to really know where someone’s coming from. As a writer/artist (George) and an engineer (Darren), What is the basis for your worldview?
GL: We do indeed live in a time when a black-and-white worldview is not only unpopular, but outright ridiculed. Hard and fast absolutes are considered narrow and intolerant. Up until recently, I shared this perception, based on my background in (what I’ll call for lack of a better term) a fundamentalist upbringing.
I, like many people, grew disillusioned with a spiritual worldview that placed far too much emphasis on superficial rule-following. In rebellion against this, I (rightly) trashed the external rulebook as a method of determining rightness or wrongness in God’s sight.
Unfortunately, along with that man-invented rulebook, I also trashed the God-ordained fundamentals of absolute truth. I didn’t do this consciously, but it happened nonetheless. I began to trust subjective sources of spiritual reality as much as the Bible. Speculation became just as reliable as revelation in terms of the truth (if such a thing could even be known) about God.
The result was that I very nearly abandoned my faith (such as it was). I was disillusioned, selfish, confused, and generally irate with God. Why? Because he simply did not make a lick of sense to me. Of course he didn’t. My head was full of contradictory thoughts about him, based on the wildly various sources of information that I was trusting as a means of knowing him.
Just to list one example of those many contradictions: how could God want my “best life now” for me, while the apostles themselves were almost all murdered horribly for their faith? Was I better than them, somehow? Had God changed his M.O. toward mankind?
This and many other confusingly contradictory thoughts about God eventually wore me down. I was done.
And then, for the first time in a long time, I heard the gospel. I won’t go into it in detail (this is already too long) but it floored me. It was so simple, so amazing! This basic, fundamental truth that 1) I was simply too messed up ever to save myself, and 2) that I didn’t have to, because Jesus did it for me– it absolutely boggled my mind.
I had been in church for decades, and I had not heard that basic, simple, awesome truth for as long as I could remember.
So I began to seek out more of those basic Biblical axioms, completely free from human speculation. I fell in love all over again (and maybe even for the first time) with the comforts of simple, absolute truth.
Now, I need to hear those truths everyday, because I forget them so easily, and because the world is so bereft of them.
There is, in short, a mind-boggling misconception that absolute truth is restrictive, somehow– that it does not respect freedom and diversity.
In fact, absolute truths are the most freeing thing in the world. Just ask anyone who has ever had to navigate a mine field. Would they claim to be offended at the “absolute truth” of a map showing exactly where all the mines were? Or would they chafe against the “restrictions” on their ability to tramp however they wished, pell-mell, regardless of the outcome?
In fact, the map of certain fundamental truths is the most freeing thing in the world. It frees me from the constantly worrying blare of the voices of speculation and guesswork. It provides a groundwork for belief that is unshakable because it does not originate with me or with other men. It comes directly, by revelation, from God himself.
Of course, this depends on one accepting the Bible as God’s inspired word. Without that, then it’s all just back to the wildly disparate winds of speculation again. If I was stuck with that, I’d choose to believe absolutely nothing. It’d be safer.
I do choose to believe in the revelation of God through the Bible, however. Not out of faith alone, but because the evidence of history, sociology, psychology and my own conscience point toward its veracity.
The existence of certain unavoidable and undeniable truths is not popular– it is, in fact, about the least popular concept in the country right now. But (and this is a huge but) the popularity of a belief bears no weight whatsoever on whether or not it is true.
MH: Thanks George. Darren?
DB: One of the first things I think of when I consider what the basis for my world view is is the importance of perspective. We are kind of trapped in perspective. Everything I view and interpret and touch mentally or physically, to take it into my mind and try to understand it or interpret it I have to get my Darren fingerprints all over it. And this is how it is for pretty much everyone as far as I can tell. I think a really healthy way to live is to have a respect that other peoples lives make sense to them inside their own heads, just like yours does. In fact exactly like yours does. I think a second healthy trait is to try to see your beliefs from the perspective of someone who doesn’t share them to see if they are merely based on your own perspective (i.e. I got in a car accident once and now I don’t drive even though driving is statistically pretty safe) or if they are broader then just what is in front of your eyes, in other words are the things you’re building a worldview on bigger then your own personal truths?
Back when I was a Chrisitan I was really excited about it’s “internal constancy” and faith=sight arguments, I would always say “I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not only because I can see it, but that by it I can see everything else.” And it really does!! It is totally true, that ain’t a sham at all. It took me several years but the more I thought about it the more flaws I saw in that type of thinking.
One of the advantages of trying to see your own beliefs from the third person is that you start to understand that just because we live in society that is religiously dominate by Christians, other people actually have religious worldviews that illuminate their world the same way as the Christian worldview. I started asking myself “Don’t you think Muslims feel that their beliefs correctly and insightfully help them to understand the world, and Buddhists and Jews?” In fact that is what all worldviews do, they are suns to our mental world. And for years I looked at the world through the lens of Christianity and honest to goodness, it was compelling, it made the world make sense, it had answers that made me think “Man, this is all so clear, I must be looking through the right lens onto the world!” But then I realized other people were looking though different lenses, and were at least claiming to see the world just as clearly as I was claiming.
This lead me only recently to conceptualize an important idea about what we can and cannot know, that it is proper for people to understand the limits of their ability to know things and the extent their beliefs can reach, and to have an intellectual respect for those limits. There is a circle around me. And within that circle is my perspective and my experiences, and that is pretty much all I have. From that I develop a worldview, I say some things are good and some things are bad and some are in between. I say some things are pretty or ugly, valuable or worthless, meaningful or banal. And I try to respect that circle and the limitations it imposes on what I truly can and cannot know, it is the salt of my worldview.
I believe aesthetics are important. I pursue happiness, beauty and understanding cause I just plain old like them. I don’t pursue them because they are absolutes, or ordained by an eternal creator. I just like sitting out under a blue sky reading a book, and it doesn’t concern me at all that doing so isn’t good because it was ordained by some higher power, I’m content with doing it simply because it’s pleasant.
So the above kind of answers the questions “what is the basis for your worldview?” even though it does very little to define the content of that worldview, what I think about things, whether love is important, if I voted for Obama and whether I eat baby puppies for dinner. And since that was Marty’s question I guess I won’t go too much further (at the moment) in to WHAT I think, as I have answered HOW I think.
