Today is Easter Sunday and I am typing this out and post it for the whole world to read. **May edit later for clarity and typos, keep your thoughts coming**
The title of this post is so hackneyed and at least one Christian apologist (who was ‘saved’ after his Atheism got a kick in the ass by Biblical truth) Lee Strobel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strobel) has written a book with this title. I believe that an intellectually honest faith is a true and healthy faith. Generally there are two equally unpalatable camps regarding Christianity, one is of course of fundamentalist Christians who believe in the inerrancy of Bible and want schools to teach biblical Creationism and so on.
The other camp is full of bitter, mocking and fundamentalist atheists like Richard Dawkins. Unfortunately many literary figures have also tried their hand from time to time at Bible bashing for example Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer etc. It is easy to do so today than when writers like D.H. Lawrence did so and got banned everywhere. And in the case of what many consider father of the great American novel and great humorist Mark Twain, he considered it wise to keep his heretic and dissenting writings about Christianity in the closet. It was only recently that it was discovered how passionately Mark Twain rejected traditional Christian faith. (See this link for introduction of Twain’s views against organized religion:http://www.twainquotes.com/Religion.html )
Then there are lapsed Christians like former nun and now ‘secular’ writer Karen Armstrong(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong). Naturally she feels her years were robbed by Christianity and now by writing books that reveal the fallacies and contradictions in the Bible she is settling the scores in a way. And why shouldn’t she. She has every right to express her opinions and she is a very competent and engrossing researcher, scholar and writer. But then she also writes books on Islam, Koran and Mohammed and she gets into appeasement gear and takes sides and glosses over Muslim fundamentalism. This is hardly what can be remotely called intellectual honesty. This is deception, this is pandering. You punch holes in Christianity because Western world gives you the freedom to do so but you go soft on Islam because you fear backlash. That makes you- and others of your ilk- intellectually dishonest cowards.
Tolstoy’s Confession (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confession) is a great resource about someone going through the crisis of faith and trying to find intellectually honest answers that agree with one’s conscience . It’s full text can be found for free on the internet from many sources including this one: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Confession. Another great Russian writer Dostoevsky dealt with issues of faith in his novels. I have not read Brothers Karamazov but love this quote ‘If there is no God, everything is permissible.’ It always rings true for me. I also love Kant’s quote ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.’ Bible agrees with this kind of thought in a few places like in Luke 17:21 ‘‘Nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold the kingdom of God is within you.’’ (English Standard Version of Bible).
To cut the long story short in order to have an intellectually honest faith I find myself reading Bart D. Ehrman’s book ‘Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and Why’. He is a Bible scholar who has extensively studied (and taught) Bible (especially New Testament) in original languages for years. This book’s content is not original but has been presented in a very easy to grasp format for a layman who wants to do some honest investigation into the Biblical text and history of the very early Christian church. One review of the book fired a passionate debate on Amazon.com and you can access it from this link: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3L9D4Y81NNVGY/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0060859512&nodeID=283155#wasThisHelpful
This only proves how Christian faith means different things to different people. I personally believe in being intellectually honest but at the same time agreeing with Immanuel Kant and Luke 21:17, the Ten Commandments, teachings of Christ to love all mankind and to love God. I also believe that the theology presented in the Book of Romans is a good introduction to Christian faith. I believe objective scholarly resources should be used only to have a healthy faith, for a progressive and open minded Christian.
