Paul Arveson wrote:
> Christianity is relational, and I've noticed that most of the messages on
>this list are too impersonal. I would be honored to get acquainted with you.
>I think we all would.
I often do lose sight of the fact that my conversion was a little
off the beaten path.
As finished up high school, I was already aiming for a career in
science. I was your normal scientific relativist raised in a pretty
agnostic household (the only remotely religious event was the Passover
Sader, with my reformed Jewish side of the family.)
My senior year, I like every other Texas high school student had a
government class, except mine was rather different. The point, though,
being that I learned that out of reasonable postulates (which I already
held) you could come to some kind of conclusions about reality. I had
also been taught (in a NSF spondered young scholars program) a bit about
epistomology and how science didn't correlate necessarly to the truth.
On top of that, I wasn't finding cynicism nearly as rewarding as it had
been.
So I graduated and started going to the local university because
they offered me a fat scholarship and a very good fizix program. Because
the school is local, I pretty much ended up hanging out with some friends
from high shcool. (Actually they were a relatively new set of friends,
even though I had known everyone since 3rd grade or so.)
We were all pretty theoretically minded and loved to talk about
philosophy/science/religion/spriituality, or whatever. 2 out of 5 of us
were active Christians, one was somewhat more quiet at the time (though
he has become far more so as of late.)
I was quite ready to start looking around, but Christianity had a
very bad rep amongst the science crowd (Plenty of vocal young earthers to go
around here in Texas.) So, upon my friends' suggestion, I started
reading the Tao Te Ching. Introduced me really to the idea of
understanding through relation instead of intellectual grasping. Very
compelling. Eventually, 1 of the Christians in the group (the one who's
a philosophy major) showed me how Christianity incorporated all of the
neato God imminent in nature part and also dealt with the God creator of
the Universe part (paradoxically, of course, but paradoxes were never
something that scared me intellectually.)
From here, I started studying the Bible and it just grew on me from
there. I started watching out for things spiritual and found them, et
cetera. Eventually my mind brought my heart around and that was that.
So my conversion was first intellectual then spiritual then
emotional, which is, I know, kind of odd, but I like it.
Stephen