Source: Lew Rockwell | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
There was a time not long ago, when any reasonable Christian would have called me an atheist.
Then, one day, a pastor said something to me that I had never heard before. He said something like this from the pulpit, “If you are having faith issues, do these eight things.”
My ears perked up. I think faith issues pretty well described the problem I was having.
I wanted to understand God. I wanted to have faith. I just couldn’t turn my brain off long enough to stop asking irrelevant questions: What happened at the Council of Nicaea? What was the role of Constantine in the forming of Christianity? Why is the King James Bible, the Bible authorized by the British Crown, the trusted Bible? What happened to all those books that the Catholics consider part of the Bible, that Luther said were good for Christians to read in his 1534 translation, that were included in the 1611 King James Version, but have since just disappeared?
Well, my forlorn and tired ears were perked up as this wizened preacher spoke about his eight things for people with face issues to do. I could not tell you what the other seven items on the list were. But I could tell you one of them was “spend more time in the Word.”
Well, I opened up the back of my Bible and looked at a checklist I had previously noticed. It described how to read the Bible in a year. You can get that same checklist at 55hours.org — so named because it only takes about 55 hours to read the Bible front-to-back, or less than 15 minutes a day to read it in a year. I have read through the Bible some 8 or 9 times now since I heard that sermon.
Though I heard many sermons, studied the Bible for years, descended into atheism and worse — through all that, the Bible did not start to come together for me until I was reading through it front-to-back for the third time. I would consider that a minimum investment for attempting to understand the Bible.
In time, I learned that no matter how many disputes I had with the King James Version, in its pages, I could find God.
I started that same day with Galatians, the appointed reading for the day. A handful of weeks into this process, I said to myself something like this, “I really don’t believe any of this crap. I mean, what am I really doing here?”
And then an idea came to mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet, mystic, and literary critic, a man whose writing I loved, and arguably not one of my better influences in life had a term, “temporary suspension of disbelief.”
I have long loved movies. It was my practice to sit down for a movie and allow the ne’er-do-wells of Hollywood to “run” through my head for two or three hours at a time unchecked.
While reading the wisest of wise books, I had my defenses on high alert. I was not letting a single word of the thing in my heart. I knew that it was way better than anything I was getting from Hollywood, so I said to myself, “What if, for ten minutes every day while I’m reading this thing, what if I pretended like it was real? What if I temporarily suspended my disbelief? Then what would happen?” I did not know. But I aimed to find out.
And find out I did.
For ten minutes each day I resolved to read this wise book, as if I believed the thing. A few weeks later a new and unfamiliar feeling appeared in me. It was in a place in my chest that I had never remembered feeling anything before.
I observed it. I knew it was faith. I took a step toward believing, I took a leap of faith. I exercised faith. And more faith showed up. Before I knew it, I was looking down at this book and saying, “I think I’m actually believing this stuff.”
And it was not long before I really believed. It was not long before I really believed it to be the Word of God. It was not long before all the ugly cynicism of critical theory started to work its way out of me.
I could see these obstacles that had been with me for many years one-by-one topple — many of them put there by my schooling, both private schooling and government schooling, both Roman Catholic and Protestant — how deeply every school I have ever attended implanted so deeply in me the tools of faithlessness and doubt and paraded them about as “thought.”
It was not too long later that I felt compelled one day to invite two guys to read the Book of Proverbs with me at 6 a.m. the following Sunday morning.
To read the Book of Proverbs every Sunday aloud, verse-by-verse, front-to-back with those gentleman, all 31 chapters has become a regular part of my week. And each week a handful of verses stand out — sometimes verses I have never noticed before, issues in my life that need dealing with, humbleness that needs to take the place of an ugly pride in me, correction that needs accepting.
After having read the Book of Proverbs dozens of times, if I had to come up with a series of messages that is most repeated, it would be this: Wisdom starts with revering the Lord. It is a fool who does otherwise, and he does not even realize what a fool he is. He who does not seek his own correction is a fool. Correction is a gift of love. It is also a great treasure and a gift from a person who risks much by correcting you. A fool will hate you for correcting him. A wise man will love you and will grow wiser. A wise man will seek correction, will even build around him opportunities for much correction.
Over-and-over that is a theme of the Book of Proverbs.
We live in an era that is heavy on data, but light on wisdom. We live in an era that is heavy on algorithmic decision making, but light on wisdom. We live in an era that is heavy on fake news, machine learning, lowest common denominator search engine results, and AI as a combination of all that, offered to us as our messianic promise of salvation, here to rescue us from everything that anyone might want rescuing from — and yet it remains an era that is so light on wisdom.
Nothing light on wisdom and no one light on wisdom has any business guiding us through this mess we have found ourselves in. We live in an era of fools. And it is an era of fools who think themselves wise — a defining feature of fools in every era.
I need men and women around me of gravitas, men and women of wisdom, some men and women who have a foundation opposite the foolishness of our era, men and women who seek wisdom and wish to share it.
My next book is about that. For a limited time, it is available here for free. It is a book for poets, authors, and other truth seekers. In it, I use the definition of poet, a definition that has been ceded to the weakest of the weak and the most foolish of the foolish girlie-men and effete women. Poet is so much more that what our era allows the word to be.
I once heard a definition of the word poet that went something like this: He who goes out to the outskirts of society and brings back to that society the essential truths he has found. I have refined that definition over the years, so I know it looks a bit different than the original, but the essence of it remains the same.
If you disagree, I encourage you to have a closer look at the book and the important reasons that this definition matters. If you agree, it, too, might be of use to you.
But this much I know is true: If you are a truth-seeker and a truth-teller, if you go out into the world into the most uncomfortable of places, and bring back hard-won truth, this era needs more of you. And it needs your voice amplified.
The media as we know it has crumbled. At this late date, it remains largely un-replaced. Even more writers are needed. Even more commentators are needed. Even more truth-seekers and truth-tellers are needed.
The vast parts of the world that has been impacted since the ides of March 2020 say so much about how little influence truth-tellers have in the world around us. More of your truth-telling is needed. And in more organized fashion. The marketplace is not saturated by truth-tellers. It is saturated by lies. No great awakening can happen in that environment. No great uprising can happen. No great reform can happen.
There are people in the world only you can reach. And you are not yet reaching them. I need you to take that next step and to become more diligent, more organized, more complete in your truth-telling and truth-sharing.
No matter how many mega-million follower, big name influencers there are, it is one-on-one, and in intimate environments that you touch your circle of influence with the most pressing of needs.
If 2020 happened again, the truth is, it would have almost the same outcome. And it does not have to be that way. We have grown as a civilization since the ides of March. We have advanced as a human race since the ides of March 2020.
But the environment for information remains saturated with lies and many refuse to stand up and win for their values. Many refuse to stand up and insist that their values are valuable enough to fight and win for those values. In many situations, that involves the most basic willingness to use the most rudimentary technology, to do it regularly, and to reach a group of people: small at first, but perhaps much larger before long, and to share the most wise thing that you can with them at a given moment.
This is a big deal.
And if you refuse to do that, you are almost certainly preparing a situation for your circle of influence to be visited by another ides of March 2020 and to fail this time much larger than they did before. I watched dear friends die because of the health protocols. I watched at least two relatives die because of the health protocols. I watched families and lives destroyed because of the health protocols.
For lack of wisdom, I saw people perish. The wisdom exists. The truth-teller ready to identify the wisdom and apply it in actionable ways for those around them are not rising up into positions of leadership.
Dear poet, you are needed. Dear author, you are needed. Dear entrepreneur, you are needed. Dear truth-teller, you are needed. The moment has come for the remnant to rise up and lead. And few care enough about those around them to do so. Many think it is the job of another.
And because they refuse to answer the call, many more will perish.
But it does not have to be that way.
