Personal Frustrations

I'm irate.  I'm very pissed off.  Yet again, today I've dealt with false claims about my Christianity, among other things, that misrepresent me and my worldview.  With no more useful outlet for my frustration available to me now, I decided to just vent here about the stupidity of a claim I've heard some people in my life make recently.

There are those who doubt my status as a Christian simply because I don't believe on emotionalistic or social grounds, and because I admit that I don't actually know if Christianity is true and thus I don't actually believe it is.  No, I'm not an intellectually dishonest person, so I admit openly that I don't know if Christianity is true in full.  My commitment to it is based solely on the fact that evidence in its favor exists and that I am able to access that information.  But it is sincere commitment based on rationality and demonstrable facts.  If Christianity is true, then I do not want to squander my time with other things.  And that is what everything in the Christian worldview reduces down to: a matter of truth, and truth alone (John 8:32).  My commitment to Christianity is not based on feelings, assumptions, or inherited family beliefs (since I was raised by professed Christian parents).  It is rooted in the best probabilistic assessment of the evidence I have, since this is not something I can have absolute certainty of.  But probabilism has led me here.  I am no pretender.

It gets very damn irritating to hear the same straw men of my Christianity get erected and attacked, as if in destroying a misrepresentation of my worldview people are actually overthrowing it!  My worldview cannot be false because logic can't be false and the claims I am making are in strict adherence to logic.  It is not that I claim to know more than I do or can know.  On the contrary, unlike most people I've met, I actually admit openly that I can't know a great many things--if any consciousness other than my own exists, if the past has existed for more than a moment, if God loves me, if my senses perceive the external world as it is, and so on.  When I make claims, I am not stating that I believe something I can't prove.  That is why I claim that there is evidence supporting Christianity and not that Christianity is true, for instance.

I have found that one of the greatest sources of annoyance in my spiritual journey has been other Christians.  This post was more a rant about recent personal irritations than about me making a specific intellectual point.  Forgive the unusual nature of it, but it is important for rationalists to remember that most people are not helpful or accurate when it comes to spiritual and intellectual matters.  Venting is healthy, and sometimes it is the only way to handle anger without detonating in an illicit manner at another person.  And anger is powerful.  When people who know me think of me, I do not want them to think I am in any way lacking passion for truth and reason.  I do not want them thinking my commitment to Christianity is lukewarm or insincere.