Easter

Today is Easter - the Sunday where we celebrate what we celebrate every Sunday and every day. So, in reality it is a normal day. But, it's nice to have special commemorations. We spend 364 days each year debating subtle issues of doctrine. We spend this one day solely dedicated to the one event that gives any doctrine meaning. Without this, Christianity is a religion and a philosophy. With this, we know the way to the restoration of how things should be.

Tim Keller's "The Reason For God"

At the moment I'm reading a book by Tim Keller called The Reason For God. It's an apologetics book of sorts. (Not quite sure if it's aimed primarily at an unbeliever or rather at people interested in learning about how to do apologetics with at least certain kinds of unbelievers. I really like its overall thought process. The target audience of the arguments are non-religious, pluralist people. Basically, it's a two step approach. The first step is to take their specific doubts and reformulate them as statements of faith (faith in something other than Jesus, of course, but faith nonetheless), and you illustrate why their faith in the form of "doubt" requires just as big a leap as faith in Jesus. Then, once the person realizes that their belief system is no more rock solid or based in "objective observation" (that is, once they doubt their doubts), you present some clues for why Jesus is plausible and good.

This deviates a bit from rationalist forms of apologetics where arguer accepts the rational premise (any true statement is provable through argument based on some set of secular premises). Indeed, anything proved through logic cannot actually be automatically held to be true, since logic is always circular, because to use logic, we have to assume that logical conclusions are true, which is unprovable within logic. And indeed, there is no logical proof for God, nor is there a logical disproof, and even the strictest rationalists accept that at some level.

So, in any case, it's a good read. (Actually, I haven't finished the book yet, but the first 3/4 of the book was good.)