I remember thinking that Marvin Gaye was using hyperbole when he cautioned his listeners to “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear”.<\/p>\n\n\n
In 2023, that advice doesn’t sound unnecessarily exaggerated.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
There’s a great scene in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by the ghost of his old business partner Marley. Scrooge’s first instinct is to dismiss the spirit as a figment of his imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t\nbelieve in me,\u201d observed the Ghost.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t,\u201d\nsaid Scrooge.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cWhat evidence\nwould you have of my reality, beyond that of your sense?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t\nknow,\u201d said Scrooge.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cWhy do\nyou doubt your senses?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cBecause,\u201d\nsaid Scrooge, \u201ca little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach\nmakes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a\ncrumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There\u2019s more of gravy than\nof grave about you, whatever you are!\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
Scrooge is not wrong in his mistrust of his senses. We ultimately cannot depend even on our own sight or hearing or touch.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
And in a world where you really can’t trust even your own senses, if you are waiting to give faith your all until you possess incontrovertible proof of God’s existence, you will never arrive at that high standard.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
There will always be a nagging thought in the back of your head saying, “Perhaps God is nothing more than a fragment of an underdone potato.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
A better approach is to throw yourself fully into faith and see what happens.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember thinking that Marvin Gaye was using hyperbole when he cautioned his listeners to “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear”. In 2023, that advice doesn’t sound unnecessarily exaggerated.\u00a0 There’s a great scene in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by the ghost of his old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5925,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5924\/revisions\/5925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}