I believe...

Yesterday the cartoon "Doonesbury" took a shot at our outgoing President I need to comment on.

The cartoon commented on the President's "Legacy Tour". A character asked him if he was going to set up a "Think Tank" in retirement. His replay was "Belief-Tank", and then the cartoon commented snidely that "the thinking must be already done".

Sad to be here in a country where we would think you can only do one or the other. I wonder if George Washington at Valley Forge had any beliefs he placed higher than "thinking". I wonder if his logically arrived at the conclusion that being there made sense, or that he believed in what he was doing and chose to be there based on that belief. Certainly everything pointed to the logical, thinking man's conclusion that he should pack it in and go home...but he BELIEVED that he must go on and struggle.

Thinking should lead us to believing, and believing is what drives us. We are not "Mr Spock", where only logic prevails. And, just to make sure we don't flatter ourselves, neither you or I are nearly smart enough for our thinking to supersede believing.

The great movements and the great decisions of our history have been more from those strong enough, bold enough, and, yes, smart enough to put their BELIEVING above their THINKING. It is a smaller, weaker person who has no beliefs, not the other way around. They are those who do what everyone else says, what everyone else does. Those are the ones who, like our 2 or 3 year old child, make no decision based on higher-order thinking, they base their decisions on what tastes the best (candy), what smells the best (baked bread), what feels the best (playing), what looks the best (brightly colored fantasies), what sounds the best (being told "you're OK, do what you want"). These people "(are) lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God - having a form of godliness but denying its power..." (written 1930 years ago describing people of a future time to come....hmmmm.....)

No beliefs? How stupid. Even those that claim to believe in nothing believe THAT...

The argument the devil presented Eve in the Garden of Eden was just this. He said "God knows when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Her choice was, BELIEVE what God said, or THINK as the devil says...thinking that rejects what God said.

A dangerous tactic.

Should we think? Of course. Should we believe? Even more - yes. Which is harder to do?

It is a non-thinking person who would ridicule a man for believing.