The great battle of the ages is emotions versus thought. One side wishes to use feelings and emotions as the basis for action. The other side would rather plan each step thoroughly before taking it.
The emotional camp is always a temporary one. Once a society becomes safe enough for any idea, no matter how stupid, to survive, emotionalism begins to spring up. Feelings are prioritized over thoughts. Emotions over rational actions.
The emotional man asks, “Why can’t we just all get along and be a big family?” Because human beings were not designed to act that way. He is attempting to justify the philosophy of socialism. This socialism was created by an atheist. It is only an option in times of abundance and peace. It then quickly devastates a plan and reduces it to poverty and war.
The great war of our time: emotions versus truth.
The logical mind is not devoid of emotion. Many people have this impression of rational thinkers and accuse them of heartless action and thinking. It is not that the rational person wants to avoid helping others, they just want to ensure it is sustainable to do so. they are not against charity, they just know that someone has to pay for the charity.
When emotions are pitted against thoughts, it is because the emotional mind wants to do something absurd. It is a childlike mentality that is unaware of any and all limitations imposed by reality. There is nothing it holds itself back from. And it wants all change to come at the expense of someone else.
In the war of emotions versus thought, emotion will always attempt to claim the moral high ground.
Because it cannot support its position with rational thought, the emotional position can only demonize the enemy. I cannot levy a rational accusation against thought so it resorts to name-calling. Know that when a position must be supported by emotion rather than by logic, it is inherently weak. Any position founded on truth will be able to support itself. Any emotion added would signal weakness.
Just like a dying animal thrashes around at everything near it before it dies, so also the emotional position screams, puts on a big show, and finally breathes its last when it can hold on no longer.
In the war of emotions versus truth, choose the side of rational thought. Truth will always be forced to come out of rational thinking and it will remain solid despite years of attack.
“And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
“And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
It is difficult to find a satisfactory explanation of faith in the modern religious world. No one can nail down a concrete definition of what faith is. It is always vague, ambiguous and unhelpful to the rational mind. The definitions most Christians give are so unclear that you may not even know if you have faith or not, because you have been confused about exactly what faith is.
Imagine a ladder leading to God. We build this ladder by gaining knowledge of God. We learn all we can about Him until a certain point where we no longer understand with our finite minds what He is and why He commands certain actions. At first we build knowledge until we can get no closer to God through our knowledge alone. The ladder we have built still does not reach God, so our faith has to cover the remaining distance. Note that faith must begin with rational knowledge (the ladder), and end with trust.
Faith is a distant relative to trust.
It is a type of hope. We do not fully understand how there can be an invisible being who created everything, so we must have faith. We do not see how it is possible to exist for eternity, so we have faith. Some do not believe that the punishment of hell fits the crimes of sin, do they still have faith then? We do not know, therefore we hope/trust/have faith.
As difficult as it is to have faith, it is much harder to have faith in atheism. Atheism is unnatural because it violates laws of nature by its very definition. It requires ten times more faith to be an atheist than to be Christian. Any man who comes to the conclusion that atheism is a rational belief is simply trying to justify a lifestyle of no accountability and maximum pleasure.
What we want to avoid are the weak minded habits of the religious people who use faith as an excuse to never learn anything.
Men want to just “have faith” so that they do not have to think about any difficult or complex religious idea. Faith replaces work for these men. Faith replaces the need of man to progress and improve, therefore men become fat and lazy. We must avoid this justification of weakness. Men then mistake faith for an emotion rather than a thought process. Faith is not a feeling, gentlemen, faith is a set of beliefs and thoughts that result in specific types of action and are founded on rationality first and foremost. Feelings are almost always irrelevant.
Of course, the opposite of the blind faith man is the blindly rational man. While there are overly emotional men, there are also overly rational men who never accept anything outside science even though science shows itself to be limited time and time again because it is carried out by human beings. Any highly logical man will find religious faith difficult, and this is not evil. This makes his faith more powerful than others because once he achieves a respectable degree of faith, it is set in stone forever because it took him so long to build. We must build our faith in the same way because we are rational men who do not trust in mere emotion.
Mantra
I trust Him who I cannot see.
Application
Faith is built by thinking, not by feeling. Therefore, we must foster the types of thoughts that lead to a bolstered faith rather than an emotional faith. The emotional faith can be destroyed in one second, it is the house built on the sand. The rational faith will outlast any siege.
You believe in God because it is rational and because all other explanations violate laws of nature. What God has told you about Himself is what you must trust. God has told us that He is merciful and longsuffering (Exodus 34:6), that He loves mankind and does not want any of them to be lost (2 Peter 3:9). Do we believe those words of Scripture or do we allow our emotions to think for us?
We must think rightly about God, and avoid “thinking” with our feelings. One of the benefits of faith is that it covers what we cannot understand logically, so we must use it as a tool. It is not intended to replace the work we are required to do in building our thoughts and belief in God.
Build thoughts conducive to a strong faith. Imagine the great heroes of the faith in the Word, mimic the thoughts you think they would have had. Above all, never let your faith be damaged simply because you are feeling a certain way. No one cares about your feelings, you must do what is right regardless of how you feel.
