Friday, January 30th, 2004 - The Bold and the Philosophical

For my Human Development class, we were assigned a 3-5 pg. paper to write our life story from birth until the present. Although I greatly procrastinated this project, I finished with an hour to spare and was pleased with what I had wrote. Surprisingly, I used a full five pages, marking the first time in my educational history when I went beyond the bare minimum necessary for a project. As I wrote, I became increasingly emotionally involved in spelling out my collection of thoughts on who I am and how I came to be that way over these 20 years.

I still have the paper as a document on my computer, so I thought about posting it up on the site. But then I realized that it is basically the exhaustively long and detailed version of my testimony and decided not to put it up. I wrote it exactly how I wanted, without editing or censoring it to make it more appropriate for a secular university assignment. However, this was while already knowing that my professor is a Christian and has said so in class.

I pondered, for a bit, if I would have been as indiscreet had I not known that. I would like to think so, but I'm not sure. I want to have that boldness, but I can't really say one way or the other until I've actually been put in that situation. For instance, I didn't speak up when my philosophy professor stated the second day of class that man made religion or that Christianity adopted a significant part of Platonism (instead of vice versa). It will be a challenge to speak out and be that city on a hill in many circumstances, so my prayer is to be working towards that boldness through this semester, namely in my philosophy class where it is the toughest.

P.S. As an afterthought, I feel that I should explain Platonism for those who are confused. Plato realized that there are two realms, a physical and a spiritual. The physical is always changing and never lasts, while the spiritual is perfect, whole, and enduring. This is a truth which God created before time, yet both my philosophy textbook and professor claim that Christianity adopted it from Plato because of the prevalence of Platonism in the Hellenistic world in which Christ took on flesh in 0 A.D. Some good news came in the "Philosophy of Christianity" section of the textbook where it rightly claims that Christianity is not rooted so much in just philosophy as it is rooted in history. I was thrilled that they got that right when so many people miss that aspect.

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