We Hold These Truths

A cyberfriend on Facebook nudged me into starting a brief series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social and political issues Americans debate. I have decided to share my posts on her "wall" with the greater cyberspace under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.

What ideas brought us to the binary electoral choice of two basically similar political parties serving whomever pays the piper? Are there alternatives for running our society, making our economy fairer for all and, if so, what are they?

To look at the beginnings, I suppose we have to look at truth. Up to 1517, when one Martin Luther rebelled, truth in Europe was said to be divinely inspired and taught by the successors of the apostles of one Yeshua bar Yosif (aka Jesus the Christ). Then came Luther and said, more or less, "no, truth is revealed to my soul directly by God when I read the Bible."

Then, a few centuries later, people such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, proposed that the truth properly had to be reached by human reason and that all reasonable people, presented certain evidence, would agree.

That is the quintessence of the original American philosophy and the underlying idea behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

You can see at least three layers of thinking that informed the framers of our nation's foundations: the idea of theological and absolute truth (Judeo-Christian religion), the notion of intuitively revealed truth through faith and, finally, empirical or factual reasoning. Today, many people question all three, not usually at the same time; but this is the source from which all our talk about principles and society and fairness, and so forth, springs forth.

Blogging Christianity

Yesterday I reached the end of the trail of what became a Sunday blog about the history of the Christian faith. I had started it for a friend preparing for confirmation as an adult; she wanted to hear the outline of the Christian story in order, so she could grasp how Christian beliefs, morals and rituals developed.

The result was my blog Let Mountains Hear, its title drawn from Micah 6:2. It originally was just a tag in a blog about faith, generally and haphazardly, as ideas came. Then the history came to dominate, then it became a weekly blog, one post every Sunday.

Yesterday was the final, 140th post since April 2013.

Anyone interested in reading it through, from beginning to end (and correcting, corrections are always welcome), may

(a) start at the beginning Story of the Christian Faith and click on the Newer Post link at the very bottom of each entry; or

(b) use the menu at the top, which organizes the posts by era, starting with Abrahamic Faith, then Bethlehem through Chalcedon, Middle Ages, Renaissance & Reformation, Modernity, Our Time.

It grew like Topsy, with some posts longer than others, a few topics spread over posts — all guided by the inexorable march of historical time, with some attention to complexity.

Describing the setting and themes of the Nicene Creed took five weekly entries. The Protestant Reformation and various reactions took about 20. Looking back, I see I did not cover every possible detail, but I would argue that all the major developments that help define modern Christianity are there.

The idea was to write something by an ordinary person — I am neither a professional theologian nor historian —for ordinary people. My biases are my biases, I wear them on my sleeve, but I tried in general to be fair as I am fair in my professional work, journalism.

So, it is done.