Trusting Doubt
Nothing can be predicted for sure until after it happens.
Washington Post Columnist Jim Hoagland, writing about the strengths and weaknesses of this 9/11 report, notes in Thursday’s Post that an experienced national political leader recently expressed to him:
"Most of the time you are not going to have perfect knowledge for making decisions. If you look at the way Saddam Hussein acted, any reasonable person would have concluded that he was hiding those weapons, just from what he said and did. The key point is always going to be the judgment you then make from what is almost always imperfect intelligence."
This is why the idea of preemptive war is the worst alternative of an already worst idea war.
Doubt is a very good thing. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t doubt themselves. My experience in public life as a newspaper reporter and later as a pastor has taught me that the difference between good action and bad action is often doubt.
A lot of Christians are afraid of doubt. For some reason they have gotten the idea that doubting means a loss of faith. The opposite is actually true, doubt is the mother of faith. For faith exists only where uncertainty lives. Where’s the faith in knowing absolute truth? Biblical faith is not certainty it’s a relationship.
After my grade school aged youngest brother died a horrible prolonged and painful death from Leukemia while I was in high school, my closest friend asked me how I could now believe in a loving God. It was an honest question and not a taunt. My family’s world had come apart. It didn’t matter that my father was a pastor who had just got a struggling congregation back on its feet, that our whole family were dedicated God fearing believers, we had been struck like the ancient Egyptians by the Angel of death. And at least those children reportedly died immediately, my brother had suffered in great agony for almost a year.
I told my friend I believed in a loving God because I had felt God’s love for me. I couldn’t prove it by what was happening in my life now, and even though I was having a lot of trouble feeling God’s love presently, I had experienced it the past, and because of that relationship I had faith.
Having experienced the devastating loss of a loved one I could never take part in giving that kind of pain to another person. That’s why I oppose any concept of war including especially preemptive war. War is conflict beyond the rules of law and order. Always has been always will be. War needs the absence of doubt and restraint to survive. Few if any wars have ever been fought because they had to be. Millions of lives have been destroyed because leaders to not take the time and effort to doubt and find a better way.
When CIA Director Gene Tenet colorful told President Bush it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq surely had weapons of mass destruction, the president should have had his doubts.
But you see in America today war is politically correct and doubting is not.
So our nation finds itself in a continuing series of military wars. Our political parties are at war with each other because they have no doubts that the other side is evil. Our divorce rate is around 50 percent because couples don’t doubt that their view of the relationship’s problems is the right one. And our congregations are at war within themselves because people have no doubt that their view of the faith is the right one.
Doubt can be a very good thing.
more almost daily dunker
Falwell And Trouble In The SBC
A Big Event Makes The Difference 7/08/2004