Welcome to my corner of the web. Here you'll find my ramblings about faith, church, drupal, Geeks and God (my podcast), and my other unrelated interests.

While you can subscribe to all posts here from the Subscribe link on the right, there are two other main feeds. There is the drupal and other technology feed along with the faith and church feed.

How To Evaluate A Worldview

Posted on: Tue, 2007-01-09 06:06 | By: matt | In:

Every day most of us run into at least a few different world views. On a typical day I deal with Christian, non-practicing Jewish, Muslim, non-practicing Muslin, Agnostic, and several Atheistic world views. Since these world views are mutually exclusive (meaning they can't all be right) how can we evaluate them? Here are a couple Augustan and Ravi Zacharias insights that might help.

Augustan said you never judge a world view by its abuse. We as people abuse things. We abuse central teachings of leaders and we even do bad things in the names of causes. A historical example of this is the Crusades. But, to evaluate a world view by this abuse doesn't look at the view at all but at the abuse of people not following that view.

Ravi made the point that you should judge a world view by the essential teaching and life of the founder. This is something I agree with. It involves actually looking at the important people such as Mohammad, Jesus, and others. Looking at their teachings and lives. And, evaluating a world view based on that. It's all about getting to the root of it.

Comments

#1 Another thought

Submitted by Joe Burnham on Tue, 2007-01-09 10:52.

I think a third criteria on worldviews would be to examine how well it works, in the long run, in everyday life. After all, since worldviews deal with our understanding of the world around us, if the one you're trying doesn't do this effectively, it's a worthless worldview.

I know I've found this valuable not only when considering radically different worldviews (Islam, hedonism, Christianity, agnosticism), but also different accents within a broader worldview (such as the various theological perspectives within Christianity).

#2 maybe

Submitted by matt on Tue, 2007-01-09 11:21.

Some don't work in everyday life. Though, there are others that may work but not work well.

#3 ravi

Submitted by dion on Wed, 2007-01-10 07:13.

i heard this same podcast... i liked it. i've heard ravi say before that in america instead of shunning all religious worldviews he things we should have a society that is open to a battle of the worldviews and let the best worldview win.
interesting statement, just brought it up b/c it gets at joe's point too.

#4 royal rumble

Submitted by matt on Wed, 2007-01-10 09:00.

I agree with Ravi, that we should let the world views battle it out. Instead of avoiding conflict let's see what happens when they do battle it out.

As for now, in our PC country where truth takes a back seat to conflict avoidance, I don't see anything close to this happening soon.