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Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This W0rld by J. Mark Bertrand
I grew up in a Christian household that analyzed everything. We analyzed ideas in conversations at the dinner table, during chats in the car on the way to town, and in visits with friends in the living room. During these discussions, a belief would be held up to the light, so to speak, and turned over, examined, to see where (or if) it fit into our system, as if it were a puzzle piece that may or may not fit into a half-done jigsaw puzzle. If the discussions in the living room carried on after I was sent upstairs to bed, I’d listen in from the top of the stairs, following the reasoning as well as I could.
So although we never used the term worldview, since it was not commonly used in Christian circles then, I grew up with a basic concept of worldview thinking. When the Christian worldview bandwagon came along and I read a little about it, my first thought was “ho-hum.” I’d been examining other people’s worldviews and finding them wanting for years, and I wasn’t afraid to ask the sort of questions that showed the incoherence of their systems. Yet, while the exercise was helpful in firming up my own faith, I couldn’t point to one person who had come over to my worldview, even when answering my questions tied them up in knots as they tried to make a coherent system out of their incoherent one. And as I understood it from my surface level reading on the concept of worldview, the whole point was to show how my faith made more sense than their ideology in order to bring them over to my side. Well, it hadn’t proved to be a sure-fire weapon for me!
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