The Evangelical Universalist Forum

The Scandal Of The Evangelical Heart by Rachel Held Evans

This is a really good article that I ran across today, and it resonated a lot with me and how I feel about things, just thought I’d share it with you guys. Here’s the link to it: rachelheldevans.com/blog/scandal … ical-heart

And here’s the article itself, to save you the trouble of clicking the link button :wink:

What do you guys think? Can you resonate with this too? And if you notice she references Dr. Beck :wink:

Blessings to you :slight_smile:

Matt

Oh yeah; this resonates with me.

1 Corinthians 13: 1-13, particularly 1-3 :mrgreen:

Wow! I love it. She’s done an excellent job of discussing the emotional disconnect in evangelical thinking.

Thanks for sharing the article.

Welcome :slight_smile:

Very much so. GREAT post. Thanks for sharing it, Mat!

Great article. Well worth the read.

Ditto Matt -

I really enjoyed the article - it ‘resonated’ as they say; and it is so well expressed.

By the way - I looked up Alexithymia:

- a personality construct characterized by the sub-clinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. The core characteristics of Alexithymia are marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relating. Furthermore, individuals suffering from Alexithymia also have difficulty in distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others, which is thought to lead to unempathic and ineffective emotional responding. Alexithymia is prevalent in approximately 10% of the general population and is known to be comorbid with a number of psychiatric conditions

And very different from our own dear, and very sane Alex :laughing:

Yeah, sounds like a few fundamentalists that I’ve run into :neutral_face:

Thanks for the quote, Prof :slight_smile:

My only complaint about the article is that the things she’s complaining about aren’t in fact logically coherent, certainly not with trinitarian theism.

Which isn’t a complaint about her, of course. She’s been trained by a tyranny of partial logic to expect her doubts to only count as mere emotion, because the people who serve those things up to her simply insist that any logical accounting beyond the point they accept is mere emotion instead – but ironically when it becomes clear that emotion isn’t the problem then they turn around and blame “human reasoning” and insist that the “truth” be accepted without logical analysis for faults.

With this in mind, I wonder if people who are wired this way are naturally drawn to those belief structures, whether Christian or otherwise, that make emotion secondary rather than equal in importance and relevance to intellect.

Not sure about the trinitarian theism bit, cuz Im up in the air on that as I’ve said before, but you’ve got a point there, bro.
It’s not so much that the kind of people she’s talking about are Vulcans and are all about logic and lack emotion, but rather they just think that they are being logical, when in fact they come up looking pretty illogical in the end, while lacking so-called ‘mere emotion’ in the process.

But with said, what the heck is logic anyway, and who defines the standards for what is and what isn’t logic?
Now that’s a tough one, as people on every side of every issue are saying that they are the ones who are being logical, and their opponents are the ones who are being illogical, and vice versa.
Which is why I think people like Rachel Held Evans, and others, probably myself included, have something of an advantage, because we honestly admit that we don’t have everything figured out and are just ‘going with our gut’.

Whether this is logical or not can’t be said for sure, but at least it’s more honest, I think, and there isn’t as much danger of falling into the trap of intellectual pride and superiority.

This reminds of something I posted on Facebook yesterday, which relates to all of this, I think:

With that said, as brainy as you are Jason, I don’t think you’re ‘alexithymic’ like some others I’ve run into.
You’ve got a big heart along with that substantial IQ of yours. :wink:

Blessings :slight_smile:

Matt

Many don’t make a claim to “logic” at all – their claim is that they are “biblical.” Human logic is fallible and can’t be relied on. Whatever contradicts their position is either dismissed as “emotional” or as faulty “human reasoning.” At least that’s what I’ve frequently encountered.

(To be fair, I know I’ve been guilty of the same. :unamused: :blush: I hope I’ve learned to do better since then.)

Oh well – it’ll all be sorted in the end. :sunglasses:

Edit – just read Jason’s post above … oops, didn’t realise he’d already said it …

Sonia

Good point. Though then there are always people bickering back and forth about which is more biblical, just like some bicker back and forth about which is more logical.
That’s why just admitting to being human and not having all the answers, and just keeping an open mind and ‘going by your gut’ has its advantages… if nothing else, it keeps you out of the constant battle back and forth over ideologies a little bit more :wink: