Faith Unraveled by Rachel Held Evans - highlights

YOUR KINDLE NOTES FOR: Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions by Rachel Held Evans

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32 Highlights | 30 Notes

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 132

My culture, my childhood, my gender, my prejudices, my hopes, my imagination, my virtues, and my vices — these things color my view of the world and infuse it with meaning.

good list for us all

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It’s a bit disconcerting to think of modern humans arriving so late to the evolutionary scene, of God taking millions upon millions of years to get to the point.

Wow! Have we gotten to the point?

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The problem with fundamentalism is that it can’t adapt to change. When you count each one of your beliefs as absolutely essential, change is never an option. When change is never an option, you have to hope that the world stays exactly as it is so as not to mess with your view of it. I think this explains why some of the preachers on TV look so frantic and angry. For fundamentalists, Christianity sits perpetually on the precipice of doom, one scientific discovery or cultural shift or difficult theological question away from extinction. So fearful of losing their grip on faith, they squeeze the life out of it.

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But the real story of Christianity is a lot less streamlined.

streamlined is a great word in this sentence

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Imagine centuries of faith undone by a telescope!

yes, imagine

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No longer satisfied with easy answers, I started asking harder questions.

or richer than some queens

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I just imagined that he and God had a lot of things in common, that they subscribed to the same magazines and wore similar shoes.

sounds right

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I’ll admit I was a little disappointed when I learned that something like 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.

I thought it was just us

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I learned how to effectively blame everything from crime rates to suicide rates on the removal of prayer from public schools.

the fault, the blame

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I thought about how much this silence would have frightened me a few years ago, back when I thought I always had to be ready with an answer.

older, smarter

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Isn’t it a little suspicious that the only true religion is the one with which we happened to grow up?

Hmmm...

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It bothered me that other people weren’t bothered.

happens often

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Wherever I sensed a calm sea, I sought to rock the boat; I wanted others to share in my storm.

again, seeking comfort, challenge both

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While some friends declared my faith dead on arrival, others insisted on defibrillation via systematic theology.

defib

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Pond-scum theology effectively shifts the question from How could a loving God send anyone to hell? to How could an angry God allow anyone into heaven?

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The more I learned, the less I felt I knew. The less I felt I knew, the more I listened.

Been there !

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It’s not that I really wanted to kill myself; I just didn’t want to live this awful life.

what change ?

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I like winning pointless little games like that.

military training

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the Bible is commonly referred to as “God’s Word,” a description that sounds so definitive and singular that it is almost misleading.

difficult subject

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Instead, we will have a physical representation of God on which to dwell, personal idols made of paper and ink.

a paper idol

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most rejected Christianity because they thought it means becoming judgmental, narrow-minded, intolerant, and unkind.

where did that idea come from?

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The assumption that God belongs to a certain country, political party, denomination, or religion seemed absurd.

yes

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So, like any good, self-aware millennial, I started a blog.

good idea

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Of course, we all carry around false fundamentals.

what ?

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I love it because narrator David Attenborough can make a colony of cockroaches feeding on a hundred-meter- high mound of bat dung sound like the most wonderful thing in the world,

But the truth is, I’ve found people to be much more receptive to the gospel when they know becoming a Christian doesn’t require becoming a know-it-all.

My hope is that if I am patient, the questions themselves will dissolve into meaning, the answers won’t matter so much anymore, and perhaps it will all make sense to me on some distant, ordinary day.

meaning

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If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that serious doubt — the kind that leads to despair — begins not when we start asking God questions but when, out of fear, we stop.

wondering more