I am looking up Wikipedia articles. I went from Hillsong United to axioms. Just for my own amusement's sake, this is the history of how I got where I am:

I had a song stuck in my head from church. I looked it up on YouTube to listen to it because it was driving me crazy. I found out it was by Hillsong United, a praise & worship group I decided I didn't like a while ago, but may have to take that back. I looked up Hillsong United--found out they're a group from Hillsong Church, a megachurch in Australia. I looked up "megachurch," just because they're so controversial and therefore interesting to me. I read pretty much the entire article on megachurches and gained a better understanding of why they are what they are, although I still agreed with some of the criticisms. One criticism was that megachurches are a divergence from evangelicalism because they didn't hold services on Christmas Day in 2005, when it was on a Sunday. That raised a lot of questions for me (Why didn't the church hold services that day? Why does not having services on Christmas make it not evangelical? What exactly is "evangelicalism"?), so I looked up "evangelicalism."

The article didn't offer a lot of understandable explanation right off the bat, but I did see down the page that "evangelical" is used in contrast to the concept "mainline." I also looked at the "Alternative Usage" and "Current Usage" for the word "evangelicalism" and found out, much to my surprise, that "Evangelicalism may sometimes be perceived as the middle ground between the theological liberalism of the Mainline (Protestant) denominations and the cultural separatism of Fundamentalist Christianity." So off to the mainline page I went!

Again I found "evangelical" contrasted with "mainline." The next sentence said, "Mainline churches tend to be open to new ideas and societal changes without abandoning what they consider to be the historical basis of their Christian faith." I still didn't understand. Wouldn't any church say exactly that? I don't know any church that would say "We're not open to new ideas" and I don't know any church that would say "We're going to abandon the historical basis of our Christian faith"! But as I read further, it mentioned things such as ordaining women and homosexuals. It made me think of the controversy between the Presbyterian Church of the United States and the Presbyterian Church of America, two organizations under which Presbyterian churches in the U.S. fall. PC (USA) would be the "mainline" organization and PCA would be the "Evangelical" organization.

But I still thought that I didn't understand enough of this "Evangelicalism" and went back to that page to read more. I found myself reading about the history of Evangelicalism throughout the two World Wars. And, as a scholarly article on religion in history can rarely separate itself from the overriding philosophy of the era, I next found myself knee-deep in an article about Post-Modernism, and to understand that better, of course, I had to also read about Modernism. I've read most of both the articles to get the big picture, and still cannot quite understand how they differ. I believe I am inclined to agree with those who think of Modernism and Post-Modernism as two parts of the same movement, rather than two different movements.

My rabbit trail of research was still not finished. On the Modernism page, the writer used the word "weltanschauung," which I of course had to look up! I've never heard the word before in my life, but I found out it's German for "world view," which I use all the time. These scholarly types. Why use a German word when you use the same word in English and people will still understand you, and perhaps even better? But that's beside the point.

The page for "World view" proved extremely interesting and I found myself reading most of that page as well. The writer said a couple of times that, of all things, a language's syntactic-semantic structure is what influences world views! How depressing! I prefer to believe that a person's personal beliefs that they decided upon based on their background, history and upbringing are what make their world view. Although I can imagine a person's world view would certainly influence their syntax and semantics (especially the semantics! That gets me into more trouble with my husband...).

I skipped down to the part of the page addressing world views in religion and philosophy. I found out that a man named David Naugle is considered an expert in the Christian world view! How fascinating! I wondered if Stephen had ever heard of him. I also read about a Christian man named James W. Sire, whom I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly when he said, "We should all think in terms of worldviews, that is, with a consciousness not only of our own way of thought but also that of other people, so that we can first understand and then genuinely communicate with others in our pluralistic society." (The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog.) His reference to a pluralistic society startled me, though. Isn't pluralism exactly what Christians are fighting against? But I didn't look that up right away. Instead, I kept reading, my eyes caught by the mentioning of the "failure of some aspects of the Enlightenment" in the next paragraph, "...such as the rationalist project of attaining all truth by reason alone." I must confess, it gave me great comfort to know that a "rationalist project of attaining all truth by reason alone" had failed! I have tried to tell Stephen so many times that everything cannot be explained by logic, especially a woman's brain!

I skipped down to the next paragraph, which began with "worldviews," the chief thing I was interested in, and found the most interesting part of all my research today: "A worldview can be considered as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued from rather than argued for." That sat me right back in my seat. Stephen had tried to explain axioms to me once before, but this set them to me in such a way that I instantly understood what it means, although I'd be hard pressed to try to define them myself. Just for confirmation, I went to the page for "axioms" and found: "In traditional logic, an axiom or postulate is a proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be either self-evident or subject to necessary decision."

Well, how's that for your breakfast news? Logical arguments are based on things that can't be proven with logical arguments.

On the one hand, I suddenly understood what Stephen had meant a while ago in a fight where he said we could never agree on our ideas of God and Christianity because we were starting in different places. So he was right about that.

On the other hand, I suddenly understood that we were starting with different assumptions. And neither could be proven wrong or right because of their very definitions.

And that's where it is. Where next? Unfortunately, I don't think there's an article on Wikipedia about how to make different axioms work in a marriage. :)

I'm not too awful worried about it. I mainly just found the journey to getting here VERY interesting and amusing! I wanted it written down for my own records. Perhaps it will show Stephen that my rabbit trails are not quite so random as he thinks. :)

-Stephanie

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