"It does not define me." It is a simple statement, but in the past few weeks, it is a statement that has caused a variety of responses. Typically the conversations will go something like this: Other person says - "You can't do that, it will kill your career, and you won't get promoted or get xyz position." Me - "That may be true, but those things don't define me. They are not the reason I do what I do." Other person now in a rather defensive posture and tone, "They don't define me either, but ..." Other person says - "You can't get out of the military until you served your 20 years, because you will miss out on that retirement check." Me - "I am not worried about money. If I feel like God is calling me out of the service early, then I am going to follow. He has never left me begging for bread, and I am certain He will provide for me in the future. It just does not define me." Other person - "It does not define me either, but God can call you after your 20 years."

The statement "It doesn't define me" elicits the most unique responses. I get everything from agreement to a fierce defensive posture. Now to be fair, I understand why this statement would cause such a defensive posture. It can be seen as negative and even semi-accusatory. It is strange though, because most of the time I am talking about myself. I am just trying to help someone understand that what means so much to them does not necessarily mean the same thing to me. What gives their life meaning is simply different than what gives my life meaning. What I find is that what gives their life meaning is something a little less than eternal (money, job, title, esprit de corp).

I have never been offended when I have heard the words, "It doesn't define me" from someone else, because when I talk about what gives my life meaning, "It does define me." Since I left high school, I have sought nothing more than to follow God where I feel he is leading me. I could write pages and pages of his unique, and faithful leading. When I was asked what my plan B was, I have on more than one occasion said, "There was no plan B, I was all in." When it comes to following God's lead, I am all in, and that is what gives my life meaning. Being all in with God is something that is eternal.

​I am not perfect, and I can tell when I let other things start to creep in. I start wondering what I should do to make the next rank or job, and I get caught up in thinking I am in control. I forget that every time that I have followed God's leading that he has not forgotten me. He has always provided for me more than I could ever imagine. I find true peace when I am all in with God. I have been called fatalistic, but I can assure you that fatalistic is something I am not. I am all in with God. That defines me. What defines you?

What propels you through adversity? It has been said that we can endure many a "what" about life if we could only answer the "why". A Professor of Tulane University said after a funeral, "With meaning, many things are bearable." So that leads me to ask the question what gives life meaning, or as some might say "What is the meaning of life?"

As I have been preparing for my next coffee shop talk, I have thought about all the answers I have heard to this question over the years. I have heard things like, "family", "kids", "procreation", "nothing", "community", etc... that for one reason or another just did not fully answer the question for me. You can observe in others, while they might not verbalize it, that their meaning is their job, status, or wealth. While I think I might be safe to say that some of these answers are more noble than others, I feel that all of these answers fall short of answering the question, "What is the meaning of Life?"

For those that say that your meaning is what you make it, what happens when your meaning is taken away from you? Is your answer to the question, "What is the meaning of life?" less than eternal? If your answer is anything less than eternal, what happens when whatever gives your life meaning is gone? I see so many people who base the meaning of their life on their job, or their family. You can see in our media those that make it wealth or status. The obvious problem occurs when what you have built your life around is not eternal. With the loss of a job, the loss of a family member, or the turn of bad health, the foundation on which some have laid the meaning of their life is shaken to the core. Of course, without this shaking everything is fine, and we can go on pretending. When what you build your life on is less than eternal, I can guarantee that you will be continually redefining what makes life meaningful for you.

This does not even begin to cover the fact that what may bring meaning to life for some might bring suffering in life for others. Who is to say which meaning is credible and which is not? Who judges between two meanings in conflict and how is that judged? The problem with an answer to the meaning of life that is anything less than eternal is that it is necessarily self-centered, and leaves us pitted as mini kingdoms in conflict. For those that say "We're here to die, just live and die"(nihilism), I would tell you there is little comfort in that answer. If life is nothing, and death the end of it all, then death is what in reality ends suffering. Death it seems would be a more logical choice than life if it truly did offer a release from suffering. However, as a prominent apologist once said, "the  resigned posture that deems life to be completely devoid of ultimate purpose and bereft of meaning can hardly be touted as rationally comforting dogma." The idea that we are here for nothing cannot be lived out, and if it is to be lived out, it is not what most would consider a good way to live. Bertrand Russell's, an atheistic philosopher, summation was "that the only sensible posture of life was one of unyielding despair and that any attitude other than despair was merely a seduction of the mind." I have no interest in living a life bereft of meaning.

What is an eternal answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" To "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and Love your neighbor as yourself." This meaning is eternal. This is a meaning that no matter what comes your way, cannot be taken away. This is a meaning that holds promise for both the present life and the life to come. It also reminds me of a story my friend told me about her dad. I do not fully remember all the parts of the story, so I hope that I do not butcher it too bad. As I remember, while her dad was in surgery, his house burnt to the ground, and not a scrap was saved. When he woke up from his hours long surgery, his family regretfully informed him that he had lost everything in the house fire. He simply stated, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord." That my friends is what it looks like to have an eternal answer to the question of "What is the meaning of life?" When adversity took everything away from him, he did not lose his meaning.

​On a personal note, I would submit that I settle for less than eternal more often than I would like to admit. This post has been probably one of the most challenging I have worked on to date. It has been a challenge because while I know that my answer to the meaning of life is eternal, I can see how in other areas I settle for less than eternal. That time that God called me to feed the homeless man, and I stubbornly chose not to. God made sure that I knew He could do it without me as the non-religious guy in our group ensured the homeless guy had something to eat. There are other times when I choose to follow my will as opposed to following what God has clearly given me direction to do. I do not know about why most people settle for less than eternal, but I do know that I generally settle for less than eternal due to selfishness. I choose what I want, and make it so. This perhaps sums up the problem with making meaning whatever you want. It makes life self-centered. It makes life about what I say it is. It makes life about something less than eternal.

There are two paintings hanging in my dinning room. I am very proud of them both, but there is something distinctly different about them. It is not the fact that one of them is an owl in a tree and the other is a fox in the snow. It is not the size, or color that I am talking about. What distinguishes the two paintings can be summed up as 1st grade art (the fox) versus 6th grade art (the owl).

Now for those who perhaps do not know what I am talking about, I will explain. The 1st grade art is very good for a first grader. You can tell that there is a red and white fox sitting on the snow with snow flakes falling all around. The painting is far from perfect due to the splotches of paint where an over zealous 1st grader got a little too much paint on her brush. That is not even mentioning the sloppy overlap of paint on the lines, outside of the lines, and sometimes just not near the lines. In comparison the sixth grader painting is of a purple and pink owl sitting in a tree with a pink song bird sitting on the branch above the owl. While there are no splotches of paint, and the painting inside the lines is much better, it can be easily discerned that the painting was the creation of a student of art vice a master of art.

So what's my point you ask? First is that when you walk into the dinning room, there is not a person in this world that imagines those paintings are self created. When you look at these two paintings you think, "I wonder who painted these?" Interestingly enough, we ask this same type of question about everything we see. "Who made that car?", "Who made that watch?", "Who made that outfit?", "What type of plant makes that fruit?", and "Who or what made that?" I realize this is perhaps the pontification of a man that has spent too much time pontificating, but I have to ask the question, "why it is hard to believe something created the universe?" It is a natural conclusion everywhere else in life.

The second thing you will notice when evaluating the paintings is the difference in skill level. It will lead you to make assumptions perhaps about the ages or other overall aptitude of the artist. This same kind of evaluation happens every time we see an impressive building, vehicle, aircraft, ship, watch, or piece of technology. We make assumptions about the creator of these things based on the complexity of the creation. Once again, I am left wondering, "why it is hard to believe that something with a great deal of skill, perhaps supernatural skill, created the universe?"

I realize that this example seemingly oversimplifies what is to some a very complex question, but I would love to understand the difference. Someone would probably think I had lost my mind if I told them those two paintings just up and one day happened. So during my first discussion we will cover Origin, and I will try to cover the different worldviews on where it all came from.

​Science would have you believe that it came from nothing (infinite energy and zero mass), the eastern thought would have you believe it has always been, and the Christian worldview would tell you that an eternal God created it all. The philosophical principal that I gave an example of with the two paintings is stated by Norman Geisler as, "Only being can cause being. Nothing does not exist, and only what exists can cause existence, since the very concept of 'cause' implies an existing thing that has the poser to effect another. From absolutely nothing comes absolutely nothing." I hope in the first discussion to both shed some light on the fact that something from nothing is not logical and that there is more room for faith in science and vice versa than we are typically taught to believe.

As I started this series of posts on thinking well, I set out to describe a good argument, and then discuss pitfalls that can mislead us. I have covered as many logical fallacies as I could while trying not to bore the reader. In this last post on logical fallacies, I will discuss begging the question, hasty generalizations, and the straw man.

When begging the question, a person will make an assumption and go through the process of circular reasoning where the original assumption is inserted into the argument. The conclusion is put into the premise, and the premise would not be true if the conclusion were not already assumed to be true. This is often referred to as being a circular argument. An example is, "The rights of the minority are every bit as sacred as the rights of the majority, for the majority's rights have no greater value than those of  the minority.” The assumption stated in both the premise and the conclusion is that minority rights are equal to majority rights. The problem with the statement that "begs the question" is that no evidence was offered proving this assertion. The statement is presented as fact, but the conclusion is just another way of saying the premise. One way to avoid this logical fallacy is to write out your premise and conclusion, and see if you have any gaps in your statement. If you find that your conclusion basically says the same thing as your premise (in different words), then you are probably begging the question.

The hasty generalization is when we make a gross generalization based on one instance. A conclusion drawn from an inadequate sample size is a hasty generalization. An example would be "My car needed a new transmission due to a flaw, and your car needed a new transmission due to a flaw. We drive the same car, so all cars of this type must have a transmission flaw." A sample size of only two cars of a certain brand is far to small to say that they all have a transmission flaw. Another example is "All Christians are judgmental, or at least the one that hurt me was." While being hurt by someone from specific worldview will affect how we see that worldview, an inadequate sample size is still a hasty generalization.

The straw man is when someone presents a case as much weaker than it actually is. In the straw man, the arguer sets up a weaker version of the opposing argument and knocks it down in order to "score points" in the mind of his audience. The problem is that just as knocking down a straw man is not very impressive, neither is knocking down a watered down version of an opposing argument. A classic straw man example is "Senator Jones says that we should not fund the attack submarine program. I disagree entirely. I can't understand why he wants to leave us defenseless like that." The fact that the senator in this argument does not want to fund an attack submarine program is not the same as leaving the country defenseless. A way to avoid this logical fallacy is to be charitable to the opposing argument. State their argument fairly and as accurately as possible. If you do not, then knocking down the opposing argument only makes your own argument look weak.

​In conclusion to the logical fallacy discussion, I would like to emphasize how important it is to listen. We must listen to our own argument, and scrutinize it as much if not more than the opposing argument. We must listen to the opposing argument, because it is only when we have heard the opposing argument and understand it that we can say we disagree with it. I confess that I have a long way to go when it comes to listening, but it is something I am constantly working on.