Earlier today I saw a bulletin board advertisement for the United Methodist Church that I thought quite odd.
"If You Can Wish, You Can Believe"
Yeah sure, faith is just like a wish. Not about receiving the gift of faith you know. Just need wishful thinking.
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“If you can wish, you can believe.”
Believe in what?
Believe in the WISH! of course!! 🙂
So sad – but here is the remedy – GKC:
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own…
[GKC, Orthodoxy CW1:236]
I wish I hadn’t read that…does that mean the sign no longer exists?
Being charitable–maybe the idea was that if you can wish then you realize you are not satisfied with the present and are ripe for accepting faith. Um, how big a sign would that have to be? Yah, there are more direct messages.
On a tangent–
There is a church down the street (Baptist) which has incredibly clever ones–I tell ya, makes me want to go in and shake someone’s hand!
Right now the sign message is
“Trespassers allowed”
🙂
The UMC down the street from me has a sign this week that reads:
Believe in what is true
Sounds good for a moment, but then you realize it’s a line short:
Believe in what is true
Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life
(Still, it’s better than their usual “drive safely” style of communication…)