Chapman Kids Blog

Big changes are about to occur in the lives of Lorena and I. God willing, we will be living in Mexico this time next week. Things will be be hectic until we finish the move and have some time to setup our household. The time spent at the Thrive Bioscience corporate meeting was excellent though very manic. The picture above is of the whole team sailing around Salem Harbor. It was a nice event with time to talk about things other than just work. A good number of my colleagues are close to my age and we talked a lot about what we will do as we move toward retirement. It was interesting that our consensus was that we wanted to keep working, at some level, as long as possible. I reflected on that and on all the projects I am doing as I move toward my 70’s on the flight home. I had no huge epiphany in all this, but operationally, it dawned on me that I need to do things that will not require a lot of ongoing maintenance when my projects are complete for very obvious reasons. It also came clear that all the things I read in my Bible in terms of my personal relationship with God, what is required of me at a personally level, and the scope of world events are immutable and good. I can either go along with His will and plan or suffer. Those are the only two options. That the former leads to joy and peace is a hard won truth in my life. What that means at this new stage will become apparent according to His timing and I am good with that.

I had occasion to call an old acquaintance in Oregon yesterday. The purpose of the call was to make a connection between people whose parents had been friends in the distant past. After asking the acquaintance about himself and his family, he directed his discussion toward his work, made misguided statements about the nature of God with which I am deeply familiar, and told me I had lashed out at him because I was offended about what he said. I was totally baffled by the aggressiveness as I had only expressed a quite calm thought about one of his statements and realized I needed to back out of the conversation. I said it seems like we have very different worldviews and maybe it would be safer not to discuss it, trying to get back to the purpose of the call.

He then started to talk about my beliefs. I am sure he has no clue about what I believe as I have had no contact with him for decades and we really never talked about that kind of thing anyway. I have spent all of that time studying these subjects deeply to the point where I have deep knowledge of what I believe and the reasons for those beliefs. I should have stopped the conversation then (due to the aggressiveness) but, in my weakness, told him my beliefs were not “leaps of faith,” rather they were reasoned understanding based on years of studying and reflecting on the scholarship. I did not mention that these reasoned understandings were bolstered by my own personal experiences of God, because that would have just gotten in the way and the reasoned understandings stand on their own. When he pushed back harder, I told him maybe we ought to just leave it at that. He stated that he would be willing to take the conversation back up again when I was willing to hear (as opposed to have a conversation). The premise on which he had started his diatribe was a false premise, so it is hard to imagine that being a meaningful conversation.

It made me sad. Not so much what he said–that tended toward the quality of argument you might see in an internet atheist forum and I have heard it all before–but because of the level of vitriol, lack of self-awareness, and unwarranted confidence in his ideas that reminds me of the baseness of the western cultural milieu.