Every religion, every philosophy, every individual outlook on life tells a story of reality.

Two things have been bothering me for a long time. The first is the tendency of people in general - and that includes Christians - to "relativize" religion. Any religious belief is only "true for," so to speak - true for you or true for me or true for those people on the other side of the world. Second, I've been bothered by how poorly believers understand their own Story. They have bits and pieces, of course, but they're missing enough that they can easily become prey to ideas that sound spiritual, but end up being foolishness in the end.

Nowadays, people have a habit of relativizing religion, reducing it to "your truth" versus "my truth" versus "their truth," and that's the end of it.

When we encounter new details of our world we fill in more of the spaces. When we discover details that don't seem to fit with our view of the world, we have a kind of "crisis of faith," even if our worldview is not especially religious. We're forced to redraw our "map" a bit.

We want to be on the offensive without being offensive.

Everyone has a belief system in his or her mind, a story about the way they think the world actually is, even if they haven't thought about it much or worked out all the details.

Human beings are special. We're creatures (we're not little gods), but we're also more than creatures. In fact, we're the most wonderful creatures in the world next to God.