Making Your Beliefs Your Own

Over the past months, you have read many of my opinions on this page. I treasure public forums like this one because they give a person the opportunity to say what they believe and why. Similarly, people who cannot defend their beliefs frustrate me. Or rather, I have a problem with how many students do not come to their own beliefs.

There are a good many good people on this campus who make comments in classes, in public, and in passing that are no different from the comments they may have made as a child. I am not saying they make childish comments, I am saying their beliefs and their belief systems are stagnant. To me the scariest thing regarding my beliefs would be to not doubt them.

Unchanging systems of belief are not a problem simply amongst those persons who were raised in Christian homes and attended Christian schools their whole life, contrary to my previous beliefs. That is what I honestly felt in high school regarding those kids in my youth group who only said the same things their parents said. I was wrong in judging them so quickly. First, I now say many of the same things my parents say. Second, I have now met a sizable group of public-schooled persons who cling even tighter to what their parents believe.

I reiterate, my beliefs are very similar to my parents' beliefs. Let me also state that I am an admitted hypocrite. I believe all persons are hypocrites. I believe very few people accept they are hypocrites. I believe even fewer persons admit to being hypocrites. We are, all of us. Being a hypocrite in some things does not make a person a hypocrite in all things. It also does not mean that they are not speaking the truth. It just means they are not also living it. That is fine-to a point.

I used to believe the same thing as my parents. It was easy, it made sense, and it seemed like the right thing to do. As I got older I fell away from many of their beliefs, and when I say beliefs I mean not only spiritual but political and any other which way too. I searched and I found that how I had been raised was largely what I agreed with. It is my last words of the year and I choose to use them as encouragement.

I encourage all persons who read this; faculty, staff, students, alumni, bums on the street who caught this in the wind, think about what you believe. Ask yourself where you got these beliefs. Finally (and most crucially) evaluate whether or not you truly believe these things, be it your faith or your favorite color, and remedy any problems. There is nothing wrong with believing what your parents believe, as long as you came to it on your own.