Cynicism

A post a day is what I've been aiming at the last while. Today's quote comes from the book Seeing Through Cynicism:

I became a Christian in my early twenties both because of my cynicism and in spite of it. Unlike other worldviews that I had considered, I never felt the God of the Bible was asking me to put on rose-colored glasses to upgrade what was wrong with the world. Even the heroes of the Bible were described unsparingly in appalling moral failures - lies, sexual aberrations and murders. I did not have to give up the honesty and realism that I had valued. Cynicism claimed that the world - both inside and outside of our heads - was profoundly broken and bent. I realized that the Christian faith had been saying this for two thousand years, and Judaism for longer than that.

On the other hand, faith in Christ challenged my cynicism. There was something too facile about cynicism. It seemed too complete in its tidy and convenient dismissal of virtue. I realized that many of the key cynical judgements I had made were overreaching what I could actually know. Faith ran with cynicism for some distance and then made a turn in a different direction.

(p. 15,16)