My Worldview

            My worldview is the unique lens through which I view the entirety of life. It is shaped by my experiences, environment, relationships, and desires. Though my filtering “lens” is completely exclusive to me, it has been influenced by the worldviews of many others. For example, from birth until my teenage years, my parents’ worldviews largely shaped my own. However, more recently, I have begun to broaden my lens and evaluate the worldviews of people different from myself, choosing to either reject their beliefs or integrate them into my own. Throughout this process of defining my worldview, I have been especially captivated by the theories of philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Soren Kierkegaard, and of course, Jesus Christ, the Great Philosopher.

            My belief in God and faith in Jesus is the primary factor that shapes every other aspect of my worldview, mainly because following Christ wholeheartedly determines the purpose of existence itself. The motivation behind every action and thought I have can be traced back to my commitment to living under God’s authority. The Bible is literally the spoken word of God to His people of exactly how they should live in accordance to His will. Yet, God knows His people are sinful by nature and incapable of perfectly abiding by His commandments. For this reason, He sent His son Jesus to be the mediator and fulfill the punishment of sin we deserve so we may be reunited in an intimate relationship with our Creator and no longer burdened by the law.

Thomas Aquinas shared a similar philosophy about the power and nature of God. Aquinas claimed that God is simple, perfect, infinite, immutable, and complete in nature. He also claimed that the existence of God was fairly rational, stated in his five proofs: motion, causation, existence of the necessary and unnecessary, gradation, and order tendencies of nature. Personally, I find it difficult to deny the existence of a God when I observe the complexity and intentionality of creation. Therefore, I am thankful for Aquinas’s boldness in synthesizing faith and reason because these two concepts are often unnecessarily separated in today’s culture.

Politically, I agree strongly with John Locke’s philosophy, which states all men have certain natural rights and men should work to earn their property. I am grateful that Locke’s theory on natural rights was built into the foundation of America; however, these principles of equality and ownership are still often abused. Natural rights are a biblical principle in the sense that God created all people equally in His image. In an ideal society, all genders, ethnicities, and nationalities would be treated with equal respect and opportunity. Also, Locke’s ideas on the importance of work for an individual to earn his own property have been slowly disappearing from American culture due to the faulty welfare system. The American government’s primary focus is no longer protecting the citizen’s rightfully earned property, but rather supplying the unemployed with free provisions. In this vicious cycle, the unemployed see no reason to look for a job while the government continues to provide for their necessities and the Americans who are employed are being taxed egregiously to fund this welfare system. Locke’s original theory of individual hard work leading to property ownership should be reinstated in America.

Morally, I am in agreement with Kierkegaard’s three stages of human existence—the aesthetic stage, ethical stage, and religious stage. A great majority of people spends their lives in the aesthetic stage, pursuing constant fulfillment of their fleshly desires without much regard to the wellbeing of others. In the ethical stage, a person becomes more aware of what is inevitably right and wrong and strives to live according to their morals. A small handful of people reach the religious stage, where they know God intimately and dedicate their entire existence to pursuing and obeying Him. It is a relentless feeling of dissatisfaction called existential angst that drives people to move from one stage to the other until they have finally reached the religious stage and found true contentment in Christ. Daily, I see individuals who live and find purpose according to which stage they are currently in. Those who are not in the religious stage are endlessly unhappy and unfulfilled because they have not yet discovered the perfect peace and provision which comes from knowing Christ alone.