Labels

Have you ever had anyone ask, "What are you?"  Usually before you answer that question there has to be some sort of context.  Are we talking politics?  You might answer Liberal, Conservative, or everyone's favorite, Independent-Moderate.   One might throw out party labels, Democrat, Republican, and Libertarian.    Sometimes that question is asked in terms of Religious affiliation, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu ….and the list could go on.   Of course once the BIG label is established, you have to drill down...So, you're a conservative,  Are you a fiscal conservative, or a social conservative, perhaps a Tea Party conservative?    The point is that there are a lot of labels, and different labels can mean different things to different people!     Take the label Christian for instance, what does that mean?  The priest burning incense at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,  The guy screaming at me through a bull horn on the Marietta Square,  The guy handling snakes in the North Georgia mountains and the guy with the nerdy glasses at Starbucks telling me Jesus was probably gay, all claim to be Christians.   So what do we need, well we need more labels!

So you are a Christian, are you Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant?  But that is still not enough, are you liberal or conservative, and to confuse the issue more a conservative Roman Catholic and a Conservative Protestant are still worlds apart.   So let us say for the sake of argument that we have established the big labels, Christian, Protestant, Conservative;  I am going to skip over the whole denominational thing for a moment, because we have yet another fork in the road.  Election verses Free-Will, maybe before that break we have Covenant verses Dispensational, then you have the three branches, Amillennial, Premillennial and Post Millennial.  Which should not be confused with  Pretribulationalism,  Midtribulationalism, and Post tribulationalism.   Are you confused yet?  If not you are not paying attention.   

The question is how are we to make sense of all of these labels?  What do they really mean? ( one person’s conservative is another person’s liberal)  Finally does it really matter?    When I was in college we used to like to say, "I don't like labels, because they don't really mean anything."   That works fine until someone changes the sugar label with the salt label and you put a cup of salt in the birthday cake you were baking.   In that case you may just end up with a birthday cake that tastes really bad.   But what if someone changes the sugar label with arsenic?  Then you end up with some dead people on your hands.    Remember the rhyme you learned in chemistry? 

Little Timmy took a drink,

But he will drink no more,

For what he thought was H2O,

Was H2SO4.

Labels help us Identify, truth from error and food from poison.  

So over the next few weeks, months, years, decades; I am going to attempt to identify the labels and then actually label myself!   Honestly I am not sure if it can be done, but over the last few months I have been asking myself, what am I?  

I guess that is what the essence of this blog is all about.  Who am I?   What am I?  

Feel free to drop in and comment on my navel gazing,  My next post might be about supralapsarianism verses infralapsarianism, or Georgia Tech's colors, Old Gold, White & Blue vs  Old Gold, White & Black?

Who knows, but we will try to stick a label on it.  Let's just hope no one switches them on the way!