I discovered over time that different people believe in so many things that its pretty much impossible to find one premise that everyone believes totally and absolutely.  In short, its impossible to make a sound argument, if the person with whom you are arguing wants to argue the premises of your argument, and inevitabley someone will come along to be "that guy" who wants to do that.  So at that point I decided that it wasn't a worthy goal to try and figure out what these common grounds are because they don't really exist.

So I hung out in that frame of mind, which more or less amounted to a sort of nihlism, for a while.  Somewhere in there I moved back to Grand Haven and started to look for a job.  Long story short, I found a job at the church in which I grew up.  Of course this meant brushing up on the religion that I grew up in, which I thought would be pretty easy to do.  I figured that I was pretty happy believing whatever it was I believed growing up and I would just go back to that, whatever that meant.  So what did that mean?  Here's where I had to come up with some premises and, whether they were universal or not, I was hoping to figure out what it was that I believed as a kid.  I wanted to do this because I know that I believed what I believed when I was a kid.  There was no doubt in my mind about some things, and at this nihlistic stage, I had nothing BUT doubts.  So this would be good for me, I said.  Time to figure out my starting point for my world view.  Here's what I came up with - a list of givens that can easily be argued against, but I believe nonetheless:

1. There is one God that exists:  
I was telling Phil in a comment I made on one of his posts that at one point I tried to imagine this premise not being true and the idea seemed perposterous to me.  Not saying that its possible that there is no God, but I'm saying that I feel quite strongly that there is, and I'm sure I'd be a very different person if I didn't believe this to be true.  Overall, this isn't a terribly hard sell in the largely monotheistic Western world.  Most of the time when I have a discussion about faith with someone, this point can be agreed on.  Also, I personally think the arguments for the existence of a higher power are more plausible than the arguments against it.  At the very least I'd much rather be living in a world that has some higher existence, but that's just me.

2. I subscribe to "Christianity", whatever that means:
I went to Christian school from Kindergarten through Eighth Grade, went to church every Sunday, youth group every Wednesday from sixth grade through my senior year of high school, had the model Christian family that everyone looked up to, and played bass guitar in church most Sundays from sixth grade on.  To top it all off, I was never really challenged in my faith in Christianity so it was quite easy for me to believe in it.  Come to find out, though, this is not the experience that most had which a lot of times makes anything with the word "Christian" involved a tough sell, but I plan on touch on this idea in my next and hopefully final post on faith.  Anyways, given the fact that I was going to be working in a Christian church, and given the fact that I had decided to believe whatever I had grown up believing, this is what I decided I was going to believe, or maybe had believed the whole time and had just forgotten that I believed it in the first place.

So, easy peasy, right?  Everything is ship-shape and I've got my creed and that's that, right?  Well, here's the obvious question that comes up.  What do Christians believe?  Well, that's a pretty very hard thing to just pigeon-hole.  It really depends who you are asking.  But me, I just wanted to easiest answer to that question, so I decided to do some more investigating and soul searching to figure it out what parts of Christianity I believed growing up, what parts I currently believed, and what parts I had believed in between...

Well, that's all I got for today.  Next up, I will go in to what I discovered Christianity meant to me and how that has actually changed a lot since I started these silly little posts.