Hi! I'm Dave Herman

Today I’ve read some negative comments about Easter, the Bible, the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, and ignorant things Christians have said. Though I believe fully in Jesus and the Bible, here’s why I don’t respond:

5. You don’t win friends by proving someone wrong.

I could fight back. I could show straw man arguments, ad hominem arguments, false assumptions, and so on. But the truth is, even if arguments are dead wrong, you rarely change someone’s opinion through mere logic. People are rational creatures, but not mainly rational creatures. You need to be friends first so their defensiveness is down and ears are open.

4. Facebook and Twitter aren’t good platforms for rational discourse.

Sure, they’re a step up from YouTube comments because people know who you are, but people post stuff because they believe it strongly, not necessarily because they’re good arguments. Remember that person who had a life-changing epiphany after seeing a GIF? I don’t either.

3. Some of their assertions are true.

Christians do say dumb stuff. It doesn’t mean Christ is wrong, but it just shows that these dumb Christians, just like everyone else, need to be forgiven and restored with truth and compassion.

2. If God is big, he doesn’t need little me to defend him.

There are some questions none of us have answers to. So when someone has legitimate questions I can’t answer, it’s okay to say I don’t know. I’m not God; I don’t know everything. No need to scold someone for not knowing everything, either.

1. Jesus is best known and proclaimed through experience.

If I were to just talk about Christian principles, you’d start thinking about Christianity that way. Instead, Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The best way to relate to people is to see what Jesus did for me. He endured the cross to give his life in place of my own. He rose again so I can have life with him.

The magnitude of what Jesus did for me is so great that the best way for others to experience Jesus through me is to myself experience Jesus. So yes, I can hold my own in debates, having studied and thought about these things for a while. However, I take the advice of a wise friend of mine: “There’s more to being right than being right,” meaning you can argue truth and distance friends, or you speak truth in love and gain them.

Let me make something clear: I’m not famous, and I don’t claim to speak for those who are.

Yet for a brief moment at the end of 2012, something incredible happened. I got what so many YouTubers and NBC lovers work their whole lives for—a spot on NBC—at a quarter to midnight on New Year’s Eve, no less.

After that, newspapers contacted me, people I didn’t know recognized me, and girls who didn’t like me now wanted to talk to me.

Again, I’m not famous, but I got a taste of what fame is like.

That taste of fame changed me. It made me care more about getting people to go to my websites than creating quality content to go there. It made me see a person more as someone to help me than someone I can help.

I started seeing people as numbers because my whole year of hard work in 2012 went by relatively unrecognized until the press started covering it. And if Facebook “likes” are any indication, I found people don’t care much about what you do until you get famous for doing it. It’s human nature to overlook the hard work but celebrate the payoff.

We all do that, like when we watch movies. We laugh at Kevin McCallister’s enemies getting hit in the faces with paint cans, but forget all the planning that went into the booby traps. We love the tenderness of the marriage between the couple from Up, but forget that the eight-minute montage covered their eighty years of learning to love in all circumstances. 

We want to be entertained. We don’t want to do the hard work.

So I started catering to what people wanted.

I started the 10,000 Kevins project as another fun way to get noticed, and linked the charity aspect to boost attention. I’d been approaching it upside down. I wanted to get 10,000 Kevins to sign a petition so Kevin Bacon would take me to dinner, and through that build awareness so we can raise $1 million through Kevin Bacon’s charity network.

You see my main motive there? I was to promote myself. People need cures, the environment needs protecting, criminals need to be brought to justice, and I care about promoting myself.

I’m sorry. I apologize to all of you that my main motive in this project has been to get myself famous. Why not do good because it’s right, because doing good resembles the kind of world we want to see?

So look, for the rest of this year, I want to pursue this project 10,000 Kevins because helping people is the right thing to do. Who cares if it gets covered by the press? Who cares if I get famous?

As John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” From now on, that’s how I want to live.

Q: What was your most memorable interview?

Tom Brokaw: The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don’t know: young civil rights leaders in the South showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of the night; a doctor working for Doctors Without Borders in Somalia, operating by kerosene lantern in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

From TIME Magazine, 11/7/2007

I see rows of boats all at the dock. The boats are slightly different from one another, but they’re all the same shape and size. They leave gradually, first one, then another. When one boat leaves, I want to get on that one. Then another starts to leave, and I want to get on that one. I can’t get on every boat, and the boats aren’t leaving in a hurry. What if I get on one boat and it’s the wrong boat?

These boats are opportunities. I want to take every opportunity that comes up because it has so much potential to be an exciting adventure! But it’s not possible to do that. Instead, I can only choose one boat because I am only one person. I can, however, drive that boat wherever I want. It’s my boat because I make it my own. I can take care of one boat and make it great instead of jumping ship to ship, which doesn’t allow my efforts to have as much effect.

Take one boat and make it my own.