Theophilogic

Cowardice and Human Essentials

2008-06-29T12:32:00.003-05:00

A couple of friends and I spent the night in the Devil's Tramping Ground recently, and aside from the fact that nothing strange at all happened (even though we were actually within the circle itself the whole night), it was a very enjoyable time. However, something struck me about the whole experience.

When we arrived at the site, we were surprised (and somewhat disheartened) to find that there were two cars already parked on the side of the road! We parked, entered, and found a small group of 18-26 year olds checking out the are. They were supposed paranormal investigators. They claimed to have photographic evidence of high spiritual activity within the circle, and also claimed to have been physically affected by spiritual forces (a push, a scratch, etc.). I made it clear to this group that I did not believe in the legend (or any of their supposed paranormal activity) and was simply there to disprove it. After some fairly civil conversation (and watching them try to contact spirits), they went on their way. I was told something very interesting, however, before they left.

I had made a comment that I do not remember, but it was simply another expression of my disbelief. I realized that it might have sounded more mocking than I had intended, so I apologized for the tone of my statement, and then simply told them again that I did not mean to mock them, I just did not believe as they did. The leader of the group told me that was fine, and then that "Disbelief and skepticism are simply signs of cowardice." I did not know how to respond to this statement immediately, so I just shrugged and expressed my apathy towards his claim, promptly disregarding it, not fully understanding what he meant. This morning, I think I began to realize what he could have intended, and then I realized that if his logic is correct, there exists not a man who isn't a coward.

I think what was meant by his statement was that I was refusing to believe in something because I was afraid of it, and instead of facing my fear, I escaped it by not allowing myself to believe it, thus, I was being a coward. I think a good example of this logic is when someone I knew found out I did not believe in Hell. This person believed that I must be going to Hell because I didn't believe in it. This was the logic: I knew I was going to Hell and that terrified me, so I decided to dismiss the idea of it so I could live my life without changing. The cowardice I was being accused of was that I dismissed anything that frightened me so I would not have to deal with it. Allow me to ponder that for a moment.

What would frighten me about the spiritual activeness of legendary locations? What would it do to me if I had a paranormal experience? I suppose that may frighten me because it would be something that didn't fit into the way I saw the world. I would not be able to explain a ghost in my worldview. I have little room for hauntings and angry spirits in the way I see things, and to experience a specter would shake the foundations of my beliefs. The idea that spiritual forces really are active and manifest in the world just doesn't fly with me. I do not deny that spiritual forces exist, but I do deny that they care enough about spooking superstitious people for the fun of it.

Shaking the way people see things. That really is the only fear that I think people have. I do not mean fear as phobias; I do not count fear of spiders or heights true fear, I consider those severe emotional drives of disgust and anxiety. I think that true fear is the unraveling of the way things are for a person. I think that everybody "knows" how the world works, and they will rationalize it to stay the way it is. Therefore allowing myself to believe in these "superstitions" as I call them would unravel my worldview, and I would thus be afraid.

My answer, however, as I have already stated, is that everybody has this fear. The man that implied I was a coward had his own worldview which probably didn't allow for these superstitions not to be true. If this man had devoted his free time to studying paranormal phenomena (as he had expressed to us that he had) then what would it mean for him to find out that he was completely wrong? He would be afraid. I cannot blame him. I would never call him a coward for it either. I would simply say that he has the same fear as all of humanity. Take a look at the man of deep faith who has devoted his entire life to the worship of the Christian Trinitarian god of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What would happen if that man found out that there really is no god at all, and all of his life's faith was in vain? He would be afraid. And what would happen to the lifelong atheist who spend his life debating and arguing that there is not god or eternal life? If he found out he was wrong he would probably be afraid for his soul.

What I am saying here is that every man is a coward if I am correct in stating that the only fear humanity has is that one's worldview is wrong, and that cowardice is hiding from fear. I believe this is essential. What would man be if he did not fear the error of his worldview? He would have no follow-through. He would be principally flimsy. He would believe nothing. If I had no reason not to do something, I would probably do it. If a man had no fear of changing his worldview, I would question the validity of his humanity. There is not one human being I have met that didn't believe the world to be a certain way. Certainly, there are many (myself included) that do not know or understand every part of the universe, but they do believe in a system (worldview) that everything is based on. There is no one that believes nothing. Believing is a human essential. Understanding is not. I claim much understanding, but I claim stronger subjectivity.

I conclude in saying that I do not believe that either skepticism or faith arises from cowardice, but that they arise from being human. It is only when they run against experience that I believe they become scapegoats from reality. It is probably commonly thought that I have fallen far away from faith in the theology I grew up with, but I believe that if I had held to it when my life's experience has pointed in another direction, only then would I really be a coward.

A Mind to Interpret What Is Seen

2008-04-07T10:42:00.003-05:00

It pleases me to see that Kirk has responded to my post, and again, I am going to show that I have no life and respond the very next day. He begins by being shocked that he needed to define "salvation" for me. I was actually a little shocked from his answer, but I suppose I can understand what he is intending. He claims that it doesn't take a long look at the world to see that we need salvation, and names things such as malnutrition, disease, genocide, deaths and tsunamis to show. I want to stop right here to make a small point. These aren't spiritual items. I think that Kirk would believe salvation to be a spiritual occurrence, and that regardless of whether one is saved or not, these things that he named would still happen. I still don't understand what he is trying to say. Salvation will rescue us from these things? Furthermore, these are not things that I believe us to need salvation from. Malnutrition, as horrible as it is in some parts of the world, is the result of overpopulation. In nature, when the food supply runs out for a species, the species does not flourish as much, and then after the food source can be replenished, the population of the predator species can increase again. In nature, it is balance, but with us, it is an evil? Now I don't want to give anyone the impression that I don't care about the poor children who are starving in the world, but I do want to say that that's just the way things work. When we reproduce to the point of making our children starve, it is not "evil" or anything we need to be saved from, it is the result of poor planning and irresponsibility. If we were to ever be "saved" from this, we would be asking to be saved from the beautiful balance that God established in creation. Again, I am not saying that I think there is beauty in starving children, but I am saying that the system itself is God's beautiful creation, and it has been abused, and now people think that we need salvation from it. I think there's something wrong with that. Kirk then names disease. I believe this falls in the same line of reasoning. What is disease but the exploitation of our fragility and mortality? It is not something that we need salvation from, it is something that we have been conditioned to reject. We are obsessed with immortality and have this ridiculous notion that there is something so wrong about death. Disease kills people. In nature, again, this is part of the balance of creation. The circle of life, I suppose one could call it. But when it applies to us, we think it's evil. We have double the life expectancy right now than we did maybe a thousand years ago, and yet we think cancer is so evil. If it wasn't cancer, it would be something else. In a few hundred years, when the life expectancy is 150, we are still going to be complaining when someone dies of a disease at 120. The disease is not the problem; the perception is. Genocidal governments are something that I think Kirk hits closer to the truth on. This is a deliberate malicious act from human beings. I will not attempt to refute this. I will discuss the human issue below. I already talked about "daily deaths." Tsunamis are again, something completely natural that is a beautiful occurrence of creation, but viewed as a terrible act of nature. There is nothing evil about a tsunami, we just happen to get in the way. This is not something we need salvation from. It's just nature.

Kirk's point is that he takes these examples and says that the victims of these occurrences need a greater hope. I think he had something going here, but then went on to talk about Americans, so I shall as well. He says that we seek our own glorification above the good of others, and then names homicide, thievery, strife, loss, difficulty in work, and fear as examples. Yes, this is true, we tend to put ourselves over everyone else. However, I would again say (with later qualifications) that this is just nature. In my limited studies on nature and species, I have approached the conclusion that animals want to survive. Everything animals do, whether it is evolving through natural selection (something that humans would call evil if they knew it was happening to them no doubt because it involved dying) or mating habits or diet or anything, organisms do what they can to survive. They will kill other members of their species for food or mates. They will scavenge (steal) food from others in the night to survive. Red in tooth and claw I suppose. I would propose that humans are not except from this animality. Does that make it evil...or natural? If this is what Kirk is saying that we need salvation from (our own bestial desires), then I would say that I could agree with that. But I would say that an atheist anthropologist could come to the very same conclusion. If one studied nature and saw that we need to better control and overcome our subhuman drives of self-preservation over the well-being of others, then they are on their way to "salvation." This is something that anyone could do (without the Bible). Kirk ends this segment by saying that "There should be no way that we miss the fact that we need something/someone from outside of us to save us." I think that if this is his definition of salvation then it can actually be done within the heart of the individual, with God or without.

Kirk then states that I have the foundational proposition "that our Reason is not flawed and therefore that it will lead us to 'the Good (God)'." I want to make a qualification that I think is important. I do not believe that our Reason is flawless; I just do not share Kirks idea that it is fundamentally flawed. I believe that people can be misled by their Reason, but I do not believe that we should be discouraged from leaning on it nonetheless. Furthermore, I do not believe that Reason will lead us to God, but that it won't necessarily lead us away from God. Kirk's statement "if our reason will lead us to God, then why hasn't it yet?" is not was I was getting at. I don't believe we will ever "lead us to God" in this life. I simply believe we have to use everything we possibly can (as I believe the Jesus of the synoptics advises us to), and that includes not neglecting Reason for Tradition. I also think that Kirk's use of wars as an example of how our we are flawed is an attack on politics and nationalism as opposed to Reason.

Kirk continues to say that through the entirety of my post I chose to start from an "unproven assumption." I believe Kirk means that my statement that we all are left to our own reason and experiences to tell us who God is is the assumption. I would like to say that this is a fact. We cannot escape our reasoning. We can convince ourselves of illogical things, but because we have to convince ourselves, we are using our reason. I believe this to be a poor use of it, but it is a use nonetheless. Kirk's theology makes sense to him for the most part, and he believes it. He believes it with his reason. I think that his reason is often spent working out things incorrectly (as he probably would think of me as well), but that does not mean he isn't using it on his own. I think it is important to note that I used Kirk himself as an example as to how he uses his Reason to work things out himself. I would like to see how he would respond to my analysis of him. Finally, the fact that Kirk states that his "assumption" is no more valid than mine goes to show that it's not really a relevant topic. I never accused Kirk of stating an assumption as fact.

Kirk proceeds to talk about how the Spirit "opens our souls to God's Word." I cannot really refute this logically. What I can say is that I don't necessarily believe it. What does it take for the Spirit to do this? I can honestly say that even when I believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, that I never felt anything really spiritual when I read it. I figured I was just doing something wrong. I read the Bible more like a rulebook or a history book. It says something about God, therefore it must be so. Once I actually started to learn about the reasons for the Bible to be written, I realized it wasn't inerrant, I came to the conclusions that it was often biased, often unfactual, and I believe I came to a much more mature understanding of what the text really was. What I didn't do is feel some type of mystical/spiritual effect from learning or reading the Bible. This is where I want to really clarify something. I do not claim to know how God works for everybody. I place such a strong emphasis on experience and I don't want to discount Kirk's (or anyone else's) experience. So if Kirk really feels some type of spiritual closeness to God or some type of divine calling, then there is nothing I can really say to put that down. What I can do is say that whatever it is that he's feeling, I do not, and cannot, unless I tried with everything I have in me to brainwash myself out of thinking the way I do now. I deny the need for this. I deny that God would require me to do that to myself. I believe that even if I tried to do that, it would be insincere, and I don't think God would appreciate that. I am what I am, and as long as I am seeking God, regardless of what I believe about the Bible, I think God will be OK with that. I just think that if the Bible was what Kirk thought it was, then it would have a better success rate (especially for people like me who try). One last thing: I do not believe John 1.1 was referring to anything biblical. The ancient Jewish notion of the logos was not the written word, but more like the agent of creation and wisdom.

Kirk addresses my statement that neither Jesus nor his disciples had the New Testament. He says that's not really true, because they just wrote down what was revealed to them from the Spirit. What counts as the end of revelation then? Why did the Spirit stop inspiring people to write? We only needed this much to combat heresies, pretty much. What about the letters of Timothy? Do those count? What if we found another letter of Paul to the Corinthians? Would that count? Do we have the only inspired books that were ever written? Kirk knows where I'm going with this. What if I wrote something inspired by God? What if Kirk did? How are we to know what counts as inspired? This is just as troublesome to me as the idea that they're inspired in the first place. What makes Kirk think that the Bible is the only thing that was inspired? My answer would be he was raised to think so. I can't do it. It would be great to believe that it is what he thinks it is, but I just can't believe it because I see little good reason to.

If it is not evident, I (unlike Kirk) have no problem with wearing out my readers. Kirk mentions what I noted that Jesus could not relate to our finiteness (if you have the same opinion as Kirk does). He asks why I worry about things, and says that Jesus told us not to. I don't see how this really addresses my question though. If Jesus is omniscient, then him telling other people not to worry about things isn't speaking from experience. It may be speaking from wisdom, but not experience. I hardly see Jesus needed to "tap into" any type of omniscience. I don't tap into any of my knowledge, I just have it. I couldn't be otherwise. I know some things, and I forget others. If I knew everything, it wouldn't be like I had a storage case of knowledge somewhere that I had to take the lid off and get what I need to know. It would just be there. I don't see that Kirk has answered my problem with the idea that an infinite being can relate to a finite one. Jesus was tempted to worry, but didn't? Just because I shouldn't be worrying doesn't mean Jesus is off the hook for not being able to relate. If he was also perfect then he wasn't even tempted to feel guilt. I'm not just trying to be difficult here. I just can't believe that he would be able to relate to a finite being like me if he was not.

Kirk accuses me of seeing what I want to see (just as I accused him). I cannot tell him he is wrong. I can dispute his statement that I "take out" parts of the Bible that don't fit my experience, but he raises a good point. However, as this could be true for anybody (seeing what they want to see), I would rather see what makes sense to me. Kirk admits that he accepts things that he is incapable of explaining and that go against his nature. He states examples like dying to himself, loving his enemies, praying for those who persecute him, and believing in the resurrection. He states that he would not want to make himself see these things, but that he accepts them "based upon God's promise of life through them." I would disagree with some of this. I believe that Jesus was teaching the Kingdom of God, and in that Kingdom, people are dead to themselves, but alive to God. They love everyone, especially those that hate them and persecute them. This is utopia. I said above that an anthropologist could see the problems in the world and reach conclusions, but this is apart from the Bible or "salvation." I think that these conclusions can be reached apart from the Bible (and have been). The resurrection bit is different. That really isn't something that anyone would believe apart from believing that the Bible has some type of authority over the matter. I am not ready to refute this.

I must add here that I am not as atheist/anti-Christian as I sound. I still consider myself a Christian, I just stand at another end of the spectrum from Kirk. I am not ready to commit to the idea that the Resurrection didn't happen (and I know I'm leaving myself open to the argument of inconsistency, but hopefully I'll cover myself before this post is done). I honestly don't know how a small movement of farmers and fishermen could have become what it did if something magnificent never actually happened. I suppose it's more important that people believe something happened than it is that it actually happened, but something sparked something. Whatever happened after the death of Jesus, it was miraculous. I do not mean miraculous in that it defied the laws of nature, but I mean miraculous in that it was revolutionary and unexpected. That's as far as I'm willing to go at the moment.

As this relates to Kirk believing things contrary to what he would want to believe, I want to question that. I think Kirk sees his life as being much more fulfilled because he believes what he does. I'm not saying he's a fair-weather believer or anything, but I think that he is happier as he is now, and that his life is better because of it. It is therefore not really contrary to his nature to believe these things. I, however, am more satisfied in my beliefs, and I could not believe otherwise (at this point in my life). So we are doing the same thing I guess. I just want to defend the idea that just because he's satisfied with his way of looking at things doesn't mean it's "Truth" or anything. I don't claim to know that I'm right, I just claim that I make a lot more sense to myself and I could be no other. I am what I am (maybe God can relate after all).

The Need for Truth Indeed

2008-03-14T13:45:00.002-05:00

I must say, I am honored that my blog was interesting enough to anybody that they felt the need to write in opposition. Indeed, fellow religion major Kirk Norris has written a response to my blog where he addresses the questions I am asking about God and man (his blog can be found at http://eklektostheou.blogspot.com under March 13). He is correct in his thought that I enjoy his foiling (it's so much more fun when we disagree), and I am pleased that he is expanding the world of internet thought by expressing his disagreement with my ideas. Although it did make me smile to see that he hopes that I take up "the challenge of confronting a truthful response" to my heresies ("heresy" being my word not his).

Kirk first states (correctly) my belief that the Bible is man's understanding of God, and not God's revelation to man, and therefore we can't simply read the Bible and hope for definitive pictures of God. He then claims that if the Bible is not "God's fully true revelation of himself to us, then no one will ever come to salvation." My first question would be for Kirk to define "salvation." I would assume that Kirk sees Jesus as the answer to salvation, and since the Bible is the most trustworthy source on the life (and afterlife) of Jesus, without it we would have no trustworthy information, and nobody could be saved (because we wouldn't have the record of God's revelation in the incarnation). I might respond that Jesus never expresses concern with people knowing their Bibles, but with how we treat other people, and so to claim that we can't know God without the Bible (more specifically the New Testament) is a fallacy. I will not develop this argument at this time, but I will put it out there. I feel like Christians often elevate the Bible to an uncomfortably high standard (when you take into the fact that neither Jesus nor any of his disciples had any knowledge of the NT during his ministry). Kirk then states that without the Bible we would be "left to our own reason and experiences to tell us who God is." This is exactly what we have done anyway! Everybody (even Kirk) has a view of God that has been shaped by his own reason and experience. He believes that the Bible is God's revelation, and so he reasons from this belief and then either shapes his experience to support it, or at the very least looks upon his own existence in light of the logic following from this assumption. I don't believe that Kirk would believe what he did if it didn't make sense to his Reason. Granted, there are things that we both do not understand, but I believe there is a difference between not understanding something and believing something that is contrary to one's own Reason. He is left with his subjective view on God, as I am to mine. Of course, he allows the Bible to be the authority on his view, but it remains his interpretation of the Bible (which is subjective) that is shaped by his experience (which he interprets subjectively). I believe Kirk to be correct in his claim to a higher level of agnosticism than I by defining it as what we can know about God outside of the Bible, but I would simply want to put a check on how objective a reading is possible by anyone (including Kirk) on this document.

Kirk then states if "even parts of the Bible are untrue," we have to decide for ourselves what is and isn't true or culturally conditioned. He claims that if we are left to our own reason, then since we are corrupted and sinful we will lead ourselves into untruth. I enjoy poking fun at his Calvinism, and this represents the T of the TULIP, Total depravity (just for the record, I don't think Kirk is a Calvinist, but he has Reformed tendencies). I think Kirk's theology (and perhaps most Christians') is too heavily influenced by his view of man's corruption. I am actually quite Pelagian in this aspect. I think that Christian tradition pressures us to think about ourselves way too negatively. I don't believe in original sin, I don't believe that we inherit some type of corruption that prevents us from getting to God. I think we have our own struggles against selfishness that we must overcome, but I think that's what it is, selfishness, not necessarily "sin." For Kirk, his view that we are sinfully corrupted does not allow him to trust his own reason to approach the Good (God). I, on the other hand, believe that all reason that we possess comes from the Good, and therefore we can follow it back to the source (Neoplatonism anyone?). I don't think our sin is corrupting our ability to reason, I believe it is corrupting our ability to love others. I believe that the "evil" caused by man is really our egocentricity. We can only overcome our "corruptness" when we think of others before ourselves. I don't think it is possible to do that (I don't believe that altruism exists), but I don't believe this is "sin" that separates us from God. I am digressing, but suffice it to say that I do not find anything wrong in relying on our God-given (in my opinion) reason over an interpretation of the Bible that our parents tell us because their parents told them (etc).

On a shorter note, I have some problems with Kirk's statement that "God's Word and His Spirit are never separate from one another." I'm not sure how he meant it (obviously not in way that implied biblical divinity), but I would question the need for God to rely on man's written word. No matter how high you view the Bible, it remains man's written word. I don't think the infinite God of being is reliant on a book in the way it seems Kirk thinks he is.

For the most part, I have answered Kirk's question already of where I believe my knowledge comes from, but I think it's the same place as Kirk; we just call it different things (although I do not expect him to agree with me). He states that he believes his knowledge comes from God giving it to him "through the coordinated work of His Spirit and His Word" (again, it seems like he is elevating the Bible to a divine status I am uncomfortable with). I am going to assume that Kirk means that he gets his knowledge of God from God, and not all knowledge in general. Kirk knows that the current President of the United States is George W. Bush. I do not believe that he thinks God gave him this information. He has this knowledge because he keeps up with current events through news, conversation, reading; basically, his experience. So it seems as if he has drawn a line dividing what he can know through experience and what he can know from divine revelation. I don't want to expound too much on this as it regards to Kirk, because I do not know how far I could go before he objects and corrects my understanding of his beliefs, but I would like to continue my reasoning impersonally, and allow Kirk the freedom to place himself wherever he may or may not be in my situation. Continuing, then, where is this line drawn? Can one only know theological truths from revelation, but all other truths are from experience? This does not sit well with me. I believe that all truth is God's truth, and he wouldn't set us up so that we can trust our experiences for everything except himself, and then send down this book from his graces to fill the gap in our knowledge. I believe that Kirk's knowledge is from experience, not from God, but he interprets his experience in a way that compartmentalizes his knowledge into divine and non-divine categories, the former of which he can only realize from revelation. He was raised a Christian, therefore he remains one. He was raised to believe the Bible had divine authority, and he believes this. Is this a coincidence? Is it just a random coincidence that he just so happens to believe the faith that his parents taught him?

Allow me to introduce a possible corrective. If Kirk was not actually raised in a conservative background (whether it be parents or other influential authority figures of his past), then I stand mistaken. Furthermore, if he turns the argument on me, and claims that since I was raised in a conservative Christian world and turned out like this there can be no trustworthy correlation, then I suppose the only answer I can offer is that we are different people. I was conservative for the majority of my aware life, but I allowed my own reason and experience (and academic study) to shape my current beliefs. I do not understand people like Kirk, who can be exposed to the same ideas as me and yet do not accept them because it contradicts what they had believed prior, but I am not them.

Not to get too bogged down for the moment, Kirk expresses concern about this statement of mine: "What we can say is that God cannot possibly experience anything like what we experience in our finite mortal bodies. Whether or not he knows what it would feel like if he could, the fact remains that in his infinite state he does not feel like we do." Kirk's response, of course, is the incarnation. Quite appropriately, he quotes Hebrews: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." I am glad he exposed this, for it will allow me to divulge a little in what was behind the statement (which I apologize, I probably did not make as clear as it should have been). I suppose I must ask Kirk a few questions concerning the nature of the incarnation. First, was Jesus omniscient? Could he read the thoughts of other men? Did he know the intent and destiny of men even before they knew it themselves (Peter's denial)? If the answer to these questions is "Yes" (and I believe Kirk's answer would be), then my next question would be "What human possesses these abilities?" Can Jesus sympathize with the stress I'm under concerning my unawareness of the future? I am worried sick about my life right now because I thought I had next year figured out, and there is good possibility now that I'm going to have to change everything about my life and it may affect me for years. Can God relate to that? If Jesus was never in any doubt about his future or his destiny, then that is one aspect in which he cannot relate to any human, because no human possesses that knowledge. If Jesus could read other's thoughts, then he cannot relate to the stress I have in social relationships, never knowing if I'm accidentally offending someone, never knowing if somebody is interested in my speech, etc. Can Jesus relate to this? What about when Jesus supposedly saw Nathanael under the fig tree before Philip called him to meet Jesus? Did Jesus possess the ability to see with his mind any occurrence on earth (in a sense, omniscience)? If he did, then he cannot possibly relate to the finiteness of humanity. The frailty and fear of being kept in the dark, of not knowing our future or the future of our friends, not knowing what we should do with our life is lost on God. Now what about sin? I would ask Kirk if he feels guilty about his sin. Could God relate to this? Could Jesus relate to the self-degradation, guilt, and low self-esteem that humanity feels? If Jesus was perfect and without sin, how can we say that he knows how we feel when we sin? Can God even fathom what it would mean to feel sinful? Kirk seems to think that sinful is all we are. We are totally corrupted in everything we do. How then has Jesus experienced anything close to this if he was perfect and sinless? That is what I meant by my statement. Jesus may know physical pain and emotional pain (from the rejection of his friends), but does he know guilt and self-loathing? Does he know the fear of uncertainty? I have made the argument before that Jesus did not in fact know the future based on his prayer in the garden preceding his crucifixion, but I am not asking myself these questions, I am asking Kirk (and those that believe as he does).

Kirk concludes that we can know who God is, and once we accept that we need his revelation we can "come to the Scriptures with a readiness to know the God who came to us and speaks to us." I have a problem with this. It seems that if the only way to see God revealing himself in the Bible is to come to the Bible with that very expectation then we are being set up to see what we make ourselves see. It seems that Kirk makes the assumption first, and then goes to the Bible and finds support for his assumption (I am not talking about proof-texting, I mean an honest interpretation). I think that no matter how much Kirk thinks that God didn't leave us "to our own devices, to seek him and find him as we are able," even Kirk himself is doing just that. He believes human knowledge outside the Bible is inferior, so he is going to the best that he can figure, and finding God just as I am: just as we are able.

How Do We Know?

2008-02-05T09:40:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest questions man has ever had is "If there's a god, what kind of god is it?" This is not a question that I believe anyone will ever be able to answer definitively (in this life anyway). I am not going to discuss the assumption that there is a God; I am more interested in what kind of god this being is. From hereon out, I will refer to this being as "he" for simplicity's sake (it's faster to type "he" than "she") and I will capitalize "God" when using it as a title.

First of all, I must say that I stand within the Judeo-Christian tradition, and most of my views of God are therefore biased in that direction. I will try to stay as ecumenical as I can, but I will also try and be clear on what I believe.

The first place a Christian would probably look for information about God is the Bible. I believe this to be a good thing and a bad thing. The Bible is a written record of man's experience with the divine, and is therefore extremely valuable to our own understanding. Just like anything else, we all build off of the information gathered by others. As Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants. There are unreasonable methods of interpreting the Bible, however, and if one limits their understanding of God to strictly what the Bible states, I believe they are misunderstanding what the Bible is. Furthermore, if one believes that the Bible is God's revelation to man, and not man's understanding of God, then the descriptions of God would be interpreted as objective fact instead of culturally influenced subjective experiences of the writers. I believe the latter to be true, and the rest of this article will be from that standpoint.

How are we to understand the many descriptions of God given in the Bible? There are a few options of methodology that we can choose from. We can either assume that all of the descriptions are equally true, and meld them together to make one picture, or we can recognize that some descriptions cannot be as accurate as others, and hold certain pictures as closer to reality than others. Then there's the question of how literal we read the descriptions. When should we recognize anthropomorphisms and metaphors, and when should we accept the text as completely factual? These are all questions that must be taken into consideration.

How do we really know anything anyway? The only know things relationally. That may sound like a ridiculously simple statement, but it is important to realize that the only way we can understand anything is to relate it to something that we have experienced ourselves. For example, if there was somebody who didn't know what the color orange was, I could tell them to imagine yellow, then imagine red, and then tell them that orange was the color in between them, just like green is the color between yellow and blue. I could only describe it to them by using what they already knew. Now if you made that person blind from birth, there would be absolutely no way of describing to them what orange was, because they would have nothing to relate it to. Another example could be describing a picture to someone. If I was describing what a sunset looked like to somebody who had never even seen the sun, I could do so by describing the color, the size, brightness and shape of the sun, and then I could describe how it made other objects look. This would require the listener to understand colors and shapes. If I told them the sun was a half-circle, they could visualize a half-circle, and then if I told them it was brilliantly bright golden yellow, they could imagine a yellow half-circle and then the brightest light they had ever seen. All knowledge relational in this way.

So what does this have to do with God? Well, it has everything to do with how we understand God. If the only way we know anything is relationally, then the only way we can know God is relationally. For example, when you talk to somebody about an experience with the divine, what might they say? They might tell you that it was "calming" or that they felt a "strange warmth" or that they felt "excited." None of these terms completely capture the experience, but it helps the listener understand. The listener can relate to times he or she had been warm, calm, or excited. Furthermore, if one were to describe being "held" by God or "seen" by God, they would be speaking in anthropomorphic terms. Does God really "see" us? Does he have eyes? Does light bounce off of us and reflect into his pupils? Does the image appear on the back of his eyeball to be transferred to his brain by rods and cones and then interpreted by his brain to show him what he is looking at? Well, of course not; the idea is ludicrous. The whole idea that God "sees" us is the only way we know how to talk about his knowledge of our activity. It may be more appropriate to say that God "senses" us, but even there lies some tricky semantics. We sense things through our 5 senses, so it would be as if God had a 6th sense but skipped 1-5! What I am trying to say is that we have no idea how God works, and the only way we can try to understand is by making him human. The only way we can understand God is to make him in our image.

To further the point, I will discuss in brief the emotional attributions of God. What are these emotions? To name a few, anger, joy, sadness, regret, jealousy and love are human emotions that are biblically attributed to God. We follow the example of the biblical authors and also claim these descriptions as accurate. These, however, are anthropopathisms, the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman objects. It is well known that hormones and brain functions have much to do with our human emotions. How then are we to explain God having these same feelings? Does God have endorphins that trigger chain reactions in his brain? Does God have a limbic system? Does he have a hypothalamus, a cingulate cortex, or a hippocampi? How ridiculous. How can one feel emotions without hormones or chemicals or even a brain? We have no idea. What we can say is that God cannot possibly experience anything like what we experience in our finite mortal bodies. Whether or not he knows what it would feel like if he could, the fact remains that in his infinite state he does not feel like we do. How then can we explain anything he does, or further still, how can we know why he does anything? I suppose we couldn't.

It may seem like this is an argument for agnosticism, but I believe there is a vital difference between agnosticism and what I am saying. Agnosticism is the belief that one can never know whether or not there is a God. I believe there is a God; it is the inability to know as much as we think we may know about him that I am proposing.

I believe that it is extremely important for Christians (and other monotheists) to understand that there is no such thing as pure objectivity, only subjective attempts at objectivity. Any type of understanding that we (as humans) try to obtain of the divine will end in introspection. We will project ourselves onto God, and we will see what we want to see: ourselves.

5 Minute Answer

2008-01-30T16:35:00.000-05:00

My dad called me an atheist the other day. This is not the case at all, and he wasn't serious, but it made me realize how my beliefs and opinions on much of Christian tradition come off sounding like to one of more conservative faith. I didn't think much of it, however. My friends know more or less where I stand, so I rarely have to define my faith to them. New issues arise, and they find out my thoughts on it, but it isn't revolutionary to them; they know where I'm coming from. I'm still overly-blasphemous at times (in good humor, of course), and unfortunately vulgar depending on the company, but little I say needs defense, because my friends know when to take (or not take me) me seriously.

I was somewhat troubled, however, when I was explaining to my mother a bit about Anselm's "fides quaerens intellectum" (her Sunday School class is using a book that, upon opening to the introduction, included a heading "Faith Seeking Understanding" and nowhere gave any mention of Anselm), and she asked me why I was a Christian, or if I was one at all. I suppose she asked me because I was expressing my dissatisfaction with Anselm's theory. I was saying that I didn't like the idea of coming to the table with assumptions, and interpreting one's experience in order to fit the prior assumptions. The question caught me off guard, and I did not know how to respond to it. For a while now I have barely considered myself a Christian. I have thought of myself as a "liberal Christian," or most recently a "Judeo-Christian Agnostic," but I have long known that my beliefs lie outside what most Christians would call "Christian". My first response was yes, of course I consider myself a Christian, but then I conceded that it all depended on how you defined Christianity. As a "Judeo-Christian Agnostic" it is much easier for me to explain what I don't believe rather than what I do believe.

Telling your mom what you believe when you know full well that she would label it non-Christian and therefore wrong and hell-binding is a difficult thing to do when you have to go to work in 5 minutes. This is the stuff of hour-long conversations, not 5 minute quibbles.

Needless to say, I got nowhere in my defense. When people ask me something about my beliefs and I fear that they may react strongly against it, I always try to explain the "why" before explaining the "what." For example, I love using the example of the Passover as it relates to the crucifixion. John's gospel records the crucifixion occurring before the Passover meal, whereas the synoptics record the Last Supper as the Passover meal, therefore the crucifixion occuring the day after. The theological significance of this is that John wanted to portray Jesus as the "Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." So if Jesus didn't really die on the day of the Passover meal, did he really die as our atoning sacrifice? But how can I explain this in 5 minutes? It seems that any theology you can explain in such a short amount of time is not a very deep one. I tried to address the statement of Jesus as "Lord" and "Savior," but that would require somewhat of a word study on these words and redefining them from each biblical authors writings.

It seems that most Christians may be able to say that they are Christian because they "believe Jesus died to save them from their sins." Unbeknownst to them, however, is the reality that they are actually expressing a specific theory of atonement that was put forth not simply from the Bible, but from medieval theologians, and it is not the only theory out there that is "Christian." Now, one of the five fundamentals of the early 20th century says that one must believe in the Sacrificial theory of atonement for one to be a Christian, but that is hardly the only way one can look at the crucifixion and remain biblical. I think that any pithy statement of believe carries a lot of weight, and the terms must be defined before one can claim them as gospel and bet their eternal soul on them.

It almost seems as though it would be easier for me to start off the conversation by admitting that I am not a Christian, and then as I explain my views, let my audience determine whether or not they accept my opinions as valid and encompassed in the broad Christian tradition. Not that I need it to, but it seems that if people believe that you are a Christian they treat you as an equal (since most people around here claim to be Christian). I sometimes wonder if I'm intolerant because I don't tolerate people that don't tolerate others. Does this make sense?

I can be arrogant in my faith, because behind my faith stands much education, personal research, and reflection. In a matter of months I will have a degree in Religion, and I would be lying if I said that this reality didn't make me somewhat arrogant of my beliefs. However, if someone is not a Christian and has come to their faith through education, study, and serious thought and personal reflection, then I will respect them much more than a fellow Christian who believes because his/her parents brainwashed them to believe.

Although I seem to be detracting from my initial point (assuming I had one to begin with), I suppose what I want to emphasize is that the relationship between God and man is a simple one, and yet it isn't. When explaining what I do believe, it is very simple. I believe in the love of God towards man, and man's moral responsibility to share that love with his fellow man. Now when I am questioned as to how that ties in with Jesus and the traditional dogmas of the Christian religion, it gets really hard. I would have to explain biblical criticism and historical/contextual studies of specific books of the Bible; I would have to discuss history from 1st century gnosticism to 5th century monasticism to 12th century scholasticism through 17th century reformed theology, and then the crisis of the 19th century that the 20th century tried to clean up before I could adequately explain my faith as it ties into the Christianity of today.

I'm not part of an "anything goes" religion, but I think that different people find their way to God in different ways. My way falls most closely in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but I lack belief in many dogmas that most would call essential to the faith. Does that make me un-Christian? Perhaps, but it does not make me ungodly. One of my favorite illustrations is Jesus' story of the "least of these." Many will come to heaven and Jesus will say "I did not know you." Many will respond and say "But we did everything in your name, for you!" And he will tell them that they didn't feed him or clothe him, and that every time they did these things, they did it to him. Jesus feels with us, he experiences life with us, he has that solidarity. In the same way, I believe those that feed and clothe him will get their inheritance in Heaven even when those that claim they lived in Jesus' name may not. Now my opinions on the afterlife are perhaps not completely biblical, but I believe my interpretation of this particular story of Jesus is. I think God would rather us love our neighbor than convert them. This, I believe, is what the true Christian message is, which is why I still like associating myself within the Christian tradition. Unfortunately I anger more than I love, it seems, because of the lack of love I see in my fellow men.

That's the easy answer, I suppose. I am Christian because I love. I don't think it's much more complicated than that. I think that's a 5 minute answer.

Who Is Jesus?

2008-01-01T20:13:00.001-05:00

The last post that I had on here about fundamentalism caused quite a stir at the website http://www.justgivemetruth.com. In the controversy I caused I was told that unless I was born of the Spirit I couldn't understand the Bible because the Truths had to be revealed to me by the Spirit, and no man-knowledge could show me these. I was asked who Jesus was to me, and this was my response. The moderators on this site believe that speaking in tongues is the initial sign of receiving the Spirit. Everything else should be self explanatory. Instead of saying directly who I thought Jesus was, I gave them a short (very much abridged) spiritual journey of sorts as it relates to the question. Here it is:

I start my spiritual journey in 10th grade.

I was not "saved" as you may say, nor was I actually baptized. I was raised Catholic in Montreal, and when I moved to North Carolina 9 years ago I started attending 2 churches, a Baptist and a Methodist church. I never became a member of either of them. To keep it brief (since this is not the topic), I did not take Christianity seriously until I got into an argument with a Catholic friend which pushed me to the boundaries of my beliefs, and then that night as I was struggling with the possibility (or impossibility) of God I felt a calming, unreal presence with me. It is hard to describe how I felt, but I was totally calm in an instant, and I knew it was the hand of God.

Over the next 2 years I started reading the Bible more and attending the FCA at my school, leading the music when needed to at Fifth Quarters and other FCA events. The Jesus I knew in high school was God. All I knew about Jesus was in the Bible, and I believed it because it was the Word of God. Jesus was one with God and all it took to go to heaven was to confess that Jesus died on the cross to save the world of its sins, and then when I repent of my own sins I would be forgiven so long as I believed it was Jesus who did it (Pray this prayer and you're in!). Jesus was the cosmic communicator that would save me from the wrath of God so long as I prayed in his name and confessed him Christ and Lord and Savior and all that stuff. That is who Jesus was to me in High School.

It should be noted that I did not come to a Jesus on my own terms. The Jesus I came to know in high school was the Jesus that I was conditioned to know. It was the Jesus that my friends claimed, it was the Jesus that FCA claimed, it was the Jesus that certain teachers claimed, but I can honestly say that most of what I knew about Jesus came from either shallow readings of the Bible or what I felt like people around me believed. It was not my own soul that accomplished my belief, it was the manipulation and peer pressure of those around me who I felt must have been right.

I went off to college an eager student wishing to learn more in order to validate his own beliefs. That is worth unpacking a bit. I was pretty confident in what I knew. I was pretty confident that the Bible was inerrant, and that if it said it, that was the end of it. Proof texting worked on me (What I mean by "proof texting" is taking a single verse or phrase out of its biblical context and using it to back an argument or point; I have hence learned that this one of the most irresponsible ways out there of reading a text). I did not go to college to have my beliefs changed; I went to learn more so that I would know that I was right (which I believe is unhealthy).

My first religion class freshman year was Old Testament survey. I learned a bunch of stuff about the Old Testament as a whole, but the class was pretty shallow because there's just so much to cover. However, one of the most valuable things I took from that class is that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but it was a collection of documents that were weaved together by a later hand. Stories told multiple times in different ways, texts that would have been impossible to have been written by Moses (like his death in Deuteronomy 34, which actually implies strongly in verse 10 that it had been written long after this event), passages that would only make sense if they were read by a much later audience (such as the reference to the kings of Israel in Genesis 36.31), and evidence that has been researched over the past few hundred years all led me to the conclusion that I could only take the Pentateuch seriously (and hold it to its true value) if I acknowledged that it was a rich collection of traditions that were brought together as a composite tradition of Israel.

This allowed me to break free of the idea that it was somehow dictated to man by God. It became more and more apparent the more I studied it that it could not have been such, and that it actually makes more sense and becomes so much more valuable when that view is discarded. This of course changed my view of the New Testament as well. I could now make sense of the Gospels in a way I never could before. I realized that these were recorded traditions about Jesus, and I should understand them as such.

As I furthered my studies from this class onward (into New Testament studies and Christian History), I came to see that the "inerrant" view of the Bible is very new, and that what many Christians claim as the way to salvation (Inviting Jesus into your heart and the likes) is really a very new phenomenon that would have fallen on deaf ears more than a few hundred years ago. This radically changed my view of salvation.

I began to read the New Testament not as one book, but as a collection of works by different authors. I ceased interpreting Paul by what John had wrote, or interpreting Luke by what Matthew wrote, because I saw this as irresponsible. It would be like reading Wordsworth and interpreting it through Blake. Most of the New Testament authors were probably not aware of the other literature that was to become New Testament canon. Surely Paul was not aware of the gospels, and one could justifiably question whether or not Paul would have agreed with literature such as the gospel of John. He may have called it heresy! We cannot know for certain. All we can do is give each book the respect it deserves by trying to understand the context in which it was written.

I began to learn about the priority of Mark, and how it was probably the earliest Gospel and then Matthew and Luke used it as an outline of sorts (sometimes copying verbatim from it) and then expanding using their own traditions (M and L respectively) and both using a common source (that has since become known as Q). This allowed me to understand more clearly what each Gospel's emphasis was. For example, Mark perhaps viewed Jesus as temperamental and quick to anger (In Mark 1.40-44 shows Jesus healing a man and then "sternly warning" him and kicking him out. In 1.41 Jesus is moved with "pity," but other manuscripts have "anger." When Mathew and Luke retell this story, they copy almost verbatim, and then leave out that sentence. They also leave out the stern warning and the sending away (Matthew 8.2-4, Luke 5.12-16). Mark also records in 3.1-6 the story of Jesus healing a man and getting angry at those around him. Mathew 12.9-14 and Luke 6.6-11 retell the story but leave out Jesus' anger), whereas Matthew and Luke omit parts in order to show that Jesus was not. I began to see how Matthew spiritualized certain things. Luke has Jesus saying "blessed are the poor" (Luke 6.20), whereas Matthew's Jesus says "blessed are the poor IN SPIRIT" (Matthew 5.3, emphasis added). This allows me to see that Luke viewed Jesus as caring about the poor and oppressed, whereas Matthew made it more universal, and allowed anybody to be able to relate by interpreting Jesus' saying as a promotion of humbleness. Both of these I believe to be true, that Jesus had an emphasis on humility and lived by example, but that he also genuinely cared for the poor and the outsiders of society. I believe this was who Jesus was and how we should be, but I do not believe he delivered the speech twice. I believe that the tradition existed (either oral or written), and then each gospel writer interpreted it to promote their view of Jesus. This is how I can make sense of it.

Then I studied the gospel of John, probably the latest of the gospels. In it Jesus is very different. Jesus doesn't tell a single parable in John (whereas he supposedly never taught in anything BUT parables in the synoptics Matthew 13.34), he never conceals his identity (Andrew proclaims him as the Christ in the 2nd chapter whereas Jesus doesn't want people to know yet in the synoptics).

There is much to the Gospel of John that I feel is important to take note of. John contains the highest Christology of the canonical gospels. John was the last of the gospels written, and is probably 60 years removed from the death of Jesus, and the community that produced the gospel probably lived in an isolated area, perhaps in Ephesus. The gospel is quite theological, and is less concerned with reporting history as it is concerned about interpreting Jesus. Jesus is placed at many Jewish festivals for the purpose of reinterpreting the festival in light of Jesus, or better, interpreting Jesus by using the festival as a starting point. For example, the Bread of Life discourse is given on the Passover as he feeds the multitudes (it isn't the Passover in the synoptics). He says that those who ate the manna in the wilderness died, but those that eat the bread that Jesus provides will live forever (much like the story of the woman at the well, and how Jesus' water will not allow one to go thirsty again). Jesus' Light of the World discourse is given in context of the Jewish Festival of Booths, and that festival contains huge candles in memory of the light that led the Hebrews in the wilderness.

What should be seen in these stories is that there is a lot of symbolism. Jesus told parables of God, he told stories to tell us truths about God, but the stories or parables would not necessarily true themselves. Did the story of the prodigal son actually happen? I highly doubt it, but that wasn't important. The importance was that God is like the father who sees his son while he is still far off and runs out to meet him in love. The stories that the author tells may have some historical basis, but for the most part they appear to be illustrations that may not have happened but are used to reveal something about who Jesus was to the Johannine community that produced the gospel.

So the question is that of validity. If the stories that are told in the fourth gospel are not historically factual, then do the abstract truths hold? Well, I would say that as far as they can be understood, yes, they do.

As I'm sure you can see, there are consequences to this view. One such consequence is it makes you think for yourself too much. It is really easy to NOT think when you think the Bible is just dropped down from God. All it takes is looking it up like a dictionary, and let it dictate your life for you. When you admit that men wrote it using the traditions they had and developed their own opinions and theology (that may be different than other NT books such as the gospel of John vs. the synoptics), it opens the doors to some legitimate questions.

One such question is why it should be worth anything. That is a legitimate but silly question. Why do we read Shakespeare? Why do we read Descartes? Why do we read anything? We read to enrich ourselves and to learn. When we read the Gospels, we can learn about God AND ourselves. We can learn about the effect that he had on his followers and his followers' followers. This is the best we can really know about him. We cannot look into the past yet; all we can do is read what generations after Jesus thought of him. We can read about how Mark saw him suffer, and how we should live sacrificially. We can see how Matthew saw him as a continuation and fulfillment of the Jewish tradition of the Annointed of God. We can read of Luke's Messiah who is universal and not bound by social taboos. We can read about John's Christ who was united with God and desired for all of his followers to be united as one as well. We can see how John's Jesus was so much more than a teacher confirmed and exalted by God.

Again, the question is one of validity. John's theology is late and farther removed from the person of Jesus than the Synoptics or the writings of Paul. In fact, Paul's Jesus is Lord and example. Paul was probably unaware of John's idea of Jesus as pre-existent Logos (cf. Romans 1). Does this mean it is invalid? Well, I am not willing to say.

What I AM willing to say is that Jesus had such a profound effect on his followers that he cannot be ignored. How else could his followers have led something so revolutionary, as fishermen? How could Paul, a Jewish Pharisee and persecutor of Christians have such a change of heart? He saw the risen Jesus. How could this man Jesus still be changing the lives of people 50 years later in the Johannine community unless he had a real presence with them. How could people be willing to die for a man they never met unless they could feel the presence of God?

Who is Jesus to me you ask. He is a man that cannot be studied enough. He is a man who changed the lives of his followers, his followers' followers, down to my own life as I strive to live for the Kingdom and glory of God. I never grow tired of reading and studying the Bible because I want to learn more about the effect that Jesus of Nazareth had on his followers. I can't ever get enough of Paul's writings because I am fascinated by the way in which Paul calls us to a higher righteousness for God. I love the universality of the gospel. I love the message of self sacrifice in the name of Jesus. I believe that the spirit of God lives in his people as it came alive in Jesus.

You probably think I'm still evading the question. Well here is my answer: Jesus is a mystery.

Have you ever seen the movie Phenomenon? It is about a man who gets brain cancer, and instead of shutting down brain function, it unlocks it. The result is genius and telekinetic power. The man tells people that he is not something magical or supernatural: he is the potential. He says that he has become the potential of everybody.

John tells us that Jesus was the incarnated Logos. This is not all that he tells us about the Logos. He says it was the light of all men. Genesis tells us that we are made in the image of God. This image, this Logos, this "divine spark" as it has been called, was incarnated in the man Jesus. Schleiermacher talks about a "God-consciousness." Imagine the moment, if you will, that you felt God with more presence than ever. Imagine one of the moments that you felt completely present with God; that his hand was holding you, that he was within you, and that you just knew that God was with you. Imagine that moment (or those moments). What if you could feel that all the time? What if your life was one consistent presence with God? This "God-consciousness" is what we only have a peek of. We only see it now and again (some more often than others). What if Jesus had this all the time? How would one live if they were at all times being inspired by the presence of God? What would it be like if the Logos and imago dei came alive in a person and took hold of their every being? I can only imagine, but I believe that this is who Jesus was. Nobody can deny that strange things happen; miraculous healings and mind over matter phenomenon are common. Who's to say that Jesus' miracles weren't because he was so in tune with nature and God that he had some amazing power of influence and charisma that bent the boundaries of the mind and body? I'm not a doctor, so I can't say what it would take to make the blind see or the lame walk. But people ARE cured. Jesus was calling us to become more than we had ever been.

You may say again that I am avoiding answering, and the only response I have for that is, maybe.

Because of the study I have put into the biblical texts, I cannot give a simple black and white answer. Can I with good conscious tell you that I believe Jesus is the Jewish Messiah? Well, no I can't, because the Christian definition of "Messiah" is very different from the Jewish definition, so as I have stated in a prior post, I cannot simply say "Jesus is the Christ" without some reservations.

I am not "avoiding the answer," I am simply sharing the reason why I am extremely hesitant to pass judgment on the man of Jesus. He called us to have faith in God, he called us to a higher morality, he called us to be more than just "religious," he called us to be true images of God as he was. When one looks at Jesus, one looks at God. There is no more physical way in which one can do that, I believe. Do I believe he was God incarnate? Well geez, I don't think there's a human being who ever lived that could explain that question. Even the Fourth Gospel shrouds that in mystery. That is what it is, a mystery. How does an infinite being inhabit a finite one? Well, I don't know, and neither does anybody else. It is beyond our comprehension. I simply claim ignorance. We are made in the image of God, and God breathed his spirit into us to give us life and consciousness, so couldn't one argue that we are ALL God incarnate? Before I get labeled a blasphemer I must say that this all depends on your definition of "incarnation." The Logos of God became flesh, according to the Fourth Gospel, and this Logos lived among us. But it didn't just inhabit the earth in Jesus. The Greek word there for "live" or "dwell" in John 1.14 is "skinao." This verb literally means to "pitch a tent" or even "tabernacle." It recalls the imagery of the Exodus and how the people would build a tabernacle (tent) whenever they stopped, and the glory of God (his very presence) would abide in it. This is the same way that the Logos abided in Jesus, according to this gospel. A very real presence of God lived in Jesus. This is how Jesus and the Father are One. But how then could he pray that his followers be One as He and the Father are One? Is he asking God to incarnate his followers? Isn't that what you guys claim he has done? If you are Trinitarian then the Holy Spirit is just as much God as Jesus or the Father is, so by claiming you have received the Holy Spirit and that it dwells inside you, then you are claiming equality with Jesus. It is the same imagery that the prologue of the Fourth Gospel depicts. Is this not what Jesus prayed for? Is this not why the curtain in the temple was torn? That we all may be one with God as Jesus was, that we all may be ever conscious of the presence of God, and that we all may live in the Spirit, not only in the Flesh (which is kind of mandatory), but in the freedom from sin and death granted to us by the grace of God?

Jesus is the Way, sure. But does that mean belief in Jesus or following his teachings? I can say wholeheartedly that I believe Jesus is the Way, but how I interpret it is probably not the same way you would interpret it. It's a metaphor, obviously, but most Christians probably interpret it to mean "if you're not a Christian, you're going the wrong way." I disagree. I think it means that the Way of Jesus is the Way. For example, if you have a cage full of prisoners, and one man goes to the front of the room and presses a blue button that opens the door and then says "I am the way" and exits, what he obviously means is that we should all go up and press the blue button to free ourselves. The prisoners are not to start debating about whom that man was, they are not to claim he is the way out of the cage if they only believe that he will get them out, they are not to believe this man is going to make anything better for them. They are to go and press the blue button to escape. If Jesus is the Way, I believe that means the teachings of Jesus are the way. For example, what happens if an observant man was scanning the walls for a way out, and because he is examining the walls he does not see the man escape? He works his way around the room, and he discovers the button, presses it, and escapes. He has found the way. Jesus told the story of those who say "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?" but Jesus tells them "I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers" (Matthew 7.21-23). I always imagine Christians in heaven seeing Buddhists getting in and claiming the same thing. The way of Jesus is that salvation. So I could say "Jesus is the Way," and you guys would agree with me, but I don't believe he is the Way in the same way that you believe he is the Way. I could say Jesus is Lord, but one would have to define Lord. Lord (Greek kurios) means master or leader, pretty much. Lord doesn't mean "God." So someone could claim Jesus Lord without professing any other Christian doctrine. They could say that Jesus is Lord and they will follow their master by selling everything they own and giving all of their money to the poor. That may be the only thing they do. You have a different definition (I do too) of Lord than that, but it's all interpretive.

Fundamentalism

2007-11-27T23:36:00.001-05:00

Fundamentalism annoys me. It does not take the Bible seriously, and makes a joke out of a faith that I cherish. In my experience, Fundamentalists have turned more people away from God than to God, and have (sometimes permanently) scarred the face of Christianity to those they turn away. This post is not so much a rant as it is begging for an answer that makes sense. It seems as if a good slogan for a Fundamentalist would be:

"It wouldn't be faith if it made sense."

If you are a Fundamentalist who does not agree with that slogan, then I beg of you to consider the rest of this post, and see if you wish to remain in your ignorance.

I will now proceed to show different examples that reveal the ludicrousness of the idea of "Biblical Inerrancy." Some are more interpretive than others, but all are worth noting. To keep the attention of any Fundamentalist that has made it this far, however, I will state the easiest ones first so they do not have to think too hard.

The Genealogy of Jesus in Matthew is different from Luke. Although there are many instances that they are different, I will only point out one. Who was Jesus' grandfather? Was it Jacob (Matthew 1.16) or Heli (Luke 3.23)? It should be noted that Matthew's gospel was written from a Jewish standpoint for a Jewish audience, and that even the genealogy was theology. In brief, Hebrew has no numbers, and they use letters instead (English equivalent: A=1, B=2, etc.). David in Hebrew is also the number 14. Matthew's genealogy has 14 generations between Abraham and David, between David and the exile, and from the exile to Jesus. This eliminates the argument that Matthew was skipping generations. Luke has 41 people between Jesus and David (as opposed to Matthew's 28). This would make one of them (or both of them) wrong.

The order of Creation is different in Genesis 1 and 2. In Genesis 1 it is clearly vegetation (day 3), water creatures (day 5), Land creatures (first thing in day 6), then mankind (end of day 6). The most important thing is that animals were created first, and then mankind was made to "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth" (Genesis 1.26). There is little to no way that this can be interpreted in any way other than the creation of mankind as the final act of creation. Genesis 2, however, tells a different story. In Genesis 2, man is formed, then vegetation, then animals, then woman. This lends itself to more interpretation than Genesis 1, which is why it is often twisted around to conform. However, if the text is to be taken seriously, it must be seen as a separate account. Man is formed (2.7), Eden is planted (2.8), vegetation is grown (2.9), animals are created to help man (2.18), woman is made (2.22). Attention must be called specifically to the fact that in Genesis 1, Mankind is created to have dominion over the animals that already exist, whereas in Genesis 2, the animals were created to help man that already existed.

One of the funniest contradictions is the story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem. Matthew 21 records Jesus riding on two animals (a donkey and a colt), somehow straddling the two, while Mark 11 and Luke 19 tell the traditional story of a colt only. The author of Matthew apparently misread Zechariah 9.9 and told his story to conform to the way he read it.

Did Jesus pray that God would not make him go through with his crucifixion? Matthew 26.39, Mark 14.36, and Luke 22.42 tell the story of Jesus praying this very thing: that he wouldn't have to do what he was about to do. John 12.27 explicitly denies that Jesus would do such a thing.

Who incited David to take a census of Israel? 2 Samuel 24.1 says it was God, but 1 Chronicles 21.1 says it was Satan. Did David do it twice?

When was Passover the week that Jesus died? The synoptics (Matthew 26.17, Mark 14.12, Luke 22.7) say that Passover was on the Thursday night (the last supper). John's (18.39, 19.14, 31) gospel places Passover on Friday (the day of Jesus' death).

Did Jesus deliver his sermon on the mount or the plain? Matthew 5, in typical Matthew fashion, has Jesus, his Messiah, up on a hill to deliver his sermon (5.1). Luke, however, in making Jesus accessible to even the lowly of society, has him deliver it on a level plain (6.17).

There are many (many) more than those mentioned above, but I feel like these are representative enough. By ignoring these texts, or interpreting them to fit together in some twisted way, Fundamentalists insult the integrity of the Bible and turn away those that realize it.

I must clarify that I am not saying that Fundamentalists are bad or stupid people. I am saying that they either don't read the Bible they claim to be sacred, or do not understand what they read. Perhaps this is because they were raised this way, but that does not make it right. It makes it tragic.

The Necessity of Liberal Christianity

2007-10-22T09:19:00.000-05:00

I am a liberal Christian.

I do not think it would take very many readings on here to come to the conclusion that I am definitely a religious liberal. However, some may doubt my qualifications concerning the noun that liberal modifies. After much thought this past month about the subject, I have come to the conclusion that not only am I a Christian, but that liberal Christianity is a necessity for the survival of a legitimate faith.

Let me rewind a couple thousand years to the first century, when Jesus of Nazareth lived. That's what Christianity is all about, isn't it? The Jews were breaking apart into sects left and right. There were the Essenes, the Sicarii, the Zealots, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, etc. They weren't as multiple as modern Christian denominations, but they were on a much smaller scale. One of these "denominations" of Judaism that I want to focus on especially are the Pharisees; mostly because they are more emphasized in the Gospels. What do the Gospels say about the Pharisees?

The Bible most often portrays the "Pharisee" as a hypocrite. Matthew 23 depicts Jesus denouncing the pharisees for their hypocrisy. He says that they teach correctly, but do wrongly. They love to be respected and honored, they love people the attention and glorification as if they are righteous, but they are only clean on the outside. They are blind guides who do the little things such as tithe and wash their hands, but they neglect things like loving your neighbor and caring for the oppressed. Their insides are filth. Surely this isn't all pharisees, but the point is that just because are in positions of religious importance does not mean that they are somehow more righteous than anyone else.

Another mention of them is in Luke when a Pharisee invited Jesus over to eat. After his arrival, a sinful woman entered and anointed his feet with oil, wash them with her tears, dry them with her hair, and kiss them. The Pharisee is surprised that Jesus is not offended; after all, she's a sinner! The Pharisee had an incorrect perception of how one is to act towards the sinful.

Luke 11 has Jesus denouncing their hypocrisy again, with several parallel statements found in Matthew 23.

The last noteworthy mention of the Pharisee is Luke 18. Jesus tells the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The Pharisee thanks God that he is not like the tax collector. He does all of the right things like tithing and fasting. The tax collector simply says "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!"

The picture we have of the Pharisees is first and foremost that of a hypocrite. The obvious answer to what makes one a hypocrite is one who does not follow his own teachings. However, I wish to push the definition a little further and say that it is also one who passes judgment on others when he himself is guilty.

To go outside of the Bible for a moment, what do we know about Pharisees? The Pharisees began to appear after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. With no temple, how would one worship? One worshiped by following the law and reading scripture. The Jewish law was incorporated into daily life as an act of worship. This led many to view Pharisees as being too legalistic. This may not be an accurate portrayal of them, but to be sure, modern Christians tend not to under-emphasize that aspect. In fact, it seems as if Christians would have us believe that 1st century Pharisees were above all hypocritical and legalistic. Hold on to that thought.

Now here comes Jesus. I must first state that Jesus was Jewish. No matter what anyone may try to say, it takes an awfully large quantity of ignorance to argue that Jesus was not Jewish. Within Judaism, what was it that Jesus taught? I am not trying to say that Jesus taught the Jews one thing, and non-Jews something else. Jesus taught one thing, and that one thing was what he was raised in: Judaism.

Let me give you a classic example I'm sure you're all familiar with. Matthew 5, the sermon on the mount; more specifically, his famous "antitheses" (Matthew 5.21-48). Jesus is here going beyond the written law of Judaism and into a personal understanding. Don't murder, but don't even be angry at another. Don't commit adultery, but don't even lust. Love your neighbor, but love your enemy as well.

Now I ask, what right did Jesus have to do this? A stock conservative Christian answer would probably something along the lines of "He's God, he gave the law to them in the first place, so he has the right to change it." I think this is too much of an assumption. I do not believe Jesus was "changing" or "adding to" the law, so to speak. I believe that he was seeing the timeless Truth of the law, and interpreting proper human conduct from it.

Another example: In Mark chapter 2, Jesus is walking through a grainfield on a Sabbath with his disciples, and they begin plucking the heads of grain. The Pharisees claimed they were disobeying the law by working on the Sabbath. By recalling an activity of king David, Jesus concludes that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. This deserves a closer look. Jesus pretty much did break the strict law. If he hadn't, he could have said "No, I didn't, if you looked at verse so and so, you would understand." But there is no avoiding it. Jesus took a liberty with the law, because he understood that it was written in a context. Just like the law of divorce. There are laws on divorce, but that is not because divorce is right. Jesus understood the context.

This can also be illustrated in Matthew 15. There are many laws in the Old Testament that prohibit what one can and can't eat, because it will make one unclean. However, Jesus recognizes that it is not what we eat (what goes into the mouth) that makes us unclean, but what we say (what comes out of the mouth). Could it be that Jesus did not just take a "liberty" but completely disregarded these certain laws? I wouldn't say that he ignored them, but it is that he saw what mattered. It matters whether you love your neighbor or not. It doesn't really matter if you eat the wrong type of fish.

I could be more exhaustive in my examples, but I believe these few examples are sufficient to express my belief that Jesus was a "liberal." Too many Jews were more concerned with cleaning their hands than their hearts. This is not the point of religion (and it is certainly not the point of Judaism). Jesus put the focus on community, love of one another, and love of God. When asked what the most important commandment was, he said love God, and love each other. At the last supper he gave his disciples a new commandment, and that was to love each other.

Who were his disciples anyway? They were fishermen, tax collectors, and nobodies. I highly doubt that he would have expected them to obey the laws as the hypocritical pharisees did. He pointed to a higher law, the law of love, community, and relationship. The Jews reacted strongly against his liberalism, and he was crucified.

Fast forward a couple thousand years. What has Christianity been through? The assault of the 19th century is still with us. Evolution, old earth, Markan priority, documentary hypothesis, all of which conservatives call "liberal" with disdain. I believe that with this liberalism, Christianity may never be the same, but religion will survive.

Those who say that science is wrong and the Bible is right, really actually say that science is misunderstood, and that it's not wrong, but we must have clearly misunderstood our evidence, because the Bible is clearly the final authority. If this view is to be continued to be held, then it will become farther and farther away from what is accepted until it is completely destroyed. The more evidence we find that the earth is billions of years old, the farther away Creationists will find themselves from legitimacy. As we continue to find more manuscripts of the Bible, the theory of biblical inerrancy will fall away into nothing.

I am not saying that Christianity is destined to die, but as Jesus saw a higher level of religion from Judaism (even if he would have still considered himself a Jew), so we must find a higher level of religion from Christianity, without renouncing the faith. I believe that Jesus would have thought that whether or not we believe that Moses actually parted a sea is irrelevant (though he probably believed that it did in fact happen). I believe that it would have mattered little to Jesus whether or not the earth was created in six days, but much that we love our creator.

I am a liberal, as has been stated. However, I believe that the future of faith is in liberalism, and by liberalism I do not mean the disbelief in conservative doctrines, but the belief in higher ones. Whether I believe in a young earth or the virgin birth is not why I am a liberal. I am a liberal because I believe in the message of Jesus above all else. I am a liberal because I believe in the power of love over the power of doctrine. I am a liberal because I believe I believe that Jesus died for a message that is higher than Christologies or atonement theories. I am a liberal because more than anything else, I believe in loving God, and loving each other, and without liberalism, I believe that Christianity will meet its death. There are too many denominations, too many preachers and congregations that believe that their salvation rests on their beliefs in doctrines of atonement and theories of the Christ. I say no, you are in darkness. I say no, come into the light of God.

Love is greater than faith, don't you see? Love is the gospel, love is God, and love is the way to salvation. If we do not love, then we are condemned already, and we walk in darkness. If this love makes me a liberal, then so be it. If refusing to kick homosexuals out of our churches makes me a liberal, so be it. If loving the Muslim and befriending the drunkard makes me a liberal, then so be it. I love, therefore I am a liberal. If Christianity is not liberal, then I say it does not love. I say that love never fails, and Christianity without love and liberty will fail.

I am a liberal, and I am a Christian; and I believe that without the former, the latter will be destroyed. Just as Jesus saw the higher meaning of his religion, so we must see the higher in ours; and when there are those yelling at us, condemning us as liberals, condemning us as heretics, crucifying us as heathens, then I will know that Christianity is falling. When those who preach Christ crucified on Sunday, and teach nonacceptance the next, I will know that Christianity is falling. When a Christian can say with a clear conscience that the only thing that matters is Christ's atonement for our sins, I will know that Christianity is in darkness. It is my fear that Christianity is already falling.

I am a liberal.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

The Relative Goodness of God

2007-09-27T22:49:00.000-05:00

While discussing the attributes of God, we came to realize that many of the things we call God are simply extensions of ourselves. We can only know God through that which we already know, and the only thing we know (and that which we know best) is ourselves. Therefore, when we call God just, wise, and merciful, it is only because we think of those attributes as good things, and we make God what we want to.

This is just to give you a very brief background to why I began thinking of these terms. If there was one way that people would like to describe God, or if there was only one word that could capture him (it), what would it be? The omni words (omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient) get too many people in trouble (the paradox of the rock too heavy for God to lift, for example, or any discussion as to God's foresight/determinism). One of the most popular words used to describe God is "good." God is good, right? I think that it is safe to say that most if not all (I would lean towards all) Christians (those whom I primarily address in general) would agree that God is good. Before I go any further, I must ask in brief what it means to be good.

One way to define "good" is "Having the qualities that are desirable or distinguishing in a particular thing." For example, I have heard bad jokes, and I have heard good jokes. I have seen bad artwork, and I have seen good artwork. But I may call one painting bad, when someone else would call it good. Which one of us is right? The obvious answer is neither. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? So if goodness is equated with beauty in art, then it would really be impossible to call something objectively good. Some jokes might make me laugh, and my friend yawn. What would make a good joke? There's no way to define a good joke. A good joke is only a good joke so far as it makes the intended audience amused. Is there anything that can be objectively good, then? Can there be anything that is good in a way that anybody could look at it and say that it was good? Goodness only exists as far as we believe it to be good. Calling something good actually says more about the one who describes the object as such than the object itself. If my favorite movies are Die Hard, Crank, The Punisher, and The Matrix, then that does not mean that those four movies are the best movies made, but it does say that I love action movies. If my friend's favorite movie is What Dreams May Come, that does in no way make that movie the best. It only means that my friend is a philosophical romantic. Good is so subjective that it appears that it is impossible for something to be objectively good by its own merit.

A second problem with using this definition of "good" is that it is not only completely subjective, but it is also comparative. What I mean, is that in the above examples of jokes, movies, and artwork, to call any one of them "good" is only when observed as one of many examples. If there only existed one painting in the world, then would it be good? It would be impossible to say. Aside from the fact that some people may like it or not, it would be impossible to realize whether or not the work was good. I think that Dream Theater's sixth album is good, but would I think that if the only music I had ever heard in my life was Beethoven's 5th? It may be easier to visualize this by using the adjective "tall."

Shaquille Oneil is tall.
The Empire State building is tall.

Everyone would agree that Shaq is tall, because what we are really saying is "Shaq is tall compared to most people." The Empire State building is tall, but we are really saying that the Empire State building is tall compared to other buildings. The word "good" as defined above is the same way. Therefore, it would be impossible to call God "good" unless we had other deities to compare him to. We could say "Zeus is alright, Baal is bad, but God is good." I would only know a good song because I've heard so many bad ones. If God is the only deity, then can we really call him good? It appears that we must modify our definition of "good" in order to clear up this mess. I will therefore offer another way of defining "good," and I believe this way to be the closer to how Christians would intend the word to be defined when God is the object.

The second way to think of "good" is in the way that you may call someone a "good person." You do not mean that they are a good person because they are stronger than others, or better looking, or have a fuller head of hair, but you mean that they are kind, generous, merciful, loving, friendly, cheerful, nice, etc. I think everyone can understand this way of thinking of "good" without further explanation. However, I must point something out. This definition of "good" is only relational. I will substitute the word "nice" for the word "good." "John is a kind man." This means that John is kind to other people. It means that when John is around other people, he is kind to them. Would we call John kind if he didn't slam his refrigerator in order to not disturb the food? Well, of course not. That has nothing to do with him being kind, because we define "kind" in relational senses. Can John be kind if he is locked in his house with no human contact? He wouldn't be unkind, but he would neither be kind. If someone is "polite," it means that when they are talking to other people, they say "please" and "thank you." It is impossible to be polite when there is no one to be polite to. So in this way we see the word "good."

We say that God is good because we apply our human concepts to him. We humans are kind some of the time. The best people (with the most "good" in them) are kind more than the worse people. God, therefore, must be the farthest extreme of kind that there could be. He must be more kind than any human can possibly imagine. I could love my family and friends, and this might be a good thing, so God must be capable of love, because he must be greater than me, and love is supposedly a good thing, so God must have it but in greater abundance. So it is with "good." God must be good because we see ourselves as good (on a "good" day).

The problem returns, however, in that this definition of "good" is only valid when there is a receiver of the good. Just as John was kind only because there were people to be kind to, so is God good because he is good to us. Christians may say that God is good because he loves us, cares for us, and watches over us. What then, I ask, would he be if he did not love us, did not care about us, and was altogether apathetic to our existence? Would we still call him good? Probably not. We may call him great and powerful, but we would not call him "good." Then is God really objectively good? If God is only good so far as he is good to us, then was God good before we were created? Before there existed anybody to be good to, could it be possible that God was "good" at all? If goodness is defined in relational terms and God is good only so far as he is good to us, then it would appear to be correct to say that Good was not good before there was anybody to recognize him. Is this objective goodness? I do not believe that it is.

It appears to me that at the very most, we can say that God is good to us. But even in that statement, no objectivity exists. If you asked your friend to buy you a drink because you were thirsty and he did, you may think he was good, while the next person who asks and gets denied will not think the same. You, however, did not know that he has said no to 9 other people before he said yes to you. Is he really all that generous then? He would be to you because of your ignorance. In this way, even if we say that God is good to us, we could not be saying anything beyond that as to the nature of God. We cannot speak of the objective goodness of God, because we would only be introducing a paradox. We can only project subjective and relative goodness on God in our ignorance.

The God of the Universe

2007-09-04T18:13:00.000-05:00

It has been brought to my attention recently through discussion of faith and science that if there existed extra-terrestrial life, the foundations of Christianity would be shaken, and to some people, broken. I would therefore like to examine the consequences of such a discovery.

First I should say that I believe it is very likely that sentient life forms exist elsewhere in the universe. The universe is far too large and far too old for us to be the only intelligent creatures that exist. As it has been said, that would be an awfully big waste of space. I am not an astrologist nor biologist nor chemist nor astrophysicist, but when I imagine the earth, a tiny planet in a tiny solar system sitting on the edge of one of countless galaxies in our enormous universe, I see a great possibility that there is (or was at one time) intelligent, conscious life somewhere in the vastness of space.

What would that say about God?

I believe that it would only go to show how magnificent and glorious a creator our God is that he could plant the seeds of life all over the universe. Why did he make man? Assuming that he did, then I think the bigger question should be why did he make only man? My answer is that he would not have necessarily had to have only created man. Just as he created the deer, the elephant, the squirrel, and the tiger, so too could he have created elsewhere a creature that would not only live, but look back to him in wonder, and search for their creator. Would it make God "love" us any less? (I put "love" in parentheses to recognize the very human term we apply to a being without body, hormones, or instincts. It is not now the place to discuss the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of how we talk about God). I think not. Does it make you think that God loves us less when we see that there are more people in the world than we thought? If there was discovered an island in the Pacific Ocean that had been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries and found that there were humans living there quite comfortably, would we be upset that there were that many more people on the planet that God had to divide his love and attention among? Not at all! If anything, we should be happy and glad that there are more human beings capable of searching for God and living in fellowship with us. The existence of ETI (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) does not take away from how much God cares for humans. How limiting would that be, if it did? Do we not think that God is really wrapped up in our own worldly affairs? Isn't it the case that we like to imagine God as living within our own atmosphere? It is easier to imagine an Ozone God that cares about everybody than it is to recognize the truth that God sees the farthest star in the farthest galaxy just as clearly as he sees any sparrows falling in the United States. Therefore, I challenge the theology of anyone who would believe that God could not love us as much if ETI existed.

The effect on our theology of God, however, is not what I really wish to discuss. It is the triune God of mainstream Christianity that I wish to question, more specifically, the being of the Son, Jesus the Christ, the supposed fulfillment of Jewish prophecy regarding a Messiah, the savior of the world, one who has been sent from the father God the Creator to die on the cross to atone for the sins of mankind who forsake the God that created them and worshiped the created instead of the creator. What would be the effect of this second person of the Trinity if ETI was ever discovered?

First of all, one must start at the beginning. Allow me to examine the story of human history. Although I believe human history began thousands and thousands of years ago, I will humor the creationists in brief. Adam and Eve, the first human beings on the planet, were created immortal, without death or sin. The serpent then tempted Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, and Adam ate after her, and humanity has been in sin ever since. God then called Abram some time after the flood (in which God wiped out all of mankind save Noah and his family), established a covenant with him, and has since updated the covenant with Moses leading the Israelite sons of Jacob out of their bondage in Egypt into the desert where he established the law before allowing the next generation of people to enter the promised land and slaughter everyone they could find. Since then the Israelites have had a few kings, some good, some bad, but overall they have faired pretty poorly as far as holding up their end of the covenant with God, and so out of divine punishment, they were exiled out of their promised land into the Babylonian east where they struggled to rediscover their identity as a people without their temple or divinely given land. Eventually their prophets began speaking of a day when God would restore balance and judge the nations, exalting the Israelites as his chosen people once again. This day would be heralded by God's chosen Messiah, or Anointed one; a king who would lead the people to victory and national independence once again. As Cyrus freed the slaves of the kingdoms he conquered, he became the Messiah of the Jews in allowing them to return back to their homeland and rebuild their cities. All was not well in the faith, however, as within a couple centuries they were persecuted and sought out to be slaughtered as a people and they dreamed again of a day when God would right the wrongs done to them, if not in this life then in the next. A few centuries more and the Maccabean Revolt gained independence for Israel, if only for a short while, before they were again occupied by the Romans until a man Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph and Mary arrived on the scene. This man was the son of God (whatever that means) and as was later interpreted, God himself in the flesh. The incarnation of the Creator came to earth in the form of a human in Jesus in order to die as the atoning sacrifice for all the sins of the world since Eve bit the apple. The new covenant in Jesus the Christ (Greek for Messiah) was eternal life for all who believed that Jesus the son of god had come in the flesh to die for the sins of the world.

This brings us up to date with Christianity.

Given all of the above, if there was intelligent life on another planet somewhere in the universe, then one would have to ask, did they have an Eden? I for one do not believe that Genesis 1-3 is to be read literally, but if it was, then when God created the first humans, he created them naked, unashamed, in a garden where they had access to eternal life. Why then, we can suppose, wouldn't God also create any other sentient being in a garden of perfection? And would they be made in the image of God as well? Although I do not believe in the literal existence of Eden, Adam, or Eve, I do believe the theology of Genesis in that we are created by God in his image. This Image of God, in my opinion, is what separates us from the animals. We are sentient, self conscious beings that have ever searched for our creator. In this way, I believe that any other sentient extra terrestrial intelligence must, by the very definition of them as such, be created in God's image as well. I do not see any theological problems with this, unless one wants to believe that humans are made physically in the image of God, but I do not believe this is a widespread belief amongst Christians (nor do I hold this belief).

To go back to the question of Eden, one must wonder...If God created this alien species in his image just as we ourselves are, then would he have created a paradise for them as well? And if he did, then was there also a tempter in that paradise? And if so, then although we failed here on earth, could they have not? Could it be possible that other creations did not eat the fruit of the forbidden tree (or whatever other edible object they may have on their planet)? This is, of course, assuming that these other species eat (can one imagine God forbidding the absorption of a specific gas?). Taking aside all of these uncertainties, the question still remains, did they fail? Whatever God forbade them to do, did they, like us, fail and allow sin and death to enter their world?

I must take a step back and say again that I am not endorsing the literal interpretation of the Eden narrative, but examining the implications of doing so. Personally, I do not believe that sin came into humanity by the eating of any mystical plant, but that sin is the selfishness that humans have in them. The desire to elevate the self above all others is our sin, not an inherited disease from the first human. We are all born into innocence, and we all reach an age where our focus turns to ourselves, and the sins are how we act (physically or mentally) to feed this desire to elevate ourselves. I believe that any alien intelligence would have this same "sin." I believe that any population in the universe would struggle amongst themselves with the problem of egocentricity. But I am addressing the problems in taking the Eden narrative literally and projecting it onto another planet.

To diverge yet again on a more abstract thought, I must mention the fact that much theology has been done to attempt to explain whether or not God knew Adam and Eve would sin. Did God not know they were going to sin? In which case he had to send his son (who would have supposedly existed at Creation) to die for us as a backup (Jesus as Plan B)? Or did God know we were going to sin and know that he would have to send his son from the start to save us (Jesus as Plan A)? Or, did God already know that he was going to glorify his son, and if all actions in the universe are caused by God, did Eve even have a choice not to eat the forbidden fruit? Were Adam and Eve (and all of humanity) just pawns in God's plan to glorify his son? If God didn't know that humanity would fail, then, aside from the theological issues brought up by the suggestion that God does not know the future, does that imply that alien creatures didn't fail? Or had they all failed, and God tried again with humans and we are just one of the many failures that God has created? Or, if God had planned on the failure of his creation, then one would wonder why he kept creating them. Maybe one of these millennia God would skip the creation of the tempter.

However one interprets the Eden narrative, one way or another I must confess my belief that we are a broken species. We do sin, and however one believes that we obtained that sin, the fact remains that we have it (although hopefully you can see all the problems that would arise if we take Genesis literally). What then would Jesus mean? If Jesus was sent to earth because of our sin, then unless alien civilizations had no sin (which I do not believe), then wouldn't they need a savior too? So would the Son have been sent to other planets to die for them too? In which case, when Jesus came to earth, was it really the first time that he had done something like that? Or has he gone to other planets and taught his message, then been betrayed (as part of God's interstellar plan) and sentenced to a horrible death on every planet that contains life in the universe? Or to take a step behind that, did Judaism exist on these other planets? Did God establish a covenant before he sent his Son? Was the coming of the Son foretold? Did he fulfill alien Scripture? If all of these answers are "Yes," then Jesus must have been awfully tired.

But wait! There is yet another problem. If Jesus had died for every civilization, then was there also a resurrection on every planet? Most Christians would believe that without the resurrection, Christianity ceases to be. One cannot be a Christian without the Resurrection. Then what would it mean if the Son had already been resurrected? This would make no sense. Supposedly, when he was resurrected, he still had his human body. He still bore the holes in his hands and feet, and his wound in his side. If the Son retains his wounds even in the afterlife, then wouldn't he also have to retain his physical appearance? In which case, would he have had to have been some type of shape shifter that could change into any alien species? Would he have had to hide the scars from every other time that he had been killed? Or perhaps, did he only retain his physical body until the ascension? Then what happened to his body? Did it vaporize? How many bodies could the Son have had? Millions? Supposedly when Jesus returns in the Parousia he will still have his human body. Does this mean that he is returning to the other planets as well? Does this mean that he's going to have to change his bodily appearance every time God decides to end the world? Or will God end the universe all at once and Jesus will somehow ride in on his white horse (or whatever other alien creature he may be riding) at every planet at the same time?

If we wish to erase this dilemna of time and space in dealing with the Son, then maybe God just had more than one Son. This solves our problem, right? God is the father of all planets, but then there was a savior for each individual planet, and so God really has thousands of "Sons" that saved their respective planets. So there would exist a triune God in every Galaxy. Or would the Sons watch over their planets while God was the grand facilitator who ran the project on the large scale while his secretary (the Holy Spirit) floated around making sure everyone has the spirit when they need it.

How confusing this has suddenly become. These are questions that must have answers. Christians get their name from "Christ," which is Greek for "Messiah," which is Hebrew for "Anointed." A "Christian" would have to believe that Jesus is the Anointed one of the Jewish faith. What about all the other "Christs" then? How many planets has there been this fulfillment? How many planets has this fulfillment not yet come? Are we multiplying our Godhead? Is every Christ another essence of God? Or is there still only 3 persons? What about the interstellar holy Spirit? How large is the body of Christ?

If any of the above is challenging your faith, then I hope you do not shut your mind to your doubt. If you do not believe there ever has been or ever will be intelligent life aside from us humans, then this may have been a waste of your time and you should be reading science articles instead of theology. However, if you accept the possibility that there could be, then you must face the implications of such an existence. I beg of you that you do not shut me out as an apostate that you should not take seriously, but that you think through these issues yourself and make your own conclusions. I think God can handle your questioning. Can you?

A Christian Response to Homosexuality

2007-04-22T23:52:00.000-05:00

It seems that one of the largest issues splitting the church today is the issue of homosexuality. By “issue” I mean the ordination and marriage of homosexuals. I believe it is also a matter of discrimination, but suffice it to say that discrimination and prejudice is unchristian; even if it is against “sinners.”

I believe that most (if not all) Christians opposed to granting the above mentioned rights to homosexuals do so because they believe marriage and ordination to be Christian institutions that should not include the homosexual lifestyle.

Apparently, to these Christians, if one assumes that homosexuality is a sin, then it would be an abomination to ordain a man or woman who commits sins. Since this is absolutely ridiculous (from a Christian view that all commit sins), I think it would be more appropriate to say that because homosexuals do not view homosexuality as a sin, they must not be Christian and would lead others astray. If this be the case, then I must investigate what makes homosexuality a sin.

Even before I do so, however, it should be noted that no matter how much one views homosexuality as a sin, it is still only a sin. If, therefore, a homosexual commits himself to God and refuses to have relationships with anybody, there should be no objection to ordaining him. The single homosexual is no more sinful than the married preacher. In fact, the single homosexual may even be less sinful than the married preacher, because if the married preacher ever looks at another woman with lust, he is committing adultery against his wife (the homosexual would have no attachment). Therefore, I believe that any Christian against the ordination of homosexuals must at the very least allow the ordination of homosexuals who vow to remain single. If, then, the homosexual pastor wishes to begin a homosexual relationship, they would be stripped of ordination for willingly sinning.

I hope you understand that I do not support the above position, but must state it as I believe the logic of conservative Christians concludes.

Now to the tedious occupation of inquiring of the reasons homosexual actions (I specify actions as opposed to homosexuality in general based on the above paragraph that explains that there is no difference in sinfulness between a single homosexual and a married or single straight pastor) are sinful.

I believe that most (if not all) Christians who believe homosexual actions to be sins do so because of the condemnation of the actions in the Bible. I must emphasize again that the actions may be condemned, but never the state of being. I am unaware of any source aside from the Bible that Christians appeal to for moral guidance. The Bible is the ultimate authority for faith and morals (and to some science and cosmology). Therefore, there is no reason to condemn homosexuality as a sin aside from the Bible as a whole. I will proceed to discuss most passages I am familiar with that are used against the practice of homosexuality.

Leviticus 18:22 – You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

To start with one of the verses most commonly used to condemn homosexuality as a sin, Leviticus 18:22 is a clear condemnation of the act, and states the law that it should not be done. I am not going to argue that this verse does not condemn homosexual activity. What I am going to discuss is the understanding of the prohibition. It should be noted that there is no mention of "sin" or "immorality" in this verse. It is a prohibition just like the prohibition to eat pork. It is not unnatural or morally sinful to eat pork, only forbidden. What makes this prohibition different then? It can be argued that the prohibition to eat pork (and other non-kosher items) do not have to be followed because we are under the new covenant of Jesus, and therefore do not have to keep the law of the Torah (forgive redundancy). Then would that also exempt us from the prohibitions of homosexual activity? I think most would say no, we are still bound to that prohibition. Why then? If one is to say we must abide by the prohibition because of the verse in Romans, then that is using one verse to interpret another, and is not applicable when isolating verses to be studied and understood by themselves for what they are. Therefore, we are left wondering why the prohibition is here in the first place.

If one argues that the prohibition is there because the action is unnatural, then one must also say that heterosexual activity is also unnatural, because the chapter prohibits many acts of heterosexual activity such as intercourse with two women that happen to be sisters, or two women that happen to be mother and daughter, regardless of their familial relationship to you. I don't think many would argue the "unnaturalness" of having sex with two people in the same family, they would at most say it is "morally wrong" or "adulterous." Therefore, the prohibition of homosexual activity cannot be present for any kind of "unnaturalness" of the action.

It should also be stated that there is no reason to believe the impossibility of procreating is a factor for prohibiting the action, since there are no prohibitions for intercourse with infertile or post-menopausal women, and almost every other prohibition in Leviticus 18 could be procreative.

Furthermore, there is no suggestion anywhere that one must not have homosexual desires; they only must not commit the action. In other places, such as the Decalogue, where theft is prohibited, the desire to steal is also prohibited only a few verses later (coveting). When adultery is prohibited in the Decalogue, the desire is prohibited as well. However, when homosexual action is prohibited, there are no prohibitions on homosexual desires.

The prohibition seems to be (from the context) very specific. What I mean is that it may not even be prohibiting all homosexual activity, but only a specific type (i.e. penetration). If this is the case, then the prohibition is not directed towards kissing, fondling, or any type of action aside from lying with a man as one would with a woman.

The prohibition is also directed towards men alone, and not women. There is no way around this fact. The prohibition is not prohibiting all homosexual action, but only male homosexual action. It does not mention anything having to do with "the same gender," but only that a man should not lie with another man as he would with a woman.

How are we to then understand the prohibition? An excellent article by Martin Samuel Cohen (from which I am framing much of this response) concludes that the prohibition is based on the understanding of semen; more specifically, the proper uses of the substance. This is why there are no prohibitions of lesbianism or other homosexual desires or actions that would not result in the misuse of semen.

Cohen steps back from the discussion to first describe the Israelite practice of categorizing everything. Clean from unclean, pure from impure, light from dark, but most importantly, life from death. The Lord is the God of Life, and death is very taboo. There is nothing that can make one unclean in the Torah to the extent that a corpse can. The handling of a corpse is very important. Everything falls into a category of living, dead, or inanimate. Blood and semen are not alive, but they are what cause life, so are they really inanimate? They do not fit neatly into one of the categories so it is vital that the use of the substances is proper. Chapter 11 begins with dietary laws (what is pure, impure, or an abomination). Chapter 12 discusses purity laws about childbirth, chapters 13 and 14 discus lepers and purification. Chapter 15 begins laws of sexual natures, and chapters 16 and 17 discus the Day of Atonement. Then chapter 18 goes back to sexual matters. What can be noticed in the rhythm of the book of Leviticus is the order in which the author discusses laws. First in chapter 11, purity and impurity of food is discussed. Then childbirth, then lepers, but when it gets to chapter 15, the author begins to discuss the "twin stuffs of life" (blood and semen). Beginning with involuntary emissions of semen (chapter 15) and then moving to voluntary intercourse with a woman with different types of menstrual discharges (which are involuntary), it moves to blood in the use of the Day of Atonement (voluntary use of blood). It then orderly enough discusses in chapter 18 misuse of voluntary emissions of semen. There are a few categories to divide handling semen, there are cases that do not render the parties impure, cases that they do, and then cases that are forbidden because they "transcend the laws of purity." Purity, not morality, is the issue. When a man rapes a little boy, the boy is to be put to death as well as the man (Leviticus 20:13); Israel is eradicating the uncleanliness, not correcting an immorality.

These prohibitions, then, in chapter 18 are specifically describing improper uses of semen. This explains why the only prohibition against women is bestiality (where the semen of the male animal who doesn't know any better is misused), and why other sexual prohibitions (such as rape or sexual relationships between priests or prostitutes) do not appear in this chapter. Furthermore, the prohibition against offering zera' (seed) to Molech can more clearly be understood as possibly a reference to an obscure practice of offering semen to a pagan deity. Zera' is most primarily translated "seed" (semen) but secondarily "offspring." There is little connection to any part of the passage if it means "offspring," but makes much sense if understood as "semen" and maintains the continuity of the passage, leading then into the prohibition of a specific homosexual action.

Finally, I must address the use of the noun "abomination" and what it means generally. Coming from the verb "abhor" it means something despicable or hated. That seems obvious. However, why is it used sometimes, and not other times? To say that it is used in this verse because homosexuality is so much worse than any other prohibition that it deserves the word is in my opinion irresponsible interpretation. Other instances that the word "abomination" is used are eating a sacrifice on the third day (Leviticus 7:18), eating certain birds (Leviticus 11:13), or as referring broadly to prohibitions (Leviticus 18:24-30). The key to interpreting the term is to understanding the previously mentioned idea of separation and categorization of everything into clean/unclean, pure/impure, holy/unholy divisions. To blur these lines is an abomination. It must not be thought that these categories are moral/immoral categories. They are not. I don't think that anybody would say that eating a buzzard is immoral (unless one is of the opinion that eating any animal is immoral), but it was forbidden in Leviticus because for whatever reason, it was deemed unclean. To eat it then, would be an abomination. Other abominations recorded in the Bible refer to doing things that other nations do, therefore mixing Israel (a holy nation to be divided from the rest) with other nations, such as King Manasseh (2 Kings 21:11), King Solomon (2 Kings 23:13), or the things that Josiah reformed (2 Kings 23:24, 2 Chronicles 34:33). Leviticus 18 opens with the Lord's command to not do the things they do in Egypt, in order that they may be separate. Abomination is blurring those lines of separation of the nations (2 Chronicles 36:14). It is therefore not a label for something "really bad," it is only a label of an intermingling between things that should not be intermingling, for whatever reason that may be. This is why rape and murder are not called abominations; they do not blur the lines of separation; it is not that they are "less sinful."

It is therefore my conclusion that this verse is not a blanket condemnation of all homosexuality (as many Christians wish it were), but only a condemnation of a specific act because of the ancient view of semen. Therefore, this verse is irrelevant to today's world where we see no problem in eating birds. More directly, unless Christians take on the ancient world view of separation of everything into cleanliness/uncleanliness, pure/impure, and holy/unholy, we have no right in isolating one aspect of that view (the improper use of semen) and exploiting a verse out of context in order to defend our prejudice.

Leviticus 20:13 – If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.

This verse can be explained in the same way Leviticus 18:22 has been above. I do not need to say the same thing again. Suffice it to say that this passage is also talking about the improper use of semen, as the chapter opens with harsh condemnation of offering one's zera' to Molech, and the only prohibition against women in the passage being bestiality.

1 Kings 14:24 – there were also male temple prostitutes in the land. They committed all the abominations of the nations that the Lord drove out before the people of Israel.

First, as a point of grammar, there is no reason to say specifically from this verse that male prostitutes were homosexual. The passage overall is talking about the actions of Judah, and when the collective pronoun "they" is used in this verse it is proper to interpret it as referring to all of Judah (as the context makes clear), and not the temple prostitutes specifically. It is therefore not the male temple prostitutes that are the ones committing abominations, but the whole of Judah.

Romans 1:26-27 – For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

It is my belief that this is the strongest verse to argue that homosexuality is immoral. Paul is introducing his argument that all men need grace. His point is that man chose to worship the created and not the creator. In doing so, all Hell broke loose, and you have Romans 1:26-32. There are a couple of things that need to be said about this passage. The homosexuality of Paul's day and the homosexuality of today is very different. Though the act may be the same, the lifestyle is radically different. Where as the context of Leviticus 18:22 implied a very specific action, the context of Romans 1:27 implies lifestyle. Paul does not seem to be condemning a single act, but a whole manner of living and thinking; one that is void of God. Therefore, I believe that given the difference between what Paul was actually condemning and what we 2000 years later like to say he was condemning, it is irresponsible to rest on this verse.

Homosexuality in Paul's day was just not the same. A common practice (and most likely the practice that Paul was familiar with and condemning) in ancient Greco-Roman society (as reflected in other ancient literature) was that boys would go under somewhat of an apprenticeship to an older man to transition the boy from boyhood to manhood. This often was of a sexual nature. This was completely accepted in culture. The boy, then, when maturing, would go on to have a wife and children, and then perhaps one day take on an apprentice of his own to guide into manhood. This is obviously nothing like the homosexual lifestyle today. We do not know if Paul would have had the same opinion of today's homosexuality as he had of his day. Furthermore, the homosexuality Paul was likely condemning appears to be much more of a choice than homosexuals today. Homosexuals today often grow up thinking that they are going to be heterosexual, and then realize over a time that they are not, and then perhaps after years of guilt (or none), they accept their condition (I use the term in no demeaning way). The ancient Greco-Roman homosexuality was a willful fling of sorts that was performed by otherwise heterosexual men intending to live a heterosexual life. To completely ignore the difference and condemn it all as the same is irresponsible.

I must add an amendment to this as well. Given the difference between first century pagan homosexual actions and modern homosexuals, I must say that Paul seemed to be condemning the unnaturalness of the actions, and not the actions themselves. To be more specific, Greek homosexual actions were done by homosexuals, so the "unnaturalness" that Paul is condemning in his letter to the Romans is really the act of heterosexuals doing homosexual actions, not natural homosexuals. This is another reason why I believe it is irresponsible to apply Paul's admonitions to contemporary culture.

I must also discuss briefly Sodom and Gomorrah. They were not destroyed because the people were homosexual. Genesis 19 records the event of the men wishing to rape the guests (literally to "know"), but homosexuality is an irresponsible label of the sin of the people. Deuteronomy 29:23 mentions the destruction of Sodom when the subject is rejecting the Lord's covenant. Isaiah 1 discusses Sodom and Gomorrah when condemning sacrifices being brought to God with the wrong motivation. Jeremiah 23:14 is condemning false prophets of Jerusalem. Lamentations 4:6 says the punishment Jerusalem received was greater than the punishment Sodom received. Ezekiel 16 mentions Sodom when discussing turning away from God's covenant. Jesus referred to Sodom when discussing the mission of the Twelve to other cities. If the cities do not receive them, the punishment will be worse than that of Sodom. I see no evidence to claim that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because they were homosexuals. If, in fact, all the men of the town were homosexual (Genesis 19:4 records "all the people to the last man"), the town would not have any population in the first place.

Finally, aside from Biblical discussion, one must ask the question "Is homosexuality a choice?" My opinion is that the actions are just as much a choice as heterosexual actions, but the orientation is not. I am not a scientist, and I find that most Christians who condemn homosexuality are not either, and yet they feel like they have a right to say that sexual orientation is a choice. I think the burden lies on them to provide the proof that they could change their orientation if they wanted to. I am a heterosexual male, and I believe that it would be extremely difficult (and unpleasant) to change my orientation. At the very most, it is possible that I could complete a homosexual act, but then revert entirely to my heterosexual orientation. I think that most heterosexuals would have a similar opinion. Therefore, I think it is unfair to claim that homosexuals should just be able to change their orientation at will. Or, I think it is unfair to claim that they really aren't homosexual, they just think they are. If someone told me I was really homosexual and only pretending to be heterosexual, they would be wrong. So how does anyone have the right to say that to homosexuals?

Back to the science of it, Christians will often say that there is absolutely no scientific proof that homosexuality is an orientation that cannot be helped. This is absolutely correct. But, it would be incorrect to say that scientific discoveries conclude that orientation is chosen. Experiment after experiment (such as testing arousal to the scent of hormones of specific genders, measuring finger lengths, or testing reflexes) show physical differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals. This is not proof, but it is irresponsible (and unscientific) to take these conclusions and claim that there is no science behind the opinion. Something that gets tossed around is that if sexual orientation was genetic, then wouldn't all biological twins have the same orientation? Since that is not the case, that must be proof that orientation has nothing to do with biology, right? Not quite so. It just so happens (forgive me for not being able to cite my source right now, but at a later time if questioned I will find it for you) that if one twin is homosexual, the percentage that the other twin is as well is upwards of 40-50%. Considering that only about 2-10% of the general population is homosexual, that up to half of the siblings of homosexual people are also homosexual is worth noting. This (I believe if my memory serves me correctly) is also true in situations where the twins were raised in separate environments (such as being adopted into different families). Here it can be seen how claims that there is no "science" behind homosexuality can get by. If that percentage of 50 would go up to 99%, a conservative Christian (with his or her mind already made up) can say "Science does not have any proof whatsoever that genetics determine orientation." However, that statement is irresponsible given the evidence (not proof) that exists. Therefore, I say, let the scientists do what they do and be scientists, and let us not impose our opinions on their conclusions. It has, however, been said that even if it were biological, it would only go to show how deep our sinful nature has gone. I think that this is (even if unintentionally) cruel. I don't personally believe that God would have somebody made biologically unable to live a Christian life. Our sin nature may be deep in our soul and mind, but I do not believe it to be in our body.

I speak as an amateur biblical theologian and scholar, not as a scientist, and as I have explained above, I have little problem with homosexuality. The problem I have is with "Christians" who condemn homosexuals. The claim that they are "just being biblical" is nonsense in my opinion. How often does the Bible mention homosexuality? Somewhere around the vicinity of six times. How many times does Jesus mention homosexuality? Somewhere around the vicinity of none. Why then is there any emphasis at all on the condemnation of it, when the condemnation of it is based on irresponsible biblical exegesis? I think as Christians we should condemn not homosexuality, but the condemnation of homosexuality. Homosexuals get made fun of, they are outcast, they are stereotyped, they are discriminated against, they are hated, they are accused, and they are even beaten and murdered for being homosexual. This is what I believe as Christians we should be fighting against. The Bible talks a lot more about loving outsiders and not condemning or mocking than it does about homosexuality (for that matter, Jesus' statement on divorce is stronger and clearer than any condemnation of homosexuality). But "Christians" so often think it is their duty or something to mock and condemn the homosexual. What sickens me the most is that some Christians would deny a homosexual membership (or even attendance) to their church. This is an outrage. That some "Christians" would dare say that the grace of God is not going to be bestowed upon a homosexual.

My conclusion, as I hope is obvious by now, is that I believe heterosexuality and homosexuality to be the same as being right or left handed. I believe that it is only through misunderstanding and misapplication of Scripture that Christians have the illusion of a foundation for their discrimination, and that though not all Christians are as malicious as those I am infuriated at I am disappointed in my fellows of faith for not standing up to the real abomination of society: Hate towards people different than themselves.

The Christian Response to Abortion

2007-04-03T21:52:00.000-05:00

One of the political platforms that seems to be at the top of many Christians' priorities is the issue of Abortion. Should it be legal or not? That is not the topic I am going to discuss. For the record, I do not like the idea of abortion, it is not a decision that I would ever want to wish on a woman. The topic is how Christians should respond.

A common thought is that Christians should respond to abortion by voting to make abortion illegal. That's fine, if you don't like it, vote against it. Whether it is legal or not, women are going to have abortions. It's going to happen. So it's either going to be done by doctors, or it's going to be done in a back alley somewhere.

I realize a counter to this argument is that murder is going to happen whether it's legal or not, but that doesn't mean we should make it legal. The same goes with rape, theft, or other violence.

Laws, however, are not in place in order to punish wrongdoings. The first priority of a law is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place. Therefore, one would have to ask themselves how much does the law prevent crimes? If rape were to become legal, then I would be pretty sure that the rape rate in the country would skyrocket. The same goes with theft. If stealing was legal, it would be hard to hold on to anything. In this way, it is the law that prevents the crimes from being conducted. If outlawing abortion really stopped women from having them, I would push more for making it illegal. That isn't really the case. The lowest abortion rate since Roe vs. Wade (1973) was during Clinton's final term (with his "legal, safe, and rare policy").

What are we to do then? We are to respond as Christians. How do we do that? It's not by voting. Voting to make abortion is not how we are to be Christians. Being Christian is about loving people; and that is what we are not doing.

I propose that we stop worrying so much about whether abortion is legal or not, and I say we try and prevent it from happening. Since I've said that it's not the laws that prevent abortion, what does? In order to figure out how to prevent abortions, we must ask first, why do women have them in the first place?

Now we should look at some statistics.

37.4% of women who have abortions consider themselves Protestant. 18% of women who have abortions consider themselves "Born-again/Evangelical." 31.3% consider themselves catholic. 1.3% consider themselves Jewish, and 23.7% have no religious affiliation. This means that 75% of abortions are done by Christian women. Think about that for a moment. If it's all these Christians that are saying that abortion should be illegal, and yet they are responsible for three quarters of the abortions conducted, what does that mean? It seems as if there's some type of miscommunication here; perhaps between the Christian men and the Christian women. I think we should ask why it is that Christians get more abortions than anyone else.

It should be noted that 78% of people in America call themselves Christians, so the fact that 75% of abortions are performed by Christian women really just says one thing. Religion has little to no influence on whether or not women have abortions.

Why then do women have abortions? Only 1% is because of rape or incest. 6% due to health problems. 93% for social reasons/inconvenience. This 93% deserves a look.

Given now the statistics that most abortions are done by Christian women for social reasons rather than health reasons, it may not be too difficult to come up with some real life examples of what this means.

To give one more statistic to help us with our story, 52% of abortions are done by women under the age of 25. Ages 20-24 have 32% of abortions. Teenagers have 20% of abortions.

So a large chunk (if not the majority) of abortions are done by young Christian women due to social inconvenience. I don't think I'm being too presumptuous to say that these young women are afraid of social condemnation. They are afraid of what their parents will think. They are afraid of what their friends will think.

They are afraid of what their church will think.

This is my point. Churches are supposed to be filled with people who love people and love God. Churches are supposed to be filled with people who follow the example of Jesus and love all the outcasts and those who are rejected by others. "Christians," however, have turned into the ones that reject and condemn the "sinners." I believe that "Christians" cause more abortions than the laws can prevent. I believe that it is the "Christians" who condemn the women who get pregnant that force them into making a decision. The women get to decide to either have an abortion secretly (because if her church found out she would be outcast), or have the child (as supposedly the church would prefer) and be condemned by her church for getting pregnant in the first place. In this situation, abortion is the only option she has in order to not be estranged from the supposedly "Christian" people. This is tragic. This is what makes me mourn Christianity. I believe that if churches would start being Christian, aside from just the sheer rationality of such an act, I believe that abortion would decrease substantially if that were the case. Just think about it. The 52% of women below the age of 25 probably still associate with the people they grew up with (such as church family and biological family). If a young woman knew that if she got pregnant her church would love her all the same, would love her child, and would not condemn her and look down on her and treat her like an outcast, she probably wouldn't get an abortion in the first place. If only Christians would love.

If only Christians would be Christian.

My conclusion is that as Christians, we should not place our emphasis on making abortion illegal; we should place our emphasis on making it not even happen. We should love the women who find themselves in that situation. We should let it be known that we are Christians and we will love others no matter what. That's the Jesus I know. That's the Christianity I stand for. I believe Christians can change the world. I believe that love can. So I say let's make the 50% of young Christian women know that they will still be loved with a child, and maybe that child will make its way into the world.

Brainwashed Damnation

2007-04-02T12:26:00.001-05:00

This is the counterpart to my previous post. I had concluded that, against popular belief, if you are not a Christian, you can go to heaven if you had never heard of Jesus. Now I will set up a hypothetical situation that will require another line to be drawn around the limits of God's mercy.

A child is born. The child has no siblings, and is being raised by a single mother. For the sake of keeping this hypothetical, I will not name a country or geographical location. The mother is somewhat mentally unbalanced, but not so much that she cannot raise a child and show love to him (it could be a "her" but for the sake of not saying "it" I will use "him"). The mother cares deeply for the child, and without a husband or any other children, she protects him and loves him with everything that she has. The problem, however, is the mother's paranoia.

The mother is an extreme atheist. She believes that Christianity is a literal plague. She believes that to believe in God is a contagious mental disease that you can only escape by staying away from religious talk, especially Christianity (this is the mentally unbalanced part of her). She raises the child alone and isolated in order to protect him from this disease, not allowing television, newspapers, or radio to corrupt her child's innocent mind. Constantly, daily, she drills him on what he will have to do to survive in the world without becoming infected. She fears for the safety of her child when he must go out of her protection. Christianity, after all, is extremely dangerous, just like every other religion. People will kill themselves and kill other people for it (surely a sign of mental disease). It will ruin your life forever, whether you give up your time or your wealth, you will never be the same once you are infected. The child must not even accept the stupid idea that there is an invisible being somewhere. How silly. As soon as he acknowledges the existence of something as stupid and insane as that, he's as good as dead.

The child is raised in peace. He is happy to have such a caring mother who protects him from the evils of the outside. He grows up drawing pictures of fighting the diseased Christians, hoping doctors can one day cure their plight. As he gets older, he learns math, and learns how to read English by texts that his mother writes for him. He dreams about what the outside looks like, and what type of dangers his mother has to fight against just to bring home the groceries. He is very happy to be safe inside his home where even the windows are plastered over so that the sun cannot make its way inside, and the door is latched many times with many locks that only his mother possesses the key to.

The day approaches. The child must leave the house for the first time in his life. He is 16 years old. It is his first time he will have ever left his home. He finds out that one of the reasons his mother was so frightened for his life was that there was a large evangelical Christian church right next to their house. The Christians in that church had apparently discovered that the child was being protected from their disease, and had attempted to infect the mother and make their way to the defenseless child inside their isolated house. The child was told to be weary, to keep his mind alert, and not let any one talk about God or any other silly nonsense.

The child leaves the house, and walks by the church. He is caught! He cannot escape their glances, they walk towards him. It seems like only an instant, and he is surrounded! The first word out of their mouths is "Jesus loves you." Who was this Jesus? His mother had not mentioned a Jesus. But she did tell him that they would tell him anything and everything insane (they couldn't help it, they're diseased after all) in order to infect his healthy mind. They caught him in a religious fervor and brought him inside against his will. They strapped him down to a chair and told him this man Jesus was God and had died for his sins (which apparently they believed he had). He only had to believe and repent of his sins. He escaped from their torment and ran out in a panic, tripped on the curb outside the church as they chased him shouting about Jesus and God nonsense, and he was hit by a car and died on contact.

He went to hell, right? He had rejected the message of Jesus. He had rejected the religious fanaticism of Christianity. He's got no excuse, right? There's no way that he should have said no to the wonderful good news of Christ, right?

The point of this is to force another line to be drawn. If this ridiculous situation had actually happened (crazier things happen in the world), then the theory that you can go to heaven as long you have never been exposed to Christianity would place the poor child in hell. Should we be willing to say that? I'm not. It's possible to be brainwashed in a matter of months, so imagine what would happen if someone was raised since birth to believe the world is one way and no other, then can we really blame them when they turn the option of Christianity down? I am not willing to do that. If you are, then I suppose there is little point in reading this. I wish you would think about it though. It's so easy to group everyone in the world into one category; a category more like us. It's easy (and tempting) to view the whole world as one big USA with churches on every corner (here in the Bible Belt) and theistic talk throughout our society. It is so much easier to say "If you've heard of Jesus and rejected it then you're going to hell" than it is to say "If you've been brainwashed since birth to not believe in it and only get one exposure (and it happens to be by radical extremists) and you still turn it down then you go to hell."

So now hopefully you may be forming your own hypothetical illustrations in your mind that may make more sense to you than my example. Hopefully you are coming to the realization that it is unfair to claim the theory that if you have heard of Jesus and reject it you are going to hell. Because then one can say, what counts as hearing of Jesus? If you've heard the sentence "Jesus died for your sins" and reject it, are you going to hell? No, because how are you to know who Jesus is? If you hear the sentence "God (an all powerful being) became human in order to fix what we broke," and reject it, are you going to hell? I would say no. It depends on the context you hear it in, how much you trust the person telling you, what you've been raised with, etc. Then what are we doing? We are drawing a line. I reject the theory that says just because you've heard of Jesus and denied it as truth you're going to hell. This never gives anyone the benefit of the doubt. In fact, there is no such thing as a "benefit" of a "doubt" in this case. No matter what led the person to be confronted with the idea of Jesus, if one ignores every influence on their lives, place them in a vacuum, and isolate the one moment when they are introduced to Jesus, and view that as the moment that defines where their soul goes for eternity, then I must say that is unfair and actually quite merciless.

We like to imagine that those who reject Jesus and go to hell are really those that get a full understanding of Christianity and then reject it, but that's not where contemporary theology stands. In reality, probably a lot of people who reject Christianity really don't understand what it is (although I think many "Christians" don't understand Christianity), and yet they are held responsible (by Christians) for the destination of their souls. This bothers me. I hope it bothers you.

I will briefly discuss a relevant point.

Jesus states in Luke 6.37 "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven."

Judge --> To form an opinion or estimation of after careful consideration.
To pass sentence on; condemn.

If we make the statement "Those who have rejected Christianity are going to hell" then we have judged. We have passed a sentence on someone and condemned their souls. If say that atheists who try to convert Christians are going to hell, then we have condemned. If we are to take the above words of Jesus seriously, then we are not to say that anyone is going to hell, for that would be condemning them. We should forgive them and love them. That is being a Christian.

Being a Christian is not feeling good about yourself because you know that although 70% of the world's population is going to hell you're not because you were lucky enough to be born of Christian parents or lucky enough that you happened to go to that one church service that day when you felt bad and got saved. No. Being a Christian is about loving people. You may say that converting people is out of love of them because you don't want their souls to go to hell, but then your love is based on your prejudice condemnation.

I am not saying that missionaries are not Christian. I am saying that there are ways of spreading Christianity that do not fully reside within the teachings of Jesus. I think we as Christian should reevaluate what it means to be one. I do not believe that it means we have any right to tell everyone else they are going to hell. That's human nature, not Christianity. It is human nature to elevate the self and degrade everyone else. I believe it is God's nature as revealed in Jesus to lower the self in order to raise up others. To love others more than the self. To feed the hungry; to hug the weeping; to comfort the sorrowful; to encourage the desperate. I am sometimes afraid of what Christianity has evolved into. Sometimes I am even hesitant to call myself a Christian because of the connotation. That is the tragedy.

To bring the theme of the topic together, I declare an armistice. I declare an armistice between those who are "saved" against those who are "lost." I feel that those declaring war on the "lost" should really wonder if they're on the wrong side of the battle.

I have asked you once before to draw your line in your theology. I have asked you now twice. It is my hope that you refuse to. It is my hope that you refuse to draw a line and fall on the mercy and love of God.

"I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." - Jesus, John 12.47

When Christianity Became

2007-04-02T11:53:00.001-05:00

I have a question for a general population of Christians. First I must list certain understandings to clarify who I'm posing the inquiry to. The following is a list of basic beliefs of the plurality (if not the majority) of Christians:

1) If you are a Christian, you are going to heaven when you die.

2) If you are not a Christian, you are not going to heaven when you die, you are going to hell.

If you believe both of those statements to be true, then it is to you that I am posing my question.

My question is this: "When did Christianity become the saving religion?"

What I mean, broadly, is that since Christianity didn't exist before Jesus, there must have been a previous saving religion, or else everybody who ever lived before Jesus was doomed to hell because there was no way that they could have been saved. I do not think anyone believes that (even the most fundamentalist conservative exclusivist Christian). I will state now, a third belief:

3) Before Jesus of Nazareth, Judaism was the saving religion.

The topic for discussion is not where Jews went when they died before Jesus (although it is closely related), but what religion is the "right" religion. I think most Christians would say that Judaism was, because it was the only one that worshiped the true God (YHWH).

So, given the 3 beliefs stated above, I will proceed to a higher specificity of inquiry.

If Judaism was the saving religion before Jesus, then one can say that if one were not a Jew, they were damned (damned meaning "sent to hell"). If one were to argue that Jews and non-Jews all went to a waiting area until Jesus died, and then got ministered to by Jesus in the afterlife, then I think it would be safe to say that everybody who died before Jesus died got into heaven. Who would say no to Jesus once they're already dead? Therefore, either Judaism was the only saving religion, or everyone who died before Jesus' death got into heaven.

Now, I want to try and pinpoint the time Christianity became the saving religion. There are a few moments in Jesus' career that might have signified this beginning. The first is Jesus' birth.

Did Jesus' birth institute Christianity as the saving religion?

I think the answer to this can be readily declared to be "No." The reason for this seems self explanatory. If the birth of Jesus was the transition from Judaism to Christianity as the saving religion, then had Mary died from complications of the birth, then she would have been damned for not being a Christian. Likewise, as soon as Jesus' umbilical cord was cut, the gates of hell would have been ripped apart by the sudden influx of souls, since nobody in the entire world would have been a Christian and every death would be an extra tick on the roll. I think it is correct to conclude that the birth of Jesus is not the beginning of Christianity.

The next time that it could have began was the teachings of Jesus. As soon as Jesus began teaching people, Christianity became. This would make sense, right? As Jesus taught people, they would have converted to his teachings, and they would be saved. The ones who rejected his teachings would then be damned. The problem with this, is that the majority of what Jesus taught had little to do with himself. Jesus taught ethics and proper worship of God. He didn't teach people about "inviting Jesus into their hearts" or anything that modern Christians would claim as the meaning of Christianity. Jesus taught people to love God and love one another. If, therefore, Jesus' teachings instituted Christianity, those who accepted his teachings went to heaven (even if they knew nothing about Jesus as God incarnate), and those who didn't embrace his teachings were damned. This also would mean that as soon as Jesus started speaking, everybody would be going to hell, because only the people in earshot of Jesus would be saved. This is preposterous in my opinion. This theory also ignores the resurrection. If Jesus had not yet atoned for the sins of the world and had been resurrected, then how could anyone be called a "Christian"? Jesus taught people how to worship within Judaism. I conclude, therefore, that the teachings of Jesus did not institute Christianity as the saving religion.

Now I move to the death of Jesus on the cross. Now that Jesus has died for the sins of the world, people can start believing it. Modern Christians would probably agree that being a Christian means believing that Jesus died for the sins of the world, and that believing this will save them. So when Jesus died, people could start believing in his sacrificial death. The problem with this view, however, also seems readily apparent. If a devout Jew was standing nearby, one who had just traveled from Alexandria to visit relatives, and witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus without knowing the surrounding circumstances and was so shocked by the gruesomeness of it that he had a heart attack and died, he would be going to hell. As soon as Jesus died, hell would have to expand to allow all the souls into it. Every Jew in the world (along with every one else, of course) who died following the death of Jesus would be going to hell, no matter how much they loved the true God and worshiped him in sincerity and purity. This seems unreasonable. After all, there is no resurrection yet! Another crucial point in modern Christianity is that one must believe that Jesus rose from the dead a day and a half after his death. The resurrection is what ensured that Jesus wasn't a fake, but really was God, right? Jesus conquering death so that we could have eternal life, right? Therefore I conclude that the death of Jesus was not the beginning of Christianity as the one true saving religion.

Up until this point, it should be noted, that if Christianity is not yet the saving religion, Judaism is still. Therefore devout (and sincere) Jews would not be damned even up until Saturday night before the resurrection.

The resurrection then seems to be the last moment in which Christianity could have began. After all, there wasn't really much left for Jesus to do (aside from Pentecost, which doesn't really make one a Christian or not). Therefore, it must have been Sunday morning at dawn, when Jesus rose from the dead to be seated at the right hand of the father, that Christianity became the one true saving religion of the world. This means that as soon as Jesus body disappeared from the tomb, heaven stopped checking people in. As soon as Jesus had been resurrected, he would have gone up to heaven and wondered why no one else was joining him. This would mean that a Jewish man in Spain could be on his deathbed early Sunday morning, and if he died a minute after Jesus had been resurrected, he would go to hell, and for all eternity he'd be wishing he had kicked the bucket just a moment sooner. I think it is safe to say that this theory must also be concluded to be false. It seems very unreasonable, doesn't it? A devout Jew, outstanding in commitment to God who loves his neighbor and follows all the laws of the Torah and worships God with all of his being, would be damned to hell for eternity if he died just a minute too late. I am unwilling to conclude that God would do that.

What does this mean then? There's no other time that Christianity could have become the saving religion, right? I suppose, if one were to say that the Jewish man mentioned above could go to heaven after dying the Sunday morning of the resurrection, one would have to make other exceptions. What about two minutes after the resurrection? What about three? You can see where this is going. If we don't condemn everyone who died after the minute Jesus was resurrected from the dead to hell, then we have to start modifying our theory. If not, we risk never drawing the line that separates Judaism as the saving religion from Christianity as the saving religion and today there would be two true, saving religions! Modern Christians can't have that! Let us discuss further possibilities, then.

How about, when the last Jewish man (or woman) dies who had been alive at the time of the resurrection of Jesus. That way, as soon as that man dies, everybody who is alive would have had the opportunity to accept or reject Jesus, right? Therefore, a Jewish man born early Easter Sunday morning (before the resurrection) could remain a Jew his whole life and go to heaven, while his younger twin brother who came out just a few minutes later (after the resurrection) would go to hell, wishing for eternity that his older brother would have taken less time. This also seems preposterously ridiculous.

What can we do then? When can we say that Christianity became the saving religion and Judaism ceased? No matter where we draw the line in time, if we draw it, we are declaring that God actually condemned the majority of the world by sending Jesus into it.

But isn't that what Christians do anyway? Christians claim that Jesus is the savior of the world, and yet it seems that Jesus really was the cause of condemnation rather than salvation.

Unless, of course, one can say that only those who truly reject Jesus are the ones that are damned. This is another topic completely (which I will address shortly in another post). Unless we can say that it is possible for people who have never heard of Jesus can go to heaven, then it appears that Jesus is the cause of the damnation of most of the world population, and that Holy Week marked the largest influx of souls to hell that history has ever seen.

So I ask those who claim to be Christian: "Where to you draw the line?"

Jesus Did Not Want to Die

2007-02-28T18:32:00.000-05:00

Matthew 26.36-46
Mark 14.32-42
Luke 22.39-46

I do not know what I believe about the connection between Jesus and God (the Son and the Father), but I would like to explore one aspect of Jesus' knowledge (or lack thereof).

If Jesus is completely God (as ecumenical councils and common Christian theology would seem to teach), then what's the deal with what God wants vs. what Jesus wants, or what God knows vs. what Jesus knows? I do not believe that Jesus was omniscient, I believe that if he was, he would not be completely human. I would like to bring up something that I believe is biblically undeniable: Jesus did not want to be crucified.

Now this may seem like something elementary. "Of course," we may say, "of course he did not want to be crucified...who would?" However, what do we risk when we say this?

Jesus prayed to God in the garden of Gethsemane. Regardless of the problem present when we ask "Did Jesus pray to himself? What's the point?" it must be recognized that Jesus prayed that "the hour might pass from him" (Mark version; in Matthew and Luke he prays for the "cup" to pass from him). In Matthew and Mark, Jesus reportedly says "if it is possible" before he makes his request. This implies that Jesus did not know what was possible (otherwise he wouldn't have said "if"). The gospel of John does not include Jesus' prayer and states that he knew what was going to happen. This is not surprising from John, because John's Jesus is very much in control of most every situation. As John is likely the latest and most theologically evolved, the fourth gospel will be set aside from this discussion, as it bears no texts on this prayer.

So now it seems that Jesus did not know what was going to happen (he no doubt had a good idea, otherwise he wouldn't have prayed this in the first place, but he still thought that there was a possibility that it wouldn't happen). Not only did he not know whether or not what was going to happen to him, but if what he thought was correct, then he did not want to do it.

This is somewhat troubling to popular theology. Jesus and God did not want the same thing. Jesus' will was not to be crucified. He kept going back from waking up the disciples and praying the same thing. As Luke puts it: "yet, not my will but yours be done." This directly implies that God's will and Jesus' will were not the same. Jesus did not want to do what was required of him. He only wanted to so far as he was willing to.

For example, when one compromises to make happy the spouse, they in turn are happy because they made the other happy. It is not that one wants to compromise, but only wants to so far as they are willing. This, I believe, is what is present in the synoptic gospels' account of Jesus' prayer.

Jesus did not want to be crucified. He probably didn't want to die at all. He didn't know what God was going to decide to send him through, but he was willing.

I do not think that it is troublesome to say that the will of Jesus was not the same as the will of God, but some people whose Christology is much higher than mine would probably take issue. I believe that most Christians would have problems with that statement. I believe that statement is firmly established in the passages of Scripture mentioned above.

What does this mean then?

It seems that Jesus' connection with God did not include omniscience. It seems that Jesus' connection with God did not include the power to change the events himself. He was praying to God that God would change the events, because he didn't want to go through with it, and was hoping that maybe he wouldn't have to. What does this do about Atonement theories then? Jesus didn't want to die for the sins of the world? Jesus didn't want Christianity to be founded? One could argue that if the crucifixion and resurrection (since there couldn't be a resurrection without his death) did not happen, then Christianity would not exist, and we'd all be Jewish. That seems to be what Jesus prayed for. If Jesus didn't want to be crucified, then one could say that he had no idea what his death would mean. He didn't know that he was the perfect sacrificial lamb. He didn't know he was going to take the sins of the world upon him. He didn't know, and because of that, he didn't want to do it. This challenges us to rethink what we think about the crucifixion and what Jesus' death really meant. If Jesus didn't even know the results of his death, then how much are we allowed to read into it?

This makes Jesus a lot more human than most Christians may want to admit. I think this is very important though. Jesus suffered as we do. He was uncertain about things. He didn't know how the future was going to happen. He didn't know what God was going to do next. He was a scared human being who repeatedly prayed for there to be another way. His request was not granted.

That's something that we should take note of. God did not grant Jesus' request. Jesus, this "Son of God," this "Messiah," the great "I AM" in the flesh...couldn't ask hard enough to escape his fate. What we should also observe is that Jesus accepted God's will over his will. Jesus probably was pretty sure that God wasn't going to let him off the hook, and he accepted it. He said that God's will in his life should take precedence over his own human will. This is the example to follow. What is there to learn if we say that Jesus wasn't really praying for God to change his mind? What would it benefit us to view this as Jesus talking to himself for therapeutic reasons? The greatest lesson we can learn from these passages are when we look at Jesus as a scared human who doesn't know what's going to happen, but accepts the will of God in his life. This is as we all must do. We, like Jesus, are men incapable of knowing everything God is going to do. We should learn to pray as Jesus did, that God's will be done, not ours.

Stolen Philosophy

2007-02-27T11:05:00.001-05:00

I think people get famous for the strangest things.

I would like to state from the start that I do not think that I am a genius and I do not think I am some brilliant thinker. I am intelligent no doubt, but hardly any Einstein, and I do not intend this post to be a boast of my intellect, only an inquisitive look in the "genius" of certain concepts that have been glorified.

The first I was thinking of is the "Liar Paradox." In case you are not familiar with what this is (at least by that name), I will give an example.

This is a false statement.

Obviously, this is troubling. If the statement is false, then it would make it true, making it false, etc. So pretty much this is simply nonsense.

I figured that out when I was about 12. And yet it has been grappled with for over two millennia. Can't we just admit that it is nonsense and be done with it? If someone walks up to you and says "I can't speak a word of English," they are obviously quite mistaken and have just spoken a paradox. People get famous over grappling with this. Just look it up on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.iep.utm.edu/p/par-liar.htm) and see how many people got in there for talking about this kind of thing. It just seems quite elementary to me, but I suppose that may only reveal my own elementary mind.

Another thing I don't get is Rene Descartes. His famous "I think, therefore I am" from his Meditations on First Philosophy is pretty much universally known. Basically this statement confirms the existence of the mind of the one thinking. I know I exist because I can think. Everything I see may be an illusion, because eyes can be deceived. Everything I smell, taste, touch or hear may also be illusions, because they are only senses that can be faulty (The Matrix, anyone?). The only thing that is certain is that the mind exists. But I don't know that anyone else's mind exists, only that my own does. From this Descartes figures that God exists. This is one of the most famous philosophical discussions there has ever been, and I figured it out in the fourth grade.

I remember the conversation with my friend Adam in class. We were discussing how we knew that we existed, but not that the other did. We could be dreaming and not know it. We may not even be human, but only in our dream. Why couldn't I have been born a few hundred years earlier and written it down? I would have been famous...

Blast.

I wonder how many other Philosophical concepts are things that a ten year old had already figured out a century earlier and just never said anything. I can just imagine some old and broken man in the 1650s living his entire life wishing that he had done something worthwhile and then stumbling upon his friend Rene's manuscript Meditations on First Philosophy and having a stroke because he actually thought of it 40 years earlier.

Just a thought.

Can God Sin?

2007-02-22T00:04:00.002-05:00

From my earlier post on God's Morality, a question was raised on "Can God sin?" I do not claim to know the answer, but maybe by the end of my written thought process, I'll have somewhat of a conclusion and where I stand.

First we must define the terms.

God --> The divine being. Coming from the Christian faith, to me (and as I will refer to him throughout) God is an immaterial spirit who created the world and continues to exist in everything everywhere and reveals himself to humans here and there. That would probably suffice for my definition as far as this topic is concerned, although further clarification may be allowed.

Can --> What does it mean if I ask Can God do something. Is he able to? If he so chose to, he could imagine anything and do it. He could create the universe, destroy the universe, if he can. So notice the question is not would God do something, but can he, if he wanted to.

Now for the real topic. How do you define sin. There are 2 ways that I'm going to approach defining sin.

1. Sin --> Going against God, separation from God, not doing what God has commanded. This is a very popular definition. I would even say it's the (overwhelmingly) dominant definition in Christianity. In this model, God, being sovereign, makes up what is right and what is wrong. When he created the universe, he also "created" what was good. Good was doing what he said. Good brought people closer to God, and sin brought them away from God. Separation is the result of the action (sin), and the action (sin) is when we (the people) go against the commandments/instructions of God. Adam sinned because he ate the apple when he was told not to. Christians sin when we don't follow the Bible (the Bible for the purpose of argument here is going to be equivalent with God's commandments). How would everyone else sin? By not following the law anyway (as addressed by Paul in Romans). As Paul says, we all have the law of God written on our hearts, and when we sin, we're still to blame whether we know God's commands or not (I'm not telling you my own opinion, but how it is presented by Paul).

Whatever God does then, is good. If good is defined as what God is, then whenever we are good, we are being like God. When we love others, we are doing what God would do. Goodness is defined by God.

This model works I suppose, you have God as good, and he wants everyone on earth to be good as well. He tells us what to do (directly or indirectly), and then if we follow it we are on God's good side, and if not then we are not on his good side, which leaves us screwed. This is not the topic to discuss whether or not people who have never heard of God are doomed as sinners, but to ask if God can sin.

Ignore the statement "God can do anything" for a moment ok?

If loving others is good because it's what God would do (WWJD?), then we could form a perfect model of behavior by following what God would do. So to Christians, when Jesus shows up and people start saying that he is God, they say that if we do what Jesus did, we are doing what God would do because Jesus was/is God.

So by this model, if God got jealous of a man's wife and came down and struck the husband dead in a rage and then killed his wife in order to take her up to heaven, this would not be sin. If sin is defined by what God does/is, then this would still not be sin, because God is doing it.

This is very uncomfortable. Of course we would say God wouldn't do something like that, but we'd like to think that God could do it. So if we follow model 1 of sin, then God cannot sin, because as soon as he would do something that we'd like to call sin, it becomes not-sin because by definition it can't be (since God is doing it).

I reject this model. I think it can be inappropriately used (as my example above shows), and just leads to ridiculousness.

This leads to model 2.

2. Sin --> Moral code is independent of what God choses to do. Something isn't good because it is like God. We do not call God good because he defines what good is, but we call him good because he "follows" the moral code better than anyone. In this way, God could sin. We would again say that he would never sin, but we would admit the possibility that he could if he wanted to.

This is again uncomfortable. It is less uncomfortable, because we can say that Jesus (God) was the perfect human because he didn't sin.

As a side note, this is simiar to Pelagianism. This would imply that we could all be like Jesus, and choose not to sin. Pelagianism was declared heresy in 451 CE.

Also, neither of these models accounts for Original Sin. I'll leave it at that. Original sin doesn't make sense in these models and I may talk about it another time.

The biggest way that this model (2) of sin seems not quite right is that it makes God independent of morality. He didn't invent it, but abides by it. That just seems weird. It makes it seem as if God is not really inherently good, but has to try just like anyone else, and because he succeeds, we can worship him. This is definitely uncomfortable.

What then does that leave us with. To the question "Can God sin?" we are left with a yes or no that puts God in awkward positions.

I then challenge sin itself. I challenge the notion of it. But I will save that for another time. My conclusion on the question "Can God sin?" is that there is a problem with the question of sin. I would challenge the idea of God and sin that is all to common. Not that they don't exist, but that they are extremely misunderstood. I do not claim that I know something everyone else doesn't, but I would only ask people to think about things on their own, and don't just accept what you're told.

On a Tragedy

2007-02-21T21:50:00.000-05:00

I am only an undergraduate, and cannot boast of superior knowledge in the matters of church history, but I can comment on what I have learned, and in many aspects, I see the unfolding of Jesus' amazing message upon his followers as an unfortunate tragedy.

I call myself a Christian, although I know that probably the comfortable majority of others claiming the same title would disagree. I believe that it is not doctrine or theology that saves though, but God. I look to Jesus for inspiration. I look to God for help, for comfort, for guidance, for strength, for pretty much anything I would call good in me. But sometimes I realize that so many who share the same faith and same tradition have fallen so far away from intent, that I can't help but call it a constantly unfolding tragedy.

I suppose I should start at the beginning.

Jesus, a remarkable man and teacher, is unjustly sentenced to death for preaching radical love and peace. After the death of this man, his followers go out through the world proclaiming his teachings. Paul, the great missionary, never even met the pre-Easter Jesus, and yet spoke on behalf of God as a devout Jew and ex-pharisee. Years go by, martyrs die, and Jesus is deified as more than just any man. People start writing of his divinity, of how he was unlike any human, and even greater than any prophet who had come before him. People started calling him God in the flesh, the incarnation of the Jewish YHWH. Years go by and people start arguing about what this man was exactly. Was he God? Was he not God but equal to God? Was he less than God? What exactly was this man who reportedly healed the sick and made the blind man see? It was God, they decided. It was none other than the Old Testament YHWH who created the world and spoke to Moses to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt. But did this man Jesus have a body? Or did he only appear to? Does he still have a body? What happened to his body? What happened to his body if he ever did have one? Did he know everything? As God, did he limit his powers while incarnated? Did he change? Did he cease to be everywhere when he was on earth? People started dying for this man, they were dying, people with families, people with children, people with brothers or sisters, young people with futures ahead of them, elderly people with full lives behind them. They all died for this man, this God. What was this man? Does he still have holes in his hands? Does he still wince when he walks from the holes in his feet? Does he still feel my pain? Does he still care about me when I have a bad day?

Then they had to make sure that the correct teaching made its way through history. So we had to make sure that we got everyone on the same page. There must be unity among believers, since we all believe in the same thing, and there was only one Truth, they must make sure that everyone believes it. Get people who were with Jesus. Of course, that must be the way to do it, because I'm sure that after hanging around somebody for a couple years make them worthy of speaking on account of him, knowing exactly what he would have said had he been there. And then when they all die, I guess the real teachings belong to the followers of them. Because, of course, I would know exactly what my grandparents would believe on any matter because I was raised by those that they raised. So a few generations after Jesus of course it must have been the same way, and I'm sure that something like "Authority" is something that can be passed from one person to another at will. I'm sure that if I taught someone for 20 years they would know what I would say if asked about something new that I had not taught them. But the bishops of the old church kept the Truth. The one and only. But then they disagreed. So what truth? Who knew exactly who this Jesus was?

When they start disagreeing about who Jesus was, what Jesus was, what he wasn't, they must be heretics. Let's kill them. That seems to be appropriate. Let's go to war against them. Let's tell them that they cannot be accepted into the kingdom of God that Jesus talked about because they don't believe the doctrines that Jesus never mentioned.

Let's deny Jesus' offer in his name. That sounds like a good idea.

Let's tell everyone what we think Jesus meant, and let's look at what other people thought he meant. Let's look at a few writings that have made it through and see if what we already think about Jesus is reflected in it, and if it's so, then they must be right. Then eventually let's start associating them with the Hebrew Bible, and let's start calling it all divine. Let's start making up theories about inerrancy and God's infallible word because it allows us to use the Bible as evidence for whatever we want it to and claim that it's not our own ideas, but it's God's.

Let's tell someone they're not a Christian because they don't want to believe what someone wrote about Jesus is really not written by them but written by God and therefore the complete Truth. Let's find something to cling to that will allow us to condemn people that aren't like us in the name of an incredible man that reached out to those same people.

Let's tell everybody else that we're the only ones who have it right. Lucky us eh?

I think Jesus would be absolutely appalled at what his teachings became. I think Jesus of Nazareth would find it disgusting that people learned how to hate and discriminate by being raised on "his words." I think Jesus would laugh out loud at the philosophies of those only several generations after his death. I think he would be sad to know that all of his work in trying to promote love and acceptance turned into obnoxious self-righteousness and elitist inclusiveness.

Am I saying that we should not be Christians, not at all. I think we should reevaluate what it means to say that we are one. I think Jesus would weep to those that said you had to believe that these ancient writings we have are divine and as long as we believe every word of them we'll go to Heaven when we die. I think Jesus would weep if he knew that his "followers" did not love those that were "sinners" and instead told them that they were doomed (unless they became like us). I think Jesus would hardly want to be labeled a "Christian" in our society today.

I am proud of being a follower of Jesus. I believe that he was unlike any other man that has ever lived or ever will. I believe that he has the power to save us in this life. I believe that God is revealed through him in a unique way, and that through Jesus we can see what God is like. God is like the caring parent, the loving husband, the accepting friend. God loves us, but it seems like Christians today would like to think that he loves them the best. I think that Jesus is in heaven with God looking down shaking his head at his flock. I think that we could all learn something from him. He died because he wanted us all to love. He died to overcome the power of death. He lived to teach us how.

It is a tragedy, I believe, to see what Christianity has become, and to see how far it's fallen. Oh what it must be like to love others. I hope Christianity comes around to doing that some day.

Spontaneous Treatise on God's Morality

2007-02-17T20:18:00.000-05:00

Does God have to be moral? Or do morals come from God? What is a moral law? Is a law moral because it is from God? Or is it from God because it is moral? And if the law is from God because the law is moral in the first place, then does that mean God is following rules that are somehow outside of himself? Even if it is completely natural for God to be moral, if God caused a law to come into being because it is already inherently moral, then was God not the creator of the moral? In which case is God subordinate to a higher law?

If God is the creator of morals, and no law contains morality unless it is from God, then God is that good in which the laws come from. One should not murder because God said not to (all biblical criticism aside, for the sake of argument, I am assuming that God directly gave Moses the Decalogue with the above commandment). There is no other reason that one should not murder aside from the fact that God said not to.

This is almost uncomfortable. I think most people, even nonreligious people, would agree that murder is wrong. It is unkind, it produces grief and anger in other persons, and is often motivated by selfish greed or malevolence. If one were to say that the law is only moral because it is from God, then what is one to make of every atheist who agrees with the law? What be their motivation? It seems that there are two responses to this. Either these atheists are hiding a secret belief in God, or the laws are somehow moral even outside of belief in God's divine command.

But if we say that morality exists outside of God's command, then does it make God less? Does it mean that God did not "create" or "invent" morality? or that morality exists apart from God? What would this imply? I really don't know, honestly. Perhaps morality and God are inseparable, and that God is somehow morality. When 1 John describes God as love, it directly states that God is love. The way the letter reads, it seems as if the morality in which I speak of is love, and that love is the measurement of morality. God is love, therefore, God is morality. Sin is therefore lawlessness (as it states in 3:4). When you sin, you are going against love, against morality, therefore against God; this is lawlessness. But could it also be stated that lawlessness is sin? In this case, is it only sin because it broke the law of love? that it broke the law of God? This seems to lead back to the previous comments that sin is only sin because it breaks the law of God (which also happens to be the law of love).

Where does this put us then? It would seem to me that morality is the law of love, which is also the law of God. It does not appear that the law of love is separate from God, but that it is inseparable, but still knowable. The law of love is present in culture and society, and so much so that I believe we can see the consequences of disobeying it, and the benefits of following it. It is for this reason that atheists can still believe in the law of love, but not for reasons of God. One could also argue that the law of love is inside every human being as part of our divine image from our creator.

Therefore it seems that we should not murder people because it would be against the law of love and the law of God, not necessitating that one needs to believe in God to follow the law of love.

I feel like I am not bring the Bible into this enough, so I wish to comment on certain biblical themes. Here's an example: The bible does not have good rape laws. The laws on rape are to the extent that unless a woman is out in a field, it is not rape. If the woman is raped in the city and is married or engaged, she is to be stoned to death as well as the attacker because she did not cry out, therefore it mustn't have been rape. The attacker is punished not for rape, but for violating another man's property (Deuteronomy 22:23-24). Furthermore, if the woman who is raped is unattached, then the attacker must by law marry the woman(Deuteronomy 22:28-29). This would mean that if a man wanted a woman for himself, it would be completely lawful to rape her, and then admit to it in order to ensure he would be able to do so for as long as he desired. Women were not allowed to initiate a divorce, so the woman is trapped.

What this example demonstrates is that biblical law may not be compatible with the "law of love" which I have equated with the "law of God." My response to this is that the culture in which these Deuteronomistic laws was very patriarchal and simply did not treat women with the respect that we feel is owed to them today.

The importance of this example was to demonstrate a biblical law as being separate from the law of love. Does this mean that the Bible is not from God? In a case like this, I say yes, and that is the topic of another discussion, and it shall suffice to say that the Bible was written in a culture by men with their own worldview. In this case, it is the worldview that women were property.

If, then, the laws of the Bible are not completely compatible at all times with the law of God, how are we then to distinguish laws against murder from laws corrupted by cultural bias? This I will address further later, but will return to an original point of inquiry.

The question remaining from above is whether or not God is independent on morality. I am not led to believe that he is. Can it be, then, that God acts outside of morality? Could God commit a sin? That is, could God do something contrary to the nature of love? I would assume that most would find that question rather easy to answer, and that obviously the answer is no on all counts. Then can God murder? This may seem elementary, but I must pose the question anyway. The response would likely be that it is not murder for God to kill someone, because it is his right to do it. He is bringing us to him. Murder in the world is a banishment, whereas when God kills a body it is a uniting with God (unless the person goes to Hell, which, although the topic of another discussion, will be for the sake of simplicity referred to as a judgment deserved). Could God commit rape, then? Again, the obvious answer (Please don't give me any "God can do anything" alright? That would again be another discussion) is no. God would not do such a thing, even if he was a physical being that could (Jesus is also another discussion). It seems now that God follows his law quite well. Is it also, though, that he expects us to be like him? If we bring up Jesus just for a moment, and go under the assumption that he was God, then one might be inclined to believe that God wants us to be like him, and showed us what that is through Jesus. I believe that is a very basic Christian belief. But I would call attention to one of the most known speeches of Jesus. In the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5), Jesus says to love your enemies, and to be perfect as God is (vs. 43-48). In this case, we are commanded not to hate our enemies, and not even to wish evil on them. We are to love them as we would love ourselves, we are to pray for them. This is considered in Christianity as one of the most holy and great laws that one could follow.

So here is the climax.

If we are to be like God, and that means to love and pray for our enemies, then what does God do to them? Does God send his enemies to Hell?

Does God hold humans to a higher standard that he holds himself?

If one argues that we should love our enemies because it's not our place to condemn them, but God's, then that is saying that God would not follow what Jesus said in Matthew 5.

The law of love, which is the law of God, seems to say that God does not send people to Hell, because that would be unloving.

Now one may bring the Bible in it again. Yes, the New Testament Jesus talks about Hell (mostly Matthew), and I would say that a discourse on Hell belongs to another discussion, but since I brought it up, I will only say briefly that just as I have reviewed biblical rape laws and concluded that they were the product of a certain society, and not divine commandments, the same may be said of any discussion of Hell in the New Testament (since it's not in the Old Testament), and that I will discuss that on another occasion.

This was completely unplanned and minimally organized or structured before actually writing it, and it probably raised more questions that it asked, but I must say that I do not have answers for everything here, but that I am ever on a quest for them. Not that I will ever know the answers, but it is worth looking. This is the nature of my mind, and I do tend to enjoy this confusion with great satisfaction.

Introduction

2007-02-13T15:05:00.000-05:00

Hello all, this is now my blog, of which I do not know how successful I will be at keeping it updated, but I thought may be worth a try. I will attempt to maintain this page as an outlet for theological/philosophical ramblings. Welcome all.