Tag Archives: christianity

Light Weight

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In various things I’ve been reading on some of the blogs I frequent, and in just assessing myself and my approach to both the physical and the spiritual world, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “light of Christ” and “light of God” thing.

That is, as a Christian, I should be a reflection, as much as possible, of my savior and my father in Heaven. Their light, via the Holy Spirit, should shine through me. Ideally, in promoting the gospel, I will be both a beacon to draw people into discussions about faith and salvation, and a lighthouse to help point them in the right direction. Or a candle to help them study something and understand it as it relates to the Word of God.

But it occurs to me that this is a much heavier burden and responsibility than it might at first seem. It’s already daunting enough to try to be the best person I can be and to sometimes stop thinking of my wants so that my duty to God can be carried out.

What is more daunting is to realize that light isn’t always a good thing. We are supposed to be lights for God and Jesus, but sometimes, we don’t illuminate but rather blind people.

Shining a flashlight into a person’s eyes is not generally something that person will desire. It will make them look away, and it might evoke a nasty response if the flashlight is held there long enough. Going overboard and saying too much, too fast to someone about Christianity can be so generally blinding as to make it impossible to see the core truths and foundational things a person needs to start with before they dive deeply into a faith walk.

And, well, the military and special forces police officers sometimes uses flash grenades to stun and disorient people. That’s essentially light as a weapon.

I try to be light in this blog. And I don’t refrain from being snarky and even obnoxious at times. I don’t know that any of that will change any time soon, but I wonder if it must one day. Do the words and attitudes I throw out help to guide people in to learn more?

Or are the words I use (foul or otherwise) actually flash grenades that will do nothing but harm?

I don’t have answers. But it does bear examination.

And, hopefully, personal illumination.

Disproving Jesus

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Most atheists with whom I have interacted wisely stick to the argument that religion and faith are silly notions after centuries of increasing scientific discovery, and that Jesus, while a fine guy, couldn’t be the son of a God that doesn’t exist.

I understand this belief system. I really do. I even respect it, as much as I would respect any non-Christian religious belief system with which I did not agree.

But some poor fools in subsets of the atheist camp insist on doing something more: Arguing that Jesus never existed.

The thing is, how many ancient people in the historical record—religious, philosophical or otherwise—can we really prove existed? Siddartha Buddha? Moses? Sun Tzu? Aristotle?

We accept the existence of certain people based on a faith in the historical record. Either they wrote things themselves, people wrote about them, or both.

The New Testament documents, the gospels and the letters both, are among the most enduring and complete historical records around. I’m not saying that they can be proven to be 100% accurate in the details, but many surviving historical documents about famous figures we know to have existed (like Alexander the Great) were written centuries after they died. Between fragments of multiple copies of the New Testament documents and complete documents from within mere decades of Jesus’ life and death, we have sufficient proof—combined with mentions of him by Jewish authorites and historians of the time—to make the case that he existed.

Argue all you want about the divinity or the details, but he existed, and he made a splash when he arrived on the scene. A splash with ripples that continue well into today and far into the future.

Yet there are some atheists who continue to go through convoluted arguments about how Jesus was made up, or Jesus was an amalgam of multiple figures at the time. They are intent on proving that he didn’t exist, which is just as fruitless, pointless and stupid as Christians who feel they have to find Jesus’ final resting place and prove that’s where he was buried or trot out the Shroud of Turin as definitely being the burial shroud of the Christ. I’m all for archeology and science. And sometimes, they can bear fruit on filling in gaps and explaining things that once didn’t make sense in the Old and New Testaments.

But proving that you’ve found something of Jesus’ probably is virtualy impossible. Just like proving he didn’t exist.

And I wonder, why the drive to prove he doesn’t exist? If you don’t believe in his divinity, fine. But why try to expunge him from the historical record?

Unless he threatens you. Unless on some level, you are afraid he might exist as savior and Lord, and your faith that he isn’t divine rests of trying to convince yourself he never lived at all, much less rose from the dead.

Mind you, I’m not talking about atheists in general, whom I can respect even when they irritate the hell out of me. What I mean are those who insist on trying to wipe Jesus out entirely.

Because they remind me too much of the people who try to insist the Holocaust never happened. Sure, we say it’s something you cannot ignore or deny, but look how their efforts gain a tiny bit of traction with every decade that passes, with every survivor of it who dies. One day, decades or centuries in the future, people will be able to easily say, “That couldn’t have happened,” and the Holocaust may one day be relegated to mythology, even though it happened. Or, people may say it was a huge campaign of lies and disinformation, and wasn’t nearly as bad as the record says.

So, unless you’re planning to negate the existences of a lot of other people in ancient history, please give up trying to disprove Jesus’ existence. It’s intellectually dishonest and smacks of a cover-up job.

Stupid Christians

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So, mostly, I’ve grown accustomed to people making blanket statements about how Christians are basically stupid.

That is, if you are strong in your belief or faith  you have automatically abandoned all ability to think logically, think critically, question authority, or have any objective opinion worth hearing.

My latest reminder of that is in a comment under the “Christian Sans” post at Deus Ex Malcontent, part of which comment goes:

I only think it is pathetically sad that religious people can only think in terms of right and wrong according to their God of choice, and not in terms of “Okay, how or why does this person do or think this?” Religion gets in the way of objective thought, period. There is no question in my mind that anyone who professes to me to be highly religious is also highly retarded and sheep-like in their morality and almost undoubtedly opinionated to the point of absolute frustration.

I know the commenter didn’t really call out Christians specifically, but really, that’s the group that mostly gets called out on stupidity via faith. Next up on the list to get slammed are the Muslims, but because of concerns about racial and ethnic slurs, liberal and progressive folk (I consider myself fairly liberal and progressive by the way, despite my total faith in God the Father and Jesus the Lord) don’t pick on them as much. I have yet to really hear anyone slam Jews for lacking the ability to think, except from time to time when truly conservative Jews or Israel’s policies come up. Scientologists get slammed too, but that isn’t really a religion…it’s a cultish L. Ron Hubbard fan club. And as yet, I have heard zero comment about lack of intelligence among Buddhists, Wiccans (or other Pagans), Hindus, etc.

Anyway, my point isn’t to rant about how this irritates me, partly because it irritates me less than it used to, if only because I’m developing thicker emotional calluses.

My point is that I think when people slam the intelligence of religious folks, they miss the point. Generally speaking, there are many intelligent and thoughtful people with strongly held religious beliefs. Yes, even Christians. The problem isn’t with people who put their faith in Jesus…or Allah…or Whomever. The problem is with people who blindly follow a religious leader or religious institution. It’s generally organizations and leaders who put wrongheaded thoughts into people’s heads in a way that makes them really stick.

You see, I don’t put my faith in an institution. Nor even a specific denomination. At various times in my life, I’ve been Catholic, Baptist, Congregational and totally non-denominational. That’s because I go to a church to get community and to get my soul feed through the hearing of the Word of God, not to join a damn club. It’s being around people with some common touchpoints and it’s about getting a little edification. When a pastor or institution makes me feel unwelcome, when it starts creating its own special dogma or rules for people to follow aside from God’s, or when it just gets boring or silly or rude, I leave. I find a new church home.

My loyalty isn’t to a pastor or a physical church. My loyalty is to The Church, with a capital “c.” The one that God wanted established through Jesus. Now, keeping my eye on what Jesus taught and told us to do, and filtering that through most of what the New Testament writers shared…well, I can do pretty damn well being accepting of all sorts of people and holding all sorts of opinions and even having many intelligent thoughts about the world.

I don’t base my politics on my religious beliefs. I don’t base my science on the Book of Genesis. I don’t pick and choose whom I will befriend based on whether they believe what I believe.

And I know that I’m not alone in this. It may be that many Christians allow themselves to be sheeple. But at the same time, so do many people in general. They blindly follow their political leaders or their nation without a care in the world. They follow shopping trends or rack up their debt or buy shit that Sarah Jessica Parker wears…because they are often sheeple.

People in general have an aversion to deep reflection and critical thinking. And objective thinking in its truest form is pretty fucking rare. Most people don’t want to lead or dance to their own drumbeat. They want to be led.

That, my friends, is the problem. Not religion. Because while there are many deep-thinking atheists and agnostics, there are also plenty of them who are just as slavishly stupid as Christians are made out to be. They just choose entirely different ways to express it.

One Nation, After God

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So, as you may have heard, not only are we in a post-racial America now that Barack Obama has been elected president (yeah, right…), we also may be on the brink of the End of Christian America (cue up the ominous music…and go here if you want to read an article about this matter).

OK, so fewer Americans self-identify as Christians. More people identify as having no particular religious beliefs or profess to be atheists. And “only” a third of Americans think of themselves as born-again.

And I say: So what?

What is the frickin’ problem here? Why are so many Christians so up in arms about this? As a Christian myself, who is born again, this trend strikes me as neither a surprise nor, in fact, even a real issue.

I say this for two reasons: one of them political/social and the other biblical.

The Political and Social Aspect

Regardless of the ranting and ravings of the more froth-at-the-mouth conservative commentators, the United States of America is not a Christian nation, and never was. It doesn’t matter that our money says “In God We Trust.” It doesn’t matter that the Founding Fathers were either Christians or Deists. It doesn’t matter that the government added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, (62 years after the pledge was first introduced, incidentally). We are not a Christian nation.

The Founding Fathers expressly dictated that there should be no state religion. They were trying to escape the tyranny of a government that told them what to believe and taxed them from afar while giving them no say in the running of their nation. And even if they had put Christianity into the Constitution as the official religion of the the land—which they didn’t—they had designed the Constitution so that it could be amended later to change with the times and evolve. Even if they secretly desired everyone in the nation to be a Christian, they left open the intrinsic right—and expectation—that not everyone would be so.

If we are going to insist that this be a Christian nation because the Founding Fathers were Christian, we should still embrace other notions they had at the time, such as the idea that only white landowners should vote. We should therefore revoke voting rights from all women, most of the men in the nation, and all non-whites. If that sounds good to you, you scare me and should immediately hole up in your bunker until you starve to death.

In a nation that embraced immigration and encourages people all over the world to come and enjoy our “American Dream” by becoming citizens of our nation, or at least fans of it from overseas, it is ridiculous to think that we would remain overwhelming Christian. There is more than one religion in the world. And two of the other biggies, Judaism and Islam, come from essentially the same roots as Christianity, so we should expect them to stick around too and even grow.

I don’t want a nation to base it policies and laws on a single religion’s belief system. So, frankly, I’m glad that conservative Christians aren’t calling all the political shots and able to freely frame laws around their specific religious precepts.

The Biblical Take on Things

But beyond the political and social reasons why should neither be surprised nor frightened by a lessening of the “Christianity” of the United States, there is the biblical aspect.

Jesus and the writers of the New Testament have all told us, multiple times, that people will ultimately turn away from God for the most part. It has been made crystal clear that a time will come when Christians will not necessarily be in a position of prestige or even safety. “Men will become lovers of themselves and not of God.” Furthemore, “we will be persecuted for Jesus’ sake.” Need I go on?

If you’re Christian and you’ve read the Bible at all, you should expect that the world will gradually drift away from Christianity. We were never promised a world in which folks would mostly be praising God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost and just a few people would be lost. God would prefer that no one be lost, but the fact is that the world is supposed to go away from God’s away. That’s is what we’ve been told to expect.

To fret about gradual movements (or even seismic-level ones) toward that and to argue about how wrong it is strikes me a lot like complaining that teenagers often don’t listen to their parents or like their decisions. Sure, it’s a valid topic of conversation, but the core fact you’re addressing is only going to come as a surprise to someone who’s totally clueless about reality.

This doesn’t change the fact that we should be ready to share the Gospel with those who are interested or who don’t really understand it. But to be surprised that Christianity would fall by the wayside should be no surprise at all. That road was predicted more than 2,000 years ago for us.

Taking the Leap

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No surprise to regular readers that I have semi-regular discussions with atheists and agnostics on this blog and at others. I don’t try to covert them, because I’m not clinically insane nor masochistic, but I think it’s great to make sure we all understand each other. Much better than one side calling the other a bunch of superstitious idiots, while the other side is calling them narrow-minded secularists.

In fact, TitforTat and The Word of Me have probably been my most frequent foils lately (and I mean that in the nicest recreational fencing/dueling way possible). In terms of longer dialogs, though, TWOM had a conversation with me here with regard to a Mrs. Blue post here, and I’m trading thoughts with him over at one of his postsover at his blog right now.

It’s good stuff, and I like the conversations. As long as no one gets to calling me an out-of-touch looney-toon, all’s good (that hasn’t happened often, and most of those people I don’t even try to engage again). But I have been thinking a lot lately about what divides a spiritual believer from a non-believer, and it strikes me that as much as we intellectually can appreciate each other, it is hard to truly explain ourselves to each other. For both sides, it seems self-evident that our position is the correct one, and it troubles us on some level that the other side hasn’t broken through to our way of thinking.

This struck me in particular when TWOM recently posted in one of his comments something to the effect of “I’ve read the Bible and I’ve tried to understand it and believe.” I’m probably misquoting him a bit, but that was the gist as I recall. And it’s been said to me before by other agnostics and atheists that they have tried to read the Bible with an open mind and “just don’t get it.”

And this is precisely where the rubber meets the road: Faith vs. concrete facts. Intellect vs. surrender.

This is not to say that the faithful lack intellect nor that the doubters and atheists lack any kind of “spiritual” or moral core. Far from it. But here is the best example I can come up with as a person of faith:

Imagine a person who decides to go skydiving. There are a few likely scenarios.

She completely freaks out with fear and doesn’t go to the skydiving takeoff point at all. This would analogous, I believe, to someone who says “Yes, I’ll consider your points and/or read that Bible thing” but never really tries.

She goes to the site, freaks out, and just cannot get on the plane, or she gets on the plane but cannot get herself out of that seat until it lands again. She never jumps, but she at least went to where it would all start. I liken this to the person who does give some consideration to it, but never really turns off the literal/concrete parts of their brain. I mean, I personally enjoy and respect (and use) critical thinking, but you cannot think your way to faith.

She makes it to the door of the plane while it is in midair, but she cannot make the jump. She sees all that open sky beneath her and feels the excitement and fear in her gut. She has a visceral and emotional reaction, but making the leap is just too much. She goes back to her seat. Here we have a person who has managed to open their heart and might see a glimpse of what the faith believer sees, but on some level, the thought of letting go is too much. Whether because of fear that it might be true, and a desire not to find out and have to consider answering to a higher power, or whether fear that faith will lessen them somehow; reduce their intellect or spin them too far away from provable reality perhaps.

She jumps out of the plane and goes for the ride. This would be the person who does make the leap from purely temporal and rational thought to faith. It is a wild and scary ride sometimes, and the person might regret it in some ways. The person might even decide one day to reverse course and deny that faith she tasted or decide not to embrace it fully, but the leap was indeed made, whether for a short time or a lifetime.

None of this is to suggest that atheists or agnostics are cowards. Fear isn’t altogether a bad thing. And they, in turn, could accuse someone of me of being fearful of considering that there isn’t anything beyond this life; that there isn’t any intelligence guiding the universe. They would argue that I am afraid to let go of a comfortable superstition.

Myself, I don’t feel fear at the possibility there might not be a God. I have considered it. Hell, I spent most of my life ignoring spiritual things and the church and might as well have been an agnostic or even atheist, despite having been a baptized Catholic who occasionally went to church. I still find myself at a crossroads at times when I ask, “Am I spiritually delusional?” In the end analysis, having made the leap and feeling the swell of my spirit and sensing things beyond the physical and intellectual, I simply cannot conceive of there not being a God.

It is, to me, as clear and as unassailable as the existence of gravity. That doesn’t mean I don’t doubt some of the specifics of the Bible or wonder if my spiritual path is the right one. But for me, taking the leap wasn’t simply a transient thing. I live in a world where God exists, and I can no more deny Him than I can deny myself.

In the “In” Crowd, Part 2

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Well, nothing like having “part 1″ of a post and then following that up with the second portion roughly three weeks later—particularly when I said I’d follow up in a couple days. *sigh*

Anyway, back in mid-December I posted about an issue that irritates me: How a lot of people get riled  at Christians because they believe their way is the only way, even though most faiths are guilty of the same conceit.

Well, my follow-up is a related topic that was itching at the back of my head from a post—well, actually, the comments to a post—at the blog Losing My Religion in which someone hispanic-couplenamed Yaelbatsarah was railing about how Christian evangelists break up homes and marriages. The original point of the post was sort of a support and encouragement from the blog author SocietyVs (with a call out to his readers for assistance) for two women whose husbands had been sucked in by a “prophet” calling himself a Christian and claiming to speak to Jesus directly and presenting his personal letters as a new gospel. (That’s what I recall. This post was months ago, so I’m somewhat sketchy). The wives were disturbed because their husbands were so into this cult that they were neglecting their families. It was an unhealthy thing, as these guys were pretty much fawning over their “prophet” and disregarding their marriages and the actual Word of God.

Here are some snippets I had copy-pasted from Yaelbatsarah that stuck me, as he (I’m assuming maleness based on memory…if Yael is a woman, my very sincere and extensive apologies) basically found at least a twinge of bitter humor and righteous payback somehow in the way we were worrying about what this “prophet” (whom we were referring to as Speedothy, as his name is Timothy and his nickname Speedy…yeah, a prophet named Speedy…) was doing to these two marriages. He seemed to think we were hypocritical in bemoaning the fate of these two women’s marriages because according to him, evangelist Christians who are mainstream supposedly do the same thing. Here are some of Yael’s comments:

What about today? Do you target husbands or wives from other religions for evangelism? What do you think happens within their homes if you do? Is it only a problem when the shoe is on the other foot? BTW, my utmost sympathies are with the two women involved here, yet I have to wonder, my people, my children, are targeted for evangelism all the time. Do we have their sympathies?

I think Speedothy is totally wrong in what he is doing, however, if you go around teaching your gospel with no regard for the home lives you may be disrupting, than you are no different.

All through history followers of Paul have attempted to convince Jews OUR sacred texts mean something other than what we have read and have been taught AND that we Jews should instead follow the teachings from Paul’s letters. The similarity in these cases is quite glaring. The difference is only as I said, with the shoe on the other foot all of the sudden this is a problem, but when it is YOU doing it to other people its not a problem at all! How convenient! Don’t you think if I asked Speedothy he would also rationalize his taking people away from Christianity, claiming his is true Christianity, just as many Christians rationalize taking Jews away from Torah, by claiming their view is the true Torah? Don’t get me wrong, I think Speedothy has gone off the deep end, but I don’t see how what he’s doing is any different than what was done by Paul 2000 years ago nor what is done by many Christians today.

For the record, here’s part of a response I made to Yaelbatsarah, though I never got a reply to it as far as I recall:

In principle, I see where Yaelbatsarah is going in trying to spin parallels between was was done some 2,000 years ago that sometimes pit spouses and families against each other with regard to faith and saying that it’s hypocritical for us to assume Speedy is any different, worse or better…but there are some important points to note:

Paul seemed to prefer NOT to be having married men out there on the trail preaching the gospel and leaving their families behind. He wrote that he would rather someone be celibate and devoted to spreading the good news. Better, he said, to be married and not to sin in the flesh, but best to not have sex (or marriage) to muddle things up at all. It didn’t seem to be his goal or desire to pit one spouse against another. In fact, Christian spouses were urged to stay WITH their spouses even if they didn’t themselves also convert. Speedy seems to be saying choose me over your wife.

These are snapshots, and I hope they aren’t too out of context. That post and its comments were very long and covered a lot of territory beyond the marriage issue. But some of the things Yael said really pissed me off, to be honest.

I mean, why the venom? I suspect that either he has had a personal experience of someone close to him converting, or knows one or more people who have. He seems to have an attitude that evangelism has personally wronged him and his fellow Jews and who knows who else.

So, if it’s OK to blast evangelists for this, does that mean that when someone from a Christian family converts to Judaism to marry the person he or she loves, then the medieval-mixed-coupleChristian family has the right to demonize the fiance as some sort of religious seducer who has set out to destroy their family or has let “love” get in the way of doing the right thing by “leaving their child alone”?

And why, pray tell, does this have to tear a marriage or a family apart? If one spouse becomes Christian and the other one doesn’t feel the same way, we are not told in the Bible to browbeat that other spouse and cram Jesus down their throat. In fact, Paul writes in First Corinthians, chapter 7 (verses 12-16):

But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her. And a woman who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave; the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace. For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife?

Also, I just don’t get where Yael’s sense that evangelists are preying on relationships comes from. It almost seems like he suggests that Christian evangelists often target one spouse to get to both or to get to a whole family. I’m not saying that it can’t happen; of course it could. But by and large, evangelism is about sharing the Gospel and leaving the non-believer to make their own decision, ask questions, etc. Evangelism is about presenting Jesus as an option, not trying to seduce or trick people into it.

And Yael is clear that he thinks Christian evangelists are insensitive to marriages. Well, seeing as how we believe the only trustworthy path to salvation is through Jesus, it would be pretty damn insensitive of us not to tell others about that path. We can’t make anyone walk it, but we are supposed to point to it and say, “You really should take that road. I’m just sayin’…”

It’s not about insensitivity. I think that an average evangelist would much rather reach out to both people in a marriage at the same time and share with them equally. Well, our contacts and friendships in life don’t always work that way. A good evangelist will share when and where he or she can, without pressure, and that might mean reaching out to just one person in a marriage. Is the evangelist supposed to say, “Well, gee, the other spouse might not like Christianity. Oh well, I guess I don’t mind if I pass on the opportunity to help this spouse save his/her soul. I’ll just assume they wouldn’t care anyway.”

I’m sure there are more than a few husbands out there with very old-fashioned values who didn’t like “nosy broads” telling their wives about being liberated and equal and shit. Does that make those women wrong for wanting to empower women they saw as being held down? In the end, it’s the choice of a spouse what to do in a case like this and the choice of the other spouse how to handle it.

To demonize evangelism itself as destructive to marriages and families—whether Christian evangelism or some other faith’s—is simply ignorant and wrong.

So It’s An Uneven Field by Miz Pink

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I know Deke keeps an even head most of the time and a sunny disposition with people who think people who believe in God are nutter-butters. He doesn’t let it get to him much but I do see times when he clearly gets a little miffed (even if he tries to hide it) that his faith somehow puts him in a category of not being “in touch with reality” or not being a “critical thinker.”

So as I see things here at this blog in the comments sometimes and stalk him around some of the other blogs he posts at I can almost see him getting a twitch in the corner of his eye and balling his fists at times. Not often but enough.

I understand it because I get irritated when I see some of that too. As much as I don’t like Christians who brow-beat everyone else and slam them with “your going to hell” when they disagree and crap…I also don’t like atheists and agnostics who act like people of faith are simple-minded folks who are holding onto fairy tales.

But you know what? I’m not going to get irritated anymore, and I’m gonna encourage Deke not to either.

Jesus told us we would catch flack for our beliefs and for lifting him up. He told us we would have tribulations and trials and he told us to turn the other cheek.

People who are opposed to faith-led beliefs are sometimes going to be irritating and even insulting at times. They are going to be in many cases dismissive. I accept that. And as hard as it makes my job or Deke’s. As much as it might hurt to not get the same consideration that we give to them (I’m not lumping everyone into this boat…there are atheists and agnostics who are respectful but some are just jerks) well…we just need to accept that they are going to want an uneven playing field.

They are going to want to throw science into our faces and remind us that we can’t prove the existence of God, then rub salt into the wound by telling us that we shouldn’t even be trying to use science or archeology or anything else either because the Bible tells us faith is enough. They will continue to tell us it’s silly to believe in a God that always existed but refuse to explain how that’s sillier than the fact we live in a universe thats clearly always existed or came from nothing at some point…just like God.

It’s not worth getting upset about. And after this post, I probably shouldn’t even point out this mindset again…because it’s not something we should let get to us. As believers in Christ, it isn’t our right to expect a level playing field in discussions about faith with ANYONE. We might get level fields. Sometimes we might get the high ground in a debate and have the advantage. But we shouldn’t expect anything to be “fair” and we shouldn’t let that stop us. We should just be ready to take the heat and turn the cheek and keep on going.

In the “In” Crowd, Part 1

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angel-of-light1Once again, posting far later than I like, but it was a busy day.

It’s been suggested to me a couple times that I post on the subject of why everybody’s so down on Christians because they believe their way is the only way.

This won’t be long, so consider it a prelude to a longer rant/diabtribe/discussion.

At another blog I frequent, in the comments to a recent post, someone mentioned that 4 billion people on this planet or thereabouts don’t follow Christianity, with the suggestion (or so it seemed) that this was somehow evidence that belief in the Judeo-Christian God and in Jesus was wrong.

As one Christian pointed out quietly, why does the fact that 4 billion people believe something else mean he shouldn’t believe what he believes?

And it’s a valid point, for a number of reasons, but mostly because those 4 billion people don’t all believe in the same thing. Sure, a lot of agnostics and most of  the atheists will argue that’s virtual proof that nobody is right, but that’s a line of discussion I’ll tackle another time. The point is, they all think they are right, too, and they believe in a multitude of things.

But I don’t really hear people complaining that the Jews believe they are right or that the Hindus believe they are right or that the Shinto folks believe they are right or that the pagans believe they are right or anything else.

Occasionally, someone grumbles about the fact that the Muslims think they are right, but usually only when some militant offshoot goes on a murderous jihad or something.

Mostly though, they complain that the Christians think they are right, and they turn this into some kind of indictment that Christians are evil, closed-minded, hateful individuals.

Put in that context, doesn’t seem so fair, does it?

I’m sure someone will now mutter (or decide that they should type in my comments) that “Sure, that might be the case, but how often do those other religions go out and try to convert people?”

Well, first of all, at the core of Jesus’ commands to us as his followers, we are to spread the gospel. Thus, evangelism is part of our religion and thus our faith walk.

But more to the point, really, when was the last time a Christian proselytized to you? Really. Not that often for most of us. Sure, we run into the periodic person handing out leaflets about the ways to avoid Hell or somesuch, but the fact is, the vast majority of Christians hardly evangelize at all. They should be, in some way, even if it’s low-key, but they don’t.

So, I guess my point to those of you who hate Christians thinking that they are right: What’s the effing problem?

More ranting on the topic in a day or two, probably.

Modern Gods

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moment-of-glory1So, I wasn’t planning on posting today. I mean, hey, it’s almost 11 p.m. Why bother, right? But I feel compelled. And I did have a thought leap to mind.

I’m reading a novel by Neil Gaiman called American Gods and it’s an interesting read. Not finished with it yet but I wanted to share a little something from the novel that made me think about some stuff. What I’ll be saying here really shouldn’t be any kind of spoiler, but if you’re concerned I might ruin anything for you and you’re planning to read the book, take this opportunity to move on and catch up with me again tomorrow.

Anyway, in this novel, we meet a great many gods. Yeah, the kind you read about in mythology stuff in high school or college, and a lot of others that your instructor probably didn’t teach you about. The concept is that these manifestations of ancient gods are here in the United States because people essentially brought them with them in their minds, and caused them to exist, and their faith and worship and sacrifices made them as real as the original gods were. But, as worshippers declined and the religions faded, some of these gods died off. Others maintained existences but as these kind of sorry-ass individuals. They have powers that we don’t, but their lives aren’t anything to covet, and they certainly don’t seem very godlike.

The core conflict of the novel is the fact that these old gods have been targetted by the new gods for destruction. Those new gods are who, you might wonder?

Television. Casinos. Freeways. Internet and so on. These gods have physical manifestations and they walk among us and influence things at times.

What struck me as particularly interesting is that while the old gods scrape for any faith or remembrance or any kind of sacrifice to keep them going, the new gods of America are flush with not just “worshippers” but also sacrifices.

Our time is sacrificed to the television. Our money to the casinos. Things like that.

And what it made me realize is that even though this novel is a work of fiction, there is an essential truth there. Think of the time and money and other valuable resources of our lives that we throw at things that don’t really matter.

How many of us, myself included, are willing to spend hours on the Internet, yet precious few minutes so much as volunteering for a non-profit organization or giving our children the time they want and need, or reading God’s word? How many of us purport to worship God and actually worship everything but Him?

I’m not suggesting we toss away our temporal lives and go into the wilderness like John the Baptist or leave our families to go on missionary treks the rest of our lives, but I do think we should all reassess how much time we are willing to give to the modern gods we have created and how much more we should be giving to the God who created us.

Two-fer Tuesday: Imagining God by Miz Pink

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pinkhairlongIt freaks me out sometimes how easily people brush off the uniqueness of God and the Judeo-Christian history because people are sometimes really fast on the draw to say the Jews were better “myth makers” than anyone else before or since…and that the whole monotheistic faith that they spearheaded was simply great marketing. But is just doesn’t jive for me.

Why try to create a “better religious mousetrap” especially several thousand years ago? There was nothing “broken” in the multiple gods model that so many other folks were using. It suited humans well. And the early Jews were certainly not so durned brilliant as to foresee that we would unlock most of the secrets of nature and genetics and all that and knew “We just gotta create a God that can handle the new world order coming up in a few thousand years.”

I understand that so many gods were “imagined” by people to explain things we take for granted like rain and emotions and stuff. They were what passed for science before science came along but I don’t see why the kind of God that the Jews and I and even the Muslims worship is something ANYONE would WANT to create.

This wasn’t a God who wasn’t particularly keen on doling out a bunch of favors. He wasn’t easy to get ahold of. He expected a heck of a lot. He set high standards. He was not the kind of God that would appeal to the masses unlike most gods that were pretty much just messed up beings with a lot of power…they were just like humans except with cosmic bad-mama-jamma-ness. Gods that people could relate to. So why create the God known as Yahweh (and other things) Unless of course he was a god that actually existed, showed his power to his first chosen people, and set them on the path to reveal his glory and show the world what they needed to return to…which is his loving embrace and his eternal family.

Men and women didn’t “imagine God.” The did their part to reveal him, though, that’s for sure. And its a shame that so many people are willing to write that off and reduce God to merely being a better made myth.