Evil: a Primer

I went to see "Paranormal Activity" this weekend. I love a good scary movie and this one didn't disappoint. It's a far cry from the usual, wretched gorefests that Hollywood produces en masse.
The scares were subtle, the monster virtually unseen, and the story not all that implausible in my opinion. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys being creeped out every now and then. Don't take the kids!

With Halloween just around the corner, my thoughts have turned to the dark side of spirituality:
namely evil, including its biblical personifications as Satan or the Devil. This is one topic that liberal theologians are guilty of glossing over, in my opinion. In fact, one of my misgivings with those further to the left than I am is that they don't seem to take evil seriously.

When people do bad things it's not uncommon for progressives to blame poverty or lack of education or mental illness. I suspect that's because it's difficult for a basically good person to think that anyone could willingly and gleefully indulge their propensities for malicious selfishness. That is what I believe underlies most of the truly horrific things we hear about on the news and read of in history books. Mix these two thoughts together: "all that matters is what I want" and "it might be fun to hurt someone else." The result is monsters worse than anything dreamed of by Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King, because they're real. Think Charles Manson, Josef Stalin, or the man whose name comes up in any discussion of evil, Der Fuhrer.

The other side of the Christian spectrum has its own misconceptions about evil. They look for it behind bushes, peek in the shadows, and dream up wacky conspiracy theories. They read badly written novels about secret Illuminati - New Age cabals trying to outlaw the Bible and teach past life regression techniques to kids. They not only recognize evil's existence, they give it an arcane mystique and blame demons for such earthly woes as mental disease and financial misfortune.

Worst of all, they look for the Devil in all the wrong places. I recall with cynicism one particular All Hallows' Eve, when I was in Bible college, and a group of my fellow students drove to the top of a hillside after dark. There they prayed to "bind the wicked forces that were rampant that night," i.e. Satan and his henchmen, who were surely lurking in plastic masks, bags full of candy and drive-in slasher movie marathons.

It was all very melodramatic, and surely gave those who participated in it the feeling that they were accomplishing something. But when they came down from the hillside and retired to their safe, comfortable dormitory rooms, there was just as much real evil surrounding them as before their little excursion. The problem was they couldn't see it, despite, or because, it was right in front of them.

A few weeks ago I took a drive in the Tennessee mountains, which are especially beautiful this time of year. But marring the lovely colors of Fall and the rustic cabins and farms was the ugly sight of tobacco drying in barns owned by major agricultural producers as well as part-time farmers. This picturesque land, in which the best apples on earth are grown, is used to produce a toxic weed that gets shipped to the giant cigarette factories in eastern North Carolina. There it's turned into a deadly, addictive product that's sold in almost every retail outlet across the USA as well as the rest of the globe.

Go a little further east in the great state of NC and you'll encounter corporate owned pig farms, where swine are crowded together for the entirety of their short lives, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and then slaughtered to feed our ravenous appetite for things that kill us. These unfortunate creatures do leave their mark on the land, though. They produce countless tons of
feces and urine, which agribusiness tries to control by pouring into massive artificial lagoons. But toxins from these giant lakes of crap leech into the water table, poisoning the impoverished residents of the area, who rely on wells for their water supply. To make things worse the overfilled ponds occasionally burst, releasing rivers of raw sewage that flow through yards and fields where children play. Sometimes they even make it to the ocean, where it turns the waters foul and kills thousands of fish.

Saturated fat and tobacco kill millions of Americans every year, and their production isn't only allowed but encouraged by the government. Last year I watched my father-in-law, who smoked most of his life, die a slow, agonizing death as lung cancer ate his body from the inside. People I care about have seemed healthy one day only to collapse the next, dead from arteries clogged by sausage biscuits and bacon eaten in indiscriminate amounts for decades.

Journey back to the mountains I was speaking of earlier. Go just a little south of the part of Tennessee I was in. You'll find yourself in Cherokee, NC, home of a monster casino that was supposed to lift the American Indians who live in the area from poverty yet for some reason never did. I visited it recently, not to gamble but just out of curiosity. I was only able to stay for a few minutes though, because the air was filled with second hand smoke; NC doesn't yet ban smoking in public buildings. In fact the endless rows of electronic slot machines were equipped with ash trays, so that the patrons could destroy their bodies even as they handed their rent and grocery money to a megabucks corporation that offered them nothing in return but false hopes.

The saddest thing about the visit was seeing the throngs of people that were there. Not only was the vast parking lot almost completely full but more vehicles poured in through the entryway by the second. Judging from their dress and language I could discern that most of them weren't the stereotypical well-heeled seniors spending their kid's inheritance. They were people who hold jobs that could provide them and their families with a reasonable standard of living, but for the fact that they were willingly throwing their modest wages away. Maybe their children will learn to eat the Chinese-made ribbons that every patron was given on their way out, so that they would feel like a "winner" no matter how empty their pockets were.

The point of this depressing tour isn't to bash Dixie, the land that I love and that has nurtured me all my life. What I'm trying point out is this: there's no need to look for the Devil in haunted houses, spooky movies or Harry Potter books. Wherever you are, just look around.
You'll see things just as wicked, just as abominable and despicable as the spectacles I've described here. They won't be hiding behind the bushes, they'll be right in your face.

As much as I admire Augustine, he was wrong about evil. It's not merely the absence of good. It's a powerful, active force that corrupts whatever it touches and struggles constantly against God's efforts to redeem His creation. We can no longer afford to pretend it doesn't exist. Nor can we waste time looking for it in the wrong places. If the mission Jesus gave us is to be fulfilled, evil must be recognized, it must be pointed out, and it must be fought. May we be given both the wisdom and courage to do just that. Peace.

Why I Don't Believe in (that) God

I thought that title would grab your attention!

Ever since Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" came out in 2006, I've had numerous dialogues with atheists on the subject of the Almighty's existence. I have noticed a consistent theme in their thinking. They are prone to a fallacy known as "all or none thinking."

This is how it works. They raise legitimate questions about the coherence of the traditional Christian understanding of God's nature. They may wonder how it is possible for anyone to have free will if the Lord knows everything we will ever do. They might also question what sort of God would punish His Son for the sins of others, and through that miscarriage of justice find a basis for forgiving humans of their shortcomings. When the fail to find satisfactory answers to these concerns then they triumphantly proclaim "aha! There is no God!" And off they go on their merry way.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it contains a faulty assumption: that there is only one possible conception of God.

In earlier posts I've discussed how the God of our Lord Jesus Christ has been badly maligned by well meaning theologians in the pre-modern era. It's easy to see how clear thinking, mentally healthy persons would have trouble believing in the God of John Calvin, for instance. Likewise, the deity proclaimed from many (though by no means all) evangelical and fundamentalist pulpits is far from the sort of Heavenly Father I would care to worship.

Any Being that would cast people into everlasting torment for not believing in a gospel they never heard should be relegated to the ash heap of history. The same is likewise true of a God who worries about people of homosexual orientation forming loving, lasting relationships, while ignoring far weightier matters of economic and social justice. These ideas about the nature of the Ultimate say more about the psychological maladies of their inventors than they do about spiritual truth.

If we dispense with these distorted caricatures, however, who or what do we put in their place? This very topic has been the subject of my thoughts, prayers, studies and reflections for the last several years.

I don't pretend to have found Buddha-like enlightenment in any of these matters. But I have reached some conclusions about what I think the true God of the Universe is like, and I want to share them in point by point fashion:

1.) God is in some way intimately related to the Universe, far more so than Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have long believed. The image of a Cosmic Sovereign sitting high above and well beyond His creation is fraught with philosophical shortcomings. In its place we must develop a conception of a loving Parent, Guide and Friend who is our fellow traveler through time and space.

This God "feels our pain," to borrow a somewhat trite phrase. He rejoices with us in our moments of ecstasy and suffers with us in our times of pain and grief. He either cannot fully control our actions or, as I suspect, could do so but chooses not to.

He sees the evil and suffering which blight this world, and graciously invites us to partner with Him in redeeming it from the curses of sin and mortality. The death of His Son on the cross is an integral part of this plan, in ways that we humans cannot fully fathom. However, we can look upon the death and resurrection of Jesus (yes, I do believe that Christ rose from the dead) as demonstration of both Gods' love for us and the eventual triumph we will share with Him when evil and death have at last been purged from creation.

The question of why this evil exists at all leads into my second point:

2. ) God is not yet in full control of our world. I don't know why, but His ultimate desires for His children have not yet been realized. He struggles both with the forces of chaos and of moral evil on a moment by moment basis. As He possesses unlimited power and all possible knowledge, His final triumph is assured. However, like a boxer trading blows with an able but inferior opponent, he suffers setbacks and temporary defeats in His ages-long struggle.

These forces of chaos and of moral wrongdoing are personified in the entity known in the Bible as Satan, or the Devil. I believe that this archfiend is more than a simple personification, however. He or it is a conscious presence that pervades the Universe and actively resists God's redemptive efforts.

3.) God does not know exactly how the future will unfold, but nevertheless some things about it are certain. For one, it will bring the ultimate victory of the three Divine Persons known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit over the Evil One and his allies. This is the underlying and overarching message of the apocalyptic books of the Bible, including Revelation. The exact day and time of this event is not yet determined, and is partially affected by our actions, or conversely our inaction, as God's agents and co-workers in the redemptive process.

This victory will result in a physical transformation of the creation that will alter the laws of nature, resulting in a remaking of the world into a place of overwhelming peace and benevolence.

It will also entail the redemption of the vast majority of the people who have ever lived. If any are lost it will be a vanishingly small number who, while in full knowledge of their actions and in complete control of their wills, reject the offer of the Divine Persons to participate in this new epoch of unending harmony.

These poor souls are the ones whom Jude 1:13 describes as "raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever."
Their ultimate fate will not be endless torture, but rather a merciful snuffing out of their conscious existence in the Universe.

4.)As a Christian, I believe that God works primarily, but by no means exclusively, through the church to accomplish His redemptive goals. The compassionate Jew or Muslim, the kind Buddhist or Hindu, and all people of goodwill, even those of no particular faith - all of these are God's children and His partners in the redemptive program. They will share in the final victory and the blessedness of the world to come.

5.) This will perhaps be most shocking of all to my more conservative readers, but I say with full conviction that the God I have described in this post is also the Deity described in the Old and New Testaments, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the beloved Son and the eternal Spirit. I see no conflict in holding to both a high view of the Judeo-Christian scriptures and the views I have described in the preceding words.

To those interested in pursuing this last line of thought for themselves I recommend the following works by theologians, philosophers of religion and biblical scholars of widely varying church affiliations and educational backgrounds. For the reader's convenience I am listing these in hyperlink form. Clicking on them will lead to their listings at Amazon.com.


Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists

Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality

God of the Possible: an Introduction to the Open View of God

In God's Time: the Bible and the Future

God's Politics

The Openness of God: a Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God

A Wideness in God's Mercy

What does the Bible Really Say about Hell? Wrestling with the Traditional View

The Inescapable Love of God

I trust these resources will be of benefit to those who, like me, seek for the truth. As always, your own thoughts, expressed in a civil and thoughtful tone, are welcome here.

Family History

The following has nothing whatsoever to do with theology, philosophy or the price of eggs for that matter. But it has met with a strongly positive reception among my readers so I thought I'd post it here. Just a little background information about Yours Truly.

My mother grew up during the Great Depression. When she was in her teens he held a job as a janitor which paid 50 cents a week. Her mother would take half of it and buy basics like flour and cornmeal in big cloth sacks. When the sacks were empty she would sew them into dresses for my mother and her siblings.

The other 25 cents was my mother's to keep. On Saturdays she and my aunt (her younger sister) would walk into town. The quarter would buy them movie tickets and snacks to munch on during the shows. They would get news reels, a couple of cartoons, a short feature such as a Three Stooges bit, a chapter in a serial adventure like Flash Gordon and then the main feature. Afterwards they took what was left of the 25 cents and bought ice cream at the drug store.

They raised pigs, from which most of their meat came. They grew vegetables and canned them, so they always had food. Winters were cold and summers were hot, but they survived.

My father's family grew up in the mountains of northern Georgia. They survived by hunting, fishing and I believe a little moonshining. They knew better than to stray too far from the cabin because bobcats and mountain lions prowled the woods. Among their sources of cash were turnip and collard greens, which grew in abundance in the mountain climate. When the crop came in they loaded up the wagon with greens, hitched up the mule and rode into town square, where they sold their produce.

My father was a heathen and a Hell raiser all his 83 years (actually he cut back on the heavy drinking after he turned 75). When I became a teenager I couldn't rebel against him by getting involved with sex and alcohol, as he had long ago mastered those vices and I would never have been able to keep up with him. So I took the only route I could to defy him: I kept my nose clean and joined a church. That really set him off, but he finally came to peace with it when he got into his 70s and calmed down a little.

One of my most vivid memories is when he asked me to buy him a large print Bible; he was about 81 at the time and decided it was finally time to read the Good Book. I sent him a copy along with his usual Christmas gifts of cigars and peach brandy.

He finally passed away at age 83 of a kidney infection that he ignored for months until it shut his body down. When we went to clean up his home I found the Bible, with several well-turned pages in it. It sat next to a stack of pamphlets about Viagra. Apparently his spiritual life wasn't the only thing he sought to resurrect in his sunset years.

The Gospel According to Calvin

In the last post we looked at some of the antiquated, neurotic and downright silly ideas that people have had about the nature of God. In this offering I want to expand on that theme a bit. Here we go:


“God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation”
-John Calvin

I try to be tolerant. I long to be open-minded. I sincerely want to evaluate all opinions without bias or emotion.

But there is a belief system that sickens me to my core and derails my powers of objectivity almost completely. It is the classic form of Calvinism created by a sick man and held to by his equally sick followers over the last five centuries. To me it contains all that is wrong with the view of God that has dominated Christian theology for over fifteen hundred years.

Christian thinkers, even brilliant and devout ones, are influenced by the political realities of their day. The ancients were no exception to this rule. They saw that the power to do as one willed was the defining characteristic of earthly kings, and integrated this fact into their religious beliefs.

Augustine (354-430) was one of the greatest minds in the history of the church. His works are marked by their depth of thought and the love for Christ expressed in their words. They offer powerful insights into fields as disparate as physics, ethics, aesthetics and rhetoric. Their contributions to theology and philosophy are inestimable.

Like all of us, however, this illuminating thinker was a product of the times in which he lived. As a citizen of the late Roman empire, he modeled his ideas about God on the example set by the Caesars, who ruled with an iron fist. He saw God as a cosmic monarch who used His omnipotence to accomplish His will, including His desires for our salvation. Augustine declared that in His sovereignty God chooses some humans to be His children and rejects all others, consigning them to Hell.

Aquinas (1225-1274), building on this theme of divine fiat, taught that eternal punishment of sinners was perfectly just. After all, in the feudal society in which he lived it was a grave matter to offend the honor of a nobleman, and what greater example of royalty was there than God Himself? The Almighty possesses infinite honor, so an offense against Him merits eternal punishment.

These ideas influenced later writers and scholastics. Martin Luther (1483-1546) wrote volumes about the love and mercy of God, yet he also believed that the Lord arbitrarily chose some to go to Hell while only a lucky few would enjoy His mercy. It’s likely that these ideas were largely to blame for the malicious and vengeful tone of his later writings.

The notion of God as all-controlling hyper-sovereign found its fullest expression in the writings of John Calvin. He lived from 1509 to 1564 and much of that time dominating the lives of the citizens of Geneva.

Contemporary thinkers believe Calvin was deeply neurotic and likely suffered from major mental illnesses. Without a doubt he was rigid, dour and intolerant in the extreme. It’s not surprising that such a man would mold the God of love into his own hateful image. His theological ideas were marked by a belief in a cruel, arbitrary and despotic deity and an extremely low view of his fellow human beings.

The key to Calvin’s theology is an obsessive focus on the sovereignty of God.
Like Anselm and Augustine before him, he saw his Maker through the eyes of the monarchial society he lived in, imagining the Creator as the Ultimate King, with total and unshakeable control over the earth.

In Calvinist thinking the Almighty has predestined each of us to behave exactly as He wills. Thus God, through His pawn Satan, caused Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. He did this to glorify Himself, both by damning most of His children to Hell and by forcing a few of them to accept His Son’s blood sacrifice on the cross as payment for the evil deeds they were coerced into performing.

So, according to this great theologian, our Heavenly Father drives us to commit sins through no choice of our own, for which He then condemns us. But to show His merciful side He murdered His beloved son Jesus. This was done to appease His wrath against a few people that He arbitrarily chooses to spare from Hell

This sadistic and twisted plan was, in Calvin‘s mind, a beautiful example of divine mercy. He taught that the people in Heaven should praise God for His benevolence while those in Hell should praise Him for His justice. This guy really needed some Prozac and a good psychiatrist!

Needless to mention, there have been a number of free-thinking people who have objected to this nonsense over the centuries. John Wesley (1703-1791) issued a devastating critique of it in his classic sermon “On Free Grace." Consider his words, which follow:

However much I love the persons who teach it, I hate the doctrine of predestination. It is a doctrine which, if it were true or even possible, one could rightly say to our enemy the devil, "You fool, why do keep strutting around with your arrogance and malice? Your efforts to damn souls are as useless and meaningless as our attempts to save them. Have you not heard that God has taken your work out of your hands; and that he does it much more effectively than you ever could?”

“You, with all your kingdoms and powers, can only assault those humans who resist you; but God can irresistibly destroy both body and soul in hell! You can only entice; but His unchangeable command to leave thousands of souls in death forces them to keep sinning till they fall into everlasting torture. You can only tempt; He forces us to be damned; for we cannot resist his will. You fool, why do you prowl about, seeking whom you may devour? Have you not heard that God is the devouring lion, the destroyer of souls, the murderer of men?”

There are scores of lengthy volumes in print, written by scholars of prodigious intellect, that expose the biblical, philosophical and theological shortcomings of Calvinist thought. But none of them do a better job of pointing out its inherent absurdities than the two brief paragraphs above. In my mind Wesley’s remarks are brilliant. Their brevity and profundity are matched by only a handful of works throughout history.

As mentioned before, the concept of God as an oppressive dictator has its roots in ancient ideas about the proper role of government. It has been enormously influential throughout the history of the church. It is also directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus, who tells us that the role of the strong is to serve the weak (Matthew 20:20-28):

20Then the mother of Zebedee's sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.

21"What is it you want?" he asked.
She said, "Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom."

22"You don't know what you are asking," Jesus said to them. "Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?"
"We can," they answered.

23Jesus said to them, "You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father."

24When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. 25Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

With the coming of the Enlightenment the old notions about God’s nature centering on His power began to lose their grip on the church. In their place far more Christ-like conceptions emerged, centering around His love. We will explore these next time.

As a concluding thought, I should mention that in this post I have given only a very general treatment of the beliefs and history I have discussed. For those wanting to explore these issues in more depth I recommend the book "Perspectives on the Doctrine of God: Four Views," edited by Bruce Ware and available from online merchants such as Amazon. It contains articles by scholars who support Calvin’s views as well as others who are critical of them.

I’ve long believed in the importance in hearing all sides of an argument before deciding one’s own position. Of course this applies to my beliefs as well. For all you know I could be full of BS, so I urge you to put my writings to the test before you agree with them. Peace.

Why it's Time for a New God

The title of this post is not only purposely provocative, it's also not quite accurate. What I want to discuss is not getting rid of God, but rather dispensing with some silly ideas about what the Creator must be like.

My misgivings with the deity many Christians believe in began during my college days. I attended a conservative religious school. The administration of the institution tried to steer the bulk of the student body towards being pastors or missionaries. One tactic they employed was to make us feel guilty about the "billions of unreached people" who would go to Hell because nobody preached the Christian gospel to them.
I recall the man who taught my New Testament Introduction class saying that God had provided the means for humanity's salvation on the cross, but that He left it up to the church to spread the news of that provision. Thus, anyone who did not hear about Christ in this life, for whatever reason, who be tortured forever to satisfy the "justice" of the Almighty.

Not only would things turn out horribly wrong for those poor souls, but matters would not go well for us at the Final Judgment, if we heard God's call to preach and ignored it. At the very least we would watch as the unsaved were tossed into the Lake of Fire. And Jesus would be forever disappointed with us for letting it happen.

But the hereafter wasn't our only source of anxiety. Like most young people, we were concerned with our futures here on earth. We wondered how we would make a living, who we would marry, and how we would ever repay our student loans with the tiny pay most ministers earn.

Not to worry, we were assured. God was in control, and would care for all of our needs. Our job was to simply step out in faith and we would be miraculously taken care of. To reinforce this message we were told apocryphal tales about cash strapped clergy who the Lord had miraculously provided for. We all knew the story about the pastor whose church couldn't pay him a proper salary, but who received a check in the mail just in time to pay his rent and buy his family some food.

For some reason the man's name and location were never mentioned, so we were unable to verify the account.

Another yarn peddled to us concerned two missionaries lost in the jungle and on the verge of starvation. Weak with hunger, they collapsed to the ground, and as they did one looked up and saw a nearby fruit tree. Struggling to his feet, he picked the sweet produce for him and his companion, and they regained their strength and went about the work of evangelizing the locals.

Exactly who this devoted pair were remained a mystery, but we were assured the story was true.

Needless to say these wonderful tales clashed with reality. The little town the college was in was filled with graduates who had finished school deeply in debt. Unable to raise financial support to be pastors or missionaries, and without marketable job skills, they labored in low paid factory jobs, stocked shelves at grocery stores, flipped burgers or waited tables for their former classmates.
There were no miraculous checks showing up in their mailboxes.

Like all people of faith, our trust in our beliefs was tested from time to time. Particularly tragic was what happened to the Dean of Men's daughter, a lovely young girl named Kimberly, who was traveling in a car that struck a tree at a high rate of speed one sunny afternoon. She flew through the windshield and into the large oak that the vehicle had collided with. She was rushed to the hospital and the entire campus prayed intensely for her recovery. For the first few days after the wreck it seemed that God was listening, as reports came from the hospital that she would be fine.

Then about five days after the accident she slipped into a coma. She was dead within seventy two hours. It seemed the God who routed checks to cash strapped pastors and grew apples for starving missionaries was unwilling to intervene in her case.

Not that this caused any of us to lose our faith, of course. The power of the human mind to rationalize unwanted news is nothing if not astounding. I recall one of my classmates saying that a pair of people had gotten saved after hearing of Kimberly's death. "I can see why God would let her die," he opined, "if it would save two souls from Hell. It was worth it."

One friend of mine chose not to dismiss her doubts so easily, and she approached a professor with her concerns. Instead of addressing the issues she raised he told her that she needed to "surrender her rights to the Lord," including her right to question her faith.

I share these bleak memories with you to illustrate the kind of God that too many people believe in:

1.) One who tosses people into Hell for not believing the correct facts about Him, even if they never had a chance to hear them;

2.) One who has a highly detailed plan for our lives, including our choice of vocations and the exact identity of our spouses;

3.) One who provides for his followers, unless He sees that sacrificing one of them will gain him two additional pawns for His chess match with the Devil;

4.) One who demands we stop thinking for ourselves and blindly trust what we are told by ecclesiastical authority figures.

Over the years I have watched dozens of old friends who believed in this God degenerate into bitter, enraged and pitiful caricatures of their former selves. And it's little wonder that they've turned out that way. Committing one's heart, mind and life to such a deranged Creature is like being married to an abusive, alcoholic spouse.
The victim is worn down by the need to make excuses, to rationalize, and to blame oneself for the failings of their partner.

This goes on year after torturous year, until finally they realize how deeply they have been betrayed. When that dark day arrives there is nothing left but a final plunge into nihilistic despair.

It's said that we all create God in our own image, and I wonder how sick the people were who invented this Cosmic Despot from their fears, hatreds and insecurities. Their twisted view of the Almighty has haunted humanity for too long. It is time for their God to go.

All well and good, of course, but then the question comes to mind of what kind of Being will take his place. That's the topic I will be exploring in future posts. We'll explore how powerful God really is, how He can and cannot intervene in the universe, what Christ's death really means for us, the kind of life Jesus wants us to live, and how we will be judged in the world after this one.

In the meantime I close with a prayer for my old mentors and fellow students. It's based on a quote from Voltaire which I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing for the occasion:

"May the true God of the Universe, who doesn't send people to Hell for other's actions, doesn't micro-manage His children's lives, doesn't treat us like pawns, and doesn't demand that we commit intellectual suicide - may He forgive the pitiful creatures who blaspheme Him."

To which I say a hearty "Amen."

Why I'm soft on fundamentalists

A parable of Jesus from Luke 18:9-14:

And he spoke this parable to some self-righteous people who hated and looked down on others. "Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and said these words: 'God, I thank you that I am not as other men: extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this fellow, a tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all I possess."

"And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying 'God be merciful to me a sinner.'"

"I tell you, this man went down to his house forgiven of his sins, and the Pharisee did not. For anyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

This story always comes to my mind when I read comments like those posted recently by a fellow blogger, a Progressive Christian minister who noticed that a nearby conservative church has the message "Christ died for your sins" posted on its sign.
He chose to amuse himself a bit by making fun of the message, using words like "fetishism" and "torture" to paint a caricature of how his fellow Christians interpreted the meaning of the crucifixion.

Even more discouraging to me were the comments posted by those who joined this fellow in ridiculing these good people. The scent of self-righteous smugness was apparent in their words, as they condemned their brothers and sisters in Christ as backwards, ignorant, homophobic and superstitious.

No one suggested starting a dialogue with the members of the fundamentalist church. No one suggested trying to see things from their point of view. They were too busy patting themselves on the back for their enlightened, tolerant ideals to see that they were modeling the same attitudes and actions that they claimed to despise.

It has never ceased to amaze me has we humans can so easily forget one of Jesus' core messages: that it is our own sins and shortcomings that we must be quick to note and to condemn, not those of others. Fundamentalists and neo-fundamentalist Evangelicals love to call Progressive believers heretics. They condemn us as anti-family and anti-American. They say we don't honor the Bible, that we compromise with evil, and that we are out of touch elitists. Sometimes they even push God out of His rightful place as judge of humanity and consign us to Hell.

And how do we react? We raise our noses in the air and talk in superior tones about our critics. We accuse them of being anti-science because they mistrust the theory of evolution. We label them as hateful because they have sincere concerns about the morality of welcoming practicing homosexuals into the church. We make snide remarks about their family trees, we wonder if they drive pickup trucks and live in trailer parks, and we engage in silly paranoid discussions about how many guns they own. All too often we liken them to Hitler, knowing full well that the comparison is not only unjustified but slanderous.

And all the time we are doing this, we forget words like these:

"Condemn not and you will not be condemned."

"Bless those who curse you, do good to those who despitefully use you and persecute you."

"Why do you seek to remove the speck from your brother's eye, and ignore the plank that is in your own?"

"Who are you to judge another man's servant? It is by his own master that he stands or falls. And he will stand, because the Lord is able to make him stand."

"Why do you judge your brother? And why do you show contempt for your brother? For we shall all appear at the judgment seat of Christ."

"It's easier to point a finger than to look in the mirror." (Okay, that one isn't in the Bible, but I like it so much I tossed it in the mix anyway.

And yes, I know that there are many on the Religious Right who would abolish government aid to the poor, declare Jihad on all Muslims, ban Harry Potter books, forbid the teaching of evolution, imprison homosexuals, etc., etc. if they could.

And I have heard the oh-so-handy rationalization "but it's perfectly okay to be intolerant of intolerance!" proclaimed by liberals and progressives looking for an excuse to indulge their own raging xenophobia.

But I never forget that intolerance, suspicion, groupthink, tribalism and a host of other ills are not the sole province of any one group of people. We are all looking for an excuse to hate and to dehumanize others. If we can no longer do so on the basis on race or sexual orientation, well then, we will simply use the fact that "they" don't believe everything I believe, therefore "they" are the enemy.

The terrifying truth is this: the shadow of Hitler hangs not only over political conservatives and religious fundamentalists. It also looms large over their ideological opponents. All of us - ALL OF US - are potential witch hunters. Let a well-spoken leader assure us of our own superiority, let him or her tell us that we are justified in our fears and hatreds, and we can all be manipulated into becoming a mob, burning, destroying, killing those sub-human - (fill in the blank here with your favorite prejudical term - queer, socialist, tree-hugger; or, if you like, fascist, redneck, homophobe - whatever; all those terms, when spoken in hatred, are spawned from the same dark corner of the human soul).

Jesus knew these things, and that is why he urges us so strongly to be slow to judge others, but quick to examine ourselves; slow to speak, but quick to listen; and slow to become angry, but quick to forgive and to seek reconciliation with all people. This is the way of peace, it is the way of Christ. And, if we are to call ourselves Christians, it must be our way as well. May God help it to be so.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Darwin?

It was with a touch of sadness that I read a pair of letters printed recently in the newspaper. The first was written by a man who was upset at a local natural history museum for hosting a “Darwin Day” celebration. The poor fellow claimed that the theory of evolution is an affront to the Bible and Christianity and should not be taught.

About a week later a response from a local atheist was published. It started out by attacking the previous letter. Not content with this, however, the author went on to launch a assault on all religion, decrying it as dangerous and intolerant. By the end of the piece it was clear that this person thought that all people of faith are filled with hatred and violent impulses. He also expressed his disdain for spiritual approaches to discovering life’s meaning and purpose.

Those two letter writers are far from a couple of isolated cranks. They are combatants in a much larger conflict. Like warring mobs of blood thirsty school kids, folks on both sides of the Evolution/Creation controversy have been trying to provoke their champions into mixing it up for well over a century now.

On one side are the perennially insecure Christian fundamentalists, cheering for Jesus to knock Darwin out once and for all. On the other are hysterical, xenophobic anti-Christian atheists and agnostics, who swing the theory of natural selection like a club, hoping it will deal a fatal blow to the Almighty and clear the way for materialism to reign unopposed.

Sometimes I picture Christ and Darwin standing side by side, looking down from heaven and shaking their heads, wondering what all the furor is over. In all of the attempts to destroy religion or to censor science a simple and most profound principle has been overlooked: that all truth is God’s truth. Believers have nothing to fear from scientific insight. And science has nothing to fear from spiritual beliefs.

I say this with confidence, having studied both the theory of evolution and the creation accounts in Genesis over the past twenty years. I have read books by scientists both critical and supportive of Darwin’s claims, and studied the positions of biblical scholars of all persuasions.

In this debate there are two small and very vocal groups of extremists. On one side are the Young Earth Creationists, represented by the likes of Ken Ham and Duane Gish. These people claim that the Earth is no more than ten thousand years old, and anyone who says otherwise is either deceived by the Devil or an outright liar. They interpret Genesis ultra-literally and try to force science to support their untenable worldview.

In the other camp are militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. They claim that evolution destroys all rational basis for belief in God. Dawkins is especially fanatical in his beliefs, saying that religion is not only false but evil. His recent book The God Delusion, which I read with some amusement, paints a caricature of believers as ignorant Bible thumpers, anxious to burn all free thinking persons at the stake.

The tragic part of this silly pissing war is how it drowns out the voices of countless others, those who respect both religion and science, and are trying to find areas of common ground between the two disciplines. Some of the more prominent persons in this group include geneticist Francis Collins, whose book The Language of God finds signs of God’s handiwork in the marvelous things which science has discovered, including the evolutionary process.

Another person of note is Brown University Professor Ken Miller, who wrote the outstanding volume Finding Darwin’s God. Brown defends evolution against the Creationists and Christianity against the off the wall polemics of Dawkins and his ilk. Approaching the subject from a different perspective, physicist and author Paul Davies finds grounds for belief in a Higher Power in the marvelous way the Universe displays a sense of order and rationality.

These men, and others like them, have no quarrel with either Darwin or Jesus. Collins and Miller find in Genesis a beautiful narrative about how God is the ultimate cause for creation. In stories like that of Adam and Eve they see profound commentaries on how humanity is led astray both by pride and the lust of the eye. Davies, while not a member of any organized religion, finds in his studies of the heavens ample proof that there is a Purpose underlying everything we see.

Reflecting once more on the aforementioned letter writers, I see that both of them missed the mark. The Christian fundamentalist is anxious to put God in a box, lest the Almighty and his ways prove too wondrous to comprehend. On the other hand the militant atheist is a bigot, and a small minded one at that. He sees religion through a filter clouded by his own arrogance and closed-mindedness. Both men have my pity. And, looking down from some corner of God’s vast and marvelous universe, I suspect that two other pairs of eyes regard them in the same way, while they wait patiently for the human race to grow up.