Truth and Purpose

Within the last 6 years, two devastating natural disasters have shaken the consciences of our generation.  On December 26^th 2004, an underwater earthquake with a magnitude measuring between 9.0 and 9.3 on the Richter scale occurred a hundred miles off the coast of northern Sumatra, a province of Indonesia.  The resulting tsunami, later named “The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami,” devastated the coastline communities of nearly all nearby land masses with tidal waves up to a hundred feet high.  The death toll was enormous: nearly a quarter of a million people perished, and based on the many photos taken in the aftermath, many of its victims were small children, whose bodies were found scattered up and down the coasts where the tsunamis hit.[1]

Six years later in January of 2010, another devastating earthquake hit a small town 16 miles away from the heavily populated city of Port-au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti.  The quake measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, and the death toll according to the Haitian government was 230,000 with 300,000 injured and 1,000,000 left homeless.

No more than a month later, an even more severe earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale hit off the coast of the Maule region of Chili, devastating coastal towns thought the region. Although the death toll was not as high as the Asian tsunami or the Haitian earthquakes, local news services at the time reported that more than 1.5 million people had been displaced.

This was not the first time such visceral evil and suffering had jarred the minds and hearts of people in this decade.  From an American perspective, the beginning of this century was marred by a horrifying display of terrorism as the infamous events of 9/11 flashed before our eyes on television and computer screens across the world.  People all over the country, unaccustomed to violence so immanent in their lives, sought to find answers and consolation.  How could this kind of evil have happened to our country?  Some people turned to religion to answer questions.  Church attendance grew for a time.

However, the Tsunami of 2004 awoke in men and women of this generation the realization of a different kind of evil – one that could not be blamed on men, but on whimsical natural forces of the earth.  No longer could the senseless violence and the deaths of thousands be blamed on moral agents as we had been culturally accustomed to thinking about evil over the last 3 years, but was instead the fault of an “act of God.”  A discomfort with religion and its attempts to explain such suffering began to emerge.  Both the atheist and the theist could see a common enemy behind the 9/11 attacks, but with the horrors of a natural disaster now in the forefront, the national and international religious communities began to struggle with answers for questions they were not used to addressing.

In some cases, Christians and religious leaders could not digest the events of the Tsunami or other instances of natural evil without readjusting their views of the goodness or power of God.[2] Outspoken atheists seemed to find real proof that the claim of the Christian God being all-powerful and loving was illogical.[3] Outspoken Christians unconcerned with correlating these events with God’s character were quick to see them instead as being a righteous judgment against people who deserved it.  Others saw it as an act of God that was in some way beneficial to the human race or more specifically to enlightened Christians.  As it turned out, there were a lot of bad explanations for the reasons behind these terrible disasters, but there was an absence of any good ones.  Why would God allow such devastation?  Many more thoughtful and rational religious thinkers agreed: there was no answer.[4] Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to difficulties and tragedy in life, a question has always been on my mind:  why does God not reveal apparently important things to us, especially things regarding terrible experiences that have the potential to emotionally ruin us?  Why does God remain silent as to its meaning or ultimate purpose in our lives—people whom he has a loving relationship with? Didn’t he himself suffer on Earth with clear purpose?  Shouldn’t we likewise be knowledgeable of the reasons behind our portion?

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It’s been a long time since I’ve written something here, and I’m discouraged about it.  I remember praying the other day about not being able to read and write more about spiritual things, and I suddenly had this thought come into my mind:  Yes, I had been studying and writing a lot about morality, selflessness, and a dependence on God.  However, I am reminded daily that I do not live in the world of peaceful quiet spiritual reflection but in a stormy one full of dirty diapers, screaming children, sleepless nights, and an exhausted and frustrated wife.  All I have time to do these days is eat, sleep, and spend time with my kids until I can’t move from the couch.  Oh – and go to work and try to do something useful.

There is a time and a place for deep thinking and quiet reflection.  However, I think the power of the spiritual life lies in the difficulties of reality.  Impatient men learn patience, people distant from God draw near to him because of their need.  It is here somewhere that we are fashioned into the nature and character of God and we bring a little light into the world in the process.  We are shaped not so often by our thinking, but by the events in our lives.  Most of my spiritual reflection has been based on reactions to difficult events in my life.  Now it seems the opposite is true.  I have thought a lot about patience, selflessness, and the character of God.  Now its time to live those beliefs and bring light to the world again.  My wife and children need it.

This is going to be one of those topics I don’t like writing about because it’s going to upset nearly everyone who reads this blog (if there is anyone left).  But the purpose of this weblog is to inspire people who are interested in finding truth, and what I am about to say is an important part of finding it.

About four years ago, I attended a bad church.  The pastor of this church had a problem – he constantly lied (about anything and everything) and plagiarized.  When my friend confronted him on this problem, he responded with a lot of self-centered dribble, but one comment he made stuck out in my memory:  he simply asked my friend how many people he had personally led to the Lord.  What was he implying?  That his tactics, although unorthodox, lead people to Christ.  This excuses his sermon plagiarizing. This somehow excuses his constant lying.  In other words, the end justifies the means.  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from a Christian pastor.  My rosy-colored view of the Christian “church” began to slowly fall apart from that point on.  But this wasn’t the first time I saw this. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m taking a quick break from my weekly paper writing.  I was recently asked by my pastor, who didn’t know better ,  to give a short meditation to speak in church on Jesus’ first statement while on the cross.  I thought I’d post it, because in seeing Jesus’ reaction, I was immediately reminded of my failure to be anything like him when I was going though very painful times in my life, specifically my ugly church experiences where I made many enemies.  It has been an inspiration for me to read and think about this moment in Jesus’ life, and is a story about a person’s heart that we should all strive for, whether Christian or not.

When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals—one on his right and one on his left. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. – Luke 23:33-34

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My wife and her best friend have been reading the books that the movie Twilight was based on, and it made me think about the kind of entertainment we are drawn to.  My wife and I are both passionate about different things – she about passionate romance and meaningful relationships, and me about bravery and fighting for good causes.  I find it interesting that we are both drawn to certain media (video games, movies, books) that feature these themes.

While my wife reads Twilight, I am currently playing Fallout 3, a video game that is full of fighting and moral choices, a dreamworld for me.  I am also reading Cherryh (science fiction) which involves a war between humans and aliens on other planets – way cool.

I thought a long time ago about being drawn to these things.  Why is this?  In my wife’s case- how is it possible anymore to have a passionate romance with very young children who constantly need your attention?  In my case, how can I get out a gun and go fight the bad guys and be brave when I have a family and a wife that takes top priority?

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I messed up my comment badly at a post over at Mind On Fire – so I had to repost here so it will be legible.  Go over there and check out what the post is about and the discussion there first to get some context…

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I was just doing my daily reading this morning, and I came across some interesting quotes that really got me thinking:

“Get truth and don’t ever sell it.” ~ Proverbs 23:23

“When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, your lives will produce these evil results: …the feeling that everyone is wrong except for those in your own little group…” ~ Galatians 5:19-21.

These are two passages point out dangers that the person who is searching for truth will inevitably encounter. Since truth is what this website is all about, and the people who come here to read stuff care about it, I thought it would be a good idea to write about these dangers.

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Hey all!  I thought I would start the new semester off by publishing a paper I wrote about the history, culture, and geography of the Lower Galilee region of Israel, the place where Jesus lived for about 30 years before he began his public ministry.  I left out the footnotes, but included a cited works section at the end if you are interested.  If you don’t feel like reading the entire thing, I can sum it up for you:

The region is quite conservative.  Many scholars- atheist, agnostic, and Christian alike seem to agree that the area Jesus grew up in was populated by people who were resistant to outside religion or spirituality.  This culture was in many ways linked to its secluded location up in the mountains off the main roadways.  Although they could see out over the valley of Armageddon where the main roadways were, they were not influenced by the foreign influences that traveled along them.  The body of research work I surveyed seems to agree – Whatever cultural influences that affected Jesus growing up, its certain that little to none were of a foreign nature.  He grew up in a very traditional Jewish world, one that remembered very clearly the stories of Elisha and Elijia, and the many Judges.  For a resident of Nazereth need only look out over the valley to see the very location of where a majority of the stories took place – where God acted on behalf of his people.

Enjoy!

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I just found a new blog that I’ve added to my blogroll.  It’s one by a fellow grad student who loves writing about the Christian life from a philosophic / theological point of view…  Awesome stuff.  I’m still reading posts from it myself.  If you have a chance – please go take a look.

http://www.emergingpa.blogspot.com/

I just realized the other day that this website has hit its 2 year mark!  It dawned on me that I’ve been writing on this site longer than my son’s been alive (he is now 16 months old!)

I haven’t been doing any posting for a long time, but I have a lot to write about.  I’m in the raw learning stage right now and have not had time to digest and distill it into something engaging enough to write about.

I have actually toyed around with ditching the site altogether because I have become so busy.  But I think that would hurt me.  I really enjoy the interaction with others on philosophical or biblical topics.  My immediate family and circle of friends do not really enjoy this kind of discussion on a regular basis, so I am left to discuss and think on my own and with others like me thoughout the blogsphere.

So, I’ve renewed my hosting and kept my domain name for another year.  Hopefully I will have more time to write again soon…

Over the past couple of months, I’ve taken a good look at myself, and realized that I’m not too thrilled with what I see. I’ve become discouraged with the blatant fact that I cannot become a more moral person by mere effort. If I look hard enough at my motivations for doing good things, I begin to see I have partial selfish reasons for doing nearly all of them.

More recently, I think I’ve discovered something that has really helped me, and I thought I’d share it with everyone out there who struggles with being a moral person and has decided to devote their life to doing what is right. You know who you are, and you know what I mean by being “moral.” To put others first in your priorities, to love without expecting to be loved in return, to not steal, lie, wish harm to others, or to talk badly about them, etc. We have a desire to leave our spheres of influences in better shape then if we were never around to influence them. In fact, we have decided that being moral and following a moral code is more important than anything else – it is a cause that drives our lives as we sit in the passenger seat.

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Martin’s comment got me thinking… Do animals “get emotional?” I have argued with others that animals operate under a system of cause and effect – try something: if it works, do it again, otherwise, operate under instinct. There is no getting depressed about the meaning of life, to wonder about our purpose and be eager to fulfill it, to wonder about our origins, etc. There is simply survival, and stoically going about a life ensuring that it continues. I am not entirely sure this is true, and would like to see more research done on the subject. However, even Harris seems unsure of what goes on in the mind of animals in the area of conscious, and he’s close to a Ph.D in neurobiology, so I’ll take his word for it.

However, something tells me that the experience of emotions is one area that separates us from the animal kingdom. We are not merely acting for survival only, although life can be reduced to that way of living in some cases. I can understand emotions as a tool to spur one to action in order to survive, but I believe it is not their only purpose. I cannot understand why a person can cry over a beautiful painting or being moved by music with only a natural understanding of them.

Here’s my guess – That animalistic/naturalistic emotions are akin to an alphabet with only 4 letters. If we were to translate English into this limited language, we would have to re-use those letters a lot. Within our being, I believe there exists a higher, non-natural conscious which must express itself in its rich detail to our natural bodies via a more limited vocabulary – “feelings” – which manifest themselves physically as our adrenaline and endorphins acting. C.S. Lewis called this spiritual->natural translation “transposition.” Emotions serve many distinctly different purposes, but we see their differences in the richness of the higher, but cannot see such distinction in observing the lower. All we see there are endorphins and a release of adrenaline.

All this is to say that emotions, which can be used for survival in the natural world, have a far richer usage that we are all aware of, but make no sense from that perspective. We cannot interpret higher from the perspective of the lower. The richness of its nearly unlimited variety of experience originates in the higher language that far exceeds the utility of survival. It is one tiny part of something that exists outside of the natural universe: the enormously complex, beautiful, and mysterious entity called the “spiritual” being.

One of the “unconvincing arguments” for God set out by the Minnesota Atheists has piqued my interest. It is argument # 26: Free will is proof that God exists. Whether or not its existing proves God or not is besides the point here. Here is the text quoted:

(26) Free Will – Some people argue that without a god there would be no free will, that we would live in a deterministic universe of cause and effect and that we would be mere “robots.”

Actually, there is far less free will than most people think there is. Our conditioning (our biological desire to survive and prosper, combined with our experiences) makes certain “choices” far more likely than others. How else can we explain our ability, in many cases, to predict human behavior?

Experiments have shown that our brain makes a “decision” to take action before we become conscious of it!

Some believe that the only free will we have is to exercise a conscious veto over actions suggested by our thoughts.

Most atheists have no problem admitting that free will may be an illusion.

This issue also brings up a conundrum: If a god who created us knows the future, how can we have free will?

In the end, if we are enjoying our lives, does it matter if free will is real or an illusion? Isn’t it only our ego – our healthy self-esteem that is beneficial for survival – that has been conditioned to believe that real free will is somehow better than imaginary free will?

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The folks at Minnesota Atheists have released a rebuttal to 34 typical arguments that Christians use to prove God exists from either a philosophical or scientific standpoint. P.Z. Myers posted the list and its detailed argument for each point in HTML form on his site. For those of you who enjoy hearing all sides of the debate on the existence of God, it’s worth checking out. Thank you to xJane over at MindOnFire for the link. This is one of the better pieces of work I’ve read that keeps the Christian-bashing to a minimum so that non-opinionated good logic and thinking are the main points, an aspect of logical debate that makes me smile no matter which side is presenting.

A lot of their criticisms of the Bible are very good, probably because they are drawing on the resources of Dan Barker, a vocal skeptic who is an intelligent ex-pastor and seems to know his stuff, a person whose resources the atheist community should draw heavily upon if they want to make better headway debating intellectual Christianity regarding Biblical criticism.

I was intrigued to see some new items I wasn’t used to reading, such as their approach on free will and morality. I was pleasantly surprised to see some humility in some points (such as they cannot prove atheism ontologically any better than Christians can to prove God.)

Now that the semester is over and my finals are almost finished, I can begin more critical writing again, and I would like to discuss my thoughts on some of their points. Also, I am currently working on a piece illustrating how God handle’s man’s free-will in practical examples of the current picture of the Church and in bible translations. Stay tuned! Sorry I can’t write more – My nights are filled with moonlighting web design and school paperwork.

One of the things we are doing in class is closely studying individual passages in the Psalms. Our process includes background research, a structural analysis, a verse-by-verse examination highlighting confusing parts, a section on theological insights, and then a concluding practical application. Believe it or not, most of the good scholarly exegetical work is done by atheists!

Anyway, here is the psalm according to the TNIV translation. Following this will be my analysis.  Hope you guys enjoy it.

A psalm of David.

1 The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,

3 he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.

4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, ^[a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.

6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.

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If anyone is interested, this is my admission essay I wrote for acceptance into seminary for my Masters of Arts and Religion degree. I ended up being accepted. Hope you enjoy it!

I began my walk as a Christian later then my childhood friends growing up. Most of them had dedicated their lives to the Lord when they were between 3-5 years old; something that to this day I am suspicious of. At the time, I remember thinking that such spiritual experiences would be impossible for a very young child – for it takes a serious amount of understanding to fathom the complexity of hearing God’s invitation. For me, the time when I encountered God was much later.

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I had another one of those dreams.

This time I was in the South – probably during the Civil rights era. In my dream, I had grown up in this mid-sized town somewhere, and it appeared that I was somewhere in my 60s or 70s. There was a big scandal that had just happened in town – an African American boy of about 15 or so had been caught dating a white girl. It was the talk of the town. Nothing seemed to have been done by the law in the town, but the poor boy was the object of scorn anytime he showed his face in public. Unfortunately, it was a small enough town that everyone knew each other, so it was hard for him to hide.

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I recently read a great post by John Remy at MindOnFire.com regarding the criticism about atheists also having “faith” as a fundamental tenant of their world view. I can see why this criticism is annoying – the atheist (loose or strict) relies on evidence and rationality for their world view, and to be told their fundamental beliefs are (surprise!) just based on blind faith, will see this as an insult.
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*updated on Oct. 15th*

I wanted to speak about a thought I closed my last post series with: accountability. This religious term has a lot of baggage for me, and I am assuming it may to my readers as well. But understanding what it really is, or at least defining a healthy version of it, is important for formulating a final idea I am trying to reach – what a good working spiritual authority structure looks like. I have concluded in my past post that current religious power structures don’t take into account the fallibility of human moral corruption. Human leaders + power = inevitable corruption. Just because people are Christian and are expected to be moral doesn’t protect them from moral decline that people in all other spheres of power are susceptible to. To temper this unfortunate truth, I believe a leadership structure overhaul is needed. In the closing thoughts of my last post, I mentioned that the glue to hold a better structure together is – you guessed it – spiritual accountability, a feature that is hopelessly broken due to the way traditional structures are designed.

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