Has Christianity failed?

You might look at the teachings of Jesus as presented in the Christian bible. Then you might look at what people calling themselves Christians are doing and saying. Noting that those two things don’t quite line up, you might ask yourself the question: Has Christianity failed?

Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding.

When you do something for someone else, don’t call attention to yourself. You’ve seen them in action, I’m sure—‘playactors’ I call them—treating prayer meeting and street corner alike as a stage, acting compassionate as long as someone is watching, playing to the crowds. They get applause, true, but that’s all they get. When you help someone out, don’t think about how it looks. Just do it—quietly and unobtrusively. That is the way your God, who conceived you in love, working behind the scenes, helps you out.

—Matthew 6:1–4 (MSG)

In Jesus’ day there were self-righteous, divisive people who put on a show about being religious in public while completely missing the point of the religious teachings. Christianity can’t stop that any more that Judaism or Jesus himself could. People will do what people will do. Jesus’ teachings don’t tell Christians to do anything about that beyond: Don’t be like them! Modern-day Pharisees aren’t evidence that Christianity is failing.

Perhaps more importantly, being Christian doesn’t mean being perfect. It means—when you’re doing it right—recognizing that you aren’t perfect and wanting to become perfect. The most authentic Christian makes mistakes. Christians making mistakes isn’t evidence that Christianity is failing.

When Christianity succeeds, it seldom makes headlines. Which, the gospel of Matthew tells us, is exactly how the Christ said it should be.

And that’s true for other faiths as well. Don’t judge a faith by the headlines.

What’s the more important message?

I find it academically interesting to read things like “Mark and Divine Christology?”

But the question of whether Jesus was wholly God or wholly man or wholly both or wholly neither... That’s all academic to me. I can’t understand why it is anything more than that to anyone.

My own personal credo says nothing about the divinity of the Jesus.

If you honestly study the scriptures, you will find that they do not necessarily agree on this matter. (Perhaps they don’t necessarily disagree either, but...again: Academic.)

What is the more important message? The one that is more mixed or the one that is more consistent?

What is the more important message? That Jesus was divine or that we should love our enemies?

What is the more important message? That we should stone certain offenders or that we should not judge others lest we be judged ourselves?

What would Jesus say?

The Bible is...

From “Making the world a better place”:

Readers of the Bible need to be able to recognize when God is depicted in a manner that is a projection of humanity at its worst.

To me the Bible is not a message from God to humans. It is a story of humans trying to understand God (i.e. truth). And themselves.

And it isn’t a story that is finished. Faith isn’t about dogma. It is about starting with the wisdom of our predecessors and then trying to go beyond that.

Exploring Our Matrix: “The Message is to You”:

In the spiritual life, there aren’t too many absolutes I can make, but this is certainly one. On the spiritual journey, the message is always to you. The message is always telling you to change.

Now, what most people do is they use religion to try to change other people. It’s always someone else that needs changing. No. Stop it. Once and for all. Whatever happens to you in your life is a message to you.

Oh the ego wants to avoid that. So we look for something out there to change–somebody not like me is always the problem.

—Richard Rohr

I don’t think I could agree with that more.

WWJD

What would Jesus do?

Not to knock the sentiment behind it, but I’m not sure that...really...that’s a question we should be asking ourselves. I’m not convinced Jesus was meant as an exemplar as much as a teacher.

e.g. If Jesus is God, and if He told us that we are not to judge because to judge is God’s place, not ours... Then what we should do is different than what God, and therefore Jesus, does. Perhaps God as Jesus meant to be an exemplar and thus limited Himself to doing what we should do. But are we sure.

shrug In the end, I guess I find that kind of line of argument unpersuasive per se. We shouldn’t get so caught up with logic puzzles as much as trying to understand what the gist of the message.

In any case, when reading scripture, I tend to pay more attention to what it tells us Jesus said than what it tells us He did.

Jesus and fundamentalism

Jesus spoke out against the ways of the fundamentalists of his time. But he never taught that we should directly oppose them. His teaching is that I should concentrate on doing the right thing and not waste time judging others.

(The best I seem to do is that I sometimes keep myself from expressing my judgements. I am still working on the actually not judging.)

So, I have come to accept that fundamentalism is always going to be there. Because the fundamentalists are vocal, they are going to widely been seen as exemplars of the faith even though they are not. That is not for me to correct, as much as I might want to. The task laid for me is not to fight that but to simply worry about my own path.

Doing so, I can sow seeds among those who I have direct contact with. But sowing the seeds is not the purpose but a side-effect. If I am making choices in order to sow seeds, I am not sowing authentic seeds. When I concentrate on my path, then the seeds will sow themselves.

Nye and Ham

To me, there’s only one thing to say to people like Ham: You are missing the point of the scriptures. Until he—or anyone inclined to agree with him—hears that, there’s no point in saying anything else.

Unblind faith

Not all faith is blind faith.

Christology / Christian

Was Jesus fully God, fully human, both, or neither? Could Jesus really know the human condition if He was truly without sin? If Jesus was omniscient, unable to deceive himself the way we can, how could He have struggled with temptation the way scripture tells us He did?

Was Jesus married? Did He have a beard? Did He wear His hair long? Was Jesus an actual historical person or a myth?

By Berihert (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

These are all interesting questions to ponder, but—ultimately—I don’t believe they matter. Jesus’ message wasn’t about His nature, even if scripture occasionally tries to say that it was.

Being a Christian is not—to me—about the Trinity, the nature of the Christ, the Immaculate Conception (which probably doesn’t mean what you think it means), the Cross, the Resurrection, or the Afterlife.

Being a Christian is about a humble attitude, a charitable spirit, and the words & actions that flow naturally from those. It is about being at peace in the midst of strife. It is about loving both the lovable and the unlovable. It is about forgiving the unforgivable. It is about learning to listen to that small, still voice inside. It is about being able to put other priorities above your will. It is about learning that whatever mistakes you may have made, you are worthy of love, you can turn things around, you can make amends, and you can be forgiven.

Is that cherry-picking? Perhaps. I’d rather be called a hypocrite for using reason and prayer to discern the Godly from the human in religion than to be called a hypocrite for putting the letter of the law above the spirit or for preaching one thing while practicing another.

Note that while I may be all three kinds of hypocrite, I am saying that I only aspire to being the first. I’m working on not being the others.

The golden rule

In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. (Talmud, Shabbath 31a)

Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself. (Hadith)

This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. (Mahabharata 5:1517)

Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. (The Buddha, Udana-Varga 5.18)

The difference between science and religion

Penn Jillette, via Gruber, via Kottke:

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Actually, I think it is pretty clear that the basic truths—which you find repeated in nigh every religion—would reappear.

The big difficulty with religion is that it is easy to get caught up in the unimportant parts and lose sight of the important ones.

(Though, we don’t need to be putting science and faith into opposition.)

Rapture day!

From “Why There Will Be No Rapture” on the Exploring Our Matrix blog:

Others understand the Bible even better, and are aware that the passages appealed to in support of the doctrine of the Rapture (such as 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) do not teach the idea of a Rapture followed by tribulation that is the mainstay of Dispensational Pre-Millennialist eschatology.

I love that. It pretty succinctly tells most of us that we really don’t have the theology chops for this subject.

Honestly, I’m not crazy about the argument that James then makes in that post.

For me, it’s pretty simple. If you’re concerned with when The Rapture will come, you’ve missed the point. Read the book again.

Cheating in Sunday school

After some research, I settled on the Olive Tree Bible Reader for iPad.

I really like the Tecarta app, but they didn’t have the NRSV. I really wanted a single app with—at least—the NRSV, the NIV, and the Message.

I used to just use Bible Gateway with my iPhone. It’s a fabulous site, works well with the iPhone, and is completely free. The one downside was that over 3G it was slow enough that I would still be loading when everyone else had already found the passage. Another downside was that the iPhone’s small screen was poorly suited to sharing with your neighbor.

Well, with the Olive Tree app and having the Bibles installed on the iPad, I now find passages while everyone else is still flipping pages. It felt almost like cheating. ^_^ Just four taps to get to any verse.

There is one really weird thing about the Olive Tree app. From the app store, you can buy different versions of it that come bundled with different Bibles. Then there is a sort of “generic” version that allows you to buy multiple translations via in-app purchases.

Once you log-in through one of the bundled versions of the app, Olive Tree will record that you have the bundled Bible (and other bundled books). You can then download those in the generic version of the app.

The weird part is that the versions of the app with the bundles are cheaper than buying the same books directly in the generic app via in-app purchase. So, instead of just buying the generic app and then the translations I wanted via in-app purchase, it was cheaper to buy all the individual bundled apps and then download all the books in the generic app.

It’s hard to even explain. It was confusing for me, and I suspect my background in software and e-books means it was easier for me to understand than for most of their customers.

In any case, I’m pretty happy with the final results. I have the KJV, the NRSV, the NIV, the NIrV, the TNIV, the Message, the ASV, the Vulgate, and the Bible in Esperanto all installed on my iPad in a single app. It’s quick to get to any verse. The search seems decent. And it will do split-screen to compare two versions side-by-side. I also have a couple of commentaries. (In split-screen mode, you can get the commentary for a passage next to the passage.) Plus a few other free e-books. Olive Tree seems to have a good selection of other Bibles, commentaries, and books to buy as well.

Push the button

(Some Lost spoilers follow.)

“Push the button every 108 seconds or the world will end.”

The only way to disprove that is to not press the button, but—if you’re right—it will be a pyrrhic victory.

Given what the candidates knew, could any of them be truly certain whether Jacob or his nemesis was the villain? Even with the extra information we—the viewers—have... We know that Jacob was not infallible. It seems that Smokey’s goal was originally fully justified, even if his methods weren’t.

This, to me, has been one of the strongest messages of Lost. Logic and science can only get us so far. Often we reach a point at which a decision must be made with incomplete information. We have to make a leap of faith, though one informed by reason.

Reason and faith are not choices, as they are sometimes presented. Nor are they opposed to one another. Rather they are tools we use to live our lives. You have to use both, and you have to use them together.

“Christian militia”

On NPR the other day, the reporter kept referencing a “Christian militia” that had been planning to kill police officers. It’s fairly clear that such a militia is not Christian. Reporters are careful to use “alleged” and “allegedly” since people are innocent until proven guilty. Too bad that their use of adjectives requires no standard of proof.

Which reminds me of an old blog 1.0 post: “Reporting about Serial Killers” (11 October 2002)

Dr. Welner said that the media should change how they cover serial killers. Instead of words like “cunning” and “sniper”, they should use words like “coward” and “shooter”.

Micah 6:8

A popular verse from today’s Sunday school lesson in a lesser known form:

But he’s already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and don’t take yourself too seriously—take God seriously.

—Micah 6:8 (The Message)

WalkingBible

This is either brilliant or silly. Probably both.

WalkingBible

I tend to think that study—considering context, thinking about, talking about—is more important than rote memorization.

In fact, I should probably take Disciple I again.

Merry Christmas!

Whether you believe in the story of Christmas or not, consider for today the meaning of it. Why was it written? Why do we continue to tell it?

I’m thinking about three of the four words that I saw at both of the Christmas Eve services I attended this year. Love Caritas omnia vincit? No. Love doesn’t overcome my problems, but love can defang them. Peace If I can feel love, show love, do love, be love, then I can find peace even amidst strife. Hope No matter how dark the clouds may be, there’s always a silver lining. There are new beginnings. There’s a chance for me make the world a better place.

Those are the things that the birth of a child—human, divine, or both—bring to my mind today.

Goldfish Guitars

I found the story of Goldfish Guitars interesting.

Science versus religion, part 2

In response to this post, Anonymous wrote:

I guess if you want your science without objectivity, a little faith thrown in is fine.

What if I just want to look to science for answers to the questions it can answer while looking to faith when considering the issues it addresses?

When there is a conflict between science and faith, it is because somebody has misunderstood one or both of them.

Sadly, some scientists manage to misunderstand science, and some clerics manage to misunderstand faith.

If you think a scientific conclusion conflicts with your religion, you’ve missed the point of religion.

Not that that means the scientific conclusion is always right. Science is imperfect. Most of the time, there’s more to the story yet to be discovered. Sometimes, we just get it plain wrong. Religion, however, doesn’t really care about the issues science addresses.

If you expect science to provide meaning, you’ll be disappointed.