Pat Robertson seems to have a problem with his mouth

This, from Breibart.tv:

‘They Have Been Cursed’: Pat Robertson Says Haiti ‘Swore a Pact to the Devil’

I don’t like to sit here and bad mouth any other Christian. Each of us answers to God individually, and we’ll be brought to account soon enough. My knee jerk reaction to the headlines I hear that are originated by this guy though… I mean Robertson makes Christians look like complete jerks.

It is as if Roberston can only conceive of bad things happening to people if they deserve it. Like Job’s erring friends, he seems to assume that the people of Haiti are incurring the wrath of God because they offended God. Well we ALL offend God. What makes Haiti so special? What about bad things that happen to people who DON’T make pacts with the devil?

God does as He pleases, and answers to no one, least of all Pat Robertson. His statements smack of arrogance to me, and this latest one seems to be an attempt in Robertson’s mind to resolve the goodness of God with the incredible scale of death in Haiti. What would Robertson say if God told him He didn’t cause that earthquake because of Haitian sin? Would Robertson condemn God as a murderer?

I really think Robertson makes this stuff up. He just says what he thinks is the answer and starts talking about it like he’s some kind of authority; like he’s got some kind of an “in” with God. But he does not speak for God, and he does not speak for Christians.

God bless the guy, but his behavior is hurtful.

The Golden Ticket

There are many verses in the Bible that seem to support either Predesitination (You’re already bound for heaven or hell from the day you were born and there’s nothing you can do about it) or Choice (You make the conscious decision to follow Christ, setting you on the path the heaven). This is a debate that I hear has been going on for ages and will probably never end until the end of the world. There most certainly is a Truth though. Even now it may be one way or the other, and it always was, and we show our ignorance of the Holy Spirit by the fact that we don’t know.

Personally I have problems with both lines of thought on this.

PREDESTINATION

If we are predestined for heaven, it seems to take away the responsibility of the individual, and rest it instead on God. Peter says this about it though:

Be good because you are God’s children. Don’t slip back into your old ways, doing evil because you knew no better. Be holy now in everything you do, just as God is Holy. God says “You must be holy, for I am holy.”

So we must be good because we are related to Him. And yet I still have a proclivity towards my own selfishness. I have a hard time believing that God will absolutely take me home with Him no matter what I choose to do in life. What if, after I have tasted the goodness of God, I fall away and murder, lie, cheat, steal, commit adultery, and do any other things my dumb heart desires with no repentance at all? Could I really spit in God’s face until the end and still get an escort through the Pearly Gate? Even if I decided that I cared nothing for God?

It’s not even to say that we must “do stuff” to earn our salvation somehow. The earning was already done by Christ. We can earn nothing. I guess I just think that one can’t really go the complete other direction and expect the be with God forever. It doesn’t make sense to me. God made many promises to the Jews, only to eventually cut Himself off from those who would not accept Christ. Should God accept “Christians” who have become unrepentant? Surely we can pray for mercy, but what about when we don’t even bother to do that?

I have a hard time believing that there is no “Us” component at all in our relationship with God, even if that component is as little as recognizing our sin and humbling ourselves before God. Personally I think that acknowledging our depravity instead of hiding it is perhaps one of the only things a human being can do that God respects.

CHOICE

If we choose Christ on an individual basis and there is no predestination then I have a problem with what I called The Golden Ticket. When one makes that choice, no matter what point in their life– be it the early years or the end, do they then have carte blanche for the rest of their lives? I guess the big thing that concerns me about both of these is that I’ve met several Former Christians. What does that even mean if, when somebody says the magic words, they are bound for heaven?

Furthermore, this may open up the possibility that Pascal’s Wager (Link) may be a pretty good option, or better yet, wait until the moment before death, i.e. Last Rites. I don’t think God is dumb, and I don’t think that accepting Christ is something we do on our own. Just as Predestination seems to take away the “us” component in our salvation, Choice seems to take away the “God” component.

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I once heard a sermon by a pastor that I really liked in Tucson, where he was talking about these two things, and whether or not one may be able to lose their salvation. He said it was a funny thing: being saved was sort of like a swinging door where it has a sign on the front that says “Come unto me, all ye that labor” and after you go through the door and look at it from behind it says “You were always meant to be here”. He said he didn’t know if you could lose your salvation or not, but he did know one thing: if one will keep after God, keep working on that relationship, keep getting up after they fall down, then surely God rewards that.

My thought on it is this: when I got married, I did not ask my wife what was the minimum amount of time I could spend with her before she divorced me. I didn’t ask her how long she could possibly go between kisses or hugs. I didn’t ask her what the minimum investment would be to keep her there and married to me. My wife was simply preferable.

Is a relationship with God so different? Indeed, if we are going to spend forever with God, and supposing that it’s something we want, why would we act differently here? It’s like people who get completely wasted and gorge themselves at Mardi Gras before Lent. If you wanted to do that, if that’s where your heart is, why did you bother with Lent? If you had strippers at your bachelor party, why did you bother getting married? If you wanted to live life on your own terms and disregard God, why bother going to heaven? Why would you want to, when everything you want is here?

And why, knowing this, is my heart so doggedly determined to veer away from God’s desires for me?

In the end, we have to look at the guy who was crucified with Christ of whom Jesus said “I tell you the Truth, today you will be with me in paradise.” That guy never tithed, never went to church, never read the Bible, never spent significant amounts of time praying, and in fact actually committed crimes so terrible that society decided they needed to kill him horribly rather than let him hurt anyone else. At the end of his life he probably felt like the lowest dog in the world… a stark contrast from the OTHER guy that was crucified with Christ that still found time to mock Jesus. The one Jesus responded to was the one who acknowledged his sin, recognized Jesus for who He was, and had faith in Him.

That’s all it takes, yeah? The guy made a choice, but so did Jesus.

Much ado about Carrie Prejean

Wow. Ms. Prejean has gotten herself ripped up one way and down the other, all because of a very simple opinion that gay marriage is unacceptable. My first question in all this was why this was even a question in a beauty pageant. Shouldn’t these questions be relatively benign, or generally social no-brainers like whether children in the world should have food or not? Was this the place to ask a question that garnered so much controversy?

I have to imagine that Perez Hilton was simply pushing the movement towards gay marriage in asking that question, and probably fully expected the exact opposite answer he got. I imagine he was fishing for a social endorsement from Ms. California.

So here’s my question: Are societal norms led by the powerful few, or the not-so-powerful many?

As it currently stands a majority of Voters (Not really a representative sample) say that gay marriage is not socially normal. This has been true in every state in the U.S… AND YET, when we watch TV you’d think that anyone who thinks this way is some kind of pariah! This woman has been deliberately embarrassed and harassed ever since she gave that answer, as if she was endorsing the KKK or something.

And of course this raises an interesting parallel.

For a very, very long time, racial discrimination was the norm; Not just discrimination, but truly evil inhumane treatment. How did that change? Was it the Civil War? Was it the 13th Amendment? Was it the civil rights movement? Oh wait I remember. Abolitionists called southern beauty contestants “dumb bitches” and sought to embarrass them publicly any way they possibly could… that got the job done.

Looking at the evolution of societal norms regarding racism, it would seem that shifts like this actually come about over the process of time through law and public discourse. I think it’s the few that steer norms.The voice of society is the voice in your ear. If the voice in your ear is your neighbor, that’s a one on one transaction. If the voice in your ear is the TV or radio, that’s quite a bit more prolific isn’t it? It’s as if the tail wags the dog, hmm?

Eventually gay marriage will be completely acceptable in America and anywhere else, I guess. It makes me wonder where the line really is? Is there a universal conscience that is basic to all human beings that will show itself at some point and halt any further advances of liberalism?

What to Wear…

I don’t read the Bible as much as I used to, but I still get into it from time to time. Reading into Matthew the last couple of days, I read something that I thought was important.

Reading the New Testament, you find some stuff that seems to say that Salvation is a gift you keep forever, no matter what. You find other stuff that makes you second guess that idea.

Matthew 22: Jesus also told them other parables. He said, 2 “The Kingdom of Heaven can be illustrated by the story of a king who prepared a great wedding feast for his son. 3 When the banquet was ready, he sent his servants to notify those who were invited. But they all refused to come!

4 “So he sent other servants to tell them, ‘The feast has been prepared. The bulls and fattened cattle have been killed, and everything is ready. Come to the banquet!’ 5 But the guests he had invited ignored them and went their own way, one to his farm, another to his business. 6 Others seized his messengers and insulted them and killed them.

7 “The king was furious, and he sent out his army to destroy the murderers and burn their town. 8 And he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, and the guests I invited aren’t worthy of the honor. 9 Now go out to the street corners and invite everyone you see.’ 10 So the servants brought in everyone they could find, good and bad alike, and the banquet hall was filled with guests.

11 “But when the king came in to meet the guests, he noticed a man who wasn’t wearing the proper clothes for a wedding. 12 ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how is it that you are here without wedding clothes?’ But the man had no reply. 13 Then the king said to his aides, ‘Bind his hands and feet and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

So, Jesus is telling this story directly to the religious leaders of the Jewish nation as an indictment on their inability (or  refusal) to recognize Jesus as the fulfillment of scripture. It seems to be a clear statement: Jews don’t accept the Messiah, so all the rest of us get invited.

What is concerning is the last guy: invited, but not dressed appropriately. What is this an analogy of? What do clothes mean in this analogy? How does this play out practically in our lives? Could we be Christians and still be “dressed” inappropriately? What do we need to do?

Many are called… Few are chosen. Do I have a tuxedo?

Zeal vs. Wisdom

I got a news story recently from one of my atheist antagonists, in which Christians were making an event of book burning, saying that the King James version of the Bible was the only authentic version and such. Basically, it didn’t make us look very good at all. You can find the story here:

North Carolina church to burn ‘Satan’s books,’ including works of Mother Teresa

Anyway, it’s ridiculous to assert that anything other than the King James version is authentic, as even this version was a translation from the original language. Any Bible you can buy off the shelf today is only as authentic as it is an effective translation of the original message. As the verbiage in the KJ is a little dated for today’s readers, doesn’t it make sense that an effective translation would be one that uses language we do today? If Jesus were walking around today, doesn’t it make sense that He’d speak plainly to the common person? Yeah… it does, because that’s what He did before. The End.

As Christians, I think we can sometimes actually be bigger jerks to Christians than we are to other people. It’s real easy to fall into a trap of condemning the activities of others– a lot easier to critique than to do. It’s not that we aren’t supposed to be concerned about others in the faith, but maybe we tend to separate ourselves from them in our heart as we do so, and this is clearly wrong. Maybe this is why we have so many denominations.

Anyway, The Christians in the story obviously have a lot of zeal for God, and I think this is commendable, but really it doesn’t matter what I think. These folks answer to God, not to any man. Proverbs says that enthusiasm without knowledge is no good, haste makes mistakes (19:2). I would say these folks are hasty and wrong, but with good intentions. I can understand the intentions.

Even within the Christian faith, I think we can be pretty wrong about a lot of things. Nobody knows everything. Christians may grasp onto a thing and make that the focus of their faith, but that does not regard the Big Picture as it should. Book burning may a form of rejecting evil and cleansing oneself for some folks, but that does not make us righteous to God.

Hell

Just wanted to write a few things about this.

Hell, in my opinion (and there is some scriptural basis for this), is simply separation from God. I mean, is Hell really a punishment for bad people and bad angels? When you punish someone it’s usually to engender some kind of reaction like remorse or something… I mean, it’s supposed to be something you to do someone who shows them how bad their behavior was so they don’t do it anymore. Is that what Hell is for? It seems rather permanent when you read about it in scripture, and doesn’t seem to be for anything other than a trash bin, really. This strikes me a lot harder than lakes of fire and such.

I think we take for granted all the good things we enjoy that God has already put in place. To be separated from the author of all good things would be Hell indeed. To never again know Love? Beauty? Never again to have Hope?

I wonder sometimes if there isn’t some meaning to the sun and the moon and the way we know them. I don’t mean to get all weird here or anything, but God is kind of like the sun and Satan perhaps is kind of like the moon.

• The sun gives life to our planet, and everything in our solar system revolves around it. We are in a perfect distance from the sun to have life here. Any closer and we would burn up — any further away and all our water would freeze. This is rather like God, in my opinion, As God gives us life and light, but is a holy furnace that would burn us up when we approach if not for the grace of Christ.
• The moon has no light of its own, but merely reflects the light of the sun. It’s a cold, dry, barren wasteland that appears as a glorious and graceful light in the sky at night. It waxes and wanes, ever changing. I think Satan is like this. There really isn’t anything I can think of that Satan uses as a temptation that is not an aberration of something good from God. Sex isn’t a bad thing. Being wealthy isn’t a bad thing. Experiencing the pleasures of life is not bad… it’s the method and the motive, isn’t it? Satan takes the life giving light of God and reflects it off himself, as if he were the one providing the gift, but it’s all a scam. Hope that makes sense.

Anyway, if the sun were to leave us behind, all life would perish. Even the moon would lose it’s luster.

There would be nothing left to cherish.

It makes me fear God to think that there will be many that will be cast out into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, whatever that may mean. I only understand proximity to God, and wanting to be nearer to Him, not further away. I do wish a lot of times that God would offer free samples of understanding to the skeptics, but maybe the skeptics never really cared to begin with. Maybe C.S. Lewis was right when he wrote that heaven would be a hell to them. Maybe. I can not imagine worse than watching the sun set for the last time… watching the light fade from the horizon, never to be seen again.

Creative Destruction in Religion

I came across a news story recently about a lawsuit in which a Jedi… yes, a Jedi… had been discriminated against in a store because he refused to remove his hood as according to his religious beliefs, and was therefore escorted out. I guess Jedi hoods are a little too obstructive for security cameras or something. Maybe he was scaring the other customers? Who knows.

 Out of curiosity, I took a look at the website here: www.jedichurch.org

It claims to predate the Star Wars, yet uses dialogue from the movies quite liberally to explain its concepts. Odd that.

If you think about it though, how cool would that be if the force was actually real? Really being able to throw lightning out your hands? Move things with your mind? WOW! That would be awesome– So awesome that I’m tempted to just want to believe it even though I know it means exactly squat.

So how about this? Here we’ve got a world full of different points of view that seem right to all of us, meanwhile there is an actual TRUTH out there that is beyond our ability to disturb… a Truth that both predates and surpasses us. There must necessarily BE an Absolute Truth, and I go into that HERE. What we end up with, however is a cheap, ridiculous sham that is repeated ad nauseum throughout human history in the form of “religion”.

There IS a way that it is. Who’s concerned about that? What if it’s something you don’t like or personally agree with? Would that make it any less True?

National Debate on Politics

While I don’t normally subscribe to politics as any kind of meaning to the real Big Picture, I do think this country is pretty torn up about the differences between the right and the left in the United States.

I’m reminded of when I was a kid and used to watch the WORLD WRESTLING FEDERATION! You had the Good guys and the Bad guys. Hulk Hogan against… uh… well whoever was the leader of the Bad guys. was it the Russian guy? Haha. I was so into it too, man. I hated it so much when one of the Bad guys would distract a ref while his Bad guy buddy hit the Good guy with a chair, causing him to lose the match. I would get SO MAD I would yell at the TV! Someone finally did the courtesy of letting me know it was all staged. Boy was that stupid.

It’s probably not a fair comparison, but I think I see the same thing going on in our government. I think the majority of Americans are getting played like a fiddle. We get played by the sensationalist rhetoric of radio commentary, and we get played by the good members of Congress who are interested in keeping their jobs, for what reason I cannot imagine. Surely there’s more rewarding work out there to do when you’re a person of means. We get played by the press, having sometimes painfully obvious leanings one way or the other, but it gets ratings and ratings mean money.

Is this really what it all boils down to? Cash? Payola?

I think there ARE some very real ideological differences that create a platform for each side to stand on, each valid in it’s own way, but not necessarily a stand alone method. What we need is a good mix of both, hmm?

What an amazingly healthy thing it would be to have a week long debate about left vs. right… one in which the main ground is covered, and one that creates a unified national conscience about right vs. wrong. This may be naive, but I really do think that making human beings of ourselves on either side would do a lot to stem the rhetorical, and sometimes REAL violence that we are moving towards now.

I’ve got faith that people on either side really do want what they see as the best direction for the country. Nobody is really as selfish or stupid as some on either side would like to make them out to be. Most people have good intentions. It’s the ideology that needs to be worked out.

America needs to define itself again.

What is Truth?

Is this a complicated question? Not really. I think the only factor that complicates this is the human mind’s proclivity to perceive reality in shades and colors that reflect our own expectations. Regardless of what people may think on one subject or another, Truth can have a simple meaning if we let it. Truth is what is actually true.

George Berkeley postulated (supposedly) “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?” You can read up on this statement and the theory behind it HERE. Isn’t it hubris for any philisophical question to point towards us as any kind of focal point for Truth? Doesn’t that put undue expectations on human beings? We all perceive radically different things, even when we’re looking in the same direction.

If we were to define a “sound” not as vibrations moving through the air, but as those vibrations hitting an ear drum, then indeed we would say that falling trees do not make a sound if there’s no one there to hear them. If we were to define sound as vibrating air particles moving through the air pressure regardless of ear drums, we’d define sound differently. It all depends on how you define it.

AND YET, did anything change about the scenario at all? Tree fell, sound waves created, either hit ear drum or did not. The only thing that may be different is how we perceive the event.

So it goes with Truth, right? What is True is still True, regardless of what any of us may see in it or say about it. Nothing changes in the universe, only in our minds. We can’t change one hair in our heads black or white merely by perceiving anything. Regardless how sincere we are, or how devout, or how convinced we are about absolutely anything at all, it frankly means nothing next to what is actually True.

I think that it is important in this day and age to recognize that there IS a way that it is, both in the physical world and the spiritual world. We see so many takes on the Truth today, so many perceptions, that it would appear that the vast majority of us have come to the conclusion that the tree we heard is the only tree there is. We readily accept others’ beliefs as long as they don’t actually commit violence on our own. Frankly, we don’t really give it much thought, do we? We’ve got other things to worry about here and now.

But… it’s all a lie. Further, it’s a lie that we don’t even care to correct because it helps us all get along, and that at least is something that helps us now. And Truth is no longer sought. Truth is taken for granted. Truth is ignored.

Pontius Pilate in the book of John questions Christ about who He is before handing him over for execution. Christ explains “You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate scoffs at this, asking “What is Truth?“.

What is Truth?

It’s not so hard when you recognize that we are not the center of the universe.

Religious Feelings?

I recently watched one of my wife’s Bollywood movies that depicted a story of an ancient emperor and his efforts to unite Hindustan under him. There was a lot of intrigue, fighting, politics and romance involved. The scene that struck me though, was one in which the emperor, a devout Muslim, is presented with a performance from a Muslim chorus singing praise to a saint of Allah. First of all, the song was actually pretty cool musically anyway, so much so that I listened to it a few times. Second, the scene depicts the emperor meditating on the music and seems to see a white light descending on him from above in his mind’s eye, which inspires him to stand up and dance with the chorus. This reminded me so much of King David and his dance before the ark of God as the Jews brought it back from a foreign land.

It got me thinking about how much of God is really “in” what we do as worshipers.

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve seen what I consider to be some ridiculous stuff coming from the Christian side of worship. Not to pick on any particular denomination here, but… the passing out, much of the “speaking in tongues”, and basically the near LSD-like state that I’ve seen some folks in is something that misses me.

• Speaking in Tongues – Biblical precedent for this. I’m absolutely certain that this is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Looking at the Biblical precedent though, it does seem to indicate that what one says while speaking in tongues is an actual language. It doesn’t even matter if the language is of humanity or not, language itself follows certain rules. You cannot say “Homina homina homina homina” and have it mean anything other than a single phrase repeated over and over and over again. Understand? AND YET… My brothers and sisters in Christ get this in church only to hear it TRANSLATED by someone else in the body claiming it says some long oratory that could not POSSIBLY be a translation of what was just said.

• And friends, if this is CLEARLY fake, what else do we embrace that is simply mankind’s proclivity towards fantasy? It begs the question, yes? I have felt, in praising God, a love that absolutely fills my heart to overflowing. Have other people in other faiths felt something similar? My knee-jerk reaction is that they could not possibly have, because surely this feeling comes from God… and yet – and this is pretty important folks – How does my joy differ from from a worshiper of Allah? There must undoubtedly be some kind of distinction, but what is it?
  

How much have we distorted the Truth over 2000 years? Not deliberately, of course… but how much do we get wrong? God is outside of ourselves. God is immutable and eternal. God’s purpose is greater than all of our grasping at Him. We reach out, but we cannot get a hand-hold… and so we pretend? Do we even fool ourselves?

I daresay we do.

This is a hard thing, because I think the average run-of-the-mill Christian equates God with the good feelings we get from spending time with Him. If we consider though, that people have been endowed with this capacity for religious fervor by God, perhaps we can also consider that this capacity gets abused or misdirected. The blind leading the blind, and both will fall into a ditch.

Could it really be that our feelings are actually useless in determining Truth?

Could it really be that the heart is deceitful above all things?