The other day I was having one of those bad days. The kind of day where I get depressed about my life. When that happens, I start questioning everything about my daily activities. Why do I do the things I do? Do they really make me happy? What is the point of anything I do?
That kind of thinking usually pushes me into a deep depression. But this time I was trying to think positive. And as I was trying to pull out of the whole depression state, I remembered something I memorized as child.
It’s an excerpt from the Westminster Shorter catechism.
“Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
Am I glorifying God in my daily life? Maybe my frequent bouts of depression and dissatisfaction are actually because I keep losing focus and forgetting what I’m supposed to be doing here on earth.
I watched the new Rambo movie a couple of days ago. It was actually pretty decent for an action film. Not a lot of plot, and very bloody, but good overall.
The premise is that Rambo has to go in to rescue a group of missionaries that have been captured by the Burmese military. The plot line is a bit weak, but what can you expect form a Rambo movie.
The thing that struck me was the portrayal of the missionaries in the movie. Throughout the entire movie they are portrayed as naive and out of touch with the real world.
Rambo cautions them against going into Burma unarmed, but they won’t listen. Instead they tell him that weapons are the problem. So they refuse to carry them.
He saves them from river pirates, and they tell him that violence isn’t the answer. In fact, they tell him they are going to report his killing of the pirates to the Burmese government.
They bring prayer books to people who are starving. They sing hymns and read Bible stories to people who are under attack. They just have no concept of what is happening all around them, until it happens to them.
So that made me wonder. Is that how people see Christian missionaries? The movie wasn’t anti-Christian and the Christians in it weren’t portrayed as bad people. They were just portrayed as people who don’t understand the world.
Today I set up a website for my missions project. The whole thing kind of went on hold over the last month. What with Christmas and everything, I just didn’t have a lot of time to work on it. But now I’m getting back to it.
Things are going rather well on the Installer. So I thought it was time to set up a website to host the project files and various pieces of data that this project entails. It’s mostly a shell at the moment, but I’ll be adding to it in the next few weeks. So stay tuned to the new project website for updates.
The other day I got an invitation on Facebook from a friend. The invitation was to join an online poll.
The poll was put out by ABC News and the question was “What role should the personal faith of a President play in his/her decision-making?”
The choices in the poll were as follows.
Not sure
It should not play any role
It should play a balanced role with other considerations
It should play a strong role
I didn’t join the poll, but it did get me thinking about the question. And that made me realize that the entire poll was wrong. No matter what you believe about God, religion, or life, there is no right answer to the question asked. It’s a trick question.
Your personal faith is your world view. It is how you believe the world works, and what you believe your place in it is. It is what you use to decide right from wrong, and it is what you use as a measurement and guideline for everything you do. You can’t divorce it from your decisions. So how can you even question how strong a role it should play?
The majority of the participants in the poll voted that “It should not play any role.” Most of them posted comments to go with their vote that expressed sentiments stating the President should do what is best for the country. Or that he/she should attempt to be fair to all religions. But aren’t those both aspects of personal faith?
How does the President decide what is best for the country? What does he/she use as a guideline to know what is best? The President uses his/her belief about how the world works. And what he/she believes is right or wrong. There isn’t any other way to decide what is “best” than to use what he/she believes about the world.
And as for fairness towards all religions, isn’t that also an aspect of personal faith? A belief in personal responsibility and the freedom of religion is the only thing that can ensure “fairness” towards religions that are not your own. That belief comes from your world view. Which is entirely based on your personal faith. This applies even if your “personal faith” is Atheism.
Your personal faith is what you believe about how the world works. And whether you believe in Atheism, Humanism, Christianity, Islam, or any other belief system, it will and must affect every decision you make. It isn’t possible to divorce it from your decision making process. Because it is part of how you think!
Aside
I know some people will say that Atheism should not be included as a “personal faith.” The objection being that atheism is a belief in nothing, or is an absence of belief. And they may be right, but it is still a decision about how the world works. And it still affects all decisions and aspects of a person’s life. So I think in the context of the question in the poll, it fits right in.
Ok, the paying bills post got me actively working on trying to find something I could do. Preferably, at least to start, it needed to be something I could do with my current resources. And after a lot of discussions with friends an family, I think I came up with something I can do now. This project would be just the beginning, but at least it’s a start. My thought is to put together a software and training package for missionaries.
Specifically a package for missionaries and native pastors dealing with writing prayer letters and doing basic publishing. I’ve been trying to find something where I can use my current skill set. And I think this might be useful. I realized that, while I don’t have a lot of formal training, I do have a lot of word processing and small scale publishing experience. Things a lot of people can do with very little experience, but most wouldn’t know where to start.
If I could create a training package that used nothing but free software and taught missionaries and native pastors how to create prayer letters and presentations using that software it would be a really useful tool. Maybe add some basic image editing to the package. I could try to get a list of cheap digital cameras that I could evaluate and recommend (or tell them to avoid) as part of the package.
I’ll also be trying to collect a bunch of online resources and links for them. And if they have local Internet access, try to teach them how to set up and run a blog (which would be basically just an online prayer letter).
So the plan is to use my expertise to build an entire resource package geared towards missions that would be very low cost or free for the missionary. I’ve done a good bit of research already to see if there is a package out there that does this, and haven’t found anything. And the more I talk to about this to people, the more it seems like there is a real need. And it is something I can easily do and should be able to do a good job at.
Finding and evaluating disparate pieces of software, integrating them together, and writing support documentation is something I do in my job all the time. So building and collecting the pieces needed for a package like this is something I have some experience with and should be able to do.
We have a concept in modern Western culture called “Freedom of religion.” It’s not a concept that has always existed in Western cultures, but rather something that was painfully grafted on. Hundreds of wars have been fought over this concept, and millions of our ancestors have died fighting over it.
It’s one of the most basic freedoms a person can have. The right to decide for yourself what to believe about God. It is not something to be taken lightly. And that right isn’t something that should ever be taken away. But lately some very vocal and highly respected voices are being raised against our freedom.
Today’s attacks on religious freedom aren’t coming from the same groups and areas that they have in the past. Historically, attacks of freedom of religion come from religion itself. Other religions, or sects within a religion will attempt to impose their beliefs on everyone. We are used to that kind of attack and are quick to condemn it. But these attacks aren’t coming from that direction, they are coming from the secular side. The anti-religion groups.
You might say that that is nothing new. After all, secular institutions and organizations have long been against religion. Particularly Christianity. And that is true. Secular Universities and colleges have long taught that religion is outdated and wrong. Atheist organizations have openly attacked religion and a belief in God. Nothing new there. What’s new is that the attack has begun to change from an attack on religion’s tenets and beliefs, to an attack on the right to even believe those believe those things.
Increasingly the message is that tolerating religion in modern society should not be done. And that religion, in any form, is harmful and detrimental to society. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this video of a lecture given by Sam Harris. He is working on a doctorate in neurology at Stanford University and is also the author of a book called “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.”
The video is kind of long, and a little dry at times, but worth listening through to the end. Here are just a few quotes from the video that jumped out at me.
“Faith is a sign that there is something wrong with your mind. It is a sign that you cannot be trusted”
“They[speaking of Christian beliefs] are really the responses of a madman or an idiot”
The message of his video is that religion should not be tolerated by modern society. His book contains much the same message. If he was just writing a book that said this, or just giving lectures on it, I wouldn’t really pay much attention. After all, lots of people write all kinds of things that aren’t good. Most of them are ignored by the mainstream. But what is scary is that he and others with the same message, are getting a lot of attention and respect in our educational institutions and media.
You say, so what? So what if atheists and agnostics believe that religion is harmful. They don’t believe in God anyway. So it isn’t much of a stretch for them to believe that religion is harmful to society. The problem is that in the past, religious freedom was something they would have fought for just as hard as you and I would. Because it is the right to believe whatever you want to believe that has allowed atheism to be a viable and acceptable world view.
Now, influential atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are telling other atheists that tolerance of religion itself should not be tolerated. And people are paying attention. If religion is not to be tolerated, then how much longer will it be before people start calling for laws prohibiting religion. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t calling for laws against religion now, they are just calling for intolerance of religion. But it does logically follow that if something is harmful and not to be tolerated, then it should be outlawed. That’s why I’m worried.
Is there anything you or I can do about it? Well not much. They have every right to say these things and believe them. Just as you and I have the right to say and believe what we believe. The only thing you and I can do is make sure that the right to believe what we want to believe isn’t taken from us. How do we do that? By exercising our right to vote. And by making sure that those we vote for will support our right to believe what we want to believe. No matter what that is.
Why can’t we all just agree to disagree? Why do we have to fight and argue about our beliefs? I’m not asking people to like each other, just that we not fight all the time.
On my other blog, I posted a video demonstrating cymatics. I thought the shapes and patterns generated by the sound waves, were pretty cool. Obviously other people agreed with me because it started getting a lot of hits. And then it got stumbled, and I started getting thousands of hits. That’s a good thing, right?
At some point, someone posted a comment about the wonders of God’s creation. basically praising God and expressing amazement at what He has built into his world. Someone else posted a similar comment. There was no attack, or condemnation of others in either of the posts. Just some simple praise for God.
Shortly after that, the conversation went downhill. Someone else posted a comment attacking the first two. Saying that there was no god, and that the earlier commenter’s were stupid for ascribing to god what was nothing but simple science. I posted a rebuttal to his comment, telling him that everyone has a right to their beliefs, and that there was no cause for attacking them when they were simply expressing their beliefs.
After that, the comments attacking Christianity and anyone who believed in God, got a lot worse. Since it is my blog, I get to moderate the comments. Which is really a good thing. Because I deleted a lot of the comments that were using seriously excessive amounts of language and were saying very nasty things that were just uncalled for. My rule on comments is if they are using excessive language or are comparing other people to various body parts, they get deleted. I also don’t like advertisements,
All of this made me feel like the atheists, who were the ones doing most of the attacking, were simply intolerant and very much hypocrites. After all, it is usually atheists in the media and in colleges that are preaching and pushing tolerance. And now here it’s the atheists that are attacking Christians for simply expressing their beliefs.
I was feeling like I was so much better than they were. Saying to myself, “Christians wouldn’t stoop to that level.” But then I realized how stupid that thought was. We Christians aren’t really any better at this than anyone else. We may not preach tolerance, but we do preach love. And what are most of the mainstream Christian groups doing? They are actively hating and attacking anyone who believes differently.
Jesus said that the second greatest commandment, second only to loving God, is to love your neighbor. You’re supposed to love him/her the way you love yourself. How can you show love to a person that you are attacking? God loved us so much that he let us kill his son! And that is the example we are supposed to be following.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our differences should be ignored. or that they should be glossed over. Beliefs are important, and should not be abandoned in the interest of love or unity. But standing up for what you believe, does not mean you have to attack others. There is nothing wrong with agreeing to disagree. No matter what side you are on and no matter what the belief may be.
Towards the end of the comment thread, many people started posting comments that seemed to echo some of what I’m saying here. We can just agree to disagree, without having to attack each other. I just wish more people had that view.
This past Sunday, the pastor of my church preached a message on Christian love and how church members should be demonstrating it. He showed the above video during the message to illustrate his point. The video is a parody and exaggerated, but it nevertheless holds a lot of truth. Most Christians are only interested in what they can get from going to church. Today he wrote up a pretty good post to his blog about it. Here is a little excerpt from his blog:
“Too many believers are more preoccupied with being blessed than being a blessing. We have bought into a greedy, indulgent message thinly veiled behind prosperity. Where preachers are known for being slick salesmen and not the servants of all. Jesus came to give us life that overflows with so much love, joy, and hope that it spills on everyone we know and come into contact with.”
The message really struck me. Way too often Christians, me included, are not radiating that love and joy that we should have.
I encourage you to follow the link below and read his entire post.
What is tolerance? Am I tolerant of other peoples beliefs? These are questions that have been running through my head since I had a disturbing conversation with a friend of mine. She accused me of being intolerant because I told her that I believed her belief system was wrong. The accusation caught me completely by surprise.
To understand why I was so surprised, I need to give you a little background about myself and about the conversation we were having. I’m an extremely non-confrontational person. So unless I know the person very well, I avoid having conversations with people about religion, politics, and belief systems. I avoid them like the plague. I have definite opinions and beliefs, but am much happier agreeing to disagree with someone than I am arguing them with. If I think that voicing my beliefs to a person will cause conflict, I usually just stay quiet.
So back to this particular person who thinks I am intolerant. I’ve known this person for several years. She has a rather forceful personality and is just about the opposite from me when it comes to conflict and voicing her opinions. So needless to say, I’ve known almost as long as I’ve known her, that her opinions and beliefs were strongly in conflict with mine.
Anyway, she and a few other people were having a discussion about the existence of God and hell. Everyone present, including her, knows that I’m a Christian. But I was mostly keeping out of the discussion. Unfortunately this time, I was not allowed to keep out of it. She started pressing me about whether I believed non-Christians would really go to hell. I didn’t really want to tell her yes, because I knew that would upset her. So I tried to deflect the question, but she wouldn’t let me. So I finally told her that yes I did believe that. She then said the following, “Well I don’t believe that. Are you saying you think I’m wrong?” Since I had already put myself into hot water with her, I figured I might as well go all the way. So I told her that yes, I thought that her belief was wrong. That is when I she accused me of being intolerant of her beliefs.
So back to my original question. What is tolerance? And am I intolerant?
Well, I don’t really think I’m “intolerant.” I strongly believe that everyone has the right to believe what they want to believe. I don’t think anyone should, or even can, be forced to believe in something that is contrary to what they “believe.” I have no problem accepting people who believe differently from me, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve been friends with this person for several years. So why did she tell me that I’m intolerant?
I think it is because she, and much of our current culture, has redefined the meaning of tolerance. Tolerance to me means that I put up with and “tolerate” beliefs I don’t like, and that I think are wrong. In her mind that isn’t true tolerance. She has equated tolerance of beliefs with acceptance and equality of beliefs. In her mind, in order for me to tolerate her beliefs, I must also accept that they are equally as correct as mine. Which is impossible. Since they are contradictory, they cannot both be right. One or the other must be wrong.
I personally am incapable of taking that strange middle ground that she wants me to. A place where somehow both views are right at the same time. I simply can’t do that. I either need to abandon my belief and take hers, or I need to believe that her belief is wrong. One or the other is wrong. I’ve taken the position that her belief is wrong, but I’ve also taken the position that she has the right to be wrong. Does that make me intolerant?
A friend of mine posted a commentary on his blog about preference and bias, and how it affects the Christian church today. His commentary really got me thinking about the tendency in the modern church to go to extremes of either separation, or inclusiveness. It doesn’t seem like there are many churches in between.
As many of you know, I went to a Christian College here in Pensacola. Pensacola Christian College sees itself as a spiritual leader in the Independent Baptist movement. And the truth is, that they are. Though, even though they won’t admit it, they share that position with Bob Jones University.
When I first went to PCC, I really didn’t know much about the college. I don’t come from a Baptist background, and hadn’t heard much about them. There were a few adjustments, but my church background was pretty conservative, so I didn’t have a big problem fitting in. The worship styles and daily living standards, were not much different from those in the Presbyterian denominations (OPC and PCA) I had grown up in. But what I wasn’t used to, was the extremes of separation the Independent Baptist movement goes to. Music, books, instruments, politics, Bible versions, clothing styles, preaching styles, praying styles, associations, lack of associations, and the list goes on. It seemed to me that they were actively looking for reasons to separate and vilify their fellow Christians. Most of the things they were separating over were petty and stupid, but if you suggested such, people assumed that that meant you didn’t believe in “separation.” The constant divisiveness and fighting really bothered me.
After I graduated, I did a lot of church hopping as I looked for a church I felt comfortable with. As a consequence I ended up visiting a lot of churches that didn’t believe in separating at all. So important doctrines and standards were thrown out in favor of presenting a united Christian front. All the emphasis was centered around being a big family. Which is good in a way. After all, we are a big family and will be together in heaven. But by ignoring key doctrines and beliefs in favor of unity, you open the door to a lot of problems and heresies that can seriously mess up peoples lives. The message seemed to be that in order to associate with people who believed differently, we had to accept that their beliefs were just as correct as ours. Even when they were in direct contradiction with our beliefs.
What is really needed, is a middle ground. We need to recognize and acknowledge our differences without vilifying each other over them. We should be able to meet on common ground whenever it won’t compromise our beliefs. Both sides fall into the trap of equating association with validation. There is no reason why you can’t associate with someone without agreeing with all his actions and beliefs.
