In _ _ _ We Trust.

Please permit me to disassociate with the official monetary slogan of he United States. But the line comes to mind. I am currently reading Richard Dawkins‘ “The God Delusion“. In his book, Dawkins states his case claiming the non-existence of God. Which is all well and good, it’s a free country. He and I see eye to eye on one thing which is tangential to the God question, but is nevertheless interesting. That belief in belief is not good.

Let’s unpack all that. Dawkins’ central question is of the existence of God. Some people say people are better off believing in God regardless of his reality, or society is better off because of religious adhearents. And Dawkins and I agree that is not so. In that opinion we are in good company. The Apostle Paul wrote:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.

If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

Dawkins has his own substantial reasons. The abuses of the Church, the holy wars (historic and current), and suppressive arbitrary moral codes. He claims that no matter how constructive the results would be, that is no reason to believe a lie. That is, of coarse, from the persuasion that all religion of all times is a lie.

So this is where I’m at, I am reading a persuasive book about the non-existence of God. I will have more to say about Dawkins’ writing style, style of persuasion, and subjective assumptions (which is a sin for scientists). The introduction to the book promised that a thinking person would become an atheist by the end of the book.

I hope to write more on this as I feel like it.

The Importance Of The Character Of God

This is a difficult subject to breach, but it is extremely profound in it’s implications. None of the ideas I am putting forward here reflect the stances of Cornerstone or Great Commission Ministries, and I am unprepared to conclusively defend them. Having said that, I am looking to spark ideas of what it means to worship God.

The central question is how do you define God? Defining God by a proper name alone leaves a gaping hole in theology. For example: “I worship Jesus, he sits atop Mt. Olympus and sometimes meddles in the affairs of mortals, and is the father of all other Gods.” That example is too simple but makes a few points. The ‘Jesus’ described here is the Greek god Zeus, I hope you caught that. The proper noun for God is only useful if used to refer to to the common definition. That needs some more examples.

The central claims of Christianity is that God is the good creator of the universe whose union with man was broken by the sin of man, and sent his Son to Earth to teach us the character of God and to die for our sins. That is really an over simplification. It is much clearer in the Nicene Creed. That is why all Christians bond over this.

King James Version Bible proponents have made the claim the name of God is in the KJV, and it is therefore the only true bible. Well, that is strange. Because if we got the name just right, but regarded God as a self-interested, aloof member of a pantheon (referring to the Zeus example), we would not be worshiping the God of the bible. This is quite orthodox, except for the KJV people.

Where we get ‘out there’ is the contrapositive statement: If we get the character of God right, than the name is not important. Well, that’s not so out there so long as we are in the realm of Christianity. But what if a non-Christian defined God as a good creator and redeemer of humanity but continued to call it something else (for fun, lets say he called it ‘the unknown god’)? This is all very entertaining to think about.

C.S. Lewis, in his book The Last Battle described a situation like the one above. I’ll just briefly describe what happened in the book. It was the end of the fictional world of Narnia, and some were allowed to pass into the ‘new’ Narnia based on there devotion to Aslan (the Lion you probably saw in the movie trailers). There was, in that world at least a second religion that worshiped a god named Tash, and to everybody’s surprise a worshiper of Tash was in the new world (including the Tash worshiper, but not including Aslan). The explanation given by Aslan is nothing short of C.S. Lewis’ coded theology for the nature of worship. Aslan said that as the man worshiped Tash honestly, whole heartedly, selflessly, and lovingly he was not worshiping Tash, because Tash was none of those things. A person who worships must worship with the character of God.

That is just an idea, maybe too close to unitarianism.

This is an interesting site I stumbled upon.  It makes some interesting points about God’s name, but then starts to use it like a chant (or mantra) to reveal God to you.  In fact that short of chant is definitively called a mantra.  So, I would not regard that site as orthodox.

But this is food for thought and perhaps deeper worship.   I would say a person who claims to have wholly defined God has done nothing of the sort, but has only spit in His face.

Is God Good?

Two men were discussing current events, wars here, disasters there, and other events that cause human suffering. The first man asked the second, “How can God watch all this evil in the world and do nothing.” The second man quipped, “I am more troubled by God asking me how I do it.”

This will only touch on a small corner of one of the biggest questions for those who 1) think about God, and 2) live or have lived on Earth for some amount of time during the past 10,000 years.

Harald Kushner, a rabbi, wrote in his book, “When Bad Things Happen To Good People” , there are three things in the Book of Job which we all understand to be true: God is good, God is all powerful, and that Job was not at fault. Kushner points out that only two of the three can be true at once. Take a moment to arrange them in the different sets of two. This is the conflict of the whole story in Job. The big question he answers is that we are not God’s defenders. When people go through trying times, times of suffering, bad times, we are not responsible for shifting the blame from God. God does not need your defense. When we do this, we end up shifting the blame to the person. The result is their suffering only increases due to our help. Read Job for yourself, he really lashes out at his friends for the things they say.

Kushner concludes that God has to let all things happen here because of free will. For example, stopping a man from hitting his wife would be an intrusion of his choice to do either good or evil. I don’t assign that amount of idleness to God. What Kushner does rightly assign is that pain is a crucible, from pain we can draw two different lessons. The easy lesson is that you are alone and suffering defines the universe. The other lesson is that you are not the center of the universe, you are not in control, and pain is temporary.

This is an ongoing topic, I will explore it again and again.