2 posts tagged “faith”
Marathon post warning!
We're talking about our passions at church (not those kind of passions, people). A guest speaker a few weeks ago told us that if we're unsure what we're passionate about, we can ask ourselves three questions: What makes you sad? What makes you mad? What makes you glad? Then we can use the answers to find out how we can use our passions to serve others. So...
Mad:
Judgmental Christians make me angrier than anything. Shush Now had a fantastic post about this a few days ago. We are NOT called to judge. We are called to LOVE. That's it. Love the Lord God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. I have no idea where in the Bible it says to castigate people for their actions, beliefs, or ideas. The closest I can find is that as Christians we are called to speak with other Christians (not those outside the faith) who we see acting in a way contrary to what we believe. And we're supposed to do that IN LOVE. So, Mr. Phelps, let's talk.
The complete lack of charity by people who can afford it (this definitely includes myself at times) makes me mad. It makes me more than mad -- it makes me sick -- to see the distribution of wealth around the world. I'm not saying we should sell everything and give all our money to the poor, but does Paris Hilton's dog really need a freaking diamond collar when thousands of people die daily because they can't afford a meal? Do I really need 30 pairs of shoes when there are millions who have no shoes at all?
People who believe themselves to be entitled to something for reasons A, B, or C make me mad. These are the people who think respect should just be doled out in handfuls instead of earned. People who cheat and think it's okay because other people cheat. People who sponge up welfare without trying to earn their own way. People who refuse to merge properly on the freeway because they drive a nicer, faster car, and they deserve to go first. People who expect others to be at their beck and call. Basically, people who think the rules don't apply to them make me mad.
Sad:
The situation in Africa (and anywhere else this might happen) where children are kidnapped in the middle of the night and are forced into being soldiers. Just thinking of being ripped out of my home and being forced to kill the people for reasons I can't understand because I'm ten years old makes me tear up. I don't understand how the world can allow this to happen. Why is this okay? Isn't there something we can do?
The rate of illiteracy around the world, especially here in the US. My parents read to me from the day I was born until the day I grabbed the book out of their hands and read it for myself. I've been a reader ever since. I love books because they give me insight, they take me on adventures, and I learn incredible things from them. The thought of not being able to read and experience books (not to mention all the other things we read on a daily basis -- signs, applications, etc.) makes my heart ache.
It makes me mad when women think of themselves as worth nothing. This includes women who have been battered and abused, girls who find their worth only in how they look and what guys think about them, women who have been told lies about who they are, and pretty much any girl at the wrong end of the foster system. I want to take all of these women and teach them that they are worth everything to God. And that there are people out there who find them worthwhile, too.
Glad:
People doing noble things make me glad. Anyone who runs a good charity falls in this category. Seeing people who find all the satisfaction in the world from seeing a kid with cancer smile, or spending some quality time with an elderly person, or seeing the look on a mom's face when she's finally free from an abusive relationship. These people tend to sacrifice a lot of things that the rest of us take for granted. These people make me glad.
Being outside in God's creation makes me glad. I've never considered myself an environmentalist by any stretch (I recycle. I use CFLs. That's about it.). But I'm coming to the realization that God entrusted us with this world, and it's a good thing to be good to the earth. So maybe that's a passion that's slowly developing, although not in this alternative-to-religion way that environmentalism seems to be lately. I just want it to be beautiful when I go to the beach, or for a hike, or even just for a walk in my own neighborhood.
Being in communion with people makes me glad. Just being around people and loving them and having a good time makes me very happy. Learning new things about people I've known for years makes me glad. Meeting new people and expanding the circle of people I know brings me joy. I used to be a total homebody, never getting out and meeting new people. But it's becoming a lot easier these days (thank you WGA strike), and I find that I like having people around; people to talk to, to discuss issues with, to enjoy activies with. These things are making me happy these days.
My thoughts about what makes me mad, sad, and glad:
I think that I'm scratching the surface of my passions. Financially, I try and give as much as possible because I've been blessed with a lot, and I'm giving to charities that align with what make me mad, sad, and glad. I'm taking time to enjoy the things that make me glad, and to try and become like the people who make me glad. I'd like to start doing a little volunteer work outside the church. I'm still working with the youth group girls to try and instill in them a sense of worth and respect. I'm not afraid to (in love) knock some of my youth group kids down off their little entitlement pedestals. Mostly I'm trying my best to love everyone around me, especially the people who aren't as easy to love. Like that guy on the freeway who can't merge.
I know I have both Christians and scientists who read my blog (as well as people who would not attribute either label to themselves). I hope this post inspires some (friendly) discussion about science and faith (and not necessarily the Christian faith, at least in this post, but the faith of a higher, all-powerful Being). I am very interested in hearing what you all have to say! This is most likely going to be a long post, but I encourage you to read and respond to it, because I think it's an important issue that deserves discussion.
As someone who's gone to a Christian church for years, I've sort of always pushed the questions and theories of science to the wayside to make room for my faith. The church believes one thing; science believes another, and they definitely don't agree and they can't seem to get along, so I'm just going to ignore it. But darn it, I'm the inquisitive type. So I've undertaken a journey to learn more about science and faith, and to see if the two are reconcilable. Surely if God is the God of the universe, He can hardly be threatened by my lowly efforts to find out the workings of His natural world, right? Galileo, who found himself lodged squarely between science and the church when he posited that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa, said, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." And so it is with this mentality I begin.
Please note that I am NOT a scientist. I was an English major, and now I'm an editor by trade and I remember only odds and ends from biology and chemistry and other science classes in college and high school. My personal knowledge is extremely limited in this area and that's why I'm undertaking this search. I am also not a theologian, although I would say I know more about theology than I do about science.
My search has stared with the Language of God, by Francis Collins. Collins is a nationally recognized scientist, one who was instrumental in the mapping of the human genome, which is apparently really important to medical advances, as well as other areas of science (I think Steve Betz has mentioned it on occasion). He is also a Christian. The Language of God was his attempt to explain to the general public how he has reconciled what he believes about science -- including the ever-so-debatable theory of evolution -- with what he believes in his heart to be true about God. I'm not sure if I agree with everything said in this book, and I'm still trying to discover how his theories might mesh with my own, but I think he has a lot of good things to think about.
Although this statement didn't appear until well into the book, I thought it was a good observation to start out with: "Science alone is not enough to answer all the important questions... The meaning of human existence, the reality of God, the posibility of an afterlife, and many other spiritual questions lay outside of the reach of the scientific method. While an athiest may claim that those questions are therefore unanswerable and irrelevant, that does not resonate with most individual's human experience." This is why searching is worth it at all, I think. Later he says, "Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview provides another way of finding truth."
This book probably could have been a thousand pages long, but Collins decides to focus on what he calls BioLogos (from the Greek word for life bios and the Greek word for word -- or Word, in a higher sense -- logos), which has the more widespread (but still relatively unknown) title of "theistic evolution." He sees the scientific evidence for evolution (especially in reference to DNA) as compelling, yet he also sees evidence for God -- namely in what CS Lewis dubbed Moral Law. Collins believes that because we, as humans, have this innate sense of right and wrong that doesn't seem to fit with evolution. Atheists would say that there is evidence for how this sense would have evolved, Christians say that God wrote it on our hearts. Moral Law is one of my own personal evidences for the existence of God as well.
BioLogos looks like this (to Collins -- there are other variations):
- The universe came into being out of nothingness approximately 14 billion years ago.
- Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
- While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
- Once evolution got underway, no special supernatural intervention was required.
- Humans are a part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
- But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
Wow. That's not something that you'll hear at most churches on a Sunday morning. The American Association of Lutheran Church, the group to which my church belongs, professes a literal six-day Creationist view. Collins deems this as incompatible with modern science, but is held onto by "sincere, well-meaning, God-fearing Christians who are driven by deep concerns that naturalism is threatening to drive God out of the human experience." This makes sense -- most believe that if there's evolution, there's no need for God. Instead, Collins posits that the creation account in Genesis is not a literal translation, but does have a more lyrical and allegorical flavor, like the Song of Solomon or the Psalms. Collins believes that "the intention of the Bible was (and is) to reveal the true nature of God to humankind. Would it have served God's puposes thirty-four hundred years ago to lecture to His people about radioactive decay, geological strata, and DNA?" Of course, there is always a concern with liberal translations of the Bible -- people can read into anything. But Collins feels there is a difference between these more allegorical books and books with eyewitness testimony and historical accounts, such as the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. Collins finds that BioLogos to be both scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying.
I think my biggest concern with all of this is how many times in history things have been attributed to God when, in fact, they have had a very logical scientific reasons -- solar eclipses, the movement of the planets, etc. If evolution is true (I'm not saying that it is, but go with me on this), then sticking by our standard Creation story is actually doing a disservice to faith. For when a person who has grown up in the church goes out into the world and finds a lot of contradictory information, there's a good chance that the person will walk away from the faith completely. It's like the God of the Gaps theory. God fills in where science has no explanation. Problem is, if science does find a solution, God is squeezed out. Instead, perhaps we should, as people of faith, be looking to God as the Author and Perfector of all things, even if all things were done a little bit differently than we have been taught to believe.
I know this is a basic basic basic overview of what this books is about, and it doesn't really cover the few reasons Collins gives about why he chose Christianity over other faiths, but this post was getting long enough that I thought most people might start skipping over this post if I kept going. I'm interested in knowing what you all think. I'm still not sure what I think about it all!
