A Final Word

It's been a great semester, and I think I've learned a lot from this blog. To me, the most important thing to learn about Christianity is how it affects people today. There are a thousand Christian cultures to choose from, and they're all readily available and at your fingertips. Some are outrageous, some are funny, some are conservative, and some are new. It's always up to you to decide what Christianity means to you and if it's the right choice.

With that, I'll leave you to contemplate the most modern thing I've ever seen: Jesus taking a mirror selfie with an iPhone.

"Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus"

This is a four-minute spoken word poem by Jefferson Bethke that attacks the contemporary problems facing Christianity and religion. He describes it as such: "A poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it's core Jesus' gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can't do your own list of rules and feel "not good enough" for God. With Jesus though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don't represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God the Father."

It's a really interesting poem that highlights a lot of stereotypes and prejudices that faced Jesus and apply to today's culture. He denounces religion mostly for the political and controlling aspects, and he embraces the simplicity of Jesus and his teachings. It's worth a couple of listens for anyone who dislikes religion but still feels the draw of some of its aspects.

Does ethical objectivity require God?

This is a bit of an aside from another one of my classes, but I find it very interesting and I'll leave it here for you all to consider. This article by Shafer-Landau is a philosophical argument that depicts the problem with religious people  saying that atheists have no morals because they don't believe in God. The crux of the argument is this: If God decides what is moral, then there is no real objectivity or inherent rightness to morality outside of God's command. If God were to decide that gratuitous torture was moral, then there would be no objective reason for anyone to still believe that it was wrong, despite our current beliefs that it is wrong. However, if God does NOT decide what is moral because there is a moral objectivity inherent in the universe, then God musts recognize some higher law or power above himself that dictates morality.

So which side are good Christians supposed to take? Does God bow to a great Morality Law? Or does He create Morality in a way that would essentially be arbitrary because he would decide morality and immorality  by only his own reasoning and not by any inherent good or badness?

It's an interesting debate to think about.

"Left Behind" The Series

The Left Behind series is a set of sixteen books by authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins that depicts the world in the middle of the Christian apocalypse. In the series, the Rapture occurs and the remaining people on earth try desperately to figure out what to do. A Romanian by the name of Nicolae Jetty Carpathia gains political power, and is eventually discovered to be the Antichrist. Meanwhile, a small group of people who call themselves the Tribulation Force try to gather people and prepare for Christ's return and second judgement.

The books were wildly popular. They garnered the number one positions on the New York Times Bestsellers, USA Today Bestsellers, and Publishers Weekly Bestsellers. It's an interesting comment on our society that the NY Times list didn't include Protestant bookstore sales and yet the books remained topsellers. Even when people don't prescribe to a particular religion, they're hungry for anything labeled "apocalyptic."

Darwin's Christianity

I don't think very many people recognize it, but Charles Darwin (who created the theory of evolution by natural selection) was quite pious. In fact, he initially went to school hoping to become a clergyman. However, after travelling quite a bit of the world and documenting the biology of creatures across the globe, he felt that he had no choice but to face evolution in light of overwhelming evidence. His wife, Emma, (who was also his cousin) begged him not to pursue the theory and wrote to him  asking him to return to scripture instead just before their marriage:

"My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us. I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain. It is perhaps foolish of me to say this much but my own dear Charley we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you. Will you do me a favour? yes I am sure you will, it is to read our Saviours farewell discourse to his disciples which begins at the end of the 13th Chap of John. It is so full of love to them & devotion & every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best. This is a whim of mine it would give me great pleasure, though I can hardly tell why I don't wish you to give me your opinion about it."

Darwin himself was very conflicted, and he stayed involved with his church even as his theory garnered attention. But after he truly accepted the theory, he took on a more agnostic attitude because of the rifts he saw between science and the possibility of a God:

"With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.– I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I [should] wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man hope & believe what he can."

Just goes to show that not all scientists are happy with the problems between theology and science. Darwin, the father of evolution and origin of the biggest Christian conflict in history, wished it wasn't so.

(source)

Best of : Church Signs

We've all seen one or two of them. Signs outside of good, God-fearing churches that appear oddly out of place when covered in a little wit or cleverness. I decided to search the web in a quest to find the best and most offensive church signs of all. Here's what I found:

The Wedge Document

The Wedge Document is a very controversial piece of hushed-up Intelligent Design propaganda. It essentially outlines a social battle plan to defeat naturalism, materialism, and most of all, evolution. The ID network, which often tries to pass itself off as a science, threw a fit when the document was leaked online several years ago. The Document describes ways that the ID Network wants to infiltrate the American media and then spread theism and a belief in God throughout the Western world. The three main stages outlined in the document include: Scientific Research Writing & Publicity,
Publicity & Opinion-making, and Cultural Confrontation & Renewal. Essentially, the idea is to make figures from the ID Network popular and influential in popular opinion, and then use that influence to bring about a social renewal in Christianity. Ultimately, they want to destroy the public's faith in evolution among other things.

The Document was obviously removed from the internet some years ago by ID workers, but one of my professors had saved a cached version to present to her class. I'll link it here for you guys to read yourselves.

http://spot.colorado.edu/~cleland/articles/The_Wedge_Document.pdf