Installment # 63

My foray into bible-based Christianity occupied and often dominated about 20 years of my life from around 1980 to 2000.  It started when Michelle and Bobby were in elementary school and I heard that the teachers were introducing sex education with no moral context at all.  I thought that was outrageous; then I thought: well, what moral context or values were they receiving at home? None.  If the school was to provide it, what would I want them to teach?  What did I believe?  Not much.  So if I was not equipped, and it was not the place of the public school system to teach morals, who was?  My neighbor told me about Los Gatos Christian Church, which was just inside the border of the Town of Los Gatos, and just a couple of miles from our home.  I went there one Sunday morning to see what kind of Sunday school classes they had for children.

It wasn’t long, of course, before I was faced with my own personal decision to make.  Here is another example of how a logical mind combined with no common sense can lead to unfortunate decision-making.  The plan of salvation, as supported by bible passages and as presented by believable speakers makes a lot of sense.  It is very logical.  Additionally, if you sit among hundreds of believers each week and have a consistent message reinforced over and over, it is very hard not to become convinced.  I would also add that humans seem to have a built-in need to believe something in the spiritual realm.  We see the wonders of the human brain and body, the wonders of nature and the planet we live on, the immensity and precision of the universe, and we cannot help wondering how it all came about and maybe why it all came about and, of course, what happens after we die.

Bible-based Christians believe that the bible, which they call “The Word of God,” is God’s complete, inerrant message to us.  Nothing should be added to it, or removed from it.  If you insist on picking and choosing which parts you are going to believe and not believe, then you will stay lost and confused.  That of course rules out every other religion or system of thought.  Any group that has a different opinion on anything non-trivial is by definition wrong (and maybe dangerous and probably unsaved).  To put things in perspective, at the present time (per the Internet), the most popular religion among the world’s 7+ billion people is still Christianity at 2.1 billion people, followed by Islam at 1.5 billion.  The third biggest category, at 1.1 billion, is “nothing,” including atheism, and the fourth is Hinduism at 900 million.  So 5 billion people are lost right off the bat, and then there is probably a goodly number within the 2.1 billion who are only nominal Christians.  Each denomination or sect disagrees with the others on some minor or even major issues, including whether or not they are really “saved,” whether you can “lose your salvation,” whether you are predestined to go to heaven, and the role of good works in qualifying for heaven, to name a few.

It was amusing, if not amazing, to note the lengths we had to go to in order for every sentence in the bible be true.  There is a place in the New Testament, for example, where Jesus admonishes his disciples with: “Oh ye of little faith.  If you had but faith the size of a mustard seed (which is very small), you could say to this mountain, ‘be gone and cast into the sea’, and the mountain would be cast into the sea.”  We had all manner of twisted logic as to how that and many similar statements could be literally true.  There was a whole line of reasoning as to how and why Jesus turned the water into wine at a wedding feast and how, despite the clear context of the story, it was non-alcoholic wine.  I guess the bottom line is that people will always find a way to believe what they want to believe badly enough.

I heard a guy on Christian radio discussing “the cults” say that he would allow as how the Catholic Church is a true church with a lot of error in it, while the major cults (Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) are false churches with a lot of truth in them.  I thought of this when reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.  Referring to something he had just stated about the Quakers of his day, he said, “This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, though in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.”

We had a biblical explanation for everything, and we spoke them with straight faces.  If something good happened to someone we agreed with, we said, “See?  Doesn’t the bible tell us that God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him?”    If something bad happened to someone we agreed with, we said, “Well, the bible says that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.”  If one of our leaders was caught in a scandal (happens a lot), we shook our heads sadly and reminded ourselves that leaders are held to a higher standard than the rest of us, and that the devil especially targets and attacks the leaders.  If something good happened to someone we disagreed with, we would say with David (in the Psalms), “How long, oh Lord, must the heathen flourish,” or words to that affect.  If something bad happened to someone we disagreed with we would nod knowingly and say, “See?  The bible says, ‘be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.’  They won’t get away with it forever.”

We accepted seemingly contradictory information and situations with a shrug and a “Well, we cannot expect our finite minds to understand the nature of God – why he does what he does, why he allows certain things to happen; how he can condemn all those other billions of people (whom the bible says He loves) to eternity in Hell, etc.” And yet we were absolutely convinced that we understood God’s plan of salvation.  Another source of contradiction was how some practices were considered applicable to modern times, and some were thought to be relevant only in biblical times.  In the New Testament church, the women had to keep their heads covered, and were not allowed to preach.  At Los Gatos Christian Church, the women were of course not expected to keep their heads covered, but they were definitely not permitted to preach.  We got around this somewhat by saying that they were only teaching, not preaching.  What a joke!  Also, if a woman felt called to preach, she was considered to be out of “right relationship” with God.  She shouldn’t even want to preach.

Then there is the terminology: Anything you did to help out around the church was your “ministry.”  If a minister was offered a position on the staff, he was “called.”  Almost anyone who served in almost any capacity was included in the “leadership” of the church.  I’m not saying there was anything contradictory or hypocritical about the terminology, but it tended to lock people in and make them feel important, which was especially compelling to people who did not get a feeling of importance or validation at work or at home.  Of course, the military has its own terminology; so does the accounting profession, for that matter.  When I was stationed in Germany, a soldier who lived off post and had his own car had a POV (privately-owned vehicle).  It was never referred to as a car; always as a POV.  I hear reference to “government-speak.”  Apparently they have their own language, too.  Again, there is that sense of belonging – of being “in the know,” of fitting in.

It really is amazing how we could say that we and only we had the true Truth, yet of course could not fathom the mind of God.  The other argument takes the form: “That’s why it is called faith.  When you make that leap of faith, God then starts revealing more of his truths to you.  It is like a veil is lifted from your eyes.”  Good luck trying to reason with anyone who has made that “leap of faith.”  He will steadfastly tell you that he has had an experience that you haven’t had, but if and when you do, then you will understand.  One line of reasoning about faith is that we take many things on faith that we cannot see.  When you eat at a restaurant, you cannot see what is going on in the kitchen.  You trust them to use proper standards of hygiene, food fit for human consumption, and so forth.  You have faith in them!  Driving a car: when the light is green, you proceed through the intersection knowing that the cross traffic has a red light.  But of course we grow up riding in cars and eating what people give us.  By the time we are old enough to think about it, we already know through experience that we need not worry about certain things.  They have never happened.

Another interesting line of reasoning is that in order to recognize something as wrong or evil, we need to have a concept of what is good or true.  Where would a human get the concepts of goodness and truth, if not from his Creator?  Well, that may be a good argument in favor of the supernatural as the origin of things, but it doesn’t follow that we can know much for certain about the supernatural.  We do not need to be shown a physical example of a perfect circle in order to have a mental concept of one, but where did that mental concept come from?  Does that have anything to do with faith? Who knows? We understand the theory of displacement whereby if we place a heavy object into a small body of water, the level of the water rise perceptibly.  Based on that, we also know that if I stick my finger in the ocean, the level of the ocean will rise, but it is so infinitesimal that we would never see it.  We can’t see it, but we believe it.  Is that faith?  Well, it is not observation, but it is a mental extension from the seen to the unseen.  Consider the concept of infinity.  We cannot really picture it in our minds, and our words are inadequate, e.g. “goes on forever,” “never ends,” etc.  Yet I think we understand the concept.  For me, this just speaks of how incredible our minds are; not the origin thereof.

As a comical aside, someone has pointed out that those on the “religious right” nearly all believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, and they believe in the death penalty (capital punishment).  So if a woman is guilty of having an abortion, should she receive the death penalty?  Just poking fun…let it go.

So-called faith comes from associating on a frequent and regular basis with people who all believe the same thing and hear the same message repeated and reinforced over and over again.  It is not unlike the seed of an idea I spoke of in connection with running the marathon or running to the top of Mt. Umunhum: Unless the idea is rejected outright, it will fester in the back of the mind and grow until you act upon it.  Making it even more compelling, in my view, is that humans almost universally have this great need for answers to the great questions of existence: Why am I here?  Where did the universe come from?  What happens when I die?  In terms of the universe, there are really only two schools of thought: the natural and the supernatural, which can also be called random chance versus intelligent design.  There are many compelling arguments for and against both theories, and both theories seem highly unlikely.  To be adamantly confident about either takes a leap of faith, in my opinion.  If I had to choose, I guess I would come down on the supernatural side, but certainly not adamantly.

The origin of man follows right on the heels of the origin of the universe, in terms of the great unanswerable questions that have intrigued humans since recorded time, and probably before.  The great divide here is creation versus evolution, although some have tried to have it both ways by suggesting that a divine being created man, but evolution is how she did it.  (I am just playing around here by saying “she.”  The term “he” is ordinarily accepted in context to be gender-neutral, the way “man” and “mankind” are generally taken as universal, not male or female.  Not so with “she.” “She” always refers to the female of the species.)  Ironically, nearly everyone who talks about God uses “He,” but would acknowledge that in really God is spirit and neither male nor female.  At any rate, if you come down on the supernatural side in regards to the origin of the universe, you probably come down on the creation side when it comes to man.  And “random chance” goes better with evolution of species.  As with the question of the universe, both theories seem preposterous to me, but again, if I had to choose I would come down on the supernatural/creation side.

Many theologians would shout, “But that’s the whole point…you do have to choose!” (You can’t say “Who knows? And who cares?”). But that is because of the third question, “What happens when I die?”  Each religious group or sect has their own elaborate belief system as to the nature of the Creator and what happens in the hereafter.  With, in many cases, hundreds or thousands of years to develop and refine their research, reasoning and messages, each system of thought has a compelling ring to it.  When we add the idea that most people need certainty over ambiguity, and belonging over isolation, it should come as no surprise that they gravitate to the systems of thought that they come in closest contact with, and to the people who seem to have that certainty and community that they need.

Given the great gulf between man and the next brightest animal, in terms of mental abilities, if nothing else, it is hard not to suspect that something supernatural is going on.  But suspecting that something supernatural is going on is a far cry from believing that you have found the group that has it virtually all figured out.  How arrogant and condescending to think that your group is right and all the other groups are wrong to the extent that they don’t agree with you.  I had a sincere young practicing Jew tell me that as far as he understood, the only difference between man and the animal kingdom is that man has self-awareness, and animals do not.  Really?  Wow!  I confess I do not know how the mind of the next most intelligent animal works or about its emotional range or moral code, but to think that self-awareness is the only difference seems ludicrous.  For that matter, I suspect that some of the higher-level animals do have a degree of self-awareness.

If humans were created through some supernatural process, I wonder about the existence of an immortal soul.  I mean, why create something so special – man - only to let him cease to exist at the end of his life span?  And if souls are immortal, where do they hang out?  Where did my soul come from?  Where will it go when I die?  Who will get it next? Does the soul create the essence of personality?  Does it define our individuality?  Speculation can be interesting but, again, to think that you or your group has all the answers is ridiculous.  Allowing for the possibility of the supernatural also opens the door to speculation, theory and belief in all manner of increasingly bizarre and unlikely follow-on ideas that are also possible.  “Evil supernaturalism,” for example, leads to speculation about hell, the devil, spiritual warfare between the forces of good and the forces of evil, etc. 

It also opens the door to accepting the idea that if I just have enough faith, anything is possible.  One example is the “name it and claim it” belief: If the believer is right with God in all respects, he should be able to place his hand on an expensive car, for example, and claim that God is going to give one of those to him; and if he believes it sufficiently, he will receive it.  I think people accept the “random chance/evolution” theory because the alternative opens the door to way more questions and possibilities than they are willing to deal with.  Again, both theories are highly unlikely, but one must be true: either natural or supernatural.  My point is that you can choose the supernatural explanation without needing or expecting that you will need to choose among the various theological speculations.  You just have to be willing to accept “I don’t know, and neither do you!”