In a website comment section yesterday, someone linked to this short video for me to check out, so I did. It’s only a few minutes, but it’s very much worth watching because the guy is a gifted communicator and said some seemingly wise and thoughtful things, until you really think about what he’s saying. It sounds so profound on the surface, but it’s as solid as the surface of an egg shell. I wrote a comment in reply that I thought I’d share here because it is so necessary to confront the meaning of mortality, and entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics, all of which he talks about.
This is sad, even as it is beautifully elegant deeply unfulfilling garbage. The young man thinks this is some kind of answer to our mortality, but all it does is blind him to obvious questions: Why do we die? Why is there entropy? Why is everything ephemeral and fleeting and ultimately unfulfilling? For most secularists, including Freud, and all Eastern religions, the meaning of death is the elephant in the room best left ignored. Maybe death is ultimately meaningless, maybe it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself, doesn’t come from anywhere or have any reason for being. It is, as the atheist contends, just a brute fact of the natural world. Or maybe not. (more…)
As everyone in the Evangelical world, and many beyond, know by now, evangelist and apologist Ravi Zacharias was a phony and serial sexual abuser. Those are words I never thought I’d write, to say the least, but they also don’t surprise me. Christianity assumes and teaches that fallen man is, well, fallen. It assumes and teaches that the sinful human heart is capable of complete self-deception. It also teaches that salvation is the reconciliation of man to a holy God by an inner transformation, and not merely intellectual assent to certain propositions. It appears that Ravi was all head and no heart. Zillions of people have written and talked about this, and many have asked if they thought Rave was saved, or not. A tree, Jesus tells us, is known by it’s fruit, but the history of redemption we encounter in our Bibles is filled with God using and saving terribly flawed human beings, so none of us knows the answer. From what I’ve heard and read about all this, Ravi seems to me like he was a smooth talking sociopath, but I’ll leave the judging of his soul to God. (more…)
If you have to ask what Frank, stop reading right now. Anyone who lived in the 20th century, and raised their kids well in the 21st, should know that could only be the incomparable Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board. The other night my wife told some little intimate cylinder with the name Alexa to play big band Frank Sinatra, and on came the wonderful song Come Fly With Me, and the phrase of the title of this post came instantly to my mind. There is nothing as awesome as Big Band Frank. One song after the other came on, and each so incredibly captured the vibrant vitality of life through The Voice. Even though Frank in the 40s made his name as a crooner, his legacy lives on more as the voice of the Great American Songbook with big bands led by the likes of the great Nelson Riddle. It’s difficult to express in mere words how his voice accompanied by the amazing arrangements of so many songs capture how wonderful and vibrant this life can be. When you’re listening you can almost feel like it is possible that what we’re ultimately looking for can actually be found in this life. As any honest person will tell you, it can’t, not least because the Grim Reaper is always waiting in the wings to spoil the party. (more…)
I wrote several posts in response to some of my critics, for lack of a better term, and ended the third one with a reference to a co-worker of mine who said she was a strong Christian some years ago, then abandoned her faith because of things she found online by Bart Ehrman and other skeptics. Given what I was writing about, her timing was perfect because most Christians, and everyone else, buys into the secular notion, or uses the language to affirm it, that there are such a people as believers and non-believers. She said something that perfectly encapsulates this fiction: “Wow Mike, I had no idea that you were such a fervent believer.” The implication is, of course, that she is a “non” believer. It’s unfortunate that most Christians would never question her assertion. They should because her implication is not true, that there are such people as believers and not believers. Everyone is a “believer” whether they are religious or not. (more…)
I was going to write something on the dying of conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh, and before I got to that I listened to this interview from the Dallas Theological Seminary’s The Table podcast about embracing our mortality. That’s quite the counter intuitive notion, especially in our secular age, so I had to check it out. Given I think about death a lot, my own, but also death in general, I found the discussion right down my alley. Dr. J. Todd Billings, the interviewee, wrote a book calledThe End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live. He should know about the topic. He was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2012, so immanent death is something he can’t help thinking, and writing, about. The reality for all of us is that our death’s are immanent as well. It may happen in five minutes, or in 50 years, but it will happen before we know it and are ready for it.
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