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…)
In my last post I discussed the explanatory power of Christianity, why it better explains reality as we experience it than any other religion or worldview. I wasn’t able to address why it isn’t only Christianity as a worldview that makes sense of everything, but specifically the gospel. Let’s start with our own consciousness. There are many common threads to how human beings encounter themselves and the world, but none as common as conscience. We, at almost every moment of our existence, encounter the notion of right and wrong, good and evil, and that none of us measure up to the standard, whatever we think that is. Because the moral law is built into the universe and into our beings, nobody lives up to their own standards, let alone those of a holy God. I don’t often quote Immanel Kant approvingly, but he got it right when he wrote in the Critique of Practical Reason:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
Ideas for blog posts often seem to come when I start praying in the morning. As has been my habit for almost seven years, every morning I wrestle my way through a text of Scripture and write my thoughts in my uncreatively named Walk Through the Bible blog. Contemplating the word of the living God, the Creator of all things, can’t help but inspire, so thoughts bubble up as I pray. Then I stop, say to myself, I have to write that down! Such is the subject of this post. I’ll explain why that may have happened with this specific thought at this specific time, but it goes back to a quote from C.S. Lewis I put on the cover of my book, and one of the most powerful apologetic (defense of the truth claims of Christianity) sentences I’ve ever encountered. It’s no surprise it came from the pen and mind of Lewis:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
I’m such a Debbie Downer! I can’t help it. After I became a Christian when I was 18, I haven’t been able to attend or see a New Year’s celebration with out being struck by how ridiculous it all is. Do not these people, I always think, realize that they are celebrating being one year closer to their death? Is that not the ultimate buzz kill? Of course it is! So, let’s just stuff the thought down whenever it might bubble up a bit, and PARTY! Yet we cannot escape the uncomfortable fact of our mortality, no matter how hard we try, and people try very hard. What a bummer this death thing is—puts such a crimp in our plans. In our health obsessed, airbrushed culture, thinking about death too much is an indication of some kind of psychosis, and talking about it too much is impolite, not to mention awkward. Blaise Pascal understood this modern condition some 350 years ago:
In spite of all these miseries man wants to be happy, and only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how can he go about this? It would be best if he could make himself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to stop thinking about it. Being unable to cure death, misery, and ignorance, men have decided that in order to be happy, they must repress thinking about such things.
I don’t know about you, but I find this whole spiritual, Christian, life after death, life is more than matter thing very hard to believe at times. Scripture tells us we live by faith, and not by sight, but I find it so much easier to live by sight and not by faith! This is of course really dumb, because there are all kinds of things I can’t see, or understand, or comprehend, but which I live by all the time. I can’t “see” gravity or wind or logic or love or quarks or smells or my thoughts or any number of other things, but that makes them no less real. In fact, the more we learn about the so called “natural” world, the more inconceivable and incomprehensible it becomes, but we still “believe” in it. It’s impossible to read a book like Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny, like I’m currently doing, and find atheism/materialism the least bit plausible. In fact, it is absurd! That everything came from nothing for no reason at all, and that by chance, is truly unbelievable! With all that said, spiritual reality is still hard for me to believe. (more…)
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