lately, i've been struggling not to hate my job. i don't really want to be doing what i do, and doing something you're not really into for 3 years starts to take a toll. days like this, when i can think of a huge amount of things i'd like to do or be doing, make going into work that much harder. i really like what i'm studying at school. for fun, i have been reading my western civ. text book to brush up on my knowledge of WWI and WWII and i love it. the chapters are pretty big, but i just fly right through them. i've been doing some serious yard work lately. i think i'm being bitten by the home improvement bug, as i've dropped almost 100 dollars at home depot in the past couple days. i'm exited about finishing our upstairs so we can finally have our huge master suite, and more room.
this past weekend i got to catch up with some old friends. we went to a food festival in skee town, and then hit up this nice little bar. i don't get to go out like that often anymore, or with those people, so it was even more of a good time. house church was also a good time, we actually had a discussion where everyone chimed in. we talked about prayer. my after-thoughts on it are this: i said that my ideal "prayer life" is that i would have an ever-present awareness that God is at work, and be in constant communication with Him. Meaning that since we believe God is always present and is our friend and father, that we should always be listening and looking for Him, and always in a state of constant communication. going further, ancient people looked at the gods as over them, always ready to strike if they weren't happy, and people were to always be in a posture where they were trying to please the gods. christianity, however, raises the person up to God's eye-level, so to speak, into a relationship posture. it's interesting then, that our prayer is often much more ritualized, and formal looking -- more like the ancient understanding of god than the biblical one. lately, i've been noticing that how i talk to God-- the way i speak-- is so much different than how i talk to friends and family.
anyways, i'm just trying to be thankful that i have a job, since so many in our economy don't. i'm also exited about the number of opportunities we are getting with our business, and all the days off i have coming up in the near future.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 2, 2008
on being a skeptical believer : doubts
last year, i wrote a post called "on being a skeptical believer." in it, i talked about my struggle with believing some of the more supernatural and mythical stuff in the bible. i also talked about my evolving faith. i think it's time for an update. i was going to post this all in one entry, but there is just too much to say, so i'm going to start by laying out reasons i struggle with doubt.
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in the year 2000 i had my first really big faith crisis. i started going online and reading all sorts of atheist websites, and was faced with arguments and ideas that i had never heard before. it was the beginning of a journey that led me away from the pre-packaged christianity i had been handed as a child and toward developing my own personal faith. according to fowler's stages of faith, i had entered stage four. this first faith crisis scared me and made me wonder how long i would remain a christian. however, since the beginning of this journey, i have learned that faith crises are part of it, and i now have them quite regularly.
my recent faith crisis was sparked by a comment that joe left on my other blog, asking me about my take on satan and demons. he asked me this because i mentioned that, while i struggle with my understanding of satan and demons, greg boyd is encouraging to me because he is an ivy league trained theologian and scholar who views them as literal beings. as i thought about how or if i would respond to joe, i decided to pick up greg boyd's book, letters from a skeptic which is, basically, a series of letters between him and his agnostic father. there's a part in the book where boyd discusses his view that there are evil cosmic forces at work in the world and points out that most of reality is made up of things we can't see. he also says that the world is, essentially, a cosmic battlefield. also, boyd points out that we-- modern people-- are the weird ones, because everyone else throughout the ages have believed in gods and evil spirits.
i agree, that it is entirely possible that there are evil spirits, and i also agree that the naturalist/materialist worldview that westerners hold is just that, another worldview, and we make the assumption that there isn't other forces or beings that exist. but isn't that the point? ancient people, and people ignorant of science, explain things they don't understand with supernatural explanations. for example, blessing someone after she sneezes comes from the belief that the act of sneezing was the release of an evil spirit. the belief in micro-organisms was once controversial because it contradicted the belief that sickness was caused by spiritual forces. so imagine a schizophrenic person living in, say, 50 B.C. how would schizophrenia be understood? as a mental illness? of course not. if you lived back then and you heard voices, people wouldn't believe there was something wrong with your brain, there would be a supernatural explanation. the universe is an incredibly amazing place, and the brain is arguably the most complex structure in it. is the reason everyone has believed in the supernatural up until the age of science because there was no other explanation?
another argument boyd puts forth is the argument for the existence of God from morality. this is also how c.s. lewis begins mere christianity. the gist of the argument is that because we intuitively know that murder or stealing is wrong, then there must be an ultimate source for that morality, namely God. but here's my problem. isn't much of our basic moral ideals rooted in self-preservation and our own happiness? we all agree not to murder because we, ourselves, don't want to be murdered. we essentially say, "ok, i'll allow you to live, if you allow me to live." the same goes for stealing. we make an agreement to allow each other to keep our own stuff. if someone breaks that agreement, then we get pissed. we then assign religious meaning to these rules and agreements to reinforce them
to close, i'll go back to the original topic of demons, which sparked all of this. i'm not sure that scripture itself views demons as literal beings. my prime example is the story of jesus casting out the demons collectively named "legion." this story is loaded with symbolism. first, the name legion is what an army of roman soldiers were called. second, jesus casts "legion" into a herd of pigs which were considered unclean according to jews. third, the pigs then drown in the sea, which immediately would conjure up images of the egyptian soldiers drowning in the red sea. so, is this a literal, just-telling-the-facts, recounting of actual events; or is the story saying that jesus is the messiah who will ultimately do away with the roman empire? or, was there really an exorcism, but the author took artistic liberty and added the symbolism?
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in the year 2000 i had my first really big faith crisis. i started going online and reading all sorts of atheist websites, and was faced with arguments and ideas that i had never heard before. it was the beginning of a journey that led me away from the pre-packaged christianity i had been handed as a child and toward developing my own personal faith. according to fowler's stages of faith, i had entered stage four. this first faith crisis scared me and made me wonder how long i would remain a christian. however, since the beginning of this journey, i have learned that faith crises are part of it, and i now have them quite regularly.
my recent faith crisis was sparked by a comment that joe left on my other blog, asking me about my take on satan and demons. he asked me this because i mentioned that, while i struggle with my understanding of satan and demons, greg boyd is encouraging to me because he is an ivy league trained theologian and scholar who views them as literal beings. as i thought about how or if i would respond to joe, i decided to pick up greg boyd's book, letters from a skeptic which is, basically, a series of letters between him and his agnostic father. there's a part in the book where boyd discusses his view that there are evil cosmic forces at work in the world and points out that most of reality is made up of things we can't see. he also says that the world is, essentially, a cosmic battlefield. also, boyd points out that we-- modern people-- are the weird ones, because everyone else throughout the ages have believed in gods and evil spirits.
i agree, that it is entirely possible that there are evil spirits, and i also agree that the naturalist/materialist worldview that westerners hold is just that, another worldview, and we make the assumption that there isn't other forces or beings that exist. but isn't that the point? ancient people, and people ignorant of science, explain things they don't understand with supernatural explanations. for example, blessing someone after she sneezes comes from the belief that the act of sneezing was the release of an evil spirit. the belief in micro-organisms was once controversial because it contradicted the belief that sickness was caused by spiritual forces. so imagine a schizophrenic person living in, say, 50 B.C. how would schizophrenia be understood? as a mental illness? of course not. if you lived back then and you heard voices, people wouldn't believe there was something wrong with your brain, there would be a supernatural explanation. the universe is an incredibly amazing place, and the brain is arguably the most complex structure in it. is the reason everyone has believed in the supernatural up until the age of science because there was no other explanation?
another argument boyd puts forth is the argument for the existence of God from morality. this is also how c.s. lewis begins mere christianity. the gist of the argument is that because we intuitively know that murder or stealing is wrong, then there must be an ultimate source for that morality, namely God. but here's my problem. isn't much of our basic moral ideals rooted in self-preservation and our own happiness? we all agree not to murder because we, ourselves, don't want to be murdered. we essentially say, "ok, i'll allow you to live, if you allow me to live." the same goes for stealing. we make an agreement to allow each other to keep our own stuff. if someone breaks that agreement, then we get pissed. we then assign religious meaning to these rules and agreements to reinforce them
to close, i'll go back to the original topic of demons, which sparked all of this. i'm not sure that scripture itself views demons as literal beings. my prime example is the story of jesus casting out the demons collectively named "legion." this story is loaded with symbolism. first, the name legion is what an army of roman soldiers were called. second, jesus casts "legion" into a herd of pigs which were considered unclean according to jews. third, the pigs then drown in the sea, which immediately would conjure up images of the egyptian soldiers drowning in the red sea. so, is this a literal, just-telling-the-facts, recounting of actual events; or is the story saying that jesus is the messiah who will ultimately do away with the roman empire? or, was there really an exorcism, but the author took artistic liberty and added the symbolism?
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