Spaceship Church

One of my favorite movies as a child was 2001 A Space Odyssey.  Even at about age 6 I was a space nerd. The highlight of my early life was Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. While my classmates were collecting baseball cards, I was scrapbooking stories about the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo program.

I thought I knew science well.  One of the reasons that I liked 2001 so well was that it was a fictional fulfillment of what we (meaning the scientist at the time) anticipated about the year 2001. However, one scene confused me (okay, the monolith was a little confusing to a 7 year old too). That scene was where Dave was locked outside the spaceship without his helmet.  The computer, which had evolved an artificial intelligence, including human-like emotions, had a fatal attraction for Dave and wouldn’t open the pod doors so he could reenter via the airlock.  So Dave had to leap through space, while holding his breath, to the door and unlock it himself.  He was pissed. He shut down the computer after that.

I remember sitting in the theater with my big sister (about 25 at the time) and feeling puzzled. But that scene was not true to science. You couldn’t leap through the vacuum of space without a helmet. It isn’t the simple lack of oxygen as the movie conveniently portrayed but the lack of free gasses . . . or in other words an almost total vacuum. You would die. Your body would be sucked through the neck hole on your suit and maybe your lungs would be pulled inside out through your mouth. Not a pretty sight.

This week something very unexpectedly happened. My new church called and asked me to be an elder. I was surprised because during my year there, I’ve been peripherally involved . . .  by design. I’m afraid to venture deeper. I like what I have and I’m afraid that if I dared to enter the core, I would be disappointed.  The reason is that the church, while far better for me than my last church, is still the product of American Evangelicalism. I know that my endeavor could bring some greatly disappointing encounters. I recognize that I am the exception. Most Christians my age (different than the < 30 generation) actually and honestly do love the present state of the evangelical church. 

Our church has a surprisingly large population of educated people, scientists, engineers, CEOs, physicians and others, like Bob whom I sat with last Sunday. He is a retired professor of Science History from a major Christian university.  I bet Bob and I would share a lot of similar interests. So, my present church is about as good as it gets (in my view) but still, I am nervous about going deeper.

I turned down the offer for several reasons. For one, I am literally working right now 10-11 hour days, plus several hours on Saturday and Sunday.  I’m way behind in so many things (and why I don’t write much here anymore). I have virtually no recreational time.  The job description of the Elder came with many, many time consuming strings. 

The second, and most compelling reason I said no, is my fear of entering the inner-most chambers of the spaceship, is that I was an elder at my old church . . . and it was a crazy-hell realm of dysfunctionality.  While the pastor there promoted himself as being “anal about being Biblical” that was just window dressing, and a cover for his insanity.  I loath being in dysfunctional relationships with evangelicals.  With non Christians (and I’m involved with plenty of those dysfunctional relationships through my patients) you can call a spade a spade. They may not like it, but you can tell them they are being manipulative, controlling, angry, anxious and etc. In the Evangelical world, you can not.  They wrap their dysfunctional in “Biblical” cloaks.

A good friend taught me something a long time ago. No, she wasn’t a believer. She was a co-worker and a widowed thirty-five year old. I was often trying to set her up with dates with friends.  She never had a lot of interest. She had been involved with a couple of men, and it turned out ugly. She would always say, “It is easier to stay out than to get out.”

So I reside just inside the door of the spaceship . . . actually in the air-lock. I’m still inside, because outside is a deadly vacuum.

This is another reason so many youth leave Christianity completely. The choice is between the safety of the traditional church, and its baggage . . . or the vacuum.  I believe that we must create space . . . in space . . . where people can breathe and thrive. 

I dream of the coffee shop church. But it would shed its weirdness.  People there would be very honest with each other and very close. There would be no pressure to lie, to fake miracles or to act spiritual.  They wouldn’t be expected to put on the show that my evangelical friends feel compelled to do.  I can’t go to Facebook anymore without seeing them trying to out-do each other in their spiritual statements. “I just love Go so much, that I’m about to bust.”  Or, “I’ve witnessed five miracles this morning and it is only 10 AM.” I can't stand that chatter anymore and if I attempted to do it . . . I would be a Caulfied Phony.

There would be a seamless flow between how the people in the coffee shop church were in their private world and how they are in their church world.  Relationships would be meaningful, really meaningful.  Others would not just be an audience where could try and project our spirituality onto, but people whom we honestly care about and are deeply empathic with.

 In the coffee shop church, if one of the members was caught stealing from their employer, they wouldn’t be thrown out on their heels (which I saw happy at a previous church years ago).  But the “members” would gab a six pack of beer, come over to that person’s house and sit with them. They would listen and talk and help them unravel the mess they got themselves into.  In that church, everyone would know that they are just one decision away from a personal disaster and therefore they could humbly support one another. They would never pretend that they are "godly" thus above the fray. I could go on ad nauseam about this idealize church . . . but I will stop with that one example.

An Ingenuous Apologetic (. . . or why I still believe that Christianity is true . . . or mostly true). The Problems with Christianity

I promised that before I ended this narrative that I would talk about the problems within the Christian option . . . meaning the problems that I personally perceive. Sticking with the intention of writing ingenuously, I will reveal what no Christian testimony normally would.

I dare you to stand up in any evangelical church service and say, "While I really believe that Christianity is true, some parts make no sense."  Then sit down and see what happens.  I guarantee that a wave of superficial cliches would pour out on you.  "I know God is there because I sense Him in my heart . . . in a very real way, it all makes perfect sense. If you have the mind of God you would see that it is profoundly reasonable."

Like I said many times before, there is no easy path out of the pit. As a Christian, I can explain this difficulty as the mind is fallen, thus can not find its way out easily. A perfect mind would not, in theory, have this problem.

So what are my problems with Christianity.

1) God is silent.  While the Christian narrative has God acting in space and time, historically, there has not been a verifiable contact with God in space and time in two millennia. Sure, miracles are attested to all the time. Sit with a group of evangelicals and you will hear of constant miracles . . . but let's get real for a moment.  Raising Lazarus from the dead after rotting for three days . . . that's a miracle. Your uncle recovering from heart surgery (when 78% of patients do) is not a miracle. The Mets winning the World Series in 1969 was not a miracle. The fluttering feeling that you felt in your stomach, was not supernatural.

Now a Christian would have to assume that the reason God is silent is because it is part of His plan rather than Him being impotent. But it would certainly make life a heck of lot easier if He made a grand appearance now and then.

2) Why Was the Gospel Necessary? While I've personally explained why the gospel was necessary many, many times and even preached on it myself, it does beg the question as to why?  If God is omnipotent, then He would have the ability to do things differently. He could have prevented sin from entering the world. He could have avoided the need for Christ to die on the cross.  The gospel story, in ways, sounds like it could have been written by Hans Christian Anderson.

3) If the Holy Spirit's role is to purify people, why is it that Christians have no more, overall, purity than non-Christians?  While Christians may drink, smoke, curse less than non-Christians, I honestly think they, in general, lie more.  They lie about their motives, their witness of miracles, and even about the events of day to day life, in order to make themselves appear more spiritual.

4) Why is there this confusion between the Biblical narrative in primordial history and the scientific record? It would be much easier if the two dove tailed without question.

I will rest my case with those problems. But despite these, I am still a Christian because I believe the Christian answers, such as the problem of evil, is better than the answers of the other possibilities.

An Ingenuous Apologetic (. . . or why I still believe that Christianity is true . . . or mostly true.

A good day in church. A retired college professor is doing a series on Science and Christianity. Today, most of the time was in discussion however, he did show the following video by Francis Collins, MD, PhD.  I would embed it if I could but you just have to follow this link. It is consistent with the series I was doing on why I personally believe.

Me, the Fundie-Conflict-Magnet

I decided to delete this post. I just had the feeling if the information fell into the wrong hands . . .  well, it would be used against me.

An Ingenuous Apologetic (. . . or why I still believe that Christianity is true . . . or more true) Why I'm Not a Muslim

It was almost a quarter of a century ago that I arrived on the streets of Cairo, as a missionary.  I had read many books on Islam up that point and had many Muslim friends. We had been the host family for Yemeni students at a Michigan university for four years, not to mention the summer I had spent in Abu Dhabi and Pakistan.

Soon after arriving, I met an American evangelical missionary.  He made a statement to me, that I will never forget. "Mike," he said, "when you get to the point of being strongly tempted to convert to Islam, only then do you truly understand it."

Well, either I never understood it . . . or he was wrong.  I think he was wrong. After all, once I got to know him better, I saw why he felt this way.  He was so Islamic, in his thinking, that he called himself a "Christian Taliban (this was before the rise of the Taliban but he used terms that meant the same, extremely fundamentalist  and ruthless Muslims).

I never became an expert on Islam. I did have many conversations with many Muslims and read many more books before my dance with that culture came to an end. I have forgotten much of it now. But, I will readily admit, while not tempted at all to become a Muslim, I was smitten by the beauty of the culture and the language.  I am so smitten that I'll always conniving of ways to get back, even for a visit. Even tonight I hope to be buying tickets for Dubi so my wife and I can go and celebrate our anniversary there in the fall. I would love to retire in Morocco or Algeria.

So if I were to try to put into words why Islam is not appealing to me, I would simply say that at this time in history, of all the things I hate about evangelicalism . . . in Islam those issues are worse.  I will break it down into a few of those.

In the spirit of this blog, one huge issue for me with evangelicalism is its infatuation with dualism. Simply, all things of this physical world are inferior to the "spiritual." But because reality is no so divided, the evangelicals live much of their world in a fantasy. So to them, the emotions don't exist . . . only the spiritual.

At this time in history Islam is more dualistic than Christianity . . . but it wasn't always so.  During Islam's enlighten (and formative) years (The Middle Ages), they carried the torch for scientific discovery while Christianity was suffocating under the black waters of dualism.

The way that this translates is that when you are a dualist, you loose the insight into your own psychological phenomena. The reason is, if the physical world has no value, then the matters of the brain and psychology have no value.  So then you start to use the so-called principles of the "other" to get what you want and you want those things from simple psychological ( and egocentricitic ) reasons.

In case I lost you (and this is where I wished I had the vocabulary of a Leonard Cohen) I will illustrate.  If you deconstructed what the Taliban want, it would come to this. They want to have sex with many women, even very young girls and they want those girls to be totally loyal to them. They want to dominate other people ( not just women) and have them severe them. Part of that domination is keeping people ignorant. Ignorant people are much easier to enslave. That is why Ken Ham doesn't want you to send your kids to college. I could go on an on. But it is no coincidence that God spoke to Joseph Smith and told him that he should take multiple wives, the younger the better.

I remember sitting in this very remote, oasis, village in the mountains of Oman. The group of about 20 houses clustered around a deep wadi and spring, where they could grow some wheat and raise some sheep.  One household (of women and children) invited me in for tea, dates and bread.  As we were eating, we were trying to figure out who each person was in the household.  The master was not at home. The six women were his four wives, one of his wives' mothers and even an ex-wife. She had no place to go so she was still living there after the divorce.

I asked the ex-wife why he had divorced her. She said that Islam only allows four wives and her ex-husband wanted to take a new wife. She pointed at this girl (looked like she was 10 but was made up to look like an adult) who was his most recent acquisition. The ex-wife I was speaking to must have been in her forties (but looked much older under the parching sun).

I asked her how she felt about being replace by a very young girl.  Tears started building up in her eyes and running down her cheek. She wiped them quickly with her sleeve, (in Arabic of course) she said, "Oh, I am delighted because this is God's will. Her husband was a very noble man and only took the young girl ( remember to have sex with) as his wife because he wanted to honor God and if the girl was left without a husband her whole family would be dishonored."

So, while Islam is centered around a God who is just (without compassion) they live in practice and promote a horrible, egocentristic injustice.  To quickly get a sense of this cultural injustice, I suggest that you do a read (would take about 2 hours at most) of Craig Thompson's graphic novel Habibi . That book will also introduce you to the some of the beauty of Islamic art.

So, I, by no means, am saying that American, evangelical culture is more just. If you take Christianity's history as a whole, when they were even more dualistic back in the Dark Ages, Christian atrocities were even worse than the Taliban.

I may be back to add more . . . or maybe not.

An Ingenuous Apologetic (. . . or why I still believe that Christianity is true . . . or more true) Why I'm Not a Polytheist

I debated if I should even cover this topic. While polytheism may have made sense in a finite, geocentric world where the "universe" was dispersed on concentric spheres above, it became obsolete in the modern world.

The problem became finitism. Finite gods can't rule in an infinite universe. The issue quickly became, the gods were too small.  They were entertaining, exciting and gave meaning to the mundane events of life. However, the answers to the big questions, the reason for being, the purposes of life and such were left mute.

The Greco Roman system could have been written and produced by Marvel. The gods of that age were little more than the fictional super heroes of today. So, were the gods above fate or did fate control the gods? Who defined evil? Good? Even those gods did evil, were jealous and had hate.

That's all I will say. Simply the gods were too small to satisfy the real questions of life . . . although a worthwhile read and made great movies.

An Ingenuous Apologetic (. . . or why I still believe that Christianity is true . . . or more true) Why I'm Not a Pantheist Part II

In many ways, because I'm a product of and live in this pluralistic culture, pantheism is more attractive to me than many of the other options.  Besides the removal of the moral tensions, mentioned last time, it does give some answer for meaning (the cycle of life) and even for some of the mysteries of the universe (quantum physics, dark matter and etc). But those answers are general at best and are somewhat pandering to the real questions of physics.

I grew up within an easy drive to the Biltmore House, outside of Asheville, NC (pictured).  In my eyes, it is clearly the most beautiful home in America and one of the most beautiful in the world (I found the Palace of Versailles both plain outside and over the top inside). The way the limestone is cut and crafted together and the asymmetry it all adds up as domestic architecture at its best. Thus, men and women in God's image being creative in His like.

Having toured the "house" many times, I noticed that over the years the family has slowly opened up more and more of it to the public.

Typical of the Victorian age, the area of the house designed for the owners, the George Washington and Edit Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, plus their single child, daughter Cornelia, were opulent in style (see the dinning room).

However as you make your way further and further into the bowels of the rear of the house (the rear pictured below), you stumble into the quarters of the most common servants. The house required one hundred such servants to keep it running smoothly.

As I walked through those tiny rooms, not much bigger than the single bed, it reminded of a federal prison I once worked in. Tiny, cell-sized rooms, many without windows. But this too was typical of the Victorian age. Now, this is not to say that the servants weren't well treated and loved their work, but this stands as a metaphor for my relationship with pantheism.

The belief that everything is part of God (and that means EVERYTHING) and God is in everything is very comforting and takes away that moral tension I was speaking of.  All of us desire, okay most of us, desire peace in our personal lives and pantheism can bring that quickly. The problem, for me, is that same moral relevance that gives that enticing grandeur in the front of pantheism, creates an awful consequence in the rear.

So, if I were a pantheist, I would have no tension of helping a sibling become a better Mormon one day and help my best friend become a better Scientologist the next. But that same moral relativism would force me to accept the child molester-murder in that same spirit of peace. In summary, it is the philosophical problem of evil, that on the back side of pantheism that I could not accept. If all is from the god-force, then not only is the child molester/murderer created in god's image, but the actions of that molester would have to somehow originate in that god-force.

Christianity (meaning simple, pure Christianity and not a particular brand such as American-Evangelical) deals with the problem of evil differently. It states that the molester is indeed created in God's image and can do many things, creatively, to reflect that image. He can also love with unselfish love as God has intended. But when he molests, then it is anti-theist, against all that God is. That is why the Christian concept of the Fall seems to solve this problem better than most philosophical ideas.  However, as I will talk about later, Christianity has its own areas of absurdity.

So as a Christian, I can respect and love the person whom God created, but hate their actions with all my heart. I can hate cancer, without hating God (although many modern evangelicals have perverted this idea and they thank God for their cancer as "His plan").

I will illustrate this further.

Once I was at a birthday party for a profession (can't remember why I was invited). His 21 year old son was there, just getting back from six months in India. I love the Indian culture and cornered him, each with a beer in our hands. "So, what were you doing in India?"

He responded, "I've converted to Hinduism and I wanted to go and learn the culture much better."

I was intrigued. "So, how did you convert (knowing that his father was an Anglican)?"

He explained, "I've found Christianity to be extremely racist. I knew that they would have to be a better way. Hinduism is a peaceful religion that places the love of all men at the highest level of calling."

I had to scratch my head.  Then I realized that as a causal Hindu, he was living in that large part of the front of the house, the one with all the grandeur. Because true Hinduism is the most racist religions and cultural systems in the world. If you don't believe me, walk the slums of Calcutta.  Look at how the untouchables are treated. It is deplorable. They clean the pit toilets of the higher castes with their bare hand. Why? Because the color of their skin. It works out that the darker-skinned groups are pushed to the bottom of the pile (an in this case it is a pile of shit) simply because they were born with darker skin. But in a pantheistic frame of mind, this too is from the god-force as EVERYTHING is. Practically, my Hindu friends have told me that the untouchables deserve being untouchables because in a previous life, they did something that made this deserve this treatment.

But, in the front rooms of the house, the George Harrisons ( I know he really was a follower of Hare Krishna) or the Shirley MacLaines of the western world never venture beyond the front and beautiful rooms of the front of the house of pantheism. To Shirley reincarnation is a beautiful thing, not an excuse to treat another human being like a shit-sifter.

I've gone on long enough. But I will close by saying that I could never just live in the glorious rooms in the front of pantheism in the same way I can't stand in church Sunday after Sunday, raising my hands and rolling back my eyes and living in the magically world of evangelicalism. I've always colored outside the lines. I've always been a red pill taker. If I were an pantheist, I would have to explore and deal with the issues of pain, suffering and evil. I didn't find the answers I needed in pantheism.

Once again I had to type as fast as I could and then typos may reign here tonight. Sorry.