Evil and What We Should Do About It.

the problem of evil in our world is a problem believers have wrestled with since the inception of our faith. i don't claim in any way to have the answers, but i'd like to propose what i hope is a fresh perspective. the most common question i hear with respect to the presence of evil is "how can a just God allow evil in the world?" or the slight variant "if God loves us so much, why do bad things happen to good people?"

the underlying assumption of these questions is that a good, just, and loving God would wave his magic wand and remove evil from the world instantly. putting aside attempting to force an incomplete human perception of the divine on an infinite God for the moment, i feel this is a question we can answer by examining the evidence provided in scripture. first, we need to acknowledge that the presence of evil in our world is a direct result of humanities actions. As a species, we chose to allow evil into our world when we ate the fruit off the tree.

a common point at this juncture in the discussion of the problem of evil is "why did God even put the tree in the garden?" while i in no way have a perfect answer for this, when i look at the way God acts toward us and examine the things he asks us to do, i come to the conclusion that He is glorified when we make choices. God gave us reason and intellect to use. He gave us the ability to chose how we should serve Him, and even gave us the choice to not serve Him. i think God is most glorified when we have the ability to chose to not serve Him and we do it anyway.

with that established, i think we must address the presence of evil from a different perspective. the question should not be "why is there evil in the world?" but "what has/is a good, just, loving God done/doing about the presence of evil in His world?" the obvious answer is that He sent His Son to die in order to defeat evil in the world. and had He left it at that, i might say that that could not possibly be enough to fix the problem of evil. if we approach our faith from a dichotomous spirit-is-good and flesh-is-bad perspective, that's where we end up. we often approach our faith with the idea that Jesus died on the cross to save us from the spiritual effects of our sins, and so once we pray a prayer everything is better.

unfortunately, anyone who has experienced this knows that is not a satisfactory answer. we want more, we want a better answer, we want to know why we're still suffering, and i think we should want all of those things. Jesus did indeed die for our sin, but He didn't stay dead. He was resurrected and spent time with His followers after his death and resurrection. I think as believers we have a tendency to separate Jesus into pre- and post-resurrection Jesuses. not consciously, of course, but we fall into thinking that Jesus before his death was the one worried about the poor and the orphans and widows, and the one after the resurrection wanted to save everyone's souls from eternal damnation (probably another topic for another day).

i think a lot of times we forget that Jesus told us to teach all things he commanded us. if a man asks for my coat, i should give him my shirt as well; i should sell all i have and give the money to the poor; care for orphans and widows. there is absolutely evil in the world, Jesus came and died, giving us the ability to fight evil, then told us to go out and do it. to go fix the problem we created. He told us He'd be with us every step of the way, that we don't have to--and can't--do it alone, but he did make it quite clear whose responsibility it is to fix the problem.

these thoughts were sparked Sunday morning as my church was praying for Haiti. One of the women in the church prayed "Father, i claim Haiti for Jesus." i think that's a wonderful prayer, i think that's a Godly prayer. but i think that the Lord has given us the responsibility to fix the results of evil, not just spiritual results, but the tangible, physical results that are just as important as those spiritual results. we're not split persons with an evil physical nature and a good spiritual one, we're complete persons who have been broken by the results of our sin and we need God to fix us in both body and spirit. to return to that prayer, yes, claim Haiti for Jesus, i think that's a Biblical thing to do. but i believe that the Biblical follow up to that is to go out and take it. to follow up our powerful prayers with powerful actions and, with God's guidance and power, to fix what we've broken.

some thoughts on the eve of a premiere

so i've been thinking about some stuff since around the middle of the summer. specifically, since i read the twilight series by stephanie meyer. yes, i did indeed read it. i feel like avoiding something and ignoring it takes away my right to have an opinion on that thing. and i like having opinions.

as i read through twilight and the next three books i felt like something was off. just wrong. the story was fine. the writing was halfway decent. it's not going to be a classic piece of literature, i don't think the depth is there, but it's not a terrible book and i even enjoyed much of it. but something was off, and i think that finally crystallized for me last night as i was struggling desperately to fall asleep.

the problem is the titanic struggle of love versus attraction, of selfishness versus selflessness, of creating unrealistic expectations. and i think that's what has bothered me about the complete enjoyment of these books and movies that i see. i feel like the ideas that are planted are going to result in pain later in life.

that's the general problem, i'll take some time to flesh this out with specifics. the book tells the story of edward cullen, a vampire, and bella swan, a misfit high school girl. they fall madly in love and can't keep away from each other, and life is complicated by such problems as edward's vampirism, a werewolf falling for bella, a secret society of ancient vampires that take it as their mandate to maintain the secrecy of vampiric society.

cool story, lots of tension, etc. the first book was, however, filled with a general confusion between love and attraction. some quick definitions for the purpose of clarity. love is a choice. it's a decision we make to care about someone regardless of future difficulties, of changes that may happen later. it's not something that happens, it's not something that we fall into, it's something we decide to do and there is no halfway. attraction is something else entirely. it's fairly self-explanatory, but it's important to point out that attraction is not a choice. it's something that just happens and is dependent on both our inherent qualities as well as our socialization. i don't decide who i'm attracted to, but i do decide who i'm going to love and how that's going to look. attraction is not bad. it's necessary, it's one of God's greatest gifts to us, but let us be perfectly clear: attraction is not love.

in the the first book of the twilight series we see a picture of two people who are wildly attracted to each other. they can't keep away from each other, they break rules, they fall madly "in love". pretty standard stuff, really. this perspective permeates popular culture. as believers, we have not done the best job of countering that issue, but it is something we are at least aware of and can combat (though divorce rates in the American church may show differently, that's another topic for another day). The biggest problem begins in book two.

the book opens with edward leaving bella. he leaves for a good reason, he feels like he is a danger to bella due to his vampiric nature and does not want to hurt her. possibly an unselfish action, though later we discover that it may not be as selfless as it appears on the surface. the trouble starts with bella's reaction. she tries to kill herself. she becomes hollow, lonely. she becomes a half person. the loss of edward is so devastating to her that she loses track of who she is as a person. now i know that most believers "know" that we are not to find our identity in anyone but the Lord. but do we really know this?

i want to get married at some point, i want to have that kind of deep relationship. but the thought that i would ever have my identity so tied up in anyone but God makes me sick to my stomach and i pray that God will not let me fall into that. So that's the problem with the book. why does this matter to me?

i feel like when i talk to people about this book they fall into two camps: "twilight? oh that's stupid" and "twilight? it's the best! such an amazing story!" i won't go into some of the other opinions on the second camp cause frankly, they make me uncomfortable. my point here is that i feel like this series is creating unrealistic expectations of relationships. i can't and shouldn't tie myself so deeply to any person that i loose track of who i am when i lose them. i feel like people, and girls especially, get this warped view of what guys can give them and that worries me. i'm worried that it will lead to broken relationships down the road.

guys deal with other things, i'm not saying that all broken relationships should be blamed on feelings created in girls by twilight, that's a ridiculous proposition. what i am saying is that if we're unthinking in our evaluations of our entertainment, they will begin to influence how we think, and twilight happens to be both salient and a good example of how this happens.

i haven't talked to many people about this series on a very deep level, so i don't know who thinks what. i don't want to say that everyone i talk to unthinkingly loves this work and unquestioningly agrees with the picture of love and attraction that is presented by it. but when i do talk to friends about it there answer is rarely "yeah it's fun, but it's got some messed up pictures of love", it's almost always "twilight is so good." perhaps i'm at fault because i don't try to dig deeper and find out people's opinions. i'm going to try to do that because it does bother me that this wrong view of love has so permeated our society, and even our christian community.

finally, i'm not saying that we shouldn't watch twilight or read the books. in fact, i think we should read them. rather, my point is that we should read them discerningly. let's understand our view of love and enjoy entertainment in the light of our beliefs.

Community

i've been learning some interesting things about this word we throw around (the one in the title). i talked about it some in earlier posts, but i want to develop some thoughts more fully, if i can.

i read something that really caught my attention in Brian Mclaren's book "A Generous Orthodoxy". i don't have the book with me so i'll paraphrase: the church is a continuation of the original twelve disciples, a group of people learning to follow Jesus in a voluntary community. Mclaren was summing up what anabaptists believed about the church, and it really stood out to me. anabaptists are pretty interesting people in the first place, with some pretty radical beliefs about non-violence, etc. but this idea of the church is something that's new to me.

the concept has been rattling around in my head for a while, but this is the first time i've see it written out clearly like that. naturally my mind took off. what if that's how we thought about church? we always here that the church is the community of believers, but do we really live that way? what if instead of saying "i'm going to church" we said "i'm going to spend time with the church" or "i'm going to meet with the church" or how about "i'm hanging out with the family tonight?" imagine the radical difference we would see in church life if we thought that way.

One of the saddest things for me recently is to see how not only our society, but even our community of faith has become radically individualistic to the point that believers oppose legislation that benefits the poorest of the poor. i don't mean to insinuate that these are great programs that could never fail, they are usually filled with waste and rarely give people the support they need. what i'm trying to say is that many conservative right wing christians are opposed to the concept of caring for the poor. the philosophy of social darwinism has permeated the core of our faith in America even as we fight the far less insidious biological Darwinism in our schools.

what happened? when did we turn the commands to care for the widows and orphans into opt in programs? i've said it before, but it needs to be said again. it's not about me and God, it's about us and God. when the Father saw man working alone in Eden he said "it is not good for Man to be alone". God wasn't just creating a helper when he made Eve, he was creating a community, one that was supposed to fill the earth and subdue, all in relationship with God. us and God.

there are a lot of ideological reasons for the prevalence of American individualism in the churches including the influence of Lockian Liberalism at the time of the founding as well as the infiltration of Social Darwinism in the early 1900s and this could get ridiculously long if i went into it all. suffice to say that i believe our community has been hijacked to defend the interests of the wealthy when we are clearly commanded to defend the orphan and the widow. i think it's time we took our community back and start being the church.

peace.

what can i say

the team just got back yesterday from MO after spending a week there working at a christian childrens ranch. i have so many half learned lessons and mixed metaphors running around in my head right now; i want to try to get some of them written down and maybe they'll start to come together into something cohesive that i can actually think about without getting confused.

the first and, i believe, most important lesson is that of the christian's responsibility to be a part of what we know as social justice. i know that a lot of times those of us in the conservative evangelical (ce) branch of our faith think of social justice as something that those liberal so-called christians do in order to work their way to God. you know the ones, those heretics that believe that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead and that he wasn't really God. guess what: despite their less than orthodox (read:wrong) beliefs about the divinity of the Son, they actually got something right. Titus 3:14 reads: our people must also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, so that they will not be unfruitful.

so often in the ce tradition (most ces would cringe at the word tradition, but ce has become just that) we use the word fruit to refer to something ethereal. we use fruit to refer to the "immortal souls" of men. we use fruit to describe our personal growth as we learn more about God. we use fruit to describe a set of attributes that are truly visible only when we're acting them out in our lives, but that we so often lump together in this hypothetical "christian character" classification.

paul is not talking about this when he says we shouldn't be unfruitful. he's saying that we need to be active in good deeds to produce fruit. fruit is something that can be produced by our physical actions. this doesn't make any sense if we continue to use the ce paradigm. a worldview that has been so inexplicably influenced by second century gnosticism that it has morphed into something that doesn't resemble early christianity at all. we've fallen into an incorrect mindset. the shift was subtle, but it is clearly there. we seem to be under the impression that the physical world is evil, that the only remedy is for God to completely destroy it and take us believers away to a spiritual plane to live in eternal bliss.

there is no way in my mind that i can reconcile this to what i see in scripture, allow me to give a few examples. when Jesus rose from the dead, he went to great lengths to show that he was actually physically alive. eating with the disciples and cooking breakfast for them wasn't just a way to spend time with them, it was to show them that he indeed had a physical body. why do all this if God is going to simply destroy this physical plane of existence and exchange it for a purely spiritual one.

as for the idea that we're bound for an existence of eternal bliss worshiping the Father, i think the concept is correct, but it's implementation is not. when God created humanity, he gave him a specific purpose: man was to care for the garden with his helper, the woman. they were to fill the earth and subdue it, and give names to all the animals. part of being human is to be engaged in work, to actively be filling the earth and subduing it. the rest of being human is to be in a relationship with God. God gave us a clear task, one that is not complete, and one that we are frequently working against. So what is the Day of the Lord going to look like? i can't believe that it involves the annihilation of creation. creation is what we were made for. we are the caretakers of what God made. if God destroys creation, he doesn't need us. the Day of the Lord will most definitely involve a purging of creation, a destruction of the evil in the world, but not the destruction of what is good and beautiful, the parts that we were made for.

it may seem like i've drifted from my original point in this post, but we really just took the long way around. if creation is not to be destroyed, if we are to be a part of the world God created for eternity, then what we do on earth matters. the evil that we do will be destroyed, purged and washed away, but the good we do will stand. the good deeds that we do will bear fruit, a lasting legacy in eternity. so back to shiloh christian children's ranch; the people there are doing good deeds that has and already will bear fruit. many of the children that have spent time there have eventually found their way to a relationship with the Father. the ranch is having a huge impact on an incredible number of people, all because a few families really believe that their good deeds will bear fruit.

i'll talk about some other thoughts i had about the week in future posts. also, a lot of the ideas i've discussed are proposed by Bishop N.T. Wright in his book Surprised By Hope. others are thoughts that i've had that were sparked by reading that book. i'm sorry i don't have everything footnoted properly. ask me if you have any questions about anything i've said.

peace

electricity is fun.

So i have this old laptop lying around, i figured i'd try to do something with it. the power connection is broken, so i decided to hardwire the power cable (blue and red) to the laptop, bypassing the little connector/adapter board that broke in the computer.

after removing the board (which i did years ago when i was going to try to find a new one, and have now lost), i found myself facing a conundrum. i need to go from the two wires in the power adaptor to the four that are in the computer.

the problem is, i don't know (a) if this will work and (b) what goes to what. now my guess is (a) yes, but if it doesn't i go from having a non-working laptop that i've scavenged for parts to pretty much the same thing, so no big deal there. as for (b), my guess is that the wires in the red circle is the ground (they were originally sheathing the blue). and blue is the hot wire. as for the laptop side, i know red is hot and black is ground. what i really need to know is can i combine the two grounds and two hot in the yellow?

i need to get a soldering iron to finish this up, which means waiting till radio shack is open tomorrow. if anyone has any ideas or suggestions they'd be greatly appreciated. otherwise, i'll play it by ear.

peace

puzzle

This is just one of a huge list of puzzles on this site. i was able to figure it out, which is why i re-posted it. heheh.
The Bridge

4 people need to traverse a bridge. The bridge is old and only two persons can use it at the same time. It is night and to traverse the bridge a flashlight is needed.

The group only has one flashlight. Each person traverses the bridge at different speeds and when 2 go together the faster one needs to adapt for the slower one (otherwise they can't share the light).

The first person (A) needs 10 minutes to cross the bridge. The second (B) 5; the third (C) 2, and the fastest one (D) only 1 minute.

How long does it take the group to cross the bridge.

Example (not the most efficient one):

A+D -> // 10 min (let's assume the slowest and the fastest go first)
D <- // 1 min (D needs to bring back the flashlight)
B+D -> // 5 min
D <- // 1 min
C+D -> // 2 min (and the group has crossed the bridge)
--
totals 19 minutes.

There is a better way.

Note: A computer program would find the solution. So no tricks involved.

from http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/Puzzles

peace and enjoy

love, community, and bishop wright

i've read a lot of Bishop N.T. Wright recently, and i've come to the conclusion that he is indeed a brilliant man. we've been talking about community and love at ccf, and it's reinforced in my mind the importance of those two concepts. my connection of two of these subjects is in the pre-eminence of love. Wright proposes that as believers we need a new epistemology(study of how we know). he proposes what he calls an "epistemology of love", the idea that we know things through love, that we can only know things fully through love.

it seemed strange when i first heard it, but it has grown on me. i don't think i fully understand the practical implications (it seems like it might have a hard time replacing empirical testing in science), but for a huge part of our daily lives, it makes wonderful sense. If we apply it to our relationships, we gain knowledge about those around us through loving them. we learn about God by loving him. and, to tie in the third theme, we build and learn about our community through love.

Obviously Wright does a far better job of explaining this than i do, but the idea is fascinating, and i can't help but try to apply it to my field. political science has been so permeated by numbers and statistics and incomprehensible equations that it's become hard for me to see the people. sure, it's the study of power, and how governments work, but at its heart, i think political science is and should be about people. how different is it when we love the people that we study? would we understand people better if we loved them, instead of experimenting on them?

peace