Roll 'em

                I’ve noticed that Christianity, more than any other faith, seems to inspire a disproportionate amount of eyeball-rolling from critics of “religion.”  If confession is made to being a Buddhist, or a Jew, or a Mormon, or a Wiccan, or an Atheist, reactions tend to range from polite muteness to lukewarm “ah!’s” of false interest; but announce your Christianity, and there go the eyeballs, in full sweep around the sockets.

                Why is that?

                One reason, certainly, is our portrayal by a secular media salivating for any opportunity to feast on Christian hypocrisy and scandal; another is the fact that we keep feeding them.  That such disgraces are disproportionate to the reality does not generally occur to the flat-lining masses eating popcorn on the couch in front of their television sets.  

               Combine this with the mass ignorance of what Christianity is, the almost unanimous inability to distinguish the Biblical Christ from the hijacked version of the Western church, and it’s hard to keep a straight face.

                Eyeball-rolling is avoidance.  It is a facial gesture that exclaims, “Oh, how lame!,” that can barely stand the imbecility of the utterance, that cannot waste its breath on condescending to reply.

                That’s where it gets interesting.  It is easy to roll the eyes, or curl the lip, or to make fake retching sounds…whatever.  But when the eyes return to level, look into them and ask the person if they can tell you what it is they hate – what, exactly. 

                An honest person will rip into you about the hypocrisy and ignorance of Christians, how they’re always telling everybody else what to do, how they act worse than other people, that they’re all anti-progressive, against women’s rights, racist, and whatever else he’s learned on the couch with his popcorn.  Like any stereotyping, his own ignorance is founded on some truth.  He defines Christianity by the glaring exceptions, or by the one Christian he talked to, once,  or by the Crusades, for instance.  In his eyes, our failed perfection proves Christianity’s falseness.  

                A polite person will try to ward you off with something vague and hopefully acceptable:  he believes in God, “but,” he points out (since you haven’t thought of this), “God means different things to different people.” Or, he believes in loving everyone equally (like his mother, and the mass murderer).  He simply refuses to think too closely about anything.  In his eyes, nothing is false because nothing is true, or maybe everything is.  It doesn’t matter.  Now please go away.

                There are other classes of objectors, but those seem to be the most common.  Christians are responsible for much of this ignorance.  We engage in arguments about “Christianity,” trying, stupidly, to defend our “religion” against the ridiculing onslaught, when what we are really defending is our own injured egos.  If we are about “Christianity,” we are missing the point.

                Most religions are safely “organizations” in which nice, like-minded people get together to do like-minded things, such as eat and hold rummage sales.  Christianity is very adamantly about a very particular historical person, with a very particular mission:  to bleed to death for the sins of the people.

                I think most people join a religion or a religious group to fulfill some psychological need – for community,  for forgiveness and understanding, friendships, “spirituality” (whatever that is) – all of which masks a deeper, visceral need for justification, which they will never find outside of Christ. 

                This is the only argument.  You can NEVER hope to prove the rightness of a religion by the example of its people without sounding like an idiot and losing.  You can only point to the rightness of it by the righteousness derived from the blood of God himself.

                Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Confucius, the Popes, and so on, all imparted their own brand of wisdom and law, made tremendous marks on the societies that grew around them, and made long-term contributions to humanity (for good or ill). Yes, God means different things to different people.  But nobody except Jesus died for you.  

                I wonder, during the brief pause in which I follow the eyeballs around, if maybe this is not what really irks them.  As an unbeliever, I did the same thing, although usually with a fouler gesture, and not confined to the face.  Is that what bothered me, maybe in a way too deep to grasp, or did I just miss the obvious because I was too focused on spewing what I imagined were clever offenses?  I don’t know. 

                I do know that the “religion” of Christianity has done much to destroy the message of Christ, perhaps more than any other single factor in history, and the responses to it seem to bear that out.  Going straight to the issue will still incur derision, maybe even more of it, but at least the focus will be where it belongs.  It is one thing to ridicule Christianity, which can save no one anyway; it is another entirely to ridicule Christ, who is the only one who can.

LPM

Suffer!

             When someone asks me, “If there’s a God, and he’s good, why does he allow so much suffering in the world?” it is usually as a challenge, a “gotcha!” question that they expect has never occurred to my simple Christian brain.  The question often comes from a person who, if asked, believes that man is basically good and can redeem himself through some vaguely defined evolution to social maturity.

            That is not to dismiss the question, which is a very good one.  But if coming from a person who believes in the essential goodness of man, then there is a question which naturally precedes it, which is, “If there is only man, and he is good, why does he allow so much suffering in the world?”

            Because the fact is, aside from natural catastrophes (which are generally “catastrophic” because people build in areas prone to catastrophe), man is the cause of the majority of human suffering.  From the obvious examples of victimization – murder, rape, armed robbery, eminent domain, etc. – to the more ubiquitous manifestations seen in the quiet hostilities daily played out between family members or office staff, man is central to the generation of his own woes.  Despite the cacophony of false prophets who proclaim man’s evolution to an increasingly higher moral stature, any simpleton with eyes in his head can see society plunging headlong down the toilet.

            Which brings us back to the original question since “evolving” man needs someone to blame for this:  “Why does God allow so much suffering in the world?” 

            Well, suppose he didn’t?

            What if he just steered us around by remote control, holding our arms to our sides when we wanted to swing, forcing happy words from our mouths, making the world like one big, never-ending Barney marathon.   Is that what we really want, to have our every word and movement forced into conformation with his will – against our own?  Unfortunately, that’s what it would take.

            God allows suffering because he allows us to choose the behaviors that lead to it.  It is the dark side of our free will -- the collision of myriad individual wills, resisting the unity of his. 

            But not to over-simplify a very troubling subject.  Why, for instance, if God has the power, does he not rescue the helpless child from the hands of a brutal predator?  Why not heal the cancer-ridden young mother?  Why allow an entire society to starve and go homeless because of the criminal excesses of its government?  What about terrible accidents?  And so on.

            I can only speculate, but maybe the answer is that he doesn’t intervene so that we will be continually reminded of what we are:  weak and infinitely fallible, imperiled by our own evil; helpless to control anyone or anything but ourselves – and sometimes, not even that. 

            Outrage and terror, grief and frustration, these are motivators.  They motivate us to ask the original question, “Why, God?,” but it is a pointless question unless the asker is willing to meditate on the breadth and depth of the answer.

            The scripture says that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).  If we define “good” as what makes us feel good, or safe, then few things in life will work together towards that end, especially since we all die after a very short existence in which there is too little time to clean up our messes.  But if we carry the definition of “good” through the second half of that verse – for those who love God and are called according to his purpose – it becomes clearer that the nature of true “good” is only ever within the ultimate purposes of God, and specifically for those who love him.  The ultimate purpose is rarely the immediate purpose, but rather, that which will manifest itself in some wider context of time and events. 

            It is interesting that the evolutionist has no problem believing that life and perfection evolve over billions of years from random gases swirling in space; but when it comes to the proposition that all things work over the course of history according to the plan of God toward an ultimate good end -- which may not be manifested during his own brief life -- he responds with sneers and ridicule.  He is usually the one most bitter at the course of unfortunate events.

            The apostle Peter, writing about the end of days, said “[God] is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).  If suffering leads to repentance for what we have done and what we have become through our own devices, then his “allowing” it is for the higher purpose of leading us to a revelation of his salvation.   What then grows (or should) from that seedbed of loss and redemption is compassion, patience, self-control, and so on – the fruits of the spirit, the “life” that is promised to those who look to the Messiah for restoration through his sacrifice – those very qualities that, if practiced individually, make for the peaceable co-existence of a citizenry and a nation. 

            In the last several generations, we have witnessed the gradual dismissal of Biblical precepts from government, an absence which has manifested itself in schools, the media and the family by disunity and moral disintegration.  By turning the job of establishing morality and salvation over to ourselves, determining that God is not an external being, but existent only within the imagination of unenlightened humanity, we have (predictably) found ourselves in moral chaos:  “Every man for himself!”  Interestingly, now that our enlightenment has pushed us to the precipice of a new dark age, that of  Islamic oppression, we have a growing surge of American outrage – aimed at those who uphold the Bible as the standard of morality and government.  Could it be that, despite our rebellion against the allegedly non-existent God, there is a fresh anger directed at him, for “allowing” our impending destruction? 

            Why, indeed, does he allow suffering.  Go look in the mirror.  Then get on your knees.