Saved, And I Deserve It!

Recently I heard a prominent pastor speaking jocularly about the Rapture.

"Don't fly with a Christian pilot if you're not saved," he joked. "Because if you do, he's going up, and you're going down!"

Cue the laughter.

Funny. I don't hear Jesus laughing.

What this idiot - and I'm being kind - didn't bother to think about is that, in the event of the aircrew being raptured up and the unpiloted airplane crashing, the individuals left behind would have a terrifying few minutes, watching the horizon rise around them to crush in a fatal embrace.

There are not many things that I would imagine that can be worse.

At least, I hope the idiot pastor wasn't thinking. Because the other alternative...that he doesn't consider unsaved people as being worthy of compassion - is chilling.

I think that's one of the great dangers facing Christianity today, the elitism and hubris among the 'saved'. I'm putting that in quotes not because I don't believe in salvation, but because taking pride in it, feeling oneself above others, seems to me to cancel the process.

Salvation is an awesome and terrible thing. None of us deserve it, but we've been offered the gift by God's grace.

Do we accept it with humility?

Or do we hold it over our heads like a trophy we've won? "We're Number One!"

Gonna spray Jesus with a shaken-up champagne bottle, celebrating?

Just asking.

Please Excuse...What is Funny?

I don't get some humor.

Last night (Tuesday, August 27), on America's Got Talent, a stand-up comedian was running through an act that he said was supposed to be 'kid-friendly'.

I guess that was part of the joke. It wasn't. He simply told risque jokes by analogy, couching them in terms that had the veneer of innocence.

I'd repeat some of them here, but I have better taste than that. If you saw the guy, found him funny, and think I'm impugning your taste...uh, well...I am.

Making adult jokes (as in adult movies, in at least one case) sound like kids' jokes removes something from our culture. It removes a boundary that is intended to protect and preserve innocence, and it removes the boundary for a cheap laugh..and, ultimately, as a road to make money.

I'm sorry, but I won't stand with that, and I won't stand for it in my house.

Wait one...why did I say I;m sorry? I'm not sorry.

And there's another thing. You take a moral stance, and somehow you are made to feel that you've got to apologize to the people you're standing up against. They can call me a pigheaded reactionary who should be publicly pilloried, and mot everyone will nod knowingly.

I have to apologize. Not any more.

I do have a sense of humor. Recently I was welding, and my nose started itching. So I went to scratch it with the molten-hot end of the welding rod.

Well, it cured the itch!

Why You Can't Abandon Your Dreams

Why?

Because they're not really yours.

Your dreams are seeds that God planted in your heart and in your soul, to start with. Turning your back on them is, to start with, an insult to the Godhead.

Not a good idea. Insult anyone else, but not Him.

Secondly, your dreams may not be entirely about, or for you. They may be intended to reach past your life to touch, and inspire others.

The film Invincible is a good example of this. It's the story of Vince Papale, who at the age of 30 went to an open tryout for the Philadelphia Eagles football team, in 1976. He had played one year of high school ball, went to a college without a football team, and played league football while working as a teacher and bartender.

And he made the team, playing for three and a half seasons before injury forced his retirement.

But it was more than his dream. Philadelphia was treated poorly by the 1970s, and football was an important binder for the community. But the Eagles were a disaster, one of the worst teams in the NFL.

But things changed in 1976, when they brought an 'old man' with a fiery heart and a big dream on board. The fans had one of their own with whom they could identify, and the team had a seemingly bottomless reservoir of enthusiasm in one player.

In 1981, the Eagles won the Super Bowl. Papale was no longer playing, but that victory is widely regarded as his legacy.

One man's dream brought pride, unity, and, yes, hope to a city of millions.

(The movie is well worth seeing...produced by the Disney studios, it's a great family-friendly film.)

Tolerating Atheism?

What are atheists trying to prove?

A lot. And they want to change the fabric of our society so it can never be changed back.

Atheism is a faith. While many of its adherents claim that it's based on scientific fact, that's untrue. What they call 'fact' often boils down to either what they call the absence of scientific evidence for God, or quotes from 'smart people' like Stephen Hawking, who claims that a self-originating universe makes God unnecessary.

Oh, please. I have a lot of respect for Dr. Hawking, but (a) the self-originating universe is unproven and unprovable - it merely does not violate physics as we know it, and (b) to infer that such a universe could independently achieve the degree of complexity and organization that we see involves enough special pleading to beggar the imagination.

But they persist - buying ad space that says "God Doesn't Exist", and demanding the right to erect monuments to atheism in public places. One, recently built in Florida, is a bench inscribed with quotes from such men as Albert Einstein (who specifically said he was not an atheist...go figure).

Well, my dogs need a place to pee when we visit there.

And why do they persist? Why, to win people over to their faith, of course. They want you, me, and everyone to abandon God, abandon hope for a life beyond this one.

They want freedom from religion., because they feel that religion has caused too many wars, too much killing. Too much intolerance.

We shouldn't look to a God in the sky to give us our values. We should look to the innate nobility of Man.

Interesting, considering the Nazis, the genocide in Rwanda, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Not very noble.

There have been several officially atheistic societies in recent history. The Soviet Union, Communist China, and France, after the Revolution.

All three set records in mass murder of their own citizens.

Without God, we are rudderless. The only True North we have are ideas from the mind of man, which are changeable as the wind, and salted with ego and self-interest.

Nobility and good are defined by who's in power, and the strength of their support.

Is this the world you want for your kids?

Fight back. Stand for your faith. This isn't a question of tolerating different points of view.

This is survival.

Answering an Atheist

The Epicurean Paradox -

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

This is an argument that many atheists use to try to deny the existence of God. It appears on many Facebook walls, and I'm sure it's floating around Pinterest as well.

It makes a lot of Christians (and Hindus, and Muslims, and Sikhs) a bit uncomfortable. When quoted by a quick and clever thinker, it can be hard to refute on the spot. It seems to fold back in on itself quite neatly, and leave few chinks by which it can be dismantled.

I have another way...put a block of C4 on it and blow the little turkey to Mars.

The problem with the Epicurean paradox is that it's a circular argument, and one that completely depends on a straw man. The circularity comes from the a priori assumption that we know how the world should work, and that our view is unquestionably correct.

The straw man is the 'God' whose motives are inferred by His actions, and which are judged by 'our' standards.

We really have to look at the question in two parts - evil arising from free human will, and 'natural evil' like cancer.

All of the monotheistic religions mentioned above grant that we have free will, and the opportunity to choose between good and evil. This, then, would imply that the tolerance of evil was a necessary part of the creation of a world in which good could also arise. Banning free will would prevent human evil, but would also prevent human goodness. If you don't have shadow, you don't have light, and therefore no way to define 'good'.

An interim step of allowing evil intent but preventing evil action is meaningless. Even a cow knows that it can't walk through a canyon wall, and it won't try.

Natural evil follows a similar line of reasoning. We have a creation that 'works'; the parts fit together. And some of those parts are rather dangerous to us. Could God have removed them? We don't know - but we do know that He set the natural laws, and it would make Creation nonsensical if He broke them on a whim.

Think of teaching a child to drive, after having been brought up in relative isolation (rural New Mexico, maybe?) - you want her to mind the speed limits and stay in her lane. If you didn't follow the rules of the road, and she had no other role models to follow, she's be terribly confused. Why rules for her, yet none for you?

Of course, you didn't set the rules of the road. They were formulated on a social plane 'above' you. So let's look at another example - house rules, like no computer games before church on Sunday.

No law against computer games, except your own...but how would your child feel on seeing you break your own rule?

It really does come down to God avoiding "do what I say, not what I do."

We have a world that allows free will, and that obey certain physical laws. And both of these allow for the presence of evil. We may not like it, but we have to accept it as a price that God decided was worth paying.

Worth paying to raise up His companions for Eternity.

Last Rites

Last Rites, or Extreme Unction, is the sacrament a Catholic priest delivers if a person is in imminent danger of death.

I've had Last Rites. Several times.

Several years ago, I was newly married, and had a problem...hemorrhoids. Bad ones. They were limiting life to the point that I finally agreed to go under the knife, for what is widely regarded as a very painful procedure.

And it was, even though the surgeon used a new technique, 'stapling' the prolapsed blood vessels. He said the post-operative pain would be reduced - somewhat.

Not having anything to compare it to, I agreed, and the morning after the surgery I woke up feeling not too bad. It was kind of like a healing gunshot wound. Sore but bearable. They let me go home at noon, and suggested I take it easy. That was no problem.

Except that when I went to the bathroom, I passed blood. I was told to expect some bleeding, but it seemed a bit extreme.

Barbara called the doctor, and was told, if it happens again, bring me to the hospital.

Barbara does not listen to dumb advice anymore.

She helped me to the living room, and I watched television for a bit, but it was getting harder to stay upright, and I thought I'd better get to bed. I tried to stand, and the room started spinning. So I told Barbara, "I'll crawl."

"No," she said. "You'll walk."

She helped me up, and three steps later the floor rotated up in front of me. I dimly remember the paramedics arriving, and the trip to the ER.

"He's bleeding out!" I remember a doctor yelling that. Not something one forgets.

And then there was Father Vic, bending over me. I don't remember what he said, or how I responded, if indeed I did.

But he was there.

And so was Jesus.

They replaced 150% of my blood, and I spent a week in hospital. Father Vic turned up again when things went very wrong, but I don';t remember what happened, and Barbara will never tell me.

Just as well.

(The surgeon was horrified, and very contrite. We didn't sue. Surgery's a risk, and he did the best he could. I survived, and the hemorrhoids are gone. We won.)

Does God Exist?

Does God exist?

If you're reading this, you probably believe He does. Whether or not that's an entirely happy thought for you may be a different story.

But can you prove it? No fair using the Bible as a reference. It's biased. To sharpen the question, is there any independently verifiable evidence that He's there?

The quick answer is, no.

Now, another question. You may be sitting in a chair as you're reading this. Does your chair exist?

It does?

Okay - is there anything that makes up the structure of the chair that is the chair?

No. The chair may be made of wood, or metal, or a combination of materials, but none of it is chair.

Well, okay - it's a chair made of wood.  So it exists.

But what's the wood made of? Lignite and cellulose.

Lignite and cellulose are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of proton, neutrons, and electrons. Electrons don't really count, because they're both particles and waves.

But even if we count the electrons, we come to the realization that the parts that make up an atom are so very, very small in relation to even the atom's size, that atoms are mostly empty space.

So your chair doesn't exist, but what's keeping your butt off the floor?

Energy. The bonds between the atoms are so ferociously strong that they allow empty space to pretend it's solid. And we can't see it.

A a model, think of what happens when you try to pull identical poles of two magnets together. This close and no closer, eh? And it feels like there's something in the middle, that very quickly becomes unsqueezable. But you can't see it, and unless you have specialized instruments, you can't measure it.

But it's there, and it has a real effect on the world.

Same thing with God. We can't see Him, but we can see the shadow He casts, and feel the palpable energy in our lives. The times when we want do to something we shouldn't, and we hear a little voice asking "Are you sure?" - that's God.

If the voice said, "No!", it would likely be us.

But God gave us free will.

And yeah, He's real