He is risen!

I can’t get past Jesus.  Science can say what it wants about millions of years ago, but 2000 years ago the world fundamentally changed.  Was it actually today?  Who knows, and does it really matter?

The world is fundamentally not right.  We all know this.  We all feel the brokenness permeating everything, just below the surface.  

We look for cures.  

Some say look to science, but science explains everything without giving it any meaning.  Some say look to politics, but kings, prime ministers, and presidents have failed again and again across the millennia to make the world  a better place.  So I look to God.  Not God, the absent, who made the model train and walked away, but God the father.  He watched the conductors derail their trains, their lives, and ruin everything about themselves and each other. 

God, the perfect, watched his creation distort the perfection they were given into war, hate, starvation.  Even when we forgot about God we recognized the broken and we tried to fix it. We called it inequality, and made a new stratification.  We called it poverty, but there were too many empty mouths to feed.  We forgot the first term: sin, and what it requires: a sacrifice.  

God did not forget.  In an inexplicable way God joined us in his son Jesus.  God, the perfect, became God, the human.  Not just human but the perfect human, the one we were all supposed to be.  Jesus scared the authorities of his day so they killed him.  He died and his cult vanished, he rose again and his follower caught fire.  They told the world, as I tell you now:

Beyond hate there is the love of God.
This was the Resurrection.
Beyond this broken world there is the work of Christ’s followers.
This is the Resurrection.
Beyond death there is the life of bent knee and dry eyes.
This will be the resurrection

He is risen!
He is risen indeed!

An Atheist and a Christian walk into a bar.

This thought has reoccurred to me a number of times. It is kind of simple and definitely in need of refinement. It is essentially related to the problem of evil. When you ask nonbelievers why they don’t believe in God, especially those who once did, you frequently get an interesting response. “If there is a God look at all the pain he’s caused, all the evil he allows. How could anyone believe in him?” They blame the God who doesn’t exist for the problems in the world. But there is a disconnect. Without God being responsible for evil we are left with two possible conclusions as to evil’s existence. There is no evil, or evil is humanity’s fault.

In the first category you have Nietzsche and Richard Rorty. Evil is merely a definition that varies according to person or the powerful. This is, so far as I can tell, the most logical outcome of true atheistic ethics. However, if you don’t subscribe to that outcome of atheism you are left drawing the same conclusion as the Christian.  We’re responsible.

This is where exitential guilt comes in.  Every time I lie, every time I take an action that in some way injures someone else, it is my responsibility.  I can blame no one else.  This guilt seems to be little felt in the West, where the consequences for something as simple as buying a cup of coffee or pair of sneakers are so far removed from us we don’t see them.  But we’re contributing to the mess of the third world by our mere existence.  Forget pollution, try and imagine everyone on earth producing as much physical trash as we do, there isn’t the landfill space for it.

Christianity, and Judaism before it, had and has a word for this problem: sin.  We are responsible for the problems of the world, merely by existing.  The atheist doesn’t agree with us on the terminology.  But if they believe that evil exists in the world then we are on the same page.

Some thoughts on Torture.

For torture to be condemned requires absolute morality.

Atheistic utilitarian ethics eliminates restraint in information gathering provided more lives are at stake than the one being tortured.

As we have seen with nations like China and Soviet Russia, when God is removed from the equation torture becomes a viable option.  Torture’s use can be for anything deemed a threat to the state, internal or external.

Deism will not do, the blind watchmaker who disappeared could care less about any of us, much less one of us.

Nations whose constitutions are declared under God, such as Canada or the U.S. must subscribe to absolute morality or forfeit honouring their constitution.

Nations with a constitutional directive to employ absolutes in their ethical processes cannot resort to Torture for information gathering.

(This is my first simul-blog with Deep and Meaningful for Dummies, an awesome project by my friend David.)

Richard Dawkins Rapping.

It’s rare that parody is this good. The music kicks in around a minute in. I’m guessing by the “expelled” stamped on the forehead of the guy at the beginning that this is part of the advertising for that Ben Stein documentary. Regardless it is hilarious and the beat is pretty awesome.

Know your enemy…

Here’s a thought that just struck me while reading this. Whoever a Christian calls his enemy he has to love. This is the basis of true revolution. The successful revolutions of the 20th Century, Be it Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, Mandela’s anti-apartheid movement, or even Gandhi’s movement to free India were love revolutions.

People don’t know how to respond to non violence; people don’t know how to hate love. Someone asked Gandhi how he expected the British to leave India, he replied “as friends.” How do you respond to that? The paradox of the Death and Resurrection is the triumph of Love over Violence. The triumph of love over power.*

Instead of trying to win control of political systems, instead of trying to rule the world, perhaps we should be learning how to love our enemies. If people living in the slums of the Rift Vally weren’t hungry would they be killing each other?

How do we put our love in action? It isn’t enough to say the words, we need to act. We need to feed the hungry instead of indulging in our own gluttony. When we love those we despise we change everything, from how we perceive them to how they perceive us, and all the implications in between.

Turn the Rage Against the Machine song inside out: Know your enemy… so that you can love them. It’s harder to love, but sometimes that which is more difficult is more effective.

*for more on this read “Which Jesus?” by Tony Campolo