A cautionary tale

Turns out blogging really does take over your brain. Due to a busy weekend, I didn’t get to church on Sunday. Sunday night, I had a very odd dream involving being sort of lost at the beach (a friend of mine was nearby, but I couldn’t find her) and being accosted by a weird, red-headed, bearded man who wanted to tell me all about Jesus. He followed me as I looked for Julie, and although I can’t remember anything he said, I know he was trying to convince me to become a Christian. When I asked him his name, he said, “You can call me Patriot.”

The moral of the story? In the dream, I remember thinking: “Well, I didn’t get to church, but I can blog about this.” True story. Blogging takes over even your subconscious.

Living in poverty

Richard Dawkins has already managed to annoy me in The God Delusion. His first chapter covers, among other things, “the poverty of agnosticism.” He distinguishes between the kind of agnostic who says, “I don’t know, but when the facts are in I will,” from the kind who says, “I don’t know and there is no way to know,” but he condemns the latter as wishy-washy fence-riding. Although now that I write that, it actually makes sense. That’s annoying too.

His point is that the existence of God is something that can be proven or disproven scientifically, and that therefore the question of God’s existence should not be reserved to the theologians and denied to the scientists. He asks why scientists shouldn’t be allowed to hold forth on this question, since their business is the nature of the universe and obviously, whether the universe contains a God is an important question about its nature.

It’s an okay read so far, and he’s asking questions that require pondering about normally accepted givens. That’s the kind of book I like – the kind that stretches my tiny agnostic brain and makes it do jumping-jacks. More as it becomes relevant.

Books and more books

Ever since I rode a bus from Chicago to Minneapolis, I’ve been reading like the wind. I’m still working (very slowly) on Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, but I also just bought Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

And for good measure I’m reading A Crack in the Edge of the World (about the San Francisco earthquake in 1906) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (food and how it comes to us).

 

And finally, I’m still working on Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. I’m between books when it comes to fiction, but I suppose if I were reading even one more book my head might explode.

What am I learning from all of this? The Crack book is underrated, and hasn’t done as well as the author’s previous book about Krakatoa, judging by the fact that I found it in bargain books. It’s a very cool explanation of continental drift, volcanic activity, and how the entire world works – geologically, anyway. I’ve just barely started Omnivore’s, but I do gather that corn is in a lot more foods than we realize.

Constantine’s Sword, as I’ve discussed before, is an extremely detailed examination of the way hatred of Jews, helped along in ways by the doctrines of the Catholic Church, led to the Holocaust. But I had to start over because I haven’t read it since Christmas, so nothing new on that. But The Great Transformation is just amazing. Armstrong starts out by explaining the history of each region before the Axial Age, and that helps you to understand where the ideas of the Axial Age came from. My best love in reading is history, but not just for the sake of knowing what happened Back When. I love history because it often explains how we got Where We Are Now. It may be part of my agnosticism that I treat religion the same way, but before I subscribe to a religious tradition, I want to understand it – not just what it says, but where it comes from.

The God Delusion is exactly what it sounds like, but I’m not reading it so I can avoid believing in God. So far, what he says squares with what I believe, oddly, except that his conclusion is that there is no God and my conclusion is that I don’t know. It also sharpens my understanding of why I believe what I believe, which is surprising from a book about why someone doesn’t believe at all.

 And now I have to stop typing because my hands hurt. This is pitiful, but I helped friends lay sod yesterday and the only part of me that’s sore is my hands, from picking up the rolls of sod. Who knew?

Also…

…I’m finding it instructive how radical the differences are in the theology of those who have kindly posted here. Some think there’s no hell at all; others say there is, but it’s a state of mind, not a place; and others say, of course there’s a hell, how could you think there isn’t?

It would be a shame if all Christians did agree on this and other topics. What would be more boring than a religion with no internal differences? And less human, since nothing is so human as variety?

Later on, I think I’ll post about sin, since it came up in the comments earlier. That should be a good time. Everyone got their flak jackets? 🙂

An example

And no doubt an extreme one, but especially disturbing given that it was perpetrated by employees of the U.S. Government.

http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/05/navy_conversion_070513w/

If you don’t feel like clicking through, it’s an article about an Orthodox Jewish veteran who was repeatedly proselytized by military chaplains while he was being treated for kidney stones and who was even denied kosher food because “staff” (it doesn’t get specific) refused to contact his rabbi, who could have handled that request. Zowie.

Where am I going? And why am I in this handbasket?

I’ll do one more post on this one, and then I’m moving on because I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good discussion by getting all repetitive. I’m just a little agnostic in a big world, and my viewpoint is all I have to offer here. Past a certain point of explaining it, I’m defending it – which I don’t need to do. I hope that folks who read my opinions here are able to see that, argue or not, this is the perspective of someone who doesn’t subscribe to any organized religion.

Anyhoo, ila’s comment helps me to illustrate something that may not be clear to folks with a different take than mine on religion. She compares sharing the Gospel with stopping someone from walking off a cliff. In both cases, she seems to be saying (and ila, step in if I’m wildly overinterpreting!) that the one person is saving another from an obvious danger and that doing so in no way implies judgment.

I would love to agree, but think about this: To someone who is not Christian, only the cliff is such a clear case. Based on the widely shared assumption that everyone wants to live, warning someone in this case would be the only thing to do.

But only Christian faith makes the second case – sharing the Gospel to prevent hell – comparable. Only Christian faith states that hell is the danger on the other end of not believing. To a non-Christian, the second case is not a demonstrable danger with assumptions shared by both. Not only that, but avoiding the danger that the Christian postulates requires more than a single, simple act, like stopping. Avoiding the danger – which you do not see – means changing certain beliefs and activities and even feelings. That’s much more complicated than just not stepping off a cliff. And it may be simple, but it’s not easy, and it’s especially not easy if you’re not positive that it’s necessary.

It’s also a matter of judgement. You have to believe that the other person is right and can see something you can’t, and that their assessment of your behavior is correct. That’s accepting someone else’s judgement in place of your own, judgement about what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s safe, and what’s not. And this is how it looks to someone who isn’t Christian. It may not feel like it, but judgment is part and parcel of evangelizing if you’ve decided you’re saving others from hell. It’s a difficult conflict and it sounds like it’s a Scriptural one. And with the authority vested in me as a self-described agnostic with the Biblical knowledge of a second-grader (if that), I’m not sure how you can resolve it without dropping the hellbound thing.

New header

On a more visual than spiritual note, what does everybody think of my new header? The good folks at Outreach designed it, so I can’t take credit for it, but let me know what you think.

Hazing the Hellbound

Third or fourth (maybe fifth? who knows?) rule of blogging: Every post creates more posts. Yippee!

 When last we spoke, I was sounding off about Lee Strobel’s take on Us Hellbound. (I’m being a little snarky with that phrase, but I also assume that I fall within his category.) Since then, some valuable comments have come in, which stimulated more thought and (hopefully, with this post) more precision.

Several of you agreed with me, which is always enjoyable for my sense of righteousness. (I can run off to my agnostic friends and say, “See?”) I especially liked the idea of the Gospel as practical, as expressed by Chuck, because that seems to approach the idea of the Axial Age that I’ve been reading about.

However, sprocket23 (good handle!) made an excellent point, that to evangelize to Us Hellbound is an act of love. Absolutely, I agree with this and I’ve seen this. I even had this in mind when I wrote the post, because I’ve had several friends tell me that they just don’t want to get to heaven and see that I’m not there. I believe that nothing but love motivates that kind of thing. So even if I didn’t say this in my earlier post, I do not question the motivation behind spreading the Gospel.

But my original point was that I object to the practice of seeing non-Christians as hellbound. Is it true, as Chuck points out, that Jesus never mentioned anyone being “hellbound”? If so, that wouldn’t surprise me. Although I respect the devotion of Christians to their idea of Christianity, I sometimes feel there’s a gap between what Jesus said and what Christianity (or later Christians) said.

Regardless of the scriptural basis of whether or not someone is truly hellbound, though, the real wrong is the idea of any human being presuming to determine that. I stand by my original thought that it is absolute arrogance to think that you know whether someone is hellbound or not. Catholics think Protestants are hellbound; some other sects think Catholics are hellbound; a whole lot of people think Jews are hellbound, and it’s all based on a scriptural interpretation and an opinion about the worth of that sect’s beliefs. Unless a whole lot of us are hellbound (and how again do we know until we go?), the sorting system isn’t really clear to any of us.

And arrogance just isn’t cute. Arrogance doesn’t make me think, “Hey, I think I should open up to this person.” On the contrary, it makes me irritable. Maybe I’m just contrary, but arrogance makes me more suspicious, not less, that the person in question doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I suspect, in fact, that this is at the heart of why a lot of evangelism doesn’t work. We’ve discussed this before, but I think it bears repeating because I think it’s a message that some evangelizing Christians won’t want to hear, even though listening might make them more successful with exactly what they’d like to accomplish.

If you see someone as hellbound, you have judged them. Period. And even where love abides, judgment makes for a big stone around its neck, dragging it away from its true purpose and real transcendence. Only God can judge, and the rest of us mostly have to theorize.

If you’re certain based on Scripture that someone is hellbound, you can have the comfort of your judgement, I guess. But you’ve also saddled yourself with a burden for your evangelism. Even if you don’t want it to, your attitude that someone is hellbound will communicate itself in the way you speak, the arguments you come up with, and other subtle factors that will tell your listener that you aren’t just saying, “Hey, this really was the right path for me and here’s why.”

When people can hear you saying, “You’re going to hell unless you do what I do,” the resistance springs up. You can dislike that fact all you want, and you can give reasons why it shouldn’t be that way. But if you can’t accept it as true (the way you want others to accept the Gospel as true), you’ll always be working with an anchor around your neck.

Shytown!

I’m taking an impromptu trip to Chicago this weekend and I’ll be going to a beautiful old church (this is all the information I have!) to hear someone sing. Ought to be lovely. A good weekend to everyone and I’ll post again Monday.

And, some crankiness.

I have my pet peeves as an agnostic, and they may not show often but they’re about to. Reading Lee Strobel On Outreach: Shortchanging the Good News, two of my biggest annoyances got tweaked.

1. Strobel said, “The secular world sees zero value in preaching the Gospel to the spiritually needy.” Argh. I’ll just put on my Representative Of The Secular World hat and say that that’s crap. As a secular person, it’s not that there’s zero value; I’d say the secular world doesn’t take much of a position on that. But it does see meeting people’s needs (for food, for medicine, for help of all kinds) as the thing to do first, before focusing on the Gospel. And it does have a big, big problem with anyone who thinks it’s okay to make listening to the Gospel a condition of rendering said help. To me, it’s more admirable to help for its own sake, as you would want to be helped, and to talk about the gospel afterward. When people need help, they’re vulnerable and they’re afraid, and it’s easy to take advantage of them without meaning to.

2. Strobel mentions Christians “who cannot bring themselves to take the personal risk of sharing Jesus with the hell-bound co-worker who sits day after day in the cubicle right next to them.” Whatever your personal beliefs on hell, why would you think of someone else as hellbound? First of all, you don’t know, not really. Second of all, how unbelievably insulting to proceed from the presumption that you know God’s will for anybody when it’s so hard to even know God’s will for yourself! Those of us who don’t share your spiritual beliefs would really appreciate not being thought of as “hellbound.” It may be true and it may be false, but it says more about you than it does about the person you’ve so casually judged.