Heart, Mind, and Mission

Good evening, Blogosphere! I think the time has come for a quick new post after several long months of silence, so here we go!

Although my intellectual doubts and concerns haven't really changed much since my last post, I felt it was time to post because over the last month or two I have felt something of a restoration of my faith--specifically the emotional (spiritual?) component of it. I just feel somehow better about things, more certain in my heart (if not in my head) that God exists, that He is present, that He means me (and all of us) well, and that the world as a whole will ultimately come to a good end..whatever exactly that means.

That's an improvement, I'd say, so I'm certainly not complaining. That said, I have to wonder what has caused it. And perhaps more importantly, what does this resurgence of faith feelings entail for my life, when it seems to have arrived in a form oddly divorced from any sort of intellectual certainty or inner peace? It's all well and good to say that I feel more like God is truly there and that He is doing something good with my life, and that the world does indeed possess some underlying meaning and purpose (that certainly makes me feel better, at least!), it doesn't shed much light on how I am to live my day-to-day life. I'm uncertain whether or not Jesus was/is indeed God Incarnate, which raises the question of whether or not I should be praying in His name, let alone how exactly I should be responding to His various teachings. Beyond that, I'm uncertain of what morality found in the Bible is the direct Word of God and what is merely the words of the man who wrote a particular verse (Paul, for instance), suited to his time and place.

Some of the questions which haunt me (is homosexuality truly a Sin? If so, why?) don't directly impact my own life, but others certainly do, like whether I should be selling off all my belongings to give to the poor, how I should respond to violence, how/if I should be tithing, whether or not I should be attending a regular church service (and if so, which?), how much and what sorts of humanitarian works should I be doing, and the ever-popular set of questions for the bachelor: what sorts of behavior in unmarried relationships are acceptable in the eyes of God? Does He even care about the details of such things (traditional Christianity certainly says that He does) or is one's ultimate intentions toward the other party and theirs toward you really the only relevant factor?

To summarize: I'm feeling much better about God lately, and that's great, but my head and my heart are so out of sync that I'm unsure of what exactly to do about it. In other words, I want to know (ideally in more specific terms than "love others," which is currently all I'm really operating on) what God wants from me. What am I living for? Without a sense of clarity on Scripture, I don't feel like I have clarity on what I'm supposed to be doing, and without a clear sense of purpose, I sometimes feel like I'm just existing rather than actually living. I think you can largely ignore this problem when you're exceedingly busy, or when you have some clear-cut goal up ahead (promotion, buying a house...whatever), but when that's done...then the lack of specific purpose and "mission" quickly resurfaces. Perhaps "love others as best I can until eventually I die" really is the entirety of my mission in life, with no more specific guidelines or objectives than that, but somehow I doubt it.

Honestly, deep down I think maybe I fear actually getting an answer to all this clamoring for mission and purpose (i.e. "God, just tell me what to do!"). I can't help but think of the "rich young ruler" (Luke 18:18-23) who told Jesus that he was already keeping the Commandments and then asked what else he should be doing. Jesus answered him "give all your belongings to the poor and follow me," and he went away sad, for what Jesus asked was more than he could bring himself to do. Perhaps I am no different, and so I fear to hear an answer to my question as much as I long for it.

No News is Good News?

Some friends have recently badgered me about the lack of updates here, so I thought I'd make a quick note. The reason I haven't been posting lately is that I simply don't have a lot new to say. My "status," so to speak, hasn't changed.

I read a book a month and a half or so ago (which I've mentioned before, Tim Keller's The Reason for God) which was perhaps the best work of apologetics I've read since C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. I've read a lot of apologetics, so that's a ringing endorsement. If you're interested in the logical defense and support of Christianity (especially if you're a non-religious person wondering if there might be any credibility to Christianity or not), I highly recommend it. I will probably post at another time with some of the highlights of the book.

As I read it, there were a few moments when I thought "Yes!" and could feel myself forming some sort of faith once again, but then it would always fade again after. Not because the points I'd read ceased to be valid, but because I'd once again remember other points (not addressed in the book) that I've not gotten a decent answer to, and despair of ever feeling much certainty about anything, one way or the other. And so I've remained where I was before, a guy with flat-lining faith who mostly just tries not to think about it and go about his day. I go to work, play some games at home, hang out with friends occasionally, read a book, go on a date or two--just live life and try to suppress the lingering feeling that all these things are ungrounded and pointless without having some sense of what I believe (or don't believe) about God. I feel like I'm running on auto-pilot, just continuing to drift in the same general trajectory I was on before my already-weak faith imploded, with only very minor course corrections. I mean, I don't feel that I especially believe in God these days, but I still behave as if I do, for the most part. Perhaps a time will come when that ceases to be true, I don't know.

I'm not feeling as down about everything as I was before, so that's good, but I think the reason is mostly just that things are going moderately well in my life right now, so it's easier to not think about matters of faith at the moment. Sooner or later these things will come to a head again, and I've got to figure out what the heck I believe, and where I'm headed, before some major new stage in my life comes along and I find myself lost, desperately needing some sort of map for reality and not having one at hand.

Creedal Clarification

Something I read today reminded me that what people mean when they say "Christianity" can vary considerably from one person to the next, and that meaning can be especially unclear to non-Christians who aren't very familiar with the church, as there's no telling what combination of things they've heard are core to Christianity and what things are more peripheral. So, since I use the word "Christianity" here a lot, in regards to sets of things I do believe, don't believe, or have trouble believing, I thought it might be worth laying out at least what I mean when I say the word.

What is Christianity, at the core? Leaving aside the things the zillion different breeds of Christians disagree on (ranging from whether sprinkling or dunking is a better approach to baptism to whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to preach), what is the heart of the whole thing that virtually everyone has agreed on for the last 2000 years or so? What is the same between Methodists, Calvinists, German Lutherans, New England Charismatics, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic? The main answer to that is "all the contents of the three big Christian Creeds that emerged over the first few centuries after the Crucifixion, all of which are very similar in contents if not in exact expression." Even denominations of Christianity (like the Baptists) who formally deny the need for a creed just so happen to be aligned with all the substance of the ancient creeds.

So what are these Creeds?

~*~

First, the Apostle's Creed, dated by most scholars in the first or second century AD:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic* Church, the
communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the
body, and the life everlasting.

Amen.

* Note that this is lower-case "catholic." Prior to its association with the Vatican-based globe-spanning organization we all know today, the word originally just mean "universal."

~*~

Next up, the Nicene Creed, formed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and redrafted in 381 AD. (You can read the original draft on Wikipedia at the link above--I'm only posting the second draft here, as there were no substantial changes)

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic* and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

~*~

Last but not least, the Chalcedonian Creed, adopted at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. Its main purpose was to clear up increasing controversy at the time regarding the exact nature of the Incarnation of Christ. In other words, it was written out of a desire to clarify who/what exactly Jesus was, in terms of humanity and divinity. A tricky proposition, to say the least.

We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood;
truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body;
co-substantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and co-substantial with us according to the Manhood;
in all things like unto us, without sin;
begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood;
one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably;
the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ;
as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.

~*~

So, for future reference, whenever I use the word "Christianity" in this blog, you'll know what exactly I'm talking about. :)

C.S. Lewis Rocks the Casbah

This has really nothing to do with the current line of thought I've been blogging about for the last two posts, but I just ran across it and felt like sharing. It's a quote from C.S. Lewis which just cropped up in a book I'm currently reading, Timothy Keller's The Reason for God. I'm a big fan of Lewis, and tend to really connect with his writing, and this quote in particular just struck me as awesome. To have such depth of thought and the capacity to write with such eloquence and profound clarity...the man's just amazing to me.

Anyway, here's the quote, from Lewis' The Four Loves:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation."

Indubitably Dubious

Hello again, folks. A couple of people responded to my last post with requests that I explain in more detail some of the things that make it hard for me to believe. It's mostly a mass of little things rather than some single giant thing, but I'll do my best to list out some specifics here tonight. After putting some thought into it, I've distilled it down to what I think are the six biggest things, and will share those below. I'm somewhat uncomfortable with doing this, as I always have a little fear in the back of my mind that my doubts are "contagious," that listing out my thinking in detail may lead others to think/feel the same way and cripple their own faith. And I really, really don't want that--if Christianity is true, then harming the faith of others would be a horrific Sin, and even if Christianity is not true, I'd potentially be depriving people of a faith that's comforting to them, which I'd have no desire to do.

So in short, if you're on rocky ground faith-wise right now yourself, I would not recommend you read this post, as there's a (hopefully quite small) chance that the contemplation of something you read here will make things worse for you. If you're feeling pretty sturdy in your faith, on the other hand, I'd certainly appreciate some solid refutation of my points below, or really anything that you feel might be helpful to a guy who can't seem to believe but still wants to.

Anyway, without further ado:


#1 - Miracles
I'll start with the one that's probably the biggest deal for me: Miracles. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a "miracle" as "an event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God."

I'm pretty sure I've never seen a miracle. Or if I have, I suppose I didn't recognize it.

I'm talking about indisputable, clearly supernatural miracles here. Walking on water, turning water to wine, resurrecting the dead, healing a man who's been blind or lame or years, turning a staff into a serpent, parting the waters of a sea, raining fire from the sky, or (on the darker side of divine intervention) a river turning to blood or every first-born child in an entire country mysterious dying overnight. To some degree, the fact that I've never personally seen anything even remotely close to these things is a cause of my doubt, but that degree is pretty small. After all, I've never personally seen the American flag planted on the surface of the moon, but despite it being something radically outside my personal experience, I have no trouble at all believing in the moon landing (notably and amusingly, there are those who do).

There are several key differences between the moon landing and biblical miracles, however:

A.) The people who claim to have landed on the moon are still alive today. We're separated from the miracles reported in the Bible by 2000 years (or much more, in the case of the Old Testament), thus making verification of the stories and actual evidence from the time incredibly difficult.

B.) I've got photographs and videotapes of the moon landing. The collective scientific community of the entire planet agrees that they are legit, as well as the telemetry information from the craft and the rock samples the astronauts brought back. The biblical miracles are recorded in text only, and it's impossible to even be sure they were written in the time frame when the eyewitnesses could have written them.

Most biblical scholars seem to agree that at least the majority of the books in the New Testament were in fact written within a few decades after the events they record, but as far as I can tell, their primary piece of evidence for this is the fact that the books don't reference the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans in AD 70, which in turn implies that they must have been written before that event, which places them (at most) 40 years after the Crucifixion. I don't find that to be terribly compelling evidence, as it's quite possible that the writers simply didn't write in that fact. The argument goes that no Jew would possibly have left that out, and I'd say that's probably true if the gospels were written in AD 75 or something, but if someone around AD 110 or so was writing down (for the first time) tales that had been passed down orally for 80 years (notably, this sort of dating would mean that everyone except perhaps some infants who were around during Jesus' day were already dead at the time of the writing), I could easily imagine them writing about Jesus without ever mentioning the (comparatively recent) fact of the Temple's destruction, as that is after all not the topic they were trying to write about--especially given the fact the destruction of the Temple becomes less meaningful to a person who believes that the curtain is already torn and the Temple is no longer needed to connect us to God.

C.) The moon landing took place in the Modern era, in our post-Enlightenment age of skepticism and science. On the whole, people today (I'm primarily referring to Americans and other post-industrial nations here, not everyone in the world) don't believe in colossal sea serpents, magic spells, or ghosts. The reason for this is that although we have as much of an inexplicable desire to believe in the supernatural as we ever did, after several centuries of science gradually proving that things mankind previously thought were supernatural were really entirely natural in origin (the sun, moon, stars, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.), we now rightly require a great deal more evidence to become convinced that something which appears to be supernatural really is one (rather than being a hoax, a misunderstanding/mis-perception, or something which otherwise has a "perfectly natural explanation"). I feel pretty confident in saying that standards for verifying the truth of supernatural claims were much, much, much lower in the ancient world. And even if their standards were as high as ours, their available means for evaluation were pretty limited.

In short, moon landing analogy aside, I find it disconcertingly convenient that not only have I never personally seen any hint of the supernatural, but that every single miracle I've ever even heard of took place in a location and/or time period where it was highly likely to be believed and highly unlikely to be disproved by a scientific/skeptical mind. A little too convenient. To my mind, that puts miracles in the same category as flying saucers and Bigfoot--it's quite possible that they're real, but due to the complete lack of quality evidence relative to the amount of people claiming they're real, I'm don't consider their existence to be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt."


#2 - Prayer
In a nutshell, I'm not convinced that prayer "works." I've prayed about/for a great many things, sometimes seeming to get a result and sometimes not, but I've never been someone with great faith, so I don't consider my personal experience in this regard to be terribly meaningful. I do, however, think it's very striking that the effects of prayer have never been scientifically confirmed. Many different studies have been done to determine if prayer has any greater effect than placebos, and the general answer seems to be "no." I could perhaps write this off as irrelevant, determining that either God won't allow His presence to be revealed in these experiments (If so, WHY not?) or that Jesus simply didn't mean what it looks like he meant when He said in verses like Matthew 7:7-11, Matthew 17:20, Mark 16:17, and Luke 11:5-13, but both of those rationalizations feel pretty weak to me.

There's an entire website specifically dedicated to the inefficacy of prayer and what that ultimately means, Marshall Brain's Why Won't God Heal Amputees? The guy comes off as pretty nasty and bitter, so I find him moderately annoying to read, but amidst the needless vitriol he makes a lot of very compelling points. To be fair, there's another website dedicated to refuting Brain's site, and I've read it as well. That guy comes off as roughly as bitter as Brain and is therefore also somewhat annoying to read, albeit on the other side of the fence. Some of his rebuttals are stronger than others, but on the whole I'd have to say Brain's case is the weightier of the two.

Note: I find it quite easy to believe that if there is a God, then perhaps He answers prayers sometimes and not others, and that He does so for reasons beyond our fathoming. And that's fine. If I already had a sturdy belief in God, I'd say this must indeed be the case and shrug off the rest. But if you don't already have a solid belief in God, then this line of thinking isn't especially helpful.


#3 - The Second Coming of Christ (or Lack Thereof)
In the Gospels, Jesus says pretty darn clearly that He's planning to return to Earth, in unrivaled power and majesty. He says this shall occur "soon." While it's possible that He meant this from the divine "oh, you know, four or five million years isn't all that long..." perspective, there's nothing to especially indicate this in His own words (especially note Matthew 16:28, which even C.S. Lewis called "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible"), and a reading through the book of Acts and the various Epistles gives me a pretty consistent impression that the early church was also expecting Jesus' return to happen during their lifetimes, as Jesus had said.

Unless my (and most people's) impression of the Second Coming is way off base, it never happened. Perhaps someday it will, but it hasn't yet. Two millennia have passed since Jesus said He'd be back "soon," two millennia during which angels, demons, and miracles have become progressively more difficult to believe in as science has increasingly provided natural explanations for everything around us, and He has yet to return. I find it impossible to contemplate that fact without my faith taking the metaphysical equivalent of a kidney punch.

My only consolation here is that perhaps Jesus Himself didn't realize that the Second Coming was a loooooong way away, hence the reason why his use of "soon" didn't pan out in any human sense of the word. While this doesn't really jibe with the idea that Jesus was God in the flesh and therefore (presumably) all-knowing, it does fit with Jesus' words in Matthew 24:36, where He's speaking about the End Times and says "...but about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."


#4 - Divine Atrocities
I find it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the God of the New Testament with the one of the Old. "Love thy neighbor as thyself"? "Love thine enemies"? No matter how you look at it, I can't see any reasonable way to square the God who says such things (in human form, as Jesus Christ) with the one who commands activities like those in the list below. The loves-everyone-equally-with-mercy-for-all-who-are-willing-to-repent God of the New Testament seems a far cry from the God described in the barbaric and unquestionably nationalistic days of the Old Testament as "good" (which sometimes seems to mean "perfectly moral" and other times simply "on our side").

A.) Three thousand golden calf worshippers killed. "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel … slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour." After the event, Moses praises them for killing their own sons and brothers. (Exodus 32:25-29)

B.) God opens the earth and swallows up Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and their tents, their wives, and little ones. Another 250 men burned to death. All killed for accusing Moses of taking on airs and graces, and raising questions about the quality of his leadership. (Numbers 16:1-3, Numbers 16:23-35)

C.) God orders, through Moses, the extermination of the male Midianites and their five kings. (Numbers 31:7-12). Why was extermination ordered? After Hebrew men fornicated with Midianite women, they caught what sounds like some form of STD and 24,000 died (Numbers 25).

D.) The standard-issue example for the Old Testament being nasty: God commands the Hebrews to "utterly destroy" the seven nations that are in the Promised Land, "nor shew mercy unto them." In addition, the Hebrews must "destroy" everything of those cultures (Deuteronomy 7:1-6).

E.) God orders Hebrews to exterminate the people of Jericho (Joshua 6:1-2, Joshua 6:20-24); "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword."

F.) God gives military victory to Jephthah in return for the promise of a human sacrifice. As fate would have it, the victim turns out to be Jephthah's beloved daughter, his only child, but he performs the sacrifice as promised. (Judges 11:30-40)

G.) God orders extermination of the Amaleks (for the second time in scripture). The incident to be avenged is the Amalek attack on Moses' expedition, more than 250 years earlier (1 Samuel 15:1-8, 1 Samuel 15:32-33); "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." Then, though King Saul does carry out God's vengeance against the Amaleks, he fails in the details. He has kept King Agag alive, thus angering both God and the prophet Samuel. Samuel goes to the battlefield, summons King Agag, and personally cuts him to pieces. (1 Samuel 15:9-11, 1 Samuel 15:32-33)


#5 - Christian Behavior
This one's pretty simple. I've known (and still know) some Christians who were/are truly wonderful people. I've also known people of other religious persuasions (and atheists) who were equally wonderful. And I've known complete schmucks on both sides of the fence. Apart from my own anecdotal evidence, it appears even statistically that Christians simply aren't better people (morally) than anyone else. Even when it comes to divorce, a matter on which the Bible is quite clear, [American] Christians are no different from anyone else. Although I certainly wouldn't expect Christians to be perfect (and there's definitely nothing in the Bible that would make me expect that), I do think it's reasonable to expect that, on average, a group of people who are supposed to be filled with the Holy Spirit will be at least somewhat better than those who are not...and I just don't find that to be true on any consistent basis. Christians seem to be, as a group, just as screwed up as everybody else--they just tend to be a bit more ashamed by (and better at hiding) their sins than non-Christians. And as far as I can tell, though this may or may not have been the case in the first few centuries AD, it's certainly been true from the middle ages up through today.

Don't get me wrong. There are some wonderful, good, genuine, caring Christians in the world (some of them are friends of mine!). It's just that there are also wonderful, good, genuine, caring Atheists in the world (some of whom are also friends of mine), and thus far I can't honestly say that the proportions I find them in vary much from one side of the fence to the other. And that bothers me.

Note: In case you're wondering how I can look at "Christians" from a totally detached perspective, it's because I'm completely discarding the personal evidence that I myself have never been a better or more moral person than your average Joe, even when at the strongest points of my faith. I discard this evidence as unfit to consider on the grounds that I've never really been a sparkling example of a good Christian, and even if I was, objective self-evaluation is virtually impossible.


#6 - Jesus Believed the Old Testament
Believing in just the New Testament would make the task of having Christian faith much easier. But it's not that simple. It's very clear in the Gospels that Jesus Himself wholeheartedly believed in the Scriptures of the time, what we now call the Old Testament. If I am to believe that Jesus was/is God incarnate, then I need to believe that Jesus was right to look on the Old Testament as true. And I find this very, very hard to do. Even assuming one has no trouble whatsoever accepting all the supernatural elements, there are some specific stories in the Old Testament that make it very, very hard for me to believe.

The one example I can think of off the top of my head: In Genesis, Jacob (later known as Israel, for which the nation is named) goes to his blind father Isaac, pretending to be his older brother Esau and hoping to steal the paternal blessing. Esau is a much hairier, bearded fellow than Jacob is, so he is advised by his mother to put goatskins on his neck and the back of his hands in order to successfully convince his father he's Esau. It works. His father doesn't recognize that his voice is Jacob's voice and not Esau's (so much for blindness improving one's other senses) and apparently can't tell the difference between goatskin and his own son's hands and face. Unless he was completely senile rather than merely blind (which nothing in the text indicates), this is patently ridiculous. (Genesis 27)

I'd like to dig up more specific examples along these lines (stories which are difficult to believe on their own merits, not ones that seem morally at odds with the God of the New Testament or ones which include supernatural elements), but that's the only one I can immediately bring to mind, and it's nearly 2 AM now and I've got work in the morning.

~*~

Ok, that's pretty much all the biggest stuff. All that negativity and doubt aside, I'll end with a few positive concluding thoughts for the road:

1.) I originally had 8 items on the above list rather than 6. As I started actually writing those two points out clearly, they basically fell apart under close scrutiny, so I dropped them. It's always nice to find some of the nebulous doubts floating around in your head really aren't all that compelling when seen in the light of day (well, it's well past midnight now, but you know what I mean).

2.) I recently ran across a book on Amazon that I put on my I-want-to-buy-and-read-this-sometime-soon list, Timothy Keller's The Reason for God. A few days later, I had lunch with the pastor of the church I've been to the most here in Baltimore, and he had read my last blog post and (very thoughtfully) had gotten me a copy of that exact book. Then a few days later, my friend Shannon posted a comment here recommending the book. Anyway, I thought that was pretty cool. I've just started reading it and am a couple chapters in so far--seems promising.

3.) In the process of "researching" across the 'net while writing this blog post, I stumbled across a website I've never seen before, called The Skeptical Christian. It looks very interesting, and clearly related to my topic here at In the Chasm. I'm going to crash now, but look forward to reading through the articles in it later.

Apostalicious

In a discourse on the topic of Faith [as a virtue] in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote:

"I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue--what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing in a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."

As is often the case with C.S. Lewis, what he's saying here matches up with how I've always thought/felt. He goes on to say that he's not changed his mind about what he said above, but that he's come to realize something he was overlooking before: that just because we're intellectually convinced of something doesn't mean we'll always hold onto that intellectual belief in the face of emotions that may come along later. He gives several great examples of this, my favorite of which is the first:

"...my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not mother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they were start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words: I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It's not reason taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other."

Lewis later goes on to say:

"[Faith is] the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. ...that is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off,' you can never be a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion."

I think he's right about all that, and and I am most definitely that detestable "dithering creature" he refers to. There have been many, many times over the last several years when I think my faith in Christianity has flagged, not because I had good new intellectual reasons to doubt it, but because my emotional state was shaky (thus calling everything into question) or because I wanted something or other at the time that frankly didn't jibe with Christian morality.

In the same chapter on Faith, Lewis says, "I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter." Quite true, but he never (at least in none of his writings that I'm familiar with) describes exactly how one does deal with that "different matter," and unfortunately I find myself increasingly convinced that this is really the situation I'm in today. I fear that what I've been experiencing lately isn't just more of that emotion-fueled waffling, but is on the contrary something more legitimate, something more real, and perhaps something more...well...permanent.

Over the last several months, my faith has been more or less vaporized, my spiritual life hollowed out. I've still prayed (albeit less) and I've still read bits of the Bible and other books on Christian topics in recent months (heck, the three most recent non-fiction books I read were A Generous Orthodoxy, The New Christians, and Why We're Not Emergent), but there's no real belief underlying it all. If I'm honest with myself, I'd have to say that right now I'm just barely on the Theist side of Agnosticism--in other words, right now I am moderately convinced that there is some sort of God, but my degree of certainty on that is just a bit above 50% (it sounds weird to put a number to it, but I can't think of a way to be more descriptive), and the degree to which I believe any sort of specific details about that God is nearly nil (and here I'm talking about even the huge things like whether or not He intervenes in our world in any way, shape or form, not to mention whether or not Jesus was/is who the Gospels claim--I'm not talking about the minutiae of dogma, here, but the very foundations of the Christian religion!). I've not been able to find a church that I like where I feel like I actually fit in since I moved to Baltimore (don't get me wrong, some are quite nice--I just don't "belong" in them); when combined with this growing apostasy (loss of faith, for those of you not up on your hip church lingo), I'm finally at a point now where I just can't bring myself to go at all. I feel like a fraud even being in church right now, and despite my unreasonably long list of faults and flaws, I do pride myself on at least being genuine.

So what...happened? It should be obvious from the mere existence of this blog that I've struggled with a weak and unstable faith for years, so what's new? The big thing that's new is the duration of the problem (we're not talking about a few sporadic days or a week where my faith wavers here, but a contiguous stretch of over six months where nearly every hint of faith in me is emotionally and intellectually dead).

The other big new thing is the lack of foundations to fall back on--in the past when I've had serious crises of faith, it's been because of an increasing knowledge of the Bible has made me aware of things in Scripture that I simply don't believe for one reason or another, or find contradictory. In those cases, jarring though they may have been, I was always ultimately able to fall back on some of the (rational, logical) reasons that first convinced me that Christianity was actually true. Clearing my head and circling around back to those sturdy foundations might not make me feel any better about New Faith Problem #12, but at least it would allow me to say, "Well, I don't get that. Maybe it's untrue or maybe it's true and I just lack understanding, but in either case, what really matters is that the core concept of Jesus being God in the flesh and saving us is solid, and I believe that because of Reasonable Cause for Faith #3." The problem now is that I no longer have those things to fall back on. I simply don't find them so convincing any more.

Sure, the ancient traditions say that all but one of the Apostles died a martyr's death proclaiming the truth of the Gospels which they'd claimed with their own eyes. And yes, if that's true, that's pretty convincing--after all who goes to their death for what they know to be a lie? This was the strongest single argument I ever saw in favor of believing that the New Testament (and by extension, all of Christianity) is in fact true. And I still find it somewhat compelling. But not like I did 9 years ago. After all, what if the Apostles were just...nuts? Just look at the followers of David Koresh--even in our modern scientific/skeptical world, it's quite possible for a group of people to get together and believe something crazy and ultimately get killed for it. It certainly wouldn't have been less possible in the first century AD. And for that matter, who says that there really were 12 Apostles anyway, much less that 11 of them were martyred? We have much, much better manuscript evidence for the New Testament than we do for other historical documents of the time, and that's great, but seeing the wacky "telephone game" miscommunication that can happen in my office in even a single day makes it very hard for me to believe in the accurate communication of the historical events surrounding Jesus' life over the first few post-Crucifixion decades.

In other cases, the problem is that I've had to erect intellectual scaffolding to make an idea in one place be believable but then have that scaffolding invalidated by another intellectual problem elsewhere. For instance, one of the most convincing reasons I found for the existence of God was the concept of Moral Law--i.e. if we innately view some things as "good" and some things as "bad," but still proceed to regularly do the things we've marked as "bad," then that clearly indicates that there's some greater meaning to these statements than merely "I prefer this thing to that," which in turn hints at something more transcendent and True. That's well and good and quite compelling. But what do you do when one of your strongest reasons to believe in God is the belief that your moral sense was largely derived from Him, and then you read over the Old Testament (and even bits of the New!) and find yourself morally disgusted with the alleged actions of God, time and time again? I can say, "Well, my moral sense is merely wrong about that--whatever God does is intrinsically 'good,' whether or not it seems that way to me." But the moment I say that, I'm devaluing my moral sense, which in turn starts disintegrating the initial reason to believe in God at all, which in turn was the reason for giving a crap what's written in the Old Testament. I cannot have my cake and eat it too, theologically speaking.

So here I am. Nearly a decade of growing older (and theoretically wiser) and more familiar with the Bible and theology in general since I first became a Christian has not strengthened my faith and made me a steadfast rock of pious certitude as one might hope--on the contrary, it's riddled me full of holes, intellectually speaking, making it harder rather than easier for me to believe.

Right at the moment I don't think I can rightly call myself a Christian, but by the same token I don't know what I could honestly call myself. I'm not an atheist. Agnostic and Theist and Deist are all partially true, but none quite captures it. In a nutshell, I'm a man who wants to be Christian but really isn't one, and I'm beginning to wonder if it's just not in the cards for me. And if not, what am I supposed to do with that? On a day-to-day basis I can largely ignore my struggles with faith, as I'm plenty busy dealing with craziness at work and paying the bills and getting groceries, blah blah blah, but Ican't just ignore those things in the quiet moments when I can actually sit down and think, and they often quite literally keep me up at night. Beyond that, I really won't be able to ignore them when it's time to consider the big things in life: relationships, marriage, children, etc. I feel stuck at an impasse with no clear route either forward or backward from here, and it's...frustrating, to put it mildly.

I'm afraid that's as close as I've got to a conclusion for this particular post. Hopefully the next one will be more chipper!

Note: Upon coming up with the title for this post, I googled it and found to my delight that no one in the entire Internet is using it. For the record, "apostalicious" is my newly-coined adjective meaning "pseudo-cheerfully full to the brim with apostasy." I feel a sense of pride welling up inside at the knowledge that no one has beaten me to it. Please remember me fondly when this word inevitably catapults you to glorious victory in Scrabble™ and/or Balderdash™.

Some Axioms

A large focus of this blog tends to be my doubts, my lack of faith. And that's fine, as it's a large part of what I feel like writing about here, but on the other hand I find the incessant negativity kind of annoying, and I'd imagine that at least some of you do too. So lately I've been thinking about the things I do NOT doubt, the stuff which I've never for an instant wavered on, over the last 10 years or so since I've been old enough to think at all seriously about this stuff. I waver all over on the details of Christianity, and at times my faith even in the existence of God Himself completely bottoms out, but there are at least SOME points on which I have always been (and think I always will be) solid. Although the list of these items is pretty short, it's something, and it makes me strangely happy to put it down in writing as sort of a "Statement of Unwavering Belief."

1. I believe that there is an objective reality. Although I believe that our perceptions and prejudices may skew everything one way or another, that in no way changes the fact that the nature of reality itself is truly solid. I do not believe in the concept of "some things being true for you and some things being true for me"--I believe that there are times when we are both saying different but truthful things (because of different viewpoints) about the same topic, but that there are other times when our beliefs directly contradict and only one of us is right. Sometimes the other guy is right, and sometimes I am. (probably the former more often than the latter) Anyway, I believe that even if everyone on Earth is dead wrong about the way things "really" are, the objective reality remains.


2. I want to figure out that objective reality as best I can, accepting in advance the fact that I'll always be (at best) a pretty fair distance from it, but will still strive to close that gap wherever possible.


3. I believe that whether or not there's a God matters. And if there is a God, the nature of that God matters. Moreover, these things matter more than anything else in the world. This is for many reasons, but primarily [for me] because if there is no God (i.e. if the universe, all life, and even ultimately sentient life like ours is entirely the product of random chance), then everything in existence is entirely without meaning. You and I are no more than a random assortment of molecules, and our thoughts and feelings are merely pointless chemical reactions with no meaningful connection to the objective reality, arrived at without any transcendent reality like Free Will or a soul. At any given moment, whether at that moment I'm believing in the Christian God or am utterly devoid of any religious faith at all, I still believe this to be true. And that's precisely why I am unable to ever stop searching for God, even at times when I don't feel like there's much likelihood at all that He's actually there to be found--because without Him, there is no meaning, no purpose, no value...to anything.

Anyway, as a guy perpetually wracked with doubt and skepticism, it's nice to think about and definitively state a few ways in which I actually do have complete, rock-solid certitude--some ways in which I am not, so to speak, In the Chasm.


So there you go.