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The Thrill Is Gone

January 30, 2010 in General, Religion

A month ago, I was overcome with a certain euphoria on Christmas Eve. I felt something I’d literally never felt before. And that led to a certain excitement. Which, honestly speaking, has waned.

Where does that leave me?

With work to do.

I met someone or something. I felt giddy. The newness wore off quickly. And now I have to ask myself whether or not it was infatuation or something more serious.

I’ve felt infatuation before. I’ve often confused it with love. I once proposed to a woman I was infatuated with, only to realize months later that there was no trust in the relationship. We broke a few months after I had that realization. It was something more than the thrill being gone, or even simply tarnished. It was a question of trust. Which is a question of faith.

And now I find myself wondering whether or not there’s trust in what I experienced. Whether there’s faith.

Then along comes Mr. Rodriguez, carrying words of the great twentieth-century apologist, C. S. Lewis:

Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable. But when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either 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. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith. (Christ Rodriguez)

The right words at just the right time.

Who would have thought?

Give me some time — I hope to have an answer.

Tags: faith 1 Comment »

by G. Scott

Reciting Philippians From Memory

January 25, 2010 in General, Religion

Via Kowalker:

http://kowalker.com/2010/01/24/john-piper-reciting-philippians-from-memory/

No Comments »

by G. Scott

Prayer: What It Was For Me

January 24, 2010 in General, Religion

I’ve been reading Donald Spoto’s In Silence: Why We Pray, and I’ve come to realize that my assumptions about prayer — like so many of my other assumptions — were dreadfully inaccurate. Much of this comes from my assumptions as an atheist, but a great deal of it is lingering crud from my early church experience.

An initial realization is the difference between communal and private prayer. I would argue that only very rarely do Protestant churches have anything resembling communal prayer, but Spoto points out the importance of communal prayer in the Old Testament, and experience illustrates the importance of communal prayer in the Catholic tradition.

Prayer in the church I attended in my youth was hierarchical and private. Even when someone prayed in public, it was a private prayer. Our church service began and concluded with prayer (opening and closing prayer, it was called), but like most Protestant prayer, it was merely a private (i.e., individual) prayer said in public. Members bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and dutifully said “amen” at the conclusion, but the congregation never felt — and was never made to feel — as if it were praying. We were standing behind the one man who praying. He represented us all before God.

That was very much a common model in our church. Members were forbidden — not merely discouraged, but forbidden — to proselytize. That job fell to Herbert Armstrong. Our responsibility in preaching the Gospel was primarily to back him up. To support him fiscally.

It was very much like that with public prayers. Just as Armstrong represented us to the world, the individual offering up prayer was representing us before God. Our job was simply to say “We agree” by saying “amen.” The petitioner spoke; God and the congregation listened.

That model of humans speaking and God listening somehow became the dominant paradigm of prayer for me. Very one-way.

What about prayer as listening? Spoto, you have opened my eyes and closed my mouth…

Tags: Catholicism, prayer, protestantism No Comments »

by G. Scott

A Sense of History

January 23, 2010 in General

It’s odd: I’d decided — and stated — long ago (at least six years ago) that if I ever became Christian, I would become Catholic.

I mentioned this to my father, who attends a small evangelical church after having attended the Worldwide Church of God for over thirty years (and sticking by the WCG through all its changes). I stated that Catholicism has the clearest historical links to the early church. “The early church was clearly much closer to Catholicism than Protestantism,” I contended.

It doesn’t seem like a radical statement. After all, it was the Catholic against whom the first Protestants were protesting. One doesn’t need to read the early church fathers and make doctrinal comparisons between their writings and today’s churches to make that simple observation.

He flatly denied it. In his mind, somewhere between the first century and 1517, the Catholic church arose from the “true church” and corrupted it.

I’ve thought it’s perhaps a lingering vestige of his acceptance of Herbert Armstrong’s theology in the Worldwide Church of God. Armstrong taught just that, suggesting that somewhere between the writing of the New Testament (which happened, according to him, almost immediately after the death of Jesus) and the emergence of a visible church some seventy years later (again, whence these painfully inaccurate dates?), a spiritual coup took place. The culprit, Armstrong taught, was Simon Magus.

At the time of that conversation, my father didn’t bring up any of the Simon Magus, and I generally left the issue alone. The conversation died, and that was that.

I wish I’d read Dave Armstrong (ironic — another Armstrong, this one with a sense of and knowledge about history):

Protestantism arose in 1517, and is a “Johnny-come-lately” in the history of Christianity (having introduced many doctrines previously accepted by no Christian group, or very few individuals). Therefore it cannot possibly be the “restoration” of “pure”, “primitive” Christianity, since this is ruled out by the fact of its novelties and absurdly late appearance. Christianity must have historic continuity or it is not Christianity. Protestantism is necessarily a “parasite” of Catholicism: historically and doctrinally speaking. (Biblical Evidence for Catholicism)

This is so plainly obvious that it’s difficult to see how any Protestant could contest it.

That complete lack of any real sense of history — church or otherwise — is one element of my WCG upbringing that thankfully doesn’t linger.

Tags: Catholicism, history 1 Comment »

by G. Scott

Thoughts on Jesus

January 20, 2010 in General

The name “Jesus” makes me cringe. There’s a long history behind that, but it started with the church of my youth, the Worldwide Church of God.

“Jesus” was Protestant, fluffy, feel-good nonsense. It was always to be pronounced with the “e” stretched out almost a half second and was the name of a long-haired weakling. The WCG put its emphasis on the Old Testament God, who would soon return and set up a totalitarian regime known as the Kingdom of God. If Jesus was mentioned, his title had to be affixed: it was Jesus Christ to us, never just plain, Protestant Jesus.

As an atheist, “Jesus” was a crutch. A sign of weakness. An indication that whoever had the name on his/her lips couldn’t handle the rigors of life.

And so with all that baggage, I have a hard time even with the thought of Jesus playing a role — any role — in my life. “God” is fine; “Christ” doesn’t bother me so much. “Jesus” gets me.

It’s a gut reaction that will continue for some time, I imagine.

Tags: conversion, jesus 5 Comments »

by G. Scott

The Pond

January 19, 2010 in General

Good parables are hard to come by. This one is a little much a times, but still worth the time to watch.

Tags: parable, sin No Comments »

by G. Scott

Slavery

January 16, 2010 in General

To visit a former center of human suffering is to walk into one of atheists’ most significant objections to God’s existence: how can a benevolent God allow such pain. Such thoughts flooded my every step when I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stories of children stripped from parents and, on occasion, thrust into the crematoria alive, a Nazi uniform woven out of human hair, and a million other terrors make it difficult even walk without collapsing under the weight of the atrocity.

Today, at a plantation complete with eight authentic slave cabins, I expected to experience a similar sense of nihilistic emptiness. It didn’t linger, though I’m not quite sure why. I ran my hand along the brick that, two hundred years ago, would have been one of the many elements imprisoning human beings solely because of the amount of melatonin in their skin, and I felt sorry, I felt emptiness, but I didn’t find myself thinking, “Why would God allow this?”

Both asking and withholding the question seems to cheapen the experience. Going around asking, “Why does God allow this?” and pointing to things as proof of the nonexistence of God means making every atrocity into a bullet point in a philosophical treatise I’m finding increasingly less meaningful. These awful things that humans do to one another are not fodder for an atheistic screed any more than they are for divine punishment theories. The atheist holds no higher moral ground for rejecting God and saying, “It’s just the way that things are,” then challenging the nearest theist to a debate about theodicy. In the end, neither approach answers the question, because it is merely unanswerable.

I feel this realization, when began developing as I thought about the earthquake in Haiti, represents a theological plateau for me. In the end, for both the atheist and the theist, it matters little what we say when faced with evil, natural or man-made. It only matters what we do.

Tags: problem of evil, theodicy 2 Comments »

by G. Scott

Using Haiti

January 15, 2010 in General

Between Danny Glover’s gaia comment and Pat Robertson’s divine punishment theory, the tragedy in Haiti has been a plentiful source for pseudo-theological and bone-head political sniping. There are other responses that, to my knowledge, have not yet made it to the news. Apocalypse-seeking Protestants know that an upswing in seismic activity is a harbinger of the end, so they are probably gleeful in their own twisted way.

And then there’s the atheists. We like to use things like this to point out the seeming arbitrary nature of God’s goodness and justice, use it (after some tasteful amount of time has passed) as proof that God doesn’t exist. “God could have stopped it, and he chose not to!” we like to cry.

Isn’t that using the Haitians in the same way as Glover, Robertson, et. al?

Tags: earthquake, haiti, theodicy, theology 1 Comment »

by G. Scott

Baptism

January 12, 2010 in General

From Sunday:

The people were filled with expectation,
and all were asking in their hearts
whether John might be the Christ.
John answered them all, saying,
“I am baptizing you with water,
but one mightier than I is coming.
I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals.
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

After all the people had been baptized
and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying,
heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him
in bodily form like a dove.
And a voice came from heaven,
“You are my beloved Son;
with you I am well pleased.”

I have never been baptized. The church I was raised in — the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) — taught that baptism was a ritual only for adults.

It’s not surprising: the WCG guarded the gates carefully. To get invited to church, on had to show some real persistence. To be baptized, one had to be living a “Godly” life. The church itself took the prerogative in defining this “holiness.” Though it liked to claim everything came from the Bible, the theology was twisted into unrecognizable shapes by the time it got to us, so holiness meant things like paying tithes, not celebrating Christmas, getting all the leaven out of your house once a year, not smoking, and a thousand other examples of pettiness.

Whenever one of my church friends or acquaintances announced he or she was getting baptized, it seemed like the end for our friendship. After baptism, they were entering a whole new league, and we were often encouraged to see the baptized young adults as true adults, while we unbaptized dilly dallied in sin.

Because it was such a momentousness step, I never considered it. Not once. The thought never entered my mind, and that is yet another in a long line of “proofs” that I never really believed any of it to begin with.

As an atheist, I once took pride in that simple fact. “I’ve never been baptized, and I never will be,” I declared.

I still remain doubtful on some days — and I mean that “doubtful” in every conceivable way. I pray occasionally; I go to Mass with my wife; I read. And through it all, I have little idea what to expect.

Tags: baptism 3 Comments »

by G. Scott