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Rolled Into One

From James McGrath regarding the Japanese tsunami and whether or not God “did it for a reason.”

In my Sunday school class last week, the subject [of the Japanese earthquake] came up, and as we were up to Romans 1 in our study of that letter, we discussed what it means to think of God as in some sense plainly visible in the natural world. I emphasized that we cannot help but think differently than people did in bygone ages about these matters, and that theists should not simply have all the gods of polytheism, personifying forces of nature, rolled into one, but must find a way of acknowledging that things happen which simply ought not to be interpreted in terms of divine action or theological significance. If science offers anything helpful to religious thought, it is to free us from needing to interpret meaningless accidents and tragedies as though they are the acts of a malevolent deity who, although supposedly omnipotent, chooses to vent his frutrations using blunt, indiscriminate instruments of harm, fors [sic] of nature that seem perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Attributing them to supernatural agency is to make the tragic into something even worse.

How Souls Get Sorted

Brian McLaren in a post about the Rob Bell universalist controversy.

… [T]he biblical story is bigger and better than a narrative about how souls get sorted out into two bins at the end of time.

Look Into All That Space

Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, sums up how the universe is both incomprehensibly vast and quite personal.

In my time on Hubble we’d routinely see background galaxies that were well over a billion light years away. Routinely. Mind you, each of these background objects is itself an entire galaxy, containing tens or hundreds of billion of stars, perhaps as big, rich, and diverse as our own Milky Way.

Some people feel small, insignificant, when they look out into all that space, all that blackness. It’s easy to feel that way, but it’s not a fair assessment. It can be a struggle, and a mighty one, but it’s worth the effort to seek out the awe and the grandeur in it as well. In all that vastness, all that depth, it’s entirely possible there are trillions of planets like Earth, and maybe more. But none is this Earth. Nowhere else is there another you, another me.

In the end, when you make that effort, this is one of most important lessons you learn: we’re a part of all this. A unique part. And that’s a fine thing to know.

Other People Have Different Questions

That’s all. Other people have different questions.

I heard that spoken by a man who was on an economics panel talking about why gathering a group of diverse scholars was beneficial. Because even though each was a giant in his own field, some of the others would phrase the questions differently than the giant would. When we know all the answers, it’s good to remember that other people have different questions.

Absolute, Crystalized Divine Perfection

Steve Douglas does a nice job contending that we don’t need to be convinced that the Bible is inerrant in order to be confident that it’s telling the truth.

…I doubt very many reasonable people become Christians solely because they have been persuaded that the Bible is inerrant. They become convinced by what it says, and this may or may not suggest to them that the whole thing is absolute, crystalized divine perfection. We don’t need to be assured of inerrancy in order to make good use of a newspaper, but our confidence may be boosted by its consistent accuracy.

Telling an unbeliever, “Accept Christ as Lord, just as the Bible says,” is not itself dependent on inerrancy at all.

Obviously Some Indication Of…

Quote from Douglas Adams’ book The Salmon of Doubt

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Found at 3quarksdaily

Only Love Can Do That

Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Several parts of this quote bear reflection, but the one that stands out most in my mind is only derived by misunderstanding what’s being said. By saying, “a night already devoid of stars,” Mr. King intends the image of a very dark place. But this being the morning after the Golden Globe Awards, the word “stars” immediately brought to mind those who are famous. Think of violence, devoid of its stars. No stars, no heroes, no practitioners made famous for their violence. No hope of glory by that path.

Violence, devoid of stars.

It’s Not Woman’s Fault

Here’s what I thought was a great quote from Rachel Held Evans in her blog post A Good Example of Picking and Choosing. The whole post bears consideration.

Let’s face it. The Bible was written in a misogynistic culture. It’s not God’s fault. It’s not man’s fault. And it shouldn’t be woman’s fault anymore.

Symbolic Representations and Quantum Mechanics

Charles Halton states that we misread the Bible when we interpret its descriptions of the Heavens and Earth as the ancient authors’ best attempt at a literal description of how the cosmos was structured. If we take the Biblical description literally we arrive at something like this picture of the cosmos by Michael Paukner.

Mr. Halton goes on to say:

I don’t think that any of these cultures believed that they produced a scientifically accurate description of the universe.  This idea should be tautologically obvious since it is anachronistic to think that ancient cultures would view the world like modern people who take things like the Hubble telescope and quantum mechanics for granted.  How else would ancient people have approached a topic that was so beyond their technological capacities to understand?  Symbolic representations were the only things available to them.

This is a new thought for me, that perhaps the biblical authors’ descriptions of the world aren’t an attempt at a physical description at all, but rather a decidedly symbolic description because the writers themselves knew they had no way of knowing how the physical world was really structured. I’d assumed the ancient authors were “taking a best guess” at describing the physical structure of the cosmos and that they were unsophisticated enough not to realize that they’d never be able to get at an accurate description because they didn’t have the tools necessary for the job.

Mr. Halton then introduces the idea of quantum mechanics in our own time. I certainly don’t have the tools to understand quantum mechanics, though I could give a thumbnail description of the ideas surrounding the field. Due to the fact that I know I’m ignorant on the subject, my description would end up being just as symbolic and untied to actual physical particles, forces, and structures as an ancient author’s description of the structure of the cosmos. But if I can set out to convey ideas about the quantum realm of our universe yet knowing that I’m light on physical details, why shouldn’t I allow that an ancient author might recognize his own limitations in knowing the physical details of the world and so try conveying ideas about the world in a symbolic manner?

Mr. Halton continues:

We should respect this fact as as we read ancient texts and not force them into some hyper-scientific grid.  Instead, read them as they were intended and likely understood by the vast majority of ancient peoples themselves: as beautiful and accurate–in their own right–symbolic representations of the world from the perspectives of particular cultures.

Poop Continues To Smell

The question “Did poop smell before the ‘Fall’?” is answered from several theological perspectives at the blog Preach It, Teach It. I quote the part of the answer I thought was funny, emphasis mine.

If you are a seven-day, twenty-four-hour creationist then you have to decide whether or not the animals … ate and pooped before Adam and Eve had time to eat the forbidden fruit? If they did poop before the Fall, then poop did not smell because decay did not occur until after the Fall. But, then on the other hand, you have to consider the fact that poop by its very nature is decay. If the first poop came after the Fall then, of course, poop stank. Poop continues to smell as a residual reminder of the Fall into sin.

One need not be a 7/24 creationist to derive logical conclusions from a set of premises; whether or not those premises are right or wrong is a different issue. So given the premise “No decay before the Fall” and the notion that what’s going on inside poop is decay, we are led to conclude that poop wouldn’t stink. Wouldn’t, that is, if what’s going on in poop is indeed decay. The remaining hurdle is to support the proposition that the biologic processes of bacteria and fungus breaking down organic matter is properly classified as “decay” of the sort that arrived with the curse. I’m pretty confident that it’s not.

I would think that Curse-worthy decay would destroy and consume and ruin. What happens to poop via the stink-making bacteria-and-fungus process isn’t waste and ruin but reprocessing. Reuse! You wouldn’t heap ruin onto your garden, would you? Poop isn’t ruin, it’s useful stuff.

Perhaps we can get away with calling human death a part of the curse, but nature’s reclaiming of the corpse to put the now-dead body’s materials back to good use isn’t a broken, cursed system, is it? I would imagine that any curse would be interested in breaking this miraculous process of reuse. Nature’s reclaiming of God’s materials to use again as part of God’s creation seems like a brilliantly functioning plan, not a curse.