God's Logic

I have noticed that any remotely religious topic on News24 is hotly debated. News24 is my on line news provider, but I imagine the insight is true of any news vendor on the net.

There are always 2 distinct camps, those who angrily refute the myth that God exists, based on solid logical, and rational arguments, peppered with belittling language. In other words, how can you idiotic Christians believe in ‘fairy tales’? The other camp consists of the individuals rooting for God. Their reasoning is often flowery, weak, full of biblical quotes, and ultimately ending in the ‘no debate’, ‘just have faith’ argument.

Each side tries their best to convert the other to their way of thinking, with neither side seemingly making any progress in amassing converts. To my surprise, it is the masters of logic who seem hell bent on winning each of these interactions. The arguments always end in impasse. No surprise there!

The notion of faith is the crux of the disagreement! This concept is unacceptable to anyone who wants it proven from first principles. Obviously if that were possible, the debate around God’s existence would be a non issue, either we prove him to be here or not. Christians fail to get the logic argument, as by its nature Christianity asks its believers to believe what cannot be seen (and hence proven). In other words, one must put logic aside in order to embrace the concept of being Christian.

For a non believer, the logic just does not stack up.

I am then further amazed how upset both sides become, as they fail to make any headway. As per any good disagreement, both sides refuse to budge from their opinion. Sadly, agreeing to disagree, and then moving on, does not seem to be an option. Instead the same debate is rehashed on publication of the next religious article, with the same amount of fervour.

I wonder what the right response is to such an impasse. Being a highly logical thinker, I appreciate the logical argument. Being a good Christian at the same time, I get the complete breakdown in logic. I see my inconsistent thinking and yet, I would have it no other way. God makes sense to me on all levels of my life, more than that I feel genuinely loved. I am happy to take that any day over the satisfaction of winning an on line sparring match with cold logic.

In Addition

I have to add something to my last post.

If you have not read it, read it!

I was thinking through my approach to this grown man crying about his life and my lack of compassion due to my knowing better. In other words, I judged this man as being unworthy of my time, money, and attention. As a good Christian boy, I know that the right approach to this circumstance was one filled with love and compassion. Yet I found it incredibly difficult to follow the same example that was set so long ago.

When rereading this post, I had the realisation that both of us need help from above, perhaps I more than him, even though it seems to be the other way around!!

Old, Sick, & Forgotten

The wind was blowing feebly and the air was chilly due to the weather being sandwiched between two cold fronts. I parked the car at the Sir Lowry’s Pass train station. A lovely building which has been converted into a soup kitchen, and offers the services of a bakery, laundry, ablution block, and counselling room. 200 to 300 people pass through its doors every day, desperate and destitute. A sad reflection of life in this village!

Every day parcels are packed from donations of old Woolworths perishables, and then delivered on foot to the people too old or sick to make the walk to the station. My mission for the day was to join the volunteers as they handed out these parcels. I wanted to see the conditions under which these poor people live, and see if there is any way I can make a difference.

I hooked up with Cathy and Dolly, volunteers who themselves have nothing. Both of their husbands are out of work and money is non-existent. Their attitudes were humbling, instead of feeling sorry for themselves, they were out helping others. With great love and care they delivered the food parcels and chatted to the families in each house. There was much laughter and gaiety as they went about using the gifts of themselves to make a difference in the lives of people forgotten by society.

I met so many people and all gladly invited me, a complete stranger, into their homes for a chat. Some of their homes were lovely, carefully filled with ornaments and mementos. Others were nothing more than hovels. In some holes bigger than footballs peppered the walls and wet patches on the floor remained as testament to the recent violent rainy weather. One woman described how everything inside her house took off in the gale force winds.

God came up in every conversation. I was amazed at the depth of their faith, especially as they stood in broken bodies, in broken shelters, with futures as dim as mud. One man told me how he thanks God every day for his health. This is a man with glycaemia, can barely see, and cannot walk unaided. And he is thankful for his health. He is my new inspiration!

It was a touching morning. I felt that through my presence and conversation, I too had made a difference. But I could do so much more! A friend and I have come up with a plan to seek some funding. Then we aim to purchase materials and start doing home repairs for these people, hopefully training some unemployed youths in the process.

The benefits of a home visit will last a day or two. The benefits of simple repairs may last many years! Hopefully we can pull it off!

Lost 2

After giving my last post on ‘lost’ some lateral thought, I decided that I was not happy with it all. If you have not read it, read it and then come back to this post.

There is one other thing that I can do for my children. Ensure that they know and feel Gods love for them. With it, at least they can expect heaven when they die, and as a parent, I will know that this is where they will be. Without it, they are gone without a trace, and as a parent, I will be left with a tragic loss!

You may be thinking that you won’t be reading this blog again because I have brought up the God factor? The thing is, I would rather be an idiot and believe in God, and be wrong, than clever, not believe, and be wrong! This comment though, tries to reduce faith to a tenet of logic which obviously cannot be done, so please forgive me.

As a Christian, I believe that God gave up his son to die for me. There is no way I would ever be able to sacrifice my children for any reason, no matter how good. I am far too small a man for that. To think that God did exactly that for me; means that his love for me is humanly unfathomable. Truly, I want my children to experience that love.

So the things I can do for my children, regardless if they die young or old, is to give them a home filled with love and a life filled with God!

Love & Providence

Beware, this is deep!

I am struggling with a couple of concepts. The first is that when life is spent serving others with love, it is filled with an inner peace and joy that far surpasses that gained by any other means. Seems to be simple enough and surely everyone has experienced this at some or other point in their lives, but how on earth does one centre one’s life on this principle?

I have long been a student of business; thinking big and out of the box. Taking a concept and blowing away the world with it! How wonderful the financial rewards, the adulation, and heaps of respect from one’s peers! Yet if I am to centre my life on serving others, I would no longer be the hero but rather a support player. In fact, if I am to serve with love, the most important aspect of every interaction is the outpouring of my love for the other person. The rest is meaningless...

Another concept is based on Mother Theresa. MT founded and ran the Missionaries of Charity on the firm belief that God would provide. She went so far as to stipulate that none of her sisters would be involved in any form of fund raising. Incredible for an organisation that ran over 300 houses in 5 of the continents with more than 2400 women in the early 80’s, all focussed on loving the poorest of the poor. So how does one go about trusting God to look after one’s well being? How does one even begin to think like this when one must support a family?

I assume it is all possible; living a life of service, an outpouring of love, under God’s providence. But taking that first step...

Committment

I entered the church of my childhood with trepidation. Today was a special day and I was quite unprepared for what was about to happen. A good friend of mine was to be ordained as a priest, the culmination of a long journey. The sacristy of this very church had been where I met Justin for the first time, a mere 26 years ago! My mother had been a sacristan, which meant that she occasionally prepared the church for mass during the week. On those occasions, I invariably got dragged along for an extra hour of church torture. To my utter amazement, on one of those visits, I found Justin, a ten year old boy happily preparing to serve as an altar boy because he wanted to be there!

Fast forward to today and he was about to make a lifelong commitment to God.

I saw one of my old school mates waving madly to me and so my wife and I made our way over and sat with his family. We were early but the church was already packed, and this is no small church. Sitting in that pew, I was assaulted by memories long forgotten. Of countless hours spent on that same altar as an altar boy. Of banding together with two of my close friends, one of whom sat next to me, to join the choir and attempt to make a difference to the singing. Yeah me singing, I had the volume, sometimes, I even had the tune! And then time spent starting and running a youth group in the parish. It had been a long and wonderful association.

The service was incredible, fascinating, beautiful, and full of symbolism. More than 20 priests were in attendance as well as the Arch Bishop. Much of the singing was in Latin, hauntingly beautiful, sung by three choirs, all adding a special flavour to this day. At a point in the service, Justin lay down in the church, prostrate before God. Later the Arch Bishop tied his hands together as a symbol of Justin’s obedience to him. At many times in the service I had to close my eyes and blink back tears. I was not the only one!

A barely noticed two hours later, Justin emerged a priest. Smiling broadly, reflecting a deep inner happiness! And only now will his journey begin!

This event was the emotional pinnacle of my life. It feels funny to write that when I think of the momentous occasions of my own life; including my own marriage and the birth of my children. Yet, I do believe that I have grown as a person over the last 20 months on my own journey. At long last starting to shake the cold calculating persona I had so carefully created. Mixed together with the time I have spent watching my good friend struggle with his call to God. I feel so privileged to have shared a part of his suffering on the road that led here. To see him emerge on the other side, made me feel radiant and alive, bursting with pride.

Challenged to do more!

Justin, my friend, my prayers and thoughts are with you. Live a life filled with love!

Time to Die?

I am a little amazed at the amount of people around me that have contracted dreaded diseases. Perhaps it is because I am now a little older and the people I know are older still. Every day, my wife and I seem to hear of more people with cancers, strokes, heart attacks, mystery fits, and worst of all halitosis. All except the last are as serious as they can get. For the victims, this is an attack on their life that they need to defend or else surrender is the end.

I would hate to go through the experience that all of those people must have gone through when the doctor sits them down and says that he has bad news. I expect that they each would have had to work through their own grief cycle; rejection, anger, despair, and finally acceptance. Then if they were lucky, they would have time to get their attitude right so that they could fight this attack with the best possible mental strategy. And then hope and pray that this too will pass.

It just highlights the fact that death is always around the corner. Can it be that those who have to accept they have a dreaded disease are luckier still than those whose lives are ended instantly by a bullet or a car? At least they have some time to prepare. Although these same people might vehemently disagree!

As a Christian, I am supposed to be ready for the day when death knocks. Supposedly I have lived my life as a servant of others and with my values intact. I have a relationship with God and a firm belief in an everlasting life with him when I die.

Yet am I ready? Certainly not!

Am I not ready because I jealously guard this life of mine, or because I know that I have not been the person I have been called to be, or is it because my faith is rather weak? I’m not sure, perhaps all of the above. A regular recurring thought of mine is that I need to do something about it, because try as I might, my time will come when there is no more time to do anything about it.

There are things that I can do like studying my faith, working on my relationship with God, striving to be a force of goodness, living with love, and praying more. Of course all of this should be driven by my outward expression of love for my fellow man rather than the threat of death!

It is a little hard, but then again, I guess it would be harder still, to go unprepared...

Good vs Evil

Be prepared!

I was musing over one of my theories that people fit into a continuum from bad to good. I imagine, if graphed, it would look like a typical bell curve, with most people sitting in the middle. The middle would put them in the neither particularly good nor particularly bad category, kind of on the fence, although hopefully skewed to being on the side of good. At the extremes are people who for the most part are particularly evil and on the other side, those that are incredible forces for good. Simple hey?


Now imagine the end of the world has come and God has completed his judgement of mankind. The graph is the then the final analysis of the world. Of course this all presupposes you believe in God, judgement, and a world hereafter! But let’s say you do, and let’s say that this incredibly simplistic representation of good and evil is a good starting point for discussion!

If we start at the extremes, it is easy to see a number of people that could be placed out there. Some names come to mind like; Hitler, Mao, Mother Theresa, and Ghandi. This list could really go on and on, and we could spend hours debating who should be on it and where they would fit into my theoretical graph. Of course all of that debate would be pretty pointless as God will decide in his own way in the end. They all have one thing in common though, through their tireless effort for good or evil, they have changed the world. They are the ones who have held massive sway over this tenuous seesaw between good and evil.

The rest of us still get to chose where we are going to sit on this continuum. We still have life within us and while we have life, we can change the world for better or worse. I imagine it is incredibly hard to be a force for good, or completely evil. Although there must be an element of self fulfilling prophecy at both sides, the more good you do, the more you want to do, the more you do. On the other hand, sitting on the fence in the middle is easy, doing good things when you feel like it and when it suits you.

If we come back to God and put him back into the equation, as this is of course a discourse on the results of his judgement! As a Christian, I believe that it is only with God’s love that we even exist. More than that it is the sharing of his love that brings about goodness. You should know that I am a Christian because I live out my faith through loving and serving others all the time. This means that the graph should be heavily skewed to the side of goodness because all religious people should be seriously influencing this graph. Of course I understand that goodness, morals, and values are not the preserve of the religious. The fact that there are good unreligious people out there also skewing the graph to goodness can only be a plus to the human race! Unfortunately there are far too many religious people quite unconcerned about their efforts to do good!

A question springs to mind; why should anyone sitting in the middle bother to make any effort to move towards goodness, if it is only the people on the extremes who really impact on humanity? Quite simply, it cannot just be the people on the extremes who change the world; every one of us has the ability to change our own worlds by the actions we take, for better or worse! OK, so that does not answer the question of why? All I can think is that we must all respond to the upwelling of love within us, to either let it blossom (at our expense) or squash it away (also at our expense). And perhaps we only have to change our worlds and not the whole world!

You are probably wondering about the point of all of this waffle as we know it is good to do good things! I was really thinking about my children. They too will need to make their own decisions on where they will fit into my theoretical graph. They will need to choose their own level of goodness with which they are comfortable. As a parent, I obviously would like them to take up a role of extreme goodness. Surely this is the essence of Christianity that we love, and an outpouring of love is squarely in the extreme goodness category. Why would I want my child to be on the extreme evil side? One does not think much about Hitler’s parents but he certainly had a set. His father, Alois, died when he was 14 and his mother, Klara, when he was 18. Somehow those parents laid the foundation for the person he was to become through their action or complete inaction. As a parent, I would prefer to err on the side of goodness, although in the end, the decisions will be up to my children.

If I am to lay the right foundation for my children, then it is essential that I show them the right example, through how I live my life. This is where things get difficult. It is far easier to tell someone how to do something that to do it yourself. If I am serious about my children growing up to be forces for good in this world, then not only do I have to love, educate, and guide them but I also have to show them how!

The responsibility of being a parent is pretty awesome!!