savage

You really don’t want to go to Hell.

Posted on March 2, 2015 Written by savage Leave a Comment

Jessa Duggar’s recent post admonishing Christians to be, like, Christians gathered some interesting reponses – the most common of which seemed to be “If this woman’s in Heaven, I’d rather be in Hell!”

… and no, you wouldn’t. You really don’t want to go to Hell.

The thought of wanting to choose Hell over Heaven is fairly popular in art; Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young,” for example, has a memorable line in which he says he’d “rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints,” for example. To be fair, Mr. Joel is referring to life here rather than existence after we pass away, but the sentiment is clear, and found often; my own father, for example, said that he’d prefer to spend time in Hell after his life ended, with Hell being populated with more interesting people.

My father was not a Christian.

The portrayal of Hell as an alternative to Heaven makes sense, but the nature of the portrayal does not.

It suggests that Heaven is a solemn cathedral, filled with enforced order and quiet, perhaps with the hymns of angels in the distance. People do little in the populist version of Heaven: they sit and worship, which to most people seems to mean they sit and listen, and perhaps drop a bit of change in an offering plate as it goes by.

Hell, on the other hand, is a party, filled with roughnecks interested in having a good time – that’s what landed them in Hell, after all, right? The “punishment” has been administered; the evil have to put up with a few fires here and there, and the rest of the time is spent drinking, carousing, laughing… defiance at its best, since there is nothing left. Why bother to behave, after all? Once you’re in Hell, there’s nowhere left to go; might as well enjoy yourself while you’re there.

The problem is that neither portrayal makes any sense.

Heaven is, by definition, beautiful – heavenly, you might say. Heaven is where everything we are and everything we want is magnified and purified in God’s Will. When we reach Heaven, those things that distract us from God – our desires to misbehave, you might say – are purified and refined such that they are made perfect in God’s Will. Our defiance, if such is what God desires in us, because “defiance” — note the air quotes — and becomes an expression of God’s Will rather than our railing against a Holy and Just God.

Our parties don’t stop being parties – they becomes parties, perfect and blessed in every way.

Hell, on the other hand, isn’t “a few fires” where our wayward decisions are encouraged and manifested. It’s eternal separation from everything desirable.

Think about that.

Eternal separation from everything desirable.

That means that if you desire drink – Hell, by definition, will have nothing for you. If you desire sex, you are left without – and without any release. If you desire solitude, you will be surrounded by the groans of millions who desired separation from God right along with you. If you desire a crowd, you will know nothing but the separation from the One who died for you such that you might be eternally with Him.

Hell, by definition, is unpleasant. Everything you want, Hell is not. On the other hand, Heaven is everything you want. That’s what the terms mean.

People who say they’d rather go to Hell are being stupid – they’re using a mechanism very common in today’s media, the catchphrase.

Catchphrases caught on during the run of Seinfeld, where every episode tried to create a new meme for people to use. Examples are “Yadda, yadda, yadda,” or “master of your domain,” or “No soup for you!”

Nowadays, it seems like headlines are built around memes, and they’re fun – it’s all about the snappy comeback, and they’re certainly memorable. (Memes being memorable – what an idea! It’s almost like being memorable is what makes a meme what it is.)

The problem with the snappy headlines is that they’re wrong. They often end up being composed of more lies than truths.

Consider the noise around Ms. Duggar’s recent post: one headline said “Duggar Daughter: Liberal Christians Are Going To Hell, Just Like Other Sinners.” The problem is, she didn’t; she actually never referred to political leanings at all, and she said that people who posed as Christians – in other words, Christians in name only – were no different than non-christians in terms of salvation.

But the headline was catchy, so people picked up on it, and never bothered to actually read what she said, or think about what she said, to determine if her words actually represented wisdom or not.

There’s a tragic amount of this, too: it’s easy to find on both sides of the political fence. The right says that Obama is a Muslim and a traitor! The left says that everyone who hates Obama eats children for dessert! (To be fair, it’s not limited to the right or left – Libertarians do it, too.)

It’s stupid, and none of it makes much sense if you actually look at the source material.

Obama is, at the very least, a professing Christian, and is not a Muslim; I don’t know if he was ever a Muslim, and I don’t know if he’s actually a Christian or not, but by golly, he claims it, and I am in no position to know otherwise. What’s more, he’s the American President – at the very least it’d be nice to accord him the respect due his office, if anyone remembers what that might mean.

Jessa Duggar didn’t even mention liberality in her post – it’s only the headlines that associated licentiousness and sin with liberality, which I find highly amusing and ironic (as well as very, very sad).

My Personal Plea

Look, if you’re writing something, you will want to use a headline. You need one. But it would be better to not have hits than it would do attract traffic with a headline that misrepresents what you’re actually trying to say. Lying to your audience trains them to expect you to lie, if they’re intellectually honest, and if they decide to accept your lies as truth, they’re either stupid, or participating in your lies. That walks very close to being evil.

Don’t be evil.

If you’re reading, please look at what’s being said, at what’s being described; go back to the source material, if you can. (If you can’t, then what you’re reading can probably be discarded out of hand.) Even disreputable sites will attribute their work to their source material, even if they’re contorting the content past recognition; follow the source! The articles on Jessa Duggar’s claim actually had links back to her original Facebook post, in which she actually didn’t say what they said she said – reading the original material provides a much better context in which one can discuss what’s actually being talked about, instead of yapping endlessly about something that’s not actually worth discussing.

Think for yourself.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged” considered harmful?

Posted on February 27, 2015 Written by savage Leave a Comment

Jessa Duggar is back, and under fire from those enlightened souls at Addicting Info, who posted Duggar Daughter: Liberal Christians Are Going To Hell, Just Like Other Sinners. It’s an interesting read, but not for the reasons the site would hope.

This kind of content makes me angry, even as I try to be calm and mild in expression.

It’s not journalism – although I’m sure its perpetrators think it is – and it gets a lot of commentary on Facebook, to the tune of “I’d rather go to Hell than go to a Heaven where these morons are” and, in one inspiring case, “I want to go to Hell so I can see the look on (Jessa Duggar’s) face when I get there.”

What she said

The title says “Liberal Christians are going to Hell, just like other sinners.” Yet that statement is not anywhere present from Jessa Duggar herself! From the article’s own quote, verbatim:

People are content to live on in lying, cursing, pride, anger, bitterness, disrespecting of parents, lust, pornography, fornication, adultery, and other sexual sins– and if anyone tries to confront them, their attitude and response is, “You live your life, I’ll live mine. Don’t you tell me what to do! Only God can judge me!”

They don’t even realize what they’re saying. God’s judgement isn’t something to be taken lightly! It should scare you! Man’s “judgement” is a 1000x lighter… usually just a voicing of disapproval. But when unbelieving, sinful men die and stand before God, He justly condemns them to hell.

Note the lack of “liberal Christians.” At no point in the quote does she suggest that Christians are going to Hell – she says, specifically, that unbelieving, sinful people are justly condemned to Hell. No reference to believing Christians going to Hell whatsoever, regardless of their political leanings.

The original content came from Facebook, from Jessa’s own fingers. If you read the article, again, there’s no mention of liberality – only sinful condition. Jessa focused on two kinds of people:

The “Christian” who believes God is nothing but love, who would never send anyone to Hell
The “Christian” who feels in his heart that whatever he’s doing is okay, not being pricked by conscience

In both cases, you have someone claiming a label that, well, might not apply. A Christian has to understand that God is holy (Deuteronomy 6:4-9); it’s not really negotiable, and we see Christ as Redeemer because we need His sacrifice to stand in our stead, such that we have His Holiness and purity as a blanket that covers our sin. (see Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2.)

Political leanings aren’t part of it; everything Jessa was saying was focused directly on the condition of the heart. Is it sinful or not? Mankind’s heart is sinful (Romans 3:23) – there’s no escaping that. Even when we would want to do right, we still desire that which is wrong, or selfish, or evil (Romans 7:18). Thus, the blood of Christ covering us redeems us despite our innate sinful natures.

The label isn’t part of that; a liberal Christian who believes is saved. A conservative Christian who does not believe is not saved. Period. The “liberal” and “conservative” labels are irrelevant; remove them from those phrases and they lose absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Here, I’ll help:

A liberal Christian who believes in Christ is saved. A conservative Christian who does not believe in Christ is not saved.
A Christian who believes in Christ is saved. A Christian who does not believe in Christ is not saved.

Those two statements are exactly equivalent, except for emotional connotation attached to the labels. Emotions, not being rational, can be discarded here.

About what they say she said

It strikes me as ironic that the pages using her comments as fodder scream about how she’s being all judgmental. For one thing, they all scream about “judge not,” even though they’re judging her, and they’re using “judge not” as a defense almost exactly like she said they would; then they say that she’s judging liberal Christians even though she never mentions liberals at all.

And what an implication, if she did! AddictingInfo seems to stand to defend those who see their own behavior as immoral: do they think all liberals think it’s okay to lie, or curse, or steal, or live in pornography, or whatever? Why would the “liberal Christians” want the defense of “judge not?” Wouldn’t they – as Christians – want to know what they could do better?

Perhaps the bar is just lower for liberal Christians – I don’t know. I think I’m fairly liberal, but I’d hate to think that that meant that my standards were lower – I want my standards to be what God sees them to be, not what I think I can get away with.

That means I want the judgement of other Christians – people who can and will stand beside me, encouraging and correcting me.

But, then, where does “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1-3) enter in? The key is in the nature of “judgement.” Jesus was telling his audience that they were not in a position to condemn others, that doing so meant they were assuming God’s role for the person being judged. Jesus was not telling people to turn off their brains, to accept everything before them as gospel truth and ultimate wisdom. In fact, if you read the whole paragraph, it becomes obvious: before you condemn others, make your own heart right, then help them — but “helping them” would fall under AddictingInfo’s umbrella of “not judging,” which goes directly against what Christ was actually telling his audience.

Using “don’t judge me, judge not!” as a defense means you’ve lowered your own standards. You’ve decided that whatever you’re doing is wrong, but that it’s okay, because your fellow man shouldn’t condemn you.

Here’s the thing: you’re right, your fellow sinner is not in a position to condemn you. But you are condemned. You know it, too, because when you say “don’t judge me!” you’re assuming that judgement is going to be negative, and you’re most likely right.

Thanks be to God, who offers the free gift of Christ to all who would believe – the condemnation is washed away for those who are saved, no matter who they are or what they’ve done. (That doesn’t mean there aren’t still consequences of sin: an adulterer who gets saved might still have to deal with the tragedy of the betrayed spouse.)

I’m not suggesting that we, as Christians, are to walk around telling people every sin they’ve ever committed. For one thing, it’d take too long; for another, there’s no way for one person to truly understand another person’s sin; for a third, there’s no-one who is without sin such that they have the moral authority to actually walk around doing that.

To correct in love is one thing; condemnation in general is another.

We should correct in love, as iron sharpens iron. That’s really what Jessa was urging; “believe in Christ, minister to each other.”

Does God Change?

Posted on February 25, 2015 Written by savage Leave a Comment

On 23 Feb 2015, Humans of New York posted this picture on Facebook, along with a fascinating quote:

“I’m a rabbi. But I don’t try to provide any answers. I tell people what tradition says, and if they find meaning in it, and it works for them, then they are welcome to apply it. If not, we’ll look at other possibilities. I think that every generation has a responsibility to create its own understanding of religion. I believe God can grow as we do. I could be accused of diluting Judaism, but I think that if it has no relevance to people’s lives, Judaism will cease to exist.”

It’s a timely quote, along with Rob Bell’s rather unfortunate statement that if Christianity remains committed to its core values, it will fade away and die. However, the Rabbi isn’t striking at the core values of Judaism like Bell struck at the core values of Christianity – instead, this Rabbi actually bolstered Judaism, and provided a workable model for Christianity as well.

But there’s a statement in there that stands out.

“I believe God can grow as we do.”

Naturally, many people find a lot of beauty in what the Rabbi said (and I’m among them), but many comments also centered on that phrase, and took issue with it.

I think there’s danger in that phrase, but I don’t think the phrase itself is dangerous – nor is the idea dangerous, as long as we remember who God is.

Some people stated that God, being above the concept of time, does not ever change. Others stated that a God who “changed with the wind” was not God. Others stated that God has no need to change, being, well, the “I am,” being without cause and without the need for justification or response.

I understand all of these sentiments, and from God’s perspective, they would be perfectly correct. God is the “I am.”

When God told Moses that His Name was “I Am that I Am,” God was saying that He existed without anything else: He needed nothing to exist such that He was a response to it. God was the cause. God was the source. God was the beginning.

God was grunge before grunge was cool.

Change is a response to circumstances; as time passes, or things happen, we change in relation to the world around us to compensate for the changes the world endures.

God doesn’t need that relation. He is beyond it. There is no change.

How, then, can I agree with the Rabbi?

The key is to remember who God is – unchanging, perfect, unified, Holy – and also to remember who we are.

We change. We grow. We change perspective.

With change, with growth, with perspective, our understanding of God – individually, and corporately – also changes.

Does this change God, though? Or is it just a play on words to say that God changes?

I think it’s closer to the latter. God has no need to change, but there is a continuing, individual revelation; God appears to us each individually from where we stand.

This is part of why Rob Bell’s dismissal of core Christian values (namely, the Bible) is so important. If we accept a continuing revelation of God, then we have to have a way of determining what is constant. Otherwise, we lose any ability to tell the difference between God and whim.

We have to have axioms: God exists. He is knowable. He is One. We exist. We are separated from God. We are to love Him. We are to be His people. We can know what His Will is to at least some degree.

Without those things… there is no God. There can be no relationship between us and Him. Destroy any of those, and we lose any context in which God becomes important to us in any way.

That does not preclude a growth in understanding; that doesn’t prevent God from doing different things at different times, fully within His Will.

Consider Nineveh. He sent Jonah to Nineveh to save its people – and a generation later, destroyed Nineveh so much that armies walked nearby, unaware of the existence of what had been the greatest city in the world.

The important question is not “Can God change?” but “Can we change?” We can, and we do. Let’s use that change to become closer to God, and to bring others along with us.

The Beginning as Proof of God

Posted on February 23, 2015 Written by savage Leave a Comment

Recently, there’s been news about the theory that the universe is cyclic in nature, not existing from a point of a “big bang” and dying in a “big crunch.” Many theologians – apologists, really – including William Lane Craig – use the idea of a terminal universe as a beginning point for the existence of a higher power, God, who brought this universe into being and exists outside of it.

A cyclic universe strikes against this idea, according to some, because the Bible begins with “In the beginning.” With no beginning, the statement that God created what we know of existence in a beginning is moot; there goes another crutch for theists, who assume that something in progress (existence) had to have an earlier state (in this case, nonexistence) and therefore a prime mover (God) who changed its state from nonexistence to existence.

I don’t think theists are actually in trouble, given the suggestion of an eternal universe.

Maybe some are, but an eternal universe is a poorer attack on theism than it might seem.

Genesis may not have been one hundred percent literal. Some Christians certainly believe so, with varying implications. (Some of these might actually believe that Ha-Adam and Havvah spoke English, because that’s what the Bible says, after all!)

With a literal Genesis, any provable or firm theoretical divergence from it means devastation for theism, because the idea of an inerrant Bible can’t withstand error.

However, I don’t think Genesis is literal. I don’t think many do, honestly, because an honest investigation would yield contradictions within a few chapters, and many details are preserved in Genesis that simply make no sense to preserve.

It’s worth pointing out (and was pointed out, by a friend) that there’s a way to resolve the two stories of creation in Genesis, through a literary method called “Synopsis, Resumption, Expansion,” that actually itself focuses on an eastern mindset held by Hebrew authors. The narrative doesn’t have to have a singular flow from beginning to end to be one narrative, although it might seem like two separate stories. This makes sense to me – a lot of sense, really – but I still don’t think the story is more than a cohesive framework representative of a history, rather than a literal history.

Simply put, I don’t think Genesis was ever meant to be taken literally.

I don’t think that a literal Genesis is outside of God’s power, however.

Consider the Young Earth idea, which states that the universe is somewhere in the realm of six thousand years old. Carbon dating can show age of billions of years if it likes; clearly God created the universe with age, including the bones of dinosaurs, right?

Well… my stance is that He might have, I guess. I don’t know why, because Occam’s Razor suggests the that universe is as old as it might appear, including a cyclic nature if that’s what it turns out to have.

Yet the main point is that God is able to do whatever He desires – and if His desire was to create a universe that is six thousand years – or maybe only fifty years – or maybe even one year – old, such that I think it looks like it’s fifty trillion years old… then so be it. I think God can do that.

So back to Genesis – if it’s not meant to be taken literally, what is it? Why is it there?

It’s there to give its readers – us – a context. An image. A mythos – not purely in terms of myth, but a framework in which to seat ourselves. It’s a mythos in which we see a constant – a history in which God exposes who He is, in some small way. It’s a beginning, if not the beginning.

It gives us a working starting point. It’s even allegorical in nature – what with two creation myths in the first three chapters – and thus it’s self-aware, almost as if God were saying “This should tide you over until you see more of the mystery of what I have created.”

And thus, an eternal universe, never beginning, never ending? I don’t see where that changes anything. Maybe it changes things for people who are trying to stake a claim that “with no beginning, there is no God,” but that’s a silly argument and always has been, if the question becomes “Is there a God?”

Consider:

If the universe has no beginning, there is no God.
There is a God. Therefore, the universe has no beginning.

Nope. Let’s try again.

There is a God.
The universe therefore had a beginning.

Darn it, another non sequitur!

Try this one, which fails to trigger my “this is baloney!” sense:

There is a God.
There is a universe.

No therefores, no ties, no conclusions about beginnings that are unrelated. It’s a statement of faith, not science — and what it does is state what I believe.

What it doesn’t do is pit science against God, pit evidence against evidence. It accepts that what is, might actually be, on both sides.

Does that make an apologetic statement? Hmm, no, it really doesn’t. It’s a statement of faith, not apologetics. I’m not actually much of an apologist, as it turns out – I don’t think apologetics works well as a positive assertion.

For me, apologetics is a matter of accepting possibilities, not denying them.

I have no problem with the concept of arguing for the possibility of God.

I have no problem opening the door – I find myself unable to use apologetics to try to force someone to acknowledge God.

And that makes sense to me; nobody has ever been argued into Heaven. Nobody of whom I know has ever accepted Christ for real, in a living relationship, out of pure reason – maybe reason was the lever used by God to create a willingness to hear Him, but I don’t think anyone has ever or can decide to follow Him truly out of pure reason.

(If they could, they’d be saving themselves… and the Bible says that the work of salvation is His and not ours.)

So:

Apologetics is great, it’s fun to watch – but it’s also not more than one more tool for witnessing.

Science is not religion’s enemy, no matter what stance some scientists take against religion. The two are in different domains; math does not win the fight against history, english doesn’t totally trounce chemistry, social studies doesn’t beat up western literature.

They’re both ways to experience and study the world in which we live, in different ways and in different spheres altogether; I want science to advance as far as it can, and to me, every victory science claims is proof of and glory to God.