Before I get on some sort of roll here (which I'm sure I will), I need to take care of some business.

First, the final record for the Lady Blazers soccer team this year was 12-3-2. Woo hoo!! Awesome work, ladies!!

Also, I need to vent a little. I'm trying to get maps. That doesn't sound hard until you try to do it. Mapquest and Yahoo Maps are both DOA, not because of their servers, but because DoubleClick can't deliver the banner ads without causing a five-minute delay loading the page. Now I understand the need for websites to generate revenue, but first off, I don't know anyone that buys things from a banner ad. That should indicate that whoever is buying advertising needs to refocus their efforts. Second, it's bad enough I have to suffer through a bunch of graphics crap downloading, then animating all over what I'm trying to read, but when I have to sit for five minutes in front of a computer while nothing happens because DoubleClick's ad servers are inadequate to the task, excuse me if I get a little testy.

And yes, I feel better. Thanks for asking.

And some good news in the mail today: Nestina received a letter from a friend in the National Guards. He became a believer on May 22! Welcome to the family of God, Dan!!

I mentioned the Larry Summers bruha a couple postings ago. Here is a good summary of what he said, and more importantly, what he did not say. Notice that the bottom line is that he was threatened with termination for making an observation that anyone with an IQ above 60 should be able to make. But the emperor has no cloths, and we are forbidden on pain of death from pointing that out.

Sometimes when I write about religious topics or get into religious discussions, it can get pretty lonely-feeling at times. Then I read something like this and feel like I've found another soul on the same path as myself. I find myself moving in a more primitive and mystic direction than anything that I've been taught. I'm not so much changing my beliefs as I am changing my emphasis; stressing the basics as taught in Scripture and practiced in the early church, rather than evangelical traditions and rituals. And yes, there are as many traditions and rituals in the typical evangelical church as any Roman Catholic service. If you doubt that, consider this: where did the New Testament come from? That's right. Church tradition. Worse, Roman Catholic Church tradition, which evangelicals denounce tirelessly (or is that tiresomely?). I could go on for pages, but today I want to write pages about something else.

And this is the stupid quote of the year:

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
- Ray Mummert, creationist from Dover, Pennsylvania, 2005

Which makes you what exactly, Mr. Mummert? The unintelligent and uneducated segment? Please explain why, other than the typical Christian's preference for ignorance over knowledge, I would listen to unintelligence and ignorance over intelligence and knowledge? People like this just make my job that much harder....

And it is getting very late, but I will try to tackle the comment left on Friday's Post. [Editor's Note: I fell asleep on my keyboard, so this ended up being posted on Tuesday instead.]

Free will is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult areas of Christianity to tackle. Christian teachings tend to fall into one of two extremes. Both of these extremes have held the upper hand at various times and in various denominations. I don't believe either is entirely correct (big surprise, that).

In the extreme free will camp, God is essentially helpless while we people make all the important decisions. That's stating it in a deliberately provocative way, but no matter how you dance around it, any level of human free will plays havoc with God's sovereignty.

The ditch on the other side of the road solves one theological problem only to introduce a new one. Strict predestination makes God absolute sovereign, but also makes him a petty one that burns people in hell for all eternity for simply following their (God-ordained) path.

To bring this back to the topic of demon possession and the control of the Holy Spirit: Does a demon-possessed person have free will? Are they responsible for their actions? Does a person under the control of the Holy Spirit have free will?

First, it is clear from Scripture that being under the control of the Holy Spirit is voluntary. I decide to yield control in the same way I yield control when I board an airplane. I simply get on, sit down, shut up, and trust that I will get where my ticket says in one piece. As importantly, (unlike my airline analogy) I can take control back at will.

So much for the easy case.

What about demon possession? Does a person decide to yield to demonic control the same way that I decide to submit to the Holy Spirit's control? The pat answer would be "Yes," but pat answers are seldom correct or complete. Again, referring to the best description we have of someone that is demon possessed (Mark 9:17-29 ; the epileptic), the key verse for our discussion is Mark 9:21. Jesus asks how long the boy had been afflicted and the father replies "Since childhood." That doesn't sound like something done voluntarily, although the term "childhood" is somewhat nebulous. But can a child be said to truly submit to anything?

I was saved at a very young age (7) and I know of others that claim salvation at even younger ages. I have to be honest and say that the older I get, the less convinced I am that I had a clue what I was doing. Like all children, I was a master at telling the adults around me whatever made them happy, but I'm not sure it was much more than that. On the flip side then, can a child be truly said to submit to demonic control? Mark seems to be saying that no one was responsible for the demon possession other than the demon. In no other specific case of demon possession in the New Testament do we see the demoniac in any way held responsible for becoming possessed. That seems to pretty much kill any version of free will I can think of, if random demon(s) can possess people without their consent.

This also raises an interesting juxtaposition: The Holy Spirit can only control me if I allow, but demons/Satan can take control of anyone, anytime? Hmmm.

So what about salvation? Did I really choose to be saved? Not, it seems, according to the New Testament (Romans 9:10-18, Romans 16:13, Galations 1:13-17). I know all the arguments about cultural context; that people in the first century considered their lives to be driven by fate. A person was born slave or free, Roman or subject, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, and that was that. Your life was determined. So Paul's words would not have caused the slightest stir when they were written. Western civilization has put the individual in the driver's seat. My fate is what I make it to be. Again, like Jesus treating an epileptic as demon-possessed, we can rationalize these teachings away as being culturally specific. But I can rationalize away nearly every instruction in the Bible that way. Where does it end?

In practice, we just pick and choose. In 1 Corinthians 11:5-7, Paul issues a direct command that women are to have their head covered, which is completely ignored in Western churches. Yet, evangelical churches take 1 Timothy 2:11-14 seriously to the point that any church that allows women to teach will all burn in hell forever. At least if evangelicals get their way, which we know that us and God; we be tight.

But to get back to my point: I have been asking since Junior High why the 1 Corinthian passage is ignored as cultural, yet the 1 Timothy passage is not. I was told all the way through school that I didn't have enough knowledge of the Bible to understand and just trust the smart people. Well, I'm forty years old. I've read the Bible cover-to-cover numerous times in nearly every English translation. I'm certainly no Greek scholar, but I can muddle through the original texts passably well. I spent $20K on Christian undergraduate education. My IQ lands somewhere between 135 and 140, so I'm not exactly a moron. I still don't see the difference. Women wearing hats in church (something my great-grandmother insisted on) has fallen out of fashion and no one is going start teaching otherwise, because the church building would empty if they tried.

So where does all this leave us? Nowhere comfortable, that's for certain. I see slippery slopes in every direction. On the one hand we have an impersonal God, Newton's Cosmological Watchmaker, that set everything up and now just sits and watches it run. On the other, we have a hands-on, active God who lovingly decides to send the vast majority of people to hell for all eternity. Any attempt to wiggle out of those two options lands us in the quicksand; we have to abandon either Biblical literalism or God's sovereignty. Or both.

As I said: free will is one of the most challenging aspects of Christianity.