What Do I Believe

One of the comments to my previous post asks: "and what do you believe Ric? " Fair enough question, but the answer is going to be somewhat long-winded. I know that will come as a shock to the regulars here. It won't be real organized, but then most of what I post isn't.

Man seems to have an innate need to be religious. Every culture that has existed had a deity. The author of the site I previously linked to explains it as a transference: everyone is born dependent on an all-powerful, all-knowing being called a parent. Once we become old enough to realize our parents are far from all-powerful and all-knowing, we simply transfer our "worship" to a convenient deity. Christians would argue that God made humans with a desire to know the creator. Others argue that humans just love to anthropomorphize everything. We need a god to animate the universe for the same reason we mistake our cat's scent-marking behavior for affection; we can't conceive of a universe (or a pet) that is indifferent to us. But regardless of the source, it is there. I have become acutely aware of this over the last year when I have been questioning my own beliefs. My rational mind gave up on religion a long time ago, but some part of me keeps screaming, "There has to be a god!!" Not being a neuro-biologist, I have no idea what is going on, but I'm starting to feel like Sybil.

One other point: I am not so foolish as to believe that Christianity is so superior to every other belief system that I would have chosen it over whatever dominated in my place of birth. If I had been born in India, I would almost certainly be Hindu; if in Turkey, almost certainly Muslim; if in Salt Lake City, almost certainly Mormon. I was born in a country where Christianity is the dominant religion and into a family with an evangelical bent, so that is where I landed. It wasn't the result of years of comparative study or prayer or a vision from God like Paul. It was the default. It was what was right there in front of me. Like anything that you don't work too hard for, I'm not exactly pulling out all the stops to keep my evangelicalism.

With all that as introduction, what do I believe?

I believe Jesus was a historical person. He was, like many others at the time, an itinerant preacher who seemed to deliberately say and do outrageous things to shock and offend people, especially the religious elites. He was a bit of a party animal that liked his wine. And no, it wasn't grape juice; it was deliberately fermented wine. A little thought makes this obvious. Jesus was repeatedly accused by the religious elites of being a drunkard. No one accuses someone of being a drunkard for consuming inordinate amounts of Welch's. His first miracle, in fact, was to provide additional alcohol for a wedding party to keep things rolling. And at some point in the second or third year of his preaching, he took some sort of action against the temple that resulted in him being put to death.

As far as the New Testament goes, that's pretty much all I take away from it. The letters don't do much for me, and Revelation should be relegated back to the status it had in the early church: probably not inspired, but may have some useful bits. In my opinion, the Christian church, especially in North America, spends way too much time fantasizing about the bad guys taking it in the ass, with the cult of Tim LaHaye just being the most recent example. Anybody remember Hal Lindsey? He's still around, even though pretty much everything he predicted in the 1970's didn't happen. I seem to recall the Bible having something to say about prophets whose prophesies don't pan out....

The Old Testament has always been a problem for me for several reasons. First, I haven't accepted the first eleven chapters of Genesis as literal since shortly after high school. Second, it's pretty clear that most of the books were not written by who the church teaches wrote them, nor were they written when the church teaches they were written. Places and place names used in the "books of Moses" either didn't exist until centuries later, or existed, but were not called by that name until centuries later. Third, God makes a lot of promises to Israel. Those promises were not made to the church. 2 Chronicles 7:14 was not written to the United States, no matter how many times the church choir sings it on the Fourth of July. In other words, the Old Testament has some good stories and can be an interesting jumping off point for studying the actual history of Babylon or Assyria, but not much else.

What I would like to see from the modern church:

First, some honesty. Stop denying the evidence from archeology, geology, biology, paleontology, cosmology, linguistics, ice cores, oil drilling, plate tectonics, and so on and so forth. Stop lying to the largely uneducated laypeople about the evidence for taking every word of the Bible literally. The earth is not 6,000 years old. There was not a universal flood. Evolution happened and is still happening. Moses did not write the Pentateuch. The Gospels are not first-hand accounts. Deal with it.

Second, less emphasis on the afterlife and more on what is going on around us. Just one small example: 27,000 children a day die from starvation. What are the churches doing to address that? It's wonderful that the average congregation will spend 20%, 25%, even 30% of what hits the offering plate to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, but it would be nice if they could take along a bag of rice as well. Every North American church's web site is obsessed with building buildings. Show me anywhere in the gospels where the church is commanded to build physical buildings. The Old Testament prophets repeatedly slammed Israel for ignoring and exploiting the poor. What exactly do you call it when we purchase cheap tennis shoes made by and eight-year-old working for $2/day? Jesus told the rich man in the gospels to sell all he had and give it to the poor. Do you not realize that the poorest families in Kalkaska county live at a level of luxury unimaginable by kings in the first century? What is all the real estate owned by all the churches in North America worth? Billions? Trillions? "Christians" sit in their board meetings arguing about whether or not to install air conditioning while 27,000 children die every day. I'm sure God is very pleased.

Third, a little humility. No church, denomination, sect, or cult has a corner on the truth. God seems to have a hard time speaking clearly, which has resulted in a fragmentation of Christendom that staggers the imagination. Maybe we need to spend a little less time building fortresses and firing cannon at each other, and a little more time taking a long hard look at exactly what we believe and why and how many people we are willing to send to hell while we argue about it. Start with eschatology, keeping in mind my comments on the book of Revelation above.

And I'm sure that is quite enough for now.