I have struggled for years to find my way through some of the difficulties that lie in the borderland where my faith and the Bible meet the realities of this beautiful…….yet broken ……world. My hope has been to find explanations that would resonate with my secular friends and acquaintances………to find the words that would spread the peace, hope, and joy that I have found. I believe that these explanations exist…….and I have found some answers……..but there remain unresolved conflicts. There is a lot that is just beyond my comprehension.

Here is a partial list of the problems that I………that we…… haven’t yet resolved.

Justice vs. Mercy
Free will vs. God’s sovereignty
Creation vs. Evolution
Heterosexuality vs. Homosexuality
6000 year old earth vs. 600 million year old earth
Judeo-christian government vs. Secular government
Right to life vs. Right to choose
Self defense vs. Turn the other cheek
Open borders vs. Restricted immigration
One world government vs. Nationalism
Environmentalism vs. Economy
Taking care of my family vs. Taking care of the world

And finally……….at the heart of it all:
Who is in charge here…………me or God?

I have listened to both sides. I have studied books from both sides. I have read and reread the Bible. And still, I cannot resolve these conflicts. It should not be too surprising that……… if you look at them……..the items on the list account for most of the rancor in our current politics……..and most of the conflict among Christians and between Christians and the secular world. At best, watching them play out on the news each day feels like a bad dream.

In trying to find my way through this forest of conflict, I have come back to an idea that I often hear from my friends.

“Think globally……act locally”

In a way, Christianity, when done well, has a similar focus…….. though we, especially Christians, tend to get lost in the details. We tend to miss the forest for the trees.

“Think globally” is the easy part. It is what I tend to do by nature. I wrestle with these “global” ideas. I struggle through the old testament. I try to intellectualize my way through it all.

But how to “act locally”?

Today it hit me……..the answer is at the very heart of Christianity………the answer is at the heart of the new testament.

Love God……love your neighbor. If you were to distill Christianity down to 5 words……….these are the five.

I can keep thinking about all of our “global” conundrums……..even though I will probably never resolve them. But, most of my problems…….most of our problems…….will fade into the background……..will fall into their proper place…….. if I prioritize “Love God…..love your neighbor”.

If we can defer fighting over our list of conflicts until we have perfected “Love God……love your neighbor”…….it is unlikely that we will spend much time fighting. It is unlikely that we will have any energy left for the conflict list. I know that I will have my hands full, because I’m a long way from living up to these 2 primary commands. If I can grow into them, I might find more of the peace and joy that God built me for.

So…….”act locally”.

Love God and love the person who is standing right in front of you right now. Only after you and I reach those two goals…….and we probably will never fully realize them……… then we can slug it out over the conflicts on the list.

If you read the bible, you will run across 3 faces of God: father, son, and holy spirit. The best way to think of this is 3 aspects of one being. You’ve heard this before. Today, I want to talk about the father and son. The old testament is where we read about the father and the new testament is where we read about the son. They are quite different…….. so much so that it can be hard to reconcile them. It is hard to buy into the idea that they are even related………much less that they are the same being. But, in order to see the big picture, you have to deal with both of them.

God (ver. 1.0)

In the old testament, God is the creator. He then sets up a long list of rules, some of which are hard to understand. He periodically punishes his people for breaking the rules. He seems a bit distant. He is very intimidating…..not a really warm, fuzzy type. Later he spends a lot of time telling his people what to expect. The God of the old testament doesn’t read like somebody that you’d get a hug from. A great many people dislike this version of God. I am reading “The God Delusion”, by Dawkins. I hate to put words in the other guy’s mouth…….but I suspect that he despises the old testament God based on the adjectives that he uses. I have noticed that most people who dislike God…….or object to God…….. are reacting to the God described in the old testament. The God of the old testament seems focused on rules, justice, and punishment. He’s just not much fun.

God (ver. 2.0)

In the new testament, we see an entirely different face of God. Jesus is much more like us……..in a word, he is human. He has experienced our pain. He has experienced our temptations. He has been mistreated. He has been let down. He has been abandoned by his friends in his hour of need. And yet, he is kind, generous, and forgiving. He can laugh……….and he can cry. He embodies our highest aspirations. But most of all…… he is approachable. I can see him holding a child’s hand. I can see him hugging somebody…………I can imagine him hugging me. I can imagine that I may have had a conversation with him in a crowd somewhere along the way.

How do we reconcile these two faces of God?

I think that the old testament deals with God’s ideal expectations of us and his hopes for us. The new testament deals with his love for us. It is a lot like our parents (at least the good ones). When we were young, they spent a lot of time laying down the rules and their expectations of us. We spent some time sitting in “time out”……… and yes……..heaven forbid………..we got paddled. Our parents loved us but they had a job to do………. they socialized us. They taught us how to function in the household that they had built. They taught us how to operate in the family that they had created. Sometimes they did things that really made us mad. Sometimes they did things that we just didn’t understand. When we grew older and more mature, our relationship changed. We became more like friends. With a firm framework to build on, we came to relate to them differently. No more time out and paddling……..now we get emotional support when we are in trouble. We get good advice. And when we screw up……hopefully not too often……….we know that we can count on their love and forgiveness. Our parents didn’t change. They are exactly the same people. Their objective from the start was to lead us into adulthood …….to mold us into happy complete people and to build a deep satisfying relationship with us. Because we grew, they began to show us a different face. They nudged our relationship into a new, more mature phase.

To those who object to the God of the old testament: I say don’t dwell on the paddling that you got as a child. You should focus on growing into mature adult relationship with a father who loves you.

You need to focus on Jesus……….God (ver. 2.0).

For years now I have wanted to read Richard Dawkins’ book. “The God Delusion”. But, I kept putting it off………the fact is that I was a bit reluctant……..what if he presented an unassailable argument against my faith? Well, I finally bit the bullet……and I have just finished reading it. I was expecting a scholarly and fair academic analysis of the presence or absence of God. After all, Dawkins is a professor at Oxford. What I found was quite different. The first sentence in the second chapter is Dawkin’s description of God.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Wow……. certainly gets your attention. This line pretty much sets the tone for what follows.

These are not the words of an honest academic inquiry. They are not the description that you would expect of someone whom Dawkins says doesn’t even exist. Rather, they are words that come from somewhere between anger, hatred and malice. The book is more of a “hit piece” than a dispassionate quest for truth.

I have often said that you don’t have to say something that is factually untrue………to tell a lie. The book is loaded with quotes and citations……..all of them, I have no doubt, accurate. But Dawkins presents only the facts that support his position. Anything positive about God is dismissed as myth…….or completely ignored. Anything that he interprets as negative about God is treated as fact. He dwells on the old testament and essentially ignores the teachings of Christ. He completely ignores the central theme of the Bible……..”love God/love your fellow man”. Publishing this book would be a bit like publishing a biography of Mother Teresa…….a book that contains a list of her parking tickets and overdue library books, a description of a tantrum that she threw as a child, and a falsehood that she once told……..and nothing else (all of it completely factual and true…….and yet, as a biography………a complete lie).

He treats Darwian evolution as an all encompassing explanation. He calls it a “crane”……..I’m not quite sure what that means. And yet he offers little justification for it and little or no defense of its failures. He dedicates chapters to developing fairly contorted “workarounds” to human characteristics that are clearly non-Darwinian.

He includes one chapter that compares the act of raising your children as Christians to child abuse. This chapter dwells on the molestation of children by Catholic priests. His concludes this chapter by quoting himself…….. that raising your child as a Christian is worse than sexually abusing a child.

“the damage (from sexual abuse) was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic”.

If this book had been a balanced, honest, scholarly investigation, it might have been damaging to my faith. Instead, what I discovered was a biased, dishonest, hostile (Dawkins’ word) hatchet job.

In short, I was terribly relieved by the book. It is clearly an attack on God in general and Christianity in particular. It is not, however, fatal. If you are a Christian, I think you will be saddened by this book. You may be offended…… you might even be angry. If you are agnostic or undecided, you will find it highly biased. If you are an atheist……or if you actively despise Christians………you are going to love it.

Take a look around………. at the amazing world that we live in. Blue skies, sun, rain, snow, and the incredible variety of life.

If you ask a statistician to calculate the probability that this world could happen, he would consider the size of earth, its distance from the sun, the temperature of our sun, the presence and size of the outer planets, solar radiation and thousands of other variables to calculate the probability of a blue planet where life is possible. Then he would multiply in the chance of the accidental assembly of billions of strands of DNA(one for each species), each unique, each with hundreds of billions of chemical bonds. He would then multiply in the probability that somehow………….life just happened. He would come up with a number that would represent the probability that our world, and the incredible variety of life in it, happened, all on it’s own…….by random accident. I don’t know what that number is, but my reading says that it is a vanishingly low probability……low enough that it is statistically impossible.

If you ask a creationist how we got to where we are, he would say that an omnipotent supernatural creator operating outside of the constraints of our understanding did it all. The statistician would reply………..”that’s impossible too!”.

So, based on our current understanding, we……..and the world we live in……. are impossible.

And yet, here we stand.

How do we deal with this impossible reality that we live in?

We come up with ideas to bridge the gap between what actually is……….and what is possible. These ideas, out of necessity, are based on assumptions. The two leading ideas are Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. For now, I’m ignoring ideas that are further “out there”…..like “it’s all a giant communal hallucination……..we are all avatars in somebody else’s cosmic video game”. Watch “The Matrix” some time.

The creationist and the Darwinist begin with different assumptions. Both require us to accept things that are unproven. In a word……..both require acts of faith. In a way, both are religions.

The creationist assumes the pre-existence of a very powerful creator who is not constrained by what we call science. The Darwinian assumes the pre-existence of an inhabitable earth and the pre-existence of life. Creation doesn’t address where the creator came from. Darwin doesn’t address where the earth came from and where life came from. By any analysis, both ideas leave huge gaps. Each side says that the other side’s gaps are fatal.

And so, we are free to choose. But we have to either fill in the gaps………or ignore them. Sadly, almost to a man, we choose to ignore them. Creationists ignore the question of where God came from. Darwinists ignore the questions of how a cloud of interstellar dust became inhabitable and how life began.

Why? Because there is no clear answer to these questions based on our current understanding. We have no universally accepted guidance to go on.

So……….ultimately, we decide based on what we want.

The creationist wants an orderly world that doesn’t end in the grave…….and accepts the creator and the rules that go with it.

The Dawinist wants a world where he (or she) is at the top of the intellectual ladder…….a world where no other being can tell him what to do…….and is willing to accept absolute death after 75 years to get it.

The creationist wants paradise and will subject himself to the dominion of a vastly superior being to get there.

The Darwinist wants to BE the supreme being and will accept physical death with nothing beyond her death as the price for dominion.

In a word, we choose between eternal existence, subservient to a creator and a temporary existence where we are the boss.

But what is the truth?

I choose creation and specifically Christianity because, it works. It requires humility, generosity, and love. If we all follow the two central rules of Christianity: love God and love your neighbor, this world will be much improved. If we choose Darwin, we all get to do whatever serves us best. We can help our fellow man or we can kill him…….whatever gets us and our progeny ahead. Whatever spreads our DNA the furthest.

We are a long way from a pure Christian society. But, as a goal, “love your neighbor” appeals to me more than “spread your DNA as far as you can”.