First, what is a “moral code”. It’s a group of ideas, maybe even rules that you fall back on when making decisions about how you will run your life. Usually, we go to our moral code when trying to decide whether something we want to do is right or wrong. Today’s question deals with how you choose your code.

Specifically I’m asking for a citation. What book, religion, or philosophy did you find your moral code in? As a young man, the first moral code that I followed was from the Boy Scouts. I don’t claim to have met this code in my life. It is a goal

Be Prepared

On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

A scout is: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

Later, I added the Bible:

Love God, Love your neighbor. Don’t lie, steal, or murder. Honor your parents, sex is for husbands and wives, don’t covet, rest on Sunday.

There are other moral codes…….I chose these because they are widely accepted…….. and they make sense. Obviously, the fact that I am a Christian played a part as well.

The point here is not which moral code you choose. The point is……is your moral code external or internal? An external code is likely objective. There are many to choose from. Some are very good, some are very bad. If you choose an external moral code, the code you choose will define you as a human being. It is very likely that your opinion of the people around you is largely shaped by their choice of a moral code. FWIW…… their opinion of you is shaped by your moral code. This may explain why people sometimes react to you in ways that you don’t understand……. or like. Another point about the external moral code is that there is a moral authority that validates the rules…..in my case, the creator of the universe.

The problem is that most people do not choose an external moral code. If you cannot name the book, religion, or philosophy that is the source of your code, then you fall into one of two camps.

The purely internal moral code:

This is a set of ideas and rules that you use to guide your life. They are rules that YOU made up because they make sense to you. The problem here is that when you make up your own set of rules, you tend to come up with rules that say that anything that you really want badly is OK. Your internal rules rarely restrict your behaviour. If you really want to have an amorous relationship with a goat……..it’s probably going to be OK in your home grown moral code. The main use for your code, then, is to beat up others because they aren’t following your rules. But, they are YOUR rules…….. there is no good reason to expect others to follow your rules. What you can expect, is that they will follow their rules……and since all of these rules are home grown, their rules are just as valid as yours.

The no code plan:

In this case, you have no foundational set of rules, internal or external. You decide each case based on the facts at hand. This allows you flexibility. What is wrong today may be ok tomorrow, based on changing circumstances. The no code plan, however, is highly susceptible to manipulation, justification, and rationalization. We humans are masters at this. The no code plan also makes it hard for others to deal with you. The friend who wouldn’t lie to you on Monday may decide that lying to you is OK on Tuesday based on circumstances.

I suspect that most people operate somewhere between and an internal code and the no code plan. They have a few basic rules; but, often make their moral decisions on the fly using the facts at hand.

I believe that the best choice, not necessarily the easiest, is to adopt a good external moral code and follow it as closely as you can. This will restrict your behavior a bit. It will cut way back on manipulation, justification, and rationalization. It will make you a much more predictable person for your friends, family, and acquaintances. I recommend the 2 codes at the top of this post. They have served me well for most of my 65 years.

Fair warning…….. this post likely contains things that you will not like. It is unusual to be able to offend and annoy people on both sides of an issue at the same time.         What can I say…….it’s a gift.

First off…….. some ideas and definitions. The analysis that follows is based on these precepts.

1. There is an afterlife…. the Bible says so……. but in addition there is something written on our hearts that tells us so. You can argue about the details, but I believe in an afterlife that is beyond scientific explanation. The afterlife will be divided into a “nice place” (paradise) and a “not nice place” (hell). I want to end up in the nice place even though I am a bit unclear on the details.

2. All humans are fallen, imperfect beings……..We all do bad things. There are differences in degree, but we all fall short. I’m a better person than Hitler.   But;     God’s spectrum of good to evil is so vast, that,  compared to God,   the difference between me and Hitler is pretty small.  In a word…… it’s insignificant. To use a metaphor…… If evil is San Francisco and good is Boston, then Hitler is the west side of tenth street in St. Louis……and I’m in the middle of tenth.  Looking west from Boston, Hitler and I are hard to distinguish.  BTW,  my apologies to the good people of San Francisco.

3. According to social scientists, those who identify as Christians are just as likely to do bad things as those who identify as non-Christians. This ranges from priests abusing children to using the handicapped spot when you have no significant handicap. (That just drives me crazy)

4. Admission to paradise is through grace……acknowledging Christ and accepting his gift of forgiveness.

So here is the analysis:

If we are all fallen beings, and entry into paradise is through Christ’s forgiveness…….. then paradise is not going to be full of “good people”………….. it will be full of forgiven sinners. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? If you aren’t annoyed yet, just wait……it gets worse.

There is a corollary. Hell is not going to be full of “bad people”……. it will be full of unforgiven sinners.

Even worse…… the people in hell are not going to be substantially different from the people in paradise.

Kind of adds a new urgency to the business of “marketing” Christianity to our friends and family doesn’t it?

This just doesn’t seem fair, does it? Our human need for justice cries out……. the bad people must be punished……at least all of those people who are “badder” than me. We want THEM to go to hell.

But, in the process, we overlook the fact that we are sinners too. If you really want fair……. If you really want justice……..then we all go to hell….. both sides of tenth street.

There are 2 choices here:

Plan A………..the Fair plan……….. We all go to hell.

Plan B………..God’s plan…………….We accept Christ’s gift and go someplace better than we deserve.

Plan B looks like the “hot ticket” to me.

It is very common to talk to somebody who is skeptical about matters of spirituality. After all, if you can’t see it, it can’t be real……..Right? This same person, however, will believe just about anything you tell them as long as it is “scientific”. There is very little skepticism in our world about matters of “science”. I think we need to take science with a grain of salt. To put it another way, we need to asses matters of science with the same cautious, critical eye as we do matters of spirituality. As a disclaimer, I worked 40 years in a job that was applied science. I am by nature and training a scientist.

So……why should we look at science with the eye of a skeptic?

1. The scientists haven’t figured it all out yet. Every year we learn more. In 10 years we will know twice what we know now. In 10 years, some of what we “know” today will be wrong. We will look back and laugh at how naive we used to be. In 1492 the greatest scientific minds of the age told Columbus that the world was flat. In the middle ages they were in laboratories trying to turn lead into gold. In the late 1700’s, they bled George Washington to treat his pneumonia. In 1980, they believed that ulcers were caused by stress and treated them by cutting out your stomach. The scientists are smart, most of them are honest, and they are trying hard. But, THEY DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING.

As Will Rogers said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble…….it’s what you KNOW that ain’t so.”

2. Astrophysicists are the people who tell us how the universe formed and how it behaves…….how we got here.  They describe with complete confidence the “big bang”, the expanding universe, black holes and so on. But, if you question them closely, they will say that their theories don’t fully explain the universe. In a word, the theories are wrong …….or at least incomplete. For the universe to behave as they say it does, there must be much more mass and energy out there than they have found. They call this “missing” stuff “dark matter” and “dark energy”.  Here’s the rub. The “missing stuff” amounts to about 80% of the observable universe. In other words, the scientists who are telling us how we got here are basing their theories on observations of a system that they have only seen 20% of. This is not a great confidence builder. One of the “missing” things is the “Higgs boson”……and no I can’t explain it. They even call it “the God particle”. This may be an astrophysics joke.

If somebody proposed to explain to you how your car works after inspecting in detail the radio, A/C, and heater, but without ever having seen what goes on under the hood, they would likely get it wrong……and, you would be correctly skeptical.

Scientists cannot prove that God doesn’t exist. They don’t even try. They don’t have the tools to assess the supernatural. And yet, the conclusion that we must draw from listening to them,  is that they have everything figured out…….. and that God isn’t involved. If you think about it, they begin with the tacit assumption that God does not exist, because any explanation that involves the supernatural is discarded.

All that I am asking you to do is to maintain a healthy doubt…..a healthy skepticism about science and it’s limitations.

Because, in that 80% of the universe that we haven’t seen…….yet……. there is plenty of room for God.

Does God get a pass?

I’m reading Job.  The book asks a lot of questions but has few answers.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Who is responsible?

How should we respond?

Does God get a pass for the bad things that happen to us?

This last question is the big one.  There are millions of people who reject God, Christianity,  and ultimately paradise over this last question. They usually say something like this:  “I refuse to accept a God who would let my son die.”  I can sympathise……two of my sons have died….. and I have struggled with this for a long time.

Spoiler alert……….I don’t know the answers;  but,  I’ll make my best guess.

There is evil in the world.  It was here before we were.  Did God create the evil?….. did he make the serpent? ……..Did he create Satan? I don’t know. I do know that God dislikes evil and told us how to avoid it,  how to control it.  He gave us guidelines (rules) to follow. Then he gave us free will….. the right to follow or break the rules.  This free will, for better or worse, is unlimited. There is no question that much of the evil in the world comes from the exercise of free will…… the other guy’s free will……. and ours. God also gave Satan free will. Even more, he gave Satan permission to attack Job. He also strictly limited Satan’s ability to do evil to Job. In a word, he set up the parameters for Satan’s attack on Job.

So…….Why do bad things happen?

Either God made them happen,  God allows them to happen, or they slipped in while God wasn’t looking (the devil made me do it).

I have trouble with the last choice. It speaks to a God who is at least careless and at worst impotent. It allows us to choose anything that we don’t like and blame it on Satan. We give God  credit for the good things and we blame Satan for the bad things. This leaves God as a nice guy, but not exactly the Clint Eastwood, superhero type.. I think that the creator of the universe is a little more potent than that.

So…..God either actively orchestrates the bad things or he stands by and allows them.

I think that both of these things are going on.  Clearly in Job,  God stands by and allows Satan to attack Job. He even dictates the terms of the attack. I don’t know why.  Could it be a test of faith? A sign of God’s confidence in Job? Could God have been using Job’s suffering to teach somebody nearby………..maybe me……..a lesson about faith? Job is ultimately restored but the question of why? is never answered. What I finally come to is this:  it is easy to love the benign, soft focus, smiling,  God in a cloud who gives you whatever you want. That is in fact Satan’s description of the relationship between God and Job before the attack. It takes a much stronger, more powerful and more trusting faith to love a God who allows bad things to happen, and who does things that we don’t approve of.

I think that there are bad things that happen that God actively orchestrates.  These are the things that are painful in our short term,  temporal world; but, that lead to positive eternal outcomes.  This is a bit like the chemo that makes your hair fall  out today but cures the cancer that would have killed you. When something undeniably bad happens to me, I say a prayer:

“God,  I thank you for what you have given;   even though I don’t understand it, I trust your wisdom in what you have taken away;   and I praise you for what I have left. ”

Job said a similar prayer in his pain.

So…… why do bad things happen?   I don’t know.

Who is responsible?       God is….. either actively or passively.

How should we respond?   We should recognise that God is smarter and more powerful than we are….. that he is in charge…. that he loves us and in the end will make it right.  We should trust him, we should love him,  and we should praise him……. even when we don’t understand…….today.

As a friend once said,  “I have to believe that he knows what he’s doing.”

So…… does God get a pass?  In a way this is a trick question. It assumes, as do many of us,  that we get to pass judgement on God….. that we are his supervisor.  It assumes that we are wiser and more in tune with creation than God. This is hubris at its peak. This is also the crux of the problem in our relationship with God. Either he is in charge……..or we are. Either God is external to us……..or we are God.

If we are God…..why haven’t we cleaned up this mess.  Why have we allowed poverty, disease, war and pain to go on? It’s pretty simple.  We haven’t cleaned up the mess,  because we can’t,   because we aren’t God.

I don’t know about you,  but I’m not feeling very Godlike today.

Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone

Toxic Christians and Marketing

There is hardly a day that goes by that I don’t spend some time trying to clean up the mess left behind by a toxic Christian. This is a difficult topic because it straddles a gap between Christians who are doing a bad job of showing Christ to the world and non-Christians who would use an episode with a toxic Christian as an excuse to avoid doing something that they weren’t going to do anyway.

So….what is a toxic Christian?    My definition is: “a Christian who is focused on some aspect of the faith other than loving God and loving his/her neighbor.”

First of all, they are Christians. They are saved. They will be in paradise. They honestly believe that they are doing God’s work. They tend to be legalistic. They focus on one or more of the 600 some odd rules that are scattered through the bible. Invariably, they choose a rule that is being broken by somebody else. This results in a self righteous presentation of our faith. This is often accompanied by an element of anger. This is often seen as hypocritical. The toxic Christian often speaks for the faith by condemning others. The subtext is “I’m better than you.”  FWIW they are not better than you.  By focusing on the sin of others they manage to push their own sinfulness into the background.

Why are toxic Christians a problem? It’s simple. Our job is to draw others to Christ. We are here to market Christianity to the “unchurched”.   A toxic Christian can drive more people away in a day than I can draw back in a year. How many times have you talked to somebody about Christ only to have them reject him outright based on something a toxic Christian did or said to them 20 years ago?

We often see Christianity portrayed in a bad light in the media. We are portrayed as angry, judgemental, and legalistic. This saddens and offends me. There are TV shows that I avoid because of their consistent portrayal of Christians as bad people. But, where does this come from? I believe that these shows are often striking back against toxic Christians. I also believe that these portrayals of toxic Christians do more damage to the faith than the many shows that portray and even glorify the occult.

My son was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. He was paralyzed for a while but was on crutches and was relearning how to walk. A young, devout, but toxic, Christian walked up to him and said, “I can heal you right now!” He said a brief prayer and then said “walk!”    Nothing changed.       He told my son that the reason that he wasn’t healed was due to my son’s failure of faith. You can argue about the theology involved all day. The point is that the presentation of Christianity by that young man moved my son further away from Christ not closer. Many years later, I still haven’t fully overcome the damage that that kid, and others like him, did in 10 minutes. By the way, my son can now walk!

Toxic Christianity is about bad marketing. It is about a narrow, legalistic focus on secondary rules. It misses the forest of God’s deep abiding love by focusing on a tree that is one of the hundreds of God’s rules. It is driven by something, anything, other than Christ’s love for all of us…..ALL OF US.

So, how do we market Christianity? I can begin with what will not work. You will not draw others to Christ with bulletproof dogma, with miracles, with bible quotations, with the promise of heaven or the threat of hell. You will not lead others to Christ by beating them up over rule #342. You will not save somebody with any message that implies, “If you were as good as me you might get into heaven.”

Others will come to Christ when they see what you do….how you live….when they feel the joy and love that radiates out from you. They will see the evidence of the great treasure that you have found. They will say to themselves. “I don’t know what he has……but I want some of it.”

I have heard it said that joy is the surest sign of the presence of God.

If you think that you might be toxic when interacting with somebody, ask yourself these questions. “Is what I am doing right now motivated by love for God and love for this person?” and ”Will what I am doing right now draw this person to Christ?” If you are not absolutely sure that the answer to these critical questions is yes, then just stop. By not driving them away you may give somebody else a chance to draw them to Christ somewhere down the road.

Let me be more blunt. If you are a toxic Christian, the most productive ministry that you can undertake may be to sit down, shut up, and let somebody who is focused on God’s love and love for their fellow man do the heavy lifting.

I am convinced that there are many people who will die unsaved because of an encounter with a well intentioned but toxic Christian decades ago.

If you are the victim of an encounter with a toxic Christian somewhere in the past,  I am truly sorry. Whatever he or she said or did…..it did not come from God but from a fallible human being…..just like me. Don’t let his or her bad job of marketing keep you from the love and joy that you are meant for.

There is a book called “The Giving Tree”, by Shel Silverstein.

I re-read it about every 10 years. Each time I read it I have a different reaction. Each time I read it, I receive a different message. Each time the message gets more powerful.

In short, there is a rather lopsided relationship between a boy and a tree. The tree loves the boy and gives the boy gifts. The gifts become progressively more and more sacrificial. The boy takes from the tree….. nothing more……no gratitude…….no reciprocation……. no appreciation of the sacrifice….nothing.

On the surface, it’s about giving and taking. For many years it was a metaphor for parenting and for my experiences as a parent. Lately, though, I have begun to experience the book as the child.

For most of my 30 or so years as a parent, I took a message from the book. It came in many forms. But, basically, the message was that parenting is not something that you do in order to fulfill yourself…….it is an exercise in learning how to give of yourself to others. I have learned that this ability to give to others is the secret of finding true happiness. I have found no other path.

Lately, I have come to know that in addition to being the tree(a parent), I am also the child(a taker). I take and take and take the gifts of God’s sacrificial love. Often, I don’t even recognize the sacrifice or say thanks. Just now, I’m beginning to explore how God, the tree, must feel about me as the child….and it’s humbling.

If you are a parent….. or are thinking about becoming one.

If you are a Christian…….or are thinking about becoming one.

If you are a tree……….or a child.

You need to read this book….every ten years or so.

If you are interested, here is a link to a you tube video of the author reading the entire book. It takes about 10 minutes. It will be worth your time.

Here is how judgement day will go for me.

I find myself in huge room. It’s a lot like customs at a large airport. I’m in a long line of strangers. They are all tired and strangely quiet. They are all shuffling forward. After what seems like hours, I reach the front of the line.

There is an old guy sitting on a stool behind a tall desk. It looks like something Bob Cratchet would have used. There is a very old, very large book on the desk. The book looks heavy. The old guy looks tired… it must be the end of a long shift. He’s not smiling……..come to think of it, neither is anybody in the room.

He opens the book and turns a couple of pages. He reads for what seems like a long time, then he looks up at me. He says, “would you care to explain this?” ………..as he gestures at the book. He’s still not smiling. This is not going well.

I try to assemble the stack of justifications, rationalizations, and excuses that I have used for a lifetime. I’m trying to find the one that will work……in this situation……in this place……with this man.

Then, I hear a voice behind me…….the voice says “It’s OK Peter……..he’s with me.”

The old guy gets a little half grin, and he motions me through.

As I walk past, he flips to the next page in the book……looks past me and says. …..”next”.

The little half grin is gone.

I worry a little about the next tired traveller in the line behind me….. and that is the reason for this blog.