Lee & Me

The idea of writing this blog post has given me some pause.  See I have on many occasions mentioned that I find former journalist and current Christian author Lee Strobel to be deeply dishonest and I thought a short post to clarify my motivations for that was in order.  However, I really don’t want this blog to become just another cog in the great internet hate machine with post after post about how much everything and everyone sucks.  I decided that this blog was worth writing for two reasons though.  Firstly, to simply call someone dishonest and never explain why makes me no better than those anonymous online commentators who seem to think that simply calling something “gay” is a fully formed argument.  Secondly, I am very strongly against groupthink; and that is the main reason I have the “The Christian I am not” tag on this blog.  If someone in your group – albeit family, ideological, religious or political – does something you strongly disagree with and instead of voicing your disagreement you keep your head down and go with the crowd then you lose all right to complain when a critic tars you with the same brush.

So why Lee Strobel?  He seems like a nice enough guy after all.  Looks like the kind of man who pays his taxes, obeys the law and he is probably a good husband and father, the kind of man who (and this is just a wild guess) doesn’t kick puppies.  Yet this man – nice fellow as he may be – manages to be more dishonest than all the other Creationist speakers out there.  See a Creationist like Kent Hovind (even though he is in jail for tax evasion) will tell you right off the bat who he is (a Young Earth Creationist), what he believes (The Earth was created 6000 years ago in 6 literal days) and why he believes it (because that’s what the Bible says).  Not so with Mr Strobel.  He pretends to be a skeptic, a man of science just looking for some truth.

Now let’s say I make that very same claim.  I tell you I’m a skeptic regarding the efficacy of so called Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM).  I tell you that as a skeptic, I am going to do an investigation to see which side has the proof – Science based medicine or CAM.  However, in my investigation I do something really weird though.  I don’t speak any medical professional who disagrees with CAM.  I don’t visit any medical schools or pharmaceutical labs to speak to the many experts there who are supremely knowledgeable in the field.  In fact I ignore pretty much all doctors, surgeons and pharmacists and the only person with a medical degree I actually speak to is someone like Dr Oz who is fully and vocally in support of CAM.  For the rest of my investigation I speak only to shamans, acupuncturists, herbalists, reiki masters and homoeopaths and report their claims uncritically.  In fact in lieu of actually finding out for myself, I instead let the CAM crowd tell me what the scientifically based medical community believes and why they are wrong to do so.  At no point in my investigation do I give actual medical professionals a chance to respond to these claims.

Now if at the end of my investigation I claim that after thoroughly investigating the matter I have learned that CAM is actually the best possible way to treat illness and that the science based medical community is actually a sham designed to keep you sick, would you take me seriously?  I hope you don't!!  Why should you, its clear that I started out already convinced about CAM and that the whole “investigation” was just a sham since I clearly only picked “experts” who were guaranteed to give me the answers I wanted!  So no, you shouldn’t take hypothetical medical investigator me seriously at all and you shouldn’t take Lee Strobel seriously either.

In his series of “The Case for ….” books he does pretty much exactly what hypothetical medical investigator me did and nowhere more outrageously than in “The Case for a Creator”.  In this book he pretends to play a skeptic looking into Creationism and Evolution but exclusively talks to those in the “Intelligent Design” community and presents their views uncritically.  See I could still make excuses for hypothetical medical investigator me – maybe I’m really gullible, maybe I have no idea how to properly investigate something – but there is no way to excuse Lee Strobel.  He used to be a very successful journalist before he became a pastor, he knows how to investigate, he knows how to properly report in a balanced fashion but he chose not to.  That is what makes him so immensely dishonest in my view.  See I'm not calling him dishonest because he has a view that differs from mine.  I call him dishonest because he knows how to properly investigate a viewpoint to see if it's true but despite pretending to do so, in reality he bends over backwards to ensure that he does no such thing.  No wonder he gets nominated for the Golden Crocoduck award (awarded for the biggest breach of the Ninth Commandment in pursuit of the Creationist cause) every year!

For anyone interested in a piece by piece dissection of The Case for a Creator, there is a very informative one here.   For those who are interested but don’t like reading and with about 2 hours to kill, here is an excellent critical analysis of the Case for a Creator video:

Who Would Jesus Shoot?

 

Ever since ABC News reported that, since 2005, military contractor Trijicon has been engraving coded Bible passages on sniper sights supplied to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a lot of reaction from all over.  The Onion joked about it.  Others didn't find it funny and sent threats to those who tried to get rid of the Jesus guns.  Some journalists claimed it was no big deal while another even felt it was justified because the Muslims totally started it started it (SPOILER ALERT: They both work for Fox).  Other journalists pointed out that this was in fact a big deal because it gave Islamic extremists a potent propaganda and recruitment tool by turning the "War on Terror" into a "Christianity vs Islam" conflict.  The Anglican Church denounced it, as did the top US military commanders. 
 
Trijicon, responded by pointing out:  "We believe that America is great when its people are good," ...  "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals."*  They also added that that those objecting to it are simply "not Christian".  Obviously!!

But enough of the boring opinions, lets get to the big picture that all those armchair generals seem to be missing.  The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported a case where an officer told his troops that thanks to these scopes an ordinary rifle is "spiritually transformed into the Fire Arm of Jesus Christ" and when it runs out of ammo it becomes the "spiritually transformed club of Jesus Christ".   See?  All these reporters and politicians seem to be missing the fact that all Trijicon actually tried to do was to supply the troops with Divine Weapons of Conquest and Victory!  You know, like the ones Jesus gave to the Apostles.

However when I read the Bible verses that was engraved onto the scopes I spotted a teensy problem.  They all use verses like:

2 Corinthians 4:6 "For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."

John 8:12  "When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.""

As well as other citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as "the light of the world."  Really, what is up with all these verses about light?  Are they using frikken laser beams now?  No wonder the war is dragging on forever!  Of course the magic spell won't be effective if you try and enchant your weapon with something irrelevant!!  So as a free service, I'm offering some more appropriate verses for turning your ordinary machine gun into a Magic Jesus Gun.  Jesus did after all have plenty to say regarding the use of force and violence as well as matters of defence.  How about:

Matt 5:44 “But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” 
Matt 5:39 “But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also”
Matt 26:52 “Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” 
Matt 7:12 “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you”
Matt 5:9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God”

Yep, I think those are the kind of Scriptures Jesus would put on HIS machine gun!




*  However they quickly changed their tune when the Pentagon threatened to stop the money train.  It just goes to show that the Bible is true, you really can't serve Jesus AND Mammon!

Of Cake and Catholics

You know, the saying "you can't have your cake and eat it" used to make no sense to me.  Maybe it was because English was my second language but somehow that saying just seemed ridiculous.  As far as I knew "lets have some cake" and "lets eat some cake" meant exactly the same thing so what was up with that weird proverb?  Eventually I actually bothered to look it up and found that the modern saying is a corruption of the original form which was "wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?"* which (olde Englishe aside) made a lot more sense.  Obviously you can't eat your cake and expect to have cake afterwards, it should have been obvious all along!!

Well, I can at least find some solace in the fact that I'm not the only one who has trouble grasping the whole concept of "you can't have your cake and eat it".  It seems to afflict a great many of my Christian brothers and sisters as well.  One of the most baffling instances seems to be regarding Catholics.  If you ask a Protestant whether they think Roman Catholics are Christians, the answer is almost guaranteed to be an emphatic "no".  Opinions differ of course.  Some merely think them deluded while guys like Jack Chick teach that Catholics are actually the agents of the Antichrist who have been spending the last 2000 years trying to destroy Real True Christianity.  Yet whenever said Protestants need their numbers to look high - especially regarding the core values of Christianity** - then suddenly Catholics are totally Christian enough.  The best examples of this confusing line of thinking usually occur during debates about creation vs evolution.  It tends to go a little something like this:

Creo:  "Evolution is just something Atheists made up to destroy faith in God"
Evo:  "That's not true, the Catholic Church fully accept evolution and it finds no conflict with their faith.
Creo:  "Ah, but you see, Catholics aren't really Christians, that's why!"
...later in the same conversation...
Creo:  "Evolution is an Atheistic worldview that promotes racism and eugenics.  Christianity on the other hand provides a worldview that is all about helping others.  Why just look at the names of the hospitals in your city - St John's, St Mary's, St Anne's, the list of Christian hospitals is huge!  Name one Atheist hospital!"

See what just happened there?  In the course of one conversation, Catholics went from non-Christians to Christians without skipping a beat.  It makes my head spin.  Seriously people, you can't have your Catholics and eat them too!

That actually sounded better in my head...

Anyway, there is one other instance of wanting to have your cake and eat it too among Christians that really grinds my gears.  I blogged about it before and everyone disagreed with me but I'm sticking to my guns.  Look, if you believe that every human being is handcrafted and sculpted in the womb by God Himself that's fine.  If you believe that people look the way they do because they are the product of the random arrangement of genes inherited from both parents that is fine too.  What is not fine is being inconsistent about it.  You can't have it both ways!!  To claim plastic surgery is wrong because "you are perfect the way God made you" on the one hand but on the other claim that its OK to fix birth defects because that's just genetic accident is hypocritical.  Either we look the way God intended or we look the way our parent's genes determined.  It doesn't work both ways, it can't just be God when its good and accident when it's bad.  If you think God gave you your chiselled jawline then doesn't it follow logically that God also gives some babies harelips?

It's not that I'm for frivolous plastic surgery.  It's the having your cake and eat it too part that gets me.  If you want to discourage a loved one from getting some work done, make a real argument against it.  Simply throwing God in front of the bus is just plain lazy.  However if you truly believe that then why not be consistent with it - don't get your kids braces either.  




* From a 1546 book called "A dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue" by John Heywood.  Sounds like a real pageturner.
** Being anti-abortion, anti-homosexual and pro-abstinence only sex ed.

How Randomness Can Free Us All

The Interwebs are all aflutter these days because Pat Robinson said that the recent earthquake in Haiti was due to the Haitians making a pact with the devil.  Now there is so much wrong with that statement it’s hard to know where to begin.  However there are far more capable commenters and bloggers out there who have dealt with this extensively so I don’t really feel like I have much to add.

This whole unpleasant business does however perfectly illustrate why randomness is good.  If you accept that the universe is a random and sometimes cruel place, you free yourself from the primitive superstition that bad things only happen because someone angered the gods.  Pat Robinson is a prime example of this mindset but the truth is that he is just a very visible symptom of a disease prevalent throughout Christianity.  Something bad always has to be someone’s fault.  This gets especially bad in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles.  Earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks can apparently be blamed on gays, abortions and people not believing the Bible like they should.  Miscarriages, diseases and cancer can similarly be blamed on everything from the premarital sex you had as a teenager to the demons living in ornaments you bought from the (evil) East.  No theory can ever be too convoluted, no idea too crazy. 

There is a twofold evil to this line of thinking.  Firstly there is the guilt it induces.  Someone is to blame and usually that someone is YOU.  If you prayed more, believed harder, lived more purely, tithed more often, pled the Blood, anointed your house, confessed more positively and wrote more letters to the editors about the swearing on TV – none of these bad things would have happened!!  Then there is the slimy, horrible conclusion this line of thinking inevitably leads to – that if you just do enough things right, bad things will never happen to you.  If you read your Bible, pray, name it, claim it and write a check to my ministry, you will be shielded from everything bad.  This is why I find this entire mindset to be stupid, evil, disgusting and wrong (not to mention utterly unbiblical).

Simply by accepting that lots of things in this world is out of your (or anyone’s) control can free you from this burden.  There is a lot of randomness in the universe and sometimes that randomness screws you over.  El Niño events can cause droughts and floods half a world a way, movement of the earth’s plates can cause earthquakes, a small genetic copy error can cause birth defects just like it sometimes causes cancer.  Sometimes you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Sometimes, bad things are simply random chance events.  They didn’t happen because you (or anyone else) did anything wrong and nothing you could have done could have stopped it from happening.  Nothing.  It is the great common denominator in humanity – terrible things happen to us all and it is often for no reason at all.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m certainly not suggesting everything happens randomly.  I certainly believe in causality.  Only a complete idiot would deny the existence of cause and effect in our universe.  But sometimes – oftentimes – that cause has nothing to do with you and is utterly out of your control.  I guess that is what it all comes down to in the end – control.  If everything bad in our lives is due to some divine hissyfit or demonic activity then we have control back again, don't we?  Cast out the demons, calm down the Lord and all will be well again, putting us back firmly in the driving seat.

Problem is we are not in control and no good will come from pretending we are.  Some things happen because of us and others just happen to us.  All we really have control over is how we react.  So why not stop reacting like cave people?  Bad things do not happen because the gods are mad at us.  Randomness happens.  Good news is that it is not always bad, good things happen randomly too*.

So if something happens, go ahead and look for a reason – after all if you are somehow causing your misfortune you really should stop – but if there is no apparent cause, don’t invent one.  Accepting the sometimes random nature of life and our own lack of control can free us to instead focus our energies on the things we actually can control.

____________________________________________________________________________________________
EDIT:
It would seem I owe Pat Robertson an apology of sorts.  After reading this article on the history of Haiti it seems that their seemingly endless misfortune really was due to a deal with the devil.  Though not the devil Pastor Pat had in mind I think...
____________________________________________________________________________________________


*This isn’t always good news to everyone though, much of the Psalms for instance consists of bitching about good things happening to people who don’t deserve it.  Oh well...

Persecution is all about you

My previous history blog reminded me of a bit of personal history.  Shortly before starting this blog I was watching the "That the World May Know" series by historian Ray Van der Laan.  I was watching this one section relating to the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire and there was this very emotionally stirring part where the group is sitting in a cave fugitive Christians once hid in.  One girl in the group survived some pretty brutal religious violence in North Africa and she was telling her story.  It was a very poignant moment - not a dry eye in the house.  As touched as I was at the time, there was an annoying voice in the back of my mind with an uncomfortable question.  At that point in time, there were fresh reports in the news about the religious violence against Buddhists in Thailand.  The question that would not leave me alone was this - would the people now weeping about the persecution of Christians shed any tears at all about the persecution of Buddhists?

Now, I don't know the answer.  I honestly like to think that these good people would care about persecution not their own.  There are large groups of Christians though who I have serious doubts about though.  Often times when I hear Christians talk, I get the impression that they believe religious persecution is only a bad thing when it happens to Christians.  Any sane person should be able to see the problem with that but I think the most ironic part is the fact that these Christians are missing is that all religious persecution concerns Christians.  Whenever someone is persecuted, jailed, beaten or discriminated against  simply due to their beliefs then it concerns you directly.  If it can happen to anyone else then it can happen to you.  Persecution is always wrong, no matter who it happens to.  How is this not obvious?

You would think that due to everything Christians have had to suffer in their history they would have truckloads of empathy for everyone else suffering the same tragedy.  Instead you find them acting like it is not a tragedy at all!  Whenever Christians act as if they are the only people on the planet who ever suffered persecution, or worse when we try to pretend we are being persecuted when that is clearly not the case (recent case study here) it just makes me sick.  But it gets far, far worse when we act as if people of other faiths deserve to be treated badly.  There seems to be this pervasive notion that Christianity should be fully protected by the might of the law from anything that makes it even mildly unhappy while all other beliefs should only be grudgingly tolerated by the law - provided they never do or say anything that a Christian disagrees with.  That is stupid and evil and the fact that otherwise intelligent people can act that way frightens me.

Did Jesus not teach that we are to treat others the way we would wish to be treated?  Did the founder of the Christian faith not say "in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you"?  Does it not stand to reason then that if you are a Christian you should oppose all persecution on the basis of belief?  If you don't oppose it when it happens to others, what right have you to cry foul when it happens to you?  If you act like it doesn't matter when others are persecuted, others may act like it does not matter when you are persecuted.  If you think persecution of other faiths are deserved then perhaps you deserve it too.

Persecuting someone simply due to their beliefs is always wrong, no matter if the person being persecuted is Atheist, Baptist, Catholic, Hindu or Muslim.  It doesn't matter if you disagree with their beliefs.  It doesn't matter if they persecuted you in the past.  It doesn't matter if they never spoke up for you.  All that matters is that is always wrong to persecute someone for their faith.  Always.  If it is true for you then it is true for everyone.

Persecution of others always concerns you.  Martyrs matter.  If it can happen to anyone then it could happen to you.  If someone else is a victim then so are you.

History lessons

Due to my procrastinating ways I have had to spend most of my December holiday wading through 2000 years of Church history so that I can finish an 8000 word essay on it by the end of this month.  Now I have always loved history but for some reason have never spent that much time getting to know Church history and I have no idea why.  I'm really glad I was finally forced to study it though because it has been fascinating.  Anyway, the assignment requires that I not only report on Church history but that I also indicate the lessons I have learned from it.  Call me cynical but I doubt that some of the lessons I took away from my study would earn me good marks, so instead I decided to jot them down here.

 I learned that the biggest changes were often made by those who had no intention of making big changes.  Those who tried to start new movements and sects more often than not end up as short lived footnotes in the history books.  The lasting changes sometimes happen more or less by accident.  Luther and the other Reformers never intended to start the Protestant faith.  All Luther set out to do with his 95 Theses was to try and fix something he saw as broken in the Catholic Church.  All the Reformers wanted was, well, reform.  They liked the Catholic Church just fine, they just thought it had started to go astray and they were trying to fix it.  Of course that well meant suggestion went down about as well as husband making a well meaning suggestion that his wife perhaps lose some weight would.  Similarly the Wesley brothers never intended to form the Methodist Church.  John was an Anglican priest and remained one to his death - he really only intended for his movement to be a society within the Anglican church.

I learned that many of the sainted leaders in the Christian faith were anything but sainted.  Martin Luther?  Kind of a douche!  Anyone who disagreed with him on anything was attacked from a dizzying height.  From Anabaptists to Jews, anyone who crossed him had to face his wrath.  I found some wry amusement reading one author defending Calvin burning at the stake a Spanish heretic who sought sanctuary from the Inquisition in Geneva.  His defence was basically that it wasn't so bad because that was common church practice at the time and Calvin was really just doing what everyone else was doing.  Wow...  

That leads me to arguably the saddest lesson from Church History, that when it comes to persecution, Christians are fast learners.  You would think that after nearly three centuries of almost constant persecution of the most brutal kind imaginable, the Christians would be the one group who would grasp just how precious religious tolerance in society is.  You would think that, but you would be wrong.  In almost no time they went from being persecuted by the Pagans to being the ones persecuting the Pagans.  Why would the very people who experienced the horror of the Empire razing their churches and burning their Scriptures find it so easy to legislate against the Pagan faith, burn down the sacred groves (as a form of evangelism no less!!) and order the closure of the schools of Greek philosophy?

I learned that Christianity was at its best when it had no power, when it exists as a counter-culture movement.  There was a time when the Christian faith was one of beautiful simplicity.  But boy did that go spectacularly south when the Christians gained the upper hand!  I read that a recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical.  Now contrast that with the perception of the Pagan Governor Pliny around 111 AD who described Christians as follows:

"on an appointed day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak, and to recite a hymn by turns to Christ, as to a god, and to bind themselves by an oath, not for the commission of any crime but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery and breach of faith, and not to deny a deposit when it was claimed".

That's right, we somehow went from a point where the persecutors of Christianity basically described them as "a bunch of weirdo's really into being good and not committing crimes" to a point where Christian seems to be a synonym for "bigoted hypocrite".  It seems that power is like crack to the Church - once it gets a taste it just craves more and from there its a terrible spiral downward.  Before they had power Christians worshipped Jesus with simple adoration and focused on doing good and having character.  After gaining the upper hand the simplicity was replaced by endless bickering over theological minutia, various schisms and much ugliness.  I really liked the way Shane Claiborne put it, "Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination".  One of the worst ideas of all time was spreading Christianity by legislation.

The monastic movement especially gave me a lot of "what if's" to ponder.  For the first time, I think I grasp the "why" of it better.  As decadence grew in the Roman Empire and with Pagans and Barbarians being forced into the Church - which partially paganized Christianity - monasteries became havens for men and women who were serious about their faith.  But what if they instead stayed and tried to make a difference?  What if they tried being the salt and light in a dark world like Jesus commanded instead of running from the scary darkness?  How different would our history have been if generation after generation of the brightest, most moral and sensitive people of the land didn't go live in isolation and die childless?  Would the Dark Ages even have happened?


So what did I learn from Church history?  That the Church should stay out of politics, say no to power and instead stay humble, trying to end poverty not purgatory.  That Christians should remember the atrocities committed against them and let that motivate them to oppose those atrocities when they are committed against others - whether they agree with those others or not.  Most of all I learned that the Church is not great when it arrays itself in gold and power.  The Church is great when it follows the lead of its Founder, when it does good, cares for the outcasts and the marginalised.  The Church will be great when it starts treating others the way it would like others to treat it.  When it brings change through kindness and self sacrifice, not through intimidation and legislation.   Especially when it leads by example, offering light and warmth to world in need.

But then, I could be wrong.  After all, I've only been studying Church history for a month now

God hates recliners

A couple of interesting stories came to my attention lately

Tillmon Webb of South Carolina injured his knee and chose a very novel way of dealing with it – he sat down in his recliner and waited for God to heal him.  According to his wife: “He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God and he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn't think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people.”  So then, wearing nothing but a blanket, the 33-year-old didn't move from that recliner for the next eight months.  He insisted that his wife not call for help but after 8 months she did finally call an ambulance.  Greenwood County authorities say they found Tillmon covered with sores, and that he appeared to weigh about 800 pounds. They say he was stuck to his chair, and they had to saw the recliner apart. They cut a large hole around the front door to get him out.  He died at the hospital.  You can read the entire story here.

For 3 months Estelle Walker holed herself and her 5 children up in a cabin and during this time she made no effort to find food for any of them.  Instead of looking for a job or even asking for help she instead chose to wait on God to provide food for them. By the time police were at last summoned by neighbours, investigators found the children so malnourished they had difficulty talking.  You can read the full story here

In 2000 a young man noticed a bump on his neck.  Instead of going to the doctor he instead chose to spend the next eight years of his life in various prayer lines, prayer circles and spent a substantial amount of money on various “healing resources” from international Word of Faith ministries while the bump kept getting larger.  That young man was me.  Luckily my story had a happier ending than the previous two because I eventually got out of the prayer line and into the doctors office and it turned out I did it in the nick of time – by that time the tumor had started to squeeze my arteries and I was in immanent danger of a stroke.  Here is a picture taken around my 30th birthday which finally frightened me enough to take action:

 

 See as much as I would like to point at these people and call them names, I can’t because I am guilty of the same thing they are.  We all depended on a miracle when we didn’t need a miracle.  Tillmon Webb just had a torn ACL, hardly a lethal injury!  Estelle Walker was a qualified teacher who could easily have earned money for food and failing that she could have asked friends, family, her ex husband or anyone at one of the two churches within walking distance of the cabin for help.  All I had to do was just go see a doctor.  So why didn’t we?  Why the steadfast search for a miracle when the miracle clearly wasn’t coming – or needed?  I don't know about the other two but I'm normally a reasonably intelligent person.  How could I be so monumentally stupid then?  We were all holding the idiot ball, no point in pretending otherwise.  Whatever else we may have been we certainly acted like gullible retards.  However I do feel that the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement should shoulder a share of the blame here.  I don’t know about Mr Webb and Mrs Walker, but I know that the churches I grew up in, the books I read and the televangelists I watched all taught that we should expect the continual miraculous working of God in our lives.  More damning however is the common Pentecostal/Charismatic teaching that you should ignore circumstances, push past your common sense and close your eyes to the warning signs and just keep on believing for your miraculous breakthrough no matter how unlikely it looks.  To do anything else is to lack faith and if you don’t have enough faith you can forget about your miracle.  If you had spent any time in the Charismatic movement, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Practical solutions are bad, faith in unnecessarily miracles are good. 

What stings the most is that this wasn’t just bad thinking, it was all bad theology too.  This is a religious idea with no backing in the Bible.  Yes, the Bible does say to trust in God but yet if you read the Bible you will see that the people in it still planted crops for food and still built walls and watchtowers to protect their cities (something I blogged about previously).  I bet you if you sat me or Tillmon or Estelle down and asked us about why evil exists we would have all explained the importance of free will and making the right decisions to you.  Likewise if you asked us about salvation we would have told you how important it is to make the right decisions because what you do has great impact on your life.  Yet when we had to make a choice to make a much needed impact on our lives we chose to do nothing instead.  How did we miss something so obvious?

Taking responsibility for your actions and their consequences isn’t just common sense, it’s Biblical too.  In the parable of the talents, Jesus doesn’t praise the servant who hid his talent, He praised the one who took what he had and worked with it.  The servant who hid his money didn’t get rewarded with a miraculous increase, no only those who earned an increase received it.  Then (as Tim recently reminded me) there is arguably one of the best Biblical examples of taking responsibility – Nehemiah.  Nehemiah didn’t receive an angelic visitation, he didn’t hear the voice of God and no prophet came to give him a word.  Instead he saw that there was something that needed doing, he realized he was able to do it and he then went ahead and did it.  When things started going wrong he didn’t quit either.  He didn’t try to back out by claiming that what he was doing must not be the will of God somehow.  Instead he got creative and he worked harder and he succeeded.  Now that is an example worth following!

Lack of critical thinking skills, gullibility and bad theology are bad enough when they are on their own, when you combine them you set the stage for disaster.  Moral of the story, God hates recliners.  That personal responsibility you’ve heard so much about?  Take some.  You want something to happen, get off your lazy ass and do your best to make it happen.  Alternatively, you could just sit back and wait for God to take responsibility for something you should be taking responsibility for yourself.   I have to warn you though, it will be a really really really long wait!