NOTE: This is not a research paper. It is a blog containing my thoughts. Nothing that I've said is to be taken as absolute. Most of this was written without consulting other sources at the time of writing. Information was taken from memory in most cases and so is not cited.
I work with a guy who was raised in a Christian home but departed from the faith as a teenager and has begun to slowly return to it, albeit a very different one than he left behind a few years ago. Like me, he is tired of religious ceremony and of the pomp and circumstance displayed by many in church, and of the hypocrisy that tends to run rampant through the lives of believers. However, unlike me, he takes a liberal, often extremely liberal, view of life whereas I am more conservative. One day while discussion the problems with "churches" and Christianity he asked me why Christians don't do more about global warming. I didn't know what to tell him then aside from mentioning that I had read that many Christians don't believe it is happening or else don't believe that it is as big a problem as it is made out to be by the media and politicians.
I still am no expert on global warming and the arguments for or against it. I do my part to combat it by making sure loads of laundry are bigger, doing dishes by hand instead of using the dishwasher, buying a car with better fuel economy instead of the beefed up fast one that I was looking at, using those new halogen light bulbs instead of the old incandescent ones, etc. I do all this, not because I believe humans are increasing the temperature of the globe, or altering climates to the point where mass extinctions are a given if we don't cut it out, but because it doesn't hurt anything or anyone to do it. To my knowledge, even the biggest alarmest can not imagine a circumstance where using less oil, water and electricity will cause irreparable damage to the earth, so I don't mind doing my part to be responsible with the resources I use.
The reason that I have not joined the green side and why I will not parade arrogantly around with a condescending T-shirt that says "Save the Earth You Idiot!" or something similar is probably much the same reason that I don't believe in evolution. That is, I feel the people arguing in favour of global warming have more to gain from it being true than those arguing against it have to gain from it not being true.
For example, Kyoto costs one trillion dollars a year for full implementation according to one article I read. Who gets that money? Chances are most of the money goes to scientists and engineers who try to come up with alternative energy resources and the machines that use them. Since 1990, and probably even earlier, global warming has been big business. Scientists have devoted their entire careers to studying the effects of a warmer globe. In order to get the funding necessary to continue their research they have to show that the globe is in fact warming. But many of these scientists are not climatologists, they are biologists who study the effects of a warmer climate on animals in a particular area of the world. That's great. I'm sure there are many good uses for such information. But when they speak about what caused the warming, they are speaking outside of their field of expertise, in other words as layman.
I once read that most scientists whose degree is in climateology are on the skeptics side of the debate. I have not done a thorough examination to see if this is true, but I have done some looking and it seems as though many climateologists are actually against this global warming alarmism that has taken control of the media. Many of them suggest that the warming of globe is a natural phenomenon that has happened many times before and will continue to happen as long as the earth goes on, and that it always has and always will be followed by a cooling period. In the seventies some were worried about global cooling, predicting that an ice age was imminent if something wasn't done. The following quote bears this out:
"It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
I'm quite certain that many on the global warming side would say that the quote is taken out of context or that Lowell Ponte was an idiot, quack, fringe thinker, fundamentalist, etc. They may or may not be right. I don't know who he is except that he seems to have been a radio announcer and former roaming editor of Reader's Digest. To my knowledge he had no qulaifying credentials. The only reason that I quote him is that there must have been some reason for him to have said that. Take it how you will.
Lastly, I should say that I don't side with the alarmists because they act like bullies. Much the same way as evolutionists snub their noses at anyone who would question their beliefs, so too it seems that those who support global warming do it to those who are skeptical of it, even going so far as to call them 'deniers' thereby equating them to, or at least drawing comparisions to Holocaust deniers. This reason is of course very unscientific. Whether or not global warming is true is entirely independant of the attitudes of those who support it. But over the years I have come to mistrust those people. I've seen the way they can ignore facts and get away with it because most people agree with them and will never give ear to the opposition. I've seen the way science has become a popularity contest more than an intelligent inquiry into the way the world works. Unlike most, I've come to the conclusion that the small voice in the background is usually more trustworthy than the trumpet blower on the pedastal.
You don't have to agree with me. I already know most people don't and never will. I'm not concerned with convincing you otherwise, just explaining myself and in so doing learning a bit more about hwy I believe what I do because, until you've explained yourself, I don't see how you can really know what you believe.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
The Time's, They Are A-Changin'
Shortly after I became a Christian I began to realize that something was just not right. I seemed to go through periods of highs and lows in my faith and I thought that was just normal and that everyone did it. But soon my lows began to severely outpace my highs, and in the beginning, I found myself often questioning whether or not there even is a God. To get out of my lows I would often search the internet for Christian material and I would learn something new about my faith and it would fire me up and off I would go to the message boards thinking that I now had the key to converting every last sinner in cyberspace. I had information now that proved I was right, or I had a little anecdote that really described a vital truth that I thought people were missing (because obviously if people didn't agree with me it was because they didn't understand what I was saying.)
At the very beginning it was e-mail forwards that got me revved up. I remember one in particular about a class that was told to bring a picture of someone they were angry at or that they (gasp!) hated, and the teacher put their pictures up on the dartboard and everyone took turns throwing darts at the pictures. Afterwards the teacher took down their pictures and behind it was a holey (yuk-yuk-yuk) picture of Jesus. And I thought "Oh yeah. Hey that's neat. When we throw darts at people we are also throwing darts at Jesus. Therefore Christianity is true!" I forwarded that little nugget of soul-saving truth off to all of my friends in my contacts list. A few of them wrote back with some of the harshest words that were ever spoken to me. Words that people who hate me would hear and say "Whoa. That's a little harsh, dude." And we got into arguments, and I lost some friends at that point.
Eventually I moved on to apologetics. I would read C.S. Lewis and suggest him to all of my hethen friends thinking that if cutesy little e-mail forwards didn't do the trick then surely an Oxford Scholar would do the trick. Some people refused to even look at him and others suggested that he was one of the worst arguers in the world and that only an idiot would be taken in by his lies. (I think that's taking it a little far actually but whatever.) I presented arguments about how the Bible was put together by 40 different authors, comprising of 66 books, written over thousands of years and is completely congruent. I soon found out that not all people believe the Bible to be completely congruent, or that it was written by 66 authors, or that it took thousands of years.
Later still I found my faith under attack by my college professors, most of whom flatly stated that since evolution was true, Christianity could not be; and also, science had disproved miracles, including explaining the 10 plagues of Egypt (mind you their explanation fails because it only explains how the river could have turned red and not how the water in all the Egyptian basins but not the Israelite ones could have, but that's beside the point.) I almost fell to this attack, but while searching the internet I came across some people who believed that the earth was only six thousand years old and that it was created in six days. Most importantly they had lists of quotes from evolutionists admitting that evolution was either not the water tight theory/fact that we were taught it was, or even some that said it had been proven impossible!!
Well, you better believe I copied those quotes wholesale and pasted them in every discussion forum I knew of. And I hit the post button with a grim satisfaction as I imagined the jaws of all the damned evolutionist-atheists hitting their respective computer desks as their evolutionary worldview crumbled around them.
I waited impatiently for the first response so that I could start witnessing to these poor lost souls. And the first one I got was something like this. "What are you fu*%&ng stupid? Those quotes don't prove anything! They were taken out of context (which considering that taking things out of context is their favourite means of biblical interpretation I was a bit surprised to read.) And even if some weren't, it only proves that one scientist is as stupid as you. Die already. Your impeding our species evolutionary progress." (I think that he failed to understand that, if evolution were true, he still would never experience being more evolved than he was now and therefore impediment of evolution shouldn't really concern him. But whatever.)
My studies of creation continued and as you may have read in my previous post, I moved on to more qualified websites run by real scientists with real degress from secular Universities. I figured that people would at least have to accept that not all "thinking" people were evolutionists and that they would give ear to the arguments made by people much more qualified than themselves. But, as with the previous cases, my vision was left unrealized as I received insult after insult for stating my views.
By this point in time I was beginning to develop a caustic attitude toward people. I would argue for the sake of arguing, I would enter debates I didn't really care about just to fight with people. And I bore real pains from the comments of people who I felt I was trying to help. At this point I realized that I was doing it but I was so angry that I didn't care. I just wanted to rile them up.
But not too long ago I read a book about relational Christianity called "So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore" by Jake Colson (Which is actually a combination of two guys names, but I don't remember their names right now.) It's main thrust was getting away from institutionalized Christianity and into a relationship with each other and with Christ that most people only ever dream of. One of the big points was learning to trust God with EVERYTHING in your life. About trusting that God will ensure we have enough to get through today, though he made not have made his provisions for two weeks from now clear. If you think you believe in God here's a thought experiement for you. If you felt that something you were doing at work was in violation of what Christ would want for you, would you quit your job on the spot and trust God to carry you through your day to day life until he saw fit to bless you with another job ? (And it's a possibility that he may never do that.) If your answer is not an emphatic yes then it would seem that you don't fully trust God, or fully believe in him. Or at the very least you are not following him with all that you have. God said he would take care of you and provide you with what you need to get through the day. If you can't put everything, including your finances and sense of security into God's hands then you don't trust him to fulfill that promise.
But what does this have to do with what I began writing about? Well, there was a point in the book where the main character, Jake, was admonished by the teacher character, John, to stop always trying to push his beliefs on other people. John wasn't endorsing pluralism (the idea that there is more than one path to God), he was just saying that out job is just to help people along on their journey. It's up to the Spirit of God to convict and change people and He's doing it in the most efficient way possible. When witnessing becomes about getting other people to agree with you more than it is about sharing Christ's love and helping them to be set free from the bondage of sin and society (including institutionalized church), we are only getting in God's way.
It is one of the most freeing feelings I've had in years to realize that I don't need to make people believe what I do. That all is not lost if people don't believe in a literal creation or even if they leave conversations with me believing there is no God. I no longer feel the intense need to have my beliefs confirmed by other people. I no longer feel that I have to be hard as a rock, never admitting that I could be wrong, as if admitting it would make it so, or not admitting it would do the opposite.
I think "church" as most people understand it doesn't help people to get past these things. "Church" is a passive thing where we go and we perform a comfortable (if boring) routine and we get told how it is. We are taught that the person standing at the front has a special annointing from God and that whatever they say is true. We believe that since they went to school that they know more than we can about the Bible. And that may be true in all of the senses that don't matter such as various ways in which it is translated, how it came to be put together and so on. But the real teacher of all truths that you hold dear is the Holy Spirit and he was poured out on to all believers. That's not to say that you can't learn anything from anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. No matter who you are, you can learn something from everyone. Or such is my belief. Take it or leave it, or take some and leave the rest. But I feel that I'm on a better path than I was simply because I no longer feel bound by the truth, but set free instead.
At the very beginning it was e-mail forwards that got me revved up. I remember one in particular about a class that was told to bring a picture of someone they were angry at or that they (gasp!) hated, and the teacher put their pictures up on the dartboard and everyone took turns throwing darts at the pictures. Afterwards the teacher took down their pictures and behind it was a holey (yuk-yuk-yuk) picture of Jesus. And I thought "Oh yeah. Hey that's neat. When we throw darts at people we are also throwing darts at Jesus. Therefore Christianity is true!" I forwarded that little nugget of soul-saving truth off to all of my friends in my contacts list. A few of them wrote back with some of the harshest words that were ever spoken to me. Words that people who hate me would hear and say "Whoa. That's a little harsh, dude." And we got into arguments, and I lost some friends at that point.
Eventually I moved on to apologetics. I would read C.S. Lewis and suggest him to all of my hethen friends thinking that if cutesy little e-mail forwards didn't do the trick then surely an Oxford Scholar would do the trick. Some people refused to even look at him and others suggested that he was one of the worst arguers in the world and that only an idiot would be taken in by his lies. (I think that's taking it a little far actually but whatever.) I presented arguments about how the Bible was put together by 40 different authors, comprising of 66 books, written over thousands of years and is completely congruent. I soon found out that not all people believe the Bible to be completely congruent, or that it was written by 66 authors, or that it took thousands of years.
Later still I found my faith under attack by my college professors, most of whom flatly stated that since evolution was true, Christianity could not be; and also, science had disproved miracles, including explaining the 10 plagues of Egypt (mind you their explanation fails because it only explains how the river could have turned red and not how the water in all the Egyptian basins but not the Israelite ones could have, but that's beside the point.) I almost fell to this attack, but while searching the internet I came across some people who believed that the earth was only six thousand years old and that it was created in six days. Most importantly they had lists of quotes from evolutionists admitting that evolution was either not the water tight theory/fact that we were taught it was, or even some that said it had been proven impossible!!
Well, you better believe I copied those quotes wholesale and pasted them in every discussion forum I knew of. And I hit the post button with a grim satisfaction as I imagined the jaws of all the damned evolutionist-atheists hitting their respective computer desks as their evolutionary worldview crumbled around them.
I waited impatiently for the first response so that I could start witnessing to these poor lost souls. And the first one I got was something like this. "What are you fu*%&ng stupid? Those quotes don't prove anything! They were taken out of context (which considering that taking things out of context is their favourite means of biblical interpretation I was a bit surprised to read.) And even if some weren't, it only proves that one scientist is as stupid as you. Die already. Your impeding our species evolutionary progress." (I think that he failed to understand that, if evolution were true, he still would never experience being more evolved than he was now and therefore impediment of evolution shouldn't really concern him. But whatever.)
My studies of creation continued and as you may have read in my previous post, I moved on to more qualified websites run by real scientists with real degress from secular Universities. I figured that people would at least have to accept that not all "thinking" people were evolutionists and that they would give ear to the arguments made by people much more qualified than themselves. But, as with the previous cases, my vision was left unrealized as I received insult after insult for stating my views.
By this point in time I was beginning to develop a caustic attitude toward people. I would argue for the sake of arguing, I would enter debates I didn't really care about just to fight with people. And I bore real pains from the comments of people who I felt I was trying to help. At this point I realized that I was doing it but I was so angry that I didn't care. I just wanted to rile them up.
But not too long ago I read a book about relational Christianity called "So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore" by Jake Colson (Which is actually a combination of two guys names, but I don't remember their names right now.) It's main thrust was getting away from institutionalized Christianity and into a relationship with each other and with Christ that most people only ever dream of. One of the big points was learning to trust God with EVERYTHING in your life. About trusting that God will ensure we have enough to get through today, though he made not have made his provisions for two weeks from now clear. If you think you believe in God here's a thought experiement for you. If you felt that something you were doing at work was in violation of what Christ would want for you, would you quit your job on the spot and trust God to carry you through your day to day life until he saw fit to bless you with another job ? (And it's a possibility that he may never do that.) If your answer is not an emphatic yes then it would seem that you don't fully trust God, or fully believe in him. Or at the very least you are not following him with all that you have. God said he would take care of you and provide you with what you need to get through the day. If you can't put everything, including your finances and sense of security into God's hands then you don't trust him to fulfill that promise.
But what does this have to do with what I began writing about? Well, there was a point in the book where the main character, Jake, was admonished by the teacher character, John, to stop always trying to push his beliefs on other people. John wasn't endorsing pluralism (the idea that there is more than one path to God), he was just saying that out job is just to help people along on their journey. It's up to the Spirit of God to convict and change people and He's doing it in the most efficient way possible. When witnessing becomes about getting other people to agree with you more than it is about sharing Christ's love and helping them to be set free from the bondage of sin and society (including institutionalized church), we are only getting in God's way.
It is one of the most freeing feelings I've had in years to realize that I don't need to make people believe what I do. That all is not lost if people don't believe in a literal creation or even if they leave conversations with me believing there is no God. I no longer feel the intense need to have my beliefs confirmed by other people. I no longer feel that I have to be hard as a rock, never admitting that I could be wrong, as if admitting it would make it so, or not admitting it would do the opposite.
I think "church" as most people understand it doesn't help people to get past these things. "Church" is a passive thing where we go and we perform a comfortable (if boring) routine and we get told how it is. We are taught that the person standing at the front has a special annointing from God and that whatever they say is true. We believe that since they went to school that they know more than we can about the Bible. And that may be true in all of the senses that don't matter such as various ways in which it is translated, how it came to be put together and so on. But the real teacher of all truths that you hold dear is the Holy Spirit and he was poured out on to all believers. That's not to say that you can't learn anything from anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. No matter who you are, you can learn something from everyone. Or such is my belief. Take it or leave it, or take some and leave the rest. But I feel that I'm on a better path than I was simply because I no longer feel bound by the truth, but set free instead.
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