So what is right and what is wrong? Gimme a sign.

To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. [...]
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, [...]
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns [...]
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
[...] Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered. (Hamlet, III.I.71-97)

Hamlet reflects on suicide, and realizes that the reason more people aren't afraid to do it - the reason why people instead "bear the whips and scorns of time" is that they fear for what will happen to their souls after their deaths, which he calls "the undiscovered country." 

It is this place after death that Christianity fills with the rolls of Heaven and Hell, and the fear of the latter is what is used to urge people to fight against sin, to instead choose to live righteous lives.  I'm a bit reductive here, as there are positives noted in Scripture as well; but, we would be remiss not to acknowledge the role that sin and the fear of sin take in our spiritual lives.

We sin, we go to Hell.
We have forgiveness of sin, we go to Heaven.

That's the extent of it.  There is no in-between for believers.  And, since our default position is sin, we start out going to Hell.  This is more than a bit troublesome for many believers, especially in light of 2,000 years of high infant mortality.  If a human being starts out having a sinful nature derived from his or her parents, then if he or she dies before that sin can be forgiven, he or she will be doomed to Hell.

In Protestant Christianity, we fumble around this one by saying that a human can't be a sinner until he or she has learned the difference between right and wrong.  In Catholicism, they just baptize babies and are done with it.

(As an aside: this could be the reason Catholicism is so adamant about abortion - anyone conceived and then aborted could be in spiritual jeopardy.  In “No Embryos in Paradise,” found in his collection, Inventing the Enemy, Umberto Eco explains Thomas Aquinas's description of how an embryo forms a soul, and it turns out that Aquinas thought its human soul wasn't complete until fairly late in the process and thus there was nothing to either be condemned or saved.  Catholics who find themselves torn between abortion viewpoints might want to check out that essay to help support a pro-choice stance, though Eco himself doesn't specify a stance either way.)

But let's go back to that idea.  We sin, and we start out in sin.  Paul says, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23), and it's from there that we assume babies, too, are tainted with sin.

But none of it says what sin is.

That's the weird thing.  We define sin not by any verse of the Bible.  Instead, we seem to define it in abstract ways.

For the legalistic among us, we describe it as breaking God's law.  It's why, when some on the right claim that homosexuality is immoral, they refer to laws of the Old Testament - because those laws are sacrosanct.  They represent clear delineations of right and wrong.  Except when those delineations aren't clear, and then there's a huge profit to be made in writing books commenting on the Bible and teasing out justifications for various different things.  For instance, the Old Testament clearly says "Thou Shalt Not Murder" - and then God's chosen people turn around and brutally slaughter surrounding tribes.  The apologists argue that murder is OK in cases of war, self defense, and legal discipline (though they might try to rephrase it as "killing" or "execution").

In such a case, both murder-apologists and anti-murderers claim to hold the moral high ground.  In Romans 14, Paul showed us another situation where two different camps interpreted scripture differently, and thus this could provide us insight into this murder issue.

I already provided some background on this in my Shades of White article, but let's go further into the exact reasoning behind it:

Paul spoke to Christians who held different beliefs on the practice of eating meat.  Some I've heard interpret this scripture do so to say that Paul was not referring to vegetarianism per se, but that those who chose not to eat meat were concerned that the meat had been sacrificed to pagan gods.  Nothing in Romans 14 indicates this strictly, but the passage closely parallels 1 Corinthians 8, which does specifically call out food sacrificed to idols.

Using that argument, we see a potential point of view that goes something like this: "I can't be certain whether this meat was sacrificed to pagan gods or not.  If, by eating that meat, I'm reminded of those gods whom I used to worship, I might be tempted away from God.  Ergo, I should not eat that meat."  It probably wasn't so clearly stated, but the intent seems to be the same.

Paul, for his part, thought that the meat itself shouldn't be such an icon and shouldn't cause such temptation.  He couldn't personally relate to the effect it had on those who were tempted away from God by it.  But, he could understand their argument, could place himself in their shoes.  In so doing, he realized that to keep pressuring them to eat meat might, in fact, pull them away from God.  The result - they'd be sinning. 

(Even assuming Romans 14 stands alone and is talking about vegetarianism, the result of the argument is the same - by trying to force something on people who aren't able to handle it, you might cause them to sin.)

It's interesting to me that this argument takes place at the end of the book of Romans, because throughout that letter, Paul had been trying to explain to the Romans about sin and the law.  Here, finally, he lays out an argument that has nothing to do with the law - in fact, Christ had already abolished the law on unclean meat by saying that it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean.  Paul reveals that sin doesn't have to be tied to the law, just as righteousness is not tied to the law.

In Romans 14, as in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul describes sin as something that happens not as the result of acting against the law, but instead acting in a way that threatens our relationships with God.  That is, by eating the potentially-idol-sacrificed meat, a Christian who might find him/herself straying to other gods was knowingly risking his/her relationship with God.  Acting in such a way that you open yourself up to separation from God, being willing to make such an action without regard to that relationship, is sin.

There's a corollary as well - acting in such a way that you put another Christian's relationship with God in jeopardy.

And thus, the definition of sin is not acting against God's law, but acting against God's love - either personally with God, or tangentially with another believer.

---

There's another way to arrive at the same conclusion, which is fortunate - if my hypothesis about sin is correct, it must fit other arguments that are Biblically-sourced.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.  One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:  “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  (Matthew 22:34-40)

We know from Christ's own words that the law can be broken down based on what's most important for believers - and that the two most important parts are the commands He quoted: "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself."   These quotes come from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, respectively.  According to Deuteronomy, "Love the Lord your God" was the first commandment given to the Jews.  Interestingly, though, the command to love our neighbors was buried deep within the commands given only to the Levites, shortly before the command not to wear linen and wool blends and to execute anyone who engages in adultery, and shortly after the command to pay employees on time.

Christ really had to understand the law deeply to see that as the second greatest commandment.  Had He not taught it to us, we might have ignored it as simply a line in the midst of a lot of other lines about treating people fairly.  And, and I say this to shame those who take this tack, we might have simply discarded it as a command given only to the Levites, the priests of God's people.  A 3-second-long Google Search will prove to you how often we currently do that regarding other commands in that book we don't like (it's why I pointed out the linen and wool blends command and the adultery command - those are two that apologists have argued away by saying they were "only for the Levites").

But not only does Christ point out these two laws as being "greatest," He further goes on to say that "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."  What could that possibly mean?

With the Ten Commandments, at least, the answer is usually easy:

1. "You shall have no other gods before me" - loving God with everything we are means loving Him more than anything else, including other gods.
2. "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below" - loving God means recognizing God and not the symbol or sign of God (the writer of Exodus understood Saussure?).
3. “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God" - loving God means respecting the name of God (but that writer didn't understand Saussure that well).
4. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy" - loving God means taking one day a week to remember Him. 
5. “Honor your father and your mother" - this is the start of the "love your neighbor" section.  Your father and mother are closer than neighbors, and have sacrificed much for you, more than neighbors generally will.  Ergo, you should love them by keeping their commands (within reason - the "honor" command is awfully vague).
6. “You shall not murder." - Obviously, committing violence against someone is not a loving act.  Love demands you recognize the right of other people to live.
7. “You shall not commit adultery." - When a couple have pledged themselves to each other, coming into that relationship and tearing it apart is an unloving act.  It hurts both of the people in that original relationship, and will probably hurt you as well.  Ditto if you are one of the people in that relationship - you are violating your partner's trust in the most extreme of ways.  
8. “You shall not steal." - When someone owns property, and you take that property from them, you're declaring that you have a greater right to that property than they do - and they paid for it, whereas you did not, so that not only are they out the property, they're out the original money for the property.  It's a bum deal.  Love demands respecting other people's property. 
9. “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor." - When you testify that your neighbor has done wrong he/she has not done, that can cause extreme distress, jail time, even death for your neighbor.  False testimony can only be driven by hate.
10.  “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” - Well, first of all, people aren't property in a civil society.  That out of the way, this seems to be in-line with the later postulations of Jesus when He said that it wasn't enough not to murder but also not to think angry thoughts at someone.  This is the only thought crime of the Ten Commandments, and the only one that is only inwardly-driven.  Remember that the command is "love your neighbor as yourself" - that is, you also have to love yourself.  When you love yourself, you recognize that coveting someone else's property or relationships is painful, it causes you to feel bad about yourself, it causes depression, anxiety, and so on.  It can also lead you to doing the four things in the list above coveting - murdering, stealing, cheating, and lying in testimony.   

It is, however, somewhat harder to see how other commands derive from these - such as the command not to mix linen and wool (which appears to have something to do with making sure the Israelites were clothed in such a way as to set them apart from societies around them and help them remain pure for the Lord, which would be a "love the Lord" command).  Sometimes they are hard to understand, but their purpose, their meaning, is to help structure society in such a way as to ensure that people behave in loving manner toward one another and toward God. 

That said, once people learn to love, they no longer need law.

That's what Paul seems to be trying to say in Romans: 

So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death.  But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:4-6)

We are now dead to the law - that is, we no longer need the law to inform us, because we have the Love of Christ.  The Love of Christ drives out sin, it prevents it and purifies us.  Paul tries to explain that the law can lead us to sin, and the reason is simple: when we only live by a standard of "do this" or "do not do this," we have no reason for it, no understanding behind it.  If we don't have love for one another in our hearts, we can see someone else's property and think "I shouldn't take that, because it's against the law," but, the moment we think we can do so without anyone noticing, the moment we think that we can get away with it, we'll steal.  The evil that lurks within all of us can be somewhat controlled by the law, but it is not perfect.  But, when we love, we don't need the law to tell us not to steal - we know that by stealing, we would be hurting that other person, and our love will not even allow us to consider the concept.

So then, if we have the love of Christ, we are free from the law.  We are not bound to do what it says.  Christ showed us this Himself when He healed a man and a woman on the Sabbath:

On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.
Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”
The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” (Luke 13:10-16)

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?” But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way.
Then he asked them, “If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” And they had nothing to say.  (Luke 14:1-6)

In each case, Jesus called people out for being willing to do for themselves what they were unwilling to do for others, citing the law.  The Pharisees were using the law as a shield to prevent them from having to show love - that is, if they had the power to heal, they would still hold it back, as they sought to hold Christ back, and would proclaim that this was simply God's will.  But God's will is love, and loving means sometimes breaking God's law in order to achieve God's love.

As Paul notes, that does not mean we can do whatever we want.  Or, rather, we aren't free to sin in whatever ways we would like.  We cannot use the love of Christ as a writ saying that we have complete freedom to do anything without repercussions.  But, if we actually have the love of Christ, we are free to do whatever we want - because what we want will always be what's loving.

The challenge is that we don't always love.  Even Paul notes that he has problems with that:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:18-19)

That is, we must be careful and evaluate each thing to know whether it is the love of Christ that compels it, or our sinful nature.  But, if we are sure that what we do is good, then we should do it without regard to whether or not the "law" says we should not.

Paul gives us a test by which we can know whether something is part of the love of Christ or the sinful nature:

All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. (1 Corinthians 6:12, KJV)
All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth. (1 Corinthians 10:23-24, KJV)

If something is not beneficial, it is controls us, if it does not help build us up, if it is only for our own good and not for the good of others, then it is not done with the love of Christ.

Many scholars have claimed that Paul was either sarcastic with his "I have the right to do anything" comments.  In fact, the NIV added in the words "you say" so that he's shown to be quoting an audience and reflecting what they're claiming; which is why I quoted the KJV instead, to show that that isn't apparent in the original.  I would argue, instead, that Paul does actually believe that "all things are lawful" - that is, because he is no longer bound by law, he can do anything he wants.   But, he applies this test, of whether or not something controls him, whether or not something is edifying, etc., to see whether he should do it or not.

---

Finally, we find that homosexuality - and indeed, anything - is "good" so long as it is beneficial, does not master us, and so on.  "Sexual immorality" is dangerous not because it acts against the will of God, but because it's such an intimate act and has the potential to hurt people in ways that other activities do not.  It also has the ability to control us ("I will not be mastered by anything," as Paul says), as an addictive activity.

But if two people, regardless of their gender, love each other, are honest with each other and with themselves, are open and communicative in discussing their needs, then they are showing love toward one another.  They can do anything within the bounds of that relationship that they both agree upon, so long as they aren't being mastered by those things.  If those two people happen to share the same gender, that's OK - if they act with love toward one another, they are doing more good than a heterosexual couple behaving unlovingly toward one another.

Which is worse, my fundy readers - a gay couple who stay devoted to each other for 30 years; or straight couples who divorce and remarry constantly, who cheat, who lie about themselves and their needs to keep their partners happy, who stay in unhappy relationships for "the sake of the children," who abuse each other, and so on?  One is loving, the other is not.  We should never promote an unloving relationship above a loving one.

Love never fails.

Distant light Part 2 - Dinosaurs and Humans, living together

A responder on my Facebook page, after reading the first post about God's supposed lies, said,

"The Bible does mention dinosaurs."

Let's address that in detail.

First, the Bible makes several mentions to a "Leviathan."  They are as follows (all verses from NIV):

• Job 3:8
  May those who curse days curse that day    those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.
  (For context, Job 3:1 says, "After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth" and then provides his curses.  Job 3:8 is one of his curses.)
• Job 41 (all of it is a description of the Leviathan.  It starts with this, in 41:1)
  Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
      or tie down its tongue with a rope?
• Psalm 74:14
  It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan
      and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.
• Psalm 104:25-26
  There is the sea, vast and spacious,
      teeming with creatures beyond number—
      living things both large and small.
  There the ships go to and fro,
      and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.
• Isaiah 27:1 (Chapter titled: "Deliverance of Israel")In that day,the LORD will punish with his sword—
      his fierce, great and powerful sword—
  Leviathan the gliding serpent,
      Leviathan the coiling serpent;
  he will slay the monster of the sea.

So here's a brief summary of the attributes of the Leviathan:

1. It is a creature of the sea, as denoted in Job 41:1 and 31-32, Psalm 104:26, and Isaiah 27:1.  
2. It "glides" and "coils" as per Isaiah 27:1.
3. It has limbs as per Job 41:12.
4. It has "strength and its graceful form" as per Job 41:12.
5. It has a "double coat of armor" as per Job 41:13.
6. Its mouth is "ringed about with fearsome teeth" as per Job 41:14.
7. "Its back has rows of shields
       tightly sealed together
   each is so close to the next
       that no air can pass between.
   They are joined fast to one another;
       they cling together and cannot be parted" (Job 41:15-17).
8. "Its snorting throws out flashes of light" (Job 41:18a).
9. "Flames stream from its mouth;
       sparks of fire shoot out." (Job 41:19).
10. "Smoke pours from its nostrils" (Job 41:20a).
11. "Its breath sets coals ablaze,
        and flames dart from its mouth" (Job 41:21).
12. "Strength resides in its neck" (Job 41:22a).
13. "The folds of its flesh are tightly joined" (Job 41:23a).
14. "Its chest is hard as rock," (Job 41:24a).
15. It's impenetrable to all weapons at the very beginning of the iron age* (Job 41:25-29)
    *if this exhaustive mathematical calculation is correct in assuming that it chronicles events from 1280-1270 B.C., then it would be taking place at the beginning of the iron age.
16. "Its undersides are jagged potsherds," (Job 41:30a).
17. It leaves "a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge" (Job 41:30b).
    A threshing sledge is a board covered with spikes or shards so that when dragged across cereal grains, it good remove the cereal from the straw.  Note that I list this verse separately from the one above it because it's indicating that not only is this a creature that lives mostly in the sea, it also comes out of the sea, at least on muddy areas

Now, nothing in the dinosaur world conforms to that in any way.  Some people might claim it's talking about real dragons (that can't fly), but since we've never found anything remotely dragonesque, that seems unlikely.  Nothing in all of known creation breathes fire, of course.  If we assume the fire and light descriptions are more talking about its teeth and red tongue, then the rest of it we can actually draw a creature from.

Firstly, it has to be a sea creature.  It moves quite well in the sea, according to Job, Isaiah, and whoever wrote that particular Psalm that described it as "frolic[king]."  Historically, people have seen it in many different ways.  In 1865, Gustave Doré saw it as a giant sea-snake:

"Destruction of Leviathan". Gustave Doré, 1865

In Liber Floridus, from the turn of the 12th century, Leviathan looked something like this (pictured with the anti-christ riding atop it): 

By Lambert- Liber Floridus (1120) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

And in William Blake's late-18th century depiction, it was the creature at the bottom:

William Blake [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

None of which are very dinosaur-like.  For the creature to be able to glide through the water as described in Isaiah, it needs to be relatively fish-like or serpent-like, as in these drawings.  Since it has limbs, the closest to the Biblical description would be the middle drawing, which looks like a giant crocodile with a very long tail and wings.  Wings, again, aren't mentioned anywhere in the description, so they're unnecessary, as are giant tusks and horns.  

And of course, feathers aren't depicted in the Bible account.

You see, dinosaurs were feathered.  Our depictions of them in movies and museums are totally inaccurate.  

Wired.com shows an artist's rendering of what the feathered T-Rex might have looked like

So it's patently impossible for the Leviathan to be describing a dinosaur.  It mentions scales, and dinosaurs weren't scaled.  It's amphibious, so the best thing we could go with is a prehistoric amphibian, like Mastodonsaurus.  

But here's the next problem - let's just say that Mastodonsaurus is the leviathan of the Bible, and managing to live at the same time as Job - whence all the other dinosaurs?  

We know that dinosaur tracks have been found in Israel, belonging to a dinosaur called Elaphrosaurus:

By FunkMonk (Michael B. H.) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

This thing was big.  Head to tail, it would be 20 feet long.  But besides the Leviathan, there is no record of any type of "dinosaur" or other giant creature in the Bible.  Ergo - how come people running in terror from this beastie didn't record it in Scripture?

Lastly, let's have a little bit of a logical fleshing out of something that was said in the video: that the fossil record is out of whack because of the flood.

Let's be really clear about that.

Assuming they're entirely correct, which I disagree with but I'll accept for this one simple argument, then how is it that the fossil record after the flood... isn't?

You see, leviathan is mentioned, as I said, in Psalms, Isaiah, and Job.  Psalms and Isaiah were clearly written after any such flood, as any reading of the Bible would tend to indicate.  As the Answers In Genesis folks but the date of the flood as 4362 years ago, and the writer I quoted above had Job written 3,284 years ago, give or take a few years, Job was also likely written after any such theoretical flood.

Thus, everything that occurred after the flood should continue to follow normal geological processes, regardless of what happened before it.  This means that there's no excuse for dinosaur fossils and human fossils to not be found right next to each other (especially when one of the creatures had us over for lunch, if you catch my meaning).  

But we have lots and lots of dinosaur poop.  There's never been the slightest trace of anything remotely resembling a human in it.  We have lots and lots of dinosaur fossils and human fossils, but never from the same place.  Layers of dirt would have been laid down at a steady rate after the flood, so those fossils buried in dirt would have no excuse not to be protected equally.  

It just doesn't happen.  That's because the idea of dinosaurs living at the same time as humans is preposterous.

Nope, not even Mastodonsaurus.

Try again.

Distant light, dinosaur bones, and the fully-formed Earth

Why do we believe that the Bible is telling us the truth?

It's not because the Bible tells us it does - that'd be circular logic: the Bible is true because the Bible is true.

Rather, it's because we already believe the Bible is true that we're willing to accept what it says about itself.  Why do we believe the Bible is true?  Because we accept the idea that God is true and that the Bible is His message to us about how to be restored to life with Him.

What necessarily follows, then, is that we believe the Bible is true because we believe that A: God is real; B: God does not lie; and C: God wants us to know Him.

If that's true - and it's necessarily true for an inerrant Bible, for if we argue against those premises, we have to admit the possibility that the Bible is lying to us - then whence came dinosaurs?

I used to believe this: God, when He created the heavens and the Earth, also created the dinosaur bones and distant light to try to trip us up, to make us doubt Him and what He has said about Creation.

That argument is not consistent with a God who does not lie and desires us to know Him. 

Because in that argument, God is the creator of two records - the Bible, and the physical reality (universe and planet).  We can "read" both, if we are literate in the languages they were written in.  One is true, the other is a lie - but both were written by God.

So isn't it true that accepting the science about the world is claiming that God is lying in the Bible?

No.  Remember that the Bible never claims itself to be inerrant, only God-breathed.  If we accept that it can be flawed - that is, that God did not write it Himself but through flawed intermediaries who took occasional shortcuts,  then we can still accept that God is always truthful and that the Bible is His way of teaching us about certain aspects of Him - namely, His love and grace.  If the Bible is, as my pastors told me so long ago, God's love-letter to humanity, why would we assume a love-letter is scientifically accurate?  There's no point to.  But it can still provide us insights about His love, if we're open to those insights.

There's also a way to read it, if you prefer, to say that the Bible is literally written word-for-word by God, and that, as with my love-letter argument above, God took shortcuts rather than attempting to explain everything to an ancient peoples who couldn't have possibly understood it.  If God had told them that the world is billions of years old, they would've laughed at Him, because they couldn't read the world, couldn't understand the things they looked at, and sought answers for them in inappropriate places (such as other gods).

Thus, you can't argue that God created distant light or hid supposedly-ancient dinosaur bones and still argue that God loves us and wants us to know Him - but you can argue (and I threw that out there if you want to take it) that as ancient people were bad at reading the physical world, we are still.  It's a fair argument, but good luck proving the science wrong.  You'll have to engage science where it lives for that.

Shades of White, Part 3

I should mention that John talks of the Spirit's role in teaching...

"But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you." (John 14:26)

So there is how the Spirit helps us with Scripture - by teaching us "all things" and reminding us of Jesus's words.

Does teaching us "all things" mean that the Spirit is the exclusive source of knowledge?  No!  In the Venn diagram:

All things occupies the red circle, things we know occupies the green circle, and what is taught to us is in the yellow.  We are obviously not taught "all things" because "all things" would incorporate the hidden thoughts of people we've never met.  It would be too much knowledge for one brain to handle!  Does it mean that everything we learn will come from the Spirit?  No!  We learned things before the Spirit came into our lives, and those things still act as a filter for new, incoming knowledge.

Let's say you're a Christian who is just hearing, for the first time, about global warming.  The knowledge is coming from scientists.  Once you hear about it, then you are tasked with determining how that new knowledge applies to God.  It challenges what you think you know about the Bible.  So, going back to the Bible, you read with this new knowledge, and when you read the Old Testament account of Noah and the promise that God will never send another great flood on Earth, you realize that that promise only applies to God sending floods, not to mankind.

That moment of realization is a moment of teaching - a teaching of something that might be called truth, although even it could be changed, because you don't know what the Spirit will teach you next.  This is how the Spirit teaches us all things - by giving us a heart that is open to new knowledge, and the courage to know that any new knowledge that comes in doesn't destroy our faith or our ability to believe in the unbelievable.

Shades of White, Part 2

I feel I need to expound on a few thoughts from my pontification about Truth...

It's clear throughout that, I hope, that I still believe in Absolute Truth.  God is not "the source of" Truth, but rather something that is, I believe, true.  Truth is internal, rather than external - that is, it is the belief that something is ....

What?

We can't really define what Truth is, because to do so requires other words that all mean similar ideas to Truth.

We can give examples of Truth.  We know that when we throw an apple up in the air, it comes down and hits the ground.  The effects of gravity are true, and will always be true.  Regardless of what we know about gravity, how it's created, how it works, its effects are demonstrably true. 

We know it's true because we see it with our own eyes.  We feel it with our own heads when apples fall from trees onto us.  I've never had an apple fall on my head, but let me tell you a little story...

When I was probably 12, during the summer, I went to a summer cookout with my church.  For some reason that escapes me now, they had a piñata.  They put a blindfold on my head so that I could not see, and gave me a stick with which to hit the piñata, and pointed me in a direction.  Before I took my first swing, I *felt* gravity in a very real and very powerful way, as most of the tree branch - somehow missing the last few feet connected to the tree and, therefore, the piñata, but the rest of the branch beyond the piñata - came crashing down.  Two hundred pounds of dry lumber split open my left side like a gutted fish.  Had I been just a hair further left, that'd be a very terminal point to the story.

Gravity, I'm certain, is true.  And yes, you know it is from feeling, too, for you know you can't jump too high or too far, you can't throw a ball into space, you can't float through the clouds without a giant metal machine holding you aloft, and that only briefly. 

For many people, that's the end of the story on truth.  Things are true only if we can demonstrate them, or at least imagine a test that could be performed on them.

In a world of absolutes, everything that cannot be true is a falsehood.  Ergo, if God cannot be proven true, God must be false.

Christianity actually benefits from a more murky definition of truth than that, because the very idea of a God cannot be proven and, therefore, can never be demonstrable.  This is, I think, the difference between Fundamentalist Christianity and Fundamentalist Atheism - a difference in the definition of where truth comes from.  What is true for the former always descends from God, and therefore all proofs must come from God.  For the latter, what is true must always descend from observation, and therefore all proofs must be observable. 

But God never said that all truth comes from Him, and we have the ability to imagine truths that cannot be observed.  If, for instance, there are multiple universes, as some scientists believe to be the case, we may never be able to observe them, because we may never be able to set foot outside of our own.  We are, by our nature, creatures created by a single universe, a universe whose laws are favorable to us but also inhibit us from becoming more than the sum of those laws.

I think God is true, because I have seen things that are best explained by "God," such as dreams coming literally and precisely true, without the need for interpretation.  But I also think science is true, because when I test something in the laboratory, it works time and time again, and the only times it fails are when I've failed in my precision. 

The only way both God and not-God can be true is if the concept of truth is murky.

Let's go back to the circle metaphor from the previous post...

If Absolute Truth is a red dot in the center of some kind of field, that field is multidimensional and unknown - that is, we don't know the size of the field any more than we know the size of the universe.  We know the size of the observable universe, which is limited by the speed of light, the rate of expansion, and the time since the Big Bang, but we don't know the total size of the universe beyond what we can see.  The universe gets bigger for us every second, as more light from further away makes it to our eyes.

In the same way, the field upon which Absolute Truth lies is unmeasurable and vast.  We have no idea where its edges are.  We could have a map to the spot of Absolute Truth that says it is "5 billion miles from the southwest corner," but we don't know where that corner is or even have a compass to tell us which way is southwest. 

We know where we are.  But we don't know where we are in relation to everything else.  And thus, every reading we take is necessarily flawed by the fact that we don't know what those readings mean in relation to Absolute Truth.

Allow me one more scientific example... in the early days of nuclear chemistry - and this was not that long ago! - we thought that the atom was a kind of pudding, with protons interspersed throughout.  In more recent days, we saw the center of the atom containing the protons and neutrons, and then electrons occupying very specific positions around it.  Now, our idea of electrons around that center is more cloudesque.

In each case, we thought we had the truth, but as our instruments got better and better, we learned that we had been mistaken in the previous case.  We will, someday, upset even what we think we know now about atoms, although I think our understanding is very, very good now.  But part of the problem is that we don't know what questions to ask.  We have to stumble upon those questions.

Why?  Because we don't already know the truth about any of this.  If we did, we could say "here's how to get to that point from where we're at now."  But we don't - we are stumbling around, blindly.  Every once in a while, we realize that, in our stumbling, we've fallen on something profoundly different than what we expected, and it challenges our ideas. 

The same thing held true 2000 years ago in the Bible.  The Pharisees and Sadducees believed they knew everything there was to know about the law, and they were very, very good at understanding it.  And then Christ came along and told them that everything they knew about the law was wrong.  Not because the law was wrong, but because they weren't asking the right questions about it.

For example, when they told Christ that He couldn't heal anyone on the Sabbath because that was working on the Sabbath.  He corrected them:

Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”

The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water?  Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. (Luke 13:14-17)

In the same way, we've become Pharisees today, proclaiming loudly what we know about the Bible and insisting people follow it exactly our way.  But in so doing, we proclaim that all Truth is settled, and that we know it all.  We deny ourselves the ability to grow and to discover new ways of interpreting the Scripture and understanding God.  We also deny the Spirit, if the Spirit helps us to interpret (which I think He can, even if the Scripture doesn't say He does, but I hesitate to stand on that more strongly because to proclaim something is the responsibility of the Spirit when it's not is blasphemy - all we CAN say is that the Spirit helps us by giving us the gifts and fruits of the Spirit), because by proclaiming a single truth, we do not open our hearts to any new truths that the Spirit might want to teach us. 

This is a lesson for all people who believe firmly that Truth is set in stone: it might be, but you can't know it, and by thinking you do, you limit yourself from learning more.  Scientists cannot discover new things if they think they already know everything.  Christians cannot, either.

In the words of Neil Degrasse Tyson from one of the most touching moments of the new Cosmos series:
“It’s OK not to know all the answers; It’s better to admit our ignorance, than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything, closes the door to finding out what’s really there.”

Shades of White

During a town hall meeting, Tom Coburn said the following,

"We didn't get to where we are as a nation ... outside of a connection to the originator of it all.  Intellectual minds can argue that, but it's foolishness in the sight of the creator.  My answer to most things is go to the author and find out what He says..."

This brings up a point I wanted to talk about anyway... (and I'm sure there was more to talk about during that meeting, but listening to Coburn makes me ill.  And I voted for this guy, once, long ago...).

My initial idea of what was right and wrong was strongly rigid - I believed that there is Truth, and everything else is Falsehood.  Imagine, if you will, a bullseye, dartboard, or circle with a dot in the very center.  In that center is Truth.  Everything outside of it is Falsehood.

Only the Red in the middle is Truth

Now, I don't know where on that dartboard I appear, but I believe I'm close to the middle, that my Truth largely overlaps God's Truth, with maybe a few minor exceptions.  I believe this because I read the Bible and if the Bible says something's evil, I try to avoid it.  I fail miserably on a number of things, but my belief doesn't change for failing miserably.  There are a few places where I disagree with the Bible - things like slavery and letting women speak in the Church (my own mother is ordained, which helped make me a little more progressive in that respect), and I rationalize the difference by saying that God had been saying only what was needed by the people of that time and place needed to hear to survive in their world, and that those messages weren't meant for us now.

I believed that my ideas about God and Truth were so spot on that I could harbor no dissent.  Something was either True or False.  It was a black-and-white situation, and there could be no shades of gray.  Discussions of shades of gray were sin straight from the mouth of Satan.  When I began dating a Jewish girl, I did so under protest, because obviously Christ is Truth and therefore Judaism is evil. 

Largely, those beliefs were what I had been informed about by pastors, youth group leaders, Sunday School teachers, and the few Biblical scholars I had read.  I also read my Bible exhaustively and my copy had commentary in it as well that I used to help focus my theology.  By reinforcing them from these authority sources, I could justify believing that one thing was only true for a specific time and place, while another thing wasn't, because these authority sources became my gospel, unwittingly.  I was not a "Bible-only" believer, because I was taking input from outside sources.

I have way, way more to say on that topic... but now is neither the time nor place.

So I believed rigidly that what I believed was true; and even if it wasn't, I believed I had to act as if it was, because to do otherwise would be to court evil.  This is, certainly, one way to read Romans 14:23:

But whoever has doubts is condemned if they eat, because their eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

This reading says that anyone who believes must hold his beliefs strongly or admit sin into his life... that is, if you have any doubts about your beliefs, then everything that relates to them is sin as well.

What I didn't realize is how Truth as we know it is informed by non-Bible sources.

During my education and conversion to the Left, I was impressed upon by the Sophists and Plato.  The following will be an extremely-simplified version of history, which is to say that it will be wrong, but it is close enough that you can work with it to understand my point (if it's blatantly wrong, please tell me and I'll correct it).  Plato spoke about absolute truth (or, as I say it, "Truth" with a capital T) as a real thing that exists behind all other things.  It is from this truth that we can understand morality.  As a classical Greek philosopher, the Romans adopted him when they usurped Greek culture, and the Christian church, because it was Roman already when it was born and became even moreso when Constantine converted, inherited the philosophical background of Rome.  That background was re-strengthened during the Renaissance, as people fell in love with Greek culture all over again.  So, basically, Christianity as we know it today cannot be functionally separated from Greek philosophy, and this idea of Absolute Truth came with it.

When the Absolute Truth idea gets applied to Christianity, we would say that God is the absolute truth from whence all other truth derives.  Interesting, though, that Plato and the rest of the Greeks did not believe in a single God... but I digress. 

Gorgias, one of the Sophists that Plato wrote about as debating Socrates, famously had an opposite idea of Truth:

1. Nothing exists
2. Even if existence exists, it cannot be known
3. Even if it could be known, it cannot be communicated.

The last point is the point I latched onto.  You see, I also learned that language is horribly inadequate to express knowledge.  Even a simple bit of reasoning can cause a person to see how "true" this is - take how many times we have to ask a judge for clarification on legal matters.  When, for instance, the founders said, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" - did they mean that we shall all be free to own guns?  Or did they mean that if we were part of a "well-regulated militia" we should own guns?  This very debate rages today, more than 200 years later.  No matter whether you believe that it lands only on one side or the other of that debate, you must at least admit that it remains something that people are confused by.

Thus, if a document 222 years old and studied by millions of people can have a confused meaning by virtue of the obscurity of language, how much more would a document close to 2,000 years old and translated multiple times - from Greek into Hebrew and then into English for most of our translations of the New Testament - be confusing in its language?  We have evidence that it is, by virtue of having a nearly-limitless number of Christian denominations, all of whom disagree over relatively simple matters.  The Church, in fact, has been having such disagreements and schisms throughout its entire history.

And yet, we are convinced that the Holy Spirit translates the text for us.  It is how people attempt to bridge the gap between confusing language and Absolute Truth - namely, that the God inside us translates it for us.  This brings up a difficult conundrum:

1. Those who disagree with us must not be Christian
2. or Truth must be adaptable to the individual person

And this is, I think, the cause of a lot of our distress in the Christian Church.  We constantly vary between the two points, and we try to accept that variation without acknowledging its idiosyncrasy. 

Take, for example, Fundamentalism.

The Christian Fundamentalist movement was not a movement with an evil intention.  They recognized the problem of Absolute Truth and attempted to create a list of what was known and accepted as Absolute Truth so that believers could come together and share in that Absolute Truth without having to bicker and argue about it.  The rest of the arguments would seem relatively minor if we could agree on the "big things."  What it did instead, however, was create a sense of other - that is, by defining what Christianity IS, it also defined what Christianity IS NOT, and pushed all beliefs that did not share in those key points into the realm of the ostracized other.  And, as I've talked about elsewhere, what is other easily transitions into enemy.

I came up with a different rationalization: that Absolute Truth cannot be known.  We can know things that approximate Truth, but never quite reach it.

Why?

Well, no matter what happens, no matter how we are informed by the Spirit, we still think in terms of language.  When we try to rationalize things from God, we try to do so through words in our minds.  The moment we do that, we place a filter upon God, and limit the power of God.  We tell God that He can only speak to us through a filter of our existing knowledge. 

That's not to say God cannot speak to us beyond that, just that the moment He does, we will filter it.

As an aside - maybe this is the meaning of speaking in tongues - an understanding that defies language and comes out in utterances that are unintelligible.  Again, though, even with a Gifted translator, the moment it's turned into language it's stripped of its power.  If we try to rationalize the tongues we just spoke in, we rationalize them into language.  In Romans 8:26, Paul says that the Spirit prays on our behalf using grunts we cannot understand, so there's some merit to that idea.

Interestingly, no where in the Bible does it say that the Holy Spirit is here to help us translate the Bible.  2 Peter 1:20-21 says,

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

But that concerns prophecy, not all of Scripture.  Just as the passage that people reference to say the entire Bible is perfect and without error doesn't actually say that, but rather "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16), which means that it's inspired by God but not necessarily "True."  That is, God could be speaking to us in ways we can understand, but that miss the mark of what is "True."  Would it have been useful for God to tell ancient Jews living 5,000 years ago that the world was created in a big bang?  Would they have understood the background science necessary to navigate that?  

Thus I now understand that Truth isn't relative, but is unknowable, at least as a discernible fact.  If it exists, it is so far behind reality that we can't understand it directly, and can only see its effects.  

Back to the question of Romans 14 - how does this inform that passage?  Well, in our own country, we have what's called "Reasonable doubt" - that is, is there a good reason for thinking that something might not be as we expect?  We can certainly have doubts - most Christians would be remiss if they didn't admit to having doubts about the existence of God - but "reasonable doubts" are another thing altogether.  I may doubt whether it's appropriate to get a tattoo, for instance, but is there something in the Bible that would cause me to have a "reasonable doubt."  In this case, there is a proclamation that altering your skin is evil.  But can I rationalize that in a way that makes sense to how I understand God?  If that proclamation is, for example, only applicable to Levites, then it's obvious that it was to keep them separate from the rest of the population and show clearly how they were God's representatives.  It doesn't necessarily apply to me, then, and I'm free to do so.

In the rest of Romans 14, Paul showed us how this works.  He talks about Christians who eat meat, and Christians who don't.  He says for his own part, he thinks that it's OK to eat meat.  But, for those who don't think it is, it's not.  They have doubt about it.  He has justified his doubts, and so it's OK for him.  He doesn't rub it in their face, but instead he says to accept those who disagree, and to keep from eating meat in front of them for fear of making them fall into sin.  There may be Absolute Truth about meat, but even Paul doesn't know it.  Ergo, what matters far more is what you do with the Truth you believe - and part of that is not being a jerk with it.

Now, this realization allowed me to soften my heart, and to come up with an additional benefit of seeing Truth this way...

When I believed I knew what was Right and what was Wrong, I created a space where even God was not welcome to speak to me.  If I heard a voice telling me that I was wrong about something, it must not be from God, because God agrees fully with me.  But if I was wrong, then that meant that God could not tell me - I was unable to hear from Him.  This means that if the Spirit was trying to speak with me about the Truth, I had shut Him out, and said "No, I will find my own Truth."  

Only in being able to accept that the things we think we know aren't True can we learn, even from the source of all Truth.