So I’m at Toronto Pearson airport, heading to Paris, France. Cool eh? I
wasn’t expecting to go. There is this work conference for Lustre, the
filesystem I work on, and there is a project that is going to get talked
about. I asked to go to the conference and my manager told me that it’s
too late and too expensive. That was on a Friday. The following Monday,
he asked if I was still interested to go.. Hell ya! Go to Paris all
expenses paid... Not a bad deal.
Well, now I’m waiting for my connecting flight, a pretty long layover, 4.5
hours. Was procrastinating, didn’t want to read any of the books I brought
with me, mind you I just finished one when I was on the first plane. But
anyway, my point is that I was procrastinating, looking at facebook stuff
(utter waste of time... but facebook is this age’s cocaine) and as usual,
one of the people I have on my facebook, posted this meme, talking about
how the bible is not accurate, and that faith in it is insanity.
So, I admit I’m not a guru in the historicity of the Bible, but I read a
bit about it. And I believe if you do honest research, you’ll find that
there is lots of references collaborating the accuracy of the Bible.
But that aside, I have something to say in this matter, that I wouldn’t
put on facebook. It’s cool, if you don’t want to believe in the Bible and
Christianity. My question is, why do you feel the need to diss it or mock
it? Is there a purpose to that? What will be the benefit to you? Isn’t it
enough to just not believe in it and ignore it? Or do you feel the truth
of it pressing on you that you feel that you need to put time and effort
into dismissing it?
I’m sure that people will point out the many atrocities that were
committed in the name of religion. I don’t know, but this is becoming a
cliché answer, don’t you think? I don’t think anyone is denying the great
human potential for evil. But stepping back from Christianity for a second
and thinking about the author of our faith, Christ, God the Son. Can you
detect anything in his Character that would signify such evil? Or that
would encourage such evil? In order to answer this question, you would
need to spend time reading the Bible with an open mind and putting in the
effort to understand it, and not at a superficial level.
What I came to believe is that the potential for evil is inherit in the
fact that we have free will. To ask God to prevent this evil, is to ask
God to eliminate our free will. Read up on C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity
and The Problem of Pain. Plenty of material there. So us humans find it
very easy to attribute all the evil to God or the lack of God’s actions
and all the good to ourselves. We don’t even consider that in all our
successes and achievements, in order for any of them to have even been
realized, a bunch of factors must have been just right. And the funny
thing is, all these factors are hardly any of our doing. But we’re totally
fine in saying that all this is just luck, or chance, but the evil that we
observe, is in fact God’s doing. Come on! Does that even make sense?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I’m any different. God knows I
fall in this trap all the time. And at some points, I’m totally convinced
that it is in fact true. But in my mind it just doesn’t add up. I realize
that this is an emotional response. I let my impulse guide my thinking.
But if I step back and really think about it, you are forced to come to
the conclusion, that evil is our doing and the good is mostly God’s doing,
with us being marginally involved.
The next point that I hear often, is that people use religion for
violence. But don’t they do that with everything. Why should religion be
immune. What is evil anyway? Evil is just good corrupted. The law is
good, but people can twist the law and achieve horrible results. Anything
in itself is good... even nuclear power has the potential for good, but we
just happen to use it for evil, IE war.
So Christ is good, and since he is the author of our faith, then the
Christian faith is good, but that will not prevent people taking a good
thing and turning it upside down, corrupting it and using it for their
evil means. But as C.S Lewis says, God is able to use this simple evil of
people and turn it into complex good. Refer to the Problem of Pain for a
good argument he presents.
Finally, I don’t doubt that there is destructive ideology out there that
mascaraed itself in religion, and it has the ability to turn its true
followers into monsters. And the less than true followers into people who
are willing to turn a blind eye to the disastrous actions of their fellow
believers. But that’s why we have reason; we have logic; to ask questions,
do research and come to a conclusion on our own. Really though, I don’t
think it’s that complicated. I’m a total believer that we have this common
morality across all of humanity. We believe that we ought to love our
neighbours, to do justice, to help the poor, to visit the sick, etc. We
can differ in our definition of a neighbour or what justice means, or who
is poor, but no one sane human will say it’s good to kill everyone you
meet. Or to abuse your neighbours and seek his hurt at every turn. Or
destroy and use the poor as fuel for the fire. Indeed if any of that is
true, there could not be any society. Nothing would stand, or maybe you’d
have a society built on fear and oppression, no sane human can or would
want to live in it. So if there is an ideology out there that says we
ought to kill, or we ought to destroy in the name of God, we can
automatically dismiss this. Unless God gives such a direct order, which he
hasn’t in thousands of years (because I’m sure people will point at the
old testament and say look God loves to destroy, etc, but this is a
completely different discussion), like I was saying looking at our current
day and age, anything that says you should kill non-believers at any turn,
is not the word of God, because it goes against this Global Moral Code
which is common among humans, which is no doubt God’s Moral code. Read up
on that in Mere Christianity.
The thing is though, at the end of the day Christianity is all about
Christ. It’s about having a living relationship with Him, the same way you
would with your husband or your wife or your best friend, except that
it’ll be a much more intimate relationship. So we can do all the research
and thinking we want, but if we don’t have Christ as the end goal, then
our research is in vain. And I think that if we look deep into our soul,
we’ll find a longing that can not be filled by any temporal item. Not by
money or by human relationships or by success or by any other thing no
matter how noble and honourable it is. At the end of the day when we sit
back alone, with no one around us, we will feel this empty spot. This
feeling of lack of true purpose. The problem that I find is that we, at
least I, tend to hide this realization by being too busy, or by never
being quiet, and I mean real quiet, internally, as well as externally. And
if we keep fighting off this realization, then we will never realize the
need for Christ, and we will go on hiding our emptiness behind our busy
life, our achievements, our pursuits, our relationships. Which at the end
of the day when we setup any of these as our soul goal we will end up
hopelessly unsatisfied and empty.