2 Signs + 1 Van

As I drive to work every morning, I pass a church sign that frequently provokes a chuckle or a groan. Unfortunately, as traffic is heavy and fast-moving, I am unable to take photos of it. In lieu of actual photos, I memorized the blurbs and made signs at the Church Sign Generator web site. So, while these are not the actual signs I saw, the messages are verbatim. I saw this message about two weeks ago:

Last week, the message changed:

About a week ago, I stopped at a Starbucks around the corner from my office and saw this van:

The odd thing about the van is that there was no additional information on it – no business name, or phone number, or church name – just what you see in the photo.

– the chaplain

 

Need a Babysitter? Don’t Call God!

As I browsed the Internet this evening, I came across a post that made me shake my head in sorrow.

The author of this post tells a horrific story of the sexual abuse of a child, then has the nerve to explain that his loving God should be excused for not intervening in the situation. Follow the link above if you want to read the entire pathetic post for yourself. I’ll just provide some excerpts here. Don’t be surprised if, at some point in your reading, you find yourself weeping, gnashing your teeth, releasing a primal scream or engaging in some other expression of frustration, disgust or rage.

Monday evening I turned on the television in a hotel room in Gatlinburg, TN to hear something that made my blood boil…toward God. I was so disturbed by what I had heard that I found myself having difficulty sleeping. There were even moments when I wanted to scream out and cry for the misery that had been given to an innocent toddler who had no one to turn to…not even God.

You may have heard the news that someone video taped the rape of a three-year-old girl….

I hear so many stories about God’s powerful presence during times of prayer, when entire cities are transformed by revival. Why is the powerful presence of God always so evident when people are worshiping, but not when an innocent child is being mutilated and destroyed by those who she believes are the protectors of her world?

The absence of God in these kinds of situations is beyond frustration for me and millions of others….

Although the questions that surround God’s absence in times of desperation may never be fully reconciled on this side of heaven, there is an answer.

God is not our baby sitter….

Keep our children safe. Stop trying to give God our jobs. God is not a baby sitter!

Blessings,

Johnny

We’ve all read and heard stories of Christians (almost always fundogelicals) whom God has helped find parking places at crowded malls, whom he has helped find their car keys so they wouldn’t be late for important meetings, whom he has helped find the perfect wedding dress at the perfect discounted price…. We’ve also heard stories (far too many) of the sort told by Johnny: of children raped and brutalized (usually by people they trusted) while God did nothing, of children whose parents prayed for them instead of seeking medical treatment for them – and watched them die as God did nothing, of families who have been terrorized by tyrannical fathers (who justify their tyranny by quoting the Good Book) while God did nothing…. If you were Johnny, what lesson would you take from these things? What I’ve learned is that God’s a pretty good parking attendant, but he’s a lousy child care provider. Would you hire this deity to work in your day care center? Me neither.

Many years ago, I listened in amazement as Ruth Carter Stapleton testified to approximately 500 people that God had helped her pick out just the right number of ketchup bottles for a large dinner she had hosted. She told how she pushed her cart up and down the aisles and just couldn’t figure out how much ketchup she’d need. As she pushed her cart, she prayed for divine guidance regarding this critical decision. Finally, she reached out and grabbed some bottles from the shelf and placed them in her cart. And what do you know? After the party had ended and the cleaning up had commenced, she realized that she’d had a Goldilocks experience! She’d bought just the right amount of ketchup, not too much and not too little. At the time, even though I was a Christian, I thought her story was bizarre (as if the Master of the Universe actually cares whether someone buys 8 bottles of ketchup rather than 9). Having had more than a few more years to think about the matter some more, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Noting that the Bible has plenty of stories about banquets, it doesn’t surprise me at all that he’s finally got the catering business figured out.

It’s ironic that Johnny calls his blog Flock’s Diner. He deliberately invokes the image of God as a shepherd and believers as the sheep under his care – there’s even a blurb in his sidebar that explains it. All I can say is, I hope God takes better care of sheep than he does of kids. How can Johnny defend God for not lifting a finger to assist a helpless child, yet contend that God cares for anyone at all? How can he miss the discontinuity? Instead, he makes an excuse for his piss poor example of a god: he’s not a babysitter; we have to take some responsibility for doing some things ourselves. I’ll take you up on that, Johnny: next time you can’t find your car keys, say this prayer – God, I know you’re not my babysitter, so I’ll go ahead and find my keys on my own this time. In the meantime, if there’s a child who needs your help, feel free to leave me alone for a bit so that you can go and take care of her. Did you ever think, Johnny, that maybe the reason God doesn’t help defenseless children who desperately need assistance is because he’s spending way too much time and energy helping childish, sheep-like Christians do shit that they really should be doing for themselves?

On the other hand, Johnny, maybe the reason God doesn’t help defenseless children is because he’s not there. Your analysis of the situation was not completely wrong. You were absolutely correct when you pointed out that people, especially adults, have to be willing to step up and take responsibility for ourselves, our families and our communities. But the reason for that is not because God needs people to be his “eyes, ears, hands, and even fists in the world.” No. Not at all. The reason is that the world needs all decent people to be “eyes, ears, hands, and fists in the world” to overcome brutality, violence and hatred. We have to do it on our own, because there is no God to help us do it or to do it for us. All of us must work together to make the world a safer place for everyone.

– the chaplain

 

From Theistic Evolution to Apostasy

For much of my evangelical Christian life, I held a Theistic Evolutionary view of creation. I’ll confess that I didn’t always adhere firmly to this view. Sometimes I wavered and veered into a fairly conservative Creationist point of view. Nevertheless, I could never entirely shake free of the realization that evolution had lots of empirical support. Moreover, I realized this long before I ever read my first book about evolution.

What, you may wonder (or maybe not), does a theistic view of evolution look like? Let me state up front that I can only describe what my view was; I cannot and do not claim to speak in any way for other theistic evolutionists. My view of theistic evolution was pretty simple and consisted of these points:

• The first section of Genesis (say, the first eleven chapters) should not be read as literal accounts; they were literary constructions intended to recognize and respectfully memorialize through poetic imagery God’s activity in the universe. As for the rest of Genesis, I’ll shamefacedly admit that I took much of it literally.

• Evolution was the process that God designed to create and sustain life on earth.

• The Original Sin of Adam and Eve was pride; maybe Eve sinned first, maybe she didn’t – what mattered was that Adam and Eve ruptured, in some indefinite way, their relationship with God. The consequences of that rupture were death, evil, suffering, etc., that catastrophically affected all of creation, as well as humankind. Before their Fall, the universe was perfect.

As you can see, this view was long on Christian theological concepts and extremely short on evolutionary ones. I will not bore you with the details regarding how and why I came to learn more about evolution. Suffice to say that, as I became more familiar with the basic ideas, I realized that evolution and theology did not mesh very well.

The first point above, understanding Genesis as a literary rather than a literal account, was not and is not particularly problematic. It is, in fact, the right position. My difficulty was my inability to reconcile the second and third points with a realistic, albeit fairly basic, view of evolution.

The first problem I had was accepting that a perfect God deliberately established a very imperfect process to sustain life. One of the reasons evolution is imperfect is because, while it is not random, it is inefficient. Species do not travel a straight path of development, nor do they inevitably progress from less perfect ways of being toward better ways of being. Each mutation that takes hold and becomes a regular feature of a species shuts off many possible developmental pathways and slightly narrows the options for future developments. Many of the paths that are taken eventually lead to extinction. Many more species have withered and died than have survived and thrived throughout the earth’s history. That’s a lot of wasted effort. It’s difficult to call such waste “perfect” in any way. How could such a process have been the plan of a perfect God?

Another imperfection in the evolutionary process is the fact that species have evolved to devour each other. Predator-prey relationships are violent and they were going on long before human beings entered the stage. Many animals are eaten alive by their predators and their deaths are often slow and agonizing. Why would God establish an inefficient, violent, painful system for sustaining life on earth? Neither of those characteristics is consistent with the activities of a loving, perfect God.

All of this leads to the second problem I had with theistic evolution, namely, blaming humankind for all the woes of the world. If suffering, death and extinction are inevitable components of the evolutionary process, then it follows that the doctrine of Original Sin makes no sense. Firstly, as I’ve already noted, there is no way that humankind can be held responsible for bringing suffering and “evil” into the world. The world is not imperfect because people did something really bad and messed up what had been a perfect place and a perfect way of life. Humans evolved into a world that was already filled with suffering and other forms of imperfection, such as hurricanes, floods and Ice Ages. Secondly, death is not a punishment for sin; death has always been part of the cycle of life and evolution on earth. If humans are not responsible for suffering and evil, and death is simply a natural process rather than a punishment, then what need is there for atonement and redemption? Once I reached the right conclusion to that question, that there is no such need, I only needed a short, quick mental step to advance from discarding theistic evolution to discarding theism in its entirety.

– the chaplain

 

Carnival of the Godless 96

UPDATE: As DbO noted in comment #2 below, this week’s Carnival is being hosted by Sean the Blogonaut. Please follow the link in this paragraph to the Carnival. My sincere apologies to Sean. I’ve removed the link that led to the site that stole his hard work. The rest of my post still stands: you really should check out this carnival, at Sean’s place!

ORIGINAL POST (sans evil link): You’ll want to check out this week’s Carnival of the Godless. There are plenty of good posts to read, probably enough to keep you busy until the next carnival. One of my posts, In God We Trust, is in the mix.

– the chaplain

 

Friday Foto #7

From my archives:

– the chaplain