Running Faster in the Wrong Direction

So, Ted Cruz is running for President, as of today.

For some reason, both he and Liberty University (the largest evangelical college in the country) thought that he should announce his candidacy there. Some thoughts:

This really drives the unspoken narrative that if you're a democrat, an independent, or even a moderate Republican (as Ted Cruz is one of the most extreme members of the Tea Party), Christianity and evangelicalism especially are not for you. Which, if you're here, you know I find upsetting.

It's also just ugly to me that a Christian university is letting an extremely polarized politician speak there, let alone announce their presidential bid. God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

It's particularly ridiculous that they let *Ted Cruz* speak there, as very few politicians have been as callous toward the poor, the immigrants, and the oppressed, which evangelicals who actually read their Bibles will know God wants us to look out for.

The last line of the article about "Liberty" University and this libertarian-ish candidate: "Student attendance at the convocation is mandatory." Ironic, though I suppose that's about chapel, generally, and not this particular chapel (which somehow is being led by a *distinctly* un-Christian politician). While highly ironic, it adds to the kafka-esque "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills" sensation - a Christian university is requiring it's students to attend a political rally. Rend unto Ceasar, indeed - or something.

All that said, the propoganda video he linked on his "announcement tweet" is amazing - my inner 3rd grader (who believes all the ridiculous "America is the free-est place in the world, since we INVENTED freedom" stuff I was told growing up) really wants to vote for him when I watch it.

Sigh.

Lack of World Vision

I was so disappointed to see this week that so many people cancelled their child sponsorships, that World Vision felt they needed to retract their policy change that allowed legally married gay or lesbian people to be their employees.

Regardless of one's view of those relationships, what that means is this: large numbers of Christian people, who claim to follow Jesus, thought it was more important to take a stand against gay marriage, than it is to feed, clothe and educate the 22,000~ children under 5 who die each DAY of easily preventable causes.

"Then He will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me."

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

I don't quote that to question anyone's salvation; there's only one Judge. But that passage highlights that Jesus' priority is how we treat those in need and those outside the fold. Both groups, sheep and goats, called Him Lord, but only one was allowed into heaven with him, and it was based on their fruit and their actions.

Evangelical Christianity, I share all your theological beliefs, but I could hardly be more disappointed and frustrated.

When World Vision, one of our largest charities, took a step forward to heal the damage we did by not protesting Fred Phelps and not clearly proclaiming the love of God for all people, and elevating homosexuality above our own sin as magically worse than our own extramarital sex, divorce, pride, gluttony, and greed, we not only didn't go along, but to make our protest heard we stopped feeding the hungry.

We stopped doing exactly what Jesus told us to do, what James says in 1:27 is religion that God our Father sees as pure and faultless, what God Himself said it means to "know me" in Jeremiah 22:16, to make what, fundamentally, is not a "top tier" theological point, and in so-doing, rebroadcast to the world our hatred of and disdain for gay and lesbian people.

Fundamentally, we've lost our vision for what God tells us His priorities are in the world - whether or not you believe gay marriage is right or wrong, there's no denying that. We've taken an ultimately insignificant, over-politicized fight, and to win that fight, we've compromised the one thing that is effective in showing the lost who God is and what kind of love he calls us to.

Richard Stearns, World Vision's CEO, is one of my heroes, and everyone should read his book The Hole In Our Gospel. I have no doubt that, under his able leadership, they'll be able to shuffle and stretch things so that the poorest recipients of their aid are not hurt by this. Hopefully followers of Christ step up as well, to keep the ministry going where some have cancelled their support. But I don't believe the same can be said for the evangelical church's testimony, and those who are poor in faith.

It's hard to imagine the events of this week haven't driven some, already questioning their faith, out of the church, and hasn't kept others, who had begun to turn towards Christ and Christianity, thinking that if there *is* a loving God in this world, Christianity isn't the place to find him.

In that respect, I can't help but think that many Christians and Christian leaders who responded to this news by speaking against and cutting support for World Vision, have shown a deep lack of the world vision Christ wants us to have.

Pascal's Wager and the Planet

Without question, Blaise Pascal is one of the smartest men to have lived ________ (you can fill in the blank with any set of time that includes his life - week, month, year, and century are out, but millennium, 'in the last 500 years', or "AD" would all work fine). His intro sentence on Wikipedia says he was a "French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher." A true interdisciplanarian. Further down, "after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator."  Oops, left out "while still a teenager".

When he was 16, he "wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry" - I'm twice as old as that, and I don't even know what projective geometry *is*. He proved that vacuums do exist (a vacuum had been believed impossible since Aristotle), so you can thank *him* for your Roomba, as well as giving us this great quote, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus." I'm leaving out a whole bunch of his achievements, but here's one more: "And, prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems, he corresponded with Fermat on the subject, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probabilities."

One of his contributions, in the realm of religion, or philosophy, or probability, or however you'd like to categorize it, is called Pascal's Wager. He laid out the following statements: "God is, or He is not." "A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up." "According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions". "You must wager" (not choosing a position is the same as believing there's no God). "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." "Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

Pascal recognized that we couldn't verify the claims of Christianity in the same way we would claims of probability or physics, but, knowing what the stakes were, he proposed it was very wise to take measures to protect oneself from the risks of inaction (and, if you're reading this and not a Christian, while I find his vacuum quote more compelling, this is a great reason to consider the claims of Jesus).

However, I believe Pascal's approach is also useful in a lot of areas of life - the basic lesson that, when the stakes are both very high and very one-sided, it's simply pragmatic to take the safe bet. One place this makes *very* good sense, although the individual stakes are not *as high*, is climate change.

If you know me well, you're probably tired of my refrains, warnings, discussions and Facebook posts about climate change. Most people are; congratulations, you find me just as boring as the rest of the population! (Be kind to my wife; she has the burden of living with me *every* day, with no escape.) I believe the science behind climate change is both sound and convincing, but the real problem with discussions about climate change isn't as much disagreement about the science, as it is that most of us don't know what the stakes are.

The danger of climate change isn't that we don't get to build snowmen in the winter, or that our air conditioning bill goes up. It's not even record wildfires like we saw this summer in Colorado, or mega-tornadoes cutting huge swaths across towns like Joplin, Missouri. No, the real threat of climate change involves two "f" words. The first one is flooding; most of us have seen pictures on the news at various times of flooded homes. My parents, little sister and little brother had their home flooded in 2008, and it was one of the most devastating things that's ever happened to them.

But the good thing about flooding, in typical human experience, is that the waters go back down, you're able to go back and salvage what possessions are intact, and if it's feasible, clean or rebuild your home. If climate change predictions are correct, and there are only reasons to think that they are (though perhaps underestimated), we won't be facing floods from rivers, streams, or broken dams that last days or months (my parent's house was flooded for six weeks); we'll be looking at oceans rising (due to melting ice caps), flooding our cities (as many of the largest cities are near the coast, both in the US and throughout the world), and the water never leaving. It's a pretty bad scenario, and by itself, just the risk of it ought to motivate us to get our collective act together in terms of pollution, fossil fuels, and CO2. But that's the little f.

The big F, the much more deadly and disturbing F, and the far less familiar F, is famine. Climate change is affecting, and will affect, global rainfall patterns, and while some local areas will have better growing conditions (parts of Canada and Siberia), the parts of the world that currently excel at feeding 7 billion of us are going to be increasingly more difficult to get adequate yields from - especially regions that are currently more arid. I had the fortune of growing up on some of the best farmland in the country, and as much as I wished I lived in the city so I could have friends, I didn't realize that friends required social skills, and there were a lot of privileges to growing up on the farm, as well.

This summer, I was back to visit our family farm for about three weeks, in the midst of the worst drought America has experienced in roughly 60 years. Not only did I drive from Texas to get there and back, but I did a fair amount of driving around in the Midwest, as well, and on every farm that wasn't irrigated, the corn was either brown and dead, or wilted and unlikely to produce more than a few kernels per ear. My parents were lucky to have an irrigation system for their field, but not only was that expensive, but for their farm, it uses 1100 gallons of water *per minute* (that's twenty 55 gallon barrels). Per minute! It was great for them, and for other farmers during this drought, to have these systems, but many don't because of the cost. And at 1100 gallons per minute, if major droughts should become more common, I question how many years groundwater tables are able to sustain that use.

This is an important question, because while the world *does* produce enough food for everyone, we don't distribute it well enough or use it wisely enough for everyone to have what they need, and about 20,000 children under 5 die every day due to malnutrition and similar effects. If we start producing less food, those numbers will skyrocket, as will the non-fatal effects of malnutrition.

In any case, if climate change occurs as scientists are predicting, many of the world's major cities will flood, but that's not actually the real threat. The real risk of climate change is that droughts will increase, crops will fail, and millions more will die of hunger or be malnourished than is already the case. The ironic thing is that the CO2 emissions that would cause climate change, relatively, come from the global rich and middle class, with our higher rates of consumption, but it's the world's poor who won't be able to afford higher food prices and would be faced with starvation.

I don't know how it came to be that we live in a country where *Christians* are the main opponents of calls to steward what God has given us, but it's past time for that trend to stop. We can't leave care for the planet, and the poor it most effects, to the non-believing any longer.

Developing ways to raise efficiency, use less oil, and lower CO2 emissions has a cost (though probably a lower cost that flooding many of the world's largest cities), but when looking at the overall stakes, the relatively small costs to avert disaster, compared to the ongoing deaths and losses due to floods and famines climate change would bring about, I believe Blaise Pascal would say, regardless of what doubts you may have about the work of scientists, you should wager, without hesitation, that climate change is a real threat we must prevent.

All Truth is God's Truth - Why I'm not a Young Earth Creationist

I used to be a young earth creationist, which made sense to me even though science disagreed, for three reasons: A. I knew evolution was in crisis, and scientists always assumed the scientists in *other* fields surely had evidence for it, because they didn't. B. I knew scientists had an anti-God bias that kept them from checking out what creationists had to say about flood geology. C. I knew if scientists ever *did* take an objective look at creationist writings, they would say, "Oh, wow - this explains what we see a *lot* better than evolution and an old earth."

Turns out, though, each of those pre-suppositions I approached the issue with isn't true. The evidence for both the age of the universe (~ 13.73 billion years) and the common descent of living things is unanimous, overwhelming, and indisputable. Particularly, on the evolution side, since we've developed microfluidic processors (I don't know what those are, but they've enabled us to analyze DNA in around an hour, instead of the years the Human Genome Project took), we can see leftovers in our DNA of viruses our ancestors had, that have been passed down to us. So far, we've found 14 of these virus remnants that we have in our DNA, which chimps and bonobos also have in the exact same position - because our shared ancestors had those viruses (the same "viral strand" would indicate having the virus, but where it would be in our DNA is entirely random - since all of them occupy the exact same position in *their* DNA as in ours, there's no possible explanation but common ancestry). 

The age of the universe is equally well-evidenced; what I learned in my private Christian school - that scientists keep making it older to try to give enough time for the laws of probability to allow for evolution - just isn't true. Most simply, we can see light from stars 13 billion light years away, and light years are both measures of distance, and the time it takes for light to travel that distance, so that light came from a star 13 billion years old, therefore the universe must be 13 billion years old.

There is one other possible explanation for both sets of data, that a few people have suggested. It usually goes like, "Just as Adam and Eve weren't created as infants, God created a mature universe", but if one understands the science, it requires God creating light from stars that never existed, or creating viruses that can only be explained by common ancestry, and that not just implies, but requires, that God is a deceiver, creating a world that looks old but isn't to "test our faith". But we know from Scripture that God "cannot lie" (Hebrews 6:18) and it's actually a trait of the devil, not God, to deceive the non-believing (2 Corinthians 4:4).

What do I believe? I believe it was wrong of me to dismiss the findings of science without having scientific grounds to do so, and I believe astronomy and biology should fill us with awe and wonder, not denial, and finally, I believe learning what science tells us about God's universe, life, and how they came to be, is the most compelling evidence there is backing Isaiah 55:9, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

W.W.J.D.?

Who Would Jesus Drone?

I'd like to think that, if American Christians actually knew how we conduct our drone wars, there would be national outrage, but I honestly don't have that much confidence in our national conscience.  I hope to be completely mistaken about that, but it's unlikely we'll ever find out, because it's not a topic that gets a lot of time on the evening news, and a lot of us don't watch the evening news anyway.

I don't claim our pilots in Missouri or Nevada just want to kill people, and I think it's great that we can keep our troops out of harm's way, to a much greater extent, with drones than more invasions (for the most part; at the same time, I worry that for most Americans, only concern over American casualties keeps us from being more war-prone than we already are).

My problem is with how the decisions to fire are made. I find it dangerous and Orwellian to call any male in the area of a drone strike a military combatant: "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." (http://goo.gl/WVDzb)

My problem is with our own self-assured dishonesty of how few civilians we've killed (None this year - high five! Except that's been thoroughly shown not to be true, even with very conservative methods). http://goo.gl/ojg3e

My problem is that we've used drones to kill a U.S. citizen, without trial (http://goo.gl/fM7bV), for nothing more than exercising his constitutionally enshrined right to free speech (to say reprehensible things, but the Supreme Court established, without question, that we have the right to do that, even to the point of advocating violence, in Brandenburg v. Ohio (http://goo.gl/T9hU2). Then, just two weeks later, we killed his 16 year old son (who, of course, we described as a military combatant - after all, he was killed in a drone strike), also a US citizen, which Obama's press secretary had the audacity to justify by saying, "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they're truly concerned about the well-being of their children" - that's right, it's his fault for not choosing a more responsible father (http://goo.gl/c0KW2).

I have a big problem with us using drones, strategically, to kill those who show up to help the wounded or come to attend a funeral - no risk of civilian deaths there (at least not if they're male - those are enemy combatants!) (http://goo.gl/6ZZsb). This swells the ranks of our enemies, because God has given all of us a desire to see injustice against our loved ones avenged. If a far away, faceless foreign government killed your wife, father, son or daughter, in a group, because there might be bad guys there too, are you going to tell me, with a straight face, that you wouldn't consider (or want to consider, for the cowardly or principled pacifists) joining the side that's fighting that? (Lots more details here: http://goo.gl/Ir2tt)

I'm not a pacifist, I'm not opposed to the United States as a country defending herself. But I do think, ultimately, as citizens of heaven and aliens and strangers in the United States, what we do to stay alive is an important moral question with a lot of repercussions, perhaps more important than whether we stay alive. Some may say it's dangerous for me, just a civilian, who's not privy to any classified intelligence on our drone program, to be asking these questions and making moral judgments about what we're doing; I believe it's more dangerous not to. I believe, when government demands the power to kill, it's our job to call for strict care and oversight, and while I don't think any of our military leaders, or President Obama, or President Bush, want to see civilian deaths, I don't think we're trying hard enough to avoid them.

As Christians, when we talk about these things, I think we need to consider the words of Scripture, and especially those of Christ. So I'll leave off with two verses that I think we could benefit from giving more consideration. First, Proverbs 20:7 "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God." Second, Jesus said to Peter, on the night he was betrayed, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." (Matthew 26:52)

A few honest thoughts about dishonesty

Let's have a little conversation here about the 9th commandment, "You shall not bear false withness against your neighbor". Because Christians are *really* bad at this one sometimes. Some of us, anyway. And, it's easy to slip-up, frankly, without even realizing it. When we *do* slip up, it's easy to justify to ourselves.

When I was a kid, I assumed, because of the word "witness", that this really only applied to what you said in court. It *does* apply to that, but it's a lot bigger than that. "Bearing false witness" is saying something untrue. But it's really something bigger than that, even. A true witness only says what they *know* is true. They don't pass on things that might have happened, speculations about a person, or what they heard from someone else. This has all kinds of implications for what we do and don't say, and really tends to cut down on gossip, but in my opinion, this is the biggest: We look on the outward appearance, God looks at the heart. Therefore, we have no business making definitive statements about a person's belief/unbelief, a person's motive, or the intentions behind an action unless that person has told us those things. Anyway, what we know so far is that if we're obeying this commandment, we won't say things we know are false *or* things we don't *know* are true. And there's a corollary here: Nothing you read in an e-mail forward is true. EVER. Obviously, that's an exaggeration, but I'm firmly convinced that there is *zero* correlation between e-mail forwards and what is true, *especially* if they relate to politics or religion. So unless you've looked up those things on snopes, wikipedia, or some other real source of information, don't pass them on.

So, a false witness says or repeats things that are untrue, or things they don't know to be true. There's two ways falsehood can be "against your neighbor". The obvious one is false accusations, but the other is just lying to your neighbor - if someone asks you for directions, you don't know the way for sure, and you give them directions, they may get lost or worse, because of you. Both types of false witness are wrong, and there's no exception clause for "I thought I was right". Don't bear false witness.

This means it's our responsibility to know *what* we know, and it's our job to humbly tell people when we *don't* know. We Christians frequently fall into the trap, however, of believing that since we've found the truth about Christ (even though we didn't find it, but He found us), we have some kind of uncanny, magical ability to measure how true something is with our gut, our feelings, or our instinct. But God hasn't given us that ability, an unfortunate fact that shows up in several disappointing ways. It shows up when we tell people evolution is a lie, even though we don't have a science degree, and our hobby is watching sports, not reading biology. It shows up when we say President Obama doesn't believe in the same God we do, even though we don't know the man, he claims to follow Christ, and we can't see inside his heart. It shows up when we tell someone we know *why* they did or didn't do something - whether or not we turn out to be correct (and usually, we aren't).

If you've seen the movie Bambi, you may remember Thumper repeatedly needing to be reminded, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I think we as Christian need to take that statement, adapt it to, "If you can't clearly explain how you *know* something, don't say anything at all." Because right now there's a lot of Christians being poor witnesses by saying things that either aren't right, or that they don't know are right. And part of what that means is we need to recognize that being "sure something is true" doesn't mean it is true. It's complicated, but we should aspire to know enough about the world to know where we do and don't know about the world. And then, if we're going to be good, godly, and honest witnesses, we won't speak with certainty on things we don't or can't know. Like Paul, let's keep the emphasis on what we know.

Affinity for Inequality

Usually, I can understand where people are coming from, or why they hold their ideas, even if I don't agree - and that's especially true of people I'm closely involved or affiliated with (evangelicals, men, nerds, you get the idea). But what I'm about to write about, I simply don't understand, even though I'm a lifelong evangelical who has been constantly surrounded by and interacting with other evangelicals. For some reason, evangelicals have an affection for inequality - they want to live in a society where a few have far more than some others. Why? I'm not sure, but I (genuinely; seriously) think the thinking goes like this: Communists deny God, and communism aims for economic equality for all, therefore economic equality is a bad thing, therefore economic inequality is a good thing.

Why do I say evangelicals are in favor of inequality? It's a feeling I get - I've never seen research done, or a study commissioned, but here's some evidence from my personal experience. 1) I've heard significantly more in sermons about the evil of high taxes than I have about government not doing enough to help the poor (Some might say, "But that's the church's job!" - I agree, it is! Cancel your youth ski trip, and give the homeless your winter coats! But, where in the Bible does it say that only churches, not governments, are allowed to help the poor? I'll give you a hint: It's in "Imadeituptations".) 2) When I put something on Facebook about helping those in need, it's my evangelical friends who disagree and come after me. My atheist/agnostic friends agree that we should help the poor (See, that communism reasoning was correct! Concern for the poor leads to godlessness!!! So, by the way, do my Christian friends who are theologically liberal). 3) I can count on the number "one" the number of times I've heard it said, from a pulpit, that those who have two houses should give to those who have none (Luke 3:11 - and those weren't the exact words that were used, but I did hear Chip Ingram say, "People who have two houses are going to have to do some explaining, when they get to heaven") and Jesus' advice to the rich young ruler to "sell his possessions, give to the poor, and come, follow me"... well, Jesus is just saying that to illustrate that being perfect is impossible. He doesn't actually expect anyone to do anything like that. And 4) I've heard, as most people have, a whole lot about what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, and that it was because they practiced homosexuality (and I believe that played a role in their judgment). But I've heard very little - and I've never heard it in a church, about why God says they were judged: "She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy."

I have heard of some Christian leaders saying, however, that if God doesn't judge America soon, he's going to owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. That's absolutely right (Well, except that it's theologically wrong, because in Christ, we are forgiven for our shortcomings and not, generally, fire and brimestoned). But we are doing the same thing Sodom was judged for, even down to being overfed. Most of all, we "did not help the poor and needy". We've allowed cheered on our society's transformation from the land of opportunity, where anyone willing to study, work hard, and not waste their money could afford a decent life, to the land of inequality, with 93% of income growth in 2010 going to the top 1% of Americans, while the income of households making less than $101,000 annually (and that's 80% of us) fell by 1.7%. We've been slipping for years, so that now we are less equal than Uganda and Kazakhstan. Those aren't places I want my country competing with, on anything, and losing.

The inequality in our country is wrong. Immoral. Unjust. This isn't about "greedy, entitled poor people", it's not about "class warfare against the job creators", it's about whether the "American dream" will be a real thing anymore, or if we're going to become, for the steadily growing poor of our population, a land of nightmares. And that just doesn't match the message Jesus brought for them.

But whenever I try to bring this issue of inequality up, each time I try to discuss it with Christian people who should have a Christlike approach to helping the poor, I'm told that communism doesn't work (I agree, but it's dishonest to act as though anyone is suggesting that), that poor people are just looking for handouts (I'm sure some are, but what did Jesus say about handouts?), or that if we raise taxes, the economy will crash (all sorts of data prove that tax rates have little correlation with the health of the economy - there's no consistent correlation between the two). Yes, there are Christians who agree with me, but the trend I notice is Christians who somehow don't believe the rich have enough, while often suggesting we need to cut back on food stamps and aid to the poor. It's as though we've never read the book of James, and we really should. Or if we read Proverbs, we might come away with a better perspective.