Jesus Course

The virgin Mary has been discovered on the bottom of a rock in California.

You can read the story here

Jesus in funny places

It’s easy to get distracted these days. It’s hard to keep your attention on something you want to keep your attention on, it’s even harder when you don’t really care.

When it comes to keeping our attention on people we should try hard to recognise that whilst what they are saying may not be important to us – it is to them. Loving someone involves being prepared to listen to them when you don’t really want to.

Jesus always seems to have been very focussed on the people he met and on what was important to them. Sometimes it meant having to get people to think in different ways and at other times he noticed people even when all they did was touch him.

There is a very moving story in the gospels of a woman who needed some help from Jesus and Jesus noticed her touch his clothes even when he was in the middle of a crowd of people. That’s how sensitive Jesus was to people and how focussed he was on helping people.

There is another story of how Jesus was tempted by the devil. The temptations revolved around being distracted from what his purpose was. I always think its a little strange to think that when Jesus was in the wilderness he was tempted. We might think that the wilderness – away from all the distractions – would be a place where you wouldn’t get distracted and it would be easy to stay focussed. Jesus’ experience (and the experience of others who have also spent time in the wilderness) is that often the temptations to get distracted away from a course of action is worse when you are in the wilderness.

Sp let’s not get too attached to the idea that it is all the modern day living stuff that distracts us from what is important because even if we didn’t have any of it we are likely to get distracted. Remember that the distraction comes from inside your own head and not from the things that surround (or don’t surround) you. Stay focussed to achieve your goals.

Thoughts

I spend a fair bit of time listening to what atheists have to say. I think it’s important for Christians to understand what others say and to really listen to the opinions of others.

There is something I find very interesting about why people declare themselves atheists. Some seem to have reasoned things out for themselves and taken that step of saying that they don’t believe there is a god, but the vast majority don’t take that reasoned approach. Of course they do try to make reasoned arguments but ultimately their declaration that there is no god stems from two assumptions. I’m not saying any of this to attack anyone – by the way – I’m not interested in name calling but I am interested in finding the truth.

The first of these, it seems to me, is that a great number of atheists assume that atheism is somehow the natural result of being intelligent. “How can anyone who is clever believe in all that superstition?”, they might well want to claim. They assume that religious belief is something that poor uneducated peasants believe in. The kind of thing that a Granny might believe because she didn’t get a proper education and likes to think the world is all lovely and fluffy. Or the kind of thing a country yokel, who also believes that drinking cider and dancing around a tree drives away the evil spirits to ensure a good harvest, might believe. But that belief in god is not for the more sophisticated and educated city dweller.

The thing is that this is all assumption and just plain rubbish. There are plenty of very intelligent people who believe in god. I’ve got a bit of paper somewhere from an I.Q. test I once had to endure (took 6 hours I seem to remember) that declares that I’m a pretty intelligent person myself (modesty prevents me from saying how high) and yet I’m convinced that there is a God. I can also appeal to many very intelligent people who are convinced that god exists, whoever that god might be (I’m not arguing for a Christian view of god here but just a view that there is a god).

There does seem to be a certain anti-god snobbishness in certain academic circles but this is often based on prejudice more than any evidence or argument.

This comes out in the claim by some atheists that theists (those who do believe in god) have to prove their belief where a-theists don’t. However an atheist can’t assume the non-existence of god and then say that theists have to prove it – both sides need to have good reason to say what they do. A-theism is a truth ‘claim’ just as much as theism.

I’d better get back to subject because this could get to be a very involved discussion for a blog.

The other assumption that is often made is based on bad experience with an organised religion. Something like ‘I don’t believe in god because I hate organised religion – after all look at all the wars it has caused’, etc. Or it might stem from a bad religious school experience, or perhaps a bad vicar/priest/minister, or even an over zealous evangelist, or even worse a corrupt evangelist. It doesn’t take a clever person (or perhaps it does) to see that anger at organised religion doesn’t prove that there is no god. The best you should be able to come up from this is that you hate god because his followers make you angry.

The first thing to point out is that it isn’t the fault of organised religion that some people in a religion (and sometimes even the leaders) turn out to be nasty, despicable people. If we took this line then we would have to also hate organised sport, organised politics, organised education, organised news reporting (e.g. newspapers), organised businesses, organised holidays, organised families, organised anything. It isn’t because something is organised that makes it bad but sometimes people abuse that organisation for their own ends.

Everyone in an organised religion hates the fact that some people have abused their position in that organisation for their own ends. In that sense we don’t like organised religion any more than anyone else does- but you see sometimes being organised can help.

Schools, for example, come out of organised religion and if their was no organisation their would be no schools (same goes for Universities).  What about hospitals? What about helping the homeless? What about charitable works? All these and many more stem from organised religion.

Of course I can’t claim that no one would ever have come up with the idea without organised religion but there is plenty of history to show that organised religion played a key role in pioneering many good things which we often take for granted.

Bad things do not stem from organised religion but we who are a part of it (that is organised religion) need to work hard to make sure that corrupt people don’t get the chance to abuse the organisation for their own agendas.

Anyway if you are someone who claims not to believe in god: a) because you think intelligent people don’t – please think again because this is simply not true, or b) because an encounter with a crackpot organised religious group has made you angry – please think again because the majority of those in organised religions are really quite good people.

If you are going to claim to be atheist then you need better reasons that these.

Thoughts atheism, god, organised religion, organized religion, religion, theism

Christians always get excited when they hear Jesus’ name mentioned in a pop song. Robbie Williams (I understand he was raised a Roman Catholic) gives Jesus the treatment in another of his songs. However, as is often the case, the thinking about God in the song is not really from a Christian viewpoint.

Here is one of the verses from his song

God gave me the sunshine,
Then showed me my lifeline,
I was told it was all mine,
Then I got laid on a ley line,
What a day, what a day,
And your Jesus really died for me,
Then Jesus really tried for me

The last two lines of this verse are fine but it’s the rest of the song that confuses things.

I guess this just reflects common thinking on religion where you pic n’ mix from them all. My own thinking is that we should listen to different perspectives but not assume that somehow the best answer is going to be to try and mix them together. I like ketchup and I like Golden Syrup. One day I tried mixing them together in a sandwich – it didn’t come out well. Not all things are better mixed up.

All religions claim to hold the truth but they can’t all do so at the same time. Jesus says some pretty distinctive things about himself and God that just don’t fit with any other religion. I advocate respect and the right to choose but we don’t find the truth in a mixing bowl of religions.

Jesus jesus christ, robbie williams

Death is always a tricky subject, most of us don’t like to think about it until we are forced to. When you are forced to think about death it can be pretty hard. As a minister of a church I had to think about death on pretty much a daily basis, people die and there is no way of getting around this.

Some people have wanted to discredit Christianity on the basis that part of what it says is that there is a life after death. Christians are accused of making up the story of Jesus so that they have a way of avoiding the finality of death.

Well just because something is desirable doesn’t mean that is can’t therefore exist. I think the nonsense of this argument is pretty clear really. I might desire to have a great big bar of chocolate but that doesn’t mean that the great big bar of chocolate therefore does not exist.

I want to go back to Jesus again. Jesus doesn’t make all the questions about life and death go away but he does provide some answers to the hardest questions. Jesus died on the cross – nearly every serious historian believes this. The evidence for this event is overwhelming.

Then Jesus rose from the dead. Most historians accept that the disciples believed that Jesus had risen from the dead. Now we could argue about whether the disciples were deluded but I think the evidence is pretty good that they weren’t and even in the ancient world people understood that when someone died they stayed dead. Something remarkable happened.

There isn’t time to explore the meaning of the resurrection in detail in a blog but let’s say that the resurrection of Jesus says something very important about death.

It tells us that there is something after death. Jesus described this something as pretty amazing and wonderful. We could spend a long time exploring that as well.

I think you should bother with Jesus because he tells us something very important about death – that it is not the end.

Jesus death, suffering

It might seem a silly question but it is an important one. One of the strange things that happened when the church tried to explore who the historical Jesus actually is was that those who did the research seemed to end up with a Jesus that was just like them. Instead of digging through all the layers supposedly imposed on Jesus what we found was that the layers that got removed were the layers that made Jesus seem uncomfortable for the one removing the layers. There are still some scholars who do this today and claim they have found the ‘real’ Jesus when the truth is that this ‘real’ Jesus is actually a Jesus just like them.

It’s taken the church a long time to understand that in fact the gospels paint a very accurate picture of who Jesus actually was/is. Our problem is learning to appreciate who Jesus actually was/is even when that makes us feel uncomfortable. This means we have to revise what we think of Jesus and not try and avoid what Jesus is like by claiming the bits we don’t like belong to some later editor of the gospels.

If you want to know what Jesus was actually like then read the gospels and you’ll get a pretty good idea.

Jesus Jesus