Just received this email from a friend from watermark and though I don't have time to really interact with it now I wanted to get it up here because it struck such a chord with me, not so much because it answered all (or even any) of my questions but just because of the tone of acceptance and understanding it contained. So here it is:

You know I hate it when religion becomes a burden to a person's faith. I have always considered not having been raised in a fundamentalist home a blessing, especially the more I understand the damage caused by toxic faith.[...]I do understand your crisis of faith. I have had people suggest that the best thing to do when facing such a dilemma is to take a vacation from church. Try not to feel judged, because I know your history in the C&MA and the long ties to the traditions of your family and denomination will probably dog you.

I don't think you're alone in your struggles either. I think the revolution taking place is a reflection of people with similar struggles and thoughts. Jesus was a Jew, He wasn't protestant or catholic and I have had those thoughts for years, since seminary in 1980. I at one point considered returning to catholicism. Let me just say, I love Jesus but hate what we have made of Him and the church. I don't have doubts about Him but for me my crisis was and is how can I reconcile the simple message of Jesus with the screwed up denominational rantings of fundamentalism and evangelicalism.

I have two people in my house church who won't call themselves Christians. I can't go that far, but I do understand their struggles. I asked one of them "would you follow Jesus if he walked in here now" and he said yes! So I advised him to just say I am a follower of Jesus and try to live by His teachings.

Look for Him everywhere and you will find Him.(green for earth day)

Anyone reading this (thankfully, an unlikely scenario) will begin to wonder at the frequency with which spiders are mentioned in this blog...but I had another encounter with one that has made me think...and gave me a tiny insight into the concept of grace.

I was washing up and (luckily for the spider) before I began to run the water, I noticed a small spider down in the basin. I switched to the other side, all the while keeping an eye on her to see what she would do next. During the course of rinsing of dishes, etc, the poor thing tried repeatedly to climb up the wall of the sink and kept falling down. The thoughts of her slowly starving to death or worse, being inadvertently killed when I next washed dishes, were too unsettling so I determined to "rescue" her. I tried the first thing at hand - a fork - which she did *not* like and scurried away from, even when presented with the handled end.

After several other implements were tried and rejected by said spider, I finally hit upon the drain stopper and that met with her approval. I airlifted her to the counter and watched with satisfaction as she scurried off to the corner, probably never to venture out to the world of the sink again. It made me think of my biggest roadblock to believing in God - that I cannot fathom an infinite being of a vast universe concerning itself with such a small and inconsequential planet such as Earth, much less one of the billions of beings that inhabit it. Obviously, I am much more closely connected to the spider in terms of scale than this being would be to me but still, it made me think that perhaps such a thing could be possible.

I keep thinking of something that lenon said to me the other day. Along the lines that God exists as a kind of karmic force in the universe, making things come together for people, basically working for the good. This also goes along with the (central?) theory behind The Artist's Way (e.g.,"As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected." and "...when we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance.")

I can understand this argument and in fact, I think the basic principle is true; I just don't know that I believe it is true due to the existence of God. Similar to the effect of prayer or meditation, I think that what actually happens is by praying/meditating/chanting affirmations/what have you, we start to expect positive results and to watching and waiting for them so that as soon as an opportunity presents itself, we are ready to act.

I think that it's similar to finding one's way by acting subconsciously rather than consciously. There is certainly a great deal to the universe and to human abilities that are still unexplored. Look at how little medical science knows about the human brain. Perhaps religion somehow taps into some as-yet-unexplained mental abilities? Either way, it does not seem to be to be a sufficient argument for god's existence.

Spent most of the weekend's daylight hours (as much as I could spare from obligations) in the backyard. I spent several hours this afternoon watching butterflies zero in on the choicest flowers, trying to discover the secret to their flight pattern. Then a bird made a minute inspection of the good orange tree; I wondered if it was looking for a nest location since it seemed to spend a great deal of time looking at the nest left there by a previous occupant. There seemed to be quite a large number of birds hanging out this afternoon. Seemed to be around 20 or so just in the laurel oak at any given moment.

I am feeling a bit of relief and also a great deal of sadness too - this morning I spoke to Tommy re: my decision to step down from the leadership team. He was quite understanding and said that he had gone through a similar crisis a year or so ago. It was difficult to do and, like last time, I almost chickened out at the last minute due to the feelings I always experience after singing. But overall, I think it was the right decision to make - mostly for my own mental well-being. I hate feeling like I am living a lie and that is exactly how I'd been feeling the past few months.

I'm reading a new book entitled The Case for Religion by Keith Ward. So far (and to be honest this isn't very far at all), his arguments seem to primarily rest on showing the longevity of religious beliefs and the vast number of people who have believed in various religions. And so far, his arguments are striking me the same way that many of the arguments from many Christians around have: purely personal and therefore difficult for me to believe.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the argument from personal experience. I have FELT personal experiences that seemed to be miraculous, moments of God reaching out to humanity in a way that seemed could only be from God. But I guess I'm just too jaded (especially after being in marketing!) to trust that kind of thing. It's so easy to be misled and/or swayed by emotion and I can just as easily be swayed into negative feelings. I just don't trust them to be any indicator of truth.

So I cannot rely on what I feel or even what I think I've seen. And I certainly cannot trust what other people tell them from their own personal experience. Martyrs are/were absolutely convinced in order to die for their beliefs. But people die all the time for inaccuracies and untruths. Even listing all the intelligent people who have come before me who have believed does not convince me.

Here's hoping that subsequent chapters will provide arguments with a little more *meat*!

My current "investigation" is into the questions of the Bible and inaccuracies. The more I read, the more I find it difficult to explain them away. Some tenets of Christian doctrine that many take issue with I do not consider to be critical to my faith (such as the virgin birth) and therefore am not disillusioned to find that most likely the old testament writings referred simply to a young girl rather than a "virgin" (although this does not seem to be much by way of sign...but whatever).

Outrights untruths though are another matter. I do not know what to do with the historical fact that Herod died four years before Quirinius began his rule or that there is no record of a census/tax anywhere around that time, particularly one requiring people to journey back to their city of origin (which always seemed odd to me in any event). The obvious conclusion seems to be that the writers of the gospels were tailoring their story to fit in with the prophecies concerning the Messiah (i.e., that he would be born in Bethlehem) rather than relating the actual story. I'm having a very hard time reconciling this to what I have always believed: namely, that God's word, while not primarily a historical document, would nonetheless prove to be true to the extent that the human (and therefore fallible) authors were capable. I expect inaccuracies of the sort of an imperfect understanding of science, but the above reeks of manipulation and outright charlatanism.

Perhaps the solution, as has been suggested to me now by a whole range of friends and acquaintances, is to accept that the Bible is not inerrant but to view it as I would the words and works of more contemporary Christians - imperfect and broken tools that God uses to His glory in spite of themselves.

Atheism is not a proof that God does not exist. Instead it is the assertion that theism does not provide an adequate proof of the existence of God.(Dawkins)

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science & reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. (Hitchens, God Is Not Great, p.5)

So this brings me to the crux of my problem: while I have no problem believing that there is god, much of the Bible "contradicts science or outrages reason" so many times. And yes, I know the verse about God's wisdom being wiser than the wisdom of the world but to be honest, this just seems like a bit of a cop-out in my present frame of mind. I keep coming back to the thought that if humans are created in God's image (and given the whole "God is a spirit" doctrine, I'm assuming that's spiritual image rather than bodily), why wouldn't it make sense? Yes, acting in faith can be a spiritual experience but why wouldn't the overall framework fit together? It's one thing to believe that there is a God, that he wants a personal relationship with humans - but why would there be huge discrepancies in the revelation he gave us then?

I am now 2 more books into my search (Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God and Christopher Hitchins' God Is Not Great; I also read Swinburne's Is There a God? in there but didn't find anything new/enlightening) and have reached the tenuous conclusion that there is a god of some sort - in the sense that there is some supernatural being who is eternal and upon whose existence the laws of the universe are based.

Of course, since this is not much more than calling the constants "god", I'm not sure how much progress this is but it feels like a start.

Here are the points which make up Dawkins' central argument (taken verbatim from God Delusion, my comments in orange):

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect... has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.- Agreed


2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. - Agreed


3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer....It is no solution to postulate something even more improbably. We need a "crane", not a "skyhook", for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually & plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity. - This is where I disagree. To me, it makes more sense that an eternal God is a less improbable and easier explanation than something from nothing.


4. The most ingenious & powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection... - Agreed


5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with. - Agreed


6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer. - Agreed, somewhat.

(Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006, pp 157-158)

If there is no God, what existed before? How did life come into being ex nihilo? Despite the difficulty in wrapping my mind around an eternal being who always existed, it is even more difficult to imagine nothingness and then suddenly something. Perhaps I've just had more practice believing the former and I will admit that I have an interest in coming to the conclusion that God exists.

Although maybe that too is a lie. In some ways life would be much easier if there were no God. It would then simply be a matter of making life as rich and meaningful as possible based solely on my own interests. And if there truly is no God, then it doesn't really matter if I do or do not continue to go to church, etc since the net result is ultimately the same and I have the advantage of a community & friendship either way. But that all just seems so....wrong.

I've been researching it online, since Dawkins did not really address the question in God Delusion and have not found anything that satisfactorily answers it for me. All admit that it is a good question...and then most seem to gloss right over it and assume that it happened ("we know that it happened because we exist" which seems like a complete tautology to me.)

Here are some of the better examples I could find:

Big Bang Theory
University of Wisconsin Physics Dept

What existed before the Big Bang?
by Alison Snyder, posted August 21st, 2006.

I have acquired a new book Kenneth R Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution but it almost seems too soon for that. I have no issue with believing evolution; in fact, I suspect that this will go right along with my own theories with regard to how the world began. But I fear moving on to a theory that assumes God's existence without having first definitely proved that it is solid. It seems so precarious to all come down to one tenant - God exists because otherwise something would have come from nothing and that would be impossible.

richard dawkins' the god delusion

The time has come to write about a book that has certainly changed my life in the short-term and perhaps forever. It certainly feels that way at the moment and to say that determining how to react has been an obsession for me this last month would not be an overstatement.

For the first couple of chapters, I was quite unimpressed and found myself thinking that this book would be easily dismissed as the diatribes of a fanatic. Perhaps this lured me into a sense of false security but, for whatever reason, beginning with the third or fourth chapter, I found myself blind-sided with well-reasoned, compelling arguments that have forced me to re-examine my entire belief structure.I will admit that there have always been underlying doubts. What height of arrogance to imagine that a supreme being of this vast universe (over 100 billion billion visible solar systems as a friend of mine has pointed out) would take an interest in a single, solitary planet and more than that, a single solitary human being such as myself. Even assuming that God exists, how can we really know that we have the correct version of worship. Who is to say whether it is Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism that is correct? I admit, my first instinct is to think "But isn't is more practical to continue to ascribe to Christianity since if it is true, it is the only way to avoid eternal damnation and if it is false, it won't matter anyway." Somehow I doubt that a "safety net" belief system would count for much in the final analysis. Besides, without that belief at the core, I cannot go back to that innocent faith anyway. I must figure out what I believe because until I do, everything feels like a lie.