Living In Grey

While browsing through the news today, I came across this article entitled “U.K. Job Office Apologizes for Anti-Jedi Discrimination.” Now being a Star Wars fan I, naturally, clicked this article and began to read it. Basically, a man dressed as a Jedi was thrown out of the job center, because he refused to remove his hood. You can read the full article here:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/17/uk-job-office-apologizes-anti-jedi-discrimination/

This is not even the craziest part of the article. The craziest part is that there is an actual link to the International Church of Jediism! Before you scoff at the notion of a church revolving its beliefs around a fictitious movie, I’d like to point out what exactly they believe. On their website (link to website is at the bottom of this blog), they have a link to their doctrine. This is what they would like to promote:

1.) “There is one all powerful force that binds the universe together.”
2.) “There are 2 sides to the force, the dark side and the light side.”
3.) “Good and evil are only axioms of the all powerful and unifying force. The force contains all that is good and all that is bad.”

In retrospect, one must ask how this is any different than any other religion. Many believe in an “all powerful force” that is some kind of deity. Many, if not everyone, believe in the powers of good & evil, and many religions have their views on where good & evil came from. Jediism seems very in tune with many religious beliefs. However, I think that Jediism does more harm for Christianity, and organized religion in general, than it does good.

The members of the Jedi Church know that their belief system stems from a fictitious movie. They will whole-heartedly admit this truth! However, they say their concepts and ideals are “innate truths”, things that their followers have always known to be true. They would say that Star Wars gave them the names and terminology to explain something they’ve known to be true, but did not know how to express it. This is how the Jedi Church explains it:

“The sun existed before it was given a name, and it could be revered as God, however, when the sun finally had a human name, it could be written about and communicated with others. The Jedi religion is like the Sun, it existed before a popular movie gave it a name, and now that it has a name, people all over the world can share their experiences of the Jedi religion, here in the Jedi Church.”

It is true that the sun existed before it was given an official name. Unlike the sun, there was a name for the “one all powerful force that binds the universe together” and that force is named Yahweh. The concept of God is nothing new. Documents have shown that over a span of thousands of years, many intelligent people have postulated the existence of God. Followers of Jediism have always had a name for their “all powerful force.” Their problem was that they did not want to believe in it. They wanted to believe in something different.

Another point that the Jedi Church makes about religion in general is that religious texts are “merely words on paper, with no ability to confirm [their] authenticity.” They also say that, “many religions claim to speak the word of God, but the truth is they are only the written words of prophets or followers of the religion. There is no way to prove or deny that was written was the word of God.”

Their claim that there is no way to prove or deny any religious text is the written word of God is true. A Christian cannot prove with absolute certainty that the Bible is the written word of God. Neither can a Muslim or anyone of a belief system that claims their religious texts are the written word of God. But why do we have to be absolutely certain? The fact is we cannot prove with absolutely certainty that the Bible is the Word of God, but we can prove without a shadow of doubt that it is the Word of God. For example, we have Old Testament and New Testament texts that are hundreds of years a part in terms of when they were written and they are 95% the same. The 5% of errors are mostly minor grammar mishaps, such as punctuation and spelling errors. What does this prove? What this proves is that over hundreds of years, these texts have been translated extremely accurately and that the theme of the message is still the same despite the difference in age. There are also a number of archaeological and historical evidence to support the truth of the Bible (i.e. “House of David” Inscription, Jehoiachin’s Ration Tablets, Ossuaries, Dead Sea Scrolls, Masoretic Texts, the Gnostic Gospels, etc.). We also have philosophical arguments to support the belief in God (i.e. The Kalam Cosmological Argument, The Ontological Argument, The Moral Argument, etc.). We even have science to help support the existence of God (i.e. Irreducibly Complex Machines, the Cosmic Constants, etc.). I say all this to say that though we may not be able to confirm with absolute certainty that the Bible is the authentic Word of God, we can, however, prove without a shadow of doubt that this is the Word of God, because we have plenty of evidence to support our belief.

To conclude, the concepts and beliefs the Jedi Church are activists for are nothing new. These things have been around for centuries. The Jedi Church wants to embrace these concepts and beliefs in a different way, but they have no evidence to support their belief system. They even know that what they believe is false and that their ideas originated from a science-fiction movie! The Jedi Church makes Christianity, and organized religion in general, look like a joke and that religion is nothing more than ideas surrounded by myth, superstition, and fantasy. It will be a sad day when anything can be a religion, even if it has absolutely nothing to support the claims, and with the rise of the Jedi Church, that day may not be too far away.

To read more about the Jedi Church, click the following link: http://www.jedichurch.org/

Last night I killed a roach. Nothing else…just a roach. This is nothing strange or unusual for most people, because most people find roaches disgusting. I am one of those people. Roaches are not like kittens. When you see a roach, you don’t want to pick it up and pat its little thorax and say, “Oh what a cute little roachy you are!” When you see a roach, you probably want to kill the creepy bugger. That’s what I did. I killed it, and I felt a little bad afterwards for killing it.

I guess in the hierarchy of importance, animals are always put behind humans. If we run over a raccoon accidently, we don’t worry or feel too bad because it is just a raccoon. If we beat a dog because we have had a bad day, we don’t worry or feel too bad because it is just a dog. If we cut the fin off a shark and throw it back in the ocean, we don’t worry or feel too bad because it is just a shark. Some might say, “Who cares? They are JUST animals and not humans.” I guess in some people’s minds, they do not believe that animals feel pain; that they are incapable of displaying emotions; that they are soulless beings who have no hope in any way. But is this true? Are animals really soulless?

I do not see why we have to think animals are soulless. Granted, I do not have a thorough understanding of metaphysics and different concepts of souls, but I think it should not be considered unreasonable to believe in the possibility that animals have souls. However, I do not want to get into a discourse about metaphysics and souls, but I would rather take a more practical approach. In Matthew 6:26-27, Jesus states, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” In context, Jesus is letting his audience know that they should not store up things on earth, but should work towards storing up things in heaven. Therefore, they need not worry, because just as God provides for birds, he too shall provide for his children who are of more value. Though we are of more value to God, it does not mean that He does not value his other creations (i.e. animals) at all. I think at the least, this passage gives us a strong hint that God cares for his other creations, and that He values them in some way.

My fiancé was telling me a story about how she saw a dead raccoon on the side of the road at her apartment complex. The raccoon had been hit by a car apparently. She said there was a living raccoon next to the dead one, and it kept nudging at it as if to say, “Get up.” My fiancé was heartbroken at the sight of this and told me that, “All that poor raccoon was doing was trying to live and now it is dead.” Animals are like us in a sense, in that we are all trying to live. Bad things happen to animals, and bad things happen to humans. Animals deal with emotions such as joy, fear, sadness, and anger, just like humans. No animal wants to feel pain or die an undeserving death, and neither do humans. I may have no proof, as of right now, that there is sufficient evidence to believe that animals have a soul; however, I think Scripture paints a picture of a loving God who cares for all of His creations, humans and animals alike whether they have a soul or not.

To conclude, I think we should look at Genesis 1:26, which is where God tells man to rule over and take care of His creation. This was the first command given to man and one that we should still obey to this day. In light of this, we have no just reason to mistreat, abuse, or unnecessarily kill any creature…whether that creature is a kitten or a roach. After all, they, like us, are just trying to live.

God and his relationship with time is something that I find very interesting. At the heart of this, are the questions, “What does God know?” and “How does He know it?” I finally finished the book entitled The God Who Risks by John Sanders, and I found it to be a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Near the end of the book, he talks about the idea of “simple foreknowledge” and offers two different views. This article will focus on these two views.

First, we should define what simple foreknowledge is. In the book, John Sanders defines it as, “prior to creation, God had a noetic big bang by which he acquired comprehensive direct vision of every single act that libertarian free creatures would actually do in this world.” It should be noted that John Sanders is a proponent for Open Theism, which is a theology that revolves around the idea of God choosing not to know the future exhaustively. I believe that Sanders wants to stay away from the idea that God knows all things exhaustively, because then it makes God out to be the author of the sins and evil that we commit. However, Sanders does agree that there are some things that God just knows and he must reconcile how God knows these things. Sanders talks about two views in his book that try to answer the question, “How does God know what He knows?” They are the Complete Simple Foreknowledge (CSF) view and Incremental Simple Foreknowledge (ISF) view.

According to Sanders, he defines CSF as “God provisioned before the creation of the world absolutely everything that will occur from beginning to end.” For example, I am an engaged man and God knew this before I even became engaged. Not only did He know I would be engaged, but He also knew when I would be engaged, who I would be engaged to, where I would be when I got engaged, and all the circumstances leading up to and surrounding my engagement. In CSF, God acquires all of this knowledge at once. Unfortunately for CSF, Sanders does not agree with it (who didn’t see that coming?) and he points out some interesting flaws in CSF. First in CSF, God does not prevision what might occur, but what must occur. Divine foreknowledge, by definition, cannot be wrong. If God knows it is going to happen like this, then it must happen how God knows it will happen. The problem with this is if God knows something is going to happen, he cannot change it…he cannot intervene in human history. Some may say that this is not a bad thing or that they are fine in believing in a God who cannot change or intervene for us; however, Sanders makes an interesting point and this is the second thing I want to focus on. Sanders says that, “If a God with CSF possess foreknowledge of his own actions, then the problem is to explain how the foreknowledge can be the basis for the actions when it already includes the actions.” He elaborates more on this point by saying, “Such a deity would then know what he is going to do before deciding what to do. God would learn of his own future actions. But that seems to imply that a script has been written and even God is captive to it. A God with CSF would be unable to plan, anticipate, or even decide – he would simply know. This seems to call the divine freedom into question, making God a prisoner of his own foreknowledge, lacking perfect freedom.” To me, this makes sense. If one holds to the idea that God has known before the beginning what we are going to do, then we must do. Just like us then, if God knows before the beginning what He is going to do, then He must do. CSF makes the idea of God’s foreknowledge greater than God Himself, because He is restricted to what He must do by His own foreknowledge. Nobody, I think, wants to say that God a prisoner of His own foreknowledge, so Sanders offers us another option, that option being ISF.

“When God is foreseeing the future he only sees parts of it at a time – not the complete whole at once as in CSF – and learns what will happen in the future incrementally or step by step.” This is how Sanders defines ISF. Think of it like this: God is watching a tape of the future and at certain points he stops the tape to interject what He wants to do. He then pushes play, and lets the tape continue to see how His creations will respond to what He has done. At another point, He stops the tape again. Based on how His creations responded, God decides what He will do and then pushes play. This metaphor I offer is extremely close to the way Sanders puts it in his book. So prior to the creation, this is how God comes to foreknow everything in human history. The benefits to ISF allow God to freely interject in history, it does not undermine God’s divine freedom, and it allows for us to have some form of freedom and decision making abilities. Still, I feel that there are questions and holes in this option. How does time progress if God is constantly stopping to interject and respond to creation? Granted, God acquires this foreknowledge before even creating; but if that is the case, how does He reach the point to create? Also, just like in CSF, it seems that God is imprisoned by His foreknowledge in this view as well. However, this view is more beneficial to having a genuine relationship with God. Still, once God knows what is going to happen, it must happen that way. If that is case, then what is God doing right now if we hold to believing in ISF? Is He just watching what He already knows?

Out of the two views, I think (as of right now) that ISF is the better option. ISF permits us to respond and to act, it takes away from God being the author of our sins and evil, and God is not totally imprisoned to His own foreknowledge. I am curious to know what other people think about these two views and what I have said. Do you agree with CSF or ISF? Why do you agree with one and not the other?