Contemplations on Christianity

As anyone reading this may have gathered, I don't see the Bible as consistent. It will tie your mind in knots, if you try to believe every word in it. I'll talk about the conflicts inherent in the Bible sometime soon, but I feel like the first thing to talk about is the notion that the Bible is literally true.

Some Christians that believe the Bible is literally true, ...and that it is the "The Word of God". They gloss over the contradictions in the Bible by saying "God's ways are mysterious". They say we are meant to have faith, and avoid the pitfalls of believing we can interpret the Bible ourselves, avoid the pitfalls of logic, and pride in our minds.

I cannot believe in a God that is sitting out there "being tricky" and trying to "trip us up". I think it is hard enough to live a virtuous life without having God make things difficult. The God I hear Christ talking about would not do that. He is a God of compassion. He is the father, hoping for the prodigal son to return. He may say "Go, and sin no more", but He makes efforts to help repentance up to the last moment. He doesn't dig pitfalls in the path.

We know that, in terms of fact, the Bible is not literally correct. The universe was not created some 6000 years ago. To believe otherwise, we would have to believe that God created a universe full of physical evidence that it is older than it really is. We would have to believe that God created dinosaur bones, but never created dinosaurs. We would have to believe God created light in the middle of space, travelling through space so that it appears to be coming from suns or galaxies 10s of thousands of light years away, too far to have travelled here in the time the Bible says the stars existed.

The thing is, believing the Bible literally means we would have to believe in God as a "trickster" out to make things hard for us. We'd have to believe in a God who engages in a monstrous, incredibly complex deception. We would have to believe in a God so perverse that he gives us a mind, and then makes the condition of being virtuous that we entirely reject everything our mind tells us. We'd have to believe in a God so desperate for our faith and so insecure that He demands as "proof" of our faith that we abandon every other notion, idea, fact or reality we can perceive.

Personally, this is not an idea of God I can believe in.

I know it breaks the rhetorical flow, but I won't be too apologetic for the consideration of history that follows. A lot of our misunderstanding of things, and strange ideas such as "fundamentalism", come from the ignorance of how we arrived at where we are, and where we came from, and the struggles that went on to get here.

Historically, St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) in his work sought enunciate the place of reason in the Church, and built many of his ideas on the science of the Greeks. One of his central messages is that we cannot know God, the "Prime Mover". The only way we can know anything of his plans is through what he has done, his "effects", by understanding this world in a rational, scientific manner. This idea became central in the Church, and is one of the reasons Aquinas was made a saint.

The Church later rejected the idea of reason and rationality. In 1633, it condemned Galileo, mathematician, astronomer and physicist, for the crime of saying the Earth turned on its axis, and rotates around the sun. He was tried, convicted of heresy, and placed under house arrest for the last 8 years of his life.

The Church is a little slow at times, especially where accepting reality comes in. I mean that literally. Reality seems to be difficult for many Christians to accept, and this includes Church leaders. To his credit, Pope John Paul II was brave enough to revisit the Church decision, something earlier Popes did not do.

It is distressing, to have Christians running around denying things anyone with an open mind realises must be true. We have proof that science is mostly correct all the time. Most 8 year olds in the developed world know the world turns, and that is why day and night happen.

For the Church to deny this means they have to either just put their fingers in their ears and say "NO, No, NO.." as loud as they can so they can't hear, or they have to invent some really phenomenal conspiracies to explain away many things we know.

I do not feel comfortable where my fellows in religion are in denial or are loopy conspiracy theorists in alfoil helmets. I believe that this is not what Christ wanted. He was not loopy. He didn't insist the world was flat, or that belief in absurdity was a condition of faith, or a test of our love of God. That came later, and was invented by other, troubled, minds.

I do not believe the world was made in 6 days, about 6000 years ago. I don't believe He created day and night on the first day, and the Sun on the 4th. I don't think the earth is fixed in one place, or that the Earth is the centre of the universe. I think that's all total fantasy and codswollop, and that a lot of people with far too much time on their hands have spent far to many resources trying to support or "prove" absurdity.

The saddest thing about that, is that it ignores a lot of thinking (real thinking) by devout Christians like St Thomas Aquinas. I think St Thomas was correct. God gave us minds, and we can discover something of the workings of God by looking at the works of God. Scientists like Copernicus were clerics, not heretics. They saw nothing contradictory in using their minds, and having faith in Christ's words.

Nature is amazing, a true miracle. The creationists miss that, in their hurry to deny reality and "prove" nonsense. One of my most profoundly spiritual insights into creation came not from Creationists, but from a biochemistry professor. He was teaching biochem, and touched on the origin of life. He mentioned various theories, the "warm soup in the primeval ocean" theory, and noted that we have found in space bits of DNA, and have also found that DNA fragments and other biochemicals could be produced by replicating what the oceans may have been like, and imitating a lightning strike.

Then after a few seconds of silence, he said "It really doesn't explain the origin of life, though. Biochemically, it is not enough to have bits of protein, or DNA. What is needed is DNA that codes for everything necessary to replicate itself. It would need to code for the right RNA, code for the proteins, code for enzymes, code for molecules that can create energy through metabolic pathways, code for a barrier to contain itself and code for what it needs to reproduce itself. That is the minimum it needs to code for. I can't imagine that happening in any way by accident. I don't see how life could have been created accidentally." (thoughts on Creation)

What creationists miss, by being ignorant of science, is that Science itself does not deny the notion of creation. Knowing the real wonder of life and the Universe, it is obviously a miracle, though not in the tightly defined theological sense of that word. But knowing how big, and how wonderful, existence is, we can recognise that it's beginning points, 15 billion years ago, are still a mystery. The origin of life is still a mystery. The moment of creation just occurred very long ago, and is a lot more complex than the Bible ever imagined. It is a bigger miracle than the Bible states.

The Bible is not the work of God. The Bible is a record of our human attempt to understand God's work. It was written by people in the language and with the understanding of the time. It is not perfect and immutable. It contains contradictions. It contains primitive notions of reality that seemed right at the time, but we now know are wrong. It has been changed and edited by men. The Old Testament is specifically a history of the Jewish people. It is not a history of the world, or of all the peoples in it, it is a tribal history of the Jews.

Bottom line, I don't believe that God is so immature, and insecure that He needs to continually demand "sacrifice" of rational thought so that we "prove" our love for Him. To have such a belief would be to see God as a pathetic and dysfunctional being, and I am more prepared to believe in the error of the followers of Christ than in the dysfunctionality of God himself.

The Bible is a book of religion. It contains guidelines for living, it is historically interesting, and contains great works of literature, as well as more average writing. More importantly, it was the book of religion in which Christ gave his teachings. But Christ's teachings may have been given in the context of Judaism, but they went far beyond that context. Christ was a Jew, but he was being condemned by his own people as a heratic. Christ was born into a Jewish world, but his teachings began a fundamentally different religion, Christianity.

My faith is in the teachings of Christ. I have faith that God is not a trickster, not insecure, not immature. I believe in the God of Christ, the God of mercy and compassion. I also believe in the beauty of the world, and the sanctity of God's creation. And knowing the reality of the miracle of creation does not in any way lessen my wonder in experiencing, or my faith the the God who lives within every particle of it.