What do you believe?

One of the things that amazes me is how many people want to claim that they don't believe in anything. Really? You don't believe in anything? Do you believe that the sun is coming up tomorrow? Why - because it always has before? Well, of course! How else can we learn things except through observing? We observe that the sun comes up each morning (of course, it doesn't really "come up"), so we conclude that it will continue to do so.

But observation on its own doesn't tell us everything; it doesn't tell us why things happen. We may observe and believe that the sun will come up tomorrow, but we don't understand why it does. People observed the sun rising each morning for thousands of years before someone figured out that it really doesn't "come up" - it only appears to, due to the rotation of the earth. But even that conclusion came from observation - Copernicus observing other aspects of the heavens, and determining that the only way to explain what happens every morning was the revolution of the earth around the sun and the earth's rotation on its axis.

Next step: why does the earth revolve around the sun? Why does the earth rotate? Well, scientists can give us all sorts of answers for those questions: the gravitational pull of the sun keeps the earth in its orbit, rather than just floating around in space; the rotation of the earth is a vestige of the swirling of the materials which eventually formed to create the earth.

But at some point, we get to a cause: what made all that happen? What caused the sun to form? What caused the materials to swirl around to create the earth? Where did it all come from? How did it happen? That, friends, is where we all come to the question of belief: Was it chance - a "big bang"? Or was it God? Now, no matter which answer you choose, you are basing it on belief, not evidence. No one was there to tell us about it (except God, if your belief goes His direction), so the only thing that we can do is to make a decision what to believe based on our interpretation of the evidence.

The funny thing is that the people who come down on the opposite side from God will claim that they don't base their decisions on "faith" but on "fact." The "fact" is that it's all based on faith - theirs is faith in science, and by extension, themselves.

Another "fact" that they conveniently ignore is that "faith" is not opposed to "fact" - "faith" simply interprets the facts differently than those who claim to not believe. And can we just acknowledge that much of the so-called "conflict" between "science" and the Bible is not a conflict between science and the Bible at all; it is between the interpretations of those camps that we've called "faith" and "fact." Science and the Bible are not in conflict because they focus on different questions: "science" focuses on answering the question "how" - and, to a lesser extent, "when" - while the Bible focuses on answering the questions "who" and "why." How did the earth come to exist? What forces were involved in the creation of the world? When did it come into existence? These are questions that science seeks to answer. Why was the world created? Who was responsible for it? These are questions that the Bible addresses. (For the record, I'm talking about the Bible, although the same would be true for most religiously-oriented people. The "why" question has always been at the center of religious faith, because religion seeks to answer the "meaning of life" questions.)

If we start from the premise that God created the world, then we should be willing to accept the idea that he could have done it in any way that he chose. If you want to believe in a "big bang," for instance, then God lit the fuse. The Bible says that God created; it doesn't tell us how. So, if you want to believe that God was not behind it all, that's your choice - but you should also acknowledge that there is some faith involved in your choice - faith that somehow, against the astronomical odds of this all happening by chance, it did.

As for the evidence of God? Well, we'll get to that some other time.

What Would Jesus Do?

I was picking up a pizza last night, and the car next to me had a bumper sticker on it that said, "Jesus would slap the s*** out of you."

Really? You want to go there? Show me one person that Jesus actually did that to, in his 30+ years on earth. It amazes me that people who haven't taken the time to actually read the Bible - which, after all, is the record that we have of what Jesus did and said while here - have the nerve to try to guess what he would do.

And, for the record, that goes for "both sides of the aisle."

So, what would Jesus do? Well, first, he would love people. That's what he did; that's what he told the disciples to do. When he was asked about the greatest commandment, he combined "love God" and "love your neighbor" into one commandment and said that summed it all up. Second, and related to the first, he would point people toward God. You see, love doesn't mean letting someone do whatever they want; I love my kids, but I don't let them do whatever they want. I try to teach them what's right, teach them how to make good decisions, and pray that by the time they're adults some of that has sunken into their heads.

People who want to say that love means letting people do whatever they want are fond of quoting Jesus' statement, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." (John 8:7, NIV) However, they forget to add Jesus' comment to the woman who was at the center of the controversy: "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:11, NIV)

So, Jesus didn't slap the you-know-what out of anybody. Can we just stop trying to discuss the vital issues of life through bumper stickers and soundbites? Or has our collective attention span diminished to the point where that's as long as we can focus?