Agnostic Theism

A little over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about a crisis of faith that was induced by a very powerful email sent to me by Steve Wells, the editor of the Skeptics’ Annotated Bible. If you don't care to follow the link and read it, the short version is that he claims followers of God are a lot like Trump supporters: it doesn't seem to matter what the object of adoration actually does, it's somehow all excusable because we just have faith he's terrific.

I see this in Trump supporters, but as a Christian who is appalled at Trump’s politics and personal life, it's jarring to see that sort of misplaced devotion framed with God at the center. It's especially jarring because really, he's right. Christians are going to do that; it's sort of our thing, isn't it?

There's a lot of unsavory stuff in the Bible, but we just assume God had a good reason for drowning everyone in the story of Noah. There's a lot of unsavory stuff in history, but you chalk it up to “free will” and maybe man's fallen nature. Then, there's a lot of unsavory stuff that we're living through right here in the present, and for me at least, it gets harder to explain how there can be an all-knowing, all-powerful God who supposedly loves humanity.

Watching the acceleration of genocide in Gaza for the past 16 months, as Israelis seem to have no conscience and the American government seems to have no limit to what we will support, it got to me. I was suffering just watching it unfold on my phone; how much more the Palestinians actually living through it?

And then Americans handed over the government to President Trump once again, with virtually the blessing of the Democratic party, who showed very little interest in winning through taking the moral high ground. President Trump, upon taking office, quickly took us on a refresher course on the Third Reich, attacking transgender people, rounding up non-white people into concentration camps, and consolidating political power.

Where is God in all of this? I've been struggling for a year with my faith, and in that time, God has answered none of my prayers and the world has proceeded to go from bad to worse. It feels like something is broken, both in the world and in my connection to God. I've been through hard times, and it felt like God was somehow with me through the struggles. But this last year? I talk to God and it feels like nobody is listening.

I see so many videos of the Palestinians in this brief ceasefire coming home to see Gaza in piles of rubble and bones, and they praise God to be alive. Where does that faith come from? I can't fathom it. I only praise God that so many of my friends and family are not alive to see the destruction of what they once held dear. Is that really faith of any sort, or just cynicism?

I continue to call myself a Christian because I don't know what to label what I seem to have become in the last year. I've prayed, probably more than any other time in my life. I have gone to church and studied the Bible. I've talked to pastors. I just keep wondering that same question; where is God in all of this? He doesn't seem to be in Palestine or America.

Election Day:An open letter to God

Dear God,

This is election day.

I already voted via mail, and I prayed that I would make the right decisions concerning my vote. I prayed that I would vote according to Your will, and that I would have a clear conscience about it, whatever Your will might be. I also know that You love us and care about what we feel, and I want to ask You for your grace and mercy on this, democracy's Holy Day.

Lord, I don't know who You want to hold office, but I do know that whoever does, they will have been put there by Your will. I pray that I and my fellow Christians would not cease to pray for the well-being of our next President, no matter who he (or she) might be, no matter their political affiliations or personal beliefs, no matter how close this election gets. I pray that the new President would be kept in good health, would be protected form harm, and would be focussed on doing the best he can to lead our country towards a brighter future.

I know that we as a country are in the middle of two wars which have stretched longer than most people thought, and I pray that you would bring resolution to these conflicts. I pray, not that peace would reign on earth, because I know that will never come before You do, but that the wars that we do fight will be fought for justice and righteousness, not for greed or hate, and that they would be resolved with minimal bloodshed.

Lord, I pray for our economy. I do not pray for easy answers and a speedy recovery, but for the people of the world who have lived in prosperity to experience enough struggle that they see money in itself is not the answer to their problems. I pray that people would turn to You in their troubles, and find the grace they truly need for their souls, not their wallets.

I pray for my children, and for all the children of the world. I pray that their parents and grandparents will make choices that will leave them a world where they can live in freedom and peace, and that we would manage to set a better example for them than we have, both politically and spiritually. Let us all realize that while we hope and vote for a government that will solve the problems of the world, in the end, it is us as individuals who have the power to shape it and do what's right, and no government can fix the problems of a people who choose to live with selfishness in their hearts.

That is why most of all, I pray for me, Lord. Shape me into the man that You would have me be. Let me be everything my family and community needs of me. Let me look on others, whether they be family and friends or strangers, with compassion. Let me listen for Your voice guiding my path in Your ways, so that I can be an agent of love, not hate.

Lord, I thank You for the gift of prayer, that You, King of the universe, would allow us to talk to You, and hear our prayers. I offer up this prayer in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The book of leviticus

I'm sure I've mentioned it to everyone who knows me, and yet, I never feel like anyone knows, because in a sense, I don't even know it about myself: I am Jewish. Or am I?

See, my father was (and still is) Jewish, but my mother is not; at least not in the technical sense. For most people, this implies that I also am not in the technical sense. Yet I was raised by my father to believe that I was a Jew, and he called me one, and so I genuinely thought I was one. Anyway, a large portion of society feels that having any Jewish ancestry at all makes one a Jew.

Certainly I will always remember a moment in my freshman year of high school when I was waiting patiently behind a fellow student who was trying to negotiate another few points on his physics exam, and the instructor told him he would have to take his grade as it stood. This classmate of mine actually slapped his test on the teacher's desk and exclaimed, "I can't believe this. That's so Jewish!" This was probably the first time in my life that I lost my temper at an insult not leveled directly at me. This guy was bigger, stronger, taller, and older than me, and I saw red and gave him a shove and said, "Oh hell no! I don't know what problems you have with your grade, dude, but *I* am Jewish, and you owe my people an apology!" I don't know if I had steam coming out of my ears or what, but I've never seen someone back down from me so quickly.

But am I Jewish? I won't take anyone using a racial (or similar: sexist? homophobic?) slur around me without getting a bit ticked off anyway, but of course, this was a bit more personal. I can't help but identifying with the Jewish people to some degree, no matter what I might be told about the fact that my status as a half-Jewish, non bar mitzvah Christian puts my Jewish identity at question. Oddly, to some extent while one would expect the Torah--a document chronicling the creation of the Jewish nation and defining its laws--to give a definition of what a Jew is, really any sort of official definition has come later in extrabiblical writings.

If I stay on the originally unintentional thread of these last few musings, I suppose I would do well to mention A Jew Today by Elie Wiesel, a book of writings in which the writer explores what it means to be a Jew in 20th century America that I happened to pick up from the same used-book bin where I picked up my copy of Marx/Engels. A much larger book than the Manifesto, I haven't had time to read more than small portion of the first chapter, in which he talks about how often being a Jew means being a stranger in the gentile world, where people will always look at you as something strange and foreign. It's an uncomfortable feeling, and yet it's a feeling that the average Jew holds within themself with a great deal of pride.

A book that I did read recently that's in a very important way about being a Jew is Responsa from the Holocaust, by Rabbi Ephraim Oshry. The author details what it was like to be a Jew in Lithuania during the horror that was World War II, and how it effected the Jews of Europe. Throughout this horrible time, when the lives of European Jews were daily on the brink of total destruction, individual Jews continued to consult with their rabbis concerning how to practice their religion in the midst of persecution. If Nazis seem to be more likely to attack Jewish men with beards, should we shave them off? We only get the food that the Nazis let us have, and it's clearly not kosher meat, what can we do about that? Is it a crime to commit suicide when all indications are that you are not long for the world anyway, and the powers that be are seeing to it that every day you live is intense suffering?

It's tragic, but at the same time inspiring. These people did their best not to let their oppressors keep them from doing what they believed to be right, even seemingly little things (to a non-Jew) such as whether they should say Sabbath prayers on a Saturday when they were suffering through forced labor seven days a week. These Jews held strongly to their beliefs and identity in the face of torture and death. How many people today avoid stating their beliefs openly simply for fear of ridicule?

The thing that really struck me about these stories however, was where Oshry and his fellow rabbis allowed exceptions to general rules and where they did not. Can't find kosher food? Well, you can't starve yourself, so eat what you can. A 12-year-old boy wants to have his bar mitzvah ceremony early because he suspects he will not live to see 13? The boy seems mature and earnest in his desire, so luckily he is granted his request, and indeed he died a short time later.

But where were exceptions *not* granted? Perhaps oddly enough, in the one place that might have been the one sure-fire way to save their own lives: the rabbis never once wavered from their conviction that pretending not to be a Jew was an unacceptable compromise, although it would seem that it was for this one fact that they were being killed. Steal if it takes care of your family, kill if it's in self-defense, defy the law if you believe it unjust, and lie: lie about where you live, what you do for a living, how old you are, who's in your family, but never, NEVER lie about being a Jew.

It's a strange thing to an outsider perhaps, and it may even be strange to Jews themselves, but when all else has been stripped away, either by an evil, tyrannical government or by an individual's apathy towards the strictness of the Mosaic Law, there still remains an essential fact of identity that is central and indelible to Judaism. The Jews of Europe essentially said to the world that you could take away their beards and special clothing, take away their kosher foods and festivals, take away their temples and holy books, but you can never take away their Jewishness.

Five favorite quotes

So my friend Marauder tagged me to post about my five favorite quotes. I don't know why I'm responding, as it's just going to encourage him and others to keep doing things like this, but well, here I am. Here are five quotes I'm rather fond of, in no particular order:

"From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God." -Jonah 2:1

I might as well start with my favorite verse from the Bible, seeing as I'm a Bible blogger. I'm rather fond of this verse because there's something simultaneously absurd and profound about the idea of praying from inside a fish (or whale?). It seems like an entirely unlikely place to be praying, but on the other hand, most people would do exactly that upon finding themselves in such a position, and in Jonah's case, if he had bothered to talk to God earlier in his story, he probably wouldn't have been there.

"Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds." -Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

I like this quote, because whether or not Stephenson is a Christian (I have no idea) I think he's hit on a profound truth. I think just about every religion, including Christianity, is like a shiny gold coin with a mountain of crap piled on top of it. Even in a good church, how much of the time one spends in there is spent studying the basic, fundamental truths of Christianity that really matter? Not that you could do that 100% of the time, because all the extra stuff is important, too, if it happens to be tangential to the fundamental truths rather than central.

"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." -Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

This quote by Crick is one I find humorous. As you may have gathered from some of my previous posts, I'm not completely set against the concepts of evolutionary theory, and actually am often found to be an advocate among fellow Christians for the concept of evolution in a general sense. However, I've always thought that the amazing complexity of the DNA molecule points very strongly to the idea of an intelligent designer. I think it's funny that Crick here seems to be agreeing with that assessment, but insists that any serious scientist must keep his mind closed to such an idea.

"A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing everyday without repeating himself." -Charles M. Schulz

A lot of people seem to feel that the comic strip Peanuts got sort of old and tired towards the end, or that it was never quite as good as the earlier strips. This may be true, but keep in mind that Schulz was drawing the thing for fifty years! One of my favorite blogs is The Comics Curmudgeon, in which the writer rants daily on what's really really bad on the newspaper comics page. I love newspaper comics, and consider it a wonderful art form all of its own, but it's true that there is a lot of bad stuff out there. At the same time, consider how difficult it must be to come up with 365 new jokes every year, and to draw a picture for each one. Even though I laugh along with Josh's other readers at his blog, I appreciate the challenge that these artists are facing, and bow down to even the mediocre ones as being far more talented than I probably ever will be.

" 'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
" 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
" 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
" 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' " -Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

I feel like this a lot. (Alice, or the cat? Take your pick.)