things that don't make sense

In the town that I live in (Coleman, Texas), there is an interesting thing that has been done with the streets. Intersecting Commercial Avenue, we have First through Thirteenth Street. However, intersecting these streets is Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue and Fifth Street intersect with each other. How did this happen?

Well, however it happened, it did. When I first encountered this, I was shocked speechless. Both signs said "5th" in large letters, and I failed to notice the tiny letters saying "st." and "ave." After a while, I got used to it. I don't really notice the strangeness anymore, I just keep going.

Christians tend to do that also. There will be some incongruity that doesn't quite fit, that doesn't make sense with the things we've been taught. However, our lives are much to busy to spend all our time trying to think through these things, and so we just push ahead. Eventually, we just forget about it.

Here's one of them:

Look up at the stars. These tiny points of light are massive balls of flame billions of lightyears away. A lightyear is the distance it takes light to travel in one year. So if the earth is only a few thousand years old, as it is according to the Bible, how could the light have reached us yet? How can this be?

At some point in the future, I will write about my theory as a comment to this post. However, in the meantime, I would like to hear your ideas, because they could (probably) be better than mine.

A Story

Today I'm going to tell a story.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Jimmy. Jimmy, when he was very little, went to church every Sunday. In Sunday-school he learned all about Jesus. Jesus was a friendly-looking man dressed in bright colors who lived in drawings populated by other bright and colorful people. For some reason, every once in a while, those pictures were less bright and more gray. The Jesus person looked sad in those pictures, and was usually nailed to the wooden thing at the top of the church steeple.

Then, Jimmy got bigger. He moved up to the next Sunday-school class, were he began to memorize verses from the Bible. He memorized things like, "for God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life." He didn't really know what it meant, but it sure sounded nice. It was often abbreviated with things like, "God so loved the world," when the pastor noticed people getting bored.

Jimmy kept growing, and one day he realized that he was supposed to be actually doing something, and not just memorizing Bible verse. So he found one of his friends in school, and invited him to church. He was immensely proud of his good deeds, and decided he should do even more.

When he got into his teenage years, he graduated from Sunday-school to the Youth Group. The Youth Pastor there was always talking about "witnessing to the lost." So he decided to try it out, since that's what a godly person should do.

So Jimmy told one of his friends about Jesus. This friend was an atheist, and told Jimmy so. "But why?" Jimmy asked.

His friend had lots of convincing arguments. Jimmy just laughed and said, "well, you're wrong. The Bible says that--"

"Wait, I don't believe in the Bible," his friend said.

Then Jimmy was confused. Now what should he say? So he went to his Youth Pastor, who showed him several verses in the Bible that demonstrated how true it must be. Jimmy, once again armed to the teeth with knowledge, went after the unbelievers once again. But once again, he was conquered. The fact that he was using the Bible to prove itself for some reason didn't work.

So Jimmy began to have doubts. If there was no good reason to believe in the Bible, why should he believe it? He also started to realize how much better life could be if he didn't have to follow all those silly rules. This, of course, meant the end of Jimmy's time in church. He looked back upon it as his "religious phase," and laughed at all those people who actually still believed such an old-fashioned idea.

The big question is, why is this story so common? What are we doing wrong? I think the answer if fairly simple: the church is only teaching the easy things. We say, "this is what the Bible says," because that's easy. But we don't explain why we should believe the Bible, which is a necessary piece of knowledge in order to survive in this world.

Maybe it's time to figure this out.
Mitchell

Leading Worship

I have begun a new thing (for me). I now lead worship for a very small group on Saturday evenings at a not-quite-church. This is the reason why I got the electric guitar shown in a previous post. This is a thing I have wanted to do for a long time, and only in the last few weeks have actually started.

However, I have discovered a problem with our current system that we call "worship." Basically, it's the fact that we have "worship leaders." You see, this term implies that there is someone "leading" the worship, which is true. However, then we look at the worship leader. In order to be accurate, the leader of worship has to be God, but the worship leaders we have are only humans.

So here's a better term: "worship helper." All they really do, after all, is give people someone to look at while praising God.

Somehow, though, I don't think that it's going to catch on.

Information

We are living in the communication and information age. At this time, communicating with a person on the other side of the globe is as easy as talking to your next-door neighbor. It's about as easy to gather information as it is to gather oxygen. It has become as the song says "it's a small world after all." Plus, the invention of jets allows us to get to anywhere on the planet in two days, three at the most.

This has done a lot of things for the planet. For example, the information increase has allowed us to learn faster and easier than ever before, which makes knowledge available to nearly everyone. And when everyone has a basic understanding of the workings of the world, this helps prevent superstitions and false cures for disease that lead to worse ailments.

But there is also a problem with this constant flow of information. It has deculturized our world (I just made that word up, by the way. It means to remove all culture from something). Because we can get anywhere quickly, we have begun thinking that everyone is like us. This is not so. The cultures of the countries across the ocean differ from ours in sometimes enormous ways.

One thing in particular is often forgotten: Jesus was from one of the cultures differing the most from ours. The Middle East is nothing like the United States. The Middle East today is different than it was 2,000 years ago. So to properly understand Jesus, the culture He came from has to be understood.

I can't give you a good understanding of this. There's too much to learn, and I don't yet know a tenth of it all. But I can give you a little piece of information about His homeland.

Jesus was a Jew. The Jewish people have a complex history, which can be found in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (as I said in another post, the Bible is the word of God. However, it is debated whether the Apocrypha is "inspired." Either way, though, it has been shown to be an accurate historical document). About one hundred years before His birth, there was a large war between the Hebrews and everyone else over how they could worship God. This can be read about in first and second Maccabees. Somehow, I must think that this was as important to them as our wars are to us.

What does this mean? Well, it's sort of like this: imagine that Hitler had won World War II. His grandson is ruling the world, killing people he doesn't like, destroying forests and causing many other problems. This is the kind of world Jesus was born into.

So what can be done with this? I don't really know, this is just what I wrote. Hopefully one of you can make some use of it.

Goodbye, valiant reader,
Mitchell

The Reason For The Cow

Objections have been raised by several people about the picture I have used for my profile. It is a cow formerly owned by my family and formerly named Sarah. Currently, this cow is in our freezer, fridge and stomachs. The objection is over the fact that the picture is one of a now-dead thing.

However, this is why I don't think it matters:

The picture is supposed to be one of me, not that of a cow. So if it were merely a cow, the picture would be flawed. But this cow is one that I have assisted in eating. So actually, various parts of the cow are now a part of me. So really this picture, when it was taken, could be captioned "future Mitchell."

So that is why I have a picture of a deceased cow on my blog.

The Most Important Question In The World

Whose side are you on?

Christians

Now that I have proven Christianity (to my own satisfaction, at least), I will make the following statement: Christians are stupid. They are not universally stupid, but many are foolish nonetheless. This can be summed up in the phenomena of evolution.

I don't personally believe in evolution. I don't think that the evidence supports it. I think that scientists should carefully search through what little evidence there is, and carefully reconsider the theory. However, many Christians have a better idea how to disprove it.

"The Bible says the world was made in six days, so evolution is wrong."

What a brilliant idea. It's sort of like being your own witness in court. If the Bible is the thing in question here, then how can we use it as evidence? Christians are killing themselves with their stupidity. Those of us who think (yes, I am including myself in the thinking group) don't want to be lumped together with the others, but we are anyway. We're technically part of the same religion, and so therefore we must be as stupid as the rest.

So let's start thinking, and stop saying "I want it to be this way and so it is." All we're doing is making ourselves look like two-year-olds.

Islam and Christianity

This really is the final comparison. So far, no problems have been seen in Judaism, and enough evidence has been put forward to let us rely on it for the moment. So now, let's look at Christianity and Islam.


First of all, Christianity is the completion of Judaism. In Judaism, there is prophecy of a Messiah, the Son of God who will come to rescue the earth from sin. Christianity fulfills that prophecy through Jesus. Since you (the reader) probably know at least a little about Christianity already, I don't feel the need to explain in great detail who Jesus was. Let's just leave it at this:


In the Torah (the Jewish holy book, in the Bible the Old Testament), there are over three hundred prophecies of the Messiah, what He will do and how He will do it. These prophecies are very specific. Jesus fulfills every one of them. Unless shown otherwise, Christianity fully completes Judaism.


The problem, however, is Islam. Islam was founded by a man named Muhammad. He claimed to be a prophet--the last prophet, in fact--and that he was given the ultimate revelation from God. Basically, the revelation was that Christianity and Judaism were all wrong. Their supposed "words from God" had been distorted somehow, lost in the translation somewhere.


He claimed to be restoring the way of the old prophets, such as Noah, Abraham and Moses. One of the core beliefs of Muhammad was that there is only one God. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is considered blasphemous by Muslims, as is the fact that we claim Jesus is the Son of God (they belive Him to be a prophet, but not God).

So Islam has a strong objection to the deity of Jesus by claiming that the Torah is inaccurate. This would mean that the prophecies concerning Jesus are irrelevant.

Islam and Christianity were both built on the foundation of Judaism, so they should be proved by the same way Judaism was proved. Judaism's proof came through its moral law, so if one of its branches is correct then the moral law should be just as relevant to us as the Jewish law. Christianity fits with this: Jesus Himself stressed many times the importance of the law.

Islam does not fit with this. Their law, in several cases, is nearly the opposite of Judaism. In other places it contradicts itself. So in this regard, Christianity is superior, and Islam doesn't make it. If a branch differs from the root, the branch is in error. Does this conclusively prove anything? No. But it is, however, enough for me. So I remain happy with my religion. However, I'm not going to even start on denominations.

The Final Three

I am now on my final post of this whatever-it-might-be on various possible truths. This will be the largest and most complex of them all--Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I have put the three together for a good reason: Christianity and Islam are both derived from Judaism, and thus the proving-wrong of Judaism would cancel out both of those. Their purpose, essentially, is to complete Judaism in some way (this is less accurate of Islam than Christianity, but more on that below).

So, to begin, Judaism must go under the lights. Let's look at what it is first of all:

Judaism was the first strictly monotheistic religion in history. According to their beliefs, God existed when there was nothing. He then created the universe out of nothing. This God, according to their belief, is actually three in one. This is characterized in the use of the word "Elohim" to describe Him. This is a pluralized word, in Hebrew, meaning that there is more than one.

The next part is that this God takes part in the lives of humanity, by giving them laws to obey, and then rewarding or punishing them according to their obedience to these laws. Because no one is able to follow the law perfectly, sacrifices must be made in order to appease the wrath of God and take the punishment deserved by us.

No problem, so far. No flaws so far, but also no evidence in favor. So let's compare it to life.

First of all, the idea that we are imperfect. This is not a strictly Jewish belief, but it lines up very well with what we can see in our own lives. Where do you think the phrase "only human" came from? We recognize without being told that we are missing something. But if we are imperfect, there must be a standard.

What is that standard? The standard, according to Judaism, is the Law. Interestingly, upon looking at the book of Leviticus, everything makes perfect sense. For some reason, it seems natural to us that it is wrong to kill. Why? If we came about by chance, we would need to kill simply to survive. Yet this makes sense. Or how about this: the Sabbath. Although some say the Sabbath is no longer relevant, this doesn't matter. The Sabbath makes perfect sense.

In the Soviet Union, at the height of Communism, their leaders decided to change a week to the length of ten days. The seven-day week comes clearly from the Bible, and they wanted an atheistic country. To make a long story short, they had to go back to the seven-day week. Nine days between each break doesn't work. Neither does it work to have four in between each break. The only system that works is a seven day week.

So the law fits with what works in our lives. This fits with the fact that the designer of the law is the same as the designer of humanity. So this is a rather strong point for Judaism.

As it turns out, this is not the last post in this set. Due to the current length, Islam and Christianity will be brought up tomorrow.