Bible Analysis

I have heard recently people talking about watered-down Christianity and I wonder what that means specifically?  If you can tell me what that means to you, please post a comment. It obviously concerns the purity of Christian faith, but which aspects of faith are being diluted? 

To some people I think it is primarily talking about how literally one reads the Bible.  The idea is that if it is not read literally, then it can be interpreted to mean anything and thus has lost all meaning.  I can understand this line of reasoning, even if I disagree with it.  Seeing the Bible as art instead of history does allow some room for interpretation, but it is not so free that it loses meaning.  God speaks to us through His word and says different things to different people.  There are multiple levels of meaning which is why it is beautiful.  The literalist approach is well-meaning, but it destroys this beauty and puts God in a box.  Even literalists disagree with each other on what the Bible says, so literalism is also ineffective.

Others may talk about watered-down Christianity because they are conservative.  They grew up with specific beliefs and practices and to deviate from them would be incorrect -- Tradition rules.  All other beliefs are simply wrong.  To these people watered-down Christianity is liberal because it seeks to change the status quo, which is bad.  I wonder if they spend more energy worrying about what other people believe than they do about what they believe themselves.  Maybe this is because spiritual growth in such a rigid system is inhibited.  Perhaps I am being a little hypocritical though, since I am also concerned about what other Christians believe.  I explore my Christian faith too; I just don’t blog about it as much.  Maybe I should.

Some people that talk about watered-down Christianity take pride in believing the incredible.  The more incredible the story, the more faith it takes to believe it.  When people say they believe in the incredible they are displaying their faith as badge of honor for all to see.  To make these stories more palatable and easier to believe would be to give heaven to the undeserving.  Watering-down Christianity to them is anything that allows people to accept it with less faith.  Making it more believable would be bad.  Making it real instead of magic would be very bad.  Without the magic, what else is there?  It wouldn’t take any faith at all to believe and everyone would be saved.  Is that bad?

I am certain that not everyone can take Christianity full-strength, so to speak.  If you grew up with it, it may be easier to do.  If you did not grow up in a Christian home going to church every week, then the incredible stories told by “pure” Christians can put people off and keep them away from Jesus.  I know this from experience.  I am a Christian now, but I had to look at it differently to get there.  I could not take it “full-strength”.  I did not have a dramatic conversion experience and I don’t think that one is needed to become a Christian.

Please tell me what you think.

 

If there is a god, why does he allow tsunamis to kill thousands of people?  Why do innocent people suffer?  Why do the good die young?  How can evil exist? This question has been posed since the beginning of monotheism.  Before that, when people worshipped idols, they reasoned that the god that they worshipped was not powerful enough.  They just switched to the latest and greatest god to worship and hoped for the best.  When monotheism came about people had one god that was all-powerful (omnipotent).  This problem of evil then appeared.  There was no, more powerful, god to switch to.  So why did God allow evil to exist if He was all-powerful?

Let’s assume that we conclude that there must be no God.  Then we have to also conclude that there is no such thing as good and evil.  If there is no God, then we are just animals following the natural laws of the universe and everything happens according to those laws.  We have no free will because we are just biological machines.  Thoughts are just chemical reactions in our brains.  What we call good are things that we like and evil are things that we don’t like.  We don’t have any choice about this though, we ARE just machines right?  People cannot be anymore evil than a green bean (although my daughter thinks they are pretty evil J).  Stuff happens and then you die.

When I considered that scenario I didn’t like the conclusion because it was depressing.  That is no reason to deny the truth though, except that I also didn’t believe that it was true.  People are more than a little different from other animals.  Are chimps going to start their own space program some day?  When was the last time people performed for an audience of dolphins?  While we ARE animals, we are also more than that.  I believe that we DO have free will, and thus the ability to distinguish between good and evil and the ability to do good and evil.  A tomato is not evil even if you get sick and die after eating it (assuming you are innocent).  If a person poisons a tomato and then feeds it to you knowing you will die, then they could be considered to be evil, or at least choosing to do evil at that moment.  Since this is what I and most other people believe, let’s look at the problem of evil in that light.

Natural disasters have always happened.  They used to be blamed on the gods being angry in ancient times because they did not understand what caused them.  Today we understand a lot more and are not so quick to blame God.  Or are we?  If someone you love suffers or dies as a result of a natural disasteryou might blame God because you believe that God is all-powerful and could have stopped it.  This is the real problem, the problem of omnipotence. 

There is a paradox with omnipotence:  Can God create a stone so heavy that He could not lift it?  There is also the assumption that God is good and thus cannot do evil.  This is a limit on omnipotence.  Anything that is not in God’s character, according to the scriptures or personal experience, is a self-imposed limit on His omnipotence.  If we have free will, then it is a limit on His omnipotence.  It is does not matter if He chooses not to do something or cannot do something, the effect on us is the same. 

This does not mean that God is not powerful however.  He lit the fuse on the Big Bang that created the universe!  If that is not powerful, then I don’t know what is.  I believe that God created all the natural laws and does not violate them.  I also believe that He does not micro-manage the universe and create tsunamis or other natural disasters to punish us.  Does this mean that God is effectively dead?

Deism is the belief that God started the universe and then let it run, never to intervene again.  My pastor calls this the “Cosmic Bowler” belief.  This was born out of a need to deny miracles without denying God.  For most of the last 12 billion years or so of the history of the universe, I believe that IS what happened.  Then he created people and everything changed.

God gave people free will and thus separated them from the other animals forever.  We can go against our animal instincts.  We can choose between good and evil.  God gave us this ability so that we could choose to love Him and know Him.  Love means nothing if not given freely.  Our free will is the human spirit. 

We can know God because we have free will.  Because we can know God, He can interact with us directly or through other people.  This is how God is alive in the world today.  This is why we should embrace our spirituality.  The alternative is to live like an animal, in denial of our spiritual nature. 

Knowing God does not eliminate suffering from your life.  It does improve the quality of your life because you realize that you are more than a tomato and that the Creator of the universe loves you.

Like many others, I have been following the eBay Atheist blog at http://www.off-the-map.org/atheist/ .  It has been fascinating to say the least.  In reading the posts that appear there, a spectrum of belief becomes apparent.  It is not enough to call someone a believer or non-believer.  That will just create an inaccurate picture in most people’s minds.  It is not descriptive enough.  This inadequacy causes misunderstandings and turmoil.  Here is the spectrum of belief from left to right as I see it:

Atheism, Agnosticism, Uncommitted Theism, Religion.

 

Using Christianity as an example, we can further subdivide Religion, from left to right, into the following:

Liberal, Mainstream, Fundamentalist

 

From this we can see where we or others might fit and how it affects their perceptions of us or our perceptions of them.  For example, some people might consider me a liberal Christian because I don’t accept miracles.  Those to the right of me (mainstream, fundamentalist) may see this as progressing toward atheism.  Those to the left might see it as progressing toward fundamentalism. 

 

Of course atheism, as expressed by someone like Richard Dawkins, or Fundamentalism, as expressed by someone like Pat Robertson are the extremes that get the most press.  Most of us are somewhere between and not headed for the extremes.  Where are you?

I have developed an understanding of the Bible that eliminates a lot of the barriers between myself and God.  I did not grow up in a Christian family, so I had to eliminate the idea of "miracles" in the Bible as being demonstrations of magical power.  I found the Bible much more meaningful and easier to understand once I did this.  I don't think the authors intended that the stories should always be taken literally.  This is fairly easy for many Christians to accept if you are taking about the creation story in Genesis, but what about the Gospel stories?  This is a lot more sensitive to a lot of Christians, especially the ones that grew up as Christians. When I analyze some of these Gospel stories, I see the symbolism and the real message that was intended.  I also destroy the magic in the process.  This is what most Christians want to reject. If you are a Christian, please let me know in the comments if the following analysis of a "miracle" in Mark 5 makes you mad.

 

Starting in Mark 5:22 is the story of the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus, the synagogue leader.  It has a subplot in the middle of the story that is interesting and goes along with the story, but you wouldn't think so if you read it literally.  The first question that comes to mind in this story is why did the author of Mark point out that Jairus was a synagogue leader?  After all, the focus of the story was his daughter wasn't it?  It is because Jairus' daughter was the synagogue. What!  You mean there was not a physical resurrection of a human body!  That isn't what the story is about?  This is the reaction that I typically get when I share this interpretation followed by an almost hostile skepticism.  There is a good reason why I believe that this is what it means and how it is more useful to Christians to believe this. 

 

Synagogues are rarely mentioned anywhere in the Bible.  Some historians believe that these were invented juring the exile in Babylon because the Temple was destroyed and they did not have access to Jerusalem.  Other historians believe that these emerged after the exile.  The concensus was that they were a relatively recent jewish invention in the first century.  This is probably the mechanism by which Christianity first proliferated amount the Jews.  Since the age of the synagogue leaders daughter is revealed at the end of the story (Mark 5:42) of 12 years old, this indicates to me that the synagogue was about to come of age, meaning perhaps a Christian synagogue or perhaps the synagogue as the primary system of worship for the Jews instead of the Temple.  During the beginning of the first century the Temple was believed to have been corrupted by King Herod the Great when he started a massive expansion project on it.  The thing that signified its corruption was a golden eagle attached to the temple gates.  This was Herod's way of paying homage to Rome so he could remain in power.  It was a clear violation of the jewish law against graven images however.  It was almost idolatry to some of the pious jews.   

 

This story in Mark talks about how Jesus came to the little girl and healed her even after others said she was dead.  Jesus did not resurrect a human girl or even a single synagogue, but the whole synagogue system.

 

Starting in verse 25 is the subplot of a woman that had a hemorrage for 12 years.  Isn't that the same number of years that the girl was old?  Is that just a coincedence?  No, of course not.  I believe that this represented represented the time of the corruption of the Temple.  Jesus came to restore our relationship with God and thus eliminate the sacrificial system and even the need for the Temple to exist.  The woman represents the people that brought sacrifices to the Temple every year.  The hemorrage represents the suffering that they endured during the time that the temple was corrupt before Jesus came.  These people did not attend a synagogue.  She had grown worse at the hands of the physicians (corrupt temple priests).  She had faith the Jesus could heal her (reconcile the people with God).  She didn't need His direct action, but just brushing his garment would be enough to make her well she believed.  This says that faith in Jesus from the traditional Jews will save them, even if they don't go to the Christian synagogues.

 

What does this mean to us today?  I think that it means that we don't have to all worship the exact same way in order to be saved, we just need faith in Jesus.  I think this position of tolerance is more useful to Christians than a miracle story that contains details that have no meaning and thus make the story confusing to the modern reader.  I hope that other Christians can see this truth and accept me as a fellow Christian even though I don't read the Gospels the same way they do.