December 30, 2008: "They Take Away People's Minds"

Years ago my brother Dave told me he read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian concurrently with C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and that he would have liked to have seen a debate between those two. "Lewis would have destroyed Russell," he said.

Recently I read Russell's essay myself and found that my brother under-spoke. Why I Am Not A Christian strikes me as the work of a child. Granted, a very witty and smart-mouthed child - but a child nonetheless. Before reading it I assumed that the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and standard-bearer of 20th century atheism would at least be a worthy opponent for Lewis, and that bringing these two minds into dialogue would be a stimulating exercise. But it is not so. A "debate" between Lewis and Russell would have had all the sizzle of a grown-up corralling a boy who is just playing verbal "Gotcha!" and changing the subject every two minutes. Russell's colleague Alfred North Whitehead knew whereof he spoke when he told students at Harvard, "Bertie [Russell]...is simple-minded."

Two examples of what I mean:

Russell understands the "First Cause" argument to mean that everything has a cause, and notes, "If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause" (I heard Richard Dawkins make the same mistake in his debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, asking rhetorically: "If God made everything, who made God?"). But this point involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from causation! No theistic philosopher would be so stupid as to claim that everything has a cause; what has frequently been claimed (and I believe justly) is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The distinction between existing and beginning to exist is what the causation debate is all about! Russell's sleight-of-hand at this point is breath-taking, since later in the same paragraph he simply assumes an atheistic answer to the beginning-to-exist question without ever having noted (or noting himself?) that he has moved the debate onto different ground.

That which is truly eternal, which has no beginning, need not - and, I would argue, cannot - have a cause. The interesting question then, the one on which the whole debate turns, is whether the universe is eternal. I believe there are good reasons for believing it is not. (For an excellent discussion on this matter, please read chapter 5 of Lee Strobel's The Case For Creator, an interview with philosopher William Lane Craig.) But even if the universe were eternal in the only sense it could be - extending backward in time through an infinite succession of moments - it would still not have the kind of eternality which theists have traditionally claimed for God. God has been understood to be eternal in the sense of having existence outside of time, with "time", like "space", merely being things he might choose to enter or exit as a man would his own house. (Christians in fact understand that this is precisely what he did in the incarnation and ascension of Christ.)

Russell is playing a child's game when he asks, "If God made everything, who made God?" That is a question I first heard as a young teenager, along with, "If God is all-powerful, could he make a stone so big he couldn't move it?" Such questions did not impress me as profound even then, when I knew very little and had not read anything. They're barely worth the intellectual effort required to dismiss them.

A second example concerns one of Russell's attacks on Christian morality. He writes, "Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life.' And no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children." Russell calls this a "fiendish cruelty", one example among many of the ways the Church inflicts suffering on people.

Wait a minute. First of all, I personally do not undertake to defend any Catholic dogma that conflicts with Scripture, and Russell's attempts to condemn Christian faith because aberrant Romanist practices have attached themselves to it like leeches is simply illegitimate. Russell's point might better be made in an essay titled Why I Am Not A Catholic rather than Why I Am Not A Christian.

Second, Jesus explicitly taught that divorce was permissible in the case of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). A woman may freely divorce her adulterous husband - even as Joseph nearly divorced Mary on the suspicion of unfaithfulness (Matthew 1:18-19). If Russell had thought about it for two seconds, he would have seen that he actually agrees with biblical policy, and that what he finds cruel is Catholic repudiation of it!

Third, all brands of Christian faith teach faithfulness and chastity. It is not through following the Church's moral teaching that a man becomes syphilitic, but through rejecting it. If, on the other hand, a man adopted Russell's moral code and personal example, he might indeed become as syphilitic as Nietzsche (who died deranged of the disease), and give that wasting illness to his wife and kids too. The problem here is not with Christians who obey the Church's teaching, but with people - Christian or not - who defy it.

The intellectual poverty of Russell's essay puts me in mind of something my son Ben said when he was just three years old. It remains perhaps the one truly mystical experience of my life. When we were living in Colombia my wife and I took Ben to the beach one night to see a dance performance. We thought he would enjoy the spectacle of a bonfire and drums and energy and movement. As the first dance played out, it dawned on me that what we were watching was a reenactment of a frenzied pagan ritual. (The dancers had dressed as Chimila Indians; one character in a mask portrayed the devil who was tied up by others and then released.) Neither my wife nor I said anything, but when the dance ended, Ben said quietly, "They take away people's minds." We stared at our little boy and asked, "What did you say Ben?" and he repeated, in a small voice, "They take away people's minds."

We left immediately. Ben said nothing else, and we questioned him no further. But I felt that I had grasped the import of what was actually a prophetic statement - a word from God, if you will - and have reflected on it many times since. To "take away people's minds" is the work of demons. The forces arrayed against God have, as one of their goals, the corruption of human intellect. Though they may leave intact the IQ, and memory, and faculties of expression, they hinder the mind's ability to think rationally, and leave vacuous space where otherwise a mind might work to perceive spiritual truth and awaken to God.

I do not think that demons can do this to us without our permission, which we grant by sinning. I have known several former Christians who became "Russellitic" in their thoughts, and, for every last one of them, the loss of faith was preceded by (or at least accompanied by) obvious personal sin. The correlation in my experience is 100% exact,
and I do not regard it as coincidental. I have seen the correlation work the other way too. In discussing his reluctant conversion from atheism to Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, "[I]t is significant that this...happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience." (in C. S. Lewis: Christian Reflections: "The Seeing Eye"). Submission to conscience brightens the mind, even as rebellion against it summons intellectual darkness.

In John 7:17 Jesus laid down a gauntlet challenge to any who might question whether he was speaking for God or blowing smoke out his ears. It was simple: do good. "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." The best preparation for contemplating ultimate truth,
including the weighing of the claims of Christ, is to behave well. Do good. Submit humbly to the voice of conscience and divine authority, and watch where your thoughts go.

Or sin, and, apart from God's grace, you will manage to find verbal mush persuasive. Russell himself is the best example. He was an utterly despicable human being, a would-be genocidal maniac (see my November 18 essay) and serial cheater so enslaved to the urges of his genitalia that T. S. Eliot labeled him "Priapus in the shrubbery." (And that was before Russell seduced Eliot's wife!). If you go in that direction, abandoning your morals to the self-serving call of fallen human nature and despising the voice of duty, conscience and law, you risk having your mind taken away, and philosophical rubbish of the sort that Russell spouted may start making sense to you.

December 16, 2008: What Would Abraham Do?

Recently I read a broadside against biblical faith that focused on the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac. The author wrote, "What was Abraham thinking?...[He] receives the instruction to kill his son. But wouldn't he be mad simply to go ahead and do so?...It might not be God talking, but the devil; Abraham might be mad; the test might be to see if he refuses. All three of these possibilities seem more plausible than the idea that God wants his son dead, since what kind of loving God would command such a barbaric act?"

Researching the matter I found another writer who said: "Abraham is nothing less than that person who unthinkingly says 'Yes, Lord' when told to murder another human being...[H]ow can we possibly feel anything but horror at what he was prepared to do? Here is a man who was prepared to murder his own child,... - and this is the example which the Bible holds up as praiseworthy. Think about it: Nowadays, any parent who claimed she killed her child because God told her to would be thrown into jail, or into a mental institution...I challenge anybody to find one person who would hear about it and exclaim, 'Wow, I wish I had that much faith!'"

I think these writers make a good point. If any man today killed his son (or tried to) because God commanded it, we would not praise his faith but execute him or lock him up. And this isn't merely a hypothetical mental exercise - many people have indeed murdered family members for just such religious reasons. Jon Krakauer's amazing book Under The Banner Of Heaven tells riveting stories of Mormon Fundamentalists who killed because God told them to. And remember that poor psycho Andrea Yates? In 2001 she drowned her five kids because she thought that was what God wanted.

So, was Abraham a psychopath for believing that the voice in his head saying, "Gut and bleed Isaac for me" was the Lord's? And are Christians inconsistent for exalting him as a man of faith while imprisoning, executing or confining to mental institutions those who act upon the same instruction? Can we praise Father Abraham, but run and call the police when some parent starts asking himself, "What Would Abraham Do?"

I have a thought that I'd like to throw into the discussion. It seems to me that the disgust about Abraham and the voice-in-his-head-that-claimed-to-be-God fails to take into account the religious context of Abraham's day. Abraham was born into raw paganism and knew practically nothing about God. Joshua 24:2 says that his father worshiped other gods. Abraham came to theology "green," we might say, with no Bible to read and no church or synagogue to attend. He not only lived before Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, but before Moses and the 10 commandments. His template for understanding the supernatural would have been the pagan religions around him, and the gods of those faith communities - the Chemoshes and Molechs and Ashterahs - often demanded child sacrifice from the truly devout.

I don't believe that Abraham understood at first that the supernatural being who spoke in his ear and promised him good things was necessarily all that different from Molech. In fact, I see no convincing evidence that Abraham was even a monotheist! When did the Lord ever tell him that there were no other gods? Abraham only worshiped and served the Lord God, but that does not mean he necessarily disbelieved the existence of others.

So part of Abraham's theological education had to involve unlearning some of the elementary things he thought he knew about "gods and their behavior." And I believe that much of the significance of the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac is lost if we don't understand that God was at this point distinguishing himself from the gods of Abraham's acquaintance. We who occupy this spot on the timeline of revelation history don't need this lesson, because we know God – or should know him - well enough for something as simple as that. But from Abraham's perspective, it would have been a commonplace, unquestioned truth that all gods demanded blood somehow - even human blood. And when the order came to sacrifice his son, I suppose he was disheartened but not surprised by it. "Oh. Of course. I might have known. So that's what you're like."

But that isn't what God is like. Molech may have been pleased with the smell of burning infant flesh, but not the God who spoke in the ear of Abraham. After proving (or, rather, after having Abraham prove to himself and to us) that Abraham was no less devoted to God than pagans were to their demons, God provided a substitute.
A ram sufficed
As sacrifice
To self-appease
The great I Am.

In this instance Abraham learned at least a couple things: (1) His God was much nicer than Molech, and (2) His God was no softie. Just because God was good did not mean he had less of a claim to ultimate devotion from Abraham than the demon gods had from their worshipers.

While I believe the story of Abraham nearly killing Isaac makes sense in its context, it is still incomplete until you get to the New Testament. There God himself endures the torment he spared Abraham, giving up his Son - with no last-minute substitute, and it wasn't mercifully quick - so that sinners could live. In comparing the stories of Isaac's near-death experience with Jesus' crucifixion, we come to learn, and love, the shocking truth that God is kinder to us than he is to himself.

If you allow the analogy, I might compare the moral revulsion that skeptics feel over Abraham's action with Isaac to the aesthetic revulsion we would feel over examining a square millimeter of a beautiful woman's face. If you pressed your eye up to a magnifying glass an inch away from her skin, she would not look pretty at that distance. No one would. You must back away and take in the context. Likewise, if you take in the context of Abraham's religious environment - and the great work God would do 2,000 years later - you can then appreciate the beauty of the whole.

And as for any evil psycho who claims today to murder at the command of God - "just like Abraham!" - I think the rebuff comes easily enough. "Oh no. We've known for 4,000 years now that God isn't like that. And even granting that he commanded Abraham to kill Isaac – in circumstances that do not hold today, and that foreshadowed the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ - don't forget that God provided a substitute ram, and that, in the end, Abraham never killed anybody."

December 9, 2008: Bank Error In Your Favor - Collect $200.

In his book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, Julian Baggini writes up and comments on "100 experiments for the armchair philosopher." Many of the thought experiments involve ethical quandaries. For example:

Richard went to an ATM to withdraw 100 (British) pounds from his account and received 10,000 pounds by mistake. Certain that the bank would catch the error, he put the loot away and waited. But after a couple months and no word from the bank, he took the money and went to put a hefty down-payment on a new luxury car. "On the way, however, he did feel a twinge of guilt. Wasn't this stealing? He quickly managed to convince himself it was no such thing. He had not deliberately taken the money, it had just been given to him...No, this wasn't theft. It was just the biggest stroke of luck he had ever had."

Baggini invites the reader to do some moral reasoning about Richard's actions. He notes, "In real life..., we might expect an honest person [to notify the bank]. But how many people would? Not that many, I'd guess."

Some would. I know someone who did. About 30 years ago, Baggini's hypothetical scenario actually happened to my parents. Even the numbers were the same, though the amount was in dollars rather than pounds. My mother deposited $100 in the family checking account and later found out that the bank had recorded it as $10,000. They had apparently left out the decimal point between dollars and cents.

So mom immediately notified them of the error. (In her letter she playfully suggested, "Of course, if it is too much trouble for you to adjust your records, we will gladly adjust ours!") The bank quickly corrected the mistake - though without thanking my mother for bringing it to their attention - and $9,900 that my parents could have made prudent use of was carried away by that steady-blowing wind of moral integrity that characterized their lives.

As I look back on it now, one of the early signs that I was marrying into a family of very different moral outlook was when my father-in-law-to-be told me about the time a teller made a huge error in his favor when he was cashing in some bonds - and boy did he walk away with a chunk of change! I hardly knew what to say. I didn't tell him my mother's story. Some years later, though, it made sense when my (now ex-) wife came home with a pair of jeans that a checkout clerk neglected to ring up, and I was the one who trudged back to the mall to pay for them.

Be scrupulously honest all the time. It is wrong to take advantage of correctable mistakes made in your favor. Any follower of Christ should know this instinctively, live accordingly, and train his children to do the same.

December 2, 2008: Dropping Off Your Kid In Nebraska

Outrage greeted the news that parents were abandoning their older kids at Nebraska hospitals this fall. A safe-haven policy designed for newborns actually set the age limit at 18, so instead of getting day-old babies from panicked young moms, hospitals started receiving teenage kids from parents in their 40s. Who could imagine a parent so evil? What mom or dad would just dump their kid like that?

Then we started hearing about some of the kids.

Melyssa Cowburn's 5-year-old "tried to bash in a baby's head with a hammer. Then he set the shower curtain on fire. The next day he plugged all the sinks and toilets in their apartment and flooded the place." (Chicago Tribune 11/21/08). This child was the offspring of a crack addict who had abandoned him when he was 16 months old. Melissa became his guardian and decided, "I'm going to love this little guy and it's just going to make everything better." Right. Despite Melyssa and her husband's loving efforts, the child remained a violent screaming monster who constantly got expelled from day-care programs. Melyssa tried everything - even a drug overdose to end her own life - but nothing worked. She drove him to Omaha, said good-bye, and cried herself all the way back home to Washington state.

Parents of older devils have feared, with good reason, that their sons would kill them in their sleep or rape their daughters. What would you do with such a son? I could see myself handcuffing him and throwing him in the trunk of my car and speeding westward on the I-80. I say "I could see myself" doing this because there's no reason it couldn't have happened to me, good parent though I am. Years ago a missionary friend told me, "My wife and I had three good kids and always thought that parents whose kids were out-of-control just didn't know how to raise them. Then we had our fourth...". He didn't even finish the sentence. The fourth was a candidate for a Nebraska hospital drop-off.

The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as evil you can't fix. I hope this provides some comfort - cold comfort, a "quantum of solace" - to parents of really bad kids. Scripture shows no naivete about the wickedness that can be bound up in the heart of a child. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 told ancient Israelites what to do with their chronically bad kids in a policy so fierce it makes Nebraska abandonment look like treacly indulgence:

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard." Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

No, I don't think we should kill bad kids. Even rabbinic tradition holds that the death sentence above was never actually carried out. (But what a powerful deterrent! Israelite parents never needed to tell their hellions that the boogey-man would get them: they could just point to the sacred scroll and say, "Listen, numb-nut. Me and the elders are going to pelt you with rocks.")

The larger point though should not be missed: some kids (like some grownups) are just bad, and the strongest measures must be taken concerning them - not necessarily for their rehabilitation (who knows if that is possible?), but simply for the protection and sanity of those around them. Such cases provide the more fortunate among us, the ones who have decent kids, with opportunities to extend the mercy of God to longsuffering parents, and judge them not, lest we be judged.

November 18, 2008: Philosophical Poison

Many of the philosophers who laid the foundations of modern and post-modern thought were profoundly bad men. This fact seems to surprise Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson, authors of Philosophers Behaving Badly. They write, "From philosophers...we expect, not unreasonably, nobler, wiser behavior, demonstrating some attempt to live up to their ideals." But, they note, "philosophers, while godlike in the intellectual sphere, can be the sorriest children in the world of power and money."

"Sorriest children" is too kind a label for the eight philosophers they profile in the book. "Demon-spawn" is more like it. A few tidbits:

Martin Heidegger, a father of Existentialism, was a Nazi. He concluded his lectures with "Heil Hitler!", and actively worked to make the university at Frieburg an institution subservient to the goals of Hitler and the Nazi Party. This included persecuting Jewish students and even the Jewish professor, Edmund Husserl, who had mentored him.

Jean-Paul Sarte was an apologist for Stalin, and so vigorous in his support of the Soviet madman that he criticized Krushchev for denouncing his predecessor! Even though Sarte knew about the gulags, he simply denied them the way some deny the Holocaust. To Sarte, heroic dissidents like Solzhenitsyn were mere criminals.

Michel Foucault, darling of postmodernism, was a drug-addled Peeping Tom. From his 8th floor apartment he used to train his binoculars on men undressing. He died of AIDS, but not before probably infecting many others because (1) he hid the fact that he had AIDS and (2) he refused to take precautions. Once while debating Noam Chomsky he maintained that he was willing to dispense with any principle of justice in order to achieve total victory for the proletariat. And if the proletariat needed to preserve power by violent oppression of the vanquished, so be it. Chomsky (no angel himself) "felt that he was debating with someone who did not even inhabit the same moral universe."

Bertrand Russell was the 20th century's foremost philosophical promoter of atheism, and though he had a reputation for non-violent pacifism he was actually such a war-mongering beast that he favored genocide. He considered defensible the extermination of North American Indians because they stood in the way of the spread of Western Civilization. In October of 1945 the famed author of Why I Am Not A Christian proposed that the US launch a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, saying, "I should for my part prefer all the chaos and destruction of a war conducted by means of the atomic bomb to the universal domination of a government having the evil characteristics of the Nazis." Later, Rodgers and Thompson note, "he accepted that such a war might kill 500 million people and set civilization back centuries, yet thought this a price well worth paying." It seems to me that if this influential philosopher had possessed dictatorial power in the late 1940s, then the title of "Greatest Villain in the History of the World" would no longer be contested between Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Those pipsqueak knee-biters, with their millions of victims, would be nothing compared to Bertrand Russell and his hundreds of millions.

Time would fail me to relate all the cruelty, selfishness, mendacity, mean-spiritedness and grotesque immorality of the eight philosophers in Rodger's and Thompson's book. It is worth checking out of the library and reading for yourself. And it is worth thinking about a question the authors keep raising: "How could these men think so well but behave so badly?"

For the Christian, the answer lies pretty close at hand. The premise is wrong. These men were not great thinkers. Six of them (Foucalt, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Russell, Schopenhauer and Sartre) were atheists, and the other two (Rousseau and Wittgenstein) were not Christians. If you deny God and reject his incarnate Son, the worldview you construct will necessarily find itself twisted into a bad shape. Why expect good behavior to spring from that?

As I've written before, atheism can seek - but never find – a ground for moral behavior. A society that has philosophical materialists in it must hope that none of them thinks too hard. Because once atheists get to thinking and living by the results, watch out! They'll conclude (they always do) that the morality they learned in kindergarten is simply a creation of mankind, and, as such, can be reshaped like play-doh in their capable hands. They are free (Existentialists love to talk this way!) to construct their own realities and meaning. When they do that, why should any of us be shocked - shocked - that the behavior they find most reasonable is that which magnifies themselves, absolutizes their pleasure, and sacrifices all other people on the altar of self-serving desire?

November 4, 2008: The Cougar And The Ant

After I finish writing this I'll go vote, even though I know beyond doubt it won't matter. My individual vote is meaningless - not just in the national election, but in all the local ones too. Since no significant election I've ever heard of was decided by one vote, it is certain that the same persons will win public office tonight whether I go to the polls or stay home and drink hot chocolate.

The reason I vote then is not because I think it matters. The reason is because I know that if lots of people are as lazy about voting as I am tempted to be, it will matter. Thousands of people, each making the unassailably correct assumption "My vote won't change anything," will in fact change everything. To avoid the political catastrophe that would result from the mass inaction of otherwise thoughtful people, I (and everyone else!) must flip a mental switch, if need be, and act in the mode of an ant-in-a-colony building a bridge rather than a lone cougar-on-a-prowl hunting for food.

There are thousands of cases where it is our obligation to be that ant-in-a-colony. Let me mention one especially dear to my heart: attending Sunday School and church.

I'll be honest: you may be in a position where going to Sunday School and church does nothing for you. You learn nothing because you've heard it before, and you may even know by heart the passage being studied. You're just one person anyway and you won't be missed – so why go? Go because when lots of people begin to think as self-centeredly as you, churches empty out and have to close their doors. The anthill collapses when all the ants start thinking like cougars.

I attend a Wednesday night Bible study at a church near my home. Two young associate pastors are leading a study of Hebrews. When a young woman found out I was pastor of another church, she said to me, "I just think that's so neat that a pastor would come to a Bible study to get fed himself!" Of course I received her gracious words without correcting her. The truth is, I'm not there to feed. I've read through Hebrews lots of times, have preached through it twice, have strong opinions about it. I'm just there as an ant lending my support. (I'm hoping, for example, that my being there will encourage an unchurched friend to come.)

A relative of mine attends a church pastored by a buffoon. I've tried to get her to leave that church a number of times, but her answer is always the same: she stays for the sake of other dear souls who go there. Not for her sake, and certainly not for the buffoon's - but for others and for the good of the whole. I can never argue with that. May her saintly (or antly?) attitude infect many others!

When you show up promptly this Sunday at 10 AM for the adult class at Faith Bible Church, I'll be aware, all too painfully aware, that it is probably not for your own sake that you do that. I'll live with that, and the pain of knowing that the severely dwindled attendance of recent months must mean I'm boring the snot out of people, as long as there are some ants who understand that their continued presence is crucial to the functioning of the whole. In both of the last two weeks we had Sunday School, two first-time guests showed up at 10 and talked to me alone for quite a while until a few others arrived. (And thank God for those later arrivals! It would have been a long hour without them.) It's like when I took lunch the other day at a newly opened Chinese restaurant where I was the only person in the place apart from the waiter and a cook. The food was great, but it would have felt more comfortable, more right, if others were there too.

Be one of those others. Sure, you have your individual needs - we all do - but while seeking to fulfill them, do not neglect to take up your assigned spot in the ant colony. You have to go to church. And Sunday School.

October 28, 2008: A Reason To Be Humble

One of the reasons we ought to be humble is that others have done so much better than we with far less help, far fewer resources, and far greater challenges.

A friend told me he has a spiritual fantasy: he wants to be called upon in the Final Judgment to "rise and condemn" adulterers who defend themselves by saying they were married to bad people. My friend was married to a bad person too, but did not consider that grief a justification for sexual license. Maybe at the throne of God he will rise to judge, joining the Queen of Sheba and the men of Nineveh (Matthew 12:41-42) who will condemn certain Judeans. (Sheba valued the wisdom of mere Solomon, and the Ninevites repented at the preaching of mere Jonah, while the Judeans rejected Someone Far Greater.) On the day when all souls are rendering account for deeds done in the body, and some adulterous creep cries out, "But I was married to a shrew!" God can say, "Well, concerning that, let us hear a word from my servant Doug..."

I can understand my friend's fantasy because I relate so well to it. For example, one of the reasons I find former InterVarsity President Gordon MacDonald so insufferable is because he cheated on a good and faithful wife - his partner in ministry! - while I stayed faithful to a hostile and frigid apostate. So, MacDonald, what do you suppose a guy like you has to teach a guy like me about Christian virtue?

But such fantasies receive a hard rebuke when we consider all the people who could rise up in judgment against us. The line of my just condemners would be long. Sometimes, for example, I sin by being discouraged, and in my spirit stare blankly at cinder-block walls of hindrance and captivity. Quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada could be called upon to rise (or in her case, sit) in judgment against me, saying, "How dare you be discouraged! At least you've got arms and legs that work - I can't even brush my own teeth!"

Or take the sin of indulgence and the contrasting virtue of generosity. If I hear one more WMBI preacher begging money one minute, and talking about his Alaskan or Caribbean cruise the next, I'm going to scream bloody judgment. At such times I feel a dark temptation to pray like the Pharisee in Luke 18:11: "God, I thank thee that I am not as other [preachers]." But then there come to mind the widow of Zarephath, who shared what she thought was her and her son's last meal with the prophet Elijah, and the widow at the temple in Jerusalem, who gave her last two pennies in the offering plate. I imagine these women rising in judgment against me, saying, "Yes, Paul, do tell us your great story of faithful stewardship of meager resources."

God sets us as examples to one another. When we are tempted to sin, and justify that sin because our situation is so tough, let us call to mind victors who have had it so much tougher. And when we do well, and because of doing well come to despise those who fail, let us call to mind the real heroes, the ones who probably would not find our moral accomplishments all that impressive.

My Living Will, or Heaven Ain't So Bad

Some years ago I wrote a Pastor's Page advising people to make out a living will. Today I thought I'd tell you what mine is. I have written (by hand) and distributed these words:

In the event of my incapacitation, I insist that no medical measures be taken other than those designed to relieve pain or that have a strong likelihood of restoring me to full, independent, unmedicated health. Hence no breathing machines, feeding tubes, dialysis, resuscitation, or anything else that medical science may invent to delay the inevitable. I mean it. See with what large letters I write with my own hand. [The last sentence is writ larger than the rest. You may recognize it from Galatians 6:11.]

I want to persuade you of the rightness of making such a statement. My case:

(1) When I die I will be received into glory, not by any merit of my own but by the same grace that Jesus promised the dying thief: "Today you will be with me in paradise." Though it is sinful to try to hasten heavenly bliss through suicide, is it not foolish to try to postpone it through grasping at straws? Is heaven so frightful that we must avoid being sucked into it until the last possible moment? Especially when so many of those medical "lifelines" thrown to us from the shores of earth are just flotsam that enable us drown more slowly.

(2) The quicker we let go, the less we burden our children. They have jobs and families and burdens of their own. What used to be a few weeks of making grandpa comfortable have now become years and years of changing his diapers and hooking him up to tubes. I'd rather not do that to my kids if I can help it. Sure, the young have a responsibility to care for the old, and it builds character for them to do so - but don't the old also have a responsibility to make that care-giving period as short and simple and dignified as possible?

(3) The quicker we go, the less we burden the health care system. The cost of preserving (I know this is offensive, but I'll just say it) a human vegetable can run into millions of dollars, and that money is better spent on those who have a shot at productive health. The staggering costs of long-term maintenance will break Medicare someday. Our selfish clinging to earthly life makes medical costs go up for everyone, and renders insurance unaffordable. To borrow an image from global warming, I don't know if my "carbon footprint" will ever really damage the planet, but I do believe that my "medical care footprint" weighs down a system that will increasingly struggle to provide care for those who can actually benefit from it.

You may notice that I say nothing in my living will about my funeral. That is because I believe it is selfish for people to give post-death instructions about their remains. That is for the living to decide - why should we care about it if we're dead? When my soul is rejoicing before Jesus, I won't give two hoots if, for example, med school students are slicing up my dead body in order to learn how better to treat living ones. Won't bother me one bit - and if it helps them, well, glory to God.

October 14, 2008: Endorsing A Candidate

Of the four Roman emperors who reigned during the New Testament era, three (Tiberius, Caligula and Nero) raped boys. Only Claudius might not have.

I bring up this unpleasant fact for the sake of those who seem to think that the flourishing of the church depends on having good secular leaders and laws. It doesn't. The church was born, and the gospel spread, in lands ruled by murderous thug perverts like Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, Herod Agrippa I and the emperors named above. (Even the best of the lot, Herod Agrippa II, slept with his sister!) Despite demons at the helm of secular government, the gospel was preached and the kingdom grew and tens of thousands of elect saints bowed the knee to Jesus Christ.

I'm not saying it is ok therefore to leave demons at the helm. I am saying that the cause of Christ will proceed or flounder no matter who is in charge.

That is one of the reasons I strongly oppose the action of 33 ministers who, two weeks ago, deliberately endorsed political candidates from the pulpit. (It was a protest against a 54-year-old law prohibiting non-profits from endorsing candidates. These churches may now lose their tax-exempt status.) As a citizen and private individual I certainly care who gets elected, and I'm happy to banter politics with anyone who would like to engage me about it on the side. But when I get into the pulpit I am not merely a citizen but a proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus Christ endowed with the sacred trust of exalting his name and making him known. To get distracted in the pulpit by these lesser things of politics is sin. Old-school preachers used to scotch-tape to their pulpits the text John 12:21: "We would see Jesus." They knew the temptation of taking the focus off Christ and fixing it on the relatively inconsequential, like political heroes and villains.

Rather than striking a blow for free speech by the civilly disobedient act of endorsing McCain or Obama in their September 28 sermons, it would have been better if these 33 preachers had raised their right hands and sworn, "I will not allow my political convictions to veil Christ from those who need to see him." Even from their perspective, even if they knew without error that one of these candidates was good and the other evil, how could they know whether the cause of Christ would flourish more under an Obama or a McCain administration? None of us can know that. Look at the world: western Europe has freedom of religion but nobody goes to church, while China enforces policies hostile to the faith and its churches multiply.

I have preferences, but you won't hear them in the pulpit. Part of that is because I have a Bigger Name to exalt and don't want lesser names to obscure it. Part of it too is because I seek first the kingdom of God, and am fully convinced that that kingdom can advance just as easily whether the Oval Office is occupied by humble St. Francis or Attila the Hun.

October 7, 2008: The Least Of These

There is a joy that smart, independent, capable people will never know: that of being rescued from befuddled predicament by a kind and resourceful person. Only a confused idiot can really experience that pleasure.

I know because I have been that confused idiot. Three years ago I invited friends and family over for Thanksgiving, which was a problem because I had no table. The fact weighed on me - not simply that I didn't have a table, but that I knew in my heart that normal people knew how to get one and I didn't. I did know enough to go to Goodwill and find a serviceable table for only 10 dollars, but now, how to get it home?

God in his grace sent me a Mexican auto mechanic. Juan saw me struggling to disassemble the table in the Goodwill parking lot, came over, and just did it for me - squeezing all the parts into my small car like a contortionist into an aquarium. What joy! I hope I was grateful enough. I found out where he worked and called his boss to laud him for the kindness he showed to me, a total (and hapless) stranger.

Haplessness is no stranger to me - it haunts me like the ghost of Hamlet's father. Like when my lawnmower stopped working a few weeks ago. I did not know how to dispose of it and get a new one at an affordable price. I last bought a lawnmower in 1998, which required some assembly, which I did myself. It broke of course, literally broke - the frame snapped in two - the first time I used it. A kind friend assembled the replacement. This time though I just let the grass grow, hoping that with fall coming I wouldn't have to worry about my lawn until May. Wrong. Warm autumn rains left my untended lawn overgrown and unsightly, and I didn't know what to do.

Then yesterday a friend said, "I have three lawnmowers. Which one do you want?" More joy! Now my troublesome lawn is clipped tidy and short, and it cost me nothing more than grass stains on my gym shoes. Glory to God, and gratitude to my friend.

It can be embarrassing and demoralizing to be the fool in need, but there is redemption in it. In Matthew 25:35-36 Jesus casts himself in the role of the needy person that capable people do nice things for: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." It seems that when we talk about being Christlike to people, we usually mean doing good things to them with our talents and time and resources. That is true, but it can also mean just being the poor luckless schmo that other people help out. This is a good thing, because it brings joy to us, and credit to them, and glory to God.

September 30, 2008: Let Your Yes Be Yes

"I gave my word."

I found myself having to say that a lot recently as I kept getting the same advice from friends who recommended that I try to renegotiate a financial obligation I incurred a couple years ago. (Here "renegotiate" pretty much means "not pay as much as I said I would"). It is true that unforeseeable circumstances had turned a fair deal into a disastrous one for me. Everyone could see that. I was left scrambling between options that all looked bad. But the one option that kept getting placed under my nose and that I had to keep swatting away because of its stench was the one that would have made a promise-breaker of me. That is not acceptable. I would rather be poor - I would rather be unhappy! - than go back on my word.

I have righteous contempt for those who break their word. That is why I root against Bret Favre now. Favre held a tearful press conference on March 6 to announce, "I am officially retiring from the NFL and the Green Bay Packers," and then revoked his word a few months later just because he decided he felt differently. His broken promise threw the whole Packer organization into chaos (how do you plan anything when your star says one thing one day and the opposite thing the next?) and left his replacement, Aaron Rodgers, dangling on a string. Then Favre angrily blamed the Packers for not treating him with respect. He does not understand that he is not worthy of respect. Sure, he can throw a football - but as for his words, write them on water. Go Jets' opponents.

And were it not for Barak Obama's position on abortion and some other things I would certainly be saying "Go McCain's opponent." You may have heard that last week John McCain canceled a David Letterman appearance an hour before the show was to be taped, claiming he had to get back to Washington to deal with the nation's financial crisis. Actually McCain was in no hurry to get to Washington - he had simply decided to go down the street to be interviewed by Katie Couric. Letterman rightly went nuts, and has been ripping McCain ever since with the fury of a jilted bride. Speaking of brides, McCain did not keep his word to his first one, but ditched her years ago for someone younger, prettier and richer. (Between Obama's baby-killing policies and McCain's lack of integrity, I'm glad that our Electoral-College manner of electing a president will insure that my vote this year in the state of Illinois will not matter!)

When you give your word, keep it. This is your duty as a godly man or woman. When King David asked in Psalm 15: "Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?" part of his answer was "one who keeps his oath even if it hurts." (Better in the King James: "He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not."). Of course your situation will change and make your promises hard to keep. That is to be expected. There is no virtue in keeping your word when it is easy to do so, when it costs you nothing, when it is your happiest course of action anyway. Virtue demands that you keep the promises that hurt. Especially the promises that hurt.

September 23, 2008: One Way To Test Your Goodness

"I thought I was a good person until I had Indians living in my house."

A missionary told me that around 1990. She and her husband were working with a South American indigenous group whose small villages were off limits to foreigners due to guerrilla activity. In order to have regular contact with the indigenous people and learn their language, they invited three Indians to live in their home, which was about 50 miles from the tribal area.

The indigenous guests behaved well, but the simple fact that they were around proved burdensome to the missionary. She confessed to me that her desire to be rid of them revealed a shameful fact about herself, a selfishness never previously suspected. "If you had asked me a couple years ago if I were kind and hospitable, I would have said 'Sure.' Now I know that I'm not."

That's the price, or part of the price, of trying to do a good work. You realize to your horror that you're not up to it. Your conscience had been giving you a pass only because your virtue hadn't been tested. Think you're a good person? Take three Indians into your home and get back to me in a year. Then, rather than professing "I'm a redeemed child of the King who loves me just the way I am" you might be saying, "I am a worm. God have mercy on my selfish little putrid soul."

Some time ago I ran across an essay that my son Peter wrote where he expressed how much in awe he was of his Aunt Grace, who with her husband took in dozens of difficult foster kids over the years and adopted several of them. And Peter has no idea how hard that really is! He can only guess from afar. Perhaps some day he will attempt such hospitality himself, and the effort will reveal faults that will humble him and move him to be more dependent on God.

But of course it is possible, upon being awakened to one's selfishness, to decide to love it rather than repent of it. That is what happened with the missionary eventually. Overcoming the shock of painful self-discovery, she learned to embrace her narcissism. She abandoned Christian service, renounced Christ, left her husband and neglected her children. Welcoming Indians into her home to show them the love of God is now a distant and suppressed memory.

I never tire of repeating my answer to a question asked of me in March of 2003 when I assumed the pastorate of Faith Bible Church: "What do you want from us?" - and I responded with one word: "Hospitality." Open the doors of your homes to guests.

Certainly there is risk in that. A guest may track dog dirt onto your floors (I've had worse on my floors!). You may discover that you really don't like people that much, and, if you are reprobate, may eventually conclude that you don't want Jesus in your heart any more than you want a stranger in your house. But that is the worst case scenario. I choose to think better of you. Climb the high Himalayan peaks of hospitality, and some day not only will God smile on you, but, maybe, even some smart-aleck niece or nephew will hold you in awe.

September 16, 2008: Epitaph

While visiting Gordon's church last week I received a shock when the Sunday School paper was handed out. It included an essay on Proverbs that my mother wrote years ago! Gordon had me read it aloud, which I could barely do for the emotion. I was one of the examples in it. Mom wrote, "My little boy once protested, 'A whole dime for a torn comic book? You're nuts!' But as soon as the salesman was out of earshot, Paul gloated about his bargain, 'I really got a good buy for only a dime.'" She cited Proverbs 20:14: "'It's no good, it's no good!'" says the buyer; then off he goes and boasts about his purchase." I can still see her smiling and hear her quoting that verse in the King James: "'It is naught, it is naught,'" saith the buyer; but when he goeth his way, he boasteth."

After I finished reading the essay, Gordon said, "I would have really liked your mom." I said, "Everyone did."

I thank God for my maternal legacy. The joy of it, though, is crashing hard these days against the sorrow I feel for those who never experience it. Even as I pen these words, I sit literally six feet away from a young man whose alcoholic mother abandoned him - and his brother, and his father. Two other young friends of mine saw their mother convert from devout Christianity to a "religion" that might be called "Bible-Hating Narcissism." While writing the above line (I'm not kidding! You can't make this up!) a friend called, and in the course of conversation told me that he too was estranged from his mother. When he was young, he said, among other cruelties his mom constantly told his friends that he was the black sheep of the family. "And I was a B+ student who never got in trouble!" he said, and I believe him.

On August 16 and 17 the following obituary appeared in the Vallejo (California) Times-Herald.

Dolores Aguilar, born in 1929 in New Mexico, left us on August 7, 2008. Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing... I truly believe at the end of the day ALL of us will really only miss what we never had, a good and kind mother, grandmother and great-grandmother... There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart. We cannot come together in the end to see to it that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren can say their goodbyes. So I say here for all of us, GOOD BYE, MOM.

Sadly, the obituary above is authentic. (You can look it up on Snopes.com). It has lit up the internet because of its brutal honesty and also because it has struck a chord with thousands who, like the author, were left "completely terrorized."

You have no idea how many moms (and dads too of course - but here I'm just focusing on moms) I'd like to wake up and in whose ears I'd like to shout, "What is the matter with you? Trust God and behave well! Don't you know that some day your children will grow up and evaluate you? And that, if they are worthy, they won't care if you made money, or kept yourself thin, or accomplished much, or had fun, or lived a life of self-fulfillment; but they will care whether you were kind and pure and did good to others?"

When I emailed an old friend about my extraordinary experience in Sunday School, he emailed back, "Your mom is one of my all-time favorite human beings of all time." Outside of God's approval, who could hope for a better evaluation than that? No fortune gathered from all the treasuries in the world could buy it. As Solomon said, "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold." (Proverbs 22:1).

September 2, 2008: "What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 3)

Christianity is mainly about glorifying God by believing what is true and doing what is right.

For the past two weeks I have been discussing the core of Christianity, taking as a jumping-off point a comment made by Bill Maher to the effect that religion is bad because "it's not mainly about doing the right thing...it's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die." I believe Maher is wrong on several counts. In the first essay I said that doing the right thing is essential to Christianity - though it is not essential to atheism. In the second essay I said that the prime motive for Christian practice must be the glory of God rather than the salvation of our souls (or of our butts, as Maher more colorfully put it).

Now I would like to put in a word for truth. I am a Christian because I believe that Christianity is true - regardless of whether I am saved, regardless of whether I want it to be true, regardless of whether it helps me be good or hopeful or happy or anything else. I take Christianity as fact, and believe that all statements of fact, simply by virtue of their correspondence to reality, demand assent from all honest men and women. This includes facts that are pleasant and facts that are horrific, those that are completely irrelevant and those that are life-changing. You must believe the truth no matter what it does for you or against you. If I knew beyond doubt that I was eternally damned, it would still be my duty to believe that Jesus was the incarnate Word of God who died for sinners. And - though I admit this would be very hard - it would still be my duty to obey the God who damned me.

C. S. Lewis' "descent" into Christian faith is instructive in this regard. He became a reluctant theist when he found to his dismay that he could not, in good conscience, hold on to atheism any more. He wanted to. Atheism for Lewis was freedom, and theism was a shackle. Who wants to believe in a God who is looking over your shoulder all the time, a God from whom you can never escape and breathe free, a God whom you can't dismiss by saying, "Go over there and tend to your own business, and just leave me alone"? But all of Lewis' wistful hope for God's non-existence could not keep the wrecking ball of Reason from pounding his edifice of atheism to shambles.

Significantly, Lewis was a theist for two years before he came to believe in the afterlife! He was ever afterward grateful to God for bringing him so gradually to the faith. It armed him against the charge (and the internal doubt) that he had become a Christian just to get his butt saved when he died. That was the furthest thing from his mind. He believed in God because God existed, and in Jesus because he was God incarnate. Facts compelled the assent of his mind and the obedience of his will long before the matter of eternal bliss came up.

When we stewards of the gospel proclaim Christ, we must be careful to set before people the reality they must believe and the moral code they must obey. Truth and goodness are not options, spices tossed on to the main dish of salvation. Of course we all want to be saved - assuming we believe in such a thing as salvation and fear such a thing as damnation. There is nothing particularly praiseworthy or even God-pleasing about wanting to be saved. That is just a reasonable (and inescapably selfish) human desire. True Christianity aims at more. True Christianity aims to magnify God, believing in him because he is there and obeying him because he is good.

August 27, 2008: "What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 2)

Bill Maher complained recently that religion (by which he meant Christianity) is "not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."

I think I can understand why Maher would say that. He's probably heard some bad sermons over the years. I've heard them too. Ever since I was a boy I've heard invitations to receive Christ that were really only about getting into heaven and staying out of hell - and some of those were so egregiously self-centered that they deliberately gutted the gospel of any call to repent and serve God. Jesus was presented as our ticket to heaven rather than the Lord who must be worshiped and obeyed. He was that "Thing You Had To Believe In" in order to get to the unending fun you really cared about. "You want to go to heaven? Say this prayer!"

The problem of crass Christian exhortation is an old one. When Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto begged the citizens of Geneva to return to Catholicism in 1539, he made a point of appealing to their desire to go to heaven. He wrote: "I presume, dearest brethren, that...all... who have put their faith and hope in Christ...have done so for this one reason: that they may obtain salvation for themselves and their souls."

Was that really the only reason to believe in Christ - to obtain salvation for oneself and one's soul? Not for Christ's own sake, nor for his pleasure, nor even because he commanded it - but simply to get saved? I'm afraid Sadoleto thought so. He even taught that personal salvation was the greatest thing a person could desire: "We all...believe in Christ in order that we may find salvation for our souls. There can be nothing more earnestly to be desired than this."

Sadoleto's letter was brought to John Calvin, who quickly wrote a response that merits careful study on the part of all those who proclaim the gospel. Attacking Sadoleto's notion that the best thing a man could desire was salvation, Calvin wrote: "It is not very sound theology to confine a man's thoughts so much to himself." Exactly. Instead, Calvin continued, we must "set before him, as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God." That is and must always be the Christian's main motivation: to glorify God. The zeal to exalt God must overrule the natural - but purely selfish - zeal to save our souls. Or, as Calvin put it, "This zeal [for God's glory] ought to exceed all thought and care for our own good and advantage."

Calvin even warned that good people would find tasteless and boring a constant stream of sermons about getting into heaven. The following quote is worth reading twice: "It certainly is the part of a Christian man to ascend higher than merely to seek and secure the salvation of his own soul. I am persuaded, therefore, that there is no man imbued with a true piety, who will not consider as insipid that long and labored exhortation to zeal for heavenly life, a zeal which keeps a man entirely devoted to himself, and does not, even by one expression, arouse him to sanctify the name of God."

I don't know if it will do Bill Maher any good, but I hope that some day he gets to hear some solid evangelical preaching that seeks above all else to magnify God. Glorifying God is what our faith is mainly about. Yes, there is that matter of getting our butts saved when we die - but that is just icing on the cake.

August 20, 2008: "What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 1)

Last night on “Larry King Live” atheist Bill Maher voiced a complaint against Christianity. He said, "One thing I don't like about religion is that - ask any of the truly devout - it's not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."

I suppose by Maher's standards I qualify as one of those "truly devout", but I do not answer, "This is mainly about getting our butts saved when we die" when asked what is central to the Christian faith. What, would I say, is our faith mainly about?

It is mainly about glorifying God. Ethical behavior, doing the right thing, is certainly one aspect of that. How can you glorify God if you displease him? Christians believe that God has commanded us to be pleasant and kind and gracious and honest and noble and generous, and not do things like cheat, lie, kill, steal, extort or insult. Moral goodness is bound up in Christian doctrine, and can't be bled or cut out of it. Ethics-less Christianity is no Christianity at all - it is a bloodless, boneless corpse.

Atheism, however, survives quite well without ethics. In fact, I have never been able to understand how atheism can build a theory of moral behavior that actually succeeds in urging anybody to do good. I am glad that Bill Maher wants to "do the right thing", and I hope he continues to want to do the right thing and does not think too hard about it. Because if he does think about it, he'll see (ask any atheist!) that morality reduces to social custom, which reduces to urges dictated by the competing claims of evolutionary biology, which reduces to chemical reactions in our brains and in our environment, which reduces to electrons jumping from the orbital of one atom to another under the precise laws of physics and the imprecise randomness of quantum mechanics, which reduces to, well, that's pretty much all there is! That is where the chain of moral reasoning stops. What then is to keep the atheist from torturing Guantanamo detainees or falsifying evidence to convict innocent men if, when he asks why he shouldn't, all he's got to answer to (or even formulate an answer with!) are atoms in his brain knocking about like ping pong balls in a lottery glass cage? For the Christian, though, at the end of every chain of moral reasoning (which in some contexts we might call "temptation"), there is a holy God wagging his finger and saying, "You must not do that bad thing."

Doing the right thing is packed hard into Christianity and distributed through every feature of it like crude oil in Canadian shale. Dig into atheism, however, and keep digging hard and deep, and you will bore a hole right through the center and come out the other side without ever having encountered a single thing to fuel good works with. I'm not saying atheists can't find reasons for doing good - I'm just saying they can't find them in atheism. Good atheists (I've known several) will then shrug their philosophical shoulders and say, "Well, I don't know why, but we should do good anyways." Bad atheists (though they are not logically inconsistent) will say, "Nietzsche was right," and, given power, will become our Stalins and Mussolinis and Pol Pots and Kim Jong Ils. Millions die as a result. How can you appeal to the conscience of someone who knows in his heart that conscience is an illusion - the mere froth of an evolutionary heritage that strong people can sweep away with a wave of their hand?

I think there is a reason why, when you go around the world and look for those who are rebuilding schools in New Orleans, rescuing AIDS orphans in Kenya, helping lepers in India, rebuilding the shattered lives of rape victims in the Congo - what you find are Christians, Christians, and more Christians, and virtually nobody representing the atheist and freethinker societies. It is not just because Christians outnumber atheists - though certainly that is a factor. It is because our religion commands us to do good no matter what.

More next week, Lord willing, on what our religion is mainly about.

August 12, 2008: How To Fight Poverty

In a cover story this week on Pastor Rick Warren, Time Magazine reports that the influential pastor of Saddleback Church is "leading and riding the newest wave of change in the Evangelical community: an expansion beyond social conservatism to causes such as battling poverty, opposing torture and combating global warming."

I'll leave aside torture and global warming for another day, but as for battling poverty - is this a new cause for evangelicals? In the past all we cared about was social conservatism, but now thanks to Warren and others we have awakened to the campaign of ending global poverty?

Among the things I find frustrating about this "new evangelical emphasis" is its blindness to the fact that conservative Christians have always been the best poverty fighters the world has ever known. We own this topic. We've known how to prevent and stay out of penniless misery for thousands of years. All the principles are jam-packed into the pages of the Bible, and they are on display every time we open it up and proclaim its message. There is nothing new about how to fight poverty. Here in a nutshell is how not to be poor:

1) Work hard. (This includes studying hard to learn a skill – work hard at being educated).

The Bible says that "Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth" (Proverbs 4:10). You'll never end the poverty of those who refuse to learn, who drop out of school, who depend on the goodwill and productivity of others for their food. "If a man will not work, neither let him eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

2) Don't have sex with anyone you're not married to.

The Bible's laws against adultery, fornication and all other sexual misconduct (Hebrews 13:5: "Let the marriage bed be undefiled") are great anti-poverty measures. Poverty results from the kind of immorality that produces fatherless children, sexually transmitted diseases, broken homes, etc. The other day I read an article about a region in Africa where the majority of children are raped. That is what their culture permits and expects. As long as this inhumanly cruel perverse sexual behavior continues, this region will always be poor - no matter how many billions of dollars of aid are given to it, and no matter how often its debts are forgiven.

3) Don't have vices.

Let me personalize this one. The other day I shocked a man by telling him I'd never had a beer. It's true. Completely aside from any moral implications, do you have any idea how much money I've saved over the years by never buying alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, porn, or lottery tickets? A lot. This is one of the factors that helps explain the minor miracle of how I have been able, in the past few years, to raise two sons in the suburbs while taking home a preacher's salary of $543 a week. But for all those people who waste money on things that ordinary evangelical preaching warns against, well, it doesn't surprise me if they wind up poorer than I am.

If you have a life that obeys the principles above, and a society and environment that respects them, then in all likelihood you won't be poor. Of course there are exceptions. You might be poor anyways because of disease, handicap, natural disaster, oppression, or really bad luck. That's why we have charity, and must always act charitably toward the worthy poor. (Yes, the worthy poor - 1 Timothy 5:9-10 forbids helping widows who had been lazy or promiscuous; they had to have done good deeds.) I've been the thankful recipient of charity many times myself, and am all in favor of it.

We who take the Bible seriously have always known how to fight poverty in ourselves and others, and that fight has always involved an uncompromising message to act morally, work diligently and give compassionately. What then, is "new" about Warren's battle against poverty?

Nothing, really, except for the call upon governments to take action. This is why Warren is convening a forum with Barak Obama and John McCain in Orange County, California. This is why Mike Huckabee and James Meeks left their pulpits and their callings to proclaim Christ so that now they could really make a difference(!) by pushing for political solutions to public problems. This is why a number of evangelical leaders, including Warren, John Stott and Billy Graham signed an open letter to President Bush asking him to undertake the cause of the poor in global concerns.

It is a big mistake. Every government campaign to end poverty has only created more of it in the long run. Lyndon Johnson's well-intentioned programs created cycles of dependency that made and kept people poor. The same Time Magazine issue that features Warren has a stunningly honest article on Africa, "Pain amid Plenty", that outlines how the billions of dollars of charitable aid to Africa over the years has had the unintended effect of fostering perpetual starvation.

I can't understand why Christian clergymen are taking the cause for fighting poverty to governments when political institutions have been so bad at it and we have been so good at it! This isn't government's job. Governments are there to preserve order, protect the citizenry, punish evildoers and reward good behavior. Ask them to do more than that, or worse, give them the power to try to create the poverty-less utopias we like to dream of, and they will find ways to make people starve.

July 29, 2008: Not All "Fundamentalisms" Are The Same

If you take the words of Joseph Smith or Mohammed literally and try to pattern your life after theirs, you will be a violent sex offender. If you take the words of Jesus literally and try to pattern your life after his, you will be a celibate pacifist.

That is my basic answer to those who try to lump together all brands of fundamentalism into a single sinister phenomenon. Lately I have been reading the comments of some religion haters who find little to distinguish between Muslim, Mormon and Christian fundamentalism, and who claim that they are all roots of intolerance and evil. Here is why I think such judgments miss the mark:

Mohammed married a six-year-old girl and had sex with her when she was nine. (Look it up, her name was Aishah.) He was a child molester. As far as I am concerned, that is all we need to know about that pervert. Imitate Mohammed, and you will rape single-digit aged girls and call it marriage. And you will kill people too. Among Mohammed's countless atrocities, he ordered the beheading of the 800 Jewish men of Medina in 627. He had plenty of encouragement from the Koran, which says concerning infidels:

Seize them and slay them wherever you find them: and in any case take no friends or helpers from their ranks. (Surah 4:89)

I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips of them. It is not you who slew them; it was Allah. (Surah 8:13-17)

(Read more about Mohammed's demented personality and violence in Unveiling Islam by former Muslim professors Ergun and Emir Caner.)

Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was another piece of work. He committed adultery with Marinda Nancy Johnson when she was 16, and on March 24, 1832 a mob that included Marinda's relatives tried to castrate him. (Instead they merely beat, tarred and feathered him.) In 1835 Smith's wife Emma caught him sleeping with their housemaid Fanny Alger and kicked the girl out of their house. Smith went on to "marry" about 40 women between 1840 and 1844, including 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Smith basically fornicated with anyone he could seduce or overpower and called it "celestial marriage."

He also incited followers to violence against opponents of Mormonism. In 1842 he preached that some sins were so heinous that they could only be atoned for if the guilty one were to "spill his blood upon the ground." He let his followers do the spilling. When he wanted former Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs dead, he simply prophesied that the man would "die by violent means within one year." Mormon enforcer Orrin Porter Rockwell did his part to fulfill Smith's prophesy by firing three bullets into Boggs' head and neck.

But when it comes to trying to make Jesus the author of violence and brute sexual conquest, you draw a total blank. Jesus never married, was never accused of sexual impropriety, and taught that even mental adultery was wrong (Matthew 5:28). Imitate him and you will be a celibate. And where do you ever find Jesus practicing violence, or inciting his followers to it? He told Peter to put his sword away (Matthew 26:52), commanded us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and told us to turn the other cheek when we are struck (Matthew 5:39). It is true that over the years many people have committed acts of perversion or violence in the name of Jesus, but the simple fact is they cannot find justification for such behavior in the example of his life or in any of his teachings.

As you can imagine, I really don't like mentioning Jesus in the same breath as Mohammed and Joseph Smith, because Jesus is Holy God Incarnate while Mohammed and Smith were evil clown freaks with followings. I only mention them together here because they are regarded in the popular, secular mind as "founders of major
religions," and all equally dangerous if taken too seriously or followed too closely. That is just not so. Follow in the footsteps of Mohammed and Joseph Smith and you will impregnate young teenagers like Warren Jeffs or murder thousands (millions if you could) like Osama Bin Laden. Follow in the footsteps of Jesus and you will simply do good.

July 22, 2008: The Trouble With Adoration

A pastor friend told me that he was teaching his congregation to pray according to the ACTS formula (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), and that he was having trouble with the "A". He couldn't get them to pray prayers of adoration.

I think there is a reason for that which has nothing to do with lukewarmness or immaturity on the part of the worshippers. It is simply because adoration tends to demand accompaniment. Stripped to mere words it comes across awkward and flat. When I pray I only need standard prose to confess, or give thanks, or make a request. But the act of praise wants more - a musical instrument perhaps, or formal expression in poetry or song. It is possible that my stuttering over verbal adoration is due to my coldness or lack of love for God, and if so, then God forgive me and reform me, and may he dismiss from everyone's mind the analysis below. But here is how I see it.

We have an intuition of what makes for an appropriate response to a performance, or revelation of fact, or stimulus. It is the denial of this intuition that allows that stupid line of rhetoric we've all heard in sermons: "At the football game Friday night you cheered for your team and shouted yourself hoarse when they scored a touchdown - are you telling me you can get excited about football but you can't get excited about God?" It is a common preacher's technique for drumming up enthusiasm-by-guilt in a quiet congregation, and it is idiotic. We should not cheer for God the way we cheer a walk-off home run. I believe we can see that by imagining other attempts to gin up inappropriate responses. When I'm hungry, for example, and good food is set before me, I salivate like one of Pavlov's dogs - and you probably do too. Imagine a preacher indicting us watery-mouthed diners with: "You mean to say you can salivate over a plate of food but you don't love God enough to get any spit in your mouth over him?" We'd say, "Fool! God isn't something you salivate over, food is." Or, if you will permit a racy example (we're all adults here), a man's body will respond in certain God-designed ways to the sight of an under-clad, shapely woman. If a preacher said, "You mean to say you can get it on for a woman but you can't do that for God?" I'd just walk out of the church.

The point is that different things call for different responses, and a vehicle of expression that works perfectly well in one setting will not work at all in another. Words work well for some things – like communicating truth, but not at all for other things - like satisfying hunger. And, I contend, words only "kind of" work, clunkily and under handicap, for some other good things. Like expressing love. As you know, love is notoriously difficult to express with words alone. Jim Croce gave up trying to do so and solved his problem musically:

Well I know it's kind of late,
I hope I didn't wake you.
But what I've got to say can't wait,
I know you'd understand.
'Cause every time I tried to tell you,
The words just came out wrong.
So I'll have to say 'I love you' in a song.

There it is, in a song! (Of course, you have to hear the above words sung to get their effect.) Croce was right. Love demands a song the way apple pie demands (for me anyway) a cup of coffee. Lovers stumble over mere words, and find themselves waxing poetical and musical in attempts to get their expression just right. Thus it was and ever shall be.

I believe that adoration of God is like the expression of love. Confine it to words alone and you'll see that it is "not quite right" or "missing something." That sense may be so strong that you'll struggle to get out any words at all. So try singing your praise instead. I can sing "How Great Thou Art", but if I update the language and try to say, "God you're really great," the words seem to die on my tongue. Perhaps they should, because I'm not using the right medium. In a terribly inappropriate (but wickedly funny) skit in Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life a clergyman played by Michael Palin leads antiphonal praise in a chapel service, saying, "Oh Lord...Oooh you are so big...So absolutely huge...Gosh we're all really impressed down here I tell you." This is a lampooning of the Psalms of praise of course, but remember: the Psalms were composed as poetry and performed as songs! Cripple the poetry and mute the music and of course you wind up with something that sounds funny and odd.

I'm recommending to my pastor friend (and if I'm wrong, God give him the wisdom to ignore me!) to leave the confession, thanksgiving and supplication as they are - verbal - but to flavor the adoration with something else. Music, probably. Sing a song of adoration, or perhaps listen in silence to sacred instrumental music. Read a devotional poem. In a charismatic congregation, tongues might do nicely here. Maybe there are visual ways too of provoking the heart's adoration (a friend of mine came to believe in God when he saw mountains!), but I don't know how to do that in a worship service. The main thing is to find a way to give to Adoration the non-verbal accompaniment it demands and deserves.

July 8, 2008: Think More

I was glad to hear a college-age friend of my son admit that thoughtful investigation was hard.

I had been explaining a cheap-trick method of argumentation that involved nothing more than postulating an underlying motive for an opponent's thesis. For example, suppose someone maintains that gun control laws are counterproductive because "Fewer guns mean more crime, and when municipalities permit concealed carry weapons, the crime rate drops." An easy response to that is, "Well, you just say that because you're in the NRA and you've got a huge gun collection!"

That may be true. But even if the NRA member only believes his statistics because they bolster his position, the question remains: "Are they accurate?" Because no matter what the gun-nut believes or why he believes it, statements of fact must be received or contested on their own terms. If he is wrong, then you can only demonstrate he is wrong by showing that his statistics are in error or that they are erroneously applied. His motives may be relevant for understanding how he came to believe as he did, but they are irrelevant for determining whether what he believes is true. To discern that, you have to investigate and think.

My son's friend said, "That's so hard" and I rejoiced. Exactly. Of course it's hard. Disciplined thinking is always hard - but like most things that require effort there is a payoff for engaging in it and a cost for neglecting it. Indolence is a vice that exacts a toll: physical laziness leaves you flabby and winded; occupational laziness leaves you poor and needy; intellectual laziness leaves you shallow and bigoted; spiritual laziness leaves you far from God. Work hard. This includes forcing your mind to work as hard as it can.

(While writing this paragraph I was interrupted by the doorbell ringing - it was two boys asking me if I wanted to buy something to drink at their lemonade stand. So of course I had to reward their industriousness by going over and buying two cans of pop and a cup of lemonade. Good for them. Now, let's see - where was I? Oh yes, intellectual laziness):

Sunday I was asked about an archeological find featured in the New York Times. It was a Hebrew stone tablet with an apocalyptic message. Looking into the matter afterward I found that the scholar promoting his interpretation of the tablet had a long-standing ax to grind: the overturning of what he thinks is "our traditional understanding of Christianity." It would be easy enough to dismiss his claims on the basis of his motive. But in investigating further and plowing through arcane details of Hebrew orthography, I was happy to find that - though I believe his proposal ultimately lacks merit - it turns out that, if he is correct, his thesis actually supports standard evangelical belief about messianic expectation on the part of first-century Jews!

That was an eye-opener. (The original article and my response are available upon request).

My point is that I was only able to come to this unexpected conclusion through careful reading and investigation and thinking. Valid conclusions and supportable convictions are worth all the "mindly" effort you have to muster to attain them. Think more.

July 1, 2008: Our Curse, Another's Blessing

I have a new answer now to the question, "What's your favorite book?" The best book I have ever read is Volume 3 of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis.

It was never intended to be a book. Lewis did not keep letters mailed to him, and he did not expect anyone to keep letters he sent to them. But they did - friends, scholars, children, strangers, lunatics, pastors. They wrote him boatloads of mail from all over the world and he painstakingly responded to every one. They treasured his letters like gold and were able to produce them 30-40 years after his death when editor Walter Hooper went looking for them.

Many who received a personal letter from Lewis were ecstatic (and this encouraged them to write more!), but for him letter-writing was a constant woe. He called it "the bane of my life" when speaking in confidence to a friend. It ate up all his leisure time and bit into his work. He had to get up early every morning to respond to the previous day's mail. When he returned from a brief vacation he'd find an overwhelming stack of 60 letters waiting for him. Since he could not type, and had a genetically deformed thumb that would not bend at the knuckle, he had to do the best he could writing by hand (and he constantly apologized for his bad handwriting, especially as he got older.) For at least a decade he dreaded Christmas, because he would get hundreds of letters at that time, and he felt he needed to answer them all. He begged close friends to write him at some other time of the year.

But Lewis' curse is my blessing. I find his letters to be the best devotional material I have ever read. I noticed long ago that writing that is intended as devotional usually leaves me unmoved. But when I read Lewis dealing graciously with a confused child or correcting an errant scholar or appreciating a gift or simply expressing grief, it inspires me to worship. And as for his casual insights, oh my goodness they leap out from every page. You have no idea how many times over the past few months I've said to my sons, "Remember the other day when we were talking about plagiarism/ the gracious treatment of bores/ the foibles of Rev So-and-So/ the poetry of T. S. Elliot? Well listen to this paragraph I just read in Lewis!" It is as though he had somehow listened to our conversation and nailed the point in 50 words or less.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 St. Paul asked to be delivered from a thorn in the flesh, and God said no. Lewis' thorn in the flesh was a constant pile of correspondence he wished he could avoid, but his response to that thorn comes down to me as a source of great enrichment and delight. Now I have a follow-up prayer with regard to my own thorns: "Lord, please take this curse from me. It is the bane of my life. But if you will not, then would you be so kind as to turn it into a blessing for others? Thank you."

June 24, 2008: "The Lord Has Been Good To Me"

In an email recently I praised an individual for her sunny appreciation of God's blessings. She has to have a sharp eye for those blessings, because in many ways she has a difficult life. In fact, her general situation is so hard that I mentally reference her example when I quote to myself the proverb, "I cried because I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet." She's the one without feet, and I'm just temporarily shoeless.

But while praising her peace I recalled a time when I was 17 and a friend told me how impressed he was with my mother's spiritual calm when she lost her husband. "She has such a look of the peace of the Lord on her face," he said, and I was shocked. "Oh no - you haven't seen her tears," I told him. "I see her anguish at home all the time."

I also recalled a moment when I was 14 and my mother was deeply upset over the fact that a family member had fallen into sin. Foolishly I said to her, "Mom - look at Dad! He's calm about this. He's taking it well." She told me, "No, he is not taking it well." And she explained how outraged and grieved he was, along with examples of how he expressed that in private. I hadn't known. I simply had not seen his sorrow. He had thought it wise - and certainly he was right - to hide that from his son.

We are like icebergs sometimes. I read somewhere, and suppose it's true, that only about 10 percent of an iceberg floats above the surface of the water. The rest sits heavily below where less sunlight can reach.

But it is good if that 10 percent of us that can bask in and reflect light is also the public side that people can see. This is not hypocrisy but good manners. Joseph washed tears from his face before appearing to his brothers (Genesis 43:31). Nehemiah only once gambled sorrow in the presence of Artaxerxes - otherwise his policy was never to be sad before the king (Nehemiah 2:1). While we must sometimes speak of our burdens in order to give others the privilege of bearing them, we do well to remember that they have their burdens too, and may well find their sorrows eased more by our expressions of gratitude than our cries of complaint. May God give us grace so that, like my saintly friend, our public face manifests a resolve to count our blessings more than we bemoan our curses.

The Gracious Gift Of Obligation

Do you ever feel tied down to duties from which you wish you were free? Those duties might be God's grace to you. To be relieved of them – if no fresh duties took their place - might be more numbing than pleasant. What happiness you have may depend in no small part on things that, if taken away, would not leave you saying, "Thank God I'm free!" but rather, "What in the world do I do now?"

Lately I have been reading through the private letters of C. S. Lewis (and what great devotional reading that has been!). In 1956 Lewis married a dying woman, Joy Gresham, mostly as a favor to her so that she could remain in England rather than be forced to return to America when her visa expired. He was her caretaker. Then she had a miraculous recovery, and they had a blissful two years together before her disease returned and she passed away. Shortly after she died Lewis wrote the following to a pastor friend:

I'd like to meet. Perhaps I could come up to town some day when you are in town and take you to lunch...For I am - oh God that I were not- very free now. One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.

To be happy one must be tied! Those words hit me so hard I had to put the book down. I know them to be true. A kite, if it could think, might say, "This string pulling at my chest is annoying. If only I could cut it I could fly free!" But if the string were cut the kite would fall. The same string that holds it down also holds it up.

About a year ago I had a dream that had a strong emotional impact on me. In the dream I found myself in a line where people were buying tickets for some kind of entertainment. I happened to spot a lady friend there, greeted her and suggested (or assumed) that we go to the event together. But it turned out she was waiting to meet some other people and would attend with them. Feeling awkward, I excused myself, left and drove away. In the car I thought, "Well, now I can do anything I want." It was early evening and there was nothing on the agenda, so I was free to drive anywhere, eat anywhere, see a movie or go for a walk or anything else. But in the same moment I realized there was nothing that I really wanted to do by myself, and the thought filled me with sadness.

Solomon's near-absolute freedom wound up depressing him, and he wisely concluded that it was good for a man "to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor" (Ecclesiastes 5:18). Not apart from his toilsome labor, but in it. If you have things you must do, people you must care for, duties you must discharge, toilsome labors you must complete: give thanks. To be happy you must be tied to things for which people depend on you. Those duties, disguised as burdens, are often a gift from God.

June 10, 2008: As For Me And My House

Do parents matter?

Seriously. I'm asking this for real.

I found out the other day that a devout Christian friend of mine never knew his father, because the man abandoned his family when my friend was young. A pastor friend of mine, an example to me of holy good cheer, had a father who was angry and bitter. My father's father was a nasty unpleasant grouch - but somehow my dad wound up with a personality as warm as the sun.

Leon Powe of the Celtics grew up fatherless, and his mother, who had trouble with the law, died when he was a junior in high school. But Powe turned into a saint. Jim Daly, current president of Focus On The Family, was raised in foster homes - some of them really bad – after his parents divorced and his mother died and his stepfather abandoned him. But Daly turned out good.

Jerry Falwell's father tried to make him an atheist, and Madeleine Murray O'Hare tried to do the same with her son William. They failed, and their sons became outspoken evangelists of the gospel their parents hated.

And then there are all those good, godly parents whose children are evil. A missionary couple I know had a daughter who tried to poison them. That is extreme, of course, but I know plenty of cases not too far removed from that. Ever since God created Adam good people have begotten villains.

I find especially instructive those cases of close-in-age siblings, raised in the same home under the same conditions by the same parents, where one sibling is good and the other bad. A friend of mine (a good man) has told me that if his brother ever shows up on his doorstep, he will call the police (and I'm sorry to say he would be right to do so). Another friend who leads a moral life agonizes over a brother who has turned into a criminal bum. This friend happened to mention to me that his parents went out of their way to raise him and his brother just the same.

So, seriously: do parents matter?

After observing life and families and studying the Bible a lot, my answer has become, "Not nearly as much as we think." In the last few decades, parenting and family matters have become an obsession of the evangelical Christian subculture. The topic dominates Christian radio, is featured in a thousand sermon series, has launched millions of books and dozens of institutions. This fosters the illusion that we can control much of the way our kids turn out. The question I have been wanting to ask for a while is, "Why do we say so much about parenting when the Bible says so little?" Read through the whole Bible yourself and you will see what I mean. It is not that the Bible says nothing about parenting, but relative to other topics it is actually pretty low on the priority scale. Consider this: can you name even one child of a disciple of Christ? Can you name any of their wives? The apostles managed to write a whole New Testament and never mention their family members once!

I believe the apostles knew in their bones something we are in danger of losing: every one makes his or her own decision for Christ. Good parenting does not sanctify, and bad parenting does not doom. Do not take credit for your little saints, and do not beat yourself up over your little demons. Do your best as a parent, and remember always that your children will have to answer to God for themselves just as you will.

June 3, 2008: Suffering And Faith

Have you ever known someone who lost faith in God because of suffering? I mean his or her own personal suffering - not somebody else's.

I raise the question because people I know or know of who don't believe in God often point to suffering as the reason for their disbelief. The odd thing is, it always seems to be somebody else's suffering. Former evangelist and Billy Graham colleague Charles Templeton indicated that his conversion from Christianity to atheism involved outrage over the plight of starving multitudes in Africa. Templeton himself, however, led a long prosperous life in the United States and Canada. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wrote a "How can anybody believe in God?" essay after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami - but wrote it, of course, from the comfort of a desk in Chicago a half a world away from the killer waves.

At that time I wrote, "It just isn't the case that those who have suffered the worst lack religious faith while those who live at ease embrace it." Last week I came across a couple news stories that illustrate the point. The Tribune said that Rabbi Bob Schreibman began to lose his faith in 1988 when he had to conduct the funeral of 8-year-old Nicholas Corwin, who had been murdered in a random act of violence by a psychotic individual who shot up a school classroom. Schreibman, now retired, describes himself as a skeptic. Within days of reading about Schreibman, I saw a report on Bill and Linda Correira, who lost their daughter Bethany to a murderer-rapist in May of 2003. Bill and Linda, deeply religious both before and after the tragedy, have forgiven their daughter's killer.

Schreibman did not lose his own son, but the fact that another couple lost their son was enough to erode his faith. The Correiras, however, actually did lose their daughter - and in just about the most horrible way imaginable. But they have kept on worshipping God.

Though the cases of Schreibman and the Correiras are anecdotal, I do not believe they are merely so. As I pile up lots of consistent anecdotes over the years I begin to suspect that they reflect real tendencies. It would be going too far, and it would be uncharitable, to conclude, "See! No one who ever really suffered lost faith in God because of it." But what I think I can confidently say is this: Though suffering is perhaps the most frequently invoked reason to reject God, there is, in general, no positive correlation between one's own suffering and one's disbelief.

While I don't know a single person who became an atheist because of personal suffering, I do know people who became Christians that way. Some 23 years ago when I was working in a grim warehouse where it seemed that most of my co-workers were neither nice nor law-abiding, I prayed, "Lord, if there are any Christians here, please help me to find them!" Then one day I was in the cafeteria when I spotted a Bible on a table and sat down next to it to see who was reading it on break. It turned out to be a soft-spoken, kind-hearted black gentleman who explained to me how he had become a Christian. It was after his 4-year-old son died of a brain tumor.