Defending God

I've been gone for quite a while mostly busy with school but I thought I'd share something I came across again yesterday. Andrew Hackman, from Hackman's Musings, shared this verse on Facebook.

And the Lord said, " “Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. 6 Slaughter the old men, the young men and women, the mothers and children, but do not touch anyone who has the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the old men who were in front of the temple. ~ Ezekiel 9:5-6

How does this verse make you feel? Are your initial thoughts to defend or oppose it? What if we made some minor changes to the verse like the following:

And Allah said, " “Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. 6 Slaughter the old men, the young men and women, the mothers and children, but do not touch anyone who has the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the old men who were in front of the temple. ~ The Holy Quran sura 9:5-6

Does that make a difference? Would you defend one more so than the other, or do you find them both abhorrent? What if I tied these words to Hitler? Would it make a difference if we added context to each of these scenarios? What if we explained that the residents of the city needed to be exterminated or else they would continue to commit heinous crimes against humanity?

The words themselves regardless of the source are abhorrent, period.  The issue some people struggle with is what to do about the source. If the source is someone (or some group/institution) you identify with what do you do with a verse/quote promoting genocide? What does that verse/quote tell you about the source? Are your tribal loyalties so important to you that you would defend the source regardless of what he/she/it may say?

If you can work out some clever double think so that your source stays innocent and blameless while promoting something as sicking as genocide AND still be able to sleep at night, then I applaud your skills in mental gymnastics. I, on the other hand, can not look at a verse like this without feeling sick. Opposing this verse doesn't mean I throw out the Bible entirely or despise the religion (or the believers) around it. I just can't believe in a deity which calls for genocide in one verse and then promises showers of blessings and love in the next. It is the image of a barbecue-obsessed deity, who demands obedience or blood, that I have rejected after many years struggling with questions brought up by reading the rarely mentioned parts of the Bible. Studying the Bible in-depth is what set me on the path to the conclusions I've reached today. (Although, I wouldn't mind grilling with Thor.)

Conversations with Ourselves-The Question

I love conversation. I love the interaction, mingling, sharing, and even merging of thoughts produced by conversing with one another. It is a way in which we can grow together. Of course there are many pitfalls to conversations in which I will not get into today (name-calling, being argumentative,  miscommunication, assumptions, etc.). I want to focus on the power of conversation and especially on self reflection.

(H/T to McGrath from Exploring Our Matrix for sharing this photo).

Self reflection is something which I enjoy so much it's almost second nature to me. Asking questions is what guides me through my daily
self reflection moments. I am a thinker, and I always will be. I can get lost for hours down the rabbit hole following question after question. I can't help myself from asking questions, to think and wrestle with those questions and see what (or, more importantly, who) emerges. Answers are too easy, and easy answers can be messy and come with strings attached. But when you wrestle with a question, you come from the experienced a changed person. Not necessarily good or bad ( that's too black and white) but a changed person, a new creation. There are no easy answers to life, although some of us may feel better with easy answers, being human is an experience which must be experienced. And with each experience we are transformed, with each thought and wrestling we become something new, and in our actions we create a space for new things to flourish. THAT creative space is what I used to call God and what I still hold sacred.

So the question I ask others, but mostly myself, is "who are you, really?" For me THIS is the question which catapulted me into a sea of questions. Are we merely a collection of experiences, memories, genetic code, characteristics? Are we afraid to ask, or afraid to discover? What if we discover something about yourself which causes us shame and embarrassment, what then? What if what we are is completely alien from what we've been told since childhood? How do we wrestle that? How do we live? How do we be human? How do we love? The questions can go on and on, and we can either wrestle and learn to live WITH them, or we can take the easy prepackaged answer.

So who are you, really?

Part 1) Conversations with Ourselves: The Question
Part 2) Conversations with Ourselves: The Internal Struggle
Part 3) Conversations with Ourselves: The External Struggle
Part 4) Conversations with Ourselves:  Reflections on Who We Were
Part 5) Conversations with Ourselves: Making Peace with Chaos
Part 6) Conversations with Ourselves: Making Sense of It All

Internal Battle

David Hayward illustrates what many of us believers in exile have experienced.When David shared this on Facebook he said  he wasn't going to say anything to "just see what happens". That rascal. On his website he says that he is a graffiti artist on the walls of religion. I'd go one step further and say he's a holy rascal.  

[Intellect vs. Belief by David Hayward]

Has this happened to you? I struggled with this internal war for years before letting go of religion. My beliefs have changed. I feel it has led me to be more compassionate and loving towards my fellow man. This works for me because I've realized that our spirituality is uniquely our own. You don't need an outside force (religion) telling you HOW to be human. It can be useful but not exclusively necessary. Churches are hemorrhaging members and they are doing everything they can to bring lost sheep back into the fold. Most use fear tactics which backfires mainly because people they (churches) fail to understand one of the main reasons people leave is because they don't feel comfortable in that community. They leave because they don't feel welcomed, they feel alone within the community, and even feel that there is more fear than love being spouted from the pulpit. It just doesn't work for them. But just because it doesn't work for them means your faith is meaningless. Quite the opposite: by discovering your spirituality is your own allows you to grow in your faith, to grow in love.  THIS works for me. What works for you?

Hobby Lobby's Hurt Feelings

I know this is a bit outdated but here's another gem brought to you by On Knees for Jesus. Hobby Lobby filed a lawsuit against the government over the health care mandate because they don't want to provide abortion inducing drugs in their health care plan. Hopefully you won't lose too many customers from this.



Hobby Lobby, I know you feel that providing coverage for something which goes against your beliefs is important to you. In the end you WILL be providing abortion drugs to your employees one way or another. If you don't provide it in your health care plan you'll provide it through the paycheck you give to your employees. Either way you, the company, are paying for abortions (and probably a mess of other things you'd rather not know about). That is unless you see fit to monitor what your employees do with their paycheck. I believe abortion should be a minor issue. As a civilization with contraceptive technology why aren't we promoting pregnancy prevention instead of terminating them? People are going to have sex, especially teenagers, so why not give them the means to have safe sex? Using contraceptives will not condemn your soul AND you can choose when you and your mate are ready to have a baby. If the religious right focused more on birth control the abortion issue will be disappear on its own. But of course every group needs something easy to rally behind, Christians against poverty and homelessness seems too much like hard. You can't handle a Bible with dirty hands.

Homegrown Extremists

This photo has been floating about the internet for a couple years but this is the first I've seen it  "Liked" by a friend on Facebook which appeared on my radar.

We are worried about terrorists getting a hold of nuclear weapons but what would happen if some trigger happy Americans got a hold of them first? Now, I'm not saying all Americans want to nuke the Middle East and the same goes for Muslims. We are talking about extremists and extremist thinking (or lack thereof). There are extremists who would love nothing more than to wipe Mecca off the map. Shoot first and recover from an economic catastrophe, oil shortage, and environmental (dare I say planetary by the size of this impact we're looking at nuclear winter) annihilation later. All to settle a score. If you can look at this photo and not feel disgusted I don't think I could consider you human let alone a "friend". Here's the link to the Facebook page which posted this picture if you want to peruse through the comments. I posted this photo not because I feel I have better morals than these people but to demonstrate how poisonous a twisted ideology can be if left to fester. 11 years later and some Americans feel justice has not been served even though we have taken out Osama bin Laden.

This is not justice. To quote one of my favorite moments of the Bible Abraham challenged God

"Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Gen 18:25

We've come a long way from OT morality, or at least most of us have. Loving your enemy is hard, but a way towards that goal is to understand them. Once you understand them you will find they're no different than we are. There is no They, there is no Other.   We can be better than this. We are better than this. Or at least we should teach our children to be better than us.

Education I Haz It

I thought I would share a couple of gems floating around the internets. Although you might receive a slight headache afterwards, enjoy!

(Both via Unreasonable Faith, I love you guys!)