Gods and Generals and Rainbows

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

NORTHERN LIGHTS

Welcome back.  In the movie, Gods and Generals, there is a scene after the battle of Fredricksburg where the Northern Lights appear in the sky above the living and the dead.  

Shelby Foote mentions this rare occurrence in Ken Burns' excellent documentary The Civil War.  Foote suggests that the aurora borealis would have engendered religious meaning to both sides. Indeed, religious sentiment is expressed in the movie.

I have never seen this magnificent display, but I have seen pictures. I hope to one day travel North to watch the night sky blaze with those luminous streams.  I imagine it appears quietly over the night sky, looking so eerie and divine that one cannot help but attribute it to a god.  

It is, however, a natural display of electrons from solar winds interacting with our atmosphere.  The swirls "follow the lines of the magnetic force generated by the earth's core."

The timeliness of the event struck the soldiers, and scholars today, as being significant.  It happened on the very night after the Rebels decimated the Federal army.  

If the Rebels saw the Northern Lights as a sign that God was with them, as they most surely did, they were proven to be bad interpreters of a natural event.  History has proven since Appomattox which side God favored, if we think of God favoring one side over another in a war.

RAINBOWS

A rainbow is similar to an aurora borealis in that it appears in the sky.  We have all seen a rainbow.  It is a spectacular sight, often making us stop what we are doing to stare.  This can be a bad idea if we are driving.

To ancients, the appearance of a gigantic arch of many colors bending over the sky must have been a miracle.  In the Hebrew stories of the flood, the rainbow signifies God's promise to never destroy humanity by flood again.  

In the older, Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, the rainbow is Ishtar's necklace shown yet with no promise.  

Of course, a rainbow is merely sunlight shining through raindrops.  It tends to happen later in the day because of where the sun's position is in the sky.

A rainbow would appear anywhere, and anytime, on any planet with sun and rain without gods or a God making it happen.  It is a law of nature.  It just happens that sunlight through rain or glass is bent into a prism.

I took a picture recently of a rainbow fragment shining on my dining room wall.  It was not much bigger than a half dollar.  The sun had dipped close enough to the horizon to shine into my window and create those splendid colors.

Again, to the ancients, the appearance of a rainbow must have been a sign that the gods or a god were real. Even now, I thrill to the sight of a rainbow.  If the sun is shining late in the day, and there is rain, I start looking for it.  I have to be careful not to wreck my car.  
It makes me think of God too, but not as a divine, corporeal being who waits for the sun and rain so he can stop what he is doing, and then bend a bow, and then make it appear magically in the sky.  

Rather, I am one who appreciates how a natural world generates an epiphany or a numinous sense of God.

I often wonder if an atheist can see a rainbow without the idea of a god ever occurring to him or her.  Often, the experience of God comes as an emanating association with life as easily and naturally as colors come from light and rain.

Blessings...

Sabbath Today

Have a happy day.

Christianity for the next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Thanks for visiting.  I hope my words today give you a sense of being okay with your faith if you are someone who wants to have faith in our modern world.


I have been writing about cosmology.  I can think of only one statement in the Bible that was insightful and accords with what we know today.  Job wrote that the world hangs on nothing (26:7).  In other translations, the world is suspended on nothing.  

Well, we know our planet is not suspended.  It is moving on its axis and in orbit around the sun.  Nonetheless, we have here an ancient writer whose mind grasped for outer space without him really knowing there was an outer space.

In his mind, the skies rested on a foundation of mountains and the earth just sort of floated.  Or did he imagine that entire cosmos was suspended, including the realm where God and the heavenly host lived?

In our world, gravity is a property of mass.  Planets and stars tug on one another in outer space.  Without gravity, everything would just move in a straight line.  Instead, solar systems and galaxies are moving through space and time.

This is what Being does and our God, who is love, empowers it.

Blessings...

Atheists, Agnostics, and Whatever the Heck I Am

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Yesterday, I overheard fellow teachers discussing so and so as being an atheist and another so and so being an agnostic.  Everyone pretty much knows I'm ordained.  Because of that I did not expect anyone to ask me what I thought about the subject.

The truth is there are different ways to believe about God.  Most of them have to do with God's relationship to Being.

Animist:  gods or spirits exist within Being
Pantheist:  Being is God
Panentheist:  Being exists within in God
Polytheist:  many gods within Being
Deist: god made Being then moved on 
Theist:  Being was created by a god

Agnostic:  does not know if there is a god
Atheist:  knows there is not a god

That's about it.  If I've forgotten anything let me know.

Atheists and theists are kinfolk in the sense that they are both absolutely know they are right.  They really do not need proof or evidence since they already know the truth.  Both can be arrogant. Both can be dogmatic.

If I had to choose whether atheists or theists had the better evidence and arguments, I'd have to go with the atheists since they are not required by logic to prove that God does not exist.  

No one goes around proving that gods, unicorns, abducting aliens, zombies, goblins, angels, vampires, demons, and Vanderbilt football national championships do not exist.  The burden of proof is always thrust upon the person who makes a fantastic claim. 

Indeed, fantastic claims require fantastic evidence.  If I declare the earth moves in a world where everyone believes the earth is flat and immovable, then my evidence better step up to the challenge.  

Prophets and seers are lousy evidence.  In fact, in our world today, few people accept the word of an authority as proof.  

Let's say in an imaginary world a prophet wrote in scripture that the earth moves.  If he did that, if that were in the Bible, then that prophet made a lucky, insightful guess.  

That it was written by prophet who is sanctioned by God, according to the scriptures, and in a world that accepts prophetic writings as conclusive proof, does not make the prophet's claim true--especially in a world that requires scientific evidence.  

Theists have lousy arguments that do not justify their smugness, so it is tempting to believe that their smugness is a smoke screen.

Atheists seem to have the arguments and evidence on their side, but their claims of certitude are not persuasive for many reasons.  

To be an atheist implies omniscience if an atheist truly believes he or she knows there is not a god.  I do not ever see myself having that much certitude about anything.

I am a blend.  I am agnostic in that I most certainly am not certain that God or gods are real or illusions.  I suspect they all are illusions in some way.  However, I am a person of faith.  Although I do not know for certain that God is or is not, I do love God, and in that sense I do believe in God.

The more I love God, the more comfortable I am with not knowing.

Instead, I prefer to be humble.  It is okay to admit that we do not know as we love one another.  Doctrine is highly overrated and has caused much grief in the world.  

So I operate as an agnostic panentheist with deist tendencies.  I believe we live, move, and have our being in God.  I believe we are made in God's image because we have consciousness, and we have the ability to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.  We do not need God to tell us where to go to college or whom to marry. The thoughts that pop into our heads are not God's thoughts, but we are connected to God as we live.  

We have everything we need to reveal God in our lives to this world.  We must be about that business.

Blessings...

How Shall We Believe?

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

We know today that the cosmos is far more vast and complicated than any the ancients could imagine. How are we going to envision God in our cosmos? What stories and poems will we tell to celebrate God?

Are we going to saddle God with the view of the first ten millennia of unscientific humanity and spend the next ten millennia denying scientific discoveries altogether or ignoring them through a twisted process of cognitive dissonance?

Do we not also possess the liberty and the imperative from God to envision God as true in a cosmos that is being manifested scientifically?

That is the task of theology. I believe people of faith cannot leave theology to preachers anymore. We must all become theologians as we learn about the world.

Even if we share a plethora of different doctrines, we must hold these in our hearts, but they do not define us as Christians. It is our love for one another, especially as Christians, that show the world the nature of God.

We must live a faith that proclaims love or our faith will perish.

Blessings…

STAR TREK and the Children of the Son

CHRISTIANITY FOR THE NEXT 1000 YEARS

In the beginning God created skies and earth.

Greetings and welcome back. I pray my post today finds you fit and felicitous.  I have been seeking to explain how we can be God people without keeping our intellects in the sand.

Captain Kirk in Rome

In a fascinating Star Trek episode, “Bread and Circuses,” Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock beam down to a planet run by 20th Century Romans. They are searching for the captain and crew of a Federation ship that is orbiting the planet on autopilot.

All the well known trappings of being Roman are still present. They are as brutal and powerful in their 20th Century as they were in our 1st Century, except they possess guns and swords. 

The Romans have transformed slavery into an institution with pensions and healthcare for their slaves. The Romans also broadcast their gladiatorial games on television for global entertainment.

Before running into the Romans, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock fall in with a group of people who call themselves Children of the Son.

Kirk and Spock believe they are saying Children of the Sun. They do not recognize that Rome has lasted into the 20th Century as has Christianity.

They try to explain where they came from to the leader of the group, Septimus, without saying that they are from the United Federation of Planets.

In Star Trek lore, the Prime Directive forbids any Federation explorer from telling the truth about where they come from so there is no undue influence on societies that are not ready to be contacted. 

An Old Way of Thinking

In the discussion, Kirk is trying to ascertain what happened to Captain Merrick and his crew without violating the Prime Directive. He asks Septimus if there have been rumors of distant travelers who may have come from the stars in the sky.

Septimus explains that it would be impossible for travelers to come from the sky for that is where the Son dwells. He also says that the stars in the sky are only lights.

I could not help but think how nicely this 1968 broadcast captured the sense of what it was like to believe an ancient cosmology.

Cosmology is the study of the cosmos, the universe, of all that is. The way we think about God today, even if we are fundamentalists, is greatly affected by modern cosmology.

Indeed, the way ancients thought was profoundly affected by their cosmology. 

Cosmology and God Lore

This ancient cosmology underlies all God lore: about God forming a shapeless earth, about God planting a garden, about God visiting Abraham, about sky dwellers visiting Lot, about a flood that covers earth (the flat disk, not the planet), about the sons of heaven looking down on women of the earth and lusting to mate with them, about a tower raised up to the sky; about a god who lives in heaven yet sends his presence on a mountain, then a tabernacle, then a temple, then a Torah in our hearts; about a star that can be followed, about a son being sent down to earth, about a son seeing all the kingdoms of the world from a great height, about a son being crucified, resurrected, and ascending back home in the sky.

So how shall we believe today?

Blessings…

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Thanks for visiting today. I pray you are well and happy.

Consider setting. Setting is everything. Setting is space and time in a story.

The place and time of a man or woman, an invention or discovery, a social transformation or disaster, and a story or poem are the context that underlies and influences everything that is imagined, thought, conceived, or written within that space and time.

I like to include Genesis 1:1 at the top of my posts not only because it is a lovely verse, but the faith embedded within it is the context for what is and what is not in the Bible.

On the one hand, Genesis 1:1 must be true if our faith is to move on for another one thousand years. 

On the other hand, if we do not boldly and with faith look into the subtext of Genesis 1:1, with our telescopes and microscopes and scientific method, our faith is doomed to perish as another quaint superstition.

I love God.  I believe in God.  I know this is possible.  I do it everyday and so do millions of other believers.  I am not believing in an invisible man, or an invisible friend, or any other silliness.  I ground my faith in One beyond all silliness.

Genesis 1:1 is the context of everything in the Bible. It says that God created everything.

Notice, that “everything” is expressed as skies and earth.

To ancient people, skies and earth were all there was. Forget about outer space. Stars were lights, small enough to fit into a god’s hand, not suns. And they could fall from the sky.

The concept of an atmosphere did not exist. There was no ozone layer or magnetic field. There was no three days to travel to the moon and three to return safely.

The sky was where god and god’s heavenly host dwelled. It was already inhabited before the elohim began shaping earth.

The sky was heaven, literally, and it was not far away. It was shaped like a dome, or the dome we see when we look at it today. Above it was a celestial ocean. Above the ocean was the heavenly realm where the elohim dwelled.

The sky had windows that opened so the heavenly ocean fell as rain. It is silly for modern people to offer as a criticism of creationism the notion that our sun above a huge ocean of water would burn up the planet.

In the ancient world view, the sun was below the body of water.

It moved in the heavens among those little lights called stars and that other big night light called moon.

The word for sky like the word for god in this verse is plural. Samayim is the word for heaven. Compare that to Elohim, the word for God in Genesis 1:1.

Samayim has been translated as firmament, vault, arch, heaven, heavens, skies, and sky.

The sky was as close as it appears to us today. Sky dwellers could walk down a staircase to earth. Jacob saw the staircase once in a dream.

We are not talking light years here. The heavens were so close that humans began building a tower just to be there. Rockets were millennia away from being imagined let alone built.

As the humans got closer, the heaven dwellers got nervous. Do you blame them? I imagine they did not want their property value to go down as the humans took up residence.

A few humans were so special they could live in heaven. Enoch, presumably, was one. A chariot was sent down to pick up Elijah.

Occasionally, messengers are sent down to earth to give warnings. God Himself visited Abraham to haggle over who would live or die in a city God was bound and determined to destroy.

Jesus was sent down to earth. He simply flew back up while some of his disciples watched him.

He took his seat next to God, that is, on God’s right side. I've often wondered who sat on God’s left side? Not the Holy Spirit. He dwells on earth as God’s presence with us.

All that language comes out of a world view that no longer exists.

So how does our generation, and the ones following us, believe within the context of a cosmos more vast, infinite, and complex than the one imagined in Genesis 1:1?

Blessings…