Theodicy

One day, when I was a child, I lent my relatively new bike to a friend, the friend promptly broke my prized bicycle attempting to go over a jump. In a whirlwind of tears, burning anger and shame at the fact that  I was responsible for a broken bike I ran my it back home. I discarded it on the drive and ran into the house and flung myself on the sofa, barely noticing my fathers presence on the sofa opposite. My dad asked me what was wrong ... To my shame I think I told him to piss off, or at least words to the same effect.

So pretty much a run of the mill tantrum right? Why would I be talking about this now? Because some things about the human condition don't actually change. They change their outfit, sure, but the issue itself remains the same. You, I and every child in the world still have tantrums it's just that most of us dress them up differently now that we have 'grown up'.

When you think about it we have a great number of things to have tantrums over - certainly better reasons than when we were children. We discover poverty, injustice, chronic health conditions, relationship break downs and any other form of suffering that you can think of. There is an in-built trigger of rage and sadness in each of us when we are party to and particularly when we are the target of said suffering.

Of course being grown up we now realise that there is absolutely nothing that our earthly parents can do about these problems, indeed in many cases they are in fact the source of many of these problems. So what do we do? Well all too often we perpetuate the problem, we either internalise and end up imploding turning to self loathing which in turn sabotages all of our closest relationships or we externalise and end up exploding which respectively sabotages all of our closest relationships. Not good.

So this is why I started with this story - because my bike fiasco did not end this way. In response to being told where to go my dad could have taken offence and left me to cry it out on the sofa. Fortunately for me however, I have a good father. He told me that I could tell him what happened and that he could try and help. In my infinite wisdom  I had already concluded that the damage to my bike was beyond repair and as a result there was really nothing that my dad could offer me as consolation in this situation, hence I felt the need to rebuff him. I articulated the conundrum quite effectively - 'my bike is broken'. Of course my dads knowledge of bikes was far superior to mine and so he decided that rather than solving the small problem of my bike he would fix the bigger issue of my attitude. He came over to my sofa and wrapped his arms around me.

Of course he assured me that he would do his best to fix my bike but he was far more interested in letting me know that a much healthier way for me to resolve my issues was to come to him and explain my problem rather than believing the lie that all hope was lost. I had tried to fix my bike myself and couldn't - that doesn't mean my bike is beyond repair. But more important than any of that, my relationship with my dad was of far greater value than any bike I could own. The refrain that shaped my childhood came out once again. 'I might not always like what you do but I will always love you, no matter what.'

After some time on the sofa I calmed down a bit and apologised to my dad, we went out together to get my bike and of course my dad showed me how it could be fixed easily without even needing any tools.

Ok, time to bring this back to us adults. We experience the 'broken bike' in our lives and it hurts, we don't really have any human relationships that are able to fix those hurts but we certainly try. We marry people who 'complete' us, we drink, gamble, sleep around, advance our career, work harder, get stronger be better all in an attempt to fix our broken bike. The issue is that at best we only break our bike further. We divorce, become alcoholics, get into debt, traffick modern day salves, get addicted to porn and cheat to get ahead in the game. Sooner or later we come to the end of our self destructive resources and we have to face the fact that our bike is broken and there is nothing we can do to fix it.

Now comes the equivalent of telling your dad to piss off... We blame God, we say that he cannot exist because of all this mess. We become frustrated with him and run away from him, we throw one heck of a tantrum.

Now here religion can do some seriously weird things, as Christians we often feel the need to cover up our problems. We can't possibly throw a tantrum that is beneath us. God is good and we know it but this situation makes it feel like God is not good. Both cannot be right so I will just bury the feelings and say God is great, YAY, praise the lord! We sell God short and don't actually take our frustration and anger and pain and anxiety to him we just say he is good and busily try and figure out how to patch ourselves up so we can look pretty on Sunday. We even create whole schools of theology to explain why there can be suffering  and a good God (we call it a theodicy) instead of facing our problems. Well this is a Faberge egg. We can do great at making it look pretty on the outside for a bit but it is paper thin and has absolutely no substance to it and just ends up propagating the problem. What's more this is not what the God of the bible tells us to do at all. It is some weird twisted, dismembered, decaffeinated version of what Christ has given us.

 Fortunately for all of us as good as my dad is he is not even a touch on how good God is. While we are far off trying to sort ourselves out and failing miserably he asks 'what is wrong?' it's not that he doesn't know the answer. He is giving you the opportunity to cry out and admit to him and to yourself 'my bike is BROKEN!'.

I can assure you when you make that admission to God, as painful and messy as it can be there is release. For some reason western Christianity has completely forgotten the place of lament, of unashamedly calling it like you see it. Life sucks some times and God is absolutely big enough to handle us screaming at him every now and again. When you are honest with God you give him the opportunity to wrap his arms around you and be enough for you. Now despite the fact that your bike is still in pieces on the drive things are looking better. Why? Because the far more important issue of your relationship with God is improving and that will set you free! The fact that God is also able to put your bike back together (and improve it too) becomes a small side issue by comparison to the fact that you have discovered something better than life itself. The love of God.

God of the gaps

Last night a sizeable group of us went hunting for the Aurora Borealis, to be honest I was rather sceptical from the start. I was more than happy to venture out into the cold hills surrounding Gloucester though - the stars were out in force.

We never did see the northern lights in the end, seemingly the scientists that informed various news agencies were wrong or maybe it just wasn't Gods will for us on that particular night.

Now here we have a bit of a conundrum, God Vs Science, arch enemies from the dawn of reason endlessly pitted against one another in a fight to the death. Of course some (Nietzsche) see that the fight is over 'God is dead'. Nonetheless there are myriad believers who profess otherwise and rather would see science as the losing side, never able to agree on a theory for longer than a decade or two it is simply misinterpreted data that is further misinterpreted every so often.

Of course this debate is hashed out in numerous arenas but none so severely as the existence of creation. The big bang theory and Genesis 1-3 are the weapons in this battle, forged by the most rigorous of scholars.

So with these two opponents poised ready to beat the snot out of each other what does the bookie say? What are the odds? Who is going to win, and who will die?

Now here we need to take a bit of a step back because something a bit odd is about to happen and we need to understand why. The atheist scientist largely understands his concept of God from the people who profess to follow him, naturally. The majority of the time this is Christianity and what does the scientist see the Christian doing? Well, he sees the Christian walk out into a field in the middle of the night expecting to see the northern lights. Except in the face of the disappointment of not seeing the northern lights the Christian decides to comfort himself with the sentiment that God must have not wanted to him to see the Northern lights that night. Now of course the reasonable scientist knows that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the northern lights not being visible from that particular field that particular night. The Christian therefore must be decidedly ignorant to settle for 'God didn't want it'. This behaviour is repeated everywhere to almost any question ... How did the earth come to be? 'God made it' Why is the sky blue 'God likes blue' where did man come from? 'God made man'

The Scientist analysing the Christians behaviour comes to the perfectly reasonable explanation that the Christian is like him seeking truth except whenever he discovers a truth that is uncomfortable or cannot explain something he simply replaces that truth with God.

Thus the God of the gaps is born. There has to be a God because without him we wouldn't have an explanation for the existence of the world, a reason to live or any warm comforting thoughts to consol ourselves with.

The scientist then has a mission, close the gaps! Pursue knowledge, provide explanations and there are no longer any gaps for God to be in and he will die and then we can all be liberated to do as we please.

So we have God of the gaps in one corner of the arena and we have science in the other, after thousands of years, millions of papers, countless debates and a whole lot of media hype science lands the final blow and the God of the gaps dies! Finally!

Now depending on your perspective this point is either yet to come or has already happened but the fact that it will happen is doubtless.

At this point the scientist rejoices, finally he has killed the tyrannous God of the gaps and he can pursue pure truth. He approaches the Christian to shake his hand, a gentlemen victor. He finds the Christian rejoicing, he must be excited about his new found freedom without God. The Christian exclaims 'now I understand how God did it all it is even MORE amazing!'.

The scientist sits back, looks at all that he has learned and for the first time perceives the face of God in the complexity and detail and structure of creation and realises that the whole fight was in fact orchestrated by God in the first place in order to reveal himself. He is not the God of the gaps, he is truth that underlines every discovery ever made. And yes, that is comforting. 

Crutch

'God is just a crutch for people who cannot cope with life.'

I have heard this from many people, especially while I was studying the philosophy of religion. When people are saying this they generally mean it as a slight insult to point out the seemingly obvious flaw in religion - it is only for people who are messed up and if you are doing all right then it's essentially pointless - no healthy person walks around with a crutch, it's just wrong. The prime motive of religion is seen as resolving difficult problems  to which there is no real answer. It pursues these resolutions above the pursuit of truth and therefore the latter bends to meet the needs of the former. Thus making it null and void.

Many Christians have responded to this saying that it is not true, God is not a crutch, he is a loving father, a real, personal, powerful, active God. While I believe this sentiment is true I wouldn't respond this way.

What would I say? Well probably something along the lines of ...

Amen! I have tried doing life my own way and I have tried doing it Gods way and without a shadow of a doubt I can confirm that life without God is like trying to walk with broken legs. My legs are broken, I need a crutch. In fact I would say that a crutch is being far too generous to me ... If we are going to analogise God with a piece of medical equipment then he is a defibrillator! I am just a sack of meat and bones without him. Life is void, pleasure is meaningless and death is hopeless without God. The fact that the outcome of a life with God is a positive one is not evidence for the falsification of Gods existence, it is proof of it! To say that a system is fabricated simply because it fulfils the yearnings  of the parishioners   is an absurd use of predetermined logic.

More to the point however, when a person accuses God of being a crutch they omit a very important element of analysis. They do not reflect on their own lives. If they did so then they would very quickly realise that their legs were broken and what they really need is a crutch to lean on. A God to carry them through.  But, as a very good friend once told me 'No one is as deaf as the one who does not want to hear, no one is as blind as the one who does not want to see.'

God puts just one single condition on salvation. Acceptance. You have to accept that your legs are broken before you will be willing to take up a crutch. You have to accept that you cannot make it on your own, you don't have all the answers and you need the help of the one who does before you are ever going to take his hand and let him pull you out of the pit.

Jesus said that he did not come for the healthy but for the sick. What he meant when he said this is not that some are healthy and some are sick. He was effectively saying - I have come for those who are willing to accept the help. Those who recognise their sickness and decide to give it to me instead of just denying it, those are the people I have come for.

Hypocricy

I think many of us are familiar with the searing red hot burn that the innocent heart experiences in the face of hypocrisy. Authenticity is so often assumed (frankly why shouldn't it be - it is definitely the way things should be even if it is not the way things are. ) and the let down when the veneer peels off can be quite devastating. It can take some time to regain trust and the more times we are let down the harder it becomes to believe the hypocrite at all.

That is at least  how it starts - as we get older  and the veneer falls too many times we simply become disenfranchised, disillusioned and disinterested altogether. The norm shifts from authenticity to errancy. There are a few prime examples of this in our culture, the one that was most recently highlighted to me was that of politics.

Jeremy Paxman recently interviewed Russell Brand and the video went viral. Why? Because so many people can so readily sympathise with Brand. He is correct to say that my generation has given up on politics. So many are just so thoroughly  bemused by the hypocrisy of it all that they find themselves asking why bother? Why entertain a system that consistently produces the very antithesis of what it promises?

While I disagree with a great number of other things that Russell suggests in the interview I cannot fault him on how well he captures the despondency produced in people who consistently witness hypocrisy.

Closer to home for me however is the issue of the Church. For as long as politicians have been criticised for being hypocritical so have Christians - particularly church leaders. They are meant to be beacons of righteousness, paragons of purity, towers of truth! But we all know that if you look close enough (or wait long enough) you will inevitably see the cracks and often not little ones either - we are talking grand canyon here. You never have to wait long before you hear another story of a vicar who has been caught with child pornography or cheating on his wife. You can take one look at god TV and get blinded by the gigantic diamond ring on the hand of a man who is talking about giving sacrificially.

And this is just talking about things that get media attention, equally we will find the Christians that we know personally will uphold a moral standard with their mouth but they will live out a very different reality.

Just as it is with politics: the more you hear the less interested you become - church is a lie, God is a crutch and these people are either deceiving or deceived ... Or both.

But here is some good news...

First things first hypocrisy usually has far more to do with the expected standard than it does with the actual action. What do I mean by this? If politicians didn't make such grandiose promises while they were trying to win an election the fact that they messed up during their term would not be such a big let down. Equally if Christians didn't profess such a spotless moral code so the disparity would not seem so great in their lives. Now this is the bit where politics and Christianity part ways. The Bible is a compilation of 66 books written by messed up, broken people who were trying to follow God. The authors do not shy away from the fact that they get it wrong. Often. You can trace deception, murder, rape, adultery, pride, gluttony and just generally plain old failure throughout the pages of the bible. Christians don't (or rather I should say shouldn't) shy away from the fact that they are anything but shining examples of perfect people. Much of the disenfranchisement that people experience from Christianity is birthed from a misconception that it is about being perfect. It really isn't!

So the question then is not 'how come you fail?' everyone fails the question is more 'what does one do in the face of failure?' There is another misunderstanding here too.

To an onlooker it can be quite simple, you condemn the people who totally mess up and you pardon the ones who get it right. Simple. The problem with that is highlighted very well by Jesus himself - 'let him who is without sin cast the first stone.'. Somewhat ironically it would be incredibly hypocritical to pronounce such a judgement on anyone given that whoever it is throwing the stone will themselves have royally messed up at some point in their lives ... Who are they to judge?

The bible offers an alternative to condemnation in the face of failure. Grace. A second chance. Redemption. So while Christianity is littered with people messing it up throughout the ages it is also full of the same people being given another chance to try to do better next time. Sadly the 'trying to do better next time' is often communicated in a very judgemental way, listing off things that we all do and saying 'these are all wrong!' It gives the impression that you can't 'join the club' if you do these things. That is not the case at all... It is more saying look at all these terrible things that we all do yet seem incapable of stopping - we need to join the club to rescue us from those things!

So next time you see a Christian who sets their standard as perfection and falls short of that standard, don't leap to the conclusion that they are a hypocrite, perhaps realise that they are trying to be a better person but that it doesn't happen over night.

So what am I saying here - Christians always have a perfect motive but they are just not the best at executing the plan? No. I am not even saying that Christians are not hypocrites... Just less than they are accused of being. I would say that to be a hypocrite is to be human. No, hypocrisy is not a good thing but it is a common thing among all people. So if you have problems with Christianity because of the hypocrisy of Christians then you should feel welcome, they are not so different from you after all.

Finally I would address the distinction between a hypocritical person and a hypocritical system. Sadly for us all there are some Christians who don't just set standards for themselves but for everyone else as well. It is one thing to set perfection as your own standard but to hold other people to account on that standard is quite another thing. this is what gets us really hot under the collar. When someone is 'Holier than thou' and pronounces everyone else sinners as though they themselves were faultless, all the while trying to cover up their own shortcomings. While there may be people who call themselves Christians who behave like this it does not change the fact that this is anything but Christianity. In fact it is this group of people who Jesus most strongly opposed. The Pharisees. If people had arch enemies Jesus would have picked the Pharisees to be his. They were the religious elite who made ridiculous rules that were impossible to keep so they could puff themselves up and be 'holier than thou'. Jesus called them whitewashed tombs and a pit of vipers. Sadly there are still some Pharisees around today but try not to let them put you off Jesus even if they profess to follow him.