I don't want to just be a content aggregator. Those things are fairly awful, so I'll quote some content from this post and add my own. The author wrote about nine reasons that modern books on the Christian life are bad. Here are two of them:
3. Drawing on illustrations that apply to only 0.01% of people won’t help anyone.4. Do I really need to have sectarianism and branding/marketing ever before me?
One of the things in life that is often most difficult for people is using their 24 hours well. I've been trying to learn to use my time more wisely. One of my biggest distractions is a sense of listlessness. I just sit and idle because I'm "bored." Boredom is an interesting topic in itself. Is it a result of being physical bodies, but with minds that are irreducible to physical processes? Is it because we're in an industrial/technological era, therefore so much of our time is spent on things that do not contribute to our survival? Who knows? The point of this is time management in the context of the kingdom of God. Bishop Jeremy Taylor wrote a book entitled, "Holy Living" in the 1600s. He states that there are three means to be employed in learning to live as a Christian: management of time, practicing God's presence, and holy intentions (or planning in advance to do good). His 23 rules for care of the time are fairly standard for Christian cases of conscience in his era, but they are exceptional today:
Dallas Willard, in Renovation of the Heart, noted that human character is both formed over time, but that it can also be transformed. These are very mundane observations (p 14). Mundane though they be, many people do not consider either fact. If you make a plan for improving your character, it is, at least, your plan. If you do not, then your character is being formed/transformed, but into what? I submit that Christian repentance is (though the Spirit of God enables it) a decision to plan one's life based upon the gospel of Jesus rather than on whatever program you had previously been using. So, you character is formed (that's how you got to be yourself) and it can be transformed. Willard goes on
Howard Synder posted fourteen ways that we can distort the gospel. h/t to Jim West. Number 10 was particularly striking to me:
Though Paul and Jesus (in John’s gospel) teach a great deal about salvation by means of faith, the question is still, “What does that faith look like?” We often take words like “believe” and “faith” and insert modernized meanings into the words. But Paul, nor Jesus really let us do that. For instance, Jesus tells a group of believers this, “If you continue in my word, you are really my disciples. (32) And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.(Joh 8:31-32)” He wants the group of people who trust in him to be synonymous with people who do what he says. Similarly, Paul who says over and over again that we are justified by faith, notes what kind of faith this is in Romans 1:5, “Through him we received grace and a commission as an apostle to bring about faithful obedience among all the gentiles for the sake of his name.” Thus, for Paul, the very faith he later says justifies, is a faith that is obedient to Jesus. Not just Jesus as cipher for this or that theological position or political hobby horse, but the Jesus who says to do difficult things, “take up your cross,” “when you fast,” “make disciples of the nations,” “when you give alms,” “whoever wishes to be first must be the servant of all,” etc.10. “Believers” instead of disciples.
Jesus calls and forms disciples so that the body of Christ becomes a community of kingdom-of-God disciples. The New Testament rarely uses the word “believers.” Today this fact is distorted by the tendency in modern translations to use “believers” in place of “brothers” (in order to be more inclusive) or in place of pronouns such as “them.”What counts is not the number of believers but the number of disciples, and thus the ministry of disciple-making.
An atheist writer over at Melting Asphalt wrote this:
In light of this view of religion (as a tribal strategy), I’d like to share a little hack I sometimes use to make sense of religious practices. Whenever I hear someone say “God,” I try substituting “society” in its place. E.g.:Though that's a neat little mind hack, he's missing some things. Many religious people often, after they come to believe in a deity, find themselves living lifestyles that are in stark contrast to society and thus in conflict with its mores and its most powerful members. To adhere to a religion in a serious fashion often puts an individual at odds with society. So though it is a nice hack for an atheist trying to play nice with religious doofuses (make no mistake the irenic author calls religious beliefs crazy, in a sense that either means obviously untrue, therefore being held delusionally or perhaps in the sense of outrageously unintelligent to hold), it does not work as a descriptor of actual religious belief. A central piece, for instance, of the New Testament message is that:
- God is great becomes society is great.
- When someone says, praying before a meal, “We give thanks to God for this food,” I hear praise of society, of civilization
- When a Muslim says that Islam is all about submission to Allah, I understand this as submission to society.
If anyone thinks that he is religious and does not bridle his tongue, but instead deceives himself, his religion is worthless. (27) A religion that is pure and stainless according to God the Father is this: to take care of orphans and widows who are suffering, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (James 1:26-27)It is precisely that there is a society that makes widows and orphans into a group of undesirables that makes the message of Jesus necessary. Incidentally, God, in the book of James is precisely not anthropomorphic (a claim the aforementioned blog makes several times). God is rather, unchanging. God sustains the universe, free agents therein do evil.
Every generous act of giving and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father who made the heavenly lights, in whom there is no inconsistency or shifting shadow. (James 1:17)Many theistic religions would claim that, for whatever reason (some have explanations and accounts of how/why this is and some do not) there is evil in the world, but ultimately God is goodness as such. Thus, God is for the well being of the cosmos and of discrete creatures but not discrete creatures at the cost of the whole cosmos. This is a vast oversimplification, but God is not a substitute for society. When a society is evil, God, being goodness as such, is then manifestly opposed to that society's actions and ideologies.
For people who have trouble with the concept that God is goodness, I recommend reading the posts here at Ed Feser’s blog. God’s existence is a matter of metaphysical demonstration, not a matter of symbolically replacing society with a super-person. Religious people claim either to be trying to live good lives because it is morally appropriate in light of God’s existence or they are a part of a community which claims to have revelation from God (or a combination of the two). That can lead to beliefs that seem crazy but that remains to be demonstrated based on the logic of the claims that the best representatives of the group make, not based on “obviousness.” It’s obvious that humans are internally symmetrical based on their exterior until you dissect one.
Samuel Johnson, in his 1755 dictionary of the English language said thus about Oats:
'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.'
All the athletes I know who eat oatmeal would perhaps concur that oatmeal helps them to run, lift, and jump like horses. I've elsewhere heard it jokingly described as Oatanobol (reference to a steroid that increases protein synthesis and aggression and thus muscle size and strength).
Anyhow, I suddenly remembered that fact about that dictionary. A co-worker of mine loves Scotsmen (he is one and so was Adam Smith) but he hates oatmeal and he often recounts that quote.
Christians and Goal Setting
Can Christians Set Goals?
Jas 4:13-17 Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"— (14) yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (15) Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." (16) As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (17) So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
Jim West came down, seemingly jokingly, against New Year Resolutions with a quote from James 4:13-16.
13 ¶ Ἄγε νῦν οἱ λέγοντες· σήμερον ἢ αὔριον πορευσόμεθα εἰς τήνδε τὴν πόλιν καὶ ποιήσομεν ἐκεῖ ἐνιαυτὸν καὶ ἐμπορευσόμεθα καὶ κερδήσομεν·
14 οἵτινες οὐκ ἐπίστασθε τὸ τῆς αὔριον ποία ἡ ζωὴ ὑμῶν· ἀτμὶς γάρ ἐστε ἡ πρὸς ὀλίγον φαινομένη, ἔπειτα καὶ ἀφανιζομένη.
15 ἀντὶ τοῦ λέγειν ὑμᾶς· ἐὰν ὁ κύριος θελήσῃ καὶ ζήσομεν καὶ ποιήσομεν τοῦτο ἢ ἐκεῖνο.
16 νῦν δὲ καυχᾶσθε ἐν ταῖς ἀλαζονείαις ὑμῶν· πᾶσα καύχησις τοιαύτη πονηρά ἐστιν. (James 4:13-16 BGT)
My translation:
Come now, you who constantly say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into this city and we will stay there a year and we will do business and we will make profit; you cannot know that which happens tomorrow. What is your life? You are a vapor, appearing for a brief time, then dissipating. Instead, you should say, "Should the Lord will it, we both will live and do this or that. But as it stands, you are boasting in your arrogance, all such boasting is from the Evil One." (James 4:13-16)
I recently bought Mike Bird's Evangelical Theology. It has been a marvelous read so far, but when I read the section entitled “Traditional Proofs for the Existence of God (pp 180-183)” I was left a bit frustrated. Now, please take the following comments with the understanding that the book, over all, has been edifying. I especially appreciate Bird's attempt to make the gospel message itself (as described in the New Testament) the focal point of each traditional loci of theology. So it looks like this, "How does the gospel inform the doctrine of the church and how do traditional understandings of this doctrine illuminate the gospel." It's a very helpful approach.
Something I’ve been saying for years has apparently also been said by Neil deGrasse Tyson:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbvDYyoAv9k&w=420&h=315]
This is important to me. When people have repeated the old canard that religious people are necessarily opposed to science and progress I usually point to the fact that I’m not opposed to science and I’m religious. That piece of hard, personally observable date usually never sufficed. I’d quote statistics. That also never seems to work. So I began trying pointing out how religious people, even profoundly religious people like Leonard Euler, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Galileo, and others were scientists and mathematicians and logicians. Heck my landlord is a Christian and a Coral Reef biologist who is doing ground breaking work in preserving, observing, and cataloging rare specimens of coral in Hawaii. I also would try to explain how it was actually the rise of monotheistic religion on an empire wide scale that lead to advancements in scientific knowledge, method, and metaphysical assumptions about reality (like the nature of cause and effect). But it never worked. Hopefully this video will and does help. But since empirical, historical, and testimonial evidence from surveys of scientists didn’t work for me, maybe it won’t for Tyson.