Did you know that animals engage in what appears to be ritualistic behaviors which appear to show some awareness of the luminous, if not the spiritual? It’s true. In particular, a variety of animals have death rituals: Magpies, gorillas, elephants, llamas, foxes, and wolves all use ritual to cope with the death of a companion. Magpies will peck the dead body and then lay blades … Continue reading Animals and Religion
The things Christians decide are important enough to raise a stink over on religious liberty ground always astound me. Like the way we keep fighting for the right to say prayers at government meetings and such. As if such prayers have ANY meaning at all or losing them would be detrimental to Christianity. It’s a laughable proposition. Especially when the meetings that follow these prayers … Continue reading The Real Challenge to Religious Liberty in America
Since the 80s at least, brave Christians have been noticing that there is some syncronicity between the mystical practices and teachings of Christianity and New Age theories. Being a fairly adventurous sort of mystically inclined Christian, I understand the allure. But in the end, I would strongly warn people against delving in too deep.
Many Christians warn against New Age teaching primarily because getting involved with New Age teachings is so frequently associated with leaving Christianity altogether or morphing it into some sort of strange hybrid. I very intentionally made a commitment to remaining an orthodox Christian (the historical version of orthodox, not any of these new fangled post-Constantine versions these kids these days are into) before delving into any New Age materials. Which I’m glad I did because some of it is just right there on the split edge of truth. It’s very easy to see why people who start down that path so often follow it. But I just kept coming back to the fact that at its core is a very shaming message.
At the core of New Age teaching are a lot of ideas which are really shaming to people who are struggling. No matter how gently they try to put it, the basic message is that there is something at the root of your suffering which must be addressed or corrected before you can reach enlightenment and end your suffering. I think even Christians like Richard Rohr get caught in this idea of the root of our suffering being about what we need to fix.
I know it’s meant to be empowering and hopeful, but when you’re six feet under and ready to die from pain, being told that your ego is at the root of all your suffering is not helpful. I mean, go tell that to the little girl who just got sold into slavery. Or the woman who did it. I call bullshit.
Then there’s the “name it and claim it” theology of The Secret. I also have a hard time with any practice which requires you to spend money on crystals and oils and classes. That chakra balancing Thai Yoga massage would probably do wonders for me, but not at $80 a pop.
New Age teachings very consistently fail to serve the needs of those who are poor, oppressed and suffering. Which means that they are not and cannot be the road to humanity’s freedom and enlightenment.
Among New Agers, what may need fixing is your ego or false self or energy balance or whatever. And none of it may be bad in and of itself. I’ve been thinking I have a blocked throat chakra for a while myself. But for a desperate person to be told “here are the answers” only to discover that the answer is “it’s all your fault for doing it wrong” is cruel. It’s no different than what Job’s friends did to him, except there’s a marketing arm involved.
I think Christianity is the only faith which offers a real answer to people who are suffering. It basically tells the suffering person that Continue reading “New Age Stuff Drives Me Nuts”
I once knew a family that didn’t do Santa Claus with their kids at Christmas. The reason they didn’t do Santa Claus was because they felt it might lead their children to doubt the existence of God. You see, Santa is basically an old man living far away at the top of the world. He gives you what you want because he loves you. And nobody ever gets to see him. And many children think of God as an old man living far away in heaven who answers our prayers (gives you what you want) and you never get to see him either. So their concern was that when the kids discover that Santa isn’t real (sorry if that’s a shock to you), that would sow the seeds of doubt about whether they were being similarly bamboozled when it came to believing in God. No seriously, that’s what the mom told me. I’m not making it up at all.
I actually think that the experience of finding out that Santa isn’t real, when handled decently well, is a good thing for kids. It’s a safe way to teach them that sometimes you believe things that aren’t actually true. And it’s OK. Life doesn’t end. The presents don’t stop coming. Yeah, you lose a little bit of the magic. But it’s not the end of the world. The real fun of Christmas doesn’t come from in believing in magic; it comes from expanding what brings you joy beyond just receiving. Christmas is much bigger and richer than presents that show up by magic if you’ve been good. It’s just like Christianity that way.
Unfortunately, this whole “never allow doubt, never consider that you might be wrong, never question the reality you’ve be taught” mentality is exactly how a good number of people teach their kids to approach the faith. I know that the people who do this and think this way believe they are doing the right thing. But the hubris of it is astonishing.
In order for me to teach my child never to doubt, question or challenge what they have been taught about God, I have to be confident that what I have taught them about God is 100% accurate and complete. I have to be so certain that my faith experience and theology represents the pinnacle of the Christian faith that it would be foolish and dangerous us for them to ever seek anything better than what I’ve got. And if you believe that about your faith, um, well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but, hmmmm . . . how to put this delicately? Maybe if I pet your unicorn while I figure out how to say this without sounding like a jerk? I know they must exist somewhere in your world, because your world clearly doesn’t work the way my world does. Continue reading “The Process is the Solution”
Remember me raving a few weeks back about Humans of New York? Well, I want to share a picture and the quote that went with it which was recently posted on their Facebook page:
The comments under this post were FILLED with various versions of people saying, “I always assume that the homeless people I see on the streets are there because they’re lazy drug users. I guess I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”
Now, this picture and this man’s story isn’t going to change the world all by itself. But there’s something powerful going on here nonetheless. Because it’s not just this one picture and one story. Right now, millions of stories that have never been told before are being told for the first time. And those stories are challenging long held assumptions about people who have long lived under the weight of humanity’s condemnation. Continue reading “In the End Times, We All Tell Our Story”
Earlier this year, I did a series of posts on why God doesn’t answer prayers. My reason for writing the posts was to push back against the common church narrative which says that if you just have enough faith, God will answer your prayers. I think this is such a problematic teaching as it basically teaches us that if our lives are hard and God is not answering our prayers, it is because our faith is inadequate. We didn’t believe hard or well enough to be rewarded with answered prayers. Which just isn’t true and encourages us to engage in the sort of magical thinking that keeps fairies alive. I suspect that this teaching results in very few answered prayers and a whole lot of burnt out, discouraged Christians.
The other day, I read a wonderful post on just this topic titled “Why Your Prayer Will not Be Answered” which pointed something out which I wanted to pass on to y’all. It was written by John Igbinovia. (Yes that John Igbinovia, also known as XTsamurai, also known as the Nigerian musician I wrote about yesterday. I wasn’t kidding when I said that he was an exceptional person.) At any rate, in it John explains a few things about what faith is and what faith is not:
Faith is NOT the same as belief. . . If GOD has not given insight about a situation to you, there is NOTHING to faith.
All you have is passionate ardent belief that is your HOPE – and it is fine to act with the hopes of getting what you want and telling God, your Father, what your desires are. . . Faith is acting based on a KNOWING of God’s intention about something. Basically, there is a plan about a person or situation that God is bringing about and somehow, you have been able to hear or “hear”, as in know SOMEHOW on the inside, what God intends to DO. Praying with that understanding simply aligns with what God plans to DO already
“Faith cometh by hearing the word of God”. If you have not heard, what are you “faithing’’?
Mmmmm . . . Doesn’t that explain so much? We have our hopes and desires and even bible verses which can be read to say that God will give us what we hope for and desire. Then when God does not answer our prayers of hope, we feel betrayed and confused. But it’s not our prayers of hope that God answers, it’s our prayers of faith. And faith comes from the promises we’ve been given, not from our own desires for what we want: Continue reading “Prayers of Faith”
So, did you hear what NBA team owner Donald Sterling said to his mistress? Did you happen to see Prince Harry in his birthday suit a while back? Have you seen the video of family-values Congressman Vance McAllister kissing a staffer (who was not his wife)? Or maybe you gawked at pictures of the mansion and private zoo deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych bought for himself with bribes and money stolen from government coffers.
Within living memory, part of being rich and powerful meant having the freedom to behave abominably in private without having the public find out. At least not until you were dead. Today, all the money in the world won’t keep your secrets from being exposed.
And it’s not just the rich and powerful whose secrets are being dragged into the light. Divorce courts are filled with people whose marriages are ending because of deception revealed by cell phone records, text messages, emails, instant messaging and internet browsing histories. You can now discover which of your neighbors have arrest records with a quick internet search. If you exclude a friend from a get-together, you’ll get caught when one of the attendees puts pictures up on facebook. And all you have to do is watch a true crimes detective show on cable to see how hard it is to get away with murder once science gets involved.
This loss of secrecy and some would say privacy is so obvious and so commonplace now as to barely be worth mentioning. It’s just a reality of our age. What is shocking to me is how rarely it is mentioned that this is exactly what the bible said was going to happen:
^There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” ~ Matthew 10:26
“For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light.” ~ Mark 4:22
“But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.” ~ Luke 12:2
Therefore do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and disclose the motives of men’s hearts ~ 1 Corinthians 4:5
There are many other verses which say that the time will come when what is done in secret will be known to all. It’s a concept which is found all throughout scriptures. And it’s a promise we are seeing fulfilled in real time right before our eyes.
As I said, the fact that nothing is a secret anymore is so commonplace that it’s not in the least bit shocking anymore. But consider what a radical shift this is in human affairs. 300 years ago, the average person living in areas ruled by the British Empire wouldn’t know what a British prince’s face looked like. Today, people all over the world have seen pictures of Prince Harry (and other lesser nobles) in the nude. The idea would have been astonishing to an Indian peasant in 1700. There has never been a time like this in all of human history.
So, what should we Christians be doing in light of this fulfillment of scripture? Continue reading “There Are No Secrets In the End Times”
A random thought to contemplate over your lunch break: Anyone in a serious relationship with God will at some point find it necessary to forgive Him. It may not be theologically correct, but it’s true. Continue reading Your Daily Cud
The parts of the bible which deal with “end times” prophecies are something I’ve always shied away from dealing with directly. Studying and researching those parts of scripture can be very entertaining, but it’s a dangerous past time. Nearly everyone who gives it a go winds up lost and led astray. And sadly, some of these people have managed to warp many people’s entire understanding of Christianity.
Part of the problem is a pervasive, fundamental misunderstanding of what prophecy is and what it does. In the bible, a prophet doesn’t predict the far-off future. Instead, their gift is an ability to see and explain the reality of what they see happening all around them. These are the people who have heard the voices of those who are being silenced. They see through the agreed upon lies and narratives for why things are the way they are. They are able to look at their present with spiritual eyes and recognize what others are blind to. Further, they understand God and his ways well enough to easily see where it’s all heading.
Which is not to say that they have nothing at all to say about the future. The ancient Hebrews viewed time as circular. What has happened before, will happened again. When a prophet shares a vision, it is a symbolic description of what they see happening in the spiritual realm. It’s purpose is to illuminate of the archetypal patterns at work in their world. That way, when a time cycles back and a time such as the prophet’s comes around again, we might better understand the spiritual reality of what we are seeing.
This is why, bible prophecies which clearly refer to a specific person or set of events in the past continue to inform us about what we see going on around us today. For example, the whore of Babylon in Revelation obviously refers to the Roman Empire. And also bears a striking resemblance to the corrupt Roman Catholic Church of the late middle ages. And is arguably a good illustration of a certain super power at work in the world today. It’s an archetype of empire at work in the world. So long as empires which rely on violence, greed, fear, idolatry and control continue to arise, the whore of Babylon will also continue to arise. Continue reading “Let’s Talk Prophecy and End Times”
The Upside Down World 