Ye Olde Viral: Penn Jillette vs. Piers Morgan

I personally think Penn Jillette and Piers Morgan would both be fantastic contributors to the New Inklings.  The following video is an excerpt from Morgan’s show when he interviewed Jillette about Jillette’s book, “God, No!”  I love what Jillette says about strong conversation being a must when talking about religion and theology.

Is strong conversation a must when it comes to theological discussions?  What value does a place like NI have in such conversations – a place for strong, yet civil, conversation?  Converse in the comments.

The Bumpy Ride of Faith Transitions

When I began Project Conversion back in January of this year, I had no idea the change would be this difficult. Immersing myself in one faith, each month for a year…how hard could it be? But change is hard, especially when you are shifting your entire perspective on the divine, life, and the world around you.

I’ve already done this nine times…but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier.

The Transition.

I can already feel the change–the ground shifting beneath me–within the last few days of each month. I’m walking this life path with one faith, holding fast to convictions I’ve only adopted weeks before, when suddenly, the hairs on the back of my neck rise and tingle. I glance over my shoulder and there they are: The glowing eyes of the next faith gazing at me from around the corner of the alley of the unknown. I feel distracted, conflicted, a blur of color and shape…like the metamorphosis of an insect or the gradual phases of the moon.

Interesting how we talk a lot here about comfort zones and about how Project Conversion promotes stepping outside of them in order to better understand our world. But what happens when we become comfortable with the uncomfortable? This happens to me every month and so the last few days are the most difficult. What was strange before is now just a part of life. Tying the turban as a Sikh in September (my last full month)? Down to five minutes max. I don’t even notice people staring anymore. Wearing a blade on my side doesn’t feel strange. I don’t remember the last time I didn’t have something wrapped around my head.

And the beard (I had to grow a beard as a Sikh)…

I hated facial hair. My wife especially detests it. “You look old now,” she sneered. But the longer it gets, the more comfortable–the more natural–it feels. I rub my beard subconsciously when I’m pondering something (which is most of the time). Sometimes, when I wash my face in the sink, I like to watch the water filter through the hair on my chin and drip away. Trippy, I know, but there it is. When I shave my beard on October 1st, will I suffer from phantom beard syndrome, rubbing my cheeks and chin where a piece of a holy uniform used to be?

Thinking hard about beards…

Will I feel lighter, naked? And what about my new Sikh friends. According to the Rehat Maryada (the Sikh Code of Conduct), Sikhs are discouraged from social relationships with those who once accepted Sikhi, and subsequently cut or shaved their hair. Will they avoid me?

It’s tough being a man without a country and maybe even harder being a man without a faith. I belong everywhere, to everyone…and yet nowhere and to no one. My thoughts for the next three days will be like two continental plates grinding against one another as one philosophy, one way of life, slowly slips over the other. The friction of this transition is the most difficult time of this journey, but friction is the catalyst for every precious stone.

What sort of friction or trials by fire have polished your faith or brought you out of faith? What fires of change have made you the person you are today?  Sound off in the comments.

Ye Olde Viral: Vintage 21 Church (again)

Since it’s more of an introductory week, I figured I would just post another video from Vintage 21 church.  This video was done to poke fun at Christians and how we present Jesus to others through our attitudes.  Enjoy!

The Spiritual Side of Steve Jobs

It would be an understatement to say that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple who died last week at the age of 56, made an impact.  No one has been more influential in the realm of personal technology than Jobs.  Within minutes of his passing, Facebook and Twitter blazed with homages to Jobs.  Words like innovator, leader, genius, and visionary were used to describe Jobs and his legacy.

While most remember Jobs for his technological prowess, fewer talked about Job’s spiritual beliefs.  He was a Buddhist.  CNN tackled the subject in a recent article.  Consider the following segment:

“I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren’t random,” Jobs said in a 1997 interview with Time, providing a glimpse into his complicated belief system that extends well beyond the Buddhist teachings.

Karma is another principle of the religion, but it didn’t appear to be a system Jobs lived by. If he feared karma coming back to bite him, the sentiment wasn’t evident in his public statements about competitors and former colleagues, calling them “bozos” lacking taste. Those who worked for Jobs described him as a tyrant they feared meeting in an elevator.

“You’d be surprised how hard people work around here,” Jobs said in a 2004 interview with Businessweek. “They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”

Some engineers who worked tirelessly on the original Mac emerged from the project estranged from their spouses and children.

In other words, Steve Jobs wasn’t perfect.  He was guilty of hypocrisy.  So am I.  So are you.  We all are.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Is Jobs’ legacy flawed due to his apparent hypocrisy?  How does the hypocrisy of others influence your view of religion?  Sound off in the comments.

Dave’s Foundation for Belief

I was 15 years old when my faith got rocked.  There was no tragedy in my life that sparked a firestorm of doubt that would last for nearly 18 months.  There was no catastrophic event that birthed my skepticism.  It was a simple question, one posed by a good friend of mine as we debated philosophy, worldviews and religion.  We were in art class and our teacher allowed us to talk as long as we continued to work.  Theories, arguments and counter-arguments were volleyed across the heavily varnished, yet gouged, worktable.  Like a great game of table tennis, we served, put spin on the return and tried to slam home one point after the other.  These discussions were nothing new, in fact, they were the fabric of our friendship.  We each could hold our own, but that’s when his question came.  Like a player expecting a spike, I wasn’t ready for the drop shot, “You’re only a Christian because your parents are Christians.  Can you honestly tell me that if your parents were Buddhists, Muslims or Atheists you wouldn’t be the same?”

Game. Match. Point.

I had memorized arguments.  I had answered questions of what, how and who but I had not examined the most important question of faith: why? Why do I believe in the things I do?  Why do I believe that my worldview is somehow more correct than hundreds of millions who hold to a differing one?  What ensued over the next year-and-a-half was a personal journey in which I privately questioned everything.  On the outside I still kept up the ‘good church kid’ image, but inside I was searching.  I read everything I could get my hands on about other religions.  I pestered my friends from other faiths with annoying questions.  “Why are you Jewish?  How does atheism explain life’s origins?  How is Mormonism better than Christianity? Why don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate anything?”  Eventually, I began asking tough questions about my beliefs.  “Can I prove God exists?  Was Jesus real?  How reliable is the Bible?”  Eventually I came out on the same side I started on: Christianity.  But now I could answer the ‘why’ question.  So why am I a Christian?

1. Historical Evidence

History has always been a favorite subject of mine, and history is not based on scientific observation, but on eye-witnesses, written records and archaeology.  Even a cursory glance at Christianity reveals that it boasts all three of these in abundance.  Quite frankly, no one credible disputes whether Jesus lived or whether the Church had an early doctrine concerning the resurrection of Jesus.  The historical proof is overwhelmingly on the side of Christianity.

2.  Origins and Design

We had to have come from somewhere.  So I ask, where?  Where did all this ‘stuff’ we see come from?  The ‘Big Bang’ just doesn’t satisfy my doubt.  Order does not erupt out of chaos, but that is exactly what big bang theorists want us to believe.  That the complexity of life, the information in DNA and a functioning earth all resulted from an explosion.  That sounds like it takes more faith to believe in than a God who could create it.

3.  The Resurrection

I, like Aaron, believe the resurrection to not only be the central tenet of the Christian faith, but also the most provable event of ancient history.  I’m not going to rehash arguments that have already been made, when you can go read them in the Rabbit Room.

4. Changed Lives

I am amazed at how a group of Galilean rednecks became the founders of the Church.  These men, who refused to recant, even when faced with death, all chose execution over denying their faith.  I count that pretty significant considering the picture of them in the gospels is of a bunch of power-hungry, egotistical, guys who ran away whenever the pressure got to them.  What accounts for such a change?  An encounter with the Risen Christ.  I’ve seen addicts kick their habits and drunkards put down their bottles.  I have seen men who neglected their families turn into men who cherish every moment they get with their families.  I have seen the stingiest penny-pinchers transform into the most generous givers.  Why?  Because, each, in their own way, encountered the Risen Christ.  He is, because I am changed, and I am changed because He is.

Did I ever go back and win that debate with my friend?  No.  Because once I answered the why question, I realized that my friend was not an argument to be solved, but a person to be loved.  I still talk with him from time to time, and it is my sincerest desire that he too encounters the Risen Jesus.

Ye Olde Viral: Pat Robertson and Alzheimer’s

Several weeks ago, 700 Club founder and utterer of controversial soundbites Pat Robertson stuck his foot in his mouth with the following comment about married people and Alzheimer’s:

How do you react to Robertson’s statements, regardless of what you do or do not believe?

Why I Believe What I Believe

Since we’re relaunching the site, we’re going to spend a few weeks discussing each viewpoint.  Today, Aaron chimes in with three reasons he believes in the Christian God:

I’ve been immersed in Christianity all my life.  My faith is my own.  I don’t believe because my parents told me to.  I have researched the core beliefs of Christianity, and have found them to be true.  Here are the three main reasons I believe what I believe, the reasons that make Christianity reasonable:

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE UNIVERSE

From the complexity of subatomic particles to the almost daily discoveries from the edges of the universe that we can currently observe, to say our universe is complex is an understatement.  Take our planet.  Earth just happens to be in the “butter zone” of our solar system where life not only survives, but thrives.  Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere are unmatched (as far as we know) for thriving life.  The complexity of all living things, from their life processes to the makeup of DNA, continues to amaze and astound us.  Knowing that we’ve only begun to unlock the complexities of the human genome and how it works boggles the mind.  Does this prove that the Christian God exists?  No.  But science cannot explain how life supposedly arose from non-living substances.  Science also has yet to explain how something came from nothing.  To me, it requires more “faith” to believe that matter is eternal or that our version of the universe is just one of innumerable cycles of the universe than it does to believe in the existence of God.

MANKIND’S LONGING FOR SOMETHING GREATER

Every civilization in history has had some belief in deity.  The point of this post isn’t to argue which beliefs are right or wrong.  It is simply to affirm that mankind in general has always believed in the divine.  Those who have chosen not to believe have always been in the minority.  Does this prove that the Christian God exists?  No.  But it may be a clue that we were designed to connect with that which created us.

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

This is the reason I believe in the Christian God and no other.  We’ve dealt with the resurrection in multiple posts (Part 1, Part 2, the Conversation).  To summarize, the resurrection of Jesus is attested to by the gospel accounts in the Bible, extra-biblical accounts from ancient secular historians, eyewitness testimony, the willingness of the original apostles of Jesus to die for proclaiming his resurrection, the explosive growth and cultural impact of the early church–all of these point to the plausibility of the resurrection of Jesus.  If it is true, then it deserves our consideration.  And if it is true, then no other belief system can match it because no other belief system has a God who has died and come back from death in real time and space history.

Why do you hold your theological views?  Let’s start the conversation in the comments.