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I have one on my Android phone as do many Christians I know. How about you? This infographic provides some amazing statistics on how many people are using the YouVersion mobile Bible.
I wonder if many people have really ever thought about the idea of Karma. The way that I have always understood it, when you did something selfish, insensitive, rude, cruel, mean, or otherwise unkind you will accumulate “bad Karma.” On the other hand, when you do things that are kind, considerate, selfless, caring, loving or otherwise “good” you will earn “good Karma.”
My guess is that this is the understanding that most people have with regards to Karma. As I have learned, however, this is not actually an entirely accurate way to understand Karma. You see, according to the Hindu belief, Karma is intrinsically associated with reincarnation. Reincarnation is the belief that one will continue to be “reborn” over and over again into a different type of living organism. The type of organism you are reborn into is dependent upon something referred to as your “Karmic debt.”
For Easter this year, my family and I were out of town. We ended up attending Easter services at Central Christian Church in Henderson, NV. After the opening worship band left the stage, there was a young man who came out and presented a monologue/poem/rap that highlighted a good deal of what Christianity is about. I was impressed at the broad spectrum of doctrine, challenges and truths that were professed during this brief presentation.
While following along with it, however, I began to start thinking about how this young man might appear to non-Christians. He was very energetic and passionate. Which got me thinking about how often we tend to view emotions and reason as being so very opposite from one another. As I wondered how the non-Christian would perceive this young man, it occurred to me that he would likely be labeled as a religious fanatic, to pick one of the less derogatory things people might think.
If you’ve been around Christianity long enough, you’ve probably heard someone say that Jesus was “fully man and fully God.” Perhaps you’ve heard some other variation. Perhaps you’ve wondered how that is possible. Hopefully, at the very least, you took it on faith. Better than that, hopefully you’ve wrestled with it a bit in order to get an understanding that you feel comfortable with intellectually.
One way that I have seen this characterized is that Jesus was “100% man and 100% God.” This, of course, invites a number of criticisms as some will point out that this is a simple error of mathematics. You cannot have 200% of a single thing. How can Jesus be 100% + 100%. Some, more sophisticated skeptics, might argue that this violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.
If you were to ask most apologists, Christian philosophers or theologians what the most difficult objection was to Christianity, they would mostly give you the same answer. The Problem of Evil. Some might refer to this as the “Problem of Evil and Suffering” or some such thing, but it usually involves the same idea.
Briefly, the Problem of Evil is the argument that says that if God is all loving and all good and all powerful, why is there so much pain and suffering and evil in the world? That is a very over-simplified explanation, but it should be enough to at least get us on the same page for now.
Recently I had one of those strange moments. I had seen something that made me think that it was not something that I would do. What it was isn’t important. What is important is that the reason I felt that I wouldn’t do the same was because it wasn’t a very “Christian” thing to do.
Immediately after that thought, it occurred to me that if were to mention that to someone, they might respond with something like, “Yeah, well…you do ______, and that’s not a very ‘Christian’ thing to do.” I wonder if you might have thought the very same thing, though you may not have had a specific issue in mind since you don’t know me personally. Still, you might be thinking something like, “I’ll be you do other things that aren’t very Christian. Isn’t it kind of hypocritical to say you wouldn’t do _____ because you’re a Christian?”
It always is fascinating to me when people will try to refute a theistic claim and then turn around and make a claim based on the very logic they are trying to use to refute the other’s claim. An example of this came up during a recent debate with Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Lawrence Krauss. The topic of the debate was “Is there Evidence for God?”
It seemed to me, while listening to the debate, that a good portion of the problem between both parties was that they appeared to be arguing based on two different understandings of “evidence.” Dr. Craig seemed to view the idea of “evidence” with a more broad definition of the term, including any concept or idea that can be discerned using the laws of logic in addition to empirical evidence. Dr. Krauss’ concept of “evidence” seemed to only include empirical, or material, evidence.
The truth has an interesting characteristic about it. If something is true, you can generally work the idea backward or forward and it just works. Let’s take a simple math problem, for example. If you add together 2 + 3, you get 5. Now, if you work it backwards and start at 5 and subtract 3, you end up back at 2. Most math teachers will tell their students that this is a good way to verify that they have answered a math problem correctly.
This works in other areas, too. If you have step-by-step directions to travel from one place to another, you should be able to follow the same set of directions in reverse and end up where you started. (Now, one-way streets may ruin this analogy, but you get the idea.) It also works when it comes to whether or not God exists.
There are many arguments for the existence of God. Many of the best philosophers in the marketplace today will use various cosmological arguments, teleological arguments (arguments from design) and moral arguments among others. A common tactic from non-believers is to post some alternative explanation and claim that this eliminates the necessity of belief in God.
These alternatives can often seem like very powerful arguments against the Christian faith. It is not without certain problems, however. Before I get to that, though, let us take a short look at why this argument seems to be so powerful.
I thought this would be a good time to go back into the recesses of history and bring up a topic that was taught in my church quite a number of years ago, now. That is, as the title of this post suggests, guilt and shame. I still recall several of the distinctions that Pastor Ray from Desert Breeze Community Church made regarding these two topics. It is those distinctions that I’d like to go over.
First, we’ll need to distinguish between the ideas of guilt and shame themselves. Next, we’ll further break down guilt into two different forms of guilt. Once we make these distinctions, there may not be so much in the way of new information or knowledge. Rather my aim is to provide a somewhat more complete understanding of these ideas.
