I was checking out Mike Cope’s blog, which I don’t get to read often enough, and saw this post about Philemon, aptly titled: “Philemon”. While Mike and I have some different ideas about Paul’s position on slavery, those thoughts went to the back burner when I read this comment:
I mean, seriously…I was only a sophomore at a certain college when I realized, “Hey, if God didn’t create people until later in the week, who was writing down all the things he did on days one and two?”
And then began my slow descent into something other than CoC orthodoxy. Once you open that door…
It makes me sad that he wasn’t taught much sooner about the books of Moses. How can the church allow someone to live 20 years as a member of the body and not teach them something so simple? To me this is a major reason for our slide into theological heterodoxy. When a generation is taught the party line with no explanation, they will rebel.
Instead of waiting for kids to be asked questions like “Who created God?” or “Why does the bible call bats birds?” by atheists and agnostics, we should ask them first. That way they deal with the questions in a safe environment, and they can learn that the faith can stand up to inquisition.
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My wife regularly reads the Natural Family Living Blog at NatureMoms.com. The other day she pointed out this recent post on global warming. The title is “Climate Crisis – Truth or Hoax?” I saw this in the lede:
The push is on to promote green living to help save the environment and stop some of the effects of global warming and for many this is good news. Others though, feel that climate crisis is nothing more than a hoax perpetrated to change the global economy and put new political powers into play.
I was immediately excited about the interchange that would await.
I wish green living wasn’t so deeply tied to global warming. I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who are put off by the idea because of all the baggage that comes with it. Tiffany’s comments section says as much.
I’m so blown away by some of the technological possibilities that I couldn’t imagine someone not being interested, especially in today’s world. Did you know that in the near future we could be powering our cars with lawn clippings? Did you know you can drive a diesel engine on vegetable oil? These are things a lot of people would get excited about, if they weren’t attached to a coming climate crisis.
And Christians, you can be environmentalists, if you want to. Just FYI.
Alex Fear
I too was fond of ‘green’ solutions for a while until the latest, greatest catastrophe we were in danger of came into the political sphere. Remember the Star Wars space program- to protect us from enemies that were going to fire nukes at us from afar, during the 90’s the earth was in danger of being hit at any moment by a giant asteroid, during the 00’s it was terrorism and now the effect of that is waining off, global warming is going to end us all.
It’s not only a problem of not asking questions.. those who do ask questions and challenge the accepted wisdom usually get dismissed or laughed- yet no answers come forth. It seems we need not only need to teach asking questions but to teach how to accept someone’s questions without feeling the need to launch on the defensive as though someone was attempting to blow a hole in your faith.
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