Saturday, November 1, 2008

I think, therefore I am a Christian


The following article tells about a campaign in London, lead by atheists, to proselytize atheism (or at least a form of agnosticism):
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,443705,00.html

They have purchased ad space on the buses reading, "There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

This statement says so much about the biases of Atheists. In their minds, God is an obstacle for happiness and pleasure. The very idea of God is a cosmic killjoy.

How can one have such biases and be objective about the question of God's existence?

Richard Dawkins' expresses a bias against religion in the article when he says:
"This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think, and thinking is anathema to religion."

As a biased Christian, I can tell you that Dawkins is not arguing against orthodox Christianity. No, he is arguing against a popular, stereotyped caricature of it. You probably know the one that I'm talking about. In a nutshell, it says, "throw away your mind and just have faith. Faith is believing in things the mind can NOT rationalize."

Many Christians have this perspective as well as non-believers. BOTH sides are wrong.

Christianity clearly teaches the convergence of the propositional with the existential, in that it teaches that faith is to be applied to the Word of God.

Youtube and MP3 downloading services are artistic outworkings (despite lots of junk content that passes as "art"). What underlies these internet web sites is ultimately the black and white world of 0's and 1's known as binary digital code.

It is beyond coincidence that one can reduce these creative elements down to the simple on and off, black and white codes of the computer world, yet they can produce videos that make us laugh or cry, music that moves our hearts, and in general communication that strands the threads of human relationships.

The cold rational world, when "electrically charged" with creativity (think faith), produces the very World Wide Web that undergirds this very blog.

I am a musician and see this clearly in music. Music can be reduced to systems known as scales, intervals, arpeggios, and the circle of fifths. It can be scientifically reduced to the physics of sound. Yet, when creativity (coupled with order) is added to it, we get music.

Christianity is misunderstood, both by many Christians as well as non-christians, to not be a thinking man's religion.

But true Christianity is to be understood holistically.

I applied my rational mind to the questions of how the Gospels could have been written by four different authors, all agreeing that God became flesh and lived among us in the form of Jesus Christ, who healed people, walked on water, raised the dead, claimed to show us who the Father was, and then even died and resurrected on the third day. I logically can NOT conclude that these authors conspired for they had no motive but martyrdom. I can NOT conclude that they were delusional, because collective delusions are improbable. Only my imagination (think creativity and faith) gives me a choice that bridges that gap. That choice is that these phenomenal things DID happen.

Dawkins and others like him can claim that Christians don't think, but until they can demonstrate that THEY have thought enough about these things to come up with a reasonable explanation, they only indict themselves.