Sunday, 13 April 2008

• Just a few of my ruminations from the past few months...If some of these rambling seem a little bit incomplete, I will simply use the same excuse that you find on a box of corn flakes, and say that some settling has occurred during shipping from my computer to Xanga's.
  
  I hate it when people get on their high horse.  Whether it be in politics, parenting, church, or whatever, I hate it when people get on their high horse.  I especially hate hate HATE it when it's Christians who are on their high horse.  I don't want to be identified w/ that.  The thing is, once someone is OTHH, they're almost always wrong, and yet they're so convinced that they're the ones who are right that they feel like they have the right to attack you since you're so obviously wrong.
  
  Classic signs of being a Christian and OYHH:

  1. The issue is something along the lines of birth control, politics, homeschooling, or the media (which could include movies, TV, music, or video games).
  
  2. They have plenty of Scripture to back themselves up, but none of it actually pertains directly to the issue at hand.  Romans 12:2 is a common one.
  
  3. For some reason, not very many people are buying into their ideas, which only leads them to believe that everyone else is somehow just more worldly and/or sinful than they are.  When in reality, they're just being a jerk.

  **edit** Just for clarification, I'm not at all against homeschooling, the Republican Party, or anything else like that.  Just the people who try to insist that if I'm a Christian I will homeschool my children, or I will vote Republican, and so on.
  

  "God gave me a BF/GF/spouse once I stopped wanting it."  "Maybe the reason you're still single is because you've made an idol of marriage."  Sound familiar?  I've heard people say these before, and it just doesn't make sense.  Men and women have been created with a desire for each other, and it started at the Garden of Eden.  And if we're created that way, why would God give you a significant other only when you stopped wanting it?  I realize people who are euphorically married want to find some way to comfort their single friends, but somehow this one just doesn't cut it.  Any thoughts you readers might have on this would be greatly appreciated.
  
  I went to a church this morning called Doxology.  A friend of mine who used to live here recommended it to me, and I've been there a few times now.  It meets in the basement of a bar/nightclub, and apparently has been doing so for a number of years.  It's a little weird to be sitting in a church service and see a poster on the wall advertising for beer pong on Thursday nights, but I think I might keep attending there.  It has the friendliest people in it of any non-Mennonite church I've ever been in.

  I left the Mennonite church, and now that I've left I can see that one of its big strengths is its friendliness toward new visitors. Generalizing here, but it seems like anyone who walks into a Mennonite church for the first time is immediately recognized as being new, and people make an effort to be friendly to them.  (And yes, all you Mennos reading should take a little pride in that )
  

  I've visited a lot of churches in the last few months, and that is seldom the case. But that's how it is at Dox, and I like that.
  

  There is something that is totally awesome about seeing old friends again. The SMBI choir sang at OSU on Friday...I went and saw my old BMABI roomie Pete Byler for the first time since I was down in Jamaica in 2006. Really awesome.

  I also met Hans Mast, who I've been back and forth with online at times, but had never actually met in person before.
  
  Christians have plenty of proofs and evidence when it comes to proving stuff from the Bible like the Genesis Creation and Christ's Resurrection.  But so often we get on our high horse over it, to the extent that we think we can simply ignore or pass off any evidence to the contrary.
  
  For example, take radiocarbon dating.  It isn't hard at all to test it's accuracy using something that we know the age of.  I can go, dig up bones of people or animals that were killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and carbon-date them to get an idea of how accurate the system really is.  I know to the day how old those bones are (August 24, A.D. 79), and comparing the results to that is simple.
  
  So if my dating technique turns out fairly accurate, what happens when I date something and it comes out at 20000 years old?

  A lot of Christians will simply assume that the dating procedure can't be accurate, because in their/our mind the Bible doesn't allow for a universe that's that old.

  Some Christians assume that when Genesis talks about the 7 days of Creation, it's not a literal 7 days. This assumption thus allows for an older universe, since the 7 days could cover longer spans. Growing up in the setting I did, this view was bashed somewhat.

  If you hold to the L7D, I have a question for you: What is it about the L7D that means it has to be true?

  If you take Adam and Eve out of the equation, you take out the Fall of man and with it one of the foundational aspects of Christian theology. So if my faith means anything, Genesis 3 pretty much has to be literally true. Does the L7D have the same status, and if so, why?

  Note that I'm not questioning whether everything was created by God; this isn't a thing of Creation vs. Evolution. This is simply L7D vs. a longer time period. Thoughts?

  I'll leave you with that one. This got really really long all of a sudden

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