Ascent Blog

ABC recently aired a debate between two Christians and two atheists. While I don’t think such debates are incredibly helpful because they don’t capture the essense of Christianity and are highly dependent on the knowledge and oratory skills of each speaker, there were several arguments worth noting. Take a look at the videos below. I think they have a couple of good points in them.

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Ok I admit, I read it… I read a book that some may think I shouldn’t have because, after all, I’m a man and men don’t read girlie books. But give me the benefit of doubt on this one. This one is different. It is called “Captivating” by John and Stasi Eldredge. If you’re a Christian, you are probably familiar with the writers. John wrote “Wild at Heart” - a book about men for men. Great read, by the way. But I figured that since I’ve already seen one side of the story, why stop there? I wanted to learn about both sides.

While this book didn’t resonate with me the way “Wild at Heart” did (and I’d be scared if I found “Captivating” very resonating…), I think John and Stasi do a good job pointing out the aspects of God that are feminine. Quite often we forget that all of us, both male and female, are made in the image of God. Thus it is only logical that we can discover who God is by looking at the feminine side as well.

So let’s talk about beauty for a minute. John and Stasi point out that beauty is not just something you stumble upon every day. Oftentimes beauty is hidden. It needs to be uncovered. In feminine terms Stasi says that every woman has an outer and an inner beauty to unveil. Every woman likes to be pursued and every woman longs to “be the beauty and to offer beauty”. And in the Godly sense there is also hidden beauty. In both senses that beauty isn’t simply there for the taking. It is hidden because God wants it to be pursued and uncovered. For example, it isn’t enough for God to just sit there high on His throne, look down upon us, peons, point his finger and tell us what to do. No, the whole point of Christianity is the relationship that we build with God. God isn’t merely content with us acknowledging Him. He wants us to pursue Him and to build that very personal relationship. In turn, we uncover God’s majesty as we get closer and closer.

John and Stasi liken this to the process of uncovering beauty in nature. Typically, the most beautiful and pristine places aren’t the ones that you see outside your window every day. To find the truly breathtaking sights you must put some effort into it, you must embark on a journey. I have done quite a bit of traveling myself and can attest to this firsthand. The most remote locations I have visited proved to harbor the most stunning gems of natural beauty. It cannot be captured, it cannot be described, it can only be perceived. So it is with God that the beauty is only revealed when you seek out God yourself. Have you noticed God’s beauty? It is everywhere. It is in nature, it is in us as humans, it is in the love He pours out onto each and every person without reservation and it is in the relationship each one of us builds with Him. Have you found this beauty yet? Are you looking for it?

– Alexei

A young man is brought before a judge for drunk driving. When his name is announced by the bailiff, there’s a gasp in the courtroom - the defendant is the judge’s son! [...] What is the judge to do? He’s caught in a dilemma between justice and love. Since his son is guilty, he deserves punishment. But the judge doesn’t want to punish his son because of his great love for him.

He reluctantly announces the sentence: “Son, you can either pay $5000 fine or go to jail.

“The son looks up at the judge and says, “But, Dad, I promise to be good from now on! I’ll volunteer at soup kitchens. I’ll visit the elderly. I’ll even open a home to care for abused children. And I’ll never do anything wrong again! Please let me go!”At this point, the judge asks, “Are you still drunk? You can’t do all of that. But even if you could, your future good deeds can’t change the fact that you’re already guilty of drunk driving.” Indeed, the judge realizes that good works cannot cancel bad works! Perfect justice demands that his son be punished for what he has done.

So the judge repeats, “I’m sorry Son. As much as I’d like to allow you to go, I’m bound by the law. The punishment for this crime is $5000 or you go to jail.”

The Son pleads with his father, “But, Dad, you know I don’t have $5000. There has to be another way to avoid jail!”

The judge stands up and takes off his robe. He walks down from his raised bench and gets down to his son’s level. Standing eye to eye next to his son, he reaches into his pocket … [...] (from Geisler and Turek, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist)

… pulls out his checkbook and writes a check for $5000. He holds it out to his son. “This is your only way out of jail, Son. Take it.”

The son is faced with a choice. Take his Dad’s sacrifice for him or pay for breaking the law himself. If you were that son (or daughter), what would you choose?

It isn’t difficult to see the moral of the story. When Jesus died on the cross, he paid that ultimate sacrifice. But none of us can be forced into accepting it. Free will is a promise that God will not break even it means that his children go to jail. One might argue that our punishment is unfair. Why should we pay for sins committed by Adam and Eve? But the fact of the matter is that it’s not their sins, it is their sinful nature that lives within us. We have failed to adhere to God’s law because of this nature. Each and every one of us has committed at least one sin, and no matter how small that sin is, it is enough to be unclean in God’s perfect eye. The sacrifice, then, is our only option if we want to remain in God’s presence.

One might also say that it is unfair to ask someone to adhere to a law that one does not know or understand. But the fact of the matter is that the law has been written down and has been taught for thousands of years. Additionally, someone might argue that the Old Testament laws are no longer applicable in light of Jesus’s coming and the New Covenant that he made with the people. But Jesus himself was the biggest proponent of God’s Law. Some of the most important stories of the New Testament involve Jesus correcting the priests and even the devil in the interpretation of the scripture. What is most amazing is that not only are Jesus’s teachings in line with the law and his conduct is impecable, but also that the entire purpose of his life was to fulfill the law! His death on a cross is the only way to satisfy a demand for infinite and perfect justice.

Having understood that, I can only marvel at the beauty, simplicity and perfection of God’s grace. An infinite sacrifice has been made to satisfy an infinite God. Yet our most coveted right, that of freedom of choice, has been preserved. Incredible.

Through a friend of mine I have stumbled upon a very well written, eloquent and challenging article by David Kupelian. It is a bit long but the author does an amazing job describing the American dream, the foundations upon which it was built and the social changes that have taken place since America first became the land of the free.

I include a few excerpts below. The rest you can read here.

“Inscribed in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’ transcendent 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” captures the spirit of America’s big-heartedness and generosity perhaps more than anything else, except for “Lady Liberty” herself.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

There has always been something different about America, which enabled this magnanimous nation to wrap her arms around the “wretched refuse” of other nations.
This nation of immigrants was bound together by a spirit, you might say. For although one cannot become French or Chinese or Russian, one can become an American – by embracing that spirit.

Becoming a naturalized American citizen therefore meant more than passing the federal government’s screening process and stumbling through a few civics questions. It meant an implicit and heartfelt agreement to abide not only by the nation’s laws, but by its hidden, unwritten “laws” as well – the principles that made up the invisible but vital fabric of Western Civilization: the individual as citizen-sovereign; a balance of freedom and responsibility; unlimited opportunity – to succeed or fail; independence and self-reliance; tolerance; the work ethic; equality under the law; and other core Judeo-Christian values. [...]

[...] The teacher had questioned the unquestionable, injecting doubt into a room of impressionable young boys and girls. It was one of those moments you remember 40 years later because it created a spark, a momentary contact with another dimension – that alien dimension of cynicism and disbelief.

Within a few years, the gathering tides of rebellion against traditional America would come crashing down with great ferocity and on many shores. One key area was the Civil Rights Movement.Despite the fact that America had long-since forsaken slavery, and – thanks to the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which culminated in the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act – had outlawed segregation and made great strides in moving beyond racism altogether, a demand for “black studies” nevertheless arose in the nation’s colleges.

The idea was that past denigration and mistreatment of blacks necessitated special emphasis on their culture and accomplishments. “Black pride” was born and “black studies,” “black history” and the like proliferated through the nation’s university campuses.

Although most people didn’t comprehend it at the time, “black pride” and similar “liberation movements” did not arise out of the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement, which had arrived, in King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, at the ultimate solution to racism: the “color-blind” society where people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This enlightened vision of America – which would have completed the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” – was hijacked by forces of the ’60s radical left. These were people who did not want peace and racial harmony. They condemned racial integration as “Uncle Tomism” and “co-optation.” Their aim was to indict America as a racist oppressor as a means to foment division, revolution and societal transformation.”

As many of you know, I grew up in a non-religious society. When I was young, we studied Greek mythology in school and I read a lot of it. In fact, I probably read the entire collection because I was fascinated with the cool stories. Somebody had quite an imagination to come up with the wild and out-of-this-world tales of Zeus and Athena and the Cyclops and the myriad of gods and demi-gods that populated Olympus. Then there were the “dark” forces of Hades, the river Styx with its ferryman and the big bad three-headed monster Cerberus. I put the word ‘dark’ in quotes because it wasn’t always obvious that the gods of Olympus were any better than the gods of the underworld. They stole, murdered, cheated and lied to one another just as they did to people on Earth. But still, the stories were awesome. They fueled my imagination with vivid pictures of battles where man stood against man and god stood against god, with heroes and villains reigning over the world in succession and with all the amazing powers each god wielded. And through it all I never had the slightest doubt that these stories were products of wild imagination of men who attempted to understand their extremely complicated world. Where they failed to use reason they filled the gaping holes with mysticism and invented new powers, new gods and new incredible adventures.

And in this highly vivid and imaginative world Jesus fit right in. He was a bit confusing, since his message was different from the gods of Greece, but hey, he had more powers than the Greek gods since he claimed to be the only god, unlimited by anybody or anything. If people wanted to believe in him, that was just fine with me. Personally, I did not see the point of going to a largely dark and gloomy church (you know what I mean if you’ve ever visited the Russian orthodox variety) filled with old people lighting some candles to icons. Aha, I said to myself, those icons are like the demi-gods in Greek mythology. All these guys have powers but they are weaker than the ultimate guy at the top.

Fast-forward to about 5 years ago. By that time I was going to college, working pretty hard toward my degrees and enjoying the experience. Also by that time, I had a few good Christian friends. Most of the time religion didn’t come up in our conversations, but now and again we would talk and battle over how it was just another form of control and how the tithes were used to cheat people out of their income to promote church’s goals. Jesus was still a great myth in my head and all this stuff about prophets and miracles fit right along the lines of all the other lustrous but dead religions that came before Christianity.

And then came one day which I remember quite vividly. I was riding in a car, debating a friend of mine on the merits of religion and at some point he turned his head, looked at me and said: “You know that Jesus is a true historical figure, not a figment of imagination, right?”

Huh? Someone has the audacity to claim that? that’s ridiculous! I mean, that’s a good story and all, but it would be absurd to claim that he is anything but a story made up by a few people.

“No, no,” my friend protested, “even the non-religious historians agree that Jesus truly lived. They might say that he was just a prophet, not a god, but it’s a historically accurate fact.”

Weird. That conversation kind of stuck to me. So Jesus is real? I don’t think so! Hmm…and yet this new claim bothered me. There were some uneasy repercussions to that statement if, indeed, it was true. Well, apparently, I was not the only one bothered by this thought. Some of the most prominent historians, archaeologists, lawyers and scholars have set out to check for themselves the validity of the stories in the New Testament.

So what have they found? Well, I could not put it better than it has already been put before me so I will refer to a couple of books that contain their analysis. Keep in mind that most of the people I quote here were atheists or agnostics who took an extremely careful and skeptical look at the evidence before deriving the answer. Many of them are the top scholars of their respective disciplines.

Josh McDowell writes: “After personally trying to shatter the historicity and validity of the Scriptures, I have come to the conclusion that they are historically trustworthy. If a person discards the Bible as unreliable in this sense, then he or she must discard almost all the literature of antiquity. “  What does he mean by that? Geisler and Turek shed more insight in their detailed study of the historicity of the New Testament: “To see if the New Testament is a record of actual history, we need to answer two questions concerning the documents that comprise the New Testament:

1. Do we have accurate copies of the original documents that were written down in the first century?
2. Do those documents speak the truth.”

The authors then spend 75 pages of their book meticulously documenting and presenting every fact that has been established about the historicity of the New Testament. Their conclusion is supported by a wealth of secular and religious archaeological, historical and legal studies. I do not have the right nor the desire to copy their work so instead I will present just a few excerpts from their writing as well as from McDowell’s book.

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I bow my head in shame and deep sorrow for the tragic events that took place this morning. No doubt you have already heard - a gunman at Virginia Tech rampaged through the campus today, leaving 33 dead and many more wounded. This atrocity cannot be comprehended. It cannot be described. It cannot be understood. All we are left with is pain, confusion and anger for such disregard of human life. These killings are meaningless. The lives lost are irreplaceable.

Please join me tonight in prayer for the students and teachers who have become unwilling victims of this tragedy. Both, the wounded and the dead need your prayers, but let us pray foremost for those who have passed away. I wish I knew their names so I could pray for each one in turn, but the names will not be released until later. Right now, my most sincere prayer goes out for the 32 souls standing at the gates of heaven. May God accept his children even as they go out of this world so prematurely.

Please pray with me.

In other news, I wanted to mention briefly that I have released a very simple yet hopefully useful encryption program today, called Enfomi. Basically, it lets you encrypt data with a password using very strong encryption algorithms (there are 27 total). It is completely open-source (free), completely standalone and completely portable (means it will run on Mac or PC as long as you have Java. Check out the rest on the official Enfomi page.

One of the last few meetings of Fusion (the young adults church group I attend at FAC) has given me an idea for a question I would like to pose to everyone. Take a look at the picture below. Each of the black dots represents a person just like you and me. Mentally place yourself (as a dot) in an area that you think describes the strength of your relationship with Jesus Christ. Consider ‘A’ to be an atheist (or no relationship) and ‘B’ through ‘D’ to be gradually strengthening relationship. Now… which area would you like to be in?

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