Answers for atheists

A post that I wrote a little while back caught the attention of an atheist, and you can read the entire post and comments by clicking here.  But the main comment concerned some tough questions that have been asked in similar form by many a non-believer, which I will quote here:

If [God] is all good, why do 20,000 children die every day in this world? Surely someone all good, would not let that many children die? So he is either not all good, or he is unable to help them so he is not all powerful..

Do you believe in a devil? If so why would a god "allow" him to exist? If he does, then again he is either not all good or not all powerful and cannot stop him or stop him from existing..

See how quickly cracks appear in even your most basic belief system?

Here was my initial reaction to this comment, so bear with me: I must admit that I was a little put off at first. Was I supposed to abandon my faith simply on the basis of two issues that this person assumed I hadn't found answers to? Perhaps this person didn't really care to find answers to these questions but was simply trying to discredit believers in general and this blog in particular, upset merely by the fact that my belief system runs contrary to his/hers?

Also, as the comments progressed, I had the feeling that s/he was calling my character and level of intelligence into question solely as a result of me believing in God, as though only some half-wit would do something so audacious. You can see in subsequent comments how s/he and I attempted to iron some things out, and how in the end I realized that attempting to answer these questions isn't a bad thing.  However, doing so just wasn't the intention of this blog.  Let me explain.

I started this blog for reasons explained in the introductory post, and I hoped that people would read it so that any comments would not resort to making me feel as though I was being regarded as a second-rate human being for believing in God, for example by inferring that I am "brain washed by a cult" or that by believing in God I "may as well be believing in Santa Claus, except you are an adult". I wasn't expecting to be subjected to ad hominem attacks - to attacks on my character - and to attacks on my intelligence, but rather I had hoped to be asked to reasonably and intelligently discuss matters related to God.

But then I realized that perhaps this atheist has only ever encountered "religious" people, as s/he refers to them (perhaps not yet realizing that true Christianity is actually the anti-thesis and the greatest enemy of religion), who seem as though they are robotically brainwashed by how they act and live.  Or maybe Christians (or those who claim to be) have looked down their noses at him/her and attacked his/her character as well.  Maybe I was simply bearing the brunt of his/her discontent.

Although this person should not have assumed the same about me or done the same to me, I guess I can't blame him/her.  What I realized is that s/he's probably never become acquainted with, let alone met, someone who believes in God like me yet with the integrity, character, and intelligence that those around me know I possess.  It's easy to assume things about someone whose stuff you're only reading about online instead of getting to know them face-to-face. I'm also very well regarded by Christians and non-believers in my sphere of influence because I don't walk around with a 'holier than thou' attitude. I'm very real, and I don't walk around with my head in the clouds. In short, I'm very personable and don't speak with people as though I look like I was weaned on a pickle.

I also realized that to not answer those questions would lead this person to rightly assume that I lack integrity, character, and intelligence. Therefore, I am attempting to answer these questions for these reasons, but also since this person has never met "one single person who can logically answer those questions. Not a priest, not a born again Christian, not Mormons nor Jehovah Witnesses at the front door." However, I do not make this attempt with the illusion that an atheist will suddenly "see the light" regarding Jesus.  This person him/herself has stated that s/he is "not someone looking for God".

So why should I bother answering these questions?  Because I as a follower of Jesus need to be as open, caring, and transparent to non-believers as he was to all around him when he walked this earth. He is the example that sadly most Christians have failed to follow, and I've never wanted to be a part of that majority. If most Christians truly reflected the character of their Savior, their Messiah, then the atheist ranks on this planet would be almost non-existent because the love of God would be hugely apparent, since it is meant to be reflected through Christian believers.  Sure, this person has implied that s/he really doesn't care to know the answers, which means that perhaps instead I'll either be mocked again as I was at first (but hopefully not) or s/he'll simply try to poke more holes into my faith that s/he cannot truly understand apart from that faith.

But maybe none of this will happen; maybe I'm assuming that this person will act exactly how I did as a hater of God for the first 22 years of my life, when I responded to any spiritual inquiries with venom and hatred (and all without objectively considering their viewpoint, by the way) that few non-believers have had the guts to express with a believer face-to-face.  Anyhow, this is a chance I'm willing to take; my faith has and never will be shaken, so really I've got nothing to lose, and maybe it will actually be somewhat informative to this and other atheists/agnostics who stumble across this blog. At the very least, these are good questions that deserve attempts at answers - hey, I wondered about them as well at one time - and hopefully the responses are respectful and reasonable even if someone still disagrees with them.

So here's my approach.  In this post, I've decided I'm not going to re-invent the wheel.  These questions have been addressed somewhat directly or indirectly in this blog.  So first, do a search by blog title or keyword for the items of concern, such as "brainwashing" or "atheists" or "Satan" or "devil".

Second, search online for other sources that will answer these questions, because they've been asked and answered ad nauseum throughout the ages.  I simply feel I don't need to try to answer them myself at this point if others have done so already.

But beware: not all people who claim to represent God truly represent the God of the Bible, the one true God.  So please avoid anyone who has violated the warning of Revelation chapter 22, verses 18-19 like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses have:  they have tweaked and even re-written the Bible to make God fit their mold, to suit their twisted agendas.  They are cults in the truest sense of the word, and therefore their answers to these questions will be misinformed and intended to mislead.  In fact, any religious movement or self-proclaimed "faith" that has rejected Jesus and therefore the Bible is also not a good source for information (ex. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.). I've never found their explanations on such issues to be reputable or even helpful because they lack a true understanding of such issues by, for example, their removal of Jesus from the equation.

Instead, start with organizations like the Christian Research Institute (the best cult-busting organization in existence!), and search for messages from the likes of Charles Stanley and Chuck Swindoll.  I'm sorry, but answers to these questions are only best addressed from a Biblical perspective (since these questions are about God and the devil), so you need to be open-minded about this no matter how uncomfortable this may be!

Now I won't leave you totally hanging.  Here are a few links to answers to the above (or similar) questions to get you started.  Where you go from here is up to you:

If [God] is all good, why do 20,000 children die every day in this world?

• Link 1, Link 2, Link 3

Do you believe in a devil? If so why would a god "allow" him to exist?

• Link 1, Link 2, Link 3

Some of these responses are written from Christians to Christians, but bear with them as you read them. Don't get upset, don't get insulted - just take them for what they are.  In some cases, some answers to the specific questions are sprinkled throughout various parts of the articles.

Third, these questions do not have cut-and-dried, simple answers.  In fact, for me these answers only came after several years of gaining a deep understanding of God through reading my Bible, listening to reputable (not just any) Bible teachers in person and on the radio (this involved me sorting the reputable from the pseudo-biblical and cultic teachings), and through asking God to reveal his truths to me.  Even if I can refer you to cut-and-dried attempts at answers, they'll probably seem non-sensical without a solid background of walking with God.

So there you go!  Now, if you're assuming that this is a cop-out on my part, I hope you will do your due diligence and first research these things more for yourself.  Then, if you really would like me to answer them from my perspective, in my own words that I believe God is revealing to me, please leave me a comment to that effect and I will create a new post.

BUT PLEASE, if your desire is not to really seek to understand God more but rather to try to mock me, my faith, or to just keep asking questions for the sake of mockery and/or to waste my time and energy, then I will no longer be answering such questions.

Again, I intended this blog to share what I believe God has laid upon my heart over the years for the benefit of believers and non-believers seeking to understand God more.  And I will return strictly to this agenda if I sense that my character is being subjected to attack or if my faith is being mocked in a disrespectful fashion.  I am asking you to hold to the same level of integrity that I have hopefully also held to, and I believe this is an absolutely fair and reasonable request.

What "religion" are you?

Several times in my life I've had to fill out forms - on paper or online - that ask me what "religion" I am.  I can't help but be tempted to write "Non-religious Christian" because I can't stand the concept of religion nor do I practice a religion.

Now how's that for a contradiction in terms!  How can one possibly claim to be a Christian yet also non-religious?  Isn't Christianity a "religion", and therefore to be a Christian means you're "religious?"  'How blasphemous', you might be thinking.  Or is it?

There's a reason why it's called the "Christian faith", because a religion and a faith are two entirely different things.  People who have not put their trust in Jesus Christ to save them wrongly call it a "religion" because they have a false understanding of who God is and how people are supposed to relate to Him.  However, people who have put their trust in Jesus Christ to save them - Christians - rightly call it a "faith".  They have realized that the salvation given to them through this faith is the "gift of God", that it can't be earned by anything you do (Ephesians 2:8-10).  Thus, they have been invited and accepted into a relationship - not a religion - with the one true God through Jesus Christ and Him alone.

I've come to realize that a religion is a man-made system designed to try to please their god (or gods).  It's full of rules and regulations and ordinances, most of which have no origin in the Bible.  It's also not a very fun system to try to follow, because failure to live up to its standards is constant and therefore it's a great cause of demoralization.  All too often, there is a push to get other people "converted" in a vain attempt to please or appease their god(s) and thus feel more important and better about themselves. 

Sadly, many denominations and movements claiming to be Christian are in fact religions far removed from what God intended Christianity to be.  They go by different names:  Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and so forth.  Then there are the cultic movements, like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons (Latter Day Saints).  God did not invent denominations or movements; rather, He intended Christianity to be a way to personally relate to Him through Jesus Christ and Him alone - no human intervention required.  However, people unwilling to accept His grace extended through Jesus Christ thought they knew better, and viola - the birth of modern religion.

Unfortunately, a lot of the atheism and agnosticism in this world today stem from those who have felt the pressure to convert to a particular religion.  These mindsets are compounded when these people witness the failure of religious followers to live up to religious standards, such as practicing what they preach.  And when these religious followers fail (not if, but when), they assume - or are told by their religious leaders - that their god(s) will fail to love them.

How the Bible paints a different picture!  If only these people would look past man-made religion and instead to the Bible where they can be told not only of the reality of the one true God, but also His amazing love for them, available without a single religious act on their part!

Here's what the Bible has to say about the Christian faith:

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope at your calling; one Lord [that is, Jesus], one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all."  (Ephesians 4:4-5)

What this passage implies is that the "one" Christian faith is therefore the only faith that exists.  It is one of those passages that is very exclusive, the kind that annoys and even greatly angers those outside the Christian faith.  In other words, it implies that there is no Muslim "faith", or Buddhist "faith", or Hindu "faith" and so on.  In reality, these are all religions:  the "one God" is revealed only in the Bible and in no other bodies of scripture, and therefore they are all worshipping false gods.  Also, they all have strict, man-made standards that have created a schizophrenic god or gods who can snap and go crazy on their followers at any moment and, worst of all, deny them passage to eternal paradise.

The appeal of Christianity is so much greater:

"Come to Me [Jesus], all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."  (Matthew 11:28, emphasis added)

"Everyone the Father [God] gives Me [Jesus] will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will never cast out." (John 6:37, emphasis added)

"... [God] is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9, emphasis added)

"For God loved the world in this way:  He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16, emphasis added)

"For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God's gift - not from works [religious effort] so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9, emphasis added)

I don't know about you, but I much prefer the "one" true faith that accepts everyone - people of all races and colors and, yes, all religious backgrounds - and doesn't require us to be cleaned up and perfect before approaching the "one" true God and humbly and sincerely asking for His mercy to forgive and cleanse and save us.  How about you?

The Great Facade

I was watching a video a couple of nights ago where some non-believing youth were being asked their opinions about various things related to God. One was, "What do you think about church?" The answers were not surprising to me, because I was also once a non-believing youth who felt precisely the same as they do. They referred to some stereotypes that are common in only a few churches, like the mention of "smelly old people", but other answers were sadly all too common, like "boring", "outdated", "irrelevant", and so on.

On arguably one of the greatest Christian music albums ever recorded, wonderfully named "Jesus Freak", the group dc Talk wrote a song called "What If I Stumble?" They open the song with a spoken audio clip of some guy who says

"The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

What God has been showing me the past few months to a greater degree than at any point in my Christian walk is examples of people who call themselves Christians but who put on what I like to call The Great Facade. I have been anguished at times how their claim to be followers of Christ could not be more opposite in the reality of how they live their lives.

It is the existence of these people who are responsible for the opinions given by the non-believing youth in the video I mentioned. These people also give total validity to the above quote in that dc Talk song.

Now referring to them as "these people" doesn't imply that I'm looking down my nose at them or having hatred towards them. Sometimes I say and do little things that put me in the same category for a moment and leave me crying out to God and asking about why I was so stupid! But my anguish is for "these people" whose facade is continual, whose outward actions and appearance are put on to hide their actual lack of true understanding and relationship with God/Jesus. A facade that creates a Jeckyl-and-Hyde sort of approach to being a Christian that causes great damage to the reputation of God/Jesus as outsiders scratch their heads and wonder if their hypocrisy and inconsistency in life is what it means to be a "Christian".

Here's just one example of sadly many people I've personally known who've put on The Great Facade. An acquaintance of mine and his wife - both Christian by title - are almost at the point of separation. He wants to make things right again but she refuses, adamantly stating among other things that it won't work between them any more. She has seen her lawyer and is on the verge of leaving. At stake are their three young children who dearly love their mom and dad. She in particular is very proactive at school to make sure her children are doing well and being kept safe from bullies. However, among many measures she is taking, she no longer wants their dad to attend the same church as her and the kids once she leaves.

I cringe at how this woman claims to be a Christian but doesn't realize how leaving her husband will do infinitely more damage to their children than poor grades or a bully's actions could ever possibly do. And I almost gasped with disbelief when he told me that she doesn't want him to attend the same church any longer. Basically, she wants to put on The Great Facade at church to appear as though she's right with God, yet she won't humble herself before her husband to whom she once pledged her life - and Jesus who she claims to believe in and therefore follow - in order to make things work again.

Unfortunately, any non-believer who might learn of these things will only see the hypocrisy of a Christian couple divorcing despite the Christian belief in the sanctity of marriage. And they'll wonder why someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus would take so many actions that reflect the total opposite.

The host of the video followed up the answers of the non-believing youth by re-affirming much of what they said, but he then took things in a brilliant direction by commenting that perhaps the church has given God a bad rap. That for a non-believer to form an opinion of God based upon the mess that humans have made of the church that was created and is headed by Jesus is a crucial mistake to make.

When I was "unsaved", my opinion of God - as you will read about in other posts - was initially totally formulated by the particular "spiritual morgue" that I attended as a kid. It was reinforced by people who didn't have a real relationship with God - like people in the media and in academic circles - but still thought they had God and Christians and the Bible all figured out and discredited.

In other words, I was basing my opinion of God on bad sources of information. It was akin to asking an artist how to diagnose and fix a problem with my car, or asking a medical doctor to help me draft a plan to get out of financial trouble. I was using the mistakes and hypocrisy of believers and the lies and subjective opinions of non-believers to form my false understanding of God.

Now I have no idea how or why God began to unravel my totally false understanding of who He is, but He began to do so by exposing me to the Bible. He did this through books and preachers and teachers - including those on Christian radio broadcasts - who began to show me the truth of God and what a relationship with Him is really all about. In other words, I began to see God from His side, and I was so impressed by the non-religious reality of who God is that I was intrigued and eventually gave my life to Him through His only appointed Mediator, Jesus.

I began to realize how religion is not from God, but rather a means created by people to try to relate to God outside of what the Bible teaches. They have a beef with this-or-that, like the claim by Jesus that He is the only way to come to God and to know God, so they make up their own rules and think that God will somehow honor these man-made substitutes by forgiving them and letting them into heaven anyhow. Such religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.

In the case of some sects that call themselves "Christian", they claim to relate to God according to what the Bible teaches, but they twist the Bible just enough to deceive people into thinking that their beliefs are still Bible-based when they actually are not. Such sects include Mormonism (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and such sects are typically and more appropriately called "cults".

Why have I shared this last bit about my realizations and about religion and cults? Because I want you, if you're a non-believer, to be careful about the sources of information you use to form your understanding of God. Quite simply, if these sources discredit or mock the Bible, or if their information doesn't line up with the Bible, then you should ignore them entirely until you have a better biblical understanding.

So how come so many Christians put on The Great Facade? I believe the #1 reason is because they don't make the effort to know and understand who God is. Because they don't know and understand Him, they don't trust Him and therefore don't allow Him to control their lives. So the root causes of a divorce or financial ruin never get dealt with because the Christian tries to fix these things himself/herself. And these disasters occur in the first place because these people never formed a daily relationship of dependence upon this God whom they've claimed to put their trust in. Doing so would have prevented many of these disasters from ever occurring. So these people claim to believe but they don't actually trust, and this makes their belief very shallow and superficial.

They don't read the Bible themselves and ask for God to help them understand it because they don't make the time and the effort to do so, and then come up with excuses. So they instead listen to a teacher's or preacher's opinion and claim that to be truth instead of consulting the source of truth itself. And when one is not familiar with the truth presented in the Bible, it's easy to fall for teachings that sound biblical but actually aren't. Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses live on today simply because Christians don't know their Bible (and don't understand what the cultic versions of the Bible are and how they differ from the real one) nor apply what the Bible teaches them.

They also don't really commune with God, which means spending time getting to know Him. They resort to prayer during an emergency or to present their wish list; they don't pray to ask God to show them what to do in life then ask for the patience to wait for His answer. They sing at church so they don't look unholy, but they don't mean what they sing nor give their reverence and praise to God because they fear being vulnerable plus looking wierd to their friends.

So on and on The Great Facade goes. The Christian puts on their "Sunday best" but then lives not much differently from the non-believer during the rest of the week. It doesn't help that they watch the same TV shows and movies and listen to the same music, either. And all the while the mighty power of Jesus that is available to work in peoples' lives gets overshadowed by the hypocrisy and mistakes of multitude Christians who've put on this facade and don't allow this power into their lives.

These are the main reasons why so many churches become "boring", "outdated", and "irrelevant". The people are there pretending to know God when they actually don't, so they tolerate and never question all the irrelevant (i.e. non-biblical) religious ritual. The religion becomes a safe alternative to actually becoming vulnerable to a relationship with God that will bring about change and growth. They want change and growth on their own terms even if they realize that God's plan is a much better one.

And the net result of all these factors is Christians that are far too often ineffective and hypocritical to the outside world.