Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Have you heard of Bard? By Google? It’s their artificial intelligence program. I have it a try today.
My query: Help me describe today’s bike ride in the rain.
Bard’s response:
Sure, I can help you describe today’s bike ride in the rain.
It was a cold and rainy day, but I was determined to go for a bike ride. I put on my waterproof jacket and gloves, and I set off into the rain. The roads were slippery and the wind was strong, but I was enjoying the challenge. I rode for about an hour, and by the time I got home, I was soaked to the bone. But I felt great! I had had a great workout, and I had enjoyed the feeling of the wind and the rain on my face.
Here are some tips for biking in the rain:
Dress in layers so you can adjust your clothing as needed.
Wear a waterproof jacket and gloves.
Use a helmet with a visor to protect your eyes.
Be extra cautious when braking and cornering.
Be aware of your surroundings and be prepared to stop suddenly.
Enjoy the challenge and the feeling of the wind and the rain on your face!
Not bad, says I!
Here’s a few photos taken along my route:
Today, while biking, I listened to an hour’s worth of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.
A preeminent scientist — and the world’s most prominent atheist — asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe’s wonders than any faith could ever muster.
“A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Why do writers write? Some of literary history’s most famous and timeless answers have come from George Orwell, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Charles Bukowski. In her beautiful essay “Uncanny Singing That Comes from Certain Husks,” published in the 1998 anthology Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (public library), Joy Williams considers the impetus for writing with equal parts insight, irreverence, and that blend of anguishing ambivalence and convulsive conviction so characteristic of the writer’s mind.
It’s become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole, of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well. There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process. Writers are like eremites or anchorites — natural-born eremites or anchorites — who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? Why is my sweat being sold as elixir? And how have I become so enmeshed with works, mere works, phantoms?
[…]
A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. (Making contact with the self — healing the wound — is even less satisfactory.) Writers end up writing stories — or rather, stories’ shadows — and they’re grateful if they can but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.
She considers the generative power of awareness:
The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.
[…]
A writer’s awareness must never be inadequate. Still, it will never be adequate to the greater awareness of the work itself, the work that the writer is trying to write. The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is — what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be dumb enough to break himself to harness.
On complacency:
The moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be abandoned. Effects repeated become false, mannered. The writer’s style is his doppelgänger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.
Recounting critical reactions to some of her essays, Williams offers:
But a writer isn’t supposed to make friends with his writing, I don’t think.
On language, and the metaphor from which the essay title comes:
Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There is something uncanny about good writing — uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. The work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater, which is the writing. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesn’t want to go down with him when he stumbles or fails to retreat. The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time.
[…]
The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work — this Other, this other thing — this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really. Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, either is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face. Whenever the writer writes, it’s always three o’clock in the morning, it’s always three or four or five o’clock in the morning in his head. Those horrid hours are the writer’s days and nights when he is writing. The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
Williams ends with a direct yet wonderfully poetic answer:
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.
A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.
Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.
As we have seen, parts of our Bibles are probably mistaken. But what about the original source? I was taught to believe that holy men of God wrote down the Bible as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Is this what happened? Is the Bible in its essence the words of God?
Now this is a rather extraordinary claim–that a mere book represents the words of God. We should expect that some would be skeptical about that claim, yes? After all, you yourself are probably skeptical of the claim that the Quran or the Book of Mormon is the word of God. You demand more than a simple assertion. You would like some real evidence. Very well then. It also seems to me that, if one wants people to believe the Bible is God’s inspired word, one needs to have a good reason why we should believe it.
Why Believe in Inspiration?
So why should we believe that the Bible is God’s Word? II Timothy 3:16 comes to mind: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;” So here we have a claim. But a claim is not proof.
I think that II Timothy 3:16 does not count as significant evidence that the Bible is God’s word. First, we don’t know what books the author is referring to as scripture. He does not tell us. What do you think he refers to? The 66 books of the Protestant Bible? What makes you think he means those books? Unless he defines what he is talking about, how can we know what books he thinks are inspired?
Second, the passage has alternate translations. It could mean, “All scripture that is inspired of God is profitable.” In other words, it could simply mean that God has had a hand in certain books, and that they are worth reading. It may not even be claiming verbal inspiration or that the books are more inspired than other inspiring reading that you might find.
And finally, the author may be mistaken. After all, we don’t even know who wrote this book.
Oh yes, many will tell me that Paul wrote II Timothy. But could someone else have written it? After all, it was a common practice in those days to write a book and claim that some famous person had written it. The books could have been falsely attributed to Paul.
The vocabulary of these books does not match the rest of Paul’s writings, but rather, is similar to second century writings.[1] This book is never mentioned by the early church fathers, even though other books of Paul are frequently referenced. It appears that this book had not even been written until years after Paul. If you think Paul wrote it, why?
Even if you could show that Paul wrote it, we could argue that he could have been mistaken when he wrote this. Paul, after all, was human, and humans are sometimes mistaken.
Can you understand why many do not think that quoting this verse proves that the 66 books in your Bible are inspired?
The odd thing to me is that no book of the New Testament specifically claims to be inspired (with the possible exception of Revelation.)
Let’s look at one example. In Romans 1 we read, “Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God… to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints.” Now, according to Evangelical thinking, this book is not just expressing Paul’s thoughts. It is expressing the very thoughts of God. But where does the book say this?
Imagine that you were in the church of Rome and you received this personal letter from Paul. You would, of course, be thrilled to have a lengthy letter from this leader of your faith. But would you consider this letter to be the writings of God? You read right there that Paul wrote it. Nowhere does it say that God wrote it. Nowhere does Romans claim that Paul was merely the vehicle that God used to express his thoughts. And we have no record that the recipients thought this book was written by God.
Now look at the end of the book: In Rom 16:22 it says, “I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord.”
Okay, so perhaps Paul didn’t do the writing, but he dictated it to a scribe. Imagine the chain of command–God told Paul what to write, Paul told Tertius, and Tertius wrote it down. Isn’t it possible that something was lost in transmission?
And how did Romans 16:22 get there? Was Paul dictating these words–“And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you… I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord.” Can you imagine what Tertius would have said if he was taking dictation and Paul had said “I Tertius”? It’s just not natural. So, most likely Tertius wrote this verse on his own.
Did God switch modes, so that he was now inspiring Tertius instead of Paul? If so, why didn’t God just inspire Tertius in the first place, and leave Paul out of the loop? Or did Tertius just inject this verse on his own? If so, how many other verses did Tertius insert?
Regardless, we find that Paul takes credit for the book, and Tertius steps in and takes credit for his contribution, but somehow, they didn’t think it was important to mention that God was the author. Why would the book give credit to the channel (Paul) and the scribe (Tertius) and fail to mention the author (God)? How odd. If God wrote this, wouldn’t he have taken the credit?
Thus saith the Lord
Oh, but people will tell me that the Old Testament prophets often wrote, “Thus saith the Lord.” Does this prove that those verses are quotes from God? I think not. How would we know that the prophets were not just pretending that God said those things? Many prophets were doing that. You can read about them in Jeremiah 23. Jeremiah writes,
16 Thus says the LORD of hosts, “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; They speak a vision of their own imagination, Not from the mouth of the LORD… 21″I did not send these prophets, But they ran. I did not speak to them, But they prophesied. (Jer 23:16,21)
These prophets said, “Thus saith the Lord,” but Jeremiah says that they were lying. What do you think these other prophets said about Jeremiah? That’s right. They probably said that the Lord told them Jeremiah was lying. So, who was right? Can you see that merely claiming that God says something does not prove that the writer is correct?
To convince a skeptic that he is wrong, you will need to do more than state that you are right, and he is wrong. You will need evidence. What evidence do you have that the Bible is inspired? Many Christians have proposed evidence, including claimed prophetic fulfillment, miraculous biblical unity, and the Bible’s life-changing power. Do these things prove that the book is inspired? We are here to ask questions. Let’s ask.
Prophecy
One of the most frequently used arguments for the Bible’s inspiration is the claim of fulfilled prophecy. We are told that the writers miraculously predicted many things years before they happened. Let us look at some claimed examples.
One of the most famous is Micah 5:2, “But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, From the days of eternity.”
We are told that this verse predicted that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem. But does it say that? First, look at whom this verse is talking about. Look at the context. We find more about this ruler in verses 5 and 6,
This One will be our peace. When the Assyrian invades our land, When he tramples on our citadels, Then we will raise against him Seven shepherds and eight leaders of men. They will shepherd the land of Assyria with the sword, The land of Nimrod at its entrances; And He will deliver us from the Assyrian When he attacks our land And when he tramples our territory.
Micah wrote during the time of Assyrian dominance and writes of somebody who will conquer Assyria. Does this sound like a description of Jesus? Did Jesus deliver “from the Assyrian?” No. So apparently the man spoken of in Micah 5–the one that was to come out of Bethlehem and defeat Assryia– is not even Jesus.
Some might argue that this verse could be taken figuratively, that Jesus symbolically defeated the Assyrian tyranny. But how many other people could be said to have figurative conquered Assyrian tyranny? Churchill, Washington, and Martin Luther King come to mind. In fact, thousands of people can be said to have figuratively conquered Assyria. So how can you be sure this is talking about Jesus? And if the conquest of Assryia is not to be taken literally, how do we know that “Bethlehem” is to be taken literally? If we are allowed to use figurative interpretations, hundreds of towns might figurative be Bethlehem, the city of David.
There is a second problem. The verse is probably not even referring to the town of Bethlehem, but to a man named Bethlehem, the descendent of Ephratah. I Chron 4:4 speaks of this man, “These were the sons of Hur, the first-born of Ephrathah and father of Bethlehem.” Now the “prophecy” in Micah refers to Bethlehem Ephratah. Sounds like Micah is describing a descendant of Bethlehem Ephratah, not a citizen of a town.
Third, how do we even know where Jesus was born? Sure, Matthew and Luke said he was born in Bethlehem, but could they have been mistaken? Or could the books have been altered to make it look like Jesus was born in Bethlehem?
It is no use arguing that the gospels are correct because they are inspired. That is the point we are trying to determine. Unless we can prove they are inspired, we cannot simply assume the issue under consideration. That would be arguing in a circle. So, the books could possibly be wrong on this point.
And, other than these two books–which conflict on the details–we have no record of Jesus being born in Bethlehem. So maybe the writers made this up so they could show a fulfillment of prophecy as they understood it. Once more, we have reason to be less than impressed with this prophecy.
So, I don’t find Micah 5:2 to be an impressive prophecy about Jesus.
How about Isaiah 53? This tells about a suffering servant. Many think it predicts Jesus. Again, let’s look at the passage in context. Notice the language.
3 He was despised, and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not.4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
It seems to be talking about somebody in the past, that is, before Isaiah. “He was despised…was wounded…was bruised.”
The theme of the suffering servant appears throughout Isaiah 40 through 55. When Isaiah refers to this suffering servant, it appears he is talking about the nation of Israel. For instance, in Isaiah 44:1-2 :
1″But now listen, O Jacob, My servant, And Israel, whom I have chosen: 2Thus says the LORD who made you And formed you from the womb, who will help you, ‘Do not fear, O Jacob My servant; And you Jeshurun whom I have chosen.
We find that Jacob (Israel) is referred to as a servant. This theme is repeated throughout the later part of Isaiah. The passage could be telling us nothing more than that the nation of Israel suffered for the sins of the people. This passage could have nothing to do with a future savior. Perhaps Isaiah was not even writing a prophecy.
Do you think the prophecies of the Bible are impressive? May I suggest a way to check this claim out for yourself? Start at the Psalms and read through to the end of the prophets. Lay aside the commentaries and chapter headings. Every time you see something that might be a prophecy of Christ, ask yourself if this is really prophesying a future event. Is the prophecy so vague it really predicts nothing? Is it talking about a contemporaneous event, and not even talking about the future? Is the reference so cryptic that it takes a specially trained eye to pick it out of context? Would God hide things like that? Read it from the perspective of a person who has never heard of Jesus. Would he be expected from these verses to know that some particular event would happen in the life of Jesus? I think you will find that the claimed prophecies melt away when you do this.
I remember the first time I read the book of Isaiah. I was excited to read all of those marvelous prophecies in context. What a surprise it was to read what was actually in the book. The “prophecies” come rather unexpectedly, in passages that are totally unrelated to Jesus. And most of the book consists of long diatribes about ancient affairs that mean little to modern people. I am not making this up. You can see it for yourself. Simply pick the Bible off the shelf and read the book of Isaiah.
Before we move on, let’s look at one more prophecy claim. In Zechariah 11 we read:
2 I said to them, “If it is good in your sight, give me my wages; but if not, never mind!” So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages. 3Then the LORD said to me, “Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them.” So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the LORD.Zechariah 11:12-13
Now this has been claimed to be a marvelous prophecy of the fee paid to Judas. If this is a prophecy, then God has hidden it well. We find it is again written in the past tense. It tells the story of a discouraged shepherd trying to lead Israel. Having given up, he asks for his wages and throws the money to the potter. Now in what way does this represent Judas? The story simply doesn’t match. If Judas happened to receive the same wage as the man in the story, that is a coincidence. How is that a prophecy? You see, if one tries to find little matches between any two stories, one can usually do it. But that does not prove that the first story prophesied the second. (See, for instance, the “startling discovery” made by a rabbi in the sidebar above.)
Even if a story in the New Testament has parallels to something in the Old Testament that does not prove the Old Testament was prophetic. It is possible that the writers of the New Testament slanted the story to make it match what they read in the Old Testament.
It is no use claiming that the New Testament is right because it is inspired. That is the point in question. You cannot prove the Bible is inspired by assuming it is inspired.
So, if fallible men wrote the gospels, maybe their bias influenced how they told the story. In many places the New Testament says something happened “that it might be fulfilled” and then it references some passage in the Old Testament. So, if the writer knew about the Old Testament passage, and wanted to show a fulfillment, isn’t it possible that he slanted the story?
It turns out that the only sources we have for any of the details that are claimed to be fulfillment of messianic prophecy are the New Testament writers themselves. Could these writers have been biased? I find no clearly unbiased sources verifying the 30 pieces of silver, the birth in Bethlehem, the virgin birth, or any of the other claimed fulfillment. Once more, those who claim miraculous fulfillment have little support.
Even if you would find an impressive prophecy, does that prove that all 66 books of the Bible are inspired? Suppose you find an impressive prophecy by Nostradamus. Would that prove that all books in a collection that includes his book are inspired of God? Of course not. Would it prove that the book that the prophecy is written in is God-inspired? I doubt if you would conclude that. So even if you do find an impressive messianic prophecy– I have not yet found one– you are far from proving that all 66 books of the Protestant Bible are inspired by God.
Unity
Others have tried to claim that the Bible must be inspired since, in their opinion, the Bible has a tremendous unity of theme. They say that 40 authors wrote over a period of 1500 years and yet they put together a completely unified book. But is this true? It does not look consistent to me.
How can the Old Testament writers spend many chapters listing genealogies, while Titus 3:9 states that genealogies are unprofitable and worthless? Are Paul and Moses working in unity? Are they teaching the same gospel?
Or how can Matthew and Luke record the life of Christ without recording any instance of Jesus making the fantastic claims we read in the book of John? Are they presenting the same message?
Why do we find the constant emphasis in the Old Testament on the Jewish nation, only to find out in the New Testament that there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles? Is this a perfect work of harmony?
Perhaps you can find ways to fit the Bible together. Fine, but understand that many others have found ways of fitting it all together and their way does not match yours. For instance, some can interpret the Bible to be in accord with Calvinism, but others find it to be consistent with Arminianism or something in between. Some find biblical consistency that teaches us to ignore the Jewish laws such as Sabbath (Saturday) worship; others find a consistency that requires us to keep the Jewish Sabbath. Some find the Bible teaches salvation by grace through faith alone; some find that it teaches faith plus works. Some find the Bible to be consistently pre-millennial; others find it to be consistently amillennial or post-millennial. If the Bible is a miraculous unity, why do Christians have so much trouble figuring out what it is united about?
Calvinism and Arminianism One example of two incompatible views that both claim to fit the whole Bible together.
You will have a hard time convincing skeptics that this is a miraculous work of unity. So, the argument from unity is not a good argument for evangelists to use with informed people.
Power
Others point to the power of the book to change lives. That may be. But other books have had a powerful influence on people also. Does the influence of the book prove that God wrote it? I think not.
Others will tell me that it is amazing that the Bible survived history. But how does that prove inspiration? Is that not rather tribute to the fanaticism with which many accepted this book?
In conclusion, I find that the arguments from prophecy, unity, and power are not very convincing.
Should I Just Have Faith?
You may tell me that we will never prove the Bible is inspired, so we should just take it by faith. So, what should I say when my Catholic friends tell me to take it by faith that they are right? What should I say when the Mormons say to take the Book of Mormon by faith? What about the robed hippie on the streets that wants me to have faith in his way? It seems to me that I should ask them the same question that I ask here: Do you have convincing evidence that your source is an accurate record of God’s thoughts? I need a reason.
You want me to take it by faith–should I have faith in every verse? What about Leviticus 11:21-22? It tells me that grasshoppers walk on four legs. Should I try to have faith that this is true? How can I do that? Grasshoppers, like all insects, have six legs. I could try to have faith that grasshoppers have four legs as this verse says. But I have a scientific mind. And I can’t help but count the grasshopper’s legs. And my faith gets weak the moment the count reaches five.
Are we really to believe this grasshopper walks on four legs?
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
The first verse in the first book of the Christian Bible says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The verses that follow go on to explain all that God created. His crowning achievement was the creation of Adam and Eve — humans created in the image of God. Adam and Eve would later eat fruit from a tree that God said was off-limits. Their love of fruit brought sin and death into the world. From this point forward, humans come forth from their mother’s wombs at variance with God. According to the Bible, newborns come into the world speaking lies. Humans are, by nature, enemies of God. Wanting to repair the fractured relationship between the Creator and his creation, God cooked up a scheme through which sins could be forgiven. In the Old Testament, the Bible says God required blood sacrifices for the expiation of sin. Animals were ritually slaughtered and their blood was placed upon altars to provide atonement for national and personal sins. In the New Testament, the Bible says that God sent himself to earth in the form of a God-man by the name of Jesus. This Jesus was one hundred percent man and one hundred percent God. After traveling through Palestine for three years, working miracles, and preaching sermons, this Jesus was accused of heresy by the Jews, arrested by the Roman government, and executed. Three days later, this Jesus miraculously came back to life, spent forty days appearing to his followers, after which he ascended to Heaven. According to Christians, for the past 2,000 years, Jesus has been hanging out in heaven doing God things: building rooms (mansions) for Christians to live in, helping Christians score touchdowns, helping grandmas find their car keys, and controlling presidential elections. While Jesus, at least according to those who speak on his behalf, is intimately involved in the minutest details of the lives of his followers, it seems he can’t be bothered with important issues such as war, starvation, global climate change, human trafficking, and the Cincinnati Reds winning the World Series. Why is it that Jesus never seems to be around when you really, really need him?
Most Christian sects can be plotted along the line between Arminianism and Calvinism. While these two systematic theologies are poles apart from one another, both agree that the Christian God is the absolute, authoritative ruler of the universe. While Arminians and Calvinists argue amongst themselves about free will and the order of salvation, both agree that God is sovereign, and that he has the whole world in the palm of his hands. This God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Bible says that none of us can escape the presence of this God. He is everywhere — the ultimate voyeur.
If everything is created by God, owned by God, known by God, and nothing escapes his ever-seeing eye, isn’t it logical to say that God is responsible for sin? Isn’t it logical to hold God responsible for everything that happens? If humans are not ultimately in control of their lives or their destiny, how then can they be held responsible? If God alone — either through predestination and election or prevenient grace — saves sinners and gives them keys to their Jesus-built mansions in the sky, how then can any of us be held accountable for not becoming Christians? If it is God, through the Holy Spirit, that gives life to dead sinners so they can believe, how then can any un-quickened sinners be held accountable for their depravity? Billions of people, past and present, live in places where Christianity has no influence. People can go through their entire lives without hearing the Christian gospel, yet when they die God will hold them accountable for not hearing that which they had no opportunity to hear. Does this sound just and fair?
Does any of this make sense to you? Wouldn’t it have been better for the Gods — Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit — to cut out all the bullshit and create a universe not tainted by sin and depravity? Surely it was in God’s power to create an Adam and Eve who were incapable of sinning. It’s a fair question, then, to ask why God did what he did. If God controls the universe and nothing escapes his sovereign grasp, why all the war, violence, rape, starvation, and terrible contemporary Christian music?
Start asking Christian pastors and laypeople these questions, and you’ll quickly conclude that they really don’t have any answers. Oh, they will spin some sort of elaborate theological answer that will leave you neck-deep in quicksand, but don’t expect them to give direct, succinct answers. Most often, apologists for the Christian God will give contradictory or incoherent answers, and when their nonsense is pointed out they will swiftly run to the house of faith, slamming the door while they scream, GOD’S WAYS ARE NOT OUR WAYS! GOD’S THOUGHTS ARE NOT OUR THOUGHTS! HOW DARE YOU CHALLENGE THE CREATOR! HE CAN DO WHAT HE WANTS! This screaming is the equivalent of la-la-la-la, I can’t hear you, now fuck off.
A perfect illustration of this can be found in a post on the Faith-It website by Christine Suhan. Titled, Dear Christians, Stop Saying ‘Everything Happens for a Reason,’ Suhan shows how it is impossible for Christians to develop a coherent understanding of the world while at the same time trying to hold on to Evangelical beliefs. Here’s some of what she had to say:
Have you ever found yourself, in the midst of unimaginable grief, pain, heartache or despair, wondering how you are going to make it through another day? Wondering where your next breath is going to come from? Your world has crumbled beneath you and you are left feeling shattered, empty and hopeless.
And then a well meaning friend or family member comes along and drops the infamous “Everything happens for a reason” bomb. You smile kindly and nod—that’s all you can do to keep yourself from punching them in the face.
….
Sometimes bad things happen for no reason other than we are human beings having a human experience. Pain, heartache, grief, loss, disease and death are inevitable parts of the human experience.
We hear people say “Life dealt me a crappy hand” as if pain and hardships are not the norm. We assume that life is supposed to be easy and when things don’t go our way, we feel like we have been wronged. Human beings seem to have an innate sense of entitlement. We think that we are owed a pain-free existence.
But the truth is that human beings are not exempt from the human experience. And struggle is an innate part of the human experience. None of us are exceptions to this rule. We all struggle. We all suffer. We all experience pain, heartache and loss. And sometimes, there’s just no reason other than we are human and pain is a part of the process.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who was struggling to find peace with “God’s plan” for her life including the recent death of a loved one.
“How could this possibly be God’s will?” she asked.
Here’s what I’ve come to know about God’s will:
God’s will is not the path we walk, but rather how we walk the path.
God’s plan is never for someone to have cancer. God’s will is not for an innocent child to be brutally murdered. God’s will is not for a teenage girl to be raped. God’s will is not chronic pain, illness, disability or death.
God’s will is not an event that happens to us, it’s how we respond to what happens.
God’s will for us is to walk with Him through the cancer. Through the abuse. Through the death. Through the illness. God’s will is for us to draw close to him in the midst of pain. God’s will is for us to use our painful life events to carry his message of hope, grace, forgiveness and mercy.
God’s plan was never for pain to be part of the human experience. His plan was for us to live in peace and harmony with Him. The human experience became painful when sin entered the world. Our own free will weaved threads of tragedy, loss, heartache and pain into the human experience.
God is not responsible for our pain. We are not responsible for our pain. What happened in the Garden of Eden is responsible for the human condition. And the human condition is hard wired for pain and suffering. God is not causing us to hurt. He is hurting with us. What we do with our hurt is what matters. How we handle tragedy is what brings purpose into our pain.
There’s hardly ever a justifiable reason for the bad things that happen in life. Tragic loss is not laced with inherent specs of good. I used to get so mad when people would say, “You can find good in every situation.” That’s just not true. There was nothing good about being raped. There is no good in murder or abuse.
Suhan takes the shit happens approach. Thanks to Adam and Eve and their progeny’s sin nature, pain, suffering, and death are part of the human (Westworld) experience. According to Suhan, there is no reason or purpose for these things to happen. The problem, however, is that Suhan’s worldview runs contrary to orthodox Christian doctrine. This often happens when Christians try to thoughtfully ponder about human existence. How can rape or murder be good or have some sort of higher purpose? If God is the sovereign of the universe, why does he permit, either passively or by decree, such things to happen? Surely, an all-powerful God can keep people from being raped or murdered. Why does he idly stand by and do nothing?
According to Suhan, God does do s-o-m-e-t-h-i-n-g. When a teenage girl is being ritually raped by her pastor or an altar boy is being repeatedly sodomized by his priest, Jesus is right there holding the victim’s hand. That’s right, the God who could stop sexual assault does little more than send victims a BFF text that says, I am with you in spirit. Love, Jesus. Millions of people will go to bed tonight hungry, and the God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and sends sunshine and rain for crops to grow will do nothing to feed them, choosing instead to smile and hold their empty plates. While the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia continues to increase, Jesus wants everyone to know that he will be right there with them if they are turned into an ash heap. Is this the best that God can do for us — hold our hand?
If God is the supreme ruler of the universe, the creator of all things, the giver of life and death, and he who sees and knows everything, it is impossible to absolve him of culpability for pain, suffering, violence, and death. God could intervene, but he does nothing. Try as they might, Christian apologists have no suitable answer for their sovereign God’s inaction. The best these defenders of the faith can come up with is that Adam and Eve ate an apple, pissed off God in the process, and for thousands of years now he is been standing by while Evangelical pastors rape church children, serial killers murder innocents, and warring nations rain death down on the heads of innocent civilians.
And if this isn’t bad enough, Christian pastors and theologians remind us that there is coming a day when God will end his hand-holding ways, resurrecting everyone from the dead so he can judge them and fit those who don’t measure up with some sort of supernatural body that will survive an eternity of torture in a lake filled with fire and brimstone. This God, who couldn’t be bothered with stopping Hitler’s horrendous slaughter of six million Jews, will definitely be hands-on when the time comes to make his “chosen” people pay for their rejection and execution of Jesus Christ. Billions of Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and wrong-flavor-of-ice-cream Christians will be awakened from their slumber, only to be cast into Hell with the Devil, his angels, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and Bruce Gerencser.
Who in their right mind would want anything to do with Evangelical Christianity?
It is for these reasons (and others) that many people turn to agnosticism, atheism, universalism, and other non-theistic religions. The only way to understand what goes on in the world is to realize that we humans are responsible for what does and does not happen. It is up to humans, not fictional deities, to put an end to violence and suffering. We are the masters of our universe, and if we want things to be different, then it is up to us to change them. A humanistic view of the world requires us to acknowledge that randomness and luck often affect our lives. Sometimes, we are at the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. Slight variations in decisions or movements can drastically change outcomes. It is highly unlikely that a jet flying overhead will crash into my home. It’s possible, but the probability of it happening is minuscule. And when that unlikely event happens to some unlucky individuals, we must accept it as just that – an unfortunate incident that took lives, but not an act of God. Instead of attempting to develop some elaborate and often contradictory religious explanation of the world that supposedly matches the dictates of ancient religious texts, it is far better for us to just live in the moment and do what we can to improve life for not only ourselves and our progeny, but also for animals and other humans. Interjecting God into the discussion just complicates things. We humanists hope that Suhan and her fellow Christians leave off holding hands with their fictional best friend, and instead join hands with us as we try to combat violence, pain, suffering, disease, climate change, starvation, inequality, and death. Surely God is not so jealous that he can’t put off the handholding until Christians make it to the other side.
Bruce Gerencser, 65, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 44 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
“When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
The question of why writers write holds especial mesmerism, both as a piece of psychological voyeurism and as a beacon of self-conscious hope that if we got a glimpse of the innermost drivers of greats, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to replicate the workings of genius in our own work. So why do great writers write? George Orwell itemized four universal motives. Joan Didion saw it as access to her own mind. For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. Joy Williams found in it a gateway from the darkness to the light. For Charles Bukowski, it sprang from the soul like a rocket. Italo Calvino found in writing the comfort of belonging to a collective enterprise.
Lewis begins at the bumpy beginning, echoing Ray Bradbury’s insistence on perseverance in the face of rejection: Even though his thesis adviser at Princeton praised the intellectual angle of his senior thesis but admonished him to never attempt making a living with that kind of writing, Lewis was drawn to the writing life. He wrote a piece on the homeless and pitched it to various magazines. It was rejected, with one magazine editor noting that “pieces on the life of the underclass in America” were unsuitable for publication. (One has to wonder whether the defiant remnants of this early brush with gobsmacking censorship spurred Lewis’s provocative look at the housing and credit bubble more than twenty years later.) Still, he “kept plugging away” and, in 1983, applied for an internship as a science writer at the Economist. He recalls:
I didn’t get the job — the other two applicants were doing their PhDs in physics and biology, and I’d flunked the one science class I took in college — but the editor who interviewed me said, “You’re a fraud, but you’re a very good fraud. Go write anything you want for the magazine, except science.” They published the first words I ever got into print. They paid ninety bucks per piece. It cost money to write for the Economist. I didn’t know how I was ever going to make a living at writing, but I felt encouraged. Luckily, I was delusional. I didn’t know that I didn’t have much of an audience, so I kept doing it.
Before I wrote my first book in 1989, the sum total of my earnings as a writer, over four years of freelancing, was about three thousand bucks. So it did appear to be financial suicide when I quit my job at Salomon Brothers — where I’d been working for a couple of years, and where I’d just gotten a bonus of $225,000, which they promised they’d double the following year—to take a $40,000 book advance for a book that took a year and a half to write.
My father thought I was crazy. I was twenty-seven years old, and they were throwing all this money at me, and it was going to be an easy career. He said, “Do it another ten years, then you can be a writer.” But I looked around at the people on Wall Street who were ten years older than me, and I didn’t see anyone who could have left. You get trapped by the money. Something dies inside. It’s very hard to preserve the quality in a kid that makes him jump out of a high-paying job to go write a book.
More than a living, Lewis found in writing a true calling — the kind of deep flow that fully absorbs the mind and soul:
There’s no simple explanation for why I write. It changes over time. There’s no hole inside me to fill or anything like that, but once I started doing it, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else for a living. I noticed very quickly that writing was the only way for me to lose track of the time.
[…]
I used to get the total immersion feeling by writing at midnight. The day is not structured to write, and so I unplug the phones. I pull down the blinds. I put my headset on and play the same soundtrack of twenty songs over and over and I don’t hear them. It shuts everything else out. So I don’t hear myself as I’m writing and laughing and talking to myself. I’m not even aware I’m making noise. I’m having a physical reaction to a very engaging experience. It is not a detached process.
Still, Lewis admits to being stirred by the awareness that he can change minds and move hearts — a somewhat nobler version of Orwell’s “sheer egotism” motive:
The reasons I write change over time. In the beginning, it was that sense of losing time. Now it’s changed, because I have a sense of an audience. I have the sense that I can biff the world a bit. I don’t know that I have control of the direction of the pinball, but I can exert a force.
That power is a mixed blessing. It’s good to have something to get you into the chair. I’m not sure it’s great for the writing to think of yourself as important while you’re doing it. I don’t quite think that way. But I can’t deny that I’m aware of the effects my writing will have.
“Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it,” Hugh MacLeod famously wrote. It might be an overly cynical notion, one that perpetuates the unjustified yet deep-seated cultural guilt over simultaneously doing good and doing well, but Lewis echoes the sentiment:
Once you have a career, and once you have an audience, once you have paying customers, the motives for doing it just change.
And yet Lewis approaches the friction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation — one experienced by anyone who loves what they do and takes pride in clarity of editorial vision, but has an audience whose approval or disapproval becomes increasingly challenging to tune out — with extraordinary candor and insight:
Commercial success makes writing books a lot easier to do, and it also creates pressure to be more of a commercial success. If you sold a million books once, your publisher really, really thinks you might sell a million books again. And they really want you to do it.
That dynamic has the possibility of constraining the imagination. There are invisible pressures. There’s a huge incentive to write about things that you know will sell. But I don’t find myself thinking, “I can’t write about that because it won’t sell.” It’s such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can’t imagine writing one if I’m not interested in the subject.
And yet his clarity of vision is still what guides the best of his work:
Those are the best moments, when I’ve got the whale on the line, when I see exactly what it is I’ve got to do.
After that moment there’s always misery. It never goes quite like you think, but that moment is a touchstone, a place to come back to. It gives you a kind of compass to guide you through the story.
That feeling has never done me wrong. Sometimes you don’t understand the misery it will lead to, but it’s always been right to feel it. And it’s a great feeling.
When I was writing my first book, I was going from eleven at night till seven in the morning. I was very happy waking up at two in the afternoon. My body clock would naturally like to start writing around nine at night and finish at four in the morning, but I have a wife and kids and endless commitments. … My natural writing schedule doesn’t work with my family’s schedule. I actually do better when I have pressure, some mental deadline.
Aware that he is “mentally absent” from family life while immersed in a book project, Lewis considers himself lucky to be a “binge writer” who takes lots of time off between books … “which is why I still have a family,” he jokes. His immersion, in fact, is so complete that it changes his physical experience:
When I’m working on a book, I’m in a very agitated mental state. My sleep is disrupted. I only dream about the project. My sex drive goes up. My need for exercise, and the catharsis I get from exercise, is greater. When I’m in the middle of a project, whether I’m doing Bikram yoga or hiking up the hill or working out at the gym, I carry a blank pad and a pen. I’ll take eight hundred little notes right in the middle of a posture. It drives my yoga instructor crazy.
Like many of history’s great minds, from Henri Poincaré to T. S. Eliot, Lewis is a believer in the power of unconscious processing and creative pause, or the “mental mastication” period of which Lewis Carroll wrote:
At any given time I usually have eight new ideas. … I need time between projects. It’s like a tank filling up. I can’t just go from one to the other.
It’s always good to have a motive to get you in the chair. If your motive is money, find another one.
I took my biggest risk when I walked away from a lucrative job at age twenty-seven to be a writer. I’m glad I was too young to realize what a dumb decision it seemed to be, because it was the right decision for me.
A lot of my best decisions were made in a state of self-delusion. When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.
Why We Write remains a must-read of the most highly recommended kind, featuring contributions from such celebrated authors as Jennifer Egan, Ann Patchett, and Rick Moody.
Bard’s response:
Richard L. Fricks 