The Bible As A Book of Liberation:

There is probably no other Book that has so profoundly changed the life of mankind on earth, not only with individuals, but in the way it has changed societies and nations and the systems by which they govern those that live in those nations. And yet it has been used by some to promote slavery, exploitation of poor workers by the greedy rich, the using, degrading and exploitation of women, the abuse of more impoverished races by richer ones, and the oppression of human liberty, especially personal sexuality. And in the name of God people have waged wars and persecutions from people who held to different religious faiths. People have, in the name of God, made it too easy for people who don't want anything to do with any faith, especially Christianity, to curse the name of God, and of Jesus.

But the charge made that the Bible itself is a book of that kind of bigotry is itself based upon three types of ignorance: 1) an ignorance of the Bible; 2) an ignorance of history related to the Bible; and 3) an ignorance, possibly a willful one, of the capacity of sinful men to misuse the Bible to achieve their own selfish ends or support their own biases. We'll talk about each one, in turn.

Ignorance of the Bible and Its Importance To Human Progress:

Those who have accused that the Bible is a book of bigotry have made that accusation based upon a great number of passages of Scripture. Some are, to be honest, just plain bizarre. Like the practicing member of the Wiccan order of witches, who condemned Jesus as an evil god. Why? Because she read the story in the New Testament about when Jesus cursed a fruitless fig tree (which was done to teach his disciples about how faith works), and decided that he was a cruel predator against a life form. "Any person who would use his power to destroy a living being out of mere frustration is no Savior of mine!" she said. Well, even if you're a vegetarian, discrediting the greatest man who ever lived for that is not only silly, but wrong, especially when she sees nothing wrong with smashing a worm on her sidewalk because she thinks they're just gross. I'm sure that for her, she has to have that issue answered seriously (We believe that Jesus even loves flaky goofballs like that!), but there is only a limit in time and space to answer more unusual questions like that.

But there are usually several passages that people with serious questions about the Bible usually bring up. I'll bring up the charge and the answer coupled together as follows:

1) The Bible teaches racism in Genesis, with the story of Noah's curse of Ham, the forefather of the African peoples (see Genesis 11:26).

Fact: The Bible passage was a specific curse of, not Ham, but Caanan, the son of Ham, who was the forefather of the Caananite peoples, whom the people of Israel, the Jews, conquered after the Exodus from Egypt in about 1400 B.C. The truth is that the curse was an acknowledgement of future mistreatment by others, but in no way does it justify the act of anyone forcing slavery upon another person on account of their race. It is without doubt, that for many centuries many people have relied upon this misreading of the Bible to justify mistreatment of other races, and especially those of African descent, down to the present day. The truth is, the clear teaching of the Bible is that racism is a sin, and those who engage in the slave trade, which sadly goes on in many Third World countries, are despicable in the eyes of God.

The book of Deuteronomy forbids the turnover of runaway slaves back to their masters, the Old Testament records the intermarriage of several of its most righteous heroes to African women (Joseph, Moses), the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah is indisputably of African descent, and the early New Testament Christian church's leadership is composed of African men (Simeon called Niger, Apollos from Alexandria, Egypt, Rufus, and the Ethiopian royal treasurer).
Furthermore, the New Testament, which clearly teaches that it fulfills and supersedes the Old, clearly says that in Christianity there is total equality. "Neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Colossians 3:27). “My beloved brothers, who are called by the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism...If you show favoritism, you sin and show yourselves to be evildoers with evil thoughts.” (James 2:1, 13).

2) The Bible teaches sexism in the assigning of authoritative status to men over women.

Fact: The Bible teaches complete equality, especially in the New Testament. The Bible has been misused for 2,000 years, perhaps more so even than in the case of racism and slavery. Men have quoted passages in Genesis 3, in which God declared the curse of sin as a result of the original sin of Adam and Eve, and Ephesians 5 in the New Testament, where women are commanded to submit to their husbands. But the truth is that women were given equal inheritance rights to sons in the book of Numbers, and Job, one of the great heroes of faith in the Old Testament, was commended by implication when he made his daughters equal heirs to his sons of his vast estate. That practice was considered anathema in the ancient world, indeed in the modern world until the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, women were frequently recognized as having roles beyond that of homemaker in the Bible. Deborah was one of the most righteous figures of the Bible, and was Judge of all Israel in the 13th century B.C. Huldah was a prophetess (II Kings and II Chronicles), who was a spiritual consultant to King Josiah, and who spoke boldly of God's judgment against an Israeli nation that had forsaken God. In the Proverbs of King Solomon, the wisest man to ever live before Jesus, his description of the ideal woman, in the 31st chapter, referred to the fact that she was able to combine being both a homemaker and a businesswoman.

In the New Testament, great attention was given to women, unprecedented in the ancient world. Jesus first appeared to women after his resurrection, and they were the first to be given instructions to spread his message. That was an incredibly revolutionary act, due to the fact that women were ineligible to give testimony in courts of law, and yet women were considered unquestionably reliable witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection. In fact, when his closest men, called disciples, mockingly rejected the women’s testimony, Jesus later is said to angrily rebuke them for disregarding their word, again, an unheard-of display of honor toward women in antiquity. In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul, falsely alleged by some to be anti-woman, recognized two women, Andronicus and Junias, to be apostles, and notable ones at that. Priscilla, serving at her husband Aquila's side, was recognized as a notable evangelist. Women were recognized as having authority to act as prophets, preachers, church leaders (deaconesses), and as teachers (they were subject to ordination by the local church body's leaders).

Even in the home, men were only considered leaders in the position of servants, acting as a final authority when all other options are exhausted. Men were commanded to submit to women as they would to Christ by St. Paul, in both Ephesians (chapter 5) and I Corinthians (chapter 10.). In their relationship to their wives, men are commanded to focus on their responsibility to "lay down their lives for their wives." (Eph. 5:25). And nowhere is it stated in Scripture that women could not pursue careers or seek political positions of authority outside their homes. Even those Scriptures that seem to show inequality were far advanced for their time, perhaps done to prevent complete social upheaval.

And let's remember that God's desire is that there be no racial or sexual divisions within his community of faith--the Christian church. "For there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." While it is true that many have misinterpreted Scripture to justify oppression of women, the truth is that the Bible is a book of equality that is far-sighted even beyond the attitudes of the followers of Jesus for many centuries, until more recent times.

Some say that they can't identify with God as a Father because that would make God a male. But the problem with that concept is that it makes God's personality limited to that of human male figures, human fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, other authority figures, all frail and flawed. We're dealing with a male figure that is the creator of both male and female, and is shown in the Bible as a being as showing the emotions and attributes of both genders. Even Jesus, when speaking of his love for his fellow Jews in the city of Jerusalem, likened himself to a mother hen, wanting to "gather her chicks under her wings." (Matthew 25).

God is an ideal Father, since he is perfect, and is therefore a God who provides exactly what is needed for each one of us. If it is strength and protection or stability or rationalism we need, logical or aggressive characteristics normally associated with males, God provides it. If it is intuitiveness, community, spiritual sensitivity, nurturing, gentleness, emotional sensitivity, creativity, these which are normally associated to be feminine traits, He is, in all the right ways. God is not androgynous, with no identity at all. To be something other than what He is would not only promote a God who is a God of confusion and uncertainty, but a God who is fundamentally untrue to Himself. How can you possibly trust someone like that to take care of you? But God shows how someone can be both truly male, like He is, yet able to identify with those different than Him, which attacks the notion of intolerance.

And one more thing. God does identify with both men and women. In Genesis 1:26 He says, "Let us make man in our image…male and female created he them…" When God referred to man, or Adam, he was referring to them both. When he called one, he called the other. That is why the Apostle Paul says, "In the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman." (I Corinthians 11:12). When Jesus came, it was his intention to bring mankind back to being humankind, back to God's original design of the family, a design of equality. Therefore, the Bible, if anything, cries out a message of equality.



3) The Bible is a book promoting bigotry against homosexuality.

Fact: The Bible's prohibition against homosexuality is an act of mercy, not hatred. First thing to remember about the Bible and homosexuality is that its commands to punish those involved in homosexual activity are solely found in the Old Testament, not the New Testament. A fundamental principle to be found in Christianity is that Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of all that is commanded in the Ten Commandments, which the Bible says were given by God to Moses. (We'll later find that the Bible teaches that it was Jesus himself that gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, but we'll talk about that later.). Because of that fundamental principle, the nature of the laws of the Old Testament, and their application to the New, changes after the coming of Jesus. At the top of it is the principle that purely private sins of a sexual nature are no longer to be punished by the authority of government. A Christian church cannot even shun a fellow Christian who commits what the Bible calls sexual sin without leaving the option for the offender of repenting and correcting the activity, if possible (Colossians 2:14, I Corinthians 6:13).

Because of that principle, any discussion of the issue of homosexuality can't be given justice without recognizing that everyone who engages in that lifestyle must be allowed to make that decision without being harmed physically, or denied basic rights socially, economically, or politically, unless that decision has consequences in public health or the protection of children or the traditional family unit. Every adult has the right to make their own choices of sexual relationships, and face God for the consequences of those relationships. The condemnation of homosexuality was part of the condemnation of the act of adultery, the violation of the most sacred of relationships, the marriage covenant.

The prohibition of homosexuality is a reflection of God's desire to give direction to everyone in their lifestyle choices. We all have raging hormones and desires that are affected by the genetics inside us, and the lives that we have had to lead in our early years. Because bad things often happen to us, it is easy to allow those bad things, like child abuse, to cloud our judgment about who we are, including our sexuality. But when the Bible--the New Testament, says that homosexuality is against the natural tendency of our sex drives, look at what it says that it's for. It gives guidance to look past our experiences and our emotions to objective fact. If God objectively says that we are by nature heterosexual, then any other emotions are like emotions often are--a deception.

Furthermore, the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is actually a promise of hope for those who find themselves compelled to a lifestyle that will forever come from bitterness, even from abuse, and a desperate longing for love that always eludes them. Even the adoption of children, in a relationship that can never produce them naturally, seems to come from an angry defiance at a world, or even a God, who appeared to make them into someone whom the world or God then hates. But God does not hate you, he made you straight, and can bring you back, too, like anyone else in bondage to addictions or to anything that was never intended to be a dominant part of your life.

Also, the condemnations of homosexuality in the Old Testament, as harsh as they were back then, were not a singling out of that sin as far worse than other sexual sins against God. The same penalties of death were meted out for adultery, rape, or perjury. What is also important to be noted is that, instead of the case in other civilizations of the ancient world, that penalty was to be applied regardless of whether it involved a king or queen or their slaves. Also, whether a king or a slave, no one could be convicted of a crime involving the death penalty merely on the testimony of a single witness. Rather, the law was "let every matter be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses." (Deuteronomy 17:6). That made the Old Testament's commands actually quite advanced in its time for its sense of equality and its protection of the rights of those accused of crime. Also, the penalties were meted out, not for the stated status of being attracted to people of the same sex, but for the actual acts themselves.

And what is to be understood is that in the New Testament, these acts were no longer to be punished by the legal system, or by the church, through incarceration or physical or capital punishment. The offending party, in any case of consensual sex considered to be immoral or a threat to the family unit, was to be shunned by his/her fellow Christians until brought to repentence. What is also important is that the church was taught none of the "red letter" condemnation that marked people for life, as depicted in literature over the centuries. Instead, the New Testament specifically taught that a Christian caught in that kind of sinful behavior was to be immediately received back into the fellowship of the community once he makes public confession of sin, with love and compassion---no questions asked. (2 Corinthians 2:6-7, Galatians 6:1-2). Too many Christian churches have frankly been all wrong in that area. Counseling? Yes. A requirement of self-discipline on the part of the individual offender? Yes, of course. Compassion by the community? Absolutely. Because, as the Bible says, "Consider yourselves, you may also be tempted." No one is beyond forgiveness, noone is too pure to not be snared by his own frailties and sinful flaws.

Also, the Christian is told that he/she cannot mete out the same kind of punishment, even the punishment of shunning, to people who are not Christians. St. Paul said that "by necessity you must interact with the people of the world." (I Corinthians 5:5). In the New Testament we have the principle of tolerance of others different from you, which is a foundation of a free and open society, which can only be possible by one that is built upon true Christianity, not the fake religiosity that has characterized so much of the adherents of the faith. In this members of the faith listened more to the voice of politically-minded church leaders, rather than the Bible itself. No Christian has any business imposing the denial of housing, of employment, of educational opportunity or health care merely because he rejects the sinful lifestyle of homosexuals, or any other person who engages in sexual immorality. It does nothing but breed bitterness and rebellion against God in the hearts of those who need God's love and ours the most.

What is also to be understood about homosexuality in the Bible is the reason for its condemnation. It was considered an attack on marriage, because marriage is not merely a covenant of two lovers to unite for life, but a covenant with the community to build it up with a stable home, and the rearing of healthy children. Marriage also is to demonstrate to children the fact that men and women need each other, that without each other, we all are the losers.

And the Bible also shows the character of God, what he had in mind in creating each one of us. And he knew the nature of each person, that their sexual nature--their genetics, was to be attracted to the opposite gender/sex. And he did that for a simple reason--to propagate the human race within happy, stable families. To allow people to decide that it was not for them was to call God, in effect, a liar, and a sick, twisted individual for saying that we're all heterosexuals and then making some of us differently. Adoption aside, it harms the individual's ability to begat and rear children and it harms the community's ability to continue to grow and maintain its life over succeeding generations.

The Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is not an act of mindless bigotry, but an act of compassion that helps give people an ability to combat a compulsion born out of tragedy and deception, usually started through child sexual abuse, which has exploded in this "anything goes" age we live in at the start of the new millenium.

Ignorance of the History Surrounding the Bible:

One of the things about the notion that the Bible is a book of bigotry is its striking lack of knowledge about history concerning the Bible. Faith in the Bible inspired many of those who founded the beginnings of modern science, modern health care, the end of feudalism and the beginning of the unified nation-state, modern democracy, freedom of the marketplace, freedom of religious worship and practice, freedom of speech, the philosophy of the sanctity of human life, the establishment of the rights of children, the anti-slavery movement, the civil rights movement, the early years of the women's rights movement, the concept of "just war" solely to establish justice rather than war to merely seize power or territory, the birth of the Renaissance, especially as reflected in Northern Europe in the art of such as Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, the beginnings of classical and later most modern music, including jazz and rock and roll, the protection of the nuclear family, and even the very concept of romantic love, which was itself an exaltation of the value of women from mere childbearers and housekeepers into objects of the deepest love and devotion.

There are many passages in the Bible that are extraordinary in its establishing the foundations of the very society that contains so many that reject it. Long before other civilizations came along to model its concepts, the Bible taught the following:

1) Equal inheritance rights for women;
2) The rejection of the slave trade;
3) The rejection of the round-up and seizure of runaway slaves;
4) The establishment of a work-oriented system for caring for the poor;
5) The establishment of a principle of debt forgiveness for those hopelessly in debt;
6) The establishment of the principle of women in leadership in the church and society, without benefit of being born to wealth or privilege;
7) The separation of powers of government (actually used by the Founders of the United States--see the book of Ezra);
8) Protection of new families through exemption of new husbands from military service;
9) Jesus' establishment of equality of all believers in him--and the shunning of a strict clergy-laity distinction.
10) The imposition of primary responsibility for sexual morality on the man, not the woman, done by Jesus Himself. No other religious system, nor traditionalist distortions of Christianity, understands that principle;
11) The concept of a single God, with a universal faith covering the whole earth, not merely one race (Judaism never understood it, though the principle originated in the Old Testament.).

These and many other concepts essential to the free societies we have in most of the world's nations, first had its beginnings in the writings of the Bible. Those acts of injustice done by people who espoused the Christian faith were done by people who either were not Christians or who were simply ignorant of the Bible's commands.

Furthermore, some of the things that non-believers attack believers for doing, especially the Crusades, were not entirely out of line in the first place. Islam, for one thing, had been trying to conquer Christian Europe for about 300 years when the first Crusades were launched in about 1000 A.D., and they continued thereafter until even after the last Crusade was over. The death toll inflicted by the Islamic armies against Christians in the city of Fez, in Morocco, in the eighth century exceeded all the executions of civilians done by "Christian" crusaders in the almost 500 years of crusades in the Middle East. While there were certainly atrocities done by men who called themselves Christian against Muslims and Jews during the Crusades, the majority of such soldiers did not commit such acts, and they certainly were justified in fighting wars intended to unite Europe to stop the Islamic invaders, such as Moors, Turks, and Mongol-Tatars who came within a hair breadth of conquering all of Europe for Islam, not once but three times, in the 8th, 12th, and 14th centuries.

The fact is that Christianity has been continuously judged by a different set of scales than that of its detractors. Even in its flawed, institutionalized form (we'll deal with that subject later), Christianity seems to have less in the way of blood on its hands than what others may have. This is so especially when you compare it to the number of deaths shed in the name of Islam, or the name of Communism in the twentieth century. For example, deaths in the name of Christianity in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century numbered less than 10 million--a period of about 700 years. The total number of deaths by execution, starvation, or death in prison under Communism, whose foundation is evolution and atheism, from 1917-1991 in all countries under the control of governments holding that philosophy, numbered almost 250 million, in just over 70 years. Yet there is nothing of the outcry against communism that has been imposed upon Christianity, even though Communism's philosophy encourages that kind of carnage against dissent, and Jesus directly teaches against the abuses of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the religious wars of Europe.

Such inconsistent attitudes on the part of so many in the modern world has to be explained in one of two ways: either benign ignorance, or through deliberate hatred or malice against Christianity. And explanation number one is itself a result of deliberate refusal on the part of many in modern society to expose the great majority of us to all but information that supports a point of view that puts Christianity in the worst possible light. So it's important to consider what would motivates many of the most significant detractors of the Bible and Christianity

The Motives of the Bible's Detractors:

When you try to explain why there has been so much apparent hostility against the Bible, you have to understand that noone operates out of a vacuum. At the top of their motivation are two problems: 1) the perceived, or real hypocrisy of Christians in their personal lives, and; 2) the unwillingness on the part of the detractors to submit to God's authority.

Obviously, it is difficult to overcome the temptation on the part of non-believers to attribute to God the misdeeds of those who claim to represent him. But you don't blame your wife for what your mother did to you as a child. It's the same here. Very bluntly, God is not the jerk who verbally assaulted you for living with your girlfriend and rejecting his religion, and yet was doing drugs on the side. A jerk did that. God condemns his behavior, and all of us when we judge someone when we don't know all of what's going on in their lives. It's our responsibility to look directly at Jesus, and decide whether to follow him based upon what he says, and what he did and does, not on what other people do.

As to the problem of submission to the authority of a God who would assume the right to tell you what to do, and how to live your life, it shows perhaps a false idea of what someone with that kind of power would do. All of our lives we are told that no one should have absolute power over us. We distrust it in our politicians, our leaders, our law enforcement, our military, our religious leaders, our employers, our teachers, even our parents or spouses. We always assume that anyone who gets total power over us will abuse it, because it's in human nature to abuse power and use it selfishly. Lord Acton, a famous British politician and lawyer said it best; "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Even in the system of democratic rule, power is divided among different branches of government precisely because of that mistrust. And with anyone else that kind of mistrust is, at least partly justified.

But we're dealing with a God, as we'll soon show the Bible talks about, who doesn't just hold up his laws and commands, but abides by them. And he doesn't just expects mankind to live by them, he came, as the person of Jesus, to live by those same commands--as a man, subject to all the frailties and flaws of a man--and he succeeded with the only perfect life ever lived. And we're dealing with a God willing to sacrifice himself--and his only Son, to the cruelest of deaths, and to the penalty of going to Hell, the place of total destruction, so that none of us would have to go there. According to the Bible, all these acts, which the Bible says happened as historical fact, not legend, were done for one reason in mind. Just one. God loves us. Everyone of us. Both those who accept him and those who do not. And while he requires to be accepted by anyone who would be in his kingdom, he never stops trying to persuade all of us to accept him and be a part of him. And he will love us, no matter how many mistakes we make, or how bad we may be. And he does not love us any more deeply, no matter how much good we do. He may take more pleasure in our good deeds, but his love is unconditional and universal.

When we deal with a God like that, with both limitless power (we call it omnipotence), and with limitless love (known as omnibenevolence), who is called Father, we are dealing with someone who has proved that he can be trusted with total power and authority over your life and mine. He's the only one who doesn't need checks or balances on his power. He can be absolutely trusted. And as we will find out later, He has even placed himself subject to his own authority and commands--and set them down in the Bible. He says himself that he deliberately built it in his nature not to lie, and to bind himself to his own word, sworn in his own blood--as the blood of his Son, Jesus. (Hebrews 6:28?).

Those who attack the Bible can be truthfully said to be people who don't know God and don't really want to know him. They see him as unfair, cruel, and unkind, when the opposite is true. They are afraid that he will take away what they enjoy, the lives they want to live, the way they want to live them. And as far as they are concerned, any information, no matter how true or reasonable, that indicates that the Bible may be truly the unique book of God, is a threat to their independence. They are afraid they may have to change their behavior, especially if the Bible says that their behavior is sin, a violation of his laws, which is to be punished both in this world and eternity beyond the grave. And that they cannot abide. So they seek to discredit the Bible, and leave others in the dark about the case to be made for its valid status as God's book, to escape accountability. But running from the evidence to support the Bible does not make it vanish, nor does it help to hide that evidence from young people seeking an education. What it does is make them more to blame, and cause more heartaches, as those who are kept ignorant of the truth about the Bible act as a law to themselves, and chaos results.

We know that God is this loving and trustworthy God through observing the person of Jesus. He is the central figure of Christianity. And it will be through considering who Jesus is that we can make the decision of whether the Christian faith is true, and to be accepted. And we'll deal with that next.

Hello. I hope your day was good. Below is the next chapter of Re-Intro. The links are soon to come, as I said yesterday. Hope you enjoy it, or at least get challenged by it. See you later.


CHAPTER TWO: GOD, DARWIN, AND JIM MORRISON
(OR, “GOOD REASONS FOR BELIEVING THAT THE GOD OF THE BIBLE IS THE TRUE AND ONLY LIVING GOD”)


A whole lot of people, including a lot of Gen-Xers and teenagers who were not even born when he died in 1971, think that Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the 1960s band The Doors, was the greatest singer that ever held a microphone. He was, without a doubt, a singer who came along at the right time. In a time when all restraint was being thrown off, Morrison spoke and lived the feelings of a whole generation. Whatever illegal recreational drugs were available, he took, injected, or inhaled them. Whatever kinds of sex acts could be engaged in, he did them, without regard to either the consequences or the emotions of his partners. Whatever morals, mores, or societal boundaries there were, he loved to flaunt them. He was repeatedly arrested for flashing his penis to his concert audiences, shouting, “Let’s show some nakedness around here!” And he died at the age of 27, drowning in his own vomit in a Paris hotel bathroom after a heroin overdose.

He was adored by tens of millions of young people, all over the world. He is still idolized as one of the pillars of the development of rock music. His music, and perhaps most unfortunately, his lifestyle, is mimiced by millions. Yet everyone who knew him all agreed that he was a desperately unhappy man. He was characterized as a man with no hope. What it was that drove him, was embodied in his most famous statement, “Nobody gets out of here alive.”

Charles Darwin is today one of the most famous people to have ever lived. His theory of evolution was a big turn in the road for the civilized world. It transformed science into the modern age. It changed the approach for the study of the heavens, the study of geology, physics, biology, chemistry, and of course, the study of the human sciences: psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It has been adopted as the most common view of man in disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, government, and law. Evolutionary-based education was adopted by the likes of William James and John Dewey as the foundation of modern public education. It has even affected art, music, and language itself. There is no inherent objective meaning, even in words, according to those educators and philosophers and philologists who determine how language should be used.

Darwin set out to eliminate what he saw as unscientific bias in the observation, classification, and dating, of marine and animal life in the world, and used his observations of life on the Galapagos Islands of the Pacific coast of Chile as the basis of his findings. And there was a lot of value in what he found, natural selection within species does happen, just look at fruitflies. Uniformitarianism, the concept that the process by which the world and nature changed in the past is the way it does now, is in most cases valid. And while the use of the scientific method in testing natural phenomena had been around since the time of Galileo and Copernicus, it was Darwin’s findings that made it the standard for scientific activity.

Most of all, Darwin’s conclusions, embodied in his book, Origin of the Species, changed civilization’s view of man. Man was no longer a unique creature, made in the image of a personal God, as reflected in most of the world’s leading religions, especially the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of God. Man was a result of a gradual developmental process from simpler to more complex life forms, especially from those animal species that have similar skeletal structures, particularly apes. Therefore, human dignity is not a function of a single deity or designer, but a matter of what a given individual’s society will assign to him.

Darwin was either celebrated or reviled, by the world, depending upon the point of view of either religious or non-religious people. But he was certainly famous, and changed the world forever. In fact, those who have had the experience of living in Communist countries will tell you that when the communist government first takes power, they will attempt to indoctrinate their people, but not as anyone would expect. Their “re-education courses” would start, not with the writings of Marx or Lenin, but with Origin of the Species. The reason? Communists felt that it disproved God’s existence, and that it showed that since man’s individuality is only shaped by societal forces, the state, on behalf of the society, could and should determine what rights and liberties that individual should have.

But when Darwin died, he was by all accounts, a desperately unhappy man. He felt that he was misunderstood by his contemporaries, both his supporters and his opponents. He longed for the faith that marked his earlier years, yet felt that such a return to that faith would be intellectually and emotionally dishonest. So he died, determinedly holding to his intellectual conclusions, but expressing to his family that he had no hope at the end.

It is unfortunate that Darwin couldn’t hang around long enough to see the development of scientific technology move forward---to the point that his own theory could become so discredited that he could have had the excuse he needed to reject it himself. More and more, scientists and philosophers, not theologians and church leaders, are observing that there are problems with evolution, not only the classical kind that Darwin first introduced, but several different kinds of evolutionary theory, like that from modern scientists like the late Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen Hawking. We’ll deal with those problem areas, directly from the scientists’ mouths themselves, later on.

But the truth that I want you to focus upon is the foundation of what both made Charles Darwin and Jim Morrison, as well as multitudes of people for centuries, lost, lonely, bitter, and disillusioned, feeling that their lives were failures. That foundation was that God could not be a factor for them, at all. He either was nonexistent, or irrelevant. People a lot smarter than you and I will tell you that for most of the last century, world, and especially Western civilization, operated off a principle called, “practical atheism.” Practical atheism is the view of life that assumes that God, even if He (or She) existed, is irrelevant to our ability as humans to set and control our own destiny and live out our lives on our own terms. Like was said by Julian Huxley in the book Invictus, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” That same theme has been repeated by multitudes of artists and musicians, parroting a spirit of this age that permeates all things, including all the institutions we have, the things or people we value, the way we work, even how we view and treat ourselves.

The problem with that view of life is that we now have a world full of people who, in the words of Henry David Thoreau and Bernard Levin, “live lives of quiet desperation,” “and at times noisy desperation.” One very smart man I know, a minister from Hemet, California named Dick Mills, said to me that the normal demeanor of most people is that of “normal depression.” “What they feel is that no one understands what they feel, and that no one really cares.” At the very heart of it, perhaps without realizing it in the rush and stress of their life, is the belief that, if He exists at all, in the words of Bette Midler, “God is watching us, ….from a distance.” And at the foundation of that belief, in most of the societies of the world, is that theory originating from the pen of old Chuck Darwin. Special creation is discredited by what scientists call the theory of “naturalist evolution.” As scientist Julian Huxley put it, adroitly, “Naturalism is atheism.”

There are four destructive outcomes, I’ve found, for a world that has chosen to embrace “practical atheism”, founded upon naturalist evolution. That world includes those who may believe in a God but not the Bible’s version of God, at least not literally.

One: The “loss of God,” as a result of evolution, destroys humanity’s accountability;

Two: The “loss of God,” as a result of evolution, destroys humanity’s dignity;

Three: The “loss of God,” as a result of evolution, destroys humanity’s significance;

Four: The “loss of God,” as a result of evolution, destroys humanity’s hope.”

There are at least fourteen major problems with evolution that I can think of right away, which have been exposed by modern science:

One: It cannot explain the law of entropy;

Two: It cannot adequately explain the state of sedimentary rock;

Three: It cannot adequately explain the changing nature of the magnetic field of the earth;

Four: It cannot adequately explain the suddenness of the mass destruction of species, as shown by the fossil records in geology;

Five: It cannot adequately explain the complexity of even the most basic, single-celled life forms now shown in the science of microbiology;

Six: It cannot adequately explain the sudden explosion of water upon the earth, which immediately led to the Ice Age, the presence of civilizations beneath the Black Sea, and the split of the earth’s landmass;
Seven: It cannot adequately explain the existence of species of animals, birds, and insects, which have physical properties or perform acts common to its way of life, which are physically impossible (examples are the bumble bee, the hummingbird, and the fish-hunting sea bird of Scotland);

Eight: Evolution cannot adequately explain the covalent bonding of atoms, in which protons, which should repel each other, are held in each nucleus, without explanation as to how matter itself does not remain in a constant state of explosive and destructive chaos.

Nine: It cannot adequately explain the imperfect process of natural selection, in which each species acquires genetically changed forms, yet fails to prevent continual extinction of many species;

Ten: It cannot adequately explain the perfect positioning of the earth, as a celestial body ideally capable for supporting life in all its forms;

Eleven: Evolution cannot adequately explain the complete absence of transitional forms, or how each one of its attempts to do so have failed (all the so-called prehistoric versions of man were either discredited as fakes or later re-explained as mere variations of modern man;

Twelve: It cannot explain how the fossil record, upon which evolutionary scientists depend for the age of the earth, has evidence of modern man in each one of them;

Thirteen: It cannot adequately explain how catastrophism, as recently demonstrated in volcanic occurrences like Mt. St. Helens in 1980, can display all the sedimentary changes in the earth that evolutionists claim would take billions of years of change, within a matter of days;

Fourteen: It cannot adequately explain the origination of matter itself, the foundational building blocks of all existence.


There are a mass of books that deal with each one of these and more reasons why the various theories of evolution, from Darwin’s original to the variations that are propounded today, are totally inadequate in answering the basic questions of “Who am I?” “Where do I come from?” “How did everything get this way?”

So what is the alternative? There’s only one adequate theory in opposition to a non-personal universe and world, that believes that all nature and its activity has no ultimate source but itself. It comes under different names: intelligent design, design theory, creationism, biblical creationism. This theory, like that of evolution, can’t drag you back in a non-existent time machine, and prove to you live and in color, how everything started. But it claims, and with good reason, what evolution has attempted to persuade us to disbelieve for a long time, that the concept of a Divine Hand, a Master Designer, as the Originator of all things, is the most reasonable and most likely explanation for the development and dynamic activity of the universe and most particularly the earth.

Now some would say, “Well, that’s fine, design theory may prove a designer or at least design itself, but it says nothing about what kind of God or Master Designer it was that made everything. It could be the Deity of a multitude of different religions, or none at all. Well, there’s a problem with that. Those people are assuming that all the religions and philosophies of the world have equal validity in their explanation of the universe, the earth, and man himself. You have to look at each one of these philosophical and religious systems and ask yourself several questions, and decide, “Which one is by far the most reasonable explanation for everything that has, and does go on in the universe?”

I have found the following conclusions, based upon my comparison of the universe, and Christianity:

One: The universe is so interrelated that a multiple number of gods with independent free will could not possibly exist, for if they were, all things would conflict, and we would be a universe of confusion; (precludes animism and the ancient mythological gods of the Babylonians, Greeks, etc.)

Two: The universe is subject to time and space and matter, in all of its diversity, to the point that a God cannot be both in heaven and in the material universe simultaneously without a unity in diversity (precludes Islam, supports the concept of the Trinity);

Three: The universe is subject to good and evil, and the two cannot be both caused by the same being, and they are not two sides of the same being, nor does good require evil to be able to exist; (precludes Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Wiccanism, and feminist and other fertility religions);

Four: The universe, and particularly the earth, is subject to such a marvelous array of diverse creatures and life forms, with incredible intricacy, complexity, and interdependence, that only a God of love and goodness would design such vast, variant, and interrelated forms of life; (precludes Islam and its harshness);

Five: The earth is not made up of a human race where the races are of superior and inferior standing, with one given the right to enslave another; (excludes Islam and Hinduism).

Six: The universe also has a source of evil that is in opposition to both God and man, because the nature of evil, rather than being mindless and purposeless, is actually purposeful and personal; (excludes all but Christianity and Judaism);

Seven: Man was created with a noble purpose, but has fallen due to his own failure, and yet, even in death, is given opportunity to gain redemption, a redemption not of his own merit; (only Christianity holds that status);

Eight: Man and God are partners in the future of the universe, with God alone as superior, yet man is glorified even in his place of subservience, as an act of God’s gracious mercy (only Christianity declares that);

Nine: To raise mankind to that redeemed status, God had to stand in the place of man, to suffer in his place and raise him up to God’s place of formerly lost glory (only Christianity teaches that).


Only Christianity has the ability to give man a sense of balance, that explains the universe’s existence and development adequately, to adequately explain the nature of a God who would design the universe, earth, and man as it is constituted, to explain the nature of evil, suffering, man, and the future. Only in Christianity, real Christianity, and in real Christianity properly understood, is racism, sexism, hatred, and moral confusion answered and destroyed.

Next, we will look into how we can know that the Bible is the exclusive true book from God, and that we can rely on that to explain both God, the universe, man, and the future.

Good morning. It has been a long period of inactivity. There have been lots of reasons, computers, health, finance, relationships. All are problems, but all seem to be manageable. At any rate, here I am. I have a lot to want to say, but I'll let what I've written suffice. I won't try to promise what I cannot guarantee, I've learned the hard way about that, but I will do my best to avoid being gone more than a day. I'll be trying to pull as many of you as I can into this site. And I hope that you'll be challenged to think about matters beyond the regular and mundane, to the world of spiritual things, and to questions and answers that go to the heart of what we all are about as human beings. When you read this, don't hesitate to respond. It doesn't matter how. If I don't have an immediate answer, I'll tell you, and I'll try to find it. If all my closest friends and confidants don't have an answer, I'll tell you, too. But I'll do my best not to get to that point.

So here's the next portion of Re-Intro. Links related to this series of articles are to follow.


REINTRO I
A SERIES OF ARTICLES REINTRODUCING
THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TO A POST-MODERN WORLD

CHAPTER ONE: JESUS OF NAZERETH & THE NEED FOR SIGNIFICANCE

Hi. My name is Floyd Fernandez. So, like I said in the Introduction, I’m here to reintroduce you to Jesus of Nazereth, who has said, without hesitation or qualification, that he is God, our Creator, and our only means to obtain eternal life beyond the grave. In fact, I’m here to demonstrate to you, conclusively, that Jesus is exactly who He claims to be, as he is so quoted in the part of the Bible commonly known as the New Testament. I’m here to make and prove the case for Jesus and the faith placed in him by billions over the course of history, in the same way that a prosecuting criminal lawyer proves that a defendant committed a serious crime. I will prove beyond a reasonable doubt, not only that Jesus of Nazereth is God, but that everything that is stated in the Bible that has to do with truth is also true, to the exclusion of any other religious or moral system.

These statements are certainly as audacious as anything that anyone could say. We live in a post-modern age where moral certainty—the claim of ultimate truth, is considered impossible and anyone who claims to know absolute and ultimate truth is deemed either insane or arrogantly self-deceived. In this age we are told by philosophers and academics that there is no longer any such thing as objective meaning to words itself. In other words, you make up your own truth and you make up whatever meaning you want to words. Former President Bill Clinton said it best when questioned whether he committed perjury in denying that he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, “It all depends upon what ‘is’ is.”

In fact, those who hold to a concept that there is moral certainty or objective meaning to life, not just to words, are held not only in contempt, but are considered dangerous. Almost everyone in the world condemn the actions of the Muslim fundamentalists who, at this hour, are seeking to plunge the planet into another world war, all in the name of God, as they conceive him. They are acting, not out of insanity, but out of a total conviction that God, the ultimate being imaginable, is supportive of war, mass murder, and mass terror. When someone like myself comes along, declaring my faith in Jesus as God and the Son of God, and that His way is spiritual truth to the exclusion of all others, many people quite understandably get suspicious. “Maybe Christians like this are bigoted and hateful, too. If people like him get their way, we may have a Christian jihad against the rest of the secular world.”

Part of me is both amused and angry. Amused because the overwhelming bulk of history over the last 2000 years shows that such a charge against Christianity is absurd. Angry because the ignorance of such statements shows a complete non-awareness of the massive persecution against Christians around the world, from China, to Sudan, to Nigeria, to Colombia, even to the USA, (though in a much milder form).

But rather than be sidetracked by those emotions, I am rather concerned, enough to want to do my part to help set the record straight, to reinform, to reeducate. Why? Because Christianity is a faith that has never or rarely been properly presented, even by those who have claimed to be its most able advocates.

The truth is, the faith that Jesus of Nazereth first introduced was hijacked by his own followers. In his name men have fought wars that have mercilessly slaughtered thousands of people, oppressed members of religions they disagreed with, opposed learning, oppressed women and advanced slavery, and even murdered dissident members of their own faith for offenses like wanting the Bible translated into the common language of their people. Too often, Christianity has been known as a religion of harshness and restrictive laws, rules, and traditions that grossly distort the teachings of Jesus and his primary followers, whom we know as the Apostles. As a result, too many people see Christianity as joyless, lifeless, irrelevant to real life, and an enemy to knowledge, progress, even freedom itself.

In the light of the present culture, most people forget that in the name of Jesus for 2,000 years, men and women have ended slavery, established and spread democracy and social justice, transformed family life, introduced the concepts of a free marketplace, transformed the arts, music, poetry, prose, and aesthetics, and were the founders of modern science. Most of all, it introduced into the world the concept of God that is still revolutionary, a personal God who accepts man as he is, no matter how wretched or hopeless, and asks for nothing more than for each individual to repent of his failings, and rely, not on his own good works, but on that of an innocent One who would gladly suffer for all. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, as believed upon by Christians, still stands as the most common theme of Western literature, art, and music.

Christianity, rather than losing ground to other world religions, is experiencing incredible new growth in the nations of the Third World, Africa, Asia, South America, even starting to cross the frontiers of the Islamic world. All new growth is being experienced by the Catholic Church in places like India and West Africa. The portion of Christianity known as evangelical churches are growing at a rate six times faster than Islam, usually portrayed in the press as the fastest growing religion. And those who are of the group called Pentecostal-Charismatic have grown between 1960-2003 from 8 million to 600 million followers, more than 20 times faster than Islam. Indeed, at present rates of growth, that portion of Christianity will outnumber both Muslims and Catholics within the span of a generation, making that one branch of Protestant Christianity alone the largest single faith in history, a development which would probably serve as the most dramatic cultural change in the annals of man.

How can such growth be explained, especially of that kind of Christianity? That is an interesting question, to be dealt with at another time. But a more important question must be asked; “What does it all matter?” Or, frankly, “Who in hell cares?” (Well, frankly, someone in hell does care, and he’s not happy about that at all. But I digress.). The fact is, what matters is there is a faith, among all the others in the world, that is unique, and makes unique demands to be heard. That demand is simple, but explosive.

If Jesus is not God, and the Bible is not the only holy book from God, and God as depicted in the Bible does not exist, then the entire Christian faith, from its very foundation, is a joke. Let’s blow it off, and just look on it as a nice bump in the road on the way to mankind’s ultimate evolutionary progress. But if Jesus is God, and the rest of its Book and message is true, then all sorts of incredible things happen.

First, you realize that you’re not alone. Your life and death are directly attributed to Jesus of Nazereth. There is “someone” out there. Second, the “Someone” out there is somebody who has already demonstrated a great love for the human race generally and for you personally. Third, He also possesses the right, the sole right, to dictate to you not only how you are to live, but who you really are---as an individual. That means your identity: physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, economically, sexually, and relationally. He has the last word on everything He touches upon, and that includes how people relate to each other `s persons, families, communities, races, nations, in their way they earn their daily bread, in their recreation, the way they are born, the way they die, and what happens on the other side of death. Even in His sole right to punish what He deems to be rebellion or wrong against Him, His determinations are based not on His whims, but on His own character, one of infinite justice and mercy, that He lived by Himself, as a man.

But one thing about Him that is going to be demonstrated, since He loves you: He also gives you free will, even to reject Him. And if that right is given to you, then His followers have to give you the room to make that choice, and live with the outcome of that choice. That responsibility is something no individual, no family, no community, no government can take away, without suffering severe consequences. That right to choose and live with the result is something that Christianity has not often done a good job of respecting. But it is part of the one thing that makes Christianity so unique, the concept that God wants to embrace every man, woman and child, by each person’s freewill choice.

But again, the important thing about this whole issue about God, and whether Jesus is that God, is it goes to the biggest questions of all: Am I alone? Who is beyond me? Do I matter and how? I'll go back to that student newspaper columnist I referred to at San Diego State University earlier in Chapter 1. He was an intelligent young man, yet he seemed to be a deeply disillusioned one. More than once he seemed perfectly content to say that he knew that there was nothing beyond the grave, and that he was okay with the idea that he was of no lasting consequence to anyone, and that he would be forgotten. I did not know at the time what I would say to him, but if I saw him now I would want to tell him something once said to a similar person by a great Christian teacher of the nineteenth century, Alexander Campbell: “You may have no fear in death, but do you have any hope in death?" Campbell went on to say that this young atheist's conclusion is that he is of no dignity, nothing that should leave him of any greater value than a bull, contently chewing its cud in a field. He shows no fear of his inevitable doom, yet, when he dies, that creature, lowly and dumb, will be forgotten and unregretted, and not only is it not important that he be mourned by those who loved him, it is illogical and absurd.


And a world living like that, in the end, is one which is far more of a hell than it is, where people really don’t have any need to give a damn about anyone else. And that young man won’t be so resigned to such a world when someone else abuses him, precisely because he doesn’t matter. But in another sense that young student was right, the very ability to conceive of a power greater than oneself creates a powerful framework to have a sense of significance in the universe. Something or someone took the time to ensure that the convergence of ganglions of energy resulted in my existence, with all the complex occurrences and relationships I have experienced. And that means that I must matter to at least somebody, who in turn made me a person who matters to my family, my spouse, my community, my friends, even to my country (especially at tax time!).

So ask yourself, then, “If I matter then, is it worthwhile for me to know who put me here?” And, could the one with all the answers I need to know about my life be one Jesus of Nazereth? Is He God? How can I know? Can this cocky sounding lawyer prove it?

Let’s find out. Over the following pages we’ll be re-introducing Jesus to you, and everyone who may have heard of him, but may not really know Him. And we’ll do it in an orderly fashion, dealing with the most common objections to Him and his teachings. I hope that at the end, no matter what your choices about Jesus, you’ll at least know about Him as He is, not through the prejudices and flaws his followers have projected on Him.

I’m looking forward to the ride. See you next time.

Hello everybody and anybody. Oh, am I so incredibly embarrassed. I can't tell you the frustration I feel! One computer went totally wacko on me, lost XP...stuck with Windows ME, but without Word, error messages stop us from loading it in...the other computer is too advanced to have a floppy disk port, CD & DVD only. My good luck! Oh well, I hope to have this handled in the next two days. I'll be back. Adios.

Dear Everybody,

Sorry that I haven't been around. Computer has been down a lot, plus I have been trying to get some work done for clients in my law practice. I've not been able to get anything else entered into the blog from my Re-Intro file. I'll try to be a little more consistent, at least until I can get somewhere with a Microsoft Word document. I won't go into why, I just can't download anything else. Oh, well. God's will be done. I'll stay in touch. Bye for now.