Ok, so this is totally inappropriate, but sooo funny (in a really twisted, detective-cracking-a-joke-at-a-homicide-scene-to-cope kind of way) I had to share. At first I though it was a joke, then I realized that it was “real” and this guy is being sincere. ‘Nuff said. (Just don’t let kids watch or overhear…lots of bad language).

The central idea of Christianity is whether or not you love your neighbor and it is not whether or not you subscribe to a particular notion of God. The cross is the revelation of the love of God for us. Many religious persons have it reversed. For the religious person bound inextricably to dogmatic assertions about God the test is first to agree to propositions about God, then to love. But should not love come before dogma? If your neighbor is anyone regardless of proximity, socio-cultural status, race, etc. then you must love everyone. For when Christ was Crucified he did not save those who professed correct dogma, but came first to save those who were cast out because they did not have any dogmatic understanding of God at all and were excluded from the society inside the gates of the city who were revered for their knowledge of God and the Law. Christ included the excluded. The Cross includes and does not exclude, it is the radical essence of God’s love. “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). As Barth says, “He died for us whilst ‘we’ - all that we are and have and do - were weak and godless. How then can this relation between Him and us - between Him, risen from the dead, and us, still involved in all questionable possibilities of a life which has not yet been illuminated by the light of his death - be fundamentally altered?” (The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford 6th Ed., 1968, p. 160). Placing dogmatic propositions about the love of God before the love of God itself is dogmatic idolatry. Excluding anyone from the Kingdom of God you profess based on dogmatic requirements alone is therefore an evil since it excludes God in order to exclude others who do not conform to the propositions about God.

Idolatry is why religion causes problems, harms people, and intensifies a negative response to it. Idolatry is still seen in a primeval view of something physical like the golden calf or a statue of Mary. But the religious have been lulled to sleep in not understanding that they can idolize their own ideas. When that happens, you must exclude and therefore harm others because persecution or disagreement of your ideas is a test for truth. Opposition and truth therefore co-terminate and become the essence of self-idolatry. If no one really opposes your idea, then it will become as one pinch of salt in 20 gallon vat of sauce - imperceptible and insignificant. But to turn your idea into a totem that all can see and then demanding that this is the way to know sacred reality apart from all other means; the consequence for not bowing before it, an extrication from any notion of what is right or good, is like tossing 10 pounds of raw meat into that vat and serving it to a life long vegetarian while convincing them in the midst of abdominal discomfort that it is the only thing good for them anymore. Religion becomes a means of status - of celebrity; a means of vanity; a means of replacing the imperceptible image of God with a structure of ideas that suit you - and in fact are you as a copy of yourself as an idealized image of what you look like perfected and in God’s Kingdom for eternity. Dogmatic idolatry becomes a form of wicked self-idolatry posing as the revelation of God when it is the revelation of an idea of a notion of self.

Religion and the entire structure of belief in God so conceived as dogmatic idolatry can more subtly and more powerfully block one from knowledge of God for the end of this knowledge is knowledge of an idealized self. Not the true self; but a re-imagined self cast in the image of God. Imagining one’s self in relation to God this way paradoxically eliminates the relationship between self and God for it eclipses the image of God with the image of the self. The relationship with God calls one’s self into question; it fuels one’s very existence. When the relationship between self and God collapses through dogmatic ideology, one’s very existence is called into question. But here not by that which gives life, but that which gives nothing. As the serpent would eat its own tail dogmatic idolatry leads to death. Doctrine that demands an immutable and therefore eternal status replaces the eternal Word to which it is designed to give witness. As an imperfect witness divined by imperfect and fundamentally limited and contingent beings it must change as people change. This is the nature of ideas and how human notions about this or that reality reveal there contingency on reality as a whole. To ignore this fundament of human evolution is to deny humanity of its very being and therefore to deny human being from its access to God.

The contingency of human being and the realization of the very limitation of human knowing in relation to God who is an eternal an infinite limit to any knowledge of God in God’s own self is paradoxically a knowledge that gives life. Relating to God through a knowledge of God that is understood to be contingent in itself is therefore sacramental – it is an icon. As with Christ, to know the limit of human being which is death, is to know the source of life who conquers death by calling the very essence of human being into question. Life therefore meets us in our death. And relating to our death as a possibility and necessity of our contingency is a source of life. It is that which gives life, for by relating to the necessity of death we understand what it means to be human and how temporary, limited, and contingent our ideas about the eternal must be. And it is only in the midst of this limit that God meets us and pierces through contingency to give a momentary glimpse of the eternal and infinite; a boundary only the person of the risen Christ has crossed.

So apparently Richard Dawkins does not have sole rights to the word meme. I have learned recently that a blogging meme is something of a social exercise that blogger’s can share with one another. It is kind of a way to share an idea and at the same time see how well the idea propagates through the web by “tagging” people to participate. Tagging is generally reserved for those whom you might already know otherwise this would just be a creative way to spam people like mad. You remember those emails that you would and perhaps still do get from friends where you list your favorite TV shows, books, what you are doing right now, what you would rather be doing, etc.? It’s kind of like that but on the blogosphere. So I was recently tagged by someone I know rather well after I asked what a meme was in the context of the blog world and what tagging actually is?

Well, what follows is my response to it and my participation in the wider blog community.

The Rules:

1. You have to post the rules before you give the facts.
2. Players must list one fact that is relevant to your life for each letter in your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name then use a name that you like.
3. When you are tagged, you must write a post containing your own middle name game facts.
4. At the end of your post, you must tag one person for each letter in your middle name. Don’t forget to comment them telling that they are tagged and to read your post to get the rules.

So my middle name is Michael which makes this a time comsuming exercise, but I am sick and bedridden at the moment and have nothing better to do so why not?

M - Music. I am a music addict. I always have a song in my head. Love indie music, shoegaze old and new, heavy music, rock and straight jazz.

I - Intelligence. I like talking with smart people and trying to be a smart person. Anything that might set me apart from the other animals on the planet is a good thing I think.

C - Cars. One of the areas in my life that sets me apart as a bit different from a lot of males in this area in central PA. I do not work on them, I do not know a lot about the internal workings of them, I can’t stand NASCAR, and cars is a very short topic of discussion with me. However, my oldest son loves the movie Cars and loves to “push cars” on the floor often very early in the morning. I would venture a guess that he and I have driven a couple of mini-miles long before my wife’s head leaves her pillow!

H - Headache. Since contracting Lyme disease this summer (the tests came back negative but the large EM rash on my forearm, total exhaustion, and vertigo would beg to differ with the blood tests I have had) I have had them repeatedly. Going to see a specialist soon to get a little more aggressive than only two weeks of antibiotics which was a less aggressive treatment than my dog received!

A - Alex. My oldest son. He’s a little more than 2 1/2 now and getting so big and smart! Here is a video of him counting to ten last fall:

E - Evan. My youngest son. He is still warming up to me but is still addicted to his mommy. Here he is cuddled up to me whilst at the grill. Yes - fire and children, I know it’s not a good mix.

L - Love. For my family and my wife. All the time. ‘Nuff said!

Now the outcome of this is to send it to others for each letter of my name who also have blogs. This is how the whole natural selection of ideas works out. So if you send it off to more connected people, the better chance that your game or idea will be “successful”. But since I am last in line of all of those I know who have blogs and participate in this kind of thing… It’s the end of the line

I was reading the God Delusion yesterday and Richard Dawkins’ view of faith is simply not well supported in Christian theology. The problem is that he divorces faith as a belief devoid of evidence (in the strictly scientific norm of the nature of evidence as externally verifiable) from any notion of trust. In Christian theology faith is a form of trust. It is trust in God as revealed in Jesus Christ. This means that it is not rooted in the absence of evidence, although the evidence in which it is rooted is clearly not of the scientific sort. But one does not come to faith based on what one has been told in the past or through simple logical formulations. Parroting what one has been told is not faith even if one claims that it is.

Faith is the result of evidence that is satisfying to one’s sense of trust in a relational logic to God. Clearly this evidence that leads one to faith is unsatisfying to many even as scientific evidence is unsatisfying to many regarding the meaning of life and what is best for one to do on ethical grounds. But I urge one to find a theological explication of faith that is even similar to that of Dawkins for I would take issue with any understanding of faith that is not coterminous with trust in terms of satisfying evidence and therefore satisfying knowledge of God. Saying faith is based in nothing as Dawkins says is not what faith is from especially from what I would roughly consider a Christian perspective. Now it is true that fundamentalists have a penchant for looking for ways to substantiate faith with externally verifiable evidence. I would submit this task bears no fruit and is itself misleading based on the above.

Second, Dawkins’ issue with faith as a foundation of belief leads to another misleading statement about how the liberal view enables the more radical of fundamentalist actions which the liberals would like to separate themselves. The problem with Dawkins’ assertion is that since faith is based in essentially nothing and since it is called faith, it is beyond reproach or criticism. Since it is beyond reproach or criticism as a foundation of belief the liberal view enables the fundamentalist view to act within the conditions of faith since faith is that which needs assent beyond reproach or criticism. The problem here is that again, faith in theological discourse is the object of criticism itself. While it is true that many do not criticize it, those who do not are also not acting within the bounds of good theological thinking.

Good theological thinking requires a critical analysis of faith in certain bounded conditions of human experience. Without this engagement, it is not theological thinking at all, but dogmatic assertion. The very history of the liberal-progressive strain in Christian religious history in the US, at least, is that it engages in this critical engagement and rejects blind dogmatic assertion. Theology is faith seeking understanding. Based on the understanding of faith as trust in God through satisfying evidence of such, the task of theology is to question these grounds in a clearly self-critical manner. This aspect of faith is one that Dawkins clearly does not account for in his volume and I was rather disappointed that he did not answer this issue.

Now it is true that many Christians (could be most) do not engage in this self-critical reflection on the very grounds on which their faith is built. That is to say, this kind of thinking is absent of theology, or has a misguided sense of theology as find support for assertions rather than critically engaging assertions in order to question the very grounds of faith itself. At best it is a-theology, at worst it is anti-theology holding to any assertion of faith as an object as clearly defined as a tennisball at the U.S. open (McEnroe’s challenges notwithstanding!). But faith works in probabilities – probabilities of God’s revelation as revealed in Jesus and from then to us through the Holy Spirit. Theology helps the believer to sharpen his or her apprehension and experience of these probabilities. But that some of a given group do not engage in good theology does not mean that it is evidence that faith itself is therefore somehow enabling bad theology - especially if one has any theological sense of what faith is. How one chooses to operate within the bounds of a structure does not logically mean that the structure is therefore bad. That is to say, because there are those who make false assumptions about faith and operate within those false assumptions does not therefore mean that faith itself as trust in God as revealed in Jesus Christ is therefore contingent upon those false assumptions and is itself false.

As I have noted before, doctrine – our attempt to rationalize and make explicit the norms of faith through language – is sacramental. It is a vehicle for us to understand God and grow in that knowledge, but it is not to be equated with God literally. Now it must be noted that I do tend more towards the position of Ulrich Zwingli or a Baptist with respect to sacrament. It is a symbol and witness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and faith is not contingent upon the reception of a sacrament even if the ritual act of partaking a sacrament is nourishing to that faith in a faith community. But whatever tact you may take towards sacramentology, its nature as that which offers us a vehicle to experience the mystery of God’s presence is clear. The problem is when the symbol is confuse with the referent – the reality to which it points – and then reified to the degree that the sacrament is confused with its referent namely God. In terms of doctrine, when this occurs, the doctrine becomes co-exhaustive of the being of God and therefore replaces the presence of God with the ideas about God that people articulate by word, image, or deed. To claim otherwise is to assert that God is bound to our doctrinal statements and doing so causes God to be contingent upon what we say about God. This is idolatry, not theology.

What Dawkins does do is offer an argument of the consequences of this view of doctrine and faith as idolatry rather than a trust in God as revealed in Jesus Christ that we critically engage in our theological thinking. One such consequence is the thought of Dawkins himself on religion along with those of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – all of whom atheists seem to revere as the torch bearers of their worldview. No doubt this perspective with further entrench the views of the doctrinal idolater into even clearer and more reified boundaries into which faith in God is unflinchingly inscribed. But perhaps the dwindling middle road of Christianity can find its identity in these discussions once more.