No. Seriously. Let me go back to sleep.

The story of humanity told by atheists is one of “awakening.” As in, humans were more or less drifting along in a drunken slumber of silly superstition until the dawn of the Modern Age and the introduction of the scientific method. Science pulled up the shades and bathed us in light, shook us from sleep, and is now explaining all that can be explained.

Apres moi, le hangover.

(Atheism story via Jon in the comments)

Fiddle on.

The Saints of Doubt: Doug Pinnick

In what I hope will be an ongoing series, I will be highlighting the great doubters who have shaped my own spirituality. Some of these are ex-Christians, some were burned by the church, some just tortured souls; all have influenced me (and others, I presume) in profound ways. Many of them are artists who have remembered tragedy in the midst of a Church afraid to read the hard parts of her own Book. Many are theologians or philosophers who dared to look into infinite spaces even when these filled them with dread.  All have struggled with faith, not all have remained faithful.

I don’t know how well this will go over, so I will very much appreciate feedback (email if you don’t feel like commenting). I especially want to hear from those of you who don’t like it.

The Patron Saint of Gay Christians

King’s X is one of the coolest, dirtiest rock bands still playing.  15 albums and counting.  Doug is their lead singer.  Although they never branded themselves a “Christian” band, Christians were their base, and many of Doug’s early lyrics were evangelical to say the least. 

In 1998, Pinnick came out of the closet in a Christian magazine. 

On 2004’s Ear Candy, the second verse of “Looking for Love” features these lyrics:

A standard, a program/religion burned me at the stake./I questioned, I listened, I worshiped, how can I relate?/I worked so hard at it, oh Lord, the bruises and the burns/I just don’t—don’t get it—I guess I lost my faith/Looking for love.

Listen to it here.

In a 2002 interview, Pinnick had this to say about giving up on faith:

The greatest thing that happened to me was, when I stopped believing in God, I stopped believing in the Devil. When I stopped believing in the Devil, all my fear went away. I'm not afraid to die, I'm not afraid to walk down the street. I'm not looking over my shoulder thinking the Devil's going to get me, or 'God is watching me, so I'd better not do that,' when there's nothing wrong with what I've done. We used to preach when you come to Christ you're free, and you have peace and you have happiness. Well, for me, I got all that stuff when I stopped believing in God. I was in prison, I was unhappy. I felt like I didn't fit in-- And then people tell me that I didn't believe in God in the first place. Well, I totally did. I gave my whole life to it. I studied it. I learned it. I lived it. I really, really did.

Well, even on the other side of the fence he still hopes you’ll pray:

Technorati Tags: Saints of Doubt,King's X,Doug Pinnick,Gay Christians,ex-Christians,Doubt,Christian Rock,Rock Music,Atheism,New-atheism,agnosticism

On second thought, let's just do satire

This from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle.

Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

Via Hit Dan Back

This being the post in which the “theologian” acts like one

In the last week, a lot of people have asked me what I think about Haiti and God, or what Pat Robertson said, or how I can believe in a good God when things like this happen, or something along these lines. It boils down to a simple question: How can we think about Haiti theologically? How should persons of faith encounter terrible tragedies?

It’s interesting to me that these questions didn’t really crop up the first or second time Airbear and I went to Haiti. When we came back and told stories about how horrible the conditions were, no one asked us how we could still believe in God, or questioned God’s goodness, or anything like that. I certainly asked those questions in-country. For someone who often struggles with doubt, seeing the devastation firsthand simply italicized my own questions, underlined them, and put them in bold.

And eventually, working there, being with the people, seeing the blessing that is La Maison Des Enfants De Dieu to those kids, eating gut-busting curries and lam-en-sauce, hearing the children praying before and after lunch, I just decided I was asking the wrong questions.

A lot of people assume the Bible is supposed to help us make sense of the world, supposed to explain things. If that’s the case, it’s a really crappy book, because for every story about God punishing sin with disaster and war, there’s a story about innocent suffering. For every story about God angered, frustrated, and vengeful, there’s a story about God moved, merciful, and relentlessly kind. For every prophecy of God turning his face from his people, there is an utterance about God’s gracious, unending, unyielding commitment.

The Bible doesn’t explain life and sort things into neat categories. It rather takes life seriously, in all its messy madness. It doesn’t dole out a prescription for fixing every illness; instead it invites us to live faithfully with our infirmity. If God wants to tell us why this earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, I’m sure God will raise up a prophet to speak to us. Maybe right now there is some Haitian Christian out there with a Word from the Lord we need to take seriously.

Maybe Pat Robertson is sort of right. Maybe vodou really is evil and God really doesn’t like child sacrifice, child prostitution, and child slavery and so he gave those tectonic plates a little nudge on the quantum level.

Or maybe being God is really hard. Maybe God is having a tough time balancing all the crazy going on down here while simultaneously trying to unleash the Spirit and move people into Kingdom life while keeping an eye on human evil and minimizing its effects and giving his natural creation the freedom to be itself. Maybe being God is a little bit like being asked to turn a jungle into a garden. Maybe that’s why he asked us to help.

Maybe this place is just nuts.

But maybe, just maybe, we need to ask these questions from time to time to spur us on in faith. We need to slam our heads against information that simply defies explanation until we, like Paul, are reduced to worship. When we are so exhausted by our inability to comprehend that we can’t help but pray in solidarity with those who suffer and solemnly commit ourselves to alleviating their pain in the name of one crucified. The world cannot understand this sort of incomprehension, though it tries to mimic the response.

Thinking theologically about Haiti means taking scripture seriously, taking God’s work in the world seriously, asking questions seriously, and then seriously shutting up.

Technorati Tags: Haiti,Orphanage,God,Theodicy,Job,Suffering,Theology,Pat Robertson

A tribute to Airbear

While I fritter away the days reading and writing, Airbear accomplishes things (read the scrolling update in the middle of the page).

Haiti Update

A couple of things.

First, Fox News has been broadcasting from our orphanage! I haven't seen any wide-angle coverage of the grounds, but for those of you who haven't been there and have no idea what it's like, you should check out this link and this one (via Jon Varela and Monica Grim).

The second link has the Bennett household's new favorite reporter. British accent plus hatred of "bureaucratic red tape" equals fabulous populist critique of the US State Department. Awesome how he repeats "legally adopted."

Next, for those of you who would like to do something to help, the most important thing you can do right now is contact your senators and house representative and ask that the State Department suspend all restrictions on evacuating orphans to the United States. It's fun and easy (really, we tried it and it was great) and it is making a difference: my wife got word that some kids are already being released.

A couple of clicks on the internet and a phone call and you will directly effect the life of a Haitian orphan. Seriously, making a lasting impact on the life of "one of the least of these" has never been easier.

Lastly, our Friends Mike and Cory are in Haiti doing damage assessment right now. You can support their mission via Paypal here. Also, check out the trailer to Mike's upcoming Haiti documentary (Mike went to the Chili Palmer school of executive production):



Mike asks the questions and Pastor Pierre (the Haitian director of our orphanage) translates. It's directed by our friend Alex Laflamme.

Coming up: a post on how to think about Haiti theologically. Stay tuned!

Digging in the Dirt: 1, Experts: 0

Via Libertas et Memoria, a story on biblical origins:

Scientists have discovered the earliest known Hebrew writing - an inscription dating from the 10th century B.C., during the period of King David's reign.

The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought. (The Bible's Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew.)

Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B.C., because Hebrew writing was thought to stretch back no further. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.

If lectures from John Goldingay have taught me anything, it's that history is complicated. The reigning biblical studies paradigm dates the finalized text of the Old Testament at somewhere in the 6th Century BCE. This corresponds historically to a little vignette in 2 Kings where King Josiah finds an old copy of what sounds like the Pentateuch. The idea is that 2 Kings 22 is more or less reliably reporting an event which marks the fixing of the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch in this form survives the exile, a few new(er) histories and wisdom writings (e.g., Nehemiah, some Psalms, possibly Ecclesiastes) and finalized versions of the prophets (esp. 2nd and 3rd Isaiah, Jeremiah) are added, and, somewhere between 2nd and 1st Century BCE, a final form of Daniel is tacked on. Voila! the Old Testament.

Until now, it was conjectured that the form of the Pentateuch discovered in Josiah's court may have been written as late as the early 6th Century. So, basically, some priest writes a bunch of the Pentateuch, drops it in a closet, it gets lost for twenty or thirty years, is discovered, and is then hailed as the ancient text of Israel. Seriously. That's what they think.

On the conservative side of the debate, scholars will suggest that tightly controlled oral traditions preserve stories, poems, songs, and wisdom in original form from the 12th Century BCE until they are committed to ink at an indeterminate time, lost or forgotten during the reigns of naughty kings, and then rediscovered by Josiah's people and preserved through the exile.

Turns out, they're both wrong!

Until now, we had no evidence of biblical Hebrew being used before the 6th Century. That is, the language preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls was thought to have developed much later than the time of David. What's cool about the text discovered by archeologists is how it shows problems in the views of both camps. Clearly, Biblical-style Hebrew was in use at least as early as the 10th Century. And even cooler is that the recovered text is not biblical, but echoes prominent biblical texts (Ps. 72:3, Ex. 23:3, and Isa. 1:17). What's likely is that oral and written traditions were in effect (as conservatives assumed), but that they were probably looser than conservatives would have liked. What eventually gets fixed in the biblical record very much preserves the language and spirit, if not the precise grammatical constructions or internal logic, of original utterances.

To the archeologists: keep digging!

Why won't God leave Haiti alone?

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Update: A running Haiti news aggregate here.
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For those of you who don't know, my wife and I are closely connected to an orphanage in Haiti. We have friends who have adopted there and who now work on the board of a non-profit which is dedicated to Haiti outreach. Mike is headed in-country on Friday to assess damage done to the orphanage and probably a local church we visited while we were there last time. You can do pay-pal donations at the links.

My wife is speaking with the headmaster of her school today to hopefully begin another relationship with the orphanage, we'll see how that pans out.

So far, it appears none of the children in the orphanage were hurt, praise God, but I worry the real tragedy is yet to come. Haiti is always on the edge; this might send it over.

The question is why. Of course there's always the Pat Robertson explanation. Intrepid journalist Russell Goldman comments:

When American televangelist Pat Robertson on Wednesday attributed the earthquake to the Haitian people's "pact to the devil," it shined a light on the hostility some foreign Christians have aimed at the country's religious traditions.

Ah the condescension we faithful must endure on the back of Pat Robertson.

There they go again. The backwoods retards and their sky fairy. Ha! How quaint--and normally tolerable. But, in the midst of this crisis how dare they look for cosmic significance in world events? Haven't they heard of science? Plate tectonics? I can't believe I live in the same country as these idiots.

Dear Russell Goldman, I have no idea what to make of Pat Robertson's comments. I don't know what God was doing or not doing with respect to this catastrophe. But I do know that it ain't "foreign Christians" who have spun this "pact with the devil" explanation from whole cloth--it's the Haitians. Yes, Russell, after grueling days of watching my friends build a classroom for Haitian orphans in 100+ degree heat, I was treated to theological diatribes--no, rants--not once, not twice, but three times detailing the hundred year pact with the devil and the misery that has resulted. This came not from the sonorous white missionary (who didn't exist), nor even from the humble Haitian pastor who looked after the children. No Russell, this came from the son of an ex-voodoo priestess who actively participated in periodic renewals of said agreement.

Mr. Goldman. Sir. I have no doubt that the mad religious delusions of Pat Robertson and his ilk send apoplectic shivers down your neural pathways, commanding your fingers to ravage the laptop in the digital equivalent of sackcloth and ashes. And I thank you for having the tremendous journalistic courage it takes to pile on to an outspoken televangelist amidst this oppressive culture of Christianism. But please, Sir, could you find it somewhere within your tolerance, your empathy, your unswerving liberal leanings to spare the poor Haitians? Surely they should be respected enough to have their own beliefs? Their own explanations? Shouldn't they?

Sir?

All Your Virtue are Belong to Us!

Roger Lowenstein of the New York Times counsels those of you with a house that's underwater to walk away from your mortgage. Apparently experts are surprised you haven't bailed already:

And given that nearly a quarter of mortgages are underwater, and that 10 percent of mortgages are delinquent, White, of the University of Arizona, is surprised that more people haven’t walked. He thinks the desire to avoid shame is a factor, as are overblown fears of harm to credit ratings. Probably, homeowners also labor under a delusion that their homes will quickly return to value. White has argued that the government should stop perpetuating default “scare stories” and, indeed, should encourage borrowers to default when it’s in their economic interest. This would correct a prevailing imbalance: homeowners operate under a “powerful moral constraint” while lenders are busily trying to maximize profits.

You see, if a business is acting amorally, you should too. That you haven't already just means you're stupid.