Merry Christmas!

I wish you all a Merry Christmas for 2006. May your families be kept safe, and your bellies be protected from too much good food. May the weather be perfect, and the company pleasant.

Also, Happy Birthday to Jesus, the Christ, our saviour and king.

“Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

An Atheist's God

“if you are an atheist

then atheism is your god”

Courtesy of Hugh.

Healing by Faith

I have reason to go and pray for a dear friend, who recently survived one cancer scare, only to have another rear up its ugly head. Like many Christians I know, I believe that people can be healed through prayer - but I also find it a challenge to develop the faith to wholeheartedly trust in prayer. It is always useful in these situations to consider what Jesus did in these situations - because even he did not always find it possible to heal everyone.

When it comes to the miracles of Jesus, I find Mark 6:1-13 to be one of the most amazing pieces of scripture. It is the only place where Jesus says he could not do any miracles - the reason being the lack of faith of his family, neighbours and hometown. Cynics point to this as evidence that his miracles relied upon slight of hand, and willing self-delusion by those 'healed'. But read this entire section:

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! Isn't this the carpenter? Isn't this Mary's son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

Then Jesus went around teaching from village to village. Calling the Twelve to him, he sent them out two by two and gave them authority over evil spirits.

These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic. Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town. And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them.”

They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

Straight after being rejected himself, Jesus sends out the disciples to do what he could not do in his hometown. Talk about asking them to take a leap of faith!

Until we get to heaven, we can only speculate on Jesus' reasons for doing this. Perhaps he wanted to give people the chance to be healed by an unfamiliar person, like his disciples. Or perhaps this unique failure made it easier for the disciples to trust in God, knowing that it was the faith of those they preached to that would make the difference?

Later in Acts 14:8-10 we see Paul healing a man because of his faith:

In Lystra there sat a man crippled in his feet, who was lame from birth and had never walked. He listened to Paul as he was speaking. Paul looked directly at him, saw that he had faith to be healed and called out, “Stand up on your feet!” At that, the man jumped up and began to walk.

So it is quite clear that faith is a key difference between receiving healing or not. Unfortunately, some people blame others of a lack of faith when they are not healed by prayer. At its most militant this can lead to people being accused of being 'backsliders' or 'unsaved'. Whilst this is possible, I think we should examine our reaction to others' lack of faith. Rather than condemn, we should encourage, rather than chastise, we should console.

For a good encouraging verse about this issue, we need look no further than James 5:13-18:

Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.

Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.

Clearly if Elijah could pray and have God create or break a drought, we can also pray and expect great things. In other words, it is the God we serve who does the miracles, not us, and we can have faith knowing that normal people before us have prayed and received miracles like the ones we need.

Flat Earth Myth

Whilst reading the comments on one of Andrew Bolt's posts and came across an interesting link to an article entitled Myth of the Flat Earth by historian Jeffrey Russell.

Russell points out that claims that the Church Fathers believed or promoted the idea of a flat earth, particularly in opposition to Christopher Columbus, are absurd. He claims that most Christians since the 3rd century believed in a spherical Earth. The flat earth myth began in the 1830s in Paris. So why did this myth catch on?

“The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.”

Given Pope Benedict's recent speech about the place for theology in the sciences, the false view that science and religion must be opposed is a common one. For my own part, when I found my faith in Christ, I did not lose my interest in science - but I came to see that science (as I understood it) did not trump faith, but supports and is informed by it.

[UPDATE: Interestingly Daniel Tammet comments on how a recent interview with Richard Dawkins showed the same sort of erroneous either/or thinking about science and religion.]

Faith, Reason and the University

Pope Benedict's controversial speech to his old university now has an official transcript, translated into English. It makes for an interesting read if you like debating theology and what shape Christianity should have in the 21st century. The controversial quotation is less interesting than it first appeared when you can see the context of the remarks:

“It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”

Benedict's conclusion is an interesting one, and I think makes a very good point. He teases out a point of view that I had not actually understood before - which is that the setting of boundaries on the definition of "science" is a philosophical issue grounded in Greek philosophical concepts. It will be interesting to see if controversial quantum foam ideas of process physics will affect this debate (in layman's terms - they replace the platonic ideal with an ongoing process). Here is Benedict's conclusion in his own words:

“And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.”

Free Christian stock photos

I came across this interesting collection of Christian stock photos the other day, and thought I'd share.

Words fail me ... but the VIC govt failed this little girl

In a shocking case of child neglect we can see that non-government care workers did more for this baby girl, than Victoria's Department of Human Services.

“A baby suffered serious electrical burns, witnessed repeated acts of domestic violence and lived in horrific conditions for 22 months before Victorian welfare authorities finally took her away from her drug-addicted mother.

The state's Department of Human Services was first notified of concerns for the girl in March 2001, when the child was three months old.

Despite the mother's first child being removed from her care in 1999, the second child was not removed by the department until January 2003.

The full horror of the girl's first two years of life have been detailed in a judgment handed down by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.”

The mother is Aboriginal. I wonder whether Andrew Bolt is right about political correctness causing government-run departments to act more slowly than they should because of the desire to avoid the appearance of being heartless jackbooted racists - rather than just being heartless ribbon-wearing cowards. As Andrew says:

“Is it because she was Aboriginal? Is it because, as I’ve warned so often, that we leave Aboriginal children in grave danger that we would not tolerate for children of any other race because we are so terrified of the “stolen generations” myth?”

Personally, I think the mother's racial background had less to do with the problem than her family history.

“When the mother was three, her older sister had been murdered. She was placed in foster care but suffered repeated sexual abuse there.

She lived on the street from the age of 14 and had convictions for theft and robbery from the age of 15. She also took heroin.”

I think the guilt felt for society's failure to protect her as a child, led the case workers to try and be lenient with her own failings as a parent - thus perpetuating the damage from one generation to another. We need more grace-based intervention to save these kids before they have their own children and pass on the horror, we need a robust idea of love as something that involves discipline, not some wishy-washy acceptance that it's everyone else's fault.

Grace is a free gift of love, not license to do whatever you want. If you want to learn about grace, go study Christianity, have a robust conversation with your local priest, pastor or minister - or get Christian non-government organisations involved in caring for people - like the ones that made a difference here.

UPDATE: Added link to Andrew's post.

Media not interested in real miracle healings?

The Herald Sun's Bryan Patterson makes an interesting admission on his Faithworks blog:

“The Christian press sometimes follows up miracle claims with doctors reports. Years ago, I worked on a mainstream newspaper that did just that after a healing service and in most cases the doctors said they could find no rational explaination for pyhsical healings.

The mainstream media is sadly not so keen these days to investigate religiou miracle claims, especially when they involve Christians. I wish they were but it just ain’t so. And yet they probably occur at gatherings every day.”

I know of several people who have experienced genuine, document, miraculous healings - yet I've never seen the mainstream press do anything but try to deny them. Individuals in the media may disagree, Michael Willesee recently spent his own money to create the documentary Signs of God to try to prove the evidence of stigmata and healings. However, he did that after he largely 'retired' from the business, and financed it himself.

When Michael Willesee was interviewed on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope he was asked if proving miracles would really help people believe:

“ANDREW DENTON: So you believe that by a logically and scientifically-based proof of the miracles of God, this will regenerate faith?

MIKE WILLESEE: With some people. I don't think for one moment that the world's going to turn on its axis and say, "Okay, now there's a God because Mick told us." Some may be converted, some will at least open their hearts to the possibility that there is a God and that he's a loving God. He's a God of love. If I get that message through to a limited number of people, then I'll have done my job.”

That is a great quote, and very much my attitude as well. However, miracle healings are not ever a certainty. I and others that I know have gone to a healing service, only to find ourselves challenged in our faith and without a clear answer from God as to why we've not been healed. My current feeling about this is that God grants miracles like that as 'signs and wonders' to set the unsaved free and bring people to Him. Having become a Christian, there is less need for someone else to heal you - after all Peter points out that we have 'everything we need':

2 Peter 1:3
His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

James also says something similar, but is even more specific about healing:

James 5:16
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.

So we can expect less public miracles and more private ones, answers to our own prayers - perhaps before others hear of it. Nevertheless, Christian's still get sick and die. Perhaps the ultimate answer to that is 'so what?' As a Christian dying should never be what we fear, as it ushers us into the next world - God's promised second creation, or heaven, or whatever you want to call it (the eternal city?). Eternal life is a given, it is thr address that we should all be uncertain about.

For more evidence that public healings and miracles were intended to help people have faith in God, there are several verses:

Romans 15:18-19
I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done — by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ.

1 Corinthians 2:4-5
My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power.

1 Corinthians 4:18-19
Some of you have become arrogant, as if I were not coming to you. But I will come to you very soon, if the Lord is willing, and then I will find out not only how these arrogant people are talking, but what power they have. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.

1 Thessalonians 1:4-10
For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. nd so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord's message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, or they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.

However you feel about miracles and healings you need to realise that the last thing we need in this world is a form of godliness, but not a real demonstration of it:

2 Timothy 3:1-5
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God — having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

On the other hand, not every 'miracle' is one, and some things that are altogether natural, such as childbirth, should rightly be regarded as miracles, despite not meeting the definition of one.

Daniel Tammet: Autistic Savant and Christian

Daniel Tammet is a very interesting young man, who is a high-functioning autistic savant. He is fairly well-known due to a number of TV and documentary appearances, and his ability to handle numbers and language is truly amazing.

I came across his blog today, whilst researching autism (my son has a friend with Asperger's Syndrome) and noticed he has blogged about being a Christian.

“I think many people are surprised to hear that I believe in God and that I am a Christian. I think this is because many assume that autism and belief in God are somehow incompatible. In fact other autistic writers, such as Temple Grandin, have written about their own spiritual beliefs and practices.”

Where I've been ...

create your own visited countries map

Europe - the home of the wrinkly teenager

Mark Steyn's CD Kemp Lecture has been re-printed in The Australian, and makes for some interesting reading. He takes a swing at Europe for its declining society:

The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility”, where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population.

From: It's breeding obvious mate (emphasis mine)

More disturbing is this piece towards the end:

...As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

The advantage Australians and Americans have is that most of the rest of the west is ahead of us: their canoes are already on the brink of the falls. But Australians who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world in which ever more parts of the map fall prey to the reprimitivization that’s afflicted Liberia, Somalia and Bosnia.

If it’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term, think short-term: Huge changes are happening now. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs and ever less civilizational confidence, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then western civilization will go the way of all others that failed to meet a simple test: as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1870, “Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”

Big Church = Big School

There is a classic argument about whether big churches are missing some intrinsic quality of a 'real' church. Proponents of smaller churches point out that they are more intimate, less focused on finances and more community oriented. Big church supporters point out that their better quality worship music can increase intimacy with God, that smaller churches are often unable to help others because they are cash-poor and that a bigger church has more people involved in every section of the community, from young to old, rich to poor.

It's an old argument, and one that has little scriptural basis for a decision either way. Jesus did not specify a church size, but he did deal with different size groups in different ways, from the crowds that followed him, to his close followers, his group of disciples and then individuals like Peter or Mary. The book of Acts talks about the different size churches, and historians tell us that some of them were quite large (in the thousands).

My take on this (currently) is that the big vs small church debate is much like the big vs small school debate. By this I don't mean that big schools are just like big churches, but rather the comparison of the relative merits of size for schools and churches is similarly loaded.

Some people want their kids at a small school, other like the resources available in a larger school. Some think a small school will encourage more mingling of kids, others think a larger school will help their kids find a niche for them. The debate then passes onto class sizes, styles of classroom, and so on ad infinitum ...

But let's be sensible for a moment, most of these issues fall into the "it depends" bucket. When is a school big? Well it depends upon the seize of the local community, the range of years the school covers, and what other local schools are like. When is big bad? Well it depends upon what you consider the best thing for your children at their current stage of life. Etcetera.

I think most people are most affected in this area by their own good/bad experiences, certainly I am. I went to a very large boarding school and hated it, I went to a smaller day school and loved it, when younger I went to a very small day school and found it boring ... so guess where I fall when it comes to debates about big vs small, and boarding vs day? However, my two youngest brothers loved boarding school - so I figure they will have a different point of view than me.

People seem to back big, or small, churches because of the same cognitive bias. Their experiences inform them of which they would prefer, and that becomes their default 'ideal' size. Some people take this to an extreme and formulate complicated theological explanations for why their preference is the 'right' one. Piffle.

Personally I think you've got to find a church you're willing to commit to, one where there is some accountability (both ways). That means taking into account the needs of all your family. It also means being willing to forgive when someone offends you, or being able to bend when someone imposes on you, and it certainly means allowing yourself to feel underwhelmed with church from time to time. Big or small, all churches are likely to confront you with similar issues - unless the church is so small that it's basically just your family (in which case it will have its own set of flaws). My advice? Choose your church like you would your kids' schools, by weighing the pros and cons, and then being willing to stick with that decision for the good of you all.

Why a blog about my Christian walk?

Well, firstly I like blogging, it can be cathartic, is always challenging and acts as a historical record of your public thinking. That last point is very interesting, I once had a wise pastor tell me that he felt he could never state his position on contentious issues without emphasising that this was his opinion at this time, given his own experiences and knowledge.

Covering such issues in a blog gives a record of how one's thinking changes, and is why I chose to emphasise that this blog is about my walk with God, that is, a chronicle of a journey. It also holds me accountable, which is an idea I find appealing, as I am as prone to changing my mind as anyone else.

Why call the blog Cracked Jug? It wasn't my first choice, those names are already taken, and I have too many blogs to want to name one after myself. Several years ago, just after becoming a Christian, I thought about getting a tattoo, and the image that most appealed was a cracked jug (something like an ancient amphora). To me that represented the way God had taken my life and put it back together when I became a Christian in my mid-20's. I never did get that tatt, but the appeal of the image remains with me.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting, and perhaps challenging. I know I will.

A metaphor for rebirth

Oinochoe image sourced from: Poggio Civitate Archaelogical Excavation

Real Men 06: Influence

Before I begin this post, I just want to say that Brad has had a successful operation and despite some early missteps, is on his way to recovery!

I don't want to take this blog too far off-topic, but I spent most of today at RealMen 06: Influence, this year's edition of the annual men's conference run by CCC Oxford Falls. As always, it was a struggle to make the time, spend the money and physically get myself there - but as always, it was well worth the effort. Some of it was so good, I decided it was worth talking about a little bit here.

Whilst there was a well-known international speaker, Frank Damazio, it was two of the Aussie speakers that really made my day ...

Melbournian Allan Meyer ran an awesome session on helping men maintain purity in their sexual world. He was funny, but more importantly he really helped men get a handle on how to avoid sexual temptation (outside of their marriage of course!). From his own doctorate studies he has developed the Valiant Man program:

“This 10 Session Program with study and devotional guide is designed to fortify and restore the moral and spiritual integrity of men. Valiant Man challenges all men to fight for their own personal, moral and spiritual vitality and help other men fight for theirs.”

Based on today's session, I expect the material in that course would be life-changing for many men.

At the other end of the spectrum, Perth native John Finkelde was very naughty (one session not recommended for women!), and immensely funny, but he was also worth listening to as he covered how to supply your wife's emotional needs, most especially by ensuring you “spill your guts” occasionally. But he had me in tears at several sections, sometimes because of his great humour, and other times because of his raw honesty in sharing his own battles with us. His church (CCC Hepburn Heights) also runs their own blog.