Skepticism

Is skepticism good? I think so, to a degree. I think the problem is that it is acceptable and even applauded to be skeptical of faith and spirituality, especially in America today, but if anybody is skeptical about science, "Whoa, c'mon. Science is truth."

I think it is funny how so many skeptics of religion point to the example of how Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for saying the earth revolved around the sun. This is not to me an example of the church trying to bury science. It is an example of the belief of the day driving social and political policies. Is not this exactly what the global warming scientists are trying to do. They condemn anyone with a different scientific opinion and their position is the norm that is driving the social and political movements of our day. The massive amounts of email from the leading scientists in the Global Warming field is one thing, but recently India has been releasing news that the head of their climate research team has been using weak, at best, data from an interview, not an actual experiment, to drive their political agendas.

So what am I trying to get at? Well, basically science is the observations of men, human beings. Humans can be wrong and this needs to be a starting point for all scientific research. It is called humility. Science is observation and observations can be tainted by so many different factors. This does not mean that science is wrong. Far from it. It just means that if you put your faith in science, and it is a faith, then you are putting your beliefs in the hands of men who screw things up. Men who have political agendas. Men who will condemn others who disagree with them.

I think we do ourselves a disservice by quickly putting people into certain analogous relationships and do not put everything in the proper context. I am not defending those in the church who condemned Galileo, but they were speaking for God. They were speaking from the place of political dominance. The Bible does not speak of whether or not the earth is the center of the universe, or if the sun is the center of the universe, or if there are other planets with life in the universe for one simple reason: it is not important to the message. The message is about how much God loves us, not about how God made us the center of the universe and told us that we are the only thing that matters or that the Pope should be the governor of the World.

So who has the social and political dominance now? Well, that can be a hard thing to tie down, but in the area of climate science it is the Global Warming crowd who say they have a consensus. Why wouldn't they want a Galileo to set them free to the realities of science if theirs was wrong. Maybe they just don't have the correct tools like scientists before Galileo, or maybe they want to maintain their dominance like the Heliocentrists in the 17th century.

Either way, if you are going to be skeptical of religion then you should be equally skeptical of science. Not because of science itself, for it is just an idea, but of the men who use, and abuse, it.

Rejoicing over his bride...

I was in chapel the other day and one of the readings was Isaiah 62: 1-5. The passage specifically speaks about the coming salvation of Israel, but what really caught my attention was verse 5. It reads, "For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you." Again, this passage is specifically talking about God saving His bride, but the phrase "and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride" made me pause because in this statement is not a description of what is going to happen, but an assumption of something that already happens.

I think this is important for me as a husband because I lose track many times of the incredible joy that I have in my life because of my wife and I should never forget to rejoice over my bride. It is easy to get distracted by life and frustrated with all the responsibilities that come (though I know I have relatively few), but like Proverb 5 says "Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth... be intoxicated always in her love."

I am still young and our marriage is still young, but I hope that the rejoicing and joy in our marriage only grows greater with time.

By the way I am going to make a shameless plug for my wife. If you have not checked it out Jacinda has a website with her photography on it. She also just opened an Etsy page at http://www.etsy.com/shop/jacindashields. She is a wonderful artist, so please check them out.

Advent

In the church we are still in the season of Advent as we prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus into this world. Last year I found a blog by a member of the band called Jars of Clay that he had set up to post Advent poetry to sit back and reflect on the coming Christ-child in this busy time of shopping and stress. I just checked that blog again and he has not updated it this year, but it still has all the poems that he posted last year so if you are interested it has some really good reflective poems. I thought I would just share one here.

That Holy Thing
by George MacDonald

They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes and lift them high;
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing
That made a woman cry.

O Son of Man, to right my lot
Naught but Thy presence can avail;
Yet on the road Thy wheels are not,
Nor on the sea Thy sail!

My how or when Thou wilt not heed,
But come down Thine own secret stair,
That Thou may’st answer all my need-
Yea, every bygone prayer.


The rest are at
http://adventpoetry.blogspot.com/

God Bless and Merry Christmas,
Matt

Misconceptions about the Bible

I wanted to comment on something that I have been hearing lately, actually with increasing regularity. It is the idea that the Bible as we known it was given to us by a group of white, Roman Catholic men. I am not considering here the authorship of the Bible; that is a completely different and in-depth topic all-together. But as far as what we call the canon of scripture this idea that a group of biased men put in and kept out the books they wanted has become increasingly popular.

The first problem is that many of the books in the Bible were already accepted hundreds of years before Emperor Constantine gathered church leaders from across the Roman Empire to "determine" the canon. Many churches in the first three centuries flat out accepted certain "books" (really letters) to be authoritative and felt little, if any, need to have a list of accepted scripture. The main criteria for the authority came from the author and his relationship to Jesus or to someone close to Jesus. For example Matthew was a disciple of Jesus and Mark was a companion of Peter, so directly connected to an eywitness. In the case of Paul not only did he have direct connection to many of the disciples of Jesus the Christian belief accepts that he had a vision from Jesus directly giving him the Gospel account. This vision might be hard to accept for many modern people, but in Acts we find that the first thing Paul did was ask the disciples if his vision was correct. So many of the letters and writings were already accepted as having divine authority because of the authors' conections with Jesus. But by the end of the 2nd century lists were being developed, though some disagreed on what to include.

This inclusion disagreement was only a minor dispute. All of the current books of the Bible were accepted by the first generations of Christians, but there were minor issues with books like Hebrews, James, and Revelation. The concerns were small and some churches just chose not to use them. In fact, Martin Luther did not like the book of James and wanted to cut it out of the Bible, but not liking what something says does not mean cutting it out. Again, the vast majority of Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD before the canon was developed already accepted the books of the Bible that we have today.

So what of exclusion? If the books we have were accepted from the word "go" then were any left out? Yes. There were letters and writings left out. This is evident in the talk over recent years of books like the Gospel of Thomas. But there is a huge problem with the writings that were left out, especially the Gospel of Thomas. I will use the Gospel of Thomas as an example because many of the books excluded were of the same vein. The Gospel of Thomas was not written by the disciple Thomas, this is a big point. It was written by a group that denied the supremacy of God along with many other major Christian beliefs, so if the Gospel of Thomas is put into the Bible it would not have any coherence along with the fact that is not written by Thomas or by a contemporary of Thomas or another disciple. Another Gnostic writing talks about a giant Jesus coming out of the tomb and a talking cross. Obviously these do not fit into the Biblical accounts.

Now with the misconception about the "Roman Catholic" part. The problem of looking back on history with modern eyes is that we bring to history our own experiences. Many people see the church, whether Roman or not, as the medieval Roman Catholic Church with the big cathedrals and the Pope. The first few centuries did not have these. In fact the first few centuries of Christianity Roman emperors killed and persecuted Christians. Christianity did not become the state religion until 380 AD. This is almost 60 years after the Nicene Creed was put together to codify the core Christian beliefs in response to the heresy of Arianism (that Jesus was created and not eternally God). The main reason for codifying the Bible was because of heresies like this. The leaders, and the lay-people, wanted to finally make a concrete list of what they can recommend to people to read and accept. The things that were left out were left out for very good reasons.

So if you have heard or believe that a bunch of white, Roman Catholic men manipulated the Bible to give us what they wanted to give us then at least this will give you some context and more understanding of the process. It is true that white men dominated the writing of western history, but that does not make it unreliable. As for the canon of the Bible it was accepted well before those old white guys put it into a list.

Only the Beginning...

I have putting this off for some time because I did not want to be just another person with just another blog. I also did not want to write a blog that is trying to change the world like so many political and religious blogs. I just wanted to have an outlet for some of my thoughts and have a place to put some of my ideas out in order to get some feedback. I really appreciate anyone who reads this and comments.

Another thing that I really wanted to do with blog is to promote some of the incredibly talented people around me. My wife Jacinda is a great photographer and I will try to post some of her stuff and get some links up of her website and Minnesota artists page. Also, my brother Nathan is an incredible musician and has some of his music on his myspace page at www.myspace.com/welcomenathanshields.

I might not post much very often right now because our computer just broke so I do not have daily access to computers, unless I go to the Luther campus library, but it is just too cold to do that everyday.

Jacinda's website is: jacindashields.weebly.com