Category: Evil

We Remember Them

Who do we remember? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Think back to famous first-century families you know of!

Okay. The first one many readers of this blog will think of is the holy family, Jesus and his Earthly parents along with his brothers and sisters. After that, you could think of the Herods perhaps, no doubt one of the most dysfunctional families ever. You could think of families in the disciples, though even then we really don’t know about those families. You might think of the Caesars.

Really, there aren’t too many that stand out. However, every family would want to be remembered. Every family would want their honor to continue throughout the ages.

Recently, I read something in one of the church fathers, and it was about Zechariah and Elizabeth and this thought just struck me then. That’s one of the other families we can think of if we know our Bibles. These were the parents of John the Baptist, after all.

Yet it wasn’t always like that.

These were seen as good people, but they had a strike against them. They were childless. Imagine how many times they might have tried to have a child, and yet as they grew older and older, this hope abandoned them. Not only that, but this was a priestly family. If Zechariah was faithfully serving, why was he being withheld one of the great blessings?

Did Zechariah ever see his fellow priests with their own children and wonder? Did he ever see their children with their own children later on and ask why he was childless? What was it like to see the years fade away and know that this wasn’t going to happen and his family line would die with him?

What of Elizabeth? Did she long to be a mother all her life? Little girls today grow up dreaming of being mothers. Was it the same for her? Did she get a blessing at her wedding like Ruth and Boaz did about having numerous children only to grow old with a man she loved, but yet knowing there was a time in her life when she just wouldn’t have a kid anymore?

Those of us who know the Bible story know differently.

Through a miracle of God, they who had been shamed did have a kid, a kid who was so important he is a major figure in the New Testament and was even mentioned by Josephus. This was none other than John the Baptist. While there’s no indication he ever had any kids let alone a wife, he does live on in the history to this day and we know about Zechariah and Elizabeth to this day.

The only priests we know about from that time are the ones that were famous, such as Caiaphas and ones like him. All the families that Zechariah and Elizabeth saw who had kids to ensure their names would not be forgotten were, well, forgotten.

This is something I keep in mind. God can change things even when there is hopelessness. It’s been easy to look around and wonder why God hasn’t given XYZ yet, but that does not mean never and while it’s true Zechariah and Elizabeth’s line ended with John the Baptist, their memory didn’t.

Part of the problem of evil does this today sadly. It looks at circumstances today and says the story is over. It isn’t. The game is still afoot and God can change situations tremendously.

Just something to give you some hope.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Book Plunge: In God We Doubt Conclusion

How shall we wrap this up? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In these last two chapters, we find Humphrys being rather charitable. For instance, the main point he wants to get across is how the new atheists want to say we would be better off without religion. John Lennon’s Imagine would have us all think the world would be a better place if we got rid of religion.

Not so fast. Humphrys rightly points out that when you look at the mass killings of people in the 20th century, it wasn’t religion that was largely responsible. It was Communism. When you look at the major wars that happened, religion could be a factor, but it was way down the list if it was.

How about those Muslim suicide bombers? They weren’t the first. It was the Tamil Tigers that came up with the suicide bomber strategy. That was a Marxist-Leninist group in Sri Lanka. He does say that Muslim bombers today are not reflecting mainstream Islam to which I want to say “How are they not?” After all, the first Muslim groups were hardly peaceful.

He also points out that some might say extreme religion is a danger, but materialism and consumerism is also a threat. What about all these kids who are wanting to go on apps like TikTok and become celebrities? What about a culture that wants more and more and more and yet is never happy?

This isn’t to say Humphrys is entirely positive about religion. He says that it’s not that religious people don’t have time to reason out their beliefs. They don’t want to. They don’t want to think about things that have been done in the name of God. His example of this is an alleged Roman Catholic who doesn’t even believe in the deity of Christ, but finds theism comforting.

It is true that God can be a great comfort, but I do not believe in God for comfort. I believe in Him because of the evidence. I am also not bothered by the “Christians have done evil in history.” Yeah. All of us have. That’s because we’re all fallen creatures. I don’t think we should ignore the question, but it’s not a defeater.

In the end, what do I think keeps Humphrys from believing? It’s not reason. He doesn’t really deal with any arguments for the existing of God in this book. If anything, his argument seems to be more emotional. He has a hard time with evil, but if he does, that should make it all the more reason for him to be a theist.

I think about a meme I saw an atheist share yesterday with a woman, presumably in Africa, holding a dead child and crying and for us to think about how easy it is to worship God when we’re not that woman. No doubt, that woman is suffering, but as I have argued before, take away God. What do you have? This is definitely a hypothetical as I think if you take away God, nothing can exist, but you still have the crying woman and the dead child.

The problem is still the same. What you have removed is hope. On Christian theism, there is a God who will deal justly in this situation. There is a God who can bring good out of evil. There is a God who can raise the dead. Atheism takes away the possibility of hope and still leaves the problem. How is that reasonable?

Keep in mind, I am not saying that that makes Christianity true, but it sure gives you reason to consider it seriously and to at least want it to be true on some level, especially if you say you care about the woman involved. If there is no greater source of justice and hope in the universe, well some people just get dealt a very bad hand of cards and it sucks to be you if you get that bad hand. Christianity has someone overseeing the game who will make sure justice will come out right in the end.

That should give us hope and also give us a degree of fear. Justice will come for us as well. We better make sure we are ready.

We can pray that Humphrys reconsiders his opinion. Perhaps those arguments really are better than what an inquisitive child can see through. Perhaps there really is a God who loves Him out there and can give hope and justice.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

False Common Knowledge: All Sin Is The Same In God’s Eyes

Does God really see all sin as the same? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

There are some ideas that are so commonly heard in the church that most of us never question them. The problem is that if we never question them, they are assumed at the start when really, there’s no basis for them. One common one is one I heard recently and it occurred to me I have never written about as far as I can remember. This is the idea that all sin is the same in God’s eyes.

Let’s suppose you never had a police record at all. Then one day you’re going down the interstate and you wind up going 20 MPH over the speed limit. An officer pulls you over and lo and behold, you no longer have a perfect record. It just takes one ticket to do that.

Let’s suppose again you never had a police record at all. Then one day your neighbor is playing loud music way too much and you go over to his house and when he opens the door you pull out a gun and shoot him several times in the chest resulting in his death. You go back over to your place thinking no one else saw you and no need to arouse suspicion, but you were heard and the police come over and arrest you. You no longer have a perfect record. One crime did that.

With sin, all it takes is one to remove a perfect record, but that does not mean that all the sins are the same any more than speeding and murder are the same.

In John 19:11, Jesus says to Pilate that the one who handed Him over is guilty of a greater sin. In the Gospels, Jesus also says the sin of blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven in this age or the age to come. He says that if someone leads a child to stumble, it would be better for him to have a millstone attached to him and be thrown into the sea.

In the epistles, Paul writes to the church in Corinth that is heavily messed up and calls them out for many sins, but when he gets to the man who is sleeping with his father’s wife, he says to hand this one over to Satan. He says that some have died because of how they handled the Lord’s Supper. He regularly has listings of sins that if one is practicing these shows that he is not of the kingdom.

If we look at the Old Testament, we see there were some sins that led to death and some that led to much lesser penalties. We see from Jesus that the Old Testament had some commandments that were greater than others. (Which wouldn’t make much sense if all sins were the same.) We also see the dilemmas caused with the question of Rahab and the Hebrew midwives lying. If all sins are the same, then does it really matter?

I really can think of no Scripture that gives any indication that all sins are the same. Somehow, we got this idea and it has been spoken so much that we have come to believe it. It just isn’t so. We should strive to avoid all sins to be sure, but that does not mean all sins are the same.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: In God We Doubt Part 13

Are we just serving our genes? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this chapter, Humphrys makes a list of heroic people and why they did what they did. An atheist like Richard Dawkins will write that we are living in service of our selfish genes. It’s a reversal of sorts of the Christian view. In our view, we are doing what we do in service of God, but in the atheist view, it is in service of ourselves. (Not sure how aborting your children works with that considering they can’t pass on any more genes for you or sterilizing your children through “gender-affirming care”, but that’s another point.)

But Humphrys doesn’t think this works. He talks about the Virginia Tech shooting as one example. Liviu Librescu, a 76 year-old math teacher, held the door shut so his students could escape through the windows knowing this would lead to his death. On another aside, it is disappointing that in these cases, many of us can bring to mind the shooter, but not the heroes that held back the shooter to some extent. Was Librescu doing this to serve his genes?

Humphrys doesn’t find this credible, and again, I agree. In a sense, genes have become a sort of god for Dawkins and others who go this route. Whatever the genes are commanding, this must be obeyed. This is not to say that we don’t have base desires that we all fall prey to. If we didn’t, there wouldn’t be a problem with obesity, broken marriages, STDs, etc. in our world today.

Humphrys goes on to list a number of heroes and it’s worth reading this chapter just to hear what their stories are. Too often when we think about evil, we ask what is it that makes evil people do what they do? Could it perhaps be better to ask “What is it that makes good people do what they do?” and then find ways to make that far more likely to happen? Just a long shot here, but maybe we should consider the virtues that lead to people doing that and celebrate those virtues and condemn the vices that go the other way.

However, there is an unfortunate statement in this chapter in that Humphrys concludes that atheists have the best arguments. What they don’t have is a grasp of what it is that makes human beings what we are. I agree with the latter, but I definitely disagree with the former.

On the latter point, could we not consider that if atheists don’t have that, could that lead to the idea that man is more than just a material being? Could it lead to the idea of essences and substances? Could it lead to a soul, a spirit, or something of that sort? Would this not be a problematic position for atheism to explain anyway? If human beings are just material objects and we have been studying matter for so long and have personal experience with this matter, shouldn’t we have a good idea of what we are?

However, throughout this book, there has been little attention paid to theistic arguments. Even in the chapter featuring Craig, the only response given was that it was nonsense, all of it, and then Humphrys goes on to criticize Craig instead of asking his side how they can better answer Craig. I don’t see the Thomistic arguments ever dealt with nor do I see the philosophers used that have taken on the problem of evil.

Humphrys then is too dismissive. It seems that evil is just something that controls his thinking and that is the real draw. How can a good God allow evil? The problem is this is often a much more emotional argument than a rational one. We see this when Humphrys says that when a cab driver murders his wife and four children, that overpowers an argument.

Could it be atheists actually have the more emotional opinion?

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: In God We Doubt Part 12

Does Humphrys understand evil and morality? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We’re on the final section of this book. Humphrys begins this with talking about evil, the card he seems to play most often. He talks about the case of a taxi driver  who murdered his wife with a baseball bat. Then he went upstairs, got one of his four small children and took her downstairs and murdered her. Then he did the rest with his other three children.

From here, Humphrys goes on to tell us about theodicies, which are said to be how to justify the ways of God to men, a term I don’t care for. It assumes that God needs to be justified. Still, it has been around a long time and if you mean an answer to the problem of evil, it is fine.

However, he says for those who take a less intellectual approach, the cries of a child resonate more than an elegant argument. This is a quite telling statement. At the start of this book. Humphrys said anyone with the mind of an inquisitive child can see the God arguments fail. Now at the end, he is saying those who do not go the intellectual route are more persuaded by the case of this murder.

Yet at the same time, if there is no God, then ultimately, what this taxi driver did doesn’t matter in the long run. If he was never caught, he got away with it. There will never be justice for the woman and her children. They will never enjoy life again. If there is a God, and especially the Christian God, there is no free pass for this man. He will face judgment. Even if he repents, the consequences of his action will carry over into eternity still.

Later, Humphrys will speak of the view of theists that atheists could develop a moral code, but without God, there is no way of knowing good from evil. Humphrys says that this is rubbish. How is that so many societies who didn’t know that this monotheistic God existed still produce a moral code very similar in many ways to what is had today?

Once again, Humphrys is someone who does not know what the argument is and if anything, his objection actually DEMONSTRATES the claim of theism. No one is saying you have to have knowledge of God to know right from wrong. Scripture even argues in Romans 2 that all men know this because God has placed it on their hearts in some way.

What the argument claims is that if God does not exist, there is no metaphysical basis for good or evil. (Actually, there’s no metaphysical basis for anything, but that’s another post.) Good and evil as ideas make no sense apart from God. As Dostoyevsky said, if there is no God, anything goes. One does not need to know of this God to know good from evil, but this God needs to be for the knowledge to be there.

Right now, I am also reading The Plague by Camus where he attempts to answer the claims of someone like Dostoyevsky by having a plague in a city killing multiple people and so the city is sealed off from the outside world. The hero is a doctor who does not believe in God, and yet he goes about trying to relieve the suffering of the people of the city. Therefore, God is not needed for morality.

The problem is this is still the world and in this world, good and evil still exist and you don’t have to be a theist to believe in those. However, giving a metaphysical basis is different. What is this good? Why should I think the doctor is the hero? Why should I see him as the good guy?

He also says in America, that some Christians are so convinced of the evils of abortion that some doctors fear their lives due to what has happened to their unfortunate colleagues. It is difficult for us to think of people who have been bombing abortion clinics. For me, just one name comes to mind. These are by and far the exception. Of course, Humphrys doesn’t really give a reason why abortion should be allowed and while I don’t agree with murder in response, I do agree that abortion is a great evil, one of the worst actually.

He also asks if theists can produce a moral code atheists can agree to. He thinks there are plenty of rules that we could all get along with, but then says that even Jimmy Carter said that he has lusted in his heart in an interview. He says this caused a stir in the Baptist community, but why should it? Does anyone really think they haven’t committed this sin, especially my fellow men? Besides this, a moral code should be something you strive to live up to. It should not be easy.

He then produces his own moral code that he says our more enlightened society should embrace to put to death the fundamentalist mindset. On top of the list is homosexuality is not a sin. If all he said was the temptation is not a sin, I would agree, but if he means the behavior, he needs to give me a reason why I should think this. We can talk all we want about how progressive and enlightened we are in society, but when you look at the rate of STDs and of broken families and fatherless children, does anyone think we are really better off?

What a shock that the next one is a woman should be allowed abortion as long as the rules of society are followed. Here we have a talk of enlightened society and what do you know? The first two rules are about sex. Why am I not surprised?

He also says there is hardly a soul alive he is sure who does not regret some sexual adventure. Humphrys must not know a lot of people. I could introduce him to several. Odds are, you can as well.

He then goes on to give a study of the trolley problem where atheists and theists by and large gave the same example and someone like Dawkins uses this to show you don’t need God to know right from wrong. What is missed is that as someone like Tom Holland has pointed out in Dominion, this is because also there is a background Christianity in us all. Would Dawkins be appalled by some of what he would see in ancient Greece and Rome? Quite likely. He and Humphrys make the same mistake again. They think that you have to be religious in order to have epistemology here, when the claim is not an epistemological one, but a metaphysical one. This is one of the most common mistakes in atheist argumentation that I see them making left and right.

They never learn.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: In God We Doubt Part 7

What is Humphrys looking for? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We’re moving ahead now to where Humphrys starts doing interviews. In this, he interacts with a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim. To his credit, he brings on people who are informed about what they believe. WIll he find God doing this?

Doubtful, especially since at the start he says he doesn’t want to convert to Judaism any more than he wants to be a Muslim or recover his Christianity, but he would like to believe in God. But why? What benefit does he get from this? Is God just a means to an end? Will Humphrys feel better about himself if he has God?

If he finds the Christian God, for instance, that will mean repentance. That will mean humility. That will mean he has to accept that God has a good reason for allowing the evil that he complains about. If he accepts Islam, will he be willing to embrace all of the teachings and follow Muhammad as a prophet? Is he prepared to have his good and bad deeds weighed out on the scales? For Judaism, it will depend on the branch, but there’s not much emphasis from what I see usually on an afterdeath.

Humphrys gives no reason, though he admits it sounds pathetic.

But if you only want God as a means to an end for you, it’s not a shock if you don’t find Him. Why think He will let Himself be used?

One big issue he has for his interviewees is evil. This is Humphrys #1 argument against God. Now I have said before that I don’t understand what you gain from the problem of evil if you remove God. The problem is still there and you get rid of a solution of hope to the problem.

Humphrys says that most tyrants seem to die peacefully on their beds. Hitler could have had he not gone after Russia and just stayed in his own land. For Humphrys, this dispels the idea that virtue is its own reward and that God is merciful.

For the first, why would Humphrys want to be virtuous? It is not so he can please God obviously. Is he just wanting to please his fellow man? Does Humphrys do good purely because he benefits from it? These tyrants certainly didn’t care what anyone else thought of them, unless they wanted to kill them. What makes Humphrys different in the long run?

For the second, God is only merciful if He deals with evil on Humphrys timescale? Who says? If Christianity is true, God is merciful to all of us as we all deserve death right now. Of course, Humphrys would likely say he doesn’t deserve that as he’s generally a good person. What about all those evil people though?

Because it’s always someone else’s evil that needs to be dealt with. Whenever I hear atheists complain about evil, they are complaining about what other people do. They are not complaining about what they do.

Rowan Williams is shown in the interview of saying that with God, there is always hope. Of course, this is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t understand the concept of Heaven or especially of resurrection. If you think death is the end of the story, then obviously the story is terrible sometimes. Williams’s view is that it is not the end.

That doesn’t mean those words are always helpful to parents who have lost a child to cancer, but arguments aren’t the purpose of that. Charity is. This is when you come alongside and listen.

Humphrys also said that Abraham was presented with a choice that God said “If you believe in me, you must sacrifice your child.” We can question the premise, but even if we go with it, note something important. Isaac never died. It was just to show how much Abraham believed in the promise that through Isaac his covenant of offspring would be fulfilled. Abraham had to believe that either God would stop it or else He would raise Isaac from the dead.

Sacks, the rabbi, also tells Humphrys that if Humphrys didn’t have faith, he wouldn’t ask the question. I think faith is being misunderstood, but I get at what Sacks is asking. The question is asked because you expect there to be an answer. Why? If this was an atheistic universe, well, it’s just some people are going to get the short straw and tough luck it turned out to be you. You can be comforting and kind to someone suffering, but there’s really no meaning in their suffering nor any ultimate hope.

Humphrys says Sacks ultimately says that if it happened, there must be a reason why it happened and God will use it for good. Can you argue with that? Humphrys says no, which is the problem for the problem of evil. The one using it has to demonstrate that there is no good reason for God to allow evil XYZ. Quite a tall order. Not only that, he also has to deal with all the positive arguments for God’s existence, which thus far Humphrys never does.

Thus far then, color me unconvinced.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: Ready Player Two

What do I think about Ernest Cline’s sequel? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I don’t think it’s possible to talk about this without some spoilers so you have been warned. This is one of those books I have been reading just for fun as I am trying to get more fiction in my literary diet. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie Ready Player One and so I was glad to see when the sequel was available on Kindle for cheap.

As pertains to content, I still prefer the first story. In this second one, Wade, the main character, finds out that as the heir of Halliday, that Halliday left for the world a headset that one could use to log into the virtual world of the OASIS and it is up to Halliday’s heir to decide if he wants to mass produce and market this or not. The headset isn’t just a device to watch, but also a neural uplink. Wade does introduce it to the world, but the biggest critic of this decision is his then-girlfriend Samantha from the last movie.

Then along the way, a new quest is released like in the first one to find the seven shards of the siren’s soul. That quest is going okay until a threat rises up within the system of an AI that has gone rogue and decided that the seven pieces must be gathered for his own purposes. Wade and his friends then find themselves on a quest to get the shards in time and also find a way to defeat the AI.

Those are all the spoilers I want to give and I think they’re necessary. What strikes me again in looking at this is here we have the problem of technological geniuses creating an AI and lo and behold, the AI turns against its creators and decides it has its own plans. This seems to happen in every science fiction scenario involving it, but somehow, we’re the exception.

There is no doubt that science has been a means of bringing great blessings into our lives, but it has also brought great destruction into our lives. We can live in fear of nuclear weapons being used because we invented them. Whatever you think of the Covid situation, it was produced in a lab and had devastating effects around the world.

We are often told of the evils of religion, but what is really evil is the misuse of religion. Religion used for good does great things, such as fine charity work across the world and the love of one’s neighbor. Religion used for evil can have devastating consequences just as much, like 9/11.

In every scenario, the real culprit is the same actually. Us. Any good thing can be used just as much for evil. The problem is not the tool. The problem is the person using the tool. Science and religion in the hands of good men can be used for good. In the hands of evil men, it can be used for evil.

But let’s also include foolish men.

There are people in religion who are quite foolish, even in my own evangelical tradition. There are plenty of people who are sure they are called to ministry of some kind, but they don’t have the first clue how to do it and they think it’s unspiritual to get an education in what they study. Shouldn’t God just tell them everything? They’re not evil. They mean well. They just cause great destruction.

In the same way, there are plenty of people in science who aren’t evil at all. They could just have a lot of pride or foolishness, just like the person in religion, and think they can handle whatever happens. Both of them make great errors in judgment that affect not only them, but others as well.

It’s good to know we’re different, isn’t it?

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Good Friday and Evil

What has Good Friday to do with evil? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Imagine if the Democratic National Committee got together every November and remembered the day when John Kennedy was murdered and called that Good Friday. It wouldn’t make sense to us. One would think most Democrats would see this day as a tragedy. Heck. Many Republicans who would not support Kennedy would still say the president being assassinated as a tragedy.

However, every year Christians get together and think about the day that Jesus was crucified and call that Good Friday. Of course, one could say that Jesus did rise again, yet that is a reason why one would call the day of resurrection good. That makes sense. Why call this day good? Wouldn’t it make more sense to call it Dark Friday or Black Friday or something of that sort?

Many people reject Christianity because of the problem of evil. On an emotional level, one can understand why this is troublesome. Most of us do what we can to avoid suffering. It’s easy in suffering to ask where God is, yet one could ask why do we do that? God never promised us everything would be perfect.

It could be often we have an entitlement idea in our minds. We are owed a good life aren’t we? When I talk about the problem of evil, I do bring up something like this. The first point I want to ask about is “Does God owe use anything?” If anything is owed us, it is justice for what we have done.

It’s not like we gave God any special benefits when we showed up on the scene. One can say the devil was the first sinner and rightfully so, and yes, we listened to the temptation, but we still did the wrong in the end and we bear the responsibility and we have all been suffering the effects of that since then and the creation God made has suffered.

So yeah, we were given a great gift and we committed treason against the giver and decided to take it for ourselves.

Still want to talk about what we deserve?

God could have left us alone in that. He could have abandoned everything and still had immense joy within Himself for all eternity. We don’t better Him. We don’t bring Him more joy.

We were owed nothing, after all. He could have done this. No one could charge Him with doing anything wrong.

This is not what happened. God somehow chose to enter into our suffering. God chose to live a life where He came as a baby who had to pass through the birth canal and came out bloody and needing to be cleaned regularly and would poop his diapers and wet Himself and everything. He would be absolutely helpless and dependent on His parents.

In fantasy, we can easily understand the concept of a deity or deities coming to live in the world. Having them come as a baby is not how we normally picture it. They come in power and glory or if they do come in a weakened state, they’re at least capable of fighting right at the start and build themselves up with acts of glory defeating their villains.

The closest we get to Jesus as a fighter is Him making a whip and even then, He’s not taking on gangs of Pharisees at that point.

Jesus came in a way no one would notice who He was immediately and lived an ordinary life, a life that would still have suffering. Isaiah 53 describes Him as a man of sorrow, familiar with suffering, hardly the way you would want to describe the coming of your deity. This is just the beginning.

Jesus came to die and came to die not just a death, but the worst possible death at the time. It was not just a death, but a shameful and painful and enduring death. It was public and everyone would know about it. It would be unable to be separated from the Christian account, hardly the best motivator to get people to join your movement.

What is amazing about this and evil is that somehow, God entered the suffering we went in. No. I’m not talking about the idea of Patripassianism where somehow, God the Father suffered on the cross. There is no doubt that God the Son suffered. How this works entirely, I will not claim to understand.

What is known is that Jesus didn’t remain aloof from evil. He entered into it. He lived it. He took it on when He had no requirement to do so. It was an act of love.

It’s odd to say that evil is an objection to Christianity. Evil is part and parcel of the story. If there is no evil, there is no crucifixion and there is no resurrection.

Good Friday is good then because this is where the battle took place and Jesus took on the suffering and justice for us. Jesus demonstrated the love He has for the creation. At the same time, He demonstrated the love He has for the Father which in turn shows how the Father loves us.

It is sad to think about what happened on this day. It is a great evil that was done that day. What we learn from Christianity is that this evil was reversed. The promise is also that all evils will be reversed someday. Arguing against Christianity because of evil is a way of really removing hope of overcoming evil while still keeping the evil. It doesn’t make sense.

Today, we celebrate Good Friday. We mourn the evil that we have done, but we celebrate the love God has for us. We look forward to the resurrection on Sunday, and we look forward to the resurrection of all creation in the end.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

A Question on Violence and Gaming

How do I answer an objection like this? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Since I have a YouTube channel dedicated to gaming and theology, a niche I saw very few people addressing, it’s not to be a surprise when someone shoots me a question. A husband and wife I am good friends with wanted to ask me one. It goes as follows and I am quoting:

So I was wondering something based on your work with video games. I have an acquaintance from a Christian group who has a Twitch account streaming video games. (This person prides himself on being a conservative Christian and has been on his wife for being too theologically liberal). He invited some of us to tune in and I checked it out. He was playing a game I’d never heard of called “Resident Evil”. Within 30 seconds, I heard over the top vulgar language and saw a character being tortured to death. Is this the kind of game that’s common among the Christian gaming community?

Good question.

Now at the start, I have never played Resident Evil, though I am trying to get into Bioshock because of the rich philosophical themes, not because I just enjoy first-person shooters. However, I did really enjoy Goldeneye back in the day. Everyone did.

That doesn’t mean I don’t know about Resident Evil and have never seen gameplay about it. However, when I hear at the start that there was torture and vulgar language, I don’t stop immediately. It’s easy to make a hard and fast rule, but two things give me pause.

As I told them, when I was in high school, I remember being in English and the teacher showed us a movie. We had to watch it in more than one class as it was a long movie, but I do remember we saw full nudity in women. You could see a woman in a bed completely topless. I remember there was a lot of violence. People were being killed constantly. There were then scenes with several women totally nude. Keep in mind I didn’t grow up in a liberal area. I grew up in the Bible belt.

However, I bet most children in the class that if they went home and said they had watched this movie, their parents would not be concerned. They would ask what they thought. It would lead to a good discussion. I’ll go further. If I ever get blessed with children, I will want them to watch this movie one time at least when they are old enough.

The movie was Schindler’s List.

If you have a hard and fast rule against anything like what was described in the question above, you will be prone to miss this movie, and yet it is a classic. It points to a great period of evil in our history and something we need to talk about. If you look at the women who are nude and just think about sex, you have a serious problem.

Lately also, I have seen people saying that if we object to Drag Queens and certain books in our schools, then we should object to the statue of David. After all, he is fully nude. The difference here is that the intent of David is not to be sexual, but to show the glory of the human body. It is not to sexualize David. The intent of porn and many of these books is to sexualize.

Another reason this gives me pause is because I think of what skeptics say, especially about the book of Judges. Consider Judges 19 where you have a gang rape take place and then the body of the victim is cut into pieces and sent to the tribes of Israel. Skeptics ask how something this awful can be included in the Bible.

Yet this whole section is also about how wicked Israel was at the time and the consequences of living in an ungodly society when there was no godly king. It is not to celebrate the time. It is to say “Don’t be like this time!”

Thus, when it comes to these games, I make no hard and fast rule for the most part. If it leads you to sin, don’t do it. If it doesn’t, then the only thing to really consider is how other people might see it. That should be kept in mind.

Some people might play Resident Evil (RE) because they enjoy the gameplay and they enjoy the puzzle solving and the skill involved in playing a shooter game. That doesn’t mean that these people will become mass shooters.

Some people will point to school shooters, but many of these actually did not play video games. An example of this is the shooting at Virginia Tech where the student was known for not playing games. It could be this made him an outsider to the culture of people who were gamers and thus could actually be a warning sign.

If first-person shooter games were the cause of these kinds of violent outbreaks, then we would expect that there would be far more outbreaks than there are. There aren’t. The overwhelming majority of people who play these games will never kill anyone with a gun in real life.

I read a book on audio recently that talked about a lady named Daphne Maurer who was doing research on vision and at the university was looking for some guinea pigs for the tests. The only people there were the video gamers in the computer lab because, well, nerds hang out at the university. These people were playing first-person shooters and when given the vision tests, they aced them incredibly.

What Maurer found over time was that people who played these games consistently tend to have better vision. After all, you have to survey a whole area and watch for any movement and know it well and you have to be able to get a shot in quickly if a target shows up and quickly identify if they are a friend or a foe. These people learned how to do that.

Ultimately, and this said in light of the very recent school shooting in Nashville, the problem is actually not the guns. The old saying is true. Guns don’t kill people. People do. They will use any weapon whatsoever. At the start of Bioshock, your main weapon is a wrench. The largest mass killings done in America were done with planes and with trucks with fertilizer.

The problem is us. We are sinful people. The sexual revolution has especially raised the breakdown of the family where those good moral beliefs were supposed to be taught. Many of us who are gamers like myself want to avoid real-life violence. I will break to avoid hitting a squirrel while driving. If anything, a lot of us want to overcome evil. Edward Snowden even said his exposing of government surveillance came from playing video games.

There are plenty of good books on this. I recommend Moral Kombat: Why The War On Violent Video Games is Wrong and Grand Theft Childhood. I ultimately contend that the best solution is to restore the value of human life and to restore the family and undo the sexual revolution.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Armageddon Part 5

Why is the book of Revelation so violent? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We’re continuing our look at Ehrman’s latest book talking about the violence in the book. At the start, he does say a statement about the Old Testament that is worth repeating.

Many Christians admit they are just not that interested in the Old Testament because its teachings have been surpassed and even superseded by the coming of Jesus and because, well, they find it boring. I wonder what its author would say about that.

There is a lot of truth here. We need to remember the Old Testament is just as much Scripture as is the new. It was the Scripture of the original church and it’s still our Scripture today.

But to the Old Testament we go to talk about the violence. if you expect interaction with people like Flannagan and Copan, you will be disappointed. Walton is not mentioned either. If you want to see Ehrman interact with the other side, it’s not here.

Ehrman paints the picture as if the Israelites were going to these cities and they were just peacefully living out their lives and the Israelites show up and say “God wills it!” and destroy everyone involved. He uses the example of Jericho, which is fitting since this is the most graphic, but it is also not representative. It needs to be established what Jericho was.

For one thing, it could not be that big since Israel could walk around it seven times in one day. Most of these cities were not cities but forts. These would be where the military would be and not the places of women and children. Also, from Rahab, we see that the people knew what had happened and this wasn’t exactly a sneak attack. They encamped outside the city for a week. Anyone could leave if they wanted.

He also brings up the account of the Moabites and the Midianites. In this, the Moabite women come and seduce Israel into sexual immorality. Moses responds by having the leaders of the people killed. Ehrman depicts this as human sacrifice, but this is not what it is. Even if it is done to stop the wrath of God, it is done out of justice in that the people who did the wrongs are put to death for what they did in accordance with the Law.

We are told 24,000 Israelites die and not just those who did the wrong but the innocent. The problem is the text doesn’t say that. It just says 24,000 died. It doesn’t say who they were. Even if they did not participate, this is a collectivist society and each person was responsible not just for himself, but for his neighbor as well. The sin of one could be seen as the sin of all.

Ehrman also speaks with horror about the way that Phineas put a spear through Zimri and Kosbi. What is left out is that this is after judgment had started and the people were weeping. This wasn’t done in private, but was done publicly as the man brought her with him publicly and the text is unclear at least in English, but it looks like they went into the Tent of Meeting, which is a holy place. This is an act of open defiance. Phineas is praised for killing both of them with one thrust of a spear while they were having sex. Violent? Yes, but sin is violent and destructive.

Ehrman is one who complains about evil, but when God does something about evil, he complains about that as well.

Of course, this gets to Numbers 31. I have already written about that here and here.

He also talks about the wrath of God in Hosea and how infants will be dashed to pieces and pregnant women ripped open. Why is God doing this?

Answer: He isn’t. God has laid out the stipulations of the covenant with His people. If they do not obey His covenant, He removes His protection. What happens then? Their enemies have their way and this is what their enemies do. Is God supposed to overrule them somehow so they can do everything else but that? Should the children be made invincible and the pregnant women’s stomachs be indestructible? Ehrman doesn’t answer such questions. Outrage is enough.

Ehrman tells us that when people read the Bible, they tend to see what they want to see. This is true, but it includes Ehrman as well. He wants to depict God as violent. Easy to do. Just cherry-pick some passages and ignore everything to the contrary. It would be just as easy to do the opposite.

He says this is true of laypeople, but it is also true of Christian scholars who see nothing wrong with God destroying people forever in a lake of fire.

Well, it’s Ehrman’s responsibility to show this. Outrage is not enough. Now I don’t think the lake of fire is literal, but is it wrong for God to judge and take life? Why? On what basis? What is the moral code that God is obligated to follow? I can also assure Ehrman that Christian scholars have wrestled with these issues. Unfortunately, we can’t say if Ehrman is aware of these claims since he never cites them. Has he considered Jerry Walls’s dissertation on Hell, for instance?

God is above our understanding of ethics and right and wrong. Whatever he does is right by definition. It would certainly not be right for my next-door neighbor to inject scorpion venom into someone’s veins and allow them to suffer in anguish for five months, refusing to put them out of their misery when they begged to die. And no one could justify a tyrant who chose to torture his people and then throw them into a vat of burning sulfur. But God is not my next-door neighbor or an earthly tyrant, and so he cannot be judged by human standards. If God does such things in the book of Revelation, who are we, mere mortals, to object? We simply cannot judge the Almighty.

But this is an important distinction. We are moral agents put in a universe where we have rules of right and wrong to follow. God is not. There are things God can do that I cannot do. God owes no one life and has all right to take it if He wants to. I do not.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that Ehrman regularly says we shouldn’t read Revelation in a literalistic fashion, but when he wants to depict God as violent, that’s exactly what He does.

It is somewhat ironic that so many readers of Revelation think, as I did, that the God portrayed there is above all human sense of right and wrong. Most of these same readers also believe that our own sense of right and wrong has been given to us by God. This , as you probably know, is a commonly invoked “proof” that God exists. According to this argument, if there were no superior moral being who created us, we could not explain why we have such an innate knowledge of what is good and bad behavior. Our morality, it is argued, must be rooted in the character of God, given to us as creatures made in his image, whether we choose to follow our God-given sense of morality or not.

It is worth pointing out that first off, Ehrman speaks of this as a “proof” of God, but He never shows where it is wrong. He never shows where our ideas of good and evil come from. I also want to say that is not the way I make the argument. I do not say a superior moral being made us. I said a superior good being made us. God is good, but He is not moral. Morality is doing what you ought to do, but God has no ought. God just does what is good. If something is moral, it is good, but just because something is good, that does not mean you have an obligation to do it. It might be good to sell all you have and give it all to the poor (Or it might be foolish), but that doesn’t mean you are morally obligated to do it. It might be good to leave a generous tip that is double what the waitress served you, but you are not morally obligated to do it. It might be good to pay the widow’s electric bill, but you are not morally obligated to.

But if our own sense of right and wrong reveals the character of God, what if God’s moral code requires him to torture and destroy those he disapproves of, those who refuse to become his slaves? (“Torture” is not too strong a word here: Remember those locusts.) 7 If God is like that, and we are told to be “godly” people — told to imitate God in our lives — then surely it follows that we should imitate him in how we treat others. If God hates those who refuse to be his slaves and hurts and then destroys them, shouldn’t we do so as well? Are we to act “godly” or not? And what does it mean to be Christlike if Christ’s wrath leads to the destruction of nearly the entire human race? Are we really to be “imitators of Christ”? Should we, too, force our enemies to suffer excruciating pain and death?

It’s amazing how wrong someone can be in an argument. For one thing, God does not have a moral code. Ehrman will never define what is meant by good and evil. Good then simply becomes that which Ehrman likes and evil, that which Ehrman doesn’t like.

However, I also want to know what is the context in which we are told to be godly and Christlike. I can be told to be godly, but surely I am not supposed to be able to create a universe. I can be told to be Christlike, but that doesn’t mean that I can claim divine prerogatives for myself. I can say I have a mentor I want to be like, but I would not be justified in sleeping with his wife and raising his children.

He also says Jesus is seeking vengeance on those who had nothing to do with his death, but this is embracing the futurist paradigm that Ehrman said is NOT the way to read Revelation. In my Preterist understanding, this took place as judgment on the Roman Empire and especially Jerusalem in 70 AD, which were involved in the death of Jesus and had not repented. Of course, Ehrman has no inkling shown that he is aware of such a view.

In the end, I find this still confusing. Ehrman condemns a futuristic reading of the text and treating it literalistically, but when he wants to condemn the text, that is exactly what he goes to. Ehrman still gives us the sound of one hand clapping. He presents a strong case, but rather a largely emotional one, but shows no indication he has interacted with the best of his critics.

We will continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)