Worldview seeks to answer two main questions:
1. What is the nature of man?
2. What is the nature of God?
We will deal with the first now.
In two books, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, two different types of natures are described. In Frankenstein man, the monster, is basically good and corrupted by society over the course of the book. In Dr. Jekll and Mr. Hyde a man tries to seperate his good side and his bad side. It backfires when his bad side is created and formed a new man, but his good side is still corrupted too. In that book men are basically evil and individuals are responsible.
I'm gonna make a pretty hefty claim now.
Christianity is the ONLY worldview that assumes that man is basically evil.
Now I know what you are thinking. You have already made a list of other religions that assume that man is evil. These might include:
1. Jewish
2. Morman
3. Muslim
4. Jehovah's Wittness
Well let's look at them then!
1. In the Jewish faith you are required to maintain certain parts of the law in order to make it to heaven. These include sacrifices. If man is able to do anything good on his own then he is not totally evil, and can therefore save himself.
2. Mormons believe that everyone goes to some eternity. You mus work hard to become good enough to go to the good place though and must not be wholly evil.
3. Muslims believe that, even if you are not part of the faith, your good deeds and your bad feeds will be put on a scale and if you have at least 50.0000000001% good deeds then you make it to heaven. This implies that man can become mostly good and this is ridiculous.
4. Jehovah's Wittnesses that Jesus died for us, but God can chose not to accept that ransom. You will only be acceptable if you are good enough to make it in.
"For the wages of sin is Death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
--Romans 6:23
In Christianity man is totally incapable of doing anything not sinful before salvation. This means that we are not only evil, we are TOTALLY evil. The Bible says that men don't even desire salvation. It is all God. We are totally helpless until he decides to save us.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Charting Worldviews
Charting Worldviews
In this section we will look at the key points of Christianity vs every other religion, or the world for short.
MAN
Christianity:
-Man is basically evil. This means that we are born totally sinful and incapable of doing ANYTHING not sinful until we are changed by God. (Explained in Law Breakers, coming later)
-Total depravity. This means that we are completely helpless and unable to save ourselves.
-We are called to tell people the bad news. They need to know the bad news before they can hear the good news.
The world:
-Man is basically good. This means that we are born good and corrupted by society. This allows people to blame society for all the stupid stuff they do while still taking credit for doing anything of value.
GOD
Christianity:
-God is infinitely gracious and perfectly holy. The God of the Bible. Yes, he is gracious and holy even when destroying cities. (that is explained in The Power of Doubt coming later)
-The trinity exists.
The World:
-No, He is not.
THE UNIVERSE
Christianity:
-Genesis and John accurately describe Creation.
The World:
-No they don't. Jews will say that Genesis describes creation, but John doesn't.
TRUTH
Christianity:
-Truth is in the Bible. This means that the Bible is the ultimate source or truth and takes authority over any other "truth". No other "truth" has ever been able to disprove any part of the Bible.
The World:
-Truth is in man. That has to be a sad way to live! "You must find your own truth and purpose."
He had three other points (Morality, Family, and Politics) but he ran out of time talking about these.
In this section we will look at the key points of Christianity vs every other religion, or the world for short.
MAN
Christianity:
-Man is basically evil. This means that we are born totally sinful and incapable of doing ANYTHING not sinful until we are changed by God. (Explained in Law Breakers, coming later)
-Total depravity. This means that we are completely helpless and unable to save ourselves.
-We are called to tell people the bad news. They need to know the bad news before they can hear the good news.
The world:
-Man is basically good. This means that we are born good and corrupted by society. This allows people to blame society for all the stupid stuff they do while still taking credit for doing anything of value.
GOD
Christianity:
-God is infinitely gracious and perfectly holy. The God of the Bible. Yes, he is gracious and holy even when destroying cities. (that is explained in The Power of Doubt coming later)
-The trinity exists.
The World:
-No, He is not.
THE UNIVERSE
Christianity:
-Genesis and John accurately describe Creation.
The World:
-No they don't. Jews will say that Genesis describes creation, but John doesn't.
TRUTH
Christianity:
-Truth is in the Bible. This means that the Bible is the ultimate source or truth and takes authority over any other "truth". No other "truth" has ever been able to disprove any part of the Bible.
The World:
-Truth is in man. That has to be a sad way to live! "You must find your own truth and purpose."
He had three other points (Morality, Family, and Politics) but he ran out of time talking about these.
Friday, June 15, 2012
As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God.
The following is an actual article that appeared in the london times, written by Matthew Paris.
Reposted from:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. âPrivatelyâ because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: âtheirsâ and therefore best for âthemâ; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the âbig manâ and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? âBecause it's there,â he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
Reposted from:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. âPrivatelyâ because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: âtheirsâ and therefore best for âthemâ; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the âbig manâ and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? âBecause it's there,â he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
Worldview
As most of you know I went to a Worldview Academy last few days. It was pretty epic, but instead of just talking about it I'm gonna try to put the main points of the many lectures in different posts and see how that goes. I am gonna do them in the order that they appear in the book, not how I got them. Without further delay, enjoy...
Blind Faith
First off there is no such thing as an unbeliever.
The absence of belief or faith is just not possible. In fact those who say that they rely on only logic and reason, namely the atheists, rely heavily on faith. For example there are actually at least twelve (12) things that an Atheist MUST take on faith. Here they are:
1. There is no God.
2. Free will and dignity do not exist.
3. Something came from nothing.
4. Life came from non life.
5. Mind and thought do not exist.
6. There are no absolutes.
7. Conscience does not exist.
8. There is no afterlife.
9. There are no angles or demons.
10. Your life has no meaning or purpose.
11. Miracles can not happen.
12. Souls do not exist.
Now I will briefly try to explain why all of these must be taken on faith:
1. Because you must search all knowledge to prove there is no God and when you have searched all knowledge they you will have become God the only way to say that He doesn't exist is faith. (original idea from David Platt)
2. Because, if we evolved and everything is scientific, we are run by different reactions stimulated by different events or emotions we are just robots. Dignity doesn't exist where free will doesn't.
3. Almost all atheists are willing to agree that the universe had to have a definite beginning point and because there was nothing before that then something had to come from nothing.
4. Even scientists with rigged science rooms have never been able to make life from non life, much less watch it happen with no prompting.
5. If we have no actual physical thoughts and there is no such thing as the spiritual dimension thoughts must not exist.
6. Unless you have a holy, eternal, loving, unchanging God you can't have absolutes.
7. If there is no standard for moral values we can not feel bad when we do something wrong because it would not, in fact, be wrong.
8. Pretty self explanatory. If there is no way to prove that there is no afterlife then it must be taken on faith.
9. With no spiritual realm at all them there must be no angles or demons. Hard to explain possessed people then.
10. Life is meaningless with no one giving it meaning. Mortal men can not give meaning or value to anything spiritual, much less life.
11. When you have mathematical proof (another lecture) of the historical accuracy of the Bible and it speaks of miracles but there is no spiritual dimension then something has to give.
12. Souls do not exist. No afterlife, no souls, no nothing.
So the question is not "who has faith and who has reason" it really is who uses the most blind faith.
For a worldview that claims to rely on reason and logic, it is strange that try would require so much faith.
Blind Faith
First off there is no such thing as an unbeliever.
The absence of belief or faith is just not possible. In fact those who say that they rely on only logic and reason, namely the atheists, rely heavily on faith. For example there are actually at least twelve (12) things that an Atheist MUST take on faith. Here they are:
1. There is no God.
2. Free will and dignity do not exist.
3. Something came from nothing.
4. Life came from non life.
5. Mind and thought do not exist.
6. There are no absolutes.
7. Conscience does not exist.
8. There is no afterlife.
9. There are no angles or demons.
10. Your life has no meaning or purpose.
11. Miracles can not happen.
12. Souls do not exist.
Now I will briefly try to explain why all of these must be taken on faith:
1. Because you must search all knowledge to prove there is no God and when you have searched all knowledge they you will have become God the only way to say that He doesn't exist is faith. (original idea from David Platt)
2. Because, if we evolved and everything is scientific, we are run by different reactions stimulated by different events or emotions we are just robots. Dignity doesn't exist where free will doesn't.
3. Almost all atheists are willing to agree that the universe had to have a definite beginning point and because there was nothing before that then something had to come from nothing.
4. Even scientists with rigged science rooms have never been able to make life from non life, much less watch it happen with no prompting.
5. If we have no actual physical thoughts and there is no such thing as the spiritual dimension thoughts must not exist.
6. Unless you have a holy, eternal, loving, unchanging God you can't have absolutes.
7. If there is no standard for moral values we can not feel bad when we do something wrong because it would not, in fact, be wrong.
8. Pretty self explanatory. If there is no way to prove that there is no afterlife then it must be taken on faith.
9. With no spiritual realm at all them there must be no angles or demons. Hard to explain possessed people then.
10. Life is meaningless with no one giving it meaning. Mortal men can not give meaning or value to anything spiritual, much less life.
11. When you have mathematical proof (another lecture) of the historical accuracy of the Bible and it speaks of miracles but there is no spiritual dimension then something has to give.
12. Souls do not exist. No afterlife, no souls, no nothing.
So the question is not "who has faith and who has reason" it really is who uses the most blind faith.
For a worldview that claims to rely on reason and logic, it is strange that try would require so much faith.
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