On my way home from work, I was listening to "Ask Science Mike". It's a podcast I like with Science Mike, or Mike McHargue. I think that's how you spell his last name. Anyway, he was answering a question about Jesus and why he had to die for our sins. He brought up some really important questions. He also mentioned something that a lot of atheists would say against our idea of Jesus dying for our sins. I think the saying was, "God sent himself to die to save us from himself". I'll look it up on the internet now. Okay, yeah. God sent himself as a sacrifice to himself to save humanity from himself. Mike said in the podcast that it is an oversimplification of our faith, which I agree on, but there are some really important things to consider there. God sent himself, so the idea of the trinity...to sacrifice himself to himself...God the father turned his back on his son who bore our sins...to save humans from himself...because if we don't accept his salvation we'll burn forever in eternal conscious torment.
So, there's a lot there. And there's a lot of theology that I'm not qualified to dissect there. But, to start, Mike talked about the reasons Christians say Jesus died. There was one term that was used. I don't remember what that term was, but it says that Jesus died to take our sins. He was the sacrifice for us... Then he had another term that he used to describe another reason why Jesus died, I think the reason was to show that Jesus overcame death and evil. I'll have to give it another listen.
The part of the podcast that caught my attention the most was when he dissected the last part of the saying, the part that says, "to save us from himself". Because, if we don't allow him to save us, he'll send us straight to Hell to experience torture, forever. This is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. The two other podcasts I like, "The Bad Christian Podcast" and "Unbelievable" talk about the topic of Hell occasionally. My view has been challenged to say the least. And this has also challenged my faith to the core. Does God send people that he loves to hell to experience this awful thing for sin?
Oh yeah, Mike was talking about how humans were made with a sin nature. We're defective. If a manufacturer makes a defective product, the blame is on the manufacturer, not the product. So, why are we expected to take the blame when we were made like this? There's a lot to consider for sure. I think that it's true that Christian thinking changes over time, and out interpretation of the Bible changes, too.
Here's what I think: I think that God is perfect. I think that God is the author of science and supernatural. I think that God made humans with the ability to reason and use logic. But, I also think that God made humans with the ability to get things wrong. I see a culture with people that have their heads stuck in the sand. They subscribe to thought systems and feel threatened when someone comes to them with a different way of thinking. This is me, I'll admit. I remember taking anthropology in college and feeling really threatened when they taught me evolution. Then they started talking about hundreds of thousands of years, then millions and even billions of years passing for our Earth to evolve to what it is today. I was told that this was all bullshit in church. But, then I thought, maybe I was indoctrinated with the bullshit. Was the pastor of the Pentecostal church I went to growing up a scientist? Did he complete research on species of animals and geology? I don't think so... And, not to pick on my childhood pastor, many Christians today are young Earth creationists and tell their kids that evolution is a lie.
I'm just saying that science is a group of people that wrestle with ideas. They are discovering, and they don't have agendas. They are trying to prove ideas wrong. When things can't be proven wrong by one person, then another person tries to prove it wrong. And when a bunch of scientists can't prove it wrong, then it's accepted. Who am I to say otherwise? And who are these Christians to say otherwise? I don't think evolution disproves the existence of God.
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