The God Delusion

I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins is now number 4 in the amazon top 100 best selling books.

I read “Dawkins God” by Alister McGrath a while back, and it is clear that Dawkins is pumping out a lot of very poorly reasoned atheistic vitriol – which has obviously started to gain a lot of acceptance and popularity.

It is clear that society is now starting to drift to extremes. The majority of people in the UK now are probably secular humanists with a sprinkling of agnostics – but many of these would take very little persuasion to become militant atheists. 

Those of us who are religious, are now regarded with pity at best (as poor deluded creatures) and with suspicion and anger at worst (since religion is seen as dangerous extremism which tries to brainwash people).

Already there are signs that persecution is on it’s way. For example, it is already illegal in many circumstances to assert your right to object to homosexuality, since this is seen as discrimination – rather than just free speech. In fact people are already being arrested for this type of “crime”.

  

Christmas

Christmas is over.

We always have a very low key Christmas. Even as a Christian I am a bit ambivolent about Christmas.

I know people who are very enthusiastic about celebrating Christmas as Christians, and using it as an opportunity to celebrate the greatest event of history – the birth of Jesus Christ the Son of God to be the Saviour of those who believe. They take great pleasure in the Christmas services in the Church and would be disappointed with us for not attending Church on Christmas day.

On the other hand I also know Christian people who refuse to celebrate Christmas (including my brother), and who see it as an inherently materialialistic worldly indulgence based on a pagan festival.

I choose to celebrate Christmas as a purely optional opportunity to mark the birth of Jesus in a personal way with my family. It is a chance to meet together for a nice meal and exchange gifts and have a holiday. I would not be too upset if it were not celebrated by the Church. It is not commanded by scripture that we should mark our Saviours birth (in contrast to the way it is commanded that we should mark his death) – but it is not forbidden either.

I do not think the observance of Christmas is something we should argue about. I think Romans chapter 14 is relevant to this sort of example -

“Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgement on disputable matters. One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. Who are you to judge someone elses servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. You then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God’s judgement seat.  It is written ‘As surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before me; every tongue will confess to God’. So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God.”

Tower of Babel

It would be nice to deny the internet to al-Qaeda and it’s ilk but that alas is impossible – without undermining ourselves. It is a reminder of the tower of Babel. The reason God banished all the people from the Tower of Babel and made them all speak different languages was not because he did not want them to collaborate per se, it was because he was enraged at what they were collaborating on – an effort to build a tower to the heavens so they could become like God. This was a distortion of the human capacity, so God broke their union and their ability to communicate with one another. Now all these years later humankind has again created a new platform for more people from more places to communicate and collaborate with less friction and more ease than ever – the internet. Would God see the internet as heresy? The heresy is not that mankind works together – it is to what ends. It is essential that we use this new ability to communicate and collaborate for the right ends.

(Taken from “The World Is Flat” by Tom Friedman)

Playing To Your Strengths

Gallop asked 200,000 employees in 36 companies “At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”

The companies which scored a highest positive response to this question were found to be the ones with the lowest employee turnover, the highest productivity, and the highest customer satisfaction.

However the overall percentage of employees working for large organisations worldwide who believed they were playing to their strengths on a daily basis was just twenty percent.