See part 1 - Introduction

Monday - Called to Faith

There's been a lot of talk about atheism vs. belief lately. Every few years there seems to be a new crop of books that pop up about how religion is an evil influence on society. This year, I discovered Tim Keller's The Reason for God. I saw a clip of Keller giving a talk at Google summarizing part of his book and I was intriqued. I added his book to my Amazon wishlist and in a happy coincidence, it happened to be part of our assigned summer reading for work.

My goal for Monday was to explore the relationship between faith and reason and to generate some discussion about issues like evolution and atheism. The teenage years are crucial to the development of a real, lasting faith. It's the time of life where you make the decision for yourself—is this for real? We had a speaker one year who made a comment that stuck with me: for some of the campers, our camp may be the last religious experience they have for 15 years, or ever.

The Premise of Tim Keller's book
Is it ok to have doubts? The premise of the atheism books used to be religion is bad. Now it's gone so far to say that respect for religion is bad. It used to be a common belief among scholars that the more technologically advanced a society got, the less religious it would get. The more economically developed, the more "enlightened," the less religious it would get. Now we know that's not so. Orthodox faith in America has actually gotten stronger, though mainline denominations like the Methodists are in decline. But at the same time, secular thought has gotten stronger as well, leading to this conflict of differing viewpoints. Is it possible to reconcile faith and reason?

I handed out some materials ahead of time to get the leaders thinking about some of the issues that might come up that evening (much of which comes from The Reason for God:

- 1 3 basic kinds of reasons to believe/disbelieve
- 1.1 1) intellectual reasons
you read the arguments and you say, these are compelling
arguments I do/don't
- 1.2 2) Personal reasons
people don't just believe/disbelieve because of intellectual
reasons, they do so because of personal reasons. Something
bad happens to them. Some people take this and say, I need a
God, some say, I don't need a God who would allow this.
Success, some people say they can do it on their own, some
feel hollow
- 1.3 3) Social Reasons
you tend to find most plausible the beliefs of the people in
the community you most want to be a part of
- 2 It takes as much faith to disbelieve in God as to believe
- 3 Evil and Suffering - Look at all the pointless and senseless
suffering in the world, given all that, there may be a God who's
good, but unable to stop it, or there may be a God who is powerful
enough, but not good enough to stop it
- 3.1 How do you know it's pointless? How do you know it's senseless
and that there's no good reason for it? The only answer we have
is "I can't think of a good reason"
- 4 If there really is a God, how can so many bad things have been done
in his name
- 4.1 Out of Christianity came the crusades, out of Islam came
terrorism. But look at atheism -Stalin. If you believe there is a
God, it's easy to twist that into, I believe, you don't and you
must destroyed. But if you're an atheist, you can think: if I can
do this and get away with it, I won't have to pay for it. You can
twist anything into violence. It's a tie.
- 5 I don't know if there's a God or not, but no one can really know for
sure
- 5.1 Agnostics: elephant and blind man: 6 blind men grab the elephant
in different places and come to different interpretations of what
an elephant is like, and that's how religion is.
- 5.2 Newbigin: In that story, the real point is constantly overlooked,
It's told from the point of view of a person that isn't blind,
but sees what the blind men are missing out on. The only way you
could see that is if you think you're not blind. You're assuming
you have the knowledge that you think no one else has.
- 6 Until you prove there's a God, I don't have to believe in God
- 6.1 Problem is that's a big leap of faith: why would you assume that
God would be something inside of the world and provable?
- 6.2 The russians sent Yuri Gregoran into space. He said, we sent
someone to heaven, he didn't see God anywhere.
- 6.3 CS Lewis: If there is a God, you don't related to God that way,
it's more like Hamlet trying to prove there is a Shakespeare.
Shakespeare would have to write himself into the play (much like
Jesus did).
- 6.4 I can't prove to you that I'm not a butterfly dreaming I'm a man.
- 6.5 Moral convictions, humans have rights. How can you prove that?
- 6.6 If you are living as if there is no God, that's an act of faith
- 7 It makes more sense to believe than disbelieve
- 7.1 Fine tuning of the universe
- 8 Why would a good God send people to Hell?
- 8.1 Hell, says Keller, “is the trajectory of a soul, living in
self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever…hell
is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a
trajectory into infinity.”
- 8.2 Story about Lazarus and the rich man in the Bible. The rich man,
doesn't even ask to get out of Hell. He's still so selfish and
self-centered, he still thinks that Lazarus should do his bidding.
- 8.3 Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in
your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become
oneself, to get an identity, apart from him….[sin] is not just
the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into
ultimate things.” Everyone no matter if they’re Joe Blow or
Madonna has to find some way to “justify their existence.” And
when you and I turn to anything other than God we Sin.
What are the personal consequences of Sin? One consequence is the
loss of your true identity, and with that any sense of personal
stability and peace. Ultimately “A life not centered on God leads
to emptiness. Building our lives on something besides God not
only hurts us if we don’t get the desires of our hearts, but also
if we do.” Sin’s consequences don’t stop there, the consequences
of sin are not just personal, but social and cosmic.
- 9 Yeah, but aren't Christians just hypocrites
“If Christianity is all it claims to be, shouldn’t Christians on
the whole be much better people than everyone else? This
assumption is based on a mistaken belief concerning what
Christianity actually teaches about itself.” You don’t clean up
and then come to Christ, you come to Christ because you’ll always
need to clean up and his Spirit more than your good intentions
makes all the difference in the world. To mix metaphors the
church is a hospital ward full of sick people, of course its
going to look worst than the world outside.

And then some questions they might share with their group:

1.    What does the word faith mean to you?
2.    Is it ok to doubt?
If you had all of the answers, you'd be God. Being a mature Christian is sometimes about accepting that there are sometimes no good answers.
3.    What do you believe about the way the universe was created?
4.    We were taught that there were rules that govern the physical universe (think of Newton and the apple), but now we know that this isn't necessarily so. How did hearing about some of the weirdness of the bigness and the weirdness of the smallness affect the way you think about God and faith?
5.    How does the circle vs rectangle example affect the way you look at the arguments between Christian denominations? (Make sure your campers understand the concept first) Predestination vs. Freewill?
6.    Make sure the campers understand the flatland example. Flatland is all we have (reductionistic) vs. There's more - nudges, feelings, perception of the greater truth
7.    You might discuss thin places. In Celtic spirituality, certain locations - especially islands, mountains and springs - became sacred and were visited by people on relevant occasions. They were called "thin places", because here the division between heaven and earth was said to be at its narrowest. A lot of us think that Sumatanga is a thin place.
8.    How does the theory that there are 11 dimensions affect your understanding of God?
9.    A Samaritan woman once asked Jesus where her people should worship God - on Mount Gerizim, as had been their custom, or in Jerusalem.

John 4:20. The underlying question was whose religion was correct, stated in terms of the proper place for worship. To this question, Jesus replied:

Woman, believe me, the hour comes, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father. You worship that which you don’t know. We worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such to be his worshippers. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

How does this video affect your understanding of this scripture?
10.    What's wrong with thinking that God is only being in a certain place, a church, at camp? There is no word in Jesus' language for spiritual.
11.    What difference does faith in God make in your

For the actual program, we showed part of Rob Bell's Everything is Spiritual video. I went through the video and outlined it and then cut out parts of it to get it to fit within our time frame. I wish I had a picture of how we projected it, because it was a neat set up visually. The setup of the video is Rob Bell on a plain stage with a big whiteboard. And we set it up so that it was us watching it on a plain stage of a white drop cloth. Anyways, Bell ties Genesis and creation to quantum physics and string theory. It's really fascinating stuff, and it really makes you see things in a whole new way. We got a great response from it, and the counselors felt like it really set up some really great discussion for that evening as we broke into groups.

When we came back from groups, we showed another 20 minutes of the video, and then at the end of the clip, I spliced together the music from the video into a loop so that I could drag out the end of the video. He essentially ends the video making the point that everything that you do is spiritual. There's no word in the Hebrew language for spiritual. It's ALL spiritual. And that there's a lot more going on in our world than we can perceive. Scientists believe that there are at least 11 different dimensions. Unbeknowngst to the campers and most of the counselors, we replaced the light bulbs in the front part of the room with blacklights. Through some experimentation, I found that you could pretty much hide messages on the walls in plain sight  by taking brown grocery bags and writing messages on them in highlighter. Because they were the same color as the walls in the rooms we were in, they blended nicely.

One of the more vivid examples in the video is of flatland. So we had some folks act out that illustration as a closing. The video ends, the techno music loops, the screen goes dark. We flip on the blacklights. We had marked all of the campers with a Jesus fish logo with highlights (that we disguised, so it wouldn't be obvious that it was a highlighter), and on the walls is written the message "this isn't all there is... there's more" which suddenly is visible, when it wasn't there before. On stage, we have a dramatization of the flatland example. We had 2 people go up and pick up a bedsheet on which we had masked out the 2 stick figures. At a certain point we have them drop the sheet and then we have these 2 figures dressed in white playing the stick figure roles and then a dancer comes in from the back who is wearing a black shirt with a cross on it (I wanted to use the trinity triquetra symbol, but we were afraid it wouldn't translate). The dancer interacts with the stick people and then on a cue, after the dance is finished, they pick up the sheet again (it's actually a 2nd bedsheet), on which we have written "God is near" in glow in the dark ink. We cut the lights and now all you see is darkness and the words, "God is near."