Should We Reject Religion as Outdated?

There is a movement among Christians to reject "religion" in favor of being "spiritual" instead. Adherents to this theology do not seem to like going to church, listening to preachers or taking the Bible literally as the Word of God. This troubles me. We've been warned against spiritualism in Scripture and from the pulpits of Christendom. Unlike my spiritual friends, I am content to accept the Word as my guide and to wait till eternity until God offers me explanations of how everything works,

 before I cast aside religion altogether. Discovering the things we have not been shown yet, should keep me thoroughly entertained for millions of years. God's penmen could only tell us what they saw, what they experienced and what they understood in their walk with Him on Earth, when they wrote all that down. Sadly, we see through a glass darkly. I have found that it takes knowing God in His completeness to find one's way to the truth.

 

I'd be very careful about tossing out all the parts of Christian "religion", including the organized bits, that may not suit our modern clothes. Some ideas could stand to go. For instance, a lot of people stubbornly cling to the idea that God punishes dead folk by chicken frying them for eternity. The thing is Scripture doesn't actually teach that. It was a handy way to keep people afraid and in the pews with their purses opened. That Satan introduced such evil ideas doesn't void all organized religion. Paul warned about that. He says we should meet and work together even more so as we see the end approaching. And if you aren't seeing the signs on the evening news, you're not paying attention.

And if you actually come to know God experientially, you'd know He's not a Hitler or Stalin or Caligula to inflict unfathomable cruelty on creatures He6 lov, and it very specifically teaches that the human soul is not by nature immortal (John 3:16). God truly IS love and knowing that, you'll soon come to realize and recognize what some branches of the church and some churchmen who claim they have spoken for and still speak for God, take his name in vain (a severe violation of a commandment with some pretty harsh consequences).

 

In my study of psychology in grad school, I recognized many of the therapeutic tools we were taught to use were, in fact, the same sorts of things Christ and the apostles built into the church as a way of altering human bad behavior - prayer, praise, study and sharing what we learned from the other four. Turns out, Jesus knew how the human mind works and built things into His church that would help us change our behavior (what we Adventists call sanctification). We get close to emulating religious training with the behavioral/reality therapy techniques psychologists and counselors use. Seems Jesus understood how the human mind works.

 

We're just now catching up and seeing the edges of God's amazingly detailed creation. The sciences, when freed of politics, have begun to see evidence of God as Moses did. Not fully His face, but His "back parts" - the footprints of deity. Physicists, biologists, astronomers and mathematicians have recently begun to discover answers to questions they never thought to ask because they dismissed the idea of a God altogether from the very beginning. Too many approached science by first rejecting the idea of a pan-dimensional being with vast power because of what He is; one described as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end all at once. That was a pretty scientifically advanced idea for a former fisherman, traveling self-educated preacher, and prisoner of Rome living out on an island in the sea to have come up with all on his own. The remarkable thing is that the Bible we've got is flexible enough to guide everyone from the poor, the uneducated and simple folk to some of the most brilliant intellectuals of our time.

So, we probably should be very careful about rejection "religion" in its entirety and making it a dirty word. Much of the greatest good in history has come from the exercise of Christian religion, from ending the tossing of infants into the fires of Molech and Baal, the forced prostitution in Dagon's temples, the massive human sacrifices of the Aztecs, Mayans and Incans, and the scourge of slavery that persisted for far too long in Earth's history.

Tossing out the religious baby with the truly evil bath of some of the worst cultures in history, could set us back centuries. Already we've sacrificed more than 50 million unborn infants in the past half century or so. Humans have committed genocide on an unbelievable scale and seem to throw a new war every few years with result death and carnage. Does anyone believe it's going to get better if we end Christian organized religion in favor of searching for truth within our own screwed up heads. 

Me, I'm going to seek enlightenment from my creator. Looking around at humans, I don't think I'm going to find truth and goodness in the unconverted human heart. I think that comes from Someone outside ourselves and navel-gazing isn't going to find it.

(C) 2024 by Tom King

 

 

Do We Need a Law to Force Grocery Stores to Stop Throwing Away Food

In America, you have no excuse for being hungry.

Short Answer:  Nope!

Ever once in a while, some dear lefty buddy of mine will throw a post up on Facebook about a clever way that France (why is it always France) has passed a law making it illegal for grocery stores to throw away food. It feeds the hungry and stops global warming they say, thus killing two virtual birds with one stone. It seems that decomposing food releases carbon into the air much to the dismay of environmentalists and the joy of plants everywhere who need carbon to breathe.

Well, it's true that France passed such a law back in 2016. The law made it illegal for any grocery store larger than 4000 square feet to throw away food that is getting close to its sell-by date. On the surface, it all sounds like a nifty idea and even punishes those greedy corporate grocery chains.

The law requires stores to stop tossing useful nutritious, if slightly aged food. Instead, they would have to donate it to some charitable nonprofit that would hand the food out to the deserving poor and hungry while making sure only the people getting it actually need it.

And like any good law, the mechanics of it is fraught with unintended consequences. It makes the supermarket responsible for sorting and shipping out the food which adds to the cost. There is some concern that if the poor don't buy food, the grocery store will lose money from even that small amount of lost business. Remember that of all retail, grocers operate on a very narrow margin, earning, after expenses from 1 to 3 cents on every dollar they spend.

Don't get me started on the economics of making this idea a government program. My friend Mark Milliorn has done an excellent explanation of the economic chaos caused by getting government involved in this scheme. There's one reason not to do this that Mark missed. 

AMERICANS ALREADY DO EXACTLY THIS SAME THING WITHOUT A LAW FORCING THEM TO DO IT. And we do it efficiently without wrecking the economy and we insure that no one goes hungry. The surest way to mess it all up is to make it a government program. 

I worked in East Texas for close to 4 decades, helped start 5 nonprofit organizations to fill community needs that weren't being met by government programs. One in 5 East Texans didn't have ready access to transportation. One in four were seniors or disabled adults. I helped write community collaborative grants for homeless programs and agencies. And I helped raise funds for food bank programs.

The East Texas Food Bank was a huge project. ETFB operated a large warehouse as a distribution point for the East Texas Food Bank programs in the region. Several grocery stores and chains donated food being rotated off the shelves to the food bank. It was carried to the ETFB warehouse in the store's trucks and by the food banks vehicles. Volunteers from all over come in and donate their time to sort the food onto pallets, where it is labeled and stored. 

A local church school's kids
volunteer time at the Food Bank

Across the region community organizations, nonprofits and churches set up food banks in their facilities. Sometimes several churches cooperate to set up a food bank location. They buy shelves and coolers and freezers from a company that resells and recycles store appliances.  The individual location sets up a room like a store. When someone comes in needing groceries, church secretaries or volunteers give them a basket and lets them shop for what they need. The bank staff know what's available and help to distribute it fairly.

The program was particularly successful during economic hard times. People would need food to time them over till they started work. So instead of going through the Food Stamp Offices' proctological exam, they pick up a couple of bags of groceries at the church food bank. Other ways food is distributed is through outdoor distributions in parks and public facilities, through soup kitchens, nonprofit residential facilities, and Meals on Wheels.

The upshot was that one day panicked Food Stamp officials summoned us all to a meeting where they announced that the feds were cutting $800,000 from their budget.  AND IT WAS OUR FAULT THEY CLAIMED. Apparently, we did so well with the food banks that their applications dropped significantly and DC cut their budget. They were planning to spend $150,000 on a marketing campaign, the theme of which was "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform."

It was then that I discovered where they got the "One in five children go to bed hungry" slogan. The spokesman for the Food Stamp office let it slip out that their applications were way down. I asked if they were going to make the application process easier and was told "NO!" It was then that the I found that the 1-in-5 hunger statistic was based on the number of applications, not the number of food stamp awards. What they really wanted was more applications. 

Our little church/nonprofit-based food banks would pick up truckloads of food at the central bank. We would pay 1 cent per pound to help cover the food bank's operating costs. The system runs entirely without state or federal government assistance. The grocery stores donate to the central food bank without being coerced by government. Other independent nonprofit volunteers from organizations like Gleaners whose volunteers harvest fields gleaning potatoes, yams, carrots and other crops after the farmers do the first pass, also donate harvested produce and overflow stuff from festivals and fairs. 

The system works smoothly and doesn't get mucked up by government bureaucrats. And nobody knows who needs food like church secretaries and the field staffs of community organizations. 

So if the government can keep its grubby hands off of us, we can make sure the greatest health threat to Americans in poverty is obesity and we can do it efficiently and economically.

Americans are good people by nature; Christians are under orders to be good people. We give more money to charity, to third world countries and the poor than the US government does.

© 2023 by Tom King                                                 

 

 

Is God a Torturer?

You would think that the son of God would
have his Father's temper, but........not so much.

Do atheists realize the fact that we Christians will go to heaven while non-Christians and atheists will going to hell where God will torture you for eternity and we will mock you all day long?

This bait question was recently posted on Quora. It was posted I suspect in order to generate a debate between atheists and Christians, in part to reveal Christian hypocrisy. I don't think the doofus who posted it is, in fact, a Christian or has ever met Christ in his spiritual life. The premise behind the question is a false premise - an argument based on a fallacy. The false premise here is that the human soul is and always will be immortal without any interference from God to keep our souls going.

Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, "The living know that they shall die but the dead know nothing neither have they a part in anything done under the sun." The righteous dead, we are told in Scripture, will be raised from sleep at the second coming. Jesus describes death as sleep. He says (Matthew 10:28) "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." Apparently the soul does not survive hell according to Jesus.

The wicked dead, on the other hand, will be raised at the second resurrection to face judgment and will then die again one last time. There is no eternal ever-burning hell. It isn't in Scripture. It’s a doctrine borrowed by the Roman church from Greek and Roman mythology to frighten people into obedience. 

God is love and merciful. The idea that He, who died a horrific death that all of us who believe in Him might not perish but have eternal life, will “torture and mock” people for eternity is a damnable though quite effective lie designed by Satan and borrowed from paganism by the Roman church that actually drives people away from God by making Him look more evil than Hitler. 

Man’s soul is not immortal. Only God grants eternal life (see John 3:16). Nowhere does the Bible say God grants eternal life to the lost. The only place where anyone says “Thou shalt not surely die” is in the Garden of Eden and it’s the first lie told to Eve by a snake. 

Sadly, the “You’ll be tormented in hell” malarkey is just too good a story that pastors cling to in order to scare people into the pews and loosen their purse strings. Turns out that idea keeps more people out of the church than it keeps in. It’s a lie about God’s character and a violation of the 3rd commandment, even more so than using swear words like GD. It’s claiming to speak for and about God without his direction. It defames God’s character and THAT is the bit God won’t hold you blameless for as it drives away people from Him. 

Every time God gets mad at an individual or a group, it’s because they are harming the innocent. He got mad at Israel because they were sacrificing 26,000 babies a year to the god Moloch. If I were God, I’d get mad at that too, but even I wouldn’t chicken fry someone forever and not allow him to die.  And I certainly wouldn't mock him. That’s just horrible and nothing like the God of love and mercy that I know.

Jonathan Edwards lied, whether he believed what he was saying or not. The not-so-Reverend Edwards upset a lot of good Christian people with his horrific sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It upset me centuries later when I had to read that monstrous thing for literature class in high school. Edwards took massive liberties with the Scripture in that sermon. It drove thousands of the timid into the pews and loosened their purse strings as it was intended to do. You have to wonder how many good-hearted people fled westward, appalled that New England's god was a monster.

Here is the absolutely terrifying picture of God that Edwards paints. 

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment"

 No!

• 1 John 1:5 - This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
• 2 Peter 3:9 - The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
• John 17:3 - “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
• Romans 5:8 - But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

God doesn't give Himself a pass on the eternal hatred and vengeance option. How can we say God is good all the time, and tell people he sets fire to immortal people and enjoys the ensuing fiery sports - people flopping around and screaming.

I don't think so!

© 2023 by Tom King