Saturday, January 16, 2010

Honest Scrap Award

Kelly has awarded me the honest scrap award.


I am supposed to tell you ten random, honest things about myself. Here they are in no particular order.

1. I am absolutely fascinated by Jillian Michaels. I can't decide if I admire her, am scared of her, simply amused by her, or weirded out by her.

2. I am a serious chocoholic. For reals. It's becoming a problem.

3. I LOVE movies, but I will rarely watch a movie twice. There's no point when you know what is going to happen and why waste the time when you could be watching something completely new?

4. I have a tendency to overanalyze just about everything.

5. I love everything about coffee. I love the smell, the taste, and creating specialty drinks. I love the feel of coffee shops in the morning, pairing coffee with various foods to enhance flavors, and the look of a good solid mug or tumbler. Coffee=love.

6. I love to read! I regularly cruise the online best seller lists and then go check out the ones that appeal to me the most at the library.

7. I am a mountain girl at heart and I cannot seem to find the beauty of the desert no matter how hard I try.

8. I love people. I like to analyze why people do the things they do and why people are the way they are. I love the mystery of personalities and how people interact with one another.

9. I love to learn. If I had all the time in the world, I would take classes of every kind. I would learn to play every instrument, learn every kind of dance from ballroom to hip-hop, take cooking classes, and travel to learn the mystery of various cultures around the world.

10. I can touch my nose with my tongue and often will pick my nose with my tongue just to gross people out.

Your Turn!

I award:

Carrington
Christi
Jaime
Brittany
Ashley

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

What's my Motivation?


The other day, I was driving and as I was accelerating up the on ramp to the freeway, was behind a van with an interesting bumper sticker. And by interesting, of course, I mean deeply saddening, as is the most common vernacular usage of the word. Clearly. The sticker was simple, succinct. It had the image of a cross with the statement: "Believe or Be Left." (similar but not exactly as above)

I could be misinterpreting its meaning. To flesh out MY understanding for clarity: "Believe [in the cross/Jesus] or Be Left [Behind in the end times]"

Unless I am WAY off the mark here, I can't stand behind that statement. Unless, that is, he means, "Believe or Be Left [-Handed]" Because certainly, left-handedness is a curse from God. Ha! But I don't think that's what he means...

The Jesus that carried the very cross this person proclaims would never make a statement like that. The Jesus that called his followers to LOVE OTHERS and by that people would know they are His disciples would never make a statement like that. The Jesus that died because of such a great love for His creation would never make a statement like that. That's NOT WHY HE DID IT!

Jesus' motivation for allowing himself to be killed despite his innocence was simple: Love, Redemption, Grace. It wasn't so some could be in the "In" crowd and he could have an excuse to exclude others. Jesus died so that ALL could be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). But it does require a choice on our part. Christianity is not some exclusivistic, elitist club that people should join so they are not left out. It's not about God not picking you for His team in dodgeball or trying to convince God that you're cool enough to hang out with His crew. If the only motivation someone has to believe in God is to not be left behind and try to avoid the wrath of the end times, how sincere is that really?

On behalf of this person, I apologize to anyone who doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. While I do believe He is the only path back to a right relationship with God, I don't agree with the means by which this person chooses to pronounce this claim. This bumper sticker sends the wrong message that doesn't accurately depict the good news of the Gospel. Jesus calls us to believe in Him so that he can restore our RELATIONSHIP with our Creator. He doesn't desire for anyone to be left behind.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Know-it-alls: Scott waxes philosophical




Why is it that often man thinks he must understand all there is to know about God before it even becomes conceivable to believe in Him?

Men, whose worldview by definition already denies the possibility of a supernatural being beyond himself, tries to define such a being, and upon failing to do so fully to his liking, concludes that said being clearly does not exist. God is comparable to a math equation in which the answer, rather than having a well-defined numerical answer possibly with a few decimal places, is instead, "the limit does not exist." God is boundless and while we know parts of his character, parts of the equation, when trying to solve the problem, in the end the only result we can come to is that His limit does not exist. Certainly no mathematician would demand a student to find another suitable solution to the problem, that IS the solution! Even more, nobody would consider attempting to discredit mathematics as being fallacy. There is such a thing as something being defined as undefined.

The means by which some men make this attempt to solve this problem and explain God already set them up for failure. They limit His existence and His character to man-made rules based upon what we "know." But how can you prove a supernatural spiritual being exists when by default your rules already deny that possibility by limiting it to a physical realm? Think about it: A thought is some kind of electrical transmission; a memory, a reaction between neurons; neither of which we fully understand nor can we pin down a physical location in the brain where memories are stored, yet nobody doubts that man can think and can remember. Is a memory physical or is it something else? If it is just physical, why can't we extract a memory from the brain like we can extract an organ or a blood sample? Maybe it's not just physical, maybe it's something more... But if one tries to argue that God is "something more," then well it's just a bunch of fanatical religious mumbo-jumbo! And we have scientists who claim to "examine the evidence" but in reality they are merely stacking the deck, so to speak, against what they already believe to be false.

Don't hear what I'm not saying. All this is not to say that there is not scientific evidence supporting the existence of God, more specifically the claims of Christianity. There are scientists who know much more than I that make extremely convincing argumentsscientifically for the existence of God. But that's not my goal here, my point is a philosophical argument, not scientific. (I find the Kalam cosmological argument to be especially fascinating, myself)

A quote comes to mind, although I'm not sure who said it: "God created man in His own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." We have an obsession with anthropomorphism. We define our universe in relation to ourselves. We characterize life through a very human, very mortal looking glass. The world is defined in man-made terms and what something "is" or what we think about it often depends on how it relates to us. God certainly does reveal himself to us in anthropomorphic images to help us, with our feeble minds, to understand His infinite character. But as soon as we LIMIT Him to just that, we deny any possibility of knowing Him further.

Isn't it reasonable to expect that a supernatural being that exists in some way beyond His creation and thus is far greater than it, call Him God, would in some ways be beyond mortal man's understanding? A being such as this would be impossible to define in terms of man. Why SHOULD He reveal Himself completely to us? And even if He were to do so, who is to say we would even be able to comprehend it?

The good news is that for those that choose to believe, God WILL reveal Himself and He WILL be fully known. The apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12 - "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." I sincerely believe we were not meant, in our present state, to know God fully. It would be too much, we couldn't handle it. But I also sincerely believe God has revealed enough of Himself to warrant belief... even if we don't know it all.