Perhaps I'm a Fool

I stumbled across an article today in Scientific American featuring two prominent scientists debating how science should approach religion. Both are clearly atheists but have differing viewpoints on how the scientific community should interact with religion.

What struck me was one comment in particular from Lawrence M. Krauss:

Krauss: "I took guidance from your [Richard Dawkins] latest book and described how scientific principles, including the requirement not to be selective in choosing data, dictate that one cannot pick and choose in one’s fundamentalism. If one believes that homosexuality is an abomination because it says so in the Bible, one has to accept the other things that are said in the Bible, including the allowance to kill your children if they are disobedient or validation of the right to sleep with your father if you need to have a child and there are no other men around, and so forth."

I have no doubt Mr. Krauss is a man of great intelligence and a person of my intellect could never hope to successfully debate him. However, I think I do have him on one point at least. I don't see in the Bible any allowances to kill my children or for a woman to sleep with her father in order to have children. At least, not in my translation, which I admit isn't the King James Version (kidding of course, I'm sure the good old KJV doesn't promote that kind of behavior either).

In order to come to that conclusion, a person would have to have extremely poor comprehension skills, which I am quite sure is not the case, or a person would have to take excerpts of the Bible completely out of context. I'm sure you could  even make Mein Kampf sound pretty good if you were selective enough too. So, Mr. Krauss, a schooled man of science no less, makes a point about not being able to pick and choose data to support an argument by picking and choosing data to support his argument. What a comedy of ironies.

Here's one thing the Bible says that I think has been proven:

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. ~ 1 Corinthians 1:27-30

Prayers and Praise

Our prayers go out to our youth pastor and good friend Scott, who is recovering in the hospital from a very serious infection. He gave us quite a scare a couple nights ago, but God answers prayer, and he is doing much better. I was in our church administrator's office when his wife called with the latest update. She dropped by the hospital to see him and they removed his ventilator so he could talk to her. Of course, he's heavily medicated right now, so the conversation was a little bizarre for her. But despite his condition, he managed to inquire about something near and dear to his heart:

"Did the Giants win?"

Updates

Don't Read This Post!

I haven't posted for several months, so there is probably too much to be said in one post. I'm limiting myself to 15 minutes, for both your sanity and mine.

First of all, there is no particular reason for my disappearance. Life has gone on in its usual unpredictable manner, winding this way and that but in some ways I feel no closer to where I am going than when I started. Yet, I have been added to, refined, and given the understanding that life is sometimes best lived when you are being led. We are living  the antithesis to the question "If you don't know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?"

The question that hovers in the air is how can God use my family to minister to the Japanese and as I hear this question over and over, there is no immediate sign that an answer is coming. There are things going on at our church which I can't talk about just yet (but in due time, I will) that I feel is a step toward the answer, but won't address the answer directly.

Strangely enough, I can usually find some peace in this. It's humbling to have a goal and not knowing how to get there. It's refreshing to test the desire of your heart against God's plan and allowing Him to call the shots. Because we know that if God provides an answer to our question, it will genuinely come from Him. I acknowledge that I sleep very well these days, a fact I attribute to being at peace with doing or being whatever the Lord wills for me. But I have my days, and today is one of them, when my impatience gnaws at me and I grow restless, wanting something, anything, to happen.

For many of you who don't know me very well, this is just rambling, so I hope you will ignore this post and come back another day when I'm posting something more coherent. If you do understand what I'm talking about, it's probably because you've been through are are going through something similar. If that is true for you then you would know how much your prayers would mean to us right now.

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