One more dead terrorist

I know I'm a few days late with this, but I'm afraid I've only just got around to putting my thoughts on this into type.

As just about everyone in the world knows by now, Osama Bin Laden - Western public enemy number one - was shot and killed by US special forces on Sunday night just gone. But what is an appropriate Christian response to this series of events? The killing of another human being is never a good or pleasant thing, but are there ever circumstances under which it can and should be justified?

I have to say that, had I been in Barack Obama's position, I probably would have given the same order that he did, even had I known (as I assume he probably did) that the death of Bin Laden was the most likely outcome. I'm not sure I can fully justify this morally, but on the basis of my limited knowledge and understanding, it just feels like - however much I might normally object to such an action - that under these circumstances it really was (unfortunately) the only right thing to be done. To what extent the West and America in particular were responsible for creating these circumstances in the first place however, is of course another issue...

Of course, this event doesn't mark the death of Bin Laden's ideology and others will do their best to take up and continue this cause, but hopefully it will significantly weaken his organisation and have a demoralising effect on his more committed supporters. This won't be helped though, by those in the West who have been publicly and jubilantly celebrating his demise, however understandable this reaction might be.

Those involved in the strike on his compound, and in tracking him down in the first place, do of course have good reason to be proud of their success and they have performed an unpleasant - but I think necessary - service to the rest of us. The death of another human being though - made in the image of God - is always a reason for lament, however corrupt and dangerous to others that life may have become.

Glory!

A few days ago, I stayed in Glenridding in the Lake District with my wife for a couple of days and while we were there we climbed Helvellyn, via Striding Edge (shown in the picture below).

The weather was amazing, as it has been over most of the Easter / May Day period and the views - as you can see - were stunning!

As anyone who's ever tried to photograph a landscape like this will know, no photo can ever come close to the total-immersion experience of actually being there. This view in particular just took my breath away. It actually brought me close to tears! So much awesome beauty - just there, for me or anyone to experience. A picture - but not just a picture, an experience - of God's awesome power, love, beauty, abundance and generosity, all rolled into one! And yet just the minutest taste of all that there is out there to behold in this incredible universe - just a tiny fraction of the amazing glory of God!

Resurrection

The Easter story, as most people know, centers around the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth - also known as the Messiah or "Christ".

This story is absolutely central to the Christian faith - to the extent that the apostle Paul famously wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that, "if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith"!  Every now and again, another liberal-minded theologian seems to come out of the woodwork to suggest that Jesus' resurrection was not a literal, bodily resurrection, or was meant to be some kind of metaphor, but this is very clearly not what the early disciples and writers of scripture had in mind.

The resurrection - if true - is a mind-boggling event.  Everyone knows that people don't rise from the dead. We know it now, in the 21st century, but everyone knew it just as well back then.  When people die, they stay dead - especially if they've been crucified for several hours, skewered and then sealed up in a tomb!  What they don't do is get up, break the seal, roll the stone away and go for a walk.  It doesn't happen.  It doesn't require modern science or an enlightened 21st century mindset to work this out!  But nevertheless, according to the early disciples, this is exactly what Jesus did do and this remains the foundation stone of what has gone on to be the world's largest religion.  So either it was or has become an extremely convincing fraud, or it is - probably - the most monumentally groundbreaking event the world has ever known!

There have been many arguments - understandably - for and against the resurrection, and I'm not going to try and get into them all now (as if I knew them all anyway!), but to me the most convincing objective evidence seems to be the disciples themselves:

The 12 apostles all lived and travelled with Jesus for a period of more or less 3 years.  They had come to believe that he was the Messiah - the one who had come to save and deliver God's people from oppression.  What they thought this meant at this point is not exactly clear.  To begin with they presumably expected Jesus to lead the Jews to victory against the Romans but as time went on and they listened to Jesus' teaching it should have slowly become clear to them that his Kingdom was not going to work like that.  Whatever they expected though, all their hopes and dreams were invested in this man - who then went and got himself crucified!  They should have been devastated - indeed, according to the gospel accounts they were, at least to begin with - but then things changed rather dramatically.  Instead of just going back to their old lives, finding another saviour to follow, or perhaps even just trying to preserve his legacy - the disciples started preaching that Jesus had been raised from the dead!

Unless they truly believed it, this was a barefaced lie of enormous proportions!  Who was going to believe such nonsense - and what drove them to preach about it so powerfully?  Not only did they preach it though, with vigour and conviction, they were also able to convince thousands of others that it was true.  The New Testament book of Acts explains this unlikely set of events with reference to the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of God himself who empowered the early disciples to preach this message with such power that many seemed to find it irresistible, and to confirm its truth with all kinds of miraculous signs and wonders.  This is not an unreasonable explanation given how explosively the message seemed to spread in the face of all the odds and massive persecution and resistance.

Not only did the disciples devote their lives to preaching this message however, they were also willing to give up their lives for it - and many of them did so, dying gruesome and/or painful deaths as a result of anti-Christian persecution.

Could all of this really have happened off the back of a deluded fantasy, imagined or invented by a bunch of disillusioned followers of a dead Messiah?  Or is it just possible that what they say happened really did happen - that Jesus really was something special, and that he really did rise from the dead?  If it's true, then the rest of what they said is certainly worth listening to, and the rest of the world may turn out to be a very different place as a result!

Do we need religion?

To many non-believers, faith/religion can seem a bit of a crutch - a fantasy to make people feel good or a story that helps the mentally or emotionally weak to cope better with their lives.  Of course it has other benefits - there is the social/communal side of religion and the moral structures which often contribute positively to the fabric of a society.

Do we really need religion though, to provide us with these things, or have we outgrown it now?  Surely we can appreciate the positive legacy that religion has left us (as well as some of the not so positive things!), learn from this and move on?  We don't need these superstitions any more do we?  We've become enlightened - why continue to live in the dark ages?

Well, as a "religious" person myself, I'm obviously not going to see it this way!  I've put that word in quotes though, because to me it's where a lot of the misunderstandings seem to start.

To many "non-religious" people, a "religion" is a system of beliefs and behaviours which its adherents have either found beneficial for some reason, or else have been scared or brainwashed into going along with.  An inclusive secular society tolerates religion - whilst also perhaps regarding it with a certain amount of suspicion - primarily in the interests of personal freedom, but perhaps also because of the personal and social benefits it often provides.

My own experience as a "religious" person though, has been quite different from this.  There is certainly a "systematic" side to the Christian faith.  Beliefs are passed down through sacred texts, discussed and debated by scholars, taught in churches and ideally, lived out in community with each other and in our daily lives.  Much personal and social energy is devoted to the propagation and application of these beliefs and an outsider could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was some kind of corporate brain-washing exercise, or perhaps some sort of semi-delusional (or even completely delusional) self-help therapy on a grand scale!

All of this misses out on one vital element though, which can only really be seen clearly from the inside, and that is that  religion is all about God.  If there is no God, then the above paragraph pretty much sums up religion in its entirety, but once you encounter God for yourself, the whole picture changes.  Yes the systems and beliefs are there and contain much that is of benefit - developed as they often have been by others who have had similar encounters - but they are not the main point.  The main point is God: the one around whom these belief systems and practices have grown up, sometimes to the extent, unfortunately, that God actually becomes obscured by, rather than revealed through them.

So the real question then is not, "do we need religion?", but, "do we need God?"

Yes, "religion" can have many positive benefits and can also be a major source of oppression and conflict (which is a side of "religion" we could certainly do without) but the real issue is the deeper reality to which it points.

If God is there, and he made our world, then ultimately, life makes no sense without him.  We can enjoy his creation, benefit from everything he has made and even display many Godly qualities (although sadly we often don't) in our lives, characters and our treatment of one another, but if we're emotionally and spiritually disconnected from the one who is at the heart of it all then something fundamental is missing and our lives and societies will always be the poorer for it.

God of Natural Disasters?

According to a recent survey, 44 percent of Americans and 59 percent of American white evangelical Christians believe that natural disasters are or could be a sign or message from God.

So as a British evangelical(ish) Christian, what do I think?  I'm not entirely sure, so I thought if I tried to write about it I might be able to work something out!

First of all, I have to believe that God is love. This is fundamental to the Christian faith and to my own understanding of God and the Universe. I therefore find it hard to imagine God deliberately - and for no reason at all - willing destruction and misery on large numbers of people, e.g. the recent tsunami in Japan.

Thanks to modern science, we now have some knowledge of the processes that cause natural disasters - e.g. tectonic plate movements that cause earthquakes and tsunamis. This would seem to suggest that they are just blind natural processes that happen to occur in places we'd rather they didn't - e.g. where some of us have built our homes!

How can this be reconciled though, with the idea of a God who not only made everything, but also takes an active interest in His creation? Why would God make a world which was subject to these kinds of events and why would He allow them to occur, in spite of the death and suffering they cause? Is it because He doesn't care. Is He being deliberately malicious? Is it possible that He does actually cause some of these events in order to try and communicate through them in some way? Or is the real answer, "none of the above", or perhaps even a bit of a mixture?

The classic evangelical Christian response to all of this - at least in my experience - is that when God first made the world it was "perfect" so there wouldn't have been any natural disasters, but when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the garden of Eden all that changed. "Sin" entered the world and a fundamental disconnect was created between man and God and also between God and His creation. The creation itself suffered as a result of man's disobedience and so natural disasters, along with all manner of other ills, entered the equation.

This is a nice story but it doesn't really fit with the scientific evidence, which suggests that the world has been in a pretty much constant state of flux since it first formed about 5 billion years ago. Also though, I can't see any direct claims in the Bible itself that natural disasters are a consequence of Adam and Eve's rebellion, or that they didn't exist before that point (whether or not the Adam and Eve story is meant to be taken literally, which is another question!).

I do think though, that human beings were created to be rulers and priests over God's creation (for more on this see my other post on this subject), and that this role involves acting as mediators between God and the world and bringing harmony to it through our wise stewardship. When we cannot perform this role effectively due to our own estrangement from God, then to some extent creation will suffer, but I can only really speculate as to what physical effects this might have.

I do quite like Father David Cloake's explanation of natural disasters here, which hinges on the idea that the world is alive and that life requires change and at times upheaval - both as a consequence and also as a prerequisite for growth and development. In the end, to be overly safe is to be suffocated by mundanity. No parent (i.e. God) wants their children to be hurt, but by protecting them from all danger you ultimately do them more harm than good because they can never truly learn or develop.

I was also struck by this spoof article on the Onion website, about the positive effect that disasters sometimes have on human nature. Suffering can make us bury our heads in the sand in despair, or it can call out everything that is good in us in response. Suffering presents all of us with both a challenge and an opportunity to be truly "human", in the best and most positive sense of that word.

I recognise that in discussing all these options, I haven't really answered the question, but this is what I think so far:

• Did God make the world? - yes!
• Does God love people? - yes!
• Does He allow natural disasters to happen? - yes!
• Could He prevent them? - yes!
• Why doesn't He? - I've made some suggestions above but I'm sure there's more to it than this. I doubt if there's any simple "one size fits all" answer. It also seems entirely possible to me that He has done on occasion, though it would be hard to prove on the basis of something that didn't happen!
• Does He ever cause them directly? - I don't know. There is some evidence in the Bible that He has done on occasion. I see no reason why He couldn't if He wanted to and I don't know what reasons He might have, but I'm personally willing to trust that He would only do so if they were very good ones!
• Does God "speak" to us through natural disasters and if so, in what ways? - I think natural disasters speak to us in a number of ways, and as God made the world, so these could be seen as messages from our creator.
  
  • They encourage us to reach out to God, by reminding us of our mortality and the fragility of our lives.
  • By inspiring empathy in those not affected, they remind us of our shared humanity and challenge us to love one another.
  • They challenge us to learn and develop and adapt to changes in our environment.
  • They remind us of our dependence on the earth and our need to live in harmony with it.
  • It's also possible that in specific circumstances God may communicate through natural disasters in other ways but I think I've kind of run out of space to explore that properly here...

Love in Action

I recently had my attention drawn to this article on the Guardian "Poverty Matters Blog", describing efforts being made in Mali by local NGO, AEDM, to help local farmers adapt to the effects of climate change.  Faced with shorter and heavier rainy seasons, AEDM have helped villagers develop better composting techniques, and build raised, flash-flood-proof vegetable plots.

The author of the article seems full of praise for the scheme, but finishes by noting that, "the challenge to get funds down to this kind of micro level is daunting", and that, "the simplest, cheapest small-scale solutions are often the last to get the funding they need".

The author doesn't explain however, how AEDM are funded at the moment, or in fact, who AEDM actually are!  I've only recently heard of them myself and don't know where all their funding comes from, but I do know that "AEDM" stands for "Agence Evangélique de Développement du Mali" - the Mali Evangelical Development Agency - and that they are at least partially funded by various world-wide partnerships including one with UK Christian development charity, Tearfund, which my wife and I support.  I know how Tearfund are funded because their annual report is available here.  Of the £61 million income they had last year, £40 million came from supporter donations and £28 million of this was from individuals such as my wife and myself, most of whom are likely to be British Christians of an evangelical persuasion (since this is Tearfund's primary supporter base).

Religion often gets a bad press for being a source of oppression and/or conflict, but for me this is a prime example of the church doing what it does best, where the "church" in this case consists not of an institution, but of various, otherwise unconnected Christian groups that have 2 things in common:

1. They love Jesus.
2. They want to demonstrate that love in action by doing something practical to help make the world a better place.

Tearfund (among others) does a brilliant job of exploiting this "network".  Their strategy is to partner with and support local organisations like AEDM who have a similar or compatible vision, and are on the ground and understand the local situation - often working through local churches, which provide instant access to a pool of volunteers who are well integrated into the community.  The AEDM project and many others like them work by empowering local people to take control of their situation, rather than making them dependent on handouts.

Christians don't always get much recognition for this sort of thing - the Guardian article about AEDM referenced at the start of this post doesn't even mention the word "Christian" and avoids explaining what AEDM actually stands for! - but it is nevertheless a big part of the way the Christian faith is lived out, every day by ordinary believers all over the world, and perhaps provides some proof that at some level at least, Jesus Christ is actually making a difference!

St George's Day

The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, has recently called (again) for St. George's Day to be celebrated as an English national holiday.

Personally I've never paid a great deal of attention to saint's days - I guess mainly because I wasn't raised as an Anglican or a Catholic, or born in Wales or Ireland where people generally seem to have a stronger national affinity to their patron saints.  I didn't even know St. George's Day was on the 23rd April - I had to ask my Welsh wife!

As I've written elsewhere, I have an uneasy relationship with the traditional Christian (or at least Catholic) concept of "sainthood", although I do think it's good to remember and celebrate past Christians who have set a particularly good example by their character and conduct and whose lives we can still learn from.

I also like the idea of having a specifically English holiday and I do think our English national identity should be celebrated.  It seems a terrible shame that our national flag - the St George's Cross - is so often associated with racism and the BNP.  Englishness should not be something to be ashamed of - instead, like any nationality or culture it should be celebrated: not in competition with others, or at their expense, but as one culture among many which is special to us because its ours!  This kind of nationalism is secure in itself and can also celebrate, appreciate and welcome others.  To my mind this is the best antidote to the arrogant and insecure nationalism of the BNP and others, which feels so threatened by "foreigners", at least in part because it is so unsure of itself.

So what about St. George's Day then?  Who was St. George and what are we celebrating?  Most people know of him as the dragon-slayer, who killed the dragon to rescue the princess in typical fairy-tale fashion.  In less typical fairy-tale fashion, the citizens of the town which was being terrorised by this dragon consequently converted to Christianity in gratitude for St. George's brave act of heroism.  This story of course is shrouded in myth, but the true story of St. George (if it is true - it seems a little hard to tell!) may be no less interesting:

St. George was a Christian and a soldier in the Roman army who advanced to the rank of Tribunus, before the Emperor Diocletian ordered all Christians in the army to convert to paganism.  George refused, despite being offered various bribes and inducements, and remained outspoken in his devotion to Christ.  After exhausting all other avenues, Diocletian had him heavily tortured and then executed by decapitation.  Before being executed, George took the opportunity to give all his wealth to the poor.

Apart from his martyrdom, part of George's appeal as a patron saint was undoubtedly due to his military connections, and visions of him were said to have appeared to various troops during various military campaigns, particularly during the Crusades.  He is unfortunately now heavily associated with the Crusades, especially since his flag was worn by the English Crusaders (who had adopted it some years previously).  For this reason, I would happily replace St. George as English patron saint - if there were someone obvious to replace him with.  Since this is not the case however, and in any case we would be extremely unlikely to get universal agreement about this, it seems to me that the best option is to continue to celebrate what is good about St. George, but with humility regarding our past mistakes.