Life Expectancy

Do you think that life expectancy in our day and age should really be attributed to Medical advances or should the decline of the infant mortality rate be attributed to Medical advances. I am pretty sure that people who survived birth and childhood in past centuries lived into their 70-80's, but when you try to average it out and have to include deaths at birth it brings the average life span down a bunch. I was thinking about this because the bible mentions people who had long life spans outside of the first few chapters of Genesis. Anna is a great example. Anyway. I always thought as a kid that our medicine had made some spectacualar leap for mankind by creating the perfect anti-death agent. It turns out that we are just more proficient at delivering babies - no small feat in itself, but quite different from making someone live who would have lived 30 years live for 80. Just a thought...

New Testament - Old doubts...

Last night I was thinking about the New Testament. I was thinking just how outlandish it all is. The idea that God would put on skin, that He would walk around, that He died and that through that our sins are forgiven and we are redeemed from an afterlife spent in hell. I thought about the idea that He was then raised back to life after being for 3 days, I mean, His heart had not beaten for three days, rigamortis had set in, he was , . It is all so unbelievable. What I started thinking about is how there are so many other documents that record events that are just as spectacular or at least similar in their miraculous nature, that we simply discount as frauds. The book of Mormon is one that comes to mind readily.
Here is what I realized. The New Testament is different from all other Manuscripts of this type. It is a set of documents that were all written in the same span of time that the events took place. Let me explain it this way. People live for 60-90 years. Jesus died in the early 30 AD's. The new Testament was all written before or up to about the 80's. This means that a maximum of 40 years had surfaced between the latest writings of the New Testament and the of Jesus. THIS MEANS: that the reports of the New Testament were testable. Individuals could have read the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, and simply gone and talked with Nicodemus or Zacchaeus and asked if they had really witnessed Jesus in the manner the gospels record. No other document that I can think of has this same kind of "testability" to it. Joseph Smith wrote about things that had supposedly happened in the past. There is no way we can go and ask someone, did this happen. But early observers of Christianity had this luxury. It is no wonder the church grew by leaps and bounds in those early days. People in Jerusalem had seen all that had happened, they had heard reports and they were asking themselves, "what does this all mean?" Along comes Peter, he does a bit of preaching and explains the "Good News" and THOUSANDS accept Christ. It is no wonder. They accepted because it filled in the blanks for what they had witnessed.

A philosphical question and a question of philosophy...

As Christians, we are constantly trying to get rid of those elements of society that function in an immoral manner - porn on the web, violence in video games, sex in TV and movies, etc. My question is for those "free willers" out there, those Armenian brothers:
If God is a God of choice, desiring that individuals chose him, then why do we try to rid an individual of choice? Let me clarify, why do we try to rid ourselves of the negative choices in life?
Do we make for stronger Christians if we remove any possibility of sin?
Do we make for better Christians if we take away any chance of falling away?
Will grace abound? Is our job to clean up society and remove temptations? (I am not talking at a personal level, I am talking at a corporate level).
Someone might well then say, "what choice do we have but to get rid of immoral things, they corrupt, kill, maim and smell bad." Of course they do, they are immoral because they are in direct opposition to the things of God (which tend to smell quite peculiar and tantalizing). But is getting "rid" of this societal corrosion really the answer? Even God left Adam & Eve with a choice, he left them the chance to be immoral. It has always boggled me how much time we Christians put into banning, badmouthing, and breaking down immoral activities only to have five more pop up in their wake. I have long felt that, if anything, we loose ground in this fight. Perhaps, we do not gain ground because our struggle is not meant to be against imoral "things". Perhaps, God has never desired a moral nation or people, but an obedient, loving community. Perhaps, He cares much more about the condition of our souls than the language on our lips (fixing the first will lead to a rebirth in the former).
This is why Christians being involved in the working of politics and schools, homes and businesses, is of the utmost importance, because we must find a way to give a choice to the masses. We must make sure that the world not only has sex, drugs, and rock n' roll to chose from, but that they are able to see and chose the grace that can be found in a relationship with Jesus... If we make clear what is wrong but leave out what is right, we only make for moral people. I am about changed lives, not moral people...

Broke Bread

I understand the desire in churches to return to the pattern found in Acts, whatever that may be. One thing that is interesting to me is Acts 2:46-47 where it talks about the believers meeting to break bread in their homes, this follows vs 42 where they speak of devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 46 starts by saying "Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts...". Every day. I wonder if this is the reasoning behind Catholic Mass every day of the week. These folks lived in community with one another. As the church we do not hold to having a true fellowship like this. I wonder what would happen if we began to devote ourselves to a more full living out of the early church's pattern?
If I had a time every day for my students to gather together, would they? Would adults? Should we? I'm not sure yet...

Author's Intended Meaning?

I was reading a book for my greek tools class last night and the gentleman (Alan Black) was discussing doing good exegesis. One of the things that he was stressing, as all good bible college professors do, was the need to find the Author's Intended Meaning (AIM). I have always struggled with this idea. I struggle because there seems to be a dichotomy between our means of interpretation and our stance on the source of biblical literature. What I mean is this. When we talk about scripture, defend it, etc. we express the idea that these are not man made works but Spirit of God driven, divine masterpieces. Yet when we study them our goal is to find out what "Paul" or "Matthew" meant. We would argue that they are divine in origin and yet study them as though they were any other piece of literature. I guess the question I am struggling with, is if the Spirit of God is big enough to create within the scripture itself nuansces that even the hand that was writing them did not fully grasp. Is it possible that Paul was being carried along by the Spirit and wrote things that amazed him? If so, what would his intended meaning have to do with anything? I hope this makes sense.

Oil Ecology?

What part do you think oil plays in our ecosystem? What major effect will it have to remove it from the crust of our earth? My new crazy theory is that the removal of oil from the earth's crust is causing global warming, not emissions...

The Purpose of Prayer

If there is one thing I struggle with as a believer it is the discipline of having a personally devoted prayer life.

I think Jesus gets me best in Matthew 6 when he says...

"6But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."(emphasis mine)

When I pray I suffer from the knowledge that the Father already knows what I need before I ask him. I think many Christians have a nagging feeling about this knowledge that keeps them from having a devoted prayer life. I have wondered if it is my definition of what prayer is that keeps me from being motivated by it. I assume that prayer is a communication between God and I where I tell Him about me. What if prayer has very little to do with me (As far as providing God information of what I want, how I feel, etc. - he already knows, remember, he's God)? What if prayer has much more to do with me alligning myself with what Gods will is, what Gods heart beats for. What if it is about me seeking the coming of God's kingdome, and forgiveness of those I need to forgive as I am being forgiven. What if?