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BEING TWO-FACED
Their religion is skin deep and hasn’t addressed the really serious issues in their hearts or the truly important issues of society.
WE ARE ALL RECOVERING PHARISEES
WHEN CHRISTIANS are judgmental, hypocritical, insensitive, and mean-spirited,
spirited, they are acting in ways that are unchristian.
My experience with non-religious people is that they do not expect Christians to be perfect. In fact, one young adult said, “I don’t mind that you Christians don’t live up to your ideals. I don’t live up to all of my ideals either. In the end, I guess we’re all hypocrites. It’s just that I and my friends recognize that we’re hypocrites.
It seems that many Christians haven’t figured this out yet.”
When Christians are judgmental, hypocritical, insensitive, and mean-spirited, they are acting in ways that are unchristian.
what Christians should strive to be like, he used these words: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, faithfulness, and self-control
their lives have value—all
When Christians get it right they love and give, they work for
justice and demonstrate kindness. When Christians get it right they, like Jesus, befriend those who are outside the church rather than condemning them. And when Christians get it right, people are drawn to, rather than repelled by, their faith.
CHAPTER 2
CHRISTIANS, SCIENCE, AND POLITICS
SCIENCE, FAITH, AND FEAR
He was also turned off by the way many Christians approached modern science.
The whole question of creationism versus evolution and scientific theory is always something that bothered
me.
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This is the perception many thinking people have of Christians—that they are “less intellectually active.”
June 22, 1633.
the church pronounced Galileo a heretic for promoting the shocking notion that the earth moves around the sun,
SIMPLY PUT, Christians are afraid that science will disprove
or debunk what they believe.
what was a dangerous and heretical idea on June 22, 1633, is now something most people (including most Christians) take for granted. I wonder how many of the issues over which Christians battle
with science today will take a similar path.
people find themselves increasingly alienated by the belief, expressed by some Christians, that much of what we know from modern science is incompatible with Christian teaching.
new ideas undermine their faith. From discoveries in geology about the age of the earth to the much-maligned science of evolution,
some Christians have been pushing back at advances in science for centuries.
As I try to understand why so many Christians carry on this battle with science, I keep coming back to one word: fear. Simply put, Christians are afraid that scien...
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They secretly worry that the next scientific development will be the one that decisively shows that God doesn’t e...
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They think that the more people know about science, the less they will believe in God. Christians fear science because they think that it either competes with faith or is actively engaged in destroying...
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But God is not threatened by science. If creation is the handiwork of God, and science helps us see the exquisite and marvelous workings of creation,
realize how truly big God is.
“The heavens are telling the glory of God”
When some Christians add up the ages represented by the genealogies of the Old Testament and then tell us that the earth is less than ten thousand years old, I want to laugh or cry. With John, I find myself wondering why they can’t appreciate that the biblical stories of creation were written in the
form of Hebrew poetry.
They were not written as God’s way of giving ancient people a lesson in cosmolog...
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USING THE Bible to answer scientific questions
is a bit like trying to use a paintbrush to drive screws into a wall. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.
In the twentieth century, many Christians opposed evolution. Not all Christ...
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but some of the most vocal Chr...
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SCIENCE HELPS us understand how the universe works. Faith, on the other hand,
aims to teach us what our existence means.
Science and faith are two different ways of understanding our existence. Science helps us understand the physical processes—how the universe works. This is hugely important and, as I’ve already noted, no threat to genuine faith. Theology and faith, on the other hand, aim to teach ...
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theology seeks to answer the questions why and for what purpose. Both sets of ...
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THE CREATION stories in Genesis were not meant to teach us how God created,
but that God created.
This is why Christians get it wrong when they treat the book of Genesis ...
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The creation stories in Genesis were not meant to teach us how God created, but that God created.
The stories teach us that there is a God, that God is good, that creation is a good gift of God, and that human beings are created in God’s image (not in our physical appearance, but in our capacity to love, to think, to reason,
