The faith is a demanding thing, and the way may well be impossible.

You are a creature, in the flesh, and subject to the stresses and demands of physical survival.  You can no more extract yourself from the natural world than you can leap off the Earth and land on the Moon.

We will ever be at odds with the world, and if we are not, that shall be a warning to us.  As it is, the more one is faithful, the more he will be hated.

The darkness is always closing in.

The world then, with its powerful and mighty, its famed and fortunate, has an appeal the faithful can never capture.  There is enmity and it cannot be bridged.  The advantage, so long as we are in the world, belongs to the worldly.

So you may find yourself beaten down.  In a world upside-down – as it will ever be – your virtue is a drag on your success, your kindness is weakness, your modesty is a limit beyond which your competitors race to defeat you.

You may come to think that, despite the echoes of your dreams, dreams from a far-off place, you are destined to a middling life.  Gray and sluggish, commoditized, leaving no impression by which you will ever be remembered.

But you’ve got it all wrong;  You have swallowed the lie.

I am your brother, listen to me:  You have closed yourself off from God.

God – does not – permit mediocrity.  He will spit you out, and perhaps He has.

Here is how you will find the moment of expectoration:  When did you last avoid a good action because of fear?   It is that simple – in your family, in your business, in your spiritual life, when you have found something good to be too much, or too dreadful, you assumed the temperature of the room.  You were no longer pleasing to the taste, giving satisfaction to the thirst.

The lie is that, as a child of God, you are bound to defeat.  No need to begin fighting, it will all end in flames and ashes.

The enemy is no fool.  He knows that if he can demoralize you before you’ve begun to fight back, he’s already won.

The game is rigged against you, he says.  He holds all the cards.  Go ahead, make a run at it – see how easily you are slapped down?  And what are you resisting sin for, after all?  If it is all for God and the ultimate victory, why does God not win right now?  Why does He make it all but impossible for you to succeed?

Now, do you see how you have been poisoned and duped?  Do you see how the world has trampled upon your God-given dignity, and has stifled the mighty works God meant to work through you?  It is time to go in, whips in hand, and throw the tables over.

The truth is, you have not trusted God enough.  You have accepted, from fear or disappointment, that He will not come through for you.

Perhaps you are inadequate (you are).  Perhaps you are imperfect (doubtless).  Yes, you have failed, and you have shamed yourself, and you have given every earthly reason to any worldly power that you are not up to the task.

Do you see the lie?  You will see it when you hear the truth:  You do not answer to a worldly power.  You answer to the Almighty.

Therefore!  It does not matter if you have failed by worldly measures, over and over again.  It does not matter if you have showed yourself inadequate for the task, lacking in perseverance, intelligence, skill.

Fool!  IT. IS. NOT. ABOUT. YOU.

Do you wonder why Adam and Eve ate of the apple?  First, clean your lips of that bitter sweetness… you have sunk your teeth into the lie and devoured it whole.

Let’s put it starkly, written in a flame against the blackness of night:  The Devil has isolated you from God, and proceeded to devour you.  This is why you are demoralized, beaten down, perpetually inadequate, in motion and going nowhere.

The Devil is virtually a god and has convinced you that you must face him under your own power.  Every failure, every weak moment, every grasp at evil is one more victory for him, and one more defeat for you.  And you have no hope of overcoming him…

…alone.

But of course he has lied to you.  He rigged the game, he set you up for destruction.  Now, you know better.

You, as always, must call on the Almighty.  You must call on Him with all of the desperation of a drowning man, because truly you cannot defeat the waves.  You must call on him as though the enemy came fully armed, has you surrounded, and is counting down to your annihilation.  Because you cannot defeat death.

But He can.

And there it is, my brother, my sister.  Look to Him, always.  Pray to Him, at every moment, for every good thing – especially in your need.

Then, simply hold on.  Work and strive and fight with everything you have, reinforced by the power of God.  One day you will barely be able to stand, and the next you will be lifting mountains.  First, you will strain to walk, then you will race with all speed to the ends of the earth.

Many will doubt, and then you will succeed beyond all of their expectations.

Many will forecast doom, and you will deliver victory.

In our time, Christmas is a lovely thing.  It is universally observed as a time for giving, family, good works.  Only a little more narrowly, it is the great holy day, brought out as something better than any heirloom or treasure, recognized as the arrival of a singular hero, God Himself.

The comfort of family and traditions veils the shock.  Consider the infant!

A baby in the room will elicit warm smiles, soft coos, sure hands to cradle her.  The infant receives and cannot offer, cries but cannot articulate, trusts but cannot protect herself from harm.

At Christmas, we are not often reminded that the world is still enemy territory.  Christmas is the time when it feels as though the world could be otherwise – perhaps there could be peace on Earth.

But that is not the pretense for the Incarnation.  The pretense is that the world is fallen, is in need of redemption.  The pretense, as Christ later says, is that men are wicked, this generation is faithless.  They cannot grapple with the mess they’re in.  It will destroy them.

Now, if you had all power and determined to fight and win this conflict, would you begin by emptying yourself of all that power and appearing as an infant behind enemy lines?  This is the paradox that would destroy all reality:  That God made Himself utterly vulnerable to death.

That baby in the manger is everything.  And he has nothing, can say nothing, can protect nothing.

Why?

We with finite powers may begin to answer this:  If we had all power, we might storm the earth, take the holy innocents trapped behind enemy lines, and speed them to Paradise.  And then, if we had the stomach for it – and we would, being holy – we would destroy whatever remained in water and fire, and begin again.

But who, exactly, would you have rescued?

All are under the grip of sin.  None are innocent.  You would return to Heaven empty-handed, and turn around and destroy all those you meant to save.

Do you see the predicament?  We are willing captives.  We choose this every time we sin.  Meanwhile, God loves us and wishes to redeem us to unimaginable glory.

If He comes in force, we are likely as not to resist!  Our guards go up, and all of the things we value more than we should, all of the priorities we have placed above Him – these things we cling to in defiance of Him.

Not you?  Do it now, then.  Go where He has been calling you.  Give up the sins, give up even the good things which nevertheless stand in your way.  Leave all things behind – do not look back – and follow Him.

See it now?  You are the enemy’s territory.  Your heart is behind enemy lines.  God cannot rescue you by destroying you.

Make no mistake.  There is evil, and it must ultimately be destroyed.  Violently, with a permanence so profound you will not remember it existed.

Yet you are redeemable, and one of the ways you can observe this is by your response to an infant.  Do you offer a smile?  Does your hope awaken?  Would you protect the baby from harm?

It was a master stroke, wasn’t it?  God almighty, appearing as an infant invader?

He had to come claim your heart, first.  Only then could He lead you out.

The controversy over the Supreme Court decision on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has been…well, hysterical, when you think about it. There are, for instance, otherwise intelligent people shuddering for the United States. It is unbecoming for a scientist to be reading tea leaves – principally because they aren’t any good at it – since it causes them to declare that a “theocracy” is afoot.

Of course the word “theocracy” only enters the conversation because it’s scary, like communism, and not because anything like a theocracy is imminently threatening.

Rather than dig into the case as one more bloviating layperson, I’d like to comment on an issue which plays into the discussion, which has plenty of application over and above SCOTUS.

Namely, there is a peculiar fear of religion, and a distinction of religion from…well, I guess the “normal” or “ordinary” way of looking at things. There is also the widespread illusion that science and religion are so different from each other that they are actually opposed.

Here I would like to introduce the notion of worldview. This is simply the way a person believes the world to be.

Is the world knowable, or not?  If so, how can we know it, and what can we know about it? Is there a God, or not? Am I the only one who exists, or do all these other people exist in the same way that I do?

If these questions sound philosophical, that’s because they are. One’s worldview might also be likened to one’s personal philosophy. What do you perceive to be the purpose of life, if anything? What is all of this for? What duties and obligations do you have, if any?

How one answers questions like these, then, determines (or is indicative of) his worldview.

It should be obvious, I think, that while there may be trends in the way people answer these questions (the ancient Chinese might answer differently than the medieval Muslims, who again answer differently than modern Latin Americans), there is not necessarily any neat, “standard” response.

In other words, there is not a neat, “normal” response from which we could say that religion departs. If anything, religion would have to be part of that normal response, given its ubiquity across space and time.

Now, let us usher in an interesting idea: Secularism. This, of course, is a lack of commitment to any particular religion, and a positive commitment toward the common understanding of the common good. This is such an alluring idea, in fact, that it is taken to be the “standard” worldview, from which other worldviews (especially religious worldviews) depart.

I would then argue: Secularism is not meant to be a worldview. It is meant to be a mutual agreement not to impose any particular worldview. In the same way, a recipe is not an ingredient – it is a description of the way the ingredients are meant to come together.

The fascinating thing – to this bloviator, anyway – is that in its refusal to impose a particular religious worldview, secularism has thus seemed very attractive to those who reject all religious worldviews – I mean, atheists.

In fact, many atheists have often been only too happy to wear the mantle of secularism, and many Christians have been too dense to understand the distinction: Atheism is a worldview, but secularism is not. (I do think, lest I hang too many of my brethren in Christ, that plenty of atheists are so fanatical as to miss the distinction, too).

The truth is, both Christians and atheists (and Muslims, and Hindus, and…) should be happy to wear the mantle of secularism – unless they have a better strategy for governing in a pluralistic society.

Or, I suppose, unless they intend to install a theocracy.

Now, critical to secularism, it seems to me, is the free exercise of religion; but let’s amend it, and call it the free exercise of worldview.* We should not leave the atheists out, after all, or they might claim the whole damned system for themselves and install an anti-theist-ocracy. (Don’t laugh…it’s been done).

Let’s ask the question: Is it right to impose on an employer (or anyone), and require her to provide for a product or treatment to which she is morally opposed?

Is it really in line with the idea of secularism that we should require people to act in opposition to their worldviews, so that other people will receive what is considered “good” within their worldview?

Forget for a moment that this was an issue raised mainly by Christians. Think of yourself, and your sincerely held worldview. Think of one particular action which you find morally offensive.

The argument is, can a society really be justified in forcing you to commit (or be complicit in) that action, no matter how “good” other members of that society perceive it to be?

Don’t be hasty. Don’t assume you’re cool with whatever. That is not the meaning of secularism.

The meaning of secularism is to provide a real opportunity for people of multi-various worldviews to live authentically within their own worldviews, while living in common with each other.

Government impositions on sincerely held beliefs are a sin in secularism. They cripple secularism.

And they necessarily favor one worldview over others.

*Whether this bears the spirit of the Framers is a fair and interesting question, but I aim to talk about secularism principally as a concept, and not within any particular historical context.

If you’re not already a fan of www.houzz.com, I highly recommend it.  The pictures are often gorgeous, and the things people do with architecture and decor really are amazing.  (It can sometimes be approached as a challenge by the DIY types).

Well, Houzz led me to this site by way of an article on kitchen upgrades, and so I took in what information could find.  I’m not keen on granite, so the idea that its favor is fading intrigues me.  (Nanotech countertops?!  The future is now).

And good heavens, don’t forget the comments.  A debate broke out over the existence of God!

Granted:  It takes a little over 30 comments to get to God, and up until then, the comments were largely relevant to the article.  I was enjoying the back and forth, as I know nothing about geology.  There are even some fun electron jokes thrown in for good measure.

Now, it would seem “Faith Priest” said something worthy of being censored; though the content is lost, we get an idea from “guru dogg” that it was incendiary, possibly explosive.

“When you see a warhead missile detonating above your city, how will your state of mind react to the state of burning flesh? When your eyes melt in your sockets, how loud will you call out to God?”

Huh?  I, for one, really want to know what Faith Priest said.  No matter, there’s still some fine material ahead.  “Bubbawubba Gump” says,

“Holy bat sh*t crazy, Batman! @guru, you have spent way too much time in a dark room dreaming of what god will do to everyone and you should see a psychiatrist. If the bombs drop they will definitely be sent by some psycho who believes God wants him to destroy the world, not by someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife.”

So, Gump starts off in the land of humor and proportional response, then takes a sharp turn toward Dawkinsville, where any instance of evil is “definitely” the the fault of religion.  Because only religious people perpetrate evil.

“Geri” tries to bring the conversation to the abstract:

“Without God, I am the sole authority and measure of my own good. There is no objective measure of good unless it is in comparison it to the infinite goodness, God Himself.”

Geri is actually getting ahead of me in the series on objective morality, but you can guess I agree with his/her point.  Not that the combox following an article on countertop surfaces is the best place to plant one’s flag.

Not one to let a reasonable point be made, “jfahle3” retorts:

“See, caveperson, I don’t believe in an invisible sky giant. Fortunately for you, I don’t need an invisible sky giant to tell me not to steal from you, I just know it’s not right to steal from you.”

Let’s see – presuming superiority by name-calling, grossly misrepresenting what is meant by God, and failing to comprehend the point he/she is criticizing.  Here is the New Atheist trifecta!*

Something is missing, though.  “SwoodTN” goes for the knock-out with a left hook nobody saw coming…

“Interesting article about granite. You know what is really interesting about granite? It can be found on every continent on earth and has the distinction of being carbon dated as earth’s oldest rock. Scientists say it formed over millions of years as the earth’s surface cooled. But if you look at granite under a spectron microscope, you will see radio halos trapped inside.”

Unless you’ve read Internet comboxes before, then you totally saw it coming.  Here is the “But how do you explain this?” angle, which takes a narrow set of facts and interprets them in an apparently straightforward way, with the conclusion that God did it.  Frankly, the jargon is beyond me, but the rhetoric is par for the course.

“Prism” replies with the obligatory, jargon-for-jargon rebuttal:

“(2) Granites that have been appropriately age-dated (using K-Ar, U-Pb, Rb-Sr isotope dating, e.g.) range from billions to less than a million years old. Felsic magma may be cooling deep in the earth (forming new granite) even as we speak (basic earth processes continue to operate as always), but younger intrusive rocks are not yet exposed at the surface for study.
And (3) re: radio halos in granite – not even close to true. See http://paleo.cc/ce/halos.htm”

When you’re numbering your points 40 comments deep in an article about kitchen upgrades, you might be wasting your time.  It might be easier to say, “That’s interesting,” and point out that a mysterious occurrence in geology – if it is actually mysterious – does not tell us much about the existence of God, the ground of all reality.

Only two more, because they are more down to earth (or, up to the surface?).  “Stevo” says:

“So called scientific TRUTHS are only theories that are constantly amended as more facts are discovered. Christianity is belief in proven facts about Jesus that only requires faith.”

I think I get what Stevo is saying, but his intellectual opponents on dishwashers.reviewed.com are not even going to try.  Remember, Christian brothers and sisters – when in doubt, be modest in your claims.  If you have no doubt, be even more modest.

We finish with “PlacidAir,” who replies,

“There are no “proven facts” about Jesus — that’s why it’s called ‘faith’.“

I strain myself here to understand what PlacidAir is saying, though as a disposition, I do endorse modesty (see above).  Is PlacidAir saying that we have not proven that Jesus existed, for instance?  The simple existence of Jesus of Nazareth is as close to certain as it can be – doubting it gets you the label of “Myther,” which is about the same level as the “FlatEarther“.

There probably is some grand take-away here, but I’ve relayed this combox debate simply because I found it amusing.  I hope it lightens your day.

*As always, the New Atheist is to be contrasted with the serious, non-militant atheist.  They may be distinguished by the following measure:  The latter can be reasoned with.

Without wanting to get anyone’s hands too dirty, I think it can be said without controversy that fathers suffer a bruised reputation these days.  I will give you evidence – my favorite coffee shop, Caribou Coffee, has offered “BOGO” drinks on Mother’s Day, but had to be petitioned to offer them again (the following year) on Father’s Day.  BOGO, of course, stands for “buy one, get one (free)”.

I mostly wanted free coffee, and would readily admit that mothers deserve the honor before fathers do.  I think it’s proper that Mother’s Day should arrive first each year.

A funny thing happens to fathers who venture out with their children and without their mother.  After a stranger, approaching in admiration, comments to me, “You’ve really got your hands full!” – four kids and their Papa, walking around the farmers market in good order and with pleasant dispositions – the next thing she/he says is, “You’re done now, right?”

If you are not the parent of multiple children, the intimation may not be obvious.  What the stranger means is, you’re done having children, since four is plenty, right?

I think I’m quite within my rational rights to be upset about such a comment, but of course I’m not.  After all, though I enjoy talking with most people, I also realize it does not take long to get to the first of their many active hypocrisies.  Many of these people, after all, are older, and many of those come from families larger than 6.

And why be upset?  Though they may not imagine it as such, I am blessed four times over.  More than that, truth be told.

Just think of it – four people, under my care and deeply woven into my life.  And the metaphor goes on – it’s actually a seamless experience, for me.  I don’t compartmentalize my fatherhood, any more than I do my manhood.  Rather, I am a father, at every hour of the day, no matter what I am doing.  At any moment, I may be compelled by duty (and love) to wipe a nose, discipline against a bad behavior, teach a bit of logic or knowledge, wipe a butt, carry a little person bodily for her/his comfort, evoke a laugh or enjoy one, tell a story, sing a song, change a diaper (a lot of wiping going on), research information and gifts, consider opportunities, affirm my love, tickle a little person to tears…

And it’s more than that, it really is.

(In a bit of serendipity, I was just told by an old-ish friend that I remind her of Atticus, played by Gregory Peck.  She flattered me enough to think that I might look like he did in To Kill a Mockingbird in 15 years or so, and said that as she came to know me, she thought I’d also be an Atticus type of father.  She didn’t know this, but I consider Atticus one of my role models as a father, and regularly consider what he’d do in a given situation.  I have also joked that my children could call me “Papa” or “Atticus.”)

Perhaps I am only aloof, but I consider myself unbruised by the contemporary opinion of fatherhood.  I am bruised by other things, but not by things so mistaken.  What the contemporary person opines does not even scratch the surface, not even as an insult (as so much mockery does scratch and claw at our sincere beliefs); I am blessed too deeply for that.

You could not sling any taunt which would make me regret being a father.  There is nothing that you could add to me, except virtue, which would enrich me further.

I get to watch people grow from practical invisibility to (God willing) adulthood.  I get to hear some of their first heartbeats.

Moreover, I am privileged with a key role, like a lung the child breathes from, which is both a pressing of my essential qualities (like oil from olives) and an extraordinary opportunity to become better than I was, by leaps and bounds.

And what privilege, what blessing is greatest of all?  No – what terror, what insurmountable difficulty is greater?

By the simple fact that I am “father,” all that I am and all that I do is bound up inextricably in my children’s experience of God, the Father.  I am the lens, the set of constraints, the point of reference – at least for now, but perhaps for life – which shapes their expectations for God.  I pray He will supervene and do greater things than I can do (as He has for me, despite giving me a tremendous father).

And what a thing, I think, that I can nevertheless look to my father and reflect on his depth of character and selflessness, and see in them a pattern from God.  If the least thing can be said of me in this way, I will be happy.