A Visit to the Church

                                          

Last  Saturday my son went to Mass with his girlfriend (just to make her happy, he said). This certainly is an improvement in respect to a few years ago! Back then he was sort of obsessed with the problem of faith. I remember that he chose religion as the subject of an essay for his writing class. The students were supposed to write about “an interesting adventure”, and he made up an afternoon  at Mass with me. 

Now, what kind of an adventure was that for a twenty year old boy? Furthermore, it never happened!

He started by asking me to describe to him the interior of the church, which by the way is located right across the street from our home.

“What’s the problem?” I said. “Can’t you go and take a peak inside?”

“Can’t you do what I’m asking you to do, just for once?” he retorted.

So I wrote for him a brief description on a piece of paper.

“This isn’t good enough,” he commented. “Can’t you do any better?”

“Listen, it’s Sunday and in one hour I’m going to Mass. Why don’t you come with me just for five minutes?”

“Maybe. Let’s go for a walk first.”

Along the way, he apparently pulled himself together enough to step into the “dreadful” church with me.

“How do you like it?” I asked him once inside.

“Kind of creepy,” he answered, scribbling in his note book.                                                                                                          

“Maybe you should stay for Mass. How are you going to write about it if you don’t know what’s going to happen?”

“I’ll manage. Bye bye!”

And he shot himself in the open air like a lightning.  Perhaps he thought that the walls of that  church would close on him and never set him free again!

EVIL

God created the world out of chaos, but some chaos still remains. It’s the factor that transforms the beautiful waves of the ocean into a tsunami, it is why a monster is born among many good  people, or a sick child among the healthy ones. God can’t do anything to prevent this, but we can. Our technology will allow us to predict natural disasters and genetic diseases, and I don’t think that a new Hitler could get away with another Holocaust today, because the human race has been too deeply ashamed of it to let it happen again. 

We can make the world a better place, but this is not going to happen automatically, thanks to “progress”. Technology and democracy won’t protect us from evil. We must be able to recognize it, for Satan is the “Big Deceiver.”                                                                                                                              

Other times, instead, evil is so evident that we are struck by the impulse to act against it forcefully. This usually leads to more evil.  Following Christ and his message of peace seems unrealistic in a world where atomic bombs are built. It’s a challenge, but the gospels teach that evil cannot be confronted as something apart from us, where we are good and the others are bad.

Evil often reaches its climax in the interaction between the two contenders. Even the apostles had their moments of evil, including Peter, the head of the Church. Only Jesus could unmask it and exhaust its power. He did not resist it and didn’t call to the Father for vengeance, but the Father raised him from the dead, not as a reward or a statement about his divinity, but as Satan’s final defeat. Jesus’ resurrection is the first step in the new creation. 

The prophet Isaiah predicted his sacrifice, as we can read in the prophecy of the Suffering Servant. Jesus the Servant will save the world from within, for God is grieving upon His creation gone wrong. But why doesn’t God deal with evil on His own? Perhaps He can’t land in force to defeat it because, to say with C.S. Lewis, when the author walks on the stage the play is over.

  

Is God Omnipotent?

One of the arguments of the nonbelievers is the old refrain upon which we all have pondered at some moments in our life: if God is good and almighty, why does He allow so much suffering?

The professional atheists call God “incompetent” because of the world He gave us, as if they knew how a better job could have been accomplished in creating the universe. But it’s very easy to invent a world without any suffering in it. In God, A Guide for the Perplexed, professor Keith Ward writes that we simply don’t know how much control over things a perfectly good and rational being would have.

“From a Hegelian point of view,“ he goes on, “God is not omnipotent in the sense that God can choose to create absolutely any state we can imagine…God is omnipotent as the one and only  sourcee of all being, From God flows…the dialectic of darkness and light, negation and affirmation, conflict and reconciliation. God is good in that what God intends is the final reconciliation.”

Modern science has discovered the elegant laws of nature. The Fine Tuning is synonymous of perfection, yet nature is imperfect and often immoral. Mathematical constants allowed organization to emerge from chaos, together with the primal chaotic aspects of a developing  organism. As an argument against a Creator it has been said that, if these constants were different, different life forms would have developed, and they would be marveling at their own Fine Tuning just like we are. But this is exactly the point! For life to appear on a planet, some physical laws MUST be tuned. And so to say that this can happen by chance is just as improbable as it is to say that God did the tuning.

                                                                                                                                                    

Earthquakes and tsunamis occur as a consequence of plate tectonics, the giant plates that move under the surface of the earth and the ocean floor. Without them, the land would be submerged and the temperature would be either scorching or freezing. On a planet subjected to this kind of environment, mammalian life would have been impossible. Therefore, natural disasters are the toll to pay for the development of our species.

Is God watching us to see if we make it, as a scientist would observe his guinea pigs? One might think that God doesn’t care about what’s happening to His creation, but Christians believe that, on the contrary, He’s so passionate about its out coming that He would give His life for it.   

                                                                                                                                 

                                                   

Is Christianity an Utopia?

My son has been chatting on line with a guy who claims to be a Christian.                             

This individual told him that, in the afterlife, God will be my son's “worse 
nightmare”. The man felt so sorry for the unbelievers. because they were
 going to burn in hell. God, he insisted, is not all-loving, in fact He hates 
people like my son.

I was deeply embarrassed. One thing is, for example, to maintain that 
fundamentalists are wrong, because we know for a fact that the earth is 
not six thousand years old. 

A different thing is to maintain that the guy on line is wrong on the ground

that I know the nature of God and he doesn't. It's hard to argue on the basis

of a “modern” interpretation of Jesus' cryptic sayings. No wonder people

prefer to put religion aside and think about something more concrete.                          

I sat next to my son and inverted our role at the computer: As a religious 
person, I wanted to chat with an atheist. 

The first one who text-messaged me said that Jesus was crazy, or he 
wouldn't have claimed to be the Messiah.                     
I felt very tired. Once again I could only argue according with my

understanding of Christ, but it would have been pointless.
The guy was too far behind.

I wanted to scream:” Please, Jesus, do something! Come back riding on

clouds, if this is what it takes!”

Instead, I left the computer to my son. I wasn’t going to argue with people
 I don’t care about. But I do care a lot about my son, so I told him:

“Your guy was a fundamentalist. Religious people are not all full of
 hatred like he is".                                                     

 “I know,” he said, “but you both share the same mindset. Once you
refrain from criticizing propositions without evidence, where do you

draw the line? It’s a dangerous attitude, the same that can lead

to terrorism.”

“I think that morality comes before religion, “I answered.”The 
terrorist lacks moral sense, that’s why he can embrace a belief that tells

him to kill the infidels. If Jesus had ever suggested anything of that kind,

I wouldn’t believe in him.”

“Even Jesus made a few immoral statements of his own.” said my son, 
annoying me quite a bit. "The very idea of hell is immoral".

“We have been over this already. Find another one.”

“To love your enemy is immoral.”

“Really? How so?”

“It certainly is, given the world we live in. If you love your enemy, 
if you don’t defend he will destroy you".                                                                                                                                 

“So what? If I choose to be passive, that’s my own problem. Immorality
 is to hurt someone else.
You may think that pacifism doesn’t work, but not that it’s immoral.”

“Our moral sense is a product of evolution, mom. It’s a combination of 
self-interest and of a genuine desire for the ones we love to be happy.

The golden rule is an ideal we naturally strive for, because we care

for the survival of our species. But we can’t always live up to it, for

dire reasons. War should always be the last resort, but sometimes one 
must standup against injustice."

“What you don’t understand is that Jesus had a vision of a world beyond 
time,” I replied.”He saw that, in the long run, only peace will produce stability.                                                                                       

I admit that in today’s society his message seems impossible to realize.

But in a thousand years, if we don’t destroy ourselves

first, love will defeat evil.”

“Listen to you! You talk of love and evil and worlds beyond! I‘m 
interested in this one! Where is your God when evil happens?"

“He’s silent, but not absent,” I said. “We need the Christian utopia 
for the human race to survive. It's as simple as that".