Brad Pitt and "Christian Guilt"

I read today that Brad Pitt became an atheist because of "Christian guilt" that he felt throughout his Southern Baptist upbringing.

But there is no such thing as "Christian guilt". If your church is making you feel guilty, it is not Christ whom they preach.

It's all through the New Testament, with significant foreshadowings in the Old. One of the most directly stated versions of this point is in Romans 8:1-2 (NIV):

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,  because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.

I will not try to enumerate the many other scriptures that make the point. Dr. Andrew Farley, pastor of Church Without Religion in Lubbock, Texas, has written entire books that develop this point, based on scripture after scripture. I recommend reading them. Start with the first, The Naked Gospel: Jesus Plus Nothing. 100% Natural. No Additives. Then move on to God Without Religion. If you get that far, you don't need me to tell you to continue.

In John 15:14, Jesus said that we are his friends if we do what he commands us. What does he command, but to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves (and he defines "neighbor" as "everybody we come in contact with").

I will mention one of those Old Testament foreshadowings. Micah 6:8 (NIV) says this:

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

Do you see here any emphasis on guilt? Certainly not. Religious guilt is laid on us by a church that has lost sight of the Gospel and is focused instead on the Old Covenant. But we are free of that covenant.  Do we still sin? Certainly. At times, sin may even seem to control us. But we need feel no condemnation. Instead, we should feel drawn to Jesus, to let his Holy Spirit change us from the inside, not from the legalistic outside.

I look at what's going on in politics nowadays, and I see a number of right-wing candidates proclaiming their allegiance to "Judaeo-Christian values". But the true Judaeo-Christian values are not the thou-shalt-nots that these candidates so revere. Rather, true Christian values are centered around NOT telling other people what they can and cannot do, or even conforming our own lives to a list of thou-shalt-nots. The true Christian approach is to allow Christ to take over our lives, guiding us (and only us -- he'll guide others when they let him, but that's not our concern) into a mature image of God.

Consider abortion: Is it a sin? Maybe. I cannot say that it isn't. But neither can I say that it is. There is no scriptural support for the idea, apart from a couple of highly tangential references that prove nothing to anybody who does not already accept the proposition. There's even one scripture (Exodus 21:22) that seems to indicate that accidental death of an unborn child is to be considered merely a financial matter -- the eye-for-an-eye doctrine does not call it murder. So what is the Christian response? It's certainly not to attack Planned Parenthood clinics. That act follows from Old Covenant legalism -- about a subject that is not even mentioned in the Old Covenant. No, if you think it's a sin, then it would be wise not to get an abortion. But the true Christian response is to invite the Holy Spirit to guide your own spiritual development, changing you, if He so desires, into somebody who does not get an abortion. As a man, I obviously have no skin in this game, so I try to stay out of it, except to point out that it should be, it must be an individual decision by a woman in light of her own relationship to a saving Lord. Any other response does not arise from any kind of New Testament emphasis.

If there is any one thing that is wrong with the Church today, it is that we do not consistently and cogently present the true Gospel, the fact that Jesus has not only cleared our way to heaven, but he has freed us from the Old Testament.

Go read Farley's books and then tell me whether I'm right about this.

At the Rehearsal Dinner

My son, I will give you a bit of advice.

It's entirely free, though it carries a price.

As you enjoy this evening, all set to embark,

Know that marriage is a walk in the park.

As you start down the path, hand in hand, just you two,

Beautiful flowers and shrubs fill your field of view.

But looking ahead, take note that the way

Seems just a bit hazy, not quite on display.

You have yet to build out a path to your dream.

You’ll need to work hard and do so as a team.

You have to make plans and some hard-choice decisions;

Then, just as you think that you’ve nailed them, revisions.

Your path isn’t paved till you lay down your life

For her to walk on – that’s the truth of having a wife.

Yes, she’ll do the same, or you’re not truly wed,

But think first, last and always of easing her tread.

This park you meander has its peaks and its vales.

At times, you’ll despair of finding good trails.

But, if you give her your best, in old age you’ll remark

That you loved every step of your walk in the park.

Copyright ©2015, Paul H. Harder II

This poem is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

Another Dose of Climate Change News

A new study from the University of Exeter, highlighted in a Science Daily article, finds concrete evidence that a warming climate releases greenhouse gases, leading to more warming, leading to more release of greenhouse gases, and so on in a positive feedback loop.

This is no surprise to anybody who has been paying attention. Go to YouTube and search for "methane fire ice". You'll get a number of short videos that illustrate the problem.  Here's just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM0hczFNDZI. There is a lot of methane sequestered in permafrost and beneath the ice that covers frozen lakes. As climate warms, the only possible expectation is that this methane will be released into the atmosphere. As methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the result is more warming.

Some global warming deniers have tried to argue that, because paleoclimate indicators seem to show that increased carbon in the atmosphere happened before ancient warming episodes, that's proof that atmospheric carbon isn't what causes warming -- instead, they say, warming causes increased atmospheric carbon.

They're half right. Warming does cause carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be released. But greenhouse gases also cause warming. The science is clear on that, completely apart from any question of whether the mechanism would apply to the atmosphere. Physics is physics. The two phenomena, warming and carbon release, go together in what could be a dizzying spiral of runaway greenhouse effect, were it not for other, less well understood mechanisms that eventually retard the effect.

The earth will recover from our current, human induced warming episode. But it may take millennia.

Christian Values

Reuters reports that 20 states have now enacted "religious freedom" laws, and I see from CNN that the Arkansas senate has just passed a similar law. Finally, I have put my finger on what bothers me about those laws.

It appears that these laws are at least partly being supported by conservative Christians who want to preserve the rights of business owners to deny service to people whose lifestyles disagree with their Christian faith. It's an effort to guarantee these business owners the right to uphold their Christian values.

So just exactly what "Christian values" might these be?

The one constant in these news stories seems to be that conservative Christians want to preserve their right to tell other people what they cannot do.

Jesus, by contrast, focused almost entirely on prescriptions for what I should do. He never once encouraged me to try to control the behavior of any other person.

Let's recall Micah 6:8 (NIV): "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." Similarly, Matthew 7:1-2 says, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

God does not require us to make a list of things that others are not permitted to do. Rather, he wants us to follow a fairly simple list of what we, ourselves, should do.

Those who focus on thou-shalt-not pronouncements about the behavior of others, ignoring the thou-shalts that Jesus actually spoke, are not trying to uphold Christian values.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Change

Today's news has two articles related to global warming:

• From Discovery News, "Snow Now Melts In Wyoming Two Weeks Early"
• From Reuters, "Study Shows Acceleration In Decline Of Antarctic Ice Shelves"

Of course, the first article is not necessarily related to global warming. Any one climatic observation or weather event may or may not be a part of the overall suite of climate mechanisms that we call "global climate change" or "global warming". But Wyoming is not the only place that's warming earlier in the spring or cooling later in the fall. Many years ago, when Kathleen and I went to our kids' Saturday morning YMCA soccer games, we usually had to wear a jacket. Nowadays, Saturday mornings in Houston during soccer season are rarely that cool.

The second article is most definitely related to climate change. The disappearance of floating ice sheets does not, in itself raise sea levels. But this disappearance has two consequences: First, as the article mentions, the missing sea ice provides less resistance to the advance of Antarctic glaciers, which can now move faster, dumping into the ocean vast quantities of ice that is not already floating. That will indeed raise sea levels. Additionally, the missing ice is replaced by open water, which is an amazingly good absorber of solar heat. That heat warms the water, reducing the opportunity to form new sea ice. It also raises the temperature of the air, delivering energy to melt Antarctic glaciers.

This is one of the situations that has climate scientists very apprehensive. It's exactly the sort of positive feedback mechanism that can, without warning, begin a runaway change that happens far too fast to react to in any useful way. If we cross one of these tipping points, the human race will have little ability to move the climate back toward what it had been, regardless of whether we actually try.

At present, many of our political leaders are actively avoiding any belief in the existence of climate change and resisting all efforts to spend any money to do anything about it.

Colder Europe Due to Global Warming?

ScienceDaily has an article about recent findings from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, showing that the thermohaline circulation is slowing down, leading to an expectation of cooler weather for Europe -- likely resulting, at least in part, from global warming.

The article suggests that melting of Greenland's ice cap is a probable cause of the circulation slowdown. This idea is nothing new. Climate scientists have realized, for some time, that this is a possibility. Some believe that this has happened before, far distant geologic time.

It's called "thermohaline" because this circulation is driven by heat and by the salt content of the ocean. Salty water is denser than fresh water.  Greenland's ice melt, thus, floats on top of the saltier water coming northeast from the Gulf of Mexico. If enough fresh water invades the northern Atlantic, that northeastward flow is slowed or even halted. In what humans have come to think of as normal operation, this thermohaline circulation takes warm water far into the North Sea, warming Europe. Eventually, the increasingly salty water (because evaporation leaves the salt behind) is so dense that it has no choice but to sink to the depths of the sea and return southwestward. In the diagram above, we see that this circulation is worldwide. 

If the north Atlantic branch of the circulation shuts down, the result will be a colder Europe, thanks to global warming.

It's Official: New Record for Winter Sea Ice

I posted about this earlier, but it's now official. The wintertime maximum of north polar sea ice extent is the lowest on record, according to an article posted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at http://tinyurl.com/kcydsrh. This graph tells the tale:

The solid blue line is this year's day-by-day sea ice extent as measured by satellite observations. The grey swath shows the 95% prediction interval (under the assumption that the ice extent is normally distributed -- not a bad assumption, but it is an assumption). This year's trace drops almost to the level of being a full three standard deviations below the long-term mean. Even for a small sample, that's remarkable.

Ted Cruz: Candidate of the KnowNothing Party

They say that, if you keep your mouth shut, people might wonder whether you're an idiot, but, if you open you mouth, you dismiss all doubt. Apparently, Senator Ted Cruz proved the truth of this sentiment, earlier this week. The video clip from "Late Night with Seth Myers" is all over the web. One place you can see it is in a Mother Jones article at http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/03/ted-cruz-seth-myers-climate-change.

Cruz actually said this about global warming: "Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they've got a problem because the science doesn't back them up." 

In fact, it isn't only a lunatic fringe of "alarmists" who are distressed by the prospect of global warming. It's 97% of all practicing climate scientists, the people who make it their business to know about this. 97% of climate scientists know that the science does back them up. They know because they understand the science and the data. Ted Cruz does not.

The article quotes one of the more prominent of those scientists, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, as saying that everything Cruz believes about climate change is "a load of claptrap…absolute bunk". Trenberth is right: The "science" and "data" that Cruz refers to are very clear about this. Climate change is occurring, including warming of the globally averaged surface temperature, and it's caused by human activities that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I can't illustrate what's wrong with Cruz's thinking any better than Mother Jones does, so I won't try. Do please go read their article.

What I will do is wonder how Cruz thinks that his stance makes any kind of sense. Recent public opinion polls increasingly show that Americans are overwhelmingly on the side of science. A poll taken last December found that 83% of Americans believe that climate change is occurring. A poll taken in January showed that even 48% of Republicans would vote for candidates who want the government to do something to fight global warming.

It's pretty clear that Ted Cruz wants to be President. If polls are to be believed, a minority of Americans are going to score him positively on this particular issue. In what universe does Ted Cruz think that his position is making him look electable?

Oh. Right. In the universe known as "Texas".

As I happen to be a Texan, I can understand how somebody who spends all of his time here might well not realize that denial of global warming is a strategy for political failure. It plays well in some parts of this state. There are folks here who seem to have a major disconnect between the part of their brain that depends on the products of science and the part of their brain that controls what they say about climate change.  On the one hand, they want all those tech goodies that result from scientists using scientific method to learn how the universe actually works. But, whenever global warming is mentioned, they either take the position that science is irrelevant or, as Cruz does, they claim that scientists don't know what science has revealed.

Some days, I'm not all that proud to be a Texan.

Solar Plenty

An article in ScienceDaily reports on new research concluding that enough solar power generation could be installed in California to supply three to five times the state's energy needs.

This is not exactly a surprise.

I have followed the development of alternative energy sources for several years now.  Previous research has shown that wind power alone is enough to supply the energy needs of the entire United States.

Of course, the sun does not always shine and the winds do not always blow.  But that's only an engineering concern. We know how to make batteries. Ongoing research continues to make them cheaper and last longer.

So, if the United States truly wants energy independence from foreign oil, what's stopping us?

A wonderful management exercise is for a company's leaders to ask themselves the question, not of what business they are in, but what business it would be profitable for them to think that they are in. Eventually, oil companies will wise up and figure out that it would be best for them to think that they are in the energy business, rather than the oil business. I have heard that some of them are already moving in that direction.

Oil companies that insist on remaining oil companies will soon become dinosaurs. By contrast, those that invade the burgeoning alternative energy sector can be big winners.

That said, there is one teensy thing about solar and wind energy that has bothered me: To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet done any research to pin down the consequences of using these energy sources.

Think about it: If you put up a wind generator on the plains of Texas, you extract energy from the wind flow. That means that, in one tiny location, the wind is flowing differently than it would flow if you had not taken some of the energy from it.  Now repeat that a million times, with wind generators spread across the continent. What is the consequence of the resulting change in the flow of air over the earth's surface?

If you put up solar generating facilities, whether home rooftop units or gigantic industrial facilities, you extract some energy that would otherwise contribute to warming the earth's surface at that location. You then transmit that energy over wires to other places where some of it will be used to power our devices and the rest will be released as heat. What is the consequence of changing the flow of heat on the earth's surface?

I hate to say it, but there is every possibility that this generation of alternative energy proponents, motivated by the need to combat global warming, may someday be succeeded by a new generation who blame us for the destruction of their environment because we failed to look at the consequences of the solutions that we implemented.

Somebody needs to look into this.

Second Warmest February

Tom Yulsman's blog at Discover tells us that NASA has released figures showing that this February and this past winter are the second warmest on record. He also has a great animated graphic of the disparity between a lot of people's perceptions and the reality of global warming in light of recent weather.

Yulsman combines NASA images of temperature anomaly -- departure of monthly average temperature from the long-term mean for the same month -- for the three months of the winter that many in the US just suffered through. His post also has a great explanation of just what the situation was that made the eastern part of the U.S. experience such cold and wintry weather.

Predictably, quite a few people who experienced that cold are yet again calling into question whether there can be any such thing as global warming. They feel cold. How can the earth be warming?

This is a lot like a person going into a coal mine on a bright and sunny day, turning off the lights, and then claiming that the sun has gone out.  "I can't see the sun, so I guess it stopped shining." Or, "I feel cold, so I guess global warming is a myth".

But the whole idea of global warming is that, though it may be unseasonably cold in some places, it's a lot warmer in other places, so that the average temperature of the earth is warmer compared to earlier periods in history.  Look carefully at the animation above. During the period when the eastern part of the U.S. was so much colder than normal, what was happening over all of Siberia and the northwestern half of North America? How much of the southern hemisphere had warmer temperatures than normal?

Fair to Partly Whalish

A Reuters news story ("World carbon emissions stall after almost 40 years of gains: IEA") reports that the International Energy Agency has finished their tabulating and concluded that the human race released 32.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2014, approximately the same amount as in 2013. In the same year, the global economy grew by three percent. So we know that we can have economic growth without worsening the emissions problem.

So everything's cool now, right?  We can stop worrying about global warming?

32.3 billion metric tons is 71.2 trillion pounds. That's about the same as 6 billion African elephants or 187 million blue whales. or 98 thousand copies of the Empire State Building. It's the same weight as 376 copies of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, fully loaded.

We do not notice the carbon dioxide that we add to the atmosphere, because it's invisible and odorless. But, if we could somehow put 187 million blue whales into the air each year and keep them aloft and visible, you'd pretty soon be able to see the problem. That's about four whales per square mile, distributed over the surface of the earth.

After a few years, the weather forecasters would be talking about "fair to partly whalish".

So no, we can't stop worrying about global warming. We need a lot fewer whale equivalents being injected into the atmosphere.

I'm Happy to Report that I'm Happy!

ScienceDaily has an article today on happiness and politics.

The article summarizes a research report (Wojcik, et al., 2015) that appeared in Science recently. A group of five psychologists have taken another look at the previously reported result that political conservatives are happier than liberals. That earlier research was based on what the research subjects reported. On average, conservatives reported being happier than liberals.

This new research ignores what people claim about their own happiness and instead focuses on observable behaviors that are linked to happiness. The abstract from the Science article has this quote: "Relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs."

So there you have it.  Conservatives claim to be happier. Liberals actually are happier.

This result actually tallies well with much of the essential message of Jesus. Happy ("blessed") are the meek who don't force their ways upon others, but instead appeal for agreement. Happy are those who give mercy instead of insisting on everybody (that is, everybody else) getting the punishments that they so richly deserve. Happy are those who try to achieve peace.

Happiness comes through following the two most important laws: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Just in case you've heard and repeated that second one so many times that it has lost its meaning, go back and look at it afresh: In whatever way you would like to treat yourself, treat everybody else on the planet in the same way. Get rid of selfishness. Don't put yourself first. Put others ahead of you. Give liberally to others who need it.

Live that way and you'll be happier.




References:

University of California - Irvine. (2015, March 12). Political liberals display greater happiness, study shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150312142909.htm

Wojcik, S.P., Hovasapian, A., Graham, J., Moty, M., & Ditto, P.H. (2015). Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness. Science, 347(627) 143-1246, doi: 10.1126/science.1260817

Arctic Surprise

An article in Discover reports that early March sea ice extent in the arctic has collapsed, likely producing a new record low.

The article highlights a new plot from the National Sea Ice Data Center, contrasting the current year's sea ice extent (the blue line) with the thirty-year average (heavy black line) and the range of values (grey area) between the +/- 2 standard deviation bounds. 

 

A word of explanation to those who don't think of statistics as their native language:  Anything outside the two-standard-deviation bounds is something that any scientist will regard as surprising. In practice, we use much more technical metrics, involving p-values, significance levels, statistical power, and other arcana. But a very good, quick and dirty approximation is that anything more than two standard deviations from its average is surprising, "statistically significant". It's in the realm of things that are unlikely to have occurred by chance, so we generally take these occurrences as probably indicating that something systematic is going on.

In this case, the "something systematic" is climate change. As with all individual weather phenomena, this observation is not ironclad proof of global warming.

But this situation has clear physics: Ice reflects daytime solar energy to space and radiates night-time heat from the sea, resulting in net cooling. The less ice, the less cooling. The less cooling, the less ice. A positive feedback can result, contributing to significant warming of the polar regions, melting of glaciers, and thawing of permafrost, resulting in release of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide -- all of which results in more warming.

So it's especially galling that the other climate news story today (see this version from UPI) says that Florida officials, under Republican Governor Rick Scott, have clearly and unambiguously passed the word that Department of Environmental Protection employees are forbidden to use such terms as "climate change", "global warming", or "sustainability". It is telling that this policy was published only by word of mouth. Whoever gave this order did not have the guts to put it in writing. But a number of different DEP employees tell the exact same story, so I tend to provisionally accept it.

When the facts clearly tell one story but political or business or religious leaders dictate that nobody actually mention any of the facts, one conclusion leaps quickly to mind: Somebody has something to hide. Let's bring that out into the light of day and look at it.

And Another News Item about Climate Change

Another ScienceDaily article reports that tides have changed over the past century, in many cases rising more than a millimeter per year, at a rate that is comparable to the sea level rise over the same period. The researchers (Mawdsley, Haigh, and Wells, 2015) concluded that the primary cause is climate change.


Reference:

Mawdsley. R.J., Haigh, I.D., & Wells, N.C. (015). Global secular changes in different tidal high water, low water and range levels. Earth's Future, doi: 10.1002/2014EF000282

Yet More Evidence of Climate Change

An article at ScienceDaily summarizes a new research report by Lindsay and Schweiger (2015) showing that arctic sea ice is vanishing at an alarming rate. Between 1975 and 2012, what ice was present in the arctic thinned by a remarkable 65 percent. This report really ought to put to rest any doubts about whether global climate change is happening.

The study was based on U.S. Navy submarine observations from the Cold War era, as well as later aircraft and satellite measurements.  I have not yet read the journal article, so I cannot comment about whether the authors adequately controlled for disparities in sensor characteristics over that fairly long time span. I assume that they know what they're doing.

Of course, that the arctic is losing ice cover is not news. This is just new, experimental confirmation of what the National Snow and Ice Data Center has been saying consistently for years. Here's their plot (NSIDC, 2015a) of the past five years of sea ice extent for the colder months of the year. All five years' figures are significantly lower than the thirty-year average, indicating that the sea ice is declining.

And here's the NSIDC (2015b) time series plot of sea ice extent for the month of February over a thirty year period, again showing quite clearly that the arctic is losing ice.

You may wonder why this is important. That would be because of the unique and wonderful properties of water. When it's liquid, it soaks up a lot of solar radiation, warming the water and the air above it. But, when it's solid snow or ice, it reflects nearly all of the solar radiation that hits it. So we get a positive feedback effect: A little warming causes a little loss of ice, which causes more warming, which causes more ice loss, and so on. The arctic and antarctic regions thus lead the way in the global climate change that is now very firmly in progress.


References:

Lindsay, R., & Schweiger, A. (2015). Arctic sea ice thickness loss determined using subsurface, aircraft, and satellite observations. The Cryosphere, 9(1) 269-283, doi:10.5194/tc-9-269-2015

National Sea Ice Data Center. (2015a). Arctic sea ice extent [Image]. Retrieved March 6, 2015, from http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2015/03/Figure2-350x280.png

National Sea Ice Data Center. (2015b). Average monthly arctic sea ice extent, February 1979 - 2015 [Image]. Retrieved March 6, 2015, from http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2015/03/Figure3-350x270.png

Who is a Christian? [Part 4]

Tom, a friend of mine, commented about my last post, saying that he apparently doesn't know any real Christians. I think that's a bit strong, but I take his point.

Tom was reacting to what Jesus had said, that people would know that we're his disciples because of the love we demonstrate for each other, as well as what the apostle Paul wrote about doing good things for others, especially for those of the household of faith. I had made the point that, if we did this, there would be enough evidence to convict us of being Christian.

I don't really believe that our all too frequent failure to be recognizable in that way makes us fail to be real Christians. But I do think that real Christians tend to have at least a subliminal recognition that, when life isn't like that, Something Is Very Wrong!.

Sometimes, it seems like the extent of the Christian's life is going to church on Sunday morning, standing in a darkened auditorium, staring at the "praise and worship team" who are conducting a concert on a brightly lit stage, not singing because the music is too loud and it's pitched all wrong for anybody but the lead singer, shaking hands with each other during the mandated fellowship minute, and polishing off the morning by listening to a motivational speaker. 

Even when it's a wonderful motivational speaker, that's not the sort of life that Jesus said would make everybody recognize us as his disciples.

I think we all want more than that.

This is the place where you're expecting me to tell you how to solve that problem. Sorry, my little bottle of Wisdom of Solomon seems to have run dry. I don't have the answers.

What I do know is that busy modern life in large cities (where we tend not to live anywhere close to the people we spend time with during work hours) militates against most of us having fulfilling, close relationships to others, so that the kind of deep family formation we should be experiencing is very hard to do.

I'm open to suggestions from others who feel the same way about this.

Anybody?

Who is a Christian? [Part 3]

It used to be common for preachers to ask, "If being Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"  What, in the end, would clearly identify anybody as Christian?

Conclusions so far in this series:

• Being a lover of God and of one's neighbor as oneself is not a sufficient condition to define whether a person is a Christian. It's necessary, but not sufficient.
• We can't assume that those who call themselves Christian are, in fact, Christian. Christian identity is not particularly relevant.

Brian McLaren has a very good piece on the "God's Politics" blog at Sojourners (http://sojo.net/blogs/2015/03/04/7-ways-live-faithful-life), titled "7 Ways to Live a Faithful Life". He enumerates seven behaviors that really ought to follow directly from a person's faith as a Christian. Please go read it. It's important.

But it still doesn't answer the question.

It falls under point 1 above. Based on other things Brian has written, I'm sure he'd be the first to agree that these seven behaviors would probably also follow from a person's faith as a Buddhist, Jew, or Muslim. If you're a Christian, you're likely doing these things. But others do them as well.

I think, though, that we might get very close to an answer if we look at these words from Jesus:

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:34-35, NIV).

Recall that he had already noted two important commandments: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. This one sounds a lot like the second commandment, but Jesus says it's new. How?

Perhaps the explanation can be seen in what Paul wrote: "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers" (Galatians 6:9-10).

There's something special about doing good for other Christians.

I think the answer is in Paul's use of the word "family" (or "household" in other translations). Being a Christian, following God in what McLaren calls "the way of Christ", involves recognizing a special kinship with other believers.

But isn't that just what point 2 above said was not sufficient?  Not really. A great many people identify themselves as Christian but feel no special kinship with other Christians. They identify without investing. The key is to invest, without regard to identity, but because of whom we follow. We inevitably develop identity from that investment, but the key is the investment: Invest your wealth, your energy, your life in actively loving all of the others of the family of believers -- or, at least, all of them that you come in contact with.

This doesn't mean that you shake hands during the sixty seconds of programmed fellowship in your Sunday morning church service. It means to share your life with other believers, acknowledging that you're part of a family, and acting accordingly.

Do that, and anybody could convict you of being a Christian.

Who is a Christian? [Part 2]

Earlier today, I concluded that, if you want to find a Christian, you should start your search with people who follow Christ's way of loving God and loving others. Is that a sufficient condition?

That seems unlikely.

By that definition, millions of Muslims would qualify as Christians. Most Christians would not accept that idea, and most Muslims wouldn't either. But any Muslim who follows the precepts of the Quran loves God and treats other people pretty much the way Jesus asked. The essence of Matthew 22:37-38 can be found in the Quran -- in the second Surah, in fact. The extremists who engage in terrorist acts are about as Muslim as the Ku Klux Klan is Christian. But that's a thought for another day.  What I want to address today is the question of just what it is that makes a person Christian.

I would not think that we'd need to examine the idea that a person can be a Christian by virtue of being born Christian. Such an idea is foreign to the concept of repenting and deciding to follow the way of Christ. Yet many people's Christianity appears to be little more than an accident of birth. It's not whom they elect to follow, but what group defines their identity.

Here, I think, we can find the crux of several problems: Identity. People who claim to be Christian are not necessarily describing a religious faith, but rather an identity. It's sort of like when a misguided young man tells you what gang he belongs to. He may or may not subscribe to all of the gang's ethos, but he's part of the gang -- it's his identity.

It sounds disparaging to liken a religious group to a gang, but religious groups have often made violent gangs look like Sunday School.

One of the most dangerous things a Christian can do is to allow his or her identity as a Christian to become a matter of identification with a group rather than identification as a follower of the way of Christ. Such has been the root of a great many conflicts and outright wars -- between Christians and those of other faiths, as well as between different sects of Christian.

Most of us probably don't think we're like that, but how many politicians have made sure to telegraph their purported Christianity to the Christian voters they hope to represent? How many voters have voted their religion instead of their political philosophy?

Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" (Matt. 7:21-23, NIV). 

So let's just reject the idea that a person is a Christian just because he's a member of the Christian identity group, whether born into it or joined later.

There's something more than that.

Who is a Christian? [Part 1]

A Reuters news story out of Olathe, KS, reports on a hearing to decide whether Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. should be tried for murder. Nearly a year ago, witnesses stated, Cross shot and killed three people outside Jewish centers. Enough evidence has been presented to conclude that Cross is an antisemite who took these actions because he hates Jews.

To all those folks who have criticized President Obama for his comment that Muslims are not the only terrorists -- and that some terrorists claim to be Christians -- I'd just like to point out that this is only one of many cases that prove him right. According to the article, law enforcement already knew that Cross had been a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that purports to be Christian. So it's evident that some who call themselves Christian are terrorists.

Of course, that's just one incident. Are there more?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) monitors hate groups and fights extremism. Their Hate Map depicts the distribution of hate groups in the United States. By their count, at this date, there are 939 distinct, active hate groups operating in this country. The SPLC's legal actions have succeeded in shutting down some hate groups, but hate is a hydra. Shut down one group, and more pop up to replace it.

Not convinced? Check out the SPLC document "Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City". It gives a detailed history of dozens of terrorist incidents in the U.S., over a ten-year period. Many of those acts were committed by people who claim to be Christian.

By what stretch of the imagination can any of these perpetrators of violence claim to be Christian? Christians are followers of Christ. Just before he physically left this planet, Jesus instructed his disciples to go into all the world, "teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Matt 28:20, NIV). What did he command? "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt 22:37-38). He made it clear, in the parable of the good Samaritan, that everybody is our neighbor. Christians follow this path.

In what twisted universe does violent rage against innocents constitute loving God and loving others?

But the important question is not who is a Christian, but rather what we Christians are going to do about hate groups.  Maybe we should hate them?

Uh, that's kind of a contradiction, right?

No, the way to fight hate is to love.  My wife, Kathleen, has recently written a story about one man who did exactly that. You can find the story on the website of "The Faith and Peace Project". She chronicles the life and ministry of an English pastor who gave himself to the establishment of peace in Ireland and Northern Ireland. He is but one of many who put their lives on the line to help that troubled island find healing. The "Troubles" in Ireland are now in remission (though certainly not without the potential for flare-ups). Kathleen has personally witnessed former IRA soldiers worshiping in a protestant church that counts, among its members, a large contingent of former Catholics.

Who is a Christian?  If you're looking for one, start with somebody who knows how to love.

A Smoking Gun in Oklahoma

(And Another in Alaska)

From an article in The Space Reporter: 

Recalling Oklahoma Senator Inhofe's antics on the Senate floor yesterday, it seems only fitting that today's news about climate change comes from research performed in Oklahoma (and Alaska). A team led by Dan Feldman put precise measuring equipment in those states, to monitor carbon dioxide levels and the radiation budget -- incoming solar energy, outgoing energy radiated by the earth, and energy reflected, absorbed and emitted by the atmosphere. 

Result: Over the period from 2000 through 2010, carbon dioxide levels increased. Over the same period, energy absorbed by atmospheric carbon dioxide and reradiated back to the surface also increased. The science that predicted this result has now been confirmed.

Of course, we already had it confirmed. This is the same science that has let meteorologists improve their weather forecasting models by incorporating satellite measurements of the vertical profile of atmospheric temperature, based partly on the distribution of carbon dioxide. Everybody likes to gripe about inaccurate forecasts, but we all carry a weather app in our pockets nowadays, and we don't really question tomorrow's forecast very much. Forecasting has improved, in no small part due to the science of radiative transfer in the atmosphere -- the same science that says that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to a greenhouse effect and global warming.

The article quotes Feldman as saying, "This is clear observational evidence that when we add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it will push the system to a warmer place."

Take that, Senator Inhofe (and please drop your silly snowball)!

The Senate, a Screwball and a Climate Change Skeptic

The NBC News website posted an article, today, titled, "The Senate, a Snowball and a Climate Change Skeptic".  But I like my title better.

The article features a photograph of Senator James Inhofe, on the Senate floor, holding a snowball and carrying on about how it demonstrates that there's no such thing as global warming. He claims that the record cold being experienced in our northern and eastern states proves that there's no global warming.

Let's just put that into perspective.

The idea of global warming is that the globally and annually averaged surface temperature is rising. To find out whether this is happening, we would need to get the globally averaged temperature for the entire planet, for every year over a span of time. This has, in fact, been done. Following is the famous "hockey stick" graph from the work of Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes. Though a great many climate change deniers have complained loud and long that this picture cannot possibly be correct, the analysis has been performed several times, by different researchers using different methodologies, and all have produced roughly similar pictures: Since the beginning of the industrial age, when we started pouring gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, globally averaged surface temperature has been rising.

Some of the research that has verified this picture was led by Dr. Richard Muller, a physics professor and sometime global warming skeptic, who assembled a team to exhaustively examine every shred of data that had led climate scientists, including Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, to the conclusion that the climate is warming. He even accepted research funding from the Koch brothers, who are famous for denying the reality of global warming. Nevertheless, his team verified that this picture is accurate.  On average, the planet is heating up, and this warming is caused by the greenhouse gases that we are adding to the atmosphere.

But Senator Inhofe can't accept this, because, in one spot on the surface of the earth, in one month of the year, it's unseasonably cold. He appears to honestly believe that, because it's colder than normal in one place at one time, it is impossible that the average might be increasing.

If he really believes that, then I suspect he doesn't get the joke when Garrison Keillor reports "the news from Lake Wobegon, where ... all the children are above average."

Political Theater Targets the Environment

A news item in Salon (and many other places) reports that the House of Representatives has passed H.R. 1422, which would prevent the best scientific experts on any given topic (those who have done enough research that they have succeeded in getting their findings published in scientific journals) from serving on the EPA's Scientific Advisory Board -- but it would allow industry representatives (whose motives can charitably be described as "suspect") to serve. This is all in an effort to improve "transparency".

What's transparent here is the attempt to force the EPA to make decisions that are not informed by sound science. The bill's supporters think that it makes perfectly good sense to base decisions on what they think the truth should be rather than on what the truth actually is. And those industry experts will be happy to explain what the truth ought to be.

Of course, the President will exercise his veto. John Boehner knows this, so the only possible conclusion is that this action has nothing to do with governing and everything to do political posturing.

Somebody please tell me again why we pay these folks to go to Washington.

Climate Change Conundrum

According to an article at ScienceDaily, Yale University's Dan Kahan has reported in the journal Political Psychology that Americans believe some fairly silly things about climate science.

That's no real surprise.

The surprise is that, among Americans who have more than average understanding of climate science, opinions as to the reality of man-made global warming are more divided than among Americans who don't understand the science.

Really?

This means that many Americans are adept at simultaneously believing two diametrically opposed ideas: 

• Humans are adding a lot of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere raises globally averaged surface temperature, sea level, and ocean acidity. These changes cause species extinctions, altered rainfall and temperature distributions, and other more or less permanent disasters.
• The climate is not changing. Or, if it is, it doesn't involve warming, increase of sea level, and increase of ocean acidity. Or, if it does, it isn't caused by human activity. Or, if it is, it's okay because we'll adapt.

This is a lot like a driver racing toward a cliff that he can't see because he forgot to put on his glasses. He puts them on, but keeps racing toward the cliff, even though he can now see it clearly, because he firmly believes that the cliff is not really there -- or, if it is, he won't fall off it -- or, if he does, he'll land in a soft pile of marshmallows. And the improved vision doesn't change his opinion.
 
The article points out that a lot of marketing money has been going into educating Americans to understand the science, and expecting that understanding to help them accept the reality of the problem and the need to do something about it.  Apparently, these efforts are not bearing much fruit, because those who don't want to believe in man-made global warming simply continue to disbelieve, even after they fully understand the science.

The last sentence in the article is tantalizing: "Kahan pointed to the success of local political leaders in southeast Florida in depoliticizing discussions of climate science, an example that is discussed at length in the study."

That has me really wondering: What did southeast Florida do and can we replicate it elsewhere? Unfortunately, I can't see Kahan's original article, because the two University libraries I have access to won't get it until next February. I hope I can remember to look it up then.