Manifesto
Several months ago, pazuzuzu asked me to clarify my stance on why I believe the mainstream Christian Church is off-target in a lot of its activities. So this is it: the big computersherpa manifesto post. Non-Christians may not be interested in what I have to say here. Apologies to the folks on Myst Blogs who are about to be buried by a wall of text. 
///
I should probably begin with some important philosophical underpinnings and a brief look at what the Church is doing right.
Philosophically, I believe that: Assuming there is life after death, the only thing you get to take with you is yourself. The most logical use for your time is to spend your life improving yourself so that you’ll have a head start on all of the amazing things there will be to do and learn in Heaven. Answering questions like “who am I”, “what are we here for”, “what is the universe like”, and so on are rationally the first priority in life. I believe that learning as much as one can about the nature of things is a good start on wisdom, which is certainly worth striving for. Curiosity, creativity, and logic should be developed and indulged as much as possible. No-one should ever be angry, offended, or derisive because they’ve been asked an honest question; questions and answers are the way to knowledge and wisdom.
I strongly repudiate the idea that truth is different for different people. That principle is logically incoherent, it overinflates the importance of individual perspective, it tries to excuse countless fallacies, errors, and misdeeds, and it sabotages the entire point of trying to learn anything. While people, events, and situations can and should be viewed from multiple angles, the fact remains that the universe exists in a single state and doesn’t much care what we think about it.
Like every Christian, I believe that there is one God who created the universe, that the man named Jesus is God in human form, that Jesus came to earth to teach, died to atone for the sins of humanity, and rose from the dead to lead the way to Heaven. I believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it is 100% true. All Christians by definition believe these statements or something very close to them.
Where I differ from most Christians is in the conclusions I draw from these principles…
God created man because He loves stories. --Elie Wiesel
According to Genesis, man was created “in the image of God”. Interpretations vary widely on the precise meaning of that phrase, but all agree that when God created Adam, he used himself as a template. Man was created to love good, to be good.
Then Adam and Eve sinned. They turned away from God, and the result of that was the introduction of every bad thing the world now has in it. God cursed the earth, and paradise turned into a struggle to survive. Adam contaminated himself with sin, and that contamination was passed down to all of his descendants. (I wonder what would have happened if there had been two more people-let’s call them Steve and Betty-in the Garden of Eden who saw what happened to Adam and Eve and took warning from it. Potentially, there could have been an entire race of sinless humans alongside the current human race. I bet they’d get along poorly. Could be an interesting story in there, but perfect beings don’t make for exciting reading most of the time…)
Anyway. The sinful state of human beings as a result of the Fall is what oft-quoted Jeremiah 17:9 is about: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” If you ask a Christian “What is the human heart like?” nine times out of ten they’ll quote you this verse.
I believe this interpretation considerably oversimplifies a somewhat complex issue. No-one is all bad on the inside (well, that I know of) and no-one is wholly good. Everyone is a constant struggle between their lighter and darker natures, and the degree to which they cause either side to prevail determines their character. Philosophers and psychologists have known this for ages, but Christian theology seems to constantly assert that only through Christ can any good work be done. This simplistic approach makes the Bible easy to read but unfortunately ignores a lot of practical evidence which shows significant quantities of non-Christians doing very good and selfless things without our help, thank you very much. We must therefore create a theory which matches what the Bible has to say and also works with what we see on the street.
Humans tend towards no alignment, not even neutrality. The worst and best are found among them.
--Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook, 3.5 Edition
Here it is: Man was created in the image of God, with a pure heart. He was then corrupted by sin. Sin infected but did not completely destroy Man’s original, pure heart, leaving us the strange, conflicted, dual-nature creatures we are now.
Now, what about Christians and non-Christians? Your average atheist would like to be a good person, but it’s probably not his first priority. He is good when he can be without much loss to himself. Unfortunately, the odds are heavily stacked against him, because he lives under the influence of dark spiritual agents who work to keep him away from God, and he’s completely unaware of their presence. In the absence of God’s light, his character will be colored by the people around him, for good or ill.
For your average Christian, the story is not so different. Christians want to be good (or at least to be right), but their success rates vary wildly. Like the non-Christian, they will usually not place much stock in the idea of demons; they will feel more guilt than non-Christians when they do bad things, but their character will be similarly determined by those around them instead of by their inner strength or their relationship with God. The average Christian may have a slightly clearer view of the world than their atheist counterpart (because their view of the cosmos is correctly centered upon God, although it may be additionally clouded by the dogmas they’re taught), but they will go through life feeling vaguely guilty that they’re not doing more and without any real hope that they might be able to make a significant difference in the world for good.
The blame for this sorry state of affairs lies squarely with modern Christian theology and a few ideas that it teaches. The first such idea is that all humans, including Christians, are basically bad and the only good thing to be found is God. This is crippling to any sense of accomplishment, improvement, or progress for the Church. Members are taught from a young age that they are bad and that the only way they will ever do good things is to “let Christ work through you.” The implied metaphor is that God does his best work with dirty tools and isn’t really interested in cleaning them up or making sure the blades are sharp. Guess what: I’ve tried this for years and it doesn’t work. God’s certainly capable of doing great things with horrible people, but before God’s going to do any work through you he’s going to want to do a lot of work in you. Remember when Jesus said “He who is faithful with a little will be entrusted with much more”? God wants you to get into the habit of reliably listening to him before he sends you into the field, where mistakes will be costly. The mightiest deeds are done by heroes, and if you want your life story to be a good one, that’s what you’re going to have to become. Fortunately, you will have help. God wants you to be a hero even more than you want to become one. That’s what the Holy Spirit is for.
You make everything glorious, and I am yours...what does that make me? --David Crowder Band
Christians should be greater and wiser and better than their non-Christian counterparts, at least on average. We’re subject to a higher concentration of fire from the Deceiver and his minions, but we have the holy Creator of the universe living in our hearts, purifying us, and guiding our actions, so the increased Enemy activity should just accelerate our training. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually happen that way, both because the Enemy is a bit more clever than that and because the Church has dedicated itself to winning more converts and stamping out sin instead of improving the people it already has. Eliminating sin (the Church’s current objective) is not at all the same as promoting positive character improvement, but the Church seems stuck on the belief that if it can just get people to stop doing bad things then surely only good things will remain. This “gospel of sin management” is responsible for the vast majority of the frustration people, Christian and non-Christian, feel when they go to church. Sin, repent, sin, repent, rinse, lather, repeat-if telling people to stop doing bad things and making them feel guilty when they fail was going to work then it would have done so by now. The primary thing people associate with going to church is guilt, and that is dead wrong. Churches should be dispensing grace and forgiveness and helping people rise past their shortcomings-if non-Christians didn’t already know something was wrong with them then they wouldn’t be in church.
If the Church wants to do great things, it is going to have to raise up great men and women. It is going to have to unashamedly acknowledge them as great. The fact that we are nothing without God does not change the reality that in God, we are great--or we can be, if we will only allow ourselves. The Church has been fighting against pride in its members for so long that it’s dismissed the idea that taking pride in something can be good. Make no mistake, selfish pride is the most subtle and corruptive weapon the Opposer has in his arsenal, and it must be watchfully opposed by vigilant Christians everywhere, but the Church has overcorrected and is trying to crush a problem which in most of its members does not exist. Shame has sunk its roots deep into the Body of Christ, and there are precious few left who take pride in the things they’ve accomplished in God’s name. God’s greatest victories are accomplished through strong, skilled spiritual warriors, and the Church needs to be producing those, not mere flag-bearers who know what side they’re on and expect that to be good enough.
Being a Christian is cool, y’all. In this story, we are the heroes. If this was Star Wars, we would be the Jedi. We’re the special operatives, the fearless captains, the valiant knights who swear allegiance to the King and band together to do great things. When was the last time you heard anything like that from the pulpit? When was the last time you heard how awesome it is to be a Christian?
I started to leave, then stopped. "Is it true? The story." I made an inarticulate gesture. "The part you told today?"
"All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean."
--The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
Here is perhaps the most important thing for everyone to realize: Stories are the key.
What human construction survives longest? What artifact of ancient times past do we grip the most firmly? Architecture crumbles; music goes out of style; names and reputations disappear into endless genealogies that no-one can be bothered to memorize. The one sole thing that survives the passage of time untarnished is the story. Most people know Archimedes’ name, and if you’ve looked him up recently you might know of his brilliant work in mathematics, but everyone knows about the guy who had a brilliant idea, yelled “Eureka!”, and jumped out of his tub to run through the streets butt naked yelling about his discovery. David and Goliath, the Trojan Horse, the Knot of Gordia-these stories are permanently ingrained into the human consciousness and will be remembered as long as there are people alive. Stories never die.
And you can tell a lot about people by the stories they tell. Certain themes in stories never seem to go away-they come up in the great stories over and over again. Themes like redemption and valor and longing to be loved and needed. They surfaced in the epics of Homer, they were refined in the ballads of medieval Europe, and they’re louder than ever in the movies and paperbacks and comic books of today. These themes show up over and over again in the stories people write because they are components of the human heart, written into us by God. Humans write stories because we were created to do so, and the stories we write illuminate what it is to be human. Reading more stories teaches us about people, and learning how stories work makes it easier to predict and understand life because God is a storyteller, and this world is his epic-thousands of years in length, with a cast of billions and an unlimited special effects budget. The best stories catch and reflect a glimmering of that great story’s grand message, and that’s what makes them such spectacular teaching tools-which is perhaps why God saw fit to give us a book of them as our holy text. The more we learn of God’s stories, the better we understand him.
So here’s the core of my complaint against the Christian Church: If Christians are to fulfill God’s purpose for us and be a powerful force for good in the world, we need to understand our place in the great story that God has written for us, and the Church is not helping Christians do that. The Church is not stimulating courage or valor or greatness within its members. It is doing just the opposite. Only when Christians are taught to do great things in God’s name will this story really get off the ground.
In the beginning was the Word... --John 1:1
Further reading:
///
I should probably begin with some important philosophical underpinnings and a brief look at what the Church is doing right.
Philosophically, I believe that: Assuming there is life after death, the only thing you get to take with you is yourself. The most logical use for your time is to spend your life improving yourself so that you’ll have a head start on all of the amazing things there will be to do and learn in Heaven. Answering questions like “who am I”, “what are we here for”, “what is the universe like”, and so on are rationally the first priority in life. I believe that learning as much as one can about the nature of things is a good start on wisdom, which is certainly worth striving for. Curiosity, creativity, and logic should be developed and indulged as much as possible. No-one should ever be angry, offended, or derisive because they’ve been asked an honest question; questions and answers are the way to knowledge and wisdom.
I strongly repudiate the idea that truth is different for different people. That principle is logically incoherent, it overinflates the importance of individual perspective, it tries to excuse countless fallacies, errors, and misdeeds, and it sabotages the entire point of trying to learn anything. While people, events, and situations can and should be viewed from multiple angles, the fact remains that the universe exists in a single state and doesn’t much care what we think about it.
Like every Christian, I believe that there is one God who created the universe, that the man named Jesus is God in human form, that Jesus came to earth to teach, died to atone for the sins of humanity, and rose from the dead to lead the way to Heaven. I believe that the Bible is the word of God and that it is 100% true. All Christians by definition believe these statements or something very close to them.
Where I differ from most Christians is in the conclusions I draw from these principles…
God created man because He loves stories. --Elie Wiesel
According to Genesis, man was created “in the image of God”. Interpretations vary widely on the precise meaning of that phrase, but all agree that when God created Adam, he used himself as a template. Man was created to love good, to be good.
Then Adam and Eve sinned. They turned away from God, and the result of that was the introduction of every bad thing the world now has in it. God cursed the earth, and paradise turned into a struggle to survive. Adam contaminated himself with sin, and that contamination was passed down to all of his descendants. (I wonder what would have happened if there had been two more people-let’s call them Steve and Betty-in the Garden of Eden who saw what happened to Adam and Eve and took warning from it. Potentially, there could have been an entire race of sinless humans alongside the current human race. I bet they’d get along poorly. Could be an interesting story in there, but perfect beings don’t make for exciting reading most of the time…)
Anyway. The sinful state of human beings as a result of the Fall is what oft-quoted Jeremiah 17:9 is about: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” If you ask a Christian “What is the human heart like?” nine times out of ten they’ll quote you this verse.
I believe this interpretation considerably oversimplifies a somewhat complex issue. No-one is all bad on the inside (well, that I know of) and no-one is wholly good. Everyone is a constant struggle between their lighter and darker natures, and the degree to which they cause either side to prevail determines their character. Philosophers and psychologists have known this for ages, but Christian theology seems to constantly assert that only through Christ can any good work be done. This simplistic approach makes the Bible easy to read but unfortunately ignores a lot of practical evidence which shows significant quantities of non-Christians doing very good and selfless things without our help, thank you very much. We must therefore create a theory which matches what the Bible has to say and also works with what we see on the street.
Humans tend towards no alignment, not even neutrality. The worst and best are found among them.
--Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook, 3.5 Edition
Here it is: Man was created in the image of God, with a pure heart. He was then corrupted by sin. Sin infected but did not completely destroy Man’s original, pure heart, leaving us the strange, conflicted, dual-nature creatures we are now.
Now, what about Christians and non-Christians? Your average atheist would like to be a good person, but it’s probably not his first priority. He is good when he can be without much loss to himself. Unfortunately, the odds are heavily stacked against him, because he lives under the influence of dark spiritual agents who work to keep him away from God, and he’s completely unaware of their presence. In the absence of God’s light, his character will be colored by the people around him, for good or ill.
For your average Christian, the story is not so different. Christians want to be good (or at least to be right), but their success rates vary wildly. Like the non-Christian, they will usually not place much stock in the idea of demons; they will feel more guilt than non-Christians when they do bad things, but their character will be similarly determined by those around them instead of by their inner strength or their relationship with God. The average Christian may have a slightly clearer view of the world than their atheist counterpart (because their view of the cosmos is correctly centered upon God, although it may be additionally clouded by the dogmas they’re taught), but they will go through life feeling vaguely guilty that they’re not doing more and without any real hope that they might be able to make a significant difference in the world for good.
The blame for this sorry state of affairs lies squarely with modern Christian theology and a few ideas that it teaches. The first such idea is that all humans, including Christians, are basically bad and the only good thing to be found is God. This is crippling to any sense of accomplishment, improvement, or progress for the Church. Members are taught from a young age that they are bad and that the only way they will ever do good things is to “let Christ work through you.” The implied metaphor is that God does his best work with dirty tools and isn’t really interested in cleaning them up or making sure the blades are sharp. Guess what: I’ve tried this for years and it doesn’t work. God’s certainly capable of doing great things with horrible people, but before God’s going to do any work through you he’s going to want to do a lot of work in you. Remember when Jesus said “He who is faithful with a little will be entrusted with much more”? God wants you to get into the habit of reliably listening to him before he sends you into the field, where mistakes will be costly. The mightiest deeds are done by heroes, and if you want your life story to be a good one, that’s what you’re going to have to become. Fortunately, you will have help. God wants you to be a hero even more than you want to become one. That’s what the Holy Spirit is for.
You make everything glorious, and I am yours...what does that make me? --David Crowder Band
Christians should be greater and wiser and better than their non-Christian counterparts, at least on average. We’re subject to a higher concentration of fire from the Deceiver and his minions, but we have the holy Creator of the universe living in our hearts, purifying us, and guiding our actions, so the increased Enemy activity should just accelerate our training. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually happen that way, both because the Enemy is a bit more clever than that and because the Church has dedicated itself to winning more converts and stamping out sin instead of improving the people it already has. Eliminating sin (the Church’s current objective) is not at all the same as promoting positive character improvement, but the Church seems stuck on the belief that if it can just get people to stop doing bad things then surely only good things will remain. This “gospel of sin management” is responsible for the vast majority of the frustration people, Christian and non-Christian, feel when they go to church. Sin, repent, sin, repent, rinse, lather, repeat-if telling people to stop doing bad things and making them feel guilty when they fail was going to work then it would have done so by now. The primary thing people associate with going to church is guilt, and that is dead wrong. Churches should be dispensing grace and forgiveness and helping people rise past their shortcomings-if non-Christians didn’t already know something was wrong with them then they wouldn’t be in church.
If the Church wants to do great things, it is going to have to raise up great men and women. It is going to have to unashamedly acknowledge them as great. The fact that we are nothing without God does not change the reality that in God, we are great--or we can be, if we will only allow ourselves. The Church has been fighting against pride in its members for so long that it’s dismissed the idea that taking pride in something can be good. Make no mistake, selfish pride is the most subtle and corruptive weapon the Opposer has in his arsenal, and it must be watchfully opposed by vigilant Christians everywhere, but the Church has overcorrected and is trying to crush a problem which in most of its members does not exist. Shame has sunk its roots deep into the Body of Christ, and there are precious few left who take pride in the things they’ve accomplished in God’s name. God’s greatest victories are accomplished through strong, skilled spiritual warriors, and the Church needs to be producing those, not mere flag-bearers who know what side they’re on and expect that to be good enough.
Being a Christian is cool, y’all. In this story, we are the heroes. If this was Star Wars, we would be the Jedi. We’re the special operatives, the fearless captains, the valiant knights who swear allegiance to the King and band together to do great things. When was the last time you heard anything like that from the pulpit? When was the last time you heard how awesome it is to be a Christian?
I started to leave, then stopped. "Is it true? The story." I made an inarticulate gesture. "The part you told today?"
"All stories are true," Skarpi said. "But this one really happened, if that's what you mean."
--The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
Here is perhaps the most important thing for everyone to realize: Stories are the key.
What human construction survives longest? What artifact of ancient times past do we grip the most firmly? Architecture crumbles; music goes out of style; names and reputations disappear into endless genealogies that no-one can be bothered to memorize. The one sole thing that survives the passage of time untarnished is the story. Most people know Archimedes’ name, and if you’ve looked him up recently you might know of his brilliant work in mathematics, but everyone knows about the guy who had a brilliant idea, yelled “Eureka!”, and jumped out of his tub to run through the streets butt naked yelling about his discovery. David and Goliath, the Trojan Horse, the Knot of Gordia-these stories are permanently ingrained into the human consciousness and will be remembered as long as there are people alive. Stories never die.
And you can tell a lot about people by the stories they tell. Certain themes in stories never seem to go away-they come up in the great stories over and over again. Themes like redemption and valor and longing to be loved and needed. They surfaced in the epics of Homer, they were refined in the ballads of medieval Europe, and they’re louder than ever in the movies and paperbacks and comic books of today. These themes show up over and over again in the stories people write because they are components of the human heart, written into us by God. Humans write stories because we were created to do so, and the stories we write illuminate what it is to be human. Reading more stories teaches us about people, and learning how stories work makes it easier to predict and understand life because God is a storyteller, and this world is his epic-thousands of years in length, with a cast of billions and an unlimited special effects budget. The best stories catch and reflect a glimmering of that great story’s grand message, and that’s what makes them such spectacular teaching tools-which is perhaps why God saw fit to give us a book of them as our holy text. The more we learn of God’s stories, the better we understand him.
So here’s the core of my complaint against the Christian Church: If Christians are to fulfill God’s purpose for us and be a powerful force for good in the world, we need to understand our place in the great story that God has written for us, and the Church is not helping Christians do that. The Church is not stimulating courage or valor or greatness within its members. It is doing just the opposite. Only when Christians are taught to do great things in God’s name will this story really get off the ground.
In the beginning was the Word... --John 1:1
Further reading:
- Waking the Dead by John Eldredge
- What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey
- Story by Steven James