Book Sample . . . Chapter 8 (part one)

This is a sample of the new book "No Argument for God" available now at Amazon for $9

JUST BE WHO YOU ARE. Some people would benefit from this

small maxim in big ways. Let’s face it, everyone knows when we

are trying to be something we are not. Let me take you to Salem,

Massachusetts, on Halloween night in the mid 1990s. I was in

school nearby and a few friends had asked if I was interested in

visiting the central park of downtown Salem on Halloween night .

Apparently witches and warlocks gather there on Halloween to

do whatever witches and warlocks do.

As we arrived it was clear that the town was filled

with people who were eager to celebrate Halloween and catch a

glimpse of a witch at the Witch House or go on the Witch Tour.

I am sure that if I were hungry I could have had a witch burger

with a magic potion side of coke and warlock fries . It was pretty

commercialized. I was told that on Halloween everyone tries to

get some time with a celebrated witch who lives on the main

street of Salem.

We made our way to the park where the lesser-known

witches would hang out, and it was like walking into a junior

high dance. Clusters of darkly clad people—some with hats and

capes, most with fake fang teeth, occupied different sections of

the park in their own little circles. At one point I was able to

strike up a conversation with a young man who I’ll call Roger.

He had tried, as the others did, to present himself as

unpredictable and dangerous, but it was clear that

Roger was a pretty average warlock, nothing especially frighten-

ing about him. I asked him where he became a warlock and what

it means. He began to mumble something about an amulet he was

wearing around his neck, a five-pointed star within a circle . He

called it a pentagram and described himself as a Wiccan, and told

me he worships Satan.

Wiccans don’t worship Satan, for the record. This was my clue

that he was confused and just trying to unnerve me; it didn’t

work. Imagine Napoleon Dynamite in a cape with fake fangs and

a five-pointed star around his neck, trying to convince you that

he is a real menace to good people everywhere . Well, I couldn’t

help myself. I asked to look more closely at his amulet and noticed

that the five pointed star was upright within the circle. I said,

“Roger, this is a pentacle, not a pentagram, you have an ancient

symbol that has been used by all kinds of people throughout his-

tory—Babylonians, Greeks, Wiccans—but they don’t worship

Satan with it, it represents the five elements.”

It was clear that Roger was posing as something that

he wasn’t. He stepped into me as if to confide something and said,

“Look, I’m just a computer programmer who comes out here each

year because the girls are hot.”
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So . . . what's the deal with Roger?  Check back Monday with part two of the sample.

Book Sample . . . Chapter 1

Below is a snippet from the end of Chapter One of a new book I have coming out at the end of February called "No Argument for God: Going Beyond Reason in Conversations About Faith."  Check  this and the other snippets out and order it at Amazon.com.

What does that path of thinking look like?  It began for me as a kid. I was a very inquisitive and I started to wonder for what purpose we were put here.  I tried to read the Bible but got stuck in Genesis.  I tried asking my priest questions, but he was pretty evasive.  After a few questions about the Bible with him at the doorway of our church, the organist peered at me over his shoulder and huffed that I might be taking the Bible too literally.  I made a mental note that day: don’t open up to organists with the last name of “Stanke.”  More importantly, I was beginning to understand that the Bible was not as simple as I thought it was.  I was confused and didn’t know where to turn.  One day I saw a commercial on TV that depicted a man walking on a beach with a voice-over asking questions like, “Why am I here?” “What is the purpose of life?” “Are there answers?”  The funny thing is that this commercial was aimed at forty-something’s – upwardly mobile professionals – and there I was at twelve years old with my eyes glued to the TV saying, “good question!” 

So I called the number and asked for my free book called “Power for Living.”  The fact that it was free was the clincher – I had to have this book.  When I got my hands on it, I devoured it.  It was a series of biographies of professionals and sports celebrities who have come to trust Jesus with their lives.  In the back of the book was an outline for how one needs to put their trust in Christ.  This is where I froze because I was unsure of what it meant to have someone ‘come into your heart.’  I can still remember the fear I had as I considered the idea of someone actually coming into my body, into my heart.  I was upset over the idea of a strange force invading my body and making me do things that it wanted to do rather than myself calling the shots. 

The whole thing was ridiculous, there I was stopping short of attaining eternal salvation because I was afraid that if Jesus wouldn’t like “Froot Loops” I would no longer be able to eat “Froot Loops.”  Our family didn’t even have Froot Loops in the house, so the whole thing was over-thinking on my part.  The feeling was real, though – like I was on a high dive with everyone watching.  What should I do?   What if I jump and it is the very opposite of what I would want in my life?  I wanted to live my life not have someone else’s life lived through me.  I had heard other people talk about Jesus and always considered them to be freaks.  I didn’t understand how someone bleeding two thousand years ago could do anything for me today?  How does any of this make sense?

Well, to make a long story short, I jumped. I did what was unreasonable and illogical.  I trusted in something I couldn’t see, hear, taste or feel.  I did the absurd.  It wouldn’t be the last time.

I spent the next six weeks attempting to convince my parents I did not join a cult.  There is something about a child coming home from a weekend at his sister’s apartment proclaiming that he is born again that is a little unnerving to parents.  It didn’t help in the weeks to come when I had a ‘theological discussion’ with my parents and affirmed that they were going to hell if they didn’t do what I had done.  Twelve year-olds are annoying enough without the ‘you are going to hell’ speech.  Christ had come into my life, but I still had the tact of a tweener.  Though it was clumsy and awkward in expression, I felt like I had latched onto something great and unexplainable.  I wanted them to feel what I had done, but explaining it was difficult.

I eventually went to Penn State University where I studied philosophy and religion.  Between twelve and eighteen I had read several books on Christianity and listened to kooky pastors on the radio.  I was ready to talk about my faith with my professors.  I figured one or two would give their lives to Christ.  Really.  Then I met Dr Peterson.  He was a plucky professor with a balding head, large glasses, quick wit and smile.  He looked harmless, but looks are deceiving in academia, and each day brought another assault on the life of faith.  Dr Peterson, it seemed, saw his mission to suck the faith out of every student that he had.  He would get into long and intense arguments with students over everything and anything that exposed the absurdity of faith.  There were stories in my circle of friends of people who had left the faith because of Dr Peterson.  He was a legendary spiritual Goliath. 

It gets hard debating with someone who can run circles around you intellectually.  I reached a point where I felt tapped out.  I had spent the last half dozen years reading, listening and generally learning reasons for my belief.  I had become a good apologist and I was faring miserably at the hands of my first real challenge.  This was frustrating – I had already nailed down faith. I had made the most important discovery of eternal life and made sense of Jesus.  These were settled issues – at this point in my life I should be building on these foundations instead of questioning them. 

It got to a point where I felt miserable.  I wasn’t sure what to believe. One night I went back to my room, didn’t even turn on the lights, locked the door and went over to my bed and started to cry.  I was scared, tired, and confused.  I felt like at this point in my life I was supposed to have a lot more answers.  I had become a huge disappointment, I had begun to question my faith.  All my reasons for believing were being dismantled.  My mind went blank and something escaped my lips – “Lord, I have no reason to believe in you.”

Book Sample . . . Chapter 3 "Stop Making Sense"

Here is another sample of a chapter from my book coming out in a couple of weeks.  I hope you enjoy it!  I cut it off when it starts getting good - to get the rest of it, go to Amazon and order it (only $9 rather than $15 right now).

Chapter Three: Stop Making Sense.

I made a discovery a few years back in the grocery store.  After I tell you about it, you will never look at the dairy aisle again.  Actually it was my brother Jim that showed me the difference.  If you look closely at packages of cheese in the grocery store, there is real cheese like Camembert, Gouda or Vermont’s White Sharp Cheddar.  This is the kind of stuff you serve with expensive crackers at parties.  It’s the kind of cheese that makes you cranky when someone else took the last slice.  This kind of cheese takes years to make and comes complete with enzymes and flavor (and the ability to get moldy pretty quickly).  It is the real thing, though, the best stuff. 

In the same dairy section of the supermarket, though, there is something called ‘pasteurized processed cheese food.’  If you look too quickly you will miss that it is not actually cheese, but cheese food.  Cheese food?  There is a difference between cheese and cheese food.  My thought is, if they need to tell you it is food, it isn’t worth eating.  Can you imagine: there is steak and then there is ground and mechanically separated beef food.  Sounds gross.  Essentially, certain cheese manufacturers got together and said, “cheese is expensive, cheese gets moldy too quickly and it is a pain to cut into slices.”  So they made this stuff that sort of tastes like cheese, fits in nice little plastic wraps, costs half as much and lasts about a hundred years in your refrigerator.  Real cheese is made out of milk and takes along time to bring to flavor.  Cheese food is plastic.

Actually, Pasteurized Processed Cheese Food is 47% water.  It is made of oil, water, gelatin, emulsifying agents and mold inhibitors like sorbic acid and sodium sorbate (yum!).  When I think of the good cheese, I think of people in Switzerland named Johann who live in the Swiss Alps and treat cheese like an art form.  Cheese food, on the contrary, reaches the store without ever touching human hands and can be made with a chemistry set.  Cheese Food is a lot friendlier to the consumer, but lets face it – they took the cheese out of it. 

I think of this kind of plasticity when I hear of people trying to force faith into making sense.   If we are not careful, we can rob Christianity of its distinctive flavor.  To make it more friendly to the consumer, we have robbed it of its difficulties. “Look!  100% faith that is easy to figure out, and for convenience – and it fits entirely in your brain!”  No, faith is difficult; it is hard to believe and requires risk and effort to take hold of.  Faith is wild and demands a lot from us as rational beings.  It requires us to humble ourselves and accept that we are not as smart as we think.  Faith takes us on a crazy journey.  Making sense of things tries to bend the absurdities of faith to logic and make the way smooth.  It is easy to believe in a faith that has been explained, but how likely are you to believe a faith that violates everything you think you know about truth and reason?  The real question isn’t whether Christianity is a reasonable faith, but whether we are willing to believe it when it is not?  Is your faith strong enough to stop making sense?

This is not to say that faith doesn’t have a logic to it, it does, but it is very different than the logic we are used to.  At this point, however, it is important to notice how moldable and, in some ways subjective, reason can be.  In the same way that we can look at the irrational nature of faith as we have in the last chapter, we need to look now at how limited logic really is. 

We tend to hold onto this idea that logic is something handed to us from on high, that logic and rationality are the unassailable means by which we evaluate what is true and what is not true in the universe.  For a variety of reasons, we forget that reason is something that we construct within our minds.  In order to move through the world we inhabit, we have to observe patterns, see similarities and make forecasts about the way things behave.   When we use the word “make” in the phrase “making sense of things” we forget that making is in fact the key verb – we manufacture reason, it is not revealed to us.  The American philosopher William James talked about this kind of mental bending that takes place when we try to make sense of things.  James was a Pragmatist, a form of philosophy that is American-made and beats the French to the postmodern idea by almost half a century.    

James argued that truth is something humans make from their experiences.[i]  As an example, if it is January, it makes sense that it is cold outside.  It is a truth that January and cold weather go together.  “January is cold” is a true statement.  This makes sense to us especially if we live in New York City.  Of course it would make no sense to go outside in your bathing suit (although I am sure it has happened more than a few times in New York City).  If someone went outside in a bathing suit in the middle of January, we would say they are crazy because bathing suits in January doesn’t fit our way of thinking.  January and cold go together, therefore a twenty-five degree day on January 1^st in New York City would make sense. It fits the sense data we have that is stored in our memories.

For James, however, cold and January are truths that we have manufactured.  Just think of it, the idea of cold really does not exist outside the human experience.  Cold is just a word we have given to atoms that travel at a slow speed.  For some reason, our skin has nerve endings that warn us when these atoms move too slowly to prevent skin damage.  The result is the human experience arbitrarily called ‘cold.’  The same is true of atoms being too fast, heat can cause burns on your skin.  For our example, however, it is enough to understand that the idea of cold is a human-centered phenomenon that has no bearing on the world outside of our own minds.  Essentially, we make truth because of what impact certain events have on our lives. 

For example, the idea that “January is cold” doesn’t hold any weight in a place like, say, Sydney Australia.  For an Australian, it would make no sense for January to be cold.  Wearing a coat would be ridiculous in Sydney because the way we understand the world is related to perspective.  It is completely ‘normal’ for a person to wear a bathing suit in January and cook something on the grill after a swim.  Since the northern and the southern hemispheres alternate having the sun in their half of the world, a completely different perspective is evidenced.  January in Sydney is like New York in June.  So when something makes sense it is because it fits into a certain way that we look at the world, not necessarily because that is the way that the world truly is.  The way we look at the world is, in turn, informed from the point at which we are looking at it.  Truth, for James, came from perspective.

It is actually an intriguing thing to realize that reason is not something ‘out there’ that strikes us, but rather it is something that we build from within our minds.   James would argue that we forge truths from the circumstances we encounter in our lives – not the other way around.  In short, reason is not something that we encounter (like it is out there in the world awaiting discovery), but rather something we invent.  It is intriguing because it opens up a new way of looking at the world – does coldness and January go together and I just take notice of it or do I make the connection between coldness and January and create something that new that I call logic?  This is a pretty deep thought – what is the basis of something I call true?  Is it true because of some external idea of what is true?  Are things true because they are reasonable to begin with or is it more likely because my mind ‘makes sense’ between things in order to manipulate my world better?  If sense is not something we find in the world, but something our nerve endings deliver to our minds, than logical truth is not something ‘out there’ but rather inside our minds.  Logic is not grasped, but manufactured.

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[i] Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Originally published in 1907 [P]. p.104 

Book Samples . . . Chapter 2

Over the next couple of weeks I would like to share snippets of my new book coming out toward the end of February.  The book is called "No Argument for God: Going Beyond Reason in Conversations About Faith."  It is a book for both the believer who would like to look at his faith in a new way and the skeptic who has traditionally had problems with faith the way it is.

This book is the first of its kind to drop the 'fight fire with fire' approach to justifying Christian faith - instead, lets agree that faith is absurd . . . but lets move beyond that and explain why it is worth following.  This was the approach by many early Christians (Paul even called the Gospel 'foolishness').  They didn't care to try to make faith 'make sense' - it was its 'foolishness' that proved its divinity.

So enjoy some of the snippets from the book and I would encourage you to check it out on Amazon and order a copy today!

From Chapter Two:

EVERYONE NEEDS TO TAKE A TRIP to a foreign culture. We learn a lot by seeing things for the first time. One of the longest trips I have ever taken was to the Philippine Islands. Besides being a trip to the other side of the world (and twenty-two hours in a plane), it was an adventure of new experiences. When we arrived, I stepped out of the airport and into a heat unlike anything I had previously felt. It wasn’t just hot; it was like stepping into a boiler room. I thought my face would melt. It was so humid I could see the air. As I stepped off the curb and shook hands with my friend, I at first thought he had a hand-sweating problem. As I met more people that day I realized that everyone in the Philippines has a hand-sweating problem. When it is 95 degrees with 150 percent humidity, sweat is a way of life. We packed ourselves into a small car and drove through the city. I don’t know how we survived. I gripped the side of my seat as were catapulted down streets with no apparent traffic laws. (My Filipino friends chatted happily.) To me, the city of Manila was complete chaos. There were people everywhere—walking; on bikes; in cars, buses and jeepneys; and pushing carts and wagons. All of them are going somewhere—fast. Personal space in the United States is conceived differently in the Philippines. Four or five people per taxi was normal. When we loaded our group into the back of a truck (who needs seat-belts?), we sat so close together we were sharing organs. The highlight of that first day was watching a moped pass us with a sidecar carrying thirteen people. Yes, thirteen! Can you imagine that many people smashed together on a moped going about thirty-five miles per hour? I had never seen such sights. To my friend, what was a typical day in the city felt like complete craziness to me.

When we arrived where we were staying, my experience was no different. Conflicting odors of chicken and beef cooked by street vendors mingled with diesel in the heavy, humid air. One smell I will never forget is ballut. Ballut, a Filipino delicacy, is essentially the egg of a fertilized chick or duck two weeks shy of hatching. Yum. Boiled on the street, ballut is eaten by cracking the egg, drinking the amniotic juice and eating the little boiled chick, feathers and all. My friends laughed at my gag reflex. It was a real treat for them, for me it was an animal-rights issue. While I never truly adjusted to the idea of ballut, I did become acclimated to the Filipino way of life. I adjusted to the heat and the smell of diesel, and I even developed a hand-sweating problem. I moved from a nervous visitor to a participant in the culture. I learned to relax in taxis as they ricocheted through town. Though I stayed for less than a month, the masses seemed less chaotic and more inviting. In a strange way, thirteen men on a moped began to make sense to me. The foreign had become familiar. I began to lose sight of the way things appeared to me as a visitor. This is what happens to us; the familiar can sometimes blind us to what is right under our nose. Seeing what we have grown up with is like smelling our own breath. The things that are closest to us are the least noticeable.

The same is true when we look at our beliefs. Some may have a tough time viewing faith as nonsense, but the familiarity of our faith may blind us to its obvious absurdities. When we hear that faith is nonsense, it is natural to take exception or at least to be offended, but try looking at faith as if you are seeing it for the first time, like a tourist. To save the world a man builds a big boat in the desert. Angels talk to humans. God’s Son returns on clouds. Is it possible that these have become so familiar to us that their absurdity is no longer evident? But our resistance is understandable. Questioning our faith seems to ridicule the world we built our lives on, one that was formed by people we love and respect. Recounting the absurdities of our faith forces us to realize that in its purest form Christianity does not conform to human logic. Over the centuries these absurd details could have been edited and cleaned up to fit within the bounds of reason, but they haven’t.

Only in the last few hundred years have the faithful felt compelled to make sense of Christianity. So we resist acknowledging the nonsense of Christianity. If we agree that Christianity doesn’t make sense, we fear it will lose validity—revealing that Christianity is wrong. But what I hope to investigate in this book is that perhaps the absurdity of faith is the only way to validate it conclusively. If we are looking for something that proves our faith, logic or reason won’t do it. Ironically, it is the fact that our faith is so strange that makes it so logically compelling. So let’s look at Christianity with the same objectivity we would use to understand Haitian voodoo. Let’s try to imagine what Christianity would look like if we had never been to church, never read the Bible or prayed. Imagine the difficulty of understanding ideas like grace (love your enemies) or the atonement (God handed his Son over to die for us). As we step into this sometimes uncomfortable exercise, remember that the more it seems contrary to reason, the more it bears the imprint of something wholly Other.

At our first tourist stop we will visit a church and examine Christian practices. The church and its worship are very strange phenomena. Where else do people (some of them complete strangers to one another) sing songs, read stories from an ancient book and listen to a speech on how to live? Some churches feature robes and rituals; others, T-shirts and a rock band. Most churches feature a cross—a symbol of an ancient execution. Strange. Bread (or wafers) and wine (or grape juice) are distributed to people as the body and blood of someone who died over two thousand years ago. The songs, rituals and symbols on a Sunday morning all refer to events thousands of years in the past. The point of the morning is to worship someone or something unseen and unheard by most. At the conclusion of the time together, someone passes a plate or a basket to collect money. If this were your first time seeing all of this, it may look to you like an elaborate scam.