God's answer about hell

   Do you believe in hell?   That's a common question asked to people who are religious and non-religious alike.  In my years of walking this earth I have heard lots of seemingly intelligent people utter the most ridiculous claims about God than one can imagine.   One of the most outlandish statements is this:

                                            God is too loving to send anyone to hell

  On its face it does seem like an oxymoron for an infinitely loving being to send a not so loving mortal to a place of infinite pain and suffering.   For many people, this statement provides a minute amount of comfort as they spin their "wheel-of-life" and see where the arrow lands.   We pride ourselves on our accomplishments of friends, family, work, awards and riches.   The wealthy feel their mounding of riches is a reward from God for their hard work and certainly if God was displeased with them he would not have lavished such abundance on them in this life.    The poor look at their lack of wealth as their "predicament" handed down to them and that its none of their fault for what they have had to do in order to survive.  While those in the middle-class play both sides of this coin depending on how things go from year to year.

    But does God really not send anyone to hell?

    The best answer I have to that question is our favorite 20th century villain: Adolph Hitler.   For no one person personifies evil more than this one man.   A man who is credited with killing:

• 5.1–6.0 million Jews, including 
• 3.0–3.5 million Polish Jews
• 1.8 –1.9 million non-Jewish Poles 
• 500,000–1.2 million Serbs killed by Croat Nazis 
• 200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti 
• 200,000–300,000 people with disabilities 
• 80,000–200,000 Freemasons [23] 
• 100,000 communists 
• 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses  

     Add up all those people and you have about 11 to 12 million people in total.  People he deemed to be unfit for living and procreating.   Starting with the disabled, the elderly and the mentally ill, he worked his way up the chain until he attained his goal of eliminating the Jews.  

     We see these numbers and clearly we cannot hold onto the view that "God cannot send anyone to hell".    I believe that Hitler is God's instrument to show us how silly our arguments are when evil is taken to its extreme.  Like a house of cards, it all comes crumbling down.    Can you really hold to the idea that there is no hell at all?   Or is that just another fashionable delusion we try to trick ourselves with.  If that is so, then Hitler got away with it.   Sure he didn't get to live a FULL life (died at the age of 44) but his life was very full and complete.   He had many parades in his honor.  He was loved and admired by his people.  He was feared by his enemies.  He met with the heads of state from the most powerful countries on earth.   He ate the best food.  Drank the finest of wines.  Heard the greatest symphonies.   Saw the greatest works of art.   His name was shouted in large gatherings.   In terms of self-actualization, Hitler was at the top of his game having come from meager beginnings, spend several years in prison and moving all the way to the top of the German parliament.   So what if he died at the age of 44.   He did it!

     Does that annoy you in the least?   It should, if you are the least bit human.  We demand justice for acts of evil.   A bullet to the head, even if it was self-inflicted is not enough for us to accept.  Hitler beat us to the punch and stole our glorious revenge on him.  

    We look at this and we say that there must be a hell for people like Hitler.   He must be punished for all the lives he destroyed.   But that means there is an exception to the premise that we started out with that God cannot punish anyone.   So either we must let Hitler get away with it, or we must admit the folly in our argument and concede that their are people worth of hell. 

   But let's not stop at the one man, Adolph Hitler.   Did Hitler do it all by himself?   Did he build the camps?   Did he build the gas chambers and incinerators?    Did he build the train tracks to the death camps?   Did he load up the cattle cars with the Jews and other all by himself?   Did he herd the people from their makeshift barns to the gas chambers and burn their bodies all by himself?  Did he rip the gold teeth from his dead victims for their monetary worth?  Did he take over their homes and their belongings all by himself?   Did he drive the trains full of people to these camps and see that people go in, but they never come out?   Did he convince people all by himself that society would be better off without the mentally/physically handicapped, or the mentally ill, or the weak?   Of course not!  It took hundreds of thousands to put this altogether.  I remember watching a show on the History Channel called "Engineering Evil" which showed the engineers who designed Hitlers efficient death camps.   In some ways these men were even worse than Hitler as they actually did the work of thinking it all out. 

   But let's not stop with the people who were active in this pursuit of racial cleansing.   Let's also include the millions of Germans who sat idly by and did nothing to stop it.   The pastors and teachers who said nothing to call attention to the evil they were taking part in.   The medical doctors and nurses who administered the lethal injections of the "unfit".   The scientists who saw the folly of Euthanasia and Genetic-Cleansing and did not stand up for reason and sanity.  The people in the towns near the death camps who smelled the stench of burning flesh when the wind blew it into their streets and shut their windows to avoid smelling it.    

    A famous Lutheran pastor by the name of Bonhoeffer who did try to stop Hitler wrote:  

                              "Not to speak, IS to speak.  Not to act, IS to act"

    His words show us that those who chose to do nothing are as guilty of these atrocities as those who acted to carry them out.   That by their decision to turn away and pretend it wasn't real, they became an active participant in all of it.  If so, where do these people fall on God's eternal punishment scale?   Don't they deserve hell as well?  But maybe those peoples lives are just a little to close to our own for us to make that call.  For we all know we have done just a awful things as well either in action or in-action.  We were okay with the judgement line, as long as the line was a thousand miles from where we believe we stand.  But now seeing that line to be a lot closer than expected we become uncertain of our own fate. 

   So the question remains:  Do you believe there is a hell?

Can technology defeat Evil?

    I was watching the rerun of the 60-minutes episode on the future of "Driver-less Automobiles"
recently and the horrible thought occurred to me that this might be a terrorists best-friend.  With this invention they could have suicide-bomber-vehicles MINUS the suicide-bomber.   A new age in efficient killing machines could be implemented in which they would no longer have to spend countless months/weeks indoctrinating and convincing poor idiots that they are better off sending themselves off into the next life than living in this one.   Now they would only need to purchase a fleet of Google-Cars,  load them with explosives, program their final destination through a Google-map App and then send them out on their merry way to wherever you need them to go.  New York Madison avenue?   A random government building.   A school.  A county fair.  An airport.  You could even send it into places a normal person would not be able to get into since there is no driver that guards would pull out their guns and shoot to stop.

    Of course some will say, we will figure out a technological solution to these problems.  But all those solutions are meaningless as they disregard an unchangeable truth:  

                                                         EVIL ALWAYS FINDS A WAY!

    And I am not just talking about ISIS levels of evil either. I am also talking about simple day-to-day issues as well. Take for example the issue of texting-while-driving.   I have seen several "solutions" to prevent this from happening, but each solution I see I only see more dangerous ways around the "fix".   One company envisions cars using sound-wave technology from the cars speakers to "locate" where in the car the texting is taking place and if its from the drivers location, it would disable the phone.   Sounds simple doesn't it?  But all the person needs to do to work around the issue is simply hold the phone away from them in the area of the passenger seat thereby fooling the phone into thinking its being used by the passenger.   This not only works around the fix, but now puts the driver in a more dangerous position than before because now his direction is completely off the road and facing the passenger side window.   Some would say, "No one is going to do that!" but they don't understand (or just don't want to admit) how "evil/sinful" we humans can be.

    As for ISIS terrorists they take their evil to all new levels and no "solution" you might propose will fix this problem.   Any software fix will be over-ridden by a hack.   Any method to disable the car will be turned off.   Any detection method will be cloaked.

    Does this mean we should never have driver-less cars?

    My answer is a full 100%  YES.

    In my opinion, there are only 2 forces in our society driving this "driver-less car" (sorry for the pun) technology.

              1) Laziness
              2) Greed

     Most technology is built on these two forces.   We don't want to scrub clothes clean, so we built clothes-washers.   We don't want to chop down trees so we invent chainsaws.  We don't want to look at a map so we get directions from Siri. The list goes on and on.   Now we are too lazy to drive our own cars.   We would rather spend our time reading our Facebook posts or checking out Twitter or texting a family member.   To many, driving is SUCH a hassle.   Yes we could take the train, subway or bus, but those methods are too noisy, too difficult and they are not on OUR schedule and we have to spend too much of our time waiting for them to arrive.   Secondly, greed factors in as companies want to increase their profits.  Many companies find that removing humans from the equation is the fastest way to do that.  Imagine Google teaming up with Uber and how they could supply taxi services without the taxi-drivers.   So long Uber drivers!  You have been replaced with someone who will work for even cheaper than you.  A computer.

    But we have good historical company when it comes to techno-destruction.   Rome was taken

down as well because of their reliance on technology.   Of course it wasn't computers, but it was something just as necessary to them.  Their aqueducts supplied millions of gallons of water every day to a city of over 1 million people.   Those aqueducts were the life-blood of the city and without it they would not last more than a month.  They found this out 537 when the Goths destroyed several key aqueducts leading into Rome and it was only a matter of days for Rome to surrender.  

    Will we learn from their folly?  Probably not.   Greed and Laziness are too tempting to pass up for most people.   We will continue to put our heads in the sand and say that some smart people out there will find a solution to these problems.  Only problem is the other side has equally smart people working on solutions to our solutions and unlike our people, they are not limited by laws or marketing (if a solution makes a product too hard to use we will often discard the solution) like we are.   Their only concern will be how many people they can kill at a single time.

   Maybe we just have to say that technology has its limits and on the balance of good vs evil some advances are just not worth having.

 

We need a HI-DEF country

   I have worked with computer graphics for a very long time.  My first usage of graphics was on a Commodore-64 computer as a college student.   In those days, computer graphics were very crude.  In normal mode the screen was blocks of 40x25 so you could crudely color each block different shades of colors to achieve a rough Picasso-like picture.   You could however turn on its hi-res mode and achieve a granularity of 320x200 pixels but at a cost of lots of memory taken from your program space.   But with that increase in resolution you could draw circles and lines that actually looked like circles and lines.   As computers got faster and screen technology increased we have seen AMAZING improvements in what we can render on a screen.   Pictures we take almost look like the real thing and computer animation that is so detailed that it almost passes for the real thing.   All of this would not be possible without the TV/Monitor technology improvements that allow for more pixels to be colored on a screen at the same time to different colors and brightness. As this technology advances no one ever wants to return back to the older lower resolution technology again.

   Sadly the same cannot be said for our country as we seem to see a movement towards making us a lower resolution country.   We have all seen the election maps were they color our states either all red or all blue depending on how that states electoral votes went during the last election.   California is often called a BLUE state, but in reality only small areas of the state can actually be characterized this way as many counties up north are strongly RED.  But because of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco their voices get drowned out by the urban areas.  

   To illustrate this take a look at a map of the 2012 election results at a state level

Looks almost evenly divided between Red and Blue areas for the most part.

But now here is the same election at the County level

   With more resolution we can see that more areas of the country are actually more conservative than what the state level map would suggest. 

   As the Federal Government "nationalizes" all the states through regulation and mandates and the States dictate to their counties and cities through similar methods to bow to their authority, we at the bottom have less freedom to express our difference in views and ideas and pursue our own individual paths to happiness.   It's like telling all computer users that they don't really need 1920x1080 resolution and we should all go out and buy 1990 14" computer monitors with 480x256 resolution amber green screens again.   Sure it can still get the job done in some cases but in many cases it just won't do.

   Government doesn't like variety as variety requires too much work to supply.   With 300+ million "customers" it's like Henry Fords Model-T joke where he said, "You can get it in any color as long as that color is black!".  But unlike Henry Ford, who was forced by competition to supply more than black eventually, government has no competition and therefore black becomes the only color of choice.   It's not that government can't supply more variety,  it's just a whole lot easier for government to dictate to "the masses" what their "choice" will be and lower the resolution standard than to increase the choices and give us more freedom. 

    Unless this trend is stopped and we elect politicians who espouse more state and local freedom (ie. Libertarians) we will most likely end up with a country that looks like this

      And we will all be crying out in agony.

We need to see more than just Christian movies

     Recently there have been a large amount of new Christian movies that have hit the scene.  Most of the movies are the product of Kirk Cameron who grew up on TV's sitcom "Growing Pains".   Starting with the movie "Fireproof" Cameron has capitalized on a small group of evangelical Christians who feel their views are not emulated well in Hollywood.   As a Christian I feel compelled to see these movies and support these artists and producers.   But I don't see it that way at all.  Most of these movies follow a common and almost predictable plot line.  First there is the main character who is either a coach (Facing the Giants) a fireman (Fireproof) or a policeman (Courageous) whose family life is falling apart while their work life is in shambles   Next comes their pastor who challenges them to return to God's word after which everything thing changes. Their wife returns back to them, their children do better in school and their work becomes amazing. In the end everything works out gloriously and even the villains are saved. 

     But that is not how life really works nor is it guaranteed by God in his word. Jesus often even showed quite the opposite when he talked about being hated and being chased from town to town on account of him.  While I appreciate people trying to reach a dying world, the problem is that almost 100% of the people who see these films are already saved and therefore don't achieve their goal. 

    Another reason I don't support Holy-wood is because I am sick and tired of seeing Christians cloister themselves off like a bunch of monks so they don't have to touch the world they walk in.  We have christian music, schools, movies, radio stations,TV stations, bookstores, gyms, coffee shops, dating sites, businesses, and even cruises!   How can you relate to your neighbor if you have NOTHING IN COMMON WITH THEM!!  Here is how your conversation will go with them if you cloister yourself off and only see Holy-wood movies

Jim:     Hey Bob have you seen that new movie The Matrix?
Bob:     No.  I only see Christian movies. Did you see Fireproof?
Jim:     No.  Too religious (alternative:  "Never heard of it")
            (End of discussion)

     This is not how Jesus intended for us to live.  Instead he said exactly opposite when he told us to:

                    "Be in the world but not of the world".   

     How can you be "in it" if you don't participate "in it"?   Granted that doesn't mean I am free to go to strip clubs and the like, but it doesn't mean I sit at home and watch re-runs of  "The Walton's" every night on DVD either.   We have to find a happy medium here and for my Holy-wood is not where the line should be drawn.  To me, it's like saying that you can only discuss your faith if you are inside a church building and since your neighbors never want to go to church with you then ....oh well...guess you never will have that chance to share your faith then.  Of course we see that as an absurd path of logic but often that is exactly what we do.

    St. Paul exhorts his readers to "Always have an answer for the hope you have inside you"

    Translation: Find answers to questions as they arise as we live in this world

    Let's take the conversation earlier and see how it "might" play out differently

Jim:     Hey Bob have you seen that new movie The Matrix movies?
Bob:    Yes I did.  I saw all three.Pretty intense movie I must say.  I wouldn't take my kids to it but I found it interesting
Jim:     Yeah. me too.   I liked the story line
Bob:    Yeah I did too.  I found it very biblical in nature
Jim:     How?
Bob:    Well the names for example.  Trinity is the name of our Christian God. Father,Son and Holy Spirit.  Then their is Neo, which is Greek for NEW so he is kind of like Jesus.   He has the amazing powers no one else has.  Smith is sort of like the Devil that he has to fight.   In the end, when he is connected to the matrix and laid out in a cross formation and is fighting Smith its just like Jesus.  The Bible says of Jesus, "He who knew no sin, became sin for us, so that the power of sin could be destroyed once and for all".   That is just like Neo turning into Smith at the end and then destroying Smith from the inside.  Then their is Zion, which is also a biblical name for Jerusalem, and they cry out at the end "The war is over!".  We as Christians believe too that the war with God is over.  We are no longer enemies but his children now.

Jim:  Wow!  I missed all of that.  Do you think the writer intended that?
Bob:  I don't know.  Maybe.  It just seems all to coincidental to be an accident.  I think he is trying to get across a deeper message of salvation possibly.

And the conversation goes on from here....

I am not saying that every movie we go to has a direct application of the Gospel, but we should try to look and find ways of using our culture to reach out to a dying world.   Take for example St. Paul when he visited Athens.   Did he only go to the synagogues?   Apparently not.   When he visited Mars Hill to talk to the philosophers of his day, he mentioned their temples and even gave them credit for being very religious.   He also quoted one of their poets which means he either read their writings or attended their plays.   He uses this as a spring-board to the Gospel.  A way to connect to them.  In other writings Paul talks about athletes running with no clothes on which could mean he attended these competitions personally (something most Christians today would avoid like the plague).

    We, like Paul, might not agree with all of our world's "poets" but we must take want God gives us and use it wherever and whenever we can.  Who knows maybe a rap-artist might even have some social commentary that we can use to talk up our faith.   We must be more like Paul who even though he doesn't agree with all the greek poets writings, takes what he can and even gives credit to them.   We miss these chances when all we have to say is bad things about our culture and nothing good.  How do you think these Greek philosophers would feel if Paul approached them like this instead

Paul:  Hey I have been here for a week but could only hack walking around your city for a day because its covered with these shameless nude statutes of these "so-called" gods which really aren't gods at all but are stupid idols you guys think are so great.   I was also invited to go to a poetry reading but because I heard the poet was a heathen who has no religious background I told my friends that it would not be good for me to ingest that tripe.  But hey!  While I am here let me tell you about this man I follow named Jesus of Nazareth who is the Son of God and was crucified by you gentiles and was raised to life 3 days later.

How many do you think would have stayed around to hear?   None.

Yet that is how we sound too.