Questions Worth Asking

I’ve learned in my life that when Christians speak of Jesus you must ask some basic questions.

Are they speaking of Jesus as he really was, or as they imagine him to be?

Does this Jesus bless and approve of a privileged status for one group, color, denomination or nation?

Does this Jesus call us to discipleship or simply preside over a way of life we’ve come to call the “Christian lifestyle?”

Does this Jesus cross barriers, or does he send us back to hang with our own kind?

Does this Jesus have a mission, or just a moral agenda?

Does this Jesus show us where the Kingdom of God calls us, or does he spiritualize the Kingdom so that we never have to really think about it unless we’re about to die?

Is this Jesus a white, American Christian? Or a middle-eastern Jewish teacher?

Does this Jesus leave me alone? Or does he call me into community?

Does this Jesus give me a spirituality that makes me a “good Christian” on my own comfortable terms, or does he offer me a spirituality grounded in grace, but calling me into the tension of discipleship beyond the boundary lines drawn by religion?

Does this Jesus serve as the official spokesperson for organized religions lobotomized version of the Kingdom and the King, or is this the Jesus who started a world changing, cross-cultural movement of people filled with the power of the Kingdom of God?

From Jesus says Cross the Line, at Jesus Shaped Spirituality.

Ten Things I Hate About You: #5 - Seed, Scattered and Sown (Or, On being a Christian in a Secular World)

A few weeks ago, at the inaugural InterVarsity Christian Fellowship meeting of the year, one of the leadership team thoughtfully opined on the Parable of the Seed (Matthew 13: 18-23) - specifically of course, what the parable means and how that tied into the "vision" of the group that the leadership team had laid out for itself. Like many other parables, its one which doesn't take a PhD to figure out, and yet deceptively carries a considerable amount of depth. For Christians (or people of faith in general) there are many distractions and disruptions which serve as barriers to belief, and it is up to us to understand where they're coming from and how to deal with them.

Hearing that parable mentioned made me think a lot about how many people in my past experience approach this passage. The obvious and arguably most common understanding of these barriers is that they come from The Outside World; popular and secular culture, in all its myriad forms. The solution? Eliminate them. Anything not directly Christian related or ostensibly Christian is immediately suspect, if not shunned - once I was told by someone that he was disdainful of, and denounced anything that wasn't "Praise Music", and even thought of classical music as sinful for its lack of obvious praise. (I guess someone better go tell J.S. Bach.) It's an understandable position - to surround yourself with Christian culture, as a reinforcing habit.


This is the part where I start tossing in long biological words



This picture, shamelessly ripped off from a site in New Zealand is an illustration of a plant's root system. You can make out where the roots are, but one of the more subtle things about this picture is the greyish haze surrounding the roots, not to mention the small filamentous tendrils that branch off from the roots themselves. All of that comes from what's called mycorrhizal fungi. The term "Mycorrhizal" refers to the nature of the relationship between the host plant and the fungi, which commonly occur in soil, and it's a fascinating relationship.

The fungi is limited in its growth and survival by its ability to produce or acquire nutrients; the plant is limited in its growth and survival by its ability to access water. The solution? Work together. The fungi allow the plant to access more water, and the plant provides the fungi with the nutrients it needs.

The fungi are foreign bodies to the plant's root cells; nevertheless they are accepted when they come into contact with them. Instead of fighting, where the fungi tries to invade the plant for what it needs (to be confronted by the plant's immune system), the fungi and the plant have, in a sense, come to an understanding (okay, okay, I know I'm anthropomorphizing things here, please bear with me!). The fungi as a result prospers, as does the plant. In fact, it's been experimentally shown that plants grown in soil where the fungi have been removed through sterilization actually suffer compared to plants grown in soil with the fungi present.

For all of the talk of the evils of secular music, books, films and people that are often seen and heard bandied about by Christians, We often forget, or even refuse to realize, that among the junk that fills popular culture, there's a great deal of treasure to be had. There's an incredibly powerful Christian message of the meaning and value of selfless sacrifice (among other things) in 300, for example, seen in Miller's depiction of King Leonidas (and conversely, on the arrogance and pride of man, seen in his depiction of King Xerxes I). The Straight Story is a beautiful film about love and forgiveness, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, of course. That's not to excuse of course, the outright garbage that we often see in popular and secular media, but it's no reason to cast all of it with a wide brush stroke of disdainful righteous indignation (and it's not like Christian music isn't guilty of excessive banality, either). For all of the Britney Spears and Paris Hiltons we have to endure, there are people like Thom Yorke and Glen Phillips who have given us music with substance, meaning, and honesty (and I'll even include Trent Reznor, for his understanding of the importance of and meaning of music as expression). There's so much in all of that which people of faith can use to not only better understand other people, but themselves as well, and if we lose out on that, we lose out on a unique and special opportunity to challenge and enrich our collective perspective. Like the plant without the mycorrhizal soil fungi, to me I feel that there'd be something missing in my personal faith if I completely eschewed non-Christian music or books, and for that I really do feel weaker for it. To do so would be like saying that all soil fungi are pathogenic and deleterious to plant growth, advocating the growing of all of our plants in sterilized soil.

Like it or not, while Christians are a community unto themselves they are also a community that is part of a greater whole - and secular culture is an indelible part of that whole. It can be a source of spiritual obstacles, yes, but it can also be a source of spiritual reinforcement and edification as well.

Talking to Creationists (or: A Reply to "Bill")

Once more unto the breach, dear friends...

In my line of work, and amongst the crowd with whom I've found myself running around, it's inevitable that I'd meet and come into contact with Creationists. The first time that blatantly happened, it was with a handsome young chap named 'Tom', who offhandedly remarked about how "the evidence for Creationism was overwhelming". At seminar I'd attended on prayer, one of the talks took a subtly anti-intellectual bent, encouraging prayers for people to "accept the research of learned Christians" (read: that Atheistic Darwinian university/college biology departments would start teaching Intelligent Design/Creationism). At a wonderful talk given by a speaker at VCF, the speaker was a big fan of Stephen Jay Gould, but thought he was "out to lunch when it came to Creation-Evolution", and didn't hesitate to lump him in the same crowd as Richard Dawkins (!? - Sorry, but that's like lumping Jim Wallis or John Shelby Spong with Pat Roberson and Jerry Falwell). All this left me with an important question: how do I react to this? How should I react to this?


Anger Management

As I've alluded to in posts I've made in the past, back when I was but a young caterpillar resting on some grass at Joker's Hill (U of T's field station where I first got my taste for field biology), I was filled with a lot of anger at Creationists. I'm passionate about my faith, and I'm passionate about my science, so you can only imagine how I'd feel to see my fellow Christian brothers and sisters attacking science and scientists, labelling it as morally bankrupt, inherently atheistically biased, anti-religious, anti-Christian, and downright intellectually dishonest. Never mind the fact that scientists are among some of the most honest, and hard working people you will ever meet, and many of them are quite open to the idea of religion (sure, a lot of them are hostile to religion, but hey, who can blame them?). And of course, there's the little contradiction of people following a religion of love filled to the brim with emotions that are anything but filled with love.

I've realized now that it doesn't get me anywhere being so angry, and if anything, it just gets me more depressed. I've talked to and seen enough Creationists to know that nine times out of ten, a Creationist simply won't budge from their position. You can show them all of the evidence in the world and it won't register with them. The only thing I think I can do is to just shrug my shoulders, say, "live and let live" and hopefully reach a happy compromise. Contrary to popular belief, Creationist Christians aren't all terrible monsters who would damn you to hell for what you think - in fact, on the whole, they're fairly nice people with all sorts of wonderfully humane and progressive attitudes on a lot of different topics. If there's one message I have to give to scientists, especially biologists, it's this: Creationists are not your enemies.

And here's why - at the talk at VCF I'd heard earlier, I noticed two fundamental things which a lot of Creationists do, things which are at the heart of the reason as to why there's so much negative sentiment between Creationists and science. But guess what? They are all mistakes of which we are all guilty, Creationist and "evolutionist" alike...

1) Assumptions: You only need to read my posts about my experiences with my friend Alan then and now to see just what kind of problems making assumptions can get you into. Assumptions are easy to make, but they're hard to break down. It's all too easy to trot out Richard Dawkins as the face of Evolutionary Biology, but look closer - how many evolutionary biologists does he speak for? He doesn't speak for me, or for my supervisor, or for many of the profs I've worked with both here and in Toronto; in fact, many of them downright hate him for being a total asshat. Even atheists think he's total nutbar for acting like a downright dickstick with others who disagree with him.

My first point being: don't assume things about a group of people you don't know. You wouldn't assume that Christians are murderers because of people who go out shooting abortion doctors or advocate total war with Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran. Likewise, it would be equally unfair to assume that evolutionary biologists are a bunch of atheists who want to destroy Christianity.


2) The Limits of Your Expertise: A short talk I had with this speaker revealed just how much he actually knew about Gould's writings - he had conflated the "Punctuated Equilibria vs. Phyletic Gradualism" debate with the disputes that Dawkins had with Gould over "The Selfish Gene" and Sociobiology...two topics which are related, yes, but in a deeper sense are actually very different. Oh yeah, and Gould actually argued for a peaceful coexistence or even harmonious synergy between science and religion, unlike Dawkins. I asked him if he had read Gould's papers on Punctuated Equilibrium (in which he would have known that Gould actually wasn't as critical of "Phyletic Gradualism" as many people usually claim). He hadn't.

My second point being: if you are going to make statements on something...anything really, what you need to do is inform yourself. Go straight to the source. What did person X really say to person Y? See it for yourself, and not what other people want you to see. Do the primary sources confuse you, or are they overwhelming for your level of understanding? Contact someone else and get them to help you out. For Christians, this shouldn't be too hard to comprehend - we do it already, all the time...it's called Bible Study.


You'll see I'm not the enemy/Just a prisoner of society

It'd be foolish of me to not hold people on the other side accountable for this too. For all of the senseless and needless wallowing in the "oh, woe is me" Persecution Complex that more than a few Christians love to immerse themselves in, it's hard to argue that there isn't a similar prejudicial attitude of condescension, ridicule, and suspicion of Christianity and religion as a whole. People like P.Z. Myers and Larry Moran (A biochem prof at U of T who I've tangled with on several occasions) are guilty of these same sins - the only difference is that they do it for the side of evangelical Atheism.

I don't want to give the impression that this speaker was a horrible little ignoramus of a troll. He was a genuinely wonderful man with a whole set of interesting and refreshing insights on things, and I truly enjoyed talking to him about other things. (Hey, he shares a rather dim view of Ann Coulter with me, so you know he's a pretty cool guy just based on that alone.) His mistakes are not egregious sins leading unto death, but rather, common errors universal to all humans regardless of their religious background. How many times have you instinctively cast snap judgments or made quick prejudiced assumptions about people based on first impressions? God knows I have, many, many more times than I'd ever care to admit.

That to me, is what Christianity is about. Allowing our belief and faith in the divine to help us to rise above the mistakes we make as beings of flesh, towards a higher state of being - working against our instincts to judge and bear grudges against people, to be arrogant and hateful with each other...so we can be better people than what we were before.

To my Christian brothers and sisters: I am an evolutionary biologist. But I am not your enemy. As a scientist, I come to you not with a clenched fist, but with an open hand seeking dialogue and friendship. What you choose to do with that however, is ultimately up to you.

Vincent Redux

As one of my personal heroes, Stephen Jay Gould once said, "The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history." As if we didn't need reason enough already, one reason to be good to others which I have always found deeply compelling is that singular acts of wrongness have an uncanny tendency to quickly have effects grossly disproportionate to their true size. History and our own personal experience is full of examples of instances where simple words or actions have led to profound personal and/or professional tragedy.

Three years ago, one such action sent me out of the trajectory of the VCF group at Toronto. It involved a young Chinese man, probably a second-generation Canadian like myself; someone who like me at the time, carried within him a deep and painful emotional burden. His name was Vincent. I won't go into details, going back to old wounds like how I'd pick at a dried-red scab. All I can do is link back to the original post I wrote on him back at The Chrysalis. The act wasn't directed by him at us, but rather, I feel it was directed by us at him. And I really do mean "us" especiallly including me - there's no sense passing judgement on someone else if you don't submit to the same gavel yourself. It was clear that he needed something from us, and after all the time I've had to think about it I don't know quite what it was - companionship? Friendship? Love? - but I do know that when we, or should I say, I, had been challenged to rise to the occasion, nothing happened. The disappointment I felt compelled me to leave for good. I've not seen anyone of them ever since with the exception of a few friends, and to this day I still think and wonder about them.

For reasons I still can't fully grasp, I took the whole of the text from that post, and sent it in an email to the VCF staff worker we had at the time, a woman I hadn't seen in years - and had left behind in a reclusive vanishing moment, left to expecting me, but never seeing me. Remarkably, about a week later, she sent me a reply, thanking me for my willingness to share such a deeply personal story with her. The rest of the email was terse and succinct - she would forward the concerns I'd voiced at the next executive meeting and present my case before them. Thank you, farewell, and goodbye. At the time I perceived a thinly veiled hostility draped in curt politeness, but now in retrospect I feel that it was her way of dealing with what amounted to a complete core dump of a mind in an email, sent her wey by a curiously melancholic student she met once who never talked to anyone, and who never got talked to.

It wouldn't be fair to fault the VCF group there for what happened. I see myself probably reacting in the same way as the staff worker did if our roles were reversed, and it's only natural to assume that a Christian group servicing a university with over 60,000 students spread across three campuses and seven colleges has a set of challenges not seen in a group serving UNB and STU. The staff worker I knew there was an incredibly wonderful and vibrant woman who would always light up a room that she entered. Perhaps the fault was my own for not taking the risk to reach out to her.

Still - I can't get out of my mind the image of Vincent, captured in a snapshot in my mind that I hastily and furiously typed out on my blog. I can't get out of my mind the emotion of bitter desolation he exuded and how they so well resonated with my own that it almost seemed like our hearts were beating in sync with each other. I wondered how it was that, if we started out the same way in our faith, I had been able to hold on while others I had known and met like myself and Vincent continued to suffer and fade, their faith or whatever remnant of it that was left gently slipping away. How could God allow others to suffer like that, while at the same time letting me retain my faith? I couldn't accept the idea that God could be like that. Then I remembered the old French proverb that "God helps those who help themselves", that God never gives us a problem or a situation that He knows we couldn't possibly handle. Perhaps God does give us the tools that we, the spiritually depauperate, need to survive in our faith as Christians; it's only up to us to recognize what they are and how to use them. Maybe that means I had my mind attuned in such a way as to do both, meanwhile Vincent may simply take a little while longer. I don't know at all.

I asked a few people I met this weekend to pray for him. It still isn't the same as the hug I wanted to give him all of those years ago, but perhaps it goes some distance to make up for my own failure to be there for Vincent when he didn't even know that he really needed me. I pray that he will find the peace that he seeks. For the disillusioned, the angry, and the broken and the sad, peace is often the only thing we can ever hope to strive for.