There’s been a lot of discussion lately around a video by evangelist Jefferson Bethke that has gone viral called “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus”. You can see the video and read an excellent critique of it by an Eastern Orthodox priest here. There is not much left to be said on the topic, but of course, I must have my two cents’ worth!

As is the case with so many debates, problems arise because the words are not defined clearly. What does ‘religion‘ actually mean? What is it that this bloke hates, exactly? Anyone who loves Jesus is bound to also love ‘true religion’, a phrase used by St James in his epistle (1:26,27). He points out the difference between religion properly practiced and religion abused. I think what the bloke in the video is rebelling against is religion abused, but he just calls it ‘religion’, hence the controversy, since people think he is using ‘religion’ in the more general sense of the word, thus hating both true and abused religion together. Of course, that controversy is probably exactly what he was aiming at. What better way for an evangelist to get his message heard by millions?

The abuse of religiion is nothing new. It happened in the Jewish faith at the time of Christ, it happened in the early Christian Church in the time of the Apostles, and, surprise, surprise, it happens today. I fully join with Bethke in rejecting the abuse of religion.

But that doesn’t mean we should toss out religion altogether. As St James points out, there is a pure and true practice of religion that is acceptable before God and which enlightens, ennobles and elevates the believer. Our task as Christians is to constantly self-review, both on a personal and individual level as well as on the community level, and ask ourselves daily whether we are following that path. If we stray, repentance and return is called for.

Religion has acquired a bad name nowadays. I can see why this video has struck such a cord with so many people. In these days of universal education where children are taught to think for themselves from a young age the old ways of “just believe what you are told” no longer work, whether in religion, or politics, or in any sphere of life. Add to that the abuses by church leaders that the media loves to sensationalise, and the general move towards flexibility rather than rigidity in our daily lives, and it’s easy to see why ‘religion’, in the sense our grandparents thought of it, has fallen well out of favour.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. After all, Christ never came to build an institution, and He never asked people to believe in Him just out of fear of or respect for authority. He wanted people to know Him as a person, and to love Him as such. Perhaps we are finally beginning to shed a constrictive skin of institutionalism that has tended to starch and stifle our true encounter with God? Imagine a day when videos like Bethke’s don’t even raise an eyebrow, because nobody practices their religion in that way, the abusive way. Personally, I don’t like to speak of Christianity as a religion, except in a technical context. Christianity is not just an institution, or a book, or a set of ideas and rules. It is a relationship with one’s Creator and one’s fellow creations. It is a way of life. It is a state of being. It is who you are, deep down inside.  All the outer stuff follows naturally from the inner stuff, and without the inner stuff, the outer stuff is worthless.

I too hate the abuse of religion. But I think I’d be lost without true religion.

_____________________________________________________________

SUPPLEMENTARY (23rd January 2012)

A younger person’s take on the subject: Glory and Rubbish

As Xmas approaches, I present a really interesting guest blog from Samuel Kaldas. So few people today realise the incredible debt we owe to Christianity. Going on the words below, society today would be unimaginable had not that very special Baby been born two thousand years ago. Enjoy…

As often happens when one walks the streets of the Sydney CBD, I was once approached by a homeless woman who asked me for some money. In the conversation that followed, she commented on how irritated she was at the way city-goers would routinely snub her off and ignore her completely; “I mean,” she said, “I’m as human as everyone else.” I agreed with her of course. Who would deny as obvious a fact as that? Even those people who snubbed her and provoked the comment no doubt understood that although this woman was homeless, and lay considerably lower on whatever scale of social respectability we use to categorise ourselves nowadays, she was still as human as the richest person in Sydney. Her status as a member of the human race meant that she had a sort of inalienable value; she deserved exactly the same sort of basic respect and dignity as the richest and most successful members of our society, purely because she was a human being.

This might sound like a fact so obvious that it doesn’t really need to be said. All of us know perfectly well that a person’s social station does not reflect their value; we all understand that wealth and poverty, health and sickness don’t necessarily reflect any particular virtue or flaw in a person’s character, and that even if they did, we would be no less obliged to help any of our fellow human beings in need. How could we think otherwise? Isn’t that what it means to be human? In “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies”, the Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart argues that if it weren’t for Christianity and its revolutionary re-imagining of what it means to be a human being, none of us might think that way at all. In the book’s introduction he says

“At a particular moment in history, I believe, something happened to Western humanity that changed it at the deepest levels of consciousness and at the highest levels of culture.”[1]

Living as we do, at the end of 2000 years of Christian history, in a culture that has been irrevocably shaped by the Christian view of the world, it is hard for us to appreciate just how revolutionary Christianity was when it first stepped onto the stage of history. We Copts know especially well that the Roman emperors were brutal and bloody in their repression of Christianity (half the icons that line our churches are the victims of Roman persecutions), but we do not, perhaps, appreciate why as well as we should. If Hart is to be believed, Christianity’s fundamental claims that God became man and died the death of a criminal, and that the sick, the poor and the sinful are as precious to God as any other of His children, were among the most subversive, rebellious and offensive ideas that the ancient world had ever encountered.

Modern readers might be surprised to find that one of the greatest problems the ancient pagans had with the early church was the ‘sort’ of persons they invited to their churches. Celsus, a pagan of the 2nd century AD, wrote:

“No wise man believes the Gospel, being driven away by the multitudes who adhere to it.”^[2]

He harshly criticises the Christians for teaching wisdom to women, children and slaves, claiming that they only teach such people because they are unable to convince people of more ‘intelligent’ pedigree.^[3] In saying this, he was merely echoing the soundest principles of classical wisdom; centuries earlier Plato[4] and Aristotle[5] had insisted that men, by nature, were superior to women, children and slaves. Such was the natural order, the way the gods had fashioned the world, and to treat slaves and women like men by teaching them and exhorting them to wisdom, was pointless stupidity.

He expresses a similar distaste for the way that Christians called ‘sinners’ to faith in Christ. Unlike most almost every respectable religion that came before it, the Christianity not only accepted but sought out prostitutes, drunkards and other ‘sinners’ in order to convert them to life in Christ. The outrage that this practice provoked in the minds of the ancients is readily apparent in the Gospels themselves; Christ’s contemporaries were repeatedly disgusted at the company He would keep (tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers etc.), and Christ would simply explain in response that He had come to save those who had need of saving.^[6] While to us, Christ’s reason for behaving this way (“those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick …”^[7]) makes perfect sense, to many of the ancients it was impious madness. Celsus complains that: “… no one by chastisement, much less by merciful treatment, could effect a complete change in those who are sinners both by nature and custom, for to change nature is an exceedingly difficult thing.”^[8] For Celsus, sinners were sinners as much as women were women and slaves were slaves. It was ludicrous to think that one could change ‘what they were’ by any amount of correction or punishment. They simply were lesser, fouler members of the human race and no-one could or should attempt to change that. To attempt, as the Christians did by Christ’s example, to win sinners over by loving and serving them (or, to use a more modern term, by treating them as human beings) was the height of idiocy and bad taste.

To understand Celsus’ objections properly, it’s important to understand that pagan societies were heavily hierarchical^[9] – they were very clearly ordered. Every person had their place on the grand ladder of social/religious importance; the emperor’s family, the wealthy landowners and the priests sat at the top of the ladder, while slaves, poor men, sinners and women tended towards the bottom (with occasional exceptions). It borders on being an undeniable fact that the people at the higher ends of the ladder were viewed as more ‘important’ and more ‘worthwhile’ than those at the bottom.

This is partly because, by and large, the pagans saw little difference between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. That is to say, your place on the social ladder reflected not only your political importance or your level of ‘authority’, but also reflected your virtue, your ‘worth’ in the eyes of the gods. As one author put it, “for the Romans, it was not true that all people are created equal.”^[10] The gods had not created ‘humanity’ as we understand it today, a set of individuals who differ in ability, circumstances and social station but all share equal worth; the Roman gods had created rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, men and women, some of whom were made to rule and some of whom were made to serve.

Roman society was ordered in a way that reflected the superiorities and inferiorities that the gods had built into nature itself, and that notion of hierarchy pervaded every level of the Roman state, including the family. And it was the gods, captained by the great Creator God Himself, who preserved the hierarchy that held human society together; as Hart says, “the gods love order above all else.”[11]

Keeping all this in mind, think for a moment about Christianity’s fundamental historical claim: that God Himself became a lowly Jewish carpenter, spent most of His time preaching to and serving tax collectors, lepers and prostitutes, and was ultimately executed as a criminal. The extent to which this idea was a rejection of the pagan worldview is impossible to understate. In Hart’s rather forceful words:

“[To the pagans] the gospel was an outrage … this was far worse than mere irreverence; it was pure and misanthropic perversity; it was anarchy.”[12]

Christians claimed that the Creator God Himself, who should have been working to sustain and encourage the created order, had humbled Himself to its lowest level by taking the ‘form of a bondservant’^[13] and dying the death of a criminal. And in so doing, He shattered, or even inverted the pagan hierarchy and brought into being a new order; an order in which “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” and where “all are one in Christ Jesus.”^[14]

In other words, it is in Christianity that we first see the ideas of ‘humanity’ and the ‘infinite worth’ of every single human being regardless of virtue or social station, coming into being. Arguably, if it had not been for Christianity’s stunningly subversive teachings about the value of sinners and lower class peoples, such people might never have come to be considered fully ‘human’ at all. In Hart’s words, “it would not be implausible to argue that our very ability to speak of ‘persons’ as we do is a consequence of the revolution in moral sensibility that Christianity brought about.”^[15]

Christianity is called a lot of things nowadays (dreary, outdated, dogmatic, evil …), but one character rarely applied to it is rebellious; which is rather ironic given that the early Christians (and their persecutors for that matter) inevitably understood themselves as rebels. Unfortunately, as modern Christians we rarely appreciate this sense of rebellion, even though it survives powerfully in our prayers and rites. It is nowhere more obvious than in the rite of baptism where the convert (or their parents if they are a child) turns to the West and declares:

I renounce you, Satan, with all your impure works, all your evil soldiers, all your wickedness, all your powers, all your despicable worship, all your deceiving and misleading trickery, all your armies, all your principalities and all the rest of your hypocrisy.

I renounce you! I renounce you! I renounce you!

The significance of these words to an ancient convert was absolutely life changing. In saying them, he was rejecting the pagan gods (who the Christians now began to call demons), and the human empire which they sustained – which is probably why early Christians refused to worship the image of the Roman emperor even on pain of torture and death.^[16] By becoming Christians, they were confessing their allegiance to a new emperor (Christ) and a new order. And this new order rejected all the ‘hierarchy’ of the old, corrupt order; baptism washed away all pagan labels. Instead of a society based on rank and authority, the church was a community where all members bore the rank of the King Himself, for all Christians were said, by baptism, to have ‘put on Christ.’^[17] In Christ’s church, even authority figures ought to humble themselves instead of ‘lording it over each other like the Gentiles’.^[18] The Church also offered those whom the pagans despised as ‘sinners’ liberty from the rigid restraints pagan society had placed on them. In response to Celsus’ claim that it was near impossible to change the nature of a sinner, the Egyptian church father Origen replied that:

“for the word of God to change a nature in which evil has been naturalised is not only not impossible, but is even a work of no very great difficulty, if a man only believe that he must entrust himself to the God of all things.”^[19]

And that was a definite difference between the pagan and early Christian views of humanity. Where the pagans (with some exceptions) saw only men, women, slaves and sinners who were what they were and could never be otherwise, the Christians saw a potential Christ in everyone. For Christians, the worldly wisdom^[20] that ascribed different levels of worth different ‘sorts’ of people was an abomination. A Christian could not judge anyone’s worth based on their position in the social hierarchy, precisely because Christ had told them that even ‘the least of these’ warranted the respect due to the creator God Himself.

That is why Hart argues so passionately that if it weren’t for Christianity and it’s revolutionary ideas about the human race, the homeless woman I met on the street might never have thought to make the assertion that she was ‘as human as everyone else.’ For a pagan like Celsus, the idea that a homeless woman and the emperor himself shared some sort of equally respectable ‘nature’ may well have been not only ridiculous but an insult to the dignity of the emperor. Perhaps, if it had not been for the ‘Christian revolution’, many of our most cherished ‘modern’ ideals would not even have been possible.

Obviously, there’s a lot more that could be said about all this. There are questions like why, if Christianity was so revolutionarily egalitarian, Christians continued to keep slaves for so long (to which the short answer is ‘old habits die hard’), and many more. As a disclaimer, you’ll notice I’ve made a special effort to say ‘Hart argues’ or ‘according to Hart’ in much of the above rather than simply stating his arguments as facts, and this is because historical arguments this wide-ranging are hard to assess properly without a good level of historical knowledge, which I certainly don’t possess. Hart is a stunningly knowledgeable author however, and certainly, his arguments carry far more weight than the generally poorly informed historical arguments of the New Atheists. For those want to learn more, this is a beautiful, short and sweet summary of the argument:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FytwCHCniCk&feature=BFa&list=LL69h4BfHEoj4QkUWhBgHo1Q&lf=plpp_video

And of course, I highly recommend “Atheist Delusions” itself. It can be slow going at times, but Part 3 in particular presents one of the freshest and most inspiring visions of the Christian faith I have ever come across.

^[2] Origen, ‘Against Celsus’, Book III, Chapter 73,  (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04163.htm)

^[3] Ibid., Book III, Chapters 54-58 (same URL as above)

[4] Plato, The Republic, Book IV, Part v (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#2H_4_0007) (The relevant passage can be found by pressing Ctrl+F and searching for ’servants’ – the few paragraphs above that give useful background to understanding Plato’s argument here)

[5] Aristotle, The Politics, Book VII, Part iii (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8po/book1.html)

^[6] (Luke 5:30-32), (Luke 7:36-50)

^[7] (Mark 2:17)

^[8] Quoted in Origen’s Against Celsus, Book III, Chapter 65 (http://web.archive.org/web/20060427150628/http://duke.usask.ca/~niallm/252/Celstop.htm)

^[9] Barbara McManus, Social Class and Public Display (http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/socialclass.html)

^[10] N.S. Gill, Roman Society, About.com – (http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/socialculture/tp/Roman-Society.htm)

[11] DB Hart, Atheist Delusions, pg. 173

[12] Ibid, pg. 115

^[13] Phil 2:7 (Paul’s statement that Christ ‘did not consider it robbery to be equal with God’ makes a lot of sense when viewed in light of the pagan hierarchy; arguably, it was precisely this ‘robbery’, this pretension of a low ranking criminal carpenter to be the God that sat at the top of the created order that so infuriated Celsus and his contemporaries.)

^[14] (Gal 3:28)

^[15] DB Hart, Atheist Delusions, pg. 167

^[16] (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html)

^[17] (Gal 3:27)

^[18] (Matt 20:25-26)

^[19] Origen, ‘Against Celsus’, Book III, Chapter 69,  (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04163.htm)

^[20] (1 Cor 1:18-31) and (1 Cor 3:18)

In the last post I discussed the problems that might arise due to the world’s ever growing population and looked at some of the discussion about what might be done about it. In this post I am going to explore the growth in population of different religious groups.

In recent times, there has been some heated discussion about Muslims having large families and taking over western countries through sheer numbers. But do the figures bear this out? A little exploration of the Australian Bureau of Statistics website shows some interesting facts. Below are a few trends projected for the growth of religious groups, firstly in the Australian population, and then in the world population. Please keep in mind that while statistics are fun, they can also lie quite easily, so one should take the predictions for the future below with some caution.

If there are any statisticians out there who have a better way of analysing the figures and making more sound predictions, I would love to hear from you! If you email me (“Contact Me” at the top of the page) I would be happy to share my spreadsheets with all the Bureau statistics and you can play around with them to your heart’s content. But please, do share your results.

My Results:

For 1996-2006, Hinduism (120%) and Buddhism (110%) have grown faster than Islam (69%) or Christianity (0.8%).

The percentage of children in Australia who are 0-14 years old has changed from 1996 to 2006 as follows:

Buddhist: 1% to 1.8%

Hindu: 0.4% to 0.7%

Islam: 1.7% to 2.6%

Christian: 65.3% to 58.2%

Growth is very hard to predict, and I am not a professional statistician. First I tried multiplying each population by the same growth factor that occurred from 1996-2006, but this produced some obviously ridiculous results by the year 2016. So I then tried just assuming that each population grows or declines by the same number of people every ten years. Obviously, this method too has its limitations, but using it, the big winners are going to be “No religion” and “Religious Affiliation not Stated” which together will grow by 2106 to be 49.5%of the population, compared to only 29.9% in 2006. In the same period, others will change thus:

Buddhist: 2.1% to 6.4%

Hindu: 0.7% to 2.3%

Islam: 1.7% to 4.2%

Christian: 63.9% to 33.6%

At current rates of decline, Churches of Christ would disappear by 2036; Uniting Church by 2066, Presbyterians by 2086 and sadly, the Salvation Army by2076. Of course, this is all unlikely as other factors will certainly come into play.

So the biggest trends on these assumptions are the shrinkage of the Anglican Church and the growth of non-religion. In 2066, the non-religious will outnumber Christians for the first time in Australian history.

Non-Christian religions, while experiencing significant growth, are so small in number that they do not really make any big impact on the country’s profile. By 2106, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam combined would make up only 12.9% of the population compared to 4.5% in 2006.

Of course, this calculation does not take into account what the immigration trends will do, or fertility rates. I could not find fertility rates by religion at the ABS and I suspect they may not want to publish them too easily. The bureau responded to my email enquiry by telling me that such comparisons are not produced as standard, but one can have them generated at a cost of about $500.

It is interesting to compare these figures with worldwide population trends predicted by the United Nations. They note the falling growth rate of the population and predict, by some models, that the population of the world will stabilise at around 10 billion just after the year 2200. What is more interesting is their predictions about the change in the distribution of the population. Here, it is Africa that seems to be the big winner, growing from 12% of the world in 1995 to 24% in 2150. By contrast, China declines from 22% in 1995 to just 14% in 2150, and Europe from 13% to just 5%.

“By 2150 in the medium scenario about a third of the world population lives in China and India; about a quarter in the rest of Asia; another quarter in Africa; fewer than one in ten persons lives in Europe and Northern America; and about the same proportion lives in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

One of the lessons from the UN study is that population growth is exquisitely sensitive to fertility rates. The Executive Summary explains that varying the worldwide fertility rate by small amounts can lead to wildly different outcomes:

“By 2150, the population of the world will be 24.8 billion according to the high scenario, 9.7 billion according to the medium scenario and 3.2 billion according to the low scenario. The low and high scenarios illustrate how deviations of about half a child from replacement level, if sustained over the long run, can produce large deviations from the path of the medium scenario which leads to an unchanging population size. Owing to the nature of exponential growth, the deviations expand over time (see table 1 and figure 1). Thus, the differences between the high and low scenarios with respect to the medium scenario are moderate in 2050 (at less than 2 billion each), but in 2150 they amount to 15 billion and 6 billion respectively.”

So it seems that the average number of children that a community has will seriously affect the proportion of that community among the worldwide population. If the community is very small, then the effect will not be great – doubling a population is not a big deal if that population starts with only 12 million people, say, as is one estimate for the Coptic community worldwide. Amidst the billions, there is little difference between 12 million and 24 million.

But what about a much larger population, like the Hindu or Islamic communities? The UN report cleverly avoids mentioning religion, and looks at trends only in relation to geographical areas. As we saw above, the starting points in Australia (1.7% Muslim) are relatively small, so the effect will not be so pronounced, even with high fertility rates. A country like France (8-9.6% Muslim) will begin changing its face long before Australia does. But the worldwide picture is quite different. It doesn’t take much to see that if one starts out with a large proportion of the world’s population in 2011 and adds to that a high fertility rate in comparison to other groups, over the centuries the world will certainly look very different.

The population of Muslims in 2009 was estimated to be around 1.57 billion, around 23% of the world’s population. The world’s Hindu population, mostly in India, is estimated at around one billion, or about 14% of the world’s population.  But while the populations in Western countries are stable or even declining slightly, both these cultures currently have relatively high fertility rates. It would be interesting to find some modelling that projects how they will fare as percentages of the world’s population in the years to come.

One study suggests that Muslims will grow significantly as a proportion of the world’s population over the next 20 years. The trend is worth looking at from 1990 to 2030. The percentages below are percent of world population.

1990 – 19.9%

2000 – 21.6% increase by 1.7%

2010 – 23.4% increase by 1.8%

2020 – 24.9% increase by 1.5%

2030 – 26.4% increase by 1.6%

But the study also suggest that the vast majority of this increase will be in countries that are already majority Muslim, and that the Muslim populations of Western countries will not grow drastically as proportions of their national population.

“If current trends continue, however, 79 countries will have a million or more Muslim inhabitants in 2030, up from 72 countries today. A majority of the world’s Muslims (about 60%) will continue to live in the Asia-Pacific region, while about 20% will live in the Middle East and North Africa, as is the case today. But Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the country with the single largest Muslim population. The portion of the world’s Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rise; in 20 years, for example, more Muslims are likely to live in Nigeria than in Egypt. Muslims will remain relatively small minorities in Europe and the Americas, but they are expected to constitute a growing share of the total population in these regions.”

Another study compared the growth rates of the major religions in the world:

Islam  - 1.84%

Bahá’í Faith  - 1.7%

Sikhism  - 1.62%

Jainism  - 1.57%

Hinduism  – 1.52%

Christianity  - 1.32%.

If these rates continue into the future, there is little doubt that the face of the world will change. The question is whether the current fertility rates will drop as the Muslim and Hindu worlds continue to grow more prosperous, and inevitably more secular, as has happened in the largely Christian world in the west. Then again, Africa with its large Christian population may be the balancing factor.

Apologies for the lack of posting recently – I was locked out by some technical glitch which now appears to have resolved itself!

Radio National’s Encounter program (30 October 2011) recently covered a very interesting yet little discussed topic. In the Bible, God commands Adam and Eve, and later Noah and his family, to go forth and multiply and to fill the earth. With our planet’s population having ticked over seven billion this year, and expected to reach nine billion by 2050, is it time to stop multiplying? Haven’t we now filled the earth?

Interestingly, there are arguments on both sides. On the one side is the fear that the earth cannot sustain too many more people. Its resources are limited after all. We have already experienced water shortages that were undreamed of when I was a child, and it is no longer unusual to hear that there is a famine somewhere in the world on any given day. Surely it is a straightforward matter of mathematics: limited resources cannot sustain an unlimited population. If we want to preserve our quality of life, we must take steps to limit the quantity of people alive.

Some have advocated a solution to overpopulation that sees wealthy countries helping developing countries to speed up their economic development. The poor, it is argued, have many children because they know some of them will die in childhood, and they want enough children to survive into adulthood to help on the farm and to look after them in their old age. But if they become financially secure and enjoy a raised standard of living, then they will have fewer children.

But does this solve the problem of the effects of overpopulation? A peasant family in India with 10 children may actually consume fewer resources than a high tech urban family in the USA with only two children! The amount of food the American family throws away each year might well feed the whole Indian family for a year! Perhaps sheer numbers are not the only problem: lifestyle may be an equally important factor.

A capitalistic society relies on growth for its prosperity. Today, a country’s success is unquestioningly measured by the annual growth of its GDP – Gross Domestic Product (although some have challenged this and produced measures of “national happiness” as alternatives). GDP growth means that you need a growing population to provide more consumers to buy more goods to create more jobs to put more money into people’s pockets. But I have often wondered, isn’t this something very like what a cancer does? Healthy body cells and organs grow to a certain limit and then just replace damaged or dead cells, maintaining a healthy, sustainable equilibrium of cell numbers. The whole problem with cancer cells is that they just don’t know when to stop multiplying. Eventually, they consume so much of the body’s resources that the rest of the body starves, and inevitably, dies. Our economic system is built upon exactly this unlimited growth principle!

Here it is important to point out something that the Christian living in the West needs to think about. As a member of Western society, the Christian is committed to upholding and participating in its various systems, including the capitalist economic model. But capitalism is most certainly not a Christian model. To be sure, it draws on some Christian ideals, such as free will in the marketplace and the liberty of the individual. But it also relies heavily on some other ideals that are most emphatically not Christian: personal profit; selfishness; materialism and greed, to name a few. Remember that Christ commanded anyone who wishes to follow Him that they must sell all they have, and the first Christians came and laid their possessions at the feet of the Apostles who distributed them according to need among the whole community.

What would happen if we changed our system? Would we be willing to accept a freezing of our standard of living in exchange for a more sustainable future? Could our economic system survive, or would we see massive unemployment and inflation result? Or perhaps we need to rethink economics from the ground up, and come up with a completely new system that is not based on individual profit, but rather on cooperation and sharing – something much closer to the model of the ancient Christian community? Could such a system ever be made to work, in view of the disastrous experiments with communism of the twentieth century? After all, human selfishness and greed are not so easily snuffed out.

And there are other aspects to this religious dimension of this debate. The Roman Catholic Church has always opposed contraception of any kind (other than natural methods) and encouraged Catholics to have large families. The Coptic Church, being located in overpopulated Egypt, has had a much more sensible approach to the question, banning only those forms of contraception that result in the death of a fertilised zygote (e.g. IUD’s and the morning after pill) but encouraging population control with forms of contraception that prevent fertilisation of the egg in the first place (e.g. oral contraceptive pill and barrier methods). It will be interesting to see whether the Roman Catholic Church will review its position over the coming decades as the population pressures build.

In the next post I will explore some statistics about the growth of religious communities in Australia and across the world. There are some trends that might surprise you…

Diogenes was disturbed. It wasn’t really because he had lost his wares. It was frustrating to know that his carefully crafted ornaments were floating down the river for anyone to pick up, but that was not what disturbed him mostly now. It was not even the fact that he was wet and cold from having capsized as he crossed the river, nor even really because he had nearly drowned. No it was not the nearly drowning that disturbed him so much as the questions that nearly drowning had forced into his mind.

“If I had drowned, what difference would it have made?”

“Hello Diogenes,” a cheerful friendly voice hailed.

“Oh, it’s you Socrates.”

“Why so glum, then my friend? And why so damp? Have you been swimming in your clothes like an absent minded philosopher?”

“This is no time for jokes Socrates. I almost drowned. But that’s not the worst of it. My life has no meaning!”

“Oh, surely you are being too dramatic? Will you add the skills of the player to those of the philosopher?”

“What does my life amount to? What have I achieved? What mark shall I leave upon this world?”

“But surely, you are a master craftsman? Have you not created many a work of beauty and significance?”

“Bah, Socrates. In a few hundred years all my works will be dust or buried in the ground or forgotten in some dark corner. What difference does that make?”

“Ah, let us play this game then my friend. But surely you have made a good living from your craft, have you not? That is something to be proud of.”

“What is a good living but food for the stomach that will only be eaten by worthless worms one day?”

“Well parried. But you have enjoyed your life, have you not? You have found joy and pleasure in your craft, and in spending the money you have made through it? You have lived a pleasant life without want and with much luxury. You life has been better than that of the mean and the poor. Surely that makes for satisfaction?”

“Nay Socrates, for when we die, what shall set me apart from the mean and the poor, when we both shall turn to dust alike? There is no satisfaction there for me.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Diogenes. But I shall have the better of this argument yet. For you are no average man, my friend. Do you forget the fame that your craft has brought you? Why, your name is trumpeted from Athens to the Bosporus! In the highest halls of power they seek your skill and praise your handiwork.”

“What will fame be to me, when I am feeding the worms in the ground? How shall it help me then? And how fleeting is the fame of this life. I tell you Socrates, not a hundred years hence, the very names ‘Socrates’ and ‘Diogenes’ shall have disappeared from the earth!”

“I see that you are in a black mood indeed! Well if fame brings you no joy, then what of your family and your friends? What of the many happy days you have spent together with them? Shall these count for nothing? And what of the legacy that you leave behind you: manly Alithenus and your delightful little flower Sophia? Has not your life meant something for those who have loved you, as indeed, have I?”

“Yes, yes, yes. I have loved, and you have loved, and they have loved. And then, all is worms; worms and dust. What difference does it make to the worms if they feast upon a man who was loved or one who was alone all his life? Both taste just as sweet!”

“I see that it is the giant Chronos who lies at the heart of your disquiet, Diogenes, with his servants the worms. Why then do you not leave behind you such an edifice that Chronos himself cannot harm it? The travellers tell us stories of the far land of the Nile, where there are structures that have stood for more lives of men than any can remember; huge mountains constructed at the command of the great Pharaohs at the cost of a hundred thousand lives, built with sweat and blood, filled with unimaginable treasure, and standing against the storms of the desert. No worms here, my friend! Would that sate your lust for meaning?”

“At last you tempt me with a morsel of at least a little attraction. Yet even as I ponder it, it dissolves away into nothing. For who remembers the great Pharaoh now who caused this wonder to be erected? Who cares for him? How is the world different for all his exertions, other than to provide an oddity, a novelty that men gaze upon once with awe, then soon forget in the mean struggle of their real lives? And who is to say that even this edifice shall stand forever? The storms of the desert eat away at it little by little. Though it take a thousand years, yet sooner or later it too shall become nothing but dust once more. Nothing in this world, not the most adamant of stones, not the most beautiful of ideas, shall last.”

“I have but one last trick to play in this game of skill, but it shall be my best! Come with me, and let us sail to the far ends of the earth, where it is said there lies an island of mysteries, and there drink of the potion of life everlasting! Then we shall cheat Chronos of his prey, and we shall cheat the worms of their meat. What if you should live on forever, dear Diogenes?”

“You tempt me with a mirage, Socrates! For if these few score of years have no meaning, how shall multiplying them add meaning to them? All you have done is to extend their pitiful agony forever, and have taken away the only escape from that agony. For even if feeding the worms with my body shows that my life has no meaning, at least when I am being devoured, I shall not know it, and the agony will be done. Would you take away that relief from your dearest friend, Socrates?”

 “Then my dear Diogenes, I have sad news for you. For it seems that the meaning you seek is not to be found in this world at all! But then we must choose between two evil choices; for either the meaning of our lives exists outside this world where we cannot go, or else there is no meaning at all, and our existence is the same as our absence! Why if that be so, then why not end the agony now, instead of waiting for slow, witless nature to take its course?”

“And now you see the reason for my glum mood, friend Socrates. Let us at least soothe our pain by sharing this emptiness together for a little while. Come, I have a better idea: let us go to visit our mutual friend Plato. He is the wisest man I know. If anyone has an answer to our conundrum, surely it shall be he!”

Moallem Jirgis Al Jawhary

A 32 year old Protestant Iranian pastor with a young family is on trial in Iran for apostasy from the Muslim faith. He stands at grave risk of being executed, although he has been told that he would be a free man if only he would ‘repent’, renounce his Christian faith and return to Islam. Interestingly, a Muslim blogger, Hesham Hassaballa, has responded in the most powerful way possible: by proving from the very words of the Quran that such treatment is against the teachings of Islam. A sample: 

The evidence is overwhelming: Islam firmly upholds freedom of choice in matters of faith. Indeed, some Muslims do not, but their sins do not speak for the entire faith. Rather, their sins are an affront to the principles of Islam.

 The Iranian authorities must let Pastor Nadarkhani free. The choice of faith that he makes is his alone, and he will face the Lord in the end for his choice.

 Even if the head Shaikh of Al Azhar University converted to Catholicism, it would not diminish the truth of Islam’s message one iota. The Qur’an is quite confident in the truth it speaks, and so should it be with its adherents.

 When will Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt and all over the world understand that if they want to be true to their own religion, they need to accept freedom of religion?

 I think we will be waiting for a long time. This kind of fanaticism is nothing new for the Copt. An interesting historical article about important Coptic historical figure, Girgis El Gohary by Dioscorus Boles highlights some of the horrible circumstances Copts endured as recently as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Surely we, as a human race, have moved on from such barbarism?

Over the past nine months fanatic elements within the Egyptian Muslim community have stirred up civil unrest all over Egypt. Copts have been attacked, houses and shops looted, and churches burnt down. While it is true that a general degree of anarchy has prevailed in the country since the revolution, one expects that as the new order comes to fruition, such anarchy will quickly be brought under control. THis is to be expected when so drastic a revolution happens in any nation. But acts of violence along religious lines will divide the country and turn it into another Lebanon. As thousands of Egyptian Copts protested the lack of protection from the ruling Army since the revolution, the army opened fire killing dozens of civilians and injuring hundreds. The Army has blamed “unknown culprits” for the violence. Yet surely, there is no doubt as to who did the killing?

If Egypt is ever to become a modern country it has to embrace modern standards of integrity and accountability. Provocateurs are being blamed for inciting the violence, yet we have often seen armies in other countries counter such violence without killing anyone. Why can’t the Egyptian army do the same? Are they not well enough trained? It is simply not good enough to say “they started it”. You are the ones with the training and the weapons!

After this terrible incident any decent army command would very quickly find out who gave the orders to fire on civilians and make a public example of them so that the rest of the soldiers understand that this absolutely unacceptable. The Army showed admirable constraint and what seemed to be great wisdom in refusing to use violence against protesters during the January revolution. Why has that restraint disappeared now? Why does it disappear only against Christians?

If the army does not want to be seen as being selective in who it protects, it MUST take immediate, decisive action against those in its own ranks who have shown this lack of discipline and were responsible for this atrocity. Only in this way can it prevent this tragedy from being repeated. Covering up and blaming others is a green light for atrocities like this to recur in the future. There is an old adage that says, “What you allow, you teach”. If I were a Muslim army officer, with the slightest tendency towards sectarianism, and I saw the perpetrators of this violence getting off scott-free, what message does that give me? If on the other hand, i saw them being severely punished: tried, courtmarshalled, perhaps imprisoned; then I would certainly think twice before repeating their mistake.

Egypt is not at war. Soldiers killing civilians is simply not acceptable! Those responsible have committed murder. When will it be recognised for what it is?

Persecution is nothing new for the Copts. We have survived nearly two thousand years in an environment that has been hostile for the vast majority of that period. But the events unfolding in Cairo are the fork in the road for the Egyptian nation. The Army can use this crisis to point the way for a better, brighter future for all Egyptians by exercising transparency, integrity and responsibility. Or it can just fall back on old ways of the old regime and plunge an Egypt that has tasted true freedom back into the dark ages.

His Holiness Pope Shenouda has called for three days of fasting and prayer starting today on behalf of the peace and security of Egypt. This is indeed a watershed moment.

Related Posts:

http://www.frantonios.org.au/2010/10/25/292/

http://www.frantonios.org.au/2010/11/03/fanatical-drive-against-copts/

Warning: This entry is not for the traditionalist or the ascetic. If you belong to one of those categories, better to stop reading now.

It is for the sincere Christian striving to reconcile their life in the world with their faith in Christ. 

There are certain similarities between formal prayer to God and listening to a song you like. By formal prayer I mean a prayer that is written down somewhere, such as Agbia prayers, the liturgy and so on. By song I mean a song you listen to on the radio, or more likely nowadays, on your portable electronic thingummy. 

In both cases you are paying attention to someone else’s words. Ideas, thoughts, experiences and feelings that someone else has had are embodied in language an melody and thus communicated far beyond the immediate proximity of the author. Across the oceans or across the ages, in both song and formal prayers, we share something with someone we have never met and often know very little about. 

In both cases the words and melody are not the whole story. They are not like a mathematical equation that can only be interpreted in one way. The value of art is not in what it is, but in what it can inspire. You may have noticed that the lyrics of many popular songs are fairly vague, and listeners spend many hours trying to interpret them. When asked, the composer will often evade the question, because a song doesn’t have to mean just what the author intended – it can mean different things to different people. In the same way, the words and melodies of set prayers can mean different things to different people. They can even mean different things to the same person at different times in their life. The value of a prayer is not in the words or melody itself but in what they can inspire in us. They are merely tools we use to help us achieve the real goal: connection with God. 

A good pop song will make you think and feel things you might not have experienced without it. In the same way, an effective prayer opens your mind and heart to new experiences with God, revealing new insights, changing attitudes, softening hard hearts and inspiring repentance. 

There is a certain enjoyment in a well crafted song. Our brains were created to be pleased with harmonic melodies, clever rhymes or plays on words. We are also wired to derive satisfaction from seeing things in a novel way (’Oh, I never thought of that!) All these things can also apply in a formal prayer, particularly when words are synchronised with tune. Which is why virtually all the formal prayers of the Coptic Church are sung or chanted rather than just read out blandly. It takes longer, but it adds another dimension to enrich the experience. 

A truly great song inspires action, perhaps even helps to change the world. Just think of anthems like ‘We Are the World’ that moved millions to donate to help the starving masses dying in Ethiopia in the late eighties. Folk singers like Bob Dylan used their music to influence the thinking of a whole generation. Prayer too can change the world, only in this case it can act not only through the person who hears or prays it, but additionally through the work of the Holy Spirit who hears and answers prayer. 

In modern times, our Coptic community has considered listening to popular music to be a waste of time at best, downright harmful and spiritually dangerous at worst. It is considered worldly and likely to entice the listener away from God. But I wonder if we could not view it in a more positive light? Perhaps those very skills one needs to enjoy pop music are the self same skills one needs to enjoy prayer? Given the right guidance and encouragement, I wonder if the avid music listener is not the best candidate for becoming an effective exponent of prayer? It’s just a matter of taking those skills of focus, interpretation, application and feeling someone else’s words deeply and applying them to prayer. 

Kind of lends new meaning to the old phrase, ‘On a song and a prayer’.

 Fr Ant

Getting Blood from a Rose

It was such a pleasure to watch them stressing.

 Our young Sunday School class, just turned sixteen years old, had bravely decided they wanted to celebrate this milestone by donating blood for the first time at the Red Cross Blood Bank. Sixteen of course is the minimum age for donating blood. Tasoni and I were there to join and encourage them.

 It may not sound like much to many people, but it took a lot for some of these youth to do this, and their determination to see it through tells me something very important about them: they are serious about living out the true message of the Gospel.

 Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. John 15:13  

OK, they weren’t actually dying (though one or two seemed to come pretty close), but they were giving up their lifeblood in order to save the life of another.

What’s even nicer is that when you donate blood you have no idea who’s going to get it. It is not necessarily a ‘friend’. It may be a Muslim or an atheist or a Hindu or a Mormon (but probably not a Jehovah’s Witness – they ban donating or receiving blood donations!); it may be housewife or a homosexual, a CEO or a homeless person. And that is even more in keeping with the Gospel that teaches us to love everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from.

 Sometimes people really want to serve God but do not feel comfortable teaching Sunday School or doing any kind of ‘public’ service like that. They come and ask me, “what else can I do?” Giving blood is a terrific service. It has the added benefit that it is largely a hidden service, not one done publicly for show (well, the people at the Blood Bank probably don’t even know you, do they?) This kind of service is one that is done sincerely from the heart (in more ways than one) and not in order to gain the adulation of others. 

One of the benefits of donating blood is that you get to find out what your blood type is. The one I like best is B+. It almost sounds like a message from God: be positive! That optimism was certainly in evidence on the day from young people of all blood types. They were ready to try something new, something quite threatening and confronting for some of them. They faced it with courage and grace. They did not recoil or slink away. I really admire these young people, each and every one.

 IMPORTANT - CHANGE OF VENUE:
“Why Christianity?” will not be held at St Joseph’s
Instead it will be held at
St Abanoub Youth Centre
49 Fourth Ave, Blacktown
All other details remain the same.

You’re only a Christian because you were born a Christian. If you were born a Muslim, you’d be a Muslim today. So why should you think your faith is the right one? It’s purely a matter of chance.

I have discussed that challenge with many people over the years. On the face of it, it sounds pretty convincing. But that’s only on the face of it. When we dig a little deeper, you might be surprised at just how strong the case for Christianity against that of all other religions.

Now there are some who will say that we shouldn’t even be considering a question like this, that it is dangerous and might weaken the faith of some, or that it is disrespectful or blasphemous to even think about such things. But I follow the principle that if Christianity is true, then you should be able to throw anything at it, absolutely anything at all, and it should be able to stand up to it. If it can’t, then I want to know, by gum! That is, if I really care about Truth; and Truth is the very thing that Jesus not only promised would set us free, but even used as His own title (“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”).

But it turns out that those who worry need not do so. Christianity is unique in so many ways that it really does stand alone among all the religions of the world. I know that’s a politically incorrect thing to say nowadays, but I believe it is true.

Next Saturday, we hope to explore this topic in some depth. St Abanoub’s Church, Archangel Michael Church and the Coptic Apologetics Group are organising a day where we will examine the question: “Given that God exists, why should we believe that Christianity is the right faith in contrast with all the other faiths in the world?” Last year we had an Atheism Day where we looked at the arguments for and against the existence of God. The ‘Why Christianity’ Day is the logical follow up to that.

Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the reasons why I find Christianity to be quite worthy of the title, “The True Faith”. Each one is strongly supported by powerful evidence. Sure, some of the other religions may have one or two of the characteristics below, but none of them come even close to having the complete set – except Christianity …

• The founder of Christianity is universally respected for His wisdom and compassion, and lived a genuinely blameless life.
• The historical, textual and archaeological evidence for the reality of Christ as a Man who walked the earth and rose from the dead is unparalleled for the founder of any other religion.
• Christianity is the only religion that genuinely makes Love its central and essential theme. Sure you can twist other religions to try and somehow highlight love within their framework, but in Christianity, love is the cornerstone and foundation.
• None of the other great religions teach that all humans are equal. Christianity does. It may be single handedly responsible for changing human society in this way.
• Christianity offers the best explanations for the deep philosophical questions of life, and offers the best fit with the scientific knowledge of today.

If you will be in Sydney next Saturday and would like to flesh out these and many other ideas and engage in stimulating and completely open discussion about them, please come along next Saturday. No question is off limits (so long as you’re polite). You can find details on facebook.