“My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.” – Don Miller, Blue Like Jazz.

It’s been said that there’s more evidence for the existence of the person of Jesus than there was for Caesar Augustus and Alexander the Great. I don’t know if that’s really true, or how one would measure that, but when I pointed that quote out to a skeptic, he said it doesn’t matter because Alexander the Great didn’t ask us to follow him. Jesus just needed more proof.

At first, I was taken aback. That seemed like a really compelling argument. I’ve thought about it a lot, and in the years since then, I’ve come to realize that it’s only compelling on the surface.

Here’s why: most people admit that the person of Jesus as depicted in the Bible, whether real or fictional, whether God or prophet or ordinary man, is fundamentally a good person. Things like the “Golden Rule”, and “Turning the Other Cheek”, and “Love Your Enemies” are all things that came from Jesus, and it’s because of these counter-intuitive (and counter-cultural) radical ideas of love that makes Jesus pretty well universally respected and admired even if we his followers do a pretty terrible job of following his instructions. As Gandhi said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.”

And, really, with those ideas, why wouldn’t you want to follow Jesus? These ideas really resonate the world over in a wide spectrum of differing cultural, ethnic, and religious values. There is something inherent in all of us that find the teachings of Jesus very compelling. He’s the counter-cultural hero we all wish we could be.

So, what’s the risk in following his example? If you believe that these ideas are fundamentally good, would improve your life and maybe even the world, why not follow in the footsteps of Jesus?

What issue is proof? What does it matter if he was really God? What does it matter if he never even existed? What does it matter if he never rose from the dead and is dust now? Would any of this change the truth or the power of turning the other cheek? Of the golden rule?

Here’s the thing, if you can agree that the teachings are worthwhile, that they’re worth following, what else matters?

I’m absolutely convinced that I would be a better person by following the examples and teaching of Jesus. And I think our world would be that much better if everyone else did too. It literally brings tears to my eyes to think of where I could be, where we all could be, if we followed the simple truths in Jesus’ life.

And so that is where I am. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely convinced that Jesus is alive, risen from the dead as the prophets foretold, God in flesh.

But even if I’m completely mistaken, and it’s all one big lie, following the same teachings still makes a tremendous amount of sense. So that’s how I approach it.

This reminds me of another encounter with someone not entirely convinced that Christianity is true. He went to the Old Testament and was appalled at the things that God had done, and one particular issue was that he couldn’t fathom a loving God that commanded homosexuals to death. How could Jesus be God with this going on the background? How could this all possibly be true?

Well, the fundamental problem is that this is inconsistent skepticism. The distance between what happened in Leviticus and what happened with Jesus in the Gospels spans thousands of years. Dozens of changes in the Israelite legal systems, a number of stints of in captivity under a foreign king, a national split and all kinds of other religious and national changes over all those thousands of years. We Christians believe that there is a God, and his hand was at work through all of that. We believe that the guy that wrote Leviticus was guided by the same perfect Hand that guided the writings of all the other books of the Old and New Testaments.

But if I didn’t tell you that, you wouldn’t have even thought to think that Jesus and Leviticus were necessarily connected in any sort of meaningful way. Just like all other claims, it could be true, or it could be false. What happens if it turns out that Leviticus is wrong, but Jesus is right? If you’re being inconsistently skeptical, you’ve thrown out the good that Jesus has done with what’s wrong. So my advice was to be consistent about everything, by being skeptical about everything. It’s not a take it or leave it package.

Ultimately, we as Christians like to make faith a package deal. “We believe this about Jesus, this about God, this about the Bible, this about infant baptism, and this about music in church and if you can’t agree with all of that, well I’m sorry, but you’re just not a Christian.” Whole denominations have splintered off over the issue of what kind of music to play in church!

What strikes me most about the relationship between Jesus and his followers was that there was no package deal. When Jesus was first starting out his ministry, he went to a bunch of seemingly random ordinary people and literally told them to “Follow me.” That’s it. No long lectures about the Sabbath day, nothing about the role of infant baptism, or music or any of this other stuff we let get in the way of what’s really important. What’s really important is Jesus. Will you follow Him?

That’s the important question. If you decide he is not real, that the Gospels are bunk, that there never was and never will be a Jesus, nothing else really matters, does it?

Faith is not a package deal. There’s no long lectures on theology, no checklists that you should believe this, that and the other. You either follow or you don’t.

And that’s where I’ve ultimately landed on all these issues of theology and does God exist, does he not exist, whatever. Ultimately that debate is no longer interesting or captivating to me. What captures my attention, what really gets me thinking nowadays is how to best follow Jesus.

If he’s there, if he really exists and if you are truly following him the best that you can, everything else will fall into place.

If he’s not there, if he really didn’t exist, but you follow his teachings and principles and examples the best that you can, what’s the worst that can happen? You’ll make the world a slightly better place? Sounds like a fair trade-off to me.

That’s why I’m a Christian, a Jesus follower.

At least we were until 1697 when explorers landed on Australia and, oh crap, black swans are discovered.

This is the story that Nassim Taleb tells in his book The Black Swan. He applies it to economic theory and uses it to explain why humans behave why we do. The jist of the argument is that things are far more unpredictable than we really know. (I haven’t read the book, and I’m not endorsing it. I only mention it because I like the illustration and want to use it to make another point.)

The world is far more chaotic and unpredictable, at least to us, than we really care to admit, and this is a pretty fundamental human fault. You see, if all your life you only ever saw white swans, you would tend to think that all swans are white. That seems pretty reasonable, right? Reasonable but wrong.

With every white swan you ran into, you’d become more and more convinced that all swans are white. But that’s the trick! We take every white swan we see as further confirmation of our white swan theory, when in reality it isn’t.

How many white swans would you have to see before you proved that “all swans are white”? You would have to see all of them. Seeing one more does not lend any extra credence to your theory. It’s an impossible theory. You would have to know about every swan on earth to prove your theory (impossible) but you only have to know about one black swan to disprove it.

And that’s really the mind trick. Every white swan we see makes us perceive the statement “all swans are white” as being confirmed when in reality it is impossible to actually prove.

So if this is just natural human nature playing its role out, that means we are very confident about things we really don’t know much about.

Now, let’s move on from a trivial subject like feathers on a bird and look instead at something more substantial: the resurrection of Jesus.

I’ve heard from many people that are using faulty white swan reasoning unawares. They’re the ones who say, “Dead people stay dead. Therefore Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.”

This theory is very, very convincing. I don’t know about you, but all the dead people I know have, so far at least, remained dead. All of them. It would be tempting to expand my experience and say, “Well, that must mean that all people everywhere die and stay dead.” Tempting, but wrong. Just like with the black swan example, all it would take is one single case of a person rising from the dead to disprove this whole worldview. Our confidence is misplaced because it is an impossible statement to prove. We do not know about every dead person on earth (it’s impossible), so it’s impossible to make statements about them with certainty. We feel like there is certainty, but that is the mind trick.

Certainly no one would say that rising from the dead is the norm. And for Europeans, the norm certainly had nothing to do with black swans. But don’t get logical dyslexia and confuse “uncommon” with “impossible”.

There are lots of arguments about whether or not people should celebrate Christmas. Many people, especially the extreme arm of Christ-mythers, go so far as to say that Christmas was simply a Catholic rip off of the winter celebration of the Zoroastrian god (”yazata”) Mithra. They point to the celebration that happened right after the Winter Solstice, and how it was a celebration of the birth of Mithra, seen as the birth of light in a dark world. Indeed, some go so far as to say that the historical account of Jesus in the Gospels is not only a myth, but a direct copy of Mithra from years earlier, as Mithra is also said to have been raised from the dead. (this is the general argument laid out by “The Christ Conspiracy”)

I bring Mithraism up because I am interested in fleshing out my thoughts on advent. I believe that advent is utterly unique to Christ and to Christianity, and it’s what makes Christianity compelling. I bring up Mithraism for full disclosure because not everyone agrees with me. (though, the common belief among scholars has turned in the other direction. Many believe that the Romans added the advent and resurrection parts to Mithraism after seeing it in Christianity, not the other way around. Some discussion here and here.)

So, yes, in spite of Mithraism, and in some ways, because of Mithraism, I believe that advent is an utterly unique and beautiful part of the story God is telling through us and through Christ.

Advent comes from the Latin word for coming. This is the time leading up to the commemoration of the birth of Christ and the incarnation. This is the time when we celebrate Emmanuel–”God with us.” (Matthew 1:23) Jesus, “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”. (Philippians 2)

This is an incredible claim. Just digest that for a moment. God came to earth, made himself nothing and took on human flesh. He humbled himself, and allowed himself to be captured and killed.

Hundreds of years prior, Isaiah predicted exactly this:

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
      and like a root out of dry ground.
      He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
      nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
      a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
      Like one from whom men hide their faces
      he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
      and carried our sorrows,
      yet we considered him stricken by God,
      smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
      he was crushed for our iniquities;
      the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
      and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
      each of us has turned to his own way;
      and the LORD has laid on him
      the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
      yet he did not open his mouth;
      he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
      and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
      so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
      And who can speak of his descendants?
      For he was cut off from the land of the living;
      for the transgression of my people he was stricken.

9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
      and with the rich in his death,
      though he had done no violence,
      nor was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
      and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering,
      he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
      and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

11 After the suffering of his soul,
      he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
      by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
      and he will bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
      and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
      because he poured out his life unto death,
      and was numbered with the transgressors.
      For he bore the sin of many,
      and made intercession for the transgressors.

Isaiah 53, NIV.

This is what should get us through all times. This is what bears every question and doubt about God. I recently had friends struggle with the death of someone I did not know. He was in great pain due to cancer, and at one point, had doubts about his faith. What would God do?

I know plenty of people with plenty of struggles. And at some point or another, the question arises about the justice, grace and mercy of God. What would God do? Why does He allow it to happen?

First of all, the fundamental point of advent is that God cares. He cares. The Son cared deeply enough to come from heaven to earth, to empty what it means to be of nature God and to become nothing. Not only to become one of us, but to become the lowliest of us. A baby born to an audience of mere shepherds. That the Father cared deeply enough to send His Son to do this. To devise this plan from the very beginning, in one breath cursing man’s first sin and in the second, telling us of His great plan to save us all in the end. (Genesis 3:15) And beyond that, Creator God did this before we even knew what was wrong. Before we knew the trouble we were in, before we were even aware of our need for saving, let alone before we could do anything about the situation we find ourselves in, God was already working. (Romans 5:8)

And why? Because of His great love for us. He loved us so much, He came to earth to be less than nothing, to live among us, to share our struggles and to be acquainted with our suffering and our sorrows.

So I keep returning to those questions. What does God do with eternity? And why does He allow bad things to happen now?

If Jesus did not spare Himself from God’s will, why should we expect better treatment? It’s known as the problem of evil, the question of how a God who is both perfectly good, and perfectly all-powerful could allow bad things to happen, especially to good people. Philosophers and theologians for thousands of years have been looking for a pat answer, and I’m convinced one doesn’t exist. The reasons why vary from case to case. In Jesus’ case, the ultimate good was the advent story. It was a Good God who emptied Himself of everything, who became nothing and died among common thieves, all because He loved us. And that leads into two other answers: One, we can not and should not expect better treatment than what Jesus received. If Jesus, the very Son of God, was crucified as part of God’s will, there may be any number of sufferings awaiting us. Possibly up to and including death on a tree. Secondly, it is by God’s great love for us, and our shared experience of living in human flesh that we can know that God will give us the strength to do anything He calls us to do and that He is personally willing to go there Himself and serve that good purpose He has in mind with us.

But I keep going back to that question about eternity. I believe that fundamentally, lots of people have a really distorted view of God. It’s the only way that there can be so many different religions and so many different and incompatible paths to pleasing God. What I think people fundamentally forget is the advent story. God’s intentions and will are made perfectly clear in the life of Jesus. God isn’t a cosmic bully that wants to see us suffer, nor is He a cosmic genie that wants us to live with our every desire.

Instead, He loves us tremendously enough to give us what we need, when we need it. Describing God as the Father couldn’t be more appropriate. His love for us is unconditional and unending. He knows what is best for us, and will see it through to the end. He is also not far away, but is very much next to us. He knows what it’s like to be one of us.

So when I think about that question about eternity. About any question about God really, I have to go back to advent. I do not believe a good God willing to do all of this could possibly be evil, unfair or unjust. Our sense of goodness and love and justice and mercy and grace can only pale in comparison with God’s. We have these because God does too. When we share our fist at the sky and yell out to God, “That’s not fair!”, He knows already. He agrees with us, our sense of moral decency comes from Him, not from us.

Anytime a tragedy happens. A child dies. Someone without Christ passes onto eternity. Someone suffers through unspeakable pain and suffering. I come back to advent. I remember, God knows. I remember that my sense of fairness and right and wrong are only a mere shadow of God’s.

And I believe that God will do what is right. These doubts and fears evaporate in light of what God has done already and for the hope of what He must have planned next.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” –Romans 8:28-39

There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.

Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! Now that we have actually received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to simply say it in plodding prose. We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!

You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we’re in— first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. That sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone, but the extent of the disturbance was not clear until God spelled it out in detail to Moses. So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the landscape from Adam to Moses. Even those who didn’t sin precisely as Adam did by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this termination of life, this separation from God. But Adam, who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.

Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do! There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, sovereign life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?

Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

–The Apostle Paul. (via Romans 5 and Eugene Peterson’s The Message paraphrase)

I have personally never witnessed a more bitter election. My own household was sharply divided.

But that was then; this is now. It is time for us to set aside our partisan hats and put on our American ones.

As a country, we still have huge problems to solve, including the economic crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will take alignment and, most of all, leadership. This is not going to be easy.

I want to do my part. Therefore, starting today, I am publicly making four commitments to President-Elect Barack Obama:

1. I will pray for him and our country.
2. I will assume his motives are good, giving him the benefit of the doubt.
3. I will not speak ill of him, even if I don’t always agree with him.
4. I will cast off the spirit of cynicism, and be a positive force for good.

Yesterday was a historic day. We can all be proud as Americans. Today, we begin a new future. It’s time to come together. I am ready for a united United States.

Can you make these four commitments?

Read more.

# tab completion for ssh hosts
SSH_COMPLETE=( $(cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ‘ ‘ | \
sed -e s/,.*//g | grep -v \| ) )
complete -o default -W “${SSH_COMPLETE[*]}” ssh

Throw that into your .bashrc. This will search your known hosts file for ssh hosts you’ve connected to so that when you hit tab after entering ssh, you have a list of hosts. Like tab autocomplete for ls, but for remote hosts. Neat! Now to think of other cool uses for this…

And I feel obligated to mention for the benefit of some of my readers that you can subscribe to all my posts via a great service called RSS. For a primer on this great technology, check out these resources:

• RSS Learning Center by NewsGator
• RSS Into by CNet
• What is RSS?

Any questions, feel free to post here or email me at pixeldustr@pixeldustr.com.