We are Herod

Just came across this gripping post from another great blog I recently discovered, Heirs in Hope.

Often, we want to demand that God intervene -– just in this one instance. He should prevent, should somehow fix things so that children have an opportunity to grow up before being attacked by the horrors of this world. How can he possibly allow little children to be scandalized, to have their consciences offended, to suffer the sharp swords of Herod'’s soldiers? But all that is only distraction from the real question: Why doesn't God protect little children from us?

We are Herod. We are his soldiers. We hurt children, abuse them, kill them. We ignore their cries, their pleas for help, their needs. We may harangue God, may insist he is callous and hateful, but our tirades only serve to distract us from the crimes we commit against babies, against children, against little helpless people who cannot understand the hells we make for them. [more]

As with many of her posts, it's difficult to read about her experiences, but her perspective on it all and the insights she conveys are brilliant.

Driving out the snakes

Just wanted to plug one of my favorite new blogs, Driving Out the Snakes. It's like my site, but with good points and well-written posts. :) And he's from my 'hood, which is a nice plus. I didn't know it was legal to have conservative or religious blogs around here.

Your favorite gifts?

I'm always looking for good stuff for my "Gift Ideas" folder that I reference for birthdays and Christmas. So, tell me, what were the best gifts you saw this year that you or your family received for Christmas?

I'll share some of our favorites in case any of you also collect gift ideas:

- My husband loves fresh tomatoes but we don't have the space/time/competence to have a garden. So he loves this Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter he got.

- My dad had a novel he wrote a long time ago. I casually asked him for a copy of it this summer and had it printed at Lulu.com as a Christmas present. The results far surpassed my expectations -- it looks just like a "real" book you'd get at Barnes and Noble!

- I love this Good Home Cookbook I got. It is jam packed with great, traditional recipes. The best part is that a manuscript of the book was sent to 1,000 test families to see how the recipes actually turned out when attempted in the average American kitchen, then modified based on the results. (I love my Food and Wine cookbooks but my suburban grocery store isn't exactly overflowing with Lebanese mini-cucumbers or amchoor.)

- Everyone in my family got a customized calendar with our family photos from Shutterfly (you can get them lots of other places as well). They were a huge hit.

- My husband got me a big, beautiful coffee table book about the lives of the saints. I've wanted one of these beautifully illustrated books but could never justify the cost, so it was great to get it as a gift.

I hope you all had a great holiday season. Happy new year!

Christmas, for the first time

I've always loved listening to Christmas music. There's nothing like a classic rendition of The First Noel or Adeste Fidelis sung by some great choir to stir up all the warm feelings I associate with this time of year.

Even though God or Jesus was never part of the equation, my family was always big on Christmas being a time of year for generosity, forgiveness, thankfulness and hope. We would pick up a couple extra coats at Wal Mart to give to children in need, more readily forgive each other for little transgressions, and take a moment to appreciate all that we had. And no matter how bleak things were or how many difficulties we faced, we always saw Christmas as a time to set aside our worries, to just find joy in simple things like having a fire roaring in the fireplace, decorating the Christmas tree or making cookies for friends and family. There were a few years in my life that were pretty dismal, where some pretty traumatic stuff happened, and I remember Christmastime being one of the few bright spots in my life. It was a nice, pleasant time of year.

This year, it's different.

Of course I always knew that Christmas was based on the birth of the founder of the Christian religion but I thought, even as a young child, that that was an antiquated idea that few people took seriously anymore. I didn't think that anybody honestly believed all that God and Jesus stuff, except for maybe the ignorant or the self-deluded. I never even took a moment to wonder how vastly much more glorious this season would seem if the events that supposedly took place were actually true, because I was so certain they weren't.

As I've chronicled on this site, the path to belief was not a simple one for me. It has been a mostly dry endeavor, filled with doubts and uncertainty, with frustration and sometimes despair. I still don't know what it's like to have a childlike trust in God, and probably never will. I don't have a "personal relationship" with Jesus. But, by the grace of God, I believe. I set out to follow the truth wherever it led me, factoring in all data from human experience in addition to that which can be proven in a lab or a mathematical equation, and it led me to Christianity.

I have examined my decision and the path that led me here as objectively as I possibly can. I feel certain that I am not fooling myself, that the profound proof I have seen is not from my imagination alone. If nothing else, I could never come up with anything that good. I could never create within myself the deep love and peace I have experienced. But, if it is just all in my head, then it's come from some deep, previously unknown facet of my personality, and it's a pretty serious psychosis that I'll probably never be capable of realizing.

Anyway, a couple Fridays ago, I was getting the house ready for a Christmas party and turned on some Christmas music, the same tunes I enjoy hearing every year. As the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's stunning rendition of The First Noel floated through the kitchen, I was almost stopped in my tracks. I realized, for the first time, what Christmas really is. The glorious melody that recounts the tale of shepherds gazing at a star on a cold winter's night, of travelers from a distant land offering gifts upon bent knee to a newborn child, isn't just beautiful, but an expression of the most beautiful thing that ever happened.

The truth of Christianity almost makes the beauty of Christmas almost too much to absorb. "Kindness," "generosity," "joy," "love" -- all the things that were always part of this wonderful season -- are no longer just fleeting nothings, pleasant little chemical reactions in the human brain. They're real. They have a Source, and I have found him (or, rather, he has found me). As I stood motionless that Friday, stopped in my tracks with a tin of Christmas cookies, tears welled in my eyes and my throat got tight. Of course they're real, I thought. Of course. In a way, I knew it all along.

As the choir reached the crescendo, the joy in their voices pouring forth like a raging waterfall, singing this ancient carol that a thousand voices have sung before, I realized that this is really my first Christmas. What I thought was a few weeks of beauty and hope and joy, is a celebration of Beauty and Hope and Joy itself.

I've said countless holiday pleasantries in my life -- "Merry Christmas," "Happy Holidays," etc. But this year, from the very bottom of my heart, I sincerely wish every single one of the commenters and readers of this site a merry, merry Christmas.

The Watchmaker

I came across this great little kids video called The Watchmaker about life and creation (via Patrick). I think my Christian readers will get a kick out of it. Turn on your speakers.

Hey, what's this elephant doing here in this room?

I was glad to see this article in the WSJ Opinion Journal (via Adoro Te Devote) about how women exercising "sexual freedom" never quite works out like it's supposed to. Some excerpts:

Unfortunately, the young women described in "Unprotected" have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their "sexual choices." [...]

Thus the danger of sexually transmitted diseases is too often overlooked in the lifestyle choices of the young women at the unnamed college where the author works. But the dangers go far beyond the biological. [...]

The author meets patients who cannot sleep, who mutilate themselves, who exhibit every symptom of psychic distress. Often they don't even know why they feel the way they do. As these girls see it, they are acting like sensible, responsible adults: They practice "safe sex" and limit their partners to a mere two or three per year.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong. [...]

"Look at how different health decisions are valued," the author advises. "When Stacey avoids fatty foods she is being health conscious...When she stays away from alcohol, she is being responsible and resisting her impulses. For all these she is endorsed for keeping long-term goals in mind instead of giving in to peer pressure and immediate gratification. But if she makes a conscious decision to delay sexual activity, she's simply 'not sexually active'--given no praise or endorsement."

If anything, the more "transgressive" the behavior, the greater the reluctance to judge. On a University of Michigan Web site, "'external water sports' is described as a type of 'safer sex.'" (The phrase has nothing to do with a swimming pool.)...The sexual advice blog "Go Ask Alice," sponsored by Columbia University, provides helpful hints to students on menages a trois ("Nothing wrong with giving it a try, so long as you're all practicing safer sex"), swing-club etiquette and phone sex ("Getting Started").

I was in my early 20's at the height of the Sex and the City craze and saw this sort of thing play out over and over again: girl meets guy she doesn't know very well --> girl sleeps with guy she doesn't know very well --> girl tells herself and everyone else that she's totally cool with this --> girl is actually conflicted and unhappy about it.

Having a lot of female friends and hearing the intimate details of their lives actually convinced me early on, even before I had any sort of belief in God, that we'd been sold a bill of goods on this whole so-called sexual freedom thing. Whether it's just evolution or something given to us by God or both, for whatever reason, it's just not good for women's mental health to have no-strings-attached sex. (Not that it's good for men either, of course, but it seems to be disproportionately detrimental to women.)

I'm glad to see this article in the WSJ, that people are starting to point out the painfully obvious, age-old truth that having casual sex and/or lots of sexual partners makes women miserable. As the article points out, women in secular culture hear one-sided information. For fear of sounding sexist or judgmental, nobody wants to tell women that they, in particular, should treat sex as a serious matter and aim for chastity; even abstinence education programs tend to make vague, blanket statements applied to both genders equally. Hopefully this message will get out there more and more before yet another generation of women is led down this path that leads to emptiness and depression.

Feminists and sex-selection abortion

I came across another article just now about sex-selection abortion in India:

In a report released this week, UNICEF said 7,000 fewer girls are born in India every day than the global statistic would predict, because of sex-selection abortion.

Parents routinely abort a female baby because of widespread gender prejudice...The strong desire for sons is reinforced by social pressures, and by the burdensome dowries still required of parents when a daughter is married.

Although Indian law bans sex-determination tests, many doctors ignore the law, charging high fees to determine the sex of an unborn child and perform an abortion if the child is female. This unscrupulous business explains why many places, particularly in northern India, have only fewer than 800 girls born for every 1,000 boys.

I wonder what sort of interest you'd get from feminists if you tried to organize a march to protest India's ban on this practice. After all, the Indian government is clearly infringing on its women's right to choose. But it's sort of hard to imagine protestors waving those purple NOW signs alongside "LET US ABORT OUR FEMALE FETUSES!" signs.

I know that most pro-choice people honestly think they're doing a good thing by advocating for women to be able to terminate "unwanted pregnancies," but when you think of it in terms of people getting rid of unwanted daughters it seems much more...personal.

Good reading

I am ridiculously busy for the next few days so I doubt I'll have any updates (though in typical blogger fashion I have some great posts all written out in my head!) In the meantime, go read the latest over at the Darwins' blog.

I thought this observation about the lack of species solidarity we see lately was very interesting.

And I particularly enjoyed this post in response to an atheist's doubts that people who believe in God can really be rational. A brief excerpt:

In any given situation, there is often more than one conclusion which explains all of one's experiences with logical consistence, and at such a point, one must make a decision what to believe. This decision is not merely arbitrary. Usually you will make it because you are convinced by one of the experiences or observations which make up the "evidence" that you are weighing.

In a classic example, it is logically consistent with one's observations of the world to conclude either that there is an outside world populated by other thinking, acting entities or to conclude that one's entire experience of the world is the result of a demented imagination, and there is in fact one reality but one's self. Both explain all of one's experiences and are logically consistent. However, since solipsism if profoundly un-useful, few people choose to believe it. [...]

At the end of the day, belief in God, or belief in a spouse's love, or belief that all men are created equal, or what have you may be supported by an incredible amount of evidence, but the belief itself is a choice. The evidence will take you so far. Belief does not have to be some sort of "blind leap". But it is a crossroads, and one must decide which way to go.

Be sure to read the whole thing. Good stuff.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

Office haikus

I think we could all use a break for a moment from debating the great questions of God and man, so I offer you today a topic we can all agree on: work sucks. Someone sent me a copy of this little book called Office Haikus, and it is killing me. Where was this when I had a job? An example:

In my cubicle
I sit; envying the dead
Two hours left to go.

And one more:

Single occupant
Bathroom is locked. Why knock? Door
Didn't lock itself.

If you're ordering Christmas presents from Amazon, throw this one in as well for yourself or your favorite cubicle-dweller. It is hilarious.

A truce?

So I've been thinking this afternoon about how markedly the tone of the site has changed in such a short time. Just the other day Mike J commented about what a great community we have here, and now it seems that the vibe has really gone downhill. I think anyone would agree that the debates we had in these posts had a far different tone than the ones we've been having in the past two posts.

While reading through the comments that have been rolling in to my past couple of posts I had all sorts of grand retorts laid out in my head, usually reading something like, "You wanna call me prideful?! Yeah, well, YOU SUCK!" though usually with a little less elegance and charity.

As I hit delete on a particularly troll-ish comment I muttered jokingly, "I swear, these people would crucify me if they could." Ooooooh yeah. You know, that actually happened to Someone a long time ago. And here I sit, telling myself that these days I am one of his servants, getting indignant and expecting better treatment than he himself received. Upon reviewing my offending post and the internal dialogue I heard when reading the comments, I had to ask myself if my motive here was the glory of God or the glory of myself? Was my goal to bring more souls to Christ or bring more readers to Jen's blog?

Even worse, I was part of the cause of all this hostility. While I attempted to make the post about pride and atheism mostly about myself and what I was like before I believed, I did throw in a little dig at others while I was at it. If I want to have an open dialogue with atheists, which I really do, I'm not setting the tone very well by making sideways comments and assuming the worst motives on the part of those who disagree with me.

And the cherry on the cake of all the absurdity is that I really feel a strong kinship with my atheist brothers and sisters. One thing my lifelong Christian readers probably can't relate to is the treatment you receive from so-called Christians when you're an atheist and you discuss your beliefs. I could tell story after story of mean, hurtful things done and said to me by people who claimed to follow Christ -- so I of all people should know to tread lightly when discussing atheists and their beliefs. I'm sure they've been called Satan-worshipers and hellbound jerks enough times that they're getting weary.

I had another post typed up with new rules for commenting on my site. Rather, I would like to propose a truce. I was lamenting the loss of the great community of atheists and Christians alike that we had here, pondering which new commenter should be censored, I realized that it is myself who should be censored first. To all the people I called out as pots in my post about pride, I would like to introduce myself, the kettle.

One thing I will say is that despite the hostility the commenters here still seem to be really intelligent, with many insights to offer. Let's start over. I am sincerely sorry for the offense that I caused. Especially as a former atheist, it's really hypocritical. Can we go on from this point forward with a more calm, charitable tone towards one another?

Also, immediately after I hit Publish on this I'm going to say a rosary. My intention is for all my atheist readers: Mike J; Jerret; R and all; Rhinoqlous; Darwin's Dagger; Anon the Catholic-turned-atheist; Anon whose religious beliefs almost led him to a mental breakdown; Anon (the non-atheist) whom I offended so; all the other anonymous commenters. And especially Professor Chaos, whose story of begging God for help that he never received brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it.

My prayer is that you will forgive me, and be patient with me as I work to overcome my lifelong habit of self-centeredness and pride. And that you may find peace, wherever your search may lead you.

Pride and poorly-written posts

What a load of horses--t this is...I hereby urge my fellow RA'ers to let this moron know how you feel in the comments. [censoring mine -JF]

I just don't see anything of God in this post. I see a lot of ego, a LOT of pride, and a lot of self-congratulatory, self-serving BS.

Honey, you need a whopping great dose of getoveryourself.

Wow, what a straw-man, flawed, illogical, self-righteous load of crap this is.

Congratulations, now people can't say you're lacking in spirituality, but they can say you're stupid!

Well, my last post got a resounding "thumbs down" from my atheist readers. They evidently do not believe that the Holy Spirit was working through me on that one. And, boy, what a difference it makes when you get a link from The Raving Atheist vs. The Friendly Atheist. Whew! Two very aptly named sites.

As for the potential experiment I mentioned that ignited so much anger, I agree that it is nothing that would make it into Nature. The main point I was trying to make is that most (not all, but most) atheists are not open-minded. Neither are most Christians. We can call that one a truce.

And I sincerely apologize if I seemed prideful, it wasn't my intention. I'm surprised it came out that way since I really don't think of myself as having it all figured out or having any great wisdom to share with others. My hope is that talking about my experiences and giving an honest account of what my life was like before and after I really opened my mind (and my heart) to Christian teaching might be helpful to others, one way or the other. Those who think I'm a prideful, self-deluded blowhard might use my story as a cautionary tale. Others who think I'm just a prideful blowhard might find it inspiring that God was able to get through to someone as hardheaded as I. :)

Pride and atheism

In all these discussions about God and proof, one of the things I'm starting to believe is that atheism is more of a personality trait than a belief system. As I said in my last post, it was only when I approached the possibility of God with humility, set aside my fears of looking like a fool or being wrong, that I was able to see the abundant proof in front of me.

As usual, former atheist John C. Wright says it best. Below is a comment he makes after mentioning that he had a series of profound religious experiences:

You might wonder why, if God can convince atheists to worship Him merely by dropping by for a visit, He does not do it more often. The reason is that it does not help, not at all, not a bit. When I suffer doubts, when my faith gets weak, my faith in my memory gets weak too. Faith and faithlessness have NOTHING TO DO with evidence presented to reason or senses. It has to do with a humble will and an upright heart. If God presented evidence to skeptics, all that would happen is that skeptics would doubt their evidence. If God gave a logical argument to prove His own existence, all that would happen is that skeptics would doubt the power of logic to prove anything.

(via Mrs. Darwin, who emailed me the link)

Read the whole thing. It's wonderful.

His comment reminds me of an experiment I thought of recently: go to an atheist forum such as the Raving Atheist and ask the folks over there what God could do to prove himself to them. Then, take their responses, and spoof a site like Yahoo News or the New York Times and write a fake news article describing the breaking news that these events have just taken place. Now post this article at a different atheist forum and ask them if they now believe. Then just sit back and watch the atheists at the new forum attack the story and list reason after reason that it does not necessarily prove that God exists.

I've never done this because of logistical issues, mainly that it would be too hard to get a URL that would seem like a real news site. Also, it's hardly worth spending the time to do since it's obvious what the results would be. Let's say that the atheists at the second forum believed that the article was real, that the events described actually transpired. Does anyone really think that the responses would be along the lines of, "How could I have been so wrong? I hope that God will have the mercy to forgive me."

At least in my case, atheism was a defense mechanism. I was surrounded by proof of God's existence, but in every case I looked away. I described myself as open-minded and skeptical; I was really defensive and cynical. I called myself a realist; I was actually just a pessimist.

All of this was ultimately rooted in pride and fear. Because of my pride, I had a great fear of being wrong. The prospect of seeming naive, vulnerable, or (the worst case scenario) unintelligent was intolerable to me. Believing only in the material world at hand, in things that could be reduced to mathematical equations or demonstrated in a lab, ensured that at least I was never wrong. People could say that I was lacking in spirituality, but at least they couldn't say I was stupid.

On having proof

I am dizzied by the fascinating discussions that are still going on in the last few posts. Until I have time to sort through all these great thoughts and offer a coherent response, I will note one high-level takeaway that I keep coming back to as I follow these discussions:


As I read these detailed back-and-forths about one Bible verse vs. another, examples of bad Christians vs. good Christians, whether or not this or that event really happened, I think of how odd this would all seem to people like my grandfather.

My 92-year-old grandfather is a kind, humble man and a brilliant engineer. He worked his way through his college by shoveling coal during the Great Depression. After receiving his civil engineering degree he went on to oversee the construction of large refineries throughout Mexico and South America for most of his adult life. Everyone who knows him remarks first about what a wonderful, generous soul he is, and this compliment is usually followed by noting his keen intelligence.

He's never been much of a church-goer and we'd never talked about God or religion, so I'd always assumed he didn't believe in God. One day back when I was still an atheist but starting to actually listen to the Christian point of view without being in "attack mode" every time, I casually asked him over dinner if he believed in God. I was surprised when he said yes. "But he's so smart!" I thought.

When I asked him why, he thought for a moment and said it's just always seemed obvious to him that there's a purpose to all this life that surrounds us, that it came from somewhere. As an engineer, he said, he could appreciate the grand system that is the universe, that the order to it all struck him as something that was intended. When I asked him some tough questions about his faith he would answer, occasionally only with "I don't know," but through it all he seemed undisturbed, maybe even a little amused, by all my questions.

I realized he's one of those people to whom God has always seemed "so obvious". The notion that God might not exist would be, to him, like saying gravity doesn't exist. Whereas to me it had always been "so obvious" that God was nowhere to be found, his "existence" nothing more than a mental crutch to help people avoid thinking about their own meaninglessness, it intrigued me that someone so intelligent and reasonable would find God's existence so...obvious.

I thought about the great men of science like Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Boyle and all the others who believed in God. Even Socrates and co. believed in "gods" in some form or another. When I read about these men and their personalities they often reminded me of my grandfather. They didn't cry about Jesus or shout about hellfire and brimstone, but rather they struck me as calm, reasonable men of great intellect to whom the existence of God just seemed to make sense.

But why?

I always assumed that the reason I didn't believe in God was because I was a more scientific-type thinker. My mind simply demanded proof before it would believe a theory to be true. And as nice as it would be to think that God and Mr. Jesus love me and want me to hang out with them and the pretty angels in heaven, the Christian story just seemed so bizarre and, really, absurd. These were some wild, often nonsensical claims that these Christians had, and I had not seen any proof that they were true.

But what, I thought, about these great men of science? What about my grandfather? Would I really be so bold as to say that my mind is more scientific than that of these men? Did they not also demand proof for their beliefs? I was perplexed.

That question has remained in my mind over the past few years as I've gone on this wild ride of discovering faith. And now, I think, I finally understand.

When the question of confirmation bias arose in the comments the other day I thought it was a fair point. I took a moment to examine my beliefs and see if perhaps I was "seeing" the results of my faith only because I want to convince myself that I have made a good decision here. I can say with complete honesty that I don't think this is the case. Of course perhaps my mind is playing another trick on me and I don't even realize what's going on, but I am being honest when I say that I don't think this is a mere psychological mechanism at work here.

But in the process of examining my situation one thing did strike me as odd: I still don't believe in the same way a lot of Christians seem to. I don't "feel" God, I usually feel like I'm talking to myself during prayer, a lot of times I'm really just going through the motions. (And, boy, "going through the motions" of being an orthodox Catholic is quite an endeavor.) So why do I do it?

It was then that I realized: because I've seen proof. It's not the sort of proof that I could demonstrate in a laboratory but, to me, it is proof nonetheless.

When I first started reading works by Christian apologists I was quite surprised at how reasonable they were, that their arguments in favor of God and Christ his Son were more involved than the one's I'd always heard (mainly "Shut up," and the old standby "You're going to hell"). I decided to take Pascal up on his wager, to follow St. Augustine on his advice to believe so that you might understand, and to just live my life for a while as if God did exist.

The results were striking.

There was no big "come to Jesus" moment, and even few times that I could say I "felt" that God was there, but it was as if some deep, powerful magnet had been activated within me that began pulling me in one direction.

This mysterious, powerful force was a compelling data point in favor of God's existence, but it wasn't proof enough. After all, it is hard to say objectively whether all the amazing "coincidences" that kept happening, all the doors that kept opening were from Something outside of myself or just the sorts of things that had always been there but I'd overlooked.

But something else started happening as well. The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world started to make sense to me. The more I started to make sense to me. The picture of the world I'd had based on science alone now seemed incomplete. I still believed everything I'd learned from studying chemistry, physics and other sciences, but I now saw a whole other dimension to the world around me.

It was like the difference between looking at a picture of a double-fudge chocolate cake and actually having one in front of me to smell, touch and taste. Everything I knew before was still there, but I was now experiencing it at a whole different level full of wonder and richness.

I'd considered my life before this God experiment to be wonderful and full of happiness, but it now seemed disordered, confused and flat in retrospect. Little lingering "issues" faded away; parts of life that had seemed overwhelming were diffused and put in their proper place; I saw the psychological harm that certain actions that seemed totally innocuous in my atheist worldview had caused me; I was finally able to put a name to the deep stirrings within my soul I'd experience when listening to a profound piece of music or hearing about an act of evil; I understood why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, what drove the efforts to build the great cathedrals; for the first time I felt the staggering depth of my potential as a human, a woman and a mother.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Also, there's no reason to detail every single thing that fell into place in my life when I lived as if there were a God since it's proof only to me. I cannot empirically demonstrate that any of this really happened, that it was real and not imagined.

All I can say is that I am not intentionally stating an untruth when I say that my life changed in a radical, profound way, inside and out, when I began giving God's existence the benefit of the doubt, and that I am certain it came from something outside of myself. When I have acted as if God exists, setting aside cynicism and approaching it with humility and an open heart, I have seen the results that you would expect to see if he did exist. When I have followed the prescription that it is said the Perfect Doctor has prescribed, it has indeed worked to heal, even when I was sure it wouldn't.

And I now think I realize how this mysterious God could seem so obvious to so many of the great minds of science, to brilliant men like my grandfather, whose intellects also demand proof. The laboratory in which the God experiment takes place is within the confines of the individual soul, and others can only observe the results, and not the mechanisms behind them. I cannot speak to the experience of former believers who saw no fruits of their belief in God other than to say that, based on my own experience, I have to wonder if they were conducting the experiment correctly, approaching it with humility and an open heart.

Because for me, and perhaps for all those believers among the ranks of the great minds of history, we also demand proof. And we have seen it.


Related Posts: Love and conversion; Why I'm Catholic; My conversion story through books

The stories behind the data

I came across this realtime global emergencies map. At first I just marveled at this amazing feat of technology, wondering how they programmed it. But as I scanned the list of current disasters, last updated just a few minutes ago ("Epidemic - Sri Lanka", "Tropical Storm - Philippines", "Vehicle Accident - Western Sahara") I took a moment to really think about the stories that must be behind the dry list of data on this web page. Lives changed forever. Families devastated. Mothers and fathers sitting somewhere right now, even as I type these words, facing the unthinkable.

I've had this page up in my browser for a couple days now. I keep coming back to it, wondering what the people's stories are who are living in these areas. A couple times while feeling frustrated and annoyed I accidentally pulled up that browser window and the dialogue of complaints in my head was immediately silenced.

If you're ever at a lack for someone or something to pray for, or just need to be reminded how many blessing you have, go to this page and scan the list.