Consider this. In making water as necessary for life, God could have ensured water is abundant and all clean. Did God bother to do this? No:

The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage.

A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined.

According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink. see https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-17-voa34-67381152/274768.html

But, what if it would have been too difficult for God to make available lots of clean water? This doesn’t help, since surely God could have created a world without earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, childhood cancer, etc.

We often hear that God is to be thanked for all the good things in life, but never blamed for any of the bad stuff. This is not how Justice works. If God is not Evil, but merely Indifferent, how would we hold such an absentee landlord accountable if He was a human? According to the law:

In United States law, depraved-heart murder, also known as depraved-indifference murder, is a type of murder where an individual acts with a “depraved indifference” to human life and where such act results in a death, despite that individual not explicitly intending to kill. In a depraved-heart murder, defendants commit an act even though they know their act runs an unusually high risk of causing death or serious bodily harm to a person. If the risk of death or bodily harm is great enough, ignoring it demonstrates a “depraved indifference” to human life and the resulting death is considered to have been committed with malice aforethought. In some states, depraved-heart killings constitute second-degree murder, while in others, the act would be charged with “wanton murder,” varying degrees of manslaughter, or third-degree murder. (Wiki)

It’s amazing how people respond to God in a way utterly foreign to how they would treat a human, such as hoping Jesus will come back and be a political dictator, or getting promoted to heaven for the special privilege of praising and feeding God’s ego constantly for all eternity!

It can be difficult to understand what a God is, since people understand the idea differently. In general, there is a spectrum of kinds of Gods that range from being really powerful, but basically like us (eg Thor), to the God of negative theology who is so different from us that we can’t say anything about IT, only what IT is not.

Should we believe in these gods? One problem is that there is no evidence any gods exist. You can’t pray to get God to show up and say hello in the middle of a football game. Similarly, there’s no evidence such gods interact with the world in any way, like making an amputee regrow a limb. The philosopher Bertrand Russell addressed the idea of believing in a God that we have no evidence for. We know this thought experiment as Russell’s Teapot (from Wiki):

Russell’s teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.

Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion. He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.

In 1958, Russell elaborated on the thought experiment:

“I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely (Bertrand Russell).“

SO REMEMBER, THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE ASKS YOU WHY YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, IT’S OKAY TO ASK THEM WHY THEY DO BELIEVE!

A prophet is someone or thing who predicts the future. For example, many think groundhogs on groundhog day can predict if we will have an early spring.

Some have even decided to replace the groundhog with a prophesying lobster:

Who was the most famous prophet in history? It was probably Jesus, who incorrectly predicted the end of the age/apocalypse would happen in the lifetimes of those hearing him preach,  Matthew 24:34; Mark 13:30; and Luke 21:32. (oops)

For a great book for older kids about Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, see

Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium is a 1999 book by New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman. In it, he argues that Jesus of Nazareth was an apocalyptic preacher, i.e., his main message was that the end of history was near, that God would shortly intervene to overthrow evil and establish his rule on earth, and that Jesus and his disciples all believed these end time events would occur in their lifetimes. Ehrman also analyses New Testament passages such as Jesus’ supposed birth in Bethlehem of a virgin and finds them not historically credible. (Wiki)

If you are learning about Jesus, one question that comes up is what genre are the gospels that tell his story?

It’s often questioned what genre the gospels are, and the answer usually falls somewhere on the spectrum between ancient biography, and historical fiction.  In fact, the sense of the gospel is actually Ancient Propaganda, which is what Gospel means.

For example, Robert Price cites Randel Helms that:

The syncretic flavor of Mark is at once evident from his reproduction of a piece of Augustan imperial propaganda and his setting it beside a tailored scripture quote. “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” closely matches the formula found on a monument erected by the Provincial Assembly in Asia Minor (1st century BCE): “Whereas… Providence… has… brought our life to the peak of perfection in giving us Augustus Caesar… who, being sent to us and to our descendants as a savior…, and whereas… the birthday of the god has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel (euaggelion) concerning him, let all reckon a new era beginning from the date of his birth.” (Helms, p. 24)

We also see this with ancient coins.  Michael P Theophilos comments:

Greek inscriptions on coinage contribute to lexicography. New Testament use of the word ΣΩΤΗΡOΣ (saviour) is an attempt to undermine an array of political propaganda within the Greco-Roman world (Lk 2:11; Acts 13:23; Phil 3:20 etc).

This problem is specifically outlined in the dense passage of Mark 15:10-15, a passage dis-closing the hidden vileness of the easily incited crowd, the hidden jealousy of the religious elite, and the utter lack of commitment to justice of crowd-placating Pilate, breaking Roman law, who releases Barrabas, a known killer of Romans, but who tortures and executes Jesus without a confession or having found that Jesus did anything wrong.

Questions:

(1) When you are reading something with big and unusual words, what strategies can you use to understand the text?

(2) Imagine you have a brother or sister who is one year younger than you. Rewrite the above text so it would be easier for them to understand it.

(3) What is propaganda and what is it trying to do? Give some historical examples.

1. Seeing the hidden picture. You can see the old man, but can you see the hidden picture?

2. Putting together a puzzle without knowing what the picture on the front of the box is: