Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

The Bible is strongly supportive of charitable giving. The effective altruism movement, or EA, is focused on charitable giving. But that is where their similarities end. EA is not in line with how the Bible says we should donate our money or time.  I am not saying that EA is intrinsically unethical - I'm simply saying that its aims are in conflict with what the Bible says we should do. So it's therefore a very secular approach to giving - which may not be a problem for you if you're an unbeliever. But for believers, it simply doesn't line up with the Bible.  Here we will take a look at what the Bible says we should do with regards to donating time or money. Then we will look briefly at EA. Disclaimer : Although I have done some research on EA for the purposes of this blog post, I am by  no means an expert on it. It's entirely possible I have missed some of its nuances. Nonetheless, even with those caveats, I still don't see how EA is compatible with Christianit...

It's hard to exactly put a definition of faith. I am not a theologian. Ultimately, what faith means to me (which is not necessarily a theologically correct definition of faith) is this: Knowing that God is still there, is still with us, and that His plan is still going to work. Even at times when earthly happenings make it seem like this is not the case. A biblical definition of faith is given in this Bible passage from Hebrews: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. Hebrews 11: 1-3 As we saw from this Bible reading, faith is about the things unseen (to humans). Likewise, my own definition also comes down to things that we can't see ourselves. Just because we can't see something, it doesn't mean it's not there. I have covered this concept ...

There is much written in the Bible about false prophets. These are people who claim to be prophets but they are not getting their information from God - instead they are spreading things that they made up. Today, we also have false prophets in Christianity. These people spread misinformation. Often this misinformation is poorly interpreted Bible readings, but sometimes it can spread outside the sphere of the spiritual and into political things.  This is why it's very important that each person, whether a Christian or questioning, should read the Bible for themselves and compare it to what is being said by someone else. As a concrete example, some false prophets will claim to be Christian but they say racist things. Racism is not compatible with Christianity (I have written more about that here ). It is made abundantly clear in the Bible that salvation is made available for all people who choose to take this free gift of Jesus's sacrifice - not just certain people or certain ra...

After Jesus died on the cross and before He rose again, what might it have felt like to the women such as Mary his mother, and his disciples? This year at Easter I pondered this question.  The women went to the tomb early in the morning with the intent of preparing the body for burial. As they went, was there any doubt creeping into their heads about Jesus? If I was one of them, I would have surely been tempted to wonder if He was really the son of God. If He was killed, what was the point of this?  Of course, his mother Mary had the advantage of knowing the entire time that Jesus truly was the son of God - an angel had come to her to tell her when she was pregnant. An angel had visited her husband Joseph too, to give him the same information. But even knowing that Jesus was the son of God, did Mary wonder at any point whether God's plan had gone awry somewhere at the end? Or was she confident about the way things happened? And how about the disciples? The disciples had seen m...

There are many examples in the Bible of God punishing people when they did not listen to Him. So it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking God is always looking for reasons to punish us.  The more I have been reading the Bible and praying, the more I see that in fact, it's exactly the other way around - God by default wants to bless us. We are His children. He wants us to have good things for us spiritually. Again, this is different to giving us the equivalent of a bunch of candy, which I have written about before .  Even in the book of Job, where Job suffered an incredible series of calamities, none of these came from God. They all came from Satan. This is not to say that God didn't punish people - there are plenty of examples of that in the Bible too. The message I'm trying to get across here is that God by default wants to bless us. Again, blessings are things which are good for us. Often these may take the form of spiritual gifts, such as wisdom, but can take the...

This is about the difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it in your heart. I have written before about how Heaven is not an ephemeral airy-fairy thing. It is more real and more solid than this world . We just do not detect it easily. A bit like atoms - atoms are the very real building blocks of this world - but for millennia we simply weren't able to detect them because we didn't have the tools for them. For several years, I knew intellectually that Heaven was more solid and real than our physical Universe (the Earth, the planets, etc). However, I realized recently that I finally know this in my heart too. It happened when I was praying. In my prayer, I was saying "Of course, in real life...", meaning it as a reference to Heaven. It was at that moment that I realized that I now knew in my heart what I had previously only known intellectually.  Heaven is "real life".  If you found this post interesting, you might also like these rela...

This is a review of the book " God on Mute " by Pete Greig. It is a non-fiction Christian about what happens when God meets your prayers with silence. What do you do? This book is of interest not only to Christians, but also to atheists struggling with the question of "If God is good, why do bad things happen?" (I have some information about that question here ). Interspersing theological research with his own personal experience with unanswered prayers for healing for his wife suffering a serious medical condition, Pete Greig does an amazing job answering one of the toughest questions of Christianity. Everyone can relate to this book and these difficult questions.  One thing I particularly loved about this book is that Pete Greig is not trying to assign blame to the situation. He explains first that some prayers God will not answer for reasons which might become clear upon inspection (e.g. 2 people are praying for opposite things - one for rain, the other for sunsh...

For the past many months, I had been neglecting my prayer life. I was reading the Bible daily late at night before falling asleep. I would try to pray after that, but I was often so tired it would be a tiny prayer of less than a minute. This was not good for me.  Notice, it's not good FOR ME. I'm not saying this is bad for God - it's bad for me. As has been mentioned previously, it is we who are improved by praying and knowing God. God is not improved by knowing us! In the morning, I would be immediately swept up into a busy day, so I didn't feel I would be able to regularly make a significant chunk of time to read the Bible and pray at that time of day (which together could take a while). During the time I recognized this as a problem but wasn't sure how to solve it, I was invited to join a friend's weekend prayer event where I signed up for a one-off prayer slot for 1 hour. I signed up for 5am, that way I could ensure it would be done before I was needed by my...

We are well equipped for detecting things in our 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time, but poorly equipped for detecting things in the spiritual dimension, even though the spiritual dimension is more real and solid than the physical one .  In other words, our God detection sensors are bad. In the book of Hebrews, the meaning of faith is clearly described for us: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. Hebrews 11: 1-3 In particular, the last part of it is what we need to remember: what is seen was made from things that are not visible. This means that what we so easily detect with our eyes (the physical dimension) is made from things which are not visible (the spiritual dimension). The spiritual dimension clearly exists, and came first before the physical di...