Skeptical Faith

Google Image There’s an old joke about an Irish immigrant woman who found a job as a housekeeper for an affluent American family during the early part of the last century. The lady of the house became upset with the woman’s work and said, “Bridget, the dust is so thick on that sideboard I can write my name on it!”   “Ah,” replied Bridget, “isn’t education a wonderful thing?”   I read this joke in a book about Irish American history. The author used it to describe the difficulty Irish immigrants had in being accepted into American society. Many Americans didn’t understand the Irish – not their “English,” nor their religion nor their self-deprecating humor. With comments like Bridget’s, many Americans didn’t know whether the Irish were sincere, were putting them on or making fun of them.   (My brother, Jack, who died in 2010 and whom I greatly miss, loved to tell the story about the time he and other family members were in County Waterford, Ireland. He struc...

Google Image This just in. After deliberating for several hours in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, a jury found that Trinity Industries lied to federal regulators when it changed the design of highway guardrails in 2005, making them unsafe. At least a dozen related accidents – some fatal – have been reported. Vehicles run off the road and collide with Trinity-made guardrail end caps that, instead of cushioning the impact, malfunction and spear the vehicle, according to lawsuits that have been filed against Trinity. Trinity has denied wrongdoing.   Appalling, but most of us aren’t surprised when an individual or a company lies. As a society, we’re awash in lies, including many that are far from “little” or “white.” Most people know instinctively that lying is wrong, so instead of outright lies, we often engage in half-truths, withholding of the truth and bald exaggeration. The bottom line, however, is deception, an offense against the truth. This is particu...

Google Image Referring to some animal unknown to her, a person close to me (who will remain nameless) has several times asked, “What is it good for?” For believers, that question should be easy to answer, especially if you mean, “What use is any animal or plant to humans?” with the implication that an animal’s only worth is in its service to us. That idea contradicts the message about the value of God’s creation. Though many Christians may be unaware of, or ignore, it, the traditional Christian view is that all creation is sacred precisely because it is, through the evolutionary process, God’s work. I must admit I haven’t always seen it this way. Like many Christians who should know better from Scripture and tradition, I was, at best, indifferent about the natural world. I think what got me to think more about it was an experience I had years ago in Ireland. Gerald Waris, my lifelong friend, and I were staying in the house of an acquaintance in County Kerry. ...

Google Image I’ve recently finished a fascinating book called Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. A best-selling classic in thirty languages with more than 10 million copies sold around the world, it describes in remarkable detail the lives of three generations of Chang’s family in twentieth-century China. Starting with her grandmother, who was a war lord’s concubine, Chang takes the reader through the transition from feudalism to communism and the bizarre succession of communist regimes that governed mostly by whim. This includes, of course, the long reign of Mao Zedong and his “cultural revolution,” which interrupted the lives of millions of students and workers to eradicate, among other things, grass, which was considered “bourgeois,” and melt pots, pans, machinery and everything metal to contribute to the nation’s need for steel. During much of this period, ideology and the personal cult of the Great Leader always trumped human reason. The consequences wer...

Google Image For several years, I’ve grown tomatoes in my back yard. I usually have only four plants, and some years they have yielded lots of fruit (or are they vegetables?) while other years have been stingy. Even in this year, a good one, the size and quality of the tomatoes have varied widely. Humans are like tomatoes. Our human genomes may be nearly identical to each other, and we may have many cultural similarities, but we’re also very different. And we like to compare ourselves to each other. As I mentioned in a blog about the tendency to judge others, Christians who are serious about their faith find it hard not to disparage those who may not appear to be as zealous. In the Catholic Church, in fact, some have suggested that we should expect and welcome a smaller church, one that comprises the “true believers.” It’s sort of a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude about religion. If you can’t summarily accept everything the church teaches, you should leave, or...