mental wandering

I'm not sure where my mind will go with this post, but I'm going to let loose of the reins and ride.

Our small group started reading Brian McLaren's book, "A New Kind of Christian" last week. It is a fictional dialogue between a pastor questioning if he should be a pastor anymore and his daughter's high school science teacher, who is a philosopher and a Christian.

While we only discussed the first two chapters Sunday night, the conversation was good, and it wandered into other territories which have sparked a flame of intrigue in my little brain.

Firstly: Our current "revision" of what it means to be a Christian stems from Martin Luther and the birth of Protestantism in the 1500's. While there have been changes in the way it has been conveyed, the message is the same: that the "salvation was attainable only by true repentance and faith in Jesus as the Messiah, a faith unmediated by the church." (thank you wikipedia). Of course, this is still concurrent with our post-modern beliefs. However, our generation no longer must have concrete reasons on which to solidify our faith.

We don't REQUIRE an answer to the evolution vs. creation debate. It doesn't matter how many days or eons it took for the earth to become what it is today. We can stop searching for the "missing link" and still be able to sleep at night. We don't know all the answers, we can't have all the answers, and that's cool with us. What we do know is that God knows, and in that we can rest.

The conversation also took a tangent (thank you Charlie) into why certain cultures have developed along with the industrial revolution, age of technology, etc. while others remain "primitive." There are many philosophical suggestions, ecological equations and social theories that may shed light on this, but a recurring conversation with my friend Joe came to mind. In Genesis 11, all the people of the world spoke one language and some of them got together and decided to build a tower to the heavens. And they began to do so. The built and built, higher and higher, until they got God's attention...
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel [c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

God himself admitted "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them," so he confused the people, to which Joe lends the superhero psyches. He believes that's why we only use a small percentage of our brain and that there are areas of the brain that medicine has found no practical use for. However, I find it fascinating that our modern studies have discovered ancient civilizations that were building pyramids (towers) in all parts of the world. The Mayans, the Egyptians, the Native Americans all spoke different languages and build with different materials and in different styles but they were all trying to get closer to the heavens. Even our modern engineers cannot determine how they accomplished such a feat without heavy equipment.

Did God hit the reset button on the early, superhuman brain?

tangent complete.

that was much longer than i intended. sorry.