Recently in Faith Category

Last week, in response to a poll wherein almost 20% of respondents said they believed that President Obama is a Muslim, a White House spokesman stated that "the President is obviously a - is Christian." The spokesman went on to support this assertion by saying "he prays every day," as if that settled the question once and for all.

I don't pretend to know whether Obama is Christian, Muslim, or anything else. I do find it odd that he would cancel the White House's National Day of Prayer breakfast but hold a dinner to celebrate Ramadan, but neither of those things are germane to what I really want to discuss, and that is whether prayer is a sign that someone is a Christian. And, of course, the short - and Biblical - answer is "no."

It's probably helpful for purposes of this discussion to define prayer, and I take a very simplistic view: prayer is speaking with God. We can make it complicated or ritualistic, but conversing with the Deity is the essence of prayer.

Prayer is an important characteristic of the Christian faith. Jesus Christ taught His disciples how to pray, and He spent considerable time in prayer. The Christian who doesn't pray is missing a cornerstone of his faith.

But, guess what? Using my broad definition of prayer, the practice is not limited to Christians. In fact, Satan and his demons pray. A passage in the book of Revelation describes Satan's habit of coming before God to accuse us of sin, continually (as if God didn't already know these things!). And one of Jesus' earliest recorded miracles was the exorcism of an evil spirit from a man; Scripture records a short, desperate prayer by said spirit before it was evicted.

These simple examples help demonstrate that it's not what we do that makes us Christians; it's what we believe. In this regard, the President's spokesman did him no favors in attempting to describe his boss's faith.

Two additional thoughts. First, while one might argue that the faith, or lack thereof, of an American president is nobody's business, it's a fact of life that such things are still of interest to an apparent majority of Americans. I fear for our nation when that ceases to be.

Second, while we're in the neighborhood, just as praying isn't necessarily an indication that one is a Christian, neither is knowing who Jesus Christ is. Knowing Christ is not the same as accepting Him as Lord and Savior. Check out this passage in Acts where more evil spirits make this point.

Former Midlander Kyle Lent owns a recording studio in Georgetown (TX) and is also the lead guitarist for The Justin Cofield Band. The band is embarking on what it calls a "Grand Experiment," an aspect of which involves allowing us to watch their recording sessions via webcam.

If you've ever been curious about what goes on during a professional recording session, this is your chance to find out. They're streaming a session this morning beginning at 10:00 a.m. I assume that they'll provide a link somewhere on the above-referenced sites to allow you to tune in. (Unfortunately, I have a client meeting at the same time so I won't be able to watch.)

Update: I just realized that "Wednesday, January 19th" is an impossibility for 2010. Kyle, you need to check your calendar, bud.

An article in Scientific American entitled The Color of Sin--Why the Good Guys Wear White posits that "ancient fears of filth and contagion may explain why we think of morality in black and white."

The article cites the findings of a series of experiments in which words with "strong moral overtones" were printed in either black or white type, and shown to subjects who were asked to categorize what they saw (this is a variation of the Stroop test, a more familiar incarnation of which is found in games where participants are shown colored shapes with the name of the color printed in a different color). According to the researchers, there was a strong correlation between the identification of words printed in black as "immoral" and those in white as "moral."

The words used in the study were categorized by the researchers as immoral, neutral, or moral and included: cheat, crime, devil, hell, neglect, sin, torment, vulgar, aspect, calm, concert, east, motion, recall, sum, aid, angel, brave, charity, grace, honesty, saint, virtue.

They then extended the test and found that people "who expressed the strongest desire for an array of cleaning products were also those most likely to link morality with white and immorality with black."

I have no idea what to do with that last finding, but I can provide the researchers with some direction regarding their overall findings, as I think they're off base. Here's what they say:


Wrong. Black is representative of sin not because it contaminates, but because it hides. That's why the Bible frequently contrasts good and evil in terms of light and dark, proxies for white and black. (e.g. Ephesians 5:11; 1 John 1:6-7; Ephesians 5: 8-10) Humans seeks out the darkness to do their evil deeds in the mistaken assumption that they can hide those deeds from others, or even more laughably, from God. Indeed, we are amazingly successful in hiding our shortcomings from other people; we're absolute failures when it comes to fooling God. Some of the accounts of the earliest human behavior involved man's attempt to hide his actions from God (see Adam and Eve in the Garden; Cain's murder of his brother).

I hope the aforementioned study wasn't paid for with my tax dollars. Their questions could have been better answered by reading a $2 copy of the New Testament.

Please join me in extending sympathies to Jimmy Patterson and his family following his father's passing last Sunday.

For Christians it's not a trivial cliché to say that his dad is in a better place. It's an assurance that allows us to celebrate even through our grief.

This article in today's newspaper is an inadvertently honest depiction of what I suspect goes on in the zoning process of cities all around the world. It's an account of a proposed housing project that was so strenuously protested by the adjacent residents that the developer withdrew the plan.

On the surface, it's easy to see why the plan was rejected. The development would have placed almost 100 "modular homes" into a neighborhood of houses sitting on 1- or 2-acre tracts, spoiling the "rural life in the city" ambiance of the area. It's understandable that current residents would want to maintain the character of their neighborhood, and it's difficult to imagine anything more antithetical to that character than a bunch of tract homes on tiny lots.

But a couple of the quotes from the article reveal a more sinister motivation. The story refers to "residents who would not fit in," and the perception that while the development would have included "some good people," it also "would have brought in some undesirables."

So, the implication is that while the homes might be eyesores (in relation to what makes up the original neighborhood), the real concern is that the people who live in them just don't meet some arbitrary measure of acceptability.

It's unfortunate that we tend to judge people in this fashion. Your perceived worth is determined by the size of the structure you inhabit, or the nameplate on the car you drive, or the tags on the clothes you wear. None of us would ever publicly admit to this practice, but we all do it to one extent or another. We justify it because at some point in our lives we were either taught to do it, or we saw an example of behavior that somehow supported the judgment and allowed us to broadly extrapolate it to, well, everyone.

It's ironic that to some extent, in some fashion, to someone else each of us falls into a category of "those people." (If you disagree, I can assure you that you're now going to be judged as "one of those hypocrites.")

I don't know how we overcome this tendency (and you'll noticed that I use "we" a lot, because I'm not immune). A good beginning might be to see others as God sees us: imperfect beings who nevertheless are deeply loved. It might not make us any happier to have a trailer park in our backyard, but we might come to view the residents as friends rather than adversaries.