What The Bible Says About Healthy Living

Ten years ago I had a weekend to kill before going to a Natural Food Expo in L.A. and decided to tour the Crystal Cathedral. While not a fan of Robert Schuller, I was the son of an architect and wanted to see the work of Philip Johnson. I was intrigued that a gay architect was chosen to design a cathedral for such a prominent protestant pastor. Perhaps Schuller was more compassionate than most Christians as regards gay people.


Anyway, I wandered down to the bookstore and found a book on the shelf whose title instantly captured me: What The Bible Says About Healthy Living. I was so inspired by the book that I wrote the second review to appear on the Amazon site back in 1998.


The book chronicles a Doctors railing at God after reading Psalm 139:14. The good Doctor was having one health crisis after another and had a real beef with a God that said that we were "beautifully and wonderfully made." The answer he got was essentially "Are you sure you read the instructions?"


The doctor spent several years pouring over the bible finding ways that God was trying to tell us how to live in a way that would assure good health and relative freedom from pain. In addition, the doctor looked for ways that science was beginning to validate the biblical dictums.


While he received some high profile accolades from top evangelicals, he definitely had to walk a tightrope with regard to giving so much credence to OT "laws" regarding diet and lifestyle choices. After all, mainstream Christianity long ago determined that "them laws done been nailed to the cross." Forgive me but I am unable to write those words without lapsing into a Texan dialect.


Despite a good effort to argue his case, I think he missed the main issue which is that Christianity "threw the baby out with the bathwater." Jesus was tweaked with the Pharisees not for trying to follow God's instructions, but for sitting in judgement of those they felt weren't.

After all, Jesus would never have said his Father's words were stupid. Regardless whether you believe that Jesus was the son of God or not, you have to agree that if He believed it he would never have said his Dad was dumb!

In any case, revisiting this book has caused me to decide that one of the missions of this blog will be to encourage other scientists to promote research that will help validate Torah. I say this not because I need proof, but because the world clearly does. In an age when trusting God is only a trite slogan on the back of our money, it is clearly time for people to be convinced, even by as imperfect a vehicle as science, that they need to trust God for everything.

Christians Anti-Gay?

So today we get the shocking revelation that Christians are perceived as judgemental, hypocritical and anti gay by the 16-29 year old crowd. And we needed the Barna Group to tell us this? Didn't anyone realize that there was a slight affiliation between Mr Anti-Gay himself and the face of Christianity in America?

I heartily recommend that all the evangelicals take all the money they're going to spend on consultants that can tell them how to restyle the facade that Christianity presents to the world and just contribute half of it to the care and feeding of this blog site when they realize I have the answer to their problem.

Are you ready for it? Here it is in two part harmony:

1) Stop thumping your bibles and try reading them - homosexuality is not rated as any greater a falling away from The Creators of The Universe's loving instructions (a long and perhaps more politically correct way of saying Torah) than a whole host of things that Evangelicals are regularly guilty of.

2) Instead of pointing out other peoples difficulty in walking a narrow path, perhaps your focus should be on your own difficulty in keeping on the The Way. You wouldn't want to end up getting compared to the Pharisees after all.

While this train of thought gets me fired up to open the steamer trunks worth of baggage attached to the word sin, the better angels of my nature bid me delay.

Evangelical's Bad Jewish Joke

I recently heard an evangelical tell a joke that really puts a twist in my knickers. To spare myself the agita of relating it word for word, I offer the following synopsis:

Two Jewish men bemoan their sons becoming Christians and go to their rabbi who , it turns out, has the same problem. They all fall on their knees to exhort God on this subject when God of course says he has the same problem. You can read a smarmy version verbatim at an equally smarmy Christian jewelry website which is probably one of many websites schlepping such tripe over the Internet.

While Jewish parental sentiment probably often runs along these lines (relax Jewish parents - garden variety Christianity will ultimately leave them wanting and then they will become Buddhists) the bit about God's son becoming a Christian is what really pisses me off.

The telling and retelling of this joke by evangelicals proves they don't get that Jesus and his disciples ( he probably would have referred to them as his Talmidim and not used a foreign word) weren't Christians but rather Jews. While this may seem a small matter, it is really huge. It begs the question when did we start using the term Christian and why?

More importantly, it should force us to ask ourselves why a culturally Jewish phenomenon morphed into something so un-Jewish. Then we need to examine what was lost in this transmogrification. And, finding ourselves so caught up in heavy questions, we should open a bottle of wine and settle in for a lot of soul searching.

Those who find themselves surprised to discover that Jesus was Jewish shouldn't feel too bad. James Carroll, in his book Constantine's Sword, cites an unnamed college professor who routinely asks his incoming freshman students "What Religion Was Jesus?" The majority say one or another flavor of Christianity.

What have we lost through such ignorance? Many would probably say very little. I will beg to differ.

Evangelicals Converting Jews?

NPR today reports the influx of evangelical Christians to Israel during Sukkot and the nervousness of Israeli's who like the tourist income but don't like the implications of the conversion plans most evangelicals subscribe to.

Personally I find the whole thing funny. If the Creator of the Universe wants the Jews to be something besides Jews I suspect it will happen. Evangelical plotting is more a sign of hubris than anything - "Lets us Christians do God's heavy lifting for him." If they're from Texas like the yahoo's shown above, they probably think they can do it better and faster than God as well.

Likewise the Jewish fears of disappearing due to the conversion tactics of Christians is ridiculous. If the Almighty intends for there to be Jews until the end of time then there will be. I think they should spend more time reflecting on the role that God has defined for them and less time worrying what a bunch of preoccupied evangelicals are up to.

When I am king (Ha) I will use all my powers of persuasion to get the evangelicals and Jews to sit down, break some bread and crack open a few good bottles of wine and dialog on the roles that are pretty clearly defined in the Torah for them. If we could just do what we're asked instead of informing The Great One that we know better, life would be so easy.

Come to think of it I might try using the same logic on my teenagers.