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.