On having an opinion

So this is pretty great: When Having an Opinion is a Weary Endeavor, by Nate Pyle

"Rather than sharing thoughts, people are silenced by the fear of being shunned. Rather than dialoguing with those who think differently, we lob verbal bombs across party lines. We entrench ourselves in ideology and tribes and hyperbole to find protection from the dysfunction of society. But our regression behind these false barriers are only furthering the inability of individuals and society to dialogue towards real solutions."

Excellent video on marriage equality

One of the reasons why I created this blog was because Facebook isn't the greatest platform for having political discussions. A while back, I was trolled by a few Christians after posting that the struggle for LGBT rights (e.g. marriage equality) was similar to the struggle for civil rights for people of color in the 1960s. They informed me that being gay was a sin and thus, if I'm a Christian, I shouldn't be supporting gay rights. Interestingly, the arguments against gay rights parallel those against racial integration.

While church history shows us that intellectual uniformity is impossible, it's becoming increasingly disturbing to me that some American Christians are crying "persecution" when they can't legislate their beliefs on people, when stores like Target say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," or when Christian decorations such as a Ten Commandments monument are not allowed to be displayed in a government building like a courthouse, while at the same time protesting the building of mosques, discriminating against atheists, or censoring the teaching of topics such as evolution in public schools which have broad scientific consensus. To me, not being allowed to persecute others or shove your religious beliefs in their face, especially when you are in the majority, does not equal persecution. Maybe a lot of American Christians need to have some discussions with people like Christians from China, gay Christians, Muslim Americans, or Palestinians in Israel to hear some real examples of persecution.

Predictably, the recent topic of marriage equality in the Supreme Court has some Christians (amplified by the media) protesting against allowing the same rights they enjoy extended to their fellow citizens who happen to be gay. Do they really think they will win more people to Christ by blocking other people from being treated equally under the law? What they don't seem to realize is that not only are they discriminating against other human beings, they are damaging the ability of young Christians like myself to spread the Good News. Indeed, most non-Christians in the US today have come to associate the label of "Christian" with being judgemental, hypocritical, anti-gay, insensitive, and too political, and the reality is that "Many of those outside of Christianity ... reject Jesus because they feel rejected by Christians" (quoted from unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity ... And Why It Matters in this review). Ouch.

So as for me, I think it's important to communicate that Christians, being a diverse group, can have different views on things like gay marriage which may not align with common dogma. Personally, my relationship with my gay and lesbian friends and colleagues is more important than having certain Christian friends approve of me. And as an American who wants to see freedom and justice for all, who would want people in the majority to stand up for me if I were a minority against whom the law was discriminating (even though it would not directly affect them or bolster their self-interest), and who does not accept the out-of-context biblical interpretations being used against gay people, or the image of a God who sets people up for a life of loneliness when it is not good for us to be alone, how can I not support marriage equality? In fact, there was a time when interracial marriage similar to my own would have been illegal in some states. So I heartily agree with this guy:



Notice the comments section! 

Re-blog: When We Criticize the Church

This blog REALLY resonated with me this week:

When We Criticize the Church

I feel like I've simultaneously been misunderstood and failed to effectively articulate my thoughts while criticizing the Church, but this eloquent writer pretty much captured it perfectly! I have a feeling I'm going to be referring back to this in the future.

What I don't miss about Facebook

I gave up Facebook for Lent. Before college, I thought Lent was just for Catholics and about not eating meat. This year is my first time participating in it, and it's been a good experience so far. Though I was lonely the first night my hubby went to work and I was stuck at home, since then, I really haven't missed social networking and have enjoyed having more time to do things like starting this blog, reading, crocheting, cooking and baking, spending time with friends in person, sending out my would-have-been-Christmas-newsletter (in March), and mailing cookies to my papa (grandpa).

I've also been reflecting on how I want to use Facebook when I log back in at the end of the month, especially now that I have this blog as an expressional outlet. At times, Facebook can be a horribly distracting vice of mine (especially since I got a smart phone this past fall), and it can also be a source of stress--both from agonizing over the pseudoscience and ridiculously partisan things that some people post on there, but also from dealing with trolls and worrying over properly choosing my audiences for certain things I post. It really isn't a good medium for having certain kinds of discussions, especially if they involve politics (as evidenced during our idiotically long American election seasons).

I really enjoyed reading this post by Darrell Dow (a conservative Republican who is spending a year as a Democrat and consciously re-evaluating his biases, building empathy and critical thinking in the process)--check it out:

10 Ways To Ensure Any Political Discussion Turns Into a Pointless Argument

How about you--have you participated in any regrettable discussions/arguments on social networks? Was there a particular experience that caused you to lose a friend or changed the way you post?

God of the Gaps

"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." - Mark Noll 

Ever since I started studying biology in college, I've been learning what it means to love God with my mind. 

I went to public school in a small town, and we didn't discuss evolution much there. The first time I ever heard of anyone accepting both evolutionary theory and creation was extremely memorable because it seemed so novel to me--after someone in my 7th grade life science class asked my teacher what he believed, he replied: a combination of both creation and evolution. I suspect that teaching evolution in high school would have resulted in a barrage of complaints from parents, so I didn't hear about anything else Darwinian until we started having discussions about evolution in my biology classes at George Fox. At last, I was in a place where I could really explore this topic! My biochemistry professor introduced us to Dr. Francis Collins's book, The Language of God, and we discussed various beliefs on creation (young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, intelligent design, theistic evolution, etc.). We also discussed the book Darwinism Defeated?, which is a debate between Philip Johnson (a law professor who has worked very hard to push his Intelligent Design ideas) and Denis Lamoureux (a professor of science & religion with PhDs in both fields). At the end, we had an assignment to write either a 1- or 2-page paper describing our own beliefs. Mine ended up being 6.5 pages long.

In addition, my genetics & botany professor from George Fox kindly allowed me to interview him on his views regarding creation and evolution. He talked about how God wrote the book of the Bible and the book of Creation, and how two truths cannot contradict each other. This brought me a measure of peace. One of the most important concepts I took away from delving into the subject of creation and evolution was that using God to fill in gaps in our knowledge is unsustainable, especially in a time when more of the mysteries of creation are being revealed through science. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes this much better than I:

"It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt. It is now possible to find, even for these questions, human answers that take no account whatever of God. In point of fact, people deal with these questions without God (it has always been so), and it is simply not true to say that only Christianity has the answers to them. As to the idea of ‘solving’ problems, it may be that the Christian answers are just as unconvincing – or convincing – as any others. Here again, God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized as the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin."

As I've studied the mechanisms of evolution and see evidence for it even in my own research, I've gained a greater appreciation for the Creator, in a way that's just a tiny bit like how you can't fully appreciate art or music until you've studied the theory and techniques and tried doing it yourself. It's one thing to be awe of something you're ignorant of. It's something quite different to be in awe of something because of what you know about it. In the end, I traded in young earth creationism for evolutionary creationism (a.k.a. theistic evolution). Contrary to what so much of the evangelical church told me, accepting evolution (for which there is overwhelming evidence as well as scientific consensus) didn't make me stop believing in God or take away my need for Jesus. Instead, it led me to more deeply appreciate the exquisite complexity, logic, patience, and unfathomable presence of God through and beyond space and time. I was able to love God with my mind, rather than compromising intellectual integrity for an interpretation of Genesis that for me, contradicts the book of Creation.

I hope that the American Christian community will lay down its arms in the culture wars and start affirming people who choose to love God with their minds. As Rachel Held Evans put it, "The evangelical community…indeed the Christian community… is losing young people every day to a false dichotomy." One of the reasons why people my age are leaving church (or sometimes, The Church) is that while growing up, it was impressed on us that intellectualism and science are a threat to our faith--and yet, as the most educated generation in American history, we are finding as young adults that the pursuit of and advancement of knowledge enriches us and is transformatively rewarding. After all, isn't  a knowledge-seeking, curious faith much more fulfilling than an ignorance-based one?

How about you--have you struggled to reconcile empirically acquired knowledge with what you were being told about faith? Do you think the church has set up a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts that can partially account for the exodus of educated young people?


More reading:
Are gaps in scientific knowledge evidence for God?
Eight reasons to give evolution a second chance

Changes

"Growing up is becoming who you want to be."

                -Gary, The Muppets movie

There’s something about going on a journey that changes you. Navigating personal development as a twentysomething, I’ve felt a lot like the Hobbits when they returned to the Shire after their worldview-altering adventures in Middle Earth. I try to talk to people who knew me as an adolescent, who haven’t been traveling the same roads, and they just don’t “get” me, especially if a generational gap separates us. It seems impossible to convey in one conversation what has taken years for me to learn.

Every generation experiences defining events that impact their personal beliefs. Like many Millennials, I watched the coverage of the attacks on 9/11 and subsequently lost a classmate in the “war on terror.” Rippling waves from the global financial crisis impacted my family and the job aspects of my friends who were just entering the job market. Just this past year, destruction from climate change, the polarization and increasing corporate takeover of Congress to the point of it becoming almost non-functional, and the shameless exploitation of faith for political gain rocked our country. These events affected—and will continue to affect—my peers and me for our entire lives. They have pushed me to deconstruct my beliefs and worldview as I’ve become exposed to different ideas and cultures and learned to start asking uncomfortable questions. The past year galvanized my internal makeover, and though I'm still under construction—as I hope I will always continue to be—I have emerged a new me. Like someone who's just lost a startling amount of weight, I've been eager for my transformation to change my friends' mortifying old perceptions of myself. Or, maybe I’m just overly eager to talk about my journey.

However, in the process of trying to reclaim my social identity for who I have become, I might have come off a bit too strong to a few of my old friends. Some of them have discovered that one of my favorite topics to discuss is how much I now disagree with American evangelical Christianity and the GOP. I’ve lived in Oregon my entire life, the first 18 years of which were in rural eastern Oregon. I attended a Christian college, where we often joked we were living in a bubble (how true that was). There’s a lot that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. But things have changed.

In the past, I didn’t understand the purpose of staying informed or educating myself about politically or socially relevant issues because I didn’t understand how such seemingly distant topics affected me, the people I love, or the future of the country that I call home. Knowledge about current events and topics my peers weren’t talking about seemed like irrelevant minutiae, useful for games like Trivial Pursuit but not much else. Things started changing in the second half of college. I was encouraged to ask questions about topics like bioethics and evolution—a big step for an evangelical Christian girl who grew up in a conservative, small town. The great catalyst for my personal evolution, however, has been grad school.

Four and a half years have passed since I started work on my PhD. Learning to think like a scientist and adapting to life outside of the microcosms in which I had spent the entire prior part of my life has been transformative. Politically coming of age in a highly polarized and dysfunctional time in our nation’s history, experiencing a major recession and family hardships, and having the opportunity to explore viewpoints different from my former ones forced me to reevaluate what I had once taken for granted. The blinders I didn’t realize I was wearing slowly came off. I see the world and my role in it in a new light now. An increasing awareness of my own biases and willingness to revise my opinions presides.

Through this blog, I’ll be processing my evolving viewpoints on faith, politics, social issues, coming of age as a Millennial, and what things mean to me as a scientist and a younger citizen. If you are also experiencing big changes in your personal development, I invite you to join me on my journey. What sparked your transformation, and how are you dealing with it? Or, if you have no idea what I've been talking about, but wish to understand what is happening with my generation, please ask questions and stick around. I’m sure we can learn something from one another.

“Not all who wander are lost.” - J.R.R. Tolkien