I once had an argument with a guy in school.  Okay, a spirited discussion.  He thought my belief in God was a bunch of bunk.  In fact, he thought that most of my ideas were bunk.  God?  Mythology.  Morality?  Prejudicial.  Reality?  Subjective.

He was a card-carrying relativist and had me pegged as one of those obnoxious, arrogant, absolutist Christians who believes that he’s right no matter what.  So, leaning across the table at me, he drew his sword and declared: “Everything is relative!”.  Then he dared me to prove him wrong.  Rapping his knuckles on the table between us, he announced, “I don’t even believe that this table exists!”

“Yes,” I replied, “but you organize your life as though it does.”

He looked like I had slapped him.  Or maybe that he had slapped himself.  “Yes, I do,” he said, and walked away.

Apparently, he wasn’t going to run full-tilt across the room with the theoretical table in the way, because he believed he would break his theoretical neck.

Oh, he “believed”, all right - in a set of ideas.  But the real ideas on which he based his life were very different than the ones he espoused.

Now, I don’t want to be too hard on the relativist.  Some have said that many Christians live as practical atheists: they espouse beliefs, but they live their lives based on other principles.  They “believe in God”, but their lives are shaped by principles of practicality, expediency, capitalism, democracy; on preferences such as ethnicity or geography; and on emotional states such as anxiety, or anger.

If you think being a Christian is about subscribing to a set of philosophical notions, you’re wrong.  That’s not Christianity - that’s belief-ism.

Everyone “believes” in something.  The Christian “believes” in Jesus.  The Muslim “believes” in Allah.  The relativist “believes” in subjectivity.  The atheist “believes” in the natural.  I “believe” in Santa Claus.  So what?

Your real beliefs are the ones around which you organize your life.

Go ahead, believe whatever you want.  I just hope you don’t break your theoretical neck.

Greetings!  This is my first post to the God Complex blog, and I’m not even sure I know how to get it posted.  So, if you see this, maybe a miracle happened.

Let me start this whole blogging thing out by telling you a couple of things about God Complex, and about me.

God Complex is a weekly webcast to explore all sorts of ideas about God and spirituality.  Is it a “Christian” show?  Well, read about me below and you’ll see that I am a Christian, and so, yes, it talks about things from a Christian perspective.  But I hope it won’t just be a rehashing of Christian ideas - a reiteration of old, familiar stuff.  Hopefully, God Complex will help you think about your spiritual ideas, whatever they are, in new ways.

In fact, God Complex may be especially interesting for those of you who have been steeped in Christian religion, because I’m going to be looking past religion to the heart of things.  And the heart of Christianity is not religion.  I’ll just leave it at that, for now.

About me.  I’m an Anglican priest.  “Anglican” = Church of England.  “Priest” = pastor, or minister.  That means I went to school for an inordinately long time, got a second Master’s Degree, and got ordained.  But, bottom line is, I am a Christian.  Or, to use the description of the earliest disciples of Jesus Christ, I am a follower of the Way.  What I do as a profession is, for me, simply another part of that Way.  I follow Jesus.  When I can.  And I’ll leave that for now, as well.

Anyway, there you are.  Hopefully you’ll find God Complex interesting, challenging, and maybe even offensive.  I look forward to seeing your response to this whole thing.  I’ve never done anything like this before, so we’ll just see how it shapes up.

In fact, as I said earlier, I’ve never even posted to a blog before.  So, I’m really interested to see what happens when I press that button right up there ….