Brains & Stomachs Part Three

I think it was Steve Turner, a secular British journalist writing for a secular British newspaper who captured the dilemma of being just brains and stomachs when he penned his article "The Creed for the Modern Thinker." He writes in a rather sarcastic tone, and this is the consequence of what happens when man lives on bread alone.

We today believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin.
We believe that everything is ok, as long as you don't knowingly hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your definition of knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe adultery is fun.
We believe sodomy is ok.
We believe taboos are taboo.
We believe everything is getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated and you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe that there is something in horoscopes, UFOs and bent spoons. Jesus was a good man, like Buddha, Mohammed and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think his good moral teachings are really bad.
We believe that all religions are the same at least the ones that we read were. They all believe in love and goodness, and only differ on creation, sin, heaven, hell, god and salvation.
We believe that after death comes nothing. Because when you ask the dead what happens, they say nothing. If death is not the end and the dead have lied then its compulsory heaven for all; except possibly Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.
We believe that what's selected is average, what's average is normal, and what's normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed.
We believe that the Americans should beat their guns into tractors and the Russians would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good, its only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society, society is the fault of conditions, and conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find what truth is right for himself and reality will adapt accordingly. The universe will readjust, and history will alter.
We believe that there is no truth except the truth that there is no absolute truth.
We believe in the rejection of creeds and the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be the father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky. And when you hear: state of emergency, sniper kills ten, troops on rampage, youths go looting, bomb blasts school - it is but the sound of man worshipping his maker.

Man does not live on bread alone, as Jesus says. But rather on every word that comes from God. That is why, when he was conversing with the Samaritan woman, Jesus tells his disciples that he has food to eat that they know nothing about - food of purpose and meaning in life because without God, there is no goodness, no purpose, no meaning, no hope and no recovery and no living a life that is not fraught with endless contradiction as Steve Turner so elegantly put it in his article. The only option we are left with is the dead God of Nietzche, who went on to say that because god had died as a philosophical entity, the following years would be the bloodiest yet because of the consequences of that singular idea - as just previously stated - and the twentieth century has been the bloodiest century yet. Not only that, but the violence he declared for the world also took place in his own body; he eventually contracted venereal disease and spent the last fifteen years of his life, or so, insane.

Food cannot change a person's heart. Knowledge cannot change a person's heart. That is why Jesus offers not a religion, but a personal relationship, and through that relationship with our heavenly father we can be transformed on the inside. Neither food nor knowledge can change us the way Jesus changes us on the inside because he changes not only what you do, but also why you want to do it. That is what he called being born again.