by Pastor Joel Lawler

"Organized religion is a crutch and a sham for the weak minded." ~ Jesse Ventura

Jesse Ventura was a Navy SEAL, turned professional wrestler, turned movie star and most recently governor of Minnesota. His thoughts on faith sound very much like what Karl Marx has been attributed with saying "religion is the opium of the masses." 

Karl Marx was a philosopher, social scientist, historian, and revolutionary. His economic and political ideas helped shape the socialist movement.

Faith is what opens the doors to these accusations that are leveled at those who believe in God. The fact is that God's existence cannot be proved. There is no absolute proof that there is a master creator. No one can connect all the known facts and prove conclusively that there is a god. 

Marx and Ventura are referring to faith when they use the words crutch and opium. We do not have all the facts, so faith is the variable that completes the equation. The dirty little secret that they refuse to acknowledge is that they themselves are leaning on the very same crutch because they also cannot

prove scientifically; that there is no God. It also takes faith to be an atheist. 

I admire brilliant men who can speak and write with authority on God's existence. I listened to a debate where the Christian Philosopher Ravi Zacharias organized an entire university philosophy class on the topic of the existence of god. He made his case and defended it extremely well against a group of very intelligent people who strongly held the view that there is no such thing as god.  There are very smart people on both sides of this argument.

Faith comes from our hearts and not our heads. When a person is explaining his faith, he has to use his heart as much as his brain. 

The head can process numbers such as two plus two to equal four, and takes in scientific data such as how the earth rotates on an axis. The heart takes in information and causes a response. When a disaster occurs, a great distance from us, and not involving anyone we know, we still care. The head says that we need not be concerned because our own survival is not at stake. The heart

overrides the head because we feel that there is more to living than just our own survival, and being human means having compassion.

The heart helps us enjoy art, movies, songs, and literature. Often the connection to the heart involves stories. If we take the debate over the existence of God, out of the realm of science, where the head is the only part of us engaged, and place it in the context of a story, the heart will play a part.

The first story that explains the non-existence of God would be, "Once upon a time there was nothing. Something came from nothing and collided with something else. This collision brought about a set of events that has lead to us being here. We live and breathe because of random events. There is no purpose or cause. We are born and live and die until some other random event interrupts the cycle."

The second  story that explains the existence of God is the essence of the Bible: "Once upon a time God created the earth and all that is in it. He created man with a free will to choose whether he wanted a relationship with God. Man could choose to obey God and bond with Him eternally. On the other hand, man could choose his own way, becoming his own god. Man chose to rebel against God. The result of his rebellion was the fall of creation. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve lost Paradise. The evil serpent, Satan interrupted and tempted Eve to eat an apple from the tree that God had forbidden. God wanted to protect them from the full knowledge of evil that was inter-woven in the fibers of that Apple. Eve ate the apple and in its place struggle, disease, desolation, and ultimately death occurred. God loved his creation too much to let it collapse. God became man. Jesus lived a perfect life. He was executed by men because they could not bear the presence of God. Jesus was able to conquer death and rose again. He took the punishment for man's rebellion upon Himself. He is now able to offer a way back to a relationship with Himself for man. Just as man chose to become his own god, he can now choose to come back to a relationship with God.

This second story speaks to my heart. If faith helps us believe what we cannot see, for me, it takes MORE faith to believe the first story.
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