Timothy's Thoughts

Y esterday, I wrote about how psychics may be able to believe that they are telling people the truth. I also told you about some techniques that you could use if you wanted to do the same thing. Given the idea that anything any random occurrence that appears to have a pattern must have an external influence, these techniques will always work to “reveal” psychic phenomena. But we don’t want to become psychics. Personally, I see them all as performers, some of whom believe their own press. But the bigger danger is that we may attempt to apply these same techniques to Christianity. Some atheists would tell us that the logic of Christianity is just as flawed as that of the psychic. Allow me to demonstrate. Ten people are diagnosis with a disease that we know has a mortality rate of 60%. In other words, we would typically expect six of the ten to drop dead from the disease. But we start praying. After we’ve prayed, it is discovered that one was misdiagnosed and he doesn’t have the disease...

R ecently, I’ve been giving thought to psychic phenomena and paranormal events. By that, I mean what people often attribute to things like the ghosts of the dearly departed. There are people who claim to be able to serve as a medium by which a person can communicate with their dear loved ones. There are a couple of things that interest me about these things, one is the technique by which people think they can achieve results and two is that they are attributing their results to something without having a means to verify it. Let’s look at the second one first. Let’s suppose a person walks into a house and sees a rocking chair moving on its own. As he is watching the chair, suppose the front door swings shut without him touching it. What is the cause of these things? It could be the wind, but let’s suppose it isn’t. Let’s suppose it isn’t anything we would normally check for. Can we now say that it must be a ghost? Some people would say we can, but there’s a problem with that. Until we...

I ’ve watched some of these British cooking shows that look into the inner workings of restaurants and I kept hearing about Michelin stars. I thought, “that’s odd, in the UK Michelin is some rating organization for restaurants, but over here it is a tire company. Imagine my surprise when I looked up the Michelin Guide and discovered the tire man that is the Michelin tire company’s trademark. It made me wonder, how does a tire company become the symbol of excellence for restaurants. Michelin guides were started as a means to provide travelers with information about the area they were traveling through and I’m sure they were also meant to keep the Michelin name in front of the owners of automobiles. Michelin’s goal was to sell tires by placing an advertisement in every car. To keep that advertisement in cars, they had to turn their guide into a trusted resource. The only way to do that is to be very selective in which restaurants they recommended. It wasn’t enough to just list the rest...

O ne of the things I do is Church Website Design . If we can say there are rules to follow, the number one rule is probably, Content is Key . But the second rule should be something like, Use Pictures of Your Own People . And if I might go a step farther, use pictures of you own people participating in the activities of the church. How often I have looked at church websites and seen images of people that I knew the web designer had pulled off of a stock photo website somewhere. They are nice pictures with high quality and a lot of smiling faces, but they look like stock photos. I know what these designers are doing. They either don’t have access to photos of the church or they don’t like the photos of the church. When you look at the church and you see a bunch of old white ladies and what you would like to see in the church is a mix of many races, you don’t like the photos of the church. So a web designer will find a picture of some people who look like what you want the church to be...

S hirley Jackson’s classic short-story The Lottery is memorable, to say the least. It is also a good example of why authors shouldn’t pay attention to bad reviews. When The Lottery was published in 1948, most reviews were negative and many readers canceled their subscription to the magazine that published it. But it is also an example of how fiction can be used to present a message. As soon as we say a story has a message, the tendency is for people to think we’re talking about preachy writing, but the whole purpose of fiction is to present some kind of theme. Unlike non-fiction, in which the message is right there on the surface, the best place to put the message in fiction is below the surface. We do that by having a surface problem that we’re willing to talk about and a subsurface problem that is only spoken of in whispers. In The Lottery , the surface problem is this traditional gathering. Some people don’t see it as being so important. Some people are late, for one reason or a...

W ho sends people to hell? Is it God or Satan?” That’s the question I heard one of the kids at church asking another adult. It’s a question that I think many people are afraid to answer. Oddly enough, I don’t remember ever asking that question when I was growing up. Back then, my theology was simple; trust Jesus and go to heaven or reject him and you’ll go to hell. I had enough information to know the answer back then, but I don’t know that I really stopped to think about it. What I do remember is seeing the tracts showing angels throwing people over a cliff into a flaming pit. Revelation 20:12-15 makes it very clear. The dead, small and great, stand before God and are judged according to their works. “Whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” There’s no question; God is the judge. It is God who condemns. It is God who commands that they be cast into the lake of fire. Matthew 10:28: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able ...

O ne of my friends believes in ghosts. He claims to have seen things like doors closing unexpectedly, etc. I’ve seen things like that too, but I’ve never attributed it to a ghost. I figure there was enough of a change in the airflow to cause the door to close. It really don’t take much with some doors. What would be interesting is to see a locked door come unbolted and open all by itself. I still wouldn’t attribute that to a ghost, but it would be interesting. The sad thing is that this friend of mine is a church member and he’s ready to attribute a door closing to the working of some undeparted dead person. There is no logical reason to believe that. The Bible does say that spirits exist, but it makes it clear that when we die we go to one of two places—heaven or hell. There aren’t human beings waiting around because they have unfinished business. If there are spirits haunting a house, those spirits would have to be from among the angelic beings—either those who follow God or those ...