Monday, March 17, 2008
This will be the last post in my series, “Christianity’s Greatest Critics.”
I saved the most damning for last.
In a January 13th, 1997 Time Magazine interview, Bill Gates was asked about his religious beliefs and church participation. Gates responded, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on Sunday morning.”
While Gates has talked very little over the years about his belief in God and the afterlife, it’s widely held that he straddles the fence between being an agnostic and an atheist.
The common perception held among the Christian community is that not only are atheists and agnostics intellectually wrong about God, they live morally inferior lives. “If we can’t convince people not to swing over to the “No God” side based on intellectual argument, at least we can show how atheists like Gates are self-centered moral jerks,” we tell ourselves.
Strangely, in 2000, Gates and his wife Melinda founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Just look at their morally corrupt mission statement:
"Bill and Melinda Gates believe every life has equal value. In 2000, they created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help reduce inequities in the United States and around the world. There are two simple values that lie at the core of the foundation’s work: 1. All lives—no matter where they are being lived—have equal value. 2. To whom much is given, much is expected."
Crap, that wasn’t what we expected out of an agnostic.
Here’s another thing we didn’t expect: on June 26, 2006, Gate’s friend Warren Buffett, another agnostic, announced a pledge to donate 10 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stock (BRK-B) worth approximately $31 billion at the time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
No money was pledged to religious foundations. Not a penny.
Why?
Because Buffet and just about everyone else on the planet believes churches are irrelevant, and in most cases they’re dead on accurate.
Jesus has called his followers to pick up their crosses and follow him – changing people’s live both now and for eternity.
Christians have nailed the changing lives for eternity part.
It’s just that most of us have been ignoring the now part.
And Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, and our schools, and neighbors, and communities, and just about everyone else on the planet have passed us right by.
Social change agents have leveled what I consider the most damning critique of all, without ever opening their mouths. They have rendered Christianity useless in the minds of religious outsiders because they are doing what the church should be doing.
While everybody else is out in their communities changing the world, we just contentedly sit back and “have church services” to get people to heaven. And so the world has ceased to expect anything out of the church, which is worse than any situation the most vocal critics of Christianity could have created.
In October 2006 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus, founder of the world renowned Grameen Bank. Yunus’ bank provides low interest loans to the poorest of the poor in an effort to help them start their own businesses and break the cycle of poverty.
Yunus is a Muslim.
Here’s what I’m wondering: why didn’t a Christian come up with this idea?
Read other posts in this series:
Christianity’s Greatest Critics – Part 1
South Park – Part 2
Stand-Up Comedians – Part 3
Late Night Talk Show Hosts – Part 4
Social Change Agents – Part 5
Social Change Agents – Christianity’s Greatest Critics – Part 5
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10 comments:
Amazing post.
Amazing series.
Thank you.
Why didn't a Christian come up with this idea?
Because the Church at large has missed the point of following Jesus. Up until CCV's fairly recent mission change every church I've ever attended focused on saving souls and I've attended quite a few. That focus really seems to ignore a huge part of what Christ was teaching.
There also is a feeling among non-christians and nominal christians alike that if they go to a christian organization for help or donate their fund that their is a catch. "Repent or you won't get the services."
Finally, I just wanted to say You've got balls. You've taken a lot of crap from some of your readers. But, some things need to be said.
Thank you for this post. Every once in a while I get a reminder that it is truly okay for me to be an Agnostic attending CCV. As I have e-mailed you before Brian, I enjoy the messages, the people and the atmosphere and I like being a part of helping the community such as the Casas por Christo program. Also, taking part in church with my Christian family is important to my wife and me.
Thanks again!
Famous overacheivers in the realm of charity in today’s news (who are not religious) include Bill Gates & Warren Buffet (who you mentioned).
There's also Lance Armstrong (winner of the Tour de France bicycle race, and promoter of charities to cure cancer).
The non-religious biologist, Maurice Hilleman, who developed more vaccines than any other scientist, and those vaccines have spared hundreds of millions from illness and death. See Dr. Hilleman's biography that was published recently, "Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases" (author, Offit, Paul A., published, 2007).
So if it were not for a host of scientists who happened to be either lapsed churchgoers, unorthodox Christians, heretics, apostates, infidels, freethinkers, agnostics, or atheists--and their successes in the fields of agricultural and medical science-- hundreds of millions would have starved to death or suffered innumerable diseases this past century.
Those agricultural and medical scientists “multiplied more loaves of bread” and “prevented/healed more diseases” in the past hundred years than Christianity has in the past two thousand.
Also, it has not always been the most orthodox of Christians who have changed the face of charity for the better.
Florence Nightingale (the lady who helped make nursing a legitimate profession, and taught that no one should be refused admittance to a hospital based on their religious affiliation, and no patient should be proselytized in a hospital, but instead they should be allowed to see whichever clergyperson they preferred) was not an orthodox Christian, but instead a freethinking universalist Christian. (Ms. Nightingale also wrote a few steamy letters that suggest she may have been bi-sexual.)
The founder of the International Red Cross (now called the International Red Cross and Red Crescent), Andre Dunant, was gay.
Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was another freethinking universalist Christian.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who spent years in Africa as a doctor and helped to publicize the plight of suffering Africans, was a liberal Christian and author of The Search of the Historical Jesus in which he concluded that Jesus was a man who preached erroneously that the world was going to end soon.
And, Helen Keller (the woman who lost her sight and hearing to a bout with Scarlet Fever when she was very young, but who learned how to communicate via touch, and who proved an inspiration to several generations of folks suffering from severe disabilities) was both a Swedenborgian, and a member of the American Humanist Society.
Also interesting...
CHRISTIAN CORPORATE LEADERS
It’s now more obvious than ever that being moral in narrow conservative terms is no protection from sinning in other ways. Take someone like Bernard Ebbers. As head of WorldCom, Ebbers was known as one of the most religious CEOs in the high-tech sector. He invoked God regularly in speeches and press interviews, and started each board meeting with a prayer. He was a deacon at his Baptist church, where he also led a weekly bible study class. According to those who took the class, he was remarkably fluent in scripture. If someone missed the class, Ebbers would be on the phone to see if they were okay.
And yet, Ebbers presided over the largest fraud in U.S. history, a fraud that wrought massive financial pain on present and future retirees across America. After the revelations of this crime, a tearful Ebbers told his congregation: “More than anything else, I hope this doesn’t jeopardize my witness for Jesus Christ.”
It sounds as though Ebbers was more concerned with whether public knowledge of his crimes would harm his ability to evangelize his religion than he was with whether his crimes caused actual financial harm to his employees. What a great guy, huh? He may have been a poster boy for traditional sexual and Christian morality, but that didn’t stop him from helping defraud those around him.
Or look at John Rigas, who headed Adelphia Communications, one of the largest cable television companies in the United States. The son of Greek immigrants, Rigas was a regular church goer guided by social conservatism. He raised his four children in a small town in upstate New York with a strict set of traditional values. His sons went to work with their father after graduating from the nation’s best colleges and they, too, became pillars of the upstate community where Adelphia was headquartered. The sons, like the father, were social conservatives. No porn channels were alIowed on Adelphia’s cable system.
A very different morality guided the Rigases in business. By the time investigators caught on, the Rigases had appropriated hundred of milions of shareholder funds for their personal use through various shady loans and frauds. Prosecutors accused father and sons of “systematically looting” Adelphia...
Philip Anschutz is yet another business leader who publicly embraced religion and “family values” while indulging in greed and financial chicanery at the office. A billionaire who is the largest owner of movie screens in America, Anschutz is a religious man who has crusaded against homosexual rights and the medical use of marijuana. He has bankrolled a variety of Christian conservatives and invested in prayer radio.
Yet as the founder and chairman of Qwest Communications, a telecommunications firm, Anschutz ranks among the most corrupt insiders of the late 1990s. He sold nearly $2 billion of Qwest stock as it plunged in value from $63 a share to $3. As these sales took place, many in a secretive fashion, Qwest was encouraging its employees to hold on to their own stock and to build their retirement plans around 401(k)s heavy with Qwest shares. Anschutz was later investigated by Eliot Spitzer’s office and eventually agreed to give up $4.4 million in illegal gains from his shady business dealings without admitting any wrongdoing.
David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
____________________________
ANOTHER CHRISTIAN CORPORATE LEADER
The CEO and Chairman of Enron corporation, Dr. Kenneth Lay, was the son of a Baptist minister. He accepted Jesus Christ as his savior when he was 12, and remained passionate about his beliefs: “I’ve always just felt a strong presence in my life, a faith, and the will of God directing my life and giving me guidance for what He’d like to do with my life. There have been too many events in my life where it would be hard to say, ‘That was just coincidence.’ Certain roads were crossed and certain directions became apparent, which at the time--maybe for many people--didn’t look all that apparent. But the results have later turned out to be exactly the right thing at the right time. I can give you any number of examples… Throughout my life, things have fallen into place that turned out to be the right thing to do at the time… Looking back, 30 or 40 years later in some cases, those were the things that just really fit together perfectly… I am convinced that God was--and is--guiding all the way… multiple coincidences, they just seem to occur one after another. Whether it was meeting certain people at certain times, certain jobs appearing suddenly, or certain opportunities appearing… These things just fit in place… I became convinced that my true calling was business… I think, in my case, I’ve been able to make a bigger and more positive impact through business than I could have in any other profession, including the ministry. I’ve been able to impact more lives, more communities, and more causes than I could have otherwise… I begin many of our business dinners, and particularly special ones with directors and senior employees and community leaders, with a prayer. I think that sets the tone as to the importance of faith, at least in my life and sets the tone for the entire meeting. I have a retired minister on staff at Enron who does a lot of counseling for our employees. It’s at their discretion, at their request, but he’s available particularly when employees are going through or experiencing the death of loved ones, or tragic accidents, or maybe depression or whatever. Obviously as he counsels, he also ministers. My employees know that I take basic religious principles very seriously… We have nearly 20,000 employees worldwide and we obviously have a lot of different religious faiths practiced by these employees… We really try to respect everybody’s beliefs. But it’s widely known that I have a very strong Christian background and Christian faith… I basically try to create an environment at Enron where everybody has the opportunity to realize his or her God-given potential. That means that our people are always striving for excellence and to set the standard for our businesses by which others will measure their success…” Lay said in an interview, published in the May/June 2002 issue of The [Wittenburg] Door http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/archives/kennethlay.html
On July 7, 2004, Kenneth Lay was indicted by a grand jury on 11 counts of securities fraud and related charges, and was found guilty on May 25, 2006 of 10 counts against him. Legal experts said Lay could have faced 20 to 30 years in prison. However, he died about three and a half months before his scheduled sentencing in October. Preliminary autopsy reports state that he died of a heart attack caused by coronary artery disease.
Fortune magazine had named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years. However, Enron’s global reputation was undermined by persistent rumours of bribery and political pressure to secure contracts in Central America, South America, Africa, and the Philippines. Especially controversial was its $3 billion contract with the Maharashtra State Electricity Board in India, where it is alleged that Enron officials used political connections within the Clinton and Bush administrations to exert pressure on the board. After a series of scandals involving irregular accounting procedures perpetrated throughout the 1990’s involving Enron and its accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Enron underwent one of the largest bankruptcies in corporate history, it’s “healthy” financial condition had been sustained mostly by institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud.
All of this talk about the moral failures of Christians and the moral accomplishments of others doesn't prove anything. Why do you all seem to think the Church has failed? Why don't you all get together and start a new movement...you know...one that's true. Because nobody has gotten it right until you all came along. What a bunch of garbage.
I think Hope International does such micro financing. I believe they blend in offering child assistance and teach the Gospel.
Brian-
I believe you make a fatal error in asking questions like 'why didn't a Christian come up with this idea?' as if to say it was wrong for a non-Christian to 'beat us to the punch' or something. quite absurd, actually. The Bible you preach out of on Sundays says that 'every good and perfect gift comes from above' and all things that happen in this world come as a result of God empowering ALL PEOPLE with gifts. Does one need to be a christian for it to 'count' for you? Christians and non-christians ought to attach themselves to anything that is good in God's eyes. And you/I both know this was/is good in God's eyes...so who cares which human came up with it. Their 'idea' was implanted by God.
Right?
-Tristan
Brian, I think you are so hasty to provide support for your personal point of view that you must not have done even surface research on the topic. There are many Christian groups that for years have made micro loans to develop small business enterprise on the mission field. This is not a new idea at all.
The secular press, however, tends to overlook their activities. You, apparently did the same.
I raised money back in the late 70's for Mission of Mercy so that we could make micro loans to small business people in Calcutta, India.
And, as far as Christian business leaders, I could direct you to far more upright, high-integrity businesspeople who consistently practice their faith in word and deed than these "highlight reels" provided by the critics. Sure, there are some prominent examples of professing Christians who did wrong, but like the prophet complaining that he was the only one left serving God, don't think these are the rule. They are simply the exceptions always used by finger-pointers.
Brian, why are so interested in looking at the glass half-empty, when there are so many wonderful things done in the Body of Christ by so many dedicated believers? I must be missing something here.
Hi Joe,
I was afraid people would mis-interpret that last line.
I'm sure Christians have been doing micro-enterprise for years. I'm sure a few even beat Yunus himself to the punch.
My point is that Christians WERE NOT the first to create a global bank to provide micro-enterprise loans and encourage people of all faiths (and people of no faith) to invest in that bank and successsfully do so over a long period of time.
That feat, I'm sure you're well aware of, has never been done to the scope and scale of Yunus.
What Yunus has done is create a model which, in turn, Christians are now emulating.
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