Anything Can Be Inspiring

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What inspires you? Perhaps a moving speech, a heroic act you want to emulate, a perfectly executed piece of music that makes you want to pick up an instrument? When I think of being inspired this is the kind of thing I think of. Hell, I myself was inspired to start this blog in large part due to several well done blogs and podcasts, The Atheist Experience being chief among them. But these are the kinds of things that inspire us when we aren't expecting it. When I found TAE, I was just bored and looking for something to fill the time while I was commuting. The fact that it had such an effect on me was actually quite a shock.

But what happens when we go out and look for inspiration? It seems to me that when we want inspiration we will find it anywhere. If you hear a vague statement, you will read into it what you need. This is basically how cold readings work, isn't it? The "psychic" throws out a bunch of random crap and people will latch onto whatever they can.

It gets worse when you expect something to be inspirational, in those cases, you can find inspiration in things that should be repulsive to you. Look at many of the stories in the old testament, Noah's Ark for example. A story about God murdering nearly every person on the planet has been turned into a children's story. People come in expecting it to be good and so they see it as good, even though the content of the actual story is pretty horrific.

I think many Christians do this a lot when they read the bible, they expect wisdom on every page and that is what they find. Much of the time there is nothing there, and yet they see brilliance. You can see this play out for yourself if you follow a bunch of Christians on twitter like I do. They will often tweet bible verses, which I had originally expected to be all about love, compassion, and so forth. What I see, however, is quite different, they seem to tweet any random verse at all. It almost seems like they opened their Bible to a random page, picked a random verse on that page, and tweeted it. It got me wondering if that is pretty close to what really happened, they asked God for inspiration, opened their Bible randomly (In their mind they are guided by God's hand I'm sure) and started reading. After doing this, they found the inspiration that they desperately needed, regardless of what verse they landed on. This verse now holds some meaning to them and they tweet it out. This is obviously some wild speculation on my part, but it is the best explanation I have come up with for the constant stream of random verses I see posted to twitter.

Hebrews 12

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Jesus, Founder and Perfecter of Our Faith (v. 1-2)

Use all of these examples [from last chapter] as motivation to set aside sin and run this race with endurance.

I'm assuming the race we are running is our lives? Basically this is saying to be inspired by people of the past to be good people. That sounds pretty good.

Guzik agrees with me that the witnesses are the examples of faith from the previous chapter, that's nice.

v2 "looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God."

I had a little trouble parsing that verse, so I figured I'd just post it here for discussion. It looks like Jesus had the right hand of the throne set before him, I think that is the joy that is mentioned. However, to get there, he had to die on the cross, and therefore he endured the cross. Apparently the fact that he endured the cross caused him shame and he despises that fact.

I'm not sure if I am understanding this verse correctly, but this is the only way I could make sense of it. For good measure I scanned through some other translations and this still is the best I can do. From this passage it seems that Jesus wanted that seat at the right hand of God and was willing to go through the same of dying on the cross, although it pissed him off. 

According to Guzik, the point of the shame is that many people are willing to do things for Christ as long as it won't cause them shame, but they should be willing to take some shame for Jesus. He does seem totally on board with the idea that Jesus is in this for the glory though.

Do Not Grow Weary (v. 3-17)

We all have to endure our struggle against sin, but this is just Jesus disciplining us. Discipline always sucks at the time, but through it we grow stronger. You should grow from your struggle against sin and be good always. Help other people with their struggle so that they can stay holy, don't let roots of bitterness spring up and cause trouble.

Basically saying your struggle with sin is for your own good. I guess this is essentially an attempt to answer the problem of evil. There is a logic to the idea, we grow stronger through struggle and pain, but of course it doesn't really solve the problem in a universe run by an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.

Guzik does seem to agree with my interpretation that this is an answer to the problem of evil. He says that God doesn't choose evil, but he allows it to happen as nothing happens outside of his purpose. So basically he's using the free will argument. This of course doesn't answer the question of horrible natural disasters, or man made things that are horrendous in scope, like the holocaust to pick the easy example. 

He does spend a lot of time talking about the other details of the section, that hardship is ultimately good as we learn from it and such. This I do agree with, depending on how hard the hardship is.

v16 "[see to it] that no one is sexually immoral..."

Seriously, why does sex always have to be bad in the bible?

A Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken (v. 18-29)

Once again, I find this section thoroughly confusing, but I will do my best to summarize.

v18-21 seem to be describing a bad place, hell maybe? a blazing fire, a tempest, hearers who beg not to be further spoken to.

v22-24 seem to shift gears, they speak of mount zion, heavenly Jerusalem, angel gatherings.

They are talking about heaven? I'm guessing they are trying to contrast the 2 places? I don't know. I taught math, I never had to grade essays, I guess I can start now. F, see me.

Apparently we are trying to go up mount Zion instead of Mt Sinai like the Jews. I don't know how the hell I was supposed to tell that the first part was mount Sinai and the second was mount Zion.

v25-29 Do not refuse God, for those who did when he warned him on earth were unable to escape, so how can we escape now that he is warning us from heaven. He shook the earth and said he will once more shake the earth and heaven. He will shake heaven to remove things so that all that remains are things that can't be shaken, we should be grateful to receive a kingdom that can't be shaken.

Terrible. I can't even really figure out what this is trying to tell me. Basically listen to God is the bottom line I guess, but the actual words they are using to convey the message are garbage. If God shakes heaven to get rid of the undesirable stuff how can you follow that up by saying that it is unshakable? So it's saying that we got rid of the stuff that falls away so the remaining stuff is unshakable, but at the very least we are going there, so new stuff is coming in. That's it, I'm not doing more here, this is shit. F, seriously.

I guess things being shaken up is supposed to be God changing the rules. So he changed the rules once but he won't again. Fool me once...

For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation)

Good:

12:1 Use historical (and mythical) figures as inspiration to live good lives

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,"

Bad:

12:16 Sex is bad

"[see to it] that no one is sexually immoral..."