Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan, utilizing a 14-year study of over 12,000 participants, revealed a 22% lower risk of depression for monthly attenders (hazard ratio 0.78, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.95), compared with nonattenders, after controlling for age, household income, family and personal history of depression, marital status, education, and perceived social support. The researchers believe that this may be due to attenders enhanced ability to regulate emotion.
So what does this mean? How do you respond to research like this? Below are my thoughts.
This isn’t surprising. In my own life, I’ve found that being a Christian provides me a way of viewing the world in order to handle emotional lows. When tragedy strikes, the Christian response is to still trust in God. In fact, sometimes tragedy causes more trust. And this brings me to an issue that some people have with Christianity; isn’t Jesus just a crutch? I’d say yes. Jesus is a crutch.
And he’s a good one.
There’s about 8% of Canadians struggling with major depression and lots more that deal with depression everyday. There are various legitimate treatment options that I don’t disagree with. But in the thought of preventative medicine, this whole church thing seemed to do okay. I’m not arguing against what a doctor prescribes. But here’s what I think we forget sometimes: we cannot simplify our bodies to neurons, synapses, and chemicals. We are more than a bag of atoms. We have souls. And those souls need God. Everyone needs a crutch. Everyone needs something, or someone, to lean on in times of trouble. And that’s who God is. We were created with a God-shaped hole that too often goes empty or gets filled with a false, unsatisfying “god”. But the real God doesn’t just give you a crutch to hold you up, He actually gives you a whole new life to live.
There are so many other topics that this brings up. Does this research justify putting student funds towards churches that are nearby University campuses? Does this give an evidence-based reason for the government to tell the public to attend religious services? How does this research fit into a church world which is about much more than a Sunday morning service? Can this put the ‘exclusive religions are destructive to society’ arguments to rest? Could this affect your life right now? Could you consider the benefits of attending a Christian service?
All in all, it’s some interesting evidence. It’s something worth thinking about.
When death occurs around me I find it helpful to reflect on my own life. In the aftermath of Jack Layton’s death, it’s no different. To me, Jack Layton was a true Canadian leader. He inspired others with his passion and hope for the future. In his final letter to Canadians, he wrote this:
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
Inspirational.
And it causes me to reflect. How loving am I? How hopeful am I? How optimistic am I? And then it strikes me, and maybe the same strikes you… have I really accomplished ANYTHING in my life?
Jack Layton will be remembered for centuries… what of me and you? What accomplishments can ever compare to his? What can I ever do?
I’ve grown up hearing the words “you can do anything you want”, and the popular slogan of “you decide your future”… but these lines frustrate me. Why? Two reasons.
1. Because I tend to think of what I can do – rather than appreciating the works of others. Even now. Look at this blog post. I’ve made it all about me! How easily I focus on myself instead of others, although its likely only partly due to cultural slogans (I definitely deserve some blame for that).
2. Because I can arrogantly think I am the man who can do everything better than the other guy. Comparison is the poison which has infected our individualistic society by putting our personal report card marks next to “the average”. And that’s just one example. We love comparison. And it’s sickening.
So from this point on, I will try to love more, hope more, and be more optimistic. But what am I to do about my selfishness, my lack of appreciation, and my poison of comparison?
Let’s do this again. From this point on, I will love more, hope more, be optimistic, be selfless, be appreciative and compare less….. But now that I think of it… this all seems a little overwhelming…
This life is so much! One great man dies and can anyone take his place?!? The selflessness, the love for the common person… who is like this? Not I. I know I said I would not compare but the honest truth is that the bar has been set too high for me to reach! Call me a pessimist but I must say this: there are better men than me.
I simply aspire to more than I can achieve!
And you can tell me “be more optimistic”. But that’s the point! I can’t be optimistic all the time; sometimes reality gets to me. So yes. My aspirations and achievements do not line up. Surely I’m not the only one like this. We all are in the process of setting goals for September that likely won’t be kept past the third week of school.
And this is why I cling, with all the strength I have, to Jesus. Because to Jesus, my loving God, it is not about my achievements! It’s not about being the best man or the worst man… Jesus loves me because he loves me. That’s it. So that’s what I need to do. Believe in Jesus! He won’t love me more because of things I accomplish, nor love me less for failing to reach my goals. Its perfect love. And I can rest in that, be motivated in that, and tell others about that.
People are hopeful by nature. We need something to hope in – real or unreal. For some people it’s their career, for some people it’s Jesus and for others it’s a hockey team. This hope becomes your heaven. You are waiting for it; you want to experience it; your whole life will be built around this hope.
You will create hell when your false hope for heaven doesn’t come true.
Ever wonder why people seem to take the loses harder than they celebrate the wins?
Ever wonder why we desire more than we have; never finding true contentment?
Ever wonder why this world simply isn’t good enough?
Whether you like it or not, whether you believe in Buddha or hockey gods… we live in a world that isn’t good enough. We MUST hope for something more or else we can lose purpose altogether.
Go ahead… make that hope a hockey victory… make that hope a job offer… make that hope whatever you want. But I hope that you’ll have your hope in Jesus Christ. Because here’s the thing…
The comments below are that of the author only (me – Andrew Noble) and do not reflect any organization or group I have ever been a part of or am currently a part of.
And I guess this would be an awkward time to argue that a “loving” God would never judge someone. Yeah. Bad timing. That’d be awkward. I won’t argue that.
Better yet we could discuss politics, and if we should be implementing a death penalty in Canada for outrageous crimes. Yeah. That’d be awkward too. I won’t go there.
So what am I posting about?
I think pointing out hypocrisy is important – especially in religious people, or people who try to act very moral to others.
Is it okay to murder a murderer?
Is it just to kill a killer?
Most people find it easily acceptable to think this is okay with Osama. Rather than focusing on the behaviour instead of the person, we say the person is a bad apple and must be killed. We are “playing god” when we agree with statements like this. I mean deciding who should live and who should die should probably be left up to someone with a little more understanding wouldn’t you say? But that’s off the point.
My problem is that our moral, fluffy-loving culture complains about the Christian view of God: who judges people for their sins and potentially gives them what they deserve. People, including Christians, struggle with that view of God because our culture has made this view seem so ugly. They argue “God is love so therefore he cannot judge or condemn anyone”. But how many people in our culture (who like to play god) would say that God should love Osama and not give him any torment?
No we all say, kill the killer!
Where is the love though? Would anybody in the world be willing to stop that bullet from reaching bin Laden’s head? Probably not. He should get what he deserves. Right?
Let’s go into this justice vs love conflict a little deeper.
You hold to the eye-for-an-eye philosophy with Osama, but would you like the same standard for yourself? If you gossip negatively behind a friend’s back should they do the same behind yours’? If you cheat a few marks on your midterm should the prof cheat you a few marks on the final? If you make an exaggeration on your resume about some past duties you performed does your boss get to make an exaggeration about the salary you’ll actually receive? How about that awkward kid who always raises his/her hand in class that you make fun of with your friends – should you be treated the same way?
This is the problem with the eye-for-an-eye philosophy all alone. Not only does it lack the love our culture love, its simply never taken as a consistent approach. If you cannot take this philosophy seriously for yourself then you shouldn’t use it on someone else.
But wait – am I saying we shouldn’t have killed Osama?
I’m not commenting about that at all – I’m just showing how our fluffy-love culture finds it acceptable to show no love to a killer – using a system of beliefs (eye-for-an-eye philosophy) that they don’t even use for themselves. Its hypocritical.
But here is the good part.
My goal is actually for you to respond to situations with love and justice. But you will need a better system of beliefs. Let me tell you what you need.
You need a man, a real man, who is willing to stop the bullet, catch the grenade, and give of his own love so that the harm that was meant for you (in fair justice) is given to him instead of you. Then, your just mentality is protected by the love of this man. You can still take killing seriously. While also understand there can be forgiveness from it through this man. This man can’t be a wimp, but must be willing to take on the sins of the world. He’ll need power. He’ll need to be God himself to accomplish such an enormous task of taking the pain that should have been given to others.
You need Jesus. He is the man who is God, come down to us, to sacrifice his life to protect us from the pain we justly deserve.
Yes, this eye-for-an-eye thing makes sense, that’s why you wanted Osama dead! But you must also see that love makes sense! That the two can come together because of Jesus’ great love. Humans, as communities and individuals who screwed up, deserve a just & fair consequence for our actions. But it is Jesus who protects us against that consequence. Because he is that man.
If only we all believed this, so help us God.
If you are interested in what the Bible has to say about celebrating justice and loving our enemies, all with some very nice graphics, click this.
My friend James Kelly blogs about Christianity to a mostly Christian audience. Right now he’s working through prayer…. does it change God’s mind? I left my thoughts too.
ps. I’ve got 0.1% of the traffic that OMGUW has got. But I’m not doing this for the hits. This is more meant as a conversation starter. Conversations start here and can be carried on in person. On a side note I struggle with trying to sound too smart on here – in reality I’m very much figuring things out just like the rest of us.
Two upcoming things I want to blog about:
1. Top 5 reasons NOT to become a Christian
2. Letters to U… open letters of compliment and correction to unnamed people at uWaterloo. The inclusive-always girl. The campus-leader guy. The kinesiology student. The lonely-i-wanna-boyfriend girl. The my-life-revolves-around-my-gf guy. The i-wanna-be-popular guy. Mostly would be based on people I know in real life, what I would say to them as an encouragement and correction, and bringing good news into their life. Another title could be “I have good news for you”.
I read/scan through a number of blogs/paper articles/tweets. Every once in awhile I’ll try to repost some of the most important, interesting, and relevant information here. This will be anything from atheist arguments, to Christian apologetics (the defence of the faith) to news papers.
Jesus, the narrow door. What a man who has strongly shaped my theology/life said to mostly non-Christians.
Close with a quote:
(Likely in response to those who say the gospels/Bible is unreliable history because it was written by Christians/Jews etc.)
“If writing with a goal – whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic – implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda. . . a work shouldn’t be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story?”
If you’re interested at looking at various articles, statistics and just generally some places that I pieced together information for my ResLife conference talk – see below.
Sited in my presentation:
1. Religious Diversity in Canada – Statistic Canada / Horizons: click here
2. The Limits of Political Tolerance – Allison Harell (Queens University): click here
4. Why being “humble” – saying “there’s no way to know about God” is really arrogant – Timothy Keller: click here
5. Why Conservatives are more “tolerant” than liberals and better for the University – click here
Other articles of Interest:
What do Canadians really think about other religions? Macleans: click here
Young Canadians apparently going back to church. Stats click here. Personal Opinion Side Note – statistics on religion are very often misleading and poorly done.
A Buddhist writer saying we should all become Buddhists, which to her is more accepting and better for society: click here. Of coarse I disagree with her. I also find it humourous the amount of hypocrisy in her first few paragraphs.
Anything from LifeWay research. I follow the presidents blog closely here.
I looked at other stuff but I forget where now.
Feel free to email me for a copy of the presentation and anything else on your mind.
So just today, I talked to about 25 student leaders about Religious Diversity. I hit about 25 of the 45 slides I had prepared. I’ll somehow explain the full presentation on this blog sometime in the future (I present at Queen’s again in two weeks). Here are some comments I received (in bold), which were similar to my thoughts in general.
“Great auction activity, but it took too much time”
I did a group activity where people had to decide which values were most important and then bid on them. Took about 15 minutes to do and didn’t leave a ton of time for discussion and other points I wanted to make.
“I wish you had more time.”
Me too. Next time I’ll have less values to vote on. But there’s a lot of good stuff about this topic that I think people need to know so that they aren’t narrow, hypocritical and “intolerant”. Seriously though.
“It’s an important topic, great to hear someone talk about it”
I actually made this one of my points in the presentation. I think I misunderstood my audience though. If they disagreed with this point they wouldn’t be at the presentation. Next time, I’ll just use one slide instead of 8 to talk about the religious setting in our world, our culture, and our residences. So this point will be more assumed, and less argued.
“You seem rushed”
True story. I probably shouldn’t have prepared a 3 hour lecture lol. But I’m new at speaking, so I’m glad I got this practice.
“It needs to be more applicable to residence, and not just society”
I think I’m going to facilitate this by creating a Bulletin Board program for the next presentation. I do think there’s a lot in the approach though, so it’s hard to talk about specifics when each residence and school is different – celebrating a Jewish holiday at one residence (at York) may not work for another (in Waterloo). The approaches are most important. I need to emphasize which approaches are right and wrong (“tolerance” vs secularism vs common faith vs multi-faith vs Don evangelism vs Don restriction… hmmm maybe I go through each one of those one by one, maybe ask people to respond to which group they think they’re in???).
How to teach approaches? This is what I’m asking myself and you… given limited time which one of these teaching methods should I use? (comment here or on facebook):
1. Large Group Case Studies -If I’m confident I have the right approach (working on a base of equality and human rights) then I can spread that. (both case studies which be residence life focused!)
2. Small Groups Case Studies – Gives ability for everyone to work on a problem, but may lose the thrust of the presentation since people may be giving incorrect answers.
3. A well structured lecture -3 Main Points with examples.
4. Facilitated Discussion – After and during the Auction of values time, I interact and ask leading questions in order to bring them to my own conclusions. I was able to use some of this in the presentation but more is needed, and it would be appropriate.
WARNING: Powerpoints may cause injury upon poking.
As a side note, Dons can get confused. The first presentation I went to was on leaving a legacy, which was great. In the discussion, people talked about passing on the values that are important to them. People seemed to agree that it’s good to do this. However, in the context of a talk on “religious diversity” the first response was that you can’t enforce your values on others. This seems a little weird. One person mentioned that some values are okay to enforce but some aren’t. I asked him why. He said that religious values can’t be passed on through a Don, that’s not their role.
Why the double standard?
Another person pointed out later that a lot of societies built themselves on what was formally religion. True story! Yet at this point in history, because of the so-called decline in religion, people feel like values and religion can be kept separately. But religion is all about values!
This just goes to show how much diversity there is when thinking (and speaking) about this topic. People don’t know what to do, or how to approach this religious diversity that will make all parties happy. Somehow, we all seem to be making exclusive claims and exclusive rights for some people (and some values) and not others.
That’s because we have different values!
That’s why I suggested we hold on to very basic values. Simply equality and human rights. That’s it! You try to broadcast too many values and you’ll alienate other people.
I really wish I had time to show this video in the presentation, but it will nicely conclude my point for me (but ignore the politicalness of it and just think about enforcing values in residence).
In conclusion I would say my presentation was good, fun, and at least a little bit effective. I just wish I could say more, in less time. The major recurring theme in my life seems to be this (and yes I’m gonna go spiritual on you here, so watch out!):
I’m not good at efficiently managing time. This not only affects me but also others. But Jesus Christ’s love is not based on my effectiveness. I, undeserved as it is, unfair as it is, received love and receive love in Jesus.
I’m so tempting to feel hurt by the negative comments; so tempted to get cocky and prideful with the positive comments. But that’s not how Jesus’ gospel works! I must believe in the gospel! Jesus Christ loves me no matter what! He died for me and all my screwups, and he gives me a righteousness that exceeds the pharisees, the Dons, and my own.
Watch this commercial (Nike will pay me 10% of profits if you do):
Back story (skip this if you follow basketball): Lebron James grew up in Akron, near Cleveland. Got drafted by Cleveland and played there for 7 seasons. This summer was the end of his contract, he decided to play with two all-stars: Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh instead of staying with Cleveland or going to a team with less skilled players. The media and many people, including Michael Jordan, attacked Lebron’s decision as weak. He shouldn’t need other players to win a championship. He’s ruined his legacy.
The Commercial
This is one of the clearest examples of post-modernism I’ve ever seen. Who is Lebron James? It never answers the question, it shows a bunch of options and leaves you with a sense that you should accept Lebron as a multi-faceted person and player. Lebron simply asks you the question, and never defines himself.
Do you call him the villian?
Do you call him the comedian?
Lebron never gives you the answer one way or another – this is post-modernism; allowing all thoughts and paths to knowledge to be acceptable. But think about Lebron James, put yourself in his shoes. Care about a celebrity for one second! What do you think he wants to be known as? Do you think he wants to be called a bad role model, traitor, or villian?
Ofacoarse not – the dude wants to be the King. King James.
Like the commercial shows, there are many things you can call Lebron James, but I’m arguing that Lebron only wants to be called one central thing – the King. Everything else is offensive to him. And calling him a traitor or bad model may be okay in your own eyes, but to him that’s going to be ridiculous. At that point you no longer become a fan of Lebron James, but rather someone who is against him!
We Do The Same Thing To God
We call God different things, and we are okay with it. Would you say it’s okay for Muslims and Christians to have completely different views about God? In our post-modern age many think this is okay. Just like Lebron James, it’s like we can give him any identity that we want. Ultimately, it’s subjective. But what does God say about himself? God cannot be okay with so many different identities being said to him. How dare you try to tell God who he is. How dare you try to tell Lebron James who he is. You’re no longer a fan at this point, you reject the King at this point! The question remains, and I’ll ask you:
No Bull... from Noble. 