Encouragement

I just would like to share with all you dutch-reading guys the weblog of my brother Arjen:

http://www.eternaltrust.web-log.nl/

I think it is great he writes about his relationship with God. You can immediately see the difference in personality; where my blog has more of an philosophical edge, his blog is much more in a poetic form. As he is probably the one amongst us brothers who is most in touch with his own feelings. This message is just an encouragement to him to keep writing. I hope some of you will take a look and enjoy his creativity.

Johannesburg Intro

Two years after my first trip with Livingstone to Victory4all in Jeffrey's Bay (SA) I am returning to the rainbow nation. In august of this year I will again make a trip to South Africa with Livingstone, but this time to Johannesburg (SA):

We will be with a group of 14 people and visit Johannesburg for three weeks. Goal of our trip will be to visit MES (Metro Evangelical Services):



MES is an interdenominal, multi-cultural, faith- and community-based organisation working from Hillbrow and the inner-city of Johannesburg, striving to change the heart of the city.

We will help MES for this period to work on a school building and next to that do some child work.

This is the first year groups of Livingstone will visit the MES, and we will be the second group. Jeannette, whom I met at the leadership training weekend, and I will lead this journey as a team.The first group is an existing group from a church in Amsterdam, our group is formed with people wo did not know each other. Jeannette and I have already had a training weekend for leaders and after that we had a Livingstone participant training day with the whole group. Yesterday Jeannette and I met the leaders of the MES (Francois Pienaard and his wife...) from South Africa in Amsterdam together with Johannesburg 1. It was a very pleasant meeting and every step makes me more and more looking forward to the actual journey to South Africa.

This is most of the basic information, look for more also on the Livingstone Johannesburg 2 2007 hyve. In the forthcoming period and during the trip I hope to keep you all updated through my blog on what's happening...

Atheism

I am still enjoying a lot of TED talks and discussing them with friends. An interesting talk is the talk of Richard Dawkins on militant atheism. I am a christian myself, but I think it is important to keep the connection with the world around and have some knowledge of alternate viewpoints. What surprises me is that I expected to feel much more of an attack to my faith, but this is not the case. Even if I would have experienced that, than the last sentence of his talk ("Let's stop being so *** respectful") would have wiped this away because it communicates in hatred, at least in my opinion.

His arguments are not convincing to me because the most:

• Attack the church, not personal faith in a personal God
• He does not answer the real fundamental questions; If things came into existence through evolution, how did the process of evolution come into existence and why?
• He violates scientific rules, for example when he states that 5,5 % of biology scientists and 7,5 % of physical scientists believe in a God and that he would be surprised if this percentage differed in other fields such as history or philosophy. I think this is a generalisation you cannot make this simple.
• States opinion instead of fact, for example:
  "The scientific world view is more exciting, poetic, more filled with shere wonder than anything in the poverty stricken arsenals of religious imagination"
  In my opinion the beauty in science states the grandeur of God because science only tries to explain what God has created. Science only worked with the material given by God, it never created by itself.

Richard specifies why he believes in atheism and not in:

• Agnosticism, who say they do not know whether there is a God or not. Richard says atheism is better because as an agnostic you would have to prove there is no God. He says as an atheist you state that it is the problem of the creationist to prove there is a God.
• Humanism, because it is not about humans, we are just one species among thousands
• Naturalist, because it is to vague and confusing
• Non-theist would maybe be better, because it is not a taboo, but the taboo mabye better because it has more impact if people can be reached with it.

Further I think his talk mostly communicates his faith in science. I call it faith, as faith is conviction or believe that surpasses what is objective measurable. We christians have faith in a God that is not objectively measurable. I think Richard has so much expectations of and confidence in science that it much more than is objectively justifiable. So I would say science is his faith.