Finding God in the Waves Quotes

“The cross was not God’s invention—it was ours. The cross was an instrument of torture, a method of intimidation created by an empire that needed to keep its conquered cities in check. In all our need for an eye for an eye, I have to wonder sometimes if Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is an answer not to God’s wrath, but to ours. I have to wonder if God, having listened to us cry for blood, decided to offer his own. Perhaps Jesus hung on a cross to demonstrate the inevitable outcome of retributive justice in the face of an empire that used violence to expand, that survived only by placing societies under its oppressive heel. Jesus didn’t hold up a sword in response to a sword. He took the sword into His side, and in doing so, revealed our brutality for what it was.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Brené Brown says that the opposite of faith is not doubt. Faith and doubt need each other. The opposite of faith is certainty,” Bradley said. “When I heard that, I realized, no wonder I was such a screwed-up Fundamentalist. But when I let the doubt just be there, my faith grew.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Prayer became less about asking God for something and more about being in God’s presence.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“I’ve heard skeptics satirically summarize the substitutionary atonement approach to Christianity this way: “God sent himself in the form of his own son to sacrifice himself to himself so that he could save humanity from himself.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Van Gogh's view of the world becomes a lamp that reveals corners of my heart that I didn't know were there- and all of this happens immediately, even though he died 88 years before I was born.
So ask yourself this:

Is The Starry Night infallible?
The questions doesn't make sense. Though grammatically sound, it is a query with no meaning. I could just as easily ask "How much does a sunset weigh?" The beauty of The Starry Night isn't in it being fallible or infallible. It's a window into another person's soul.
Let's try another question:

Is The Starry Night true?
If we're talking logic or math, this question is as nonsensical as the first. But if we ask with the perspective of an artist or philosopher, we might find that, yes, The Starry Night is very true- it tells us truths about the human experience. It's a testament to how grief feels and the numinous quality we often experience when we peer deeply into the night sky...

It is somehow more true than facts- it resonates in some deeper chamber of the human heart.
So let me ask you two more questions:

Is the Bible infallible? Is it true?”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“If you’re a Christian who wonders what to do with someone who’s in doubt, consider these words carefully: Love and grace speak loudly. The first and best response to someone whose faith is unraveling is a hug. Apologetics aren’t helpful. Neither are Scripture references. The first thing a hurting person needs is to know they’re not alone. My path back to God was paved with grace by those who received my doubt in love.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Let’s say that you and I are close friends, but after an argument one night, you stole my car and drove it into a lake. This is a serious crime with a serious penalty—let’s say $10,000 in damages and three years spent in prison. Now imagine you came to me and apologized, expressing sincere regret and grief over your actions. What if I responded by telling you I could forgive you, but only if my daughter took your place in prison and paid the fine on your behalf, because I am a merciful and just friend. My mercy compels me to forgive you, but my justice demands that the crime be punished. This is the exact picture that most Christians paint of God: a God who offers no choice but to demand punishment for sins. But if a good friend of mine wrecked my car, I could simply forgive that friend without anyone’s being punished. I’m a nice guy but certainly not the embodiment of perfect love—so why can I forgive with no strings attached but God can’t?”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“You can know God intimately while acknowledging the mystery, even the absurdity, of such a notion. You can experience the proven neurological benefits of prayer even as you contemplate how science shows prayer's limitations. You can be part of the global body of people who follow God without turning off your brain or believing things that go against your conscience. You can read he Bible without having to brush off its ancient portrayal of science or its all-too-fruquent brutality.

And you can meet a risen Son of God named Jesus while wondering how such a thing could ever be true.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“These days, my intercessory prayers are an act of surrender—a way to voice my hopes and my hopelessness, my power to act and my powerlessness. When I pray for things I hope for, I am searching for ways I can act to make a situation better. When I pray in situations I”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“That this network is complex explains much about our faith. It explains why people with higher activity in their frontal lobes will be drawn to apologetics or theology—they want to know how God works. On the other hand, people with higher activity in their limbic systems will know God through feelings and have little concern with rational justifications for God’s existence. They know God because they feel God. Either”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“We live in interesting times, don’t we? We’ve got atheists in churches and Christians who would never dream of stepping into a house of worship.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“But listening to actual atheists taught me that most atheists simply want to be free to believe as they wish, without persecution from the faithful.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“The first and best response to someone whose faith is unraveling is a hug. Apologetics aren’t helpful. Neither are Scripture references. The first thing a hurting person needs is to know they’re not alone. My path back to God was paved with grace by those who received my doubt in love.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“I'm not the only person who carries a lot of assumptions when I read the Bible, and it can be tough to entertain the idea that the Word of God has different perspectives in it. Biblical apologists spend all their time weaving these different viewpoints into a single frame, in an effort that often looks like squids playing Twister: fascinating, appalling, and hard to follow. We've seen what this approach to history can sow: a destructive oversimplification of the Church's past.
Americans treat their national narrative in much this way, too. We simplistically teach a single story in our history classrooms, of brave rebels who left cultures of tyranny and heroically crossed the Atlantic to found a nation built on freedom and justice. When we speak of our national sins, such as the genocide committed on Nation Americans or the brutal, longterm economic extraction of wealth from black bodies via slavery and segregation, we seem to dismiss these troubling matters as things that happened in the remote past but that have been resolved today.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“You're finding that atheism isn't a belief system. It's just a lack of belief in God. You can't build a life on that. It's like trying to build a league of people who don't play golf. Total nonsense.
But let's look at things with new eyes. Was the sunrise any less beautiful today just because it won't be around forever? Is the time with your family worthless because it won't be around forever? Is life any less of a gift just because it's a result of physics?
So, God gave you meaning. Do you still care about the needy? Do you still want to be a good father? Then do those things, make them your life's purpose. You don't need some God to tell you to be good--you can be good on your own. And isn't that more meaningful? To love and to make the world a better place because you choose to?
...
You get one life, one shot to find every beautiful sight, to help others, and to enjoy the odd series of events that allow a bag of organic molecules to know they exist. Don't waste it.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Belief in things unseen is one thing; belief in things without evidence is another. And this latter kind of belief has a problem: How do you know what to believe? If God reveals Himself to us, but we have no empirical way of verifying that revelation, how do we know if that revelation is correct?”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“In the beginning, there was a rapid expansion of a Singularity. Around 380,000 years later, there was light. There was also hydrogen and helium and four stable, fundamental forces of physics. Atoms and those forces worked together to birth the first stars from massive clouds of gas, and those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died in explosions that spread their matter across the sky in clouds of gas and dust—now with heavier elements than what existed before. The forces of physics worked together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies. As the cycle repeated, heavier elements formed planets orbiting those stars, emerging from disks of gas and dust like dust bunnies under your bed. In our universe, planets can exist only because a few generations of stars died and were reborn. The rebirth of stellar matter into planets is how our Earth came to be. This planet, our home, is covered with a film of life unlike any we’ve yet seen anywhere else in the universe. As far as we know today, it is unique. A blue marble floating in the dark. Earth’s life is fed by a process in which carbon from the air and minerals in the soil are attached together by the energy of photons via photosynthesis in plants. In this process, everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice of the nearest star. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bush, every microscopic algae on this planet is a resurrected form of the Sun’s energy. I capture that energy by consuming other things that have died. Every time I eat a meal, the dead matter that made those plants and animals literally gives life to my body through digestion and my metabolism. One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to giving life to something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own Sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our Sun’s dust will meet with other stars’ remnants and form new stars and planets of their own. The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, and resurrection.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“I know what it’s like to know right from wrong without the aid of divine laws, instead relying on careful examination of how human actions can violate others’ consent and produce suffering.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“One day, when Jon and I must have been nine or ten, we were talking about God. This was a big moment, because Jon’s family didn’t go to church, and he didn’t talk about God very much, but now, while we stood in my driveway, he was being open and sharing his beliefs. Jon said he thought God was like a filing clerk. His desk was full of cards, and those cards comprised our reality. This divine Clerk had cards for physics, biology, historical events, future events, people, and everything everywhere. God spent his time filling out these cards and keeping them organized. I laughed at him. I couldn’t help it. Jon’s idea about God was so ridiculous and wrong. After all, I was an expert on God—I studied him every week at church, and I even knew him personally. I’d been saved and baptized. Here was Jon, so much smarter than I, and he didn’t understand God at all. I have to admit, the thought made me feel pretty proud of myself. After I stopped laughing, I started to tell Jon about the one true God of the Bible and His Son, Jesus. But Jon didn’t want to listen. His eyes were watering, and his face was red, too. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to cry or yell at me. I think a lot of us do what I did in that moment. We have experiences with God that are beautiful and moving, but over time, they just become things that make us feel superior to other people.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“The Loving God affects the brain in ways that are remarkably different from the Angry God. People who focus on God’s love develop thicker, richer gray matter in their prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. This development offers them better focus, concentration, compassion, and empathy. They have lower stress levels and lower blood pressure, and it’s easier for them to forgive themselves and others. Over time, they even show less activity in the amygdala. Even more, people who believe that God is loving will eventually develop a characteristic asymmetry in the activity of their thalamus. When that happens, God’s love becomes implanted in their sense of identity, and they begin to see the world as being basically safe. This not only allows the believer to experience peace—it also elevates her capacity to take risks for the sake of others. For those who know the Loving God, the risk of being hurt in relationships is less important, because God’s love will transcend that hurt.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“So let's make a deal. I will try to do the best I can to do good in the world. I will serve others, and I will work against suffering. But I have to keep asking these questions about your justice and mercy. And I can't forget about science.
Let's just keep talking about this, You an I. I don't ever want to be away from you again. I can't do that anymore.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“People are down on Evangelicalism these days, but even my earliest years of life showed me that Evangelical churches are great at doing a whole lot of important things. When an active member of an Evangelical church dies, the family of the departed receives immense support during their grieving. Dealing with the influx of casseroles and baked hams delivered to the homes of the bereaved can become a logistical issue, and their grass is mowed as if by elves.
What I'm saying is that it's easy to stand on the outside and dismiss Evangelicals as crazy Fundamentalists, but this misses most of what the movement really is (or, at least, is supposed to be). I'm not an Evangelical anymore, but it was Evangelicals who showed me how to...be a good employee and how to live my life with integrity. And Evangelicals were there for me when my life fell apart.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“So, do I think it’s OK not to know what you believe and still be a part of the Church? Heck, yeah. In fact, I think that’s exactly what following Jesus is about.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

“I think a lot of do what I did in that moment. We have experiences with God that are beautiful and moving, but over time they just become things that make us feel superior to other people.”
― Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science