So...what does your faith believe?

Here are four popular religious urban legends. Are they true or false?

1. U.S. space scientists have discovered a "lost day," one day of astral time that can't be accounted for. This confirms the account in Joshua 10:12-13 of God's halting the sun in the sky for a day.
2. A Belgian supercomputer nicknamed "the Beast" is gathering data about every person on earth.
3. Appearing on "60 Minutes" in 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno said that anyone who believed the Bible was a dangerous cultist.
4. Lightning struck a church during a sermon moments after the preacher identified thunder as the voice of God.

( Answers )

[Quiz source: A sidebar in an article on religious urban legends and cites Snopes.com and TruthOrFiction.com as sources.]

The main article quotes Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor of theology and law at Biola University - yes, a Christian university:

"Urban legends offer a great lesson on why people accept things that don't have any factual basis," he said. "And, unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons why Christians believe baloney."

Modern churches aren't catechizing believers as thoroughly as in the past, he says, leaving many Christians with a superficial understanding of church history and theology. And many tend to accept beliefs from an authority, such as a pastor, without understanding the basis of those beliefs.

That, right there, is why I'm glad that my church requires months of catechism - aka Christian initiation classes - before baptism. It's not that you have to jump through hoops; when I took the class, it was about deciding whether you could, yourself, honestly answer the questions (if you follow this link, you're looking for the heading "Presentation and Examination of the Candidates" through "The Baptismal Covenant"). But yes, we discussed that literal biblical inerrancy - that the bible is what science would consider literal fact - isn't even a couple hundred years old. And so on. It was quite a good experience for someone raised fundamentalist.

Urban legends, Lewis said, can serve as object lessons for discussion of questions like, "How do you know anything is true?" and, "Why should I believe Billy Graham rather than Jim Jones?"

Those questions have serious implications, he said. "You're cult bait if you don't use your mind."

This also reminds me of what Paul Campos characterized as Materialism's leap of faith:

Consider three statements: 1. Torturing a child for one's own sexual gratification is evil. 2. Shakespeare is a better writer than George Lucas. 3. Human beings have free will. An intellectually honest materialist must reject all these claims. At most, he can recharacterize them in much weaker forms. So, for example, he can observe that in our society sadistic pedophilia is considered evil, and that it's this social judgment that determines the content of morality.

[...]

Materialism, as a philososphical doctrine, has the great advantage that it reduces the catalog of things that actually exist to those which can be investigated by science. It has the great disadvantage that it requires treating as illusions morality, art, free will, and much else that most people call "reality." That, of course, does not make it false. It does, however, make it literally incredible to anyone who hasn't made the leap of faith materialism requires.

All worldviews require a leap of faith - whether it's so you can believe that humans can talk to God, or believe that "reality consists of nothing but particles in fields of force, and that all events are caused solely by the operation of mindless physical laws." Just be aware of what you are choosing & why. Make a choice. :)