Captain's Corner

I was raised in the church. Those of you who have experienced the same know what a loaded statement this could be. Those of you who don’t share that experience probably just shivered. But that’s okay. The way I look at life is such that I regret only the times when I haven’t learned from my experience… because that was a wasted opportunity.

So, in my years in church I have seen the best and the worst of Christians. But the one thing that always sort of confused me was when Christians have decided, despite glaringly obvious evidence to the contrary, that they, and they alone, believe XYZ and furthermore they are the only ones who could possibly feel, believe, or think this way because they have the true revelation about God.

Now I don’t want this to degrade into some kind of theological debate… sure there are some things that only the Spirit of God will reveal to believers, but many things that I’ve heard this said about just aren’t true.

I’ll give you a for instance… back when abortion was really the buzz word/issue of the day, the Religious Right made a huge deal of the sanctity of human life… and that it wasn’t just a choice a woman made about her body, but a choice she made about another human life. Of course at the same time the Religious Right all but ignored the people living and dying in poverty every day, but back to what I was saying: there was lots of talk about the sanctity of human life… I even remember going to Liberty University in the mid to late ’90′s and people were still debating it with many of the students insisting that only Christians would fully value that life because of their beliefs.

That brings us to last Saturday when I was listening to Audioslave on the way to church. Their new album just came out and after I had listened to it a couple of times, I decided to listen through all three of their albums just to get an overall view of their music.

For those of you who don’t know, Audioslave is made up of Chris Cornell, the former lead singer of Soundgarden and Tom Morello and company, formerly of Rage Against the Machine. I have always been a fan of Chris Cornell’s work… through Soundgarden, his solo projects, and now into Audioslave. Looking at the lyrics he has spent his life writing you can definitely see a spiritual journey occurring. I am not in any way under the impression that he is a believer, but I definitely see him seeking and God pulling him closer.

Anyway, back on topic, I got to the song Exploder off of their first album. The song is about justice in a broad sense. The first verse deals with a man who is wrongly incarcerated and the second with the mentally infirm, but it was the third verse that caught my attention. Here are the lyrics to it:

There was a man who had a face
It looked alot like me
I saw him in the mirror and I fought him in the street
Then when he turned away I shot him in the head
Then I came to realize I had killed myself

What I walked away from the song with was this sense of the sanctity of human life. Sure the reasoning is different, as Christians believe in the sanctity of human life because it’s created in God’s image, and here Cornell is implying that there should be a sanctity of that same life because the person is of equal value to myself.

It just really made me stop and think about how we as Christians have been taught to view and talk to non-believers… Usually we’re taught that we have some secret, and thus we’re better than them and maybe, one day, they’ll wind up being as good as me because they’ll know the secret. Funny thing is, the secret is that we’re just as desolate and depraved as they are, but have found forgiveness… Too bad we don’t act like that’s what the secret is, huh?

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