Questions from the Unsettled Mind

Either God controls everything and we are not truly responsible, or we are free and God is not truly omnipotent. Most people choose a side and lose something vital. There is a third possibility.

In this episode:

• What is actually at stake: God's omnipotence, God's goodness, human freedom, moral responsibility, and truth itself

• The worry that a God who controls everything must also be the cause of evil

• Why "it is a contradiction, but both are true" is an evasion rather than an answer

• The determinist's strange position: protecting God's power by forbidding him to do something

• What omnipotence means if God chose to create genuinely free agents

• Why God's self-limitation in creating is faithfulness rather than weakness

Mentioned: omnipotence · the problem of evil · free will

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Pray more, read more, sing more. If you are asking this question, you have tried all that and found it didn't work. Why willpower alone loses to desire, and what Socrates offers instead.

In this episode:

• Why religion is not a shortcut around the ordinary human business of desire, agony and decay

• The reason knowing what is good carries so little emotional force when you need it

• Socrates on the parts of the soul: the part that reasons, the part that wants, and the part most people forget

• The soul imagined as a city, and why good rulers alone cannot govern it

• The spirited part as the soul's guardians, and how guardians are actually trained

• Music and gymnastic: two arts that bypass reason, and can be recruited by it

• Why fasting is better understood as military training than as piety

Mentioned: Socrates · the soul as a city · music and gymnastic · fasting

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Priests in collars, nuns in habits, hermits in the wilderness. If God's aim is to make us fully human, why set some people so visibly apart?

In this episode:

• Clerical dress as a uniform rather than a costume: it lets you see the office instead of the man

• Why some orders wear the habit always, and why a bishop's finery on a feast day follows the same logic. The uniform fits the mission

• The cloistered life: withdrawn from the world, engaged in its battles, and dependent on its support, like a submarine crew on patrol

• John the Baptist, and why Jesus's critics condemned John for being too strange and Jesus for being too worldly

• Why love, not oddity, is the point of every rite, and the error of supposing strangeness makes you holy

• "When God makes the saint, he does not unmake the man"

Mentioned: John the Baptist · St Paul on love in 1 Corinthians · the Incarnation · The Little Mermaid

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Religious people can come across as complete wackos: odd speech, odd dress, odd manners. Is that what faith is supposed to do to a person?

In this episode:

• Why the answer is no, and what the oddity usually reveals about a group's idea of what religion is for

• Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, and his question of why anyone would actually want the heaven on offer

• Hell-avoidance as the real motive, once people are pressed on what they want

• Why religions aiming at pure ascended spirits logically produce anti-human dress, speech and desire

• Jesus at the wedding at Cana, and the reputation he earned for the company he kept

• Why any religion that makes man the problem must be wrong: sin is a privation, not our nature

• What actually marks the Christian out, which is not strangeness but love

Mentioned: Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth · the wedding at Cana

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

In New Testament Greek, faith and believe are the same word: pistis and pisteuo. English hides that, and the difference turns out to matter a great deal.

In this episode:

• Why faith meant more than one thing from the very beginning of Christianity

• Three New Testament phrases, believe, believe in, and believe on, and how the prepositions change what is being asked

• Believing a person against believing in a person, tested on an equal: what "I believe in you" means said to a spouse

• What a politician is really asking for when he says "believe in me": practical faith between unequals

• What God is asking when the inequality is infinite, and why that is a different order of trust altogether

• Why walking by faith and not by sight never meant living irrationally

Mentioned: pistis and pisteuo · believe in and believe on

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Enough for what? Behind the question sits an old quarrel about faith and works, and underneath that, a picture of heaven as a place you get into.

In this episode:

• What heaven is not, and why it is better described as a who than a where

• Why heaven cannot be booked, cannot be snuck into, and cannot really be entered at all

• The greatest commandment as the key to both happiness and human destiny

• Why the Protestant and Catholic argument over faith and works dissolves once the real question is asked

• Romans 4 again: different means of grace offered at different points in human history

• Why the object of your faith matters more than the particular thing you are given to believe

Mentioned: Romans 4 · the greatest commandment

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Only a friend can really betray you, because only a friend was trusted enough to do it. So how do you find the real thing?

In this episode:

• Aristotle on friendship, and why human beings need one another even to become good

• Friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and the rare third kind he called complete friendship

• Why people committed to wisdom, justice, courage and moderation are predictable, and why that is exactly what makes them trustworthy

• The uncomfortable first step: name the three things you are currently doing wrong

• Why such friends are rare, and where you would actually go to find them

• Why the same test applies to choosing a spouse, and how Jane Austen built her novels on it

Mentioned: Aristotle · the cardinal virtues · Jane Austen

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

In every other part of life we are told to follow the evidence. Why is religion the one subject where asking for reasons is treated as a failure of faith?

In this episode:

• The two standard answers: that religious truth is too high for human minds, and that our minds are too damaged to trust

• Why both answers have to rely on the very reason they are discrediting

• If God is infinite, does finite reason fail? What we already manage with other things we cannot exhaust

• Why there are infinitely many things we cannot know about God, and why that is no argument against knowing some

• Where this leaves the honest inquirer: you are going to have to go and look

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Ask an honest question about the faith and you may be met with bewilderment, irritation, or hostility. Why is guilt so welcome in Christian life when doubt is treated as a betrayal?

In this episode:

• The four replies a doubter typically meets, and what each one reveals about the responder

• Guilt drives us toward the good; doubt drives us toward the truth. So why is only one of them encouraged?

• Why a voiced doubt is uncomfortable for religious authorities in a way that private guilt never is

• Dogma treated as simply what is to be believed, and what that does to questions

• Fear of the truth as the deepest reason doubt gets discouraged, and what changes when doubts are followed

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Who should I marry? What career should I take? People want God to have a plan for them, but would they recognise it if he gave them one, and what does it say about a life if he hasn't?

In this episode:

• The two fears underneath the question: that God doesn't much care, and that an unplanned life doesn't much matter

• Why your significance is not a treasure map with an X at the end of it

• How God has actually communicated when he wanted something known: the burning bush, the ten plagues, Sinai

• Why a thought or feeling that arrives in your head is not revelation, however strong it feels

• "God led me to do this" as an imposition of our will onto God, and the authority it quietly claims over everyone else

• Where God's will genuinely is specific, and where he leaves you to do the thinking

Mentioned: Moses and the burning bush · the ten plagues · Mount Sinai

This question also appears in Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.