If you do bad can it be fixed by doing good? Is there a ying and yang at work?

Chris and Pete run into the logic of the balance of good an evil, how can I make up for things, and find that maybe they have it all wrong. So what is balance, can we make it make sense? Is fighting for balance a fallacy? Do we accidentally fail? Is this idea of balance rubbish. And if so, why? Is it possible we have got a wrong idea about sin and wrong?

Chris and Pete get out the archaeology tools and look at what it says about the very old and strange book, the bible. Is archaeology a support of faith or of religion, and should we trust archaeology more than faith, bible or logic? Can we see through one to find truth in the other? Faith or Archaeology? Is science good at discovering stuff we need to know? If findings of science show stories in the bible to be false, should we throw one of them out, and does it matter? Can we care less?

Chris and Pete delve into the writings of Dom Paul DeLatte from 1902 to see if this old mouldy stuff has anything to tell us today. Is it our duty to be joyful? And is that Happy? Was it different back then and have we lost the discipline of Joy. What about people who fast, is that joyful? Why don’t kids need to be told to play joyfully? And can we be disciplined to life with joy?

Advertising and Art guru Charles Saatchi has a go at the ten commandments… Chris and Pete wonder if he might be onto something. Is the ten commandments an outdated thing? How do we live now that makes them ignorable? Are we better now and no longer need these ‘rules’? And what has advertising done to us? How are we shaped by desire for things they sell us? What do those ten commandments mean today?

It sure looks like God just set up people to fail! We can’t be good enough, so we’ll always fail. But Chris and Pete ask why it looks like that. Why does the bible seem full of us failing? Is it really like that? What does that tree in the garden ACTUALLY mean? And how can we ‘feast’ from it? Will we take the marshmallows? And why don’t we just enjoy the ice cream?

So God’s gonna smite our enemies… but we’re also told to love our enemies, but Chris and Pete wonder, who IS our enemy? What does an enemy actually look like? Are we the enemies? Can we understand enemies as we are a dominant culture, totally opposite to the bible slaves? Have our enemies become smaller and more self-centred? How can we choose NOT to have enemies?

Thanks to an Email from Simon, Chris and Pete are forced to rethink an earlier chat about the commercial selfishness of self-care. Did missionaries, by giving away everything, do the opposite of self-care? Can self-care be about looking after others by looking after ourselves? Simon’s question makes them rethink their thinking… just like an Oddfather podcast should! Do we help ourselves first? Or others first? What is extreme self-denial? Do we need more of that?

For more than two years now Chris and Pete have been getting together every week to find the right questions. And there have been some rippers! As they seek to understand the baffling and amazing God, they have welcomed guests, listened to songs and read lots of weird stuff to try and sort out what they need to be asking. These two episodes of ‘The Oddfather’ feature grabs of some of the things that have tickled their brains and bent their beliefs over the last century of weeks.

Enjoy!

For more than two years now Chris and Pete have been getting together every week to find the right questions. And there have been some rippers! As they seek to understand the baffling and amazing God, they have welcomed guests, listened to songs and read lots of weird stuff to try and sort out what they need to be asking. These two episodes of ‘The Oddfather’ feature grabs of some of the things that have tickled their brains and bent their beliefs over the last century of weeks.

Enjoy!

Chris and Pete watch the lightning and ask is God at work in natural disasters? Are they acts of God? Are bad things God’s good work? Even when it blows up a church? Are natural disasters actually God and do we clutch too easily at miracles and fail to correctly understand what God is doing and why, and how? Perhaps we just love God being in control, even if it’s just the ‘way things are’? Whatever that is.