The credibility gap

Something Bill said over at Thinklings got me started thinking. He was quoting someone on climate change:

I’ll believe climate change is a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

I enjoyed that for its own point. It made me laugh: Exactly!

But on the rebound, I started thinking: that's a good way to sum up my point with my recent posts on how Christians sell Christianity short. I know a skeptic of sorts who says (basically) he'll think about taking Christianity seriously when the Christians start taking Christianity seriously.

You know the questions you hear sometime, "if you could meet one famous person and ask one question ..."? I know a skeptic who told me that he really wants to meet one of the big-name televangelists, and he would ask him: "Do you believe in God? No, really, do you believe God exists? Because if you really believe that stuff, how can you sleep at night? Aren't you worried what he'll say about your life?" (He figured the more dishonest types should have trouble sleeping at night if they really believed a day of reckoning were coming.) And it's not just the big-name televangelists or the pedophile priests who give us big-name headaches. It's the cumulative effect of all of us, when the time comes between choosing what is right and what is easy, far too often choosing what is easy. I don't want to minimize forgiveness: my life depends on it. I just wish we didn't use it as a cop-out.