Tim Tebow is back in the news after being cut from the New England Patriots. When he was with the Denver Broncos, Tebow made a name for himself (and added his name to the dictionary) with his flamboyant public appreciation whenever God helped him out with a football play.
The interesting thing about his kneeling in praise is that it’s self-aggrandizing while pretending not to be. It was precisely anticipated in Matthew: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others” (Matt. 6:5). Jesus makes clear that they’ve received their reward here on earth and don’t get bonus points from heaven.
Mr. Tebow, are we to imagine that the Creator of the universe took time out of his busy schedule of not saving starving children to help you make a good football play? I understand that it’s important to you, and it’s nice to see a professional athlete not bragging about how great he is, but doesn’t football seem a little trivial? Doesn’t it make your religion look bad to even suggest that? And doesn’t it seem illogical to imagine God being yanked first one way by you and then in the opposite way by some dude praying for the opposite result on the other team?
But I’m probably too harsh. Let me applaud something else that Tebow does.
He’s known for evangelizing through Bible verses painted in the eye black on his face. Above, he’s proclaiming Ephesians 2:8–10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
That’s good advice. But Tebow has promoted a variety of verses, not just the standard John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world …”) or Luke 2:10–11 (“I bring you good news of great joy …”). He not afraid to say what needs to be said.
Here he gives us Exodus 22:29, which says, “Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons.” God’s demand of child sacrifice is often forgotten, but it’s good to be reminded of the basics.
Other verses that show how God used child sacrifice within Israel are Ez. 20:25–6.
Of course, the size constraints of eye black make Twitter look like an encyclopedia, but these messages are worth reading. This one is a nice reminder of God’s limitations. 2 Kings 3:26–27 tells of the end of a battle against Moab. The prophet Elisha promised Judah a victory. But when the king of Moab saw that he was losing, he sacrificed his son and future heir. This magic was apparently too much for Yahweh, because “there was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland.” (I write more here.)
A verse with a similar message is Judges 1:19: “The Lord was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.”
Another oldie but goodie. Psalms 89:7 says “In the council of the holy ones Elohim [God] is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him.” How often do we forget that God is part of an Olympus-like pantheon? Ps. 82:1–2 gives a similar message.
I’m waiting for someone to reference Deuteronomy 32:8, which describes how Yahweh’s dad divided up his inheritance (all the tribes of the earth) among his sons: “When El Elyon [the Most High] gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the heavenly assembly.”
You rarely see an entire chapter reference, but Leviticus 20 is a meaty one with a lot of good fundamentals. Everyone knows that homosexual relations are abominable, and verse 13 gives the death as the appropriate penalty. But it’s easy to forget the other demands of this chapter: eat no unclean animals (:25), exile any couple that has sex during the woman’s menstrual period (:18), death to spiritual mediums (:27), death for adultery (:10), and death for “anyone who curses their father or mother” (:9). It comes as a package, people!
Eye black references to divine genocide are common. Who hasn’t seen a football player displaying 1 Samuel 15:2–3, Deut. 20:16–18, or Judges 21:10? But it’s nice to see this one. Deuteronomy 2:34–5 says, “And we took all [Sihon’s] cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain.”
I’ll skim through a few more that I’ve seen. Why aren’t more sermons taught on these verses?

• In our modern unbiblical and slavery-free society, we too often forget that not only did God permit slavery, but he regulated it. Exodus 21:20–21 says, “And if a man smite his slave with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. But if [the slave] live for a day or two, he shall not be punished, for [the slave] is his property.”
• I guess with football players you’ll find lots of verses about violence. Isaiah 13:15–16 is a popular one: “Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.” Another that’s so common as to almost be cliché is Ps. 137:9: “Happy is the one who seizes your [Babylon’s] infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
• It’s not surprising that sexual slavery interests football players. Numbers 31:15–18 says, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
• I like to see reminders for racial purity. Ezra 9:2 says, “They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them.” Other verses in this vein are Nehemiah 13:1–3 and Deut. 23:3.
• Finally, a helpful reminder that even Jesus can be wrong: “There be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). Two thousand years later, and we’re still waiting. Ah well, we all make mistakes!

I think of these as the Forgotten Verses, and I praise athletes like Tebow for putting them front and center where they belong. It’d be great to get them back into circulation by making them the subject of sermons. After all, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).
(If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the SNL skit where Jesus visits Tim Tebow.)

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off
as if nothing had happened.
— Winston Churchill

(This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared 1/9/12.)

Paul Vitz was a professor of psychology. His Faith of the Fatherless (1999) attempts to use Freudian techniques to conclude that “modern atheism originated in the irrational, psychological needs of a few prominent thinkers.”
Which Freud are we talking about?  
Presumably this is the same Sigmund Freud who concluded that, according to Karen Armstrong in A History of God, “a personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever.” Armstrong continues:

[Freud concluded that] God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.

What is it—is Freud a reliable critic of religion or not? Vitz wants it both ways.
The defective father hypothesis
Vitz uses Freudian thinking to conclude that atheists are atheists because of the absence of a good father. Disappointment in one’s earthly father leads to a rejection of the heavenly Father.
He’s yet another Christian apologist who concludes that atheists don’t exist. They’re actually theists. They aren’t atheists because there’s no god; rather, they know that God exists but suppress or reject that knowledge for psychological reasons.
Vitz supports his “defective father hypothesis” by listing believers such as Blaise Pascal, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had present and loving fathers and atheists such as Voltaire, Freud, and (wait for it … !) Hitler who had absent or unloving fathers.
(There’s plenty of reason to argue that Hitler was actually a believer, but let’s ignore that for now.)
This is the argument of a scientist? This is no survey; it’s cherry picking. This correlation that he’s selected can be easily turned around: it’s not that atheists are driven by a poor home life to petulantly reject the Father who is obviously there; rather, Christians are coddled by the strong and wise guidance of their father, and when they mature, they are too weak to face reality and so project a supernatural extension of that caring father onto the universe.
If I could provide the opposite list—famous Christians who had no father figure and famous atheists who did—would Vitz reject his hypothesis? Of course not. He would accuse me of biased selection of the examples, and he’d be right, but why is it okay for him but not me?
Epitaph
What’s especially offensive about this, and again we’re in the realm of anecdote and not statistics, is that my own father was present, strong, and loving. He also put a strong value on education and reason, and I’m the result. I could argue that this and many other examples refute Vitz, but he and his hypothesis are a waste of time.
I’d rather pass on a powerful story written by Charles Handy, an English economist and author. He describes the funeral of his father, a quiet and modest man who had lived his life as an unambitious minister of a small church in Ireland.

When [my father] died, I rushed back to Ireland for the funeral. Held in the little church where he had spent most of his life, it was supposed to be a quiet family affair. But it turned out to be neither quiet nor restricted to the family. I was astounded by the hundreds of people who came, on such short notice, from all corners of the British Isles. Almost every single person there came up to me and told me how much my father had meant to them—and how deeply he had touched their lives.
That day, I stood by his grave and wondered, Who would come to my funeral? How many lives have I touched? Who knows me as well as all of these people who knew this quiet man?
When I returned to London, I was a deeply changed man. Later that year, I resigned my tenured professorship. More important, I dropped my pretense of being someone other than who I was. I stopped trying to be a hot shot. I decided to do what I could to make a genuine difference in other people’s lives. Whether I have succeeded, only my own funeral will tell.
I only wish that I could have told my father that he was my greatest teacher.

My father would have been 84 today.
Photo credit: Kevin