Hip hop artist Nas has often referred to himself directly and indirectly as “god.” That’s not shocking.
However, if the God Christians worshipped was actually called or named Nas, then Steven Hawking would no doubt be Jay-Z.
Dr. Hawking has had a hip hop-styled, drive-by-shootingesque beef with God for decades. If you remember, in his book “The Grand Design,” Hawking argues that God did not create the universe, but rather, the universe created itself from essentially nothing.
Hawking turned up the heat in his beef with God by claiming recently that the concept of heaven amounted to nothing more than a fairy tale constructed for people who also are afraid of the dark.
That’s real beef. I’m not going to speculate about why Hawking has a beef with God, but he is right. Heaven, on a linear and logical plane, is a fairy tale. Nobody has ever been able to develop a hypothesis that heaven exists and prove that either God or heaven exists in the manner that Christians understand those things.
Nobody can or has ever been able to produce a shred of physical evidence to corroborate the existence of God or heaven.
Christians can curse Hawking, quietly wish he would suffer some untimely harm, or point to the occurrence of “miracles” on earth from now on, but that still doesn’t touch the validity of Hawking’s argument.
Believing in God and heaven is really quite silly in a linear, logical world.
Really.
But, isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what God and Spirit ask us to do — to believe in things that are not logical? Having hope in things that we can neither prove nor see is what we do. It’s kind of our thing.
It is the definition of faith.
It’s watching a horror flick and knowing that the black couple (you know that black couple) will be killed while the opening credits role, but watching and praying for the best for them anyway.
It’s watching the Chicago Cubs lose every year and saying with confidence at the beginning of every baseball season that they will win the World Series.
It’s praying for the Duggars to disappear, or little frail blonde women to stop having sex and making tapes of it that nobody really wants to see, or watching Stacey Dash on Fox and saying that she’ll turn it all around this year.
Its knowing that Jennifer Aniston is minutes away from a good performance in a movie that doesn’t suck. It’s believing that Kenny G will apologize to everyone for everything he’s ever done.
It’s knowing that one day some hip hop artists will care more about building than money and rims, and their suburban audience will love and appreciate them for it.
It’s knowing conservatives will stop saying silly things about rappers, black politicians, and people who don’t love guns or their version of their America as much as they do.
It doesn’t make sense. Believing and having faith in fairy tales and that the impossible can happen doesn’t make any sense, but Mr. Hawking, it’s what we do…
Perhaps, like Nas and Jay-Z, one day God and Hawking will squash their beef and get along … see, I’m doing it again.
