Day twenty-four: Is beer evil?

On Friday my friend Dan came over for a long overdue beer date. I like drinking beer with Dan, it's always a good balance of beer and conversation. 

Alcohol was never meant for drunkenness and stupidity, but for a fuller life experience. The complexity, richness and diversity of this drink, coupled with the way it makes a person happy is a rich life experience and should be enjoyed with friends. Not many of my friends drink beer and some who do, do it for all the wrong reasons. American beer-culture has been reduced to the ridiculousness that we see on TV. The big breweries, makers of Budweiser, Coors, Miller and other crap like that have been selling everyone this idea that beer is synonymous with getting wasted and laid or wasting your life on everything sports. And their beer is just as depressing and empty of taste as the kind of life style that this beer promotes.

I wanted to include this little rant here because I have a lot of friends, who because of modern church views on alcohol, may be confused by my beer fascination. Although this blog may look like a counterproductive thing to do in sharing Christ, I think it is exactly the opposite. God created beer, or at least was not at all surprised that sugar plus water plus yeast makes alcohol. So as Christians we have a choice to make, we either vilify it and and make it the devils drink, or redeem it. The intention of this blog was never to evangelize-by-beer, or to redeem beer from the evil clutches of American consumerism and drunken stupidity, it was simply to enjoy some delicious beer. At the same time I think the way that I enjoy beer and present it is a way Jesus would be happy to see it done so.

Another thing that would make Christians more comfortable with beer is if we can understand that God is okay with fun. We too often are much too serious when it comes to "God things" and so our life starts to have this bipolar-ism where we are serious with God and laugh and joke without him and that's a problem. Beer is fun and that's okay with God, sin is not.

So to finish this post in a way that maybe I should finish every post, I would like to say thank you Jesus for beer.

(I will be writing another blog-post about all the beers enjoyed over this weekend.)