Rob Bell is a pretty cool dude. I loved reading his comments in this interview.

In relating Rob's thoughts on creation and art to my own personal interests, I found myself retorting a hearty "AMEN BROTHA!" while reading this interview. I have always been a sort of creative person and I love art. I also have seriously studied our natural world from the perspective of a Rangeland Management Specialist. I have spent a lifetime marveling the natural beauty of our setting in the mountains of Montana; I've spent weeks and months out in the prairies and hills of the Western US doing meticulous rangeland surveys for management purposes, monitoring, and Ecological Site Descriptions, or ESDs. The more time I spend studying the creative nature of our Creator, the more I realize the "beautiful poetry about a God who gets off on things just cause they are and that to me is central to any sort of living, breathing spirituality is going to be plenty of room for things that don’t have any purpose other than their own beauty, design and order." As Rob mentions the passage in Job where God is like, "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE STORK?," my education and experience points me to the question, "have you considered the graceful bluebunch wheatgrass? how about the lowly slender phlox? What purpose does the indian paintbrush flower serve other than looking pretty? How beautiful is the wood's rose?

If you all are not familiar with wood's rose, most Young Earth Creationists will scowl when they observe this plant. This plant is a self-serving contradiction to their philosophy of the fall of man. The low to mid-sized bush has beautiful red flowers that produce a fleshy, red, globose to ellipsoid fruit called rose "hips". The real kicker to this plant is that it has those "cursed" thorns! Ha! Sometimes the imagination of a YEC perplexes me... Last year at a Creation Science Conference held here in Bozeman by our local Grace Bible Church, a very educated looking man tried explaining to me the proof that he had that these thorns magicly appeared on these once beautiful flowers after Adam decided to piss God off. He pulled a very professional looking book off his table and illustrated the "hyper-evolution" of thorns that took place once the entire Creation was deemed "cursed." It was at this same conference that I sat through a lecture that described that our beautiful Montana hilly landscape is a result of "water gaps" that formed as the world wide flood waters of judgement subsided. With this narrow and twisted perspective that many Christians have about our natural world today, the intrinsic beauty around them is lost as they fit their worldview into a simple mis-interpretation of scriptures. That is pretty sad.

It was at this same conference at GBC that I tried passing out some free copies of "Beyond Creation Science." Of course, the people in charge of the book table did not want me and my censored books anywhere near their stash of doctrinally homogeneous material causing controversy. Nevertheless, I succeeded in placing about a half-dozen copies in the hands of respective truth-seekers.

Rob Bell says at the end of the interview, "I think you have to cry out to God and and asked to be delivered from a system. American culture in the year 2008 is an oppressive system. It tells you to just buy, to follow the rules and be happy. I think you have to ask whether or not you want to be delivered from the system because that’s what it is... People have to ask themselves questions about what they even want or desire. Because it all begins with a deep dissatisfaction of how things are. And we do not change without pain. So a person would have to be in enough pain and despair to say “I do not want to be a part of this anymore. God, please show me another way of understanding things.”

Just as Rob Bell's "My Sweet Lord" chocolate sculpture serves as a commentary on the church in America and as a brilliant and provocative piece of art, the unmistakable beauty and creativity found in a little thorny bush out in my Montana backyard can be just as provocative.