More things in Heaven and on Earth

That's Me in the Mushy Moral Middle

2012-01-12T20:39:00.000-05:00

On case there is someone out there who hasn't actually figured it out yet, I'm a Libertarian. As such, I was perusing reason.com (the big online libertarian magazine) the other day and I found an article which has helped me to understand some of the ambiguity I am still feeling towards the occupy movement (yes I know the movement seems to be practically dead thanks to all the reporters ignoring it to focus on the Republican primaries - and for crying out loud how wishy-washy can I possibly be to have not worked out my own position on it yet anyway). As a person of faith and sometimes teacher of ethics classes, I was struck by the ethical model this fellow, Jonathan Haidt, uses to analyze the moral appeals of various political cultures and find myself wondering how a holistic, pre-modern, philosophical Christian ought to think about these things.
For those of you who don't want to go read the article, Dr. Heidt's model sets up "six clusters of moral concerns": care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. In the article, he uses a representative sampling of protest signage from Zucatti Park to determine which clusters are more valued by the occupy crowd (and presumably by those who are sympathetic to said crowd). He finds that the occupy movement - and I think it is important to distinguish the apparent values of a collective movement from the real values individuals within that movement might hold - seems to value fairness/cheating above all other clusters with care/harm coming in a strong second. After that, liberty/oppression came in a very distant third and the remaining three clusters were hardly evident at all (a few signs could be stretched to say something about a few of them but it was quite a stretch.
I found this interesting enough that I followed a couple of links over to Dr. Heidt's research website where I took an online survey and discovered that, so far as his research is concerned, I value harm/care the most, followed by loyalty then fairness, sanctity and authority which, as it turns out, I don't care very much for (apparently liberty/oppression is a new category which has not yet been added to the online-questionnaire but I am reasonably sure that I would have ranked high in that category). So my question for this post is: Is this scheme a healthy one? I certainly think that it goes a way towards explaining my ambivalence towards the occupy folks since we heavily share one value but then go on to differ as regards others; but are either of us right? Am I mistaken in valuing authority the way I do? According to Dr. Heidt, Republicans would say that I value it to little and Democrats would say I like it too much. In fact I am between the two major political persuasions in everything except fairness which I value less than anyone and loyalty which I value more than anyone.

Or would you say that it is a mistake to even rank these values (I wouldn't say it but try to convince me, it could be fun!). Is it valid to say "I'm the kind of person who values authority more than anything else and am therefore more basically moral than anyone else"? I tend to think that my ranking is a pretty good one, but then I would wouldn't I?
Well there you have it. More questions than answers or opinions in this post but I would really like to get some thoughts from y'all (even if you are reading this eight months after it goes up).

Confession of a Luddite Sympathist

2011-12-28T10:58:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that if you are going to tell the world that moderntechnology and specifically social media type technology makes you uneasy, andyou are going to say it on your blog, then you had better frame the statementas a confession. So here it is:

I confess - technological development makes me uneasy and I have a constantsort of background nervousness about what social media is doing to our abilityto relate to one another in healthy ways.

And now for disclaimers: I do not actually disapprove of technology, I tryhard to stay on top of technological development and I think that it offersgreat opportunities for good. My confession is one of inclination not ofdecision so while there is a little worried knot in my stomach every time somenew device of website catches on, I go ahead and try to learn the tech and seewhat can be made of it.

Technology is essentially power. In fact it is an expression of power whichis almost unique to humans (I think I remember that there are certain monkeyswhich do stuff with sticks and I heard somewhere that sea otters will hold onto especially useful "shellfish cracking" rocks). It is themanifestation of the power of thought, imagination and innovation and as suchit really sort of deserves to be celebrated - all things are indeed gloriousfor being themselves.

I believe that Lewis and Chesterton each pointed out that the desire todevelop technology is a manifestation of the same desire which leads people totry magic (Lewis has some really great things to say about this in The Abolition of Man). The technologist and the alchemist are the right and left hands of the same impetus. In fact when you get right down to brass tacks definitions itbecomes surprisingly difficult to differentiate between the two. The majordifference is that technology has worked while magic hasn't.

The problem is that technology is power - and exponentially increasing powerat that - in the hands of a species with questionable moral character. Poweronly increases an individual's ability to do what they want to do, to"enacting their will on the world" as the philosopher would say. Itis a good thing for a good person to enact their will on the world, butconversely it is a bad thing for a bad person to enact their will. Andtechnology itself does not discriminate between good and bad, it simplyamplifies. Technology makes bad people more able to do worse things and goodpeople more able to do good things.

I think that Facebook gives a useful example. Facebook (together with othersocial media) has enable people to organize and topple repressive regimes. Itake this to be a good thing, although I have not always been pleased with the"new boss", but that is another post. At the same time, I believethat Facebook (again together with other social media) has enabled people tocreate illusory relationships which save them from the difficulty and ultimatesatisfaction of forging real relationships. It allows for someone to becomeincreasingly antisocial without feeling as many of the negative effects ofactually being alone.

All of this is because technology essentially amoral. It is not immoral, forthen it could not serve and especially not amplify the good that it is so oftenused for. Neither is it moral, for then it could not be used in the service ofharming people as it has so often been. Technology is a catalyst, an amplifier,to stake out yet another "mushy middle" position, it is what you makeof it.

But maybe things are not quite so simple as that. As Spiderman is wont toremind us, "With great power comes great responsibility". We need toask ourselves whether we are able to handle that sort of responsibility. Afterall, there was a time when the worst mankind could do with its power was tokill itself off. This would have been a bad enough thing and we managed to beresponsible enough not to do it. But now, with much greater power, we carrymuch greater responsibilities. We now have the power to reduce our entireplanet to a glowing slag heap, ending nearly all life; and we are responsiblefor how that power is going to be used.

So the question "is technological development a good thing?" turnsout to be the question "is it a good idea for beings like us to be morepowerful?" and our answer will have to depend on whether or not we thinkthat human beings ought to be trusted with this much power. And this is a hard question to answer because in reality we all clearly observe that humans, both collectively and individually, are both incredibly evil and shockingly good. We are beings of unimaginable glory and holiness who have become corrupted and evil. We are just about as paradoxical a set of beings as can be imagines, veritable gods who have become demons and still aspire to godhood what the Greek Orthodox call Theosis. We are the only species that could have produced bothe Mother Teresa and Hitler and that species tension is at work in each of us. Indeed, to go back to C.S. Lewis, one of those two must be our ultimate destiny:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations." - The Weight of Glory

But then maybe a growth in human technological power is unavoidable, maybe whatever the answer to that question, we will still be faced with an inevitable increase in human power. So we might want tojump strait to another question: "how can we ensure that power is used responsibly? How canwe keep from blowing up the world or turning the vast majority of thepopulation into unthinking, consuming zombies?" After all, there are certainly people out there who project exponential and unavoidable technological growth over the next few years.

To my mind, the answer to these latter questions (I don't think that technologicalprogress is something which can be effectively fought) is twofold: First wehave to find a way to make people better - in spiritual terms we have to reallyfocus on bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, we have to begin to reallycare about things like sanctification, maybe we need to go back and read Jamesand Hebrews again. And secondly we need to never cease in doing good to thebest of our own ability - and this must include the acquisition of thetechnological expertise which will enable us to become more effectivepeacemakers, more efficiently generous, more aware of the suffering that we areto be forever healing. After all, Spiderman works backwards as well: "Withgreat responsibility comes the providence of great power" at least it mustGod was serious when He promised to provide everything necessary for the doingof His will.

The Third Love...

2011-12-15T16:52:00.000-05:00

I was recently asked whether or not I have a “safe person”in my life. I do. In fact I have several – my wife, my siblings and parents,and quite a few of my friends. As theconversation went on though I caught on to a couple of things: that “safe person”meant something more specific than “someone you feel safe around”, and that friend doesn’t mean much anymore. As it turns out, “safe person” in thiscontext meant what I mean when I deliberately use the word friend. Those of youwho talk to me on a regular basis may have noticed that I prefer to usesemi-synonymous titles like “buddy”, “acquaintance” or the rather awkward “aguy/woman I know” when talking about someone I like and have a relationshipwith but with whom I am not friends.

Let me say at theoutset (granted the outset of my second paragraph) that this post will not getinto the question of Facebook friending, it’s a fascinating topic but “beyondthe scope of this paper”. I will also not be concerning myself with talkingabout whether men and women can be simply friends (though that may make aworthwhile topic for another post). What I do want to talk about it whatfriendship is supposed to be and what it isn’t, I probably won’t be able torestrain myself from a few thoughts on how things have gotten this way as well.

The Turkish word for“friend” is “arkadash” which essentially means “someone who has your back” ormore literally “supports from behind”. In contrast, our word, according to my online etymologysource, comes from a Proto-Germanic word “to love”. And then the famous four loves of the Greeksincluded “phileo” which was essentially non-sexual love. If I have been at allcorrect in my previous posts in claiming that we are essentially socialcreatures, then friendship has to be something more profound than a long-termplaymate.

And that begins toget at what I am looking for with friendships. When I think, talk or writeabout friendship I am looking for something that gets beyond “acquaintance whomI really enjoy being around”; I am looking for something to which words like“honor”, “loyalty”, “commitment” and “love” come naturally and for which wordslike “like”, “enjoy”, “pal” and “nice” feel too weak.

Friendship issupposed to be a relationship you can rely on. Bill Cosby tells the story of afriend of his whom he could call at 2 am on a rainy night who would drive 70miles to pick him up if he had a break down because that man is his friend. Incollege I had a professor who defined a friend as “that guy who would give you$500.00 just because you told him you need it.” C.S. Lewis suggests in The Four Loves that friendship grows outof a discovery that you share a fundamental passion with someone. Friendship happenswhen you have a connection with someone that first reminds you that you are notalone in the cosmos and then lets you know that someone else is on yourside. It is not an accident thatsoldiers form some of the deepest friendships we know of, theirs is anexperience which demands and proves interdependence.

To my mind the archetypal friend would be Sam Gamgee, though there are others though out history and literature. David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, heck Bert and Ernie are all encouraging, moving friendships. There isn't much bad that can be said about Sam, but if there is any one trait he is most famous for it would have to be his loyalty. Sam had Frodo's back. End of story. To quote Shakespeare, Sam's love "carries it out, even to the edge of doom" Mt. Doom in Sam's case.

In fact hardshipworks this way. One of the great things about hardship (it has many bad aspectsas well) is that it brings people together. I have written about interdependencein the past; hardship creates interdependence which, itself, creates one of thebest opportunities for friendship. I would be fascinated to find out if thereis a correlation between the experience of hardship and the occurrence of realfriendship. I expect that there is a strong one and if there is, that wouldsuggest one more reason for the depression and apathy which is so prevalent inour materialist society. I certainlyknow that the last several years of financial difficulty have created andstrengthened several of my friendships.

I want to end byclarifying something: I am not saying that there is anything wrong with beingan acquaintance. As a matter of fact I think that at least part of the problemis that we have begun to take it as an insult to hear that someone we like isnot a friend. It shouldn’t be. There is nothing wrong with being a buddy or anacquaintance. It is simply a different thing, not a worse thing.

So what do y’allthink? Do you have friends? If not, have you felt the lack? If so, what is thebenefit?

If you Can't Play Nicely Then None of you Get the Toy

2011-11-21T16:56:00.001-05:00

Big warning, I think that this is the most political and potentially divisive post I have written. Or maybe not. It's certainly on a topic for which I have little to no awareness of public opinion. To wrap up the waffling and prevaricating, I have no idea what you will think of this.

While I was growing up I was in the habit of getting into fights with my siblings, especially my younger brother. Many of those fights were over who would get to play with some much coveted toy. I am reasonably certain that at least once, my parents resolved the situation by confiscating the toy and informing us that if we couldn't play nicely with it then we wouldn't get to play with it at all. If that didn't actually happen to me then it did happen to so many friends and TV characters that I have adopted it into my own experience. Before anyone throws my parents (or some now-nameless TV parents) under the bus for this atrocity, let me suggest that it worked pretty well. I have very clear memories of making efforts to resolve fights over various toys before they escalated to the point that my parents would take a hand.
I want to suggest that we take the same approach with marriage in this country. For quite a few years now, we have been fighting over who has the right to get married. The conservative crowd wants the government to define the word in such a way as to exclude certain times of lifetime monogamous commitment and the liberal crowd wants the government to step in and guarantee everyone the right to call their relationship marriage (and thereby receive the important social and legal benefits that married couples enjoy). So as a starting point I want to suggest that the kids have been fighting over this too long and it is time for us to take marriage away from the conservative and liberal politicians.
But that is really just a starting point. As I reflected on it, I realized that I don't think the politicians have any real right to claim power over the term in the first place. Historically it looks as though marriage first became an important legal term to the government (state governments I believe) when they decided to write bigamy laws. After that the federal government got involved with the income tax. Various child welfare and adoption laws joined the mix at some point as well. But all of this, with the interesting exception of bigamy which I am not going to touch, worked without any technical definition. A marriage was what everyone knew a marriage to be. No point in defining it.
Now we have various political interest groups trying to get their representatives to define a word in one way or another. Which is really silly. Can you imagine a campaign to define a chair as a "tool for sitting involving no more or less than four legs and a back"? The stool lobby would be up in arms. Why should the government have the right to define a marriage? The only answer I can come up with is that it is an important term in several tax and legal codes. But surely those codes would work just as well with the phrase "committed-cohabiting couple" substituted for marriage.
And on further reflection, doesn't the idea that the government has the right to define marriage violate the free exercise clause of the first amendment? Historically, marriage is a religious concept. At least in western civilization, we hold that God makes or at least recognizes a marriage between two people (possibly more if you are an old school Muslim but again - not going there). And if that's the case then aren't my fellow religious people out there a little offended that our government has even thought about giving itself the power to define one of the sacraments - even if they want to define it in a way you like? After all, if they get to claim that power today what assurance do you have that they will use it well tomorrow. Today they define marriage as only between a man and a woman, tomorrow they define the Eucharist as the ceremonial partaking of cotton candy and soda pop.
Now it certainly is the government's job to protect contracts (see my earlier two posts on capitalism) and if Uncle Sam wants to give tax breaks and extend insurance benefits to people who commit to act as one unit for the rest of their lives, I say let him (I am generally in favor of tax breaks and insurance benefits for people who care about each other and are willing to make life-long commitments to one another, in addition to visitation rights and other basic rights of attorney and so forth). So my "solution" is to replace the legal concept of marriage with a number of standard domestic partnership agreements. Then those people who are legal domestic partners can go to the religious (or non-religious) institution of their choice and take part in whatever ceremony they think will create a spiritual union between them, and call their union whatever it is that they want to call it - probably marriage.

And Here Comes Capitalism - Take Two.

2011-11-06T20:35:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are keeping score or who are possibly trying to make a convert out of me (love and appreciate the attempt by the way, if you think you are right about something, the nicest thing you can do is try to show me the truth you have found), the mission is not yet a success. I am still a pretty hard-core free market capitalist. A big part of that is probably the fact that I haven't yet heard (or read) a response to my "it is immoral to force people to spend their own money in a particular way" objection. Still waiting on one -really- so that I can at least be in dialogue with someone about it.
In the mean time I though it might be worth recording some of musings on the strengths of free market capitalism in a modern liberal society and why it is that I think more and more good people find themselves against capitalism these days. I have been re reading The Abolition of Man recently and it occurred to me that we (the western world in a terrible over-generalization) used to combat the major flaws of capitalism in a way that is, at best, only minimally effective in modern culture. It used to be that the average westerner held two particular views in regards to the use of their financial (and material) resources: A) that their stuff was their stuff; only they have a right to decide how to spend it so that if anyone else tried to force them to use it in a certain way they would be justified in being offended, outraged etc... B) that they ought to be generous with their resources, help those less fortunate than themselves (especially their friends, family and neighbors) so that generosity and concern for people in need was a basic part of being a decent person.
The result was a worldview which protected societies (in theory and at least sometimes in practice) from the worst impacts of a purely free market system. If people view charity (in the middle-old sense, "giving resources to the poor") as each persons duty, then the poor will generally be kept from starving.
But we can't teach that any more. Back in the day, this moral obligation to help the poor was taught as just that, a moral obligation - usually a religious moral obligation. Today we don't teach children that they have any moral obligations other than tolerance (and something akin to but not quite the same as non-violence). We tell them that everyone has a right to their opinion and then we tell them that all statements of ought or moral sentiment are statements of opinion. And once we have taught them this moral subjectivism, a lesson they pick up with alarming speed, they are almost perfectly defended against any appeals we make to some duty of charity. We have already told them that they have a right to define their own moral code, thus we lose all right (in their minds) to tell them what that moral code ought to look like. So charity becomes a matter, not of moral obligation, but of pragmatic utilitarianism.
This, by the way, is why I think so many older movies are popular as left-leaning films simply because they contain the message that the rich ought to be generous with their wealth. But that is not a socialist message, that is a capitalist message. It is the capitalist who says "the rich have a right to their riches and a responsibility to do the right thing with them. The truly evil man is the miser who has great wealth and does not use it for the good of his neighbors". The socialist thinks of the rich man as un-deserving of his treasure and insists that it be stolen from him and used to make the middle class feel better about the suffering of the poor.

Now, the average schoolchild's reaction to poverty is not "I had better do something about that" but "that makes me feel bad so some thing ought to be done about it". Do you see the difference? In the first case, the problem demands concrete action (generosity) on the part of the individual. In the second it demands action on the part of "society".
That is why I see it as only natural that good people, people who happen to care about the poor, the mistreated, the abused, are trending more and more towards socialism (not all have gotten there and I see no great shame in being a socialist - though I think that it is a very bad economic and political system). These are the people who want the problem fixed and have noticed that nobody is standing up to fix it. In short, socialism is on the rise because the free market capitalists have forgotten their moral duty.

I believe that being truly moral (something I would still like to be) means not breaking either of two principles. I must not let other people suffer if I can do anything about it and I must not steal, even from those who can afford it, to alleviate the suffering I see around me. Being a free market capitalist means taking responsibility for my fellow man, not because the government forces me to but because it is the right thing to do. A socialist society is a society which does not provide it's citizens with as much of an opportunity to learn to be good; because it is a society with less freedom, it is a society for rule breakers (in Blue Ocean terms - socialism is a good system for a stage 1 society which needs rules and the threat of violence to make it be good). A capitalist society is an audacious experiment in free will. A wager that given the necessity, the rich will voluntarily give of themselves to feed the poor. Let us pray that the experiment does not fail.

Variations on a Theme by Shakespeare, Lewis and Kreeft

2011-10-21T16:14:00.001-04:00

I was playing with different topics today and it occurred to me that I have not yet explained this blog's title. I have hinted at it and I think I may have even used it somewhere (though I can't find the post off hand) but I haven't ever posted on why I call it "Heaven and Earth Questions". In Hamlet when Horatio sees the ghost he is confounded more because ghosts don't fit into his understanding of the world, than because of any normal fear of ghosts. Hamlet responds with : "There are more things in heaven and earth. Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies." I read Hamlet quite a few times with out ever noticing that line. In fact, the line was pointed out to my by Dr. Kreeft in one of his lectures (he uses the line quite a bit and at this point I have no idea which lecture I heard it in first so let me just give him general credit).

Dr. Kreeft's point, building off of C.S. Lewis' work on the character and weaknesses of modernism as well as his own work, is that there are really only three possible relationships between an individuals epistemology (the study of what is know and how it can be know) and ontology (the study of being or of what is). Either there are more things in heaven and earth (in reality) than are dreamt of in their philosophy (their epistemology), there are the same number of things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy, or there are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. Crudely speaking - and I am already anticipating a few grumpy notes from post-modernists out there- the post-modernist holds that there are fewer things; the modernist, that there are the same number of things; and the pre-modernist, that there are more things in heaven and earth.

For the post-modern, reality is a really tricky concept (and possibly an entirely meaningless word) to begin with. The post-modern approach tends to downplay reality as unknowable and therefore unreal. For many, many reasons, they have abandoned anything like a correspondence theory of truth (truth is when a proposition corresponds to reality) and then operate out of a desire to establish ones own "working" reality which they seem to simultaneously think must also be a fundamental illusion. However it plays out it will work out to a belief that reality, to the extent that it is a meaningful word, is smaller than the conceptions of each individual.
The modernist holds on to that initially exciting yet ultimately deadening idea that human achievement will one day be able to explain absolutely every aspect of reality and offer something like a scientific proof to verify those explanations. You hear lines like "if science can't prove it then it doesn't exist" from them. Here in America we have a very common religious form of this modernism which claims instead "if the Bible doesn't prove or affirm it then it isn't real". Both are modernist by this model. The claim boils down to the belief that human reason is capable of explaining or describing every aspect of being; that there are exactly as many things in heaven and earth as are dreamed of in philosophy. Thus prior to meeting the ghost, Horatio is a sort of proto-modernist.
But the pre-modern believes that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy; that reason works but isn't comprehensive. The pre-modern believes there is more to the world than what we can figure our. This does not mean (as I find many athiest apologists have construed it) that the pre-modernist gives up on trying to understand or that they believe that reality can't be known. "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." (KJV) Instead, the pre-modernist believes that there is always going to be more to know, that reality is fuller, more complex, more meaningful, more beautiful than we can comprehend - there will always be more to discover.
That is why I named the blog "More things in Heaven and on Earth". By now you must know that I am, or at least am trying to become, a pre-modern. Thus the title reflects my belief in infinite depth and breadth of the universe, of reality, of the cosmos, of the question and of the answers. There is bottomless joy in the search for truth because the truth is always being found and will never be exhausted.

And the Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

2011-10-12T20:54:00.002-04:00

About three quarters of the way through one of my notebooks is a reminder that "science fiction and philosophy would be a good blog post". I remembered to write this without it.
I am completely and unrepentantly partisan in favor or genre fiction. A friend asked me the other day why genre fiction gets such a bad rap in literary circles and as I launched into an answering diatribe it occurred to me that I am not precisely balanced on the subject. And I am alright with that. There are enough people out there fighting for the sanctity of "realist prose", and enough of them still occupy positions of power in various prestigious universities that I am able to feel as though I am still supporting the underdog in my defense of genre. Granted we are seeing more and more "sci-fi and fantasy" courses in English departments and I even know - oh frabjous day - an instructor at the Naval Academy who was teaching a course on modern graphic novels (these are really long comic books like Watchmen and Persepolis for those of you who are not quite as immersed in geek culture).
Nevertheless, the wizened guardians of the literary canon are still debating The Lord of the Rings and Asimov's Foundation series. Let them bicker, history is on our side (well, mine anyway). But just in case it isn't; or in case I haven't made enough grumpy retorts to a nebulous literati, let me explain why and how I think that science fiction is the most philosophical of all genres (including realistic fiction).
Philosophers are huge fans of hypotheticals. Generally there is some attempt to make a hypothetical sound more impressive or intellectually worthy by calling it a "thought experiment" - this might also help with funding humanities departments - but ultimately the game is to imagine an unreal situation with it's own sets of rules for the purpose of playing out a theory to see how it might work in the absence of real world complications. And I think that this is a wonderful thing; hypotheticals give us all the opportunity to test something without having to worry about irrelevant details. A while ago I mentioned an ethical dilemma involving a train and several groups of people. The point is to imagine a situation in which someone's morality comes to the fore in a clear way. It does not matter that the situation is incredibly improbable, what matters is that it is a test case for at least two different ethical systems.
In science fiction, the author gets to do the same thing. What better way to explore philosophical anthropology than to imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is on a par with or even surpasses our own (Aasimov's Robot books)? If you want to expound a pre-modern cosmology in a way that modern thinkers will be able to understand how could you improve on a contemporary professor being shanghaied into a trip to mars (C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet)? Is there a more effective laboratory for investigation into the implications of a perfect signifier-signified relationship than a novel wherein the enemy alien's doomsday device is an entirely accurate language (Samuel R. Delaney's Babel 17)? And how could there be a more thorough thought experiment into the cosmological implications if Plato's theory of the forms and their impact on multi-verse theory than a book about intellectual monks under attack from a world more distantly emanated the good (Neal Stephenson's Anathem)? I could go on; and on and on and on.

Science fiction gives a writer the ability to imagine the specific set of circumstances which would most clearly demonstrate their own innate philosophies and world views. Of course when that is all they use the novel for (in fact when anyone uses a novel for much of anything other than as a medium for good story), they tend not to write very good books. But what if the author is a philosopher? What if they are writing not in order to preach a philosophy but to tell the excellent stories their philosophies inevitably produce? Some authors certainly are mere preachers - though sometimes they preach well - and some are tremendous story tellers and not very good philosophers (I would but Heinlein into this category). But some authors are genuinely both. Philosophers with a knack for recognizing a good story and the skill and craft to tell it well. It is probably going too far to call them philosopher poets but that would point in the right direction. That is why I find science fiction so intriguing, beguiling, thrilling and ecstatic.
Also laser guns, robots, space ships and aliens.

The Golden Mask

2011-10-06T18:06:00.000-04:00

So this post is one of those "being vulnerable because I am doing something I don't do well" deals. Having a friend who actually is an excellent poet and a circle of friends who write this stuff on a semi regular basis turns out not to have made my brief attempts in the arena any easier. Ah well, I'd better just take the plunge:

The Golden Mask

I tell a tale to turn from unknown truth; too long known
and seek instead a kindergarten color wheel.
Your palette is too subtle; your pastels strained my eye
I never could connect with grays and browns
and purples faded, washed in detail, tassels, minutia,
death.

Instead I long for fairy queens and war,
for melodies, trombones and marching bands.
The cross, the stone, the bread, the cup, the fish
smother my soul with a nuanced earthquake devoid of Flame.

But quiet winds, drifted from English pipes
to children's minds are lightning from the sun,
and dragons and ships and warriors and crowns.
a whispered wardrobe starts a carousel.

Such simple themes must overwhelm my eyes
with red and blue and brassy green and gold
And that fierce name by which I loved Him first
is Love and Death and Joy without renoun.

"My King is coming, riding on a fawn;
I could not love Thee till I loved Aslan"

By - me

Be gentle.

Really Think Alot of Yourself, Don'tcha?

2011-09-22T22:21:00.002-04:00

My last post spawneda number of conversations (on and off line) which have lead me to question oneof my standard operating assumptions about the modern, western anthropology. Iremember growing up and being told that while we Christians believe that man isbasically evil, those foolish non-Christians believe that man is basicallygood; that we start with different assumptions and that the other people’sassumption was clearly ridiculous and most likely a product of wishfulthinking. That is not the operating assumption. Instead, I have assumed for thelast several years that nearly everyone (except Presbyterians) believes thatpeople are, by nature, somewhat good and somewhat evil. Granted not many of uswould use those terms, but I thought that most people would say that themajority of the population have some goodness and some badness in them.

I’m not certain Iwas right about that. I’m sure there aremany reasons but by limited and entirely anecdotal evidence would seem tosuggest that many people of all sorts of religious and philosophicalpersuasions actually believe (or at least claim to believe) that the mass ofmen are fundamentally good. Most of the reasoning I found behind this goes backto either cultural or general ethical subjectivism. The claim seems to be thatwe judge other’s actions to be bad because we have different ethical standards(which are arbitrarily ingrained in us thanks to culture and our parents), butthat at the end of the day each person generally lives consistently with their ownethical or moral views.

But this leaves me with something of adilemma. You see, I don’t live up to my own ethical or moral views. I see myselfas rather appallingly bad, and (per my last post) infinitely good. Generally wetreat good and evil as being mutually exclusive such that a thing can be goodonly to the degree that it is not evil and evil only to the extent that it isnot good. And this approach makes sense since the two are contraries. But wetend to then conclude that a person’s soul could be plotted on a sort ofmorality number line. We tend to think of others and ourselves as this good or that evil. But I don’t believe that it actually works that way.

Instead I think thatthe human soul is incredibly good. It is glorious beyond anything we can currentlycomprehend. And it has also gone very wrong. I tend to picture my own soul assomething like a diamond with pits and stains and scarring on it. The pits andscratches can be ground off, the stains can be cleaned. Evil is not an equal ofgood after all, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, and (I think) Augustine first pointedout, evil is a parasite on good; it cannot exist in the absence of good. So thesoul is good but has become very bad. And now the task at hand is how can we befixed?

Does this resonatewith any of you? Is there anyone else out there who is simultaneously awarethat you are glorious and good beyond understanding and simultaneously twisted,warped and wretched? What do you think of mankind? Are we basically good orbasically evil? Or are those no longer meaningful terms to you?

Impossible Love?

2011-09-12T21:50:00.000-04:00

I have been thinking about self-esteem a good bit over the last several years, largely because I am perplexed by it. The whole concept of having good self esteem confuses me in that I haven't ever been able to really empathize with the way contemporary authors, thinkers and pop-psychologists seem to want to talk about it. Then, when the topic came up on Not the Religious Type, I decided to see if writing about it would clear some things up for me. This is what I came up with:

The problem for me is that the very idea of good self-esteem seems like an attempt at willful self deception in order to be happy. The reasoning seems to go like this:

1. People want to be happy.

2. People who see themselves as bad or deficient are not happy about their badness or deficiencies.

3. Therefore low self-esteem causes unhappiness.

4. So if we want people to be happy we need to give them higher self-esteem.

5. We should, therefore, convince unhappy people to see themselves as very good/beautiful/talented/intelligent - basically as possessing the qualities they value people for having.

You will have noticed that this is bad reasoning. Statement 3 is guilty of non causa, pro causa; it treats a common corellative of unhappiness as the cause of unhappiness. There is no compelling reason to conclude that seeing myself as very bad should cause me unhappiness. At least not unless I want to be good, and improvement is an impossibility. And we have no reason to think that improvement is impossible. As a Christian I believe that perfection is ultimately guaranteed. I get to be perfect some day, so why worry about how far from perfect I am right now? In fact, shouldn't my awareness of my current imperfection give me some happiness when I realize that my God (whom I love) loves me even the gross way I am? If I were perfect I would be able to say something like "well of course God loves me, who wouldn't love this" and I could say it without any arrogance or pride. If I were truly as glorious as I hope to one day be, then any scrupulously honest self appraisal would have to conclude with perfection. I don't think that that would (or will) diminish my appreciation of God's love but isn't that love even more apparent when I see that "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us"?

I think the pop-psychologists have missed this. What do they do with someone who is genuinely untalented, physically ugly (by their own societies standards), not especially talented at anything, generally unkind to everyone around them, and effectively lacking in anything we generally consider lovable? How do you tell someone to look in the mirror and find something wonderful about themselves when there is nothing especially wonderful about them, or at least nothing that falls under the modern rubric of value? I know, generally we haul out the myth of balance to avoid even thinking about this question but when you look yourself in the mirror, the myth will fall to pieces.

Or even if a person does have something this world values; say they are especially beautiful. Anyone who is honest with themselves can easily pick out a dozen flaws, imperfections and "unlovable" qualities in their character. The pop-psychologists tell us to pretend they aren't there. Even Christians tell me, "but that's not really me". Really? Then who is it? If I am not the one who has all those terrible thoughts about my closest friends, who is it who does? Sure, I hope to get beyond all that someday but today certainly isn't that day. Today I am spiteful, envious, lustful, discontent and selfish. Pretending otherwise can only last so long. All lies, even self-lies, collapse in the end. All self-esteem based on self-delusion is nothing but a house of cards under the hurricane of life. Simple reality must ultimately blow the pretty bandages off of all our festering wounds.

And then where will we be?

But I don't think that happiness or, even more importantly, Joy has to be built on high self-esteem. I think that the more honest, more real, more true our self-image is, the stronger a foundation it will be for Joy, and even for happiness. When I can look at myself as myself and see first that I am infinitely valuable simply because I exist (a quality I share with everything and everyone else) and then that I am nonetheless weak, twisted, often evil and ugly - when i can see all of that and know that I am loved, then how could anything shake my joy?

What worries me is that our culture, Christian and secular, seems to be losing it's ability to love through evil. There is an old Christian platitude: Love the sinner, hate the sin. Some people like it, some people hate it. I have opinions but I don't think they matter much since I don't think the phrase means anything to us any more. Nobody loves sinners. At least, nobody loves sinners as sinners. When we make any attempt to love sinners we seem to invariably begin by pretending that they aren't sinners. We only love sinners as saints. Which is why relationships fall apart when reality inevitably forces us to see the sin. When we just can't ignore their faults any more, we have not tools, no practice, no experience and only one example in the priceless skill of loving the unlovable.

Jesus said that they will know we are his followers by the love that we have for one another. Doesn't that mean that our love needs to be a new kind of love? Doesn't that mean that our love has to be a love that is impossible to those who haven't decided to follow Him yet? Is it possible that He was talking about the kind of love that He has for us? Love that loves such a worm as I?

I Guess this Makes me a Patchwork Person

2011-08-30T16:15:00.000-04:00

I have a friend who is extremely Presbyterian. I have another friend who is extremely Objectivist. I am sort of jealous of them. A while back I wrote a post about being a third-culture-kid and the impact that had on my views of culture in general. On that post Ben reflected on my take-what-I-like-and-leave-what-I-don't-like approach to culture and applied it to denominationalism and the search for a tradition. I am going to expand it a bit further and take a look at my approach to ism-ism (if I may coin the term) in general.

Ben pointed out that it can be uncomfortable to not have a tradition with which to identify and I found myself sympathizing with him. First, because it is nearly always more comfortable to say "well what we believe is..." than to say "I believe...". There is strength in numbers, and that is not a bad thing, we are communal beings and it is natural and I think very proper to try and find our place in a greater family. Also it always feels a little arrogant to say "I believe this and I'm not really sure whether anyone else ever has". One seems to be saying "Nobody in the history of the world has been able to figure all of this stuff out until me; but now I understand".

So I think that there are some very good reasons to want to find a tradition (philosophical or theological) to fit into.

But I don't. I do have several terms or isms I will apply to myself but I tend to find that when I use them I have to do it with a lot of caveats: "I'm a capitalist, but I don't think that selfishness is a virtue or that it is better for rich people to get money than poor people, or that capitalism will necessarily make anyone happy" or "I'm think of myself as something of a Platonist but here are bunch of things I think Plato was wrong about" or "I'm basically a protestant but I'm not really sold on the protestant understanding of sola scriptura and I think that the Orthodox have a better understanding of the Eucharist than protestants, and I'm really very confused about what the Church is in a metaphysical sense but I kind of think that the Catholics have a better understanding of it than any protestant does". You see the problem? I can usually identify with some central premise or teaching of one ism or other but I haven't found one yet that I can swallow whole (with the possible exception of Mere Christianity as Lewis defines it - whether you are christian, atheist or other I bet you will be shocked if you go back through that book and look at how basic Lewis' definition is).

And yet at the same time I don't pick and choose by fancy; at least I sincerely hope that I don't. I put a pretty high value on the law of non-contradiction and for as long as I have been trying to construct/discover/receive a complete worldview, I have insisted that no one part of it necessarily contradict any other part. Those of you who know me will know better than I whether I have been successful but I have always at least tried to reconcile any contradictions I saw in my own worldview and to reject one conclusion or the other when the reconciliation failed. Contradiction gives me a stomach ache.

Let me try and describe the process: When I come across a bit of truth and recognize it as such, I go right ahead and believe it. This is a lot like trying on a new tie; I like the tie so I put it on, then I have to see whether it matches the rest of the suit. It may match my coat well enough but it may clash horribly with my shirt. Then I have to decide whether I like the tie or the shirt better. Say I decide for the tie. This means changing the shirt, but not any old shirt will do; it has to match the tie and not clash with the rest of the suit. Eventually I might find just such a shirt only to discover that the shirt comes with a pair of shoes which won't work with the belt.

You begin to see? I am not complaining, as a general rule, I love the process. It's just that I might have
hoped by now to have found some tradition which contains or at least allows for everything I believe to be true and nothing that "clashes" with it. But I haven't.

And I am beginning to be alright with that. I have said in the past that I believe that everything I believe is true. Not because I am arrogant (I probably am but it has nothing to do with this particular conviction) but because my answer to "What do you believe that isn't true?" has to be "Nothing, if I thought that something I believed was a lie then I wouldn't believe it would I". I understand the White Queen "believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast" but I have only been able to believe impossible things by accident.

As a result I have found that I am pretty much stuck where I am. I zip through political theories, philosophies, theologies, religions and I grab gems of truth where I see them and throw out falsehoods when I become aware of them. After all, Jesus claims to be the Truth, and I believe Him. So maybe my sifting process is a good one; maybe I am slowing cleaning the glass through which I view Him; maybe my frenetic truth sorting is really just a series of course corrections towards the center. Maybe your's are too; maybe as you seek the truth at all costs and no matter where you find it, maybe you are getting closer to Jesus. He did say that He is near to those who seek Him.

In the meantime I will try to find community with anyone who will have me. Maybe this is why I care so much about reviving the ability to disagree without vitriol. After all, we are all sure to be wrong about a whole lot of things, even if we don't know which things they are.

And They'll Know We are Christians by our.....Vitriol?

2011-08-25T21:16:00.001-04:00

My apologies for the lateness of this week's post. I have been somewhat overwhelmed because I got a new job this week (cheers all 'round) and have been so busy celebrating that I haven't been able to sit down and put my thoughts to keyboard.

Last week I got my first-ever topic recommendation from a reader. I suspect that the particular observations in the e-mail I received were a result of our having officially (because I said so) entered election season 2013. At least we have on the republican side of the aisle. No, No! don't go away. I promise this is not going to be a post on politics; or at least not exactly. My correspondent commented that he has a number of Christian friends on different sides of the political spectrum - so far so good and a lot more than I could say back when I lived in the Bible belt. I, for one am hugely in favor of Christians not being tied to any particular political ideology, I have my own political opinions and I would hope that each of you have yours but I don't think that good things come from a giant, conglomerate, homogeneous, religious-political-moralist group think.

Unfortunately, things go downhill from there. It seems that these politically heterogeneous Christians are engaging the political world with all the vitriol, and blinders we have come to expect from [insert your least favorite media outlet here]. Or maybe more. Each group seems to have chosen a favored demagogue or two and will defend that demagogue with all the loyalty and ardor we might hope to see directed towards the rest of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Of course it needs to be pointed out that this attitude is not restricted to the Church. Nearly all media outlets seems to have spent the last few years lamenting the lack of civil political discourse in this country (not that I think we ever had much of a hold on it). So yes, Christians are not the only ones who can be downright hateful and nasty when it comes to talking about politics. But I seem to recall something about "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another" and somehow political, rhetorical venom doesn't seem to fit into this description. It has also been observed that this sort of approach to political discussion doesn't really reflect any of the improvements we are supposed to look for in people who have asked the Holy Spirit to start working on them. Putting aside love for a second, when was the last time you heard a political conversation between two Christians on opposite sides of the aisle which was just brimming full of joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control?
Now maybe this just has to do with our culture's loss of ability to engage in any sort of discussion or disagreement. But even if it is, shouldn't Christians at least try to correct the error?
But I suspect that the real problem for Christians in this arena is how clear it always is that the other side is not just mistaken, they are nearly always disastrously mistaken and quite possibly thoroughly evil. After all those people can't possibly be "real Christians" - never mind that we are under even more stringent orders to love people who aren't part of the family yet - why "they" want to rob the poor, or destroy the family, or kill babies, or institute anarchy, or create a dictatorship or, or, or, or.....
Or maybe, just maybe it really is more important to love one another than it is to be vindicated in our opinions, even if those opinions are true. So let me end by pointing to a couple of role models. One of the things I have noticed recently about my hero, C.S. Lewis and his best disciple Peter Kreeft is that both engage in fierce dialogue and dispute without once giving the impression of disrespect or ill-will for their opponents.
Maybe we ought to take a lesson from Pascal; a friend of mine recently drew my attention to the following:
"When we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true." - Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Have you found an effective way to enter into genuinely courteous dialogue with other people on political subjects? Do you just avoid talking about politics because it "always gets ugly"? What is your strategy?

What a Solid Idea!

2011-08-16T20:49:00.002-04:00

Last week I posted on my understanding of the non-material world in a purely philosophical a method as I could manage. My thought was, and still is, to talk this week about what impact those suspicions have on my theology. But before I get into that let me take a moment to admit that part of me sort of hates what I have done.
I think that the common distinction between philosophy and theology is baseless and damaging to both disciplines. In fact, so far as I can tell it is like trying to make a firm distinction between philosophy and ethics or philosophy and ontology. I tend to irritate a lot of Christians and non-Christians with the following statement but here goes: I think that theology is a proper subset of philosophy just like metaphysics, ethics, anthropology and the rest; and I think that it ought to be treated as such. I don't think that anyone can really develop a full philosophical worldview without addressing theology any more than someone can develop an un-philosophical theology. So just as ethics is philosophy thinking specifically about how we ought to behave, theology is philosophy thinking specifically about God.
Right, now that that is out of the way why don't I talk a little about what impact my understanding of pre-modern metaphysics has on my theology. The first observation I want to make is that it clearly undermines any purely materialist understanding of life. If the non-material world of forms has a greater participation in reality than the material world does, it would be nonsense to say that the non-material world is less real than the material world, much less that it does not exist at all.
Secondly, it makes a lot of sense to me to equate the non-material world of the forms with the spiritual world. Clearly, the spiritual world is non-material. But I realize that this will not work if we insist on a purely Platonic understanding of the non-material world. So I don't. I think that one of Plato's greater mistakes was to miss the fact that personhood is a characteristic quality of the real (I think that Lao Tzu missed this insight as well but that's another story). If things with greater being are things which are more person then it would follow that the world of forms is not merely the world of abstraction but is the domain of concrete reality in which all souls, all essential personhood, is anchored.
Another implication of this pre-modern paradigm is the idea that things and actions can have an intrinsic significance which may be even greater than their material significance. I mentioned in the last post that C.S. Lewis thought of himself as a pre-modern (he would have said medieval) thinker. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Rahmandu the Star tells Eustace that in our world, burning gas "is what stars are made of, not what they are". The idea here is that there is more to stars than just their material composition and properties. If you have ever had the feeling that you are more than a cloud of atoms even though a cloud of atoms is what you are made of, and you apply that feeling to stars as well as to yourself, then you begin to get at the point here. Or to put it in more platonic terms: the burning gas is a pale reflection, a material hint, of the reality of a star.
In the same sort of way, the bodies we interact with in our friends and enemies are pale reflections, material hints, of the reality of those persons. When I put it this way to myself generally "spiritual" or "ethereal" concepts like the immortality of the soul, or the impact that virtue and vice can have on a person, become almost self evident. Of course if the spirit has more reality than the body, there is no reason to assume that it should be subject to the same weaknesses (death) as the body.

But the biggest payout for my theology has been the understanding that certain acts may have genuine, profound, spiritual consequences which ought to be take at least as seriously as the material consequences. The clearest example I can think of at the moment would be my understanding of sex. From a pre-modern viewpoint, there is not contradiction and a great deal of gravity in the assertion that sex creates a spiritual bond between two people. If this is the case then it would follow that once one persons soul has been - remember that we are talking about events more "real" than even our physical world - joined to another, then these two people ought to make a commitment to love and support one another at least as long as their bodies stay alive; not to would be cruel and self destructive.

I want to leave it open from here. Do you find the pre-modern worldview compelling? Does it explain anything you might have struggled to understand? Do you think I have come to accurate conclusions about its implications or am I way off base? Of do you think that the whole project is a wrong turn? I would love to hear your takes, thoughts and suggestions.

What a Flimsy Reality!

2011-08-08T20:23:00.000-04:00

There is another way of writing about my topic today. In almost any other format it is a better way. I plan to talk about my suspicions about the nature of the non-material world. In another context I would do this by documenting the original publisher of the germ of every thought and observation I use to build my conclusion. I would provide comprehensive footnotes and I would address the primary objections that occur to me (I would also cite the originators of those objections). I would do that if I were writing a lecture or a formal paper. But this is a "heaven and earth questions" blog post. As such, I try to structure my writing as a conversation; partly because I think that make it a more engaging read for most people, and partly because I am way too lazy to implement the full scholarly rigor that an academic paper or lecture would require. Whether this is a good or bad thing, I have noticed one advantage that has risen out of it. This format allows me to write up and thereby work through ideas before I have them entirely worked through - it works as a great half step on the way to an academic paper.

More preamble! - this topic is, in some ways, focusing on one aspect of a larger topic I have been working on trying to develop a different way of understanding pre-modernism, modernism and post-modernism. The more I research and read, the more I find myself in agreement with what I understand to be a pre-modern mind set toward philosophy and theology. I do want to make a distinction between the descriptive (the model in itself) and the prescriptive (my sympathy for one approach as the model would describe it). This post will be focusing on certain implications I draw from the pre-modern outlook as I understand it through the (new?) model. Also it could just be a poor attempt to justify some sort of odd contemporary neo-platonism
As I have said in another post, I believe that pre-modern thinkers began with metaphysics. That is to say, they began with statements and arguments about what life, the universe and everything are really like. So far as I can tell, nearly everyone who did this was influenced by Plato's theory of the forms which (in a bare bones way that will certainly not cut the mustard if you ever find yourself in my PHIL101 class) basically claims that there is a world behind the physical world of our senses in which the essences or patterns or archetypes or abstractions exist. Something my students have a lot of trouble getting is that this "world of the forms" is more real than the physical world.

I am sympathetic to the difficulty. First, we are conditioned to think of the objects of our senses as the most real things there are. Even metaphysical relativists who like to go around talking about "my reality" and "your reality" - an absurd notion so far as I can see - tend to at least treat the physical world as a fundamentally shared, base line reality. On top of this, every time we run into a world "on top of" or "behind" the physical in literature or the media, it is nearly always presented as shadowy and/or ethereal; we get the sense that it is less real.
The only exception that springs to mind is C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce, which portrays people in purgatory/heaven as looking and functioning somewhat like ghosts because their environment is more real than they are. So he sort of inverts the popular portrayal. This sort of thing comes out in a few of his other works (notably his angels in the space trilogy and especially the ecstatic cosmic dance scene in Perelandra) But then, Lewis described himself as a pre-modern (De Descriptione Temporum) and seems to have been something of platonist as well.

But if I am going to explain Plato, much recommend co-opting part of his worldview, you need to understand that the world of forms genuinely is more real, it has more being, than the physical world. If it helps, you might try following Lewis' approach and imagine the physical world as ghostly in comparison to the world of the forms. Once you have this settled in your head, you will be in a much better position to understand the pre-modern approach.
Things in this world are merely things of seeming. Of course there is some reality to the world of seeming, things really do seem this way or that way. But if we can begin to think and talk about the world of being - a world which this one reflects - then we can begin to get at understanding. Thus, "what is a human?" is a far more interesting question than "how does the blood circulate?"; "what is justice?" is far more profound than "did she hit him without cause?".
Furthermore, the greater reality of the world of forms is actually a really great thing for all of us. Anything which has a soul, has a connection to the world of forms and (to mix my philosophers and bring in our old buddy Aristotle) pretty much everything that lives or has lived has a soul of some sort. In fact, everything that has any being at all is thereby anchored in the world of the forms from which the seeming of existence gets its start (Plato would have said "emanates"). Basically, everything physical that you think of as real is based on its greater reality in the world of forms. Although the aspects of it that we tend to focus on are probably not its more "form-ish" aspects.
Now I take this understanding of two worlds and I am inclined to modify it by denying the separation (that's not new people have been doing it at least since Augustine). I do not think that there are so much two worlds as that there is one world, many aspects of which we are not in the habit of experiencing. We pretty much orient ourselves around our senses. But that doesn't mean that there aren't aspects of reality that our senses just aren't designed to pick up. And if those aspects of reality are more profound, are more fundamental to our identities and being than the physical aspects we are so preoccupied with then it might just be worth thinking about them.
This is one reason I have been so sympathetic to the pre-modern understanding of life, the universe and everything recently. Rather that assuming that our senses give us as much reality as there is and trying to be content with that (modernism) or assuming that what our senses give us isn't even real so that ultimately there is no real reality (postmodernism) I find myself much more persuaded by the idea that our senses communicate some of reality but that there is so much more to it. Maybe there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

P.S. I decided to make this a purely philosophical post. Next week I intend to post on what I see as the religious/spiritual implications of all this.

I'm a Capitalist, Am I Going to Hell?

2011-08-01T19:56:00.000-04:00

I spend a lot of time hanging out with and reading the works of people who are (among other things) united in being anti-capitalist american Christians. This is odd because I am a pretty hard line free-market guy. But I agree with them on so many other points. In fact my worldview seems to have much more in common with theirs than it does with most other Christians, especially with other Christians who tend to hold free-market type views.
Now a when I started to notice this discrepancy I wasn't too worried about it. I just chalked it up to "personalities and preferences". After all, it is an issue of economics, not exactly (despite what some modern theologians want to claim) a matter of deep doctrinal profundity. I didn't see my stance, or the stances of others, as integral to my understanding of what Jesus is like or what it means to be one of His followers.
But recently I have found that my position on this issue does have a pretty big impact on my beliefs about how I ought to live as a Christian in the modern world (for those of you theologaphiliacs, it has substantial implications for orthopraxy). If that is an accurate observation then it would seem that I was wrong to dismiss the debate as unimportant to my worldview. If I find that I disagree with someone about how a person ought to live then it is likely that we have some fundamental disagreement on a deeper level than personality and preference.
So this post is really targeted at those of you who really disagree with me about capitalism. I intend to lay out 1. Why I am a free-market sort of person and 2. Why I think that being a free-market kinda person is more in line with following Jesus than opposing it would be. I hope that you will let me know where my thinking starts to diverge from yours and why I am so terribly mistaken.

Let me begin with some of my presuppositions. I think that Jesus is not interested in having us force people, especially people who aren't interested in following Him anyway, to behave in a "kingdom of heaven" sort of way. So Jesus isn't interested in us passing laws that make divorce illegal in the case of "irreconcilable differences" even though that doesn't look like something He thinks is actually good for people. He doesn't want us to make it illegal to "blaspheme against the Holy Spirit" even though He suggests that doing so will have pretty dire consequences. So it's not good to force someone to do good.
My second working presupposition is that capitalism creates wealth. But let me be clear about this. I'm not saying that wealth is intrinsically good (I see it more as a tool which can be used well or badly) and I'm not saying that there is any particular virtue in a countries acquiring wealth, at least not beyond the capacity required to feed the population. But I do think it's pretty clear from history that the capitalist approach has been more effective in creating wealth in general than any other system we have tried. That doesn't make it good, it just sets up a correlative and assumed causal relationship.
My third presupposition has do do with definition. I define free-market capitalism (the kind I am interested in) as an economic system which guarantees all members the right to make and enforce whatever contract they choose so long as that contract is made in good faith and doesn't infringe on the basic negative rights of anyone else. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great article on the distinction between positive and negative rights).
As a consequence of these presuppositions I see free market capitalism not so much as an established economic system so much as an economic non-system which generally has to be defended from having systems like socialism, mercantilism, or crony capitalism imposed on it. Essentially, free market capitalism is what you get if you just let people do their thing and a)don't force them to be virtuous and b) don't let them violate one another's negative rights. Thus I see it as a system of minimal justice. Free market capitalism is not forcing the kids to share but not letting them steal each other's toys either.
But this is not complete. Surely a Jesus follower wants people to do more than just "not steal each other's toys", surely it is important that people actually grow into practicing the positive virtues of love, generosity and compassion for others. Of course this is true. But remember my first premise: Jesus isn't interested in having us force our joy on people who don't want to follow Him (another way of saying this is that God's Kingdom grows by persuasion, conversion and transformation not by threat, violence and law). If this is true then following Jesus means living a life of love, generosity and compassion without ever trying to force anyone else to lead such a life.
And now I bring the two together. Free market capitalism leaves everyone free to do what they think God wants them to do with their money without forcing anyone. I am in favor of free market capitalism specifically because I see it as the economic system of maximal freedom. All the other systems I know of either force people to do what others think is right (socialism), or force people to contribute to specific injustices (mercantilism, crony capitalism, feudalism).

I want to end by heading off a couple of objections by adding a couple of clarifications. First, I do not think that this country does now or ever has practiced free market capitalism. We have been both closer to it and farther from it in the past but we haven't ever fully practiced it so I am NOT arguing for the status quo or the "system that created the current financial crisis". Second I am not arguing that free market capitalism with it's at least tacit approval if not outright benediction of greed reflects the way we would go about dealing with possessions in a perfect world. And I am not saying that capitalism is a necessary evil. I don't happen to believe that there is any such thing as a necessary evil anyway. I am only saying that free market capitalism is the only system a Jesus follower can advocate for in the world as it is because it does not, of necessity, cause us to act in ways that are contrary to the life Jesus calls people to (though it does allow such actions to occur).

In case this last point is unclear let me make an observation. In a society which restricts itself to enforcing only free market principles (a capitalist society) it is perfectly compatible with that societal structure for any given person or even for every person to behave in an economically socialist manner so long as they do not try to impose their socialism on anyone who doesn't accept it. Thus in a free market society I would be free to throw my income into a pot along with a group of friends or an established community and then distribute that wealth to each person according to their need. But the reverse is not true. In a socialist society, no person is free to behave in a free market manner distributing wealth to each person in accordance with a pre-defined, mutually agreed upon manner; instead all people are required to dispense with their incomes according to the direction of the state. Thus free market capitalism allows for socialistic behavior (so long as it does not force itself on anyone) while socialism does not allow for capitalist behavior. I note that this relationship does not exist between free market capitalism and several other economic systems (feudalism, mercantalism, crony capitalism) because they are integrally dependent on suppression of human rights.

So where have I gone wrong? Are my premises false? Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Have I overlooked some key fact? Please let me know.

You Take the High Road, You Take the Low Road and I'll Take Whichever One Gets Me There Faster.

2011-07-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

I just got back from attending my sister's wedding in Ankara, Turkey. which is not an excuse for my blogosphere absence, it's the background for what I want to talk about today. My family has lived as expats in Turkey for twenty one years now and I lived in Ankara for ten of those years (1990-2000). So going back for the wedding was going home in many ways. We stayed at my parents house and the whole week was something of a mini-family reunion for us all.
While we were there I spent a good deal of time walking around the city and just enjoying Turkey and it's culture; the good, the bad and the ugly. Which got me thinking about the way we approach culture here in the US. Generally it seems as though the typical American (if there is such a beast) will adopt one of two views towards foreign culture: ethnocentrism or multiculturalism - the pedant in me is insisting that I apologize that these are not strictly antithetical terms what with one having "ethnicity" as its root while the other centers around "culture" - But I don't really like either of those approaches.
Let me do a little defining. As I see it, ethnocentric Americans are generally convinced that America has already arrived at the cultural peak of human existence. Our culture is the best there is because... well... it's ours, gosh darn it! And anyway, look at all the things we have been able to do because of it. Am'rcan culture landed a man on the moon, won two world wars, and spent the Soviet Union into a not-early-enough grave. Ethnocentric Americans do sometimes show and interest in other cultures but usually this is done either to study them as curiosities, to mock them as bizarre and inferior, or to figure out how to gain some sort of edge (these days usually educational or athletic) over them.

Multiculturalist (spell check says I coined a word there) Americans are much more humble. They will be the first to tell you (and tell you, and tell you, and tell you, and tell you) that American culture is just one culture among equals and that all cultures are their own beautiful selves and that they cannot really be compared in any qualitative way unless of course you are willing to admit that American culture is the worst possible because we have lots of nasty, racist, oppressive tendencies so that, come to think of it, you can sort of rate cultures as being better or worse in so far as they differ from ours which is clearly at the bottom because all those ethnocentric Americans clearly want nothing more than to rise up and conquer the whole world under one vast red-white-and blue golden arch, riding wiener mobiles and throwing cold pepsi cans at defenseless, illiterate, two year old shamans in the heart of Papua New Guinea just before we force them to watch 48 straight hours of Saved By the Bell.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't really identify with either of these approaches. I am what anthropologists call a third-culture-kid. I grew up as an American in a foreign culture. The result, at least for me, has been that I like to cherry pick cultures. As I grew up, Mom and Dad would tell me that certain practices, tendencies and assumptions were either American or Turkish (or from one of the scores of international students I went to school with). I would then decide whether or not I liked that particular aspect of the given culture and either reject it as a bad idea or try to adopt it. And I have maintained that practice to this day: When I run into a new culture or cultural practice I usually do my best to understand it, appreciate it and then throw out everything I think is bad or damaging about it, recognize the beauty of the practices and attitudes that are left and then try to find a few "gems" I can harvest from it and incorporate into my own worldview and family culture.
Thus I really appreciate and try to emulate the American "can do" spirit along with the western "protestant work ethic" and the importance of taking responsibility for my own actions. I have a huge admiration for Turkish concepts of hospitality and friendship which go far deeper into a person's self-image and worldview than the more American versions of good manners and acquaintanceship. At the same time, I am perfectly happy insisting that the Turkish cultural understanding of fate and it's twisted concepts of male sexual honor, are disgusting and have no place in a healthy person's worldview. American consumerism and the value we place on things over relationships are disgusting and damaging as well.
This all feels very freeing to me. I see what multiculturalists call the tapestry of cultures as something more like a gold mine. There are so many ways of seeing the world and doing life out there and the world has become so much smaller in the last hundred years, that we now have this exciting opportunity to evaluate cultures, process them, harvest what is good, beautiful and helpful, and get rid of what is evil, disgusting and hurtful (female circumcision anyone?). While my ethnocentric friends frustrate themselves trying to defend every piece of America as "vastly superior to anything they have" and my multicultural friends tie themselves in knots trying to explain that it is right and proper for some cultures to treat women like property, I get to step back and condemn what is evil and enjoy what is good.

What do you think? Is my approach worthwhile or am I committing terrible, intolerant act here? I am particularly interested in hearing from any other third-culture people who read this; have you had similar experiences?

Sex and ....Great Books and..... Thomas Aquinas?

2011-07-11T21:19:00.001-04:00

I recently read a Peter Kreeft essay on sexual morality and the liberal arts. Given that those are both matters of some interest for me (my grad school gets mentioned in a particularly positive light in the piece) and that I think his ideas are thought provoking at the least (and possibly quite illuminating) I thought I would give a brief summary and some of my own reaction to it here at heaven and earth questions, send y'all over to Dr. Kreeft's site to read the actual essay, and invite you back here to comment.

Quick note for full transparency: I am generally a big fan of Dr. Kreeft and most of his writing. His modern scholar class on St. Thomas Aquinas is great, and I have not found a better C.S. Lewis scholar than him.
Alright, with the disclaimers out of the way, lets charge ahead. In this essay Dr. Kreeft points out that the sexual revolution in the west was generally concurrent with a decline in appreciation for what we generally refer to as "liberal education" and specifically for the study of the great books. He recognizes that correlation does not equal causation and so He argues that both of these events are results of a common cause: a decline in our cultures tendency to value truth for it's own sake.
As I understand him, he is arguing that when a person (or culture) values truth and the discovery of truth as an end in itself, - a value he identifies as being at the core of a liberal arts education - that person or culture is much more likely to see other thing, especially the good and the beautiful, as ends in themselves. Thus if we value truth for it's own sake, not as a means to some other end, we are also likely to value other people, sexual partners and even sex itself as distinct metaphysical entities which we will then value for their own sakes rather than as means to some other end (generally our own pleasure or fulfillment).
Now I am somewhat exited about this line of thinking because it would fit really well with a thesis I have been working on wherein I want to argue that we need to return to a pre-modern paradigm wherein we begin with metaphysics, asking what things are before we ask how they can be used or how we can know about them. So if Dr. Kreeft is right, then the reason I am so drawn to Liberal Arts education and so "squeemish" about newer sexual ethics, is that I want to discover the truth of what things are, to value things for their own natures and not as means to some other end.

But what do y'all think? Does Dr. Kreeft have point? Is he just dead wrong about everything? About some things? Does his approach to these issues fit more into a pre-modern paradigm? Is a pre-modern worldview worth pursuing?

I'm so Sorry for what Bob did to you!

2011-07-04T13:15:00.000-04:00

So today is America's Independence day and I imagine that there are thousands of blog posts going up with an independence day theme. I suspect that most of these posts will be either patriotic or political. What I am thinking of as patriotic will probably be reflections on the benefits and responsibilities of being American or will be a sort of anti-patriotism wherein people bemoan the many atrocities and injustices our country has committed. The political posts will be just that, political. They will be making use of the day to push some agenda which will be backed by a sort of mild-jingoistic sentiment. And I actually have no problem with any of these approaches; I think that today is a good day to reflect on our country. It is a perfectly worthwhile topic, it bears thinking about, and the holiday celebrating it's birth is certainly an appropriate occasion. But that's not quite what I hope to do with my post today.
Earlier this morning, I read C.S. Lewis' essay: Dangers of National Repentance from God in the Dock. What he said there really struck home with me so I thought it might be worth discussing here, echoing the points as I understand them and then throwing the question out to y'all to see if you have observed similar things.
Lewis wrote the essay on an occasion when England was considering the the idea of repenting (basically saying they were sorry and accepting some of the guilt for) their part in causing the war. His basic message in the essay is that the problem with national repentance is that the wrong people are doing the repenting and the wrong people are resisting the repenting. He points out that the demographic most strongly in favor of this national repentance is the group of young intellectuals and religious/spiritual types. The problem, as he sees it, is that this demographic had nothing to do with causing the things they are so eager to repent of. Recognizing that this may not seem to be much of a problem at first glance (it's not really the end of the world for me to say sorry for something I had no part in; a little foolish or insensitive perhaps but not intrinsically catastrophic), Lewis points out that because these people had nothing to do with causing the war since they were to young to vote or influence popular opinion at the time, when they "repent" they are really blaming other people. He argues that this will cause them to look down on the people who really did have something to do with England's policies leading up to the war while simultaneously being able to veil their scorn with a sort of solidarity of regret. Thus they get to sound very pious and ethical by saying "we were wrong" while at the same time they escape any actual uncomfortable guilt because they can only mean by it "they were wrong".
I found this pretty convicting. I am inclined to wonder how often I have tried to apologize (in the new sense, say I am sorry for) something I am not responsible for and in doing so have only been scorning (either purposefully or in ignorance) the people who were genuinely responsible for the acts I am apologizing for.
Now, I realize that this interpretation of corporate repentance requires a decidedly individualistic approach to the concept of guilt. In fact it seems to deny corporate guilt in all circumstances other than when all members of the group are actually guilty of the relevant act. What do the rest of y'all think? Is corporate guilt a real thing? Can I really be guilty of or repent for things that other people who are associated with me by nationality, religious conviction, ethnicity, gender, or even family ties have done? Is it actually wrong for me to try to repent for someone else's wrongs; in those terms it certainly seems ridiculous?
Finally, how would you take it if I did it "for" you? Say you practiced some form of what you thought of as tough love on a mutual friend of ours. Then say I went up to them an apologized on "our" behalf for what you had done without consulting me. Would you be offended? Would you feel betrayed? Is there any way in which you think my doing that might be helpful to you, the mutual friend or to the situation as a whole? Would it make things better or worse if you thought you really had done something wrong?

Let's Talk about....

2011-06-27T20:02:00.002-04:00

I have found myself thoroughly immersed in a conversation about premarital sex this week. Which is not normal for me. Most of my life can be divided into two sets of conversation on this topic: a) the set of conversations with conservative Christians who like to say "premarital sex (an most other kinds as well) is bad, the bible is very clear about this" and then never want to explain why; and b) the set of conversations with everyone else which generally revolve around how nice it would be to be having more sex with very few holds barred (point of order - I have discovered that it is flatly impossible to write or talk about sex without using an obscene number of accidental double entendres; so enjoy them, they aren't on purpose). This second set also only rarely talks about why sex is so great, they just assume it is.

Not the Religious Type (where I have been getting so much of my jumping off point material of late) just posed a question about sex, namely "How do you Navigate Sexual Ethics". The discussion has been so fascinating, and dovetails so well with my recent post on morality that I thought it would be worth bringing it over to heaven and earth questions to see how y'all feel about the issue. So, while this is, in itself a relatively short posting, it requires a bit of background reading since I would ask you to go check out the original here.
I am personally really interested in your takes on the threads of conversation I have been having with Bill Sergott, Otto, and Jane. Specifically, do you think that there is a good reason that Christians are so generally down on sex outside of marriage? And do you think that all sex has intrinsic metaphysical significance?

Let me copy my most recent comment to Otto as a teaser:

Bill Hoard - I find your distinction on integrity confusing. As I understand it, one of th reasons we ought to be careful about giving our word is the understanding that things (feelings, circumstances etc...) change. Conversely, it is precisely because we recognize the dynamic aspect of reality that we do give our words. What point would there have been in my giving my wedding vows if I expected to always feel towards my wife, all the same emotions I felt on our wedding day? The vows would have been superfluous. Furthermore, if I didn't think that staying together were, by nature now that we are married, the best thing for me and my wife, why would I have said my vows?

If I understand you properly, you are saying that the "wounds" other people give us are only real insofar as we recognize or "give them power" as being real. But I disagree. When one person (husband or wife) cheats on the other, they genuinely wound their spouse. Treating those wounds as illusion both demeans the value of relationship and, so far as I understand from my psychologist and counselor friends, gets in the way of full healing. One of the first steps to healing is to recognize a hurt as real and then move towards the wholeness that God offers. I do not think that trusting God means seeing ourselves as we are not. I know that I am sinful, wretched and prone to hurt the people I love. I know God plans to make me into a glorious son who will someday be worthy of the grace I have already begun to receive. I know the process of that transformation is often painful. But it strikes me as counterproductive to think I am already cured. A cured person wouldn't do the things I do and wouldn't need the healing and training I still need. How can we receive grace until we recognize that we really do need it?

I do think that divorce may sometimes be necessary, but never for things like "maturing" or "growing apart". Here I agree with a principle you referred to. The "laws" are there for the good of those to whom they are given. (I think this is clearest in Jesus attitude towards the sabbath but it shows up in other places as well) so when some unusual set of circumstances require us to set aside the letter in order to follow the spirit, we ought to be prepared to do so. But I think we are being to quick to claim our "ox is in a ditch on the sabbath". C.S. Lewis gave a helpful analogy for divorce when he called it an "operation" and reflected that "some think it so terrible that nothing can be worth it's terrible cost, other say that sometimes it may be warranted to save the life of the patient but all agree that it is more like amputating your legs than pulling a tooth" sadly I don't think we are all agreed about that anymore.

If you are using the title "true love" to refer to someone who is easier to get along with, more attractive to and attracted to someone than their spouse, I will be happy to grant that it may occasionally be applied (though there are so many factors involved that I doubt it is nearly so often as people make out). My point was that regardless of any of those factors, it is never OK to break my word and injure my partner just because I have found a "better" one. We are more than breeding animals.

Finally, in response to your comment that each person is can only be responsible for one person - themselves; I completely agree. But I want to point out that, contrary to popular assumption, we can each think, pray and reason about what actions are right in what circumstances. Whether the actors are ourselves or others.

What do you Mean by That?

2011-06-19T14:44:00.001-04:00

I have been thinking a good bit about jargon recently. As with so many other things I categorize jargon as neither intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. It is just a thing. Certainly it can be used poorly and it can be used well. My thought for this post is to make some overly broad generalizations about when jargon is helpful and when it can be harmful.

The really great thing about jargon is that it saves time. Generally, jargon shows up as a way of expressing some relatively complex, recurring thought or statement into a single word or short phrase. In order to be jargon and not just new vocabulary, this has to happen in a somewhat specialized context. If I coined a new word to talk about some aspect of grocery shopping it wouldn't be called jargon; it would just be a new word since everyone goes grocery shopping. On the other hand, if I came up with a term for some arcane literary process, and it managed to catch on in the field of literary critisizm, then that would be a bit of jargon. This is why jargon can be so great. Instead of having to give this long, technical definition or proposition, I can use this one piece of jargon and everyone who is familiar with the concept will immediately know what I am talking about.

Everyone who is familiar with the concept.

And herein lies the problem. Too often, we use jargon when our audience is not at all familiar with the concepts it represents. So instead of helping communicate the jargon is a hindrance. This downside is obvious and we see it all the time. Teachers and professors do it, and Christians are terrible about it; but really anyone with any technical expertise can get us with it. Contractors and car people do it all the time too. Of course, depending on the audience's pride, they are generally not going to ask for an explanation because they are embarrassed for not knowing the terms before hand. (Any of you guys out there ever nod sagely when your mechanic tells you that the pifflethwattle is shot and if you don't bananafringe your tintbannder the whole gutrude may have to be replaced?).

And that leads to the second danger of jargon: jargon can be used to deliberately obfuscate something. I generally suspect that mechanics do this to me counting on my pride to let them charge me for stuff I don't know anything about. But maybe I am just to suspicious. Either way, jargon can certainly be used as a tool to gain an edge of power over a situation or another person.

But what strikes me as the most dangerous effect of jargon is the way it can obfuscate meaning to the person who uses it without their ever realizing that they have no idea what they are talking about. If I have any expertise it is in two areas: Christianity and Philosophy. In both of these areas I am forever catching others and myself using terms that we ourselves aren't entirely clear on. Generally these will be terms that we have heard often enough that we understand how they ought to be used but which we have never really investigated. Think about it; do you know what it means to say "I claim the blood of Christ" or "this is a question in Meta-ethics which is linked to the concept of goodness qua positive being"? You tintinnabar needs some real bananfringing.

I think that this is the worst way that jargon can go bad because it allows for self-delusion. If you are accidentally using language you audience doesn't understand, it is unfortunate but correctable. If you are deliberately obfuscating something, that is a problem but at least you know what you are doing. But when jargon goes wrong in this third way, you might say something completely accurate without having the least idea what the truth is. Students who do this, get A's on tests without being educated and tragically don't even know that they are ignorant. Philosophers who do it miss out on the wisdom they are seeking and, because they used the jargon correctly, they don't know where they went wrong. Christians who do it are probably in the worst shape. They have no idea what they are talking about but they think that their phrase is their answer.

Let me challenge you to try something I do every so often. Stop using jargon for a while, try a week. Don't use any word unless you actually know what it means and are pretty sure that a middle school student could understand it. Don't ask God for "grace and peace" ask Him for what you want. Find out whether or not you know what you are talking about when you claim that "sanctification is a work of faith". Do you think you could explain the egocentric dilemma to a ten year old? Let me know how it goes.

No More Fun for You! Is Morality Still Worth Talking About?

2011-06-13T21:13:00.003-04:00

Are people really interested in being moral anymore? I taught my first section of ethics at CCBC this last semester and, while the students were great, it struck me that there was not much interest in questions like "how can I be moral? What would it mean to be moral? What does real morality look like?". As I have asked around I have found this to be a relatively common attitude. Some people are generally interested in morality as an abstract concept and are eager enough to compare ethical systems and debate hypothetical moral dilemmas but I don't hear many people at all who are specifically interested in becoming more moral.

I suspect that there are quite a few reasons for this (if I'm not making it up entirely) and I am positive that I would not be able to identify all of them if I tried. What I would like to do is talk about my understanding of what it means to be moral and why being moral is such an important thing and then ask any and all readers if my thoughts match theirs and what they perceive to be those of their peers. My thought is that one of the reasons for the decline in interest is a misunderstanding of what morality is. I guess I think that if more people defined morality the way I do, they would be more interested in being moral.
So as I understand it, morality is essentially the road map to living a good life. I pretty much equate "being moral" with "being righteous" with "being holy". Another way to say it would be that morality + experiencing God = Joy. In the same way, I would define immorality as something like "living poorly" or "not living well at all".
The idea here goes back to a lot of my teleological worldview. I believe that there is an "end" for each and every person, that is, that is that there is a way of being which is fundamentally in line with our own natures. I identify that way of being with tao, the good life, righteousness and of course being moral. I have mentioned elsewhere that I believe this way of being can only be accessed or achieved by joining/submitting our lives to the life of Jesus, but that goes beyond the scope of this post. The point here is that I am keenly interested in morality because as far as I can tell, the "perfect" ethical system would essentially function as a description of the perfect, fulfilled way of being. It would describe the kind of life that anyone in his right mind would be desperate for once he heard it.

Of course the problem is that we are not in our right minds most of the time. I point out to my students that 99% of the time, the right decision is pretty much obvious. The great peculiarity of human nature is that we are capable of choosing what is not in our own best interest. We are able to, and tragically often do, choose misery over joy. As Dr. Kreeft says, "We are nuts! Were crazy! We have all of these chances to choose Joy and so often we take misery instead; it didn't work out last time but maybe this time will be different".
But I think most people (at least most of my students and many of the Christians I know) think of morality as a set of rules they have to obey or they will get in trouble. Sometimes the trouble is undefined and sometimes it is basically "God will be grumpy with you" with all that that may entail. I think most people think of morality as a burden to keep them from fun rather than the map to joy. Am I wrong, or have you found that to be the case?

And His Face did Shine as the Sun

2011-06-06T21:47:00.004-04:00

Let me begin with a bit of a warning on this one. Well, two warnings actually. First, this is a reflection on something I know very little about and second, these are generally unfinished thoughts. As a result I am really craving responses to this post; both from those of you who know a good deal more about the topic than I do and from those of you who haven’t even heard of this way of thinking before. Am I going off the deep end? Have I even begun to understand the things I’m talking about? What would be a good next step to take?

About three years ago I watched a video at my pastor’s house. It had this guy talking about two ways of thinking about the spiritual life. He called them “bounded set” and “centered set” models. As I understand it, these models began as mathematical models (where as far as I know they still serve some great mathematical function) but someone (I’m still trying to track down who) worked out how to apply them as spiritual worldviews. (Update - According to Steven Hamilton, the model was developed as a theological/missiological outlook by Paul Hiebert at Fuller and then got into the vineyard movement through John Wimber)

I completely ripped this illustration off of Dave Schmelzer's "Not the Religious Type" Blog. An excellent read and well worth visiting

So if I understand correctly, the bounded set spiritual model views all people as divided into two camps (sets), in or out; and usually a person’s position in this model is determined by whether or not they have a sort of mental assent to some series of propositions. In usually means that the person will go to heaven some day and out means that they won’t. The centered set approach denies the in/out distinction in favor of orientation. The important question in this model is whether or not a person is oriented towards the center (in my circles this means oriented towards Jesus). In my experience centered set people actually get a little confused when you ask them who is going to heaven; not because they want to dodge the issue but because the question is not the point (they usually answer by pointing out that Jesus loves people and that loving Jesus is the point in life and well, it seems like people who love Jesus will probably be with Him forever and that sounds like heaven so…). In this model it is not so important to get people to cross lines and form new mental assent lists as it is to get people to notice and love Jesus, to orient their lives towards Him.

O.K. So I really like the centered set approach, at least I like it so far as I have understood it. I would have to say that as recently as 5/6 years ago I definitely had a bounded set worldview and that I am still trying to replace it with a centered set worldview in all parts of my life. That project is actually really difficult though, I find the old outlook always popping up in places I never thought to look for it.

And that was an enormous preamble but I think I needed it to set the stage for my recent thoughts about the centered set model.

One thing that strikes me about centered set thinking is that the center is really bright. Mathematically a center is a point. And I think that that is appropriate. We believe in the God who is. The God who is more real than anything else, He is That from which reality is derived. He is personal and is a particular, so it makes sense that He would be represented by a point in this model.

But He is also very bright.

In my experience it is generally quite difficult to pick out the exact center of a dazzling light. And if Jesus is the Divine Light, so powerful and overwhelming that looking directly at Him in even His full physical glory (to say nothing of the radiance of His full Being) generally causes people to fall down “as dead men” I imagine that picking out the exact center of His radiance is going to be decidedly difficult.

In terms of centered set modality, I think this means that as we draw nearer and nearer to Jesus we are going to have to be ever correcting. I suspect that we are going to be forever mis-identifying the center. I don’t think that it is especially hard at the outset to move in the right direction; the light is very bright and not too difficult to differentiate from darkness. In fact His light is so bright that I often find it shining into “other” philosophies, religions and “ways”, and many people have begun by seeing His light in those places, it is what gives them their spiritual attraction and glory.

So if we start out moving towards the light, we may be able to stay on our initial trajectory for some time, always pointing towards Jesus. But after a time, as our “eyes” begin to adjust to glory, as we begin to experience Him, we will generally find ourselves making corrections. What looked like it might have been the center keeps turning out to have been a little off course. And so we make a shift, in relational terms as we get to know Him better (tanimak) we begin to know Him more fully (bilmek). I think this explains the multitude of religions (far from the center) of churches and denominations (nearer the center) and of the variety of personal beliefs among the great saints and mystics who come so very close to God in this life. I think that it is what C.S. Lewis was describing when he talked about myth in the Perelandrea as "gleams of celestial beauty falling on a jungle of imbecility" or when the young Calormen recognized Aslan as the light he had been seeking under another name. This may also be why Jesus prayed so fervently “that they may be one, Father as You and I are one”.

Nearer to the center we are closer together; there is unity; even if we arrive from different directions.

A Nasty Eleven-Letter-Word

2011-05-31T20:45:00.001-04:00

I was talking with a couple of friends this weekend and someone dropped the word "empowerment". Which got me thinking. It's not really a word I am particularly fond of but I hadn't taken the time to work through the reasons for my dislike. So here is what I came up with.
We usually hear the word "empowerment" in one of two contexts. Either someone is talking about one social group (race, gender, orientation, political party, religion etc...) needing to be empowered by society. Or someone is talking about a specific individual "finding empowerment". Of these two usages I prefer the second one but overall I think the word ought to be dropped from the language entirely. Before I go into the two usages though, let me talk about the word itself.

"Empowerment" is a noun, I suppose. It's a sort of action that is objectifiable. But it is also intrinsically passive. One receives empowerment, if you get power for yourself you have not "been empowered" you have simply "gotten power". Of course there are a few pop-psychology books which talk about self-empowerment, but even there, a single entity is acting as both the subject and object of the phrase; thus when I engage in self-empowerment, I receive power I got for myself. So "empowerment" is not a word which can (or at least ought to) be used in the context of one increasing their own power, it is a passive word.
In the first usage (empowering a social group) I don't think the word can be used without contradicting the intentions of the person using it. Specifically, if I said that some group needs to be empowered that can only be because they currently lack power. It is possible that I would make the claim in a sort of off handed way claiming that some group or other really ought to have power, but that is unusual. Usually when the word gets used someone is talking more about taking power from another group (usually a majority of some sort) and giving it to another group. A sort of redistribution of power. Which is condescending. Really condescending. If I were to walk up to you and say "You know what you need? You need power, so lets take some from that guy over there and get it for you." You cannot really talk about empowering anyone without suggesting that a) they don't have enough power and b) they can't get it for themselves; someone else has to get it for them.
Not only is that insultingly condescending in a social context but it lacks a certain amount of historical viability. At the present I can't think of a single social group which currently has power which they did not either inherit, get from God, or get for themselves. People just don't do third party swaps on power.
In the second usage (empowering an individual) I have less of an issue with the use of the word but only because people almost never mean what it actually means when they use it. Properly understood, the phrase "You need empowerment." means something like "You don't have enough power, and you can't get it yourself so you need to find someone to get it for you". But in actual usage it generally just means "you need more power." Which may or may not be true in a given situation, but either way it is a case of misusing the language and potentially conveying an assumed superiority.
Of course there are times when it is quite appropriate to talk of empowering someone. Deputies are empowered, they don't have police power, they can't get it for themselves, it has to be given to them. Children are occasionally empowered by their parents who quite properly have more natural power (moral, physical and legal) and can, on occasion lend or give it to them. And God is omnipotent. So ultimately all power in existence is a result of divine empowerment, quite properly so.
The problem is when groups of naturally equal power (especially legal or moral power) start to talk about empowering one another. When this happens the relationship between the groups must be artificial and strained from the outset. One is the group with the power and however they feel about that (guilty, proud, justified, unjustified) they will see themselves as different both in capacity and quality from the other group (remember "empowerment" only happens when the receiver can't get the power for themselves).
Or am I wrong about this? These are just my reflections on why I dislike the word so much (my other thought was that I don't like it simply because power is almost always the wrong thing to focus on in any relationship) they may be way off base. Please let me know either way.

The Love of God

2011-05-29T13:32:00.001-04:00

There's a wideness in God's mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God

Now I've seen no band of angels
But I've heard the soldiers' songs
Love hangs over them like a banner
Love within them leads them on
To the battle on the journey
And it's never gonna stop
Ever widening their mercies
And the fury of His love

Oh the love of God
And oh the love of God
The love of God

Joy and sorrow are this ocean
And in their every ebb and flow
Now the Lord a door has opened
That all Hell could never close
Here I'm tested and made worthy
Tossed about but lifted up
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God

- Rich Mullins

I don't have much to add, but this one does a good job of summarizing my experiences over the last two years or so.

You Stupid-head!

2011-05-24T21:10:00.001-04:00

I have a suspicion, and it has been growing these last few weeks. I suspect that we are losing the art of disagreement. We just don't know how to disagree anymore. As I have thought about this over the course of this last week (My reflections were kicked up a notch after a conversation I had on Dave Schmelzer's blog) I have begun to firm up this suspicion into a full blown theory.

Before I go full bore into this idea, let me lay my cards on the table: I love debate. I love discussion, argument, seminar, dialectic. The back and forth of competing ideas in an effort to discover truth makes me all tingly inside. Seriously, I remember in college I would drop nearly anything to sit down at a table and launch into disagreement with a classmate over some bit of arcane theological minutia. And if that weren't bad enough, I tend to romanticize debate. The deeper an argument goes, the more likely I am to see myself sitting in a dimly lit pub surrounded by beer, reference books, pipe smoke and some hearty meat pie type dish. I've got it that bad. The thing is, that in a good debate, there are rules and etiquette. In fact in all of my best conversations, there has been respect on both sides and while I don't always convince my opponent/partner or become convinced by them, I do nearly always leave a) on better terms that I began and b) wiser and better able to understand them.
My experience suggests that there is no real difficulty in having an enduring, deep friendship with someone who is nearly %100 wrong about almost everything important in life (or even with Calvinists). But I find that I am somewhat unusual in that regard. Most people I run into these days don't seem to be at all comfortable with the suggestion that someone else might be wrong. This is true both within and without the Church. In both spheres, sacred and secular, there are usually two possible outcomes from this discomfort. A person who is uncomfortable with other people's potential wrongness will either 1) ignore the wrongness and do his best to pretend that everyone agrees or 2) ignore the person they think is wrong and treat them more as a category of person rather than an actual individual. To overgeneralize; people who identify as liberal (both secular and theological) tend towards the first approach while people who identify as conservative (secular and theological) tent towards the second.
And I would like to suggest that neither of these is a particularly good way to go. In fact I think that both of these approaches are based on a wrong assumption. The assumption that being wrong makes you a stupid-head; or in more adult language, that being wrong devalues a person.
In the first approach people have trouble with disagreement because to say that someone is wrong about something is to say that they are, in at least one way, less of a person. Because these people do not want to give the impression that they actually think of anyone as less than themselves they are forced to ignore any and all points of strong disagreement. I think everyone is generally familiar with this. Five people are having a conversation and someone makes some strong political statement.... conversation stops.... two people look really nervous... one of them speaks up and says something like "not everyone would want to go that far" and everyone looks at the original speaker. If he is a first approach kind of person, he backs down. "No of course, just sometimes I feel that way, but it could be anything really, I mean politics is nuts anyway right?...?" and things go back to comfortable. Nobody really disagrees with anybody else, not when they are friends.
But this is absurd. People do disagree. And that doesn't begin to affect their value as persons. In fact if we go back to an older understanding of value and recognize that each person has infinite value and that they have it simply by being a person, the whole problem disappears. We are messed up infinitely valuable people trying to figure life out. Of course we are going to disagree, often about incredibly important things. So what?
The second approach accepts the same wrong premise, that being wrong decreases the value of an individual, and therefore concludes that everyone who doesn't agree with them is a little less than they are. In the church, this manifests as spiritual pride (what C.S. Lewis called one of the ugliest of all sins); in the secular realm it's just normal pride (not a whole lot better really). And this is another group we are generally familiar with; it smacks of condescention and it tends to kill any community or relationship.

I would suggest that we need to relearn the art of disagreement. The ancient Christian saying "In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, Charity" is far wiser than any approach we tend to take today. Disagree, argue, but do it in love. Do it with humility. This, at least, might serve as a starting point if we really do want to "seek the truth in love".

Do I know you?

2011-05-19T20:11:00.001-04:00

I heard recently that English is the largest language in the world. That is to say that we have the largest vocabulary. Mostly, this is a historical accident. Modern English was really common when the wold "shrank" thanks to media and the internet, and as a result we have been plagiarizing words from other languages non-stop (I think it also has a lot to do with the globe-spanning British Empire). That being the case, my attention was recently drawn to one of our greatest deficiencies. We only have one verb for "to know". Which is odd. And unfortunate. Both of the other languages I speak, have at least two verbs which reflect what are, in my opinion, two nearly completely different concepts. But English only has one, and as a result we have a bad tendency to confuse those two concepts. Even more unfortunately there are significant theological implications behind the concept we are using. I'm not sure how this one works out in Greek and Hebrew (little info check all you linguists out there?) and there is some natural overlap between the two concepts which I will get into a little later, but this distinction is worth exploring either way.

   "To know" - bilmek (Turkish) - wissen (German) - means to know about, to have information. You would use bilmek to talk about information. In fact the Turks went ahead and incorporated that word when they coined a new word after the computer was invented (a "bilgisayar" is a knowledge/information processor). So you would use bilmek when you have information about something: I bilmek that my wife is beautiful, I bilmek that my car is a honda, I bilmek that 2+5=7. On the theological level, there are certain things we bilmek about God: He is Love, He is Truth, He is Good and so forth.

At the same time, "to know" - tanimak (Turkish) - kennen (German)- means to know relationally. You would use tanimak to express your acquaintance with or knowledge of someone or something. We are usually using the word this way when we say "yeah I know him" or "oh I know suffering". It implies intimacy and relationship. So I tanimak my wife and my son. This meaning is a little harder to communicate in English because it tends to be a secondary usage, we assume that you need to know about bilmek someone or something before you can know tanimak them.

    And that is where I think the problem begins. I would suggest that in terms of our relationships, tanimak knowing is actually much more important than bilmek knowing. I am willing to grant that there has to be at least a little bilmek knowing going on in order to have any tanimak since it is would be impossible to have a relationship with someone you know absolutely nothing about. But I think that it is a very , very little bit. Some of the most frightening passages in the bible, involve God saying "I never knew you". But it would seem really silly to suggest that God means "wow I didn't know you existed, how about that". I think we all understand that he is talking tanimak knowing here, not bilmek knowing.
    And this is why I find it so very strange that Christians in America are getting so up in arms about the relative importance of so many theological facts. Nearly all of them are bilmek facts. When we say that someone needs to know Jesus, aren't we saying that they need to tanimak know Him, not that they need to bilmek know Him? After all bilmek knowing is all about quantity; how many facts do I know about Him, while tanimak knowing is all about quality; how well do I know Him? To place bilmek knowing over tanimak knowing would suggest that entry into the kingdom tao is based on being able to pass a theology test. Which is ludicrous.
This is one of the reasons I am so excited about the general relational approach to theology. If it isn't clear by now, I am all about truth, I think it's really important. But may I suggest that in the realm of theology we ought to test our theological conclusions against our body of tanimak knowledge before our bilmek knowledge? I would suggest that it is more important to ask whether each new conclusion is consistent with the God I know tanimak than whether it is consistent with my body of bilmek knowledge about Him. Hopefully I can do both.
    Let me add one final paragraph in defense of bilmek knowledge which I'm afraid I may have cast in too negative a light. Bilmek knowledge is still incredibly important. If I tanimak know someone, and I love them, then I ought to want to bilmek know as much about them as I can. I love to learn new things about my wife and my son. I bilmek know that my son doesn't like chicken and I bilmek know that he loves firetrucks and being outside. I bilmek know that my wife cries when she watches Disney cartoons and I bilmek know that her knee is the most ticklish spot on her. These facts, these bits of bilmek knowledge delight me, they deepen my tanimak knowledge of them. So bilmek is important. But look what just happened, now you bilmek know things about my wife and my son, but you still don't tanimak know them. So in English now, do you know them?

There's Still Too Much Bathwater in with that Baby!

2011-05-16T19:47:00.001-04:00

This post is a continuation of my reflections on postmodernism and premodernism.

Postmodernism is a tricky word to define. For a number of reasons. Primarily because it is essentially negative: Instead of supporting some approach or theory, it seems to define itself by what it is not - postmodernism is not modernsim, and (presumably) it is not premodernism either. If you ask postmodernism what it is, any answer you are likely to get will eventually boil down to: "well, whatever it is, it's not that anyway". But don't take this as a necessary criticism; there are a number of things that are best defined negatively (God being a primary example - most of our definitions for God involve saying what He is not rather than what He is). After all, as C.S. Lewis pointed out :“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” So if modernism made a wrong turning somewhere, then by being negative, postmodernism is probably moving in the right direction.
So what is it that postmodernism is rejecting when it rejects modernism? Well usually I hear postmodernists talk about rejecting modern assumptions about reason and knowing things. Along with several other modernist pemises, postmodernism usually claims to reject the modern claim to know things. And certainly, knowing is a subject that modernism was (is?) intensely interested in.

I was reminded recently that one of the major differences between the enlightenment and all the western philosophy that came before it was an enormous shift in priority from metaphysics (questions about being) to epistemology (questions about knowing). Before the enlightenment, people certainly thought about epistemology but most of the time they answered their epistemological questions through the lens of their metaphysical answers. Really this was (at least initially) a shift in priority. Before the enlightenment, most thinkers would have said that you needed to have a good understanding of metaphysics if you wanted to really get a handle on epistemology. Thus metaphysics was prior to epistemology. The enlightenment, starting mostly with Bacon and Descartes, switched the formula around and started claiming that before we can get anywhere with metaphysics we need to have a handle on epistemology. Thus modernism sees epistemology as prior to metaphysics.
So what does all of this have to do with postmodernism? Quite a bit. I am beginning to suspect that many of the problems I tend to have with postmodernism stem from its failure to go far enough in rejecting this modernist assumption. Two weeks ago I might have said it goes to far; now I'm thinking it doesn't go far enough. Specifically, it seems to me that postmodernism accepts modernism's premise that epistemology is prior to metaphysics. Given that postmodernists generally want to define the movement as a rejection of modernist assumptions, this strikes me as odd and on reflection as extremely problematic.
Postmodern scholars seem to spend a great deal of time looking at language and cultural biases and various mental limitations in order to create arguments that the modernists were being pie eyed, foolish idealists when they went around making the audacious claim that we can know things. They focus a great deal of effort "debunking" the epistemological theories of the important modernist thinkers in order to build their own epistemological theories. In fact, epistemology is so big in postmodern circles that a number of people have reflected that metaphysics seems to be dead.
So postmodernism does not actually reject modernist assumptions; it just rejects modernist conclusions. In the place of those conclusions, some postmoderm thinkers have concluded that we have to find different ways of knowing (others have said that we just can't know things but I'm not going to focus on them here). Knowing though experience, emotion, narrative and instinct have all been suggested as alternate epistemological solutions to the problems that arrive when we think of epistemology as prior to metaphysics. The biggest of these problems is that post modern epistemologies are almost always too limited. They will offer some incredibly valuable way of knowing which the modernists rejected, but then they go and reject the modernist way of knowing (reason). So they tend to end up with less rather than more. Or sometimes they will accept reason as one way of knowing things but then they will make this odd suggestion that all the different ways people go about knowing are completely distinct and that as a result, contradictions aren't important.
Let me be really clear here. Premodernism did not make this mistake. Actually, premodernism didn't make either of these mistakes. Where the modernist says that reason is the only way to know things and the postmodernist says that there are many ways of knowing but none of those ways can influence one another; the premodern understood that knowing is like a rope with multiple strands and that each strand needed to work with each other strand in order to build an accurate picture of the truth.
I suspect that postmodernism is making this mistake because it is working from the "bottom up" rather than from the "top down". By asking about epistemology first, by failing to reject enough of modernisms assumptions, postmodernism limits itself to the how without a what. May I suggest that if we started talking about what life actually is, it would make questions of how a lot easier to handle.

A Life Lived Together

2011-05-09T22:29:00.002-04:00

I'm re-posting this from a question I asked on another site so you tea sanctuary people please bear with the redundancy. These are a few thoughts I put together as an answer to why I am so interested in the idea of intentional community, especially in the United States. I am thinking that I will expand each of the three threads into it's own post later on. The introduction I wrote for my original comment is not really relevant in a stand alone context so I have created a new one for the sake of this post.

I have been fascinated with the idea of intentionally forming a holistic community, mostly so that I could be a part of it, for something like six years now. For a number of reasons I have recently had the opportunity to begin working through my reasons for why I thought that an intentional community is such a great idea. While there are quite a few, I find that I am personally persuaded by three threads of thought: historical, philosophical and theological. While I hope that each of these threads is, in itself, enough to justify the pursuit, they have all played a part in bringing me to my own position of the subject.

Historically people do not live or operate in isolation. In fact it is only in the last 100 or so years that we have developed enough technology to "sustain" isolated lives. So far as I can tell, we in America have treated this use of technology as a good thing. We talk about becoming more independent or reliant. Only in the last 30 or so years have people begun to question the value of achieving this level of independence. As that warning has grown, I have become convinced that isolation and merely voluntary interaction with other people is one of the negative rather than positive side effects of the scientific revolution. I believe that we are essentially social beings, which means that we cannot experience a fulfilled life (kingdom tao) outside of interdependent relationships (though in a few unusual instances God might call someone to rely solely on Him for the fulfillment of this need - Adam was not one of these unusual people).
The problem now is that the technology and the wealth already exist. As a result, we are not basically dependent on other people, at least not on people outside the nuclear family and work. All other relationships are purely voluntary. This means that rather than the more natural interdependence which existed and kept people fulfilled in the past. We are in a position which calls us to choose voluntary interdependence. But this is a choice we must make if we want to fully enter the tao.
Philosophically I want to re-stress this concept that we are essentially social beings. I believe that the most basic unit of society is actually the family (not the individual) because the family is the smallest possible self-sustaining unit. This transition from an enlightenment individual focus, means that all relationship types need to be shifted up a notch when we consider their importance: friendships ought to be as important as we usually think family is, acquaintances as importance as friendship, social organizations (neighborhood, city, state, country) all need to make a similar shift. What I am trying to get at is this idea that there is no such thing as a fully healthy individual in isolation. Healthy individuals only exist in relationship to other individuals filling different roles. Although I may have implied differently above, there really is no such thing as voluntary interdependence. We simply are interdependent, by nature. Just as we are oxygen and food dependent by nature. Thus "voluntary interdependence" is about as redundant as "voluntary dependence on oxygen". It only needs to be said because so many people in our culture have incorporated "oxygen deprivation" into their world view.
Theologically I believe that interdependence begins, and is modeled in the Godhead. God is love, C.S. Lewis interprets that as a statement of God's relational nature. Before all other things are created, God the Father is in a love relationship with God the Son, which is so powerful that the relationship itself, the love, is a further person: God the Spirit.
I believe that this essential relational nature is part of what was incorporated into the Imago Dei when God created Adam. That creation was "not good" yet because man was alone, God had only created half of a human. So the creation of Eve (and with her, family) created the first full humans; we come in pairs.
I believe that Jesus purposefully built interdependence into the church and made it integral to the tao. Paul is especially clear on this point; even our union with Christ is not based on just the two of us. We are members (plural) of his body. "Christ in us" means that we are joined together in Him.
My intention to form an intentional community is based on my intention to live a fuller life, an abundant life, to live according the tao which is the Kingdom of Heaven. And I believe that that kind of life is a life lived in voluntary, interdependent community with others.

"Forgive and Forget" or "Forget and Forget"

2011-05-04T20:58:00.000-04:00

  It struck me the other day that our culture doesn't know how to forgive any more. This is a little odd because we talk about forgiveness a lot. So far as I know it's still one of the kindergarten virtues; share, say please and thank you, forgive. So let me offer that as my excuse for not noticing it sooner.
  Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to say that we all hold grudges and that relationships cannot be reconciled after an "unpleasantness", that happens quite frequently (though still probably not often enough) but I don't think that it happens through forgiveness. Today if you do something to upset me I seem to have two real choices; I can acknowledge that you really hurt me and I can let that come between us, maybe even retaliate, or I can pretend as though nothing happened and make a point of minimizing the whole event even if you do think to apologize. I think that most people in our culture identify that second point with forgiveness, the sort of "act as though nothing happened" mentality. When we want to "forgive" we have to convince ourselves and everyone else that no harm was actually done; sometimes we understate the damage, sometimes we explain it away, sometimes we just stop talking about it altogether.
  But that is not what forgiveness is. In fact I want to argue that this "ignore it and it will go away" mentality is an incredibly foolish, dangerous and even harmful thing to do. The first and primary problem with this approach is that it is, at bottom, an attempt to deny reality and denying reality just doesn't work in the long run. In fact, if memory serves, Screwtape heartily recommends that humans build up a habit of trying to convince themselves of something they know to be false. He claims that it will make us either give up on the virtue altogether or, even worse, establish a habit of living in two contradictory worlds with no bearing on real life. Reality is a horrendously stubborn thing: if someone hurts me, it hurts. It just does. If I try to deny that it hurts I'm only going to end up hurting worse in the end. This is most evident with physical injury. If you break my leg, the only way I can heal is to face up to the fact that my leg is broken and go and get it set and put in a cast. If I try to deny the injury so that you and I can still be friends, I'll end up walking on the leg and only make the injury worse.
  Probably the most blatant version of this false forgiveness happens on Facebook. Someone insults or upsets me. So I "un-friend" them. But later I want relationship back; maybe I just need more allies in monster backyard, or maybe I am genuinely curious about their lives, or I want to show off my own. So I send a friend request, or they do, and it is accepted. And nobody ever says anything about it again ... until the next time.
  And we do this sort of thing all the time in real life as well. How often have you heard "it was nothing" when it was something? How often have you explained away a verbal barb just so that you don't have to confront someone, so that your relationship with them will still run comfortably. Or, the worst version of this, how often have you just stopped talking about something altogether and acted as though it didn't happen at all. I'm not talking about being easy going, or being slow to take offense, those are good things. I'm talking about when that comment really does hurt and you pretend it wasn't said at all because it would be so awkward to confront the person. You might even have used the word forgiveness; "I've forgiven him so I'm not going to talk about it at all".
  Let me say again, this is not forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn't have some magical power to reach back into the past and change things. What happens in this morally dangerous world actually does happen and no amount of forgiveness can undo it. And we know this, at least we know it when reality hits us hard enough. If my car is stolen, I can forgive the thief 'til I'm blue in the face, and my car will still be gone. Forgiveness is not pretending that nothing happened. Forgiveness is admitting that something did happen and then refusing to let it get in the way of relationship. "You hurt me, but I forgive you" does not mean "you hurt me but I will pretend it didn't hurt", it means "you hurt me but I still want to have a relationship with you."
  Forgiveness is essentially vulnerable on the part of the forgiver and humble on the part of the apologizer. It is incredibly uncomfortable and difficult and when I think about it I'm not all that surprised that we have managed to forget how to do it. I have even seen people apologize and then become angry when they are forgiven: "who does he think he is saying I really hurt him but it's OK, he forgives me, does he think he's better than me?" It even feels awkward to be asked to genuinely forgive, even when we are willing to. It would almost be more comfortable if the other person would have just not brought it up. I suspect that some of that goes back to our failure to have a healthy understanding of hierarchy but I'll save that for another post.
  In the meantime I would love some feedback; do y'all think that we really forgive? That we acknowledge truth and then refuse to let an injury get in the way of our relationship? And isn't this a more difficult but beautiful concept? Isn't a relationship much, much stronger if the parties can admit to being hurt but insist on maintaining community with one another anyway. Only weak relationships cannot handle forgiveness; strong relationships demand it and grow stronger for it.

Thoughts on Teaching

2011-04-28T22:56:00.001-04:00

  I was filling out a job application a while back and since the job was a teaching position at a local private high school, one of the sections asked me to supply my philosophy of education and teaching. It strikes me that I have no real idea how common or uncommon my perspective on that topic is, so let me supply y'all with my thoughts on the subject and ask for your feedback:
  I believe that a complete education will serve two purposes: It will train and it will inform. I believe that these two purposes are inextricably linked in that information is the medium of the training which would, itself, be useless without informational content. In short, a full education is one which teaches students how to think and provides them with material which is worth thinking about.
  Unfortunately there is one particular obstacle to effective education in modern society; a lack of motivation on the part of the student. I believe that wonder, curiosity and reason are essential aspects of human nature and are especially evident in children. These qualities provide a basic motivation to learn is often crushed or pushed out of children at a tragically early age, so that by the time they have entered the later years of school, that motivation has either narrowed or shifted away from academics altogether. As a result, a modern educator must also be able to instill motivation in his students since they will only rarely bring it to the table themselves. This brings my list of educator activities up to three: instructing, training and motivating.
  As regards instruction or course content, I am convinced that a liberal education is the most broadly beneficial to the average student but that this must be tailored or altered to the specific demographics of a particular community. This alteration should only take place in a courses format or method of presentation, it should not affect a course's quality, rigor or scope.
  As regards training, I am convinced that a teacher's job is to train the students in the full development of their own natural faculties of critical thinking, creativity and effective study which constitutes the student's own pursuit of information. I believe that these skills are most effectively communicated by exposition, example and practice.
  Finally regarding motivation, I am convinced that students are best served by having the relevant content kinked to their own personal interests, drives and desires. These links ought to be natural wherever possible but may be artificial when necessary. I believe that motivation is most effectively sparked in a student when it is most thoroughly evidenced in the teacher. When a student sees that the teacher thinks that the content is fascinating and exciting, he is much more likely to develop his own intrinsic motivation to grasp the material. Thus, all else being equal, a well informed, passionate teacher will always be a more effective educator than one who is more interested in teaching in general than in teaching the specific content.

Sehnsucht - the hunt for Tao?

2011-04-21T21:45:00.003-04:00

I think this post will work best as a follow up to my earlier "Do You Like Green Eggs and Ham?". In that one I talked about the importance of desiring God. While I was responding to one of Steven Hamilton's comments, realized that I have quite a bit more to say on the subject of desire so here is at least a little bit of it.

In case you haven't noticed yet, much of my thinking, both in philosophy and theology, has been shaped by C.S. Lewis. It would be odd, therefore, if I didn't agree with what Lewis has to say about the subject he is most respected for: sehnsucht. Lewis more often referred to this as "Joy", especially in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Under either term (I take sehnsucht to be the more philosophical and joy to be the more theological) Lewis is describing a phenomenon which we don't have a really good concept of in the English speaking world. We try to get at it with words like contentment, fulfilledness, ecstasy and happiness but they all fall short; they don't quite get there. Contentment misses that sense of yearning for our far off country, fulfilledness (which my spell check insists is not even a word) isn't passionate enough, ecstasy doesn't get at the sense of coming home, and happiness just isn't strong enough. Joy, as Lewis describes it is a state well beyond emotion (although there is often emotion in it). The most effective method I have found to convey the meaning of Joy is to refer to how it is sometimes experienced. That thrill of delight when you are two chapters into a new book and you suddenly realize that it is almost exactly the sort of story you have been wanting to read but unable to find; the self forgetful delight when you are surrounded by your oldest, most comfortable friends and the day is long and you have nothing to do but be yourselves; the Monday morning you wake up and realize, really realize, that summer just started and you won't have to go back to school for three months; the tunnel vision in a groom's eye when the music changes and his bride steps into the sanctuary on her daddy's arm. These experiences often contain glimpses of Joy.

I believe we are made for that eternally. Lewis suggested that Joy was the state of yearning for what God is; that any time we experience even a glimpse of Joy it is because we have caught a ray of the divine slipping into our existence. All of those experiences above can be times when the divine essence suffuses our lives in a slightly more tangible way. I think that we are made to experience it always.

This is why I find it somewhat confusing when people talk about living a good life so that they can have happiness later (at retirement, in some eternal future etc...). I won't settle for that, I want joy now. I want joy in my doing; in my leading a good life. In fact I want to lead a good life because I believe that a good life is the most joyful kind of life I can lead. On a certain level I suppose this is very selfish; I want to have my cake and eat it to. I insist on living a life which leads to infinite, eternal ecstasy. But that isn't enough for me. I want that same life to be full of joy now, in fact I insist that it be the best kind of life I can possibly live. And I think that it's possible.

Jesus claimed to be the way, the truth and the life. If I focus on the way for a second, maybe it will explain what I am thinking. When Jesus said he is the way, I think that He was talking about much more that a path or a method. I think that Jesus was claiming to me something much more like the Tao incarnate. He was claiming to be (and to exemplify) the kind of life which is in ultimate harmony with the cosmos as the cosmos is designed to be. If that claim is true, then living in Him, and by His example would be both the most joy-filled way to live, and would lead to the highest form of ecstasy available to a person. Thus the desire for joy, sehnsucht, is the desire for Jesus; whether or not we recognize him as the end of that desire.

Let me end by saying what I am not saying. I am not saying that there is no pain, suffering or even anguish in joy. Actually I think that there is and I suspect that that has rather a lot to do with living in a warped and twisted world among warped and twisted persons and having a warped and twisted set of desires myself. I do think that if everyone entered into joy all the time, that suffering would be significantly decreased (Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth and it is in heaven). But I think that joy is an experience, deeper than any thought or emotion and is something which can somehow persist even in the worst of circumstances.

What IS that thing?

2011-04-16T23:00:00.000-04:00

I am not a psychologist. Not by training, not by persuasion, not even (really) by inclination. But I have managed to surround myself with them. My Dad, my sister, one brother, and several of my closeset friends all majored in the subject. Personally I have only taken three classes in the subject (two undergrad) and am therefore not an expert. But I am a thinker and my last psyche class brought something to my attention. We don't have an anthropology. Now don't get me wrong, I am clear that we are nearly overrun with anthropology majors and anthropology books; I have taken a number of anthropology classes myself. But that is all cultural anthropology, the study of human cultures. What I mean when I say that we do not have any anthropology is that we do not have a clear concept of what a human person actually is. In this sense, an anthropology (usually called a philosophical anthropology) is a theory of humanity and personhood. Someone's anthropology is their answer to the question "what exactly is a person after all?". We can grab this by analogy to theology in which someone's theology is their answer to the question "what exactly is a god after all?". We don't seem to have an answer.
I first became aware of this problem when I was taking one of those psychology classes. I was listeninig to the instructor and becoming more and more frustrated because it seemed as though she were going in circles. The class was educational psychology and she was explaining how wonderful it was to base educational pracitce on empirical research but when asked what theories were indicated by that research and how those theories might conform to an emerging picture of human nature from which we might then draw useful conclusions regarding the best way to educate people, she insisted that research wasn't there for drawing conclusions, it was only there to be recapitualted when we like the results. Thus research is good becuase sometimes it has results that educators like and that was important because we like them.
Now I am perfectly willing to grant that she may have simply been a bad psychologist, that psychologists as a whole do use their research to help construct and tweak their anthropologies, but all those psyche majors I have managed to surround myself with inform me that such is not the case. That in fact she is essentially representative of her field.
I think that this is horriffic. I suddenly saw all these people going to get counseling from individuals who have no coherent, definable concept of what a mentally healthy person ought to be. This is effectively the same as a bunch of sick people going to a set of doctors who have never seen a physically healthy person. And what if these doctors were proud of thier ignorance as the psychologists seem to be? Who would choose a pediatrician who boasted that she has no basic concept of what a healthy child ought to look like and refuses to even take a stab at guessing because that might bias her towards some specific (and therefore narrow) school of ideology?
And this catastrophe has spread beyond counsellors, psychologists and head shrinkers. Our general culture is loathe to come up with an anthropology. I suspect that this has more to do with a love for the "liberation" of subjectivism than it does with bad psychological training but the bad psych certainly hasn't helped things. Our culture holds pretty tightly to the "different strokes for different folks" mentality and does so with enough rigor to enable my students to defend the rights of a man to rape a woman so long as his type of "folk" (read culture) approve of the act.
I would like to propose an anthropolgy. I have already mentioned some aspects of my own beleifs about human persons on this site and I expect many more to come. Persons are of infinite value; this value is based on their identity as persons and not on thier actions. Humans were originally good but have become twisted or wounded in a profound way. Persons have free will and are ultimately responsible for thier actions and decisions. Persons are the proper objects of agape love. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, while we live at least, humans are perpetually becoming and that becoming will ultimately end in either overwhelming glory or unmitigated horror. Clearly I have a lot more work to do on this, this is only a beginning; but it is my beginning. I want to figure out what exactly we are. Please join me as I search for answers.

Read a Book, Read an Old Book

2011-04-10T14:49:00.002-04:00

  C.S. Lewis had a pet peeve as regarded the academic world of his day (WWI-1968 for those of you who need to read more Lewis). He called it a number of things, among them; "chronological snobbery", "the myth of progress", and the "historical point of view". This last term is explained by Screwtape as the idea that the more modern an idea is, the more likely it is to be true. Thus the demon gloats that he has cut modern man off from the wisdom of his ancestors. He explains that when someone reads an old book (a practice Screwtape firmly discourages), that person does not ask whether the ideas in the book are true, but rather what period in human thought they represent, how those ideas have been misinterpreted by other scholars and how the ideas fit into a grand historical framework. Lewis points out elsewhere that this is mere snobbery. The idea that a proposition is wrong only because most of my peers don't hold it is a classic logical fallacy. There may be very good reasons for the idea's being rejected but if so it still ought to be rejected for those reasons and not merely because it was in the past and "people just don't think that anymore".

  I am worried about this. If Lewis noticed it as a bad tendency over 60 years ago, I don't think that things have become that much better over time. People very rarely read old books. Even on college campuses it is incredibly rare to find someone outside of a literary class who spends much time at all with old books (and I am afraid that even lit programs are swapping out old lit for an unbalanced proportion of "modern" lit). The only schools I am aware of which have not forgotten old books are the few "great books" colleges (St. John's College and Thomas Aquinas College are the two best examples I know of). Outside of these we seem to be focused on "new" ideas. One ironic consequence here is that I am forever running into ideas which are presented as "new" but which are actually hundreds or thousands of years old. Sometimes they have been genuinely"rediscovered" and sometimes the new author is simply using old ideas and repackaging them. This, while ironic, is at least a good thing. What we are interested in is the promulgation of wisdom and truth; no need to worry too much about where it came from.
  But academia is not really the sphere that I am worried about in this context. I am more interested in our current post-modern movement and what I have come to think of as the shiftiness of western culture. Taking those in reverse order; I have observed that we have begun to value newness and change for their own sakes. We complement things as being "original" or "different" even the word "weird" has taken on positive connotations in modern language. Now I am not a Luddite and I like to think that I am more than willing to embrace any and all changes which offer an actual improvement but this focus on change for it's own sake means that nothing is actually based on anything; indeed things are valued for not being based on older things. Newton claimed that if he had seen further than other men, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Our culture kills giants and then has nowhere to stand. The likely consequence is that we will end up repeating some of the particularly stupid and tragically horrific events and ideas of the past. The warning are in old books.
  Post-modernism (the generally better forms which do not deny the existence of Truth) at least risk suffering from a similar mistake. I have mentioned in a previous post that one of the things which confuses me about the post-modern church is that all of the advantages it points to in post-modernism seem to have existed in pre-modernism as well. Here I do think that the post-modern church is generally moving in a good direction, but it does seem to be worth pointing out that we are re mapping a landscape which has already been mapped. Is there really a need for all the "new" books and ideas when the same great truths, observations and reflections are available in "old" books? Again I think that this path is a better one than the "modern" path but I think we could move along it at a much greater pace if only someone would notice that, this part of it at least, has already been paved.

I'll bring this Kingdom with a Gun.

2011-04-04T21:06:00.001-04:00

For the last several years I have been aware of a growing understanding of and emphasis on the Kingdom of Heaven. Up through the late 90's I didn't really hear very much about the Kingdom of Heaven and what little I did seemed to come from a broadly premillenial theology which identified the Kingdom of Heaven with a millenial political reign of Christ on earth. In other words people didn't really talk about the Kingdom being something that happens now so much as something we can all (or at least some of us) look forward to.
I don't intend to make the argument for current, ongoing Kingdom theology, that has already been done quite effectively. As I said, things have changed since the 90's; as far as I can tell, they have reverted to what the majority of Christians throughout history have actually thought on the subject. Suffice it to say that I fully believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that all Christians are tasked with incarnating (fun theologian word) and promulgating (fun philosopher word).
So, taking the immediate importance of the Kingdom as a given, what I do want to talk about is the manner in which we are attempting to bring that kingdom (I was personally surprised to realize that this is also why I am a libertarian). I believe that we have been given a specific set of tools and tactics for our kingdom building efforts. The tools, show up mostly in various epistles and are generally referred to as the "gifts of the spirit". Taken in tandem with our own talents, educations and circumstances; and used in cooperation with the rest of our communities, I believe that we have everything we need. The tactics are given rather explicitly by Jesus, in all four of the gospels and essentially revolve around loving God and loving our neighbors (see earlier posts for thoughts about neighbor loving). Paul gives some useful, practical examples in his epistles and we get to see the whole process in action both in Jesus' life and in the Acts of the Apostles.
What stands out as absent from both of these areas is any mention of the sword. We do not build the Kingdom by force, by threats or by violence; rather our tools and tactics fall under some combination of the true the good and the beautiful (faith, hope and love anyone?).
Now up to this point, I suspect that most of my contemporaries would agree (although I know that some of you are expecting a sneaky Bill-wordgames-trap). So here is my big pill to swallow: I believe that our tools and tactics force us to exclude government as a way of bringing the Kingdom. Why? Because nearly everything that government does is essentially based on violence. All laws are based on the premise that if they are not obeyed, the offender will be thrown into prison against their will. If they resist arrest, they can be killed. If that is the basis for law then law cannot be the basis for Kingdom building. The Kingdom is built on consent; on bringing people into relationship and offering a better way (see what Lewis has to say about the "tao" to get a good idea of this). It cannot be based on force and because all government is based on force (check out what Paul has to say about rulers specifically being people who have been given the power of the sword), it cannot, it must not be based on government.
Let me end by stating what I am not saying. I am not saying that all government is bad or that all laws should be opposed by Kingdom builders. The government is tasked with justice (again check out what Paul has to say about what rulers are given sword power for). I am all for Christian political activism on issues that involve correcting injustices (I fully expect to see Christians lined up on both sides of the death penalty debate). I am especially in favor of the use of government power to stop those who would, themselves, use force against others. I am saying only that we cannot and must not use the government to try to make people into better people. Force, and therefore government will never cause generosity, mercy, courage or temperance. It will never plant the seeds of real agape in a single heart.

Bad Things Happen When Philosophers Do Algebra

2011-03-30T21:35:00.001-04:00

I was about halfway through an ethics class last week and we were working through an ethical dilemma I had posed for the class. In the process of our discussion I was struck by an idea which I presented briefly to my students but would like to flesh out a little bit here. I am certainly interested in your response for this post because if you can convince me that the idea will hold some water I may rework it into a full paper. Keeping in line with some of my previous posts, this idea revolves around the worth of individuals.
The context for this, is the dilemma (there are many forms of it) in which someone is faced with a choice between actively saving five lives but causing a single death (not their own) or refusing to act and thereby allowing five deaths but not causing the death of the one person. In essence the idea is that if you do nothing you will passively allow evil which you could only prevent by causing evil to a smaller number of people.
We had some interesting back and forth discussing how the situation might change depending on whether or not we knew some or all of the people who would be effective. The general consensus of the class was that so long as you don't actually know any of the people involved, killing the one person to save the five would be the right thing to do. This changed, however, if you knew the one person. Not everyone agreed but the majority was in favor of allowing the five deaths if the only alternative was killing someone you knew. I asked if this might be because we knew the value of the one person but did not know the value of the five. They agreed that it was, and went so far as to say that if we knew the one person to be a very bad person, that we would be justified in causing that person's death in order to save the lives of five people who's value was undetermined. This was when the idea struck me. I wrote the following equation on the board:

a + b + c + d + e =/</> x

In this equation a,b,c,d and e are the five people who will die without intervention and x is the person who will die if they act. I will suggest that if people are assigned worths varying between, say, 1 and 100, and we didn't know the actual value of each person, it would make sense to assume that

a + b + c + d + e > x

on the other hand, if we know the value of x say because we are related to him, we can give it an actual value, say 95. With this value plugged in it becomes relatively less likely that a+b+c+d+e will have as much value as that, especially to us given that we don't know them. In fact, using this sort of ethics math, the most unlikely outcome is :

a + b + c + d + e = x

run the numbers and it is clear that the most likely outcome is:

a + b + c + d + e > x

Now as logical as all of this may be, I think that while the structure is sound, the whole process suffers from one basic flawed premise: an individual's worth does not vary between 1 and 100 on any scale. In point of fact, each individual's worth is infinite and when we plug that into the equation it becomes clear that

a + b + c + d + e = x

is the only possible outcome. After all, any number of infinite values, when added together can only equal an infinite value:

∞ + ∞ + ∞ + ∞ + ∞ = ∞

So this is the idea; it is impossible to "calculate" the outcome of our moral decisions regarding individuals precisely because each and every individual is of infinite value. We must therefore find some other way of deciding what is right and what is wrong. At the least this seems to work as one more reason I am not a utilitarian, what to the rest of you think?

All the great art in my life.

2011-03-29T22:01:00.000-04:00

A little of my buddy's poetry.

And my wife's music.

I am surrounded by incredibly talented people... just sayin'

Do you like Green Eggs and Ham?

2011-03-27T16:13:00.004-04:00

  I heard a sermon on Psalm 73 today. As a whole, the sermon did an excellent job of unpacking both the direct meaning and the emotive message of the Psalm (as an aside I think that non-religious folk really miss out by not getting a lecture style presentation once a week to mull over). Specifically though I was struck by the basic argument the psalmist (a fellow named Asaph) makes. He begins noticing that the wicked have all the really nice stuff in life. He mentions that this worried him, made him envious and ultimately almost caused him to abandon God; after all, if the wicked get all the good stuff, what is the point in being good? Then he catches himself and laughs at himself. He says that when he entered the sanctuary all his doubts vanished. He then spends a bit of time chiding himself for being foolish and then gives his answer to the original problem: "the presence of God is my good."
  That's it. It doesn't end with "surely the blessed with prosper and their vineyards will produce much and they will ultimately point and laugh at the wicked". He just says he realized that compared to all the good things life has to offer (and he doesn't really question that they are good things), being the the presence of God outshines everything. Coming from my background, this answer reminds me of two authors. Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia as the highest good for man; the good which would outweigh all other goods. And C.S. Lewis wrote extensively about joy or sehnsucht as that thing that we are made for; the experience which breaks through our ordinary lives and gives us that brief hint of being complete, of coming home to a home we have not yet seen. It seems as though Asaph decided that the point in following God, is having a relationship with God. It doesn't matter to him how much nice stuff the wicked can get, none of if can bear a candle to being in the presence of God.
  I don't think that most religious people today would have said this (I think many do believe it). We usually hear something like "If you just take the long view, the wicked will be punished and the righteous who love God will have pleasures forever". Why not say "taste and see that the Lord is good". Or, to quote one more great thinker "Try it, try it and you may, try it and you may I say!". Could it be that we don't trust God to be that rapturous? Do we not trust God to be Joy?

Does Jesus Change the Flavor of Life?

2011-03-24T20:25:00.003-04:00

As a response to a comment in my last post, I was asked :
"what is the difference between believing in an absolute Christ versus an illusory Christ if the end result as it pertains to your life and behavior towards fellow man is the same?"
which I think is an important question and will (I hope) help to clarify my thoughts as to why truth is so important to me. In this response, I will be taking a lot from an essay C.S. Lewis wrote (Man or Rabbit) in which he addresses a similar question. As I sat down to answer the question, I kept wanting to focus on different parts of it. In the end my answer became to complicated for a simple reply and so I have decided to turn int into this post.
I have several answers and I would like to first list them, and then I will comment a bit on each one. My answers are: "All the difference in the world"; "no real difference at all"; and "that question isn't a question." So let me start with "all the difference in the world":
Now I might do many of great and sacrificing things for other people if I believe in an illusory Christ, but I will only do them up until I run into a good reason not to. If I believe in an illusory Christ, I do not believe in a person with whom I have a real relationship and to whom I am actually responsible. When the ethics become tough, I can always remind myself that Jesus is a "helpful illusion" which means that I can abandon the illusion just as soon as it ceases to be helpful. If, on the other hand, I believe in an absolute Christ, the questions of "helpful" or "beneficial" will not really come up. When it becomes difficult or unhelpful or seems unwise to show agape to my neighbor, the real Jesus does not let me off the hook. The absolute Jesus is a completely demanding ethical taskmaster (in churches we call this holiness) and He doesn't really seem to care that much about how hard, confusing or demanding it is for me to have agape, He insists that I show it anyway. And this makes sense because an absolute Jesus knows more than me, is wiser than me and is better than me; an illusory Jesus cannot, by definition, be any greater than I am. In fact, if Jesus is an absolutely real person, I ought to expect that I will not understand all of the things He asks me to do.
My second answer, "no difference at all" begins to lead to my third response but is probably worth the stop along the way. It comes from my assumption that it is actually impossible to believe in something we do not think is actually true. In fact I think that this is supported by the fact that we have a word for when someone tries to believe in something they do not think is actually true, it is called "pretending". So on that level I would have to say that someone can only really believe in an illusory Jesus by making pretend. Either they are pretending that He is real, in which case they will ultimately make the same important life decisions as someone who believes that Jesus doesn't exist at all and refuses to pretend He does, or they are pretending that He is an illusion (I sometimes wonder if many of our post-modern brothers and sisters fall into this category) when they actually believe that He is real and then they will ultimately make the same crucial life decisions as someone who openly professes the absolute reality of Jesus. One final option would be that they believe He does exist but are pretending not to so that they don't have to deal with His existence (James points out that even the devil believes in God). In this situation I suppose that the person would make the same crucial life decisions as someone who doesn't believe that Jesus is real although I think that they would not be able to make them honestly.
Finally I would answer "that question is not a question" because on it's surface it pretends to be neutral as to whether or not Jesus is illusory but on a deeper level it only works as a question if the answer is that Jesus is illusory. Jesus himself claimed that He makes a huge difference in the world (Matt 10:34, John 12:46, John9:39). If the existence of the God-man is an actual fact that has to be taken into account when we make our life choices, then it is impossible that the end result of our life decisions as they "pertain to [our] life and behavior towards our fellow man" would "remain the same". It is a bit like asking whether or not it is important to add real salt to our meal instead of adding illusory salt to our food so long as the end result is the same. We have to answer that real salt makes a difference to taste and that illusory salt doesn't and therefore the end result simply cannot be the same. The only way it could is if there were no such thing as real salt and all salt were actually illusory. In the same way, the only way there could be no difference between an absolute and an illusory Jesus is if there were no real Jesus.
So my final answer to the question is: "Yes it makes a great deal of difference whether we believe in an absolute Jesus or an illusory Jesus and that difference is manifested (among other places) in my life and my behavior towards other people."

Are the things we know really things?

2011-03-21T09:46:00.001-04:00

  I make an effort (sometimes less successfully than others), when I run across an idea that first strikes me as silly or clearly wrong, to learn what the wise people who hold an idea think about it and how they justify it before I will assert my first impression. When I am able to do this, it has usually served me fairly well. Some ideas have turned out to be incredibly profound and have become important influences to my understanding of the world. Others have turned out to be just as silly as they seemed at first, but either way I certainly understand much more after my investigations than I did before.
  I am currently working through that process with an approach to theology and philosophy which I will call theological post-modernism. I have a bit of a history with post-modernism in general and had even come to the conclusion that it was one of the ultimately wrong ideas I have tried to give some real consideration to. My reason for rejecting post-modernism so far is fairly straight forward: post-modernism claims to deny the existence of absolute truth. I know that to many of us living in a generally post-modern culture, even the idea of absolute truth sounds harsh, unloving and somehow academically totalitarian, and I suppose that in some ways it is. As I understand it, believing in absolute truth means believing that there are some things, events and even abstractions which absolutely do exist. Examples would be moral absolute truths like "it was evil of Hitler to instigate the holocaust" or ontological truths like "I exist" or "God exists" or "you exist". These absolute truths are things which are part of our universal reality. They just are and they are completely unaffected by whether or not any one of us consents to them, how we feel about them, whether or not we know them and whether or not we believe them to be true. Another way to put it would be that because there is absolute truth, it is possible for people to be wrong about things.
  I still believe in absolute truth, but I am not sure that this theological post-modernism is attacking it. Instead, theological post-modernism seems to be attacking the idea that we can (and sometimes even should) prove things in an indubitable way. In other words it questions the validity of iron clad empirical or rational proof. It want's to suggest (I think and hope) that there are other ways of knowing, other ways of getting at the absolute truths which we want and whom we crave in Christ. People and writers who fall into this camp seem to be fond of criticizing the enlightenment and to some extent the reformation as a time when the western world narrowed down to the two categories of empirical and rational truth thereby excluding the many other forms of knowing. They seem to call this enlightenment approach "objective truth" which has really thrown me off balance because I was right with them (I like to think of myself as a neo-pre-modern thinker) until they started denouncing objective truth since "objective truth" sounds so much like "absolute truth"; especially since "subjective truth" works as an opposite to both of them.
  But I think that this initial impression was mistaken. I think that by "objective truth", theological post-modernists really mean "objective knowledge" and don't mean "the real nature of the cosmos in all it's natural and supernatural aspects". If I am right, then there is some really good, really exciting thinking going on. If not then I will have to be a little worried about the future of a Church which worships a God they do not believe to exist in any absolute or universally applicable way.
Let me conclude with two cautions; one to theological modernists and one to theological post-modernists. To the theological modernists I want to say that you need to notice who and what the post-modernists are worshiping. They are worshiping Christ. The Christ who is and who was and who is to come. They are not denying the Logos and because they have re-discovered ways of knowing God which were common to the apostles and the Church up until the enlightenment, they may well be drawing nearer to Him than you are, limited as you might be by mere empiricism and rationalism.
  To the theological post-modernists I want to say, please re-examine your language. to those of us brought up in a traditional church it often sounds like you are saying that Jesus doesn't really exist, that you just get a good emotional rush from pretending that He does. It sounds like you are telling us that is would be fine to orient our lives around an illusion even if we know that it was an illusion. Can you see why your conservative brethren become defensive when they "hear" you saying that it doesn't matter whether or not their Saviour really is. Taken to the extreme it feels to them like you are denying God's first revelation of His name "I Am That I Am". I don't believe you mean that but because you are using post-modern language, that is what it sounds like.
   Can we all say that God is Love?

Agape and Politics, Neighbors and Society

2011-03-17T19:45:00.004-04:00

Having started with what promises to be an incredibly controversial topic I hope to disappoint by beginning and concluding with non-controversial points (who knows what might happen in between). My foundational assumption is that as Christians we are called to agape (originally translated as "charity" then as "love") for our neighbors. I believe that our neighbors are anyone and everyone we meet or become aware of who happens to need agape (which is pretty much everyone). I understand agape to be genuine care for someones well being even and above our own well being. If this is as non-controversial as I think it is, let's move on.
I have become aware, over the last several years, that people of good political will claim to be motivated by a love for society or for their country or culture. Because this good will towards society tends to be more evident in one political party than in others at a given time, Christians tend to feel a certain pressure to identify with whichever party that is. Those who choose to identify with other parties usually defend their participation as wisdom seeing through platforms which "claim to help but will ultimately hurt". I do not want to fault the motives of either group of Christians. I believe agape should always be encouraged as a motivation both in political and private spheres. What I think is rather tragically missing on both sides is an awareness of the second half of our calling. We are to have agape for our neighbors. Contrast this with having agape for society.
Neighbors are always individuals, society is not. Society is bigger than individuals but it is less important; that is, society is only as important as the individuals of whom it is constructed. The worth, the value of society comes from the individuals (the neighbors) which are it's constituents. It is worth noticing what the effects of valuing society over the neighbor are. If society is our primary focus then we must be willing to "break a few eggs" to make our "omelet". Put another way, if society is more important than the neighbor then we might have to sacrifice the occasional neighbor for the good of society. I think that most people and nearly all politicians take this for granted.
But if we turn the focus around, something truly beautiful emerges. If we focus on having agape for each and every neighbor we run across or become aware of, we must ultimately benefit society since society is made up exclusively of neighbors. Thus if we prioritize society over the neighbor we fail to show agape to at least some neighbors. In fact I suspect that we will fail to have agape for society as well since it is impossible to value an abstract (society) over a concrete (ourselves and our neighbors). If, instead, we prioritize our neighbor over society, we will end up having agape for each and every part of society we encounter. C.S. Lewis called this the "law of first and second things". He pointed out that when we put first things first we nearly always get the second things as well. but when we try to put second things first we end up with neither first or second things.
So what is my conclusion? I think the implication here is not that Christians shouldn't be involved in civil government, or that we need to avoid associating with any particular party. What I do think is that we should be incredibly careful when it comes to supporting any law which admits to breaking "a few eggs". Christians are and ought to be many things but we can never be utilitarians.

The Myth of Balance

2011-03-14T19:02:00.002-04:00

Why not begin with a bang? I have been thinking about this particular issue since one of my education/pedagogy classes from a local community college. I don't remember the content of the particular class but I do remember driving home thinking "wow, people actually do believe that now" I had heard the myth quite a few times before but had always thought of it as PC propaganda, I was shocked that night to realize that the purveyors of the propaganda seem to be actually drinking their own koolaid. I suspect that any of you who actually read this will either be shocked and appalled at what I have to say, or will be rather incredulous that anyone believes the myth and will think it rather foolish of me to argue against such a patently absurd proposition in the first place. Either way please let me know.
The myth of balance is the idea that all people have a sort of "balance" or positive traits. The suggestion is that while some people have certain strengths, these strengths are "balanced" in them by corresponding weaknesses which may themselves be someone else's strength; ultimately resulting in a sort of strength/weakness egalitarianism in the human race. Thus one child may be exceptionally bright when it comes to mathematics but it is expected that she "makes up" for it by having poor social skills or being an athletic clutz. Some other student will be generally "well rounded" meaning that they don't exhibit any particular strengths or weaknesses. Finally there may be a student who seems to have nothing going for him whatsoever but it is expected that he is a particularly good hearted sort of person or that he lives in circumstances which his classmates would handle much more poorly .
The myth is especially common among teachers but I hear it popping up all over the place. Most often I run into it in people who are either good heartedly trying to figure out how show or say that they value some other person whom they have just accused of having some tremendous deficit; "yeah he really can't keep his temper but boy is he good at math". Sometimes it shows up as an attempt at humility after someone receives a complement; "I'm glad you liked my poem but boy was I bad at math in high school". In both situations I think the person using the myth is trying to avoid the appearance of believing in a hierarchy of being. No one wants to come across as believing that any one person is better than any other person.
This is a problem because some people clearly are better than other people. The exceptionally bright math student may actually be polite, well intentioned, a great athlete and working hard to improve her character. Mother Theresa may not have had any profound weaknesses, of course she may have but we are under no obligation to assume so. Furthermore if you spend five minutes I'm reasonably certain that you could come up with a list of people, past and present, whom you believe to be better than yourself. (If you can't then should I congratulate you on sainthood or set you free from the basement you must have been imprisoned in since birth?) The superiority and inferiority of the many members of this human race is patently obvious, to deny it would involve a strange attempt to find faults in Ghandi and virtues in Stalin.
In fact, the myth is so weak that I can not find a single argument to set up in support of it. The only reason I can think of for believing the myth is one I have already alluded to, that people use it so as not to sound like elitists. We feel bad if we don't say it. And this, I will guess, is because we want so badly, and so rightly, to believe that everyone has value. The value of each individual is certainly an important belief and to the extent that the myth perpetuates it in our minds, the myth does some good, but not very much. In fact even here the myth does quite a bit of damage (lies are like that).
Each individual does have infinite worth, and they have it as a result of being human. Not by any other means.The myth would lead us to believe that people have worth on the basis of their strengths, moral, academic, athletic, artistic or any other. It argues that we have to insist that any one persons strengths are matched in any other person in other areas. This is well intentioned but it begins with a lie. Ironically it is an incredibly elitist lie. It then trains its followers to try and fabricate strengths in other people in order to see those people as valuable. But if those people are valuable regardless and indeed are of infinite worth regardless of their strengths then is it not demeaning and insulting to say to them "you are valuable because you are extremely artistic or spiritual or moral or discerning or intelligent"? Isn't that the same as telling them "you are only as valuable as your traits and if you lost all your abilities tomorrow you would loose all value in my eyes."
So I would suggest that all people are beings of infinite worth but are as complexly superior and inferior to one another as could possibly be. We are beings of incredible variety becoming ever more and less like our perfect Father but each the treasured, beloved apple of His eye. Regardless of what we do, He loves us not because of what we can do but because of what and who we are.