emerika

Divine Right and the Army that’s Left

2009-09-12T23:35:00.001-05:00

Prolegomena

By way of a preface I'd like to note that, in medieval thought, belief begets behavior. The discipline of Philosophy recognizes three sub-disciplinary branches: Epistemology, which is concerned with how we know what we know, and with how we know we know it; Metaphysics, which is concerned with what is true and what is real; and Ethics, which is concerned with how we ought to live, both as individuals and as a society. Epistemology is the newest of these branches—most of us in Literature encounter it in the form of theory—and was not a major topic of discussion in Western thought until Descartes. Metaphysics is older than the oldest writing, as it encompasses not only the laws and facts of our world, but the less-easily-justified truths of that which is unseen. Metaphysics is often construed as entailing the Philosophy of Religion and the Philosophy of Aesthetics, among others. Religious truth claims, on which religious ethical precepts are founded, fall within the locus of the sub-discipline of Metaphysics. Because religious truth claims are difficult to prove, evidences that are accessible to all humanity are often sought as means of justification or substantiation of said claims; such evidences, when they form a cohesive line of argument, are called an "apologetic" (Gk., "a[n attorney's] case").

Combat-as-Apologetic

Geoffrey's inclusion of Eldadus' comparison of Hengist with Agag of Amalek raises an important metaphysical issue: that of divine right. I commented in class two weeks ago that Geoffrey has made a habit of alluding to biblical history in order to demonstrate the historical relationship between the Holy Land and Britain, which he later uses to establish the Britons' Christian heritage. Moreover, he also seems to use it to legitimate the truly British kings, such as Arthur (cf. Hengist, Horsa, and in some respects, Vortigern).

But how exactly does religious justification for the death of an enemy king allude to divine right? Simply put, it's a justification of divine right. As the establishment of Christendom progressed, divine right became an important justification of prevailing power structures, governing bodies, and of course, of specific regents. But in the period of history that Geoffrey has chronicled, we catch only glances of an incipient (awareness of? appeal to?) divine right because the entire basis of divine right—the matter of which deity has the authority—is still at issue.

In the bout between the Norse (and under Claudius, the Roman) pantheon and the Christian godhead, the sign of authority is victory. Essentially, battle is the apologetic. The army that's left serves the more powerful deity. Interestingly enough, this was not a new concept at the time Geoffrey was writing, but one that predated him by some two millennia. The reference to 1 Samuel (Geoffrey of Monmouth, 193) is a reference to a similar story from Hebrew history, one in which an enemy king with (apparently) weaker gods is put to death at the behest of YHWH. The chief issues at stake are the law of the land and the moral purity of the people of Israel, both of which hinge on the recognition of YHWH's authority and the imperative of human compliance with His statutes.

The issues are no different in Geoffrey's history; only the players have changed. The threats of paganism as viewed by the Christianized Britons are exemplified in the volatile political behavior of the Picts (Geoffrey of Monmouth, 151-155), or the duplicity of Renwein (162-163), Hengist, and Horsa (159-166). The theory thus went that the allegiance of all members of society, or at the very least that of a social majority, to the same deity assured a kind of social solidarity, inasmuch as said deity served as the legitimacy for the prevailing power structure, its leaders' regimes, and whatever policies (i.e., ethical statutes) they instituted.

Victory justified deity; deity justified regency; Geoffrey chronicled—and glorified—victory. It's safe to conclude that one rhetorical function of The History of the Kings of Britain is the establishment of a nationally recognized metaphysic, one which would ultimately set the ethical parameters for social policy and political legislation in what has since become one of the most influential nations in the West. The British monarchy's behavior throughout history, from Henry VIII's political moves during the Reformation, Elizabeth's relationship with her subjects during the Imperial Age, and the symbolism and ceremony surrounding the monarchy today (like, "Don't touch the queen."), seems a bit less odd after reading Geoffrey.

Possible Worlds: The Down-side

2009-07-10T14:55:00.001-05:00

I've done some thinking about the epistemology of possible worlds. Put it this way: if you conceive of a novel, or a video game, or any created work of a literary nature as a possible world, you're going to have to face the down-side of that conception. The strength of conceiving of these sorts of things as possible worlds lies in the fact that possible worlds are comprised of propositions, and so it's really easy to know with a fair degree of detail any possible world expressed propositionally. Unfortunately, propositions about the world don't generally move the characters in that world very well—unless you're a determinist. For instance, I can describe the characteristics of a room easily. With only a little more effort I can describe the people who are currently sitting in said room. I can conceive of a situation in which Mr. T, Pee Wee Herman, J.S. Bach, Harry Potter, Socrates, and Pope John Paul II are having coffee together at a diner somewhere in Middle America. What I can't conceive of is how to explain what they're all doing there and where they each go after they've paid the bill.

My trouble with possible worlds is that I view things I conceive of in this way as one might view an individual frame in an old film strip, or as we conceive of God viewing things—from afar, and in the span of a moment. I can't seem to sustain the second view—that of the character on the story's interior—in conjunction with the first. I can conceive of a novel as a world, but I have trouble conceiving of it as my world. And this is going to pose a problem unless I can find a solution.

The Wisdom of Weaving

2009-02-14T02:15:00.001-06:00

Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences…

[The story] contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding[, that is, the one in which we find ourselves.] To seek counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

--Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller"

I was thinking about the oral tradition tonight, and how for ages past the sages and loremasters of the world remembered the great tales that had meant so much to their respective cultures, how they have repeated them and passed them on. Walter Benjamin is right: we're losing our ability to tell stories. We're running out of great tales because we're forgetting how to tell them. Ironic, isn't it, that in an age when our computers can retain so much information we find ourselves at a startling loss when it pertains to meaning?

My friends and family know I tell stories. Poor Bino has put up with version after version of his life's exploits, to the point that the repetition has begotten legend, and the truth has become occluded. But the seed of the stories lives on in the pulp of the fictions I've woven about his life: Bino is an odd and remarkable person, my friend, and well-loved by many. If there seems to be little enough wisdom in this kernel, also bear in mind that wisdom need not exist at the first level of significance; the significance of these meanings is simpler still: all are unique, and each requires for his or her survival that love and admiration that would lead a friend to make of another tales that, when improved and embellished in the retelling, grow to legends that loom large, preserving the memories of our loved ones for the ages to come. I have immortalized far too few in this way, and it troubles me how few there are in my life for whom I want to do this.

More confusing still is my own yearning for immortality: can a loremaster be remembered in the lore of his people, or is he merely a conduit for the things they will remember? It seems that a great loremaster will remain invisible, allowing the story to flourish and grow, tending it, caring for it, embellishing it. But what of him is left when this work reaches its conclusion? Only his imprint on a tale he inherited. Lewis is convinced that a desire for something, even when its fulfillment seems not to exist, is evidence of heaven. Perhaps the loremaster's yearning for immortality is merely evidence of a Hereafter in which we're remembered or forgotten, and this not by others like us, but by the Author of All Tales. More on it later.

A Grace with Two Faces

2008-11-15T18:49:00.001-06:00

In a discussion with some friends this week I raked the Evangelicals over the coals for our short-sighted inattention to the life of the mind and the pursuit of knowledge, especially of their history as a Christian movement, and of knowledge of effective biblical interpretation. The consequences of this short-sightedness are many and profound: mouths that profess certain beliefs but lives that look practically atheist; an orientation toward the surrounding culture, rather than toward our own timeless message, in an effort to gain relevance; a dying artistic subculture that, to be totally honest, was very seldom cutting-edge. These are just a few; more could probably be identified.

At one point in this discussion I released my invective with a heat that I have not felt in awhile, and it scared me, but worse still, it scared my friends. I said some things that sounded pretty elitist, and as such, were pretty off-putting. And this is the reason I've begun to write this entry. People tend to perceive me as a pretty smart person. It's further proof that you can fool some of the people—maybe even most of the people—at least some, and sometimes most, of the time. Life's a poker game, the way I see it, and the best bluff is a large vocabulary wielded by a mind that can make precise distinctions between minutiae. In addition to being useful for an analytical pursuit of truth, this skill is helpful in rhetorically daunting others who would question the truth of one's claims. In short, "big vocabulary plus fine distinctions equals being perceived as correct."

Several startling realizations arise from this. First, if I employ these strategies and am mistaken, perhaps it will go unnoticed. Imagine the folly of being mistaken for one's whole life on a point that one reiterates time and again as though it were a proverb. Ouch. Second, the big vocabulary and careful distinctions can be very helpful to people who are not used to thinking precisely about things. New words and sharp observations might help others by clarifying issues that have caused them pain for a long time.

But the temptation that arises from the formulation, "big vocabulary plus fine distinctions equals being perceived as correct" is great: one could easily stray from the intention to help others with careful thought into an intention of always being right, or being beyond correction. Words become an impregnable suit of armor and distinctions become a sword. The individual who does not learn to use these for the protection and service of others will invariably be reduced to a renegade who marches through the streets of society wounding at random and leaving a trail of carnage as his or her only legacy. What an opportunity cost when one considers the alternatives.

This metaphor sheds light on a third point. As I have previously noted, an armed knight may raise a war host, or he may rule like a tyrant. But he may also content himself with simply parading around in his finery, putting it to no use at all. I suspect that this is even worse than either of the other two. Even a tyrant moves with purpose; a prima donna is almost entirely unaware of the world beyond his head—he lives for himself. A knight that neither rules nor leads is no knight, only an actor in costume for whom life is nothing more than a show. The armor has no purpose beyond his titillation.

I have raised armies. I have ruled with an iron fist. And I have paraded my finery. The confusing thing is, sometimes I don't know which I'm doing, even in the moment. But I've done all three. (This is not a change of subject:) Judgment is not fashionable in this day and age. We're a comfortable society—it's our most prized commodity, comfort. And judgment, whether from God or the government or anyone else, is not comfortable. If someone judges truly, it requires us to change, stirs us from our lethargy, makes us break the groove. If someone judges falsely, it raises questions that unsettle us and rouse us from a dull contentment in the golden cages we've worked so hard to build for ourselves.

But we must judge; we cannot live without doing so. Imagine driving and not making any judgments about how fast a car is going before deciding whether to pull out in front of it. Driving itself is a constant exercise in judgment. Living is similar. One need not draw out the moral implications of others' actions in order to judge. Now imagine you are in a great hurry, driving down the street at about 55 mph in a 25 zone. I'm about to pull out in front of you when I review the situation and make a judgment: "That's so-and-so and she's going about 55 mph." I haven't called you a speeder. I haven't thought of you as a lawbreaker. Those are implications of what I have judged: that you are moving at about 55 mph. Speeder or not, if you're moving at that pace, I'm not pulling out in front of you. In the same way, there are some Evangelical leaders to whose authority I would not subject myself.

One of the best grounds for judging is experience. I can judge what you're experiencing better if I've experienced it myself. And you can't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, because I do—I've been there. So when I level criticism at the Evangelicals, it's because I've been guilty of what I'm calling out. I know what it looks like because I've seen it with my own eyes. "It takes one to know one."

I won't deny I've harshly criticized some of what I've seen. Guilty as charged. But that doesn't mean that I'm wrong. Harshness in delivery in no way detracts from the truth of a judgment; it simply makes the judgment that much more uncomfortable. But—and this is the rub—it does raise an interesting question: when one judges correctly but harshly, why does he or she do so? If one can judge more correctly from his or her own experience, shouldn't that experience which makes the judgment correct also make it gentle? I think this is what galls us about harsh judgment. There's no grace in it, and if anyone should understand the need for grace it's someone who's been guilty of what's being judged.

I believe in redemptive judgment. In fact, I think this is exactly what God's judgment is intended to be. He sees us truly, and He pronounces what He sees. It's the attitude of the judged toward a true judgment that determines whether the process of judgment is redemptive or not. If I am judged truly but I respond negatively, the judgment cannot redeem; it can only condemn because I persist in what I now know is wrong. If I am judged truly and respond with contrition (this is one of my favorite words, by the way), judgment is redemptive because it has helped me recognize my error, and has begun to transform my attitude toward it. As such, it also changes my behavior so that I don't keep repeating the same mistake. So grace has two faces: the gentleness of the judgment's pronouncement, and the humble submission of the judged to the truth. This is redemption.

Hope Junkies

2008-11-08T20:44:00.002-06:00

So Barack Obama won the presidency on 5 November 2008. We should be clear about what this proves. First, it doesn't prove, as The Economist was so quick to claim, that "it is time." Nor does it prove that Obama was the best choice for the nomination. It doesn't prove that the future will be brighter, with the promise of "change" and the play on the "hope" of the people. It might prove that Obama understands something that the election itself actually does prove: we (humankind) are hope junkies.

Think about how many times per day you use the words "hope" and "hopefully." I'm sure it's at least once. At least. "I hope we can get home in time to catch part of the game." "Hopefully things work out for you guys." "I was hoping to have this finished by this afternoon." "Honey… sorry to call in the middle of your meeting. Listen, I'm going to be late; traffic's thick and there's an accident up ahead. I'd say that you have an extra half hour, so hopefully you get this before you pack everything up and head for the front door. Love you." "Gold medal hopeful Phelps will be competing in the Olympic 4x100 Freestyle later today…" We have trouble living without hope.

We have no purpose without hope. Alternatively, "hope" might be defined as "a proactive desire for some future state of affairs that gives purpose to one's actions." All of a hopeful person's actions are aimed at what he or she hopes for. The corporate ladder climber is hoping for power and money; they are why he climbs—and often why he crashes. The Green Peace activist hopes for a world in which humankind leaves almost no footprint on the ecosystems around it; that's why she hugs trees and parks her boat in the way of French nuclear testing in the empty expanses of the South Pacific. The suitor hopes for the lady's affection; that is why he works so diligently to win her favor and waits so faithfully for her answer. The mother hopes for successful development of her child into a person of strong character and good repute; that is why she feeds, clothes, loves, and even disciplines, and why she has trouble letting go when the dawning of adulthood on that child spells the dusk of motherhood as she knew it for two decades.
Upon the achievement of what we hope for we are presented with two alternatives: death, or more hope. First, we may cease to hope for anything any longer. Depending on one's station in life, this is not necessarily a bad option. It was, after all, Simeon's reaction to seeing the Christ child, and as such it forms the basis of the Nunc Dimittis, the prayer based on Simeon's prayer upon this joyous occasion. Simeon could die in peace because his hopes were fulfilled. This same sense arises from Coltrane's use of those Latin words after a particularly excellent rendition of his piece, "A Love Supreme."[1] Apparently all of Trane's hopes for his art were fulfilled in the thirty-two minutes he spent playing what was for him a prayer of thanks. What more could he hope for? "Nunc dimittis." But more often we discover upon achieving what we had hoped for that a new hope arises. If it doesn't, our will to live wanes. We become listless. Purposeless. Hopeless.
It makes sense to hope. "The sum of all human wisdom," wrote Alexandre Dumas, "will be contained in these two words: Wait and hope."[2] Hope is the fuel that gets us through tough days, long waits, and excruciating pain. It's the force that draws or drives us through the things that resist our efforts. And in a world that is sometimes, perhaps even often, marred by horrific evil, hope is the only reasonable reaction. Paradoxically, however,
hope is painful. Wrote Eleonore Stump in her essay, "A Mirror of Evil": "if most of your news is bad, you need to harden your heart to it. So you become accustomed to bad news, and to one extent or another, you learn to protect yourself against it, maybe by not minding so much. And then good news cracks your heart. It makes it feel keenly again all the evils to which it had become dull. It also opens it up to longing and hope, and hope is painful because what is hoped for is not yet here."[3]

I'm as big a hope junkie as the next guy. Right now I'm hoping for several things, abstract and concrete:

A feasible end to the semester, including good grades, the successful conclusion of an academic job I'm working, and ample time for rest and recuperation during the holidays from an off-kilter work/life balance this autumn;
a future as an excellent academic;
a chance to be debt-free someday;
someone to share life with—for life;
a world that is pure enough that I feel comfortable bringing other humans into it and helping them understand how to live well within it;
a divine solution to the human problem;
and an eternity that's better than the here-and-now.

That's all.

Another thing the election proves is that the power-mongers of our day are getting cagey. "In any age," wrote C.S. Lewis, "the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent."[4] Obama and his ilk have learned that we don't know what to hope for anymore. In a post-911 age we've lost hope in world peace; we're just trying to minimize the conflict now. In a post-industrial age we've lost hope in a world that isn't being systematically destroyed by industry; we're just trying to minimize the damage now. In a postmodern age we've lost hope in the truth; we're just trying to minimize the bias now. And our hope has come to rest in… hope itself. We hope in hope because we don't know what else to hope for. But we can't help it. We can't give up on hope: we're hope junkies.

[1] Guinness, Os. The Call. (Nashville, TN; Word Publishing, 1998), 45.

[2] Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Cristo. (New York; Bantam Books, 1956), 441.

[3] Stump, Eleonore. "The Mirror of Evil" in The Journey, Os Guinness, ed. (Colorado Springs, CO; NavPress, 2001), 164-174.

[4] Lewis, Clive Staples. "Is Progress Possible?: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State," in God in the Dock, Walter Hooper, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 311-316.

Hands Without Heads

2008-08-11T19:12:00.001-05:00

(I should be asleep right now; I have work in seven hours. Insomnia's a pain.)

I got to thinking about tomorrow, starting classes again for the first time in three years, and all of that. What struck me about the University (not any particular university, the entire American enterprise of higher education... sort of like there are churches that make up the Church) is that it's a culture of conviction. People hold beliefs. And everyone's trying to convince (!) everyone else that his or her own convictions have merit. I suppose it's safe to say that few would actually come out and claim that their beliefs are "true," but they'd definitely settle for the statement that their beliefs "have merit." Whatever that means. (What? Your beliefs have merit? So, you want a cookie?)

These kids come to college with all kinds of convictions that have been instilled in them by Mom and Dad, and community, and then they meet conviction-central, the University. The first thing it teaches them is to "have an open mind." That basically means you can't say that your beliefs are true. You can't say things with conviction. So they undermine your conviction by teaching you a kind of detached, casuist skepticism, then they try and sell you their convictions, which don't often look like convictions, even though they really are.

The upshot is that students flip "open-mindedly" from belief to belief, looking for something worth holding onto, but being denied the leeway to express whatever it is they espouse with any conviction. And this is genius on the part of the people who are convinced that doing anything with conviction--except undermining other people's convictions--is a bad thing. If you can't hold your beliefs with conviction, you can't ever find out whether they're actually true. Conviction is the sort of thing that leads sailors to jump ship because they know she's lost, or to lash themselves to the mast because they're sure she'll hold. What does calm, skeptical detachment do in that situation? Nothing. It's ballast.

And this is the irony of modern education. For all the talk about breeding "good citizens" and "open-minded, free-thinking contributors to society," I'm having trouble deciding what that would look like. How does one live open-mindedly, i.e., with skeptical detachment, and still contribute meaningfully? I'm not denying that the open-minded can contribute, but what meaning has their contributions? After all, if they're convinced of nothing, on what convictions are their actions based? They simply go through the motions; but where do the motions come from?

Pollution, Revolution (or is it "Devolution"?)

2008-05-01T00:47:00.003-05:00

“We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change… An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before… we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any way to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world.”

--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Twenty-first century here we go
Digital whiplash
So many formats, so little time
While out in t.v. nation
Under darkening skies
The resistance is just waiting
To be organized…”

--Ani diFranco, “Milennium Theater,” from the album Reprieve

“The politicians all make speeches
While the newsmen all take notes
They exaggerate the issues
As they shove it down our throats…”

--Larry Norman, “The Great American Novel,” from the album PeacePollutionRevolution

I think I’m having some kind of crisis of personal ethics. I’m on a collision course with a lifetime of communicating, whether from the classroom, through the printed word, or just in conversation. There’s really no getting around it. It’s not that I’ve never thought about the ethics of rhetoric; I have, and quite a bit, in fact.

What gets me is the realization that we’re all so media-saturated that it’d take a month for us to detox. “Digital whiplash” is probably the best description I’ve ever heard for it. Dr. Roy Joseph once lamented the death of coffee house culture at the hands of the iPod. I agree with him; I see it a lot. In fact, the cell phone might be even worse. The point is that we blindly accept the technology that’s been offered to us, we gladly pay, and we afford it nary a second thought. It’s usually, “Hey! Thanks for the cell phone! Now I can call people while I’m on the run,” not, “You’re just trying to eliminate my mental free space; you just want me to pick up whenever you get the whim to call me. You know I might even walk out on an important meeting just to satisfy my curiosity about whatever whomever calls me wants to say.” It’s, “Awesome! An iPod!” not, “Great. Another avenue into my head for whatever thought-control has recently been conjured.”

I’m having trouble with the fact that I’m putting this out on some hard drive somewhere, where people have to maintain it. If it were something that was going to invade inboxes across America, rather than something that will be posted where you can find it only if you take the initiative… if the former rather than the latter, I wouldn’t bother to write it. I hate communication invasions, no matter how helpful the information is. I’m not interested in invading.

( Send this message to seven people or you’ll be plagued with invasive communication for the rest of your life.)

"Secular Culture"?

2008-04-29T19:39:00.005-05:00

After a brief spell with the Oxford American Dictionary, I'm troubled by the phrase "secular culture." OAD says that "culture" is from the Latin, colere. Interestingly enough, Colere is also the root for another word we know, a word of which we are especially aware in a time when Mormon polygamy is at the fore in the national headlines. The word: "cult." This isn't all that surprising when one considers how cultures formed. People banded together in small agrarian collectives, worshiping whatever deities they thought would favor them with the necessary weather to produce a harvest. Culture formed around the practice of cultivation, which was intimately related to cultic worship. Cultures formed around cults, which formed around the practice of cultivation.

Like I said, it's no surprise. But even though we're kind of culture junkies, we're not big on cults. And isn't our beef with cults simply that the culture in their social microcosms does not closely resemble that in mainstream society? We hear of people living in cloistered communities, espousing values different from those articulated in our media and assumed by the average Joe and Jane on the street, and we immediately react, often negatively.

I have some friends that are part of a church nearby, a closely-knit community whose members live mostly in the same small Iowa town. Each of these people turns over a large portion of their income to the religious institution to which they belong, a much larger portion, I suspect, than most people who go to "regular churches" (whatever that means). The money is used to spread the gospel, which is the historic mission of the church since the time of Christ. Many in the area who do not belong look at the group with distaste. Rumors--some of them totally ludicrous (apparently this church is hiding a missile silo)--circulate regularly.

I admit, it seems odd to me that people would choose to live at church, in apartments managed by the religious community. But then again, most of the people in my home church have been bickering for the past decade; I find it hard to believe that they could live peacefully in a close-knit community like this one I'm talking about. But if they could, and if they enjoyed being together, and if there were adequate facilities like church apartments where they could live in community, I would be glad to see them try. And if the church provided the housing, I suppose they could afford to give more money to the church and its mission. Isn't this kind of the point of the monastic life? As such, it's not so inconceivable that culture different from the mainstream might arise in small communities. It's really not a surprise.

What surprises me when I read the etymology of the word "culture" is the rise of something called "secular culture." OAD defines "secular" as "denoting attitudes, activities, or other things having no religious or spiritual basis." So "secular culture" is simply a set of practices surrounding a society that is worshipping and cultivating together, but that has "no religious or spiritual basis." I've seen a lot of things in twenty-seven years, but not non-religious worship. That's like a square circle. If you worship, you're religious. If you're religious, you worship. And I'm going to argue that all of us worship, which means there's no room for secular culture.

One difference between older, agrarian cultures and "secular culture" is the deity that oversees things. Once upon a time we were worried about appeasing Ra, or Osiris, or Isis, or Thor, or Woden, or Frey, or Aphrodite, or Zeus, or Yahweh, or Allah, or Kali, or Baal, or Dagon, or any of a number of others. But Whomever we feared, Whoever it was we appealed to, Whomever received credit for governing the order of things--that Being has been supplanted. We are no less religious; let's not kid ourselves. We continue our worship. The deity that we worship is not out there, in or beyond the cosmos, governing. He or she is in here, a speck in the desert of reality, vying for control of everything out there. "Secular culture" doesn't technically exist anywhere; it can't. What we mean when we say that is "selfish culture."

The Meaningless Ambiguity of Anti-Categories

2007-09-16T19:42:00.001-05:00

Last Sunday my pastor used the term "deconstruct" from the pulpit. He's a very educated individual--he went to med school before he left to go to seminary instead--and he reads quite a bit. I don't get the vibe from him that books about deconstruction are his top choice in leisure time reading material. We have some young guys on staff at our church who probably imported something or other from the EmergentYS series that has plagued Christian publishing since Brian McLaren started boring us with his books a few years ago.

My pastor is usually adept at choosing just the words he needs to mean exactly what he is trying to communicate, which makes a word like "deconstruct" a bit of an anomaly for him. Think about it: deconstruct. De-construct. What does that mean? It's not "destroy." When you
talk about "deconstructing" something you don't necessarily mean you're "destroying" it. But you're not really "unpacking" it, "dismantling" it, "condemning" it, "reducing" it, or "explaining" it either. You're just "deconstructing" it. It's a totally unhelpful term, as the meaning of the word cannot be surmised from its parts as with other words.

And this (mis)use of language is exactly what is demanded by the epistemological quagmire that confronts postmodernism. When we cannot know anything for certain we then resort to the use of terms that are appropriately vague, terms like "deconstruction," for example. This tactic makes our meaning a moving target; it also renders our speech entirely ambiguous and therefore unhelpful. Language ceases to be denotative and becomes disappointingly connotative. Such malpractice--call it "deconstruction" of our words--will eventuate in the demise of meaningful speech, at which point the postmodern fear of not knowing anything will become a reality.

Let's steer clear of anti-categories (i.e., meaningless words).

Philological Prognostication

2007-06-21T15:58:00.000-05:00

Dad looked at emerika last week and commented that the title makes it look like I can't spell. Hopefully it's apparent from my writing that that isn't the case. The point is that America is distorted: it's not what it was meant to be. I chose a rather innocuous distortion, one that is generally distorted without commenting on the nature of the distortion. But there are several provocative alternatives.

We could, for instance, call it ComeHereica. Since its inception our country has beckoned to the world, like a promised land ripe for the taking. But this beacon call took on a note of self-satisfied elitism, begetting I'mHereica, as though that's where everyone should be because "I'm here." And now we have immigration problems.

They probably stem from the spirit of the country's assurance of the rights "to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." With that promise and the rise of a capitalist economy, "pursuit of happiness" made America AmIRicha, as we all began to ask ourselves whether we had enough to make us happy. We loved our possessions, including the land we possessed, so making it Avarica, a land steeped in avarice.

Eventually we realized that "money can't buy me love," so we made love God instead of money and thus wrought Amorica. Sure, during the naivete of the 1950's love was clean enough, but it's gotten out of hand don't you think? Based on the stuff I have to clean out of my email inbox, shameless solicitation to view the aggressive exhibitionism of total strangers, we could probably call our country I'mErica.

With the enshrinement of "love," however we define it (which is primarily sexually), we have glorified the image. But in a digital age, image seldom reflects reality, not when "the camera always lies" and any woman's faults can be removed with the right software. Call us Chimerica. Or, if you'd rather name our country after the detrimental effects that our image-craze has had on our ladies, we could call our land Anorexa. Beauty is only skin-deep, and sometimes death is the price to pay. Ask Marilyn. Or Karen Carpenter.

And why the glorification of the image anyway? Probably has to do with our epistemology. (C'mon. I'm a philosopher. You knew I wouldn't keep the lingo out of even one blog entry.) We've concluded that we know through the five senses. Call us Empirica. It rings true at two levels, in fact. We know empirically, and we've built our empire on the sensate titillations that we mass produce for the world market.

In fact, we'll go to war to defend our freedom to do so. I'm not pro-Islam in any way, but the Muslims recognize that much of what America has come to mean is smutty. But we'll fight for the right to produce smut. Call us Armorica, to use a name that we've seen before in history. Or if you want to connote the bloody messes we've made in the latter part of the twentieth century so that Hollywood has the right to make smutty movies of inglorious conflicts, you could call us Hemorrica, from the Greek word haima, "blood," and reminiscent of the medical term "hemorrhage." (In fact, I see the anglicized Greek "haima" in "hemo" and I also see a word that looks like "rage." Watch our movies: do we glorify the bloody rage, despite our shock at it when it hits our schools?)

Suffice it to say, unless we're willing to admit our problems, maybe even soberly face up to the fact that America has become AmAWrecka ("wrecka" as in "wreck," or perhaps even "wrecker" in the vernacular of the inner city), we're not going to solve things. Our fortitude is down. Our avarice, lasciviousness, and violence are up. We're ripe for the picking, as history demonstrates.

EPILOGUE

Of course, we could simply stoke the pace of the postmodern machine (yes, it's still a machine, no matter how organically you talk about it) to provide a welcome distraction from the possible names we could give our country. Ironically, this is what we do, and in good keeping with the etymology of the current name "America," of Gothic descent meaning "work-ruler." Or we could sit back with a great cup of coffee, relax, and see what happens. In that case, call our country Arabica. (If we're invaded, we might get a name like this anyway.)

I love my country. I just wish it wasn't so prone to the criticisms that I've leveled at it in this entry. Personally, I'm for keeping the name and fixing our society so that when we look at the etymology in several centuries we see something that connotes redemption.

Comings and Goings

2007-05-30T14:08:00.000-05:00

In his Iron Lance Trilogy author Stephen R. Lawhead brings to light two terms that are very helpful in understanding bewilderment as we experience it East of Eden. The first term is taithchwant,

"less an affliction than a cruel travail. It is a kind of wanderlust, but more potent than any yearning known to humankind. It is that gnawing discontent which drives a man beyond the walls of paradise to see what lies over the next hill, or to discover where the river ends, or to follow the road to its furthest destination."[1]

The taithchwant draws the voyager from home; it is what makes it true of the seafaring man, for example, that the sea is his wife and his wife is a mistress. His love lies in the journey.

The second term exposited by Lawhead and the only known equal of the taithchwant is the hiraeth,

"the home-yearning--an aching desire for the green hills of your native land, a matchless longing for the sound of a kinsman's voice, a greedy hunger only satisfied by the food first eaten at your mother's hearth... a hankering torment so strong it can bring tears to a man's eyes and make him forget all other loves, and even life itself."[2]

In other words, the hiraeth is a desire for the place where one belongs, where warmth, joy and safety dwell. After the taithchwant is given full reign and found unable to produce in the wanderer the joy that he craves, it is the hiraeth that calls him home.

We are a bewildered race, set loose to roam on the hard crust of a sin-tainted earth that was once the cradle of life but is now the gaping maw to which we return in death, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." I hear the words of the Irish hymnists: "Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love." We are consumed by the taithchwant, the precursor to our bewilderment. What is it that fuels our wanderlust? Perhaps it is curiosity about the wide world beyond. Perhaps it is rebellion against the "confines" of what we have always known. Perhaps it is simply the siren call of greatness that promises renown of legendary proportions if only we will have the courage to answer the call that in the end proves fruitless, or if not entirely so, then at least proves to be merely a tarnished shadow of what we formerly anticipated.

But when the condition of taithchwant has run its course we find a smaller, more subtle voice calling in the background, a gentle whisper that both troubles and comforts us. The hiraeth calls to us like a beacon in the night: "Come back home where you will be safe, warm, content and significant, where you will be you and not a minute point in the vastness beyond your realm. Here I am. Remember the goodness..." The hiraeth troubles us because it reminds us that we are bewildered, in over our heads in an adventure that is too big for us. It paves the way for the doubts that nag us with the thought that we cannot overcome what we have undertaken. But the hiraeth comforts us as well, reminding us that even if we do not overcome, there is someplace where we belong, where we will be remembered, where we will be protected and safe, a place from which we can look at the world and say of it truly, "Everything is all right."

It is just this aspect of the hiraeth that hints at the existence of God, according to Peter Berger. He cites the all-too-common scene of the mother who uses those words--"Everything is all right."--to comfort her fearful child in the night. But the question arises:

"Is the mother lying to the child? The answer, in the most profound sense, can be 'no' only if there is some truth in the religious interpretation of human existence. Conversely, if the 'natural' is the only reality there is, the mother is lying to the child--lying out of love, to be sure, and obviously not lying to the extent that her reassurance is grounded in the fact of this love--but, in the final analysis, lying all the same. Why? Because the reassurance, transcending the immediately present two individuals and their situation, implies a statement about reality as such."[3]

The point is simply that if there is no spiritual, if the chaotic realm of the natural is all there is, then there is no assurance that we can ever overcome that into which the taithchwant leads us. Worse still, the call of the hiraeth is a siren's call to an ideal that does not exist. Thus we cannot believe in the allure of adventure such that adventure truly has anything worthwhile to offer, nor can we believe in a place of peace and safety when we have had our fill of adventure and must turn again for home. Bewilderment is greatest in a purely natural world, for in such a world there can be no safety anywhere, and "lostness" is wherever we are, with no hope for reprieve. In Berger's words:

"If reality is coextensive with the 'natural' reality that our empirical reason can grasp, then the experience [of order amid chaos] is an illusion and the role that embodies it is a lie. For then it is perfectly obvious that everything is not in order, is not all right. The world that the child is being told to trust is the same world in which he will eventually die. If there is no other world, then the ultimate truth about this one is that eventually it will kill the child as it will kill his mother. This would not, to be sure, detract from the real presence of love and its very real comforts; it would give even this love a quality of tragic heroism. Nevertheless, the final truth would be not love but terror, not light but darkness. The nightmare of chaos, not the transitory safety of order, would be the final reality of the human situation. For, in the end, we must all find ourselves in darkness, alone with the night that will swallow us up. The face of reassuring love, bending over our terror, will then be nothing except an image of merciful illusion."[4]

I take Berger to mean here that the taithchwant and the hiraeth only have meaning in a world where order really exists, where chaos has boundaries, and where hope ultimately has a referent. "Coming" and "going" only make sense if there is a specific location, uniquely set apart as the focal point of one's identity, to and from which one comes and goes. If no such place exists, there is no real hiraeth. If no such place exists, there is no place from which the taithchwant really beckons the voyager; if we are always gone from somewhere, what sense does the call to leave really make? We may be coming and going, but where?

[1] Stephen R. Lawhead, The Iron Lance (New York, NY: HarperPrism, 1998), 173.
[2] Ibid.
[3]Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, Inc., 1969), 55.
[4] Ibid., 56.

Sin as Bewilderment

2007-05-30T13:55:00.000-05:00

As I was reading the OED[1] this week I discovered that among the many senses of the word "bewilderment" there exist the following usages:

1. Literally, "to be lost in the wild";
2. Figuratively, "to be morally lost";
3. "to be confused."

Given these three usages, I decided that this term can be applied to the phenomenon of sin, and this entry contains my case for this.

"Lost in the Wild"

The concept of "home" seems to have been tied to our original state in Eden. Genesis 1:26-28 gives the sense that the earth, in its original state, was a place made for us, a home. It was friendly to us, and our responsibility as humans was to order it, to place boundaries on its elements according to the ability and wisdom we had as beings made in the image of God. (Ge. 1:26)

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, He expelled them from Eden, expelled them from "home." (Ge. 3:23) Genesis says little about the land beyond the boundary of Eden prior to the Fall, but it does say that after the Fall the land was no longer friendly; sin had cursed it so that good things grew only with great toil and arduous care. (Ge. 3:17-19) When God judged Cain for the first murder He cut Cain off from the land, from a sedentary life, saying, "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth." (Ge. 4:10b-12) The result of this was Cain's geographical estrangement from the land of Eden, and from the presence of God. (Ge. 4:16) In both cases--that of Adam and Eve, and that of their son Cain--the punishment for sin was "bewilderment" according to definition (1) above.

If sin-as-bewilderment entails the geographical estrangement of humankind from home, and if sin-as-bewilderment is a worthwhile concept, then we would expect to see a reversal of this estrangement in the movement of redemption. In other words, if in our sin we strayed from home, as part of redemption we should see God trying to bring us back. And indeed He does. God's re-creation of a place to call home is a significant part of the promise given to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-7. With a promise, God set apart a place for Abraham's descendants.

Eventually this place, the land of Israel (named after Abraham's grandson Jacob who was renamed by God "Israel," "one who wrestles with God"), became the stage upon which the great cosmic drama of God's interaction with humankind would unfold. At the darkest hour of Israel's history, the children of Abraham are even expelled from the land that they were promised, the land that they have called home for perhaps a thousand years; and this was because of their sin. (2 Ki. 24:15-17, 25:18-26) Slowly they are brought back to rebuild the city of Jerusalem (Ez., Neh.), and just outside of the city, after it is rebuilt, the Messiah comes. In the form of an infant born in a barn, Almighty God straps on human flesh and begins to walk among His people, the race He set apart, in the land that He has promised them.

But why be so specific to one race, in one time, at one place? For one reason only: so that we would all know it was Him. In no way did God intend to leave those who were not descended from Abraham bewildered in the land beyond the borders of Israel. By setting Israel apart, He merely drew the "X" on the earth to mark the place where He would land, the place where the rest of earth would be redeemed. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus spoke very openly about God's intent to bring home the bewildered. (Lk. 15:11-31) Furthermore, his promises in John 14 indicate that heaven will be a place where we are all brought together, to be with God and with one another. For all eternity we will no longer be bewildered. We will be Home.

"Morally Lost"

There is a direct correlation between the geographic lostness and the moral lostness of all those we have mentioned in the previous section. Adam and Eve, once they partook of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, having committed the only possible trespass against God, were sent forth from the Garden of Eden. Cain was also sent forth, to roam the land east of Eden, because he had murdered his brother and the land, having drunk Abel's blood, cried in accusation. This theme continues throughout scripture: moral bewilderment begets geographic bewilderment. The sinner is also a runner.

Consider Jesus' parable of the hundred sheep. Although there are ninety-nine in the fold, his heart lies with the one that has wandered. And he goes in search of this one, rejoicing when he has finally found the lost lamb and brought it back. (Mt. 18:12-14) But in the context of the rest of Matthew 18, it becomes apparent that a geographically lost lamb is geographically lost because it was first morally lost. Had it not been morally lost, it would have followed its shepherd. (Jn. 10:11-18) Had it followed its shepherd, it would have found its home. But it did not; it became geographically lost.

"Confused"

Sheep are notoriously dumb animals. (They're also funny looking.) I suppose we could be offended that Jesus compared morally flawed human beings to sheep, given that all of us are morally flawed. But the question looms large: isn't moral flaw a product of some kind of stupidity? At one level, the answer to this is a resounding "Yes!".[2]

Nowhere in scripture where it is mentioned is confusion thought to be a good thing for those who are afflicted by it. Perhaps the most poignant reference to this sort of "endarkenment" is in the first chapter of Romans. God, it says, is angry with the wickedness of humankind, and their primary offense seems to be suppression of the truth and a concomitant embrace of lies. This is an offense to God (moral lostness is their state) because "what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, the became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles." (Ro. 1:18-22)

(Zeus, God of the Greeks, made in their image)

The God of Abraham judges by bequeathing the gift of freedom upon the confused and morally lost, and when they reach forth and take it in their bewildered state, they exacerbate their condition until one day they wake to find themselves far, far from home.

[1] i.e. The Oxford English Dictionary
[2] This is not to say that moral culpability can be eradicated through sound teaching. The general ignorance of humankind, although it should be patiently cured, is hardly the bottom-line problem confronting humanity. The entire person is corrupt: the mind fails to comprehend the truth; the emotions produce sluggish reactions to purposeful living; the body is sensate; the will is weak. Intellectual flaws are the beginning of the issue, but they are hopelessly tangled in a knot of human problems that wrack each individual.

Fides, Fiducia... Feelings

2007-04-26T18:17:00.000-05:00

It's not lost on me that we all seem to be looking for a "feel-good" spiritual experience. Not that that's all there is to spirituality or religion, but it's probably the primary goal of most people. If you ask them what they're seeking, I'm betting that the answer they give you will boil down to this.

(This may sound like a total subject-change.) I'm struggling, honestly. I've got overwhelming evidence for the truth of what's been written down in the bible, but some days I have trouble feeling like it's real. Because of the evidence, I know that the problem lies with me. This morning I was lying awake before getting out of bed, listening to the spring rain drum on the roof of our place, and I started to recheck my beliefs. Everything checked out fine, but I feel distant from them, like they're true in a sort of irrelevant, non-transformational way. And then my mind wandered to St. Augustine.

I've discussed Augustine on this blog before. Among other things, he posited that faith is bipartite (i.e. it has two parts). First, there is what he called fides. Fides is basically what we mean when we say "belief." When a person has fides, Augustine avers, he or she first understands, then gives assent to the idea in question. So I can't have fides with regard to the statement "two plus two equals four" without understanding what "two," "plus," "equals," and "four" mean. Once I understand these, then I have to figure out whether or not I agree. And when I agree, or give my assent, then--and only then--can I be said to have fides with regard to the idea that "two plus two equals four." Cake. Right?

But then Augustine gets practical on us. See, he would say if we have fides with regard to some belief, we don't have full-blown faith until we demonstrate our fiducia. Fiducia is a cool word. In fact, it's nearly a lost word. We hardly use it in our society anymore. One of the only remaining uses for it that I know of is in the financial world. See, a company has to provide benefits for its employees (well, technically it doesn't have to, but if you don't want them to find other work it's a good idea these days). It usually contracts with another company, an insurance company or a pension provider, to offer these benefits. So the two companies have an agreement, called a "plan." The plan is usually held by a third party who (a) underwrites it (i.e. defines the terms of the agreement) and then (b) holds it in trust, as a kind of referee between the two companies in the agreement that the plan represents. This third-party company is called a "fiduciary." See, the fiduciary has everyone else's trust. And this is the sense that Augustine is getting at when he uses the word fiducia. When we place our fiducia in something, we demonstrate our trust in it. So Augustine doesn't think that faith is genuinely faith if it only entails fides; it must also entail fiducia, trust. By this he means something like, "a disposition to act" on whatever the content of fides is. So faith is indeed bipartite: we place our fides, and then demonstrate it by our fiducia.

The knot I'm trying to untie is the question of where feelings fit into the equation. I think a lot of us expect to be made to feel like demonstrating our fiducia. It's the sort of thing where we know what we ought to do based on our fides, but we don't feel like doing it, so our fiducia suffers. Another word for this is hypocrisy. I believe I suffer from it more than most others I know. When I know I should do something but I don't do it, chances are I didn't do it because, "I didn't feel like it." In this way, feelings are the weapons of our fallenness as it struggles against the virtue we try to inculcate in our own lives, or even in one another's lives. By expecting feelings to precede fiducia, we allow ourselves to fall short of the mark repeatedly.

But what if feeling only comes after fiducia? What if the sequence works like this: we come into fides by understanding some new idea and giving our assent to it, we believe it so strongly we're willing to demonstrate our fiducia by placing our trust in this idea, and then, only after all of this, we discover that it feels good to us. If this is how things progress, then the feelings prior to fiducia are red herrings, misleading little distractions that threaten to prevent our outward change despite our inward change, and therefore threaten to stymie our complete transformation.

The only remedy I see is to disregard feelings as a criterion for action. We must act, whether or not we feel like it. Only after doing so can we enjoy the experience we're all craving. And the fulfillment that comes after demonstrating our fiducia is far greater than the gratification of the derailer feelings that precede it. The next time I'm about to avoid doing something because I don't feel like it, I'm going to have to decide what I believe and how strongly I believe it.

Foundations of Stone

2007-04-24T11:17:00.000-05:00

It's fair to say that I'm a foundationalist. By this I mean that if you ask me why I believe something I'll cite another belief, and if you ask me why I believe that belief I'll cite another belief, and so on. But this process doesn't go on forever. (That would make me a coherentist.) At some point you're going to ask me why I believe something and I'll say, "Because," and then I'll repeat the belief. For instance, I might say that I believe that A is A and you might ask why. I'm going to say, "Because A is A. It just is." Foundationalists basically believe that there are foundational beliefs (that's where we get our name) that we'd be crazy to disbelieve; they're self-evidently true. Another way of saying this is that a foundational belief "justifies itself." It is true by merit of itself. Now it's true that within the foundationalist camp we often disagree about what constitutes a foundational belief, but that's part of a much bigger discussion for which I have neither room nor time here. See, I'm in a dialogue with a couple of friends, and this post is my latest contribution.

I've met Christians who believe that the bible is foundational. They say that. "The bible is foundational." I think they mean that it's true, and should be the ultimate authority in the life of those who believe it is true. And I agree with these two statements, but in the sense that I'm a foundationalist, I wouldn't say that the bible is foundational. You see, I could possibly doubt the bible's content. I could doubt its provenance. These things are doubt-able. Scores of people doubt them. But it's rationally impossible to doubt that A is A. In fact, it's impossible to doubt that I have a headache. When was the last time you heard someone say, "Man, I have a headache," and someone else chime in, "Liar! No you don't!"? No reasonable person doubts that sort of thing, at least, not without good reason. And if they do it with good reason, then I guess that still makes them reasonable, doesn't it? Even if they might happen to be wrong, they had reasons for believing what was false.

So if the bible isn't foundational, in the sense that I'm using that term, what is it? Now we're getting somewhere. As a foundationalist, I think I'm committed to the belief that a rational foundation is indubitable (i.e. can't be reasonably doubted). So it's comprised of logical laws, beliefs about internal states like pain, and some things we can know without having to experience the world around us. I don't have the space to go into it here, but Plantinga's Ontological Argument for God's existence is a solid line of reasoning toward belief in God. And the argument doesn't require the use of scientific data or any other information that could be reasonably doubted. It hinges entirely on logical contingencies.[1] So we could say that from an indubitable foundation Plantinga has reasoned to the existence of God.

If God's existence can be established by reason, then we have a starting point for many other explanations of things that exist. We then have evidence for intelligent design. We have an ultimate authority for moral law. We have a first cause for the universe. We have someone rational above ourselves. It should be noted that the bible never really seeks to prove these things; it merely assumes them. These are the scenery for the drama of scripture. And they must be in place else the grand narrative conveyed in the bible makes little sense and must be explained in other ways, which usually amount to its being explained away.

Once we have established the existence of a rational, creative, intelligent, pre-cosmos, self-sustaining, morally legislating (and therefore, morally judging and morally enforcing) God, we have narrowed the field of options in a world of religious pluralism. By arguing for a God at all, we break company with the atheist who claims there is nothing but matter and chance, flying around in a void according to the laws of physics.[2] By positing God's rationality, we rule out the claims of pantheist faiths that aver that the cosmos is self-rational and that there is divinity in each one of us. By expositing God's intelligence, we begin to understand some ways in which He is like us, contra the deists. But having only come this far, we have not yet accounted for the bible, nor have we established that Christianity is true.

The bible is not simply a collection of stories. It's also not merely a system of moral statutes. The bible, at its core, is concerned with an event. It begins the drama of history at the beginning, in ages long forgotten. It traces the interaction of God with people from The first two people to the present. We see an interplay between the human and the divine: creation, fall, redemption. We must understand the first two in order to comprehend the last one.

Creation is analytically verifiable: all things have a beginning. We don't need the bible to tell us that this happened. We do need it to tell us how it happened. The same is true of the fall. We know that something is screwed up in our world. We don't need the bible to tell us that. But we do need it to tell us what the matter is. But this is where things get interesting.

All traditions have some account of origin (or lack thereof), some explanation of a cosmic flaw (whatever it may be), and some prescription for a solution. In this respect, Christianity is no different from the other theistic options: Judaism, Islam, Bahai,[3] etc. But the question then arises: can we reconcile any one of these systems of belief more easily than its opponents with what reason has established is true?

Most, myself included, are of the conviction that the more lines of evidence establish something, the more probable it is. On that belief, the task of the Christian is to demonstrate that the biblical record gives the best explanation of the world's origin, problem, and solution. Together, these constitute the veracity of scripture. If the Christian understanding of the world as articulated in the Old and New Testaments is indeed the way things are, is true, then all manner of academic disciplines will afford a great deal of help in expositing the understanding of reality that scripture provides.

In other words, if the bible is true, and if it is essential to a life well lived, then it will be understood to be so when and where we pursue extrabiblical knowledge with a truth-oriented open mind. In this way, many scholars have concluded that the biblical account of creation is true and have come to embrace its understanding of human fallenness and God's redemption through Jesus.[4] Other scholars have studied the dysfunction of humankind and have recognized in their studies' data the phenomena of sin and evil.[5] But many are those who have accepted the truth of the bible based on its account of our redemption.[6]

The point is this: truth is available to those who do not have the bible. And the bible is as good a starting place as any in understanding the world. But if one is looking for a hard case for "the way things are," it is best begun with what cannot be rationally doubted (Buddhists doubt that A is A, but then again, they are very willing to claim that rationality is not important[7]--how is this meaningful?) and then derived therefrom. This explains the difference between myself and the many Christians who claim that scripture is "foundational." In their use, that term indicates the starting point of their understanding of reality. In mine, "foundational" indicates beliefs that are rationally indubitable.

[1] I suppose if you like you may go ahead and doubt logic, but you'll have to use it to deny it. For a good treatment of Plantinga's thought, see James F. Sennett, The Analytic Theists: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 50-72.
[2] For a good discussion of why this is rationally incoherent, see Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).
[3] There is some debate over whether Bahai is actually a theistic religion, or whether, on theistic grounds, it then "abrogated" theism and established some sort of pantheism. For an informed discussion of Bahai, see Winfried Corduan, Neighboring Faiths (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998).
[4] I believe this was the case with Michael Behe, the eminent biologist who eventually published the book Darwin's Black Box. I could, however, be mistaken on this. I am more familiar with his ideas than his biography, and that isn't saying much.
[5] See Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969). See also Phillip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. This source is out of print, so good luck finding it.
[6] One of the more rational of these converts is "the most reluctant convert," Clive Staples Lewis, author of several works that indicate the direct applicability of biblical truth to extrabiblical knowledge, including Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and The Abolition of Man, to name a few.
[7] See D.T. Suzuki, What is Zen? (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971), and Tucker N. Callway, Zen Way--Jesus Way (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1976).

A Verse for Holy Week

2007-04-02T18:49:00.000-05:00

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of heaven and earth
With a word He spoke into birth
All the greatness and glory that sings out His story
And finds in His being its worth.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lamb of God who was slain
Loving me, bore my guilt in His pain
And the scars on His palms now inspire the psalms
That give glory to His holy name.

Holy, holy, holy is the Father of heavenly lights
For He set the stars off on their flight
And the heights of the heavens can't match how forgiven
We are as we stand in His sight.

"Holy, Holy, Holy"

Possible Worlds

2007-03-27T00:41:00.000-05:00

So one of the most useful concepts in modal logic is the notion of possible worlds. See, in modal logic people are always discussing whether an entity exists necessarily (that is, whether that entity "cannot not-exist"), or whether it is merely a contingent entity (possible but could also "not-exist"). So for instance, there are some possible worlds in which this blog exists and some in which it does not. There are still other possible worlds in which it exists but it has different properties: another color scheme, a different profile photo, it was written by someone else, it uses a different font but says the same things, etc. Thus this blog is contingent.

Anselm, and since him several others, posited that God is a necessary being, that there is no world in which He does not exist. Other philosophers have argued that the contents of our a priori knowledge [1] are necessary, that is, that they are the same across all possible worlds. Thus in no possible world is it false that A is A, and A is not non-A; these are necessary truths. Some have even included numbers in the class of necessary beings.

I'm not a great philosopher, just an armchair initiate I'd say, but I'm inclined to go with Anselm et. al. on God as a necessary being. Before I explain myself I should note that the argument I'm going to articulate here is not an argument for God's existence a priori like Anselm's. Rather, I'd like to toss an a posteriori argument on the pile, one that demonstrates that God's existence as a necessary being might be concluded after experience as well as before. This is useful in a world where we are loath to take anything for truth without having experienced it. In short, a priori arguments are seldom convincing in a world where the typical justification entails some sort of a posteriori knowledge. We're often saying, "It's been my experience..." as though that preamble constitutes some sort of logical trump card that rules all other counterarguments questionable.

So what if we could offer an a posteriori verification of something that Anselm (and most recently, Plantinga) has put forth as an a priori argument for God's existence? If we could know something is true without having any experience, but then also find that it's true based on our experience, wouldn't that combination lend a lot of weight to the conclusion? I think so.

So let's examine possible worlds. What is a possible world, anyway? Well, if we're granting that the laws of logic are necessary, then a possible world is any world that is logically possible. Put differently, a possible world is any world in which the laws of logic apply. If there is a world where logic doesn't apply, and if our minds can only conceptualize things according to the laws of logic, then we would never know about a world where logic doesn't apply; it wouldn't interface with our minds such that it was knowable. It would be like a color our eyes couldn't see.

There' s no possible world in which there is a square circle, or a pink-yellow car; circles can't be square, and cars cannot be pink-yellow (they can be pink and yellow, or a nasty shade of mango that you might get from mixing pink and yellow, but not simultaneously pink and yellow in the same way--you can't put a pink stripe where there is a yellow stripe and have the stripe be pink in exactly the same place it's yellow).

So beyond the laws of logic, what makes these worlds "possible"? Nothing; they must be merely logical. So what exists in them? Whatever we can logically conceptualize. So there is a possible world in which dogs meow and cats bark. There is a possible world in which horses are purple. There is a possible world in which humans have roots and trees have legs. There is a possible world in which Nicole Brown Simpson killed her husband O.J. and got off scot-free. There is a possible world in which I type better with my toes than my hands... and so on. None of these things are logically impossible. Whatever we can imagine is fair game.

But this sounds an awful lot like literature, doesn't it? For instance, Tolkien's Middle Earth is a possible world. So is Lewis' Narnia, for that matter. So is Lucas' Tatooine, or Verne's mysterious island, or Miller's Myst, or Dickens's London, or Dumas' Paris, or any of a number of other places. These are possible worlds that we recognize a posteriori. These are not worlds we thought up prior to any experience. Rather, we went and had an experience (usually with a book, although film is also a medium for the imagination of possible worlds) and came away with knowledge of a possible world. But what strikes me is this: all of these possible worlds had a god. All of them had a creator. No possible world that we know of exists without a creator. In fact, our experience of possible worlds might lead one to say that a necessary condition of any possible world is a creator. A creator exists for every possible world, at least, as far as we can tell. Thus a creator appears to be a necessary being. Even our world then, itself being a possible world--more than possible; it's actual--must have a Creator, else it would not have been conceptualized. There is no difference between our possible world and any that I have mentioned above, at least, not in this respect.

(I wonder if there is a possible world in which I refine this argument? And what if it is possible in such a way that it could yet be actualized from the status quo of the actual world?)

This line of thought combines Anselm's ontological argument (but seriously, I prefer Plantinga's variation) with empirical investigation such that no matter which way we turn we recognize the essentialness of a creator. The relationship could be expressed as follows: "For every possible world P there is a creator C, such that P is the result of the thought and action of C." Thus whenever we discover what constitutes a possible world, we can logically begin to look for a creator for that world.

[1] For those of you who aren't familiar with philosophy--my guess is that's most--you should probably know that a priori knowledge is knowledge that you have without ever having an experience of the world beyond your mind. So, for instance, your mind could recognize the simple truth that A is A, and its derivative, A is not non-A. But to know that sunshine is warm you would first have to experience sunshine. Anytime you have to experience something, whatever you learn as a result is considered a posteriori knowledge.

The Most Frightening Thing

2007-02-21T20:19:00.000-06:00

"What if I stumble, what if I fall?
What if I lose my step and I make fools of us all?
Will the love continue when the walk becomes a crawl?
What if I stumble? And what if I fall?"

--Toby McKeehan, "What If I Stumble?"

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life--the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child--he will take endless trouble--and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."

--Clive Staples Lewis, The Problem of Pain

My friend TC said the most frightening thing to me last week. He looked me square in the eye, put a large hand on my shoulder and said, "A-Rod, you're the nicest religious person I've ever met." At first it was, in my mind, a flattering comment. But as the afternoon wore on I was haunted by what he had said.

First of all, you have to understand what he means when he says, "religious person." Regardless of how much pluralization is transpiring in the major metropolises of America, here in Iowa the predominant religion remains Christianity, especially in small towns like the one in which TC grew up. So "religious person" is simply colloquial longhand for "Christian." I don't mind being called this, nor do I take offense to it's being reduced (or elongated) to the title "religious person."

The horror of the statement for me lies in its implications. On the one hand, if this kid thinks I'm the nicest one of us he's ever met, then what are the others like around him? Believe me, I know the guy who's skin I'm living in. I see him first thing every morning when I look in the mirror. When he screws up, I feel the shame. When he thinks wrongly toward or about someone else, I have a front row seat. When he is at his depraved moral worst, I know--because I'm him. And that guy doesn't deserve to be on anyone's top-10 "nicest religious people I know" list. In fact, he doesn't deserve a spot on a top-1000 list. So if he makes it to number one, one has to wonder how the other "religious people" are conducting themselves before a watching world.

On the other hand, if he makes it to number one, it's safe to assume TC hasn't seen many other "religious people" around, or if he has, then he has no idea that they are "religious people." In that case, we have to ask where they all are. I run across them all the time. Why, just today I ran into some Free Methodist church planters that just moved to town. Monday I crossed paths with my pastor's wife, and we don't even know each other by sight--I attend a megachurch that affords a fair degree of anonymity--and another pastor and his family. It's like we're a bunch of Waldos in a chaotic world of crazy stunts, waiting to be found by one another and totally indistinguishable from the rest of the people around us. To couch it in a more biblical metaphor: the salt is losing its saltiness. So perhaps I'm not the nicest religious person he's ever met; perhaps I'm the only one he's ever known was a religious person.

And why all the anonymity anyway? It's not like we're the Mafia. We're not trafficking contraband, running disreputable establishments, or interested in killing our opponents. We're just a group of people who happen to believe that a man from Galilee was actually God-in-the-flesh, and that his death and resurrection mean that the world is redeemable--one might even say "salvageable", and that by his choice we're his primary means of doing so and so we're doing just that. I'm under the impression that's almost a moral photo negative of the Mafia. They come to take, destroy and murder. We come to give, edify and enliven. So why apologize? We're not some crime wave. We're spreading grace, not a disease. We're in it for those around us, not ourselves...

And the mystery of this is that it's God working in me, because left to myself I'm a lot more like the guy I described a few paragraphs back. And this God-in-me thing is the only thing we're spreading: that He actually wants to get into our lives and begin to change things; that He can't stand to see us the way we are; that He loves us too much to allow us to remain so twisted and selfish; that He wants to bless us and the people around us with eternal life, yes, and redemption in the here-and-now. And perhaps this, the idea that a Being so vast, so powerful, so timeless, could actually care about each one of us enough to want to rid us of our imperfections--perhaps this is the most frightening thing.

Tech Details Matter

2007-02-13T00:23:00.000-06:00

(As if anyone doubted this.)

I was prowling the pages of an interesting website--new to me, but one that's been around awhile--when I realized that despite listings for several groups, there are no forms or links that help a person become a contributor. It seems that this website wants its participants to participate by subscribing to the material produced by a few who are already involved. In other words, "Join our group! Play a passive role!"

Cell phones have caller-ID these days, which is often a convenient feature because you can screen your calls. But while I'm in the middle of a discussion about something important with my (now ex-) girlfriend, I get frustrated by the fact that she can see who is calling her; this knowledge confronts her with the decision of whether to pick up, when before, without caller-ID, she might just as readily have ignored the phone altogether.

Electronic mail accounts, cable or satellite television connections, telephone numbers, personal website addresses: all of these are avenues into our lives for a barrage of information that hits us from all sides each day. Even TIVO can tell whomever provides the service what it is you're watching, recording and saving.

When they gave us the internet, they gave us a medium wherein our speech functions like God's: we decree what we wish, and it is so. But though we can declare our will and see it carried out ("Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is online."), can we stand back and look at it and declare that it is good?

By the power of our technology, we have taken a seat on what was once God's chair; will we be shoved off when He returns to sit in His seat? And what consequences will we, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, suffer for our flippant misuse of a power so fell and fair?

"I am considering what the thing called 'Man's power over Nature' must always and essentially be... what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."

--Clive Staples Lewis, The Abolition of Man

God > man > dog

2006-10-10T00:10:00.000-05:00

“What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.”

--Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law”

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—‘twas our right
(used or misused), That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

--J.R.R. Tolkien

Arthur Allen Leff noted that we at once desire both to find law and to make law.[1] The eminent J.R.R. Tolkien mused that “we make still by the laws in which we are made.”[2] Both of these men understand something of a contradiction in humankind, an internal conflict in each being that arises at the intersection of the Creator’s image in us and our own status in the cosmos as created beings. We are simultaneously taken by the enchantment of the world we live in and by the idea of creating one such world of our own to bend to our own will. This same conflict rears its head in the philosophy of language, inasmuch as we want both to discover things and name them, and to speak and by the sheer power of speech give being to that which we mean. In short, we want to be both creatures and gods. And this is our secret war.

We have become the Conquistadores of reality, would-be conquerors who are nevertheless bewitched with awe and wonder by the terrible beauty and untamed majesty of a world we view as ours for the taking. But the despondent truth of the matter is this: the world which we have discovered is not our own, and often we ravage it when we attempt to bend it to our wills. To compound the problem, the worlds we create for ourselves are far less captivating than the one we inhabit, and the governance of these realms leaves some elements of our being unsatisfied.

[1] Arthur Allen Leff, "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law" Duke Law Journal, Dec. 2000 (vol. 1979, no. 6).
[2] John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, "On Fairie Stories" in The Tolkien Reader (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1966), 33-99.

Between the Dim and the Dark

2006-09-26T12:45:00.000-05:00

I know I've articulated the criteria for truth as coherence, correspondence with reality, and personal congruence. Still, I've been really thinking about the correspondence with reality criterion.

I think it's with just this part that the discipline of Rhetoric takes issue. It is one thing to posit this criterion as a metaphysician. In fact, it's almost instinctual. Nevertheless, when we begin to describe things it becomes altogether less clear that this is as easy as it sounds. For instance, we might say that an elephant is "big," but is it? Sure, it's "bigger than," but it's also "smaller than," in which case someone with different context might be tempted to call it "small." (Think of someone who's grown up around dinosaurs, for example.)

The art of rhetoric is to allude to specific properties of the things we're talking about, such that the way we describe them persuades others of our point. In some way our speech must correspond with reality, else our audience will disregard it entirely. In another, it must creatively redirect our audience's attention toward something to which they are unattentive. As rhetors, we are subject to the correspondence criterion, but the nature of reality is such that we have the choice of many things to which we may allude. I may paint the automobile as a worthwhile investment for the work it helps one accomplish, or as a tool of the devil himself for all of the pollution it causes. The ability to accomplish work and the the polluting by-products are characteristic of all automobiles. Statements about either aspect correspond with reality. Rhetoric thus helps us sort the properties of a subject and discern which ones are best emphasized in order to further our interests.

And what of the interests themselves, these agendas we seek to further? We must be certain that they are true in order to have the assurance that we serve rightly. Some rhetors claim that they serve no agenda, that they themselves determine the agenda. In their own minds they are gods. But they are slaves, slaves to their own whims, pushed about by the world in which they live, impinged upon by the elements of the created order and of society, forced always to respond to what has already transpired. Their senses drive them. They have not contemplated a course and pursued it, initiating. They have been blown about by the winds of chance, and this is a greater darkness and a deeper slavery than the service of the truth, which they, by their subtle art, have led us to believe is thralldom. In throwing off the governance of truth we have accepted instead the reign of the rhetors. We have asked them to tell us what is real, and even where we fancy ourselves freemen, we find our actions betray us.

Consider the rhetors in advertising. Though we realize we are being advertised at, we are nevertheless persuaded by the advertisements. The humor, the color, the elegance of their art, all of these drive us to willingly turn over our money, time and energy to the causes their art propounds. And we are at the mercy of these voices, whether or not we know it... until we come to the truth. Having once tasted the coarse but honest fare of reality, we can then taste the saccharine sweetness of the simulacrity of the rhetors' art. Sweet though it is, it is nevertheless artificial. And having tasted the natural sweetness of real fruit, we cannot easily return to the synthetic without noticing its artifice.

Leff said we at once crave to make law and to find it. I suspect it is this to which I am alluding: we at once crave to describe things and to see them as they truly are. It is the internal debate between being safely subject and vulnerably godlike.

On Magic and Science: Attitudes Toward Power

2006-06-06T21:39:00.001-05:00

I suppose today of all days the question of magic is germane to the subject at hand. It is after all 6 June 2006, the first day in a thousand years when the date consists of three sixes: 06/06/06. As it is yet morning, there hasn’t been much time for the forces of evil to wind the insidious works that they will no doubt attempt to perpetrate today. Should we be looking for astrologers and sorcerers? Are we anticipating witchcraft and voodoo today? Perhaps. But Abaddon, the Destroyer, does not restrict himself to these, nor does he own all magic. And that is what this paper is about.

The question has been posed whether we as the Children of God, the followers of the Way, are allowed to appreciate magic, whether in art (i.e., stories, poems and songs) or in practice. I guess it all depends upon what one means by “magic.” In order to understand magic, however, we must first understand power.

Power can be divided into two categories: natural power, and supernatural power. Natural power consists primarily of technological advance, psychological methodology, and apothecarial practices born out of botanical and biological studies. I suppose we could also include the use of reason as a natural power, but this seems a bit premature; reason is not something we have ever seen with a microscope, and generally the things with which naturalists are concerned have the unique quality of being empirically verifiable.

In fact, it seems that a brief discussion of empirical investigation would not only be helpful here, but essential. By the term “empirical” we mean “known through the five senses.” Thus science seeks empirically verifiable facts, knowledge that comes to us through our visual, auditory, olfactory, palatable, or tactile channels. David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher of science, even proposed that the only things we could know for certain were known through the five senses. Unfortunately, this particular bit of knowledge is not verifiable with any single sense, nor with any combination of the five, so it has since been regarded as terribly self-refuting.
So the naturalist is concerned with knowing empirically, which, by definition, limits the power that he or she wields to the natural (i.e., physical) realm. The naturalist then hopes, as I mentioned previously, for technological advance, biological advance, and the harnessing of new sources of power. But to what end?

By contrast, the supernaturalist knows about physical things, to be sure, but about other things as well. These “other things” are not necessarily verifiable through the five senses.[1] For instance, the mathematician need not demonstrate with objects that two and two make four; he has already concluded this with certainty from analysis of symbols (numbers) which represent the real-world situation, and does not need to enter the real-world situation to corroborate the findings of his symbolic practice. The logician[2] does his work in much the same way, and only need be concerned about his conclusions if he is uncertain about one of his premises.

Nevertheless, two true and sound premises yield an indisputably true conclusion:

My car is either red or blue.
My car is not red, therefore
my car is blue.

One need not investigate the actual color of my car in order to determine if it is blue, provided one takes for granted the first two premises of this syllogism. Indeed, it can be replicated with even more non-physical data:

All bachelors are unmarried males.
My brother is a bachelor, therefore
my brother is an unmarried male.

There is no need, nor is there a sound method, by which we could investigate whether all bachelors are indeed unmarried. The truth of the premise lies in its redundancy—all bachelors are indeed unmarried, regardless of how common-sense the statement sounds. We need not subject it to empirical investigation because its rationality[3] confirms it.

Supernatural power, then, is rooted in things unseen but no less real. I suppose this might be what we have traditionally referred to as “magic.” It is, in the truest sense of the term, “unnatural” because it finds its source beyond the natural realm. Nevertheless, we as humans have access to it because we are bi-substantival beings,[4] interacting in both the physical or natural realm and the spiritual or supernatural realm. I don’t suppose we would go so far as to say that logic is “magic,” but there seems to be some assumption as such, for Solomon in all his wisdom (which, when read, is often simple logical prowess) was thought to be the wisest man who ever lived, and to have received this power from God. Indeed, the prophets’ words of wisdom were from God as well.[5]

The link between wisdom and magic continues in the New Testament. In the book of Matthew, chapter two, the “magi”[6] who come to visit the babe in Bethlehem are also called “wise men.”[7] Indeed, these men drew a rational conclusion from empirical data. They saw a star rise in the east (empirical datum) and rationally concluded from that fact and some other premise, perhaps a prophecy, that the great king was born. They followed the star, which, we should take note, was a purely natural phenomenon, to a stable, all the while entertaining the belief that something far more than natural had taken place. And were they wrong? Do virgins naturally give birth? Are babies naturally foretold who fulfill four hundred or more prophecies in what to us is less than half a lifetime? Perish the thought. These were supernatural, one might even say “magic” occurrences. But this is not enough to vindicate our involvement with magic. It does not take into account the nature of the supernatural realm.

As it seems, the supernatural is divided into two powers: good and evil. And the evil cannot ever be as powerful as the good, for it cannot refine or create; it can only distort destroy. Indeed the names given to the spirit of evil are “Satan,”[8] “Abaddon,”[9] “the Prince of this world,”[10] and “Beelzebub.”[11] Jesus also refers to him as a liar and a murderer.[12]

On the other hand, there is God, who is Creator,[13] called “Most High,”[14] “Savior,”[15] and “Husband” to His people.[16] The picture one gets then is that God is the origin of life, perfect beyond question, bent on saving what is salvageable, because of the love that He has for His creation. As Christians, we identify Jesus as God-in-Flesh, the One and Only[17] of this sort, sent as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind.[18]

Together, these powers constitute the options of allegiance that we have. We can ally ourselves with God, or with Satan; there is no middle ground. To not choose is to choose. God calls us to submit to His will, as Jesus’ life exemplified, for the betterment of creation. Satan calls us to claim our own lordship, to strike out on our own, to rebel against the created order in many ways. Following this path leads to divorce. Divorce between human beings, divorce of human beings within themselves (such as psychological dysfunction), divorce between humans and the created order around them (think bad ecology, for example), and ultimately, divorce between humans and God.

This war in the heavenly realms[19] plays out in the natural order. Therefore, in our natural world, there are bound to be manifestations of supernatural power, because the conflict is ultimately supernatural. These exercises of supernatural power could be called “magic,” but they are by no means forbidden. Indeed, Jesus gave his disciples power to cast out demons,[20] to heal the sick,[21] to speak in languages they did not know,[22] and to prophesy (to speak for God).[23] The Holy Spirit is the agency by which this power was transmitted to the apostles from God.

So “magic” was being done by Jesus followers at his behest. If this is true, then Jesus cannot be said to have taught against magic altogether. More interestingly, there is no textual evidence for him having personally taught against sorcery and witchcraft. Such teachings come from the apostles, especially Paul. On the other hand, Jesus does clearly draw the line between God’s side of the supernatural struggle, and Satan’s side.[24] So the teachings of Jesus are best construed as teachings against the wrongful use of magic. Given that the spirit of Satan is selfishness, and the Spirit of God as taught and lived by Jesus is submission, one could say that magic is improperly used for selfish purposes, and properly used in submission to the will of God.

Indeed, this is corroborated by the apostles’ response to Simon the Sorcerer (also known as “Simon Magus”; see the root “magi”?), who asked to buy their power from them.[25] The best explanation for their indignation at Simon’s request is that they discerned his motive as a selfish one. And indeed, they seem to have been correct. Simon was not interested in giving the Holy Spirit to advance the kingdom of God, but to advance the renown of Simon Magus.

The same holds true of science in the natural realm. There are many scientists today who wield their natural powers the way Simon Magus wielded his supernatural powers before he encountered the Living God: selfishly. Doctors proclaim themselves gods, either by their actions or their words. Scientists heedlessly press on in researching areas of the natural realm that might better be left alone. Moral law does not govern their actions, nor do they even consider submitting to it. The way of submission always requires that there be something larger than the human submitting, something that he or she can submit to. The way of selfishness never acknowledges anything larger than the selfish human; he or she is—at least in his or her mind—the end-all, be-all of all that is.

Magic, then, is like any other power. It is not evil in itself, but only in the spirit in which it is used. If it is used selfishly, then it is indeed evil. If it is used submissively, then it is good. We cannot write it off simply because it does not often enter our daily experience. On the flipside, science is like any other power as well. It is not evil in itself, but only in the spirit in which it is used. If it is used submissively, then it is good. If it is used selfishly, then it is indeed evil. We cannot blindly accept its goodness simply because it is an assumption of the way we live.

But what about literature? Can we really take all of this to mean that we are justified in reading literature that incorporates or even glorifies magic?

Depending on the literature, yes. One of the remarkable things about Tolkien, as I mentioned before, is that he has created his own world. As a staunch Christian, he could not conceive of a world existing without God, so he included God in his world, and named Him with another name. Because he ran out of life in which to write, there is no Jesus figure in Tolkien’s world, but there are passages of text from his tales that suggest he was heading that direction.

In the context of such a fictitious world, the use of magic would be acceptable when it is submitted to the will of the world’s “God” figure, and unacceptable when it is used selfishly or used in allegiance with the world’s “Satan” figure. A good book that includes magic will treat selfish and rebellious uses of magic as evil and submissive or selfless uses of magic as good. Once again, because Tolkien does this, I commend to you his books. There are great lessons to be learned from his stories, and the magic is not dark magic, but good magic. In fact, it’s not all that central to his stories. It certainly plays a significant role, but there is a huge difference between stories with magic in them and stories about magic. Magic is not the point. Tolkien could just as easily used science. But he didn’t.

What about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books?

J.K. Rowling is a stickier case. Honestly, she still meets the criteria outlined in this paper: good “sorcerers” and “witches” in her books submit their powers to what is right and use them selflessly on a regular basis, whereas bad “sorcerers” and “witches” are allied to a dark sorcerer who is selfishly consuming the magical world. Still, without a “God” figure the battle lines are not so clear as they are in Tolkien’s books.

The distinction then is that Tolkien ought to be acknowledged and accepted by Christians, because of his acknowledgment and submission to God in authoring a tale in which good and evil are defined in terms of God, whereas reading Rowling’s stories may be permissible to the Christian, but not necessarily as beneficial. A contributing factor to the muddy waters surrounding Rowling’s intention is her wholesale acceptance of a pagan magic-tradition vocabulary. It becomes difficult, once exposed to Rowling’s good “witches” and “sorcerers” to feel the proper amount of antipathy toward the real thing when it comes along in our own world. Still, she is not using these words in the usual way, and often means something much different than what they have traditionally meant. Her definitions for “witch,” “sorcerer,” and “warlock” are much more kind than the traditional understandings of these terms.[26]

In any case, uninformed perspectives are unacceptable. If a person chooses not to read a work, he or she ought to have ample justification from other sources. These sources should offer conclusive evidence that there is indeed dangerous material in the work, or that the work is not worth the investment of time and energy. Knowledge of the author’s worldview might also constitute “ample justification.”[27] Nevertheless, reading a book by someone with whom we disagree is usually a personal growing experience.

For more reading on the issue of power and how it is used, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man. It’s a scant eighty-one pages, and can be easily read in a day. Moreover, it is a refreshing but incisively written reminder of the difference between the choice to submit to something beyond oneself and the choice to serve self only.

[1] It should be noted here that although something is non-empirically verified this does not make it any less true. One need only read a few short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to realize that Holmes often gets to the bottom of things without the help of empirical evidence; he divines the truth from rational premises based on evidence, but draws initial conclusions without supporting evidence, only to discover later that new evidence does indeed corroborate his conclusions.
[2] That is, the user of logic.
[3] That is, its adherence to the laws of logic.
[4] “Bi-substantival” here means we have two substances to our existence: a body and a soul.
[5] 2 Pe. 1:21
[6] And it is from exactly this word that the word “magic” derives its root. “Magi” practice “magic.”
[7] Matthew 2:1
[8] “The Accuser.” See Job 1:6.
[9] “Destroyer.” See Rev. 9:11.
[10] See Jn. 12:31, 14:30, and 16:11.
[11] “The Prince of Demons.” See Mt. 12:24.
[12] See Jn. 8:44.
[13] See Gen. 1.
[14] See Gen. 14:18-20.
[15] See Dt. 32:15, 1 Ch. 16:35, and Ps. 25:5, to name a few.
[16] See the entire book of Hosea for a protracted analogy depicting God as a husband.
[17] See Jn. 3:16.
[18] See Ro. 5:12-21.
[19] See Eph. 6:12.
[20] See Lk. 10:17.
[21] See Acts 3:16.
[22] See Acts 2:6-8.
[23] For a more comprehensive list of these supernatural abilities, see 1 Cor. 12:7-11.
[24] Again, see Mt. 12:24.
[25] For the full account, see Acts 8:9-25.
[26] The word “wizard” is even more difficult. Tolkien has used it to mean “good.” Rowling has used it to mean both “good” and “bad.” Other authors fall on either side of the line. We cannot rule out a book merely because one of its characters is a wizard.
[27] For instance, I rarely read books by authors whose worldviews are anti-rational. They usually contradict themselves and render their own works incoherent. Since a book is intended to convey truth, and since truth is inherently meaningful, and since contradiction leaves one in the dark with regard to what is meant, I cannot bring myself to invest time and energy in an inherently meaningless work when truth is what I seek.

Meditations on Postmodernity

2006-03-25T23:11:00.000-06:00

Cognitive weatherfront chokes my mind
Like acrid cigarette smoke;
No joke: it's all a joke.
(Or is that incoherent?)
At any rate, it's apparent
The postmodern rain
Soaks my mind like a stain
And I'm straining to safeguard a corner, a spot
A rational thought
A rock in this ocean of madness.
The flotsam and jetsam in sadness adrift
In a permanent shift of becoming,
And the musical spell that we're humming,
A really repetitive
High-powered sedative,
Keeps us from walking or running around
With our feet on the ground.
And we find that we've no understanding
For when it comes down to demanding the basis
A crisis arises from life's small surprises
The world's disguises deceive us.
They heave us like wind 'neath our wings
And like birdies, we're singing the mantra again
For we don't need to try;
There's no way to stay dry
When the tears that we cry are the postmodern rain.

"Point of Tension"

Thank you, Francis, though I never met you. I pray that your God-given wisdom was well invested in we who carry on.

Some Viruses on the Network of Humanity

2006-03-21T08:46:00.000-06:00

The word "sin" is quickly becoming a bad word in our culture. No one wants to think about sin, unless they're thinking about "sinful eating," like rich desserts or something of that ilk. But not serious sin; no, we don't like thinking about that.

Perhaps it's the Modern commentary on Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which is an indispensible read for high school English courses. The upshot is this: students beLIEve whatever their teachers tell them--especially at that age, and especially if the teachers are "nice"--and many teachers have been overly exposed to the godless system of American education, so that they are not in a position to rightly assess the value of thinking of the human condition in terms of sin.

Perhaps it's sin's obvious logical connection with the reality of God; sin only makes sense if there is a real God Who decrees and enforces moral law. In a sensate society such as ours, one in which people have trouble believing in much that they cannot put their five senses on, it is difficult to buy into the fact that God exists. But if God's existence is indeed a fact, it is true regardless of how easy or difficult it may be for us to believe it. The same would hold true for sin then as well. We may not like discussing it, but that doesn't mean it is any less real.

So why talk about sin in terms of a computer virus? Well, like a virus, sin is communicable. Like a virus, sin eventually renders the system it infects incapable of detecting/eradicating it. Like a virus, sin prevents the system it infects from running the way it should--running the way it was made to run.

And what is this "list of viruses" I mentioned last entry? None other than the ancient tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins. If they are defined properly, these seven cover all of the defects ever seen in human nature. (Sounds like a massive claim to have to defend... not sure I'd put this out there as an M.A. thesis or a Ph.D. dissertation.) But in the event you think of something that doesn't fall under anything on the list, use the "comments" link below and let's take a look. From time to time traditions need to be revised to make way for truth, and the Seven are no exception if indeed the discovery of a new sin has occurred since their genesis.

PRIDE - Pride is the root of the other six. It is a sin of spirit, the one that puts self at the center of the universe. Before God Pride says, "Not Thy will, but mine be done." Before others Pride says, "You first, after me." It is self-excusing, self-serving, self-loving, and self-doting. Pride, among other things, is what makes our advertising industry successful.

ENVY - Envy is the sin that is too others-focused; it sees their state, and wishes the benefits it recognizes in others' lives upon itself (hear the Pride in there?). Eventually, it is destructive: it either destroys itself with unfulfilled longing, or the one it envies when it acts to fulfill its desire.

ANGER - Anger is often conceived of as a raging inferno of hostile emotion, but in the ancient tradition of the Seven it is actually more like a simmering pot that eventually boils over--to the destruction of whatever it is unleashed upon. In a culture that is becoming increasingly attuned to human emotion, we are beginning to see many more anger-driven offenses by some humans against others (e.g., road rage and school shootings, to name a couple).

SLOTH - "Apathy" would be a close synonym. Sloth is a deadness toward what is true, good or beautiful. This may take many forms in a human life: bodily sloth (e.g., "letting oneself go," a lack of personal discipline), spiritual sloth (e.g., living superficially... who was it that said the Church in America is a mile wide and a quarter inch deep?), or even emotional sloth (e.g., not working to feel rightly about something--like a man whose feelings for his God have cooled, who doesn't work to renew them). Sloth has often been called "the noonday demon" because it attacks and undermines what should be the most productive/prolific aspects of a person's life, which are often in full swing at that time of day. Anyone notice any sloth in the world around them?

AVARICE - Most people get envy and avarice confused. Here's the diff: envy craves others' stuff, situations, etc.; avarice loves to possess what does not belong to it. So envy needs another, but avarice needs only itself. Smeagol could be said to envy Frodo in Tolkien's great trilogy, because Frodo has the Ring. But Smeagol's envy is fed by his avarice, his love of possessing things, especially the Ring. Some recent (or not-so-recent) instances of/allusions to avarice in our culture:

Smeagol, of course
Madonna's "Material Girl"
Consumer mentality--it's everywhere
(Perhaps even America's interests in Iraq)

GLUTTONY - Gluttony is the indulgence of one's appetites for something other than the purpose those appetites serve. For instance, eating too much, not for sustenance, but because one loves the taste of food. The object of gluttony, in this case food, is misused. I've seen people with a gluttonous attitude toward worship. They worship and worship and worship, all for the emotional high it gets them, not for the glory of God. In so doing, they misuse worship--it becomes for them, rather than what it was originally intended to be. (Smell pride in there anywhere?)

LUST - And so we come to the great hangup of many Americans. We are a sensate, sexually driven culture, and we lust after many others who are not our own. Lust, in the tradition of the Seven is the least of the Seven, though still deadly, because it is the corruption of a good thing. In one sense each of the Seven can be viewed this way. But lust pursues a right desire in a wrong way, a selfish way. Whereas love is self-denying, lust is self-serving. To the lover the beloved is a person to be served, maybe even died for. To the lustful, the "belusted" is an object to be possessed (avarice, anyone?), manipulated, and used for one's own ends (gluttony??).

And it is with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach that I look into this list of the Seven, for like a mirror it shows me a reflection of myself, and I deplore what I see. Still, I am version 1.5 undergoing an upgrade, and when the upgrade is complete, these viruses will be eradicated.

Adam 1.5

2006-03-12T19:01:00.000-06:00

We think that Paradise and Calvary
Christ's cross and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look Lord, and find both Adams met in me
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face [in death]
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

--John Donne, "Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness"

"When Adam sinned, sin entered the entire human race. Adam's sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. Yes, people sinned even before the Law was given. And though there was no law to break, since it had not yet been given, they all died anyway--even though they did not disobey an explicit commandment of God, as Adam did. What a contrast between Adam and Christ, who was yet to come! And what a difference between our sin and God's generous gift of forgiveness. For this one man, Adam, brought death to many through his sin. But this other man, Jesus, brought forgiveness to many through God's immeasurable gift of grace. And the result of God's gracious gift is very different from the result of that one man's sin. For Adam's sin led to condemnation, but we have the gree gift of being accepted by God, even though we are guilty of many sins. The sin of the first man, Adam, caused death to rule over us, but all who receive God's gift of righteousness will live in triumph over sin and death through the second man, Jesus, who is the Christ."

--Paul of Tarsus, "Letter to the Church at Rome"

I am the Second Man
I am the Second Man now
I am the Second Man now
And You're raising the dead in me.

--Switchfoot, "Twenty-Four" from the album The Beautiful Letdown

I am Adam, version 1.5, the "Already, but Not-Yet." He's raising the dead in me, but it hasn't been fully raised yet. Adam 1.0 was the Win98 of our species, prone to viruses and all sorts of personal crashes. I am ME (pleonastic, I know--at least in one respect--but witty, don't you think?), but not NT, the New Thing... not yet. But the Divine Programmer bangs away at the keyboard of Providence, mending each flaw in my soul that His Spirit reports as it scans my entire existence. Yes, my friends, some of us are in the middle of an OS upgrade, and it's free. As with any upgrade, the waiting is annoying, but the finished product will be so much better than the situation in which we've been living.

Next draft, I'll catalogue some common viruses on the network. Hope no one else has gotten any of these, but if Paul was right, chances are they have them. I know I'm in the middle of a major HD quarantine/clean up. Lots of corrupted files on this drive.

Divine Romance

2006-03-10T21:15:00.000-06:00

In a recent email I wrote the following in response to the brilliant question listed here:

3) How do you feel opposite sexes complement each other???

I think the physio-biological complement is obvious.

I think men desire, need and must be given respect or their manhood will die. Problematically, when women go overboard with this, it gives men their god-complexes. So men need women who will respect and admire them, and occasionally knock them down a few notches to keep them humble.

Women, on the other hand, crave and must be given security and affection. They must be regularly assured of two things: (1) that they are deeply, uniquely, and exclusively loved, and (2) that this is not a male whim, subject to change when a newer model (no pun intended) or brighter prospect comes along. Problematically, when women acquire this, too often they become so obsessed with hanging onto it that they become idolatrous about it. So women need men who will provide for their needs, but who will also drive them to find their identity in something besides themselves (men).

The miracle of it all is the complement here. Men tend to treat love as a feeling, whereas woment tend to treat it as a commitment. To be frank, women are more sexually inclined when they feel commitment, and men are more committed when they feel sexually aroused. This causes all sorts of problems in our culture, primarily because our culture does not understand what is going on in romance. Postponing the sex drive until the commitment assures a woman her security. Having the discipline to commit (which takes a lot more time and energy than having sex) makes a man respectable, and assures that he will be that much more attractive, in all respects, to the female he is pursuing.

Ephesians 5 then makes sense. Women who submit make their men feel like men, and men who feel like men act like men. Men who act like men--disciplined, respectable, and self-sacrificing--are more attractive to women, and, to put it crassly, 'get more action' from the one woman they've chosen to bless and be blessed by. Add another woman, and the man's manhood is shot; he is no longer respectable, no longer provides the security she craves, and is only a pirate, plundering her and pillaging her for the loot he wants, heedless to what is best for her. In so doing, he forfeits his soul and becomes something he was not made to be. It will consume him, and in so doing, destroy him. Instead, he must give himself (including his sex drive) up for her. What woman in her right mind/heart would not submit to a man like this?

(As an interesting note, you'll notice that the movies only tend to give us the male definition of love--feelings. If women take any kind of solace from a contemporary film, it's that sense of, "And they lived happily ever after." "All's well that ends well." If a woman sees a film today and is satisfied with its definition of love, it's because she assumes the endurance of the happiness that characterized the end of the film; the good end will always be the case from now on. Obviously, the Hollywood power players are still men.)

I'd actually like to take this to a theological level. Given that in Christian scripture there is a definite theme of the Church (all in time and space who follow[ed] Jesus) as the Bride of Christ, I can't help but notice that submission to God takes on an entirely different tone when understood through this metaphor. It is indeed not submission to the sort of powerhouse tyrant that we have seen time and again in the governing bodies of the twentieth century, but a divine Servant-King Who will not only bend to meet us at our level, but Who will stoop to serve us in every way. What person in their right mind would not submit his/her will to a leader such as this? Indeed, this is the sort of relationship that the Church claims to have with the divine Son, who is thought to love her so much that He will stop at nothing to make her more lovable by perfecting her--slowly, but surely.

This sets a precedent for every marriage: a complement (same root as the word "complete") wherein the two parties are mutually uplifting in every way--biological, spiritual, emotional, and practical. Moreover, if the divine union is characterized by mutual selflessness--service on the part of one of the parties, and submission on the part of the other--then the human union must necessarily follow suit. When and where it doesn't, trouble arises. But in the times and places where such union occurs, there is happiness indeed!

Like a diamond through coal she emerges
Rise the symphony from gothic dirges
And she’s polished and pure
She’s content and secure
In the God’s-eye view of who she is
Not forgetting she’s first of all His.
And He sees her, He loves her
He smiles from above her
His pure, spotless lover, His bride
Her guilt and her sin He will hide
Her thoughts and emotions to guide
Through the tumult of time
And the turmoil of life
Through the martyrdom, chaos, oppression and strife
All to wipe her cold tears from her eyes
All to take her hard fears and her guise
And He draws her more near
Through His love and His care
And she’s polished and pure
And she’s finally sure
That eternally she will be His
In the God’s-eye view of who she is.

"Bride"

To See to Fly

2006-03-06T19:16:00.000-06:00

For drops of brilliance fall forgotten in a passing rain
And thought, like languid liquid, surges through my burning brain
To cool the flame and still the strain
Composing sweet refrain
Releasing fragrant evolution
Increasing flagrant revolution
Sacrifices and ablutions made, displayed and done
The brilliance grows a garden in the light of divine Son.
Thus in pursuit of truth the chariot soars
Because I drive him ruthlessly, the left-hand horse, he roars
He’d stop to chase the whores of this rebuilt Vanity Fair
But I will not reach Judgment Day and find I’m lying there.

"Chariot"

I wonder sometimes if our lives are one big collective adventure in missing the point. Deep in the throes of Lent now, I recognize how difficult it is to be a human being in a world that requires me to be a human doing. I am expected to do something productive all of the time, to the point that I sometimes cannot think of anything "productive" to do; I'm all done out. In turn, my culture tells me that I am what I do. But is it true? Is it true of me? (Is it true of you?) Or are we more than what we've been told we are, and who could know anyway? Most humans I know have huge blind spots.

I suppose that this is the point of Jesus' plank/sliver parable in Matthew 7:1-6. We live in a world full of blind men trying to cure one anothers' blindness. What hope have we then? Only hope that there is Someone else that can cure us. The world is screwed up, ergo the solution to its screwed-up-ness--if indeed there is to be one--must come from beyond it. If no solution comes from beyond, I do not see how any we could dream up would be sufficient. But if a solution does come from beyond, then there must be a God. If there are those among us who see the situation rightly, then we have only the option of believing that there is indeed a solution, and if there is a solution, then it has come from beyond. Thus those of us who do see the problem clearly have been cured by the One from beyond. If the One from beyond has cured them, then perhaps He will cure us too. And if He cures us, who knows what we will see of our world. I suspect it will look very different from the way many of us currently conceive of it.

And we may find our chariots fly more freely as well.

Askew or Intersecting?

2006-02-13T18:51:00.000-06:00

I got into a conversation with a Ph.D. student in a coffeehouse today, and she pointed out that DePew reacted strongly to my inquiries about UIowa Rhetoric because I was coming at it with a philosophical mindset. Rhetors, apparently, are constructivists. The question of "big-T Truth" is the domain of Philosophy, and is not to be brought into Rhetoric. Bogus. Why is she earning her Ph.D.? That Ph. stands for "Philosophy." I guess she forgot that Philosophy touches everything, rules everything. The search for truth (or, if you prefer, "Truth") is the entire purpose of academic endeavors. Give it up, and you're just playing "School." How asinine.

But Literature is interesting. Suppose we grant the divorce of Philosophy and Rhetoric. Literature still survives, and in the literary disciplines the two are put in their rightful places. Philosophy does not over-analyze or intellectualize in some purely theoretical way that disbars most would-be participants; ideas are still very much a part of Literature, but they are communicated in more understandable ways. Rhetoric is also included. It gives literary works their beauty, but it is not allowed to eclipse what is true; in Literature, Rhetoric is only good if it helps Philosophy along. If it convolutes things, we call that "bad writing."

Of course the pursuit of truth is always the point. Of course doing this in the most beautiful, persuasive way is always the preferred method. Most often Literature is the discipline that panders to both evenly enough to allow whole people to come to ideas they will understand.

I suppose the curmudgeonly philosophers among us might contend that Literature is merely a discipline that argues from analogy, and cannot deduce the truth of its ideas, but only assume said truth in order to communicate said ideas. I concur (for there is still some curmudgeon left in me). However, the philosophers among us must be reminded that without the rhetoricians they might find themselves bad teachers, bad writers, and bad interlocutors; Rhetoric is what gives their ideas their luster, what makes their ideas all the more convincing because it renders them intelligible to the populace. The Rhetors among us may contend that Literature merely uses language to exercise power over the reader--power of the author, based upon his or her linguistic prowess. How shortsighted. Of course there is power in good writing, but the power of good writing lies, not only in how things are said, but in what is meant. And this lies within the realm of Philosophy.

The literary scholar, then, is blessed with the opportunity to sit at a crossroads between two rivals whose bitter feud has lasted the past two and a half milennia. While they duke it out, it is the literary scholars who will acknowledge the wit and wisdom of the philosophers and the passion and art of the rhetors--and profit by them both.

EPILOGUE

I suppose if it comes to an intellectual battle, and perhaps it already has, the philosophers will be right and the rhetors will win the support of the people. Problematically, the masses will be led astray while a curmudgeonly few remain within the culture as prophetic voices, crying against the growing pall of widespread socio-cultural stupidity. And it will be up to the literati to translate this great battle into a tale that will explain to the populace what has happened to them: how they have been manipulated by rhetors and pundits, and how they have been shunned by the intelligentsia whom they would not heed. It is a dark prophecy, I suppose, but the tale it foretells is bound to be one of epic proportions.

The Voyage Begins

2006-01-22T23:30:00.000-06:00

Any solid philosophy of anything begins with epistemology, the theory of knowledge. If you cannot justify a belief, you are not licensed to hold it. No one can believe anything on a mere whim. For instance, I cannot believe that there is a pink elephant in the room if I do not have evidence for that belief. You could stick a gun to my head and try to force me to believe it, but not even your gun could convince me. I'd sure tell you I believe in the pink elephant, though, if you stuck a gun to my head.

So belief hinges on evidence. But what about a fictional world? Does it really take evidence to believe in a fictional world as fictitiously "real"? Yes. After all, Holden Caulfield couldn't exist fictitiously without us understanding what private schools and the kids who attend them are like. It's not as though Salinger was telling a story about tarshebbits. If I wrote a story about a tarshebbit who flibotted darhel, would you read that? I can see it now. New York Times bestseller: "The Tarshebbit Who Flibotted Darhel." Everyone would buy it. Or not. No one would even know what it was about. It's gobbledygook. So a fictitious world has to at least faintly resemble the real world. Or, to put it another way, a possible world, in order for us to conceive of it, must at least somewhat reflect the actual world. We know about private schools and boys who attended them in the mid-twentieth century; we don't have a clue about tarshebbits and flibotting darhel.

This means we have to get information from the external world into our minds in order to create a fictitious world for ourselves. (Some people do this automatically, and then live in their own little creation, and wonder why life is so hard for them. I used to work with a woman like this.) But first, we have to rely on something inside of us to interpret the external world. I can't understand the difference between two different things without the law of identity: A = A. It's intuitively obvious. I can't give you a reason that this law is true; it's its own justification. A = A because A = A. That's all. And its derivative is the same way: A is not non-A. It can't be. A thing cannot be what it isn't. That's why these are laws. We understand everything in terms of these two principles. And there are others of similar quality that have been more hotly debated in recent decades, but which nevertheless are laws.

1. The Principle of Bivalence: A statement is either true or false. If it's indeterminate, it is only so from the point of view of an uninformed viewer, but reality is such that it is one or the other. (In other words, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, it does make a sound, but we don't have to experience the sound in order for it to have been made.)

2. The Principle of Sufficient Reason: For every true statement T, there is an explanation R for that statement. Thus T is true because of R.

3. The Principle of Cause and Effect: For every event E that occurs, there is a preceding event D that caused it. Thus E arose because of D.

And so on and so forth. We understand these things intuitively. We repeatedly experience them empirically.

What else do we get from the external world, besides material things? Time and space, of course. You can't touch them, but there they are. I can't understand a big car or a small car without first understanding space. I can't study causes and effects without first recognizing time. So space and time are things we must understand according to our intuitive principles, from our empirical experiences.

All of this goes into creating worlds. We cannot tell stories without plots. Plots are comprised of events. Events have to be preceded by other events. Events must take place in alterable matter. So we conjure up an imaginary block of space for our story, set a span of time in which its plot takes place, and introduce all of the objects we'll need to tell the tale, including persons. A lot of our creation has been borrowed from the order around us; we have stolen shamelessly from the Great Creator. But then again, if we were made to do what He does--in a more finite way, of course--then it only seems reasonable that we should copy His foundation, that we may build our own edifice thereupon. As the great J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "We make still by the laws in which we're made." And we know these laws because they have been hardwired into us.

Of course the objects we place in our fictitious worlds are our own; but their properties are God's. He invented colors and shapes; He gave things weight and extension; He textured them and odored them and made the tasty ones pleasing to the pallet. We have not created these properties, but have merely borrowed them from the world around us, that we may lend more definition and aesthetic worth to the worlds which we create. Dumas' Dantes' cell is stone because stone is a part of God's world. Had God only created a world made from styrofoam and newspaper, Dantes might never have been incarcerated, nor would he have had to swim to safety after his escape. But swimming and sailing make the tale exciting, and they require water. We would also have thought it odd if Dantes had ever considered quenching his thirst with newspaper. It makes perfect grammatical sense, and yet there is no logic to it.

So our creativity is not entirely enacted by our will. It is perhaps informed by our will, but our will must have an environment in which to function creatively. Ours is a kind of will that is not entirely free; we have boundaries. And we need them. Without our boundaries--our environment--we cannot think of anything to will, anything to create. That is why sensorily deprived infants die; their minds are not fed any new information.

Setting Course

2006-01-17T22:34:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been catching up on some reading I've needed to do for a long time. This past week I read Dickens' David Copperfield and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The former was a tremendous novel; the latter was a sorry excuse for literature. I hope they don't make kids read that swill in any school district in the world. I think the worst part of it was I kept looking for Salinger's point right up to the final page--and never found one. It was an entire novel full of digression, small vocabulary, repetitive use of the same few phrases, and shallow, uninformed allusions to good literature. It was like reading the opinion columns in The Daily Iowan. What a waste of my mental abilities. What an ugly wart on the aquiline literary complection of our culture.

Copperfield, on the other hand, was a tremendous story. I've never enjoyed Dickens more than I did while reading this book, and I would recommend it to anyone. There is such humanity in the work, such an incisive ascertainment of the universals behind human experience, that Dickens cannot be regarded as anything but a master storyteller of the English language.

All of this fiction revisited has inspired me to begin work on a philosophy of fiction/narrative. (Mantha, some of this is for you.) It's still brewing, and will probably emerge in the next several entries, piece by piece, but basically my plan is to outline (1) an epistemology of narrative worlds; (2) the metaphysics of a narrative world, including its (a) modality, (b) axiology, and (c)cosmology; and (3) the ethics of (a) readership and (b) authorship. I expect to delve into several applications of this theory as well, including (but not limited to):

i. Why do some readers continue to live in the alternate realities of their favorite (fiction) stories upon finishing the book? (For instance, those who have formed virtual realms based upon Tolkien's Middle Earth, Lucas' sci-fi series, or even Rowling's Hogwarts.)

ii. How do some stories--especially those that are obviously fictions--manage to affect events in the real world? (The following come to mind: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Atlas Shrugged, some American folklore.)

iii. Can we (and if so, how can we) apply a philosophy of fiction/narrative to religious literature?

iv. Are there criteria to which we can appeal intersubjectively in order to collectively distinguish between actual reality and alternate reality? How do these criteria inform the retelling of daily events in the media, courtroom discourse, or historiography, for example?

v. Anything else I may undertake with regard to a full-orbed philosophy of literature between now (its genesis) and its realization.

This should be enough to occupy me until I retire. (Considering I haven't even begun a career yet, I think these are going to be fairly tough questions to answer.)

It strikes me that I have not heretofore attempted something of this nature. I think it has been brewing for awhile, beneath the surface of my awareness. I attempted several times to write the paper I only recently submitted to UIowa for application to the M.A. - Literary Studies, the one on Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I also tried to write a thesis on Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo and the theology that drove that work. If there had been an able reader for it at Denver, I might have pulled it off. It has only recently become apparent to me that a complete philosophy of religion is not possible without a solid philosophy of literature. Because all traditional religion (that is, all religion aside from the Western subjective, cafeteria-style "personal" religion that picks and chooses--as if that were philosophically justifiable ) relies on textual documents, and because so much of the vast corpus of religious scriptures from traditional religions entails narrative elements, it seems inevitable that one must necessarily formulate a defensible philosophy of narrative in order to address the texts to which he or she must come as a philosopher of religion.

I suppose this entry is much like diagnosing cancer: the diagnosis is simple; the treatment is a grueling undertaking.

On Equivalidity and Commensurability

2005-11-23T10:39:00.000-06:00

Equivalidity and commensurability are not the same.

We live in a pluralistic society, which, by nature, affirms the validity of each aspect of its plurality. All religions are valid. All philosophies are valid. All political views are valid. All cultural expressions are valid. And so the blase mantra reiterates itself. Across a spectrum of varying subjects, the predicate remains the same, and the statement seldom restrains itself from its generally universal assertion: All S is P. But when "valid" is substituted for P, what sense does the statement make for any S? In other words, if "All S is valid" for any class S, is to be taken as a true statement, what meaning can the term "valid" have? If S could be any class of items, we must ask ourselves what each item in abstract existence has in common with the others--except of course its abstract existence? It seems meaningless to say that "All ways are valid," when indeed, we have no notion whatsoever of what the criteria for validity are and whether "all ways" meet said criteria. It's a meaningless fiat screamed in the face of evidence that offers the fiat no referent. So how can we assert the equivalidity of two or more different members of a given class?

Commensurability, the way I am using it here, hinges on logic. If two statements can be simultaneously asserted without violating logical principles, then they are commensurable. For instance:

A: "My car is totally red."
B: "My car is totally yellow."

These are incommensurable statements. What is red is, by definition of color, not-yellow. Of course, the perspectivalist might press us on the epistemology of color experience and say that red to one man may be yellow to another. That's very cute, but it fails to meet the issue at hand. Let us restate the incommensurable pair with another example.

A': "All is one."
B': "All is two."

These are conflicting statements, and we need no empirical experience to demonstrate the point. When the terms are understood, simple logic discovers the incommensurability. And these two statements lie at the heart of two different understandings of the way the world is. A' supports the Buddhist's claim that all is one and any experience to the contrary is illusion; there is nothing but anatta. B' supports the Taoist's claim that all is two; there are two forces, coequal, at war with one another in existence, and neither will ever overcome the other, thus balance is the key. How can these be reconciled? They contradict one another. And in what sense are they both "valid"?

Equivalidity and commensurability are not the same.

Those who would claim so are deceived about the nature of reality. Some may think themselves crafty and claim that commensurability is not to be had, that logic itself is merely a matter of perspective. But if logic is simply a human construct, what did two communicators ever have in common in order to meaningfully communicate enough to agree on which laws of logic would apply to their communication? Without logic and the order that is derived therefrom, every term becomes a meaningless grunt. In that case, one cannot meaningfully attack logic; anyone who would do so must be content with the assumption that his or her words are no more than bestial sounds, inadmissible--or worse, irrelevant--to the discourse of truly educated individuals.

Equivalidity and commensurability are not the same.

Some claim that a way is valid "if it works." But what does this mean? Have we not, in substituting this phrase for validity, only introduced more convolution? How do we know if a thing "works"? I'm sure that those who contributed to the philosophy of world Communism and then died before it was realized were certain that it "worked." What if they had lived to see pieces of the Berlin Wall sold in Western department stores as stocking stuffers during the Christmas season the year the Wall fell? The criteria of whether or not a thing "works" are subject to (a) the moment in which an evaluation is made (an appliance may not be working at the moment, but give it a few repairs and in a few more moments it will be), (b) the purpose toward which it was directed upon its origin (I doubt that the Berlin Wall, upon its construction, was ever meant to be given in pieces to thousands of Western capitalists in celebration of a holiday that Communism does not affirm), and (c) the true goodness of the thing in itself. Without satisfying these criterion, a thing cannot "work," and cannot thus be validated. Pragmatics are no help here.

So what do we mean when we say a thing is "valid"? It's "allowable"? Who determines that? It's "pleasing"? We are bound to disagree. It's "of respectable origin"? Says who, and so what if it is? Ultimately, validity must be determined by commensurability. What cannot be rationally defended and practically applied (both are necessary), cannot be validated. And this is because we are both rational creatures and practical agents. We must consider our deeds before taking action, and we must explain them once we do. Lack of consideration begets mishap; inattention to consequences is folly; mishap and folly are the necessary results of false beliefs.

Equivalidity and commensurability are not the same. Equivalidity relies on commensurability. Sorry, pluralists. There are criteria yet. And they find your incommensurable position invalid.

"Show me what it is."

2005-11-20T23:28:00.000-06:00

I found the following as I was reviewing some old papers this weekend. It was dated 07052002. At first I thought it was a poem, but now I realize that it is a prayer.

"I refuse to live as though retirement is the goal.
I refuse to be imperialistic in the great name of capitalism.
I refuse to sacrifice beauty on the altar of efficiency.
I refuse to live life so fast that I forget to live it.
I refuse to buy the lie that achievement is the same as fulfillment.
I refuse to accept the idea that planning always brings the best results.
I refuse the fatalistic acceptance of the status quo as 'the way it is.'
I refuse to sit by and let my corner of the world remain unchanged.
I refuse to be ideologically taciturn.
I refuse to be socially nondescript.
I refuse to be orthodox.
I refuse to be static.
I refuse to be 'normal.'
I refuse an ordinary existence.
You have something for me, so show me what it is."

It is odd how much I have grown in these past three years, and despite that fact so little has changed. I do not see orthodoxy as such a bad thing now, though I suspect that if I could discuss the matter with myself as I was three years ago I would probably not disagree on what I now mean by the term. I doubt that I really thought about that line much when I wrote this.

This tells me that waiting is a part of life. I was waiting then; I am waiting now. How long will I wait to be employed toward the purpose for which I was created? "You have something for me, so show me what it is."

New Poem

2005-11-12T11:21:00.000-06:00

And paying for our vanity
In vast amounts of sanity
The cost in sheer humanity is far too great to tell
Our world a lurid, living hell
In which we wander aimless
Our deeds become more shameless
Our foes become more nameless
As we trade their true identity
For all the faults we long to see,
Forgetting our own maladies:
Hypocrisy and jealousy,
Our selfish inhumanity,
And other such depravities
That fuel our atrocities.
And this the human story,
The darker side of glory,
At once both good and gory
And amid the evanescence of our age
We suffer from the diss'nance of our rage and our compassion
Torn 'tween timeless Truth and fading Fashion
With naught upon which to rely...
Except our crippled Rational...
Our mirrors show us products of the Fall.

"Corruptio Optima Pessima" ("Nothing Worse than the Corruption of the Best")

Retribution

2005-11-05T14:05:00.000-06:00

Somebody told me about it
And it burns me up at night
What kind of man would choose to spoil a child?
Who do you call to make it right?
Not gentle Jesus, meek and mild
That's for sure
'Cause he won't fight
So I can't stop thinking about it
Imagining that I
Could be the reaper grim enough to make it right
The problem is there's no one with
Enough to lose to pay for this.

But somebody's gotta pay for this
Nobody gets away unless somebody dies
And it's confirmed that there's been pain
Enough to satisfy the rage
From the losses she's sustained by age thirteen
Only then can the rest go free
Only then can the rest go free

I'm still obsessing about it
'Cause it doesn't end up nice
Another man, another choice, another child
Who's gonna pay for all these crimes?
Some dream about avenging mine, I suppose
But nothing will suffice
Unless you stumble upon it
Like a dream I had one night
About a man who chose to pay the price
On a tree, silently and still
Just long enough for me to kill

'Cause somebody's gotta pay for this
Nobody gets away unless somebody dies
And it's confirmed that there's been pain
Enough to satisfy the rage
From the losses she's sustained by age thirteen
Only then can the rest go free
Only then can we all go free.

"Somebody's Gotta Pay" by Steve Bell

At our place we've been watching the Batman films, and it's brought me to an awareness of a sort of justice that is increasingly being eclipsed in the West: retributive justice. I've written a lot about autonomy on this blog, mostly because the drive for that is, in my assessment of our culture, the source of so many of our shortcomings. A culture of autonomy creates conflict, and often the conflict is so heated that it escalates to a murderous pitch. But even if it doesn't, in many places in our country there is a constant air about people of having been grievously wronged.

To be sure, much of this is histrionic melodrama over triflesome offenses. In fact, in a country of relativists, we cannot actually act as though we have been grievously wronged without denying the moral relativism which we so adamantly affirm. If I am wronged by John, then there must be some standard that is above both John and myself that adjudicates between the two of us. If there is no such standard, and morals are all a matter of personal preference and private practice (relativism), then there is no basis for dramatic outcries against some other person or group that has wronged me or us. We cannot excuse such disruptive behvior if morals are truly relative. But there it is: if morals are relative, there is something that still governs, namely, the relativity of morals. We are never free of a governing principle.

But the relativism principle does not govern fairly. It requires that we merely accept whatever good or evil befalls us without making a fuss over it. Nevertheless, the amount of human fuss that is made in the West (in the East it is often suppressed dictatorially) seems to indicate that it is less than humane to expect us to suffer or rejoice quietly. Thus there must be some other principle that can govern more fairly, one under which we can voice our grievances and demand that they be made right. In his book, "A Rumor of Angels," author and sociologist Peter Berger notes that

"There are certain deeds that cry out to heaven. These deeds are not only an outrage to our moral sense, they seem to violate a fundamental awareness of the constitution of our humanity. In this way, these deeds are not only evil, but MONSTROUSLY EVIL. And it is this monstrosity that seems to compel even people normally or professionally given to such perspectives to suspend relativizations. It is one thing to say that moralities are socio-historical products [constructivism, basically], which are relative in time and space. It is quite another thing to say that THEREFORE the deeds of an Eichmann can be viewed with scientific detachment as simply an instance of one such morality--and thus, ultimately, can be considered a matter of taste." (Berger, 66)

We all sense this, whether or not the philosophies that we personally affirm can make sense of this. But it does not stop there:

"The condemnation does not seem to exhaust its intrinsic intention in terms of this world alone. Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell. This is the point that was brought out very clearly in the debate over Eichmann's execution. Without going into the question of either the legality or the wisdom of the execution, it is safe to say that there was a very general feeling that 'hanging is not enough' in this case. But what would have been 'enough'? If Eichmann, instead of being hanged, had been tortured to death in the most lengthy and cruel manner imaginable, would this have been 'enough'? A negative answer seems inevitable. No human punishment is 'enough' in the case of deeds as monstrous as these. These are deeds that demand not only condemnation, but damnation in the full religious meaning of the word--that is, the doer not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human." (Berger, 67-68)

Perhaps this is why Batman must forever fight evil. He cannot be satisfied by the death of whomever shot his parents (in Batman Begins it was a common thug who was later shot to death, in Batman it was Jack Napeir, alias "the Joker," who fell from a high parapet to his death), no matter how torturous the death. He must continue to fight the evil that drove the person who ended his parents' lives prematurely. And in at least one instance, Batman himself is not beyond doling out retributive justice; toward the beginning of Batman he, apparently intentionally, dropped Jack Napier to his death in a vat of acid. As long as two humans exist, and as long as there is a point of contention to be had between them, which is innately possible in the fact that there are two of them, for with every difference between two people lies the possibility for disagreement, then there exists the possibility of human evil that must be punished. Furthermore, I submit that, on the basis of our experience of people in the world around us on a dialy basis, such evil is not only possible, but probable.

This brings me to Christianity, not the religion, but the philosophy. Often Christians speak of "sin." To translate this oft misunderstood term, it is simply an innate human inability to bring our wills and our actions into harmony with the rest of reality. As long as this problem exists, all of our best efforts will be tainted with "down sides" and "drawbacks." (We often use such terms to minimize the horrors of our advances: "The downside of our atomic capability is our atomic weaponry, however it has allowed us to power more cities more efficiently." Yay. Good for us.) In fact, the entire sin problem confronts even human justice. Here the liberals must be lauded for opposing measures that are too drastic, however they often mistake even the most benign punishments or deterrents as "too drastic." Nevertheless, Christianity the philosophy assures us that God's justice is both measured and terrible. Two thousand years ago, at the foot of a Roman cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem, people from across the empire gathered to watch a Jew die a torturously painful, slow, bloody and breathless death. If that man was indeed the human manifestation of the divine Creator, then on that afternoon, not only was our sin paid for, but we also received the ultimate in retributive justice. If Jesus was indeed God in human form, then he did indeed have enough to lose to pay for whatever wrongs have been done to us. Too often we are told only half of the story, that if we believe that Jesus was divine and his self-sacrifice really took care of our wrongdoing then we are assured of our salvation. The other half is simply that if we believe that Jesus was divine and his self-sacrifice allowed us the opportunity to see retribution on any who deserve it, then we can be assured that our pain has not gone unpunished, nor will it in eternity. The harmony with reality that this can produce in our lives is truly good news.

Swollen to Madness

2005-11-05T10:57:00.000-06:00

I recently read The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, in which he indicates that the "ideologies" of society (e.g., marxism, facism, feminism, scientism, libertarianism, etc., although he would not have been familiar with all of these in his time) are merely pieces of traditional morality, what he calls "the Tao," that have been ripped from their context within a moral system and "swollen to madness in their isolation." And he is correct in this assessment.

Visit any university town and subject yourself to the cacophony of perspectives and opinions that purportedly portray reality as it exists. Listen to the feminists rage about the atrocities committed by men, though they forget about the mothers that have murdered their children in the last ten years and been convicted for their crimes. Women have driven their cars into lakes with their children strapped into their carseats; women have given birth in high school restrooms during highschool dances and left their babies for dead; women have left their children in scorching hot vehicles for hours during the mid-day heat, only to find them dead from hyperthermia or exposure. These were not men who commited these crimes. But the feminists do not remember these incidents when they declare that the world would be a better place without men. Even if men were gone, would the problems that confront humanity vanish with them? Perhaps murder would be less frequent, but it would not vanish entirely. It is mad to claim that the problems that confront all humans would dissipate if roughly half of humans ceased to exist. The fallen human condition is not gender-specific.

Listen to the anti-war protesters scream for peace; they militantly demand peace. I've seen it. One reproached me for allowing for just war by making offensive comments. The problem is not war; the problem is offense. Offending people sparks conflict. Offend someone badly enough, and the conflict that you spark will be a war. There are two possible solutions to this problem. First, there is true tolerance, which, if we all manifested this characteristic, would have us look at one another in the moments when we are most offended by others and forgive the offense, recognizing the different understanding of reality from which the offense originates. Second, there is fake tolerance, which ought to be referred to as "non-confrontation" and which is the most cowardly of attributes that we have been taught as a society. Rather than addressing differences through honest and open discourse, solid argumentation, and detached, rational conversation, non-confrontation teaches us to claim that "everything is okay" in the face of conflict. Perhaps we have the constructivists to thank for this; if we actually believed in truth as true and farce as false, and if we did not believe that our language is the key to making things true and false, then we might come to recognize that "everything is not okay" merely by our say so, even if we wanted badly enough for it to be that way. They have divorced love from truth and swollen it to madness, to the point that love isn't really even loving any more.

Lastly, we must not neglect to mention freedom. As humans, we seem to crave autonomy, to be "a law unto ourselves." But this is not true freedom. We have conflated the two and confused our thinking. For this point a simple example might be best. Suppose there is a man who joins the Navy and becomes a pilot. Not an airplane pilot, but a naval pilot, the helmsman of a large battleship. (Perhaps battleships these days have become so advanced that they can pilot themselves; in that case, let us imagine that this man lived 100 years ago when such ingenious inventions did not yet exist.) Throughout his training he is indoctrinated with certain rules: rules of conduct, wise practices of seamen handed down through the ages, and of course, as with any trade, rules of thumb that might be useful or detrimental, depending on the circumstances. Upon completing his training, he is able to pilot his ship as well as any seasoned veteran, and he is truly free to take the ship wherever it can go. Why? Because he knows the rules of the water, and how to operate well within them. Now, consider a second seaman, who goes to sea and is not taught the rules of good seamanship. Suppose he spends his time shirking his duty, drinking and carousing, and generally lollygagging about. He is, in the truest sense of the term, autonomous, a law unto himself, for no rules apply to him but those he produces from within, and these lead him to his lackluster practices and selfish behavior. When this man takes the helm of his ship, we will find that he is not truly free, but a slave to his own nature. He will inevitably destroy his ship, his shipmates, and himself in his careless (but today we would call it "carefree"), mishappen voyage across the vastness of the deep. His autonomy becomes his slavery. These two can be associated because the self is lawless; there is no such thing as human autonomy, for to be a law unto oneself is to be entirely lawless, to live whimsically according to the morally bereft urges of the self. Tell me this is not madness.

And it is just such selfishness, resulting from too much freedom, that has overtaken our university campuses in this country. For lack of structure our students cease to learn anything, for they are too busy drinking, shooting up, or hunting the next lay that they mistakenly assume will please them. They are free to spout their opinions despite their lack of expertise, and are not made to feel badly enough for the stupidity to which they subject their fellows and the impudence with which they address their intellectual "betters." And perhaps such impudence goes unchecked because their betters are no better. They have forsaken truth as true, they have ascribed to themselves divine powers to construct or destroy reality at a word, and wonder why they are unfulfilled; reality does not obey them. So they turn to indoctrination, warping the minds of their acolytes, marinading fresh meat in the lie of selfishness and then sending these twisted fledglings forth as moral wraiths to fight those who still remember and teach the rules that give true freedom. And because these wraiths recoil at rules in general, and because their teachers have instilled revolution in their hearts, their teachers will be unable to say anything when the fledglings assail their own establishment; it is what they were taught to do. And when a generation of totally lawless fledglings has been indoctrinated, the clock will begin the countdown, for it will be at the hands of that generation that the ship will finally sink.

Of Trees and Liberal Extremists

2005-11-02T17:14:00.000-06:00

I saw a tree today while I was taking out the trash at work. It was a big, beautiful tree, dropping its glorious golden leaves through oblique shafts of autumn evening light as the November wind breathed upon it. It was surrounded. On one side of it there rose a development area, a business park I think, and on the other snaked I-80, the winding concrete trail that runs from the Big Apple to the Golden Gate. All around the tree the world was changing, moving at modern speeds, flying by.

This afternoon a woman came into the store (I work at Starbucks), distressed over the news that the company has decided to include Rick Warren and, from what she claimed, some other Christians among those whose inspiring quotations are found on the side of our cups. She encouraged us to "look for them, and when you see them, take a marker and ex them out." I asked her why, noting that Christians are as much a part of the sociological makeup of America as anyone else. "So are nons [non-Christians]," she replied. As I think about this woman, and as I think about the tree, three similarities between the tree and the Christian come to mind.

1. The tree and the Christian are both unnoticed by modern culture. I'll bet hardly anyone notices that beautiful tree there by I-80, but it's there. There it is. And if it was cut down, probably only a few would notice, and fewer would care. Still, the beauty of the drive on that stretch comes from the trees. Cut them all down, and you'll notice it soon enough. What should we do about being unnoticed? Should we shout our message louder? Should we protest more? Should we take over the mass media and build a Christian media subculture? Or should we do what trees do, and merely multiply? It's hard to miss a forest.

2. The tree and the Christian are both in the way of modern culture. In a time when "might makes right," when something's true "if it works for you," when "everyone is generally good," the message of the Bible is not in the mainstream. (Given the current state of the mainstream, I don't think that this is something we need to complain about. It's a good thing.) By contrast, we claim that there is a higher Authority than humankind, that He has been wronged by our rebellion and will repay, but that He is good and gracious and has provided a way of avoiding judgment, yes, but also a way of being made whole. Through His grace we become what we were created to be. Nothing in the mainstream can come close to this. But the mainstream, the I-80 of modern culture, with its evolutionary view of our origin, its ideological ranting, and its constant drive to throw back limitations of any sort (think free love, gay rights, ultra-liberal feminism, no moral absolutes, constructing our own realities, accessorizing ourselves, high lines of credit, etc.) will eventually choke us out. "In matters of fashion," said Thomas Jefferson, "swim with the current; in matters of principle, sink like a stone." Or, deepen your roots, as it were. We must grow deep roots. (See Psalm 1 on this matter.) The gospel is not about eternal fire insurance. It's not about health and wealth. It's not at all about what God will do for you, as if He is some divine genie. It's about so much more. It's about an event, one we'll celebrate soon, in which God Himself became a creature and walked among us. Putting down roots helps us drink deeply of the truth. And all truth points to this one event, the life, death and resurrection who claimed to be the Truth.

3. The tree and the Christian (in this country) are dying. Forests of firmly rooted Christians are rare these days. Modern culture is unafraid of saplings that it can uproot as it pleases. "I used to be a Christian, until..." is the beginning of many personal stories, stories that belong to dead planks in the modern superstructure who were once beautiful, living trees. The ardor of the ranting woman this afternoon tells me that, when only recognized as a scattered few, we are thought to be sparsely strewn about the cultural landscape, like trees in Kansas. But we are not. In many places we grow thickly, like the trees that cover Wisconsin and Michigan. The culture around us must be shown this. But we cannot scream it to them. They must be invited to eat of our good fruit, to taste the goodness of Christ in us, the hope of glory. Then and only then will they recoil at the thought of bulldozing us whenever they encounter us. And should they decide to bulldoze us, we ought to be prepared for the occasion. The deeper our roots grow, and the more of us there are, the less quietly we will die.

Another on Autonomy

2005-10-18T23:58:00.000-05:00

I found the following thoughts on autonomy in an old journal entry of mine. I think it makes some sense, though it does not fully demonstrate the logical progression from autonomy to pantheism (pantheism is the belief that all is divine). It gets there, though. I've added my comments to my previous thoughts so as to make them more intelligible.

"In a society like mine, which places the most value on autonomous freedom [it is, after all, one of Western society's cardinal virtues], every question becomes a matter of limits [this might be a slight overstatement, but it depends on the sense in which it is taken]. In such a society, limits are viewed as intrinsically evil, and each free agent is assumed to be able to function quite well in the absence of limits. [We want to set our own limits, which is the same as saying we want no limits. This is autonomy in the truest and most extreme sense.]"

It should be noted here that I am not limiting myself to a discussion of merely ideological limits. [I think I meant that I was not limiting myself to discussing the limits on what we can and cannot believe. Still, the notion of a will to believe is highly problematic; how many people do you know who can believe whatever they want, merely by wanting to believe it? I don't deny that this will may play some small role in belief, but it still depends upon sufficient evidence to lend the belief some credibility. Haack calls this sort of willful believing without any consideration of other factors, "voliting."] Instead, the variety of limits that I am addressing is limitless--in short, I am addressing all limits. [So this is a discussion of every kind of limit that confronts the human person.]

In this 'all limits' I am addressing lies the limit of an ontological [related to being; ontology is the study of being, thus an ontological limit is a limit upon your very existence] sort. Without ontological limits we have metaphysical monism [the belief that all is one--pure malarkey], which has trouble explaining itself [Monists cannot explain themselves, because as soon as they say "S is P" they imply that "S is not not-P," e.g., if "water is liquid" then "water is not gaseous. If "all is one" and I use language to say that, then I imply that "all is not more than one." There are two concepts, and if there are two of anything, then all is not one.], and thus claims that it is ideologically behond the limits of explanation [most monists try to avoid sounding self-contradictory by claiming that the laws of logic don't apply to them; they claim they have trenscended logic]. But monism is the culmination, the ideological pinnacle, if you will, of the conundrum that confronts a would-be limitless human: if you are indeed free of all limits, what ARE you, for there are no limits by which you can be identified as 'you.'

In pressing against the limits, humankind has sought to be free of all restrictions, and the sad truth of it is that in so doing, humankind has transcended the self it loves so dearly, serves as a god, and to whom it has offered all on the altar of autonomous freedom."

So autonomy, by being inherently antinomian (against laws or against limits) leads to monism, which in turn leads to self-destruction. By seeking our autonomy as the highest ideal, we run the risk of finding that we are not ourselves at all, but everything and nothing at the same time. Two observations:

1. This is self-contradictory. Self-contradictory things are incomprehensible. One ought not believe things that one cannot comprehend. Thus one ought not believe self-contradictory things. Thus one ought not believe that we are both everything and nothing.

2. We ought not pursue autonomy so hotly. It will only lead us to throw off the limits that have been placed upon us for the purpose of self-definition. If we throw of said limits, we will indeed discover new things, but they may not be the sorts of things we ought to discover. Some discoveries are horrific.

Creature and Creator

2005-10-18T01:10:00.000-05:00

Life is beautiful
For through my incompleteness
I crave its silky sweetness
Like the scrape of skin on stone
Forgotten and alone I find an unexpected solace
The ocean, overthrown, drowns all of us
And washing in its wake I find I'm me
And though I dream amid the stream in shades of deep maroon
I learn that me is who I long to be.

"Made"

Thought of You this morning when I woke
And how You spoke this vivid real into existence
Time's flowing moments
Space, with all its distance
And I wonder how I know it's really You.
I realize, then, I smell You in the dew
And feel Your smile in sunshine on my back
I see Your vastness in the starry blackness
And, standing there agape, I know there's no escape from revelation
I take it in with every new sensation

"You"

Alternatives to Autonomy

2005-10-17T10:56:00.000-05:00

There's a whisper on the wind
Of winter's coming grimness
And I've traveled long along this rolling road
From long ago into the great tomorrow.
Golden summer, given way to death of all existence
The autumn, made idyllic by the shades of smoky distance
Where the Maker spilled His hues on balding hills
On every tree and field lies glorious favor
The Maker hath created for to savor
That which He foreknew would--could not!--last forever
For man, free like Him, fallen though, would sever
Ties with good and right
He'd choose the dark'ning night
A refuge from the light that marks the winter's icy march
Upon the kingdom of the arching autumn trees
Unnoticed though, it seems, except for wand'ring me
Who, feigning that his will is truly free
Will find his self-wrought choices
Made, deaf to heaven's voices,
Are really naught but certain slavery.

"The Grand View"

So what are the alternatives to autonomy? "Autonomy" literally means, "self-governing," or "a law unto oneself." But in a world with many selves this leads to a very difficult problem: which self or selves should rule the rest? Look at it this way. Let's pretend that twenty of us are shipwrecked on an island and we go for a stroll along the shoreline to see what is there. Now, as it so happens, we are all skinny people, all of us, that is, except for Timmy, the fat kid. Timmy is a soft-spoken, gentle thirteen-year-old with a thyroid problem. As we stroll along the shore, we come upon a grotto, an underground cave. Thinking that perhaps the cave could shelter us for part of the day, we decide to explore it together. Timmy kindly waits until everyone else has descended into the grotto before attempting his own descent, but when he does, he becomes stuck in the mouth of the opening; his chest and head are still outside, while his legs dangle down into the cave. This is mildly humorous to us until we realize that the tide is coming in and flooding the cave. As it so happens, Timmy will go unharmed because his head is above the high tide line. But unless we get Timmy unstuck we will all drown. Morton has a stick of dynamite and Connie has a lighter. The tide is around our stomachs now, and will be above our heads in the next ten minutes. We could wedge the dynamite between Timmy's love handle and the opening of the cave and set it off, but that would kill Timmy. If we don't, we all will die. How do we decide who's more important?

On the one hand, Timmy is kinder than anyone else on the island. He has family back home, but so do the rest of us. He is the youngest. But left to himself, he may not survive without help. On the other hand, Ralph is a very important business man, and Donette is a world-renown opera singer. The world will certainly lose something if they die. And there are more of us than there are of Timmy. Finally, if we kill him to save ourselves, we have a better chance of survival.

We cannot communicate with Timmy because his head is above the opening and we cannot hear him, nor can he hear us. How do we decide whose life is more important?

"We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Notice though, that when a person is deprived of his or her right to life, the other two rights (liberty and the pursuit of happiness) are totally meaningless. Timmy is the individual and we are the collective. Now, if Timmy's rights are worth zero in this situation, then the collective's rights are worth zero as well; no matter how many people make up the collective, even if it is a million, a million times zero is still zero. Collectives are just conglomerates of individuals. By denying Timmy's right to live, we undercut any arguments on our own behalf. On the other hand, by affirming Timmy's right to live, we make his rights valuable enough that ours as a collective would outweigh them. If Timmy is not a zero, but a one, then we are collectively a nineteen. But Timmy is still worth something, and we would be responsible for destroying him. Can nineteen people, just by merit of the fact that there are more of them, justify murdering one person?

My point is this: we love our autonomy because it keeps us from having to agonize over questions such as these... or so we think. But really, it's an illusion of autonomy. It's the perpetuation of a world that does not really exist. People are not autonomous: "No man is an island." We may think we are self-governing, but in governing our own behaviors (whether we do it well or poorly... see the local bar for examples of both) we affect the behaviors of others. It seems that our alternatives are these: tyranny of the majority, or the anarchy of disagreeing individuals.

But could there be a tertium quid, a third option? If there was a being over all of us, then we would be equal as Jefferson recognized when he wrote the Declaration. In other words, if God exists, and if He created, and if He still governs His creation, then what He says goes. We are not then autonomous, nor are we without value. We are merely the equal subjects of a divine king. Without such a divine royal office there can be no equality among humans. Might makes right. But the horrors of totalitarian government in the twentieth century demonstrate to us what a bloodbath that adage becomes when applied to society and politics. Is it not a little startling that the freest country on the globe earned its freedom when it acknowledged the existence of the only Being that could philosophically ground such freedom? Sure, the idea helped shape the legal structure. But ideas aren't powerful enough to win wars. Ideas only begin wars. Guns and steel win them. But what if, WHAT IF, by acknowledging such a divine office in our charter document, we were blessed with providential care so that we could actually live out the beliefs that were articulated by the founders? Under the goodness of divine providence let freedom ring!

The Dark Side of Autonomy

2005-10-12T01:44:00.001-05:00

After giving it some thought, I've concluded that if there are absolutes in the world we would be in no position to know of them as such without help. I thihk that's a huge advantage that Christianity has over atheism or pantheism; in Christianity--in all of the big three monotheisms, really--there is a being Who is big enough to know absolutes, and who is also personal enough to communicate with us regarding what He knows. In all honesty, the one who decides to "go it alone," philosophically I mean, will never make it out of the hole of skepticism. Left to one's self, radical skepticism is the only option. Autonomy begets isolation.

Overcast
And I'm blue in black upon the dance floor of life
Alone and so unknown, but it's okay...
I'm not dancing anyway.
And passion overflows, but that's just not the way it goes, or so they say.
Flying high but feeling low
And we all want to know who says so
Thick, chaotic undertow will undermine my structure
A matchstick house of lust'rous ideals quakes and wheels beneath the weight
Of cursed dreams I love and blessed realities I hate.
Oh, so ungrateful: this is me.
Intellectually free
And in this vast autonomy it seems I've no identity.
But let the music play and we'll pretend it's all okay
And if you think you see me dancing we'll just chalk it up to chance
Because in black I'm oh-so-blue
I can't get from me to you in this milieu.

"Episteme"

"We walk alone in this world; friends such as we desire are dreams and fables."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Postlude to Orthodoxy

2005-09-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

Minimally excellent
I find my life is spent on fallen, fleshly pleasures
And dollar store tin treasures
Though I'm made for so much better I don't show it
And if I do not live it, do I know it?
'Cause I was made to look like You
But the image has been marred
I was offered life victorious but I've found the way is barred
I'm a freakish, dark contortion of Your portrait
And it's all because I haven't come to forfeit my own way
I slip from one toward zero in the grey.

"Marred Adam"

By way of retrospection on my previous entry, I want to formulate something affirmative. I call these the Four Virtues of a Maximally True Worldview.

ONE: Coherence. No one likes, understands, or wastes time on anyone else who can't decide which of two contradictory statements is true. You can't believe someone who claims that "God exists," and in the next breath claims, "there is no God." Which do you take to be true? We should strive for coherence by avoiding making self-contradictory statements. Enough said. I think this is pretty self-explanatory.

TWO: Correspondence with reality. People tend not to believe persons who habitually make statements that fail to reflect real states of affairs. We generally refer to such people as "confused," or even as "liars," based on how intentionally we think they are disseminating misinformation. A statement corresponds with reality if and only if reality is the way the statement describes it. For instance, the statement, "My car is a Buick," is true if and only if my car is in fact a Buick. If my car is not a Buick, then the statement is false.

THREE: Congruence. People don't waste time on those who contradict themselves, and they tend not to believe those who habitually make statements that fail to reflect real states of affairs. But they hate people who talk about the world being a certain way, and then live as though the world is some other way. These are the sort of people who earn the not-so-illustrious title "hypocrite." There is a phenomenon among humans, and though I cannot prove it, I suspect that it has been a part of human existence everywhere for all humans that ever existed. I call it, "the Grand Hypocrisy." We see it in others when they criticize us for doing something that they do. We see it in others when they fail to live up to their own ideals. We see it in others... all the time. And we rarely seem to see it in ourselves. But it's there. All of us participate in the Grand Hypocrisy, whether or not we are aware of it. The first battle is to become aware of it. Strikingly, this usually occurs when we become more attentive to whether our statements are coherent and correspond with reality. When we ardently seek truth (which entails both of these things), we arrive at the conclusion that we are indeed participants in the Grand Hypocrisy because we become painfully aware of the fact that we do not act according to our beliefs--all of the time. In the vocabulary of my last entry, fiducia does not follow our fides. We should strive to live congruently with our beliefs.

FOUR: Excellence. This one is simple: we need to increase good things in our lives, especially those that are listed above. If we believe rightly (coherence and correspondence with reality), and live accordingly (congruence), we will be much closer to our purpose as humans, and the closer we get, the more excellent our lives are.

Orthodoxy

2005-09-19T14:49:00.001-05:00

Rantings and ravings
And granting my cravings a hold on my mind
A stake on my claims and my findings
I wonder if belief is binding
And I've found the truth... it is blinding
Or something special at least
The future, a beast to predict
And sadly, I find I'm convicted of sins
Confessing again my revulsion
My reflection belies my compulsion
My craven, mistaken delusions
Illusions and dreams
But is it all as it seems?
Or can I believe the desires of my mind
And see life respond in kind?

"Believing, Unbelieving"

Orthodoxy is only orthodox to the orthodox. It's a conclusion that I reached this morning. Put another way, right belief is only right to those who believe rightly. By believing rightly I mean that a person's beliefs must be correct--that is, that they must reflect reality, the way things are--and must be arrived at correctly. Perhaps some exposition on this entire statement is necessary.

Since the Classical Era (for those of you who are as unaware of ambiguous terms like this as I was three years ago, the Classical Era was the period of Western history when the Greeks and the Romans were the high society), knowledge has been considered a three-part concoction. First, in order for a person to know something, he or she must believe it. In the Modern Age (the period of Western History since the beginning of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or the Scientific Revolution... they all happened at about the same time, and there seems to be no real consensus on which one was the real beginning of the Modern Age) we have become very good at disbelief. More correctly, we have become very good at unbelief. Disbelief seems to be a lack of belief on the basis of better evidence to the contrary. Hence our disbelief at the attacks on our homeland on 9-11-01; we had ample evidence to suggest that we were safe from any such horror. Unbelief is different than this. It is an intentional withholding of belief in something for which ample evidence is presented. Often, unbelief occurs because of the consequences of belief; if we dislike the implications of believing something, we shy away from belief, despite the evidence in its favor. Unbelief is often rampant in instances when we feel that our response is optional. For instance, had we been in New York on that fateful day four years ago, we would probably not have exercised our habitual Modern unbelief in the face of toppling buildings and billowing clouds of dust and soot. The obvious reason for this is that external reality did not allow us a comfortable skepticism. We could have decided we didn't want to believe that we were under attack, but had we been there the effects of the attack would soon have made believers out of us.

Unlike disbelief, which believes something contradictory that rules out whatever is disbelieved, and unlike unbelief, which refuses to believe something despite evidence in its favor, belief is a kind of mental reliance on something essential to our lives. For instance, we believe in truth because we have to; if we didn't, our beliefs would have no content, or they would be meaningless, sort of like whatever you see in the reflection of a mirror facing a mirror--you see forever, but you see nothing. Augustine defined belief with two words: fides and fiducia. Fides is mental, and it includes understanding something and assenting to it. Fiducia is practical, and it basically means to act as though the content of fides is true. Thus if I understand the idea of planes crashing into buildings nearby and causing a haze of noxious gases and dust, and if I assent to the reality of this idea, then fiducia drives me to act accordingly: RUN. If I do not act, one may honestly inquire whether or not I truly believe in the fides sense of belief. In short, fiducia is the fulfillment of fides. Fides isn't truly fides unless fiducia follows. It's helpful to think of these two like the old locomotive and its coal car. Back in the day, locomotives used to run on coal, so the first car in the train they were towing was a coal car. In order to stoke the steam furnace, the engineers would shovel coal out of the coal car directly behind the engine and toss it into the furnace in the engine. The point is, the coal car wasn't running the train, but the locomotive couldn't get on very well without it. So it is with fiducia. It doesn't drive a person's understanding of the world. But how can we believe that one understands the world rightly if he or she does not act on his or her understanding? Fides drives belief, but fiducia proves belief is there. Unbelief is thus the result of human reticence to act on fides. When people understand that fiducia must follow fides, they avoid fides in order to avoid fiducia. One of the easiest ways of avoiding fides is to marshal all manner of arguments against whatever should be believed. If I really did not want to act as though planes are crashing into nearby buildings, I could argue that the entire phenomenon is in someone else's head, or that it is all part of a grand illusion which we all mistake for reality, or any of a number of other asinine notions. In short, I could undercut the logical basis for belief so that I don't have to give assent to the truth of the concept that I understand.

This brings us to the second aspect of the Classical understanding of knowledge: justification. We often tell ourselves that we are justified in believing belief X because of reason Y (no pun intended... okay, maybe it was). For instance, I'm sure that my car is in the garage downstairs (X) because I left it there last night (Y) and I'm sure that when I leave things in the garage they are safe (Y2). Could the car be gone this morning? Sure. But that's the nature of justification. The philosophers use a big scary word for this: "defeasibility." A justification is always defeasible, which means simply that a justification can always be defeated. Why? Primarily because we are finite humans without the ability to know everything that takes place in our world. Even if I sat up all night looking at the car, and I was still looking at it, and you asked me if it was still there, I could not affirm that fact without a defeasible justification. I could say, "Yes, the car is still here because I'm looking at it." But what if you defeated my justification with the statement, "Ah, but my cousin the mad scientist has devised a device that disassembled your car into a radio wave, transmitted it to his garage and reassembled it, and left in your garage a perfect hologram illusion. The device works all in the blink of an eye, and when you blinked, he used it. Your car is no longer there." Whether the defeater you have just offered me is true or false remains to be seen, but the justification I offered for why my car is still there is now under fire. Nevertheless, no belief can be held without a justification. I cannot wake tomorrow believing that purple aliens are invading without some justification; beliefs do not happen randomly. And even if I willed to believe such nonsense, it would become harder and harder to stick to the belief without altering all the beliefs leading to it. Why do you think conspiracy theories get so cumbersome? We go around believing false things on the basis of justifications that in turn require that we disbelieve other things we believed. In fact, we do this until we find that we have torn out half of how we conceived of the world in order to believe in a conspiracy that may turn out to be totally nonexistent after all. That's a lot of work for nothing.

This brings us to the last of the three parts of the Classical conception of knowledge: truth. Justified beliefs are great, but they are not foolproof. In order to know something you must believe it, and you must believe it with good reason else it is a lucky guess, but you still do not have knowledge unless what you believe is actually the case. You mustn't claim to have knowledge unless the statements which you think are true accurately reflect reality, the way things are. How can we know whether things are true? After all, knowledge depends upon truth, but truth is only accessible through knowledge. This is where justification and belief come in. One must justify one's beliefs, and if at some point a belief is unjustifiable, one must abandon it. But how will we know if a belief is unjustifiable? The answer to this question is what I call "the livability requirement." Each person's worldview must meet this requirement, else the offending party will find himself or herself in an embarrassing hypocrisy at some point. Consider it: you are an explorer in the time before Christopher Columbus and you believe the earth is flat, but after months of sailing you pull a Magellan and end up back home in Europe without ever having to turn around and go home. Oops. There's quite a hypocrisy. You claim that the earth is flat (belief), but you sail (live) as though it is round. That your theory about reality is false becomes painfully apparent to your entire crew. So it is with morality. You believe that sex outside of marriage is perfectly permissible, but you find yourself loathing the STD you acquired, or resenting the child support payments you incurred, or hating the gnawing pain that tears at something inside you every time you see someone to whom you gave too much of yourself. Your belief ("sex outside of marriage is fine") fails the livability requirement, primarily because the necessary consequences of actions based on your beliefs (that is, all these different kinds of pain I just mentioned) are unlivable. A thing cannot be wholly good if it produces evil results.

So the question is why orthodoxy is only orthodox to the orthodox. The answer is simple, really. Those who aren't interested in orthodoxy are so consumed by whatever their true interest is, they do not value right belief. If true belief is not the primary concern of the believer, then truth, when and where it comes into conflict with those who are not concerned with it, will be seen as farce. They will explain it away, and all because they do not care what is really true. And they do not care what is really true, or so it seems, because they care so much about something else, perhaps personal freedom, or what they think is "beneficial for humanity" (see Shyamalan's The Village), or even just messing with the beliefs of someone with whom they are conversing. Truth pursued for truth's sake will redeem the pursuer. Truth pursued for truth's sake means relinquishing one's own selfishness and honestly asking the question, "What is the world like?" Startlingly, as we are part of the world, we may discover that we do not believe rightly because we do not rightly pursue truth, that is, we do not pursue it for it's own sake, but for our manipulative purposes. Shame on us.

Corruptio Optima Pessima

2005-09-13T00:19:00.001-05:00

There is a human fascination with evil, to the point where we in modern society have rationalized our evil away by appealing to our fascination therewith. Nevertheless, when we see the very thing about which we are constantly attempting to assuage our own guilt take the life of another, we shake our heads in frustration--or even judgment. Despite all of the good things we see in others, it is often our own faults that appear to us in sharpest relief, for it is the thing we hate most within us that galls us most when seen in another. And we recognize therein, whether or not we choose to admit it, the condition with which we are faced: core incurvatus in se (a heart turned inward on itself). It is just such selfishness that leads us to shake our heads. How can our heroes be both so great and so deeply flawed? We all have a sense that it is a terrible waste. So many people try so many things in order to earn the right to wear the label "good person." I hear it all the time: "I'm a good person." What the heck does that mean? You like yourself? Most people aren't aware of what you're really like? You're not usually horrid to others, even if it does happen once in awhile? There's a fly in the perfume, and we all crave the sweetness of the ointment of humanity sans the lurid death of the pestilence that floats among us. We are all seeking redemption, primarily because "corruptio optima pessima." There is nothing worse than the corruption of the best. And we know deep down, despite the pantheists' rave about how we're all one with everything else that (a) we aren't one with everything else, and (b) we're the most sophisticated species in this realm of existence. We're the best. We're the best gone wrong. And we crave the opportunity to undo that. Ctrl-Z isn't possible though, and we're going to have to face it. If redemption is to be had for this realm of existence, it will have to come from another realm, else the flies will continue to float within us, tainting what would otherwise have been a sweet aroma. Good as they are, everyone still stinks.

Mythos

2005-07-18T12:18:00.000-05:00

The thrill of the pain of life in my veins
Singing the same song of light
On its whistling flight
And the pulse of the core in the gulf off my shore
Pounds the rhythm of vibrant existence
And though Death seems to gain, like an oncoming train
Life, resilient in its resistance,
Gives a scream of attack
And Death, taken aback,
Breaks like ocean surf on the black crags
'Til the end of life, like tattered rags
Lays itself gently down in the sand, on the land
And the man, with blood humming and pulse all a-thrumming
Slows slowly, slowly... slowly
And with one last gasp, piteous and lowly
He breathes his last breath, and he kisses gaunt Death
Then departs with a sigh, oh so holy.

"Condition"

Bio

2005-07-18T12:12:00.000-05:00

I was born and raised a Christian in a land that once was free
In a land that poured its love out on the moon
And I grew up watching the decay of my society
But I never thought that it would die so soon

When I was thirteen you murdered law with courtroom politics
Because wealth can make a lie sound just like truth
Well I see right through you now, I don't fall for all your tricks
And you lost the one advantage of my youth

We live and die to buy the things the market says are great
And we want them yesterday, and God forbid we'd have to wait
And big business scandal's daily news, from Invesco to Enron
But why's it matter what we choose when nothing's right and nothing's wrong?

And our money says, "In God We Trust"
But it's against the law to pray in school
And they say we've got the best economy
But I say we sold our children to get it

We are far across the ocean in a war that's not our own
And while we're winning theirs we're gonna lose the one back home
Do we really think the only way to bring in world peace
Is to sacrifice our children to kill all our enemies?

The politicians all make speeches while the media takes notes
They determine all the issues and then shove 'em down our throats
Do they really think it's up to them whether this country sinks or floats?
I wonder who would make our laws if none of us would vote

And our money says, "In God We Trust"
But it's against the law to pray in school
And they say we're leading world politics
But I say we're killing our children to do it

Nobody has the right to judge, nobody can condemn
But will the unborn be as free as us if no one speaks for them?
As our kids grow up we're growing rich so we raise them with the screen
And then they die from gunshot wounds at school while they're still in their teens

But our money says, "In God We Trust"
Though it's against the law to pray in school
And they say we've got the best technology
But I say we starved our children to get it

We say "everyone's equal, sisters and brothers."
Then why wasn't Terry as "equal" as others?
Don't ask me for the answers, I've only got one:
That a soul leaves its darkness when it follows the Son.

"The Great American Novel--Revisited"