Liberal Jesus

Agora: Just a Little Talk with Jesus

2011-12-06T21:38:00.003-06:00

Will, the bartender, stands staring at the matter compiler sitting on the corner of the bar. A tiny, frustrated voice echoes from within. Reverend Carl's scheme to remix Jesus using sacramental bread and wine appears to have worked.

"Seriously?" Will asks.

Beth sits at the bar, while John Cates stands nearby, momentarily distracted from his quest to obtain the cheese omelet that is his Heart's Desire. Bud, a rather enigmatic figure, remains sitting at the opposite end of the bar.

The multicolored seed winks from inside a terracotta ashtray.

Agora: Thumbs Up

2011-11-11T16:03:00.000-06:00

Will, the scruffy barista, continues to tidy up the bar. Occasionally he picks up his cup of tea and takes a sip.

The matter compiler sits innocently at the end of the bar, a few feet from Beth, Vincent and John. Its "completed" indicator, a bright green thumbs-up symbol, glows cheerfully.

Agora: Meta

2011-10-29T18:34:00.002-05:00

This is the meta post, where we can talk about Agora (as opposed to your in-character comments, which ostensibly happen in Agora).

If you're playing along, you may want to subscribe to comments on this post, as well as the summary post, in case there's anything interesting going on.

Agora: Beginning

2011-10-24T21:03:00.002-05:00

The little shop sits on the slope of a small hill, looking down into a long, busy street that shoots straight into the heart of downtown. At the end of the street, blocks and blocks away, the old courthouse sits, delicate and ancient, surrounded by looming black skycrapers. Out here, though, the buildings are a bit less crowded and a bit more reasonably sized. This one sits at the edge of what used to be a boutique shopping district, and formerly housed an antique store with a horribly florid name: "Exilene's Land of Lovely Long-Ago Rarities" or something like that. The new owner slapped on a coat of dark blue paint to obliterate most of the sign, but left a few of Exilene's delicate, decisively serifed letters:

Ago Ra

Agora's storefront is entirely glass, allowing patrons inside to observe the commuters outside, and vice versa. On sunny days, someone occasionally drags a table out the front door and situates it on the sidewalk -- a little land grab into the commuters' territory -- but today it's a bit chilly, the west-facing storefront will be in shadow most of the day, and nobody seems terribly interested in rubbing elbows with pedestrians.

After passing through the front door, customers end up in the big main room, a few hundred square feet in size but partitioned into smaller spaces by roughly plastered walls. The partitions and plaster make the place feel a bit like a southwestern mission, split into cells populated by urban monks with a taste for joe and overstuffed Goodwill furniture. Parts of the bar are visible from the front door, but the path from here to there is less than direct. A heavy wooden door near the bar leads out to a patio.

The bar itself is formidable, festooned with both coffee mugs and glassware, because Agora is an unusual mix of coffee shop and bar. It sells mostly caffiene in the morning and mostly alcohol in the evening, but everything is available all the time, and given the human variety in a city this size, it's not unusual to see the barista serving shots of whiskey at 5 in the morning, or a double shot of espresso at midnight.

Of course, baristas aren't strictly necessary these days. The place has a matter feed, a sleek gray rectangle tucked away on one corner of the bar, but it's primarily there as a concession to a certain sort of customer, usually a guest of a regular who won't take his beverage any other way. But most folks come to Agora precisely because they like things done in the old, aromatic way, with shining, hissing metal cylinders, multicolored bottles half-full of multicolored liquids, jiggers and shakers and plenty of steam.

Today, the man tending bar is a moderately scruffy, sandy-haired grad student named Will. Will spends a lot of his time reading, sometimes tending bar with a glass in his left hand and a book in his right. He also makes a tasty Irish Coffee. At the moment he's wiping down the bar with a white towel and whistling what sounds like a Beatles tune.

Agora: Overview

2011-10-24T20:56:00.009-05:00

For a little while, this blog is going to become a coffee-shop-slash-pub called Agora. The basic mechanism is this: I will post an initial descriptive post. You folks will adopt a persona and, in the comment section, describe the actions and interactions of your characters. Characters who intend to stick around will be added to the roster below. If you would like your character's description to be added, please affix it as a comment to this post. Periodically, new suggestions and guidelines also will be added to this post.

Let's see how it go!

Guidelines

Please post in the present tense. So write "Charlie walks in the door", not "Charlie walked in the door."

Please play along. This is a basic rule of improv, and here it means several things: one is to go with the flow of the conversation, but it also means to try not to dramatically alter the parts of the world that have already been created by other people.

Characters

Will
Will is a sandy-haired barista-slash-bartender who has worked at Agora for more than a year. A graduate student at a local university, Will is, as one might expect, a bit lean and scruffy, but otherwise not a bad looking fellow. He spends a lot of his time reading, sometimes tending bar with a glass in his left hand and a book in his right. He makes a tasty Irish Coffee.

Vincent
Vincent is a homesick Englishman, age uncertain but well beyond middle. Nor is he certain how he got to this town, with its West Coast feel--perhaps San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver? He ought to know, wonders if dementia is starting to bite. If it is, he hopes to die of something else before he forgets who he is. At the first signs, he plans to start living more dangerously; and wonders if this is a suitable place to start--this town, this odd bar, which he thinks unlikely to serve English ale at cellar temperature.

Beth
Female.

John Cates
The man really wants a cheese omelet.

Bud
A rather enigmatic figure.

Carl the Cleric
Desires to remix Jesus using a matter compiler, sacramental bread and sacramental wine.

A Game of Agora

2011-10-15T01:03:00.003-05:00

Oh, hi there.

A few days ago, I ran into some interesting folks on Richard Beck's blog, and one of them mentioned liking to get together and talk with people, which made me think ... most of the people I want to chat with, like you, are not here with me in Memphis. You're in all sorts of other weird places around the globe. So I was thinking, why not use the magic of the internets to get everybody together?

If we liked each other a whole, whole lot, we could converse via skype and things like that, but that's not really ideal either. Too little ambience, too much scheduling, too much bandwith, and too much obligation to be your real life self.

But what if we just ... pretend ... to get together? Our get-together would be on this blog, so it would look a lot like a blog post with comments. But instead of discussing a post as yourself, the comments would contain descriptions of your -- I dunno -- avatar moving around in an imaginary space, doing stuff, talking about whatever people are interested in talking about.

I would start with a description of an area where we can interact. A pretty safe third space, since it would be totally made up. The initial post might look like this:

--

JuJu Bee's Bakery

Walking into JuJu Bee's, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by the flowers. They've been smeared everywhere, in bright pastel reds and blues and greens: on the walls, on the tables, on the ceiling. The only surfaces exempt from the painted garden are the glass counters containing JuJu Bee's wares: breads, cookies, pies.

JuJu Bee is sitting behind the counter, chewing on the butt end of her pen.

--

And then in the comments, you could create a character and toss him or her into JuJu Bee's, just to see what happens when you interact with one another. For example, suppose Crystal decides she wants to discuss something using the persona of a businessman named Carl. I don't know why she'd want to be a Carl, but bear with me.

--

[comment: Crystal]

A man in a business suit rolls up on a Segway, parks it near the front door, and walks into JuJu Bee's.

"Hey, sister JuJu!" Carl yells, straightening his sparkly green tie. "How's it going this morning?"

[comment: Me]

JuJu is immersed in the piece of newspaper she holds in her left hand.

"'sokay," she mumbles, scribbling something on the newspaper with her pen. "Three letter word for a scraping tool?"

--

I suspect the characters will get around to discussing things that people who read this blog like to discuss. I expect that occasionally I'll be pondering a thing, and have a character pop in to talk about it. I think the initial setting will be a sort of beverage shop called Agora. It may not work at all, but I think it could be kind of fun.

Any takers?

The Problem of Evil, Redux

2011-09-01T23:09:00.003-05:00

A while back, Crystal asked me about my theodicy. More recently, Paul (no, not our Paul) asked something similar. I've finally managed to put together a few paragraphs that communicate the essentials. Mostly it's just a bit of self-justification, but maybe a couple of other people will find it helpful.

Succinctly:

It is not enough for God to feel bad about human suffering, or to somehow make up for it after the fact. To allow the torture of innocents is to be complicit in that torture, Free Will be damned. Consequently, it is plainly incoherent to posit a God who is both good and overwhelmingly powerful.

But most of us still believe in a God. So what do we do with this belief?

We should affirm it, but also accept that we must have been mistaken in some ways, and go about finding a different way to think about God.

In my opinion, the best thing to do next — given the track record of power — is to abandon the idea that God is powerful, and by doing so, liberate our claim that God is good … that God is essentially goodness itself … or if we want to angle it a bit differently, we can claim, as the Bible does, that God is love.

This is hard for many of us, because not only does it mean giving up little things, like a God who magically gives us rain and parking spaces and helps us find our keys, it also means giving up really big things, like a God who is a big grand king, who creates everything from nothing, who inspires a Bible, and who raises people from the dead. And maybe these things are too big to give up.

But for those of us who have already given up most of those things, giving up power actually solves more problems than it causes. It’s the piece that makes everything click.

And because I’m one of those people, that’s my position. God is not powerful. Or to put it another way: Love, and nothing else, is God in the world.

Sigh

2011-08-02T22:06:00.002-05:00

The cancer has come back, which, this soon after transplant, is a Very Bad Thing. But we are having good days with our boy, and pursuing a treatment that we hope will save the day.

Basically, it's like they say over at XKCD:

"Man. Fuck cancer."

The Just, eh?

2011-07-11T00:48:00.002-05:00

Does anyone else find this song lyric strange?

For God the Just was satisfied
To look on him and pardon me
To look on him and pardon me

Holy Week(end)

2011-04-22T23:16:00.002-05:00

I was thinking I needed to share something for Holy Week, and lo and behold my friend Chad provided. Interpret it however you like.

The band's name is Typhoon, and the song is "The Honest Truth".

Leukemia Update

2011-04-13T03:28:00.002-05:00

Well, the leukemia has turned out to be a "hard" kind, but the boy is making great progress and feeling better and better lately.

Rob Grumble Bell

2011-03-20T07:39:00.005-05:00

Earlier today (well, yesterday, I guess), I read a Rob Bell update on CNN. And now, for some reason, I'm pretty angry.

It's not because Rob Bell is a heretic, of course, and it's not even because fundamentalists are giving Rob Bell crap for being a heretic. Actually, I'm not sure where the angry is coming from. Maybe it's because even edgy Rob Bell doesn't have enough balls or brains to embrace the label "universalist".

Or maybe it's this bit:

Bell would not be surprised if he saw Gandhi in heaven. “Jesus was very clear. Heaven is full of surprises. That’s central to Jesus [sic] teaching.”

HOLY F#@$. YOU MEAN THAT HEATHEN GANDHI MIGHT BE IN HEAVEN WITH ROB BELL? How about this instead, you pretentious MORONS?

Bell would be mildly surprised if Gandhi saw him in heaven. "I don't really think I'm on the same moral plane as someone like Gandhi," Bell said, "But who knows? We can hope, right?"

What Richard Said

2011-02-18T12:49:00.003-06:00

Well, it's really what Jurgen Moltmann said.

Richard's interested in universalism as a means to theodicy, and posted about it. But I was really struck by this bit he quoted from Moltmann's Trinity and Kingdom:

The question of theodicy is not a speculative question; it is a critical one. It is the all-embracing eschatological question. It is not purely theoretical, for it cannot be answered with any new theory about the existing world. It is a practical question which will only be answered through experience of the new world in which 'God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.' It is not really a question at all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound. The person who believes will not rest content with any slickly explanatory answer to the theodicy question. And he will also resist any attempts to soften the question down. The more a person believes, the more deeply he experiences pain over the suffering in the world, and the more passionately he asks about God and the new creation.

"It is not purely theoretical, for it cannot be answered with any new theory about the existing world." Put another way: theodicy is about reconciling our experience of the world with the claims people are making about God. Good theodicy is an effort to develop a living, harmonious understanding of the universe, rather than a manufactured, dead one, riddled with contradictions and conflicts.

Help me out here ...

2011-01-24T11:34:00.002-06:00

What, exactly, is the difference between a "prayer warrior" and just any old person who prays?

Ockham's Razor: A Probabilistic Justification

2011-01-15T10:14:00.004-06:00

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time with probability and statistics, partly because we're about to make some significant decisions about our boy's treatment, and partly because I've been reading The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, which, despite its overdone name, is really about -- you guessed it -- probability and statistics.

Anyhow, I was lying in bed the other night, and for some reason I was thinking about Ockham's Razor, which despite Wikipedia's protests to the contrary, is usefully summarized as "the simpler explanation is more likely the correct one." So if you imagine an explanation that rests on 5 propositions, and an explanation that rests on 10 propositions, you should give preference to the simpler argument. Sometimes this is justified in terms of "falsifiability": the longer argument is "more easily falsifiable" than the shorter argument, because it has more places it can break.

But that night, I was thinking that a slightly more interesting way of justifying the principle is in terms of probability.

Suppose you know nothing about the content of the propositions, or the quality of the argument. If it helps, think about this as being a situation where the content of the propositions is so arcane, you have no idea how to evaluate whether or not they are true. But even this little bit of information -- the number of propositions -- can help you choose an explanation, if you suppose that each proposition has an equal chance of being correct. And what else can you do, since you don't understand the argument? If that is the case, then the chance of all propositions being correct is the combination of the chances of each proposition being correct. You don't know exactly how to combine the chances, because you don't know how the propositions are related, but what you do know is that every proposition you add decreases the chances of all the propositions being correct.

To illustrate, let's look at our 5- and 10-proposition arguments and plug in some numbers. If we suppose that each proposition has a 50% chance of being correct, independently of any of the other propositions, we get:

10-proposition argument
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/1024

5-proposition argument
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/32

So there you go. Ockham's Razor is a good rule because every additional proposition decreases the chances of all the propositions being true.

Obviously, though, an actual analysis of the propositions is preferable to simply applying Ockham's Razor and taking that as proof. Right?

Well, probably. While this probability justification has the benefit of applying when we ourselves are too ignorant to analyze the argument, it also applies if we suppose that people in general are ignorant, and as likely to fail as to succeed when either composing or analyzing the truth of propositions. In that case, well, our best bet is just to guess ... and Ockham's Razor helps us make a better guess. I mean, unless I'm confused about the truth of that proposition. =)

Leukemia =(

2010-12-07T22:45:00.003-06:00

I suppose, although I'm not entirely sure why, that I should tell you that my 5-year old was diagnosed several weeks ago with an acute leukemia. It's one that they have a lot of practice treating, which is good, and his prognosis is good, which is good, but it's still not as good as, say, the year of kindergarten or first basketball season we were hoping for.

Anyway, sympathetic comments aren't really necessary. I just wanted to let you all know what's up.

Real World FTW!

2010-10-06T22:22:00.003-05:00

I want to post something about David Sosa's brief definition of happiness, but I can't figure out quite what I think about it.

I need a little goading, I think.

GOADER: Ya! Living in the Real World is obviously better than living in an Imaginary World! Real World FTW!

ME: [Rolls his eyes. Is not goaded.]

Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

Some Philosophy-Slash-Literary Junk

2010-09-28T21:27:00.004-05:00

In case any of you want to participate, Alex and I are reading through Thomas Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and discussing it over on another blogspot blog. We're only a chapter or so in, so you could even read along with us if you wanted.

We may get tired of the blog and abandon it after a few sections, leaving you forever anxious about WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENS WHEN THE WORLD TREE MEETS THE WORLD NAVEL, but those are the kind of risks you take when you follow us around.

Farewell, Teaching Aspirations

2010-09-17T15:53:00.003-05:00

I don't really know what I'm going to tell the Children's Ministry folks. They think they want me to help in my kids' classes at church, but I'm pretty sure they're mistaken.

STORY: NOAH'S ARK

ME: So, kids, what did you think of that story?

KIDS: YAYYY

ME: How do you think Noah felt while he was safe on that big boat? Pretty good, huh?

KIDS: YAYYY

ME: What about all those kids drowning in the flood? How do you think they felt?

Do you think they sank down and died pretty quickly? Do you think any of them hung onto trees for a few days before the trees got covered up and they drowned?

Do you think there were any sharks?

KIDS: *horror*

STORY: EXODUS

ME: So, kids, what did you think of that story? Frogs and hail and the river turning to blood? Our God is pretty awesome, right!?

KIDS: YAYYY

ME: And how about that plague on the firstborn, huh? I bet those were some pretty bad kids, for God to send the spooky Angel of Death to kill them all in their sleep.

What do you think those kids did wrong? Like, the babies for example? Do you think all those Egyptian babies cried too loud at night? Or maybe they didn't obey their parents right away? Yep, that was probably it. You don't ever do that, do you?

Oh, dear! Let's hope God doesn't kill you too, ha ha!

KIDS: *terror*

STORY: ...

Enh. You get the picture.

Your Life is Not a Story

2010-06-16T08:25:00.004-05:00

Useful stuff in this sermon I heard on Sunday.

http://www.highlandchurch.org/audio/by/date/2010-06-13

And here's the Alan Watts video that the speaker used, via YouTube.

The difficult question that follows, I think, is: "If that's true, then why should we think there is a Story?"

The Very Angry Tea Party

2010-06-14T08:37:00.001-05:00

J.M. Bernstein: "what all the events precipitating the Tea Party
movement share is that they ... undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency"

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/

Now with extra Hegel!

Pointed Question

2010-04-19T09:08:00.003-05:00

Crystal recently posted about the death of Antony Flew, a British philosopher. In an excerpt from one of his books (Reason and Responsibility), he describes how people engage in a watering-down of the God assertion in the face of logic or evidence.

So, for example, he says, we say we believe that God loves us like a father. Then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat, his earthly father driven insane with grief, but his heavenly father (who ostensibly is able to do something about it) apparently unmoved.

"It's OK," says the theodicist. "this is because God's love is somehow different from human love, inscrutable or beyond human love or constrained by free will or somesuch."

And so our meaty and reassuring understanding of "God loves us like a father" is redefined and eroded, until it's not really the same thing we meant in the first place.

Then Flew asks this:

"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"

I'm interested in how people answer this question, because I'm not sure whether it condemns me (because I have "watered down" my definition of God in order to keep it) or justifies me (because my understanding of "God" has changed significantly in the face of this sort of evidence).

Two Poems

2010-03-30T10:07:00.002-05:00

O hai. I really liked the first of these two poems on Crystal's blog, so I will link to it here.

Two Poems

Theodicy, Boston Edition

2009-06-24T23:03:00.005-05:00

Well, the last 10 days or so have been chock-full of theodicy, which means that I may finally have enough original material to put together a blog post.

It started last week, when I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, unquestionably one of the most terrifying books I have ever encountered. It's a postapocalyptic tale wherein a father and young son are trying to survive, but the skies are black with ash, nothing will grow and people have turned to cannibalism. The tiny book is heavy with despair.

On Saturday, after finishing that bit of sunshine and rainbows, I attended synagogue (more specifically, "Havurah on the Hill") at the Vilna Shul, which turns out to be a wonderful little building with a sanctuary above and a museum below. If anyone knows anything about theodicy, it should be Jews, right?

The Vilna Shul is the only remaining immigrant synagogue in Boston and is partially restored. The walls of the sanctuary (there's got to be a better word for for it than "sanctuary") are covered in paintings that were recently covered in beige, but the clever paintings are peeking out in places, waiting to be fully exposed.

The prayerbook that we used for the service had the words of the psalms and songs in Hebrew on the right, with a fairly free interpretation of the psalms appearing to the left. As the service progressed, we arrived at Psalm 29:

4 The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is majestic.

5 The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.

The interpretation, however, went something like this:

The cedars break, and the sound is the voice of God,
and the sound is God's silence.

The Shul is right next door, so I'll have to drop by sometime this week and get the actual text. A helpful physics software guy named Dallas, who guided a couple of us gentiles through the service, said that the interpretations were provided by Reb Moshe Waldoks, a local rabbi and co-author of "The Big Book of Jewish Humor".

The interpretations have a distinctly Eastern flavor, and this tidbit was no different, except that for some reason it jumped out at me and slapped me around a little bit. When bad things happen, can we understand them both as the voice of God and God's silence? Is it enough, as it said a few paragraphs down, to suppose that God's business is to allow us to "reap what we sow"?

I don't think so ... but the paradox is still interesting to me.

Then, on Sunday, Scott preached on Job. Why anybody would go and do a thing like that is beyond me, but there you have it. Maybe it was a lectionary reading or something. Anyhow, he started with Job, and summarized some things about the book, and gave a few possibilities for how to understand what God says in responding to Job. Then he made an interesting move and went on to the New Testament and pointed to the apostles. His suggestion was that the apostles were in a safer place than Job, that we don't see the apostles asking a lot of questions about evil or grieving over their suffering and persecution because they had already given up all their things. In other words, he was advocating a sort of (basically Eastern) detachment from the material world and an attentiveness to one's task (basically Western) that might make suffering less philosophically troubling.

I'm drastically simplifying, of course, but that's how I understood the sermon.

Altogether I thought he did well, and that the sermon was well-tailored for its audience, and that we would be well advised to do less storing up wealth and pleasure for ourselves and give a little more to doing good. But like the sabbath service, something about it rings hollow. Job doesn't need a sermon about how he was too attached to his kids.

On Tuesday, Reepicheep, who has just returned from Kenya, posted about a Bible study in which a Kenyan church member asked him about why a good God would allow so much evil in the world. Reep didn't give his response, but if I know his libertarian tendencies it was some version of the free will defense. With which i am also dissatisfied.

This afternoon, I read Richard's post, which makes reference to W. Paul Jones's Theological Worlds, in which he mentions paired ideas of "obsessio" and "epiphania":

An obsessio is whatever functions deeply and pervasively in one’s life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification than renders one’s life cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one’s life as plot. It is a memory which, as resident image, becomes so congealed as Question that all else in one’s experience is sifted in terms of its promise as Answer. Put another way, an obsessio is whatever threatens to deadlock Yeses with No. It is one horn that establishes life as dilemma…The etymology of the word says it well: obsessio means “to be besieged."

Well that sounds familiar.

And then tonight, I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I saw an amazing exhibit of Venetian renaissance painting: Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto ... just spectacular stuff. I also ogled their impressionist collection and the egyptian collection, with statues more than 4000 years old. But the thing that will probably stay with me the longest is a crucified christ who hangs in the museum's Catalonian Chapel. (On the left, below. So far, this is the best picture I've been able to find.)

Fashioned from wood and painted darkly, the Christ is a pathetic figure, with skinny legs, a slightly distended belly and a downturned face. Looking up at that Christ, it hit me, all of a sudden, how formative it must be to belong to a faith whose central figure dies, and not in glorious battle, but as a powerless, pathetic and essentially nameless human being, tortured to death by his fellow human beings and then forgotten. How could protestants abandon the crucifix? What will we become without that image constantly in front of us?

And then, as I rode home on the train, an older man ... well, probably not more than 60 ... boarded the train and flung himself into a seat. His back was horribly hunched, his face not just turned down, but turned into his chest.

And so there we were, back to theodicy again.

Worth watching

2009-04-14T21:02:00.002-05:00

Susan Boyle sings on "Britain's Got Talent"

(thanks, richard)

Gifts

2009-03-24T13:49:00.003-05:00

My son just brought me a scruffy little dandilion flower.

He may as well have brought me the universe.

That Elusive More

2009-03-24T12:53:00.002-05:00

In honor of my first visit to a UU congregation this Sunday, I'm linking you to a column by our friendly UU acquaintance Doug Muder. The column contains some of his thoughts about the "depth" of UUism, something I've been wondering about.

A Sad Dilemma

2009-03-09T14:40:00.001-05:00

Maybe you can help.

The Sea of Faith

2009-01-07T15:29:00.002-06:00

So, all you loyal Philosophy Bites podcast listeners ... what did you think of this one?

Don Cupitt on Non-Realism about God

I think I feel about Cupitt like I feel about other liberal theologians ... the deconstruction is spot on, but the reconstruction falls kind of flat. "God is life?" Meh.

What I'm going to do about those "God" billboards

2008-12-04T23:57:00.004-06:00

Living in West Texas, I endure my fair share of church talk. Maybe more than my fair share. It's dry out here, but I float along quite pleasantly in a sea of "thank the Lord" and "Lord willing" and "God's in control" and "whatever the Lord puts on your heart". The problem is compounded by the fact that I work for a business that leans fairly heavily -- and, in the annual Christmas prayer, fairly explicitly -- toward jingoism.

But the church talk doesn't bother me all that much, because I figure that the proliferation of theologically loaded statements is more a cultural phenomenon than a theological one. When brother Fred Wilson tells me, "I just prayed about it, and the very next day I found my keys / recovered from cancer / turned straight / won the lottery", I can usually just smile and nod, translating his statement into something more theologically innocuous ... like, "Hooray!"

But the continual barrage of "God" billboards grates on my nerves. You know the billboards I'm talking about: white text on a black background, with a single witty saying attributed to "- God". Here are some actual pictures:

More generally, the problem that these billboards have is what I'd like to start calling the "naked theological statement". It's the more sinister partner of the "theologically loaded statement" that I mention above. Whereas the theologically loaded statement is a statement carrying some other message but has an implicitly theological rider ("Lord willin' and the creek don't rise"), the naked theological statement is an explicitly theological statement presented with almost no surrounding context. And the God billboards aren't the only bearers of naked theological statements ... no, indeed, church signs have served up similar fare for years.

A big part of my difficulty with nakedly theological signs is that they set up this painful resonance between the postmodern and modern sides of my psyche. When I read a sign like the ones above, my modern side immediately starts screaming about the various faults of the doctrines that the billboards imply. My postmodern side perks up in response, and the whole thing goes something like this:

MODERN: (muttering) ... think it's hot here ... say what? That billboard we just passed, what did it say?

POSTMOD: It said, "You think it's hot here?"

MOD: "hyphen God?"

POSTMOD: Well, yes, but I would have said "dash God".

MOD: You would have been wrong.

POSTMOD: Mm. (nods sagely)

MOD: (thinks) So are they really suggesting that God sends people to hell where they burn in fire for all eternity?

POSTMOD: Seems like they're saying something like that.

MOD: What trash. If they ever ... wait, what? Did you see that? What did that church sign say?

POSTMOD: Something like, "Big bang theory, you've got to be kidding."

MOD: With a comma up front? As if they were telling the big bang theory it must be kidding?

POSTMOD: If you read it according to standard rules for grammar and punctuation, then yes, I guess that's what it says.

MOD: Do these people live in caves?

POSTMOD: Obviously?

MOD: (drives a minute in silence) The thing that really gets me is how utterly inconsistent these people's theologies must be. I mean, how can you say God is good and also say that God tortures people with fire for all eternity? A three-year-old could see the contradictions with that. It's utterly inane.

POSTMOD: Consistency isn't everything. These sorts of doctrines have endured for quite a long time, so apparently people find them helpful. Maybe people accumulate the set of doctrines that they find most helpful in their lives, rather than the ones that offer the most internal consistency.

MOD: They should accumulate the doctrines that best reflect what actually happens in the real world, not the ones that make them happy. Some statements about God are just false and we have an obligation to say that they're false.

POSTMOD: Happiness is kind of a low bar to set. Even then, I'm not sure we can do any better than saying, "these are the doctrines that tend to help people live good lives".

MOD: But surely certain propositions about God are more true than others! "God is Love" and "God is hate" can't say equally true things about God, can they? And it seems like the propositions that are more accurate would tend to be the ones that were the most helpful.

POSTMOD: I'm not sure. The truth of any statement has to be judged inside a particular worldview, maybe inside a particular person. So it might be that a set of questionable statements about God actually produced in a given person's mind a more accurate image of God than a set of solid, internally consistent statements.

MOD: Well then what about "healthy"? Surely we can pick out a few doctrines that seem to have turned out to be pretty harmful. Surely we can take, say, anti-semitic interpretations of the New Testament and say, "those are bad"?

POSTMOD: Probably. But it's not like you're discussing an entire theology here, or even an entire person. You're dealing with a single, naked statement -- maybe a proposition, maybe not -- with almost no context.

MOD: So how should we discourage bad theology propagated via church signs?

POSTMOD: (wicked chuckle)

No!

No no! I really want to do this, but it is not the right way! Likewise, it isn't going to do much good to put up a "good theology" billboard across from each "bad theology" billboard. Symmetrical responses just won't work, if only because the answer to a naked theological statement has to be a complicated, embodied theological experience, the sort of thing that can't be put on a billboard or bumper sticker. We have to find a powerful asymmetrical response, something subversive that undermines the naked theologians before they even know what's going on. Something complex, like ... art.

As I was researching this topic, by which I mean having lunch with a friend, he mentioned the distinction between what he perceived to be "good" Christian art and what he thought of as "bad" Christian art. One of the characteristics of good Christian art is its complexity and ambiguity; its ability to be interpreted in a number of different ways, and its respect for the viewer's capability to create meaning. Bad Christian art, on the other hand, is bumper-sticker art, saccharine and simple, intended only to propagandize and evangelize.

I hope that this same paradigm works for theological messages as well: that complicated, narrative things are the right tools to counteract bad pop theology. So where the naked theologians sell bumper-stickers, I will tell stories. Where they sell rear-bumper Jesus fish, I will share paintings, sculptures and films. And where they give sound bites, I will ask people to come in, sit down, and share a meal.

MOD: That's so crazy.

POSTMOD: It just might work.

Proposition 8

2008-12-03T16:23:00.000-06:00

The musical.

Not my blog

2008-08-15T13:19:00.003-05:00

But it may turn out to be entertaining.

Will Blog for Food

Update: Nevermind.

Some Obama Things

2008-06-04T10:44:00.003-05:00

In case you hadn't heard, Obama seems to have enough delegates to claim the Democratic presidental nomination. Yay. =)

Also a friend sent me a link to this deep and meaningful article about why Obama isn't a Christian. My immediate reaction is that it's fine and good if Cal Thomas wants to say Obama isn't a Christian, so long as he notices that he's not a Christian either, since he obviously worships the Bible instead of ... y'know ... God.

My Summer Vacation

2008-05-25T11:59:00.002-05:00

Well, OK, Spring Vacation.

For the last month and a half or so, I've been giving Google Reader a rest. I haven't read any news feeds or blog posts, and I haven't posted much of anything here. So if you were wondering whether I had fallen off the face of the Internets, I guess the answer would be yes.

I'm not sure why I've unplugged to this degree ... maybe it's my debugging instinct kicking in, turning things off one at a time to try and find out which ones improve my life and which ones degrade it. Still working on that task.

Anyhow, I apologize for the somewhat narcissistic thread that I perceive to be woven through this blog. I prefer to talk less about my particular life and more about ideas and happenings. But thank you to those of you who have shown an interest in my personal thoughts and situation. It is a pleasant way to be loved.

And since I've started down that path, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to ask for a little more help. If you recall, when I posted my post about taking a break from church, I mentioned that one of the things I was looking for was a new mentor or group of mentors. Not that there weren't virtuous people at church, but the virtues they exhibited weren't really the ones I wanted to acquire. Recently, I made a list of virtues that I would like to learn, which looked about like this:

kindness

other-interest

courage

healthfulness

calm, rhythm (not-hurry)

skill (expertise)

I can think of several ways to go about pursuing these qualities, but I'm curious about where you have learned them. I know quite a few of you have experience with particular disciplines such as fasting, prayer and meditation, 'spiritual exercises' and the like. How have those formed you?

I expect habit formation to be an important part (maybe the entirety) of virtue formation, so if you find yourself (or maybe a friend of yours) to have some of these virtues, how did you (or they) develop them?

There also seems to be this conventional wisdom that virtue is best learned within a community of people seeking the same virtues. Well, the American transcendentalists might disagree, but for the sake of argument ... what communities have you experienced that contain an inordinately large number of people who exhibit these virtues?

Or if this more specific question is easier, try answering it instead: If you could recommend that I do one thing different today, what would it be?

coldplay

2008-05-09T10:28:00.000-05:00

violet hill

Joanna Newsom again

2008-04-04T13:37:00.003-05:00

I've been listening to Cosmia by Joanna Newsom today. Here's a bit from the internets, ostensibly an article where Newsom talks about the album, Ys, ...

The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again ... But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime. It’s what my dad talks about sometimes. He says the only way that he knows there’s a God is that there’s so much gratuitous joy in this life. And that’s his only proof.

There’s so many joys that do not assist in the propagation of the race or self-preservation. There’s no point whatsoever. They are so excessively, mind-bogglingly joy-producing that they distract from the very functions that are supposed to promote human life. They can leave you stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form. And those joys are there and they are unflagging and they are ever-growing. And still there are these things that you will never be able to feel OK about–unbearably awful, sad, ugly, unfair things.

The quote is from this page. If you know what article this might be, please let me know so I can credit it.

Update: Colby found the full article over at Arthur Magazine.

"Live Blogging" was a bit ambitious

2008-03-24T22:12:00.002-05:00

I guess it's what happens most of the time when you go panning for gold: you hope to come up with a big, shiny gold nugget or twelve, but instead you find ourself with a handful of pretty pebbles.

I had hoped that I would come out of the REBA conference with a handle on a couple of Big Ideas: you know, the ones that account for all sorts of variables and, once you find them, keep turning up in places that you never expected to find them. I've spent the last couple of weeks mentally sifting through our discussions, trying to find something exciting for the kind folks who continue to read my blog.

I haven't come up with anything like that.

Instead, what I mostly have is a profile of the REBA attendees: pet issues, life events, worldview quirks, that sort of thing. So in the absence of great, wonderful ideas, I'll share with you that profile, expecting that a few of you will find it encouraging to know there are other people who share some of your pet issues, life events and worldview quirks. Maybe a few of you will even be able to diagnose us with some well-defined clinical disorder (oppositional defiance, anyone?) or help us understand ourselves.

So without further ado, these are a few of the ideas, beliefs, attitudes and experiences that the REBA attendees share.

1. Disappointment with the Christian church.

This isn't merely a disillusionment with church based on bad personal experiences - although we have those - neither is it a disappointment with the behavior of the church on a global scale - although we are pretty fed up with that, too. It's a sadness that comes from both of those directions, and meets in the middle to form a deep disappointment in the institutional church.

2. A high view of God's goodness

As I have said many times before, the statement "God is good" sums up my fundamental belief about God. I have no way of proving this belief to be true; it is simply an axiom that undergirds all of my theological beliefs and arguments. The REBA attendees seem to share this axiom, along with another sensible axiom: "and we know pretty well what we mean when we say 'good'."

3. High value on the example, person or teachings of Jesus

Jesus is important to all of us. Each of the REBA attendees expressed this sentiment in a slightly different way, but it seems that we all think that there's something different, important and powerful in the story of Jesus or his teachings.

4. A high view of people outside the church

Many of the people we love and admire are not part of the Christian church. Some of these are well-known figures from the past or present; some of them are close friends or family. We recognize both the virtues of these people, developed outside of the Christian church, and we recognize that our Jesus might be helpful to them.

5. A low view of scripture

Frankly, we just don't buy that the Bible is the direct product of divine inspiration. There are too many inconsistencies in the text itself, and we know too much about the process that produced the text we have today. Some people have the truth of the Bible at the center of their belief structure, as an axiom similar to our belief that God is good, but this belief is simply not an option for us. We believe that the Christian Bible is a valuable collection of people's stories about their experiences of the divine, but we have simply seen too much to accept the unquestioning bibliolatry that we all were raised with.

5. A belief that secondary things are obscuring Jesus

We feel that the goodness in the Christian message is largely inaccessible to those outside of the Christian tradition. Sometimes this is because churches still cling to a premodern mindset and remain actively opposed to, or ignorant of, widely-accepted scientific knowledge. Sometimes it's insistence on a particular hermeneutic, one that requires that we jettison the Bible if we find any part of it to be false. Sometimes this is because the church, and the Bible, embed Jesus in a deep metaphysical ocean of angels, demons and miraculous events that one must either accept wholesale or hack apart to get to the wisdom of Jesus, which is difficult enough on its own.

We desire to find ways to crack the nut, allowing the love and acceptance of Jesus to spill out to the people who most need this acceptance and love.

I think that's it, at least for now. I'm sure that my distillation of our discussion is somewhat skewed toward my own opinions, and it is definitely couched the language that I, personally, find most appealing and useful. One of the other attendees might even flatly disagree with one of the things that I've written here. But that's OK: I'm open to correction.

And that, I guess, is a final quality we seem to share:

6. We don't really have any doctrine

We're not terribly attached to any of the points I've mentioned above, or anything else that we currently think we know. And we certainly don't insist that you believe the same things. However, we are much more likely to take you seriously if you are willing to accept the limitations on certainty that come with one's status as a human being, and approach us wanting to discuss things rather than debate them.

So there you have it, a little nibble of our noetic structures, particularly those bits that pertain to the Bible, church, Jesus and God.

We're not really sure what we'll be doing at the next REBA meeting; maybe we'll visit a sweat lodge. Maybe we'll visit a microbrewery. Maybe we'll continue our discussions online. Whatever we do, though, I'm pretty sure that we won't be making another trip to Liberal, Kansas. The people are nice, sure, and Dorothy's house is there, but I'll be honest: when you combine high prairie winds with a meat-packing plant of that magnitude, you end up with a pleasant little town that smells like a big dead cow. And frankly, one weekend of Big Dead Cow will last me for a long, long time.

Live Blogging REBA

2008-03-15T16:04:00.004-05:00

So here I am in Liberal, Kansas, home to the monstrous American Beef packing plant, a miniature Statue of Liberty, Dorothy's house, and most recently, the first official meeting of REBA: the Recovering Evangelical Bastards Association.

The association currently has four members: one from Dallas, one from Denver, one from Nashville, and me, from Abilene. We converged on Liberal from all directions this Friday, like the four horsemen of a very minor apocalypse. Our goal: to hang out, drink plenty of beer and discuss our sundry theologcial hangups.

Friday night we picked up some Kansas barbecue (read: pork). After driving the length and breadth of Liberal (approximate time: 30 mins), we settled on an excellent place called King's. So let that be your first lesson from our meeting: King's barbecue in Liberal is, well, pretty good.

The reason we picked up the barbecue, of course, was that we felt an obligation to our abundant supply of Colorado, Nashville and Texas beer. So we sat down with our beer, barbecue and hot-water cornbread (from Harold's in Abilene) and began to tell our various stories.

I won't go into detail about those stories right now, but basically: everyone grew up in similar churches, and now everyone is either not attending a church, or attending a different church (we have one UU-attender). So very quickly, the central question for me became, "how did this happen?" How did the group of us end up at such similar conclusions about church, the Bible, and religious questions in general?

We haven't come up with an answer yet, although we have batted around some ideas that have to do with American consumerism, college professors, and the like. Let me know if you have any ideas. I'll try to update you as we go along.

Oh, and by the way, you guys that keep necro-posting on blog entries that are more than 6 months old ... quit it. I promise I'll post again on God and good and evil, and then everyone can discuss whether what you're saying makes a lick of sense. But for now, I'm ignoring your comments. So there.

Some Grey Bloke

2008-03-01T15:30:00.002-06:00

Another thing I need explained for me.

h/t Aric Clark

Hooray!

2008-02-28T22:38:00.003-06:00

I don't have to change the name of my blog!

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Modern Liberal

You are a Modern Liberal. Science and historical study have shown so much of the Bible to be unreliable and that conservative faith has made Jesus out to be a much bigger deal than he actually was. Discipleship involves continuing to preach and practice Jesus' measure of love and acceptance, and dogma is not important in today's world. You are influenced by thinkers like Bultmann and Bishop Spong.

Modern Liberal

89%

Emergent/Postmodern

79%

Classical Liberal

61%

Roman Catholic

43%

Neo orthodox

43%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

39%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

14%

Reformed Evangelical

11%

Fundamentalist

(via heather @ holy vignettes, who happens to be neo-orthodox)

Regarding Right and Wrong

2008-02-20T19:25:00.004-06:00

In a response to a recent post, Michael Ejercito said:

I find nothing wrong with the idea of God ordering Israel to do genocide. God determines what is right and what is wrong.

A lot of people seem to share this opinion, in particular some of my more intelligent friends(nudge nudge). So without a whole lot of rigamarole up front, let's discuss this.

My first question for Michael (or anybody else) is:

Are "right and wrong" things every god gets to decide, or is that a privilege unique to Yahweh?

The reason I ask is this: a few months ago I was walking across the parking lot between my office and the mall, and a dark-suited, middle-aged man stopped me and handed me a full-color tract about this god named Ishkabibble. That tract said that Ishkabibble, not Yahweh, gets to decide right and wrong, and to make things worse, it also said that lots of things that Yahweh says are right are actually wrong, and vice versa, and if I didn't do all the things that Ishkabibble instructed, then I would burn in hell for eternity.

So I'm kind of flummoxed on this one, really. Am I still safe following Yahweh? 'Cause it seems like I'm ... um ... damned if I do and ... er ... damned if I don't.

Yes We Can?

2008-02-12T08:18:00.000-06:00

If you haven't seen the Yes We Can video, watch that one first.

h/t: colby

Why I'm Taking a Break from Church

2008-02-08T22:10:00.000-06:00

People in my faith tradition love the Bible.

You may think that you too love the Bible, but you're wrong. We really, really love the Bible. We attend Bible class and Bible camp. Our kids learn about the Bible and compare their knowledge in "Bible Bowl". To protect our Bibles, we carry them in special zippered bags. We give one another guilt about reading the Bible. We claim that "we speak where the scripture speaks, and are silent where the scripture is silent." (By "the scripture", we of course mean "the Bible".) We even sing songs about ... you guessed it ... the Bible.

There are some good, historical reasons for this attitude, and very few people know or care about those reasons. Because in our tradition, history isn't very interesting, and neither is Biblical interpretation, really. There is no such thing as "interpreting" the Bible. It simply says what it means, and means what it says ... and what it means and says are what we've always said that it says and means.

It wasn't a bad way to grow up. I sailed along happily, riding this wave of certainty, singing about how I loved the Bible and how I wished someone would give me a Bible and how much I loved Bible camp, until one year at said Bible camp, something happened that roughened the seas a bit.

Every year, at the end of the week, the boys and the girls of each age group would engage in a Bible trivia competition. That year we had been studying 1 and 2 Timothy -- you know, the authoritarian epistles -- and we boys were, like every year, pretty much resigned to losing. The girls always beat us. But somehow, this year, perhaps buoyed up by the writer's exhortation that women should learn "in quietness and full submisssion", we eked out a win.

The girls were downcast. We were jubilant. And in the middle of our celebration, someone (I'm pretty sure it wasn't me) purloined the words of 2 timothy 3 for a victory chant:

"Weak-willed women. Weak-willed women! Weak-willed women!"

We all chanted together, rejoicing in our superior Bible knowledge.

"Weak-willed women!"

Then I noticed that one of the girls was crying, quietly.

If you've ever been a junior-high boy, you will probably know what happens when you see the tears of a junior-high girl who is kind, intelligent and more than a little bit cute.

You're utterly befuddled.

You walk back to your cabin, deeply confused. And as you process the situation, you start to notice that something is wrong. You're not quite sure what yet, but something, you know, is terribly wrong.

After a few years, you figure it out: something must be wrong with the Bible. Friends and acquaintances are abandoning their faith because they can't follow a God who would order genocide, or denigrate women, or abhor gays. And they can't simply ignore a few Bible verses and go on with their faith, because if they learned anything growing up in church, they learned this: either all of the Bible is true, or none of it's true.

But soon after, you realize that maybe nothing is wrong the Bible; maybe something is broken about how you're interpreting it. And if something is broken about how you're interpreting it, maybe something is also wrong about how you're applying those interpretations. Over time, and with quite a bit of help, you begin feeling your way out of the darkness of Christian fundamentalism and the trap of biblical literalism. You can see the contradictions in the text now, but they don't scare you. They simply point to he beautiful frailty of the real people behind the Bible, a frailty that you see all around you every day. As you change the way you interpret the Bible, you change your theology. You begin ignoring those parts of the Bible that endorse prejudice, or misogyny, or genocide. You allow other voices, like science and your own experience, to inform your understanding of God.

Then you wake up one morning and realize that you don't fit in at church. Not only don't you fit in, but you're not really welcome, and you don't particularly like being there.

And that's where I found myself a few weeks ago.

I realized that while my church is admirable in its attempts to pursue social justice and racial integration, its justifications for doing so, and its core theology, were essentially fundamentalist. My church is great in that it has no creeds, no membership, no checklist telling us who's in and who's out, but underlying all of its programs, all its deliberations about church leadership, all its expressions of worship and interactions with the surrounding community was this fundamental, axiomatic belief that the Bible is the infallible word of God. And that made church exhuasting.

Instead of singing, I spent my time trying to translate the song lyrics into metaphors I could affirm.

Instead of praying, I spent my time pondering the moral bankruptcy of a God who would grant any of our prayer requests, while every day, thousands of people starved to death. I tried not to be appalled at people who would follow such a God.

Instead of speaking the standard Jesus-speak, or providing perspectives that would contradict the established church culture, I tried to keep my mouth shut. I mostly failed at that, though, which mostly made me feel like a curmudgeonly bastard.

I became desperately grouchy, because I was always having to define my faith in terms of what I didn't believe, and I didn't have any spiritual mentors who could show me the way to a positive, progressive faith. (Thank God for the Internet, right? People like Paul and Crystal kept me afloat ... I want to kiss them.)

Finally, I realized that being at church wasn't doing me any good. It wasn't making me a more virtuous person, and it wasn't even making me feel good. Going to church was like poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick, and it would probably be better for everyone involved if I just STOPPED POKING MYSELF IN THE EYE WITH A STICK.

So I did. And now I feel better.

In the future, I may return to a church. My roots are there, my family is there, and I'd like to try to help people who are looking for an alternative to fundamentalism. But for now, I have to figure out the next few lines of my story.

I'd like to find a faith community that exhibits the virtues that I hope to learn. I'd like to find mentors who can express their progressive faith in positive terms. I'd like to see if I can learn some wisdom from other faith traditions, because there are books other than the Bible. I've even read a few of them, and while in lots of places they're as scary as the Bible in the hands of an angry fundamentalist, there always seems to be something to learn about love, or people, or God.

And one last thing: for those of you who might be worried about my apostasy, have no fear. God is out here too.

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.

Yes We Can

2008-02-04T09:26:00.000-06:00

I linked to this in my news feed (up there at the top right), but it deserves its own post.

Epiphany

2008-01-25T14:37:00.000-06:00

I've decided to take a break from church. Just 'cause.

Hrm

2008-01-13T14:15:00.000-06:00

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

from Letter from Birmingham Jail

Perplexed

2007-12-26T09:13:00.001-06:00

Somebody help me out here: How does a Kantian, deontological-type ethicist justify inflicting pain for medical purposes? Giving an injection, for example? And how is this different from the scenarios where he has to choose whether to trade 1 life for 100 lives?

Merry Christmas

2007-12-21T13:10:00.000-06:00

Listen.

What's new

2007-12-09T16:24:00.000-06:00

Before I begin my next bit of armchair theology, I suppose I ought to provide a few updates, just so there's not a lot of discontinuity between this year's post and last year's post.

First, I'm slowly working my way through Rene Girard for Dummies by S. Mark Heim, a fascinating book that is probably better known by the title Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. Heim begins with some of the things that start to disturb us when our liberal humanist sensibilities collide with the biblical text: things like the conquest of Canaan, and the book of Job, and the binding of Isaac.

One particularly disturbing doctrine highlighted by Heim is the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement: the idea that while all humans deserve the wrath of God, Jesus saves us from that wrath by invoking the rules of the old sacrificial system, offering himself in our place as a perfect sacrifice to appease God's thirst for justice. Heim presents Girard's thought as a sort of antidote to PSA, a different way of understanding both the Bible and the saving power of the cross.

In the next few posts, I'll pick out some interesting bits of this book and share them with you. But you'll have to be patient ... like I said, I'm moving rather slowly, because I now have not just one, but two, count them, TWO children living at my house!

In addition to the time and attention required by a new daughter, I'm also spending some extra time taking care of her mother, because for some reason -- maybe she thinks it's funny -- she just keeps trying to die on us. Yes, she's home now, and doing very well, but to be perfectly honest, I wish she would QUIT SCARING ME, thank you very much.

Also, on a totally unrelated note, I hate doctors.

So next time, we'll have big fun talking about Heim, and we'll all learn why I'm right about God and Scoots is wrong. Until then ...

So what's up with Abraham sacrificing Isaac?

2007-11-19T21:17:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to hear a sermon about this biblical story. You know, the one where Abraham is out playing ball with his miracle child Isaac, and God shows up with some instructions:

"Abraham!"
"Here I am," he replied.
"Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."

Wait, what?

To his credit, the preacher mentioned that this story is a little problematic. Then he went on to extract the moral that we ought to loosen our grip on our ideas about ownership ... that we ought not be Consumers above all, and that we should be willing to give God whatever God demands. That bit of scolding was good for me, because the message about holding loosely to things and releasing my consumer identity is definitely a message I need to hear.

But this lukewarm approach to the story of Abraham and Isaac still strikes me as sort of ... how do I say this nicely? Morally deficient?

Bad?

Evil.

OK, so I'll grant that we shouldn't be all grabby about our possessions. Great. But it makes me a bit queasy to see Abraham held up as a paragon of virtue when he holds his morals so loosely that he's willing to stoop to human sacrifice. I mean, it's not like this is some abstract theological question about an event that could only happen in the context of a Middle Eastern sacrificial system. No, apparently people have to answer this question on a fairly regular basis. When the voice of God pops into your head and tells you to kill your children, what should you do?

I don't know how much theological arguments can influence people with schizophrenic disorders. Maybe not at all. But my answer to the question is: if that voice in your head tells you to do something evil, like murder your children, call "bullshit". You can be pretty sure that it's not the voice of God.

Oh, but what if God has changed her mind and decided that in this situation, it is actually good to kill your child!?

Bullshit.

Maybe God knows good and evil, but she doesn't make them out of thin air. Power does not imply goodness. Or in the words of T.H. White, might does not make right.

Therefore, if you're worshiping a God who obliterates entire races of people, and demands child sacrifice, and deceives his followers about the nature of good and evil, then you've been tricked. You aren't worshiping a good God, you're worshiping an evil spirit. And by worshiping it, you empower it. You are complicit in it. If it continues to hold sway over the earth, then to some small degree, it's your fault.

Ahem.

After the sermon ended, a husband and wife stood up to share some thoughts before the eucharist; in our tradition we call them "communion meditations". And while I wish they had said something different, I can't really blame them for what they did next. They began juxtaposing scriptures about the sacrifice of Isaac with scriptures about Jesus, implying that just as Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac to God, God was willing to sacrifice Jesus to God, so that our sins could be forgiven.

Like I said, I can't really blame them. The metaphor pops up in the text over and over again, and if somehow God can be good while also demanding child sacrifice, well then of course God can be good while demanding adult sacrifice. God can't just forgive the sins of the world, somehow reparation has to be made, God's wrath has to be "satisfied". Jesus has to be the perfect sacrificial lamb.

On my more generous days, when I read those things, I can imagine how they were helpful to someone. But the only people I can imagine who might have taken away more good than evil from those metaphors were premodern Jews, who had no inkling about the philosophies of liberal humanism, and whose worldview was steeped in blood and sacrificial mystery.

Premodern Jews.

Now I understand why the church spends so much time literally interpreting biblical stories, giving churchgoers background about the Jewish sacrificial system, praying for rain, disparaging other religions and allowing a tribal deity's murders and genocides to go unexamined. It's because almost all of its sacred texts were written for an audience of premodern Jews. The only way to make any sense of the Bible, really, is to squeeze one's postmodern, liberal humanist mind into a premodern, Jewish worldview. It's only then that the theology of penal substitutionary atonement can be self-evidently beautiful, and it's only then that we can ignore the dissonance between God's claims to be huge and eternal and God's apparent distaste for shrimp, polyester and homosexuals. It's only then that it makes sense to say "Jesus ascended into heaven" rather than "Jesus flew off into space".

Consequently, my current task at church has become translation. Maybe this has even become my approach to theology in general. How can we understand the Christian story -- what metaphors can we use -- that will make it powerful and engaging for people who haven't spent their whole lives training to be premodern Jews? More practically, how can I make it through a church service without being offended at the wicked, petty God that my fellow Christians worship?

It's a tricky proposition, and though I think I've come a long way in the past few years, I'm still hunting the used bookstores for a pocket dictionary translating between "postmodern liberal humanist" and "premodern Jew". Wish me luck.

Slashdot: God Box

2007-10-08T09:35:00.000-05:00

Not really new news, but, does anybody want a God Box?

The most straightforward philosophical arguments are here and here.

Thanks for the clear thinking, mstone.

Guantanamo

2007-10-07T21:21:00.000-05:00

70455h/t Aric Clark

Surprise! I'm really a conservative!

2007-10-02T09:23:00.000-05:00

We haven't talked about economics for a while ... OK, we haven't talked about anything for a while, but still ... I think I'm going to highlight this post from our friend Jack Whelan:

... she rejected Greenspan's characterization of her as a socialist, defining herself rather as a proponent of a mixed economy, which is essentially what we've had here in the U.S. since the New Deal.

That's really the argument here. It's not between radical laissez-faire capitalists and radical socialists, but between radical capitalists and mixed-economy conservatives. The people who want to preserve the New Deal compromise between free markets and government controls are the real conservatives, because they are trying to conserve institutions that have already been established and despite their flaws have proved themselves effective. The fact that those who now defend the New Deal are considered leftists and that the radical capitalists are considered mainstream moderates shows how twisted our political discourse has become.

Dirty thoughts about God

2007-08-28T00:54:00.000-05:00

OK, so while we're going this direction, let's talk about "cultivating a deep love for God" ... if you know what I mean.

Assuming that none of my female readers are going to share their secret sexual thoughts about God and Jesus, let's start with the famous mystic Teresa of Avila.

It pleased our Lord that I should see the following vision a number of times. I saw an angel near me, on the left side, in bodily form. This I am not wont to see, save very rarely.... In this vision it pleased the Lord that I should see it thus. He was not tall, but short, marvellously beautiful, with a face which shone as though he were one of the highest of the angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call Seraphim.... I saw in his hands a long golden spear, and at the point of the iron there seemed to be a little fire. This I thought that he thrust several times into my heart, and that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew out the spear he seemed to be drawing them with it, leaving me all on fire with a wondrous love for God. The pain was so great that it caused me to utter several moans; and yet so exceeding sweet is this greatest of pains that it is impossible to desire to be rid of it, or for the soul to be content with less than God. (Peers, 197)

Cough cough.

Cough.

So far as I can tell, this is about par for the course with Saint Teresa. She's really, really, really hot on God.

If you know what I mean.

And I have this sneaking suspicion that she's not the only one.

Let's begin by observing that most human beings are interested in sex. Sexual hardware is buried pretty deep in our brains, and influences us in all sorts of bizarre ways. Take, for example, this image from a Nielsen eyetracking study:

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

And even if you hadn't noticed that people are interested in sex, sexuality and sexual anatomy, advertisers have noticed: On the way home from Arkansas today, I tried to count all the billboards that used some sexualized image to sell a product. And even if you don't count each breast separately, the number is ridiculously high.

SPOILER ALERT: You may not be able to sing church songs the same way after reading the next few paragraphs.

Next, let's consider the sexy lyrics of modern praise and worship music:

All to Jesus, I surrender;

All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Humbly at His feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken;
Take me, Jesus, take me now.

All to Jesus, I surrender;
Make me, Savior, wholly Thine;
Let me feel the Holy Spirit,
Truly know that Thou art mine.

All to Jesus, I surrender;
Lord, I give myself to Thee;
Fill me with Thy love and power;
Let Thy blessing fall on me.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Now I feel the sacred flame.
O the joy of full salvation!
Glory, glory, to His Name!

Yes, I think "All to Jesus I Surrender" is my favorite source of questionable lyrics, but other examples abound. Please share your own.

Now my guess is that these lyrics aren't the result of someone's explicit sexual thoughts about God or Jesus, but I find it hard to believe that the ecstatic, sexualized language of these praise songs is significantly different than Saint Teresa's visions. If nothing else, both use sexually charged language because it's the writer's best chance at communicating the ecstacy of the experience of God.

So given that people bring their sexuality to their experience of God, let's observe that almost all of the God-language and God-imagery used in evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches is masculine. God is always referred to using the male pronoun "he". God is often addressed as "father". Jesus (God incarnate) is male, and is often portrayed as a healthy young man in a snappy white tunic with a snappy blue sash. The holy spirit shows up and gets Mary pregnant.

My suspicion, then, is that women and men both have a sexual component to their understanding of God, and that this component significantly influences how they relate to God. The straight man and the gay man will have attitudes and understandings of God that are flavored by all sorts of sexual and father-figure issues. The straight woman and lesbian woman will bring similar baggage.

And so I have all these questions about how much this sexual component influences a person's perception of the divine. Are men less attracted to women who are attracted to God? (A recent study summary I read suggested that male attraction to a female decreases if another male finds the female attractive.) Are men less involved in church because it's perceived to be the territory of another male, or because they have no way to relate sexually to God? Is temple prostitution the inevitable byproduct of goddess-worship, and if so is there a mirrored problem for god-worship? Is sexual attraction to God generally good, or generally harmful? And can we talk about this, or is it too offensive?

Yeah, it's probably too offensive.

Cough.

Why it's hard to be a Christian Feminist

2007-08-19T16:10:00.000-05:00

Scenario 1

Let's suppose that you consider it virtuous to speak (and act) against injustice and oppression.

Let's also suppose that you consider it virtuous to commit yourself to a church, which means, among other things, continuing to attend even if you have issues with the church's theology or practices or members. After all, you can't change the church for the better if you just up and leave, and frankly, church-hoppers are annoying.

Let's also suppose that your church refuses to give women and men equal status in the church. In particular, certain jobs that could be done equally well by both men and women are reserved for men, and this is reflective of a deeper misogyny woven into the fabric of the church and maintained by its traditions.

Let's also suppose that you're a man.

What do you do?

Scenario 2

OK, now let's say that you've discussed the issue in bible classes, and with church leaders, and you've already refused to serve the church in any office that is not open to both men and women: One Sunday, once you finished leading worship, you politely said that you wouldn't be leading worship any more -- that you wouldn't be doing anything that men and women weren't both allowed to do -- and that no one should be upset or agitated, and then you smiled and sat down.

So you've waited for a year or so, but none of the church leaders seem interested in pursuing the issue of whether the church practices are unjust, oppressive or unfair. And in fact there is no real forum for such a discussion.

And so you're thinking about taking some action to denote your continual displeasure ... if only make yourself a little less complicit in the sins of this church that you find yourself unable to leave or change. In particular, you're thinking about wearing a gag to church every Sunday. And because your denomination is ripe for a big messy schism, you're looking into recruiting like-minded people all over the world who will wear their gags to church, maybe every Sunday, or maybe just one Sunday a year. Like father's day or something.

How's that sound?

Can't seem to get on topic

2007-08-09T09:15:00.000-05:00

But after sharing the book recommendations, I feel compelled to make some music recommendations. Both of these came to me from Colby, so if you like them, you should send all your affection to him.

First, an album: Ys, by Joanna Newsom. This is not the kind of album that you are likely to like right off. Newsom is a harpist - not an instrument you're used to hearing - and her voice is a bit ... unusual. Each track is fairly long - 7 to 15 minutes - and lyrically, the songs are very dense. But I think they're wonderful.

The other thing you need to try is Last.fm. Think of it as internet radio where you create the station. You enter the name of an artist you like, and Last.fm plays music from that artist and other artists that are "near" or "similar" to the artist you chose. It also does some social networking music tracking stuff. Obviously, you could create a channel for Joanna Newsom, but then who knows if you'll ever get to hear Ys? You should just buy it from iTunes, and then hate me for a week until you start to like it.

What I did this summer

2007-08-01T12:02:00.000-05:00

In addition to performing in the Abilene Shakespeare Festival (w00t), I also read some books. I would post my deep insights, but I don't think I have many deep insights. So I'll just give you some brief reviews, in the interest of getting back into the habit of posting again.

Bears Discover Fire - Terry Bisson
A collection of sci-fi short stories. My favorite was a story I had already read: "They're Made out of Meat".

Life Could Be Sweeter - William Sinunu
A former flight attendant brings you insights from other cultures.

Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway - Dave Barry
Not his best, but probably as funny as a Libertarian can be when talking about the U.S. government.

How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter - Sherwin B. Nuland
Interesting. Describes, clinically, how we die from cancer, cardiac arrest, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and other maladies ... but also describes how people confront the prospect of their own death. The best book in the bunch.

Through Painted Deserts - Donald Miller
A coming-of-age tale by the author of Blue Like Jazz. In my opinion, the intro is better than anything in the book itself.

A New Kind of Christian - Brian McLaren
A coming-of-age tale by a well-known pastor and emergent church guy. I didn't find any of this terribly interesting, but then again, I'm not sure I'm part of the target audience for this book. So I'm going to withhold judgment. It may have some things to teach me about approaching conservative Christians.

Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
A graphic novel written by Alan Moore, who you might know better as the author of V for Vendetta. Nudges the reader toward some interesting questions about scientific ethics, free will and determinism, and the abuse of power.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
Rowling moves really quickly in the final book of the series, trying to cram everything in I suppose. Still, it's good. I thought the final chapters were some of the best in the series.

So what's up with that floating Axehead?

2007-07-15T15:42:00.000-05:00

The company of the prophets said to Elisha, "Look, the place where we meet with you is too small for us. Let us go to the Jordan, where each of us can get a pole; and let us build a place there for us to live."

And he said, "Go."

Then one of them said, "Won't you please come with your servants?" "I will," Elisha replied. And he went with them.

They went to the Jordan and began to cut down trees. As one of them was cutting down a tree, the iron axhead fell into the water. "Oh, my lord," he cried out, "it was borrowed!"

The man of God asked, "Where did it fall?" When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. "Lift it out," he said. Then the man reached out his hand and took it.

2 Kings 6

Our preacher chose this story as the text for today's sermon. He explained that this story disturbs him, not because God made the axehead float, but because God doesn't do a lot of things that are a plainly more important than a prophet's borrowed axe.

We pray, he said, for people who need to be healed from diseases, and they aren't healed. We pray, he said, for people who need peace in their families or joy in their lives, and they dismantle their families or succumb to depression. How do we deal with these disappointments?

Now I don't know about you, but I think that it's pretty ballsy for a preacher to raise these sorts of questions from the pulpit. People need to hear that their doubts are perfectly well grounded -- that there really is something disturbing about the idea that God would float a borrowed axehead and not heal a cancer-stricken mother of three.

Rather than address the question of whether God actually floated an axehead for Elisha, our preacher chose to direct people toward what might be called "everyday miracles" ... rain, gentleness, generosity, things like that. Don't miss these miracles, he said, because you're fixated on floating axeheads, or because you've altogether given up on them.

I think this is a good redirection, and definitely a helpful antidote to the attitude that says, "your prayers aren't answered because you don't have enough faith." (Mark 11) But I question whether this goes far enough. As I've said before, I think the issue is primarily moral: can we say God is "good" if God floats axeheads for prophets but neglects to answer our prayers for suffering families? I think it is much better to say that God doesn't float axheads than to insinuate that prophets' axheads are more important to God than the friends and relatives of ordinary people.

As I was thinking about this, though, I began to wonder about my constant insistence that God be good. What if "God is good" is just as much a metaphor as "Jesus is the son of God?" What if, in using God's goodness as a basis for argument, I am overextending the metaphor "God is good"?

I'm not sure what to do with that thought, but I find it a little disconcerting.

So what's up with Ananias and Sapphira?

2007-06-26T14:55:00.000-05:00

So long as we've started with problematic Biblical passages, I guess we might as well continue. But first, a clarification: when I say, "problematic", I mostly mean morally problematic. I'm not really qualified to delve deeply into textual difficulties, but I figure I'm allowed to ask pointed questions about passages that seem to endorse things that are morally repugnant.

This isn't an attempt to repudiate the Bible or anything. In my opinion, it's absolutely ridiculous to hunt around for objectionable passages out of this book or that book, and follow that up with a conclusion that the Bible is worthless. By contrast, this is an attempt to expose questionable pieces of scripture that we might use to justify our own misbehavior. It's an attempt to allow ethics to affect how we interpret and assign normative value to various parts of scripture, when we usually do this the other way around.

So let's take a peek at the passage that was the sermon text at my church this past Sunday. It's the story of two early Christians, Ananias and Sapphira, and is found in Acts 5. I'll start my quotes a little earlier, in chapter 4.

Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means Son of Encouragement), sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles' feet.

Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife's full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles' feet.

Then Peter said, "Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn't it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn't the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God."

When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then the young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, "Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?"

"Yes," she said, "that is the price."

Peter said to her, "How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also."

At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

Now, let me begin by saying that I don't think we should let Ananias and Sapphira off the hook for being greedy. The story obviously presents them as trying to get the church to approve of their generosity while feathering their own nest. But really, does the punishment fit the crime? So that's my first question about the ethics implicit in this passage: how is God morally justified in killing Ananias and Sapphira?

My second question has to do with Peter's attitude. Like one of my friends at church said, "Peter doesn't seem to be acting very much like Jesus." To make this a little more obvious, imagine Ananias and Sapphira as a couple from your church. You can even imagine some people you don't like very much.

Now imagine that the husband comes in to talk one of the church leaders, lies to him, and then keels over dead from a heart attack. When the wife comes in a couple hours later, what would you expect the church leader to do?

A. Gently break the news of the husband's death.
B. Warn the woman to be honest so God doesn't strike her dead.
C. Craftily cross-examine the woman and get her killed too.

I would hope for A, or at least B, but Peter seems to be doing C. Yep, those are the kinds of leaders I want for my church! So the second question is: how is Peter morally justified in entrapping, rather than comforting, Sapphira?

My third question isn't really specifically moral, but in light of ConcernedEngineer's recent comments - about how rejecting him is the same thing as rejecting God - I want to ask this question too. When Sapphira lies to Peter, he responds with, "How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord?" My third question is: How is lying to Peter the same thing as "testing the Sprit of the Lord"?

My hunch is, there are no satisfactory answers to these questions. There is no way to justify the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira. There is no way to justify Peter's entrapping Sapphira. And lying to Peter is absolutely nothing like testing the Spirit of the Lord. Combined with the fact that this is one of only two New Testament stories about God striking people dead (excluding whatever the heck is happening in Revelation ... and correct me if I'm wrong), I think we should be very cautious in trying to interpret this story and apply it to today's church. Frankly, I'm tempted to take the scissors to this story, but that would put an ugly hole in the middle of the story of Stephen, so I'll refrain.

Giving notice

2007-06-22T09:51:00.001-05:00

Although I hate to give ConcernedEngineer his own post, I've never expected to have to ban anybody before, so I guess it's good to make this all aboveboard.

ConcernedEngineer:

This is my blog, and therefore I feel responsible for keeping it a hospitable environment for discussion. Your comment spamming, backposting and intellectual arrogance do not contribute to a pleasant environment. Incidentally, neither do your malice and misogyny.

I thought that if I teased you a bit, you would understand that I find you ridiculous, and then you would lighten up or go away. Obviously I was wrong.

So because this blog has only one rule, let's go back to the rule. Please answer the following questions for me:

Obviously, you believe that God exists. Is it possible that you might be wrong, and that God does not exist?

Obviously, you consider the Bible the Inspired Word Of God. Is it possible that you might be wrong, and that people, not God, were responsible for the biblical text?

Obviously, you believe that your interpretation of the Bible is correct, even on nebulous doctrines such as trinitarianism, which are not explicitly laid out anywhere in the Bible. Is it possible that you have wrongly interpreted the Bible?

If you cannot admit your own limitations with regard to these three topics, I will invoke the one rule of this blog, and ban you from it altogether.

(Also, if any of you think I should do something different, or think I'm misapplying my own rule, please comment.)

-Me

So what's up with the end of Job?

2007-06-18T15:45:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about the book of Job on Friday afternoon ... in particular, the end, where God shows up and scolds Job for trying to get a straight answer out of the being who created the earth:

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?

...

Can you pull in the leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope? ... Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?

Having read the previous 40-odd chapters, this whole monologue just sounds wrong to me. This God isn't any more righteous than Job's four "friends", and everything God says just begs for a similar rebuke from Job. Maybe something like this:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm.

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand."

"Interesting question," Job replied. "Where where you when my flocks were stolen? And when my servants were murdered? And when my sons and daughters were crushed under a ton of rubble?"

"But," the LORD blustered, "can you put the leviathan on a leash for your girls?"

"Perhaps you've forgotten," said Job. "My girls are all dead."

"Oh," the LORD said. "Good point."

So the LORD blessed Job with more sons and daughters and money than he had before.

"But my sons and daughters are still dead," Job said.

"Would you shut up already?" the LORD snarled. "Who do you think I am, God?"

Exit The LORD

So I started backpedaling through Job. Back through God's speech. Back through Elihu's speech. All the way back to chapter 31, where we find Job's last rebuke to his so-called friends, and this curious sentence:

The words of Job are ended.

What gives? Because the words of Job are definitely not ended. After Elihu shows up, and God shows up, he gives that little kicker about how he had heard of God, but now he's seen God, so he repents in dust and ashes.

Maybe ... could it be possible that the last 11 chapters of Job were added onto an original narrative? Let's look at the first part of chapter 32, right after "the words of Job are ended..."

So these three men stopped answering Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes. But Elihu son of Barakel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, became very angry with Job for justifying himself rather than God. He was also angry with the three friends, because they had found no way to refute Job, and yet had condemned him. Now Elihu had waited before speaking to Job because they were older than he. But when he saw that the three men had nothing more to say, his anger was aroused.

Blink.

Is it just me, or is that passage practically begging us to conclude that there's a second author who glued his stuff onto the end of Job?

I suspect that it is not just me, and that there's a whole bunch of scholarship that says that Job is the work of at least two authors. But I haven't gone looking for that textual stuff yet. I'm just busy being blown away because I didn't notice this before.

So, my textual-study-type friends ... do you know anything about the authorship of Job?

Linky Linky

2007-06-06T07:49:00.000-05:00

Normally, I am content to tag interesting articles that come through my feed reader and let you pick the ones you find interesting out of the "News and Opinion" widget over there on the right side of the window.

Over there. ->

But given our brief conversations about epistemic humility and the gender of God, and given my interest in seeing our traditional doctrines as metaphors, rather than reductionistic descriptions of metaphysical truths, I think you should read the following blog post at Find and Ye Shall Seek.

Trinity Sunday

The doctrine of the Trinity was a tool; it served a means of consolidating victory by Nicean forces in the Christian power struggles of that century. It lent a much needed theoretical foundation for the victorious side, one that various factions could coalesce around. The doctrine of the Trinity, as formulated by Gregory of Nyssa, actually made for an interesting and sophisticated theology. Unfortunately, whereas it should have served as a jumping off point for further free inquiry into the nature of God, the opposite is instead what happened; it became a tool with which to bludgeon dissidents. This is because the various factions that coalesced around it colluded with Roman state power to stamp out Arianism or any other free thinking doctrine.

A Shibboleth

2007-06-01T10:36:00.001-05:00

I am hereby announcing a rule for my blog.

This is significant because it is the first rule ever to be declared on my blog. And really, I don't like making rules. Usually, most people are already following all the rules they are willing to follow, and they don't need any more rules, kthx.

But after visiting other blogs and encountering the same exasperating, circular conversation over and over again, I am going to institute a rule ... not because the readers of my blog have a big problem with this issue, but because I think this rule should be a "best practice" that will help create thoughtful and productive blogging communities.

The rule is this:

If you are unwilling to admit the possibility that you might be wrong, I will delete your comments.

I think this rule will be fairly easy to enforce. We will simply use the phrase "but I might be wrong" as a shibboleth. If you are incapable of admitting even the *possibility* that you might be wrong, you're not discussing, you're proselytizing, and we'll thank you to go away. Take this discussion for example:

Biff: THE USA IS EVIL! IT IS DESTROYING THE WORLD! WE HATES IT!
Sully: The USA is evil? Do you think it's *possible* that you might be wrong about that?
Biff: No, there is no possibility that I am wrong. I am unequivocally right, I know the Truth and I am here to share it with you.
Me: Biff, please go away. You are in clear violation of the first rule and your subsequent comments on this topic will be deleted.

So beware! At any time, you may be called upon to pronounce the Shibboleth.

Altruism turns me on

2007-05-29T09:32:00.000-05:00

In a number of previous conversations, I've tried to explain why I think that people who decide to do "the right thing" aren't particularly praiseworthy.

Nice people do the right thing because they feel like it. They do not, in some spiritual sense, muster up The Will To Do Good and apply it to their situation. Instead, their values make them feel like doing the right thing instead of pursuing some other option.

Recent neuroscience seems to support this opinion. If you have a minute, read this article at the Washington Post.

The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!"

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

(h/t GKB.)

Speaking of perplexed...

2007-05-25T10:28:00.000-05:00

Congressional Democrats have recently decided to use the power of the purse a little more gently, offering the President funding to continue his war without schedules, timetables or whatever you want to call them.

Obviously, the war in Iraq has been an ill-begotten, poorly-planned, poorly executed fiasco. But given that that's the case, here are two questions for you smart people:

1. Is the situation in Iraq "improving", "degrading", or "staying the same", and on what do you base this estimation?

2. What should the U.S. do next in Iraq, and why?

Please source your responses as well as possible. And Elrod, if you're reading, I'm especially interested in your opinion.

'Cause I'm perplexed.

Update: And in case you weren't going to respond because all you had to say was BS, you're also allowed to simply link to people who seem to know what they're talking about. Ready, go.

Climate Change

2007-05-16T16:27:00.000-05:00

You may find this article from NewScientist interesting:

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed

A great bible class idea

2007-05-04T15:40:00.000-05:00

Well, Richard Beck is laying out some principles for the class he is teaching at church, so this seems like a good time to share my latest Bible class idea. I guess you could use it for a sermon, too, but you should probably send the kids out of the auditorium/sanctuary first.

The idea revolves around a trend in recent horror films ... Hostel, Saw, Saw II, Saw III, and so forth. I haven't seen any of these films myself, but people who have seen them tell me that they represent a move from "horror film" to "torture film". In the past, it might have been difficult to get ahold of graphic depictions of torture, but I'm thinking that these videos should be pretty easy to find. (Though I guess if you're not up for the horror films, you could just make do with the fingernail-ripping scene from Syriana.)

So you get together some of the most gruesome scenes in this video, and you splice them together, back to back. When your class arrives, you sit them all down in front of a TV, turn down the lights, and play your video.

Be sure to set it to loop. Over and over and over.

When people start leaving, mock them. Tell them that it's embarrassing that they can't endure an hour of watching suffering and torture, when God intends to watch people to suffer in hell for eternity.

If anyone is still hanging around, read them the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.

For the one or two people who haven't left because you cleverly tied them to their chairs while the lights were off, read them the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15. Be sure they know it's in Luke 15, which comes right before Luke 16.

Then go find a new church. Hopefully, these people won't need you to help them work out a new doctrine of hell.

Why we shouldn't talk about crucifixion with children

2007-05-03T08:22:00.000-05:00

The pair of images is from a series of monsters drawn by children and continued by artists. h/t colby.

I have an idea

2007-05-02T14:12:00.000-05:00

People seem to react poorly when I call God "she", so I've been trying to think up something a little less jarring.

If I can't call God "she", and it doesn't make much sense to call Jesus "she", maybe I can call the holy spirit "she" and not get kicked out of church.

Who's with me?

I hate April

2007-04-30T11:37:00.000-05:00

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

- from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Identity is messy

2007-04-27T13:19:00.000-05:00

Just jokin' about the post I promised you. I'm going to post this one first, because I like it, and because it's marginally related.

What follows is a musing by my Victorian* friend Sara Martinez.

In case you weren't aware, "musing" is a literary genre, named by Sara, which often involves thoughts written on napkins, trees, walls and random Web sites. This musing was first published on the wildly illustrated wall of an art studio on the ACU campus. Imagine it's written in blue marker.

I am myself, a single, whole entity, having only one physical manifestation and occupying only a set length of time, having only one soul, whose destiny is unique. Yet I am myself a plurality, made of various, uncertainly connected, discrete parts.

For I am made of emotions that bow to various masters, of thoughts born from various progenitors, of opinions that have grown from, are growing from, or have yet to grow from seeds sown by various cultivators.

My heart cannot be said to be one to give to one, for it is free for the tearing to many, who may hate me, who may love me, who may never have even imagined my existence.

I am not of a uniform, singular, or unique spirit, being prone to mercurial changes in tone of mind and direction of purpose.

Bearing all this in mind, then, though I am but one person, in what way, exactly, am I an individual?

* "Victorian" as in "from Victoria", with no connotations of prudishness or steampunk.

Thinking Blogger Awards

2007-04-26T09:44:00.002-05:00

I've been tagged with the "thinking blogger" award-slash-meme by Paul and Richard. (Richard thinks it started here.) I am supposed to respond by naming five bloggers who make me think. I'll go ahead and start with ... Paul and Richard:

1. Original Faith is Paul Martin's blog. Paul knows about interesting things like belief, psychology, and being really ill. Also, He's a bit of a poet. I like that about him.

2. Experimental Theology is Richard Beck's blog. Richard is a philosophy professor at my alma mater, Abilene Christian University, and shares my peculiar religious tradition. He knows about interesting things like genes, psychology, and speakeasies in New Orleans. He plugged me as "one of the few people I know who might be more heretical than I am". I like that about him.

Here are six other bloggers who make me think. I need to do extra because I don't want a real "blogroll" on my sidebar, and I feel bad about it sometimes. This is my way of expurgating that guilt. I'm glad you can all help me out.

3. Douglas Muder is a Unitarian Universalist, who once upon a time gently thumped me down because I said he had written a book he hadn't written. He's not a frequent poster, but he occasionally drops some good stuff at Free and Responsible Search.

4. Jack Whelan and Crystal are both Catholic, so I'm cheating and squeezing them into one slot. Jack's blog, After the Future, is primarily political, with a little touch of Catholic theology thrown in occasionally to spice things up. Crystal's blog, Perspective, is probably the most personal blog that I read, and has lots of Catholic theology with the occasional sci-fi movie review thrown in to spice things up.

5. Scoots is a Ph.D. student at Boston College, which happens to be in Boston. Scoots is a contrarian in a sea of liberals, just like I'm a contrarian in a sea of conservatives, so his posts tend to be a little conservative. His almost-eponymous blog tends to talk about things like the Bible and songs by Rich Mullins. But it's pretty good anyway.

6. Joel Spolsky, at Joel on Software, writes mostly about software development, but a lot of his insights apply to entrepreneurship in general. He used to work for Microsoft, started his own software company and wrote a couple of books, and has since ascended to the status of demigod in the programming community. I think this might have something to do with the fact that he says things like, "programmers should not be farmed in cubicles, but should have their own private offices with doors." I could be way off base, though.

7. Pastor Katherine preaches at South Bay Christian Church of Redondo Beach, which should make you deeply jealous. Her Sermon Blog is here, and she mostly keeps it updated. On a fairly regular basis, Pastor K's sermons manage to be triumphant without being cotton-candy. That's pretty sweet.

So there you have it, my set of "thinking blogger" awards. Hugs and kisses to all the winners.

Next up: the promised post about God and information theory.

Panentheism and Theodicy: Creator's guilt

2007-04-09T16:47:00.001-05:00

I strongly suspect that the panentheistic approach isn't a silver bullet for theodicy problems, but it does have some interesting implications. For example, Scoots asked...

Would we understand a panentheistic God as having created the cosmos, i.e., with some form of intention? Because if we don't, then we still need some explanation for why there's a universe, and if we do then that god would still bear culpability for making a world where horrors would take place.

I think a panentheist could go either way on this one, depending on how he understands the relationship between God and the universe. An epiphenominal panentheist* who says that the mind of God arises from out of the universe, would probably say that God did not create the universe, but instead the universe created God. Regarding the origin of the universe ... who knows? I guess he could ascribe to some scientific theory about the of the universe, or he could dip into some narrative that attempts to explain existence, or he could simply argue that the question of "why" doesn't make any sense with regard to brute existence.

A pattern panentheist* might argue that God is not personal, and is therefore both unable to willfully "create" and, by similar reasoning, exempt from guilt altogether.

But a Platonic panentheist* might say that God is personal and did in fact create the universe. Then, like Scoots says, he would need to justify God's decision to create. If God created the universe, and could have foreseen the horrors that would come to pass, then God should be held responsible for those horrors. I expect a Platonic panentheist would use one of the many arguments that traditional theists have already made attempting to extricate God from creator's guilt. Maybe he would take a line from Romans 9 and say that it's OK for God to create things with the intent of destroying them. I don't like that approach very much. Maybe he would argue this is this is indeed the best possible world, and that the goods of existence outweigh the horrors that seem to remove any possibility of meaning from that existence. I don't like that approach either.

But here's a possibility: what if the idea of "creator's guilt" makes sense when discussing, say, the atomic bomb, but is inherently contradictory when discussing the creation of worlds. Here's what I mean:

Suppose that God is puttering around in God's kitchen, making Mrs. God an egg sandwich and trying to decide whether or not to create a universe. And to simplify things, let's further suppose that God wants to create a deterministic universe, where all events in time can be known based on the universe's starting configuration.

Also, God is making the egg sandwich using eggs from free-range, grain-fed chickens, so there's no guilt to deal with there.

To decide whether a universe is worth creating, God can simply follow the implications of the universe's configuration, thinking it through, so to speak, and decide whether the horrors in this potential universe are justifiable. If they're not justifiable, God will refrain from creating the universe. If they are justifiable, then God can go right ahead and do whatever God wants.

So, settling down in an easy chair, God begins thinking through our universe. God begins with the big bang, or whatever came before that, and proceeds to the formation of earth, and the animal ferocity of life as it evolved. God's mind simulates the universe perfectly, so God knows your person in its entirety. God knows what Abraham will think about Isaac, and what Pharaoh will do about the Israelites, and what you will think about these words you are reading right now. God considers, in every detail, the suffering of starving children, the grief of mothers, lovers, friends, every single detail up to the point that God decides should be the end of the universe.

But wait.

In thinking so exactly about the world, and its people, and their thoughts and feelings, God has essentially created that world.

In information systems terms, the hardware of the universe is the mind of God. The program of the universe is composed of its its initial configuration and physical laws. And because, in our panentheistic model, the mind of God is the only reality we have to work with, the only way to know the outcome the universe is to run the program. Once the program has been run, the horrors have already occurred. God simply can't think through a potential universe without making it an actual universe.

And if that's not curious enough: what if this is the simulation? What if, right now, God is simultaneously considering all possible universes, and the salvation of the universe involves God's ultimately selecting the best possible universe, or - even better - merging all the possible universes into the Best Possible Universe?

Hunh. Things keep getting curiouser and curiouser.

* I just kind of made up the terms "epiphenominal panentheist", "pattern panentheist" and "Platonic panentheist", so you might not want to use them in essays or on dates or anywhere important.

Panentheism and Theodicy: Why worship?

2007-04-03T09:41:00.000-05:00

Next, Connor and Jennifer hand us this question regarding the God described in the previous posts.

What about him is compelling, or inspires you to worship or follow him?

I think I'm going to have to begin by unpacking some of this panentheism stuff. Briefly, panentheism is the belief that God both transcends and is radically present within the universe. It is distinct from pantheism, which teaches that God and the universe are identical. So in terms of set theory, pantheism teaches that Universe = God, while panentheism teaches that Universe ⊂ God.

Paul's speech to the Areopagus begins to move in this direction:

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

There are lots of metaphorical approaches to this idea, each with slightly different implications. You might take the Platonic route and think of God as the Divine Nature or Form of Divinity, and all the things in the universe as being instances that reflect this form to a greater or lesser degree. Or you might think of God as the Divine Pattern, with all things in the universe exhibiting this pattern to a greater or lesser degree. Or you might think of God as the Divine Mind, a consciousness arising from the interactions of the physical universe in the same way that a creature's mind arises from the physical interactions in its brain.

Each of these metaphors provides a different way of describing God's relationship with the world, and each has slightly different implications for God's relationship to the good. If God is most accurately described as a Form that exists separately from the world, but is instantiated within the world, then good becomes the degree to which an instance reflects the divine form.

If God is most accurately described as a pattern that is replicated on small and grand scales throughout the universe (think fractals), then good becomes a part of this pattern, or perhaps is identical with the pattern itself.

If God is the mind that arises from the interactions of the universe, then the good is likely an idea that has some independence from God, but the mind of God would always affirm the good, and insofar as the mind of God could interact with other minds, the mind of God would always promote the good.

I think that these metaphors present sufficient reason for feeling worshipful awe and affection toward God: First, because God is immense, subsuming the universe we know and probably all the universes that we don't know; second, because God is present, immanent, intimately involved in every moment, suffering as we suffer, and rejoicing as we rejoice; third, because we can identify God with all the good we experience, either because God is the source of that goodness, or evident within that goodness, or personally affirming that goodness.

Panentheism and Theodicy: What do we do with the Bible?

2007-03-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

In comments on my original theodicy post, Jennifer made several comments like this:

You could reject special providence, but I find it hard to reject the special providence if you're going to hold that the Scriptures contain anything that resembles truth regarding the nature of God

Sure enough, it is a royal mess. You have God dropping pillars of smoke and fire, smiting people hither, rescuing people thither, impregnating a virgin, sending angels here, sending angels there. You have Jesus walking on water, miraculously healing people, miraculously feeding people, and rising from the dead. You have tongues of fire, apostles freed by strategic earthquakes, casting out evil spirits, and raising the dead.

And then you have me sitting here, saying that this sort of behavior poses a logical dilemma that can best be resolved by saying that, in fact, God didn't do those things.

Now it's easy to see how I could maintain this belief and reject the validity of the Bible. And it's easy to see how I could abandon this belief and accept the validity of the Bible. The odd thing is that I'm saying that the Bible is valuable, but that God didn't do all these things that the Bible says God did. If the Bible contains all this misinformation about God, how can it be valuable?

I'm going to begin my answer by making an assertion about the Bible: The Bible was not written by God.

For some people, this statement will be terribly obvious, and for others it will be terribly offensive. For those who find it offensive, I'll just mention the internal contradictions in the text (variations in the number of Solomon's stalls and horses in 1 Kings 4 and 2 Chronicles 9; insects with four feet in Leviticus 11, how long Jesus spent in the tomb, yada yada). But if none of that makes *any* impression on you, please consider the following biblical story from Numbers 31:

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

And the LORD was displeased with Moses for his lecherous and genocidal counsel, and struck him dead on the spot.

Oh, wait, that's not how it ends, is it? It ends like this...

The LORD said to Moses, "You and Eleazar the priest and the family heads of the community are to count all the people and animals that were captured. Divide the spoils between the soldiers who took part in the battle and the rest of the community."
...
The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.

I find that offensive. So now we can all be offended.

Really, though, my point is that it's difficult to read the Bible as a Perfect Book provided by a Perfect God. Either God's severely messed up, or the book is, and (based on the theological axioms I mentioned earlier) I have to prefer the latter.

Now if you're still with me, let's go on to another assertion: The Bible is, first and foremost, a collection of stories. It is not a divine rulebook. It is a story about how people - mostly, Israelite people - have experienced God in some unusual circumstances. Like all stories, it was written by a person (actually, many people) with differing goals, values, biases, priorities, perspectives and ethical blind spots. Like all stories, it was written for a particular audience, within a particular society at a particular point in history. This doesn't mean that other people can't read the story and learn things from it, but it does mean that there's probably a disconnect between what the text meant to its intended audience and what it should mean to us.

These two assertions encourage us to approach the text very cautiously and interpret it with an eye to the likely biases of the writers. When a writer says, "God said this," we should read that not as a divine claim that "God said this," but, "I think God said this," a statement that could be true even if God didn't really say such a thing.

This is the generous approach, by the way. The cynical approach would assume that the writer was intentionally putting words in God's mouth to get the God Trump for manipulating people.

So there's one way in which the Bible could be considered true: it's true insofar as when people say, "I heard God say this," we can assert that those people are telling the truth, although it's possible that they could have been mistaken about what God actually said.

But I don't think this goes far enough. The Bible has been revered for thousands of years by millions of people, and seems to capture some deep truths about the human experience of God.

I think this is the sense in which we should understand the Bible to be true. Somehow, it distills many human experiences of God into a single compilation. And so rather than trying to figure out whether we have to be baptized to be saved, or whether God created the world in 7 days, we should be looking for broad themes that are woven throughout the Bible. It's here that we can expect to see God's inspiration, threading hints about Divinity through its disparate stories, occasionally surprising us, continually nudging us toward goodness and love.

God Exists, God is Good, God is Love

2007-03-19T13:51:00.000-05:00

Connor asked:

Could you say a little more about dropping special providence, but sticking with God is good. It seems to me that most people, at least at the gut level, claim God to be good because of special providence, i.e. Jesus (as God) dies for my sins so I'm saved, yanks me out of Egypt, whatever.

That is a bit of a conundrum, isn't it? The Israelites say, "we know God is good because God brought us up out of Egypt". But I'm saying, "if God brought you up out of Egypt, God is not good."

Let me cheat a little and rephrase Connor's question as, "If there is no special providence, how do you prove God is good?"

The short answer is, I can't.

My theology begins with a pair of unprovable statements: "God exists" and "God is good". My theological goal is not to prove these statements. If anything, my goal is to disprove them. I want to see if there is a way to understand the world given that these two axioms are true. While I can and can present arguments for each of them, and can relate my own experiences that reinforce these beliefs, and can relate the experiences of other people that have been elevated to the status of Church Tradition, I'm not really concerned with proving them true. These are things that I simply believe, in the same way I believe that the sky is blue. You could argue the heck out of the proposition "the sky is green", and I could try my hardest to believe it is green, but in the end I simply would be unable to affirm, from the depths of my being, that the sky is green.

Once upon a time, my theology probably operated under the influence of a third axiom, "God regularly intervenes in the world", but I've since decided that this one simply won't jive with the first two axioms and my experience of the world. However, this panentheism project is an attempt to see if it's possible to soften that axiom somewhat so that it still captures an important part of the Christian witness; in particular, I'm seeing what might happen if I changed "God regularly intervenes in the world" to, "God is intimately involved with the world," or "God loves people," or something like that.

So really, these three axioms underpin my assumption that theology is something worth doing. If God does not exist, theology is silly. If God is not good, theology is dark and futile. If God does not care about the world, then why care about God?

But if these three axioms are true, and can be brought into harmony with my experience of the world, then theology may actually be a worthy endeavor.

My theology is not for people who have happy, rosy relationships with God, and who believe things like "God made the world in 7 days" or "God got me a parking space." My theology is for people who are suffering, or who see the enormity of the suffering in the world and are - rightfully - furious with God. If I can present a theology that provides a way to understand God as good and loving within a world full of horrors, then I think I will have done something helpful.

Theodicy

2007-03-16T11:19:00.000-05:00

Theodicy (thE-'ä-d&-sE): A vindication of God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.

For those of you who haven't encountered theodicy before: it's generally depressing. In fact, it could be magnificently depressing. So if you haven't already been wondering about God, and evil, and all that, you may want to go read something more pleasant. Like cute overload or something.

Still with me? Great.

Let's start this mess with a few observations about how Christians answer Big Philosophical Questions.

1. When answering the question, "What is God like?", Christians generally make several claims about the attributes of God, among them that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. The Bible seems to support these claims.

2. When answering the question, "How does God interact with the creation?", Christians generally endorse an idea of a God who is intimately involved with the creation, particularly with human beings. Christians also usually endorse special providence, wherein God occasionally interrupts the natural order to do something helpful for people. The Bible seems to support these claims.

3. When answering the question, "Is there evil?", Christians generally say, "yes." Sometimes people say that evil is illusory, or that evil is merely an absence of good, or that all evil is constructive and eventually has positive results, but sane people generally acknowledge that the world is full of evil - sometimes perpetrated by people (murder, rape, genocide), and sometimes perpetrated at random by nature (disease, earthquake, tsunami). Most sane people also acknowledge that often, this evil is so egregious that it destroys people, and it seems patently ridiculous to insist that these sorts of evil (called "Horrors", in a recent related discussion) could ever be constructive.

From the perspective of Western philosophers, this slice of worldview is fraught with peril. More specifically, it is internally contradictory. The answers to the questions can't all be right ... one or more of them must be wrong. This is where theodicy starts to show up. People - both Christians and non-Christians - notice what appear to be contradictions in the standard Christian story about the world, and so someone has to resolve the contradictions.

In general, there seem to be three ways that people go about doing this.

1. People deny the question has any validity, whether because it is immoral to question God in this way, or because God's ways are mysterious and incomprehensible, or what have you. Really, no discussion can be had after this point.

2. People try to define terms in such a way to dissolve the contradiction. So, for example, someone might claim that all-good does not mean that God ought to rescue children trapped under the rubble of a building collapsed by an earthquake. Or they might claim that all-powerful does not mean that God can do things that are inherently contradictory, and then show that intervening on behalf of abused children would raise an inherent contradiction.

3. People try to find a leg of the argument that they can let go. So, for example, process theologians might claim that God does not really fit the traditional descriptions: that God's moral character is developing just like a person's does, so the claim that God is all-good is simply inaccurate. People who are unwilling to deviate from the traditional description of God might try to give up a different leg, perhaps claiming that evil does not really exist, or if it does, God is not responsible for creating it or intervening to fix it.

Now, a few final observations:

First, the "problem of evil", as it has often been called, raises for atheists no analogous "problem of good". The problem of evil arises specifically because theists claim that a certain kind of God exists, and that this God has a certain kind of relationship with the world, which seems incompatible with the existence of evil. On the other hand, people who claim that there is no God need not explain why God allows evil, and they also need not explain why, if God does not exist, there is good. The painfully simple atheistic answer to that question is that good is not contingent on a God.

Second, in my estimation, the problem of evil is the strongest single argument against worshiping God. If God does not exist at all, it's ridiculous to worship. If God does not provide for followers, why worship? If God is not good, why worship? In fact, if God is not good, we may have a moral obligation *not* to worship. To make matters worse, this is a visceral argument. People can brush off a claim like "the ontological argument for the existence of God is invalid", but it's harder, rhetorically, to brush off the suffering of millions of people over millions of years.

Some people manage to do it, but it's harder.

As a result, it is absolutely necessary that Christians do good theodicy, theodicy that not only can be accepted by those in the Christian community, but those outside as well. And as others have said before, people outside the community can't take you seriously if your answers won't stand up to Auschwitz.

I've recently decided that, for me, the moral contradictions in the problem of evil trump all the other problems. I absolutely accept the claim that special providence is incompatible with perfect divine goodness: A god who delivers money to American churches but fails to rescue children from Indonesian tsunamis cannot be a good god.

But I also am incapable of dropping the claim that God is all-good. I am simply incapable of releasing that belief. So I have to drop something else ... and to me, the thing that seems most droppable is the doctrine of special providence. So I have to claim that when money arrives in the mail, or when I get a good parking place, or when a friend's cancer disappears, God hasn't intervened or done anything out of the ordinary.

Obviously, this move puts a new burden on me, first to explain how I can understand the Bible to be true in light of this doctrine, and second to explain some other way that God might relate to the world. And it also doesn't solve the problem of how God could be morally justified in having created a world that allows for so much horror. I'll talk about those things in a later post.

I swear

2007-03-13T21:27:00.000-05:00

I'm going to get around to posting a real post. Regardless of the hot water leak in the slab of my house, I really am going to have some free time this week.

But this is just too rich.

Question #6: Regarding Walter Reed Medical Center

2007-03-07T10:47:00.001-06:00

Which would you rather give for your country, your legs or your life?

Question #5: Punctuation

2007-03-06T16:28:00.000-06:00

Continuing our series of odd questions ... quick, is the following sentence correctly punctuated?

Come in and enjoy a home-style dinner with all the fixin's!

Definitive Answer from Casey:
"Though it looks wonky somehow, I think it is. "Home-style" is not in the dictionary, so it's hard to say if it should be a hyphenate, and though "fixin's" looking like an improperly placed possessive, it seems like a proper conjunction."

Equality Ride 2007

2007-02-27T08:08:00.000-06:00

Looks like the Equality Riders won't be coming back to ACU this year. But they will be at Baylor...

Question #4: Zephyrs

2007-02-21T11:09:00.000-06:00

Anyone remember the name of that church song with the line about the "gentle zephyrs"?

Definitive Answer: As expected, my mom and dad figured it out.

The song is Beulah Land. Interestingly enough, in our old songbook the first line was changed to "I've reached the land of love divine".

Beulah Land by Edgar P. Stites

I’ve reached the land of corn and wine,
And all its riches freely mine;
Here shines undimmed one blissful day,
For all my night has passed away.

    * Refrain:
    O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
    As on thy highest mount I stand,
    I look away across the sea,
    Where mansions are prepared for me,
    And view the shining glory shore,
    My heav’n, my home forevermore!

My Savior comes and walks with me,
And sweet communion here have we;
He gently leads me by His hand,
For this is Heaven’s borderland.

A sweet perfume upon the breeze,
Is borne from ever vernal trees,
And flow’rs that never fading grow
Where streams of life forever flow.

The zephyrs seem to float to me,
Sweet sounds of Heaven’s melody,
As angels with the white-robed throng
Join in the sweet redemption song.

My Son My Executioner

2007-02-20T20:34:00.000-06:00

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a reading by the U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall.

The Poet Laureate is almost 80, and doesn't move too quickly. He sat behind a long, narrow table covered with a white tablecloth, and occasionally, when he got involved in a poem, his foot would poke, poke, poke at it.

I enjoyed his poetry. Listening to a thoughtful, eloquent lector made me feel like I was participating in something important and mysterious, and when he finished, I felt like I'd been to church. As far as feelings go, I haven't been to church in quite a while.

Here's one of his early poems, written about his first child.

My Son My Executioner

My son, my executioner,
  I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
  And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
  Of immortality
Your cries and hungers document
  Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
  Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
  And start to die together.

piff

2007-02-16T08:18:00.000-06:00

Woah.

I think a fuse in my brain just blew. And nobody else is likely to understand why. But here's my attempt at an explanation.

Jack Whelan just said this:

The encounter with the Christ is an experience of insemination in the Matthew 13 sense (parable of sower, mustard seed, etc.). This seed has a subversive effect within the soul life of those who are inseminated, and they find that if they nurture its germination in the right way, a new regime grows within.

This was a marginal point within his post about postmodern Catholicism.

Now briefly: The idea of "seed" is an ancient idea, an archetype that goes way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way back. It may be so old that it's actually genetic rather than just memetic. It's all tied up with life and death, with dying to live again, with harvest gods, with Jesus, with sex. And, as hinted at in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, the idea of seed is all tied up with modern things, too, particularly potentially world-changing technologies such as genetics and nanotech.

Another primary theme in The Diamond Age is subversiveness ... the idea that things change for the better primarily because of tiny changes that happen out of public view, and perhaps in opposition to public norms.

Those two ideas rattle around in my head fairly often. I know they're really important ideas, but I'm not sure why. So anything that talks about "seed" or "subversion" will light up my pattern-matcher.

Particularly things that also talk about "Matthew", and my lucky number, "13".

Hrm.

Question #3: Regarding Social Norms

2007-02-15T15:46:00.000-06:00

Say you, personally, wanted to change a social norm. In light of the last 100 years of American history, what method would you use to make that change?

Question #2: Regarding Artificial Intelligence

2007-02-14T14:30:00.000-06:00

Why is it so hard to design a machine that can make free, undetermined choices?

Question #1: Regarding the Shoah

2007-02-12T12:01:00.000-06:00

In Jewish history, is the Holocaust effectively the opposite of the Exodus?

Heavens to betsy

2007-02-10T20:57:00.000-06:00

I've written a little lately about books I've been reading, but what about the books I haven't been reading? Specifically, what about the book my wife is reading about Chinese Christians in the early 1980's, The Heavenly Man?

Because I'm not reading this book, I only know what my wife tells me. And basically, she tells me that it sounds kind of like the New Testament. Church leader gets put in prison, hears a voice, his hands are loosed, and he walks out of the prison, making a miraculous leap to the top of a wall and a miraculous leap across a sewage-filled moat to complete his escape. Back home, his wife has had a vision that he has been captured, and the church has been praying and fasting on his behalf.

Yeah, sounds like the New Testament. But the Book of Mormon sounds a lot like the Old Testament.

I say that, not because I have any good reason to believe these things didn't happen, but because I'm kind of afraid that they did.

Why am I afraid?

I'm afraid because thousands of African Christians didn't walk away from their murderers.

Because thousands of men, women and children didn't walk through tsunamis unharmed.

Because 6 million Jews didn't walk out of Nazi death camps.

In other words, I'm afraid that I'm going to believe that these things actually happened, which will force me into Dostoyevsky's corner, where I have to admit twin propositions like:

1. God exists and acts in the world

2. God only acts on the behalf of those who tickle God with prayers, or fasting, or whatever gets God off.

For me, this is the basic problem with special providence and supplicatory prayer. Can we call God "good" if God only rescues those who recite the proper incantations ... or are lucky enough to have wives back home, reciting the incantations on their behalf? And if this capricious, megalomaniacal God really were the God of the universe, could we morally justify worshipping it?

A few bucks for things she needed

2007-02-04T21:08:00.000-06:00

So a few of us are up at the church building this morning, getting lunch ready. Woman walks in and tells me about how she got jumped at the bus station. Shows me her broken glasses. Tells me how the nice bus people reinstated her ticket, thank the Lord, but now she needs some help for the trip to Dallas.

Sorry, I tell her. I don't ever give anybody cash.

Which I don't.

Buying food instead of giving people cash may take a bit longer, but it's darn hard to trade Chicken Express for drugs or booze. And I was pretty sure that this woman wasn't headed to Dallas, but to the crack house down the street. Her story wasn't very good. Her heart wasn't in it. She didn't want to lie to me. Really, he just wanted a couple bucks to buy whatever it was she needed to make her feel better for a little while, to forget whatever she needed to forget.

So she turned down my offer of food to take with her, because food wasn't really what she needed. She left looking tired and sad, telling me, as she walked out the door, that she hoped I would have a nice day.

But I wouldn't have a nice day. I had called her bluff, and for some reason, I felt pretty bad about it.

I used to think giving people drug money was patently bad, but now I'm starting to wonder. Maybe some people legitmately need drugs. And rather than pretending that what they need is food, maybe I should think about offering them ... safer drugs. I mean, really: life looks pretty bleak sometimes, and we cope the best way we know how. Street kids in Central America sniff glue, because it makes their hunger go away. Maybe Texans do meth, crack, or whatever because it's the relief they have access to.

In other words, maybe people do meth because they can't get Prozac.

Troop Surge Address

2007-01-10T12:41:00.000-06:00

Just so you don't miss it, the President is supposed to address the nation tonight at 8 p.m. Central (GMT -6) regarding his proposal for increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Democrats in congress have already started advancing legislation that would require authorization for any such surge.

(Oh, and I assume everyone knows we've been dropping bombs in Somalia? Just a heads-up.)

Jesus Fish

2007-01-09T10:12:00.000-06:00

I walked past a massive black Suburban in a parking lot today, and noticed that it was sporting a school of Jesus Fish, looked something like this:

Obviously, the four fish represent four family members. My question for you is ... and I want your knee-jerk response ... which fish do you think represents dad?

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

2007-01-03T10:50:00.000-06:00

My deepest apologies for being so off-topic ... but you've gotta see this.

(thx, laughing jack.)

Another blog for you

2007-01-02T08:31:00.000-06:00

Jack @ After The Future:

Societies evolve, and with that evolution comes painful losses with the important gains. Every society, including ours, must learn the trick of what to hold onto and what to let go of. It's not easy. The extreme cultural right is the party of hanging on no matter what; the extreme cultural left is the party of letting go no matter what. Most people live mostly unconsciously in the conflict between the two tendencies, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other. Sane people in the middle have to find a way to consciously, artfully synthesize the two tendencies. That's what it means to me to be a centrist--the center is defined by this integrationist project, which is very different from just splitting the difference between the extremes. Integration in this sense is a spiritual activity, but that's a subject for another time.

Google Zeitgeist

2006-12-20T16:02:00.000-06:00

Mark Elrod (I always want to type "Mark Aelrod") posted about Google Zeitgeist earlier today. He just looked at the top searches in 2006, but he seemed to miss some interesting things in the other ratings:

The "where is list":

1. where is togo
2. where is matt
3. where is torino
4. where is darfur
5. where is villanova
6. where is montenegro
7. where is angola
8. where is .com au
9. where is palestine
10. where dubai

Well you can all stop searching. I'm right here.

(BTW, this is probably what they were looking for.)

(Also interesting: For those of you who know my last name, you can search for "where is matt lastname" and find an amazon list that is NOT mine, but looks suspiciously me-ish. If you search for "matthew blog" you will find on page 2 a blog about Matthew at Harding. Also not me.)

Simplify

2006-12-19T12:15:00.000-06:00

It's lunchtime, now. I traipsed through a rare Abilene drizzle to grab Subway's Two for Tuesday, and now I'm sitting at my desk, munching on one of the Two and drawing little boxes and arrows on a sheet of printer paper, three-holed to fit in one of my Very Important three-ring binders.

The boxes and arrows represent different areas of my life - the layout of my home is in one box, the schedule of my week in another - because I'm trying to get things straight. I have this emotionally pressing need to simplify my life. I'm not quite sure what this means, or what the benefits would be, but the feeling is there all the same. My life feels ... cluttered.

Maybe this drive to reduce clutter is one that has arisen from programming, and I'm trying to nest and encapsulate things neatly so that I can hold the entire idea of My Life in my head all at the same time.

Maybe it's about mastery, and I think that if I can reduce the number of entities I encounter on a daily basis - clothes, books, toothbrushes, vehicles, people - I can have more control over my environment.

Or maybe it's that I think that if I could clean up my life, it would be more efficient. I would get more benefit, or be more productive, or something more positive per unit time. Maybe I'm approaching 30 and developing an unsettling, subconscious feeling that I'm wasting my life.

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyana, mispronounced in Chinese as "Chan" and again mispronounced in Japanese as "Zen." Phaedrus never got involved in meditiation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India "sense" was always logical consistency and he couldn't find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part.

But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.

Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.

He returned to his Midwest, picked up a practical degree of journalism, married, lived in Nevada and Mexico, did odd jobs, worked as a journalist, a science writer and an industrial-advertising writer. He fathered two children, bought a farm and a riding horse and two cars and was starting to put on middle-aged weight. His pursuit of what had been called the ghost of reason had been given up. That's extremely important to understand. He had given up.

Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.

What started him up here into these mountains isn't certain. His wife seems not to know, but I'd guess it was perhaps some of those inner feelings of failure and the hope that somehow this might take him back on the track again. He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly.

Hm.

I hadn't intended for this post to be about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but there you go. This bit makes me a bit nervous, if you want to know the truth. Phaedrus goes into the mountains and pretty soon he ends up insane. And if it's all the same, I'd prefer to avoid insane.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Bah, humbug.

2006-12-14T10:03:00.000-06:00

'Convert or die' game divides Christians

I expect you've heard about this game already, but here's some stuff I didn't know:

Left Behind Games' president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is pacifist because players lose "spirit points" every time they gun down nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by having their character pray.

...

Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics.

...

The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville, Fla., Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, added: "So, under the Christmas tree this year for little Johnny is this allegedly Christian video game teaching Johnny to hate and kill?"

Thanks to Colby for the linkage.

I'm going to go hide under the bed now.

Zen and the Art: Changing the World

2006-12-13T16:25:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. A surprising number of people (two) seemed to want to know what I thought of the book. So being the accommodating fellow I am, I'm going to attempt to write about it.

Now this won't be a scholarly literary analysis, or a cliffs note summary, or really any kind of review that any self-respecting publication might be interested in. Instead, I'm simply going to try to describe, in a fairly disorganized way, the sorts of things that happen when the thoughts in my head get mushed together with the thoughts in Zen.

What the book is kind of about

For those of you who haven't read Zen, a brief summary might be in order. Zen really seems to be two books, the first being a narrative about the author taking a cross-country motorcycle trip with his son, with periodic flashbacks discussing the author's life and thinking, all the way up to the point where some mental health experts got ahold of him and solved his various problems by applying choice electrical currents to the appropriate areas of his brain.

The second book, interleaved with the first, is a philosophical investigation of separateness. It's a thoroughly Buddhist attempt to contradict our tendency to reduce, subdivide and compartmentalize the world. In my opinion, this is the meat of the book: the narrative is just a framework for moving the reader along and, at some points, for illustrating the author's philosophy.

An interesting thing

Here's something from Zen that I found interesting:

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important _end products_ of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values of[sic] right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

How should you go about trying to change the world, if you're turned on by that sort of thing?

Pirsig seems to suggest that you're going to get the best results if you focus on improving yourself. And this approach makes a lot of sense: if all the leaves on a tree are green, one's experience of the tree should be green. If all the people in a society are kind, one's experience of the society should be one of kindness.

Then why write a book?

I suppose that one answer would be: you improve yourself to the point where you have something worthwhile to say to other people, and *then* you write your book. Another answer is: "Rob, you're full of crap." If you want to change the world, then bottom-up methods are important, but top-down methods are also good. Writing a book, reforming a government, starting a charity - all of these methods are just as likely to be effective as "make myself a better person".

This poses some problems from a Buddhist point of view: it reinforces my tendency to distinguish between myself and the world. But another problem - a related problem - is that one has to decide what kinds of changes to try to make. And this, I think, is why Pirsig's emphasis on introspection has merit: because effective change does not necessarily equal positive change. If your values are screwed up, then your broad attempts to change the world are likely to screw the world up rather than make it better.

So how do you get good values?

"Good values." Heh.

OK, I'm stuck. Somebody come pull me out.

Get wet

2006-12-12T08:20:00.000-06:00

Hunh. I guess today's a day for baptism.

From Pastor K at South Bay Christian Church:

Anne Lamott writes that "Christianity is about water. 'Everyone who thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' It's about baptism… It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rains and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving into all those things we can't control: it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get drenched."

And, if you're the audio-visual sermon illustration type, here's yer fix, courtesy of Steve Allison:

Calling God "He"

2006-12-05T10:05:00.000-06:00

So I'm having a conversation about using gender-neutral language in church, and an acquaintance - a woman - injects this comment:

God is a man. And if he's not a man, well he's sure not a woman.

Props to me: I didn't bite through my tongue.

I consoled myself with the thought that this isn't often an explicit theology: most conservative Christian churches probably hold that God is neither exclusively male nor exclusively female. The problem this presents is that the language most of these churches use to refer to God is exclusively male. And language matters. Because our language is currently at odds with our theology, we need to change one or the other.

One of the objections I hear for changing from masculine language is, "what are you going to use instead?" Specifically, the questioner usually wants to know what I am going to use as the singular pronoun when referring to God. So in a sentence like this:

God is good, and he wants us to be good.

they want to know, what am I going to use to replace "he?"

At first glance, this is a significant problem, because the English language has no gender-neutral singular personal pronoun.

"She" is not a good alternative, because it causes the same problems as "he". (Although one could argue for a sort of linguistic affirmative action, wherein we should call God "she" for the next several thousand years to make up for always having called God "he" before.)

Likewise, "it" is out of the question, because most of these people believe in a personal God, and calling a person "it" is degrading. (Although one could argue that calling a person "she" is also degrading.)

But the obvious answer, which sometimes gets overlooked, is: don't use a pronoun.

God is good, and God wants us to be good

Problem solved.

But won't this be cumbersome? Won't it sound really awkward?

Well, do the things said about God on this blog sound awkward? Because this is the language I already use, both in writing and speaking. It's what I've done for several years. And to my knowledge, nobody's noticed.

Sadly, this doesn't entirely solve our language problems, and here are two reasons:

1. Songs. It's hard to change them to be gender neutral, and not butcher them. (Gender-equal, maybe, but not gender neutral.) I'm sure you could come up with many more examples, but how would you reword these songs:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind
Forgive our foolish ways...

O worship the King
All glorious above
And gratefully sing
His wonderful love...

2. Gender-neutral language may not go far enough. Exploring God in the context of ideas that we have traditionally labeled "female" could be very powerful, but this is stymied somewhat by going to gender neutrality. In more conservative churches, though, going to even occasionally female language would be even harder than going to neutral language ... as you can see by the quote at the top of this post.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2006-12-01T13:30:00.000-06:00

One reason I haven't been posting: I've been reading, and it's hard for me to do both at the same time.

One of the books I finished recently: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. I may have more to say about the book later; for now, here's an excerpt.

The ugliness the Sutherlands were fleeing is not inherent in technology. It only seemed that way to them because it's so hard to isolate what it is within technology that's so ugly. But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.

Neither is the ugliness inherent in the materials of modern technology – a statement you sometimes hear. Mass-produced plastics and synthetics aren't in themselves bad. They've just acquired bad associations. A person who's lived inside stone walls of a prison most of his life is likely to see stone as an inherently ugly material, even though it's also the prime material of sculpture, and a person who's lived in a prison of ugly plastic technology that started with his childhood toys and continues through a lifetime of junky consumer products is likely to see this material as inherently ugly. But the real ugliness of modern technology isn't found in any material or shape or act or product. These are just the objects in which the low Quality appears to reside. It's our habit of assigning Quality to subjects or objects that gives this impression.

The real ugliness is not the result of any objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phaedrus' metaphysics, the result of any subjects of technology, the people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn't reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use ...

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in the world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.