So what's up with that floating Axehead?

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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...

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

You may find this article from NewScientist interesting:

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed

A great bible class idea

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

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

I have an idea

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Question #5: Punctuation

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

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

Question #4: Zephyrs

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

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*

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

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

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

Question #1: Regarding the Shoah

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

Heavens to betsy

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

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

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

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

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



(thx, laughing jack.)

Another blog for you

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

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

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.

'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

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

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"

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

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.

Out to Lunch

I'll be away for a week or two.

Don't do anything fun while I'm gone, 'k?

Update: I'm back.

(So among all those people who share my warped idea of fun, let there be much rejoicing.)

So... close...

Barring any legal hijinks by the Republicans, it looks like the Democrats are going to pick up both the House and the Senate.

w00t?

As far as I can tell, CNN has the best online coverage of the election results. They're also carrying some interesting exit poll data. For example, here's a snippet from their U.S. HOUSE SOUTH EXIT POLL:

VOTE BY RELIGION

	Democrat	Republican
Protestant (70%)	42%	57%

VOTE BY RELIGION AMONG WHITES

	Democrat	Republican
White Protestants (54%)	32%	66%

BORN-AGAIN OR EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN?

	Democrat	Republican
Yes (49%)	41%	58%

WHITE EVANGELICAL/BORN-AGAIN?

	Democrat	Republican
Yes (35%)	28%	71%

Well allrighty.

Vote.

Unless you're stupid. Then stay home.

Bonus election day link! Leonard Pitts Jr. sums up my opinion about the Democratic Party.

Richard Beck's Universalism posts

In Christian theology, Universalism is the idea that all people will be saved.

I had been considering a couple of posts about universalism, but lo and behold, Dr. Richard Beck has already done a brief series on why he's a universalist. I'll start by linking you there, and maybe later I'll have some things to add.

Why I am a Universalist

I think my favorite post in the bunch is this one, which juxtaposes Universalism, Calvinism and Arminianism. An excerpt:

Talbott in Universal Salvation? asks us to consider three theological propositions:

1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each one of them.

2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he sincerely wills or desires.

3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead be separated from God forever.

First, it should be noted that significant Biblical support could be cited for each proposition. All are supported by the biblical witness.

However, and here's the rub, Talbott points out that these propositions are logically inconsistent. That is, a Christian cannot, logically, endorse all three propositions. Look back over the propositions and mull them over. You'll see he has a point.