Leukemia =(

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Poems