labelmeplease

An Apologetic for Failure

2010-06-09T01:35:00.004-05:00

To the previous blog Nic wrote:
“It seems a bit reductionistic to conflate Christian spirituality to a rather singular expression, that of taking care of the poor, which is what it sounds like you're doing. . . . I'm not sure if Jesus' life itself is even enough to be able to reduce his message to one of economic justice. As much as Jesus loved the poor and called his followers to do the same, he didn't really do much to change institutional poverty, quite honestly. If the gospel he sought to bring was one of economic sustenance for the world's poor, then his life was a failure, because it just didn't happen.”

My views have been fundamentally shaped by two theologians, Hans Kung and Edward Schillebeeckx. Both are in accord about this: Jesus was a failure.

“Thus Jesus’ message, bearing the signature of his death, calls upon us to revise our self-understanding, by speaking of God who silently reveals himself in Jesus’ historically helpless failure on the cross.” - Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 638.

“His public life did not last for decades, but at most three years, and possibly only a few dramatic months before it was brought to a violent end . . . his whole story is ultimately a history of suffering with arrest, flogging and finally execution in a cruel, shameful form. This life has nothing enlightened and perfect about it. It remains a fragment, a torso. A fiasco? At any rate, there is no trace of success during Jesus’ lifetime . . .” Kung, Credo, 55.

I understand well that Christianity is a vastly complex system, and that to emphasize one expression is to neglect another. Yet, I’m also unconvinced that Jesus shared our neat divisions of human experience. To put it better: I highly doubt that Jesus viewed economic justice as a separate entity, or even a respectable subcategory, of Justice. He was the prophet of the Kingdom of God, the realm of God’s shalom. He pursued this Kingdom relentlessly unto his death; the very death that marked his ultimate failure to bring about the Kingdom which he hoped for. I don’t see any point at which he appeared ready to compromise for some half-assed notion of justice which slighted economic equity in the name of pragmatic concerns.

In the first part of his book Christ, Schillebeeckx points out that the origins of the word shalom imply peace that is achieved by what equates to socioeconomic reconciliation and fairness. For shalom to exist there must first be a sense of wholeness shared by all in a society, and a settling of debts. These are the preconditions of the peace that is longed for by all. This sense of peace is ultimately the foundation of the Jewish conception of the Kingdom of God as it is expressed in the New Testament. At the core of Jesus’ identity is the driving hope for a world under God where impoverished conditions are a shadow of history. This tangentially demands us to remember that poverty is not ultimately an economic matter. Poverty is a denial of the humanity of others; humanity implying the conditions by which we can identify a life as human. We frame it in terms of bank statements, but that is simply because it calms the cognitive dissonance we feel at caring more for our own comforts than for the meaningless deaths of millions.

Simply put, ignoring the economic implications of shalom destroys the very habitat in which shalom is even a remote possibility. And without shalom, the Kingdom which Jesus held as his central concern is a farce, making Jesus a peddler for a hoax. I agree that economics was not central to Jesus’ message as he preached it, but to claim that the implications of his message have any meaning apart from economic justice is foolish. Shalom implicates the whole of human existence. To maintain the divisions of our fractured reality, and pretend shalom can be approximated in all other realms while we leave a festering dead elephant under a tablecloth is a blasphemous joke.

So, let’s bring this back to where we started: the miserable failure who is our Lord. A first point is that it doesn’t mean much to say that Jesus loved the poor. Of course he loved them. He was one of them. He was born into poverty, he lived in poverty, and died in poverty. His death is a poor death. A meaningless death. His death is like the deaths of millions in our world, who die out of sight: unheard and unknown in Rome. A common disturbance among the authorities in Jerusalem. If we suspend the resurrection, then Jesus was a failure and so were his followers. Without God’s final vindication and endorsement then there is no other possible interpretation of his life. It was too sad to even qualify as a tragedy. Tragedies generally involve a downfall, but Jesus barely rose in the first place.

Yet this is the audacious and absurd claim that makes Christianity unique: it is in meaningless failure for God’s cause that God will raise us like our Christ.

Jesus died deluded, mistaken, and alone. He died meaninglessly - but for God’s final word. How dare we assume that we can claim to follow him and expect success? You choose the evil that stands in our world and attack with the authority of the Kingdom of God. You attack in the knowledge that you will fail. You attack because of Justice that is not fractured but remains unified under the Shalom of God’s existence. Beyond this expectation, apart from a faith that transcends eminent failure, the “gospel” is empty, dated, and hopefully soon forgotten.

A simpler way of saying all this could go something like this:

“I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. . . . I have fought the long defeat and I have brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . people from our background, we’re used to being on a victory team, [but] actually what we’re really trying to do is make common cause with the losers. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.” - Paul Farmer

Liberation Theology for First World people.

2010-05-25T13:19:00.004-05:00

So, why haven't I written in a while? I had a hard semester, which went well. I took my MCAT which went terrible. I'm busy, but that isn't really it. Basically, I haven't written because I've been grossly unenthused by my usual topics lately. I've had a couple philosophy books on hand. I just shelved them the other day, because . . . well, because who the hell cares? That's been my general take for a while now. This stuff (i.e. theology, philosophy, etc.) formerly seemed of great importance to me. Now, my interest has officially waned.

This leaves me with two things to discuss: science and fiction. Neither of which I find to be great blogging material. And, neither of which, I really feel qualified or inclined to speak out as an expert, or even an aspiring expert.

So, I haven't written for a while: not because of writer's block, but mostly due to apathy.

But, yesterday I finished this book:

It's a biography about a doctor/anthropologist named Paul Farmer. I had previously read one of Farmer's works, but this biography put it in context. Farmer has spent most of his life working in Haiti, which continues to rank as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It holds that honor because our government decided long ago that a nation of former slaves was only good for exploiting. Thus, we have instituted policies ever since that taken this exploitation to extremes never before seen or thought possible.

Ever since, Haiti has enjoyed the perks of extreme poverty: violence, ridiculous infant and child mortality rates, a median age range that barely escapes the teens, epidemics galore, starvation, lack of education, lack of infrastructure, and, to Farmer's dismay, lack of basic medical services. Not that these sorrows aren't found in other places, but it's simply a fact that to not find them in Haiti would require a combination of blindness, deafness, and lack of tactile perception. This is the gift of American and Latin American foreign policy because, after all, black people should know better than to revolt against French colonialism and torture.

Paul Farmer grew up in America in a poor family, but went to Duke for his Bachelor's, and received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He has predominantly worked in Haiti since his early 20's and indeed carried out most of his Harvard education by correspondence on the island. But, enough with the gist, here's why I think he's worth writing about:

Farmer is Liberation Theology incarnated. I hear people discuss liberation theology quite commonly, but it is always discussed among people in the First World. We always lend it our sympathies in theory, and in practice know that we are not actually going to do anything to join its cause. I hear the majority of churches in America talk about poverty the same way we talk about sin: it's something out there, and we should do something to stop it. We take up a collection, and then go home to watch Lost or whatever other 'cultural phenomenon' is demanding our attention. But, throwing money at Haiti only serves to shore up the power-brokers that are continuing to mutilate that country. Throwing money at charities generally serves to give jobs to naive white people, who would rather be a shoulder to cry on than an arm to work for the cause of the poor.

We can throw all the money we want at the poor, but the fact is that the "free" market is designed to steal money from those who are easiest to steal it from. American banks are fantastic at slight-of-hand. They've been using it on the Third World for centuries, and now that most of the Third World has been bled dry, they've turned (in the last 3 years especially) on Americans.

Farmer barely self-identifies as a Christian. Yet, he seems to me the embodiment of Ghandi's axiom, "Go to the poor, they will tell you who the Christians are." He simultaneously shows me three things: 1) That I am not a Christian, and that I don't know any. 2) That there is hope that we all could be if we repent. 3) That a life of service to the poor, in other words a life that follows Jesus' example is indeed beautiful, meaningful, and worth attempting.

In other words, this biography is the first meaningful theology/philosophy book I have read in years. Farmer stands out as a great example of what it is for a First World person to live out the gospel in the wake of liberation theology.

Resignation to Drifting

2010-05-13T15:47:00.006-05:00

We've been at sea for some time with our eyes to the horizon. We've longed for solid ground. We've swam towards shores we thought we saw, but none were ever found. Adrift, the question arises: If we haven't yet drown, then why do we long for shadows which resound? Drifting is our destiny.

I guess it's common to human nature to hope for a final arrival. By this I mean to say that we all have some vague ideas about a good that we hope for, and we hope on some level that one day we'll arrive. I've wished for years that I could stumble on a faith community that would meet my vague ideas of what a faith community should be. I've ceased to be surprised that this never happens. I realize that communities are made of individuals, and individuals are flawed. People aren't perfect, so how can I expect churches to be? These are things that I am reminded of every time I express my grievances to friends about the way churches are run in America. Churches are places where we must extend grace to people and their flaws. Yet, so often, this purported graciousness masks an expectation of complacency (perhaps complicity) with the worst evils to which our society clings. A few examples:

Implicit racism/ethnocentrism. In Dallas, churches come in a wide variety of flavors: white, black, Asian, yuppie, hipster, . . hell there's a wide variety of cowboy churches to choose between. The inter-racial churches I've seen all manage this by expecting all races to adhere to certain ethnic/cultural practices. In missions we referred to this as contextualizing, but more and more I just see it as self-satisfied laziness.

Failure of socioeconomic reconciliation. Perhaps this is evidence of me being a socialist, or perhaps I just find it to be the most blatant example of how "Jesus-followers" have no intention of following Jesus' teaching. I find that churches bear much of the guilt. We would rather pay for pews and stage lights than justice and righteousness. Were the salaries of ministry staffs across our nation diverted to pay for food and medicine, I imagine poverty could be wiped out in the Western hemisphere along with a good portion of the East. It seems that every church I attend views justice for the poor as an accessory. There's a bureaucracy that must be maintained, so that secondary functions like justice can be kept up. I find this to be a prioritization of values that is not compatible with Jesus.

Monologue. Sit in a pew, face forward, and swallow what your told. Let someone declare their own ideology to be the "Word of the Lord", and you follow with "Thanks be to God." We live in a world of monologue: TV, radio, editorials, pundits, movies, commercials. Where is the voice of the congregation heard? Where is the crowd given a chance to express doubts, its vague feelings, or hopes? If churches cant respond to these things, or allow them space to be voiced, then what precisely is its purpose? I'm not talking small groups, or wo/men's bible study. I mean genuine dialogue that shapes the face of the community; that determines its course. If there's anything good I see in the Emergent church movement, it's that at least they have this understood. The last thing our society needs is another place to have ministerial opinions and ideological stances projected at them.

These are three aspects, endemic among churches, that I've decided I cannot tolerate, and that I don't think anyone else should either. Thus, I've basically given up on finding a church. I now hope merely that some day by striving to "become the change I hope to see in the world", I'll find a community around me.

The University of Texas at Dallas: Land of Enchantment!

2010-02-13T12:17:00.010-06:00

If you know anyone considering an education at UTD, look them in the eye and with a British accent say, "On second thought, don't go to UTD . . . tis a silly place."

Why? A few photos may suffice:
First,

Behold the UTD geyser. . . .or hot spring. We're not sure what it is yet, but for close to a year we have watched this utility box go from a steaming block of cement, to what is now a bubbling, frothing mess. It has resulted in an alluvial flood plain that has shut down a significant chunk of sidewalk (get ready this is a theme we shall return to), and required the instillation of wooden bridges to traverse the muddy mess.

Secondly,

Ladies and Gentlemen, you might be mistaken into thinking that you are looking at a new project. Don't be. They claim this is to be a new campus "mall", on par with the national mall in D.C. Yet, after a year and a half of pardoning their progress, it appears that the trustees of my school are really just fascinated by dirt. It appears to be an ideological fixation to clear their campus' beautiful dirt of all that cursed greenery as far as the eye can see. We are a science school after all, so what could be more scientific than recreating the moon here on the earth? Progressive no?

As previously stated, moonism here at UTD has the annoying side effect of consuming all sidewalks. Therefore to transport oneself from one building to an adjacent one, requires a 15 km journey for every 5 meters that separate the buildings. Thus since the student center is 50 meters from the library, to proceed from one to the other requires no less that 150 km of hiking, (otherwise known as 93 miles). The amazing thing about such statistics is that UTD is confined to 3.5 square km of land. How, you might be wondering, is it possible to force 150 km treks across a campus that barely spans 3.5 km? . . . . Yeah. I get that question a lot, and I always respond the same way: "What else do you expect all these Nobel laureates to do with their time?"

Go science!

Lastly, the bathrooms.

To make the kids with gender issues feel more comfortable, UTD has installed gender-ambiguous toilets. Is it a urinal or a pot? No one knows. Therefore whatever confusion you may be feeling, science loves you anyway. Woosh.

Honorable mention:
- The new native forest at campus entrance. Have a 20-ft drainage ditch messing with your campus' aesthetic? Just replace ugly with . . . ugly BUT environmentally sound!

- The sidewalks that are lined by construction worker Port-a-Potties. If your day isn't crappy enough, just try to breath while walking down the only functioning sidewalk on campus.

- The mermaid (google image "UTD NSERL"). The only visually non-depressing object on campus, which one must be a research graduate student to even walk into. Confirming the UTD motto, "If it looks good, you're not allowed."

- If you wikipedia UTD, they refer to the campus architectural style as "Brutalism" . . . a shoe that fits.

Now who can swim any day in November . . ?

2010-01-06T17:02:00.004-06:00

Every other month I get an invitation to join a Facebook group to stop global warming. I never join. The prospect that a Facebook group is a sufficient means to achieve any social goal seems a bit comical to me.

The polar ice caps are melting. The paper had an article a few days ago that cargo ships were now considering routes through the arctic circle, since ice was no longer blocking their path. That seems a bit definitive to me. One of my fellow pre-med students is a staunch Republican or Libertarian (those categories grow more interchangeable by the day), and informed me that it was all natural. The world is constantly going through warming and cooling cycles, and this is just a warming cycle. He may be right, or the environmentalists may be right. Either way I find the whole discussion to be quite asinine.

The more informed biologists I talk to the more I realize that if we humans are contributing to global warming that there is essentially nothing we can do about it. We are dependent on energy . . . enormous quantities of energy. And lest we forget, the world population is still increasing at a staggering rate. Were every human to significantly decrease their own carbon footprint, the increase in numbers of humans would mean that basically nothing would change. To actually reverse global warming would mean first and foremost reversing the population growth trend, and that doesn't seem very likely at all. Whether the problem is man-made or not seems irrelevant because there is essentially nothing that we can do to change it. Our temperatures will continue to rise along with our ocean levels, and our climate patterns are going to alter.

And there is the real problem. The thing that gets ignored in the debate over whether or not Mother Nature is hitting menopause, is that real people are suffering from the consequences that are happening. Whether what we are experiencing is natural or inflicted doesn't change the fact that for every foot the oceans rise, hundreds of millions of people are displaced, and left with no place to go. The countries that suffer the worst are some of the poorest countries: Bangledesh, Indonesia, Polynesia, Haiti and the Caribbean countries. The second major problem is that as climate patterns change, so do rain patterns.

The simple fact is that when water becomes scarce people die, and nations go to war.

The real challenge to our time is not to halt global warming or slow climate change. Rather we are faced with the brutal situation in which our world's growing population will be increasingly homeless, increasingly cut off from food and water resources, and increasingly hostile to the ridiculous disparity of wealth they witness. This is not a looming evil, it is a present one. It is a process already set in motion, whether by ourselves or nature. The question is not of causes, or solutions, but of action amidst the growing calamity.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/energy/2009/03/26/how-global-warming-threatens-millions-in-bangladesh.html

http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/maldives.htm

http://www.scidev.net/en/editorials/haitis-lessons-for-managing-the-global-environmen.html

Serious sports: formerly known as an oxymoron.

2010-01-01T16:05:00.003-06:00

My refuge from the assaults of academia is sports. In doing so, I forfeit all my indie points, and suffer the scorn of intellectuals across the world . . . but hey, we all have to find some way to relax. I am currently watching the Rose Bowl, or rather, the Citi Rose Bowl. Later I plan to watch the Allstate Sugar Bowl. Thanks to Citi and Allstate for imposing their sponsorship upon our consciousness.

I wonder how long I have until I will no longer root for the Texas Longhorns, but rather the AT&T Texas Longhorns . . . that sounds more poetic doesn't it?

Ohio State just caught the kickoff (or I should say, 'Nokia Ohio State just caught the kickoff') and the commentator sets the narrative, "And so the journey begins." How profound. The Citi Rose Bowl = a journey. Were it that we all could travel afar to distant lands, to battle legendary foes, all within the confines of a stadium.

The pre-game show likened it to a rose. Should I say a Citi rose? Yes I should. Next time you are buying some Citi roses for your sweetheart, remember within that bouquet is all the metaphorical significance of a football game. Something about thorns and layers . . . whatever. Draw your own parallels, there are plenty.

Thus I can no longer relax without adding sponsorship to common objects. I now have to add Allstate sugar to my coffee, enjoy my FedEx orange juice, while sitting in America enjoying my Autozone liberty. (Notice: America is up for grabs, who's it going to be?)

Oh! someone just made a Burger King first down. Bank of America Oregon really needs to score a Ford touchdown now. Enough: I return to the profound metonymy and analogical artistry of sportscasters.

If only sports could aspire to unabashed superficiality.
If only corporate America would quit pissing territorially on household items and every form of leisure entertainment.

But, I digress: Happy Verizon New Year everyone! May your Haliburton dreams come true, and your Brinker family be healthy.

Darwinian Myths and Evolutionary Theology

2009-10-30T17:48:00.012-05:00

I've only read a small portion of Origin of Species. It was mandatory reading that a professor printed off in mass to educate myself and my fellow students. As I recall I made it through 2-3 pages. The next thing I remember is waking up face down in the article that was then serving as a sponge for a large quantity of saliva. Thus, I failed at becoming a Darwin scholar. It does not seem that this rules me among a minority. My experience is that a great deal of scientists, even geneticists, have fallen short of reading the boring and generally inaccurate prose that made Darwin a legend.

One of the greatest myths resulting from Darwin is the idea of survival of the fittest. Before I proceed I'll make it clear that I fully believe in evolution. Obviously, if you've read much of anything I've ever written, I don't hold much room for Creationism. Still, I agree with many contemporary thinkers that for all its claims of objectivity, science is just as guilty of mythic, indeed religiously dogmatic, thought as any other culture. Survival of the fittest is perhaps one of the best examples I can point out. The big problem is with the concept of fitness. Darwin was certainly on to something in noting that it is survivors that pass on their genes, and determine the make-up of their progeny. But, the problem is that these survivors are not always more fit than all the others.

There is an enormous variety of "fitness" levels in nature. When we think of fitness we tend to assume this means the big and the strong. But that's not always true. In fact nature tends to select against "the big". In the grand scope of things, it is quite rare for bigness to be an advantage. More often than not it works against one's favor. Nor is strength as it's typically depicted really give one an advantage. Large muscles and stature simply burn more calories, and demand more consumption and make one a bigger target for 'nature' to take down.

Anyone who has spent much time around horses can tell you that they are some of the sickliest animals in all of creation. The vet bills for owning a horse are staggering. We should keep this in mind when we depict professional athletes as the inheritors of the earth: it only takes one bout of flu to make them as vulnerable as everyone else. In our society athletes are paid ridiculous wages because the perpetuate the delusion that they are the fittest specimens which we should all aspire to be. But, nature does not fit into (scientific) dogmas. Nature does select, but rarely does it do so based on who is bigger, faster and stronger.

A lot of the time, natural selection proceeds by blind luck. Were the citizens of Pompeii less fit than those of Rome? If a lion is struck by lightning is it sensible to assume it was less fit than meerkat hiding below the ground? If the meerkat's burrow collapses on top of it because a rhino tramples on top of it should we assume nature voted against him? These are ridiculous questions. These are circumstances that have minuscule relationships to the idea of "fitness".

My biology professor used to put it this way, "Nature does not select the fittest, only the fit enough. Nature shows no preference for those making an A+, it only expects that you make a D."

Statistically speaking it is the D's and C's that actually fair the best in nature. This is simply because there are more of them. Nature will, more often than not, respect the bell curve. There are far more numbers in the middle, and these numbers tend to like reproducing every bit as much as those pulling an A+. Often, they like reproducing even more. The cataclysmic situations where nature raises the bar, such that only the top of the class makes it on, are sparse. Meanwhile, she continues killing off the top of the class with the rest of it at a flat rate.

I mentioned my fascination with bacteria/viruses before. This is another tie in. It would seem that one of the biggest driving forces for evolution is adaptation to adverse microorganisms. Thus, nature cares much less about muscle mass than the functionality of one's immune system. This should serve as food for thought for those who don't think the poor should be provided with adequate health care. Dr. Paul Farmer has pointed out that we rich Westerners are culturing our own demise by leaving the masses living in favellas and barrios around the world where new diseases will specifically evolve to kill humans. The poor will be the first to die of it, and the first to be born immune to it. The privileged will be the ones whose numbers are less favorable. Statistically speaking we won't stand a chance. Thus, we might ought to add a beatitude, "Blessed are the poor for they will inherit the earth." This should be taken literally, and not spiritualized. Sow economic inequality, reap pandemic.

"Survival of the fittest" is a perversion of Darwin's ideas. It is a myth that speaks more of capitalism than of reality. It is what we want to believe, so we don't have to change. We want to believe that we have what we have, because we deserve it; because we are the fit ones. We want to believe that we are the strong who have survived, that our genes are the superior ones. We want Darwin to confirm our greediness, and we've forced axioms from his mouth. In fact, his ideas have told us the opposite. The mediocre survive with the fit. The mediocre are often more fit than the strong.

A Wendel Berry quote I love goes like this, "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand, it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." Only in light of evolutionary insights, I would replace "privilege" with "imperative".

The Universe Within

2009-10-04T00:34:00.005-05:00

Neuroscience is a burgeoning field. It is exploding with new knowledge and facts that are explaining things that have puzzled humans for centuries. It is also a field that in many ways seems to be charging headlong into conflict with religion, philosophy, and any number of other fields that had sought havens of safety beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. As is the tendency with most branches of knowledge, neuroscience is quickly being taken up ideologically to argue on behalf of whoever can manage to manipulate the data better than everyone else. And, like other branches of science, extremes are typically overblown in the public arena such that ethics slips quietly out of the purview of most. Yet, I find the interface of religion and neuroscience to be one of the most potent and interesting syntheses arising in our world.

The statistics of the human brain are staggering.
- Our brains contain up to 30 billion neurons.
- Each neuron can form up to 10,000 connections (synapses) with other neurons.
- This means that the average human brain can contain up to 300 trillion connections.

All the vastness of the universe that we can witness on a moonless, clear night is nothing in complexity compared with just one milliliter of brain tissue.

Typically, I have an aversion for math, but 300 trillion is a number that I'll listen to. The crazy thing is that these connections are plastic. They are constantly rearranging, repaving, and creatively engaging in new ways. Every experience we have rearranges hundreds of thousands of these synapses, creating memories and new patterns of energy within our heads.

This is what I think of now when I hear talk of the soul or spirit. Each of us represents a unique organization of matter in space, and this matter gives an infinitely unique, indeed unrepeatable, pattern of energy. At any given moment our brains are an energetic pattern that will never be repeated in the history of the universe. It's as though our minds are an electro-chemical fingerprint of unfathomable intricacy.

This is what I think of when the Christian/atheist animosity that rehashes old arguments over materialism vs. spirituality: Our brains are certainly matter, and science as the study of matter can come to understand them, explain them, and even manipulate them. But, this loses sight of the fact that matter is spiritual; unequivocally there is mystery that will remain. There are mental phenomena that will evade adequate scientific description, but that can still be experienced by human persons. They may be partially explainable, but only partially. Explanations are reductions. Yet, I find it to be unassailable to claim that we are material. To change a person's brain is to change the person, yet as we all change (often drastically) over the course of our lives, I find it hard to believe that there is some core essence to each of us that has eternal qualities.

I've stated previously that I don't think we are eternal. If we have a soul, then it is fleeting just as we are. Ultimately (as quasi-New Age as this will sound), I believe that God is the energy of the Universe: we are created in his image, in that we are energy too. When I think about it, I think what I just said is ridiculous, and perhaps that's why it's true. There is no way to talk about God. Mystics have said so for millennia, and I trust that they know better than me. Yet, I'll speak anyway. In some way I don't understand, God is present in the energy of the universe, much as my mind is present in the energy that enlivens my neurons. Faith tells me that he is eternal, and science tells me that I am not. So, I place my hope in him for grace: for an eternity that is not mine, and that the unique moment that "I" am, would be worthy of his memory.

Distance

2009-10-02T12:17:00.004-05:00

I'm generally amazed at the paradox of time: the fact that it can drag by painfully slow, but that in hindsight it always gives the appearance of having slipped by quickly and stealthily. I count my days by quizzes, exams, projects, and commitments. I tend to think of every day, or week, as something to get through, and feel no slight pain in doing so. I try to keep focused during lectures on topics that I don't understand because they are phrased in grammar that is awkward. The language by which it is delivered to me seems to grow inorganically out of Excel spreadsheets . . . the words seem confined to individual cells that serve only as fodder for algorithms and charts. They don't speak to me. Everything is blank of emotion and purpose.

I want pictures that don't fit into rows and columns.

Several months ago I met a musician, and conversation eventually unearthed the fact that I used to play guitar, and write songs, and do my best impersonation of a musical artist. He asked me why I stopped. . . . I'm never sure how to answer that question. It's not as though I don't have any answers for it; there are plenty. None of these actually suffices to express the real reason though. When I give an answer, it comes in a format of problems that could be solved. But, as with so many other things in life, it's not the individual problems that are the actual cause. Rather it is the strange synthesis of them all at once, at one particular place, experienced in one particular way that determine the course of one's decisions.

I recall in college how deeply I felt the need to express myself. I assume a great deal of this was due to the deep sense of confusion I carried over who I actually was. I think this was the impulse that drove my futile attempt at becoming a musician. I hoped that in expressing myself through music, I might thereafter understand myself. It helped, I think. At least at first. Eventually I was confronted with the difference between musicians and those who play music, or to say it differently, I learned the difference between the music I wanted to hear, and that which I was capable of creating. To really express myself with music, thus required a degree of skill that I was lacking. Self-discovery would demand that I choose a different route.

Somewhere in this epiphany I felt an enormous sense of relief, so I take it to be a good thing.

When I was a nurse, living on my own in the middle of (metaphorical) nowhere I remember regaining a sense of purpose in a particular realization. It's not one that is easy to put into words. The best I can say is that in realizing who we want to be, we must decide to be that person even in the process of becoming such. This was the result of working on a hospital floor, and the experiences I had there. I felt that connecting with people in that setting was not only fulfilling personally, but also useful. Whether coworkers or patients, I realized that much of what goes on in the medical setting was expressive of both who I was and who I wanted to be.

There was no audience clapping at the end of my shifts, no strangers approaching me to get to know the artist. Yet it was more than enough. It was real. I was real. The patients were real. I felt I understood myself perfectly in those moments, and even more that I was helping others in that process of understanding.

It amazes me now that it seems like such a long time ago. It has been over two years since I came back to school, and I've been anything but steadfast in holding to the goals I had in coming back. Yet, I find more and more comfort mixed in with fear as my life has narrowed down to this path. I think, because I realize increasingly that this is me.

So, now as I wander through a barren wasteland of molecular orbitals, accelerations, torque, graphs with trendlines, statistics of electrons that all seem so foreign and impenetrable. I feel far removed from who I am, and want to be. I can see it, though: coming slowly, yet here and so far behind. The humanity missing in this moment will return as my voice.

Notes From Taiwan: The Rundown

2009-08-19T10:22:00.003-05:00

Highlights:

- Hiking blindly across a mountain trail that lead to the Taiwanese National Hotel. Google pictures if you want to know why that's so cool. The mountains that run through Taipei are amazing, and make for phenomenal walks.

- Secluded mountain temples.

- Un-Americanized sushi. Took some getting used to, but it's quite good. Quite good.

- A plethora of coffee shops to choose from. I feel I'm not even breaking the surface of what's available.

- Bookstores with splendid selections of philosophy and science books. American bookstores really seem lackluster now.

- Fruit: Mangoes, enormous peaches, guavas . . .

Less Favorably:

- Obnoxious jackass at McDonald's. No idea what he said, but I'm about 90% sure it was derogatory.

- Hour of boredom listening to Alice and company speaking rapid, nostalgic, untranslated Mandarin.

- Ubiquitous humidity, and the sweat that accompanies it.

- The lack of A/C in far too many places . . . though that convicts me of being a rich, privileged American . . . but still.

- Excessive shyness: a disease affecting a countless many.

- Persisting allergies.

- The impression that heterogeneity is valued less here than elsewhere.

Never gets old:

- Sense of independence that comes from knowing my way around a neighborhood.

- Chopsticks.

- Adequate public transportation.

- Friendly locals.

- Better prices: cheap massages, food, cute dresses for Alice, etc.

Love to see:

- Cyclists

- Mountaintop cityscapes.

- Alice feeling at home, having light-hearted chats with her Dad.

- Informed political opinions that don't fall into partisan extremes.

Still scared of:

- Stinky tofu.

- Earthquakes.

- The sirens that make me think there's going to be an earthquake even though the aforementioned siren has nothing to do with said imaginary earthquake, which will remain imaginary.

- Grilled squid on a stick.

- The thought of ever attempting to drive a car here.

- China. Particularly the large weaponry they have aimed at me right now.

Hopes:

- To return. (Hopefully with the capacity to converse in Mandarin)

Notes from Taiwan: Taipei Miscellany

2009-08-15T01:59:00.003-05:00

Taipei wakes up slowly. My first day here started early on account of jet lag. I stalled waking until 6:45 AM, but my body refused to get the rest it needed beyond that. Alice and I spent the next few hours in aimless pursuit of coffee. There are many shops to be found, but none that cared to open before 10 o'clock. . . . and even then tardiness is the norm.

It is impossible to adequately describe the humidity here. Swedish saunas would seem parched compared to a normal day once the sun has towered over the sky-rises. Even relatively young buildings here appear old. Tiles and bricks all quickly gain the appearance of a public shower in a college dormitory. The air carries a weight that clings to everything. The sun here is not as scorching as in Texas. In Dallas when one ventures outside at mid-day they get the feeling that the sun is carrying out an angry vendetta against them. The logical conclusion is to flee for shade and wait for nightfall. Not here. Here the sun seems removed from the experience of heat. It seems to merely be the commandant of the air, which obeys its commands even in its absence, but ever-so-much-more in its presence. Either way, the simple act of walking overwhelms with the sense that the air is attacking you; coagulating around you. Its purpose being to immobilize, and drown the individual suffering its fervor.

The streets here are a hurried, partially-tamed chaos. Scooters equal or outnumber cars. The line at stop-lights leaves a large space for the mass of scooters that make their way to the front: most of them preferring to drive on the dashes as between them. Like any city of this size the motion is endless and partially disorienting.

I have walked more in the past 3.5 days than in the few years that have preceded them. I wake up sore every morning, but I've come to realize that restful vacations are wasted ones. Or so I'm telling myself, while trying to ignore the pain in my heels. Luckily parks in Taipei have short "trails" of fixed, rounded stones designed to increase blood flow to the feet of the elderly. I am loving my old age.

Notes from Taiwan: The First Email Home

2009-08-11T20:47:00.001-05:00

Mom,

I just woke up and took my first tour of Alice's part of the city. Trust me when I say, there is absolutely and completely NO evidence that Taiwan has ever suffered a typhoon on the streets. Everything looks 'business as usual'. Again, I repeat: there is no sign that Taiwan has ever experienced a typhoon. Ever.

Ever.

There is no debris. There is no residual water. There is nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to lend weight to the news reports that some catastrophe has occurred here. I will leave it to you to surmise whether or not I have electricity.

As for earthquakes: I have experienced none. If I do, I will promptly command them to stop. Apart from such imperatives I have few means of controlling earthquakes. But, to assuage your fears: I have seen no apocalyptic collapse of the city.

I will try to take flower pictures as much as possible.

In the hour and a half I have spent galavanting around the city, I as an individual have experienced more humidity than many nations experience over entire eras. I've been too busy sweating to pay much attention to the temperature, so I can't really tell you how hot it is.

I am in full possession of all my luggage.

Alice appears to be 87% happy and 76% nostaligic.

I love you,
Joe

The Cure for Absurdity

2009-08-03T16:54:00.010-05:00

A friend and I were discussing the ever-pervasive issue of evolution once. She was far from being a scientist herself, though that's not to suggest she wasn't respectably informed. Rather, she like many, was one who left science to people who "got it", which is why I felt quite validated when she said that she thought anti-evolutionists were basically just being offensive.

I think many scientists spend far too much time meticulously seeking to understand the natural world to then suffer the obtrusive and dogmatic opinions of a person whose sole source of information is the Bible. The truth is that scientists, like all professionals, don't like ignorant people taking shots at their profession, and tend to react emotionally, even spitefully, when they are confronted as such. It's akin to rednecks commenting on modern art, or a barely literate person critiquing fine poetry. I think of most of the discussions I've heard concerning the work of Jackson Pollock, and think they tend to parallel the evolution debate quite well.

The greater tragedies I notice in all of this are the conversations that end up not happening.

One thing I think gets ignored much to easily is the statistical ridiculousness of our world. It's an argument that has been sadly twisted to fit the ulterior motives of Christian apologists for much too long. We generally call it "the Watchmaker" argument. As it's generally presented, it says that life is possible only because our world is intricately organized to allow it. It is easily as fine-tuned as a Swiss watch. Thus, if you stumble across a watch in the wilderness, you never assume it is the product of natural processes, but rather that it is the creation of a watchmaker, and that he or someone else lost it there.

There are countless flaws in this argument, and even more flaws in the way many Christians attempt to use it. Yet, still I can't help but feel that it carries a valid point that is too rarely phrased in language that does not antagonize scientists.

Our planet is characterized by a staggering variety of fine-tuned balances. Were it a few thousand miles further or closer to the Sun life in the forms we are familiar with would have been practically impossible. Even more, were the composition of our oceans different, the percentages the elements present altered, the concentric spheres of our atmosphere changed, the pull of our moon absent . . . were anything other than it is, life would have been doubtful; if not impossible. I think we should avoid religious conclusions in regard to this, at least primarily. Yet, just in terms of pure statistics, the probability of our world existing is utterly absurd.

Now, absurdity does not in and of itself mean anything. The existentialists generally viewed absurdity as a symptom of an atheistic reality. I think it comes back to a hermeneutical question of how do we interpret the facts when we view them for themselves. We live in a world that is ornately ordered: but how? Is there some ordering factor in the universe, or are we merely the result of what amounts to the most statistically ludicrous chance happening that could ever be calculated or imagined.

I feel that both positions can be respected. I don't mean to be pejorative of those who see our universe as one ruled by blind chance. Only I cannot fathom how I happen to rest at the end of such a preposterous chain of "fortunate" accidents. I say this not because I think humanity is too dignified to be the product of chance, but rather because I think that chance has its limits. When we say that P= #, I wonder how many zeros we can tack on before we have to wonder if there is something driving it.

The leap from this "driving force" to a benevolent God is enormous. So, I don't wish to make it here. Rather I just want to say that at least to my mind, randomness, in the context of our universe, has to be self-limiting. Basically, the nature and ultimate complexity of our world prevents me from conceding that it is purely the result of random events.

My Grandpa (an agnostic) once said it this way, "Doesn't it seem more miraculous that the universe came about without God?"

Certainly. Only I don't have nearly enough faith to believe this miracle to be true. Whether this can be attributed to rationality or irrationality I think will tell each person more about their own beliefs than about my own. In the end, I believe in order . . . and I think it much too absurd to claim that it came about randomly.

A Biological Identity

2009-07-26T22:41:00.005-05:00

It was about two years ago that my biology professor first informed me that I, like all of us, was mostly bacterial in nature. In our hygiene-conscious world we often take a view that we are 'here' and those pesky germs are out 'there', somewhere. This is not actually the case. All of us are actually composed of far more bacterial cells than the cells we would consider to be our own. One could make an argument that our own cells make up far more of our mass. Yet still our bodies are under a endless state of "infection", and there's essentially nothing we can do about it. To really wipe out the 'infection' would be to kill ourselves. And this is not even to begin speaking of viruses, which are totally ubiquitous.

Yogurt companies are making a good deal of profit off of this lately. Now they have coined the term 'pro-biotic' to stamp on their products, which conveniently allows them to raise the price about 30 cents per cup. All this really means is that they've not hired a team of scientists to verify that every batch of yogurt they make actually does contain the variety of bacteria that have been proven to contribute to health. Chances are you can buy any yogurt and they will contain equal amounts of the same bacteria . . . but no scientists have verified this. Thus you are denied the honor of paying more.

Nonetheless, it still seems quite common that all-too-many people in our world carry an idea that we are somehow independent of germs, and that our goal in life should be to rid ourselves and our environments of as many germs as possible. Biology tells us that this is highly ironic, and slightly stupid.

In scientific perspective, our bodies are not isolated entities at war with germs, but rather are precise and integrated ecosystems of germs. These 'ecosystems' are regulated by our own immune systems. They are kept within tight parameters. It is when these parameters are overrun that we come down with an infection, but rest assured that the germs that cause such infections are already present in your body right now. And, they have probably been present for a long time (possibly a very long time). Thus the goal of hygiene is not to keep germs away, but to keep them in the right spots and keep their population levels steady.

Germs, being universally present, end up playing very important roles in our health: not just in their potential for negative infections, but also in maintaining our normal everyday function. They make nutrients accessible for our bodies, and carry out countless chemical processes that are still being discovered all the time. These chemical processes are vital for us to be ourselves . . . whatever that means. So, then, why do I think it is important to bring all this up?

Because, I am fascinated by the implications of such boring facts in regard to the idea of human identity. What does it mean when we speak of "ourselves", when our selves are not completely distinct from the world outside? Most of us live in a context (cities) where we are trained to forget that 'from the dirt we were made, and to the dirt we shall return.' We live in a world where ecosystems are conquered by ingenuity, and we generally identify ourselves as distinct from nature-at-large. At least until we get a sore throat and are reminded that we are ecosystems in ourselves.

As I will explain later, I think many of our myths about our position in the world betray us. But I think that our bodies (the more we understand them) teach us the most about our world; a world that defines us more than we will ever understand. This is not intended to exclude God, but in essence to start over in our discussion of him (inasmuch as that is ever possible). Every generation of every culture starts with the world as they know it, and then hears the subtlety of divinity somewhere within that understanding.

Our world is delicate, and nuanced. It is marked by an unfathomable multitude of factors that keep each other in check. Unquestionably, this is as applicable to the individual as it is to nature in general.

I think for many scientists this leads to a hopeless nihilism because it all seems so predictable, and to some extent meaningless. But, I think it can lead just as readily to a mystical congruity of hope and fear. For when life is considered in this light, it certainly seems much more precarious and fleeting; yet for that, precious and undeserved. Life, for me, is so much harder to define because of science, but still it is valuable. Yet, I'll save my plea for theism for another day.

These mundane realities have become my starting point for theological reflection. They mark the reason I struggle so much with religious ideas: I feel compelled to see the world of religion and the world of science speak to each other honestly.

Simply to bring it to a point, I'll explain one difficulty that arises for me. Much of the religious eschatology I have heard throughout my life speaks of a day when the world will be freed of disease. I certainly long for this day as much as anyone. Only we speak as though this will happen by wiping out evil (illness) from the face of the earth. Here is where it becomes problematic. We speak of evil as a force needing to be destroyed, but at least when it comes to disease, more often than not, it is a force that needs to be brought into harmony. Our desire to destroy disease led the past few generations to hand out antibiotics like candy. This has saved many lives, but as diseases become resistant to these drugs we are now facing the threat of these diseases taking more lives than they have saved.

At least in terms of earthly consequences, I find the harmony myths are far less catastrophic than the myths of final vindication. This applies to identity as much as anything: our self-understanding can be informed by the world, and in turn can define our world's future.

This terrifies me, and fills me with awe.

Prelude

2009-07-23T16:13:00.004-05:00

"What for instance in the old model of physics was (and still is) a solid, easy chair appears in the new atom-model as a kind of empty space with atoms and molecules whirling and dancing about inside it. An 'outsider' hearing about this for the first time, will either shake his head in disbelief - or angry protest - over such a new-fangled aberration, since the chair's solidity seems perfectly obvious - or never dare sit on a chair with a quiet mind again."
- Schillebeeckx

Science requires frequently that we accept things on faith. It often says things that are quite ridiculous, as our Belgian Padre points out. Chairs, like walls, rocks, and softball bats, are solid. We handle them tangibly, see them visibly, and trust them to hold up our weight when we sit on them. So, when a scientist explains that they are almost completely composed of empty space, the average person understandably will utter an obliging "Sure. . ." and ignore the scientist until he returns to the realm of sanity.

In the classroom discussions of scientific insights are tedious, but I find them worthwhile as they at least offer hope of practical application. The greatest challenge I face week to week is reminding myself that the things I'm learning might one day result in restoring some person's health. Still, it is not an easy task. I've now obtained a novice's level of understanding of quantum theory, uncertainty, evolution, genetics, blah, blah, blah. Yet, even with my basic level of understanding of such things, it seems that most people outside science who make any attempt at speaking about these delve into fantasy and science fiction even when they don't mean to. I find myself still commonly wearing the layman hat when listening to these ideas, even though I don't have to do so. Even after achieving a slight degree of scientific enlightenment, I find myself looking at people discussing science, and want to interject with an aloof, "What the hell are you talking about?!" Once a layman, always a layman? At least in attitude perhaps.

Thus, I am always apprehensive about putting scientific monologues on this blog. No doubt theology can be equally as esoteric as science, but for whatever reason, I am much more comfortable offending people with boring theology than boring science.

Lately though, I've found that I am thinking in circles theologically. Nothing is really breaking new ground for me, so the few attempts at writing I have made lately seem to merely rehash things I've said previously. I might post them anyway, but once I realize they are redundant I lose all motivation to finish the post. I have conceded that if I am to keep writing, and certainly if I am to keep writing honestly, I am going to have to bore you all with science. It is my sincere desire that this does not careen off into half-baked, quasi-scientific gibberish. I feel that lately I have noticed a few meaningful connections between what I've learned the past few years and life-in-general. I hope to put a few of those into words.

Consider this my intro for the posts that I think I might soon write. Theological science . . . or maybe scientific theology. I can't decide.

Consider yourselves forewarned.

The Greatest Paradox

2009-06-26T14:24:00.003-05:00

"Since supreme omnipotence and perfect holiness are incompatible attributes, there is a note of rational absurdity in all religion, which more rational types of theologies attempt to eliminate. But they cannot succeed without sacrificing a measure of religious vitality."
- Reinhold Niebuhr

To reiterate the stale argument once more: how can a good God tolerate evil? Is he impotent, or mean? Those are the alternatives the former question allows. Most of us at some point in our lifetime play the fool and make some meager attempt to reconcile the two. To do so demands one to naively reduce either the experience of evil in our world or the horrid implications of a universe with no Ultimate Meaning.

If God is holy, then he should do something about evil. If he is omnipotent then why precisely doesn't he?

All eventually must stand in the midst of this great incongruity where Truth seems to fall apart at the seams. In former ages this was the precipice where justice stood in lurch. But perhaps now we have come to an age where this paradox merely marks the beginning of justice.

Wittgenstein was fond of pointing out that the great paradoxes of philosophy were little more than disguised nonsense: a state of being entranced by our own language. Humans have an uncanny ability to talk in elaborate circles about a topic that has no connection with reality; all the while assuming they are really getting down to the heart of things. We must begin with the realization that all our theological meanderings about God's holiness or omnipotence probably amount to little more that idiotic babbling that fails on all accounts to connect to the reality.

First we should begin with a little negative theology and admit that God is not a person, nor is he not a person. Contrarily, we are all persons, and therefore relate to everything personally. This is evident in the fact that we talk to our plants, treat animals like people, and endow everything under the sun with characteristics that are not inherent in them. And still, we project these in order to see them, so we can proceed to relate to them.

It is totally natural, and horribly problematic, that we do this with God. For millennia we have cultivated a spiritual experience that is alingual, and tried to pass it on in language. The contradiction should already be apparent, but I'll proceed.

We are totally confined by language, but God is not. This reveals a huge problem in the desire to attribute structural superlatives to God. When we speak of 'omnipotence' we are attempting to ascribe a greatness to God that is superior to all human qualities, but the structure of the term is still very human. Even for a more religious term like 'holy', we still structure the concept around a human idea of holiness. To proclaim that God is Omnipotent and Holy is one thing. I'm not saying we should abandon the terms. I'm saying the concepts which ultimately stand in conflict, rest on the idea that God is like us.

"Omnipotent and Holy!" are adulations of human persons, who can only praise personally. Yet, the descent from this doxology into speculation and conjecture on how the two can coincide is a symptom of our own idiocy. The most grandiose of words are still small, and still human.

Whether they measure as buckets or bathtubs, the ocean will not deign to be confined to either. When we feud over how he can occupy two buckets at one time we have allowed our language to mesmerize us into absurdity. Buckets vanish in the ocean all too easily. Our words are nothing.

p.s. Lately, my attitude toward the Trinity reflects what I've just said. Trinitarian language is the core of Christian praise. Yet, in regard to the theological dogma of the Trinity that proceeds into ontological syllogizing, I still reserve a deep pessimism that shows no sign of decrease.

The Appeal of Home

2009-06-13T16:16:00.007-05:00

Wanderlust is an infectious and many splendored thing. I say infectious. There's a good chance it's genetic, though that's hard to confirm. I am mostly Irish after all. If it is viral, then I am certainly surrounded by enough friends who are ridden with it. In short, I am doomed to a life of restlessness whoever may be at fault.

It's funny that this be the case, seeing that most of my adult life has been spent confined to a starkly narrow range of geography. Sure, I've managed brief excursions into isolated world corners at church expense. Yet, these never managed to constitute the prolonged and generally aimless straying that persistently haunts the recesses of my consciousness. If God made any mistake, it was making our world so miserably small as to only award Magellan and Marco Polo the privilege of discovering it anew. I've got talent. My friends have more. Lord knows we could have discovered the world with a hell of a lot more style than the European lot that preceded us.

I tried for a while to be of the rugged sort who could live in the wilderness with a rope, a tarp, and a blanket. I failed quite miserably. I require more comforts in traveling, and comforts are generally costly. As I have managed to stay broke for the last decade, I have failed to rediscover the New World, Old World, Far East, or any other great frontier one might propose.

Necessarily, this repressed desire has found a multitude of ways to resurface. If this sounds unfounded, allow me to remind you that I am working on my third degree (one of which was in missions), I tenaciously attempt in vain to find authentic foreign experiences here in my hometown, and threaten weekly to learn another language. I've also noticed a strong tendency to value ideas that seem to wander into my world from afar. Foreign religions. European theology. Etc, etc. I'm sure the need to fulfill my desire of getting away has plenty to do with the appeal of such things. Hopefully this does not lead to indictment for cheap New Age consumerism . . . that's not what I'm getting at.

I was reading A'Kempis the other day. . like you do. . . I found the spirituality it offered to be predictable, yet perplexingly appealing. This is to say that it certainly wasn't a profound new insight that struck me, but rather a new perspective on a relic of theology:

"In the holy Scriptures, truth is to be looked for rather than fair phrases. . . In them, therefore, we should seek food for our souls rather than subtleties of speech, and we should as readily read simple and devout books as those that are lofty and profound. . . If you desire to profit, read with humility, simplicity, and faith, and have no concern to appear learned. Ask questions freely, and listen in silence to the words of the Saints. . ."

For quite some time words like these would have struck me as horribly routine. I likely would have cast them aside as irrelevant, but something in them struck me. It was a familiarity not redundant, but comforting. Something that reminded me of a home I've fled for too long. Formerly, I would have read such a passage and assumed my only options were blind ingestion of a whole ideology, or a critical dissection of it that leaves no room for life. At least this appears to me to be the shape our the divide in our world: those with faith don't question and those who question have no faith. I have long chosen the latter for disgust of the former, and for the illusion that such questioning was the defining mark of freedom.

I've questioned myself into a nomadism, and lately I've been homesick. A wandering spirit may stumble upon experiences untold, but the rest is never as good as it was at journey's start.

There's always a new perspective to be gained, and when we have gained it, we can easily look upon our past with new critique. We may always challenge the scope of what we previously knew, but we should never deny that this knowledge is what has brought us to the moment we inhabit. For much too long I have hated Scripture and the Saints for their narrowness, for their flaws, for their mundane ubiquity. I've fled them, and now i'm tired.

Don't proclaim me a prodigal; I have no desire to be typecast as such. I am merely accepting that I am a new branch, reaching for light where I find it, and reaching away from the twisted mess behind me. Such is our history: that which fixes us in place against our will, and thus holds us up to find what we seek.

What Story Do We Choose? Reflections on Life of Pi

2009-05-29T14:27:00.005-05:00

Warning: I am going to ruin the book. If you have the slightest thought of reading it on your own, do so before reading this blog.

Life of Pi is a novel by Yann Martel about an Indian boy who grows up the son of a zoo keeper. His family decides to move from India to Canada, and dies in a shipwreck en route. Pi (short for Piscine) survives in a life boat which coincidentally saves a hyena, orangutan, and adult Bengal tiger. Pi, having grown up in a zoo, is quite versed in animal psychology, and manages to survive 270+ days at sea. The hyena and orangutan are not as fortunate.

Pi retells his story in harrowing detail. He recounts how he keeps himself and his pet tiger alive, distilling water and catching fish and turtles to survive on. His account bears an adequate amount of realism until the end where the story proceeds to become more and more unbelievable. Eventually, as Pi is going blind from hunger and seems to be losing his mind, they happen upon another castaway (a Frenchman) in another lifeboat who attempts to kill Pi, but does not account for the hungry tiger behind him. After the tiger dines upon the Frenchman, they stumble upon a perfect island, where Pi can enjoy a vegetarian diet to his heart's content while his tiger can feast upon docile meerkats that inhabit the island. Eventually they leave out of necessity on the lifeboat and land in Mexico. While recovering in a Mexican hospital, Pi is visited by emissaries of the ship company, seeking answers as to the ships sinking. They find none, but listen skeptically to Pi's story. They drive their doubts until Pi tells them another story of what happened.

The alternate story: the life boat was actually inhabited by an invalid sailor (zebra), his mother (the orangutan), an evil French cook (hyena) and himself (guess who). The cook greedily kills and eats the sailor, and a while later brutally kills Pi's mother in front of him as Pi watches at a distance on a makeshift raft. Pi later crawls aboard and while eating a turtle with the cook, stabs him to death and vengefully, viciously eats him.

At the end of the interview, Pi questions the representatives which story they prefer. There is no criminal trial, only opinion. So, which would they choose. The book ends with the account of the ships sinking, which concludes that Pi survived his ordeal with a tiger aboard the boat.

So, which do we choose? This reminded me of the movie Doubt in that it seems to be offering up a parable. The fact is that parables have no right or wrong answers, only that they require us to answer with our own verdict. And it is our verdict that matters, since this reveals each of us to our self. There are plenty of reasons to choose one story over the other, and that's the point. Choosing is the mirror that reveals our own face.

So, allow me to explain what I've seen in my own choices. At first, the end of this book bothered me. I struggle with the idea that religion (the story) can or should serve as a mask to the horridness of reality. A boy who watches his mother stabbed to death and eaten is hardly served by mythologizing his experience. Perhaps, in Martel's words, this makes me guilty of clinging to "dry, yeastless factuality" but, in true existentialist form, I find it better to deal with reality in all of its grotesque and brutal contours than to package it in marketable, yet false, legends.

Yet, I can point out also, that the word "false" in my previous sentence assumes quite a lot. It is factual (in a dry, yeastless sort of way) that the story of four humans on a boat is more believable. It is my own preference to always wants to start from "what really happened". Yet in doing so, it is true that the facts stand there, lifeless and without meaning. It's not that our myths replace them, but that only in such stories can we see the meaning therein. Personally, this represents to me what religion is coming to mean in my life. There is the reality that I perceive, then there is the meaning that I find.

As a sidenote, I'd like to mention my interpretation of the island mentioned in the story. Pi stumbles upon the perfect island, but realizes later that at night all life has to escape to the trees or his lifeboat. The reason for this is that at night, the algae that compose the island become carnivorous and eat all animals that cannot escape. This is confirmed when Pi picks the fruit of the algae and finds that it enshrines human teeth. Personally I find this to be a commentary on Utopian ideals. Whenever our stories, religions or ideologies offer us a perfect world, their perfection is the result of the death of others. Utopias are carnivorous, even though in the day they appear benign. At least that's what I think of it.

At first I thought I didn't like the book very much, but the more I ponder it, the more I enjoy it. A good read, even if I've just drained it of any element of surprise.

Final Thoughts on Wright's 'Surprised by Hope'

2009-05-18T14:28:00.005-05:00

My previous post on Wright seems to have sufficiently irked many people. As a result, I've gotten to have quite a few good conversations, so I think it worth it. In light of those conversations, and now the latter two thirds of the book, I'll offer a few more thoughts.

First, I'd like to respond to Jonathan's comment on my last post. I'll start by saying that I, too, do not believe that the reality of entropy in our world necessitates that we imagine the afterlife to consist of harps, clouds, or the obscene use of gold and pearl in construction. When I envision any sort of afterlife, I do envision it as a reality quite like the one I currently reside in minus the crappier aspects which I won't take the time to name. How else could I, or anyone, imagine it? The only categories for joy and fulfillment that humans have, are ones that are connected to our life experience. We have no option but to envisage our greatest hopes as perfected extensions of the world we already inhabit.

Therefore, I have no problem casting our hoped for reality as a transfigured version of the one we are already in. The hope for a transformed world, is my hope too. My problem is the way in which Wright speaks of this: as though decay/entropy is the enemy to be overcome. Science shows that entropy may be seen as the enemy, but that it is also one of the driving forces of creation itself. This, by the way, is not mere theory. This is a law every bit as real as gravity or inertia.

This connects to what I said earlier about the myth of Progress. I agree with Wright that we live in a world that has given up on Utopias. We no longer assume that political science or technological advances will bring about a perfect world. Yet, we still yearn deeply with the hope that technology will bring a cure for cancer. We still pray that scientists and doctors may find cures for M.S. or Lupus. We may not place our faith in Utopian Progress, but we still believe in progress with a little 'p'. If anyone denies this, they should consider how many times in their life they or their loved ones would have died without the advances of medicine, not to mention other technologies. And these progressive innovations, were made by people who have more than a demonizing interpretation of entropy among other concepts.

I think to view death, decay or entropy as our enemies is in fact to view the order of reality as an antagonist. This is where the worldview of the first century and our own will not line up. Yet, I agree that our hope is that this is somehow transcended, that in spite of what we do know, we don't know everything. That in the end we are remembered.

In the end I don't think we can know what awaits us after death, but even still, we all know that what we expect and hope for does, in actuality, say everything about us here and now. For this reason, as I continued to read Wright's book, I was shocked by the beauty of his depiction of Christian hope. He, in some sense, restored my appreciation of the unity of the Christian narrative, and re-focused my attention on the sincerity of faith that it can instill. His expertise in this regard proved to be enough to assuage my skepticism, albeit partially.

This brings me back to what I opened with previously, the antagonism between Crossan and Wright. After finishing Surprised by Hope, I find that, as with all fierce oppositions, the truth is that Crossan and Wright need each other. Neither author is a fool. They are both arguing from opposing platforms that I doubt will ever be totally reconciled, since the language each on couches his arguments in requires rules that the other won't play by. Thus, I think a better option to the mud-slinging that seems to mark their relationship right now, is to seek a better understanding of the other. Both seem to have similar outcomes in mind as a result of their theologies: an increase in human dignity among the poor and disenfranchised. The antipathy between them, and their followers seems horribly unnecessary and even more unfruitful. Personally, I still side mostly with Crossan, but that shouldn't detract from the good things Wright has to say. To borrow from Bryce's use of Ezra Pound, I hope there will be commerce between us.

Entropy Clarified

2009-05-07T13:08:00.010-05:00

I've been informed that my previous discussion of entropy left a few people confused, so I'll try to do better. First let me point out that though I am around a lot of science, it is basically a second language to me. I am no physicist. Therefore what I am about to write will likely be unsatisfactory to both scientists and non-scientists alike. So it goes. . .

Entropy is a form of energy which is most easily understood as a state of disorder. Consider shuffling a deck of cards ten times. What are the chances that you will be left with a perfectly ordered deck? We all assume that this will basically never happen. Statistically we can say that there is an infinitely minute possibility that this could happen, only we don't hold our breath for it. Likewise, the chances that the deck will be left with all suits or even colors grouped together are highly unlikely, yet possible. The fact is that there are far more ways for a deck to end up disorganized than organized.

This degree of disorganization is referred to in science as entropy. The deck of cards metaphor is even more apt when we think of it not a shuffling a deck, but playing a game of 52 card pick-up. What are the chances not only that the deck will land in any organized fashion, but even more improbably that it would land neatly stacked and properly ordered? Again, this is not impossible by any laws of nature, other than statistical probability. This basically goes to say that we could have a million people spend their entire lives playing 52 card pick-up, and never witness a single occurrence of such an event. How much more so when we go from 52 cards to countless trillions of atoms and molecules?

Science has found plenty of evidence to suggest that the universe is constantly expanding, which goes to say that the room we are playing 52 card pick-up in is increasing in size, so the disorganization natural to the game we are playing is only finding more chances to increase. This is the second law of thermodynamics. The universe is characterized by the fact that entropy (disorganization) is always increasing. The universe is getting messier.

We live in a world filled with countless examples of organization. Isolated systems can grow more organized, so long as the universe as a whole ends up more disorganized.

Thus, among those from a liberal arts background it quickly becomes a matter of doom and gloom. Chaos is slowly siphoning away the energy that allows for life, for meaning and hope for a future. In the course of time we will be left with a cold, lifeless universe where lonely isolated molecules float in an eternal expanse with a rare and meaningless interaction with other molecules. Insignificance will be the rule.

This is not a totally unrealistic interpretation of scientific facts. Yet, let's consider the reverse. Were it not for entropy the universe would likely have remained a confined and intolerably hot ball of energy, where anything resembling matter (let alone life!) would never have had the slightest opportunity to form. The expansion of the universe allowed for energy to consolidate into subatomic particles. Thus, atoms. Thus, molecules. Thus planets, and their fragile systems. Thus, earth and all its byzantine absurdity.

A hot, matter-less universe is no preferable situation to a cold, lifeless one. But wait, there's more.

The simple fact is that all energy wants to escape into a situation of maximum entropy. Thus when you want an ordered deck of cards you do not shuffle them, or throw them up into the air, much less a stiff breeze. You must go through manually and order them yourself. This requires brain-power, and hand-movements. It requires you to use energy: burn calories. You use some of the calories you burn to organize the cards, the rest becomes body heat which slowly escapes from you into the world around you. Similarly, this heat that escapes into the world, escapes from the world into the universe not as heat but as other forms of energy. Eventually, all energy wants to be "freed" into the world of deep space where the greatest level of disorganization is possible.

So, why does this matter?

The vast majority of chemical processes in our world that allow for life in all its forms harness the tendency of matter/energy toward entropy. Life, so to speak, is riding the entropic wave as far as it will go. We should have no illusions; this wave will run out. But, were it not for entropy there would never have been any chance that life could have come into existence in the first place. When sugar breaks down in your body, it releases energy that according to the laws of the universe seeks a more disordered state. Along its way toward disorganization, our body and the proteins in it, uses it to organize the very molecules that allow us to maintain "life". Our bodies work on the principle that the universe's momentum toward disorder can be used to create order.

This obviously carries huge implications concerning the duration of our universe, our reality. The world is temporary. No matter how long we can drag this reality out, it will eventually end. It is funny that it is generally only Westerners who find this deeply problematic. Our Hindu friends laugh at our silliness in ever assuming otherwise.

This is, in large degree, where I find the views of people like N.T. Wright implausible. Were it our destiny to raise from the dead and re-inhabit this world, then we also inherit a plethora of difficulties needing to be explained. If we assume a gracious and loving God then I find the sheer number of resurrectees difficult. At seven billion we are facing horrible over-population problems, then what of the trillions of human lives that could be accounted for throughout history. Perhaps this thinking is too mundane. Then what are we to make of our Sun which is increasing in size. A million more years and its heat will make this planet no great inheritance for anyone. Do I simply lack imagination? What of the fact that in a billion years the energy of our universe will be so widely dispersed and so stable as to make, no only life, but all chemical interactions impossible.

I don't mean to question God's capacity to change the laws of the universe. Yet, the question remains, that if he does, how is this qualitatively different to the notion of heaven? Perhaps he will create a world like earth for the resurrected dead to inhabit, but that is still not our world. And, a universe freed from the reliance on and threat of entropy is not the universe we live in now.

I also understand the heart of Wright and people like him, who believe that resurrection faith places greater value on our world and human dignity. Still, willing belief based on the fact that we've rested our ethics on an untenable worldview seems a poor way to cope with the difficulties of the human situation.

As a poor scientist and a fair theologian, I hope that sheds some light on a difficult but important subject.

After 100 Pages of N.T. Wright

2009-05-04T20:29:00.006-05:00

As one who is sympathetic to the views of J.D. Crossan, I've long known that I should consider myself opposed to the views of N.T. Wright. So I hear. Until last week I had never read anything by him. Several friends had noted how egregious they found this omission, Jonathan among them. So, he proceeded to buy me a copy of Surprised by Hope for my birthday. I'm about a third of the way through it now, and as could be predicted I'm finding myself highly at odds with Wright. Allow me to point out a few of my biggest objections so far:

First, is his method of arguing against Crossan whom he rarely names, but certainly includes as a member of the spurious "revisionists". His use of this term is pejorative and comes across with no small degree of smugness. His reasoning against Crossan does offer what seem to be legitimate critiques, but does so in a way that grossly oversimplifies both Crossan's arguments as well as the level of ambiguity inherent in the texts. Furthermore, Crossan's take on Scripture is one that seeks to understand the world around the it as much as the actual texts themselves. Wright, conversely, only makes vague references to philosophical trends of the world around the Bible. I don't mean to imply that he is ignorant of this world, but his arguments seem trapped within the world of Scripture, and thus (from my limited understanding of the world around Scripture) his arguments seemed to base themselves in contextual hearsay rather than the specific historical context. Again, I'm sure (or at least I certainly hope) in his more scholarly tomes he backs himself up better. Yet here, his scope of reference seems sadly narrow, and so, no matter how sound his arguments are, they seem incomplete.

Secondly, as one who spends much of his time around scientists, I feel that his critique of the myth of Progress is little more than an overblown caricature. True the idea that the human race is progressing towards some heavenly future by means of our own intelligence has been largely cast aside. It is culpable for much of the current ecological crisis and countless other horrid, modern developments. Yet, elements of it are certainly irreplaceable. The myth of Progress is also intimately tied to the advent of antibiotics, current methods of farming, even the electronic world that allows you to read what I've just written. Progress is no longer to believed to be leading us to Utopia, true. The vast number of Dystopian movies produced in the last 30 years proves that. Yet, while we continue to wait endlessly for the resurrection to make all things new, we have little choice but at least hope that progress will help us fix what we've already messed up, and add dignity where we have formerly only known pain. I agree with him that progress is not the answer for everything. I agree that it does a poor job of accounting for evil in our world. Still, his flippant rejection of its merits seems naive at best.

Third, it seems that Wright would prefer that we all simply reverted to a first century apocalyptic worldview. I find this laughable. I realize that he is really arguing for a return to a resurrection eschatology, and that he believe that this should prevent things such as nuclear war. But, anyone who studies the results of apocalyptic expectations in the first century would be hard-pressed to convince me that this would not imply the swift annihilation of everything on this planet other than rocks and bacteria. After all if God can simply transfigure the world in the resurrection glory of the new creation, then what does a few thousand years of desolation matter? So, I fear, would go the rationale of the masses, should they follow Wright's train of thought. I don't see a return to expectation of resurrection really solving many of our current problems. Furthermore, the current unfashionableness of belief in resurrection is equally tied to the fact that we've been waiting for two millennia, through countless religious wars, through a seeming endless return of the same, clinging to a hope that is ever more remote and ever more difficult to reconcile with what we know of the world. If we've seen too much to have faith in progress, then how much more so with the resurrection?

Lastly, allow me to quote:
"Every force, every authority in the whole cosmos, will be subjected to the Messiah, and finally death itself will give up its power. In other words, that which we are tempted to regard as the permanent state of the cosmos - entropy, threatening chaos, and dissolution - will be transformed by the Messiah as the agent of the creator God." (99, bold mine)
I find this abuse of science to be highly annoying, especially since it sounds as though it is being paraphrased out of Time magazine. Entropy is often cast as an insidious and irrepressible force of meaninglessness. Yet a universe without entropy would be incapable of life. Entropy allows for all the chemical processes in our world which give way to life. It is generally referred to as "disorder", but can just as accurately be referred to as "freedom". The electricity that flows through your brain allowing you to perceive the words on this screen, flows due to entropy. All matter in the universe is seeking the greatest amount of freedom, and thus we can rest assured that unless the Order of the Universe is completely altered, our world will one day end. This also goes to say that any other worlds in the universe which may harbor life, though they may long outlast us, will end too. Yet, if it were not for this same force, life in any form would never have come into being in the first place. If the force of entropy is halted, then life is still just as impossible as it will be when entropy is carried to the farthest extreme. I believe a Creator God could easily recreate our universe such that our existence continues without entropy, but to do so would also mark the end of what we know as reality and the start of something totally different. This seems, to me, to render Wright's arguments for resurrection null and void. Maybe that's just my take. Even where I disagree with him historically, I can see his expertise. Scientifically, though, he would do better to take a freshman chemistry class before he publishes.

Nonetheless, it is making me think, and has gotten me intrigued enough to hope to read one of his more substantial works. For the many Wright sympathizers who read this, I am determined to remain open to any defense you might give. I plan to finish the book in any case, and then get back to reading the liberal Christians who are all that manage to convince me not to convert to Judaism.

Torture . . . really?

2009-04-29T11:46:00.005-05:00

My friend Jonathan just posted a blog citing the Daily Show interview with the guy defending governmental rights to torture. To read, go to www.stormented.org. He ended by asking his readers to respond whether Christians can support torture. And the first two comments can be summed up as affirmative . . . . really.

One comment gave the same tired "if someone were attacking my family/wife" line that's generally proposed by Fox News, and anyone who's dumb enough to listen to Fox News. For now, I'll post my comment, and suggest you go read his blog if you want more context.

"I love how predictable this is. Our country is founded by people fleeing oppressive rule which commonly engaged in torturous acts. Our founders do their best to set up our country to be better than the ones they were fleeing from. Now, that we’ve achieved status as imperial empire, we wish to justify ourselves in doing the things which were the impetus for our escape. Our capacity to willingly adopt what we hate is ridiculous.

I think it important to remember the situation in Rome. We tend to be anachronistic and cast Rome in the perverse mold of Nero and Caligula. Yet, in Jesus’ day Rome was still run under the values of Augustus. Or should I say: the good, moral, family values of Augustus. He being the emperor who demanded marital fidelity, and the proper raising of children within the nuclear family, favoring what we in America would otherwise cast as “good Christian values”.

These being the ends Augustus sought to uphold, he saw no problem using any means to achieve them. Thus why he and his immediate successors saw no problem crucifying any foreigners who potentially undermined such a good, wholesome society. Thus, crucifixion saved countless (Roman) lives, just as water-boarding, among other heinous practices, saves (American) lives today.

Even still, the ends do NOT justify the means, when the means mock the foundations not only of this country, but of any humane society. Our attempts to justify ourselves by recourse to our values of family and “democracy” are a farce that prove only that we have sided with Rome and against the Kingdom of God. Our hypocrisy is further revealed when we now attempt to spin our torturous acts as “mild”, especially since we have previously called those who performed such acts on our people “war criminals” and sought their execution. When Christians seek to vindicate torture in any form, there is no gospel. Just more of the same."

Liberation and Asia

2009-04-23T14:44:00.003-05:00

Aloysius Pieris is a Jesuit priest from Sri Lanka, and a brilliant author. To my knowledge he only has a few major books he has written, which I consider to be a great tragedy after just finishing An Asian Theology of Liberation. Pieris is reported to be the first non-Buddhist to be awarded a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies by the University of Sri Lanka. In this book, which was first published in 1986, he combines the insights of liberation theology (then at its height) with a very well thought out theology of religions. His insights into other religions of Asia are profound due not only to his training but also his vast personal experience of those religions. In other words, Pieris is no outsider.

As a liberation theologian he frames the mission of the church as partaking in God’s battle against Mammon, which he occasionally (and I think aptly) refers to as Capital. This battle is both a struggle for and against poverty. The struggle against poverty is something that is becoming common in our present day situation. But, Pieris claims that this is inescapably tied to the converse struggle to be poor. These are two necessary poles of the same struggle against Capital.

Framing his theology as such, though, was not what I found so profound in this book. I’ve heard similar ideas said in much more accessible language by Shane Claiborne, or even among other liberation theologians. What is so innovative with Pieris’ book is his stance on other religions, and their place in this same struggle. Pieris seeks to escape the christocentric thought that has dominated liberation theology up to the present. He argues that all religions have the kernel of liberation in their core, and that all have fallen short of this in their own way. In other words, every religion shares Mammon-Capital as a common enemy, and all have been infiltrated with tendencies to capitulate to this great enemy.

Pieris sees Christian missions in the common usage of the term, as an insidious tool of Mammon-Capital to subvert the liberative tendencies of other religions. Not that he is against any evangelization, but that sharing the good news is inescapably tied to the liberation of the poor from oppressive structures. The history of Christian missions has shown that it’s end result is anything but such a liberation. Thus, Pieris’ most controversial idea is that Christian missions in Asia must be accompanied by a baptism into the religions of Asia. He argues that the story of Jesus is one that seeks to fulfill the faith of the poor by fulfilling their work toward their own liberation. This is because the rich do not pour down the blessings of God upon the poor. Rather God is among the poor already, and if the rich want any part with him then they must sell all they own and come follow him. Jesus certainly did not side with the theology of the rich. It can be easily seen that he cared little for the doctrines of the fortunate few, but lived fully in the worldview of the poor among whom he claimed God shared his favor. Thus, the current idea that the rich of the West should charitably share their “true” faith with the poor of Asia is a complete antithesis of what is actually Christian faith. If we wish to be a part of what God is doing we must lose our faith to find it, and be immersed in the religiousness of the poor. We must do this because this is where Jesus is actually to be found, and where the kernel of liberation is still living waiting to break through the soil.

As liberation theology always manages to do, this book proved to me how I am not a Christian nor do I know any. Yet, at the same time it revealed to me the hope of the gospel in its authentic form. Beyond all my struggles to perceive “the Truth” are the greater matters of human dignity and the oppression of those who don’t have the leisure to consider “theological matters”. For the poor the conflict between science and religion is minutia. Arguments over cosmology and the nature of God are luxuries they are rarely afforded. They are born into a faith and culture that are inadequately replaced by the gospel of missionaries. If I truly hope to follow the man who proclaimed God preferentially living in their midst, then my concern is not that they hear my version of the gospel, but that I participate to my fullest ability in their experience of his liberating blessings.

I give the book five stars. If one has any interest in liberation theology, it is a must read.

Criticism Leading to Conversation

2009-04-09T11:41:00.003-05:00

When I was living in Brownwood, a town of roughly 20,000 people, I was constantly faced with the fact that I shared close to no common interests with any of the people who lived there. It was quite challenging. I spent I huge portion of my spare time reading esoteric theology books, analyzing my own beliefs. And then, I would encounter locals who I can safely assume would never think of, nor want to ask any of the questions I found myself wrestling with. Small towns in central Texas don't tend to care much about christology or interreligious dialogue. At the time this distressed me. I found these ideas to be quite important, and simultaneously couldn't really blame Brownwoodites for not caring.

I revisited this experience last week talking with one of my friends who frequently preaches in small towns. He was telling me how irrelevant textual criticism (etc.) seemed to be in small town settings, and I agree . . . and yet totally disagree. Basically, it's true, the Jesus Seminar and various interreligious studies have no relevance to them. The same could be posited for poor people in Oak Cliff and possibly even for the filthy rich of Southlake and Highland Park. If all these historical analyses just complicate their faith and potentially tear it down, then what good does it do them?

At heart, I still basically think missiologically about everything. I mean this in the most anti-colonial sense possible. I think 'good news' is not simply proclaimed, but necessarily conversed about. And in this sense, I think the biggest need we have is to get people talking. I also believe that Christianity in it's unbastardized form, is completely and unequivocally egalitarian. It is a religion that fully rejected heirarchies. So, because of this, I believe that any conversations worth having should be held between equals. This is no small qualification. It is unquestioned in our society that those who teach/proclaim are in a higher position than those who learn/receive. Thus those who give 'good news', give from a privileged and dominant position. A position I believe automatically negates the very message they are preaching.

I believe that Dallas, like any metropolis, is a confounding mixture of cultures and worldviews which awkwardly rest together; pragmatically tolerating each other without ever really reaching understanding. Without understanding, conversation is impossible. Without conversation, the gospel is useless.

This is where I find all the esoteric concepts of theology and biblical criticism invaluable not for the other, but for myself.

John Searle, I philosopher that I like, frequently points out that the human capacity for self-deception is boundless. The 'will to believe' effectively blinds us to the dissonance of our beliefs and makes fundamentalists of us all. This is true of everyone: theists, agnostics, or atheists. Christians, Muslims, scientists, or Hindus. We are all guilty of the 'will to belief' and the purposed ignorance of all that detracts from what we would believe. I think this reveals both the necessity of conversation and the impossiblity of it. If we hope to ever achieve something more than a fractured society of uncomprehending tolerance, we have to seek to truly understand the other. Yet, the crutch of 'willing belief' demands that we avoid conversation, or if we dare to enter into it, do so only in a superior position.

The truth is that if we are incapable of self-critique, then we are also incapable of conversation. To an extent, perfect self-awareness is impossible. Yet, as much as we are capable, we must seek to be aware of our own origins, of our faith's place amongst others, of its similarities with others and its uniqueness. This is necessary because it is the only way to join in conversation with others as equals, avoiding an imperialism of faith and culture. This seems to me the only way that a world of people who will not adopt our faith, can nonetheless hear what is good in our good news.

I think that in this sense, Christians have to lead by example. The truth is that all belief systems, including systems of unbelief, have black marks that they would much prefer to ignore. They assert their superiority over other faiths by willfully ignoring their own history, their own inconsistencies, their own unspeakable questions. No one is exempt from this. Yet, too many would act as though they are. Our very message demands that we should be more than another domineering system, competing and seeking advantage over other faiths and cultures. I believe that this begins with us; with our willingness to critique ourselves, and listen to those voices who for hundreds of years have critiqued what we would otherwise 'will ourselves to believe'.

If we can't manage this, then how do we imagine that others will? And if such an endeavor fails, then are we not doomed to continue talking at and past the other? My hope is that self-awareness can foster a strength that does not fall into the trap of colonial proselytizing and religious arrogance, but rather is a strength that allows for genuine conversation and mutual understanding.

My Eschatology

2009-03-27T12:02:00.007-05:00

The earliest Christians did not have a concept of the immortal soul. Originally there was no "Christian" concept of an afterlife in some other reality beyond our own. Instead, there was the expectation of the resurrection. If one follows the history of Judaism, it is quite possible to trace an evolution of their ideas for what followed death. The advent of the Law in Hebrew culture brought with it the idea that God should, or must, reward the righteous and punish the evil. God became a Just God, and justice for his people was expected. Then over the course of time, his people came to the realization that things rarely followed this scheme.

Resurrection seems to have arisen as an answer to the question, 'If the righteous die, and the evil receive the worldly rewards, then why be just?' Especially in the shadow of Babylonian captivity, and Graeco-Roman rule this question burned all the more. Over the course of hundreds of years, there was a growing preference for the idea that the righteous dead would be raised up by God. As the world would be given to them then, this eschatological world would be a just (and therefore perfect) world. By Jesus' time, the idea seems to have caught on with the 'lower' strata of society. But, then we hear that the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. Jesus argues that this is because they don't understand the Scriptures, and since we all follow Jesus this must be true . . . but it's not. The Sadducees who had all the comforts of Graeco-Roman culture, had no need for a future day of justice. They were getting by perfectly fine as it was. They were actually staying truer to traditional Jewish thought than the Pharisees or Essenes. Obviously on both sides, pro- or anti-resurrection, there were ulterior motives for believing as such.

A vastly important point is that there is practically no evidence that Semitic cultures had any room for an eternal soul. All ideas of heaven and hell are imposed on Judeo-Christian thought from Greek thought. Even in John, which is vastly influenced by Greek culture, Jesus does not go to Heaven in his ascension, but only "to be with the father". According to Paul it is not his soul that was raised, but his glorified body, which was accordingly designed for this world, not heaven. In other words, Jesus has gone to be with God for this interim period of history while we expect him, body and all, to come back with God for the coming eschatological age.

There is a lot more that could be said about this, but let's fast-forward to today. In the age of impending nuclear war, the idea that God is patiently waiting to come back and restore the world to the righteous seems in many ways to have lost its appeal, and for many including myself, any prospect of validity. There are narrow parameters in which I believe we can still speak of a resurrection (meaning I don't deny that Jesus was "raised"), but to do so requires semantic/conceptual contortions that I don't plan to go into in this post.

But what of the 'soul'? My basic position is that there is nothing eternal about us. I am currently taking two neuroscience classes, which have both pointed out that all the things that make us "human" are products of neurological structure. I don't deny that there is a gestalt quality to people which marks a unity we can call a soul. I just don't believe that this is eternal. In adapting itself to Greek concepts and Greek cosmology, Christianity has subsumed this idea into its faith. But, it seems that it is neither original to Christianity, nor necessary.

I find this to be an important point since Christianity has long obsessed over its mission to "save souls". In this regard it seems that the majority of modern Christians are consumed with proselytizing people to an overtly Greek manner of thinking, which essentially has nothing (!) to do with Christian faith.

We have become so consumed by this syncretized form of Christian religion that we have ceased to remember that it is a religion that is whole-heartedly concerned with justice - not soul-saving.

I'll close by saying what I have personally come to believe. I have grown up as a Christian, and we are all sympathetic to the culture we grow up in. Yet, my worldview is far more scientific: I order my reality by science. Thus, my faith is shaped creatively by this tension between the way I perceive reality (science), and the ideals I hope for (God as I experience through Christian faith). I have found that Christianity does not validate the soul, and science flatly denies it. Christianity does concern itself with an eternal God, and that God's implications for justice and human dignity. Science frequently denies this God, but does not do so unilaterally, and is incapable of disproof. Science has forced us to alter the language we use to speak of God, as well as God's role in the causality of our universe.

I believe that humans have no hope for eternity outside of God. But, this theocentric hope is actually original to Judeo-Christian faith. Before Greek thought made a mess of it, Christianity agreed that God alone was eternal, and that our hope was in him as evidenced by the "resurrection" of Jesus. Jesus, the prototype of righteousness, was not lost to death. His life did not end in meaninglessness, but was validated as God raised him, which is a poor way of saying that he joined into God's eternity. However different my worldview is from Jesus' first followers, my hope is the same: that in/by the mysterious Eternal, I am remembered.

Lent, Round Two

2009-03-19T22:56:00.007-05:00

It's Lent again, which reminds me that a year has passed. My inaugural Lent experience was one year ago. I didn't participate, really. I just hung out and observed. Somewhere there's a digital archive holding the blog of my experience, which concluded with my hope that in the coming year I would be more inclined to join in.

Sad though it may be, I felt less inclined this year than last. It's slightly pathetic. There are a few reasons why I resist partaking in Lent. One is that I hate the idea of fostering a sense of depression just to make the joy of Easter more abundant. Today has enough troubles as it is, why drive myself to despair with self-inflicted difficulties?

The greater reason though, is that over the last year my level of spirituality has plummeted to new lows. I say this not so much as a lament, but more as an honest statement of fact. I could proceed to list my reasons, whether to repent or justify myself, but I'll refrain. Basically, in this season of my life (hooray for seasons), I find most spiritual disciplines annoying. Lent included. I guess I'm at a point where I question all the ideas of being "closer" to God due to any actions I would take. Right now I feel God to be more mysterious, and honestly, more distant/unknowable than ever before.

Still, in spite of my reluctance, I am a sucker for peer pressure. When everyone at church started talking about it, I felt like I should join in regardless of my misgivings. There's also the small fact that my girlfriend took up the Lenten discipline of reading the Bible daily. This is her first time to ever read it. She's already finished Mark, and has started on Genesis. When she first informed me of her plans, the repressed evangelical in my head began tearing his robes with guilt. And how did I atone for my shortcomings?

I decided to make a point to attempt to work out three times a week.
. . .Thus far I've managed to make it to the gym about 5 times, which puts me about 7 workouts behind schedule. This is the point where I could concede defeat, and reinforce my anti-liturgical tendencies by feeling guilty. Instead of that, it seems proper to wrap this up by stating what I'm learning:

First, it seems that lack of discipline in life-in-general precludes any chance of benefiting from specific spiritual disciplines. I haven't made it to the gym because I haven't managed to be efficient with school, and therefore I'm always playing catch-up with the time I would otherwise dedicate to everything from working out to praying.

Second, and most importantly, Easter is merely the extension of Lent. The problem we get ourselves into is thinking that Jesus' selflessness in his march toward the cross was something he conceded to do reluctantly. I don't get the idea Jesus was particularly excited about the prospect of dying by torture, but it seems that he was so compelled in his way in life that the threat of death was something he merely disregarded.

In other words, the joy of Easter is only an extension of the joy of Lent. Jesus' life, even in the shadow of his death, was not characterized by a bitter, muttering consent for the trials he would endure. It was an joyful extension of his faith in a loving God, even in the shadow of a cross. That same joy is continuous through his death into his resurrection. If Lent is depressing to us, then I hardly find it believable that Easter will manage to cheer us up. Our attitudes toward the trials of Lent extend into the dawn of Easter.

Thus, my difficulties in finding any enthusiasm for this time of the year can be traced back to the fact that it seems whether I add something for Lent, or take something away, it seems that life will be characterized by more of the same. Easter then is mediocre at best, and Lent a sequence of drudgery that precedes it. Obviously, it doesn't have to be that way. Realizations are seeds of change for the days to come. So, maybe, hopefully, Lenten realizations can transform heavy obligations into ways of rest.

Footnotes to Myself

2009-03-04T10:52:00.004-06:00

I'm in the process of trying to whittle down my "unread" bookcase. Around a year ago I divided up my books in an attempt to curb my gross consumerism. Books are my weakness. Used to be, I couldn't walk into Half-Price without leaving with about 10 books that I was going to read "one of these days . . ." The problem was that I was collecting a library of fancy books, and realizing that I had read precious few of them. I felt like I was guilty of false advertising, even if only to myself; saying "look at what a scholar I am", when in reality I was merely a masking my own ignorance.

I started out with a black and white dictum, that in order to be placed in the "read" bookcase, I must have read 90% of the book and understood it. This has evolved slowly. Now I am at the point where I simply have to get the gist, and if I haven't actually read much of it, I have to be able to tell you why I chose to count the book as being behind me.

There's a long tangential intro for you.

I guess I've grown tired of intensely perusing every book I read. It seems lately most of them only get one to two chapters worth of my attention before I realize that I don't really care enough to finish. Perhaps life is too short.

C.S. Lewis was my latest short-lived endeavor. He managed 12 pages of my attention before finding himself placed beside his other "read" works. On a certain level, I've grown weary of attempting to read books that don't speak to my world. There was a point, which doesn't really seem to be very distant, when I tried to listen to books in view of their own time and place. Certainly that was a beneficial exercise. Now, though, I'm ready to read people who have something applicable to say to exactly where I'm at, wherever that may be. Lewis' ideas seemed very Modern, and thus, when I hear them from my own situation, rather silly.

Whatever essay I was reading spent a lot of time defending the existence of the 'human soul and its immortality'. From a scientific and theological standpoint this is something I've completely ceased to believe in. I don't think there is anything immortal about us. Yet, I've started to realize that this is purely a matter of opinion, and it's basically an opinion that doesn't make much of a difference in anything. Lewis and countless other voices on my shelves, blather on adamantly defending their opinion as the only one which is viable . . . meanwhile the world-at-large seems to have completely ceased to care.

The majority of kids in my chemistry class, or people at my work, or people I pass on the street prove with their actions that they consider such thoughts to be total minutia. These thoughts may be interesting, like ancient history if told well can be interesting. They may even be important to explaining how we got where we are, but that's where their relevance stops and life's other, more pressing, difficulties begin.

I've got plenty of opinions, and I enjoy sharing them; even defending them. I feel I've spent most of my adult life forming my opinions and seeking to justify them over and against what I formerly thought was the truth. Now, I've got a bookcase glutted with endless footnotes on how I achieved my current state of opinion. If it seemed useful I could write one hell of a paper justifying my position on everything.

But no one appears to be asking me to justify myself. I, like most, live day to day in an anonymous sea of faces that hurry from one location to another, too busy to consider anything but how to finish all the items on their latest itinerary. All are quite content to let me stand still, endlessly justifying my own position so long as it doesn't interfere with their own to-do list. They ask me no questions, only pleading that I not slow them down.

The only question I really face is my own:
With all my volumes of facts informing my beliefs, how then should I live?

It's a long road to humility, and in the end we cover no distance at all.

Creation: Intelligently Designed, Yet Completely Lacking Compassion

2009-02-22T14:11:00.003-06:00

Confession: I never saw Ben Stein's movie. It got horrible reviews, and just looked dumb. Yet, I have a few friends who have defended this movie to me. These friends know more than enough science to earn my respect. So, maybe I'll see the movie some day. Doubtful, but maybe.

So here are a few of my problems with the whole idea of intelligent design:

First, the whole idea of intelligence is a very human concept. It is anthropocentric and anthropomorphic, which are fancy ways of saying we can't imagine anything better than ourselves, so therefore God must be mostly like us. It's a bad form of logic. We are reported to be created in the image of God, so whatever we are, or want to be, God must be as well. I don't particularly care to argue that God isn't intelligent, only that the concept of intelligence means that God's ways are basically just like our ways . . . which is an assumption I'm pretty sure every major religion contradicts in one way or another.

My second, and more significant, problem with intelligent design is that creation is overflowing with sickening forms of irony. My biology professor did a wonderful job of pointing this out. Bare with a little science for the moment: There are many different forms of "sugar chains". Two of the most common are starch and cellulose. Starch is the digestible variety found in potatoes, corn, etc. Our stomach has enzymes which can break starch down into individual sugars, which we can consume for food. Cellulose on the other hand is made from the exact same sugars as starch only the way they are joined together is different. Because of this difference, the enzymes in our stomachs are useless to break down cellulose.

Why does this matter? Because 95+% of the "sugar chains" produced in nature are of the cellulose variety. Meaning that if the human stomach was endowed with a single extra enzyme to break down cellulose, hunger would never have been known in the history of the human race. Yet here we are in a world where so much suffering occurs due to the lack of sugar. Like people dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean, it is another sense in which we are surrounded by what we need but are impotent to use it.

If our world is "intelligently" designed in the human sense of the word, then the designer is a sadist. This is far from the only example of brutal irony which a scientific look at nature has to offer, but I think it will do.

This is not to say that I don't also get what i.d. advocates are driving at. I am also acquainted with the sense in which this is all a watch, and so it is logical to assume a watchmaker. Taking a statistics course is more than sufficient to realize how utterly ridiculous it is that 'life' exists at all. It seems quite obvious to me that there is some sort of force in the universe that organizes things in absurdly complex ways. There are so many things in our world that, were they to differ in the slightest from the way they are, life as we understand it would be totally impossible.

Only, when we try to cast human categories on this organizing force, on God, we are left with blasphemous implications that I do not think can be avoided.

Studentianity

2009-02-19T17:41:00.002-06:00

Homily:

I have been forcibly converted. I now reluctantly practice two religions that I can't decide how much I believe in.

A while back a friend of mine had showed me a link to an article about some random African country where they had introduced a trillion dollar note. Inflation had progressed to the point that you needed a trillion dollars to buy a sack of rice. Meanwhile I go to a school where it is necessary to earn a 3.94 GPA to attain high honors. If one makes a 3.93 then one is deemed to have attain mediocre honors. I imagine a 3.9 is necessary for regular honors, but they don't talk about that as they would rather not admit that such a level of stupidity actually exists.

Grade inflation. One of thousands of examples of the complete absurdity of modern education.

This last week I survived my first round of tests with two A's and two B's, the latter driving me to the edge of suicidal despair(in the educational sense . . .chill). I know how ridiculous this is. Why the hell should two B's mark the end of my scholarly life. Yet here is my new religion, one which perpetually proves that no one is good enough except for those who have allowed the university system to consume their soul in its entirety.

Basically I'm just tired. Tired of one damn hurdle after another. I came back to school because I wanted the skills to help people, but instead I've obtained an assortment of arbitrary knowledge that allows me to reduce tangible reality to a math equation. Behold the University! The great fountain, effusing joie de vivre.

In other words, I've decided that the Messiah had better come soon, else I take the first escape route I can find. (new major: pyramid scheming . . anyone care to lend me some money to "invest"?)

In the name of the Professor, the Textbook, and Holy Competition.
Amen.

Ridiculous Things I Say That Make Alice Laugh

2009-01-10T13:52:00.005-06:00

At some point we get in an argument over what sound a sheep makes. She claims it is a low and steady "Baaa" sound. I reply at first that it is a "Ba" with a stuttering 'a'.
"Ba-a-a-a"
An argument ensues. Later this evolves into a "ma-a-a-a" sound. She contests this inconsistency. I respond:
"Well it depends if you're referring to the International Council of Sheep standards, or the American Sheep Association. . ."
Being eyed with skepticism, I continue, "The I.C.S. insists on the 'B' sound, but the Association leaves the leading consonant undefined . . . . Just make sure to pay attention to who the regulating union is in your part of the country. If you are unfortunate enough to make the wrong pronunciation in the wrong area you're liable to have wool thrown at you . . . they might even force you to wear and uncomfortable sweater. . . "

We're walking past the new 14 story research building, being constructed at Southwestern.
Me: "I'm always really intrigued by construction. Maybe I should have gone into that."
Alice looks unconvinced.
"Maybe we should do that instead, today. I could be really good at it. I could just look around and say, 'Ok, we've got some bricks, so . . you guys build a wall right there. Um, we need some sort of adhesive though to hold them together . . . we need 4 or 5 people to be appointed as designated gum chewers . . . .'"
Alice falls over.
"Can you nail bricks together? No? Ok, we'll have to find some scotch tape then . . . "

Alice is complaining about having to do computer programming at work.
"Just use dollar signs. They fix everything."

"Hyaaa!!!"
I karate chop her in the arm, holding back so as not to break the skin.
She eyes me with the look that non-verbally declares, "What the hell were you thinking?"
". . . Look, you gotta be ready. Ninjas are everywhere, and they won't be holding back."
She procedes to run across the ceiling throwing chinese stars and kills 15 people.

"swo-la"
This is what I intend to say to deny whatever she just said.
It means 'wrong'.
"tso-la"
This is what I actually say, unintentionally. It means 'kill him/her'.
"tswo-la"
This is what I sometimes say, which happens to be an imperative to remove one's clothes. This may or may not be intentional.
Obviously my command of Mandarin is superb.
My most frequently used word is "Gan!" I try to use this in every context where it is improper to use profanity. I do this because "gan" is profanity.

An argument over intonation . . .
Me: ma.
Her: no, ma.
Me: that's exactly what I just said.
Her: no you said 'ma'.
Me: exactly, because that's what you said.
Her: no I said 'ma'.
Me: I know, that's what I said too.
This proceeds for 30 minutes or more, and happens daily. Being American I only recognize angry, sad, and normal tones, which unfortunately don't correspond to Mandarin's up, down, flat and dipping tones. It's hopeless.

Her: How did you just do that?
Me: That's how we do it in Asia. It's a great place, you should come check it out sometime.

etc. etc.

Mocking Ourselves: Homosexuality and Christian Faith

2009-01-07T14:26:00.008-06:00

Back in college, when I was still determined to proselytize the whole world, I partook in a "spring-break campaign" as was common at my school. These were basically evangelistic trips around the country designed to shield students at our school from the worldly temptations which other college kids partook in over spring break. For financial reasons I had never joined a trip, until my senior year when a last minute opportunity arose to accompany some of my closest friends to shed light on the Gentiles of Fresno and San Francisco, California.

I don't want to speak totally pejoratively of such trips, as good things certainly came from them. As a general rule they were equally as focused on 'doing good for the Kingdom's sake' as they were on driving people into the baptistery. Often the good that was done was clumsy and inspired by mixed motives, but I don't feel that those acts were invalidated as such.

For the trip that I was on, the two days we spent in San Francisco were by far the highlight. One day was our fun day, and we spent it trying to take in as many tourist attractions as possible. The other day we spent in the Castro district.

At the time we barely knew anything about the area other than it was home to many homosexuals, and that as such many fundamentalist Christians made it their target to go a preach their message of hate and vindictiveness. Looking back, I can say that at the time we didn't know much, but we knew that this was not right. So we spent a day passing out bottles of water, hoping to make up (ever so slightly) for the hostility that other Christians displayed. In hindsight I think our hearts were in the right place, even if we were a little naive on the whole.

I write about this, because last month I had the privilege to watch the movie Milk, a movie that is essentially about the events that made the Castro what it is. It was amusing and agonizing to watch this film, because of what I had formerly believed and because of how ignorant my friends and I had been when we visited. The movie is about Harvey Milk who was the first open homosexual to be elected to public office. Milk was one of the many who helped to transform the Castro into a mecca for homosexuals, and the movie, to a large degree, portrays this period. I'll end my synopsis with that, and recommend highly for everyone to go and see it. Sean Penn does a phenomenal job, and further elevates himself on my already short list of actors whose names I consider worth remembering.

I want to explain my not so profound realization, which nonetheless hit me extremely hard as someone who has been and at some level continues to be a Christian. The movie shows that those who moved to the Castro district did so not out of some perverse desire, but genuinely because of violent persecution. Up until recently, little attention was given on any level of media to the fact that homosexuals were/are being killed for their lifestyle. The movie portrays this quite compellingly. Even within the Castro district men were being beaten to death! So, what does this say for other areas of the country?

The one thing I am convinced that is uniquely powerful within the Christian faith is the advocacy of the marginal. Even over and above compassion, the message of our faith is that there is none so small, nor so "dirty", that God does not stand for him. For him. FOR him!! If this is not true then the "gospel", as we call it, is complete and utter shit.

The question then becomes not "Can we tolerate homosexuals as Christians?", but instead "Does our faith mean anything if we fail to advocate the rights of homosexuals as human beings?"

In the struggle between life and death, we follow a religion that sides with life even up and to the point of death for ourselves. That is what we proclaim. Yet, we have allowed ourselves to be so consumed by the structure of values that we have imposed on biblical faith that we have effectively denied the entire purpose for Christianity's existence. Jesus did not come so that we might raise healthy, heterosexual families under the aegis of "biblical" values. He came that the lost sheep might be found, because if a lost sheep stays lost, it dies. He offered no guidelines for what a sheep must look or act like before it is returned. He only demanded that if we follow him, we take care of these, because when we don't they die. God sides with life.

The point is this: relations between Christian churches and the homosexual community are one of the greatest failures we have faced in our contemporary situation. There are certainly shining examples of churches who have done better, but unfortunately these typically turn into churches of homosexuals, rather than churches which are for homosexuals.

There are also many who are slowly pulling back from the repulsive intolerance which has been characteristic of Christian preachers. Yet, a halfhearted tolerance or even a impotent political correctness is not what is needed. Such is an attitude that makes our Bibles less valuable than toilet paper. The only authentic, Christian response is to affirm life over death. The experience of homosexuals worldwide has long been one which dictated by fear of death. It has reduced them to invisibility and shame.

As a statement of fact: If a church fails to extend the affirmation of life and defiance of death to all from the pulpit, in their doctrine, and with their actions, then they have scorned the message of Jesus and made a mockery of their own faith.

Every homosexual that dies or is beaten is a scandal to the message of Jesus, and this must be preached to his community because his community must act by this message. Every homosexual who lives in fear, is denied the life that God would give them, and what the world would deny the Church should confirm.

If the fold hates the lost sheep, the shepherd will leave and die with the lost. Jesus left our churches a long time ago.

Suburban Smash and Grab: a case study for how criminals in Plano are (a) incompetent, and (b) obtuse morons.

2009-01-05T15:23:00.007-06:00

This morning was a bitter, chilling cold one, and a Monday. It was the type where the sheets that surround you upon waking are as dear as your first born, and pulling them off is emotionally traumatizing. (The scene is set.) After eating breakfast, I walked out the door to find my car windows buried beneath thick ice . . . except for the one that was lying in fragments across my back seat.

For context, allow me to point out that I live on the sleepiest, and possibly most boring street in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. To get to my house requires navigating a convoluted maze of deep suburbia which would drive the average man to marry the first woman he sees and raise their three children on a healthy diet of bland mediocrity. That is where I live. It is a street where nothing interesting ever happens, and so the last thing I expected was an authentic "urban style" smash and grab.

. . . on second inspection though, it didn't even amount to that. It would appear that the would-be gangsta's didn't have the balls to break the window outright, but rather attempted to pry in open with a screwdriver. Soon they realized that they were too damn stupid to pull off such a feat; I imagine that moment came when the glass cracked, and they had to bust it all out with the aforementioned screwdriver anyway. So upon busting out the window they got what they were obviously after . . . . a messenger bag, with a neuroscience textbook, a philosophy book complete with highlighting and notes, and my journal of philosophical musings. Clever bastards had sharp eyes to spot so unassuming a bag and yet know the value of its true contents. For such astuteness I threw in a brand new Ipod which amounted to 60% of my Christmas gain. That is, if the morons happen to be bright enough to check all the pockets . . . I have some doubts.

Perhaps they wouldn't enjoy such a bonus anyway, as they left a perfectly good Ipod with three times the storage capacity sitting out in plain sight! They didn't even bother to try and plunder the other consoles, picky assholes that they were. No, no. They went straight for the heart and the heart alone. Ice in their veins, and certainly on their clumsy retarded hands! (it was really damn cold) they stole my books.

So, if you work at Half Price, and see some motherfucker trying to sell you a book by John Searle or a fairly new Behavior Psychology text book, please punch them in the crotch to confirm that their balls are missing. Then, kick them in the head repeatedly, telling them to go to the ghetto and take some damn lessons: leave the books, take the technology, and NO! you won't be able to pry open the window, you idiot, so use a blunt object and get on with it!

Ok, fine. Don't kick them in the head. All encouragement to violence was insincere, except for punching them in the crotch since obviously that wouldn't really hurt them now would it?

Poking Holes for the Soul to Live In

2009-01-02T13:29:00.004-06:00

I was rather excited when I saw this book at Borders the other day. I'm not sure exactly what made me think it would be a good idea, being as it was in the Christian section. I should have learned by now that said section exists only to sell inferior material to people who have been religiously trained to prefer inferior material.

The reason I bought it is that recently I have been particularly intrigued at how neuroscience and theology interface. There don't seem to be very many on either side who are interested in bridging the gap there. So when I saw this book I thought for a second that maybe I had found such a rarity. Unfortunately the book did a pathetic job. Instead of looking for connections between the two fields, the book quickly becomes a cheap polemic against materialistic neuroscience. There is little desire in the book to give any credit or show any respect to those with differing views, rather it amounts to a sad effort to further the polarizing between traditional religious faith and atheistic materialism as it is manifest in neuroscience.

This book's method seems to borrow from what is all too often seen in Christian apologetics: poke holes in the opposite side and hope that God can comfortably find a home there. Only instead of God they hope the the soul will be salvaged. This method in my opinion fails pathetically in apologetics, and so the similar attempt for the soul follows suit. The 'God of the gaps' and the 'soul in the gaps' both fail, I think, from a horrible lack of creativity as well as blind partisanship. This blindness prevents them from any mature understanding of the opposing point of view, and fails to admit the shortcomings of its own.

To fit the soul or God within the available mental real estate left by apologetic hole poking, requires that they contort and dissociate to such an extent that they cease to resemble anything worth believing in. Both are concepts that demand more than being 'fit in' wherever we can find room for them. Yet, many in our world maintain allegiance to them as they would to deposed kings who refuse to concede they no longer reign supreme. Validity is not displayed by pointing to small cracks in scientific knowledge where it's possible that God or the soul might reside. Nor does a weak diatribe against science bring back the bygone age when God and the soul were assumed.

Briefly allow be to state that the "soul" is not an absolutely necessary concept to any theology, Christian or otherwise. The mileage it has achieved does not prove its truth or even its necessity. If we are proved to not have souls as has been tradition for much of Christian history, this does not prove our faith to be null and void. Similarly if God is proven to not resemble a grandfather with the body of a professional athelete who dwells beyond the clouds, this does not demand his inexistence. Instead, in both cases, we are required to reconsider what we really mean by either term. We are forced to either redefine the term, or perhaps even abandon the term in favor of something totally new.

Seeking something new is exactly what this book, like most apologetic accounts, seems to lack the courage to do. It is also what Christian faith and the scientific community most need to seek. I certainly do not feel that reductionistic materialism has nullified the validity of religious experience, only I am sure that polarizing against it gets nowhere. Instead of taking shots at a conversation that has deemed us irrelevant, we should join with legitimate fresh ideas.

Opposites always lean on each other . . .

2008-12-29T15:17:00.005-06:00

I got the chance a few weeks ago to hang out with some of my church friends and have a proper theological/philosophical conversation. At some point during the talk we were talking about the idea of deconstruction, which I openly confess up front that I am no expert on. Yet, foolishly, I think it proper to use my meager understanding to segue into some things that have been on my mind lately.

In deconstruction it is believed that all oppositions such as good and evil, poor and rich necessitate their opposite. In a sense these, oppositions can been seen to lack substance and eventually cause all our forms of knowledge to collapse in on themselves. When it is understood that good needs evil, or that dark needs light, all our narratives that speak of the triumph of one or the other cease to have meaning. In the end, we find that we need to reaffirm the oppositions that we have attacked so that we continue to have some sort of structure; only knowing that the structure will always remain provisional. (If you despise my summary let me know, but this is the best sense I've been able to make in my studies)

I bring this up because of thoughts I've had recently in regard to church, as well as reactions I've had to reading The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. In this book Brueggemann discusses the way in which the prophet's role is to compromise various societal structures that marginalize others. The prophet criticizes these structures and provides a sort of poetic vision of a better way. Brueggemann offers a wonderful analysis that really contextualizes the voice of the OT prophets to our present situation in affluent America. Yet, as the author points out, this prophetic voice is only one among the plurality of voices present in our Bible. In another one of his books, Brueggemann points out the many places where OT authors are calling out for any social order. It is true that these texts might be sponsored by imperial/aristocratic interests, but it is easy to see in war-torn societies that even tyrants are preferred to chaos.

Thus, we can discern in Scripture a conflict between a desire for order and a prophetic critique which rarely offers a means to a better order but does criticize and defy the present structures. Eventually it brings me to a perspective in which I suspect that prophecy needs oppressive structures, and to an extent these structures have learned to lean on prophetic critique. To some extent I can even perceive that prophets are merely an extension of the structures they oppose.

Everything is gray. So, rather than play the role of Samson and knock over the pillars that hold the roof over my head, I just acknowledge that all my knowledge is built on false dichotomies and move on.

I was driving through Dallas the other day amazed by the sheer number and sizes of churches that I passed on every street. Consider the billions of square feet that the churches in Dallas alone must represent, and the fact that homelessness exists. Churches exist to maintain the structure of society. Churches hate prophets and kill them at every turn. They want to care for poverty by systematizing it; to manage it, but certainly not prevent it. We display the cross on steeples across the nation to remind others what we do to those who speak up, but certainly not for what we would personally consent to suffer. Yet, my very ability to write these thoughts down and your ability to read them is based on the security that such social order has provided. My desire to be a doctor and to help people is built upon the fact that I live in a society that is ordered enough that I can aim for such goals. The only reason I've been able to think these thoughts is that I was well-fed and had enough leisure time to consider the way things are.

Lately I have been troubled by the attempt to discern whether Christian faith is built upon Jesus as an example, or Jesus as an inspiration. The difference for me is enormous. If Jesus is an example that we are supposed to follow, then we are expected to emulate him in his radical prophecy even to the detriment of social order. If literally following Jesus' example is the mark of a Christian, then I hold to the fact that I've never met a Christian. I know they're out there, but I've never met one. I know no one who lives radically enough to suffer prison, hunger, disease, or death in order to be like Jesus. Not one. I certainly don't qualify, nor do I hope that I ever will.

On the other hand, if Jesus is our inspiration I still find much hope and meaning in Christianity. I say this because it leaves plenty of room for creativity. Instead of falling into a prescripted role as prophet or societal agent, it allows for human indeterminacy that plays on the ironic plasticity of systems we otherwise assume are absolute. In other words, and mostly as a confession, I have recently only found hope in faith as one who lives within a system and is part of a system, yet finds inspiration in Jesus' prophetic (and radically humanistic) mentality. This inspiration seeks to play on the fact that our society is built around pillars of order and the prophetic humanism of Judaeo-Christian tradition. To attempt to choose one over the other is to lend rigidity to the structure of our society as it is, but to encompass both . . .

Again, I write all of this confessionally rather than as instruction, which could probably be said for most of my writing. Hopefully I'll be able to clarify and explain further in a later post.

.

and all of this matters, why? . . . .

2008-12-05T15:53:00.004-06:00

". . . they all muddy their water that it may seem deep." - Nietzsche

It's always equally humorous and frustrating to me when people unacquainted with philosophy or theology ask me to explain things to them. Inevitably the look on their face progresses from inquisitiveness to a mixture of confusion and ridicule. Confusion generally stemming from the fact that I end up giving complex answers to seemingly simple questions. And, ridicule generally arising out of a sense that everything I am saying appears to be quite arbitrary and detached from any practical application. Some days I wonder at how dense these mere mortals must be, but most of the time I suffer from the nagging suspicion that they are probably correct in their skepticism.

After all, how can an idea change the world if no one, statistically speaking, understands it. This perhaps is the paradox of philosophy: that the study which was intended to clarify our thoughts has mostly served to confuse the masses by becoming so esoteric as to be impenetrable to the average person.

So then, what is it that draws me to all this? Probably some mixture of fascination and desire to prove myself. I'm not really sure. I must admit that I often find myself on both sides of the fence, arguing for the vast importance of such great thoughts and at the same time agreeing that they probably really don't matter all that much.

And so, I found it immensely satisfying in my recent studies of Wittgenstein (get used to it, I'll be talking about this guy a lot) that he believed philosophy was basically a frivolous course of study. This coming from the man heralded to be 'the most important philosopher of the 20th century'.

"What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities."

He is reported to have defied the common attitude that philosophy was somehow a form of laying foundation to or constructing truth as a structure. This was achieved by any number of other fields, but philosophy was impotent to achieve anything of the sort. Rather, sticking with the metaphor of building a house, if the sciences were the means to lay our foundations and construct our worldview, philosophy was at best a means of cleaning up the rooms of the finished product! Philosophy (and I would argue theology too) is not the "Queen of all sciences" but rather, and at best, the maid.

This is simultaneously a humbling blow and a crucial reassignment of my two favorite fields of study. Neither philosophy nor theology can really give our lives meaning. Rather, they are needed to give order and cleanliness to the experiences and beliefs that we attain elsewhere. In other words they allow us to rid our minds of garbage and tame what would otherwise amount to mental/spiritual chaos. Yet still, if we rely on them as our primary sources of meaning we will indeed be living in a sort of experiential, personal poverty.

Personally this line of thought is liberating and humbling at the same time. It reminds me that it's not merely what we think, but more what we do and choose to be that matters. I can and should keep studying in hopes to clear out all the crap that most people say in hopes to make their ideals and lifestyle appear to have depth. Yet I have to continually guard against the temptation to allow these new ideas to serve as mud to mask my own shallowness. Reading philosophy or theology is not a means to depth per se, but instead a means to perceive where depth is lacking in myself or in others.

Running from the Void

2008-11-21T16:54:00.007-06:00

A few Sundays back we had a guest speaker at our church named Pete Rollins. I enjoyed listening to him, though I cannot say I was truly amazed at anything he said. He did manage to name-drop several authors during his talk which allowed me to conjecture that he might have known what he was talking about. And, his talk did initiate a small debate about the nature of our desire for God. The gist was essentially that we have to seek God purely for himself, and that whatever ulterior motives we amend to this reason will ultimately keep us from God.

This maxim was offered in the context of a conversation on nihilism. Mr. Rollins point was that if we seek God as an escape from nihilism, we are really seeking to alleviate our fear and as such will miss God. He will not take it upon himself as a great honor to help ground our otherwise godless lives by infusing them with meaning. If we are seeking God to escape meaninglessness, our main focus is on meaning and not God.

This could apply to any number of things we expect God to do for us. God is not in the services industry though we often would like to assume he is. This lead to Rollins' idea that we should include nihilism as a part Lent. He said it partially joking, but myself and several others took it as the best idea he offered all night.

Later one friend objected that no one ever actually achieves such pure intentions in seeking God. We all have a muddled variety of intentions, and the idea that we can distill out the one's which are simply for God's own sake is too idealistic. Personally, I think it all comes back to the question of what kind of God do we believe in? I agree that perhaps a majority of people believe in God because he fulfills their needs in one way or another. Yet this is precisely what many philosophers have, for centuries now, critiqued as a human projection. If the God we profess conveniently happens to tie it all together for us and fill in all or our gaps of understanding, then is it not just as likely that we have invented him for this purpose as the idea that we were created with these needs already in place?

I think meaning is ultimately a function of the human psyche. We use meaning to give our lives a narrative and help us assign value to our experiences. I'm not convinced that meaning as such is a metaphysical reality somehow attached to our here and now. In short, I agree that God is often vital for us to find meaning in our lives, but I'm fairly confident that we create this meaning based on our experience of God; not the other way around. In other words, God does not have a single narrative which assigns us meaning when we gain a fleeting glimpse of it. Rather, we create meaning, and God is the great Other which mysteriously guides us as we fluidly determine our own narrative.

This is why the idea of acknowledging nihilism in church does not bother me. The experience of emptiness and nothingness ultimately reflects back on the human psyche, but not particularly on God. The experience of nullity is a valid experience that I do not believe can be escaped or avoided, but only transcended. Perhaps not for all of us, as my friend pointed out in his objections. There are plenty of people getting by just fine not worrying about such things. Yet, for myself and many others, running from nihilism only seems to testify to the fact that it is true.

I have found that if we are relying on God to be the source of meaning, we are expecting him to exist for the purpose of assuaging our fears and helping us find contentment. Certainly God can be a part of these human drives, but we should not expect him to fulfill them 'from the outside'. If we await some exterior gift of meaning we will ultimately be either disappointed or deluded as many a cult leader has been. Meaning is our responsibility, and as such, based on the frailty of human nature, the experience of nihilism is valid and common. Yet, hopefully it is something that we, as members of communities who persevere, can find grace to go through and surpass.

If meaning is actually a function of the human mind, then it would seem that all narratives are somehow cheapened, and that the values which structure our societies are potentially compromised. As one friend of mine commented, "Nihilism for Lent? It just wouldn't matter if we did or if we didn't." Yet, I find that just as many people who have never had a nihilistic thought in their lives and are fully convinced their own narrative is absolute still live in ways that make a mockery of their purported 'meaning'. There is certainly a level at which theists can live out a praxis of nihilism regardless of what they proclaim they believe. Just the same I think that many people who have declared the universe to be void of meaning are still drawn toward a sort of ethical action which "adds meaning to their lives". It's as though acting out meaningfully in some valid sense creates that which they thought was lost or nonexistent.

In any case, I don't think we can simply avoid the issue. Nihilism is one of several dead elephants polluting the air of our sanctuaries and worship services, and less and less people will find Christianity worthwhile until we do something about the stench. The logical first step would simply be to acknowledge it. The second might be to face our fear of it soberly and not expect God to immediately step in and palliate our discomfort.

Sex and Abortions

2008-11-07T14:41:00.010-06:00

A little over a week ago my friend sent me this article about evangelical sexuality. It is actually a very balanced analysis, and I don't know if I can recommend it highly enough. Read it. There are no excuses not to.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/03/081103fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all

(cut and paste since hyperlinks on this site suck)

I certainly have nothing as profound to say as this article, but I figured I might as well offer my opinions, whatever they may be worth.

Up until a few years ago I could have been a poster-child for the abstinence movement. In high school, shortly after converting, I was given a promise-key, which represented "the key to my heart." My youth minister suggested we keep it on our keyring to remind us to remain pure until marriage. I kept it on their all the way through college, always thinking I would be rewarded by God for my intense striving for sexual purity. I don't intend to reveal any more of my story, only I wanted to express up front that I am intimately acquainted with all the evangelical arguments for abstinence. Even more so, I was fully successful most of my life at staying faithful to such "noble" commitments.

Yet now, years later, I think all the rhetoric that goes into evangelical notions of sexuality is farcical. Allow me to state how my opinions over the last few years have changed:

1. Sex is biological. I say this in opposition to the metaphysical tones that Christianity so often imposes on it. I say this as one who formerly believed that any sexual act outside of marriage had the potential to leave dark marks (sin) on one's soul. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sex is programmed into our DNA . . . literally. It is something that we are biologically determined to seek. As such I cannot see how it is an evil force that is warring against our souls, as is pathetically purported by all-too-many ministers.

2. Sex is political. I'm pretty convinced that the excessive public concern for issues like abortion and gay marriage center around political privilege and social control. Each are threats to the values of the patriarchal household, and as such are politically provocative. This is the source of all the intense debate, not any of the supposedly "spiritual" reasons. As for abstinence, I think that focusing the attention of so many on the metaphysical dangers of sex is merely a way of maintaining the social order. Sexuality, being biological, is something that the majority of people must deal with every day. If people are consumed with anxieties over their sexuality (be it healthy or otherwise) then they generally have little time to cause any problems elsewhere. In other words, by declaring sex to be "every man's battle" all people turn inward and become blind to the more important issues continually crossing what used to be their field of vision. It's a splendid way to make people ignorant and socially impotent.

3. Celibacy: it's not healthy. Whether priests or twenty-something singles groupers, the ideal of celibacy is rarely met. Certainly there are a few like Paul who are "called" to it, but they would represent a minuscule minority. As the article above mentions for teenagers, I would assume that 'success' rates for adult celibacy are dismal. Again, humans are sexual by design, and the idea that they should strive for asexuality until desperation or luck lands them in a state/church sanctioned union, is downright stupid.

I am not calling for libertinism. I think all the apprehensiveness over sex is rooted in precarious and difficult social concerns; the most obvious being child-rearing. I am also fully aware of the deep effects which sex can have on the human psyche and social interaction. That being said, I think that the solutions offered by evangelicalism are hypocritical, impractical, and at their core, fundamentally flawed.

As a related topic, let me further address the issue of abortion. I am unashamedly Pro-Choice for reasons stated above, and probably many others. Another friend of mine, who is Pro-Life, wrote a wonderfully informative blog about abortion.

http://suburbanjesus.blogspot.com/2008/10/abortion.html

Read that one too. Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. I have no problem with the idea that life begins at conception. My problem is the preposterous inconsistency with which Pro-Life people apply such arguments. I rarely hear stories of fertility clinics being bombed even though the number of embryos which they discard is certainly high. Rick Warren somehow doesn't refer to this as a "holocaust", though if life begins at the union of sperm and egg, it certainly qualifies.

2. Pro-Life should be anti-war, but that is rarely the case. It should also imply anti-death penalty, anti-gun rights, pro-health care (of the free variety), and anti-poverty stances. Again, generally not the case.

3. Pro-Life should imply some sort of quality of life standard, but generally Pro-Life advocates are apathetic in this regard. They are pro-life, whether it's a good life or not.

4. I personally do not think the issue should be "When does life begin?", but instead "When does personhood begin?" My personal stance is that when a fetus develops neurologically enough to be distinctly human that abortion should be strongly discouraged. I am certainly against 'late decision' abortions. Yet, even in these situations, I believe that continued gestation cannot be absolutely mandated.

Part of the polemic of Pro-Life people is the mythical liberals who love abortions. As someone who personally knows several women who have had abortions, allow me to state for the record: NO ONE WANTS AN ABORTION! The legend of the abortion-hungry, liberal sex-addict represents the cavernous depth of conservative stupidity. No one wants an abortion. They are painful on a physical, emotional, social, and spiritual scale. They are sad. Horribly, horribly sad. Yet, not quite as sad as the thought of raising an unintended child in poverty which was created by the same conservatives who demanded that the child they now care nothing about be born.

I am firmly convinced that a Pro-life stance should unquestionably include:
1. A preference for adoption which is practiced rather than preached.
2. A concession to pay higher taxes in order to ensure the wellfare of the unintended child that must be born.
3. A deep concern to clean up the foster-care system (again, practiced)
4. A lifestyle that actively seeks to aid single-mothers, especially financially and socially.

Those who do not display such practices are casting severe doubts on the validity of their Pro-Life views. And, insofar as they seek to challenge the Pro-Choice movement, they are acting hypocritically and unethically towards women who are choosing because they see no other choice. If there is another choice, we should ask what is blocking their view of it?

Thoughts on Karen Armstrong's History of God

2008-11-01T17:30:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Armstrong's book this last week. I read it because I felt I should. It is a book that is fairly well known, and was a New York Times bestseller for a while. I've had several friends inform me I should read it. So, I picked it up a few months ago thinking it would be a bit of light side-reading. This was not particularly the case. A good way to describe this book is difficult yet accessible. It is certainly no easy read. Armstrong has an impressive vocabulary, and certainly is not shy about displaying her scholarship. Yet, this is not an impossible book, and given that it's mostly history it does a good job of not being too boring.

For any interested in hearing her speak for herself, a good talk can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_wish_the_charter_for_compassion.html

This book began by going over the history of the time surrounding the birth of Judaism. Armstrong does gloss over many contours of this history, but I don't get the impression she does so in ignorance. The point of the book is to display the evolution of the concept of God among the three prophetic faiths. She is attempting to show that each of the three faiths have had an amazingly varied conception of God that can be traced throughout history. To achieve this feat, Armstrong has no option but to be reductive, and still it is a far cry from being simplistic of any of these faiths.

One point that she hammers out through the entire book is the subjectivity of God.
"Indeed, the statement 'I believe in God' has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context when proclaimed by a particular community."

She points out that many of the most profound religious thinkers of the last two millennia have all known that their experiences of God were totally subjective. All their descriptions were not of objective realities but only similes and metaphors for what would always defy language. I find it difficult to state just how relieving I find such an attitude.

Another claim which I found equally refreshing was the idea of the nothingness of God. Thousands of years ago theologians came to the realization that all that can be said of God is what he is not. All positive statements, due to their being anchored in common mundane reality, equate God with something that he is far beyond. We say God is personal, yet he is certainly much more than anything we would identify as "a person". Therefore he is not personal, since he is far beyond the scope of that word. All the things that we would say God is, he really is not. So, in a profound since God is Nothing, or No-Thing. He cannot be encompassed by out thoughts, our language, our beliefs, doctrines.

As an intellectual, I found this unbelievably relieving. While to some I could see how such thoughts could lead to the demise of faith, for me it came as a resuscitating breath. I had heard such thoughts before, but Armstrong did a fantastic job of putting them into context, which seemed to make them much more accessible.

Perhaps my favorite insight in this book is the false dichotomy of intellectuals vs. mystics. Armstrong does a brilliant job of displaying that the most famous mystics were those who began as intellectuals, and that most intellectuals have some substantial mysticism to their thought. As such, they do not represent opposite poles, but flip sides of the same coin. Mysticism frequently is the end result of intelligence which has become aware of its own limits. This is not remotely close to a rejection of the value of knowledge, but rather an estimation of it which delivers one to a healthy realization of finitude. Nor is this necessarily a mysticism which involves feeling wrapped in the tender arms of the Lord, though it certainly could be. Mystics encompass an infinite range of experiences from smiling into the face of God to the lonely terror of the Great Silence where we once thought their was a personal diety. Neither is illegitimate.

This all validated much of the shock of Emptyness that I have felt for some time in regard to religion. It affirmed that none of us really know what we're talking about, yet that does not mean we have no reason to talk. Contrary to what Wittgenstein preposed, silence is not the only valid response, though it may well be a road that should be travelled more. In fact, Armstrong's work brought me to the realization that I was becoming just as intolerant of "believers" as fundamentalists were of "unbelief". As such I'm only serving to perpetuate the violence. The ever-important point is that understanding is the root of compassion, and I am certainly guilty of forsaking the attempt to understand those whom I oppose.

Pluralism

2008-10-09T21:54:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when I hear Christians defame pluralism, I wonder to myself if they have ever read the Bible. Considering that the Bible is a document that begins its discussion with an entire pantheon of gods, and then, at a much later date, proceeds to inform us that those others were just figments of their predecessors imaginations. It seems likely, that if we were to sit Abraham and second Isaiah in a room they would both deem the other an idiot. When we read Esther it is impressive that God is barely mentioned, yet at other points in the Old Testament God would appear to be involved in even the most minute details of life. Which then are we to assume is right in their attitude?

As for the New Testament we have four separate accounts of Jesus. Most of similarities between them seem to be the result of plagiarism rather than coinciding accounts. And, even insofar as they share the same material, the Gospels seem to have vastly different interests for which they are writing their accounts.

The untold truth is that the variety of interpretations and accounts of the Christian story were amazingly varied. The weeding out process that occurred within "Christianity" took hundreds of years before the process of sifting "heresies" for "orthodoxy" was sufficient to pass on the religion that we all seem to know today. The funny thing is that, quite literally, according to our definitions the earliest disciples, and indeed Jesus himself, were all heretics who erred greatly from proper Christian doctrine. Even Paul on whom all our orthodoxy is based would border on false teaching and be eyed with suspicion. If the Canon contains such conflicting and even contradictory material, imagine what kind of plurality must have existed before the "inferior" books were denied and frequently burned.

At its origins, whether in the voices of the Biblical writers, or in the history of early Christian thought, our faith is a pluralistic faith. That is simply a fact. The Bible itself is a pluralistic document. Granted, it does place some constraints on this, but not many. Many of the voices in the Bible dance precariously close to atheism, and in my opinion this is a vital part of our tradition; a vital part that is too often negated its right to be heard.

Most preachers I've heard malign pluralism appeal to fear in order to rally their congregations against it. Supposedly it makes truth irrelevant and misleads the youth. Granted, it does make it hard to give concrete moral answers to 7th graders. Thus, why the theology of 99% of churches in America has never passed the 7th grade level. I would assume that 30 year olds should be fully capable of handling the diversity of thought that pluralism presents us with, but perhaps on this one issue I am the rare optimist in a sea of skeptics.

.

Voting

2008-10-03T00:13:00.001-05:00

"These may not look like huge differences [between the parties], but they translate into substantial effects on the lives of people. Anyone who says, 'I don't care if Bush [read McCain] gets elected' is basically telling the poor and working people in the country, 'I don't care if you lives are destroyed. . . . I just don't care, because from my elevated position I don't see much difference between the two candidates.' . . . Apart from it being wrong, it's a recipe for disaster if you're hoping ever to develop a popular movement and a political alternative."
- Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions p. 114

I occasionally find myself apathetic towards politics. Supposedly we live in a bipartisan democracy, yet it appears that both parties represent the same interests; neither of which significantly benefit me. Both Republicans and Democrats represent business, particularly multinational corporations. The vast majority of candidates for either party are funded by big business lobbies, and so upon obtaining office, will vote accordingly. The difference as far as I can see is the extremes they represent.

Democrats as best as I can tell, are a business party which has subsumed what was once America's Populist, Labor, and Socialist movements. They represent business, but their ideology still bears resemblance of our more democratic foundations. I don't trust them, but they are the best thing we have at the moment.

Republicans on the other hand, have it in mind to destroy anything remotely resembling a democracy. They proclaim a "hands off" ideology, and proceed to quietly steal individual freedom at every turn. Palin last night preached that her party desires to cut taxes and leave more money in the pockets of taxpayers. Republicans want to leave money in taxpayer hands the same way casinos want patrons to win. The long term effects will be the same, and we will all be poorer. (We referring to the bottom 90%)

I'm not sure what to think about Obama. He sounds great, and that's what worries me. If he does manage to win this November (please God!!), I imagine he will inherit such a mess that three terms would not be sufficient to fix it. I'm skeptical how much he really plans to change things. Yet, allow me to state for the record: I don't know to what extent Obama/Biden are lying to us, but I am quite convinced that McCain/Palin have no intention of saying anything true, ever. Not in the next four, or (God forbid!!) eight years, and certainly not in the coming month.

Therefore, I stand by the only reliable piece of political advice I have ever heard: "All responsible Americans should vote against Republicans, and, where possible, Democrats too."

Only, for the love of God and the few holy things left in the world, lets achieve the former first!!

.

Trenches

2008-09-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

There are moments where I stare at a table upon which I am studying with books and other implements of learning strewn about, and ponder imaginary battles. As a kid, it would have been tiny men of the G.I. Joe variety, going to war. After all, it's common knowledge that all man-like entities less than one twentieth the normal human size have an insatiable appetite for war. As any male five year old could inform you.

I stare at books forming walls, and trenches down their crease. Spiral notebooks form hazardous razor wire. Pens and pencils are unexploded missiles. It's a treacherous environment.

Alas, the days where one could envision miniature humans fighting battles, almost as pointless as those which full-scale humans engage in, are past. As I am thrust into the world of "maturity" I no longer find myself at the helm of a vast army, but now I watch as ideas wage a war for my mind. This week, Trigonometry has declared war on Chemistry (of the general variety), and Analytic Philosophy is terrorizing Anatomy and Physiology the Second. Meanwhile Religious Studies and Phenomenology among others suffer brutal oppression in the midst of this endless cycle of violence . . . and sleep deprivation. It's a cruel world that we live in people. And by "we", I mean "I". Of course.

I say this from the trench (which also happens to be the crease of my chemistry textbook, coincidentally) which I am currently face down in, as the Battle of Triangular Atoms rages in my head. This, for those unfamiliar with Fall '08 history, is where the The Valence Electron Battalion of chapter 8, made a valiant but ultimately vain attempt to defeat the Cartesian Coordinate Brigade of Le Trigonometre's chapter 2.

(I know, I know, there is no way to make this interesting . . . I'm trying. I was hoping the application of a narrative would make my life more interesting . . . how foolish! Yet, the blog goes on!!)

Quite the toll such battles can take. Moonscapes are made of what was formerly referred to as a social life. The great war for the mind has cataclysmic effects . . . ok, ok, detrimental effects on blood pressure, as well as compromising the long term viability of one's own sanity. Vast fields of lovely hair now thinning and being infiltrated with gray.

. . . Yeah, anyway. So, it's not that bad, really, . . just ridiculous when every subject presumes to be your only subject.

denouement:

Moving on, life is good, and boring, . . . and busy, . .

- I plan to get in better shape this fall, which possibly includes the following:

- quitting or, more likely, drastically reducing coffee intake

- running, swimming, or biking more

- eating better, whatever that means

- I feel, actually, that my life is starting to gain some steam, in terms of the whole directionality sort of thing. I'm about to the point where I can really focus intently on med. school stuff. . . . I can see the crest of the hill, i guess would be a good way to say it.

- I'm on a break from church right now, which seems to be a good thing.

- And, I'm going to lunch.

the end.

suspended between. . . reflecting on kurt vonnegut and my faith

2008-09-05T15:01:00.000-05:00

"Kilgore Trout took a leak in the men's room of the New York City movie house. . . . There was a message on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it: What is the purpose of life? . . . he would have written, if he had found anything to write with:

To be

the eyes

and ears

and conscience

of the Creator of the Universe

you fool." - Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Spoiler warning.

Vonnegut's writing always is equally self-deprecating and critical of the world at large. I think this passage represents both his criticism of God (which is found in all of his books), as well as a criticism of himself. He writes himself into this story, as the "Creator of the [literary] Universe". He seems to point to the fact that he experiences the world through his fictional characters, just as he often feels that God himself must be deaf, blind, and in some sense antisocial. Still he is often quoted for having said that the only proof of God he needed was music.

I find it quite easy to relate to his attitude. No matter how often religious people assert that we should feel the responsibility of evil on our own shoulders, I can't help but fall back on theodicy: I don't know that I can ever escape the feeling that God has a lot to answer for. Yet, in all that, I also find him/her intricately woven into the fabric of all the things I would consider beautiful; music included.

My girlfriend who has never been a Christian keeps asking me if I actually consider myself to be so. I never really know what to say. I think somewhere inside me, there is a part of my psyche that does not want to let go of that part of my identity. There's also a part which is thoroughly disgusted by 99% of what is called "Christian" in our world, and so I want to leave it behind and not look back. There's also realist in me that looks at what "following Jesus" would mean in the most pragmatic of terms, and he questions whether I, or anyone I know have ever really . . . actually "followed" this homeless preacher who lived in such a radical way as to be killed by authorities a few months after going public. We won't be killed for our lifestyles and beliefs. We wouldn't be killed for our lifestyles or beliefs. Hell, we wouldn't even consent to live without shelter for our lifestyles and beliefs.

When I listen to Jesus talk about God, part of me is impressed, and most of me dismisses him the same as any other overzealous adherent I might hear.

"That's great for him . . . " I say

Which is really just a way of saying, "I don't want to impinge my beliefs on yours, but I think you're an idiot."

Truthfully, I don't think it's possible for any one human to know "God" any better than any other human. I think we all just focus on different facts, different histories, different myths, different lies . . . and then we indoctrinate the conclusions we draw from the picture we've chosen to see. I would be hard pressed to say I'm not an agnostic.

As I've said before, the value I take from Christianity is that I feel that at its core, and particularly at its best, it is a movement that serves as a radical humanism. Beyond what often passes for humanistic tendencies in secular circles, Christianity has always birthed a small portion of adherents who fought for a radical sort of egalitarianism. One which restored the dignity of those who slipped through cracks of popular humanist tendencies. Vonnegut once said, ". . if Jesus hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake." He considers Jesus to be the greatest inspiration to all humanists.

Vonneguts pessimism, as well as his humanism, in my opinion, are the outgrowth of his experience in World War II. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden, up through the days where our government firebombed the city mercilessly. It was a city without a military presence. We did it for revenge, and because military leaders are typically sadists. Vonnegut was one of a handful of prisoners who survived. The German guards who survived forced him and his compatriots to attempt in vain to bury the tens of thousands of bodies who had died from bombs, but whose remains had not been consumed by the ensuing fires. The city which had been a center for the German Arts looked like this afterwards:

I also assume this experience is responsible for his stance as a radical pacifist, and an outspoken critic of any pretense of a "just war".

I wonder often if Christians, or those of us who are somewhere in between, should try first to be good humanists, before they/we ever assume to be "followers" of Jesus. Maybe then we could have some sort of grasp on how extreme Jesus actually was. Maybe then we could understand why he was killed after only a few weeks of speaking publicly. Maybe then we wouldn't act as though there was ever a justified reason for the country we inhabit to firebomb anyplace, ever.

I guess lately the realist in me is controlling the floor, so to speak. I hesitate to identify myself as a Christian; not out of shame, but honesty. If Gandhi is correct, and the poor are the litmus test for who qualifies as such, I highly doubt I will be counted among the righteous. I don't particularly like sleeping outside, and I hope to never need preach to get a meal. I also don't expect the Kingdom of God to come within the week. And really I don't think lions will ever lay down with lambs, or that the world we live in will see true equality on a global scale. So, following Jesus, in the literalist sense, is the last thing that I am actually doing with my life.

But, apart from literalism, there is a degree to which my life is still inspired by Jesus. I am intrigued that a world could exist where inequalities are not respected. Where compassion is set out towards even if it is imperfect. etc. etc.

I think that means I'm either a Unitarian or a Christian Agnostic. I don't really know.

Vonnegut reminds me of the psalmists a lot of the time . . . just more sardonic. The psalms often indict God for the great tragedies of their day. Later on, extra material was added to the end of such psalms to make them more faith-friendly.

I wish it weren't so necessary to polarize our society into factions of belief and disbelief (which I find demand equal amounts of faith). I resent the greed of both sides to win support for their extremes. I, like many, remain suspended in the middle, wishing naivete and wisdom weren't mutually exclusive.

Labor Day

2008-09-01T13:25:00.000-05:00

So, most of us are off today. We get a day out of the year to relax, thanks to a movement that has basically been squeezed out of existence. Labor day is one of the many privileges we enjoy thanks to the Labor Movement. Other such privileges consist of 40 hour workweeks, vacation time, workers rights, etc., etc. It should only take a quick read of any novel produced circa 1900 to realize how significant such privileges are.

These privileges did not come cheap to those who fought for them. "Labor rights" activists have always been despised, and have always suffered the anonymous abuses which corporate industrialists find so easy to dole out.

I frequently hear people who have known someone, who knew someone who was in a labor union. Generally they complain about how the union took their money, and forced them to go on strike when money was tight. So, unions, especially in the South, are often disparaged. At best they are an inconvenience that none should be subjected to; at worst they are socialist "Commies" trying to usurp our pristine democracy.

So, here we are, on Labor Day, enjoying the last vestige of the bygone days when America was a democracy. Since unions were the only thing that kept America democratic on any level. Ask yourself: in our glorious union-free society that we have built in the South, and are building in the North (slowly but surely), what are the odds that corporate America is going to demand giving its employees another day off for any reason? What would Corporate Day (to off-set Labor Day) look like?

Somehow I doubt it would involve us getting a day to relax.

Consider: whoever wins this coming November, what are the odds of them fighting to strengthen worker rights? Are they likely to fight to maintain the 40 hour workweek, which as a matter of fact is being steadily and passionately eroded in our society? Most people I know would laugh at the idea that 40 hours and no more, should be enough to sustain their livelihood. A standard that took decades to achieve has, especially in recent years, begun to slip out of our hands. And, seeing that Democrats and Republicans are both puppets for corporate interests, it doesn't appear there is much we can do about it.

Maybe appearances aren't what they seem . . .

I remember my first corporate job sitting in a training session where I was informed that if I joined a labor union (as though one even existed in the area) I would be fired immediately. How this doesn't display a disgraceful violation of constitutional rights, I have no idea. Yet, no one seemed disturbed by it. It was a sub-clause in long verbal indoctrination, which assumed we should feel a deep sense of gratitude for said company rescuing us from the flames of unemployment.

Where there is no Labor Party, nor any unions, corporations fear nothing, and we are precariously close to slavery.

I am not calling us to revolution, except maybe in our worldview. What we are often instructed to see by (corporate) media, or churches (corporate religion), or school textbooks (corporate propaganda) is frequently not what is actually the case, but only what others would have us see. Still the choice of seeing is ours, so long as we can hold on to a spirit of subversion and criticism. As long as we have the remnants of the Labor effort around us, we should keep in mind where we have come from, and where we are going; at least on the few holidays we have left.

Personal Statement: Three years later.

2008-08-09T12:23:00.000-05:00

In four days I will officially have had this blog up and running for three years. Crazy. Honestly, when I started I don't think I had any intention of keeping it going this long, yet here I am. And where exactly is that?

When I started writing I was still well within the Christian fold. Originally, as my faithful readers will recall (both of you), my subtitle was "a guy in Texas who loves Jesus". And it's not that this quip no longer applies, only it long ago ceased to adequately express what it is that I want to offer people who would care to read this. What I have always wanted to offer was honesty. I go back and read my early posts, and though they in many way sound like someone else, I still find continuity in the hope to be authentic even (and especially) in my doubts.

I chose the title for my blog because at that time in my life I had come to two shocking realizations. The first being that each of us has precious little control over what others think of us. The second was that we are not any of the things which others label us as, unless we choose to adopt these things. This blog has been my way of publicly thinking out who I am and what I believe . . often with blunt honesty.

Three years ago I was an aimless bachelor with a Bible degree, trying to figure out why the world I found myself in wasn't ever lining up with the world I was resolute to find. I knew I wanted to seek truth, and do so with others; only I found myself seeded with a dissatisfaction for all the methods I had been taught to seek truth by. I also wanted to find a way to live out the faith that I had dedicated my life to six years prior. I wanted my world to be integrated. I was tired of bifurcated life where the spiritual and the mundane were always intolerably distinct from each other. I also found myself struggling with the hierarchies of authority that I saw everywhere, but most disturbingly among people who followed a man who said to call no man father.

So now, what would I say?

I still believe in God, and I don't feel that I have ever actually ceased in this belief. Yet, God's nature is something that has been a constant struggle in my mind. The age old questions of evil and suffering, of injustice and God's silence have always, and will always bother me. For the record, I don't believe in a God of ostentatious intervention. I believe that if miracles occur in our world, they occur subtly. I believe that our world is far too complex for us to ever understand and predict everything, and within that level of ambiguity I believe amazing things happen. These amazing things have to be interpreted by people. Those who are inclined to the myths of faith will explain them with such language, and those who are inclined to look to a natural order will use this to explain them. I believe this is a matter of interpretation, not "faith".

I believe that the experience that humans know as "reality" can be perceived by humans to have a gestalt quality. There is something transcendent in all human awareness, and this is something that I don't think psychology or neuroscience can adequately explain away (though that is not to say that they have no explanations at all). This experience of reality as a whole is what humanity has sought in divinity from the beginning. In premodern times it was hoped to control the world through this relationship, but modern understanding, I feel, has shown this relationship to be contrived on many levels. We now know that rain is not magically produced by the prayers of the pious, but by atmospheric conditions. Again, if prayers effect such things, they do so in subtle ways which always leave room for alternative explanations.

This gestalt quality of reality can be related to personally. I think it is fully possible for the human psyche to interpret its interactions with 'reality as a whole' as personal/relational. I think it is rather arrogant to think of such understandings as primitive or inferior, though I do think that if this is the only understanding one accepts then they are clinging to ignorance. I certainly feel this applies the opposite way around, for scientists who would assume an atomized understanding of the world is the only acceptable understanding.

This experience of reality as a whole is what I call God. This understanding is inherited from Judaism and Christianity (and informed by Islam as I grow to understand it). Yet for me the (post)Enlightenment worldview critiques and revises this inheritance. In Judaism and Islam, I find a relentless desire to preserve the sacredness of belief in the one God. For these religions, God/Reality is one, and anything that even holds potential to compromise this belief must be anathematized. This is quite the problem for me as a Christian, since the Christ I follow was wholly and completely Jewish. In short, I cannot accept any doctrine that would equate Jesus with divinity, nor believe any document that would claim he proclaimed such of himself. Historically and factually, I just don't believe it was possible. This is not to say I don't perceive a relationship between Jesus and God (and the the Holy Spirit too). Only I begin with the idea that however much acclaim we would give Jesus, he himself would not have supported our ideas that he is God. However much we may see the actions of God in the actions of Jesus, we should still respect the distinction, as I'm sure Jesus himself would have.

Belief in one God has in a way served to reintegrate the world for me. I no longer feel the world is divided between the material and spiritual, but that the material is spiritual and the spiritual is material. I don't believe in a God seated above the clouds, but a God who pervades the entire world. And, at certain points we discern him lucidly: like Jesus. As I have said at other times, what is convoluted amidst endless discussion of how we should live is made clear in Jesus' words and actions. Primarily, that in others we find God. Or, to return to my favorite quote, "God reveals himself by revealing man to himself". If I want to care for God, I care for others; feebly, imperfectly, yet beautifully.

For those who have followed this blog, that is why I randomly chose nursing (though I knew I wasn't particularly suited to it at the time). And, that's why I've decided to give another 8 years to pursuing medicine. This is my worship and my theology. It is my attempt to take what I have come to think in honesty, and direct it towards the service of others. It's where three years has led me to: a way towards unity, and hopefully God.

connect the dots . . .

2008-08-06T17:42:00.001-05:00

I have a friend who is teaching me Chinese. At the rate I'm learning I'll be fluent in approximately 96 years. I think I pick up about 2 new words a day, which I think amounts to 0.02% the rate at which small children can acquire new vocabularies.

Most Asian people, upon moving to the States, choose an "American" name, since Americans lack the capacity to pronounce unfamiliar names which require tonal precision. Supposedly some Americans who dare venture to Asia to live do the same, adopting a non-alien name.

The other day I learned the equivalent of my name in Chinese, and since I'm tonally retarded I immediately forgot it. Evidently I could just stick with Joe, which, to my paltry knowledge, has two possible meanings:

1) Alcohol

2) Bridge

But which to choose!?!

I had an interesting talk with some coworkers today. We were discussing racism. A few of them, being from other cultures, were telling me their first hand experiences. We were also discussing our different religious backgrounds and how hard it is to really communicate with each other. For years now I've been interested in inter-religious dialogue, but have been disheartened by how difficult it is to find adherents of other religions who aren't equally as close-minded as those of my own faith that I'd like to get away from. My coworkers informed me of how asinine most public opinion of their respective faiths is.

Supposedly we're all out to kill each other; at least that's what the media tells us. I think part of the problem is that many of the dialogue friendly people don't actually attend religious gatherings. All the sensible voices out there are too isolated to be heard.

I hate thinking that we're all xenophobic by default.

I'd like to be a bridge, but damn it can be hard.

The Historical Jesus

2008-07-30T21:07:00.000-05:00

The first time I heard of J.D. Crossan his name was said pejoratively. Crossan for those who are not aware is known as the ring-leader of The Jesus Seminar. When I was a clueless freshman studying the Bible, I was alerted toward the end of my freshman year about this wolf in sheep's clothing, who was devouring the faith of many-a-good hearted theology student.

We spent many weeks learning the proper apologetics to safeguard our faith against this man's tactics to steal our salvation.

So, now, years later, I decided it would be the smart thing to do to actually read his book. Outlandish idea I know. I can't really say I approached it with the ready-made polemic I was endowed with back in 2000, and I must admit that in doing so I've seen the reason we were so heavily forewarned: he knows what he's talking about.

I don't think I plan on getting any posters of him for my room, and I certainly wouldn't put him on par with Kung (as though it's really fair to compare a theologian with a archeological historian), but I like the guy. I'm about half way through his book, which is rather thick. So far he doesn't strike me as a bad person or someone who has it in mind to destroy Christianity. He does strike me as someone who is very well educated and really just wants to give an adequate explanation for the socio-cultural context which Jesus was born in and shaped by.

This might be further evidence amassing to an indictment that I have lost my faith, though I don't really think I have. Still, if so, losing faith is fairly anti-climactic. It's not near the catastrophe I had thought it would be.

Soon, I might write a blog about what I actually do believe at this point (to attempt to stick with the effort to avoid negative definition identity).

Anyway, I recommend Crossan. It's a little boring at points, as all good non-fiction is, but enlightening for those who can manage. If you've been trained to equate all Jesus Seminar affiliates with the incarnation of Satan, don't believe the hype.

Amen.

My Current Discontent

2008-07-13T12:39:00.001-05:00

Lately I've been attempting to familiarize myself with a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein (said with v-sounds replacing the w's). Multiple people I've read refer to him as the most important philosopher of the 20th century. He's one of those philosophers that defied being fit into any particular mold, though every contemporary school attempted to claim him as 'one of their own.'

Wittgenstein somewhat pioneered the field of linguistic philosophy, or at least was the cardinal philosopher whereby the "linguistic turn" began. His thinking is largely responsible for the trendy phenomena we would refer to as pluralism. I could go on, but this post is about me, so I won't.

Wittgenstein's thought is what provides people like Richard Rorty with a method to declare that philosophy is dead. He severely critiqued the capacity of philosophic inquiry to arrive at truth. Yet, I don't know if there is a single person who would dare to consider him postmodern. In fact, a book I've been reading lately suggest that he would be the very philosopher who implies that postmodern thought is bankrupt, which gets to what I've been generally frustrated by lately.

Postmodern culture rests on the denial of what is, but offers nothing other to fill in the void. In fact, it seems bent on a sort of nihilistic deconstruction (a la Nietzsche) of all constructs old and new. As soon as people offer a fresh idea of how to live, it is instantly criticizes ad nauseum for any number of reasons. We can lash out and "free" ourselves of all the constructs of modern society, but in the process we lose all sense of identity or meaning.

Personally I'm tired of the feeling of being defined purely in negative terms: by what I'm not. I think this has been the case for much to long, and I'm bored with it. This is difficult, because the things I negate as part of my identity, I negate for good reason. Yet, it seems so often that for too many of my friends and for myself, we spend so much energy declaring what we're not, that we have precious little to say about who we are.

There's nothing in me that wants to revert to the old banners that used to offer me identity. Only I'm ready to be something more than post_______.

Wittgenstein once said "if you tried to doubt everything, you would not get very far in doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty." I find that to be the funny thing with postmodernists, they basically use modernism (the only certainty they have) to fight modernism. As one book I read pointed out, "postmodernism requires the presence of a modernist discourse for its very existence - an existence we must assume will fade away as it reduces and deconstructs modernism to a groundless and pointless trace, thereby erasing itself". Postmodernism is merely a reincarnation of modernism, with a suicidal bent.

That's not to say that I have turned against postmodernists. I love their points. I'm just ready to move on to something more than an identity based on the negation of the things in the world I dislike.

Richard Rorty and a bunch of words related to the idea of language.

2008-07-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

So, a couple months ago I read a book by Richard Rorty. He's one of those evil postmodernists who adamantly deny that they are postmodern and probably don't consider themselves evil either. Now I'm reading a book that is a collection of essays on his legacy. Half the essays laud him for his brilliance and innovation, the other half deplore him as a shallow prophet of Western liberalism.

I love the guy. I say this as someone who has read a single book by him. Yet, in terms of philosophy, he writes in a very straight-forward way. I don't get the feeling he is inventing a new language simply to obfuscate his meaning, allowing only scholars the opportunity to understand him.

I also love him for the fact that he comes across as someone who is anti-authoritarian by birth. (One heart to another, I guess.) He shows a general disregard for the positions of professional philosophers as generally scholars of trivia who try to maintain their salary by overstating their own importance to society at large. He claims that generally the last century followed the death of God with the death of Philosophy. Funny that a philosopher would profess the demise of his own discipline. Yet, I love it, for his intent seems to be one of liberation. He claims his purpose in undermining philosophy is freeing social and political structures from the crutch of philosophy as a means to self-justification.

I feel this is quite pertinent to theology as well. It seems that theology in modern day waivers in its search for some ground to rest on. Half the time it reverts to Scripture and exclusive revelation epistemology; the other half it seeks to justify itself by philosophy. Hans Kung who I have infinite respect for is even somewhat guilty of this. He tries to establish philosophical grounds to justify his theological claims, starting with Kant. Not that he does a bad job, just I found it ironic that we would justify our talk of God by referring to an absolutized Philosophy.

Rorty dispenses with absolutized philosophy by a variety of means, but from what I've read he mostly attacks language as a means of conveying truth . . . at least Truth. (This is where people start attacking him as a postmodernist, which he finds a bit preposterous.) For Rorty, the meaning of all language is historically contingent, depending on the lost experiences of a bygone age. He denies any point where our words actually connect with reality, but rather claims that the meaning our words carry is always completely contingent on the words that surround them. Not merely that meaning is contingent on context, which we all know, but that everything is context and therefore there is no such thing as a settled meaning of a word.

The basic idea is that every experience is one that we instantly interpret upon having it. There are no uninterpreted experiences. The next point is that all interpretation is language. Therefore all experience is only known through language, but that we have no direct, non-linguistic experiences. Rather what we experience is largely pre-determined by what language we speak and the categories our linguistic culture has made available to us. The point then becomes apparent that there is no such thing as a "correct" way of speaking of an experience. In short, no one gets "it" right. All language is plastic and determined by the context we live in, and therefore a "correct" description today will likely be wrong tomorrow.

The point is that there is no such thing as a "right or wrong" way of speaking on a subject, only useful and useless ways. Thus, returning to the previous discussion, theology does well to refer to philosophy to find useful ways to speak of God, but when it makes an attempt to appeal to philosophy to prove who is and who is not speaking correctly of God, it has bastardized its own discipline and asked philosophy to do what it has no capacity to do. Philosophy is impotent to help us get anything "right". Especially God. Yet philosophy is infinitely helpful in aiding us to find useful ways of speaking of God or spirituality, as well as dismissing the forms of speech that have become useless.

I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities that Rorty opens up for living differently (even as a theologian, which is a discipline Rorty has little respect for). I have not even begun to consider all the detrimental possibilities which his philosophy might have, and I'm sure there are plenty. Still, I do find that his ideas connect with many of the ways I have thought about God for some time. I have long thought it ridiculous that we consider our verbal formulae sufficient to describe an infinite God. "Infinite" being a verbal category whose point seems to imply that which is impossible to understand of fully experience (!).

Jesus needed the bar all to himself . . .

2008-07-01T21:19:00.000-05:00

After work tonight me and a few friends decided to go to happy hour at a local bar. These are work friends who care nothing for religion and are self-professed agnostics leaning toward atheism. We arrive at the bar only to find out that we had 30 minutes before we would be evicted from the only open seating area because it was reserved . . . by a church.

Now, I've been a part of evangelical culture for most of my life, I'm a former missions major, but even in my most fundy-friendly times I would have said loudly what I'm about to say:

What a dumbass idea!!!

If you think you're message is something people need to hear, then go to where those people are, start up a relationship, and talk about it. But don't effing kick them out of the bar, so you and your "progressive" Christian friends can feel cool sipping beer and talking theology over a loudspeaker.

So thank you Uptown Church for driving out all other patrons in the name of Jesus, so you could chat about outdated theology to a crowd that you filtered to make sure they would already believe what you were saying.

They titled the thing "Ale and the Almighty". wtf?

coming of age . . . deferred

2008-06-28T23:41:00.000-05:00

Existential crisis: how am I not myself?

So, the other day my boss, who is slightly crazy yet I still respect her, took it upon herself to psychoanalyze me. Her main points were as follows:

- I still haven't found myself

- I have no idea what I want to do with life

- I have commitment issues

- I think women are evil

- I cater too much to my parents

- I value my freedom above anything and everything and everybody

For a while now I have habitually avoided asking myself deep questions about myself. I think this is due to a sort of rebellion against the relentless inwardness that serves as the core of evangelical Christian culture. I've dealt with God knows how many years of being told that you have to dissect yourself at a "soul level" in order to sift the wheat from the chaff etc. etc.

I am fully convinced that this is crap. I think it is an ideology that paralyzes people in a myopic spiritual narcissism that merely allows preachers to reign in their purity and maintain a salary. So, I decided around a year ago to quit. And, I've been floating along now for a year; sometimes I merely tolerate my life which isn't the one I've always dreamed of, and sometimes I've still found myself pleasantly content. But, one thing I've noticed, I never feel stagnant, which I remember feeling constantly when I thought that I should aspire to constantly hold my soul under a magnifying glass.

I actually feel quite the opposite of stagnation, lately I've felt as though there is never enough time to reflect or consider. I've felt that I am perpetually in motion even when I forget what that motion is taking me toward. Basically busyness has occupied the void left in my life which was formerly dedicated to hours of wondering whether my intentions were of God or of the devil.

And so, in the middle of work the other day, when I should be diligently driving towards results in the holy cause of staying busy, my boss gives me her diagnosis, and it really threw me off. I mean, I was really bothered by it, and couldn't get what she said off of my mind. This unfortunately informs me that there must be some truth to what she said.

So having given it some thought, here's what I think:

true, false, true, false, probly true, and true.

So, moving on. I think I'm more and more of an anti-essentialist. This presents me with a problem in the "search for myself" since I'm not really convinced there is a "me" out there waiting to be found . . . by me that is. I really think we, and the communities we are part of, decide or create the people that we are. So, for me, I feel it's less a matter of finding myself, and more a matter of deciding who I will be, which I find to be infinitely more challenging. I would love to believe I could simply stumble upon my own essence, but unfortunately I feel pretty certain that Plato was full of crap.

I do know what I want in life. Though the picture in my head is always a vague blur, I still feel certain about the big pieces of it. I think that this is what should inform me of "finding" who I want to be, since that's actually part of the picture.

And, so, I've returned to a place in my life where I need to start asking tough question of myself. The things we avoid are most often those which we most need to address.

I talked with a friend the other day about the odd concept of adulthood, which we are technically a part of, but only technically. Both of us are over half way through our twenties and still found it odd to think of ourselves as being "a man" or "a woman". I think maybe that's what my boss in all of her clairvoyance was getting at . . . I have a lot of growing up to do. Not something that I haven't heard before, but maybe something that for the first time I agreed with upon hearing.

Sophia

2008-06-22T12:55:00.000-05:00

As I've said previously, I think that the New Testament's primary mode for expressing the value they found in Jesus is to transpose him onto preconceived categories. Thus Jesus is expressed as the 'new Moses', the 'new Elijah', a prophet of old. Often these concepts applied to Jesus are an awkward fit. Jesus lines up with such molds in some places, but in others couldn't be further away from what those ideas expressed.

This is why calling Jesus the Messiah is only partially applicable. There were several lines of thought as to what the Messiah would be. Jesus obviously was a better fit for the idea of the 'priestly Messiah' who would liberate the people by leading them into a new spiritual depth where God himself would be moved by their purity to come and save Israel. The problem was, that this view was a minority view. Most people who expected a Messiah, expected a military general to drive Judah to triumph. When they referred to the Messiah as the "Lion of Judah" they weren't just giving lip-service; they believed the Messiah would make Judah into Rome and Rome into their slaves. Thus, Jesus was a horrible Messiah. Quite literally, as a Messiah, he was a complete failure. Still, the NT gives him this title with frequency because it is a means to express what they have failed to find a good way to articulate.

They transposed the person of Jesus onto the concept of the Messiah, and for those who came to understand Jesus, the concept was redefined. And, this is what I believe to be the foremost method that the NT uses to teach the identity and importance of Jesus to people who had never met him. So, moving on . . .

It's funny that we pay so little attention to the 400 year gap that is present between the Testaments of the Christian Bible. We treat that period as a boring era when God was taking a breather getting ready to send/become Jesus to fix our problems once and for all. That attitude is one of the peaks of Christian idiocy.

There was an astounding volume of literature produced by Jewish culture during those years. Much of it is included in the Apocrypha which we have conveniently excluded since Bibles are heavy enough as they are. The problem is that the Apocrypha and many of the books that didn't even make the cut to be considered Apocrypha-worthy are the very books which set the tone for the culture that Jesus and his contemporaries lived in. Jesus and his friends knew those books almost as well as they knew the Hebrew Bible.

One prominent feature of that time period was the emergence of Sophia. The Wisdom of God stepped out in that culture as a mythic figure which delineated new ideas about God and his relation to the world. Nonetheless Sophia was controversial, since she was . . . well, a she. Sophia was in many ways separate from God, she acted on her own, and yet she was also a part of God. It was possible to see her acting on her own, or, in her actions, to see God himself taking action. Sophia was supposed to be an eternal aspect of God. There was never a time when she was not with God, and a part of God. She was there when God created the world, and by her God created all things.

If you've ever read the New Testament the parallels become staggering. It becomes readily apparent that Jesus is not just a prophet of Sophia, but actually in the earliest contexts Jesus' disciples saw him as Sophia incarnate. In fact, most of the hyperbolic claims of the New Testament concerning the ontology of Jesus, the Son, originated with the idea of Jesus the embodiment of Sophia.

Notice this, no Jew would cry blasphemy at the equation of Jesus with Sophia, but unilaterally Jews and Muslims would anathematize the equation of Jesus with God. The difference is subtle but infinitely important.

God is active in Sophia, but in the context where Jesus lived, Sophia did have an identity of her own. Thus, when Jesus is understood as the incarnation of Sophia, the same concept applies: God is active in Jesus, but Jesus is also his own.

There was a problem with this transposition: Sophia is feminine. Around Jesus' own time Jewish society was shifting from a period of being more egalitarian to one which was more patriarchal. Under the influence of Greco-Roman culture the feminine was increasingly relegated to a place of inferiority, and so the equation of Jesus with a feminine expression of the Absolute God was feared to be distasteful for Greek Christians. A slow process of repression began. So, during the years of writing the NT we notice the idea of Jesus as Sophia fading from the scene. By the time John was written the idea of Logos was preferred over Sophia to express that Jesus was pre-existent without the disgrace of assuming he was inspired by God's feminine side.

This understanding of Jesus reconciles claims of his pre-existence and clarifies how Jesus "came" from God. I also find that it offers hope that our basic doctrines don't automatically put us in enmity with over one sixth of the world population (Muslims and Jews), and don't make us look like fools to the remaining two thirds of other faiths. It also restores some of my respect for the Gospel of John trying to find a new way to express an idea that was causing a lot of controversy . . . only I think his solution leaves us with more problems than it fixes.

The main people currently trying to lead the resurgence of Sophia theology are Christian feminists like Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza. I feel though that ecumenical Christians also have an important stake in reclaiming the role which Sophia played in early Christian faith, since Sophia helps us to reconsider the dogmas which have long lead us into exclusiveness and misunderstandings about the very man that we center our beliefs around.

Of Late . . .

2008-06-16T20:50:00.000-05:00

As of late, my thoughts regarding any topics that might be of interest in blog form have been tragically limited. So far this summer I've had precious little time for theological reflection. Woe is me.

I started college algebra last week, and came down with a horrible sore throat the next day. Coincidence? I think this once I'll stake my hat on anecdotal evidence and say that it's been proven that math results in sickness. Therefore its nuisance as a requirement is unethical, and I am demanding exemption. . . . Alas, I don't know who to send such a complaint to, so I'm writing it here. If you know who the person responsible for such outrageous expectations is, send me their address and I will write with fervor and fury!

My apologies: that rant was due to having had my first test tonight. It really had nothing to do with the aforementioned illness. I probably did fine. I just find it lame that I'm getting off work and driving back to school to take exams. Ridiculous.

In between an endless inundation of articles about neurological disorders which I am reading for work, I've managed to read a couple short books. One was on the figure of Sophia in the Bible which very well may have solved most of my problems with the pre-existence of Jesus, and the Gospel of John in general. I might write more on that later.

I've also been working on Mill's essay on Utilitarianism, which I'm finding fairly interesting. I was telling a friend the other day, science has a way of making pragmatism and utilitarianism quite palatable.

The highlight of my evenings lately is getting to read Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I love it. Marquez has sealed the deal as my favorite, and therefore the best, fiction author of all time. His style is the best descriptive prose I have ever read by far. I cannot recommend him highly enough.

It is now officially 9:12 PM and I'm going to bed. Good lord, who ever thought a summer could be this lame! Seriously! 9:12???

Work

2008-06-06T16:39:00.001-05:00

I have returned to the world which begins daily with that annoying sound of beeping in triplicate, gradually increasing speed every 20 seconds to remind me that I need to pull the covers off and stumble into wakefulness. I began my job this week. I'm immensely grateful for it, yet no amount of gratitude truly prepares one for the stark reality that is 7:00 AM.

I spent my first two days looking for wallet-friendly routes to make it from point A to B. Point A being my suburban refuge. Point B being my lab at an illustrious academic island in the middle of the ghetto. On both days I spent 40 minutes stuck at lights before taking recourse to the the tollway just to make it to work on time. Now I've conceded to the inescapable fact that the powers that be will charge me three dollars to leave the suburbs and make it to the ghetto in less than two hours.

I'm working with some pretty cool people, doing some pretty cool things. We're hoping by the end of the summer to cure several forms of epilepsy, MS, arthritis, and a few other diseases that I can't spell the names of. At least that's the goal.

Today I got paid to sit around, reading papers about said diseases and try and wrap my mind around the most up-to-date understandings of how they work.

I really enjoy it. I'm convinced this somehow evidence of insanity, since when I simply glance at the papers I'm reading, I cannot fathom anything more boring or esoteric. Nonetheless I got excited today upon understand how the immune system captures and delivers antigens to cells that then kill everything that presents the same protein. I started drawing pictures on my lab-book and then found myself drifting through delusions of finding miracle cures based on knowledge that took me one hour to obtain from multiple doctors who spent years researching. It's kind of ridiculous.

My lab is amazing. I'm on the 7th floor. I sit next to a window with a phenomenal view of the Dallas skyline. I watch herons and hawks catching the updraft off the building, hovering effortlessly 30 feet past my window. The rolling clouds today caused the light to catch the angles of the skyscrapers and I thought briefly of how beautiful a place Dallas can be.

Tonight I'm going to a jazz club, just on the opposite side of my view. We're dressing up, which is a horrible idea that I am in favor of all sober-minded adults abandoning. But as I doubt that anyone will pay mind to such objections, I've resigned myself to partaking in the charade. Small price to pay I guess, to be with friends who I'm truly coming to love.

A friend of mine got on to me the other night for complaining. This is nothing unusual; most of my close friends do so with frequency. I've never been able to pin it down. I think it might be that optimism just seems awkward to me. I've got natural talent as a cynic . . . were it a sport I might be eligible for professional play. The other day, though, I found myself thinking that I was exactly where I wanted to be. This exact time in my life. There are all kinds of things that I could desire right now, but I don't really care. I'm headed where I want to go, and I'm surrounded by everything that is indispensable. I'd be lying to say I was living in a state of contentment, but I feel it quite an accomplishment to say that I at least have realized that I have every reason to be content.

Science, Suffering, and Theology

2008-05-22T11:08:00.000-05:00

In times past pain was considered to be the manifestation of evil. All human suffering was viewed as an occurrence against the will of God. A lot of people still carry this attitude toward suffering, especially when they themselves are the ones who suffer. The human reaction to suffering is at the core of all religious experience. All ethics, all morality, in one way or another tie back to the existence of suffering and the question of what the proper human response is. All such forms of thought seem to share the idea that pain is not the way things "are supposed to be". The problem is that Darwin really threw this line of thinking for a loop, and we've never really adequately recovered from it.

In nursing it's common to refer to pain as "the sixth vital sign". One way to assure that a person is alive is to test for their reaction to pain. According to a Darwinian way of viewing the world pain is simply an adaptive response that helps life to survive. In this way, pain ceases to be an enemy, but becomes a necessary part of clinging to life in a hostile world. The reason we feel pain is that all the beings which did not feel pain died, and we suffering creatures were the only ones to survive and procreate.

From this perspective we cannot continue to vilify pain, but must allow that it is a necessary part of our humanity. Pain is a vital part of all animal nature. Yet, still, there is the sense in which we know that pain, or the avoidance of, is not and should not be the meaning of human life.

There is a very real sense in which pain is a force that drives us forward. We make our plans, we educate ourselves, we wake up before we want to, we devote ourselves to caring for our bodies in part to avoid pain and suffering. Those who would like to believe that humanity would continue striving for a better future with no recourse to pain, I cannot believe are being very practical or honest.

Yet, it does seem that this is the purpose that pain has come to fill in life: it inspires the struggle of the greater whole to survive and live in ways that minimize pain. This seems straight-forward enough, but I think for humans especially this becomes the place where our experience of suffering becomes the experience of evil. As conscious beings we know that pain should serve as an impetus for driving us to a better life. This is where we find meaning and identity in the experience of pain. This is not intended to gloss over the experience of pain, but to explain that pragmatically it serves a purpose for humanity: to drive us collectively to overcome, inspiring us toward a better future.

Thus, evil, in my view, is the experience of pain where the potential to overcome is denied. In this situation pain ceases to have a meaningful purpose. It is "dumb suffering" to quote Schillebeeckx (oops I said it). This is suffering that has no greater purpose for humanity; it has no redemptive victory.

This is the suffering of the 'third world' that disturbs us in the 'first world', for our unintended complicity to it, and our knowledge that the death of a child in a sweatshop solely for the purpose of making our t-shirts cheaper has no redemptive meaning. It is the existence of meaninglessness that we suffice to keep out of the public eye, but never completely out of the back of our minds.

This is what I mean when I say that sin and evil is simply the denial of human (or even animal) dignity. Pain in evolutionary perspective serves as an impetus to adapt, but all situations where pain is real yet all opportunities for adaptation are denied obstruct an intrinsic drive of all organisms. This takes the richness of human life, with its experience of emotions and depth of consciousness, and denies it the dignity that even insects have.

This experience of evil as the oppression of adaptive drives in the face of pain has a wide scope of implications and manifestations, which I would have to go into at another time. But, I do feel it is at least a start for a new perspective on suffering and evil in human experience; one which is more consistent with the implications of modernity and yet still offers a reverence for life consistent with religious thinking.

Satan, etc.

2008-05-14T14:13:00.000-05:00

When I was in college I took a seminar in the Old Testament with one of the few liberal professors who taught at my school. Rumors had circulated to the inquisitive collective of Bible majors that he didn't believe in Satan. Thus, I recall spending close to 30 minutes every week, participating in the group attempt to corner the man into stating this possibly blasphemous belief. Fortunately, he was much smarter than us; we could never coerce him into a blatant denial of the devil's existence. Lord knows we tried. He always dodged the question and tried to point us to literature that represented respectable scholarship, which I imagine a dismal percentage of us ever consented to read.

He did manage to incite enough interest in me to be tormented for years following with the desire to know. Such was my downfall.

I've read a few of the things that he might have possibly pointed me to earlier had I really cared to know rather than be told. So, here's my reply to the question I asked so relentlessly.

No.

First let's lay out on the table that the word Satan is used very sparingly in the OT. In all such cases, it carries the connotation of an accuser or a prosecutor. Never the personification of all evil. There are a few other terms, such a Belial, which come closer, but never amount to God's great antagonist. The OT has no category for a being that represents the inspiration of evil. There is that in the world which fights against God, but it's story is never so important as to be told. It is just an existential fact that there is evil that opposes God, but therefore the important thing is siding with God.

Second, I think it of vast importance to say that snakes are snakes. Why you may wonder? Because, goes the reply, the serpent in Eden was just that: a serpent. There is no direct equation in the OT that Satan entered Eden in serpent form to tempt man. This was to become the assumption later . . . much, much later, but the story of the Fall has no "evil force" responsible for Eve's temptation. The fact is that the ancient mind was fascinated by the fact that snakes appeared to sit around, still, all day long, and with a little venom managed to survive . . . that takes some craftiness. Keep in mind these stories are contrived by shepherd who chase sheep around all day to make a living. The serpent of Eden is just as likely to represent the craftiness of human intuition by which we deceive even our very selves. There is nothing in the narrative that advises us to assume Satan has an affinity for reptilian manifestations.

When reading the OT through an historical lens, it becomes apparent that originally faith in YHWH attempted to diminish faith in all other demigods and spiritual beings. It appears that the spiritual proponents of faith in YHWH had in mind to compromise the very existence of such lesser gods. The hope was to leave faith in YWHW alone and no others. Yet outside such circles belief in lesser spiritual beings persisted in Palestine.

In the Exile, Israel faced many significant theological challenges. Both in witnessing the wholesale slaughter of massive portions of Palestine by Assyrian and Babylonian armies, which had obvious traumatic effects. The question of theodicy (how can an omnipotent God be justified in the face of evil?) became much more pressing to those who would propose that YHWH remained the one true God. No longer was evil a matter of minor malevolent forces, but now it was major force that for all appearances could rival YHWH himself. How could this be reconciled to their theology? Israel found itself simultaneously confronted with Persian/Babylonian religions, primarily Zoroastrianism. This religion had a much more dualistic view of the world and saw the cosmos divided between good and evil equally. It is in returning from this context that we begin to hear Judaism give more and more credit to the concept of Satan.

Around 200 years before Christ we begin to find the ideas (for instance in Chronicles) that Satan is the adversary of Israel. Not God, but God's chosen people. The idea that God could be opposed by any was still largely denied. It appears that around 180 B.C.E. was when this began to change. First with the advent of the anti-messiah Antiochus IV, the man who sacrificed a pig on the alter of the temple. In other words, the man who openly defied and opposed God in front of God's people. This combined with their suffering lead to an increased viability for the idea of an "Adversary" who opposed YHWH himself. Satan is born.

By the time Jesus was born, Satan with his extensive hierarchy of sub-demons were simply an accepted part of the contemporary worldview. As I've written before I think Jesus was completely human and fully enculturated to the worldview of his people at his time. With such a mindset I think sparring with Satan was a viable idea of his time. He certainly wasn't foolish for thinking such things, as even the most educated frequently believed such ideas.

I just don't think with our modern understanding it's something we can truly believe in anymore. I fully believe in the reality of evil as an experience of humans resulting in the loss of their dignity and the opposition of wholeness. I just don't believe that there is a personified form of this evil. I believe that the realm of the 'spiritual' is so subtle and unknown that we could identify things as the work of angels or demons, but to me this is just assigning a symbolic name to a human experience. If someone chose to explain it by atoms and molecules and synapses with neurotransmitter levels I don't think they are wrong to do so.

For people who have no taste for modernity as a way of understanding the world, I don't know that I think of it as my quest to convince them to give up on the idea that there is a Satan, and a war between light and dark. But, as with all humans, I hold to my understanding because I'm convinced it's true.

At the core, I think the most important point is that belief in spiritual beings, including Satan, is not a part of the core of Christian faith. I know that a huge portion of our population, both those who believe Jesus and those who don't, are excluded by the fact that it is too often assumed that to find salvation in Jesus, I must believe in a Satan that he saves me from. I find it vitally important as someone who frequently finds himself poised between such parties, to point out that this is not so. Human salvation can readily be experienced whether or not Satan is real, just as evil is experienced by all whether or not we personify it in the form of demons.

Concentric Canons

2008-05-09T12:47:00.000-05:00

So, I'm reading one of the major books by my favorite theologian, whose name scares people so I refrain from using it. Half the book consists of giving historical context to the NT apart from the synoptic Gospels, which he dealt with in his previous book. Anyway, I'm working my way through his take on the Gospel of John.

I think I knew I had some problems with John before reading this. I could never put my finger on exactly what it was that I didn't like, I just knew there was something.

According to many scholars the Gospel of John as well as the Epistles of John were written by a Samaritan church outside the major cultural centers of Antioch, Rome, and Jerusalem. It is essentially a Palestinian Gospel. The letters are all written in the context of serious persecution by the local synagogues. It appears that Christians in John's church were significantly outnumbered, and were still clinging to their Jewish roots. Under the social pressure from the synagogue, many Christians were turning back to Judaism. So, what's the answer?

For John, it is to increase the polemic against the Jews and turn inward as a community. So, in the Gospel we find all sorts of statements excluding Judaism, and meanwhile trying to increase the strength of the community. On the one hand we have and increased call to love one another, which I appreciate highly. Yet on the other hand, John tries to lay down doctrinal guidelines to cement a community identity. This is done to force the people on the fence to choose a side. This is an aspect I'm not such a fan of.

I could go on and on, but that would be tangent to what I'm really concerned with here. The fact of the matter is that I don't like, nor do I respect, the Gospel of John on the same level I do the synoptic Gospels. Just the same as I have an extremely low estimation of the pseudo-Pauline epistles, whereas I actually like authentic Paul quite a bit. So, yes, I'm guilty of having a 'canon within a canon', as is so often referred to with denigration. Seriously though, I think it's normal, if not necessary, to do so.

Judaism does this. Esther is not taken with the same seriousness as Genesis. The Proverbs are often given less precedence than the Psalms. Isaiah is really seen as a prophetic commentary on the Torah, and so is not held on the same level.

For me, the core of the Christian faith is the person of Jesus. This sounds simple enough, but it's really not. It requires me to make completely subjective choices as to who I think that is, and what that would look like in my context. I don't really think there's anything cut and dry about it. The picture offered in the synoptics is quite divergent from that offered in John, and personally I think the synoptics offer a much more important and applicable picture for my context.

That doesn't mean I cut John out of my Bible. It just means I don't take it with the same seriousness which I extend to Matthew, Mark and Luke. It would be good to glean from John and pseudo-Paul as much as I possibly can, they still have a voice I should take seriously. But, the theology that I shape my life around need not be structured around their concerns. I feel their are core concerns in the pastoral epistles that I disagree with entirely. I don't believe that the preeminence of the patriarchal household is something that Christians need to hold central to their faith. Nor do I feel an inward facing community under Jewish persecution deserves to be a major driving voice in the theology that guides me as an American Christian in 2008.

Transposing Jesus

2008-04-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

When I read the New Testament lately I'm pretty amazed by how impassioned all of it is; sometimes to the point of irrationality. I'm also amazed by how divergent the interests of the authors are. I get the vague impression that there are a lot of people trying to grab the reigns of a movement that has become more powerful than anyone originally thought it would.

There's something in this story that grabs everyone, which could conversely be argued that there's something in everyone who grabs hold of this story.

Most of the theology I've read the last few months has elucidated the fact that everyone writing the NT had a different idea as to the role that Jesus filled. This gets really convoluted particularly in the Gospels where the authors are editing together a wide variety of traditions trying to make a coherent narrative. I've found it invaluable lately to remind myself that all of the NT is rhetorical: meaning the entire purpose behind their writing is to persuade the reader. There is no impartial reporting anywhere. Even in Acts, which has the most "historical" quality, every word is written like a sermon, trying to inspire us to live differently.

One funny thing is that all the acclamations given to Jesus in the NT are pre-existing ideas. Terms like Son of God, Messiah, Son of Man are all Jewish concepts which had a rich history of meaning long before Jesus came on to the scene. We often speak anachronistically as though these were vacant terms with no figure to fill them until Jesus came, but this is quite far from the truth. People who spoke of these concepts were not idly waiting for Jesus to come and fulfill their expectation, and when Jesus did come, not all accepted the notion that he did fulfill them. I find that to be extremely significant.

I think Christians all to often assume some self-righteous indignation that Jews won't accept Jesus as Messiah, or that both they and Muslims will not acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God. In this I think we grossly misunderstand what the NT is doing. Jews, both in Jesus' time and contemporarily, don't claim Jesus as Messiah, because he wasn't. Jesus did not restore the glory of Israel. He did not drive out the Roman oppressors. And, as evidenced by the extreme prevalence of sin and oppression the coming age of the Kingdom of God is not here in it's fullness. When Jews deny Jesus as the Son of God, they do so because they are making a blatant observation. The Messiah was a concept that existed before Jesus, and it bore a variety of expectations which Jesus did not meet. For them to deny Jesus as Messiah is not an insult to him, but a simple statement of fact.

I think at its core, the heart of the New Testament is not to demand in an absolute sense that Jesus adequately fulfilled the "vacant" concepts which awaited him. He didn't. And, I think we have to respect people who call that to our attention. The simple fact is that the concepts weren't nearly as vacant as we would like to assume, and insofar as the were, Jesus did a poor job of filling them. Instead at its core, I believe the New Testament is calling us to alter our expectations in light of the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus does not fulfill all our expectations, but instead, his person radically challenges us to reframe our hopes.

I believe the NT's way of doing this is transposing the person of Jesus onto the pre-existing concepts that were prevalent in society of that time.

The NT uses a brilliant irony, and contrasts what was hoped of the Torah, the coming Messiah or Son of Man, Caesar, etc. and places Jesus under those titles, or in their place. Where the Caesar/King would ride into a city on a stallion, Jesus comes in on a donkey. Where the Torah was assumed to be the truth and the life of the Jewish people, we hear Jesus shouting to a crowd that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I think historians I fully justified in questioning whether such a speech ever happened; I wonder myself. But the facts are not the point. The point is that our expectations that we will be liberated by law are void. Hope is found in self-sacrifice and graciousness, which we have seen in Jesus. When we hear Peter claiming "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God", and Jesus replies that on that confession the Church will be founded, I think we can rest assured that such a dialogue never happened. It seems highly likely that Jesus never uttered the word "church". Yet, a member of a church that knows the end of the story in advance could readily discern the irony that Jesus was the Christ, and would readily affirm that this paradox is the foundation of all the Church is.

The Church rests on the transposition of Jesus of Nazareth on the concept of Christ. We often hear that the Jews were expecting the "wrong kind of Christ". This is silly statement since they were the ones who created the concept. They were expecting no other kind of Christ than the one they had expected all along. But this is where the beautiful humor Christianity becomes apparent. Jesus' followers took what everyone was expecting and claimed that "this Jesus whom you crucified is he." This stark contrast of expectations against a new claim of virtue is the rhetoric which the whole Christian message is built on.

At the heart of it all is not an objective confession, but an ironic proclamation which admits a radical alteration of values.

26

2008-04-06T13:23:00.000-05:00

My grandma asked me on wednesday how it felt to begin my second quarter-century. She has a knack for asking questions of sublimated morbidity. I joke with my friends that now I just need to round up and say I'm 30 for the next four years . . . and we all know that jokes are always half-true, or they wouldn't be funny. I have friends now who are 30+, which is awesome and strange. That fact might mark as much of a turning point in my life as anything else.

. . . And I realize that 30 is just a dumb number that we lend far more significance than it deserves. Still. It just forces you into this state of realism, that you can't even fake the blissful ignorance of youth anymore. And that's fine. I never was a fan of blissful ignorance anyway. . . . only it was a nice excuse to keep as a fall-back.

It's funny how this is turning out to be one of the best times of my life. I've got awesome friends. They bought me a lot of shots the other night, and then a few drove me home in my own car. It was the best birthday I've had in a long time. . . . and the worst day after as well.

One note of maturity I've realized is how I no longer feel the imposition of "expected milestones" tugging at my soul. In college I always remember feeling the weight of imperfection for never having held a career job, never having been in love, never having seen this, or done that, or been somewhere that everyone told me I should have been. Now I've checked a sufficient number of these things off of my list to realize that a check-list is a damned idiotic way to live one's life. I still want all those things; even the one's I supposedly had. Just, now, I hope to God that they amount to more than a check mark to bring up at parties in order to feel important.

One thing I've noticed that I hate about the pace of my day-to-day life is that I never have the time (or never forced the time) to appreciate where, or who, I've come to be. I get bogged down in the demands of school, and family, and friends, losing track of the simple fact that I have every reason to pause occasionally I think about how good things are.

I was going to get things done today. I've got an absurdly hard genetics mid-term to do. I need to memorize the markings of the 206 bones that comprise the human skeleton. There's a lot of "fun" books, that I plan to read more for personal demands than simple enjoyment. I could try to get ahead on my algebra course. I've got emails that I need to send. Articles to look up.

But, the sun's out, and the flowers are enjoying the Spring. So instead I'm content to consider things as they are. If I've picked up any wisdom, it would be simple as to think that nothing is lost, and that it's been a quarter century for a good year to come into bloom . . . .

Wavering

2008-03-18T12:43:00.000-05:00

We've all heard the story of Peter confessing Jesus as the Christ. This has been the verse of contention where Catholics claim Peter inherits the keys to the kingdom and becomes the first Pope. I've thought a lot about this verse lately. I think there are many significant things to be seen that we end up missing out on.

I've considered the general presupposed view of Jesus that we inherit in the West. One of the characteristics of Jesus I think we hold to in this is a picture of a man who is unwaveringly self-assured. This, I find, is especially true in regard to his own self-understanding. We take the gospel narratives and assume that Jesus knew his own identity and destiny from infancy. But, with ourselves, how many of us know unequivocally who we are or where we are headed? I think of all the twists and turns my life has taken me through, and I know that I am in the vast majority of people who are always slightly unsure with these big existential issues. Most people take a long time to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their life. I think it is an easy projection on our part to turn Jesus into the superhuman that none of us can manage to be ourselves.

My personal thought on this is that in order to count Jesus as "God" we've reduced his humanity, and thus made him into all the things which we can't live up to. One of these being the need for a leader who never suffers the deep uncertainty that seems to be a common attribute to most of human kind. Another pertinent point is that most people who never deal with such uncertainty are those who we would diagnose with some form of mental illness. Then, there are also those "god-like" leaders of men, who project a persona which is infinitely certain of themselves and their own convictions. These are typically the type of leaders who lead suicide missions or start illegitimate wars to the destruction of their followers.

I bring all this out to challenge the all-too-common portrayal of Jesus as some indefatigable, assertive leader, infinitely confident of himself. I question whether such a leader has ever existed, and insofar as they have, I question whether it is in anyone's best interest to follow such a man. Especially in modern context I have significant doubts that such a picture of Jesus allows us to maintain his humanity.

So, back to the story at hand. We read that Jesus, in the company of his most intimate friends asks them who the crowds were making him out to be. They give him a list of potential roles he is rumored to fulfill. He then asks them the great question, "But you, who do you say that I am?" The funny thing is that we always read this as if it were a rhetorical question. We never seem to give voice to the possibility that he himself is not really sure of the answer. Granted, Matthew's Gospel skews our view toward this radical self-confidence of Jesus. But Mark, which is earlier, has no such self-confidence. Rather, Jesus asks them to keep it a secret, almost as though he was scared of the consequences of them being right. Almost as though he weren't expecting them to give him that answer. As the story progresses, Jesus begins to fulfill the messianic role more and more, but even in his resolute march toward Jerusalem there still are signs of uncertainty and hesitation, even within his obedience.

There are indications throughout the Gospels that Jesus struggled to understand who precisely he was. At times he seems to see himself as Elijah preparing the way for the coming Son of Man. Then he begins to think of himself as the Son of Man, the gracious judge of the world. Then toward his end he appears to think of himself more as the Messiah, though never with absolute certainty.

I see it as being quite normal to project onto Jesus the certainty we long for in any of our leaders. We do it with our presidents and preachers, so it is par for the course to do the same for our Savior. But, I think in doing so we lose the profound insight of the gospel, and detach Jesus from our world. This is one particular place where I take issue with our ideas of the divinity of Jesus. To claim Jesus as Lord should bring heaven down to earth, not steal the light of the world up into the ethereal realm above.

I think a view of Jesus which allows him to be every bit as human as me, even in ambivalent self-understanding, rightly places the emphasis of the gospel story on God's action and work among imperfect human beings. The beauty of the gospel, in my view, is not that Jesus was perfect in and of himself, but that God was his perfection even in Jesus' own incompleteness. And, this is why the story is so beautiful! Because it is our story too. Jesus was our example, our model, and the first-fruits of the new Way toward God. This is not that the emperor has come down to our lowly level, but that our brother has proved that God is sufficient to overcome our defeats, sins, imperfections, and uncertainty.

being human

2008-03-11T21:02:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I read to what I believe is my favorite quote of all time: "God reveals himself by revealing man to himself." This has really been a capstone to my line of theological thinking for the last few years. A couple years ago I remember being blown away reading Hans Kung who pointedly claimed that Christianity was essentially just radical humanism; humanism taken to the extreme. I remember thinking this was a welcome corrective to the model of thought that would have Christianity be resigned to a perpetual antagonism towards the the vast plurality of lines of thought that we are all confronted with on a daily basis. I'm pretty sick of it. I'm certain the quantity of people who feel likewise would be innumerable. I have long been annoyed by the simple fact that so many humanists seemed more Jesus-like than the majority of Christians. It seems to me that so many of the concepts and attitudes that can be found at the heart of Enlightenment thinking are things that are completely in line with Jesus' teaching, only we as his followers have long forgotten how they are.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how multifaceted the simple concept of 'being human' is. The depth of our existence is staggering to actually think about. Even from a purely scientific standpoint it is awe-inspiring to consider all the complexity of humans. From consciousness and psychology, to social networks and language, to art and the concept of aesthetic beauty, and then even to the ever subtle nuances of human spirituality, it seems it would be almost impossible ever run out of things to ponder in regard to 'being human'. And, this is a place where I find myself confronted with the purpose of religion in our world.

So often I think religion is foolish enough to think it possible to begin with God and precede toward man as though there is some plane above our own which is possible for us to experience. And, invariably we find men and women standing as 'spokespeople' for this ethereal realm beyond us. The will to power is sublimated into a pseudo-spirituality which works to enslave people rather than set them free. I think the Enlightenment started from this same position, realizing how the power structures in the world of that time were tied to irrationality and religious superstitions which were perpetuated by the clergy and religious figures using faith as a means to hold on to power. And, for all its flaws, the Enlightenment did serve to liberate people when religion had been overwhelmingly perverted to oppress them. I don't think much has changed in our context. Mega-churches perform the same function, using a 'spiritualized' self-help formula as extra incentive to 'just go with it'.

I think it's all intertwined with the idea that revelation comes from above, and this is exactly what I have come to deny. I don't think God has ever, or will ever, speak to us out of the heights, and any man who would speak as though he does is selling something. Beware.

I believe God always has, and always will tell us of himself through other people, and these other people assuredly have no innate qualities which make them any better than ourselves. The modern attitude that no 'middle man' is necessary for spirituality is right to an extent, but it goes to far when it fails to understand that part of being human is being social. And, we will never hear from God fully if we refuse to listen to others. This is where I see Christianity being more humanistic than humanism. Christianity has no illusions of sufficient autonomy where the 'superman' stands alone without need of anyone else. (I see that as one of several places where Nietzsche crossed the line from prophet to idiot) In order to correct the mass superstition and religious delusions of the Medieval era, Modernity fled to the reverse pole where all men were islands of cursed self-sufficiency. I believe at the heart of Jesus' message is a belief in the freedom of men from religious control and also a freedom from lonely isolation. In this way, the heart of Christianity is an offer to be free of that which would reduce the sociality of being human.

This is one of several ways in which I see that God's revelation is something that does not come down to us, but that happens among us, between us, and within us. The more we understand about ourselves, as individuals and communities, the more we have the potential to understand God and to grasp the message of salvation that has come to us across generations and cultures.

I'm coming to see that true Christian faith will always be a middle way between the dehumanizing tendencies of the culture it is in and the dehumanizing tendencies of those who would manipulate the gospel to keep a salary. On both sides (church and culture) there are beautiful things that I personally think Christians a called to protect. To swing to one side or the other is to lose the fullness of what the gospel gives us, and in doing so, to fall short of the glory of God.

I guess I gave up on giving anything up . . .

2008-03-03T15:13:00.000-06:00

Just after the turn of the 1800's a revival movement began in the wild Western frontiers of America. A few preachers got fed up with the bureaucracy of their own denominations and defected. The movement that was born sought to unite all Christians by convincing them to throw off denominational ties in the name of being "Christians simply". (Yes, that's right . . . division in the name of unity people!) Three "nondenominational" denominations ensued: the churches of Christ, the Christian Churches, and the Disciples of Christ. I grew up in the first of these.

My denomination (which denies its status as a denomination) was one that declared emphatically that all that was necessary to live a good Christian life was a New Testament. Nothing less, and unequivocally, nothing more. If one was to isolate six untrained groups of people in remote areas with nothing but a New Testament, one should, years down the road find six churches that looked exactly the same. So the theory goes. One thing which was certain was that no other governing principles were needed. Therefore, when I reached the age of 22 and heard the word "liturgy" for the first time, I remember thinking how sad and misguided those poor 'denominational' souls must be.

As much as I am aware, I represent the fifth generation of my Mom's half of the family to grow up in a church of Christ. I say this to explain the simple fact that the mindset it represents is no longer something I received through training, but I feel fairly confident it is hereditary. That is, it has sufficiently been woven into my DNA. And though my views on many things, including liturgy, have changed, my heart still heralds back towards a sort of radical autonomy when it comes to group participation. Not that I won't ever participate in group activities, only that if I do I tend to do it when I think I'm good and ready.

So, about Lent . . .

I guess I fit in at Journey pretty quickly. For several years I had adopted the 'autonomous thinking' bit to such an extent that I am now too 'church of Christ' to actually go to a church of Christ. I've found several others at Journey who feel the same; substitute their particular denomination for my own. Yet, now I find myself in a community that, at least for certain seasons, is liturgical. And, I don't feel I have quite yet reconciled myself to this way of experiencing God.

Truthfully, I'm not really against practices like Lent. In fact over the last few years, I've come to think that such activities are a pretty good idea. The problem is that I came to such conclusions by considering the theory of Lent. Thus, when people began asking me what I intended to give up this year, my radical self-determination made an executive decision not to comply. I played around with several different things I could give up, and a few disciplines that I might adopt. But, by the second week of Lent I hadn't really settled down on any one thing, and I just kind of gave up on the idea altogether. There are a lot of excuses I could give. I've never had awesome experiences based on ascetic disciplines, no matter how mild. Not to mention the part of me that obstinately disputes anyone's right to impose an arbitrary set of dates where I would need to make my own life inconvenient. But, when it all boils down, I think I'm just too lazy and proud to adhere to Lent. All the theology and personal history I would profess are really just a facade to cover up that point. Yet, that's where the beauty of community comes into play.

I am fortunate to be part of community that practices Lent even when I don't feel like it. I've been reminded this past month that being surrounded with people who are drawing closer to God, will inevitably do the same to those who are not making any particular effort to do so. I've noticed how Lent has broken more than just personal routines, but has also helped our community have different conversations than we would otherwise. We're having to deal with each other's inconveniences, and in doing so are asking questions of each other that might not otherwise be asked. We share reasons that might not be shared at other times. And, most importantly of all, we're reminded of the beauty, as well as the imperfections, of being human. It gets a lot easier to love each other when we're daily reminded how insufficient we each are to even achieve small, seemingly insignificant goals. It's all we can do to keep from smoking or drinking. It's frustrating to face the difficulty of remembering to pray or wake up a few minutes earlier. Most people I've been around have fallen short multiple times on whatever discipline they chose, and though these shortcomings do not seem to be the point of Lent, I am coming to see the beauty of Lent in them. If anything convinces me to sacrifice my deeply ingrained orneriness this time next year, that will probably be it.

Scathing rebuttal as follows:

2008-02-12T16:08:00.000-06:00

First: Damn . . . just to make it easy on you.

Second: I agree with your last part about the Spirit being equally as active now as in the first century. That's foundational to me; I don't see any great breaks in the continuity of reality between today and any previous age. BUT, for me that is a fatal blow to orthodoxy, because I see no superiority of the paradigm of first century believers over modern day believers. The disciples of the first century were presented with a story just as we are, and both are required as a simple matter of fact to interpret it based on our understanding of reality.

When you speak of rewriting Scripture according to our paradigm, I fail to see how we can speak pejoratively of doing so. In fact, I see such rewriting as our only option. I understand the concern that this could result in Scripture becoming "whatever we want" it to be. To this concern I would pose: do we really believe the Spirit is as active today? Really? If so, I believe that within community Scripture will always be rewritten, in the Spirit (Presence = Present) of God. We hold to the same Bible because we have no other access to Jesus. If we could figure a method for time travel, I would much prefer a few good documentaries from which to seek a more applicable interpretation of Jesus. Thus far, this has not proved a viable option. So, I stick with Scripture . . but according to my understanding, not theirs. Again I don't think they were better off than we.

Third: I firmly agree that the Jesus of history is the core of our faith. I've never once questioned this. Never. But, all we know of Jesus is shrouded in myth and metaphor. I don't believe this is due to an attempt to obscure him, nor to make him out to be something other than what he was. In the paradigm of the first century though, myth and metaphor was interpretation. When presenting their Savior to the world, the first believers did what was utterly natural to them: present him in the category or a rabbi, miracle-worker, Pharisee, and in doing so also show how he was much more than any of these things. This was interpreting for them. Their interpretations, for myself and countless others in our contemporary world, have ceased to aid in understanding Jesus. In fact, quite the opposite if in the name of orthodoxy I am required to believe not only in Jesus as Lord, but also as supernatural miracle-man. Culturally, I don't find the first-century worldview to be superior, and if I am required to bastardize my own understanding of reality in order to call myself Christian, I am regrettably not. I agree with you that Christianity makes some fantastic claims. At the core of Christianity, I can perceive claims which will always seem outrageous. . . I've read Paul. I understand that some of our faith will appear as foolishness, but I feel that we have readily taken this as a justification (in the face of Modernism) for adhering to a syncretism of worldviews which are incompatible. We want to act as though it is perfectly fine to live by the principles of modernity in all facets of life, except religion where it is perfectly acceptable to flee to an inconsistent premodern view of history. I cannot accept this. The foolishness we embrace is one that remains no matter what paradigm we use to interpret Jesus. Therefore, I cannot look back on the first-century as a bygone time, utterly different from our own, where supernatural miracles were the rule. I only think that people of that time interpreted as miraculous, the same event that we would seek to understand through causal relationships. Where they saw God in the miracle worker, I see God in the depth of his humanity and I use the miracle myths to understand such humanity better.

Lastly: I see major theological problems with the idea that God simply sectored off part of himself in which death could reign for a while and be absorbed. The Living God stands over against death. But more importantly than all of this is that it represents a line of thought that is thoroughly foreign to Jews of any era, and unquestionably foreign to the Jews responsible for the writings of the New Testament. To these, God cannot die.

This is a big deal to me, because I see it as one of the major dividing lines between Christianity and the other two Abrahamic faiths. It is true, I am not currently in dialogue with many Jews of Muslims. But, I find it to be of no little theological importance that we live in a world where the annihilation of the human race could likely occur because of a disagreement between these religions. I find it to be the worst blasphemy to assume that such an event would be justified by some bullshit eschatology on the part of Christians who would dare to assume that God wills a final battle between those who know him as YHWH, God, or Allah. If there is any hope for the future of humanity, it will begin because we begin to take seriously the call to interpret our religions critically, and against what we are required to believe for the sake of remaining orthodox. As a Christian who takes seriously the threat which my own faith poses to the future of humanity, I see it as necessary to critique what I think to be outdated and divisive concepts of God, and Jesus the founder of my faith.

I say all that to say, I've thought seriously about these things. There is nothing trivial about them to me. I don't trifle with orthodoxy for the sake of stepping on toes.

We cling to the idea that God loved the world enough to send Jesus (whatever that may mean to us). Yet, we think it noble or unavoidable to allow the tension between religions to escalate towards the death of life itself. I can point the finger in this situation indefinitely towards any other and in the coming future the result of hell on earth will remain unchanged. Or, I can critique my own faith deeply, and in doing so see its true contribution to hope, while standing firmly against all the divisiveness it has represented. In doing so I cling to the thought that such an example will lead the world to be a place where God does not will, nor allow, me to kill another for choosing to call him Allah.

If I say anything controversial, it is because I have ceased to see a future in saying anything else.

a few more . .

2008-02-05T19:29:00.000-06:00

Ok, since it seems to have grabbed the interest of so many, allow me to state a few of my other objections to the various trinitarian/atonement/divinity theories. I am open to thinking divergent to my own, but these are the issues I keep getting hung up on. In no particular order:

1. "The Crucified God" - I have not yet read this particular book, but I do have some objections to the general concept that God himself was crucified. As I hear it, God alone is perfect, and as a perfect being he demands a perfect sacrifice to atone for men's sins. So therefore, in order for Jesus' sacrifice on the cross to count, Jesus had to have been perfect. So, syllogistically we come to see none other than God himself in the person of Jesus hanging on the cross, offering himself for our sins.

Here's where it breaks down for me. We believe in a God who is not merely the Creator of the universe, but also the Sustainer. We are not here because God spoke, but because he is always speaking. We are maintained by the fact that he is always singing our name. So, if God dies the song dies too. This also brings me to the second big objection I have:

2. If God dies by what power is he raised? If God is dead, then nihilism is our only option. This is one platform I can't abandon. We have hope of a resurrection because we believe in a God who can't die. We believe in a God who is life. If the source of all life suffers death, then all is lost. I fully support a christology in which God identifies with his messiah (Son), and even one in which he suffers immanently in his chosen. I can't believe in a God who dies on the cross, because if God dies there is no one with the power to raise him. Rather the beauty I find in the story of Jesus is a hope in what was beyond hope. In Jesus, I see the greatness of human drama in which when it appears that even God himself had forsaken this rejected messiah, unforeseen at the last moment, God, the source of all life, vindicates Jesus by assuming him into God's own eternal life. But, for me, this hinges on the reality of God's eternal deathlessness. If God dies, I see no means by which a resurrection is possible. Radical theology becomes the only line of thought that makes any sense.

I'm pretty much at a point where I'm ok identifying myself as a pan-en-theist. I believe the biblical idea that there is no place in the world where God is not present. We may experience him differently, even sometimes as though he's not there, but nonetheless I believe he pervades everything and every person. In this way, I understand that God is fully present in all human suffering. I definitely believe that God was present in the crucifixion. I think in that particular fact the question, as much as ever, becomes why did God not do something about it? I find the unique Christian answer to be: he did. He raised Jesus into eternal life in God.

But again, in my view, if God dies on the cross all is lost.

3. Another way I've heard it posed is that sin being the rejection of God, and hell being the state of separation that is the consequence of our rejection, our sin demands that someone suffer hell. Depending on the semantics of this position I can either see it as a good point or one that is totally misguided.

I feel it breaks down when we attribute divinity to Jesus: for our sake, God forsakes himself? I don't really see this as solving anything other than making God seem schizophrenic on some level. I guess atonement completely breaks down for me when we cast it as a form of punishment. As I stated earlier, I have no room for a blood-thirsty God, nor a God who puts himself in time-out to save us from our just-desserts.

Even Moltmann who embraces atonement unequivocally, agrees that the concept of expiation is outdated. He speaks of "dissociating ourselves from the inadequate images of sacrificial theology: ransom, expiatory sacrifice, satisfaction, and so forth." He brings out a refreshing point that in Jesus, God is not saving us from the sins we've committed, but from the sinners that we are. We are not seeking spiritual bleach for spiritual dirt on our souls, but to be reborn such that sin no longer is characteristic of our being. If people spoke more consistently in this way, I doubt I would have near as many problems with atonement.

Personally, in the cross of Jesus I find a unique place where the pan-en-theistic God proves to humanity that he has not chosen a faction, but desires to embrace all. Jesus, who has chosen to represent the vulnerable, is killed by the collusion of Jewish power groups and Roman political authority. Jesus does not respond with vindictive accusations. He verbally embraces all those who oppose him, praying for their forgiveness. In the end it appears that he dies alone, until his followers experience him not as dead, but eternal. Jesus, chose the cause of the poor. He chose the lost causes. And, in him God affirms this choice by not allowing death to have the last say. Yet, at the cross we see oppressors and oppressed standing side-by-side. The world's factions are brought together and face the consequences of their divisions. The Roman centurion recognizes that the man he killed is the man who should lead him, and as he looks away he sees the poor, marginalized followers whom this leader represented. This servant of Caesar realizes that Jesus is better at being an emperor than Caesar is, and the call of this Lord is to those whom he is oppressing. The poor should by no means be painted idyllically. These are the same people who frequently plotted to kill the same Romans that Jesus just submitted to unto death. In this messiah, and no other that I've seen, God proves that he hasn't taken a side in our factions, only that he has taken our side as his creatures. To me, all our excuses for sin and hate for the Other are atoned for in that moment, where both sides are faced with the hideousness of the consequences of division. God does not take the side of the repressed Jews, nor the Roman overlords, nor the pious Jewish leaders, but rather the faithful servant who suffers for all.

It is not that God required atonement to reconcile us to himself. We required atonement to reconcile us to each other.

Who's telling who?

2008-02-01T21:46:00.000-06:00

All the theological conversations I've had of late have proven one thing to me: I really don't have my mind made up on a wide variety of issues. Maybe, it would be more accurate to say that I refuse (for the time being) to make up my mind. Several friends have challenged me of late, generally regarding the Trinity, and I have come to see that really all I know are my objections to certain theologies. I haven't taken a stand for a way of thinking, so much as taken a stand against what I will not believe.

In our contemporary context we often hear talk of how individualistic our society is, and how this is something that needs to be remedied. We need to return to community and regain the social aspect of our humanity. This is something I generally will give my unconditional agreement to. Lately though, I've been wondering if we haven't partially misdiagnosed the situation . . . at least as far as America goes. On the one hand I agree that the Western context has atomized social groupings for the sake of political control. Where other countries in the world use their spare time to form power groups to influence the culture at large, Americans rush home after a long days work in order to not miss their favorite TV shows. We spend our spare time desperately trying to listen to "what's important" rather than desperately trying to persuade others around us what really is important.

But this is where in my mind the other hand comes into play. In this setting, I think it's actually the opposite of what we often hear: there is a severe lack of individuality in our culture. I've heard it said before that modernity was marked by the autonomous thinking individual, and now our postmodern setting is supposedly marked by people trying to return to communal living. I agree that there is a level of truth to this, but it is a minor truth that in my opinion distracts us from the greater discord. I think "post-modern culture" plays to the sense of loss that so many feel in not being part of a community, and offers cheap community at the cost of personal autonomy.

Modernity convinced us we didn't need anybody.

Postmodernity points out that we don't have anybody, and so don't need ourselves. Conform while you still can!

A friend of mine has talked to me (and others) about the need for community a lot over the past few weeks. He's big on narrative theology. His point is that the community comes together to tell our story to ourselves, and that the community has a say in every person's story. We tell each other who we (each) are. In a sense I agree completely, and in another I completely don't agree.

The problem is that there is no simple trade off here. Whether we sacrifice our individuality for the sake of community, or forsake our community for the sake of autonomy, both will result in the loss of our humanity. There is no true preference for one over the other. Individuality is legitimate only in the context of community and a community is formative only insofar as it encourages us as individuals.

It's a dialectic. We exist in the tension between the two concepts, and to fail at either is to lose both.

This is my problem with the narrative community. I understand that I know myself only by seeing myself in the Other. I get the argument there. But, I find that this is the thin ice where we often unknowingly step into conformity, which in my mind is the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of false community. I know this based on the fact that I grew up church of Christ, where every congregation is autonomous and autonomy among members is a cardinal virtue . . . and yet on the whole it has a tendency to be one of the most grossly conformist denominations in existence. We preach autonomy and fail to see the nauseating irony that everyone looks and acts the same.

I find this to be disturbingly true for Western culture at large. I think what is needed is not one remedy or the other, but to stretch ourselves between the two. I perceive that most of the people I grew up with need to pursue true individuality and autonomy in their own thought and spirituality . . . I say that because I see that as the only way that community could be possible.

If I'm going to contribute to the communal recollection of the story of Jesus which is the center of our faith, I can only do so as an individual who has sought God in total honesty on an intra-personal level. Otherwise the narrative we create will be redundant and lifeless.

In other words, it is true that I only know myself based on who my community tells me I am. My autonomy cannot define me. I need others for that. Yet, the story that the community is centered on matters only so far as I the individual am liberated to tell it as I experienced it. The story the community tells itself becomes true in me as I am freed to tell it afresh. The relevance, the truth, of the community's story hinges on the voice of the individual. Just as the individual's self-understanding, which liberates him into autonomy for the community is dependent on the words and actions of the people that surround him.

songbook # 726: waitith on the Lord all ye eager sons of Adventure

2008-01-27T00:15:00.000-06:00

I saw some awesome pictures this week. My friend Laura is in Spain right now. She's living for a semester in an apartment in Madrid next to a luxurious park. Several of you who will read this just saw the Grand Canyon, and the Pacific, and a lot of stuff in between. And I'm not going to lie, I've seen your pictures and I'm jealous. My aunt and uncle just took their kids to Disney World last month. I've never been to Disney World. I'm not sure I really regret that to be honest though. They're going to Portland in a few months. I'm invited. I was also invited to the Grand Canyon. . . and Spain. When I meet people I could fill up hours with conversation about places I almost went.

But the truth is that I don't give a damn about any of those places. The world isn't a better place for me having seen it or not, nor am I really any different of a person for having gone or not gone. I have to remind myself of that on weeks like this one.

I could be recovering from sleep debt and attempting to salvage my grades for the grand experience of having spanned half of our continent. Or, I could be working my ass off at a crappy hospital right now, saving money to go stumbling across Europe. Those were definite options. Instead, I tried to grasp how algae can stay alive inside a microscopic organism which for all intensive purposes should destroy them as food. I got to learn a bit of how to make sense out of scientific jibberish as is published in massive volumes every month. I got to reacquaint myself with the wonders of the human integumentary system. And I got to read a little theology on the side. These are my adventures. People get bored when I try to recount them.

I hung out with a friend last night. We reviewed the last few years, and how our friends lives have progressed. I have close friends with kids now. . . . that presents me with a major existential crisis in a lot of ways.

Basically, I want more things out of life than I'll ever get. Finitude is very disappointing.

Seriously, how do we choose? I'd like to do the family thing at some point, but that point appears on the horizon for me long after it is really something that is physiologically possible. I'd also like to see the world and explore it like I've done in the past. But, when I really boil it down, I feel like the greatest 'talent' the Lord has given to me is intelligence, and that being the case . . . I feel I need to act responsibly there. Basically, I know on some essential level, that if I don't do a good job with that gift, I'll never be satisfied with myself or anything else in life if I let that opportunity slip me by. So I live vicariously by looking at pictures of my friends who are looking at the Grand Canyon, dancing in the Pacific (however briefly), and aimlessly stumbling through the streets of Madrid. Then I go back to learning how to differentiate sweat glands.

I think what really bothers me is missing out on community. Or rather, I know that's what bothers me. I always feel like God gives me quick little tastes of community to keep me alive, but I always miss out on the feast. Sometimes God annoys the hell out of me.

Friend: "Remember that time in Madrid . . ."

Other friend: "Yeah, running from the bulls was amazing!"

(laughter)

Me: "So the sweat on your forehead is actually much different from the sweat on your shoulder. You see, you eccrine glands are much different from your apocrine glands . . . ."

(awkward silence)

This is my life. It's not tragic, nor pitiable . . . just frustrating.

I guess I do it this way because I know that adventures are possible when your old; med school is not. And one huge triumph/accomplishment seems to me a much better aspiration than a thousand small ones. Delayed gratification I'm told tends to pay off. So I chant it like a mantra. There are days when it seems true, and days where the syllables are monotone and lifeless. Still, I guess I'm satisfied in knowing that I'm not letting the difficulty of it all intimidate me. I hate feeling that I'm missing out, but I would hate it much more to think I was settling for a life that wasn't challenging. Say it with me people (monotone please):

(awkward Eastern instrumentation)

"Delayed gratification pays

Delayed gratification pays

Delayed gratification pays"

Thus someday in the future when my chanting leads me to Nirvana, I will return to you enlightened. I plan to cure many diseases, and solve our country's political issues. I'll then travel the world aimlessly with reckless abandon. In my old age I'll probly write books for the New Age sections of nationwide stores. I'll finish my illustrious writing career with a brief autobiography entitled, Boredom: How I Became a Badass.

Prerequisite knowledge.

2008-01-17T19:31:00.000-06:00

So, I'm sitting at my coffee shop in Plano, listening to Ashley on my myspace. Sometimes people write lyrics I never really get over.

Tonight is the first night in a while when nothing's been going on, so I came here. I used to come here almost every night because I didn't know any people in range to go hang out with. It was a sad time. I made due with books. Now, I feel like I've gone a couple months with barely any nights where there wasn't something going on. It's been a good time. Floods follow droughts which follow floods.

This was a stressful week. In cell biology they call it a cascade when one chemical triggers a reaction that results in thousands of other chemicals swirling around in a cell to make _______ happen. Tuesday I went to college algebra. I haven't had a true math class in nine years. I knew this when I was signing up for algebra. See, the problem is, most of the science classes understandably require algebra or some higher form of math as a prerequisite. On the whole, I get science. It comes pretty easy to me. Math on the other hand, while not incomprehensible to me, does not just come second nature. But, I needed it to take chemistry, which I need to take organic chemistry, which I need to take biochemistry, which I need to take fancy tests that might qualify me for med school.

This is the problem I hit lately. When you're dealing with left-brained subjects, they all require multiple undesirable classes be taken before they will grace you with their own abstruse difficulties. And everything I had included in my three year plan begins to stretch into four, then five. Suddenly I'm overwhelmed with the terrible thought that I'll be 30 before I can apply for med-schools, and 35 at best before I'll be earning minimum wage as a resident.

I'm not scared of school, nor of turning 30 . . . only of living on the strained good graces of relatives and hellish part-time jobs until I'm ready for my mid-life crisis.

All these things considered, every set-back at school turns into a ridiculous amount of stress for me. So, you can imagine how I felt walking into algebra Tuesday morning and not having a damn clue what the prof was talking about for an hour and a half. I have completely forgotten 90% of the mathematical concepts they begin teaching you in 8th grade. Now I probably get to tack basic math and intermediate algebra on to the front of the already lengthy list of classes that are all prerequisites of each other. Lovely.

I've talked to a few friends about it. They all look at me with the look that implies they would be sympathetic but that they ultimately have no clue what the hell to tell me to do. I think that might be comforting in its own way . . . at least they're there.

It's amazing to me how often I find myself in this place: feeling suspended by the question of whether I'd rather sacrifice aspirations or independence and all the facets of life that rest outside my head.

I've been thinking I might just say the hell with it and stick with nursing for the immediate future . . .

I don't know.
I hate not knowing. Stupid life decisions.

Next time you see me,
A. Buy me a beer.
B. Give me a hug.
C. Tell me what the f*** to do with my life.
D. Any of the above.
E. All of the above.

I love you all.

. . . and choose E.

Why I'm probably still a Christian . . .

2008-01-05T11:56:00.000-06:00

So, my friend Richard is too good for posting comments. Instead, he chose to write an email to get me to clarify things. There are two points I figure I should throw out for everyone:

1. Am I still a Christian?

I was recently reading a theologian I respect a lot who was pointing out the extent to which we all rely on other people to understand ourselves. In a way, it can be said that the only way to really know ourselves is to know other people. There's always this level of uncertainty in each person's self-understanding, and we all rely on other humans to tell us what kind of human we are. That's kind of what I was getting at with the title of this blog . . . essentially people will define you however they see fit, but if you're expecting me to stick a label on myself you might be waiting for a long time.

One thing I read this last year that really messed me up was a quote from Gandhi saying, "Ask the poor, they will tell you who the Christians are." I started thinking about Acts where the title came into being at Antioch. The early Christians didn't label themselves as such, the word was given to them. Probably in a pejorative sense at first, and maybe over time others adopted the term with a different tone of voice. Whatever the case, I basically feel that the word "Christian" is better employed as a compliment than as a self-imposed title. If we are being Christians, then the world will let us know, and we should pay careful attention to the tone used with the term since it carries all the significance.

But, I digress. All my ideals aside, my straight forward answer would be: maybe, by who's definition? If I am allowed to delineate the meaning of the word, then definitely. But, according to the way most people define the word . . . I would definitely distance myself, and possibly respond with a 'no'. Regrettably.

2. In light of my views on the atonement . . . what do I make of the relationship between Jesus and God?

I don't think I could ever say this enough: the first disciples to meet Jesus, met a man, not a god. I think we need to do the same. I think in our context we often work in reverse: we start with the divine Christ and try to reconcile the earthly Jesus to him. But it took his closest friends and followers months if not years to believe in him as a messiah. They initially encountered a rabbi, a miracle-man, a prophet. This is what the knew him as first. With time those labels seemed inadequate, so the began attributing other, loftier titles to him.

It was only 50 years after his death, after transferring the gospel into a polytheistic Greek culture where divine incarnations were commonplace that any Christian community dared attribute divinity to Jesus. It was controversial at that point and took the course of 200 years before it was generally accepted.

My personal stance is that to work backwards from God down to Jesus is to make much too big a claim of understanding God. We begin speaking in grand metaphysical mythic terms, that assume we know the mind of God. To me this is blasphemy; it makes a joke of the God whose ways are forever above our own and whose thoughts are never capable of being brought down to our level. Rather the Christian belief is in a man who reveals the heart of this mysterious God. Not because he IS God, but because God reveals himself through him.

In this way, I can understand how Jesus becomes inseparable from God, but to me that does not make them the same. It makes sense to me that on taking the gospel on to Greek soil, it became beneficial to identify Jesus with God. But, in our modern world, Greek thought has ceased to reign supreme. In our humanistic setting, I find the human Jesus to be the necessary starting point for all theology and spirituality.

hooray for the holidays

2008-01-03T12:32:00.000-06:00

So, 2007 went out with a bang, and 2008 came in with a lot of coughing and catching up on sleep.

where to begin . . .

Christmas Eve has been monopolized by my Mom's side of the family for more decades than I have been alive. As a kid there was this magic about it all. That was the rich side of the family so I could always count on getting some awesome ridiculously expensive present. . . . Now, it's mostly just awkward. We proceed through the same formulaic evening we've had since I can remember.

Christmas day I woke up and opened presents with my parents. I got a few new sweaters and a bunch of books, which I've already made significant progress on. God bless time off. I proceeded from there to the one Starbucks in Plano that was open Christmas day. I sat reading up on genetics, when one of the hottest girls I had ever seen (at least that day) walks in and sits at the table opposite mine. In the course of the next two hours I managed to read a grand total of 3 pages in whatever book I was working on at the moment. I was going through all the checks in my head:
1. Left hand - had a ring with no rocks on it . . . appeared to be a promise ring or some lower form of jewelry.
2. Yes, she's hot enough to venture getting shot down.
3. Pretty sure she's playing eye tag . . .

for 2 hours.
Anyway, a friend of mine walked in, and upon figuring out what was going on, offered a sufficient amount of peer pressure. I catch the girl outside and ask if she'd like to get coffee at the same table at any random point in the future. She proceeded to explain that the ring on her left had was indeed an engagement ring. I have a newfound respect for diamonds . . . something I never thought I'd say.
Christmas evening, recovering from the afternoons disappointment . . . we go out to get Chinese with my Dad's parents. Yes, it was reminiscent of A Christmas Story, only the kitchen staff didn't sing Deck the Halls, and I didn't get a bb gun for Christmas.
Then I met friends at the bar for a much needed drink.

Thursday. . . . Texas kicks the crap out of Arizona State! all is right with the world.

Friday I meet Joel Thelton. He's cute. Congrats to Kristin and Travis. Me and Jacob see my second extremely heavy movie in a couple days.

Saturday . . . oh Saturday. I kick everything off with my Dad's side of the family. Three rambunctious cousins crawl all over me for several hours. They're cute, but man that can tire you out. Then I move on to the bar, for a friends birthday party. A&M loses, and life is splendid. Then the decision is to go get our groove on at a bar down the street which tends to have a DJ playing. We go. A good time is had by all until about 1:30 in the morning, when it turns out that one of the girls has lost some keys. Cell phones out to illuminate the floor and booths . . nothing. 10 minutes later, it turns out the car is gone. All these years I've lived in Dallas and this is the first time I've been on the scene for a stolen car. We call the cops, who were immediately on their way. Meantime: credit card cancellations, dialing up hotlines, 10 people standing in the freezing cold after sweating for hours prior. Wet + cold= not so awesome. 30 minutes go by . . . cops on the way (play triumphant background music). Meantime: other friends call who (driving the same model car as was stolen) had been t-boned and flipped on their side just the other side of the highway. Friends leave to rescue. 45 more minutes to by, the cops are still on the way (dissonance in triumphant background music) . . . evidently there was a fight at a ritzy club that left a guy in the ICU, and this had taken precedence. I leave somewhere around this time. From what I hear the cops finally came . . . and saw that there was a report on the computer of a car matching the description having been wrecked just across the highway . . .

I don't remember much about Sunday aside from being tired.

Monday . . . NYE party, cordially titled "Eff you 2007, bring on 2008!!" I tried to sleep up all day.
let's start with the evening . . .
9:00 - food, lots of greetings.
10:00 - stylish people show up, looking like rock stars.
11:00 - I finally move away from the bar and start being social.
12:00 - lots of yelling, everyone kisses everyone
12:10 - dance party commences
12:15-2:30 - I'm kinda fuzzy on all the details, all I really remember is trying to dance with anyone who was female . . . I hear it was provocative. Also, there were community bottles of champagne contributing to the madness. There was lots of other drama, but I'll refrain from recounting any of it in order to protect the guilty.
next morning . . .
9:30 - I wake up on Luke and Kerri's couch, surprisingly not hung over.
10:00 - Back to the apt. for clean up.
12ish - Breakfast finally.
1530 hours - movie watching - sinking feeling that a sore throat is about to kick it into gear. . . .

all in all, it was a pretty amazing way to finish out december and kick off 2008 . . . i love you all, happy new year
(cough)

reciprocality

2007-12-21T12:14:00.000-06:00

I'll admit a major fault of mine: I tend to ditch out on conversations when I'm not excited about them. Typically when I blog it's because there's some idea that's really got me excited, I write about it, I move on. Then I get questions which force me to realize how poorly I expressed such ideas, or that make me feel the need to research to adequately back up what I just said . . . and the truth is I don't care enough to put that much effort into it. Nonetheless it is true that the only thing that keeps me motivated to write these things is the conversation aspect of it all. When I don't hear back, I don't write. So, all that to say, sorry Kristin. It was mostly laziness, and, no, I haven't grouped you in with people I cut off for disagreeing with.

Here goes:

1. In regard to truth existing outside of language as some static entity . . . I don't know. I haven't made up my mind on that one. I firmly doubt that any language has the capacity to adequately display truth. So I don't think it is accurate to ever say a statement is true . . . even though we will all continue to do so out of convenience and because that's how the English language works. In my mind, to say a statement is true, is sort of hyperbole. I think it would be accurate to say that a statement approaches truth, that it bears likeness to truth, but I don't really think it is possible for a verbal formula to ever encompass truth to the extent that we identify such statement as "true". Yet, again, I think we all continue to say that things are 'true', because that is how we have learned to speak. I would probly get annoyed with myself if I forced myself at all times to say that things approached or finitely contacted the truth. Nonetheless I feel the need to keep track in my head of what I really mean to say. I don't think in the realm of language we can ever take anything at face value.

2. Is discipleship the ultimate goal of following Jesus? Well that seems to what the writers of the Bible thought. They seem pretty emphatic that Jesus wants disciples, and that those who go into the world in his name should make disciples of/in all nations. My issue with this is mostly just a pragmatic one. I meet people frequently of late, who will not be disciples. That's just a fact. Also, in that regard, I think they avoid talking or thinking about Jesus because of the fact that there is an overt agenda on the part of all Christians to make them into disciples. Reflecting back on to what it must have been like when Jesus walked the earth, I don't believe that everyone who heard him speak became a disciple. Yet, I don't really think we can say that Jesus didn't bring some degree of 'salvation' into their lives nonetheless. The people he healed: I don't get the idea that all of them became disciples. Yet they were healed, if not for their discipleship, then mostly because, however briefly, they simply followed him . . . even if only for the brief hours he spent passing through their town, walking through their fields, sitting on their shore. I think we desperately need an arena in modern Christianity for people to simply come into the presence of Jesus as a man, as a teacher, as anything BUT a religious figure. I think that people who do consider themselves to be his disciples need to see the vast importance of respecting human choice and the capacity of EVERY person to interpret Jesus for themselves. I think that claiming Jesus as Lord, Son of God, or simply as rabbi, these are all legitimate interpretations that people will come to based on their experience of him. And, how can they gain such experience of him if discipleship is the ONLY focus, and only respected outcome? If they change things in their lives, but don't call themselves a Christian in the end, can we call this a failure?? Or rather, shouldn't we celebrate the Kingdom of God, as it has increased the good in their life, since after all, that appears to be the chief concern of Jesus himself?

3. Atonement: I'll keep this short. Basically I cannot and won't believe in a God who requires a human atrocity, a child sacrifice, the spilling of blood to rectify his sense of justice. In my mind, that is a perverse sense of justice that is certainly not divine, and in my mind not even worthy of being called human. To me it represents the utmost inhumanity. I can respect what it meant for people in the first century, but I think it has become a mockery of God to believe in our modern context that this presents an acceptable picture of the nature of God. I think we have come to know God better, and I think it is time we abandoned the language that suggests that he was the one who required Jesus' crucifixion to atone for the sins of the world.

4. Virgin birth and truth: 1) There's a lot of debate on this, but nonetheless in Hebrew the word for virgin and young girl were basically interchangeable. So, at least during the oral tradition stage before the NT was written down, there is no clear indication as to whether it was meant to say that Jesus was born of a girl who had never had sex, or simply of a girl who was very, very young. This is significant to me in terms of meaning because it shows that the story of Jesus begins with a girl from an impoverished area, who was in the precarious position of being pregnant out of wedlock, probably under the age of 14. It is hard to imagine a more marginalized and unfortunate character. 2) Later, decades later, Luke (who has little grasp on the nuances of Hebrew) and Matthew take the oral traditions and each create birth narratives. There are vast portions of both narratives that seems quite unhistorical. (i.e. the gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh would likely have been enough to secure the purchase to the entire town of Bethlehem including the inn that refused them a room. Thus, Joseph was either a gambler, and idiotic businessman, or the gifts are symbolic and didn't really happen) So, for me, the birth narratives in the NT have nothing to do with history, but are rather making bold implicit statements about the meaning the early Christians had found in Jesus. If there were no magi, the theatrical statement implied is that this Jesus is the king of kings, that rulers from afar, ones who are in tune with God, should recognize the nature of divinity in this man and give him the finest of their wealth. That's a bold assertion, however subtle, in a province ruled by Rome where Caesar demanded that kings of all his conquered nations bring him gold, and burn incense to his divinity in Rome. It's a political statement, not a historical account. For me the point is that I can see God working as an inhuman tyrant, or as a human, and utterly human, impoverished peasant and teacher. The point in the gospels has little if anything to do with factual truth, but rather with the very nature of God . . . in such a discussion facts fade into irrelevance, while statements of meaning carry the greatest importance.

5. For me, the point of Jesus is the experience of God, and the reality that we call his Kingdom for lack of a better term. I feel that there was a time in my life where Christianity introduced me and brought me to see this reality and the God therein, but as I've changed and grown Christianity has done more to repel me from it. It has distracted me and tried to fit my understanding of it into frames of reference that have nothing to do with God and everything to do with tradition and politics. The harder I feel this pressed upon me the more I feel the need to push the other direction, the more I feel the need to distance myself from any sort of allegiance for the sake of being able to find a faith that is true; in the fullest sense, true. At this point in my life, I can't even pretend I have anything to 'offer' someone were they to ask me about Jesus. I could challenge someone and help them find liberation from conventionality in faith, but to guide them directly to God, I won't pretend I have found a clear path. For all my wanderings in the desert, which I've found is quite beautiful though also fearful, I still haven't found a way to guide others. I'll guide you out of Egypt, but I haven't found Canaan yet. Maybe some day.

Marcos:
heres' some Kung for you, he spends a lot of time talking about the alternatives of faith in the most basic sense, or nihilism, both he argues, are legitimate, and both are more indicative of attitudes than of mental processes.

"'The academic expert, concentrated on his special field (mathematics, history, natural science), does not like to be told that basic assumptions of his thinking are metaphysical in character; the metaphysician does not like to be told that his mental activity rests on a prerational, primordial decision; philosophers of all types - apart from skeptics - do not like to be told that the kinds of skepticism that are to be taken seriously are irrefutable; and skeptics themselves, of all shades, do no like to admit that they cannot prove their standpoint. Such a complex assessment more or less provokes the indignant protest: 'This cannot possibly be your last word. One way or another, there must be a solution of some kind.' To which I can reply: 'The solution is in your hands, and any time. Make up your mind. Decide.'"

"even the reasonableness of reason is often uncertain. And, it is not an argument of reason, but a trust in reason, that even critical rationalists must simply assume as the basis of their entire system. Karl Popper saw this clearly and admitted it: 'Rationalism appreciates argument and theory and verification by experience. But this decision for rationalism cannot in its own turn be justified by argument and experience. Although it can be discussed, it rests ultimately on an irrational decision, on faith in reason."

His basic point is that this faith in anything, whether science, religion, or simply waking up in the morning, stems from our attitude toward reality which is an attitude we each choose.

"a particular attitude to life, to the world, to reality. But, in the face of the threat so often concretely experienced in ordinary life by the nothingness, transitoriness, decay, forlorness, finiteness of all that is human and earthly, even the person who passes his life in mental idiocy and superficiality is continually forced to make a decision."

I hear the silence too. Frequently. I'm not convinced that it's final though, and I doubt you are either. I think that is one thing I gleaned from Six Feet Under, at the end of it all, men will pursue meaning at the cost of everything . . . essentially the pursuit of meaning is the last choice that anyone makes . . not that that's what Alan Ball was trying to say, just that's something I came to understand through it. I think it's true that meaninglessness is not a viable option. We can make due in the midst of it, but in the long run meaning is what matters. And for me, and perhaps for you, it is always illusive. Yet, for myself, I've decided it's there even when I'm not sure where.

all our reasons

2007-12-19T11:36:00.000-06:00

There is a lot of money poured into apologetics. We speak as though it matters. Funny how far we've come: a few hundred years ago "the church" spent all its time denying the validity of reason as opposed to faith. All were supposed to believe things based on the authority of the church, or the authority of Scripture.

And we find ourselves now in a setting where the authority of the church has been sufficiently crushed, and now we find the masses of evangelical Christianity attempting to shore up the shoddy foundation of Scriptural authority. We offer our apologies.

To do so we have thus found an awkward alliance between Christians and Enlightenment rationality. We haven't gotten very far trying to win arguments by appeals to blind faith, so now we have started buying up stock in the rationality department. After centuries of persecuting rationalists in universities . . we now bemoan our underdog status as professors lose jobs for squeamishly giving favor to intelligent design. Meanwhile forgetting that in centuries past it was the professors losing their heads (literally) for following the course of Enlightened thinking. Christendom whines that turn-about ceased to be fair play when we lost our power and privilege.

Nonetheless Lee Stroble turns out a new best-seller every year trying to convince us that we have no reason to doubt . . . that we are just as in the right as we have ever been. Should everyone else come around to our rationality maybe we could reinstate the Inquisition in a few years. Lord knows the neo-crusades are going on as splendid as crusades ever go.

So, we try to jockey for spots on the board of directors for the rationality project. While in the meantime, we try to deny admission of other faiths. After all, Christianity has been around long enough to seal up that discussion . . . obviously we are the only ones who have ever connected with God. Everyone else who appeals to their own faith in God must be way off, and if I need prove it allow me to pull out any of my vitriolic apologetics books.

Christendom's circular formula: to win a debate between faiths, appeal to reason. To win a debate between various rationalities, boil it down and then call it a leap of faith. Superiority is achieved.

The problem in my mind is that the world ceased caring about our dualistic thinking a long time ago.
We say Jesus was born of a virgin. But, so was Caesar . . . so therefore God has as many misses as hits in the parenting department.
Jesus raised from the dead . . . well, that's far from being a unique story in antiquity.
Jesus was sinless, perfect, etc. Which is why he looks so utterly inhuman in every theatric account of him I've ever seen.

These are a few of the concepts that come to mind when I say that the issue with Jesus has ceased to be historicity . . . but rather meaning. Apologetics may shore up shoddy foundations, but they don't manage to do a damn thing for those who have ceased to care about apologies. I ceased believing in the virgin birth as a historical fact a long time ago . . . so my question is, if we start from there can you tell me that it still has any meaning??? I think that applies across the board when we read our Bibles. People will choose to believe or not believe based on their experience of the world and their attitude toward truth, BUT the question isn't do I believe that the stories happened, but rather do I believe they carry any meaning into my context.

We can pour through history books and find all manner of strange and obscure facts, but the question remains do they mean anything.

We have to also remember that this is a question that always continues from generation to generation. All of us ask it regardless of the answers others have found, for us it is new and pertinent. There is no formula to answer the question of meaning. No one can simply point the way to it. Meaning is illusive and the possibility of finding only a void remains significant for all of us.

If God acted 2000 years ago or 2 weeks ago, but ceases to act, to be present, to be real from this point forward then all the apologies of our past are worthless. All the arguments for intelligent design are superficial if this same Designer has ceased to play a major role in the mundane events of our daily lives. AND, perhaps more important is that all the facts against an intelligent design also amount to nothing should we experience the meaning of such stories in spite of the doubts we may have.

The point is that for the individual believer, what is crucial is not the rational OR the irrational appeal, but the existential experience of meaning. We can amass volumes of reasons which reach to the sky, and the likelihood is that meaninglessness will continue to prevail across our society. People will parrot their "belief", but their lives and attitudes will continue to reflect the worthlessness that continually haunts them.

saturday morning.

2007-12-15T12:21:00.000-06:00

So, it's one semester down.
I've become re-immersed in suburban North Dallas culture. I find myself rushing everywhere, as though I really have somewhere to be. I have two tickets to remind me of how silly it is to presume there's anything so important in life to get in a hurry over. . . . . Damn red light cameras.
I came back to Dallas after three fourths a year of solitude. Now, thank God, I find myself increasingly surrounded by people. Though nothing is like I thought it would be. Nine months of loneliness does wonders for your thinking, while committing atrocities on one's social skills.
I guess I thought I'd renew old friendships to their former glory. At least that was what I attempted to do at first. But, the glory of days past never respects us when we summon it. Relationships change because we are never the same. The only way to regain our friendships at their former level is to go back to being who we were then; to become who we were, but aren't any longer. Being our past self feels good from time to time, but I think we all know that we've changed for good reasons.
So, I've been dealing with the bittersweet truth of moving on. And none of that is intended to say that old friendships are gone. They are what they are: different. Less intimate, but old, which makes them distinct. There is always a level at which you can pick up where you left off . . only I'm not the same person as when I put them down. That's why it's not the same. The same goes for them. I've always placed a lot of importance on geography in terms of relationships, now I have experience to back up such theses.

I didn't feel like going out for coffee this morning. But, here I am.
My mom is wrapping Christmas presents, which makes her far too irritable to enjoy resting at home on a Saturday morning.
It's cold and grey outside. It finally feels like winter. Most of the leaves are finally abandoning the trees . . . midway through December. Texas is odd.
Days like today are adept at sparking creativity. When everything seems barren, I feel the need to compensate.
The impending depression of watching nature give up on another year makes me want to bear something fruitful, even if it's just words.
I sit here taking stock of what these 4 months have accomplished.
Three A's. Ten hours to credit to my name.
A new passion for learning new things.
New friends. Maybe one's whom I can trust.
Time with my parents, who, I'm just now realizing, are not eternal.
Ceasing to hate my home, and so maybe I'm one step closer to loving myself.
Eleven new books on my 'finished' shelf.
Two new songs.
Maybe a new direction.
Maybe a new openness to the future which I won't determine.
Maybe a new chance to rest at peace . . . as myself . . . whoever that might be.

emerging . . . and what it means to follow

2007-12-12T13:55:00.000-06:00

So, I'm loving my new church. These are words I didn't really figure I'd be typing out . . . ever. Here are a few reasons:

1. It is the best example I have ever seen of a church without dogma. As best as I can tell, they seriously, actually, and in action, respect the right of everyone to make choices . . . and they love each other regardless. Example: I am one who does not believe in the atonement . . . which has meant that I have a priori been at odds with every church I have attended for the last 3 years. This church, amazingly, sees that Jesus has a point even if I don't believe in him as the atonement for my sins . . . my beliefs in this regard are a matter of choice based on what I think is true, and they love me regardless, and respect my choices . . .
2. Practically everyone uses curse words with frequency (there are exceptions). I think this is cool because it gives an air of authenticity . . it is a very superficial behavior that for some reason serves as a very significant indicator of their attitude toward conventional Christianity.
3. There are no fully supported ministers. I think our main . . . pastorette? . . . she only gets a minor fraction of her families income . . . otherwise all funds are used on behalf of the community (building, charity, etc.) Also, they rotate preaching/discussion duties. It's a church with no pope. Novel concept, I know.
4. Egalitarianism. As indicated above, the community is mainly led by a woman, and that makes me happy. Patriarchy is crap.
5. Intelligence is actually a virtue . . . and they really mean it. No, really, . . . seriously, they mean it. For real. And no, I'm not kidding.

So, here's my theology behind this, which you've probly heard before. Read the Gospels, and tell me where following Jesus presented a list to the crowds of people up front: "If you're going to follow and listen first you must . . . " I don't see any place where there were preconditions to follow and listen to him.

I mean, where exactly did following gain the implication of mimicking? To follow Jesus is not the same as adopting his actions and practices. I think it is quite safe to say that a majority of the people over the course of his life did not adopt his life-style. And I think it quite valid to seriously question whether they were wrong in not doing so?

Granted Jesus, according to his biographers, ultimately desired disciples . . . but how many chose discipleship without first following him for a while? Take Mathias in acts . . . we have every indication that he had been an active follower for a minimum of a year, possibly as many as 4 years before he was counted as a disciple or an apostle. I doubt he was the only one. I'm quite sure there were many who followed Jesus for intermittent periods. People followed and listened as he (seemingly) aimlessly wandered the Judaean countryside. I imagine many of them did this until for whatever variety of reasons they needed to return home; to work, to family, to life-as-usual. Maybe they weren't true disciples, but perhaps they modified their lives however slightly on account of the time they spent with Jesus.

It certainly doesn't appear that to be around Jesus they first were required to verbally/cognitively required to adopt a certain stance toward him. There was no, "Do you accept Jesus as Messiah, and soon-to-be atoning sacrifice for your sins?"
"Uh, I guess"
"OK, we'll let you listen for now, but rest assured we'll be testing your commitment later on in this trip."
" . . . crap, I just wanted to see if he had anything good to say . . ."
"No, no, that's not an option."

And, what of the masses that appear to have listened to Jesus, and though they probly didn't deny his good points, they certainly don't appear to have abandoned everything and jumped the bandwagon? Can we say they were evil sinners doomed to hell? Suppose they adopted his 60% of his attitude/teachings? Suppose they chose to follow occasionally, but did not see discipleship as a true option for themselves? What of these people?

I don't know if there is a more important question in our modern situation, because I meet these people everyday . . . and wonder frequently if I'm not more like them, than those "disciples". I mean in a practical sense, I see myself intermittently following Jesus, but I don't often catch myself selling my possessions to feed the poor and sleeping at the homeless shelter downtown so as to preach of the Kingdom . . . and frankly I don't see myself changing this anytime soon.

So, am I going to hell? I doubt it, though I'm sure there are plenty of self-righteous pessimists who might disagree; the same pessimists who live lives just as comfortable as mine, but since I'm attempting to reject self-deception they would say my conscience condemns me . . . . blah blah blah.

I think the truth is that there are a precious few disciples of Jesus in our world . . . though there is a countless mass of those who would call themselves such though their lives bear no resemblance to Jesus. This mass has a whole list of criteria by which to measure who is and is not among the chosen disciples, like themselves. Yet these "disciples" own houses with beds, they have retirement plans, and are good upstanding Republicans who are in good standing with America at large; and all these offer solid indications that they are anything but disciples of Jesus . . . that their lives look nothing like his and thus they are only deceiving themselves when they claim to be students of his.

The world sees this quite plainly. The world is not near as idiotic as Christians wish they were. They hate Jesus, because if these are his students, then he was obviously a lot more of an asshole that his biographers let on. They can't be fooled so easily by the stale, hollow, and neurotic justifications we try to throw out to cover the hideous inconsistencies we bear in relation to our "Lord".

Rather than this, I pose we call ourselves what we are: followers. We frequently don't employ Jesus' example ourselves . . . in fact it is far more common to not do as Jesus would than the other way around. But, implicit in this is the simple fact that there is nothing required of us to follow. The follower maintains his autonomy. He goes as far as he is willing, and then returns to what he knows. He listens, accepting some things the teacher says and rejecting others. He observes, taking on some practices and avoiding others.

But, would Jesus have been against this? There are certainly plenty of places where he makes a point to put a decision to the crowds. He doesn't make following him easy. His challenges remain for the intermittent follower just as for the disciple. Must every person be a disciple before they can consider what he has to say? Before they can be challenged by him? Or perhaps the greater question: can any ever be a disciple without first being a follower?

I believe the "emergent" church is really an attempt to create a conducive environment for those who wish to follow Jesus, who (most for quite legitimate personal/experiential reasons) cannot call themselves a disciple, much less a "Christian", but with the hope that the message and life of Jesus can still be a potent (and positive) challenge to secular culture.

the forest of truth

2007-11-30T14:29:00.000-06:00

so, in light of the last post:

If language is by its own essence something which constricts reality, then what is it's relation to truth? A question which is more pertinent for myself is, what are the consequences of my opinions of absolute truth in terms of the Bible, or philosophical truth?

Basically, I think that all truth that we as humans speak of is finite, limited, and restricted by the fact that we always feel the need to put it into words. I feel the need to state up front that my concept of truth is not really compatible with the Platonic ideal of truth. I'm not a fan of Platonism, though I know I am infected with it like all Westerners are. I don't think truth exists apart from our reality in some pristine, eternally existing ideal that we know only through the forms that it takes here on earth. Insofar as I ever allude to believing in that, I do so unintentionally as one who unfortunately falls into Platonic ruts which are everywhere in Western culture. I think that truth exists among us, between us, in us, and with us. But, before I get nauseated by my own abstractions, let me return to the point at hand . . .

If we believe in an ultimate truth, then what about language?

Language it seems at least to me, is a means by which we as humans leave marks on reality to let us know where we have been and where we are going. This is significant to me for faith, since I believe we exist within God who is infinite and eternal, and no matter how long we have sought to understand him we will never come close to understanding him. The idea of truth is little more than a discussion of one facet of our experience of God. The problem is that language in this way is like leaving marks in a forest that is forever changing, and what the markers indicate is often quite short-lived in terms of accuracy. Trees fall downs. Paths wash away. Seasons change. Things grow to obscure what used to be plain to see. And all that once signified the well worn path begin to lead us astray. This is not to say we should abandon language altogether, but rather that language is in no way deserving of blind trust on our part. Sometimes it is better to know the forest, to know how to survive, to correct course, to look critically at the ambivalent markers (language) which we and others have left behind.

Why is this significant? Well first off, the Bible is a construct of language. It is not a reality, but only the map and markers left behind, and because of that it is not foundational for me. I have seen this time after time over the past few months. Countless people I encounter are willing to talk with me about anything, so long as it is agreed that we hold the Bible as the unquestioned foundation of conversation. I believe this is done because so many people have proof-texted their existence and found a false sense of security in the Bible as though it contains answers to all the questions that really matter. Up front: I think that such an approach is false and has nothing to do with truth.

I think the Bible has unique and profound things to say about reality and truth, and things that as such are irreplaceable. I don't want to downplay the uniqueness of Christianity or its importance for humankind, but rather to point out that it is not a complete answer to all of humanity's problems. I believe that Christianity has many vitally important things to say, about the future of man; things which cannot be downplayed no matter how others may wish to simply wash over the significance of those things. BUT . . . I believe that the secular world, as well as the religious world as a whole (outside of Christian circles) has a right to read the Bible and challenge it . . . because the Bible is not absolute truth, but rather a series of signs that reveal the contours of such truth to us.

I believe that the contours of truth will always be changing and ephemeral, because truth is as static as God.

This is not limited to the Bible either. In terms of philosophical truth, or even scientific truth, the limits of language are well recognized by the scholarly world at large. In fact most of what we have come to call "postmodern thought" is unquestionably connected to what has been called "the linguistic turn" in all scholarly fields, particularly philosophy and theology. The conversation concerning "absolutes" is far from being settled, but the criticism of the connection of linguistics to such truths is rapidly finding ubiquitous expression in all fields.

In actuality this has been an issue that has consumed my thoughts for some time, as a lot of you have figured out in talking with me. One big reason why is that I have become increasingly aware of the fact that in our world far too often power is asserted by the manipulation of language. Advertising and marketing know that all they have to do is shift the way that words are used, the ideas that they bring up, and they can gain the power to create needs and corral demographics. Televangelists, politicians, lawyers, etc. All know the power of language, and the potential gains resulting from its control.

I can't begin to describe the disgust I feel when I hear Christians relying on 'Way of the Master' or any subtle variety thereof to coerce people into some psychological state by which they are wrestled into belief. The contemporary critique of truth I believe is the 'equal and opposite reaction' to the idolatrous actions of such "believers" who wish to manipulate the world to feel better about the shaky foundations of their own faith.

Concluding, I would say that we have no other option but to approach truth in humility, realizing the vast limitations of our linguistic understanding of it. I believe that the "world" has every right to determine the limits of the conversation as such: should they wish to exclude the Bible, then we must engage in dialogue toward what means would then allow it back into the conversation. I don't believe Scripture can ever really serve as the true starting point or primary foundation for spiritual discussions in secular society. Ultimately the Bible is an irreplaceable voice in our spiritual conversation with the world, but no matter how important a voice, no matter what priority we give it, it is still one voice among many. It is unique in its revelation of God, but far from being the only relevant material. In our contemporary setting it is quite legitimate to say that we need the dynamic input of all perspectives to begin to see what is required of us as a race.

I lay all this out to state more clearly that I cannot accept what Christianity has long held for its foundation: the adequacy of its own language. For me truth is not found in any of our Christian ideas about God or the world, but rather that those ideas are only points of reorientation for us. I trust that the world has adequate reasons when it rejects those ideas, and I where I find orientation by them, I am assured that many others have only found themselves more lost by relying on them. Their distrust, resulting from personal experience, is perfectly legitimate. I find this place to be the point where conversation is the only option: we can exchange perspectives, seeking to understand the reasons for our attitudes toward these beliefs. As a believer I can help them see why I still look to these points for orientation, while they should, and need to, explain how these beliefs have only cause harm for them. But, ultimately, the vital importance is found in truth itself - in finding our way - in walking out our faith, looking for home.

absolute thinking

2007-11-25T12:27:00.000-06:00

- so, i've been going to a new church. they consider themselves part of the emergent "conversation". frankly I think the "conversation" rhetoric is a bit retarded, but that's just my opinion. anyway . . I'm thankful that I've found a community of people who aren't terrified by liberal thought. there's one guy in the group who might actually be more liberal than me . . . that's a very welcome change.

- thanksgiving was challenging this year. on one side of my family i'm the only grandchild, but the other side the only cousin that showed up this year is 14. so basically I spent 10 hours on thursday making conversation with people who at minimum are 25 years older than me.

- one thing that's been on my mind lately is the word "absolute". this word comes from the same root as "absolve" or "absolution". considering that 'ab' = away from, and 'solute' refers to that which is loosened or set free, I think we've kinda screwed up the term in contemporary society. I think we've confused the Platonic ideal of TRUTH, set apart and eternally existing away from all forms of truth here in this world, as though this is a line of thinking that all moral people are required to believe. In fact, to believe in "absolute truth" is to believe in truth that is free and unrestricted. It's funny then to me, that the first thing we do to this absolute truth is try to chain it to doctrinaire systems and the confines of language. Language in its essence is confining . . . i think that basically erodes any possibility for something to be absolute. maybe instead . . . absolute truth cannot be spoken, but only acted out. With language we can approach it with metaphors and analogies, but certainly we cannot map out its structure or its core.

- I finished watching Six Feet Under last night in and 8 hour marathon. It is without question the greatest TV show ever produced. I cried.

- Thanksgiving day it snowed. I saw the biggest snowflakes I have ever seen. I got to live in a postcard for about 20 minutes. that was cool.

- Research is under way: I'm studying the interaction of a paramecium that lets some little algae live inside it, but as it appears there is a virus that lives in the algae that lets this go down. now, i get to rack my brain in my spare time trying to understand how, and why . . . and this matters, because it appears that all the worlds animal and plant cells exist because a similar event happened way back when the world was formless and void, etc.

- musically i've been very uninspired lately . . . that's sad.

- i've been very comforted lately by the fact that the wake of our mistakes, as devastating as it may feel, is the place where we really come to know ourselves. I've found that most mistakes I make come at a point where I am unsure of my self, or who exactly I am, and unsure of what my heart is really telling me . . . so I step out in uncertainty and vulnerability . . . in a mix of bravery and idiocy. I used to think this was something that could be avoided, but I believe that less and less. Not that I think it a great idea to run into bad choices . . . but, I've started to realize that to truly live requires us to live in the midst of the gray areas of life . . . another way to say it: I used to think standing out from the world and carefully avoiding the potential tragedies and dangerous points of decisions, the crises, was a mark of wisdom . . that was what my youth group morality had lead me to believe. thank God that isn't actually true; but rather, wisdom is proved by the way it lives in those crises, amidst all the dangers of life. Thank God for mistakes, and that we may seek him even through the consequences which follow . . as long as we have breath.

Of Meaning and Context

2007-11-09T10:17:00.000-06:00

I'm in a general biology class right now. Up to this point in my life I did quite the amazing job of evading every possible science course I could. Of the 129 hours for my bachelor's degree I think I graduated with a blow off earth science course, I CLEP'ed out of general biology and copied my friends work to scrape by with a B in statistics. Then I got a nursing licence which taught me some bare bones science, but which ultimately left me with no college credit. So, now, every monday and wednesday, I crowd into a lecture hall and my local college with a hundred kids who just graduated high school six months ago.

And this was providence.

My biology professor rocks. He's the only science teacher I've ever met who can carry on a conversation about philosophy or theology, and actually appear interested. I don't think he's forcing it either. Anyway, most of my thought has been veering off towards science lately . . . which is one of several reasons I haven't written much lately. Being a novice at science makes it rather difficult to write down any thoughts which amount to much. Nonetheless, one of the three readers I have who actually leaves evidence of having read this stuff has implored me to write . . . here goes . . .

So, a few weeks back in biology we were learning about proteins. Proteins basically do everything in your body. Anything that does anything at the cellular level in your body is a protein or is touching a protein. Proteins are made up of about 20 different amino acids that our bodies generally steal from the remains of other things that were once alive. These 20 amino acids are combined in certain sequences, and based on these sequences they form three dimensional shapes and it is these shapes that determine how they work and what they are capable of doing. These shapes rely on certain parameters to remain functional. Meaning if things aren't just right, their shape will change and the protein becomes useless, or worse, becomes harmful. These parameters are things like temperature, pH, and probably lots of other things I'm not aware of. This is why you aren't going to live very long if your body temperature jumps higher than 105 degrees for an extended period of time: the proteins in throughout your body, especially the ones in your bodies core, controlling your vital organs, will "denature", become dysfunctional, and you die.

And this intrigues me because . . . .

There are 26 letters in our alphabet. We put these letters together in sequence, and they form sentences and paragraphs and books, which form and express the ideas by which we understand the world. These ideas, formed by language, also rely on specific parameters to make any sense at all. We live in an age where we are increasingly aware that context is everything. The introduction or absence of single words into a sentence can change the entire meaning. Changes in syntax, order of clauses, variations in the structure of paragraphs, all these significantly effect the way ideas are presented through the words. They change the action of the ideas presented, and thus effect the meaning. Depending on the place, or time and historical context, the intentions and interactions of author and reader, and countless other factors, the meaning and effect of a document can be altered completely. In some ways it can be seen that just as protein denatures outside of specific environments, so also, language denatures.

This is undoubtedly an analogous way of understanding language, I don't mean to draw any sort of equation saying they are the same. But, I am increasingly convinced that all human knowledge comes in analogies.

So, bringing this around to matters of faith . . . I've dealt a lot lately with people who have the attitude that Scripture says what it means and we should simply obey it. My problem is that I don't think Scripture simply says what it means. The context is lost (however partially) to us, and in my opinion the meaning of the text is denatured. This implies that the meaning of the Bible itself has changed since the context is partially lost, and that the action/effect that the Bible could have also has changed since the people reading it are utterly different.

I have enormous respect for figures like Ray Vander Laan, Rob Bell, and others who are seeking to reacquaint us in the 21st century with the worldview of first century Jews. I personally have felt more hope for the future of Christian faith in listening to such figures as they bring the remains of Scriptural meaning alive again. The context IS lost, but only partially . . . and we can grow enormously from understanding how the words of Scripture would have acted in their time. Still the other edge of that sword is that I am not a first century Jew. Nor can I be. I am also not a Greek, or a Medieval Catholic, or a son of the Reformation. Nor can I be. If anything I am a descendent of the Enlightenment, but even that is challenged in our contemporary setting. I can't regress to a former era. Nor can anyone else . . no matter how bad we may wish to.

The hope for today, is that Scripture and the meaning of it, can be reformed (formed again), to carry meaning for us as we are. We don't live in a world of angels and demons, or magic, or the eager anticipation of the returning eschatological Messiah. We live in a world of political forces, of inequality, of globalization and the constant threat of human annihilation. Scripture does not speak to these things directly, but still it CAN speak to them. In fact, it needs, desperately, to speak to them. But, first we must be brave enough to accept what has been lost, in order to realize what can be gained.

I don't believe the Bible simply says what it means. The desire for this to be the case requires us to deny the truth of the world we live in. It forces us to pretend with live in first century Palestine. We don't. The other option is to twist Scripture to apply to us, where no application is present. There are a vast array of mega-churches that have perfected this art as well. They pretend the Bible was written to us and for us.

The other option is to see the Biblical world for what it was, and see our current world for what it is . . . and respect the immense differences between the two. The world of the Bible is lost, but not so completely that we can draw some inferences as to what the Bible would have meant to them. In seeing this, and then looking at our own world, as WE perceive it, we can then try humbly and faithfully to see what meaning Scripture has taken on.

2007-09-24T16:50:00.000-05:00

Satellite by Leonel Rugama

Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.

Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.

Apollo 4 cost more than Apollo 3
Apollo 3 cost more than Apollo 2
Apollo 2 cost more than Apollo 1
Apollo 1 cost plenty.

Apollo 8 cost a fortune, but no one minded
because the astronauts were Protestant
they read the Bible from the moon
astounding and delighting every Christian
and on their return Pope Paul VI gave them his blessing.

Apollo 9 cost more than all these put together
including Apollo 1 which cost plenty.

The great-grandparents of the people of Acahaulinca were
less hungry than the grandparents
The great-grandparents died of hunger.

The grandparents of the people of Acahaulinca were less
hungry than the parents.
The grandparents died of hunger.

The parents of the people of Acahaulinca were less hungry
than the children of the people there.
The parents died of hunger.

The people of Acahaulinca are less hungry than the children
of the people there,
The children of the people of Acahaulinca, because of hunger,
are not born, they hunger to be born,
only to die of hunger.

Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.

_

that and a little of this

2007-09-05T19:50:00.000-05:00

Life is odd. (Congregation: "All the time!") Mmm yes, all the time. (Congregation: "Life is odd.")

So, I've been informed lately that God is pursuing me. And, should I reign in the ruthless analyst who roams around in my own head, I'm starting to believe it. . . . Now that's not really anything new. There have been scores of people over the last 5 years who have informed me of God's persuit of me. I have promptly dismissed all of them. Maybe now I'm finding light by which to accept that statement on terms that I find reasonable. I might explain that. If you're lucky. hmmm

Tangent: recently I have had many thoughts on the idea of healing. Yes, i'm serious. My thinking has been this: the medical profession has never healed anyone, ever. And, the greatest part of that statement is that any sane doctor, nurse, therapist or pharmacist would agree if they thought it out to its logical conclusion. Take surgery for example; surgeons don't heal people. In fact, they do quite the opposite: the inflict strategic wounds on people. But, were it placed in their hands to see to it that a person was healed, the outcome would be dismal. Physicians? In regard to internal medicine at least, there is essentially nothing an M.D. does that "heals" a person. Instead, M.D.'s prescribe various chemical substances which generally serve the purpose of fulfilling something lacking that is otherwise naturally present in the body, or which fight off malevolent factors. Should someone come down with an infection, the M.D. gives antibiotics which kill off the harmful bacteria. But, if the body should at that point get lazy and prefer not to repair the damage done by the now subjugated disease, the person would most likely still die. My point is that "healing" is something our body does on its own. It is an internal force. I've heard a couple of speakers at churches recently talk about sickness of loved ones, and then speak out triumphantly against those medical workers who gave some negative diagnosis. This "faith vs. medicine" attitude that so many churches parrot is rather assinine in my opinion. I think ultimately we're all on the same side people.

I think medical people and church people would do well to remember that health and healing are not products of our actions. Our bodies heal on their own. Healing is a grace that is intrinsic to our nature as humans, and as such is a gift from God. But even where doctors don't believe in God, they still believe and faithfully trust in this glorious force within each of us to heal. The entire industry would cease to exist were it not for that.

Here's a funny thing about science: not too long ago I was discussing with a friend the mythology of science. It's funny how for all the superiority of the scientific worldview, it is fairly common to see that scientists act on myth and superstition just like any layman. My friend who is a chemist had serious reservations about the idea, but said he could at least partially see what I was saying. Since then I've reformulated what I was saying. I think science is generally not mythological, but that humans are, and so therefore even the most scientific of us end up thinking mythologically. I think that somehow myth is a form of thought that humans just simply live in. It is a way that we experience the world. So, even if myths don't hold any water by scientific standards, they still "work". I could go off on another long tangent related to paradigm theory here, but I won't. Instead I would point out that myth seems to somehow be an inherited form of thinking that basically every human has. So, even when we do our best to eliminate it from our thought, we still have this mental void that even where we fill it with science manages to sound very superstitious and mythological.

We could raise a kid on Newton and Einstein and in the end the kid ends up talking of the two as gods or saints, and speaks of their theories in a way that parallels any religious metaphysical force in any of the major world religions. I'm not saying it IS the same, only that it is VERY similar.

Recently this has brought me back to the idea of the "second naivete". I've spoken about this before, but for a refresher there was a French philosopher who said that all academics eventually took one down a winding and perilous road that simply dumped you back out into the mainstream of human society where you, like everyone else, just stood in wide-eyed wonder at it all. In other words, we can boil everything down to the most minute of systems, but in the end if we look at the big picture we don't know a damn thing. We can quote the most perplexing theories of the greatest modern minds, but still find ourselves baffled by the blunt and profound questions of six year olds everywhere.

I watched a Bible study last night at a coffee shop. It was a white girl about 30 years old sharing the gospel with two Chinese girls who were still struggling to speak English well. It was funny to me. The evangelist was carefully delineating the same stale ideas of how Jesus was God and God was Jesus to these girls and I realized something - she was speaking the language of science. She spoke of these great abstract ontologies as though they were empirical data that could be tested in a laboratory.

There the great paradox of the modern age was laid out before my eyes: religion masquerading as science while science wanders off into the mired territory of religious mythology. It's as though we live in an age of mental imperialism where the entire population of France invades England, while the whole of England simultaneously crusades into France. Both scatch their heads wondering how it could happen so easily, and still are haunted by the horrible realization that they aren't at home and have no idea what they are doing, or how they will survive.

I notice this in the language of religious healing, people stumble into idiotic formulae as though the scientific method were applicable to an event where God rids a person of cancer. Conversely scientists are fighting back nausea and exasperation trying to offer compelling proofs for the advantageous quality of spiritual depth and "positive thinking" in the realm of medical outcomes.

I have long avoided mythological thinking as I would rather not be deceived by anybody. But, lately I've started realizing how to reject that part of human thinking is to suffer a huge loss in terms of being fully human. I'm not saying I want to forget all the 'scientific' doubt and skepticism I've grown so used to thinking in, but that if that is the only way I experience the world I have become more of a machine than a man. I know how myth engages the whole of the human person in a way that science can't, though that's not to say it doesn't engage more than people give it credit for. In shoving myths to the side I felt liberated from those using religion as ideology, but in excluding myself from mythic thinking I also find that I have lost a relational aspect of my own humanity. I have lost part of what it is to be fully myself, and part of what helped me connect fully with God.

So, bringing it back around . . . people have come into my life recently and have spoken to the mythic part of my soul (wherever that might be). A friend of mine this last weekend informed me of knowing that God is pursuing me. And, as I said, there was part of me that wanted to hold that statement under a microscope, but that would be seeking a formula when my friend only intended to tell me a story. A story which, should I let it, can engage me fully; comprehensively. A story that fits perfectly into that part of my being that science will only settle into awkwardly. I'm hoping now, that grasping one and not releasing the other, maybe I'll recenter . . . closer to that wholeness I desire so deeply.

define 'anointed'. . .

2007-08-21T01:21:00.000-05:00

What is christology?

This was the question posed to me by a friend the other night. It is also the topic of most of the theology books I am reading right now. I mean, it sounds simple enough right. -ology being the study of, would imply that christology is the study of Christ. This was the answer I loosely gave, "It's the study of Jesus and who he is." I said this because it seemed like such an obvious question, which when posed so bluntly, pointed out to me that I had no answer for it. I was stumped. This was quite sad to me as I am currently 500 pages into a book dedicated purely to the topic. So, let me begin this post by saying that my answer on the spot was ultimately wrong in just about every way.

The truth is that christology deals with Jesus only indirectly. Essentially christology is the study of the "christ-concept", which existed long before and continued long after Jesus.

Multiple hundreds of years before Jesus was born Judaism was formulating the concept of the Messiah, the Christ. Now the original words mean "annointed one", which brings to mind the image of the king of any country being annointed with oil. When I say any country, I do in fact mean that, as Cyrus of the Persians was referred to as a christ or messiah. So, therefore, the messiah was not a concept that even specifically referred to a Jewish king. But, to the Jews who lost their king on being exiled to Babylon the idea of a Jewish annointed one came to the fore. The idea of the messiah began a steady evolution over the course of time.

I have no intent to delineating the evolution of the idea of the 'messiah/christ', if you care to know, I can recommend a good book to you . . . only be ready to dedicate a few month to it. Instead, I wish to point out how the concept of the Christ did not descend once for all from heaven. It was an idea that began in certain historical circumstances, and that evolved as circumstances changed. The literature written between the Old and New Testaments, which we rarely hear of, gives evidence to the difference in messianic expectation between certain Greek rulers to Roman rulers and everything in between.

By the time we get to Jesus' era, the most striking thing is the wide variety of christ concepts available. We can see the Davidic Christ who was supposed to lead the people to drive out Roman oppressors and elevate Israel to a world power. We can also see the Priestly Christ in the line of Moses. There is the ontological Enoch-christ referred to as the 'son of man', who comes to judge the world. The list could go on. There is actually a staggering multiplicity of diverse ideas as to what the Christ would be, what he would look like.

The thing is that many of these christ-traditions that precede the birth of Jesus, or at least the writing of the New Testament, account for the various claims made of him. For instance one vein of thought claimed that the Christ was actually a final prophet of God who was united with the eternal Wisdom of God. In Greek this eternal Wisdom would be referred to as the Logos. Notice the Christ prophet is not eternal, but rather becomes the dwelling place, the residence of the eternally existing Wisdom/Logos of God. Or let's take the Moses-christ tradition. Many years before Jesus was born the idea was coming about that the christ would not be a military leader, but a religious/spiritual leader. Therefore the christ's purpose would not be to liberate the people for their oppressors, but to connect them more deeply to God. For Jews this would quite naturally happen via the Law, so the christ becomes the true interpreter of the Law. So, decades later when his followers set to record why they call him the Christ the adopt this strand of thought that existed long before their master was born, to describe who he is. They set down his teaching to reveal the ultimate interpretation of the Law in one particular sermon. They say this sermon occured on 'the Mount', which the vast majority of scholars will say is not fact but a round-about way of saying he fulfilled the mosaic-christ expectation of being the ultimate interpreter of the Law.

The problem this has led me to see, is that we are taught to say that 'Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God'. This is the core of faith so we are told. The problem with this pithy saying is that in its original context, people would have said, "Sure, but so was Enoch, Samuel, Judas Maccabees, and Bar Kochba, each in their own way." The core of our faith doesn't really reveal what was unique about Jesus. In his time there was a staggering variety of interpretation concerning the meaning of being 'the christ'. Since there was no uniform concept, there was no uniform understanding of what being the christ meant.

How funny then that we have built up this religion called "christ-ianity", and that we form an exclusive social grouping of "christ-ians". We unite around the idea that Jesus is God's Christ, annointed one. We act in every respect as though Jesus holds exclusive rights to this title, and ignore the fact that the title and the concepts it employs were borrowed from a culture that had many christs before and many christs after Jesus, and sometimes is still found to be holding out for the final Messiah. The truth is that in world history God has had a plethora of sons and christs. Many have claimed such titles with a sense of legitimacy within a particular, unique cultural understanding of the titles.

The significance of Jesus is not in the fact that he is called Christ, nor the Son of God. These are pre-existing titles borrowed by early followers to express what they exprience in the man. This is what christology reveals to us. The concept of 'christ' precedes Jesus, includes him, and extends beyond him to many others after he came. Jesus is not unique for being called Christ. Yet the use of the titles gives us windows to the significance of Jesus in the eyes of the earliest followers. Beyond the framework of language we can discern a man whose life revealed, and reveals God in an entirely unique and profound way. Essentially the significance of Jesus is God. It is not the position (title) which God places him in, nor his relationship to God, but that God himself is somehow perceived in Jesus. In Jesus, the man from Nazareth, we witness God clarifying himself.

I wonder how many see the christ religion which has been built up around a title, a mere word, and thus reject not only this religion but also the man who was much more than a concept, or more imporantly the God who actively revealed his heart in this Jesus. I lament that too often it seems that we have packaged Jesus of Nazareth and thus the God who reveals himself through Jesus, inside this christ concept. People reject the packaging and miss out on the treasure inside, and unfortuately I feel as though the packaging is largely unecessary. The good news is not that Jesus is the Christ or the Son of God, but that God revealed himself through Jesus. The gospel is not that Jesus is the divine Christ calling shots on God's behalf. The protagonist of the story is God, always and without fail. It is God who acts. Jesus is the perfect case study by which we come to understand God. All the titles and interpretations we confer on Christ should only serve us to perceive God more. The purpose of all faith is to unite us to this Ineffable Reality and Ultimate Unity that we call God. It is not the Divine Christ that does this, but the remembered man of Nazareth. In this way I see him as greater than all his titles.