Camassia

2003-06-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

And as it turns out, Telford ain't the only one moving

I'm leaving blogspot! I've joined the notfrisco cabal! Please update your links to:

http://camassia.notfrisco2.com

The adventure continues!!

2003-06-19T15:13:00.000-07:00

Transitions

I apologize to those of you who've gotten interested in the historical-Jesus discussion, that it's going so slow. I've come down with a cold and have had a hard time concentrating lately, while the Westmont server seems to have gone down and taken Telford's blog with it. Before it disappeared, though, the blog announced the happy news that Telford found a house. Which will also slow down the discussion since he'll be so busy, but it's a relief for Telford.

He's been looking for a few months, ever since he found out Westmont was going to rehire him (this time on a tenure track). It's tough enough to find a house in Santa Barbara, which is one of the most expensive places in the country, but Telford's task was made harder by the size of his family. It occurred to me when I heard him talking about this, that one thing that's hard about having a lot of kids in modern American society is that our shrinking fertility rates have upped the expectations for how children should live, especially in terms of how much space they have. I remember in the movie My Left Foot, the first half of which was set in an enormous working-class Irish family, the brothers and sisters squeezed together in communal beds by sleeping head-to-foot, and kept those arrangements until they were old enough to leave home. Nowadays we tend to think there's something vaguely incestuous about a brother and sister even sharing a room. Yet throughout human history, the movie's image of family life was probably more normal than what I grew up in. (And as I pointed out in an earlier post, having relatives in your face all the time may be precisely what de-eroticizes them.)

When my family moved to California, when I was three, we bought our four-bedroom house from a very large family. The oldest daughter lived in the little bedroom that was to become mine; two brothers lived in the larger bedroom next to it, that would be my sister's; and two more kids lived in the downstairs bedroom (I forget the gender). When we showed up, they'd just had another baby, and decided they needed a new house.

With just two kids in the house, we had a lot of room. This was even more so because there was a field out back that actually belonged to a neighbor, but he wasn't doing anything with it, so he let us run around there. Since we lived in a pretty well built-up suburb, half a mile from the freeway, it was nice having that patch of nature. There was a stretch of meadow grass where we'd play; farther from the house, where there must have been an underground water source, there was a bramble of blackberries and a quince tree that must have been planted for some long-abandoned garden, but that still fruited. There was also patch of wild fennel, which the local kids called "Indian chewing gum" because when the stalks dried out you could peel off the hard skin and get a soft chewable core. It didn't taste very good, but when you're a kid there's an odd thrill to finding a source of something that isn't through your parents.

When we got older, new residents in the house tried different things with the field. First there was a terraced garden; then when I was in my teens, they fenced it off and raised sheep there. Now, as I said this was a built-up 'burb, with no agriculture for miles around, so it was always entertaining when visitors to the house would suddenly hear a "Baa-a-a-a." They would stop with the expression of someone who thinks they must be hallucinating, and say something like, "Did I just hear ... something like a ... sheep?"

There was quite a bit of animal life in the area. There were deer that aggravated my mother and me by munching on the garden. There were stray tomcats who managed to impregnate both our female cats before we could spay them. I watched the birth of one set of kittens; as you can imagine, it was quite fascinating to a six-year-old girl. I still flash back to those images, when I think of what birth is like. It wasn't much like a human birth, but it's still the only one I've seen in the flesh.

That house carved so much of my mental landscape, it's hard for me to imagine growing up moving around the way the Work children have. This is something like their fourth house in the last six years. But I guess that, whether in Pasadena or Santa Barbara, four to a bed or one to a room, children always adapt somehow.

2003-06-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

For goodness' sake

T.S. O'Rama wrote me an email in response to my remark here that when I read about God in the Bible, he doesn't always seem especially good. He writes:

Here's my 2 cents: Part of the difficulty is that the bible wasn't written for us. It was written for all times, for all peoples - including the people *at that time*. So the Old Testament necessarily had to be written in a way that would instruct and help people who had not a clue scientifically or morally, while preserving a kernel of truth (the important part) for all generations. God colors with crayon until he can paint with oils.

For example, if I am a caveman who rapes every woman I see and don't know any better, then if you are God you'd probably get across the idea of respect for God first (so I'll listen) then respect for women second (so I'll understand why raping is bad) and finally I go down the "monogamy only" path (i.e. faithfulness and exclusivity). But the latter comes later. First you'd get the respect idea down. People who are cruel only understand cruelty.

The bible may, in some places, induce head-scratching. But fortunately there are parts (especially at the end) that display total love for us, like the idea that God would come down as a man and die for us. Here's a quote I came across that unfortunately I cut & pasted but don't know who said it:

"I do not understand suffering - but I know it is real. But a God who is in any way responsible for this terror of our lives, such a God must be terrible, a Molech consuming the children we love in contempt for any individual's striving and selfhood. But that is not the God revealed in the history of Israel and in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a man whose life is written to echo the history of his people. Our God shows that he is with us - Emmanuel - in the slime of life, in the pain of life, in the joys of life, and in our death. I still do not know why people should die meaningless deaths, but because God is with us, he can look me in the face and I will not turn away in disgust. This story is so powerful that its symbols grip me absolutely. If all the details are wrong or ahistorical, the story itself remains true. Perhaps it is a dream, although I think not, but the story of Christmas is that life has meaning, humanity is worthwhile, and ultimately "all will be well, and all will be well, and all things will be well".

I've been around this a zillion times with Telford (to the point where he's heartily sick of it), but I'll say again what I've said to him: this would all be a lot easier to believe if I didn't have to believe Yahweh is the omnipotent creator. It would be easier if I didn't have to believe in an omnipotent creator at all. If somebody said there's a powerful but limited force for good in the universe that's doing what it can, that might excuse certain klutzy moves it makes along the way. But that's not the argument Christianity makes.

This reminds me of Joel Gazis-Sax's interesting post on Zoroastrianism. I don't know a whole lot about the faith, but what I know agrees with what he says. In that scheme, there is a good, but non-omnipotent god who is constantly at war with an evil one. It has heaven and hell, and an apocalyptic end-times scenario similar to Revelation (some think Zoroastrianism influenced Revelation, but that's another story), but with a rather different spin on them:

Zoroastrians believe that we have two linked souls, one which animates our earthly body and another which remains in Heaven with God (Ahura Mazda) at all times. This heavenly soul never becomes corrupted. But Ahriman, who can be called Satan if you please, can and does work to pollute the earthly soul. When he succeeds, he gets to drag you down to Hell. But not for eternity.

Hell resembles Christian Purgatory, but with a lot more pain and suffering. Good deeds performed during your lifetime help to ameliorate your pain. Once you have been cleansed, Ahriman has no more hold over you. Your earthly soul reunites with your heavenly one and you are with God...

I'm not about to convert to any religion, but if you've got to have one that demands an unequivocal belief in good and evil, Zoroastrianism's formula solves a lot of questions. God doesn't cause suffering: Satan does. In the struggle between Good and Evil, though Satan makes advances, he can never completely win. God will reclaim all that is good and beautiful after a period of purification. No one is damned for all time because God loves us. We suffer in hell so that all that is Satanic in us can be removed. In the end, we all join God in Paradise. Zoroastrians don't fret about the behavior of others: they labor to perfect themselves.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it seems have corrupted these ideas, largely I think for political reasons. When Satan's role changed to resemble that of Ahriman more, these other religions failed to incorporate compassion for the suffering soul here on earth completely. Therein, I think, is the root of the contradictions which drive so many of us mad. The critic of the Levantine religions asks "If God is Good, why does He allow evil to flourish in this world?" And it's a good question, one for which the answers I have heard are halting, selfish, and unconvincing. The Zoroastrian replies "God does not cause the evil in the world. Satan does. God can win, but He needs your help. Work hard on your own soul."

I find that empowering.

I tend to agree. I'm comfortable enough speaking the language of good and evil, but the Zoroastrian version makes more sense to me than the Christian version. It would be interesting to talk to a Zoroastrian one of these days, but sadly, there aren't a lot of them left.

2003-06-17T17:21:00.000-07:00

Yearning to breathe free

Recently I got around to reading Freedom House's latest report on the state of freedom in the world. In the essay prefacing the data, the house points out that the news is mostly good. The authors say a "third wave" of democratization began in the 1970s, and continues today. (So, you poli-sci wonks out there: what were the first two?)

The report gives some attention to the regional trends, especially the fact that the "wave" so far hasn't hit the Middle East. There's been no general improvement in the freedom ratings there in 30 years. A lot of ink has been spilled about why that's so, and I'm not going to try to add to it.

Also interesting when you look at the data is the fate of the post-Communist world. As FH noted in its Nations in Transit report, a split seems to be developing between the western and eastern parts of the former Soviet bloc. The nations of eastern Europe, as well as the Baltic states, have mostly succeeded in democratizing. (The exception has been the Balkans, but even there it seems to be happening now that the war's subsided.) The rest of the former Soviet Union, however, has had a much tougher time of it. Some, like Turkmenistan and Belorus, have fallen under the sway of outright dictators. At best, as in Russia, the scene is mixed.

This trend continues if you look at China and Indochina, which have de-Communized themselves but remain repressive. The former non-Communist, authoritarian states of east Asia, like South Korea and Taiwan, have mostly democratized successfully.

So where did the wave hit? Africa, to a certain extent. In the early 1990s there was a wave of popular protest there, no doubt inspired by eastern Europe and the end of Cold War shennanigans in the continent, and a lot of dictators lost their jobs or were forced to compromise. In only a few places did this end up with complete democracy, but the improvement is significant. (And today, via Eve Tushnet, comes news that another thug is gonna hit the road.)

Perhaps more significant to the U.S. is Latin America. Despite various setbacks, democratization there seems to be for real. This is, I think, part of a larger point: Latin Americans are in some ways becoming more like us northerners. Much has been made of the Latino cultural influence in the U.S., but politically, economically and even religiously (given the inroads Protestant groups have made there), the movement is going both ways.

This is an important point for people who fear Latino immigrants, I think. Last year when Pat Buchanan's book The Death of the West came out, several commentators criticized how he defined "the West" -- especially his including eastern Europe and Russia but excluding Latin America. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, he was really defining a racial group rather than a cultural one. (And a rather dubious racial group at that, since the boundaries of "white" are pretty blurry.)

This point is even more striking when you add economic data to the mix. One obvious difference between "the West" and "the Third World" is the former is rich and the latter is poor. Yet according to the World Bank, Latin America is richer than the former Soviet bloc. (Look at the column where it says GNI per capita.) In fact, one real shock to me when I first saw the Bank's table last year is how poor some of the old Soviet states are. If you scroll down to the third page -- to the poorest countries in the world -- you'll see Ukraine, Moldova and a couple Central Asian republics lurking there.

If there's one thing that's clear from all this, it's that the old Cold War division of the planet that we imply when we say "Third World" is way out of date. What the next arrangement will be -- well, we'll see.

2003-06-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

The meet market

On Saturday I wrote about this costume I wore to this party I went to, but I didn't write that much about the party itself. Like I said, it was put on by a singles group associated with church, but I really didn't know anything about it. After I got there I found a couple of surprises: it's for singles 35 and up (making me three years too young for it), and a lot of people there were actually from other churches. I guess the market for middle-aged Christian single people isn't that big even in L.A., so these groups are networked together.

Whenever I go to one of these singles scenes, I end up with ambivalent feelings. I chatted with some people and attracted a few interested men, and like any woman I like getting that kind of attention. But as always seems to happen I gave my phone number to a guy I really shouldn't have. He danced with me toward the end of the night -- he danced rather uncomfortably close to me, I thought -- and after that he immediately asked for my phone number, without even asking my name. That seemed a bit ... aggressive to me. I said I needed to rest and went to a sofa and sat down, and he followed me, and finally I gave him my business card. He called me at work today, where I put him off with the convenient excuse that I was busy. I've gotten much worse pickup attempts before, but this kind of thing just makes me feel ... ugh. Scuzzy.

It wasn't all that bad, though. There was another guy who hung around me the first hour or so of the party; I gave him my card too, but I think he got the feeling that it wasn't really happening for me and by the end of the night he'd moved on to another woman. I also met a couple of friends who were a bit younger and hipper than the rest of the crowd, who invited me to a party on a yacht this weekend. It costs $52 apiece, so I don't think I'll go. But they seemed to be part of some vaguely Christian party scene, so I gave one of them my card too, and told him to put me on his email list if anything was happening.

Another guy, though not an "interested" guy, that I met at the party turned up again in a weird way. After church yesterday I went outside with Telford, and he prayed for me. Telford does most of the talking on these occasions, but sometimes I make an attempt at it also. I don't really do anything in a formal "prayer" style; I just start talking about whatever's on my heart. This time I spoke about how I'd seen other people experience God, like someone they know whose presence they carry around with them always, and suddenly a voice said, "Yeah, I see him like that!"

I opened my eyes and he was already walking away, waving back at me and smiling impishly. Telford was totally confused, of course, but when I told him I'd met the guy at the party, he said, "Oh. Cool."

I was pretty disconcerted -- not just because I'd been interrupted in prayer, but because he'd been eavesdropping on me. I guess CA people don't think of prayer as a private act, especially when it's done in a public place, but I do pray with the expectation that only Telford and maybe God are going to hear me. I am not sure how freely I would speak if I didn't.

At any rate, I think a singles group is not the thing for me right now. I'm single and I don't want to remain single forever, but really, I'm not in a good place for dating at the moment. It did occur to me, though, that instead of my phone number I should have just given them the url to this blog. If they read it and still want to go out with me, then it might be worth doing.

2003-06-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

In the name of love

Somehow -- call it feminine intuition or something -- I get the feeling Telford is still not happy with Borg.

Actually, he makes criticisms similar to the ones I made, about how Borg tries to categorize Jesus. I would defend Borg on one charge Telford lobs at him, though:

His religious experience would have been "shaped by" his Jewish heritage (64). (Not defined, but merely shaped. Borg has already ruled out the applicability of Israel's tradition of a God set apart from the world and occasionally intervening and dwelling there, on 62 and 258 nn. 25-27. This "Western supernatural theism" has "seriously negative consequences.")

I read Borg's position as a little more nuanced than that. He agrees that "...imaging God as a personlike being is very common in the Bible. It is also the natural language of worhips and prayer, and there is nothing wrong with it in such contexts." But he regards the concept of God as a separate person standing outside the universe "is theologically deficient: it affirms only the transcendence of God and neglects the immanence of God, despite the fact that the Jewish and Christian traditions have consistently affirmed that God is both."

This actually kind of agrees with what I was told in the Holy Spirit part of the Alpha course, and by Telford himself, that the Holy Spirit has been a rather neglected part of the Trinity in the last few centuries. Indeed, I gather that the Pentecostal movement arose largely in response to this. What I took from Borg's comment about "supernatural theism" is that we should not look at Yahweh as if he were one of the Olympian gods of Greece, sitting up in a remote heaven and only noticing us if we do something to grab his attention. The God of the Bible is personlike but in a different way from that. I don't know, maybe he's going too far in the opposite direction with his "panentheism" concept, but I don't think he's rejecting outright the Jewish way of looking at God.

Anyway, that's kind of a side issue. Telford, like me, wondered why it was so important to Borg whether Jesus knew he was the messiah; unlike me, who disposed of it in one paragraph, he goes through a long series of guesses. I think I should elaborate a bit more on the reason I perceived this to matter to Borg, although maybe all I'm doing is projecting my own concerns onto it.

Borg wrote that he thought this went to the question of whether Jesus wanted people to believe in him, specifically, or placed more importance on what he taught. I wrote that I sympathized with this question because sometimes the focus on the name and the person of Jesus seems like you're "siding with the winning team" -- that is, if you say the right name, fly the right flag, wear the right colors and so on then you're saved. But the question that raises for me is, what is the difference between the one side and the other side? It seems to me that if this side-picking isn't based upon moral superiority, this is no more than tribalism. Our side is better because it's us. Or -- even worse -- our side is better because it's going to win.

I think that danger has always existed in religion. In fact, in a lot of ancient paganism that seemed to be more or less explicit: gods were partisans for one nation or another, and if another nation conquered you, your god "lost" so you might as well start worshipping the conquerers' gods. Back when I was blogging Exodus I griped that I saw a strain of it there, and it's pretty clear that in Christian history a lot of people have used the name of Jesus that way.

In my experience it's pretty common in liberal circles, whether Christian or not, to want to exalt the principles of Jesus over the person of Jesus for exactly that reason. I suspect that Borg's attraction to the idea of Jesus not knowing he was messiah comes from this. If he did not know, if he thought he was just a guy who had an unusually close relationship with God, then his message would have been more about goodness than power. In other words, "This is how to be the best person," rather than, "This is who you follow if you want to come out on top in the end."

I can already hear Telford protesting that this dichotomy is way too crude, and he's right. In fact, I should say that only since I've known Telford have I realized the problem with that way of thinking. But since I first read Telford's post a few days back, I've been concluding that this shows a kind of running tension between the way Telford and I look at things.

Some years ago Carol Gilligan famously, and controversially, claimed that men and women use different forms of moral reasoning: men think in terms of abstract principles, while women seek harmony in relationships. I don't know if that's true in general, but with Telf and me it's the exact opposite, because I'm always pushing principles while he's always pushing relationships. For him, religious faith is all about relationships: with God, with Jesus and with the fellow faithful. We've argued about this enough that he seems to believe I don't like the idea of faith being relational. Actually I do like it, but I put principles ahead of relationships. A lot of the disagreements we've had over Bible reading come from me looking at God's behavior and saying I do not want to have a relationship with him because he does not seem especially good. Telford seems to look at it the other way: you have a relationship with God and so you trust that even when it looks bad, it's all for the good.

But getting back to the subject, I think that this heavy emphasis on relationship is the more benign reason why a Christian would want to see God as a specific person with a specific identity. You can't have a relationship with abstract moral principles. And I can see why it would be hard to have a relationship with something as vague and floaty as Borg's "panentheist" vision. Jesus gave a name, a body, a personality to God, making God someone you could relate to like a human being. No other religion that I know of did it in quite that way.

The fact that I understand both these points of view doesn't mean I completely like either of them though. Borg, from my point of view, has a way of raising issues I understand but offering solutions that I don't really like. The pre-Easter/post-Easter Jesus idea was one of those, and the he-didn't-know-he-was-messiah thing is another. On Telford's side, I like his idea of a relational God but it's ethically troublesome to me, especially the idea that one's salvation depends on it. Telford complains at the end of his post:

Borg shows us a way to admire Jesus for "knowing God" as intimately as he did, without feeling bothered by the calls to follow him alone or the warnings of rejection's dire consequences that litter the canon of his followers, even when they appear to come from his own mouth. We can have our other ways to God without having to turn away from him.

The funny thing is, though, that Wright himself seems to have an answer to that one. As I mentioned in my Chapter 3 post, Wright believes Jesus' "judgment talk" was attached to the specific place and time: if the Jews didn't heed his words, the Romans would destroy them. It makes you wonder then, if those commands to follow him or else would really apply to all people in all of history in quite the same way. But I suppose that may come in a later chapter.

2003-06-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

Get this party started

Last night a singles group associated with Christian Assembly threw a '60s costume ball. Seeing as I've had no life for a while now, I thought it would be fun to go. But I had no idea what to wear. The '60s were not a very good fashion decade for someone who looks like me, so I don't own anything that looks '60s even in a vague sort of way. And since this was, after all, a singles event, I also kind of wanted to look good.

So I emailed my sister, who seems to know everything there is to know about clothes, especially historical clothes. I had hoped that she could just give me some general tips about what sort of thing to look for, but she took it on as a project. She went to a vintage clothing store in her town and found a genuine '60s candy-pink polyester minidress. Now, I should point out for those of you who don't know, a candy-pink polyester minidress is definitely not me. But it was the right size, it cost $10, and I was running out of time, so I said sure, get it. And then, unasked, she also somehow found a white pillbox hat with a pink bow on the back and netting over the top, faux pearl earrings, and a white purse that was actually a modern item from K-mart but looked properly retro.

She mailed all this to me. I put it on and thought, this is definitely not me, but it's actually kind of cute. The only trouble was that the hat seemed to be too small, which is not surprising given that women's hats almost always are on me. (I like to think it's my outsized brain, but maybe it's just my swelled head.) Also, the only shoes I had to go with it were pumps with two-inch heels. I try to avoid wearing heels to dance parties because they're uncomfortable and because they make me taller than most of the men, which makes them less inclined to dance with me. But I figured, it'll do, so I put everything on and headed off.

I went as "establishment" '60s, but most other people there went hippie. There's got to be a cultural comment somewhere in the fact that an evangelical Christian church would throw a party imitating the Summer of Love, but I don't know what it is. There was a live band that played the Beatles, Hendrix, and other counterculture music. Toward the end the female singer even did a Janis Joplin impersonation, complete with whiskey bottle, but it didn't actually have any whiskey in it because there was no alcohol at this gig. The band also did a strangely clean version of "Shaft," if you can imagine that.

Anyway, despite the heels I did find guys to dance with. I realized then that an era's dance styles probably have as much to do with clothes as with music, because when you're in a short skirt and high heels, all you can really do is stand there and shimmy. The outfit won third place in the costume contest (the prize was a Betty Boop mug, for some inexplicable reason), and was variously described as "Jackie Kennedy," "airline stewardess" and "Junior Miss." When I received the prize some photographers there jumped in front of me and took a bunch of pictures. If they turn up at church tomorrow, I think Telford's going to be in for a big laugh.

2003-06-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

Blogroll updates

Will at Mysterium Crucis seems to have lost interest in blogging once he became a Real Catholic, so he's losing his spot on the Catholic blogroll to T.S. O'Rama. I've also added 111:2 and Reaching for Zion to the Miscellaneous Monotheists.

2003-06-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

If you can't get enough of this stuff...

Lynn Gazis-Sax has read another book by Marcus Borg (this one entirely by Borg) called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and she posts some thoughts on it. Plus more meta-commentary on Telford and me.

2003-06-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Chapter 4: Spirit of the age

Marcus Borg starts off his chapter on Jesus' doings and teachings by defending his uncertainty about whether Jesus knew he was the messiah. He bases his argument partly on the fact that in Mark, which he believes is the oldest Gospel, Jesus doesn't say that directly, while in parts of Matthew that draw from Mark, Jesus' assertions of messiahdom seem to have been added in.

Again I'm chafing against the lack of methodology: as with Wright, I don't really know how Borg knows these things, such as why Mark is the oldest or how he knows Matthew appropriated things from him. His point also reminds me of something Telford wrote a few days ago, that the oldest source isn't necessarily the truest. Sometimes your understanding of something improves with time. My feeling about is that it depends on the type of knowledge you're talking about. In terms of details of events, like what exactly did Jesus say to Peter on X occasion, I would think having the memory fresh would be better. Time tends to give you perspective: the details fit together in a more coherent picture.

Then again, sometimes the picture you form takes you farther from truth rather than closer, especially if you don't remember the details right. Really, how can we know which happened in this instance?

Also as I was reading this, I wondered why it mattered whether Jesus knew he was the messiah. Personally I'm more interested in the question of whether he actually was the messiah, and whether he lives today, and has any interest in me. (Hey, there he is! Sorry..:-)) But Borg says this relates to whether Jesus specifically wanted people to believe in him, or believe in what he was doing.

I think I see what he's getting at. That relates to my complaint about Wright in the last chapter, when he denied that Jesus' message was really about ethics and religion and instead made it about rallying Israel to its historic moment. It makes it sound like it's mostly about siding with the winning team, whereas I assumed that the whole reason for rallying Israel at that point was religious and ethical. As I asked before: what does it really mean to be "light of the world"?

Borg begins to tackle this question by identifying Jesus' identity and message. First of all, he says, Jesus was a Jewish mystic or "Spirit person." What's a Spirit person? Borg draws upon William James (which I haven't read) and spiritual traditions of other cultures (which I have read, a bit) to draw a broad, and rather appealing, picture of mysticism:

Mystics, as I use the term, are people who have decisive and typically frequent firsthand experiences of the sacred.

The most dramatic of these experiences of the sacred involve a variety of nonordinary states of consciousness. In visions, there is a vivid sense of momentarily seeing into another layer or level of reality. In shamanic experience, one not only sees another level of reality but also enters it and perhaps even journeys within it...

The world looks exquisite, and it may even appear as if there is light shining through everything or bathing everything in its glow. Moreover, the boundary between self and world, which defines our ordinary subject-object state of consciousnes, becomes soft, indeed, less pronounced than a deep sense of connectedness and reunion.

Borg goes on to argue that Jesus was clearly one of these -- his "vision quest" in the desert, his frequent conversations with God, his mystical healings and exorcisms -- and this was foundational to his being and to understanding him.

What bothers me about all this is its attempt to cast Jesus as a typical example of something. In fact, though I didn't mention it last night, Wright did the same thing in his chapter. He argued that Jesus did know that he was messiah on the ground that it was more or less standard operating procedure at the time:

This, I must stress, is not a particularly odd thing for a first-century Jew with a strong sense of God's presence and purpose, and a clear gift for charismatic leadership, to think. Others thought much the same, with local and personal variations...

If Jesus was all the things Marcus says he was, then, in a century that saw many would-be messiahs and royal personages come and go, leading movements, announcing the kingdom, going to Jerusalem, saying and doing things about the temple, it is highly likely that Marcus's "Jewish mystic", if he was indeed a Spirit person, a social prophet, and a movement initator, would have faced the question both from onlookers and from within his own heart and mind: was he, then, the messiah? ... Even Josephus could tell people to believe in him; I can imagine Judas the Galilean and bar-Kochba telling people to believe in them. If Jesus really was, as Marcus allows, a "movement initiator", why should he not have done the same?

The two scholars use essentially the same argument: Jesus resembled people who were X, therefore he was X. Wright draws comparisions to other Jewish messianic types, while Borg draws cross-cultural categories, but they both run into the same question. Was Jesus a typical anything? If he was the Son of God, in one way he was the most untypical being ever to walk the planet. Even if he wasn't, he was a unique individual. People have their commonalities, and people are influenced by their cultures, but they also can be radically different. How much can we really infer by resemblance?

Borg does more of this when he describes Jesus as a "wisdom teacher." He compares Jesus to other teachers of "alternative wisdom," such as Buddha and Lao-tzu, and draws inferences on that basis. He also describes Jesus as a social prophet, speaking against oppression and the institutional reigious powers -- on which points he basically agrees with Wright.

I don't really know what to make of all this. I don't feel like I'm getting much closer to the historical Jesus. I did notice as an interesting little aside, though, that Borg thinks Jesus' healings were not supernatural, but not psychosomatic either:

Inexplicable and remarkable things do happen, involving processes that we do not understand. i do not need to know the explanatory mechanism in order to affirm that paranormal healings happen. And Jesus seems to have been uncommonly good at them.

I don't feel so convinced that paranormal healings happen, but Borg does seem to be agreeing with what I said at the end of this post. You don't have to defy the laws of nature to do amazing things.

2003-06-11T21:14:00.000-07:00

Chapter 3: King is coming

OK, I know Telford already blogged through 4, but my time and energy are running low, so I'll blog 4 tomorrow.

This pair of chapters deals with what Jesus did and taught, and this time Wright has the honor off the tee, so to speak. In my earlier post I said I wanted to see how Wright applied his historical method, and I'm still waiting, because I'm not seeing it in this chapter. When Telford first started urging me to read the historical evidence for Jesus I complained that it would take a year, and he claimed it would take only a few weeks. I am thinking now that I was right, because Wright doesn't build his case here so much as make a series of assertions, with footnotes referring mostly to his other works. How he reached his conclusions is not clear.

Still, what he says is interesting. He sets up the mood in Israel at the time: the belief they were being ruled by pagans as a punishment for their infidelity to God, and that a messiah would soon come to restore them to their rightful place by overthrowing Roman rule. There were a number of apocalyptic Jewish sects and claimants to messiahdom at the time; most Jews were looking forward to seeing their enemies humbled through violent conflict.

Jesus, says Wright, came to correct all that. Wright denies that Jesus was there to bring a new religion or ethical code; instead he was there to declare a new eschatology:

Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God... all could practice his way of life, a way of forgiveness and prayer, a way of jubilee, a way which renounced xenophobia toward those outside Israel and oppression of those inside. This is the context, I suggest, within which we should understand the material we call the Sermon on the Mount. It is not simply a grand new moral code. It is, primarily, the challenge of the kingdom: the summons to Israel to be Israel indeed at the critical junction of her history, the moment when, in the kindom announcemnt of Jesus, the living God is at work to reconstitute his people and so fulfill his long-cherished intentions for them and for the whole world.

Wright also has an intriguing interpretation of Jesus' judgment talk:

Many have traditionally read Jesus' saying about judgment either in terms of the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world. The first-century context of the language in qustion, however, indicates otherwise. Jesus was warning his contemporaries that if they did not follow his way, the way of peace and forgiveness, the way of the cross, the way of being the light of the world, and if they persisted in their determination to fight a desperate holy war against Rome, then Rome would destroy them, city, temple, and all, and that this would be, not an unhappy accident showing that YHWH had simply forgotten to defend them, but the sign and the means of YHWH's judgment against his rebellious people.

From my admittedly limited knowledge of these things, that does seem like a more Jewish way of looking at it than the usual otherworldly interpretations. I am having trouble seeing, though, how being "the light of the world" can be something other than an ethical and religious thing. Wright never explains what that phrase means (assuming we already know, I guess), but my impression from the OT is that it's Israel's worship of Yahweh (religion) and following the law (ethics) that makes it the light of the world. It also seems to me that opposing xenophobia and oppression is an ethical position. It may have been extra important at that particular moment, but has there been any time when those things are OK?

2003-06-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

Heavy meta

Telford's already moved onto chapters 3 and 4, which I'll get to tomorrow. In the meantime, I like his post responding to the comments from the Catholic peanut gallery about our discussion. This has got to be one of those cases of infinite blog-regress: Telford and I write a commentary on a book, which brings a commentary over the commentary, with further comments on the commentary on the commentary ...

2003-06-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

The space between

Telford remarked in his comment on my chapter 1 post that he was "interested in how you view N.T. Wright's appeal to his historical method as 'scientific'. Does Wright share your respect for leaving room for strangeness?"

I didn't discuss Wright's historical method in my own post on chapter 2, but Telford outlined it in his:

Wright's project is first to see whether the data of history support a picture of Jesus with coherence, explanatory power, and predictive power. These are the confirming tests of scientific adequacy. Here science is operating in its proper sense (not in the materialistic or naturalistic senses that have gained ascendency in our materialistic, naturalistic scientific culture). For Wright, every event of Jesus' life, including his resurrection, is open to scientific inquiry precisely because truly scientific historiography refuses to draw boundaries in advance for what counts as evidence (22).

I agree it sounds good, though I'm holding off until I see how it's applied. I have little experience with the scientific method applied to history, so it's largely theoretical to me at this point.

Telford also makes an interesting point:

Wright is forthright that he is intuiting and proposing pictures informed by his faith – and for that matter his Englishness, his schooling, his gender, and all the rest. The test is how well the picture serves, not where the picture came from. After all, no scientist I know is troubled by the fact that the discovery of benzene's chemical structure originated in someone's dream of a snake biting its own tail, or that the Big Bang theory came from a Catholic priest who didn't buy Aristotle's conviction of the constancy of the physical universe. Why should we be dismayed, or even surprised, if belief turns out to be a helpful source of intuition?

This is somewhat tangential, but it reminds me of the story behind the naming of dinosaurs. Richard Owen came up with the name in 1842, after a few species had been found and their similarities noted. (Later when more fossils turned up, scientists divided them into two separate orders -- saurischia and ornithischia -- so "dinosaur" is no longer a scientific name.)

Although it was a couple decades before Darwin's Origin of Species came out, there were already arguments about evolution. Contrary to popular belief, Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution; the idea that species change into other species had been around for a while, but how it worked and why remained puzzling until Darwin came up with natural selection. Especially popular before Darwin was the idea that all species could be lined up from "lowest" to "highest," with every animal of the past and present on the chain somewhere. The idea of the branching tree of life hadn't taken hold. (Actually, the "great chain" concept goes on after Darwin -- unfortunately, it's often turned up in Star Trek.) So the popular idea was that all reptiles were below all mammals on the chain. Which makes a certain amount of sense, given the reptiles that live today.

The story goes that Richard Owen, who was an anti-evolutionist, wasn't buying for a minute that the gigantic, complex dinosaurs could have somehow evolved into the primitive mammals of the Eocene. The name "dinosaur" is translated "terrible lizard," but the word "terrible" had a different implication 150 years ago than it does today. Now we tend to use it to mean "lousy," but back then it meant something more like "inspiring terror, awesome." (Think, "I am Oz, the great and terrible...") By naming dinosaurs that, Owen was apparently emphasizing their impressiveness, and digging his elbow into the idea that these were lowly beasts.

What this story tells me, all this time later, is the danger of polarized thinking. Owen was wrong, overall, about evolution, but he was right about this point. No animal alive today evolved from the giant dinosaurs he was looking at. The evolutionists of the time were right about the concept but wrong about the details. If you're trying to assess which side was right, the answer is complicated.

It's something to keep in mind as I'm reading a book representing the "liberal" and "conservative" views of Jesus. The subtitle of the book is "Two Views," and it is indeed that -- two views. I doubt they're the only two views, and I doubt either one of them has a lock on the truth.

2003-06-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

Marry me, marry me, marry me

Eve Tushnet, Ginger Stampley and Fr. Jim Tucker have lately been decrying the concept of a big, extravagant wedding. I tend to agree with all their points, though one thing that biases me is that my family seems to have a tradition of cheap weddings.

My mother's parents eloped, actually (her family disapproved, I think) so there wasn't much of a wedding at all. My parents married in the back yard of my grandparents' house, my mother wearing a short white slipdress that she'd made herself. They were both still in school, so there wasn't much time or energy or money to spare. My father married his second wife on the deck of his cottage. I remember my stepmother's story about the day: she got up and went off to get her hair done, and came back to find my father in his jeans, unshaven, laying carpet. When she told me this years later, she was still a little annoyed.

"Well, it was better than sitting around being nervous," my father objected. "I was ready at the appointed hour. And the carpet was down."

The fanciest wedding in my immediate family was when my sister got married, nine years ago. She continued the family tradition of marrying al fresco, in a live-oak grove in West Marin (hey, we're unchurched, so it makes sense). But she made herself a fancier dress and they rented out a women's club to throw a reception. Still, it was kind of a shoestring affair. I remember going to the grove for the rehearsal, thinking I was just tagging along, when my sister pointed out a spot next to where she and the groom were standing.

"You stand there."

"What?"

"You're the maid of honor."

"Oh. I am?"

Well it was a good thing I found out before the wedding!

What was really cool about it, though, was that many of the gifts that friends provided were contributions to the wedding itself. One friend got herself a license to actually perform the ceremony; another pair with good voices sang them up the aisle (seeing as you can't haul an organ into a grove); another did the cooking, and so on. This was apparently done by the woman in the article that started this discussion, and it was great not just because it saved money but because it added to the communal feel of the event. A lot of weddings seem like a show that the bride and groom put on that everybody shows up to watch, like a movie; but this felt more like a gathering of a community to launch a marriage. It also felt a lot more intimate that nobody there was a stranger. I haven't given much thought to what I'd want my own wedding to be like, but I think I'd like it to be like that.

2003-06-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

Been down so long

Wow, yesterday was a great advertisement for Movable Type, wasn't it? Blogger went down for maintenance, Haloscan went down for maintenance, and my enetation comments flickered in and out. It looks like I will be able to move to MT, but there are some arrangements that need to be worked out. More on that later.

Also later, more on chapter 2 of the Jesus book, now that I've read Telford's piece on it. But my day job calls ...

2003-06-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

Chapter 2: To know you is to love you

N.T. Wright starts the second chapter of The Meaning of Jesus by criticizing the attitude that he was brought up with, that faith and history are separate and often hostile camps. He approves of historians' quest for evidence on Jesus and his world, but complains there is too often a "hermeneutic of suspicion":

If two ancient writers agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. If they seem to disagree, that proves that one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer's theological scheme, that writer invented it. If there are two accounts of similar events, they are a "doublet" (there was only one event); but if a single account has anything odd about it, there must have been two events, which are now conflated. And so on. Anything to show how clever we are, how subtle, to have smoked out the reality behind the text.

This seems to be a phenomenon that afflicts most quarters of academia. You can see how constantly digging out new "hidden meanings" of things can keep the publication opportunities flowing. (I am reminded of some postmodernist scholar, I forget her name now, who claimed to have discovered the fact that a Jane Austen character was masturbating.)

This reminds me of my previous brush with Bible scholarship, Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? It would be more accurately called Who Wrote the Torah?, because it actually dealt with just the Pentateuch and a couple other OT books. The book laid out the "documentary hypothesis" that the Torah was actually the work of four different authors whose narratives were stitched together later. That seemed quite plausible, and in fact I find the Bible a lot easier to read with that in mind, what with the strange repetitions and shifts in tone. But in order to figure out who those authors were, why they wrote why they did and why they were strung together the way they were, Friedman essentially saw a kind of current-events commentary buried in the texts. If one text seemed to favor Moses and another Aaron, this was really reflecting conflicts between the two tribes that claimed descent from them many centuries later. Any text that prophesized something that actually happened was assumed to have been written after the fact.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, because people certainly do propagandize their histories. But to my mind, it creates a hypothesis that's unproven and unprovable. It really based on a psychological assumption: the only thing that really motivates people is politics.

Wright complains of similar assumptions in historical-Jesus scholarship: they assume that most of the NT material was essentially propaganda of the early church. This may be true, but scholars often seem to take it as a starting point rather than a possible conclusion:

This ... is often done, particularly by those still wedded to an older liberal picture of "Jesus the teacher" who ... would be shocked to think of himself as, for instance, messiah. I do not know in advance, more specifically, that a considerable gulf exists between Jesus as he was (the "pre-Easter Jesus"...) and Jesus as the church came to know him and speak of him (the "post-Easter Jesus"). We might eventually wish to reach some such conclusion; we cannot build it into our historical method.

Wright then moves on to the role of faith in all this. Along the way, he makes a point very similar to the one I made here about the nature of knowledge:

(Faith in God) is not just "belief." It is natural to say "I believe it's raining" when indoors with the curtains shut, but it would be odd to say it, except in irony, standing on a hillside in a downpour. For many Christians much of the time, knowing Jesus is more like the latter: being drenched in his love and the challenge of his call, not merely imagining we hear him like raindrops on a distant windowpane. (For many, of course, the latter is the norm; hinting, promising, inviting.)

But what does it mean to "know" someone? Humans being what they are, this is a great mystery. It is clearly different from knowing about them. When we "know" a person (as opposed to, say, knowing the height of the Eiffel Tower), we imply some kind of relationship, some mutual understanding. We are used to each other; we can anticipate how the other will react; we accurately assess their wishes, hopes, and fears. We could perhaps have arrived at the basic facts by careful detached study, but when we say we "know" someone, we assume that this knowledge is the result of a face-to-face encounter.

Exactly. These are the two different kinds of knowledge I was talking about. And even though Wright would prefer that history-knowledge and faith-knowledge be intermingled, he recognizes the difference between them. If Christian faith is a relationship, you cannot have a relationship with someone you only know secondhand.

2003-06-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

I'm getting there ... eventually ...

I decided not to write a response to Telford's reaction to chapter 1 of the Jesus book, since I didn't feel I had anything helpful to say about these academic disputes. But Lynn Gazis-Sax has jumped in with a good series of posts, first a general statement on the historical accuracy of the Bible, and then part one and part two of a more specific response to Telford's and my posts. Quite impressive for someone who hasn't even read the book!

I'm going to post on chapter 2 later today. Telford has already done so but, in keeping with the original deal, I haven't read it yet.

2003-06-07T10:44:00.000-07:00

Blogspotters unite!

Around the end of last year, I was getting so fed up with Blogger that I half-seriously made a New Year's resolution to move to Movable Type. Obviously, I didn't follow through on that, because I gathered that Movable Type a) costs money and b) requires technical expertise that I don't have, at least to start it up.

Well, a recent development may address both of these concerns. Dean Esmay has gotten so fed up with the defective links and comments on his favorite Blogspot sites that he's offered to move people to MT for free. He's moved nine people in the last three days. The movers still have to pay $15 for the domain and $5 a month for the hosting fee, but Dean's services are free.

In the comments, Tony of Trojan Horseshoes has a suggestion for making it even cheaper:

I know that one MT installation can support multiple Blogs. Some people may even want to go in together, which would lower the costs even more, and make you need to do fewer installs.

They would have to share a domain name though, but could have a unique first part of the domain name.

This is how Dodd has Blogfodder setup. Multiple blogs all on one MT install, and each of us has a different url, in the format of .blogfodder.com.

Since I'm painfully in debt right now (just had to get a new cooling system on my car -- yeesh), I find this idea very appealing. I know I've seen other Blogspotters I read grumbling a lot lately, especially those with comments. I'm thinking of something like this: if I get, say, two other people to share the domain, I could pay under my name and they could each send me $15 to cover their share of the start-up plus the first six months of hosting. If they want to stay on after that they can send $10 for another six months. Something like that, but it's negotiable.

Is anybody interested? Just think -- working archives, functioning permalinks, comments that don't disappear! Woohoo!

2003-06-06T19:09:00.000-07:00

Hating for fun and profit

Charles Murtaugh says some uninvited guests showed up at Harvard's graduation:

On one side of the street was a group of about ten people (including three or four little kids) carrying anti-gay signs, and on the other a larger group of counterprotesters with signs reading "No Hate in Cambridge" and the like. At first I thought it was business as usual, but a closer look at the first group revealed that these weren't your ordinary rightwing protesters.

First, their signs had bright day-glo color schemes, and the language was almost self-parodic, e.g. "God Hates Fags," "No Dyke Weddings," and, over a photo of Alan Dershowitz, "Fag Alan." Second, they were apparently not a one-issue interest group: one sign, in bright rainbow letters, read "Thank God for Sept. 11," and another said something like, "God Destroyed the WTC." Two of the picketers were dragging American flags behind them, so that their compatriots could tread on them.

Apparently this production comes courtesy of legendary hatemonger Fred Phelps (much as I dislike Michael Moore, the episode of his short-lived "Awful Truth" show when he counter-picketed Phelps with a busload of drag queens and leatherboys was absolutely wonderful), who has recently targeted graduation ceremonies to host his little publicity stunts. I knew he didn't like gays, but the anti-Americanism was new to me. Who does he expect to win over, anyway? Honestly, between the bizarrely cheerful signs and the over-the-top rhetoric, I thought I might be witnessing a staged event for a "Trigger Happy TV"-type show. I waited for a bunch of giant rabbits to come out and pummel the picketers, but they were sadly not forthcoming. The other possibility that ran through my head is that Phelps himself is some sort of sleeper agent for People for the American Way.

Actually, the reportage on Phelps reveals that he hates just about everything. The anti-gay thing is just the most publicized of his hates, and one of the newer ones. By the time he started doing that in the 1980s, he'd already pissed off enough people that the Southern Baptists tried to throw him out of his church, the ABA disbarred him, and three of his children left him, telling frightening stories of abuse. In his hometown of Topeka he's known for sending abusive letters to local officials, accusing them of weird sex acts. In other words, he's a complete fruitcake.

He also doesn't particularly care about winning people over. His congregation basically consists of his own large family intermarried with a few other clans. He's one of those tiny-remnant guys -- the more he's hated, the more righteous he thinks he is. And on his own website, which I will not link to, he responds to the point Charles makes by saying, "Who cares?" Really, Phelps would be an irrelevant figure if he did not live in the media age. He knows how to be in the right places and say such offensive things that he's made himself a public figure despite his lack of a following.

I've said here before that I doubt that anyone is all evil, but in Phelps the good qualities are hard to spot. But in a way I hope he gets to heaven. I think he'll be in for a shock when he sees who else is there.

2003-06-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday ...

... to my favorite brother-in-law! OK, so I only have one, but even if I had more he'd probably still be my favorite. The only trouble is, I can never remember exactly what day the birthday is -- the sixth? the eighth? So pardon me if I'm off. But anyway, I know you read the blog, so I hope you have a good time whatever day it is. Your present will probably be late, but it'll get there soon ...

2003-06-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

Hit the pause button

You know how I said back here that I hadn't had a good cry yet? Well, I went on not having one, until last night. Whatever the reason, it came out. I'm still a little wobbly today, so I'm not up for a real post.

The historical-Jesus discussion is generating some interest, so I hope to continue that in a day or two. Tom over at Disputations has a comment on the subject, which was picked up by Mark Shea and his bevy of commenters. (Scroll down to the post titled "Proposition" -- republish your archives, Mark!)

T.S. O'Rama also emailed me a quote from Flannery O'Connor:

It's in the nature of the Church to survive all crises - in however battered a fashion...Everything has to operate first on the literal level...I suppose what bothers us so much about writing about the return of modern people to a sense of the Holy Spirit is that the religious sense seems to be bred out of them in the kind of society we've lived in since the eighteenth century. And it's bred out of them double quick now by the religious substitutes for religion. There's nowhere to latch on to, in the characters or the audience. If there were in the public just a slight sense of ordinary theology (much less crisis theology), if they only believed at least that God has the power to do certain things. THere is no sense of the power of God that could produce the Incarnation and the Resurrection. They are all so busy explaining away the virgin birth and such things, reducing everything to human proportions that in time they lose even the sense of the human itself, what they were aiming to reduce everything to.

2003-06-04T18:20:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1: In search of the protoplasmic Jesus

I mentioned a couple days ago that Telford and I are blogging through a book about the historical Jesus, and today is the maiden launch, so to speak. This will be a more structured than previous discussions, which had a way of getting out of control (mostly because of me, alas). The deal is: we each read a chapter, post about it without looking at each other's blogs, and then make a single response to each post. Telford's responses, I assume, will be in my comments, but since Clutter has no comments I'll have to respond to him here.

Anyway, the book consists of alternating chapters by two scholars: Marcus Borg, a member of the controversially liberal Jesus Seminar, and N.T. Wright, a traditionalist. The first chapter is Borg's.

Borg lays out the backdrop of his viewpoint. He is a believer, but he takes some of the Gospels' events to be historical and some to be metaphorical. His view of the evidence is that the earliest NT author was Paul; the earliest of the Gospels was Mark, which dated to about 70 C.E.; Matthew and Luke, from slightly later, both drew on a source document, a list of sayings, called Q; and the Gospel of John was later still, and largely metaphorical.

All this I've heard before, it being a pretty common view among Bible scholars. He does make an interesting claim that I hadn't seen before, which is that we should make a distinction between the incarnated Jesus who walked, talked and died 2000 years ago (or the "protoplasmic Jesus") and the "living Jesus," the divine being who rose up and lives today. He says that growing up he blurred them together, but he now sees this as a mistake:

But note what happened: I lost the historical Jesus as a credible huan being. A person who knows himself to be the divinely begotten Son of God (and even the second person of the Trinity) and who has divine knowledge and power is not a real human being. Because he is more than human, he is not fully human ... When we emphasize his divinity at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being he was.

Less obvious but equally important, I also lost the living risen Christ as a figure of the present. Because I had uncritically identified the divine Jesus with the human Jesus, Jesus as a divine figure became a figure of the past. He was here for a while, but not anymore. For thirty years, more or less, Jesus a divine being walked the earth. The, after he had been raised from the dead, he ascended into heaven, where he is now at the right hand of God. He will come again someday -- but in the meantime, he is not here. Jesus had become for me a divine figure of the past, not a figure of the present.

I know what he means. I've had problems with both of those things myself. This is the ancient argument about how much Jesus was human and how much divine, and how to reconcile the two. In another book Telford loaned me a few months ago, the author went through various theories on this and finally settled on, "Jesus was fully divine and fully human." Which seemed to work for him, but to me it's about as helpful as pointing out that the mome raths outgrabe. It's a grammatical sentence, but that doesn't mean it makes sense.

Later, Borg also writes about the worldview he comes from:

Modernity is dominated by a secular worldview. This image of reality began to emerge in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the birth of modern science. Sometimes called the Newtonian worldview or simply the modern worldview, it sees what is real as the world of matter and energy, space and time; and it sees the universe as a closed system of cause and effect, operating in accord with natural laws ...

Like all worldviews, it functions in our minds almost unconsciously, affecting what we think possible and what we pay attention to. It is especially corrosive of religion. It reduces reality to the spactime world of matter and energy, thereby making the notion of God problematic and doubtful. It reduces truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable facts.

This worldview is also the one from which I come, though I don't know that I see it quite the way that he does. In my earlier series of posts about the historicity of Jesus I remarked that when I speak of a "scientific" way of looking at things it's not primarily based on the idea that the universe is governed by natural laws. That's part of it, but it's not the most important part to me, and it's not reason, to my mind, to categorically rule out God. This is partly because I don't, in fact, necessarily, see spiritual truth as coming down to historically reliable facts; in fact, I went in to this sort of assuming that Christianity was not in that realm, but Telford keeps insisting that it is.

But probably the larger reason is that, while it's true that the general scientific mindset is rooted in the Enlightenment, the universe that science shows me today looks very different from the cozy clocklike world of the eighteenth century. As you go out into the farthest reaches of space or the minuscule realm of molecular physics, things get very strange indeed, and often mysterious. The shift from Newtonian physics to relativity theory is probably the most famous example: the model went from something sensible and mechanical to something counterintuitive and bizarre.

That example points up the basic reason behind this: the laws of nature were not handed down to people like the Ten Commandments to Moses. They're things we have to deduce for ourselves, by observation. And as our observations expand and change, so does our understanding of the rules.

I can't help thinking of the Infinite Improbability Drive in Douglas Adams sci-fi satire The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Whenever it was turned on, bizarre things would happen -- whales and bowls of petunias appearing in deep space, for instance. When one character protests that's impossible, he gets the answer, "No, it's just highly improbable."

So anyway, I think one of the features of a scientific mindset is to give the cosmos room to be strange, and to surprise me.

2003-06-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

Entertainment value

So Tom started the game of captioning these pictures, the other Tom picked it up, and now I must make my contribution:

1. "While you're down there, could you look around for my contact lens?"

2. "So... tell me again why you're drawing a picture of Saddam Hussein?"

3. "You know, I understand every tongue of every nation, but I still don't get postmodern writing."

4. "Actually, that inflatable organ sounds pretty good."

UPDATE: The KairosGuy has more.

2003-06-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

Let love rule

I thought I had a sweet church story yesterday, but this takes the cake.

(Via Making Light.)

2003-06-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

Neighbors

Christian Assembly has grown a lot in the last few years, and one effect of this is parking chaos. The lot is too small and involves some hairpin turns, and on Sunday morning it threatens to turn into a free-for-all. So there's an attendant, a man I know only by his name-tag -- Chris -- who directs everybody to the right spot when they drive in.

A couple months ago Chris started pestering me about my brakelight. One of them had apparently burnt out. So almost every time he saw me, he would tell me to get it fixed -- or if he didn't see the car, ask me if I'd fixed it.

I got pretty annoyed about this. Like most women, I don't really understand cars, and the prospect of getting anything fixed means taking it to the shop and putting myself in the care of mechanics who have an interest in parting me from my money, which I don't have much of these days. Worse, earlier this year I got sideswiped, and I figured if I took the car in they'd try to get me to repair the body damage and part me from even more money. It was one of those things I knew I had to deal with sometime, but it was low on the priority list. So I wished Chris would just leave me alone.

Yesterday morning I showed up for the 9 a.m. service, parked, and walked past Chris. He greated me, but mercifully didn't ask about my brake light.

After the service I hung around late to talk to Telford, and so when I went back to my car I was almost the only person in the lot. I climbed inside and put my key in the ignition, when suddenly I saw Chris outside my window, looking at me.

Reluctantly, I rolled down the window.

"Look," he said, "if you'll buy a bulb for your tail-light, I'll put it in for you."

I said nothing. I wasn't expecting this.

"Because it really worries me to see somebody with a tail-light broken," he went on. "If you put on your turn signal, no one can see it. So if you go to the Auto Zone down there and get a bulb, will you let me put it in?"

"You'll do that?" I said finally.

"Yeah," he said. "I just have to take the bulb out so we can see what kind it is."

I opened the trunk and he pulled off the panel to uncover the bulbs. Looking at it, I could see how simple the setup was. Hell, I could have done it, if I'd known.

I went off to the store to buy a matching set of bulbs. On the way over, I thought about what he said about the turn signal. Suddenly it hit me: That's why I got sideswiped. It had happened when I'd been trying to turn right. I was signaling, but the other car had scraped past me. Maybe the right signal light was already out.

I took the new bulbs back and sat in the car, stepping on the brake, while he worked in the back. After he'd fixed the right side, he reappeared at the door with another bulb in his hand.

"Can I have the other one?" he asked.

"You're replacing both of them?"

"Yeah. I just saw that your other brake light is burned out too."

He finished up, and I shook his hand and thanked him emphatically, and drove off.

It's a fine line between being helpful and being intrusive. The people who wax nostalgic about the close community ties of a small town, and those who remember the gossiping, nosy neighbors, are seeing two sides of the same phenomenon. And the church, like a village within a big city, has the same dynamics. I've always been very protective of the boundaries around myself, and I don't expect people to understand me, so I don't like strangers telling me what to do. But I suppose that sometimes when somebody says they just want to help, they really do just want to help. I have Chris' little selfless act to remind me of that.

2003-05-31T17:55:00.000-07:00

From the big house to the bigger house

Thanks to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for her comments to the previous post -- especially since I agree with her last one 100%! When I wrote about how I thought that leftists and evangelical Christians can talk to each other if they tone down the rhetoric, it reminded me of a good example of this I read about recently, concerning efforts to stop prison rape. I meant to blog this at the time, but for some reason I didn't, but hey, here's my segue.

I was very gratified to read the story, because prison rape is something that's really disturbed me for a long time. The jokes nauseate me. But it was one of those things that got lost in the polarization of the culture wars. Thanks to the threefold increase in crime in the '60s and '70s, plus a backlash against extensions of the rights of the accused, I've spent just about all of my politically conscious life with nearly all politicians wanting to be tough on crime. Worrying about prison conditions was something only far leftists did.

But Christianity is the wild card here. Prison ministry, of course, is a Christian tradition all the way back to St. Paul, and many Christians like our own Peter Nixon still do it and get to know prisoners as human beings. But perhaps an even more relevant phenomenon is how many Christians actually used to be in prison. There are quite a few ex-convicts at Christian Assembly, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its general moral strictness. Even though they now regard criminal behavior as sinful, you can't have gone through the criminal-justice system from the defendant's point of view and maintain a cavalier attitude about those still inside. And what with the sheer number of people who've been locked up over the last 30 years, ex-cons are likely to go on being a significant part of church communities.

The fact that prisoner rights is no longer strictly a left-right issue gives me hope not only for domestic prisoners but for the sort of war-prisoner shennanigans I wrote about in the last post. It's harder for American Christians to identify with the terrorist suspects, because they're foreign, accused of very serious crimes, and, of course, are Muslim. But the prison-rape article suggests that conservative Christians understand that you can lobby for prisoners without being in favor of crime, which is a good start.

Speaking of constructive engagement with Christians, I recently checked out the book The Meaning of Jesus, which Telford has been on my case for a long time to read, and we're going to blog our way through it. I'm not sure how exactly this is going to work, but watch this space.

2003-05-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

In defense of Godwin's Law

I don't like to get into political debates on this blog -- the religious debates are taxing enough. But I can't get this post from Teresa Nielsen Hayden out of my mind. She links to an article from an Australian paper saying that the U.S. military is planning to try the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay through some sort of military tribunals and, if need be, execute them in situ. The paper headlines this story, "U.S. Plans Death Camp."

Teresa says, "If this story is accurate, we're going to have to repeal Godwin's Law." Meaning the informal Internet rule that you lose an argument once you compare your opponents to Nazis. Not surprisingly, this set off a long argument in her comments section about whether "death camp" is really an appropriate term, whether Nazi analogies are apt, and whether this story is accurate at all, since the paper it comes from is apparently not that reliable.

Looking back over history, I don't know if there's ever been a war where there haven't been some dubious things done to "suspicious persons." During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and locked a lot of them up without trial for the duration. During WWI, sedition laws convicted some people just for handing out protest flyers. During WWII, of course, there were the internment camps. During the Cold War... well, you know. It points up the depressing fact that the liberal theory of criminal justice, which assumes that it's better to let some guilty people go than to punish the innocent, is irrevocably opposed to the mindset of war, which takes the exact opposite viewpoint.

The encouraging part of this, though, is that the historical examples show that the slope isn't nearly as slippery as a lot of people are afraid it is. All these things that I described were later reversed and repudiated, and they did not signal the beginning of a policy of general oppression of citizens. In fact, all of them happened in a period of expansion in people's understanding of constitutional rights. Sedition laws, for instance, had long been accepted as congruent with the First Amendment, but by now we just assume that ain't so.

I don't say this to argue for complacency -- in fact, quite the opposite. What bothers me about running straight to the Nazi analogy, without considering the more applicable analogies, is that it not only paints the government with ultimate evil but with ultimate power. You can see that happening among some of the commenters on Teresa's post, spinning theories about how Bush is going to throw the election in 2004 and turn America into a police state. One even seems to think the only way out of it is a violent coup. No wonder some of them are talking about fleeing to other countries.

I sympathize more now with Marc Cooper's complaint after hearing too much of this from his fellow lefties. It not only makes them depressing conversationalists, it also makes them pretty useless as opposition. The people who have done the most to stop government abuses of power have worked within the system, at the quotidian business of politics, law and media. They did not do it by giving up on American society and thinking they were ruled by Satan. Moreover, painting Bush as a Nazi isn't going to get you anywhere with people whose subjective impression of him might be more positive, or people who are justifiably afraid of terrorists. Really, we can't know what's going on in Bush's heart, or what secrets he might be keeping. What we do know is when there are policies that we oppose.

As alarming as it is to think of the government abusing its power, it's even more alarming to think of the opposition whose job it is to stop these things immolating itself in paranoia and defeatism. The left's spiritual forebears faced down power without skipping the country or plotting coups, so there's really no excuse for doing otherwise now.

2003-05-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

Around the 'sphere

Somehow my energy is not very blog-directed today, so I'll avoid having to come up with original material by pointing to some good stuff elsewhere:

Lynn Gazis-Sax on teen sex, here and here.

An essay on the origin of Gidget (via L.A. Observed).

A study on jealousy and gender.

Peter Nixon on a cardinal's harsh words.

The Washington Monthly on the purgatory that is modern dating. I especially identified with this part:

Take, for example, this star-crossed couple who poured out their story of dueling social semiotics to a women's magazine a few years ago. Both sides agree that he invited her out on a dinner date, and that they had a wonderful time until the bill was presented. "When the dinner check came, I took it," explained 32-year-old Charlie. "But Susie reached for her wallet. 'Can I help pay?' she asked. My heart sank. I was sure she didn't like me. I figure if a woman wants to split the check, she's telling you that she wants to be friends. After that, the evening ended kind of awkwardly. I didn't know if I should kiss her or anything, so I kind of hastily said good-night."

Susie, 28, told the reporter that she saw the encounter very differently. "I offered to split the check because I didn't want him to feel obliged to pay for me. I figure if he had really liked me, in a girlfriend/boyfriend way, he wouldn't have taken my money--not on the first date, anyway. And I guess I was right: he didn't try to kiss me or say anything about another date."

Yeah, this is why the check is the part of a date that I most dread. There is no good way to deal with it any more.

2003-05-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

News from Academe

My mother, a university professor, sent me a call-for-papers that she found relevant:

Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs
ABSTRACTS DUE JUNE 30, 2003

Ed. by the University of Minnesota Blog Collective
Smiljana Antonijevic, Laura Gurak, Laurie Johnson, Jim Oliver, Clancy
Ratliff, Jessica Reyman, Sathya Yesuraja

The editors invite submissions for a new online edited collection
exploring discursive, visual, and other communicative features of weblogs. We are interested in submissions that analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and the weblog community. Although we are open to a wide range of scholarly approaches, our primary interest is in essays that comment upon specific features of the weblog and that treat the weblog as always a part of a larger community network.
Categories around which essays may cohere include:
--Social and Psychological Perspectives
--Visual Features, including Interface Design and Navigation
--Rhetorical and Linguistic Features of Weblog Discourse
--Pedagogical Implications
--Intellectual Property
--Race, Class, and Gender
--Intercultural Communication
Because blogs, like the Internet, have a global reach, we encourage an international scope as well.

Along with this being the first scholarly collection of its type focused on weblog as rhetorical artifact, we are also taking an innovative
approach to publishing and intellectual property. Weblogs represent the power of regular people to use the Internet for publishing. The ethos of blogging is collaborative and values the sharing of ideas; bloggers are not dependent on publishers to get their words out. In the same manner, the editors of this collection will publish the collection online. We will use a peer-review process to ensure scholarly quality. But like a weblog, the collection will be available to all, although authors will retain their own copyrights. We intend to obtain a version of a Creative Commons license.

The members of the collective welcome the opportunity to discuss the scope of the collection or directions for essays with prospective authors. We may be contacted at collection@intotheblogosphere.org.

I'm not turning up a page at that address, but it could be interesting. I just hope they don't blog in the same academic-speak that the email is in. (I suppose they might have tailored the message's language to academics.)

On another note, she also sent me this:

CFP: The Slayage Conference on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Nashville, Tennessee, May 28-30, 2004

David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox, coeditors of Fighting the
Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Slayage:
The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, solicit your
proposal for the Slayage Conference on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
sponsored by Middle Tennessee State University. Visit the in-
development conference website at
http://www.slayage.tv/conference/. We welcome a 250-word
proposal or a completed paper on any aspect of BtVS or Angel from
the perspective of any discipline--literature, history,
communications, film and television studies, women's studies,
religion, philosophy, linguistics, music, cultural studies, and others.
We invite discussion of the text, the social context, the audience,
the producers, the production, and more. For a lengthy but not
exhaustive list of possible topics, go here:
http://www.slayage.tv/conference/callforpapers.htm#topics and/or
examine the in-development Encyclopedia of Buffy Studies at
http://www.slayage.tv/EBS/. All proposals/essays must exhibit
strong familiarity with already published scholarship--in Fighting the
Forces, in Reading the Vampire Slayer, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and Philosophy, in Slayage, etc.

Now, in this case I am finding a website. I have a feeling that actually reading the articles would cause some sort of brain damage but the titles are certainly entertaining:

Dissing the Age of Moo: Initiatives, Alternatives, and Rationality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Teen Witches, Wiccans, and “Wanna-Blessed-Be’s”: Pop-Culture Magic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Surpassing the Love of Vampires: Or Why (and How) We are Denied a Queer Reading of Buffy/Willow

"I'm Buffy and You're . . . History”: The Postmodern Politics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Oh, I should make some witty remark. But I'm sure you'll think of your own.

2003-05-27T19:11:00.000-07:00

The whole truth

Today I somewhat rashly jumped into a discussion provoked by this Josh Claybourn post:

What religion does not believe that all other religions are wrong? Even Unitarianism, which essentially combines many faiths, believes all other religions are wrong. After all, since other religions believe theirs is the only way, than each religion, as well as atheism, must believe that something is wrong in all religions. They're mutually exclusive. So why single evangelicals out? If it's because of the "vituperation," that too is unfair since Islam carries much more of it than most evangelicals do.

He has a point -- certainly everybody has fundamental beliefs that they believe everybody who disagrees is wrong about. But as I (and others) tried to explain in the comments, there's some variation depending on what you mean by "religion" and what you mean by "wrong."

On the latter point, I referred to a conversation I had with Telford after I blogged Acts 17 and wondered, "To what extent did/does God communicate with people outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition?" According to Telford, the idea that God really didn't do anything in the world outside of what's recorded in the Bible doesn't square with what early Christians and Jews believed. The popular concept of a "high god" even in polytheist traditions may be the Holy Spirit at work. In this line of thinking, pagan knowledge is on the right track but is incomplete.

Many liberal Christians take the idea farther, seeing God as working different ways in the world but tailoring his message to different people in different circumstances. Mahatma Gandhi also essentially believed this, as does the Baha'i faith, a remarkable 19th-century offshoot of Islam:

Bahá'u'lláh taught that there is one God Who progressively reveals His will to humanity. Each of the great religions brought by the Messengers of God - Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, Muhammad - represents a successive stage in the spiritual development of civilization. Bahá'u'lláh, the most recent Messenger in this line, has brought teachings that address the moral and spiritual challenges of the modern world.

Of course, in accommodating all these faiths Bahaists and others do think other religionists are wrong if they believe that God was talking only to them. And it also means tossing out certain idiosyncracies of the various faiths. Christians who object that God could not have been saying contradictory things in different places and times might consider their own faith. Christianity is seen as an "evolution" of Judaism -- Jews were right once, but now they're out of date, so we can toss over certain Old Testament rules. By the same token, Muslims see themselves as a further evolution of that line, and Baha'ists yet another step.

So while it's true that different religions disagree, I think there are degrees and types of disagreement. And getting back to Josh's complaint, I think what bothers people about certain Christian assertions of wrongness is how strident and extreme they are. The article he cited quotes Christians teaching how Islam is "a very evil and wicked religion," and calling Muhammad "demon-possessed," which is far different from Paul's diplomatic pitch to the Athenians. It's true that many Muslims are just as bad, but Jesus explicity rejected "he did it first" as an excuse...

2003-05-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

Annika!

One disadvantage to not getting cable channels any more is that I missed Annika Sorenstam's remarkable run last week. Nonetheless, I have opinions about it, and I think Andrew Sullivan makes a good point:

She is also not attempting to deny the obvious: that there are significant differences between men and women. .... But what we have in common as human beings vastly overwhelms what differentiates us as members of one gender or another. Sorenstam is a pioneer in accepting this, and reveling in it. She's not indistinguishable from the men; but she is competitive with them.

This often gets lost in arguments about gender: yes, their averages are different in various ways, but you can't treat everybody like they're the average. Just as women are generally shorter than men but I'm taller than half the men I meet, the physical disadvantage a strong woman has isn't that much greater than a smaller man has compared to a bigger man.

Take a look at the golf statistic where men have the greatest advantage: driving distance. On the men's tour, the average ranges from Hank Kuehne's 315.3 yards to Loren Roberts' 262.1. If you look at the LPGA's list, which Annika unsurprisingly leads, you see 31 players who drive within the same range as the men.

I don't have any big problem with there being separate tours for men and women, but I do think this shows that players who fussed about Annika playing in a men's event were being silly. It does not violate any concept of gender, or of gender difference, to say that the best female golfer in the world can compete against the best male golfers. As one TV commentator remarked, the LPGA is almost too easy for Annika. She dominates that tour even more than Tiger Woods dominates his: she won 13 times last year, vs. Tiger's five wins. There was no reason to think she wasn't good enough for the field, and she certainly showed that she was.

2003-05-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

Elephant's memory

For some reason I had an urge this weekend to go to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I've been there before and it's very cool, but I also seem to be fighting some virus again, and the trip just seemed too strenuous. So I decided to check out the local L.A. zoo, which I've never been to before.

I've always had mixed feelings about zoos. My mother tells me when she was growing up she lived near the D.C. zoo, and it really depressed her. She particularly remember the big cats kept in small cages, pacing and pacing with nowhere to go. I'm pretty much a bleeding heart when it comes to animals -- I don't even like to kill bugs -- so I know what she means.

Fortunately, zoos in general seem to have improved a lot since my mother was a kid. I don't know much about zoo history, but I get the impression the industry's moved from exhibiting animals as a sort of freak-show attraction toward education and preserving endangered species. So while animals in a city zoo like L.A.'s still don't have a lot of space, they seem to be kept with their needs more in mind. Social animals are kept together in groups structured after wild ones, solitary animals are kept apart, and the pen is designed to suit their comfort. The ocelot's domain, which basically consisted of a cliff with a series of ledges and clumps of greenery, looked like a place my own cat would have really enjoyed: lounging on one of the ledges in the sun, pouncing on anything that moved. Looking at the tiger sleeping in a lush clump of grass in the fan-palm grove they'd planted for it next to an artificial waterfall, I thought I wouldn't mind spending the afternoon there myself.

Nonetheless, there were protestors hanging around the front gate, with handmade signs about an elephant. "They ejected Ruby!" said one; "Separating the herd is unethical, unhealthy," said another.

I went back and Googled to see what I could find about this. Apparently Ruby is an African elephant who was sent to a breeding program in Knoxville, and activists are upset because that will separate her from Gita, her companion in L.A. for 17 years. A letter reprinted on Indymedia says:

We all know that elephants have a rich social life. In the wild, elephants work as a community. For example, when the herd is disturbed, it clusters around the matriarch and hides the calves in the middle. The matriarch decides whether to flee or charge. If the matriarch is wounded, the other elephants mill about in a panic. They usually refuse to abandon their leader no matter what.

Elephants in the herd may attempt to raise and support another elephant that has fallen. These remarkable creatures have even been observed carrying dead comrades and burying them under branches.

This is true -- elephants do form very strong social bonds. Then again, so do humans, and we often find ourselves separated from each other. Another article points out that Gita is actually an Asian elephant, and so is from a different species. Interspecies friendships certainly happen -- hey, I still miss my cat -- but you do have to think Gita will probably be better off with another Asian.

A disruption in a relationship is not to be taken lightly; I've certainly had to deal with a lot of it myself lately. But generally, it says something good about the conditions of zoos if this is the sort of thing protestors are getting worked up about these days.

2003-05-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

Naked before God

I've had two Googlers show up in the last two days who were looking for something about "nude full immersion baptism." Is this the latest trend or something?

2003-05-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

Placing your bets

Mark at Minute Particulars provides his own answer to my resurrection question by reposting a piece he wrote last year on the same subject. Apparently, some scholar calculated a 97% probability that the resurrection happened. Mark begged to differ:

Reducing the event of the Resurrection to probability is akin to reducing it to a wager or bet. But anyone who does this either:
a) doesn’t understand the nature of a historical event
b) equivocates when using the word “Resurrection”
c) conflates reason and faith
d) or, commits all of the above

One “believes” in the Resurrection because the event is not simply historical, like Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, but because it is a historical event upon which Creation hinges. Such an event is impervious to reason because:
1) we can’t be there ourselves to witness it
2) we can’t gather evidence about it empirically (e.g. an attempt to find the bones of the historical figure Jesus Christ or some such silliness to disprove it)

On the contrary, we “believe” because this is the only mechanism by which we can have knowledge of the event. And by “believe” I simply mean “a participation in the knowledge of a knower,” to use Josef Pieper’s phrase. With the Resurrection, the first “knowers” are those who knew Christ and testified to his words, actions, and eventual resurrection from the dead. If we could “know” as these followers of Christ “knew,” we wouldn’t need to “believe” because we would have the more certain knowledge of seeing and hearing the Word Made Flesh in the flesh (albeit without the Grace of the Holy Spirit as promised at Pentecost). Hence, Aquinas's famous remark that “Other things being equal, seeing is more certain than hearing.”

To believe in the Resurrection is an eminently reasonable thing to do: not because it is reason exercising its powers to investigate the event, but because it is reason understanding the dynamics of such an event and concluding that we can only come to know it by believing the testimony of another and “participating in the knowledge of a knower.” In fact, as Pieper again points out,

the credibility of the witness whom we believe cannot also be the subject of belief; this is where real knowledge is required . . . if everything is said to be belief, then belief has been eliminated.
What this all boils down to is not a wager or bet, but knowledge of the credibility of witnesses and assent to the content of their testimony.

Thus, Aquinas writes:

Now, whoever believes, assents to someone's words; so that, in every form of belief, the person to whose words assent is given seems to hold the chief place and to be the end as it were; while the things by holding which one assents to that person hold a secondary place. Consequently he that holds the Christian faith aright assents, by his will, to Christ, in those things which truly belong to His doctrine.

I must admit this is making my head swim (not the first time an MP post had that effect on me) but I think he's making the same claim Telford does: you believe the witnesses wholly, completely, 100%. My complaint all along has basically been that I don't see how you can do this. It seems to be conferring godlike infallibility upon people of whom my knowledge is second-hand and sketchy.

His post reminds me, however, that I might have misled people when I referred to a "scientific" way of knowing back in this post. The word evokes a lot of different things for people, and I think Peter, for one, took it to mean something akin to "following natural laws." What I really meant, though, was taking a certain humility in one's approach to knowledge: that what we don't know greatly outweighs what we do, and we should be very cautious about saying, "We have enough evidence now that we KNOW what happened, and we don't have to inquire any further." Often, I think, such thinking says more about the limits of our imaginations than it does about reality. I gave the example of a geocentric model of the universe to illustrate how a perfectly reasonable explanation of things can turn out to be wrong when more data comes in. And on the imagination front, I don't think even Aristarchus or Copernicus imagined that not only does the earth orbit the sun, but the sun is one of billions of stars in one of billions of galaxies.

What this does is turn belief from the simple, "Either you believe it's true, or you believe it's false," to something like, "You believe it's probably true, but you recognize you could be wrong." I think that's where probabilistic thinking, which Mark finds so strange in this context, comes to permeate everything. You move from the binary true/false into multiple degrees of certitude.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who responded. As usual, it didn't resolve the problem, but it gave me lots to chew on.

2003-05-22T08:44:00.000-07:00

Just close your eyes, dear

Had a dream this morning that I was in a room I've never been in before with my (in waking life, deceased) cat Ditto. He was heaving like he was going to vomit, but didn't. Woke up with nausea.

Fell asleep again and dreamed I was in the same room with my (in waking life, deceased) friend John. He was helping me make the bed. Woke up with Sarah McLachlan's Possession stuck in my head.

I think the orange juice I had last night was too old. Either that, or the Apocalypse is imminent.

2003-05-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

Turning to dust

Tonight was the end of the line for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I know there must be at least a few others out there who care (cough). That was the last show on TV I was actually watching regularly. Is there anything else out there that's good?

2003-05-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

Clean up the living room, get out the good wine...

...and welcome my blog-sister to the neighborhood. Not that I ever met her, but we have the same blogfather, so we must be siblings...

2003-05-19T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is getting as good as the atonement thing

More feedback has been coming in about the resurrection. Tom of Disputations (correctly identified this time -- see the update to this post) says:

I think she's onto something. The historical fact of the Resurrection can be distinguished from its meaning. Apart from its meaning, I imagine accepting the historical fact is more like hearing of a curiosity, a Ripley's Believe It Or Not entry, than an epochal moment in a till-that-moment non-Christian's life.

For myself, I insist on the historicity of the Resurrection as a corollary to the existence of the Church -- that is, of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, not as a religious and cultural institution. The impersonal follows the personal: "If Christ be not raised," St. Paul wrote, "then our faith is empty." Since I know "personally" our faith is not empty, I know "impersonally" Christ was raised.

(Along the same lines, I consider denying the physical Resurrection to be foolishness for Christians, not apostasy.)

Reader John Hinchcliffe sent an email with a similar theme:

My comments below are some thoughts I've had
on your discussion of believing in the resurrection as an event (or
fact) and believing in it as something to believe in (something you can
stake your life on and trust in). I'm writing from a Catholic point of
view, but I can't guarantee that this is Sound Catholic TheologyTM, only
My Own OpinionTM. Also, none of it is an argument for why you have to
believe the resurrection happened. It's more how I think the
resurrection, and the ongoing christian community, and communion hang together, and why discussion about the resurrection turns into a discussion of trusting other people, especially the church.

Bridging the gap between "an impersonal event (the resurrection)" and
"a personal event (relationship)" is very important.

If you were an ardent Gallic nationalist, living in a Gaul still ruled
by the Roman empire, Caesar's conquest of Gaul would matter to you no
matter how long ago it happened. In that alternative universe, the
actually occuring event of Caesar's conquest would matter to you both as
symbol of hated Roman rule and as the first event in the continuing Roman
rule of today. It seems to me that the church is the main means by
which the good news of Jesus and the resurrection comes into our lives as
personally meaningful - as a Gallic nationalist movement might help to
make alternative-universe-you care about Julius Caesar, dead and turned
to clay.

It seems to me that there are two bad mistakes about the resurrection
I've heard people make: 1) a crudely-literalistic notion that the
resurrection happened, so the mere fact of it happening is enough to
underwrite the whole of Christianity, regardless of how any individual humans react(ed) to it: all impersonal event, no element of relationship. 2) a crudely-liberal notion of the resurrection as purely a symbol of how
the apostles felt better and more hopeful after Jesus' death. And
since the the actual state of Jesus' body is a pure irrelevancy, on this
view, it's all about the apostles and us feeling better about ourselves
and each other: all relationship, no event outside of people's
feelings.

It seems to me that the bridge over this divide is the concept of
sacrament as "a sign that accomplishes what it signifies". (Thus, baptism
actually washes away sins by the symbol of washing with water, and thus
signifies what it does.) The resurrection is sacramental in that it is
a factual reworking of our/the world's relationship with God, and also
a sign of that reworking. This is why it takes the form it does: the
execution of an innocent man with heavy overtones of a sacrifice,
followed by Jesus appearing to his disciples in a glorified form and then
visibly ascending into the sky - it has to appear to be doing what it is
in fact doing.

In the mass the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is re-presented (made
present again), and in communion those who eat and drink his body and
blood become spiritually and, especially, physically close to Jesus.
(Which I think is a point you've made about communion yourself.) The mass
and communion are made possible by the facticity of the resurrection
(which is ongoing, in that Jesus is still raised) and in turn make it
possible for us personally to come into contact with the event and with
him. Thus, the resurrection is an event that makes it possible for us to
care about it.

I think both of these pieces do a good job of elucidating what I've been groping towards. Even if you could "prove" that the resurrection happened in an intellectual way -- something I still severely doubt -- spiritually it feels like trying to swallow dust. So God was here 2000 years ago, so he said he'll come back, but in my own life it leaves me as alone as ever. But with the added burden of trying to follow a new set of rules.

On the other hand, I can also see the problem with the second attitude John describes -- taking the resurrection as a spiritual/emotional event. As I've said here before, it's not enough just to say Jesus was good; you have to also believe he was God, or at least, that God was behind him. Otherwise, he was just another doomed idealist, and following him is likely to doom you too. Still, that doesn't seem to be as big a problem as problem 1). Lots of people continue to follow slain idealists -- witness the influence MLK Jr. continues to have after getting killed. And I suppose you could see God as visiting people without actually raising the physical body of Christ.

None of this helps me much with the big questions, but at least I know I wasn't completely nuts to resist Telford's urging to research the subject. I might do it anyway, just because he feels so strongly about it. Yesterday he remarked, "I wish you were my student, so I could just assign it to you."

Bah! Hulk SMASH puny theology professor! ... Oh sorry.:-)

2003-05-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down / Her kindling buds...

It's been a rough couple of months for Telford: first he has to deal with me losing a friend, then he has to deal with his children losing their hamster. And then he has to deal with a torrent of email about it.

By the way, the Minute Particulars post I referred to is here.

2003-05-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

The May birthday onslaught goes on

A belated H.B. to Mark Kleiman and Matthew Yglesias, two of the leftward blogosphere's brightest lights. The former was born in 1951, the latter in 1981. That second date's kind of scary, isn't it? Reminds me of a line I overheard spoken to one of the youngsters in the newsroom: "I've got unopened mail that's older than you, pal!"

2003-05-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

More on faith and knowing

Lynn Gazis-Sax has a fine post on the resurrection that also touches on another old favorite, substitutional atonement.

2003-05-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Why darling, you look smashing!

I think my mother would appreciate this.

(Via the Telfster, not surprisingly.)

2003-05-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

The peanut gallery speaks

There have been several good comments on the resurrection issue. Tom quotes from the Pope:

In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other hand, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person's capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring.

Well, part of my complaint about studying the history of the resurrection was precisely that it's impersonal. It's not a relationship any more than reading about dinosaurs is a relationship. At most, what we have here is a long, loooong chain of relationships connecting 2003 L.A. to 33 Judea. That chain exists, but it's become so attenuated, and so much else has happened along the way, that it's hard to know what to make of it.

To a certain extent, this seems to be repeating the "power of witness" case I discussed at the end of this post. Essentially, if you love and trust Christians enough, you'll adopt their point of view. But "trust," like "knowledge", is an extremely broad concept. There are Christians I love and trust but I don't sufficiently trust any of them about that. That may sound bad, but I think everybody doles out trust by degrees; we probably all know somebody we'd trust to, say, keep a secret or help us out of a jam, but who we wouldn't necessarily trust to show up at a party on time.

Peter Nixon writes:

I'm not sure I completely agree that the idea of the intrinsic dignity and worth of the human person is something that arises from within ourselves. I guess the lesson I take from human history is that human beings tend to place higher value on those who are of the same family, clan, race, ethnicity, nation, or lingustic group. I think my own experience would lead me to value myself, but it wouldn't necessarily lead me to value others.

Good point. I think what I was trying to say is that if you're trying to make a general observation about human beings, you can simply draw on yourself and humans around you -- it's not the same as trying to piece together a specific event in the past. But it's true that such observation doesn't compel only one conclusion. Obviously.

But you are right, I think, to say that a lot of this comes down to how you come to trust in the truth of things that you can't verify personally. And while a scientific approach makes sense for things that are subject the normal constraints of biology and physics, I'm not sure the resurrection really falls into that category.

Well, that's exactly the problem I was pointing out. I am accustomed to taking a certain approach to evaluating events that I haven't personally experienced; if I don't take that approach, what do I take? Now that I've hashed it out like this, I think the crux of the problem is that I'm being asked to take an impersonal event (the resurrection) and treat it like a personal event (relationship). For me, at least, the way I experience some far-off and uncertain event of the past and the way I experience emotional events in my life are so different that the one really doesn't translate into the other.

My friend Gavin also makes a long comment explaining why Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul is much better attested historically than the resurrection is. I was pulling up Gaul as a hypothetical, not because I know the evidence well enough to say it's comparable (and I think Gavin knew that). But he does support the feeling I had about this already: if you're relying on documents of unclear authorship that were written decades after the event, I don't think you could even make a prima facie case in a court of law. In other words, your probability of proving anything beyond a reasonable doubt is so low it's not even worth hearing. Which I suppose is why my heels are still dug in.

UPDATE: I corrected a link above because I mistakenly identified the Tom who commented as this Tom, when apparently it was this Tom. Sorry. I have three Toms who comment on my blog, so it gets mighty confusing...

2003-05-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

I know what I know, and I'll sing what I've said

After reading my own rather negative response to Peter's valiant attempt to answer my question about the resurrection, I thought I should elaborate a little more on what I'm thinking.

In some sense, I suppose, everything you do in life is a gamble. And my perception of Christianity as a risky move comes partly from the fact that it would mean, for me, moving away from where I am. The Catholic Karen Hall likes to say that she's become more orthodox with age because "I don't want to stake my soul on the fact that I'm smarter than the Pope." For someone who's always been Catholic, the gamble is not being Catholic.

I think this is the point that Telford's been trying to drive into me -- you have to live your life by some theory of the cosmos; you can't remain neutral. Still, I've been bugged by this persistent feeling that there are different ways of knowing things, and they are not all comparable. We're wading into epistemology here, which from a book-learning standpoint I don't know jack about. So I'll just give my personal observations.

There are some things that you know because they're within yourself. Although people's self-observations aren't perfect either, there are some things that are so inherently part of the experience of consciousness itself that you can't not know them. Your sense of who you are, what your thoughts and feelings are, the sensations of your body and so on. (Some Eastern philosophies argue that self is also an illusion, but let's put that aside for the moment.) This means of knowledge is self-centered but it's not entirely about self. You also experience your relationships with other people on this level. There are certain people I say I "carry around in my heart," because they've become part of my experience of being me, whether or not they're physically present. My friend John remains that way even though he's dead.

In the movie Contact, a character defended his belief in God, despite the lack of empirical evidence, by saying, "Do you love your father? Prove it." I realize a movie based on a novel by an atheist isn't the most authoritative source on religious belief, but my own contact with the faithful suggests a lot of them do experience God that way. When Peter compared belief in the resurrection to belief in the dignity and worth of the human person, that stuck me as being off-kilter -- that's an observation about your own nature, not about the factuality of something that happened a long time ago on the other side of the world. But certainly most Christians seem to experience God as something within themselves -- even if they're not so Gnostic as to believe in "God within," their relationship with him is part of who they are, like my relationship with John is part of who I am.

The farther things are removed from you in space and time, the less you "know" them in that personal way. The farther I go outside myself, the more I rely on a scientific concept of knowledge, which is quite different from the kind I just talked about. It involves a much greater level of uncertainty, and thus much less emotional investment.

The difference is a source of a lot of conflict between religion and science. Josh Claybourn recently posted on some recent research about Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, and wondered, "Considering the ever-changing theories and what seems to be no clear idea how we got here, why should we keep latching onto the new explanations?" The fact that scientists disagree and change their minds strikes a lot of people as reason to disbelieve the whole project, whereas to scientists it's exactly the reason to believe in it. It is, in effect, admitting to the extent of what you don't know: you have a theory that fits the facts as you know them, but more facts could come along and change your view.

Through most of human history, for instance, it was perfectly sensible to believe that the earth is a giant, stationary object (and generally, a flat one) around which orbit smaller celestial bodies. After all, you look around, and that's what it looks like. The only people who doubted it were making very detailed astronomical observations, noticing funny things like parallax and the retrograde motion of certain planets. But even those people couldn't prove the shape of the universe one way or the other. It wasn't until our data radically expanded, thanks to telescopes and travel, that a counterintuitive model of the universe came to look like the right one.

To me, the factuality of the resurrection is a category of knowledge more akin to the shape of the solar system than to whether I love my friends. Sure -- as Peter says, given what we know, the theory that Jesus actually rose from the dead seems like the most straightforward explanation. But straightforward explanations often turn out to be wrong, which is why it bugs me to think that God would hitch my salvation to this. It especially bugs me because there's so much value-judgement attached to whether you have faith. There isn't a lot of that in this corner of the blogosphere, but there is among a lot of Christians, and it seems to me there's a lot in the Bible. But I don't see what it has to do with how good or bad a person you are. The ever-provisional nature of scientific knowledge does not cause you to love something with all your heart and soul and mind, to give your life to it, or to try to convert the world to it. To the extent that scientists do that, they are being unscientific.

Dash, in the comments, to the first post, put it concisely: "Faith is something you know, not something scientific. Not based on logic, but on your own needs." A lot of people are content to keep these things in separate baskets, but a lot of people aren't. Including Telford, which I think is why he's been trying to get me to do this. But I wonder if there really is an unbridgeable divide here, not in what you know but how you know it.

2003-05-15T21:12:00.000-07:00

That's gotta hurt

Dash is still blogging through Genesis, and includes this interesting aside:

I remember my ex-husband describing his circumcision at 7 years old--he was Muslim, and I guess that's the age at which it's done in Islaam. Gads! Couldn't they have done that to you when you were a baby so you wouldn't have to remember it? Nope. The point WAS that you should remember it. Culture. Go figure.

Is it done at that age all across Islam? It gets confusing because I know a lot of Islamic countries have carried over genital-mutilation practices that were actually pre-Islamic. In some cultures it's done as a rite of passage on a boy to test his ability to stoically endure pain. (Warrior societies -- gotta love 'em.) A lot of them also do "circumcison" on girls to supposedly ensure chastity, but that's definitely not Islamic.

Anyway, it's nice to finally confirm my suspicion that Dash is female. Unless we're talking "husband" in a very unofficial way, but that's unlikely...

2003-05-15T19:10:00.000-07:00

The rising

Peter Nixon responded to my questions about the historical evidence for the resurrection. His take on the evidence is more or less the same as my own:

I’m not sure the historical evidence for the resurrection is strong enough to convince someone who takes the view that something is false unless proven true by a preponderance of evidence. We are dealing with testimony that is almost 2,000 years old. You can always create plausible alternatives, particularly if you begin from the position that resurrection from the dead is physically impossible, and therefore can’t happen.

But those of us who do believe it aren’t completely naked before the bar of reason. We can ask how was it that a dispirited ban of messianists who scattered in fear after the execution of their leader suddenly returned to lives of public witness, even if it meant persecution and death? We can ask why first century Jewish polemic argued that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body from the tomb, therefore implying that there was an empty tomb that had to be explained. We can ask whether it is plausible that the disciples would proclaim that Jesus had risen from the dead, and even be willing to die for this belief, unless they were really convinced it was true?

Something momentous clearly happened. I suppose we can argue about what that something was. Was it a mystical experience? A collective hallucination brought on by religious hysteria? We have the testimony of the Gospels and of Saint Paul that the disciples encountered something that they knew to be the Jesus who they had known. The only compelling reason I find for discounting that testimony is an a priori belief that such a thing could not happen.

I don't know if I'd say that's the only reason. I think that the fact that it's something that defies the laws of physics, so to speak, does make me more skeptical than if it were something that happens all the time. I also think that, as I said earlier, the fact that people's memories are malleable, and the way stories grow and collect details over time, is not the reason to discount the testimony so much as take it with a grain of salt. Did the "something" that happened really happen that way? Did they interpret it correctly? How would we know?

Peter goes on:

But are these the reasons that I believe in the resurrection? No. They are merely reasons why such a belief does not seem unreasonable to me. My belief in the resurrection is inextricably bound up with my belief in the community that proclaims it. I see the power of the resurrection projected over 2,000 years, like the original cosmic explosion that continues to power the growth of the universe even today. I see that the community that believes this truth is able to explain the riddle of our existence, is able to survive and thrive for two millennia, is able again and again, in different times and different cultures, to raise up people who push the limits of what it means to be human. I see a truth proven, not with arguments, but with lives that have become luminous because they have been lived according to that truth.

But couldn’t it still be false? Could the resurrection be no more than a comforting story that allows those who believe it to do extraordinary things, but that has no intrinsic truth in and of itself. But we might ask the same question about concepts like the “dignity and worth of the human person,” a concept that undergirds almost everything we believe about the right ordering of the relationships between human beings. How do we know that what we believe about ourselves is true, particularly after a century where so many political movements and tyrannical regimes seemed to be dedicated to the contrary proposition? I think that in the end, we believe in the dignity and worth of the human person because we have seen the great good that comes from acting as if that belief were true, and the great evil that results from acting as if that belief were false.

This subject of the "witness" offered by the goodness of Christian communities keeps coming up, so I might as well address it, even though it's somewhat off-topic. I've been hearing both sides of this a lot: Christians saying look at all the good that Christian people do, atheists pointing to all the evil that's been done in the name of God. The problem with both viewpoints is the same: what's our point of comparison? How can we know what the world would have been like if there had been no Jesus? Certainly neither great good nor great evil have been exclusive to any one religious community. Or any community of any size.

I'm also reminded of Tom's three little words. Does the fact that something led to a good outcome mean it was a good idea to begin with, let alone true?

2003-05-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

On deaf ears

Patio Pundit has a good observation about the Jayson Blair case:

I really don't think that this is about lefty bias or affirmative action. It is about poor leadership. ...

Any of us can be fooled by a brown-noser -- I've been. The trick is to foster an open and honest atmosphere with your executive team so that your subordinates will tell you when you are being snowed. That's what saved me.

When I hired a brown-nosing slick-talking dude that fooled me, I was lucky enough to have many people who felt comfortable enough to warn me that I had made the wroing choice. Different people, from my assistant to rival managers came to me and told me some uncomfortable truths that I (and my boss) had missed.

From the Times' own accounts, the email warnings of Jayson Blair's bosses show that there were credible people who could have (or tried to) blow the whistle on Blair, if only they felt like they could without screwing up their own careers. That was Raines' failure. He should be held accountable.

I've been thinking something along these lines myself since the story broke. Some bloggers have said Howell Raines' admission that he probably (unconsciously) favored Blair because he was black proves that affirmative action was the culprit here. But Raines' unconscious bias isn't the same as an affirmative-action policy. If there had been no such policy in place, Raines would have had the same bias. If he hadn't had a bias in favor of black people, he would have had one in favor of something else. That's part of being human. The problem is when there's no mechanism to correct for the manager's personal biases. Given that many people tried to warn him about Blair's problems, it sounds like there wasn't one.

(Via Instapundit.)

2003-05-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

Bringing on the dead

Readers may recall a post last month in which I disputed the reliability of eyewitness testimony with Telford, in particular with regard to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The discussion continued offline and reached an impasse, and I'm giving Telford a much-deserved break from harassment while he finishes grading. But the subject raised some interesting issues, which I thought I'd throw open to the readers and fellow bloggers.

Telford has been leaning on me to do the obvious: read the historical-Jesus research myself. And I've been dragging my feet. Well, I've been worse than dragging my feet: I've been digging in my heels. I don't want to do it. Why not?

One thing I realized from our discussions about the earlier post, is that our disagreement wasn't so much about the quality of the evidence so much as what evidence is "enough for faith." I said that it's possible that there's as much evidence for the resurrection as there is for other, generally accepted events in ancient history, like, say, that Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. But if it came down to it, I wouldn't stake my soul on the fact that Caesar conquered Gaul either. It's simply a problem of the inherent unreliability of sources, especially after all this time. Imagine what kind of bogus stuff a future archeologist scratching through remnants of our own media could come up with. The difference is that the question of whether Caesar conquered Gaul isn't really relevant to my life, so I can just accept it as cultural common knowledge without worrying about the implications.

Suppose the evidence indicates there's a stronger possibility that the resurrection happened than that it didn't happen. So if that's the case, isn't it better to play the odds? Maybe, but it seems to me that still isn't faith. When people are so committed to the concept of Jesus that they're willing to suffer and die for it -- like those North Koreans, for instance -- I doubt they're thinking, "Well, there's a 90% certainty that this is true." People speak of knowing this sort of thing, in a very real way. Pen, whose archives I can't seem to find, wrote a while ago of a moment when he knew Jesus loved him. Moreover, I don't think it involves having in the back of your mind the possibility that, should new evidence come along saying something else, you could change your mind. Some people have said this is the sine qua non of the difference between scientific knowledge and religious faith: one is always open to change, the other isn't.

Then again, everyone who's said that has been speaking from the scientific side of it. Maybe I'm all wrong about what faith consists of. Maybe the faithful are just bolder gamblers than I am. In fact, I had a conversation with one of the Alpha leaders that indicated that. She said she regarded Christianity as the most likely explanation for things, and once she "placed her bets" on it, then she started experiencing things that convinced her further. But she admitted that probably didn't sound like the most convincing testimony.

The problem isn't just the possibility of being mistaken. The idea offends me that God wants us to gamble. (I'll resist the temptation to make any Bill Bennett jokes.) I think one reason I resist is that I so despise the idea that God wants me to meet him like that. It just seems deeply wrong somehow.

Another issue is what the reality of the resurrection would actually imply. I think Telford assumes that if you buy into the resurrection, you pretty much have to buy into everything, because it means everything Jesus said was true. I wouldn't be quite so quick to say that, though. The ability to raise the dead indicates a power beyond human capacities (at least, current human capacities), but there are several million light-years between "beyond human capacities" and "the omnipotent Creator and Lord of the universe." It also doesn't tell us whether Jesus' behavior is really all we need to know about God. On those points, we basically just have Jesus' say-so. Should we believe him? I don't know, but I still feel that the way God acts through Jesus (not to mention the rest of the Bible) is a helluva bizarre way for an omnipotent Creator to act.

Although I was raised unchurched, all my life I've felt that the existence of God was a real enough possibility to be afraid of it. Most Christians approve of fear of God, but believe me, all by itself it's an unhappy thing. I feel like if I research the historical Jesus and decide it's all probably true, it will make the problem not better but worse: I'll be more scared, but not any more loving, trusting or comprehending.

So I'm curious to know what the rest of you think of this. Is faith something you know, or is it a matter of probability? Do you know or care if the resurrection is supported by historical evidence? Do my objections make sense to anybody besides me?

2003-05-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

Men in tights

I saw the X-Men movie on Friday, by the way. It's already old news in the blogosphere so I won't go into it, but I had a good time. I just thought I'd point to Ian McKellen's defense of goofy superhero costumes:

I have been the last to acknowledge it, but Magneto's helmet was not a success in the first film. Everyone agrees on that, even the die-hardest of fans who love everything, even they agree. The helmet was a joke. The helmet is the piece of costume I treasure most, because it is very much the helmet worn in the comic. Otherwise that spandexed, over-muscular, gigantic thighed Mars and I have nothing in common, to look at. Inside, of course, we are as close as close can be.

Long ago I heard Stan Lee interviewed on the radio, and he was asked why he always drew superheroes in such undignified costumes. He replied that in the early days the Marvel folks did try out a group of heroes who wore more ordinary clothes, but the reader reaction was so negative they soon had them in garish cling-wrap outfits like everybody else. I imagine McKellen is onto the reason: the wilder the outfits, the less like reality they are. And better yet, the easier it is to transform yourself by dressing up like them. How could you play Superman if he dressed like you?

2003-05-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

Accountability

Matt Welch has a good idea for journalists to help prevent factual screw-ups, and keep relationships with sources. It also makes me feel guilty, because a lot of sources have asked me to send along a copy of the finished article, and given the lag time to publication I often forget. I really need a better note-to-self system... well, actually I need a note-to-self system...

2003-05-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

Spelling pet peeve

Yesterday at the gym, I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt commemorating some event at Vassar College. It reprinted a quote -- I don't remember now exactly what -- attributed to "Ghandi."

It's supposed to be spelled Gandhi, but the other way is becoming so common it's in danger of being an alternate spelling. Enter it in Google and you'll turn up almost as many hits as for the correct spelling.

It's confusing, of course, because the way English speakers pronounce it, the H is silent. But in India the H denotes the fact that the D is aspirated, so it actually sounds like a T, but voiced. The G is not aspirated, but pronounced the same way we pronounce it. Not that I expect English speakers to go around aspirating the D, but it would be nice if they'd spell it right...

2003-05-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

Great moments in science

When I saw this story, via Minute Particulars, I thought two things:

1) "Infinite Monkey" would be a great name for a rock band

2) Does this mean Charles Murtaugh has to change his slogan?

2003-05-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

May his tribe increase

Pen is going to have a little pacifist!

2003-05-12T18:06:00.000-07:00

I just want to make one thing clear

I haven't been dabbling in Wicca, despite what it may look like. Sheesh, you think you come up with an original blog name... The other Camassia's blog link doesn't work, though, so it looks like I'm the only one at present.

2003-05-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

The truth is out there

Telford has an interesting new FAQ up describing the various levels of Christian belief. Along the way, he goes into a general digression on relativism and absolutism.

I'd heard him talk about the false fact/value distinction before, and never bothered to pick his brain about it (usually, I was busy picking his brain about something else), but I think I see what he's getting at here. I've sometimes run into the attitude that values are things that people just "have," with no relation to their factual understanding of the world, and I think it's false. I touched on this subject in this post, on why the nature-nurture issue matters to moral issues. Or to take another example, the existence of an afterlife that rewards some behaviors and punishes others is an issue of fact, but it certainly has value implications.

Actually, Telford's whole article reminds me of a study I read when I was a psych undergrad. It was a recent study of students that was done at my college, so it had the added interest of describing the sort of people I lived among. It was actually doing a female update of a study done at Yale back when it was all male, of students' moral development. It didn't actually study what their morals were, but how they arrived at them.

The first stage that the authors identified was much like absolutism. Those subjects simply accepted dogmatically what they were brought up to believe, and thought everything else was wrong. The Yale study found some students like that, and not surprisingly Telford seems to have some too, but at my swanky 1990s liberal-arts college they found only one, and she was from an Indian reservation.

Most students they interviewed adhered to "multiplism," which sounded essentially the same as what Telford calls relativism. They still adhered to the values they were raised with, but they realized others were brought up with different values, and that was OK. It was all a "matter of opinion," and all opinions were equal. It was like differences in hair color. When pressed about really abhorrent opinions, like fascism, some of these students went into goofy mental convolutions (alas, I no longer have the study so I can't quote one), but in everyday life they didn't have to deal with these kinds of things, so it kept life on campus peaceful.

Many students stuck with multiplism throughout their college careers, but some began to realize that opinions can be constructed, not just passively received. Essentially, they tuned into the connection between values and facts. While still aware of their subjectivity, they came to form their beliefs out of evidence and thought.

I don't know if this is like what Telford calls "perspectivism" -- it's hard to tell from a one-paragraph summary -- but I think it's the same idea. Essentially it's the middle ground between realizing you can't get out of your own viewpoint, and going all pomo and thinking there's no such thing as reality. There may be many ways to see truth, but it's there somewhere, and it's worth seeking.

2003-05-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

I want my soulless superstrong manservant, and I want him NOW!

Teresa Nielsen Hayden points to a website helpfully describing how to create your own golem. A golem, for those of you who don't know, is a creature that kabbalistic rabbis can create out of earth, and has certain uses:

Golems follow the instructions of their master without question. They are rumored to be extremely strong and practically indestructable. They're good at carrying out menial tasks and are handy around the house. Golems also make great town defense systems.

It's a great concept, but I think it needs updating. Such beings were no doubt a lot more useful in the days before machines started doing essentially the same thing. If we want a golem for the 21st century, we need to get over this "muteness" thing and get them into the information age. Personally, I could really use a golem who can:
-- harass PR people
-- read SEC filings, and pick out the important parts
-- write HTML code
-- come up with snappy ledes
Then we'll be talking.

2003-05-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

America's dumbest plagiarists

Kieran Healy and his fellow academics swap their (least) favorite stories. A sampling:

A student turned a paper into my father that was a copied email. Apparently, the student's brother had taken the class a few years earlier and had sent his brother the paper.

Problem was, instead of copying just the paper, he copied the entire email, including the messages at the top of the email.

Those messages (paraphrase):

Can you send me your Congress paper? This class blows.

Reply: Yeah that class blows. Here's the paper.

Great way to start your paper.

(Via CalPundit.)

2003-05-08T16:50:00.000-07:00

At home

I did manage to do one good thing with my crappy weekend: I finally talked to someone at All Saints, the liberal Episcopal church, about its charitable activities. I didn't feel up to dealing with CA -- loud and aggressively cheerful isn't what you want when you're depressed and ill. But I thought I might be up to All Saints, so I went to the "newcomers coffee" in the interregnum between the early and late services.

There wasn't really an organized event at all, though I misremembered the time and showed up 15 minutes late. The rector's office was open but empty. Still, on the lawn in front of the church there were many tables set up, with piles of leaflets connected to every lefty cause you can imagine -- antiwar, environmentalism, gay rights, feminism, even abolishing Indian sports-team names. I didn't see anything about local street ministry, though, so I meandered around until a white-robed woman came up and introduced herself to me. She was the director of stewardship, if I remember right, and when I told her what I was looking for she took me to the rector's office and piled on some more pamphlets, including a directory of all the church's ministries. This church's agenda is huge, and I haven't waded through it yet, but I'll write more about it when I have.

The last time I was at All Saints was the day after Easter, the day I heard John died. I had landed there in the afternoon, still in shock, after a friend from church had taken me out to lunch and listened to me ramble on. I had been there maybe 10 or 15 minutes when Telford called my cell phone to see how I was doing, and I talked with him a long while. As I wandered around the lawn on Sunday, I saw a planting of Japanese anemones that rather oddly brought it back to me. I had been staring at them, in that half-seeing way you look at things when you're on the phone, while I was talking to Telford. I wonder if I'll ever be able to look at them without thinking of that.

But there was another memory that came back to me, of John himself. A couple years ago he showed me around his hometown, Turlock, in California's Central Valley. It's not a very big town, so we did the downtown on foot. At one point he took me off to a side street, lined with unremarkable bungalows with little handkerchief lawns. He walked along peering at the houses, and finally stopped in front of two houses that were much like the other houses, but smaller, tidier, and newer. "Here," he said. "These are the houses I helped build for Habitat for Humanity."

I knew he'd volunteered for them, but this was one of the few times he spoke of it. One of the other times was last summer, when he saw how glum and aimless I was, and he urged me to volunteer for them myself. I liked the idea, but was too flaky to follow through. I think I should reconsider it now. If not that, something like that. I remember John's satisfaction in looking at the houses, the way few of us in white-collar jobs get to look at the results of our work. Here's the house I helped build. Someone lives there now.

2003-05-06T21:49:00.000-07:00

Recommended

I linked below to Lynn Gazis-Sax's second post about the Jonathan Rauch article, but I highly recommend reading her first post discussing it, which outlines her philosophy on laws governing sexual behavior. It covers the same stuff I wrote about semi-coherently last week, but she does a more thorough job of it.

2003-05-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

Ad absurdum

My death-penalty post generated some interesting comments, and I apologize for rudely walking out on the conversation. Unfortunately my moods are swinging all over the place, I guess because I'm still grieving. I was pretty depressed through the weekend, and on Sunday I was suffering a bad hangover, not from partying but from Nyquil (that's a new one for me -- guess I'm getting old.) I wrote to Telford a while ago that I felt too emotionally fragile to discuss something as emotional for me as theology; and then, of course, I promptly went against my own advice, and realized I was right the first time. So I'm not going to discuss the subject further here, at this time. But after I posted Pen put up several more interesting posts on the subject, so go read him.

Yesterday was better. After work I went to the gym for the first time since before Easter(!) and then went out to dinner with a friend to his favorite Italian restaurant. I had a delectable spaghetti al cognac, washed down with chianti, followed by an excellent tiramisu, made all the tastier by the fact that, for some reason, he insisted on paying. It also went down easy because it was accompanied by entertaining conversation on unserious subjects, like Hollywood. Well, it's pretty serious for him -- he's an aspiring writer who's been trying hard to break into TV since before I met him, three years ago. But the ridiculousness of the business was coming home to him in the meetings he's been having lately with network execs, who are planning now for the fall season. His agent told him that to look like a "real writer," he had to dress down as much as possible -- jeans, T-shirt, baseball hat, and, if possible, about three days' stubble. The goal, he was gravely told, was to look as though he'd just rolled out of bed for a 5 p.m. meeting. My friend's conclusion: "I'm trying to break into an insane asylum."

This reminded me of an article by Jonathan Rauch that Lynn linked to recently. The article has many interesting subjects, but in the part I was thinking of Rauch criticizes a theorist who wants to do away with sexual norms:

The fact is, there are going to be norms; the question is always, What sort of norms? In Warner's world, the norm would be one of extreme social permissiveness. People who expressed anything but approval of sexual adventurism would be stigmatized: shamed for engaging in the oppressive act of shaming. If you don't think this can happen, ask any student or professor who has been on the receiving end of a P.C. vilification campaign.

The Hollywood writer's "uniform" seems like another example of this kind of anti-norm norm. Probably it started with some successful writers who flaunted their bohemianness by dressing like they didn't care about their appearance; as a result, everyone who aspired to be in their place slavishly imitated the look. The result is that, if you care about your appearance, you try your hardest to look like you don't care. It's pretty silly, but it's human nature, especially in a system as brutally hierarchical as Hollywood. Why my friend wants to get in I don't know, but I wish him the best...

2003-05-02T14:50:00.000-07:00

Rendering unto Caesar

Pen has been in an interesting debate about the death penalty over at Josh Claybourn's blog, which he continues on his own blog. Pen argues that as a Christian, he simply cannot be complicit in killing someone:

It isn't about me and what I would do -- it is about Jesus' words - turn the other cheek, forgive seventy times seven, walk the second mile, love your enemies.

You can wish it away, call it liberalism, or just renounce the Gospels. But in the end Jesus has more to say about forgiveness/reconciliation than he does about punishment/revenge.

If someone abused/killed my children ... I would first mourn their death, second cry out to God, and third seek Christian Counseling. Notice seeking revenge is not part of the picture.

I have come to the realization that I am not against the death penalty -- rather I have decided that I will never be the one who has to answer for an execution.

There are some jobs a Christian should not do. An executioner would be one of those.

What makes the Christian case tough here, I think, is that not only do Jesus' words not support the death penalty, they don't support any kind of punishment at all. The only punishments I ever remember Jesus referring to were those delivered by God himself. For those on earth, it's forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.

This raises a problem I mentioned a while ago: Jesus laid out a philosophy of individual righteousness, not of structuring a good society. His commands were impractical, even suicidal. Who can structure society around that? It's not surprising that those who later tried to build societies on "Christian" principles kept turning to the Old Testament.

Back in this huge post I described the contrast between All Saints' attempts to turn Christian pacifist beliefs into political action and Telford's "anti-Constantinian" view that such attempts are counterproductive and impossible. As I said, I felt a powerful attraction to Telford's viewpoint, but he did not completely convince me. (That kind of sums up my whole relationship with Telford, actually.) The hands-off attitude could work back when Paul was writing and Christians were living under an emperor, but when you live in a representative democracy, you are implicated in your government's actions. If you're a Christian who, say, voted for George W. Bush, and you knew he supports both the death penalty and military action in certain circumstances, I can't see how you can wash your hands completely of those deaths. You'd have to bifurcate yourself into a citizen half and a Christian half, which really seems un-Christian.

Actually, in the case of the death penalty I don't see a conflict here. We can see by the example of many other countries (and some states in our own) that executions aren't necessary to keep social order. Indeed, the supporters at Josh's blog argue entirely on the level of abstract justice. Conspicuously, however, they fail to cite any scriptural support for this concept of justice; they rely on "what I know is right." I think Pen is right -- there isn't any real reason for a Christian to support the death penalty. The main Biblical justification -- an eye for an eye -- was very explicitly overruled.

But when it comes to larger threats than crime, it gets more troublesome. If your country has been attacked by terrorists, or if you're in a small country threatened with invasion by its neighbors, electing a pacifist government seems, essentially, to be voting to martyr the whole country to the cause of nonviolence. If a lot of your fellow citizens aren't willing to do that, it isn't right to create a government that will. The decision to die rather than kill is a choice that I don't think anybody can make for anybody else.

So I can see why certain Christian sects have left off voting and government entirely and treated themselves as a separate kingdom. Not that that's an ideal solution either.

2003-05-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

The other holiday season

So yesterday was May Day (or the National Day of Prayer, if that's too pagan for you). Today is my father's birthday. Monday is Cinco de Mayo. Thursday is my birthday, and the birthday of a friend at the office (we usually throw a joint birthday lunch). Friday is the birthday of my stepmother, as well as (I learned recently) Telford's wife and his second son. Saturday is Bono's birthday, and Sunday is Mother's Day. I think that I should just give up now and have a weeklong party that will cover everything. Who's with me?

2003-05-01T22:15:00.000-07:00

Offstage

Well, today would have been my seventh "anniversary" of meeting John. I didn't remember the exact date myself, but he did, and he started sending me "happy anniversary" emails a few years ago. Sigh.

Lately a couple of people I've talked to have alluded to the "stages of grief." I wasn't sure what this was about -- I didn't remember hearing about it in psych classes, though that was a long time ago. So I did what any creature of the modern age would do -- I Googled for it.

Turns out this is a variation on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This has been generalized into a theory of grief over losing a loved one or even the end of a relationship. As this page amusingly points out, you can see the stages in practically anything:

As an example, apply the 5 stages to a traumatic event most all of us have experienced: The Dead Battery! You're going to be late to work so you rush out to your car, place the key in the ignition and turn it on. You hear nothing but a grind; the battery is dead.

DENIAL --- What's the first thing you do? You try to start it again! And again. You may check to make sure the radio, heater, lights, etc. are off and then..., try again.

ANGER --- "%$@^##& car!", "I should have junked you years ago." Did you slam your hand on the steering wheel? I have. "I should just leave you out in the rain and let you rust."

BARGAINING --- (realizing that you're going to be late for work)..., "Oh please car, if you will just start one more time I promise I'll buy you a brand new battery, get a tune up, new tires, belts and hoses, and keep you in perfect working condition.

DEPRESSION --- "Oh God, what am I going to do. I'm going to be late for work. I give up. My job is at risk and I don't really care any more. What's the use".

ACCEPTANCE --- "Ok. It's dead. Guess I had better call the Auto Club or find another way to work. Time to get on with my day; I'll deal with this later."

I don't know much about Kubler-Ross, but my main association with her is with a scathing 1982 piece by Ron Rosenbaum in a book that, coincidentally, my recently deceased friend gave me, Travels with Dr. Death. Rosenbaum recounts how, after making her fortune with her work on helping the dying, Kubler-Ross fell headfirst into spiritism, communicating with afterlife entities through mediums and so on. She eventually joined forces with a group called the Chruch of the Facet of Divinity, whose leader, John Barham, soon got into a sex scandal. Rosenbaum explains:

Although accounts differ as to who actually did what to whom, allegations of seductions by entities did not arise until the merger with Barham's church. According to one report "Barham regularly conducted seances in which he acted as a medium to communicate with what he called 'afterlife entities.' At many of these sessions, the former female members of the group asserted, they were instructed to enter a side room where they were joined a few minutes later in the dark by an unclothed man who talked convincingly of being an 'afterlife entity' [who] ... then proceeded to convince the women that they should engage in sex with him ..."

According to another report, the seductive entity mispronounced certain words in a manner remarkably similar to that of Barham. Some of the women began to suspect that the aroused afterlife entity had earthbound limitations when five of them came down with the same vaginal infection after being closeted with him. And then there was the woman who actually turned on the light in the entity-visiting chamber and claimed to see Barham, naked except for a turban.

Barham had a wonderful explanation for his resemblance to the turbaned apparition. He denied engaging in sexual activities with any of the women but said that in order to materialize, certain entities might have cloned themselves from Barham's cells, which would explain how they might resemble him in materialized form.

As the CA pastor said, no church is exempt from clerical abuse. But this one certainly wins the award for creative ass-covering.

2003-04-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

In the family

In the blogospheric discussions about Rick Santorum's infamous remarks, some have agreed with part of what he said -- if homosexuality is OK on the grounds that whatever goes on between consenting adults isn't the state's business, why not incest? Some bloggers, including Eugene Volokh and Matthew Yglesias, have made that very argument, but from the libertarian perspective that therefore consenting-adult incest should be legal. William Saletan also made the case in Slate.

Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, argued that the crucial difference is that homosexuality is an orientation, while incest is a choice. Therefore there is in fact a crucial distinction between the two.

Our knowledge of what motivates both homosexuality and incest is exceedingly poor. I've known enough gay people to believe them when they say they didn't choose it, but there isn't really hard evidence for that. Incest is also little understood, and consenting-adult incest is so rare I doubt it's been studied. Nonetheless, I think the distinction stands. For me, the defining characteristic of homosexuality is not the desires that gays have but the desires they don't have -- for the opposite sex. After all, we all have desires that we don't and shouldn't act on. The fact that you can't help having them isn't reason enough. But if you're incapable of having a romantic relationship through the approved route -- i.e. heterosexual marriage -- it does seem cruel to deny you the means by which you can have one.

There is reason to believe that humans are naturally oriented against incest. For one thing, every culture ever known has an incest taboo, although they differ somewhat on the exact definition of it, and they sometimes exempt certain people (such as ancient Egyptian royalty). There were also a couple of interesting studies done some years back suggesting that, since our instincts can't sniff out DNA, we sexually exclude people who feel like family. One study interviewed people who had grown up in Israeli kibbutzim together, where they had essentially lived like siblings. Only one person was found to have ever gotten romantically involved with a fellow kibbutznik, and that person hadn't joined until age 11 or so. Another study looked at marriages in China that had come about through "daughter exchange." This practice was basically a way to avoid the expensive bride-price in traditional China by trading baby girls with another family with the intention of marrying them to the respective sons in those families when they got old enough. The researchers found these marriages often failed, precisely because they felt incestuous to the couple.

But the fact that incest still happens, and therefore the taboos have to exist, suggests that this instinct doesn't always work, just as the instinct most of us have toward heterosexuality doesn't always work. Still, it's hard to imagine anybody has an "orientation" towards incest in the sense that they can't be attracted to anyone they're not related to.

One problem with this discussion is that few people have brought up actual examples of this theoretical consenting-adult intimacy. Saletan mentions a case in which an uncle and neice were prosecuted, but mentions that the neice was underage when the relationship started. He charges, "If you want to justify incest laws, don't tell me why Ami Smith's uncle belongs in jail. Tell me why she belongs there, too." It's a good point, but it brings up the fact that all these libertarian concepts of autonomy and consent get murky when you're talking about family. When you're a child, you have a strong, involuntary attachment to your parents, which is exactly why abusive parents are so horrible. When you grow up, this doesn't completely go away. Certainly abusers have been able to manipulate their victims to the point where they remain dependent and no longer require any coercion. It gets even murkier when you're talking about things that start when both parties are underage, as sometimes happens with siblings. Who, then, is culpable?

What about people who actually start these relationships as adults? Such cases are so rare that nobody raises one, at least that I've seen. I can only recall a couple examples that I've ever heard of. One was the famous book a few years ago by a woman who had an affair with her father at age 20. Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and she did not grow up around him. Another was a bizarre case I dimly remember from the '80s, where a couple met, fell in love, and discovered they were brother and sister who had been put up for adoption at birth. Oddly, they didn't break up but argued that they should be allowed to marry.

In both those cases, I think, what was basically happening was that the legal definition of family by genetics clashed with our emotional definition of family. The researchers of the above studies pointed out that what probably desexualizes relatives for us is, strangely enough, intimacy -- the kind of daily, unglamorous intimacy you have with siblings and parents who are always in your face. When you don't have that, there's room for sexual sparks to fly. The trouble is, you can't legislate that.

Punishment is probably too crude an instrument to deal with these psychologically complex cases. Except for the brother-sister case, which was a one-in-a-billion chance, we're talking about people who are severely screwed up here. I don't think throwing them in jail would help. But neither can I take a benign lassez-faire attitude toward this. Maybe the middle ground would simply be for the state to break up these pairs, and essentially put mutual restraining orders on them. If a statutory rape happened, prosecute that. And maybe the other party will realize there are other, better fish in the sea.

2003-04-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

The cruelest month... it's almost over

I've caught some cold virus. Probably from spending the weekend in a new place, hugging a lot of people and being under emotional stress. I don't have much energy to blog, but in the meantime, my sister sent me this link hoping it would make me laugh, and it did.

2003-04-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

The sensibilities of the public

One story I missed while I was gone was the one about the journalist whose employer made him stop blogging. The fear was, apparently, bad PR:

But Toolan sees it differently. "Denis Horgan's entire professional profile is a result of his attachment to the Hartford Courant, yet he has unilaterally created for himself a parallel journalistic universe where he'll do commentary on the institutions that the paper has to cover without any editing oversight by the Courant," Toolan said. "That makes the paper vulnerable."

The editor added that allowing an employee to set up his own opinion blog was a bad precedent. "There are 325 other people here who could create similar [Web sites] for themselves," said Toolan, who called his decision "common sense."

This isn't the first time a journalist has been asked by his employer to suspend private Web writing. CNN and Time magazine each recently asked an employee to cease writing personal blogs. And the Houston Chronicle reportedly fired a reporter last summer after he anonymously penned some scathing reviews on a blog about local politicians -- who he also covered for the Chronicle.

It was basically because I foresaw this sort of thing that I chose to blog under a pseudonym. I was worried about what my paper and its readers would think about me writing extemporaneously on sensitive subjects like religion, politics, abortion, homosexuality etc. Religion, which of course has come to consume so much of this blog, is a really delicate topic for media. I haven't spoken to the higher-ups about this directly, but word has it they're afraid to touch it. Some religious folk have attributed this to and anti-religious bias on the part of media people, who tend to be more secular than the country at large. There's probably a bit of that, but I think it's more that they feel they can't win. No matter how you cover it, people are going to get pissed off. And I think a lot of editors figure, well, we've managed this far without major religious coverage, so we have more to lose than to win.

So I figured it was best to keep my own and my employer's identity secret, and not to write about what I'm working on. Though I don't mind if individuals that I trust know. Obviously, I don't mind Peter and Telford knowing. Actually, Peter remarked that sometimes he wishes he blogged anonymously, because now everybody can see what he thinks about everything. Telford recently said he works so long and hard on nearly every post, and thus doesn't post very often, because it's part of his professional website. I felt guilty when he said that because I know that when I've blogged to and about him I haven't always thought about the fact that his colleagues and students may be reading. To me, he's a friend, and I speak to him as irreverently as I do to all my friends.

Anyway, I hope he gets through exam week all right. He's already showing signs of strain...

2003-04-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

We who are alive and remain

The weekend in San Francisco went well, all things considered. The memorial service was hard, of course, though not as bad as I was afraid it would be. In a way I'm not sure if that's a good thing. I thought I'd fall apart at it and get a lot of the grief out of my system, but I still haven't even had a good cry yet; it's just sitting inside me like a rock. I guess this is just going to take a long time.

There were a lot of good points about the weekend, though. The drive, for one. Most people assumed I flew and think I'm crazy to prefer driving that trip, but actually I like it. I don't have to deal with the logistical hassles of flying, and I find the long drive to be sort of meditative: I watch the scenery go by, listen to music, think my thoughts. I took the 101 route, along the stunning coastlines of Ventura and Santa Barbara, through the vineyards of Monterey County, with the hills all green from the recent rains. I think it was good for my soul.

I met an old friend from high school for dinner on Friday. We had a long talk about various things, including a parody of the "Left Behind" novels he'd dreamed up based on the life of single thirtysomethings such as ourselves. We watch our friends disappear -- i.e. get married -- so the rest of us are "left behind" in our increasingly dysfunctional dating universe, or something like that. I think my friend is getting a bit embittered, but hey, I came to commemorate a guy who had his first girlfriend at age 37, so I guess there's hope for all of us.

On Saturday morning I went to Berkeley to have breakfast with Peter Nixon. It was my first time meeting him in person, and he was just as sweet as he seems like on the blog. (For whatever reason I wouldn't have pegged him as a redhead, though.) I was short of sleep and not at my most eloquent, but it was really nice to visit with him, especially since I was dreading the service later that morning.

I don't think I mentioned that John liked to write, but one of the cool things about the service was that they read some of his poetry aloud. Some of it I'd heard before and some I hadn't. But what was really neat for me was hearing other people who loved him talk about him. I wasn't part of his church scene, so I knew some of his friends there in passing but didn't know much about his relationships with them. They appreciated the same things about him that I did, and described scenes that I could easily imagine (John was a sort of anti-chamaeleon -- he was the same in any environment!). There was an open-mike section where whoever wanted to could reminisce, and I gave a very condensed version of what I said in the previous post. Everyone who'd known him long enough observed the same transformation that I did.

I was also pleased to see his girlfriend was holding up well. It really hurt to think about her because I could identify with her -- I could have been her, in a way. She said she'd cried a lot in the first couple days but she'd been getting better, and she wrote a touching statement for the service about how she appreciated the time she had with him.

What was also great was that John's friends were so welcoming to me. They all said he talked about me a lot, so they felt like I was one of them even though we hadn't interacted a lot. I swapped contact info with several people, including the url of this blog (so hello to anyone who actually made it here!). After the wake I went back to his neighbor's apartment with the girlfriend and some other of his closest friends and just hung out, remembering John. It wasn't sad, really, and there was a lot of laughter -- especially after we ordered a pizza and a huge bottle of red wine, which we drank out of coffee mugs because our hostess had no wine glasses. (Peter had jokingly suggested keeping the Irish tradition of getting blasted after a funeral, and it sort of happened...)

So I'm back at work and life is technically back to normal, but I don't know when I'm going to feel normal. I'll try to return the blog to other subjects. But it's hard to go back to reading Leviticus and thinking about cosmic subjects when the cosmos has dealt you such a blow. At the wake I talked to a friend who had read aloud from one of the Corinthians letters, in which Paul urges his readers not to lose heart over their lost friends, because they will one day all be raised in Christ. He had a hard time not crying while he read it; and I remarked that I could see why that was hard, because even if you have faith in the Second Coming, it's still hard to be left here to wait. He looked like he was going to cry again when I said that. In a way I still envy the certainty of those who believe in heaven, but for no one is it easy.

2003-04-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

In Memoriam

Thanks so much to everyone who sent prayers and condolences my way.

I'm going to spend the weekend in San Francisco for the memorial service, so there will be no blogging for a few more days. However, a few days ago I wrote an email to Telford about my friend, which he said was the sort of thing that should be read at the service. I don't think that'll happen, but in lieu of that I'll reprint most of it here:

I've been thinking about the influence John had on my
current "walk." I didn't talk about him a lot to you,
but I think he had a profound influence. There were a
few important Christians in my life before you, and
definitely he was one of the most important.

I met him in 1996, when he arrived as a temp at the
office where I used to work. He had lived in SF for
about a year then, I think -- he grew up in the
Central Valley. He really didn't have any friends
there. Like me, he was pretty slow at socializing. If
you think you're a geek, he was a GEEK. He had a huge
collection of comic books and could tell you all the
ins and outs of the relations between the Federation
and the Klingon Empire. He lacked social skills and
had this weird, affected way of talking (one friend
said he sounded exactly like Roger Thornhill in North
by Northwest). He also suffered from frequent
depression, which I think came at least partly from
his diabetes, which was then undiagnosed.

So he didn't exactly bowl me over on first impression,
but gradually we became friends. He invited me to the
First Covenant Church, which he had been going to
since he moved to SF, and I went to a few services
there. We then got into a protracted series of debates
about Christianity, much like I've been having with
you. This went on for a while until it pretty much
came to a deadlock, and thereafter we dropped the
subject. But we kept seeing each other socially.

One day shortly after this he called me up and
announced, "I'm going to say a bunch of things that
are going to annoy you and make you want to hang up."

"Uh...OK."

This time it wasn't about God, though. He had called
me to tell me he had developed a crush on me. It kind
of vexed him because he had told himself he would only
date Christians, but he wanted to go out with me.

I did go out with him, once. But I had to give him the
whole I-like-you-but-not-in-that-way thing.

After essentially being rejected twice, he would have
been forgiven for not having much to do with me. But
that, you might say, is where the real witnessing
started. He remained an utterly steadfast friend; in
fact I became almost like his virtual girlfriend,
because we did so many things together. One woman we
knew said we seemed like an old married couple, we
were so much on the same wavelength.

Over time, I also saw the effect the church was having
on John. When we met he was new there and didn't know
anyone there well, but the community didn't judge his
weirdness and really embraced him. Slowly he
blossomed, and became a lot less gloomy and more
confident. I was pleased, because for a while his
social life was basically just me, and I knew I was
inadequate...

After I moved to L.A., naturally, we had a lot less
contact. And when he started seeing his girlfriend Ina
about a year ago (they met through an Internet
matching service, of all things), I was no longer the
woman in his life. I think that worsened my
disaffection last year. When he came down last summer
to visit Ina (and me) he saw what a funk I was in and
all but ordered me to spend a weekend in SF with him.
I did that in September. But he just wasn't able to
deal with the magnitude of my troubles.

I think it was partly because of the whole experience
with John that I turned to you, and to CA. I think the
love that the church showed for him, and that he
showed for me, led me to hope that love could be found
there. If it could rescue one screwed-up nerd, why not
another?

It's a shame you never met him, but I know he was
really happy I connected with you and with CA. I think
he was glad you could provide the 'ministry' that he
couldn't, much as I was glad the church provided him
the emotional support that I couldn't. I think if you
do meet on one of the golden streets of the New
Jerusalem, he'll thank you. I like to think we will be
there, because it hurts too much to think anything
else.

2003-04-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

Devastation

Shortly after I posted the last post, I got a call telling me one of my closest friends had died. I don't think I'll be posting a lot in the near future. But those of you who pray (and I know there are at least a few of you!), please think of my friend John and all his family and friends.

2003-04-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

Two kingdoms

As I mentioned a while back, for the last few months I've been volunteering for a food giveaway the Christian Assembly does in Watts. I have long wanted to do work for the poor, and this was a good start. But it's only once a month, and I'd like to do more. CA, however, has just been developing its charities in the last few years, and it doesn't have anything else going on locally.

I asked around about programs at other churches I might get into, and one person at Alpha directed me to All Saints. All Saints is a very different animal from the CA; it's an old Episcopal church in downtown Pasadena, known for its liberalism. Telford was actually baptized there as an infant, but his Republican family left after a few years because the clergy was getting into Vietnam War protests. The church is still highly politicized -- if you go to the main page on the website, you'll see a picture of a rector getting arrested while protesting the Iraq war. But the church is also known for its efforts to help the local poor and homeless and so on, which is what the Alpha leader thought would interest me. And Telford, who is nothing if not ecumenical (at least within Christianity) invited me to go to the Good Friday service, which his family attends every year.

The difference between CA and All Saints starts with the architecture. CA is a plain modern building with a modern (and fairly ugly) hexagonal sanctuary; All Saints is a traditional stone church with a vaulted ceiling, stained-glass windows and elaborately carved altar and pulpit. At CA you can take or leave the programs that they hand to you when you come in, because the service is so unstructured. At All Saints you'd better pick one up or you'll be totally lost, because everything is ritualized and scheduled.

The music is also quite different. As I've described before, CA has a rock-type band, and you pick up the songs by ear (though fortunately they project the lyrics on overhead screens). All Saints has two choirs, with the good Anglican names of the Canterbury Choir and the Coventry Choir, and the singalong parts of the program are printed as sheet music in the liturgy. They do a mixture of old hymns, classical devotionals by folks like Bach and Beethoven, modern-classical pieces, and what used to be called Negro spirituals. I was kind of skeptical about the last, because those songs always sound goofy sung in the classical style, especially in dialect. So I was shocked when, about halfway through a song called, "He Never Said a Mumbalin' Word," I had tears in my eyes. Those black spirituals can rip your heart out, even in the middle of a tony Episcopal church.

The mood of the whole thing was appropriately somber, and I liked that. Pentecostals are good at joyfulness, but it can get to be irritating sometimes, especially when you aren't feeling so joyful yourself. Sorrow is part of life, and a church that does it well can be valuable in its own way. CA also doesn't do much of anything meditative or inward, and I had missed that. There's a song the band does occasionally that would make a neat meditation: "Here I am, seeking after you/Listening for your still, small voice..." But whenever they play it everything goes full-throttle before you know it, with people standing and stretching their arms in the air. It always makes me think, can't we scale it back once in a while?

I didn't talk to anyone on staff when I went on Friday, but I noticed on the website that there was to be a "newcomers coffee" on Sunday morning. I decided to go to that and then stick around for the late Easter service.

When I arrived, I asked an usher to direct me to the rector's office for the coffee.

"Actually, I don't think there is a newcomers' coffee this morning," he said.

"It says so on the website," I protested.

"Well, that doesn't mean anything," he said.

And indeed, there wasn't one; everybody was too busy with Easter. So I hung around a while thinking about the fact that churches would really be a lot more seeker-friendly if they actually gave a !@# about their websites. If you look at the CA's site, it's little more than a glorified Yellow Pages listing. I remember one time I wasn't sure when the next Watts visit would be, and my mother said, "Why don't you look it up on the website?" I replied, "You'd think it would be there, wouldn't you?" But it has nothing about that, or about small group activities or any special events. You wouldn't know that the schedule changed for Easter weekend, or that you had to park in a different lot. That information was given out in previous services.

In a way there's something charming about this reliance on old-fashioned communication, but it's pretty unfriendly to anyone who isn't already networked in. I realize CA might just not have enough volunteer geeks to keep the site updated, but All Saints' site is fairly extensive, so I don't know why they'd put up with inaccurate information.

But I digress.

The priest's sermon at the Easter service also magnified the subcultural difference between the two churches. In a way, their makeup isn't that different -- the racial mix is about the, and they're both basically middle-class. But the priest started out his sermon talking about the big Matisse/Picasso exhibit he'd visited while in London recently, and analogized the two artists' different takes on the same subjects to the four Gospels' different takes on the same story. The CA pastor, on the other hand, favors analogies about surfing.

The priest also spoke about -- and defended -- the church's anti-war activism. Some say church and politics don't mix, he said, but he believed he could not truly follow Christ and steer clear of involvement. The Prince of Peace had no tolerance for violence.

This was interesting to me because the way Telford first caught my attention (though he didn't realize it) was in a debate last summer about pacifism. (If you didn't see it at the time, start here and keep scrolling up.) Telford also believes Christians should not commit violence, but he does not think they should promote pacifism by way of state power. To do so would confuse the kingdom of God with the earthly kingdoms.

In a way, I sympathize with them both. The whole reason Telford's words so impressed me back then was that they called to an idealism in me that had almost disappeared under layers of armor I had built up against the world. Especially after 9/11, many people turned angry and hateful towards the enemies of the U.S.; and yet the secular peace activists often seemed equally angry and hateful. I was drawn to the hope that there is still room for compassion in this world, despite all the heartbreak.

Is the attitude of All Saints' priest the logical extension of this compassion? In a way it seems so, and yet his case was not airtight. For one thing, he lapsed into that frequent failing of political Christians, speaking outside his area of expertise. Talk soon moved away from the ideals of Christ towards practical ideas of how to deal with the current conflict, through international law and so on, that seem like a matter of policy on whose efficacy people with the same goals can disagree. They should not be confused with religious doctrine. (Leftist Christians are hardly the only guilty parties here; the Assemblies of God, for instance, opines in its doctrine that pornography isn't covered by the First Amendment.)

But the larger problem, I think, was that he often made the anti-war argument through its supposed temporal consequences. War only begets more war, this war will beget more terrorists, etc. But I think any honest discussion of war has to admit that it often works, at least in the sense of achieving its objectives. Sometimes, a whole lot of people really are bettter off for it. That may be the case for this as well. The difficulty of opposing war -- as with many sins -- is not that it fails but that it succeeds.

Lately a lot of warbloggers have been engaged in a utilitarian calculus, weighing the war dead against the benefits to the surviving Iraqis and to us. Such calculations are sensible, but they're also horrible. If you look upon people as more than scoring-marks, you should wonder: isn't there a better way?

In that sense, I think the priest and Telford are on the same page. The priest described three ways to respond to evil: do nothing, fight it violently, and create communities of good within evil. It's the last to which Christians are called, he said; to sit at the table with all comers, even their enemies. I think Telford would agree.

Anywa, there really is a newcomers' coffee next week, so I'll be back.

2003-04-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday

When I try to sing this song, I
Oh, I try to stand up
But I can't find my feet
I try, I try to speak up
But only in you I'm complete

Gloria
In te domine
Gloria
Exultate

Oh Lord, loosen my lips

2003-04-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

Holy Saturday

Having decided to keep up the date-appropriate U2 quotes, for Holy Saturday I reach back to a relatively obscure early tune called Tomorrow:

Who broke the window,
Who broke down the door,
Who tore the curtain
And who was He for?
Who healed the wounds,
Who heals the scars?
Open the door
Open the door

Won't you come back tomorrow?
Won't you be back tomorrow?
Will you be back tomorrow?
Can I sleep tonight?

2003-04-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

Leviticus 1-7

The Book of Law begins with a long and incredibly detailed description of how to perform animal sacrifices. It sounds gross, but actually I was thinking about the meaning of sacrifice after the substitional atonement sermon last weekend. The pastor justified the concept by, among other things, appealing to the long tradition of animal sacrific in the OT. This struck me as a weird tactic: explain a concept from an alien culture by appealing to an even more alien culture! But it got me to thinking about the meaning of animal sacrifice. Like most moderns I tend to think of it as being rather barbaric, designed to propitiate selfish gods who demand a quid pro quo: give this to me and I'll send you rain, or something to that effect. It also implies gods who have strangely fleshly appetites.

I had a feeling there was more to it than that, though, especially in the case of the ancient Hebrews. Fortuitously, Dexter Haven of the Straight Dope just wrote a thorough column on that very subject. In a way it's an even better source than Leviticus, because the Levitical author(s) assumed the readers already knew a lot. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here are some of the major points:

First, a basic feature of the Israelite sacrificial system, as with that of most ancient Near East cultures, was that most of the offerings were eaten by the priests, and sometimes by the donors of the sacrifice. Eating a ritual meal in the presence of God was considered important, and the sacrifice would not be complete without such a meal. It was not "barbaric," except in the sense that slaughter of animals for meat is barbaric.

Biblical historian Richard Friedman says, "Modern readers often think that sacrifice is the unnecessary taking of animal life, or that the person offering the sacrifice was giving up something to compensate for some sin or to win God's favor. But in the biblical world, the most common type of sacrifice was for meals. The apparent rationale was that if people wanted to eat meat, they must recognize that they were taking life. They could not regard this as an ordinary act of daily secular life. It was a sacred act, to be performance in a prescribed manner, by an appointed person (a priest), at an altar."

You might say sacrifice in this case is the sacralization of killing -- the necessary killing of animals in order to eat. It does seem more respectful than the practical butchery we subject animals to today, not to mention the horrid industrial abbatoirs most of them go through.

I expect, though I have not researched the topic enough to really know, that human sacrifice often operated in the same way. Not for eating, obvioualy, but as a way of sacralizing the killing of people who would likely be killed anyway (criminals, prisoners of war, infants who couldn't be fed, etc.) by consecrated the deaths to deities. It's harsh, but again, it seems better than cheapening death. Consider the folks today who show up to revel at executions...

There were various types of sacrifices:

Burnt offerings ('olah) were certain animals or birds that were entirely burnt (except the hide). No portion was eaten.
Grain offerings (min-khah) could be raw or baked into unleavened bread. A token portion was burned on the altar, and the rest was given to the priests for a meal.
Peace offerings (zevakh shelamim) were a sacred meal, with sections of the sacrifice shared by the priest and donors. Only certain fatty portions of the animal were burned on the altar as God's share. The term is better translated as "gift of greetings" or "offering of well-being."
Expiatory sacrifices are what you're asking about. I was going to say that's the "meat of the matter" but thought better of it. They are primarily described in chapters 5 and 6 of Leviticus. The purpose of such sacrifice was to obtain atonement for one's sins and forgiveness from God. They were usually eaten by the priests...

It is important to say that expiatory sacrifices were only efficacious if the offenses were inadvertent or unwitting. Remember that there was no separation of church and state in those days--religious law was also the law of the land. In the case of crimes or deliberate acts, the law dealt directly with the offender, imposing real punishments and trying to prevent recurrences. The Hebrew prophets denounced the idea that ritual sacrifice could atone for intentional deeds.

The idea of having to do something to expiate an accidental offense sounds strange at first. But certainly the feeling of guilt, or at least taint, from an accident that had serious consequences is familiar to most people.

The first real challenge to the sacrifice system came from the Prophets (during the period from 800 to 580 BC). Max Dimont writes, "What they said was remarkable for their time: that ritual and cult in themselves were of no value to God. Humanity, justice, and morality were superior to any cult. They said God did not want rituals; He wanted higher moral standards from mankind. They said that God abhorred sacrifice [without heartfelt repentance], that it was no sin not to offer sacrifice, that the sin was corruption and the perversion of justice. These were fantastic and daring notions in those days when sacrifice and ritual were religion itself."

I do seem to recall Isaiah saying things to the effect of, "You make sacrifices up the wazoo, but does that mean Yahweh is happy with you? Nooo!" Dex goes on to explain that once the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed, Jewish authorities ruled that sacrifices could no longer be made because they were supposed to happen only at the Temple. But as Dex points out, they could have gone back to the pre-Temple system of local sacrifice. The real issue may have been that the concept itself had fallen out of favor.

All this is rather interesting to think about in connection to the sacrifice of Jesus that we are now commemorating. Although I think it was Paul who first compared the Crucifixion to a "sin offering," the differences were obvious. Sin offerings only covered inadvertant wrongs; the animal's suffering could not really substitute for human punishment. Moreover, it's not like this was sacralizing a functional death, like an animal to be eaten; Jesus' death was completely about inflicting suffering.

Also, by Paul's day the animal-sacrifice idea was apparently already drifting out of favor within Judaism. Dex says that was one of the things that split the Pharisees and the Sadducees, whom we saw arguing back in Acts. The prophets' charge that God really cares about moral conduct rather than ritual seemed to work its way into both Judaism and Christianity. So appealing to animal sacrifice as a metaphor for the Crucifixion seems a little weird.

I do not, however, claim to have the whole sacrific concept nailed down. It's not a tidy thing. My study notes for Leviticus say:

Sacrifice is a flexible symbol that conveys a variety of possible meanings. The quintessential sacrificial act is the transference of proerty from the profane to the sacred realm; in other words, a gift to the deity. That this notion is also basic to Isralite sacrifice is demonstrated by fundametnal sacrificial terms that connote a gift... To date, however, no single theory can encompass the sacrificial system of any society, even the most primitive.... The common denominator of the sacrifices discuessed in these chapters is that they arise to answer to an unpredictable religious or emotional need and are thereby set apart fromt he sacrifices of the public feasts and fasts that are fixed by the calendar.

2003-04-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Good Friday

So last night I blogged a U2 quote about Maundy Thursday, and today I decided to post another one for Good Friday that's a bit less perverse:

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice when they pierced his side
But I've seen love conquer the great divide

2003-04-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

Holy Thursday

Hernan Gonzalez quotes J.R.R. Tolkien:

I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament.... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that: Death, by the divine paradox, that which ends life and demands the surrender of all, and yet, by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires.

Wow.

Maybe it's the mood I've been in all week, but I've been thinking all day of the U2 song's version of the Last Supper in the snarky voice of Judas: "We ate the food/Drank the wine/Everybody having a good time/Except you -- you were talking about the end of the world."

2003-04-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

Applied science

A researcher at U. Chicago is studying why there's always a line at the women's room. She finds restrooms are equal in square footage but not much else:

But because urinals are smaller than stalls, “men are almost always offered more excreting opportunities than women,” which likely accounts for longer women’s lines—not women simply taking longer. And more of the space in women’s bathrooms, she notes, is filled with vanity tables, fainting couches, and baby stations.

Her preferred solution strikes me a little funny:

Believing the law rarely should distinguish between males and females, she advocates “a model akin to the typical airline toilet,” providing ultimate privacy without segregation (though she’s learned that many women prefer a same-sex environment).

Yeah, I'll bet they do. Women's rooms have become real social spaces -- thus the oft-noted habit of women to go to them in groups. Plus, women's rooms are great places to check over your clothes and make adjustments you wouldn't want to make in public, which I can't imagine little airplane-type stalls would have room for. The "ladies' lounge" model is probably going to stick, although it's true you don't want to go so far with it you don't have enough actual toilets.

(Via Daniel Drezner.)

2003-04-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

Acts 27-28

Paul is shipped off to Rome. This is a complicated business in this era; sailing technology is such that it's hardly a straight shot, but a series of hops between ports, with a lot of waiting around for favorable weather. At one stop on the coast of Crete, Paul warns that if they take off right away they'll lose the ship; and of course, he's right.

A storm hits and drives the ship off couse. It loses its cargo and drifts for weeks. Paul, characteristically, ends up running the show, using his clairvoyance to tell everybody what they have to do to survive. At line 33 he tells the crew, "Today is the fourteenth day that you have been in suspense and remaining without food, having eaten nothing. Therefore I urge you to take some food, for it will help you survive; for none of you will lose a hair from your heads." He breaks bread, and they eat.

I'm puzzled as to why they haven't eaten in so long. They'd probably want to stretch their supplies our as long as possible, given the uncertain future, but two weeks is an inordinately long time to go hungry. I'd think everyone would be going crazy, and it's hard to magine there was food that just sat there that long.

The ship finally wrecks on the island of Malta, where they stay for a few months while Paul does healings. Come springtime, they finally hitch a ride on another ship and finally make it to Rome. There Paul preaches to local Jews and meets with a mixed reception, and says again that he'll take the word to gentiles.

And there, abruptly, Acts ends.

I must say, Acts has been more fun the second time around. I think stopping and writing about every chapter (well, almost every chapter) is a good way to do it, because trying to read it straight through you get lost in all the characters and subplots. Luke's narrative style takes some getting used to.

I'm kind of sorry it's over. Especially since the next book is Leviticus.

2003-04-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

Accept no substitutes

I mentioned in my Palm Sunday post that I wasn't having a great day, so I reminisced about last year instead. I'm not going to go into all the troubles with Sunday, but one thing that didn't help was that the sermon that day was all about our old friend, substitutional atonement. The pastor described the theory, emphasized its centrality to Christianity, and got the crowd all roused about how great it was.

After the service, Telford, who knew how I felt about SA theory from this post, sent his wife and kids off to the doughnut shop while he took me aside to do "damage control." He assured me that, despite what the pastor had said, you do not have to believe in SA to be a Christian. There are other ways of interpreting the Atonement.

I told him I wasn't upset, and I wasn't. But that was mainly because I was only half listening to the sermon. Once I realized where it was headed, I sort of tuned out and thought about other things that were preoccupying me. But now that I think about it, that was a rather ominous thing to happen. Tuning out is what I tend to do when things go wrong; before I started going to the church last year, I had gotten so tuned out everything seemed to be in an unhappy, apathetic fog. Whatever I've liked or disliked since then, or agreed with or disagreed with, I have at least been engaged.

I've been thinking again today about exactly what my problem with the theory is. After I wrote the above-linked post Josiah Neeley wrote me an email that I partly reproduced in this post. (Scroll down to the part headed "In loco parentis".) That tells an allegory of a judge whose son is picked up for speeding. The judge finds the young man guilty and orders him to pay a fine. Then he steps off the bench, takes off his robe, and pays the fine himself.

I encountered a slightly different version of this story in a book Telford loaned me, written by a friend of his. In that version, rather than father and son, it was childhood friends who'd gone separate ways in adulthood.

The tale makes a kind of intuitive sense, but it doesn't transfer very well to the Atonement. I mentioned back then that the judge's gesture only makes sense as a one-off -- a kind of warning shot to the wrongdoer. Especially in the father-son version, it seems more like a way of easing a spoiled kid into the real world than like a substitutional atonement.

But the deeper problem, which I only thought of today, is that the story only works because the sentence is relatively light. The state may let you pay someone else's fine, but it won't let you serve someone else's prison term or be executed in someone else's place. The reason is obvious: there's no point to punishment if the innocent get it and the guilty don't. It's not justice, and it's not mercy either: it's cruelty. It's what happens when there's no justice system at all.

Telford tried to describe some other theories of the atonement, but I must admit that if I was only half listening to the sermon I was only about 80% listening to Telford, which is not the way to absorb his rapid-fire pedagogy. He mentioned that the Eastern Orthodox view is that "God became man so that man could become God" -- a view actually expressed by one of Peter Nixon's correspondents back in the January discussion. I'm not sure what to make of it, though, because it doesn't answer my question on what the dying was about. It seems to just be explaining the Incarnation in general.

Anyway, his main point was that you don't have to agree on exactly how the Atonement worked, just on what the outcome was. And actually, I still don't really understand that, and the dying-for-sins debate didn't really clear that up either. But one thing at a time.

2003-04-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

From where it's fall...

I looked at Sitemeter this morning and saw an unusal number of hits, and an unusual number of hits from exotic domain names, and soon found that, yes, I got linked by Hernan Gonzalez. He's been reading up on St. Theresa, and sees some connections between her and my posts (the translation here is my own):

One, about justice and mercy (with a link to another blog), and the difficulties of reconciling both ... (Teresa did not feel the need, she could tell herself ... in her personal relations with God, she only saw mercy).

Two, and more notably, this reflection upon an aspect of St. Paul: his insistence on making himself an example:
There's a touch of the egotism here that I noticed in Paul's letters: he likes to hold himself up as an example to follow. I think if I knew Paul back then I'd find it kind of irritating. Hey, I came here to know God, not become you, pal!

And so it is. And Teresa would be one of the few saints to repeat this striking -- and supremely legitimate -- trait of Paul's. "Representative sainthood," Urs von Balthasar calls it. And in her case, it's a most paradoxical thing; considering what she said about her "desire to disappear," to "be forgotten."

He promises more later. This should be interesting.

2003-04-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

Acts 24-26

The imprisoned Paul sloowwwly wends his way through the Roman bureaucracy. First he appeals to the governor of Judea, Felix. Then Felix's successor Festus hears him, along with the king, Herod Agrippa. No one seems to be able to pin down charges against him; the Romans barely seem to understand Jewish affairs anyway. But Paul insists on appealing to the emperor, largely because he feels called to proselytize in Rome. If he goes there as a prisoner, then whatever. He's still there.

It's here that the study notes start to get entertaining, as they dish the dirt on the Roman officals. Felix is apparently known for cruelty and immorality; his wife Drusilla is a femme fatale, daughter of a previous Herod, who dumped her Syrian husband to marry Felix. Herod Agrippa shows up with his sister Bernice, whom he's widely known to be sleeping with.

Paul doesn't mention any of this directly, but he does seem to disturb their consciences. We are told that when Felix hears Paul speak of justice, self-control and the coming judgement, he has Paul taken out of his sight and leaves him in the clink until he leaves office two years later. When Paul appeals to Agrippa -- not actually a Roman, but a local -- he asks if he believes in the prophets. Agrippa responds by asking, "Are you so quickly persuading me to become Christian?"

Whether he's actually wavering, or being sarcastic ("You trying to convert me, big guy?") isn't clear. Paul's answer is also rather peculiar: "Whether quickly or not, I pray to God that not only you but also all who are listening to me today might become such as I am—except for these chains."

There's a touch of the egotism here that I noticed in Paul's letters: he likes to hold himself up as an example to follow. I think if I knew Paul back then I'd find it kind of irritating. Hey, I came here to know God, not become you, pal! The fact that already some Christians have criticized him back in Acts 21 suggests maybe he didn't rub everybody the right way. He may not have rubbed James the right way either. But then again, it always seems to take these outsized personalities to get a movement going. Paul had already been locked up for years and flogged at least once, and he still thought he knew exactly what he was doing. God? Ego? Both? I don't know, but it sure changed the course of world history.

2003-04-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

57

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu.
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

--William Shakespeare

2003-04-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

Acts 22-23

Here we leave off the episodic narrative of Acts so far and launch into a longer story. Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, accused of teaching against the Jewish law and of bringing Gentiles into the holy Temple. He wards off attack by saying he's a Roman citizen, which I guess means he has to go through Roman law before he can be executed. The tribune calls a meeting of the chief priests to hear Paul's case. When Paul says he's preaching the hope of resurrection of the dead, he sets off an argument between Pharisees and Sadducees on the council. Luke helpfully explains: "The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three" (23:8).

I have heard conflicting things from Jews about the afterlife, and I guess that was true 2000 years ago too. Some Jews (even observant ones) don't seem to believe in it at all; the recent First Things article by a rabbi described a system of reward and punishment in the afterlife, but pointed out that Judaism focuses much more on this world than the next.

The afterlife looms much larger in the Christian imagination, of course. At the last Alpha course, which was last week, I remarked that one thing that seemed to be missing from the course was any discussion of the afterlife. That seems like a very large omission; resurrection was clearly an important subject already to Paul and his friends, and has remained so ever since. Moreover, the picture of the afterlife has gotten so incredibly detailed in the centuries since, with the help of Dante and Hieronymous Bosch and the whole crew, that it's probably one of the first things most people think of when the think of Christianity. And it's certainly one of the most contentious subjects also -- certainly the concept of eternal hell appalls a lot of non-Christians, including me.

The trouble is, the Bible as whole doesn't tell us much about it. There's Revelation, but that was taken as early as St. Augustine to be allegorical. (Obviously the literalist interpretations never stopped, though.) Almost all the popular imagery of the afterlife came after the Bible. At Alpha, some took this lack of attention in the Bible to mean that we shouldn't pay a lot of attention to it either. But of course people want to know this stuff. It's about their eternal destiny after all; and ultimately it's about the mind of God.

Apparently the council that was trying Paul felt just as passionately about it, because their debate gets so heated the tribune stops it for fear of violence. Well, I hope that doesn't happen at Alpha...

2003-04-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

Palm Sunday

My day ... well, my day hasn't been great, but I've been thinking about Palm Sunday of last year. I didn't have a blog and wasn't going to church then, but I did end up in church on Palm Sunday. But I get ahead of myself.

On that Saturday a friend in San Francisco threw a housewarming party, so I used that as an excuse to spend the weekend there. I told my friend who goes to the Evangelical Covenant church in SF, and he invited me to go to the Palm Sunday service and have lunch with him afterwards. It was an ad hoc trip, with me throwing a few things into my backpack and taking off. I went to the party at my friend's flat in the lovely Sunset District, chatting with strangers and eating vodka jello, and then drove to my aunt's house in the East Bay, let myself in, and went to bed.

The next morning I wasn't actually hung over (since I had to drive, after all, I wasn't going to get that inebriated), but I was pretty tired. I got up and discovered some things I'd forgotten to pack: an extra pair of underwear, and a jacket for the chillier northern clime. The underwear I decided to do without (I don't know if it's sacreligious to attend Palm Sunday service with no underwear, but I wasn't sweating the details at this point), but the jacket I definitely needed, since I just had a T-shirt to wear with my jeans. So I asked my aunt if I could borrow something. She rummaged through the closet and pulled out a distinctly '70s-looking denim overshirt, which she gave to me remarking, "If you look in the pockets, you'll probably find ticket stubs to some good concerts."

So I went to the church in this curious ensemble, with post-party fatigue and no makeup, and watched in the pew while my friend sang in the choir. After the musical part was over he came and sat next to me. Leaning over, he whispered, "You look great!"

I thought he was crazy, but then I thought, God bless men. They're always exploding female expectations. If he says I look great, then I'll believe him.

2003-04-11T17:34:00.000-07:00

Acts 21

Paul returns to Jerusalem and is greeted warmly, but told that some unnamed members of the church had accused him of teaching "all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise thier children or observe the customs" (21). They recommend he go through the Nazarite vow (an ancient Jewish purification ritual, evidently), and tell him of the contents of the letter mentioned in Acts 15 regarding the rules for Gentiles.

Why are people accusing Paul of this? Telford mentioned this back in the same post I linked to at Acts 15:

Paul seems to take this conclusion as still too conservative, for he moves beyond Jerusalem's sphere of influence, concentrates his mission farther westward, and never mentions James' letter. Even when he mentions the council of Jerusalem's conclusion that circumcision of Gentiles is unwarranted (Gal. 2:1-10), he fails to mention these guidelines (unless Gal. 2:10's "remembber the poor" is some kind of extreme gloss). The Didache might reflect the council's guidelines, but only very vaguely: "As regards diet, keep the rules so far as you are able; only be careful to refuse anything that has been offered to an idol, for that is the worship of dead gods" (chapter 6). There is definitely variety in early Christian attitudes on these matters, and maybe even persistent tension. Weirdly, Acts 21:17-26 shows James receiving Paul and informing him of the letter as if Paul has not seen it before! (This might have something to do with Luke's use of a different source for that section of Acts, but I wonder whether in the final narrative it shows us relations that are still a little strained.)

Possibly it does, making it even stranger that Jesus just trusted that everybody would figure out what Jewish rules applied to Gentile converts. Makes my skeptical mind wonder if Jesus even knew that there would be Gentile converts, but that would be extra problematic...

2003-04-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

On the suckage of eyewitness testimony

I'm finally getting around to responding to Telford's comment to my post last week on the trustworthiness of Christian witness. I wrote:

Personally, I can't imagine placing that much faith in anyone else's credibility. People are fallible. Their credibility may be fine for ordinary matters, but this is no ordinary matter and no ordinary degree of belief. How can I believe a second-hand account, no matter how sincere it is, to the point of placing my life in it? It doesn't help matters that a number of psychological experiments indicate that eyewitness testimony basically sucks.

Telford responded:

As to the credibility of the witnesses to Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, it is not a matter of "blind trust" to count them credible. I think one can approach them with a reasonable level of criticism and come away satisfied. Of course there are some who approach them with too much credulity, and others with too much incredulity. But to the responsible middle, both Jesus and his disciples offered signs to confirm his identity.

I haven't gone over precisely the evidence that Telford is probably thinking of, but I feel I should establish where I'm coming from here. The witnesses to Christ's life, death and re-life may be as credible as anybody can be from an account that old, but the point is, that's not saying much. When I said eyewitness testimony sucks, I wasn't kidding. There's been a lot of attention and research given to this subject over the years, though mostly in regard to criminal justice rather than religion. For instance, a January 2001 article in the New Yorker began as follows:

In 1901, a professor of criminal law at the University of Berlin was lecturing to his class when a student suddenly shouted an objection to his line of argument. Another student countered angrily, and the two exchanged insults. First were clenched, threats made: "If you say another word ..." The the first student drew a gun, the second rushed at him, and the professor recklessly interposed himself between them. A struggle, a blast -- then pandemonium.

Whereupon the two putative antagonists disengaged and returned to their seats. The professor swiftly restored order, explaining to his students that the incident had been staged, and for a purpose. He asked the students, as eyewitnesses, to describe exactly what they had seen. Some were to write down their account on the spot, some a day or a week later; a few even had to depose their observations under cross-examination. The results were dismal. The most accurate witness got twenty-six per cent of the significant details wrong; others up to eighty per cent. Words were put in people's mouths. Actions were described that had never taken place. Events that had taken place disappeared from memory.

In the century since, professors around the world have reenacted the experiment, in one form or another, thousands of times; the findings have been recounted in legal texts, courtrooms, and popular crime books. The trick has even been played on audiences of judges.

This isn't the only type of experiment to cast doubt on eyewitness testimony. One researcher interviewed witnesses to the London blitz shortly after the event, and then again decades later, and found they told completely different stories. Elizabeth Loftus, one of the foremost researchers on memory, has demonstrated more than once that you can "plant" a childhood memory in someone that never even happened. The new DNA findings of how many innocent people are in jail has renewed interest in this, and a good roundup of the research is here.

Witnessing the Resurrection isn't exactly the same as these experiments, but some basic principles emerge. People can be well-meaning, sober, and extremely sure of their memories and still be wrong. Moreover, having multiple witnesses doesn't necessarily prove anything -- if they're friends and they have a common interest in seeing it a certain way, as the disciples did, they can easily influence each other's memories.

So, getting back to Telford's point: what's "too much" credulity, and "too much" incredulity? What are our standards here? What's "reasonable"? As I said before, it seems reasonable to think that something extraordinary happened back then, but I don't see how we can believe any of it to the point of faith. Anything that gets processed through human beings stands a very strong chance of getting messed up; with all due respect to my Catholic readers, taking anybody to be infallible seems dangerously close to idolatry to me. At best, we can play a version of Pascal's wager with it: if the probability is great enough that it happened, maybe it's worth betting on it. But I don't see how it is, and anyway, that's not faith.

2003-04-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

Nature and nurture

Kevin Drum posted recently on the nature/nurture debate -- a subject of great interest to me -- and concluded:

And what's even worse is that, as with most of the ideology tied up in nature/nurture arguments, this whole question is wildly misplaced. Whether homosexuality is innate or not, the only real question is whether it's behavior that we approve of. If it's not, then who cares if it's innate? If there were genes for murder, we still wouldn't approve of murder. Likewise, if we do approve of it, then who cares if it's mostly a matter of upbringing?

I can't agree with that, because he acts like "what we approve of" simply falls out of the sky with no connection to our conception of the human being. But it seems to me that these things are deeply connected.

For one thing, there's the question of what we can change. If you believe that, say, intelligence and scholastic achievement are largely genetically determined, then forming educational policies aimed at leveling the differences is going to be an exercise in futility. My mother, a former English teacher who's now a professor of education, has run up against this problem: she's been hearing calls all her life to turn us into "a nation of readers," but from her actual experience with kids has gotten the feeling that a lot of people were not born to enjoy reading and probably never will. I think this affects people's moral values to the extent that a morality based on the impossible is simply unworkable.

Connected with this is the question of what will ultimately lead to the greatest happiness for most people. If you believe that, say, women are naturally less ambitious and intellectual than men and more inherently able and child-rearing, organizing society around a traditional gender division of labor makes sense. But if you believe them to be of roughly the same capabilities as men, keeping them in the home starts to look oppressive. If your morality has anything to do with human happiness, this will affect your views also.

Finally, there's the question of how much a given behavior might be "catching." This is especially the case with homosexuality -- the example Kevin was particularly talking about here. Probably most Americans are fine with letting gay people do what they want in their private lives, but a lot of argument comes out of the issue of whether going public about it "promotes" it. If you think homosexuality is entirely genetic, it doesn't matter how much people talk about it or fail to disapprove of it -- no one is going to become gay who wouldn't have been otherwise. If you see it as environmental, however, then publicity is going to make a world of difference.

I should point out that, while a lot of secular types see Christianity as a classic example of moral values "falling from the sky," it's become apparent to me as I've studied it that it, too, bases its values on a theory of human nature. At one recent Alpha lecture, the speaker quoted somebody -- I'm too flaky to look it up now -- as saying that he "became Christian in order to become fully human." I have heard this concept expressed many times in many ways -- that following the law is becoming what God meant you to be, while sin, however appealing it may be in the short term, is a corruption of your true self. I'm not totally convinced of this (in regard to sexuality in particular, I wrote about this at length here). But all this is to say, your conception of innate human nature does indeed affect what you think is right for people.

2003-04-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

Acts 20

The Paul posse spends a week in Troas. On the last night Paul gives a long speech, during which a young man named Eutychus falls asleep and topples out the window, apparently to his death. Paul goes down and takes him in his arms, saying, "Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him." He goes back upstairs, and the young man lives.

It's not clear if this is a miracle or not. There was actually one ressurection in Acts that I didn't mention, back in 9 when Peter raises a disciple called Tabitha. But though Luke writes that Eutychus "was picked up dead," it's certainly possible he was merely thought to be dead. Paul's words sound more like superior perception than some act of miracle-working.

What's the point of the story? My study notes point to Paul's line later in the chapter: "Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease day or night to warn everyone with tears." This comes in the middle of Paul's goodbye speech to the Ephesians, in which he warns that he will be persecuted and "savage wolves will come among you." So everybody be on guard. Don't fall asleep at the switch.

Or maybe it's just a warning against falling asleep in church. Fortunately, in the Christian Assembly I think that's impossible.

2003-04-10T12:37:00.000-07:00

But I know it's about ... forgiveness

Eve Tushnet recently posted a meditation on justice and mercy, and the balance between them. She concludes:

One of the things I found most attractive in Christianity (admittedly this is a long list) was its constant references to metaphors of marriage, union, communion. And one of the most powerful examples of that is the Christian belief (spelled out in St. Anselm's terrific treatise Cur Deus Homo) that the Incarnation and Crucifixion were God's way of marrying justice and mercy, being both fully just and fully merciful. In the words of the Psalmist, "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other" (Psalm 85:10).

I like all the intimate metaphors too, but for me the whole justice/mercy thing in Christianity has yet to gel into a coherent picture. Instead, it seems contradictory and confusing.

Which is too bad, because actually one of the big things that attracted me to it is forgiveness. Not just forgiveness of my own failings, which I guess everybody wants, but to learn to forgive the things that have been done to me. It's painful and corrosive to me to carry around the anger and fear left by these wounds, and it inhibits my giving to others.

Some people have advised me to get over anger simply by telling myself that the person isn't worth the energy. You're letting them "rent space in your head," so just dismiss them. I don't like that because it dehumanizes people. And especially if you're angry at someone you cared about, it means cutting out and invalidating that part of yourself that cares. I don't know about everybody else, but for me that's excruciating.

Christianity places forgiveness at the heart of its beliefs, but sometimes it's hard for me to tell what that really means. When I blogged Acts 5 I remarked that I didn't want to take on the story of the couple who get killed for withholding funds from the church. Later at Alpha, though, I explained why this story bothered me. Really, it's another question about that old hobbyhorse of mine, the Atonement. If God forgave our sins by dying on the cross, what does it mean that the first Christians in Acts to notably screw up get killed on the spot?

One answer I got was that they didn't repent. And indeed, I've heard Christians before claim that forgiveness should only be given under certain conditions: if the person is sorry, if he promises not to do it again, if he's sincere. This bothers me because, really, forgiving people under those conditions is usually easy. I mean, obviously it depends on the severity of the crime, but in most situations it makes God's forgiveness seem less than amazing. If you come grovelling to God, saying what a horrible sinner you are and that you'll do your best to sin no more, and God in his clairvoyance can see that you're sincere, would you really expect him to go, "Bwahahaha!" and smack you into hell? Only if you expect God to be a real bastard, I think.

No, forgiveness is hard precisely because in human life, you usually don't have all the power and people aren't crawling at your feet. Sometimes the person you need to forgive isn't even there, separated from you by death or other circumstances. Sometimes they apologize but you're not sure if you can believe them or trust them again. It's those situations that I struggle with. And whether Christ can provide the answers for me remains to be seen.

2003-04-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

Acts 19

Paul and the gang go to Ephesus, home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Temple of Artemis. According to my notes, this Artemis wasn't exactly the celibate huntress of Greek myth, but an ancient mother goddess who was identified with her. Provoked by some artisans who make their living working for the temple, a riot breaks out against the Christians in defense of the goddess. A city official, however, points out that there is no sign the Christians are threatening the temple, and that any complaints should go through proper legal channels. The mob disperses.

At Alpha last night Telford remarked that Paul's rhetorical move in Acts 17 wan't the first time a Jew had equated another culture's high god with Yahweh. In the Old Testament the Canaanite god El and some similar deities are likewise identified. A mother goddess is a tougher nut to crack, though. The Christian focus on the Father and the Son doesn't leave much room for a female entity.

The semi-cult of Mary that arose later is seen by some as filling that void. But what's also interesting, though I didn't realize it till recently, is that there is an important female entity in early Christianity: the church itself. In the Bible it's usually called by a female pronoun, identified as the "bride of Christ" in some detail.

This puts believers, male and female alike, in a curiously feminine position. Back in the fall I blogged a book review about Puritan sexuality that included this comment:

Ministers exhorted Puritans, male and female, to submit to "an eternal love affair with Jesus Christ." One young man asked in his diary, "Will the Lord now again return and embrace me in the arms of his dearest love? Will he fall upon my neck and kiss me?" Since souls were equal and either without gender or vaguely female, Puritan men comfortably spoke of submitting as brides to ravishment by Christ as their spiritual bridegroom.

All this is metaphorical, of course (lest anyone get the wrong idea). But it does suggest a wild idea: if there's a goddess in Christianity, it's us.

2003-04-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

Consumption

Telford left comments on some posts from last week that I want to address separately. The first he wrote to this post, although it also applied to this post, about the pastor with "food issues" who thought God was telling her to fast:

You're right: thinness is not virtue, and fasting is not in the service of losing weight. I don't think Cathy means it that way, though. My hunch is that she means one who has "food issues" – our theological ancestors called it "gluttony" – are in special need of the discipline of fasting. I have given up sweets for Lent, and can't resist the temptation to substitute other stuff (fruit, chips, etc.). That's not a weight issue, but it is a food issue. Really, way down deep, I have a feeling it's an idolatry issue.

I know Cathy didn't think the fast was meant to lose weight. What I meant was that "food issues" can cut both ways -- they can lead to pathological overeating and to pathological undereating. That's why I can't agree that it's just a newfangled version of gluttony. Anorexics are obsessed with food in the negative -- they eat very little, but they typically spend a lot of their time thinking about and dealing with food, even having elaborate rituals for preparing and portioning the food that they do eat. So the "discipline of fasting" can be perverted just as much as the indiscipline of overeating. I think your idolatry reference is on the mark here, but you can worship an idol in more than one way.

I don't know Cathy and her food issues well enough to know what's really going on, but the way she fixated on the word "fasting" set off my alarm bells for that reason. Since you're a guy, and a thin guy, I imagine you haven't spent much time inside the warped female food/body image culture, but I have enough to not ever want to go there again. I've mentioned on this blog before that I've historically had a weight problem, and I'm still pretty zaftig by L.A. standards. Modern society, which offers more food and demands less physical work than any before in history, is bound to make a lot of people fat, and so not being fat requires discipline. In that sense, I do have to deal with gluttony. But that's different from the big emotional issues with food that people like Cathy and Mark have -- food as pacifier, nurterer, temptor, etc. That's more complicated, and, spiritually speaking, more dangerous. The challenge to it is not to avoid eating but to avoid making food the center of your life. And whether fasting does that, well, I have my doubts.

2003-04-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

Acts 18

Paul and his crew keep traveling around, winning converts and getting into trouble. In Achaia Paul is brought before the Roman proconsul, Gallio, who declares this to be an intra-Jewish squabble and washes his hands of the whole thing.

We seem to have here an early example of the separation of church and state. And indeed, you can imagine Gallio listening to all this bizarre argument about a "messiah" and thinking, "Who am I to figure this out? It's a Jewish thing." But he takes his hands off even farther than American law: when the crowd beats up a synagogue official named Sosthenes, Gallio does nothing.

Who Sosthenes is and why the mob attacks him isn't clear. (Acts, unfortunately, is full of inadequately identified characters.) But there's an echo here of Pontius Pilate's reaction to Jesus, in which he tries to be a neutral arbiter but ends up as a vehicle of lynch-mob passions. Both incidents show the limits of neutrality: in ruling another people, the Romans are bound to take sides, even in the negative. The Europeans in their empires, many centuries later, were to find themselves with the same problem. And now that we Americans have committed ourselves to rebuilding two countries, we're in the same boat.

2003-04-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Up with the sun

Matthew Yglesias (and many of his commenters) is among those bashing Daylight Savings. I'm actually in the minority that likes it, for pretty much the same reason that Jeff Cooper does in Matthew's link -- as the sun rises earlier, I tend to wake up earlier anyway. This is something that's only happened as I've gotten older though; I realize grad students like Matt are experts at sleeping in broad daylight (and the 1:10 a.m. timestamp of his post proves it!). Also, although Matt points out that "we have electric lights," I tend to look upon burning fossil fuels as something we should avoid doing unnecessarily.

The one thing I don't like about it, though, is how late it runs. Since it's tied to day length, logically it should begin and end at the same point in relation to the equinoxes; that is, since it starts about two weeks after the spring equinox, it should end about two weeks before the fall equinox. But for some inexplicable reason it drags on more than a month after autumn starts. And that same attunement of my body to the sun that makes me wake up earlier now makes me really not want to get out of bed when the alarm goes off in October, because it's so frickin' dark. Why does it have to go on so long, anyway?

2003-04-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

Acts 17

Paul goes to Athens and is appalled to find it full of idols. Rather than criticize the pagans directly for this, however, he commends their piety and notes that one altar is inscribed "To an unknown god." That god has now revealed himself, Paul explains, and called upon all people to repent.

I am not aware of the Greeks worshipping an "unknown god," though there was a lot of variation in practices in different places and times in Greece. I gather that it is pretty common, though, for pagans to envision a high god who floats above all the lesser gods who actually get things done for people. The Hindus, for instance, have generally regarded their innumerable local deities as ultimately incarnations of Brahman (as is, for that matter, the rest of the universe). In Haitian voodoo, which is basically transplanted West African paganism, a high god called Olorun reigns above a legion of spirits both good and bad called lois. (It's because of this accommodational monotheism that Haitians can call themselves Catholic while still turning to the lois for practical help.)

Such high gods are generally seen as remote and unfathomable, however. This is perhaps what is meant by the "unknown god" of the Athenian altar. The idea that this high god had come to earth and offered salvation to all people would have been a powerful message, because this was quite different from the dealings with the petty, limited, humanlike gods of the Greek pantheon. I can also imagine why this message would have been more appealing to the pagans than to Jews. The pagans had a real void here, while a lot of Jews figured they already had a relationship with the high God, thank you very much.

This also brings up a broader issue that I've discussed (inconclusively) with people at Alpha: to what extent did/does God communicate with people outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition? Did he really leave 99.9% of the world in the dark while he was futzing around with the Israelites, or were there other activities that didn't make it into the Bible? Paul is beginning to deal with that question, but I don't know if Christianity as a whole has ever dealt with it very well. The exclusivity of the faith, at least as it's usually portrayed, has always bothered me, and bothers me still.

2003-04-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

Another reason to love the Internet

You know, the overlap between fans of Jane Austen novels and fans of sci-fi action movies can't be that big. But evidently I'm not alone in it, because somebody is trying crossover fiction.

(Via Brad DeLong.)

2003-04-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

She be wanting it more

To the online Bible-study club we can now welcome Sappho, who's reading Kings. (Kind of a pity we're all in different books, but such is the blogosphere.) The section she covers includes one of my favorite Bible characters, the queen of Sheba. This queen likes to ask hard questions, and wants the answers so bad she travels all the way from Ethiopia to Jerusalem just on the rumor she can get them. My kinda woman.

One thing I've been wondering though: what's the origin of the story that she had an affair with Solomon? That isn't in the Bible, where they just have a long talk and exchange presents. I know the Ethiopian emperors used to claim descent from them, but I can't imagine an Ethiopian story would have spread much in the West.

2003-04-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

Acts 16

Paul and his party go to Macedonia, where there's a strange incident that puzzles me now as much as it did the first time I read Acts:

One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.’ And it came out that very hour. (16-18)

Maybe it's my lack of knowledge of divination spirits, but why would it be making her do this? And why was Paul annoyed, since she seemd to be promoting them? Was it that she was calling them slaves? Making a racket?

Anyway, the slave girl's owners get mad and have Paul and his friend Silas thrown in prison. There follows and earthquake, and all the doors open and the chains fall off. The head jailor, thinking they've escaped, tries to kill himself. But Paul stops him, and converts him and the rest of his family.

This is an interesting contrast to Peter's two jailbreaks, in Acts 5 and 12. Those simply slip Peter out unnoticed, and don't worry about the captors. In fact, in 14 we're told Peter's jailors were executed for "letting" him escape, and no one seems terribly bothered about this.

The fact that Paul saves his jailor, even when he has a chance to escape from prison, seems to me to show an expansion of the church's mission. Up to now the Christians seem to look upon the people within Rome's power structure as the enemy, or at best as indifferent (render unto Caesar, and all that). Cornelius was a Roman soldier, but he already believed in Yahweh and came to Peter himself. This is a very different gentile.

It also, in a faint way, contradicts the plagues of Exodus that I wailed on so much. In that case God punished everyone in Egypt, on the theory they all collaborated in enslaving the Hebrews. (Though how slaves and farm animals could have really collaborated, I still don't see.) Here is a known collaborator, but Paul seems to take the attitude toward him that Jesus took toward the grunts who crucified him: he doesn't really know what he's doing. Give him a chance at enlightenment.

2003-04-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

Acts 15

I'm having a flashback here, because I blogged about this chapter last November. The main action is that the church lays out which of the Old Testament rules the new gentile converts have to follow. (Short answer: no meat from animals that were unkosherly slaughtered or sacrificed to idols, and no sexual misbehavior.) I asked why those rules, in particular, and Telford answered here.

There is, apparently, no general agreement on why the church chose those rules. But the original question -- how much Jewish law are Christians bound by? -- has driven people crazy ever since. For instance, it came up in the debate about pacifism on Josh Claybourn's blog a while back, in regard to how much the violence in the OT might relate to how Christians should live.

Homosexuality also tends to get subjected to this argument. I'm reminded of the exchange between Louder Fenn and Rob Carr that, I think, went to the ultimate heart of the issue: did Jesus intend that compassion should trump the law? And if he didn't, what exactly was he up to?

Well, that question might be better dealt with when I'm actually reading a Gospel (I think the next one is Mark, in about a month). But somehow it isn't real encouraging that even those disciples who knew Jesus firsthand didn't seem to be all that sure.

2003-04-05T18:00:00.000-08:00

Friends and relations

Telford explains the provenance of his name, which I'd been wondering about myself. (The most I got was when someone asked where his name came from, he answered, "It comes from Hell.")

The bit about his middle name is interesting. My family has a similar story, actually. My sister's middle name is Beecher, because we're distantly related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, her brother Henry Ward Beecher, and the rest of that rather colorful clan. Which I guess gives us about equal abolitionist cred, although when it comes to the quality of the writers, well, Telf has bragging rights.

2003-04-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

The meaning of hunger

Peter Nixon wrote me a fine email in response to my Acts 13 post. Since he's given up blogging for Lent, I'm goin to be his "Sabbath goy" and blog it for him:

In general, I find that evangelical Protestants, particularly
Pentecostals, are much more likely to believe that they are getting highly
specific directions from God on various issues than are Catholics. I'm not
saying that one approach is right and the other wrong, but it is
something of a modest cultural difference.

For myself, rather than asking the question "is God asking me to fast,"
I'm more likely to fast so I can hear what God is asking me. Our lives
have become so noisy that God could be sitting right next to us
shouting at the top of His lungs and we still might not hear what he is
saying. Disciplines like prayer, fasting and abstinence are tools to help us
purify our awareness so we can hear the "still, small voice."

Another way to think about it is to envision God as a radio station
that is always broadcasting. We are the radio and we need to work to keep ourselves in tune (imagine you are a radio in the days before digital tuners, I might add!).

In my own life, I have found that discerning God's will for my life
tends to take a bit of time. That is, I think, as it should be. Jesus
spent 40 days in the desert, not 40 hours. Adults wishing to become
Catholics undergo a lengthy preparation process known as the Catechumenate that dates back to the earliest days of the Church. Candidates for the priesthood and religious life undergo years of formation, and the latter make temporary vows before they make permanent vows.

On the subject of fasting, I would say that one should be careful about
drawing a firm line between acts of spiritual and material solidarity
and always favoring the former over the latter. There is a story about
someone asking Mother Teresa why her sisters spent so much time praying when they could be out in the streets of Calcutta helping the poor. She replied, "if they didn't pray so much, they wouldn't be able to continue to go out into the streets of Calcutta to help the poor."

Well, yeah, my initial response was a bit churlish -- I understand how these spiritual pursuits can encourage one to be more giving of oneself. I think one reason I reacted that way to the pastor's remarks about fasting from food in particular is that our culture's equation of thinness with moral virtue really bugs me. People say they're "being good" if they eat lightly and exercise and such, and I can sort of understand that. But ultimately it's still self-centered: it's not "being good" on par with giving your time to help the unfortunate and so on. I'm not one to judge what was going on in the pastor's heart, it just pushed my buttons.

I like the metaphor of the radio tuning. That was sort of what I was getting at when I wrote about letting go of worldly things -- not that worldly things are inherently bad, but they can draw away your emotional and spiritual energy. You're also probably right that Pentecostals are more likely to think they're getting directives from God. The whole movement started with the idea of direct communication with the Holy Spirit, so it's not surprising they see it everywhere.

2003-04-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

Acts 14

Paul and Barnabas go to Lystra and do healings, only to find themselves deified:

When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, ‘The gods have come down to us in human form!’ Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates; he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice. When the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting, ‘Friends, why are you doing this? We are mortals just like you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. (14:11-15)

It's interesting that this should come up, because I just had an email exchange with Telford about deifying people. Sure, in the modern era we don't literally call people gods or demigods, but we can act in ways that amount to the same thing. Famous people can be subject to it, like the weird cult of Elvis Presley (complete with after-death sightings). We can also do this to people in our personal relationships. A few months ago a speaker at church remarked that when he first got married, he and his wife looked to each other for an impossible level of fulfillment. "After about a week," he said, "we had to look at each other and say, 'Look, I'm not God, and you're not God.'"

Despite the fact that Christianity grew up in a revolt against that kind of blurring of the human/God boundary, I have been feeling like it strays into that realm sometimes anyway, with its great emphasis on "witness." Only a few people in world history actually met Jesus; the rest of us have to rely on the credibility of their witness, at ever greater degrees of remove. Nearly all the Christians I've talked and written to lately have placed great importance on this, and on how their relationships with and admiration of individual Christians brought them to the faith.

Personally, I can't imagine placing that much faith in anyone else's credibility. People are fallible. Their credibility may be fine for ordinary matters, but this is no ordinary matter and no ordinary degree of belief. How can I believe a second-hand account, no matter how sincere it is, to the point of placing my life in it? It doesn't help matters that a number of psychological experiments indicate that eyewitness testimony basically sucks.

The friendship and support of Christians at church and in the blogosphere has done wonders for me emotionally since my free-fall last year. But I've been reluctant to ascribe this to any kind of supernatural agency. In his last email to me Telford wrote:

When a Christian feeds a hungry brother or sister, God is involved,
though the immediate agencies are also thoroughly human. ... The Word's
incarnation, the Spirit's indwelling, and the restoration of the human
imago dei are like that. The mind-bending thing about Christian
eschatology is that Christlikeness means we are becoming both truly
ourselves again (and thus like the rest of creation), and like God (and
thus unlike the rest of the creation), yet without tension between the
two (for divinity and humanity are one in Christ without confusion,
change, division, or separation).

This is an appealing idea, but it also kind of creeps me out. I need and appreciate human kindness as much as anybody, but is it really right to worship it as the "indwelling" of the Supreme Being? Is this "imaging Christ" business so different from the idea of Paul and Barnabas being incarnations of gods? I don't know, this is giving me a headache...