Sick days
Have caught a cold or something, so posting will be light for a while. Not as bad as poor Eve, apparently, but my brain is blurry...
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Natural history
Since I didn't have anything special to do on the long weekend, I took myself to L.A.'s Natural History Museum today. I grew up loving the science and nature museums in San Francisco, so I was pleased to find that L.A. has some good ones. The NHM is in a big, beautiful 1930s-era building, and has a large and interesting collection of stuff. My only complaint is the sloppy upkeep -- some of the displays are unlabeled and many are underlit. But overall, it's a neat place to be.
Not surprisingly, I was sharing the museum with an awful lot of small children. I've wondered before why it is that, while art museums remain firmly adult territory, science museums have become so heavily child-oriented. There's nothing inherently childish about being interested in science, or wanting to see artifacts of nature. It's true that as I've grown older my scientific pursuits have gotten more intellectual and theoretical, but reading about, say, a T-Rex isn't the same as actually going and seeing the skeleton of a T-Rex looming over you.
It does seem that a lot of children are interested in animals. They figure heavily not just in things like science museums but in children's books and TV programs. I was certainly fascinated by them when I was a kid. Yet for a lot of people this interest is temporary. In our industrial world animals aren't part of most adults' lives -- except the occasional house pet -- and they ignore them. I've wondered if people are born with a natural interest in animals, but most lose it from disuse. There's also the odd business that happens to a lot of girls at around age 10 or 12: they become fascinated with horses. It didn't happen to me, so I really can't explain it. I suppose you could go all Jungian about horses as an image of masculine sexuality, but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.
I'm not one to idolize nature. My mother likes to go off camping in the boondocks, hiking and swimming in freezing lakes and that sort of thing, but I was never much into that. I like my creature comforts -- that's the sort of animal I am. But I do feel a deep connection to it; I'm aware always that it's out there, far bigger and far older than our human doings. I feel awe in the presence of its more impressive feats, like the windstorm a couple months ago. And I do feel a peculiar sympathy with animals, who occupy the same space that we do and yet live in different worlds. If I find God, I know he has to be big enough to encompass it all -- not just people and what we do to each other, but the whole thing, huge, ancient, complex, and awesome.
Since I didn't have anything special to do on the long weekend, I took myself to L.A.'s Natural History Museum today. I grew up loving the science and nature museums in San Francisco, so I was pleased to find that L.A. has some good ones. The NHM is in a big, beautiful 1930s-era building, and has a large and interesting collection of stuff. My only complaint is the sloppy upkeep -- some of the displays are unlabeled and many are underlit. But overall, it's a neat place to be.
Not surprisingly, I was sharing the museum with an awful lot of small children. I've wondered before why it is that, while art museums remain firmly adult territory, science museums have become so heavily child-oriented. There's nothing inherently childish about being interested in science, or wanting to see artifacts of nature. It's true that as I've grown older my scientific pursuits have gotten more intellectual and theoretical, but reading about, say, a T-Rex isn't the same as actually going and seeing the skeleton of a T-Rex looming over you.
It does seem that a lot of children are interested in animals. They figure heavily not just in things like science museums but in children's books and TV programs. I was certainly fascinated by them when I was a kid. Yet for a lot of people this interest is temporary. In our industrial world animals aren't part of most adults' lives -- except the occasional house pet -- and they ignore them. I've wondered if people are born with a natural interest in animals, but most lose it from disuse. There's also the odd business that happens to a lot of girls at around age 10 or 12: they become fascinated with horses. It didn't happen to me, so I really can't explain it. I suppose you could go all Jungian about horses as an image of masculine sexuality, but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.
I'm not one to idolize nature. My mother likes to go off camping in the boondocks, hiking and swimming in freezing lakes and that sort of thing, but I was never much into that. I like my creature comforts -- that's the sort of animal I am. But I do feel a deep connection to it; I'm aware always that it's out there, far bigger and far older than our human doings. I feel awe in the presence of its more impressive feats, like the windstorm a couple months ago. And I do feel a peculiar sympathy with animals, who occupy the same space that we do and yet live in different worlds. If I find God, I know he has to be big enough to encompass it all -- not just people and what we do to each other, but the whole thing, huge, ancient, complex, and awesome.
Friday, February 14, 2003
Crime and punishment
Since I hadn't been to Mysterium Crucis before today, I hadn't realized he'd weighed in on the Atonement debate last month. He pointed out that however God did the atonement, somebody was gonna be unhappy:
This brings back to my mind the fact that one way I seem to differ from a lot of Christians is in my attitude toward punishment. I mentioned before that when I last talked to Telford we had a digression about St. Anselm, and it hit on this subject. (I'm gonna milk that visit for all it's worth, apparently!) St. Anselm, apparently, wrote that once sin entered the world, God had three choices: destroy it all; forgive everything, which would be unjust because there'd be no punishment for sin; or do what he did, a substitutional atonement.
I objected to the premise of the second option. When I think about people who've wronged me, they were often people who were close to me; so I knew, even if I got extremely angry, that they were not all evil. If I could have removed the evil from within them, leaving everything else intact and healing the relationship, I wouldn't give a flip if they hadn't been punished.
Maybe it's my liberal humanist upbringing, but I think of punishment in practical rather than cosmic terms. It is, to me, a tool for minimizing evil. It can prevent people from doing something again; it can deter others; if properly designed, it might even make the wrongdoer learn something. But it's a crude instrument and it often doesn't work very well anyway, so if there is another way to minimize evil, I'm all for it.
It's for this reason that no matter how people try to spin it to me, I can't accept the concept of hell. Purgatory I can understand. Annihilation, even, I can understand. But what's the point of eternal punishment? Why keep someone around forever just to make them suffer? I don't see how that reduces the evil in the universe; in fact it's hard to imagine how, once the End Times have concluded, good can be said to have "won" if there's a pile of souls eternally in painful separation from God. I'm with the Zoroastrians here: good hasn't won until the gates of hell are closed forever. Until not just punishment but the need for punishment is gone.
Since I hadn't been to Mysterium Crucis before today, I hadn't realized he'd weighed in on the Atonement debate last month. He pointed out that however God did the atonement, somebody was gonna be unhappy:
God could have snapped his fingers, in a spiritual sense of course, and instantaneously saved us. But I imagine if he had done that, theologians would sit around, nursing their pipes, pondering the ineffable mystery of the boring anticlimactic way in which God saved the world. Couldn't He have done it with a bit of flair? A little drama? Or perhaps God could have created this mandatory, purgatorial state that not only cleanses us of venial, but mortal and original sin. Which would have theologians and laymen rather angry, and I don't think the religion would taken off very fast. What? He's going to make us pay for all the things we did? That's not fair!
This brings back to my mind the fact that one way I seem to differ from a lot of Christians is in my attitude toward punishment. I mentioned before that when I last talked to Telford we had a digression about St. Anselm, and it hit on this subject. (I'm gonna milk that visit for all it's worth, apparently!) St. Anselm, apparently, wrote that once sin entered the world, God had three choices: destroy it all; forgive everything, which would be unjust because there'd be no punishment for sin; or do what he did, a substitutional atonement.
I objected to the premise of the second option. When I think about people who've wronged me, they were often people who were close to me; so I knew, even if I got extremely angry, that they were not all evil. If I could have removed the evil from within them, leaving everything else intact and healing the relationship, I wouldn't give a flip if they hadn't been punished.
Maybe it's my liberal humanist upbringing, but I think of punishment in practical rather than cosmic terms. It is, to me, a tool for minimizing evil. It can prevent people from doing something again; it can deter others; if properly designed, it might even make the wrongdoer learn something. But it's a crude instrument and it often doesn't work very well anyway, so if there is another way to minimize evil, I'm all for it.
It's for this reason that no matter how people try to spin it to me, I can't accept the concept of hell. Purgatory I can understand. Annihilation, even, I can understand. But what's the point of eternal punishment? Why keep someone around forever just to make them suffer? I don't see how that reduces the evil in the universe; in fact it's hard to imagine how, once the End Times have concluded, good can be said to have "won" if there's a pile of souls eternally in painful separation from God. I'm with the Zoroastrians here: good hasn't won until the gates of hell are closed forever. Until not just punishment but the need for punishment is gone.
The choice that isn't, part II
Tom at Disputations agrees with my complaints about the liar/lunatic/Lord gambit that was used at Alpha. He makes the added point that the choice assumes that the Scriptural account of Jesus is accurate, and a non-Christian wouldn't assume that.
Actually, I should say in Alpha's defense that it brought up the formulation after going over reasons why we should believe the Gospels are accurate. (Those weren't entirely convincing either, but that's a subject for another post.) The point I was making was that even if you grant that Jesus' personality was as it was portrayed in the Bible, the challenge still doesn't work. It assumes you can pidgeonhole people in a way you really can't.
Paul Zadik says in the comments that the three-way choice idea originally came from G.K. Chesterton to counter the then-common idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not actually divine. In that context, it's a good point: if you look at it that way, you'd have to discount so much of the Gospels that they become pretty useless as source material. And what you're left with is really not very helpful. Will at Mysterium Crucis (which Tom links to) puts it well:
Indeed. As I've said before, the real leap of faith in Christianity isn't recognizing Jesus' goodness, it's believing that goodness=God. I am reminded here of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (or Mo-tzu, if you're being Wade-Giles about it), who preached the universal-altruism concept several centuries before Christ. His movement died shortly after he did, superseded by the much more practical Confucius. How could you possibly expect people to be as concerned with a stranger's welfare as they would be with a relative's? asked Confucius. It goes against human nature.
As Jesus (and that other successful preacher of selflessness, Buddha) knew, if you're going to tell people to so flagrantly go against their self-interest, you'd better back it up with some supernatural firepower. You are asking people to die to themselves, and you must reassure them that that kind of death is not simple annihilation. It leads to something better.
I've heard some progressive Christians argue that we should not even take the afterlife seriously; heaven and hell are simply metaphors for the worlds we'd leave our descendants if we behave well or badly. But if you're trying to build a good society, Jesus is a pretty lousy person to consult. He wasn't the least interested in building society; he told his followers to abandon their families and their jobs and be as carefree as the lilies of the field, and render the social order unto Caesar. That's why later builders of "Christian" societies wound up leaning heavily on the Old Testament, with all its helpfully detailed rules, and not on Jesus.
So I'm not inclined toward the "moral philosopher" idea of Jesus either. He was a real weirdo. Of course, so am I, so I gues there's something we have in common.
Tom at Disputations agrees with my complaints about the liar/lunatic/Lord gambit that was used at Alpha. He makes the added point that the choice assumes that the Scriptural account of Jesus is accurate, and a non-Christian wouldn't assume that.
Actually, I should say in Alpha's defense that it brought up the formulation after going over reasons why we should believe the Gospels are accurate. (Those weren't entirely convincing either, but that's a subject for another post.) The point I was making was that even if you grant that Jesus' personality was as it was portrayed in the Bible, the challenge still doesn't work. It assumes you can pidgeonhole people in a way you really can't.
Paul Zadik says in the comments that the three-way choice idea originally came from G.K. Chesterton to counter the then-common idea that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not actually divine. In that context, it's a good point: if you look at it that way, you'd have to discount so much of the Gospels that they become pretty useless as source material. And what you're left with is really not very helpful. Will at Mysterium Crucis (which Tom links to) puts it well:
Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Render unto Caesar. If you read the teachings of Jesus divorced from the context of his Godhood and divine mission, it's all pretty impractical. At its worse, it's self-evident nonsense. Take this little gem: the meek shall inherit the earth. Sure Jesus, whatever you say. Now if Jesus is God, and he can personally back up those words, I'll believe it. Barring that, the meek ain't gonna inherit jack sh!t.
The teachings of Christ only make sense when plugged into one interpretative matrix, one that assumes a set of transcendent absolutes that are morally right despite being devoid of any consideration for efficiency, practicality and self-preservation. Just read the Gospels. These aren't the teachings of a wise man. Wisdom is accrued over time, after the careful observation of a lifetime of experience. Wisdom says eliminate your enemies. Wisdom says fight back or you're going to live your entire life as a punching bag. Wisdom says screw Caesar. Wisdom says the devious and tenacious will inherit the earth.
Indeed. As I've said before, the real leap of faith in Christianity isn't recognizing Jesus' goodness, it's believing that goodness=God. I am reminded here of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (or Mo-tzu, if you're being Wade-Giles about it), who preached the universal-altruism concept several centuries before Christ. His movement died shortly after he did, superseded by the much more practical Confucius. How could you possibly expect people to be as concerned with a stranger's welfare as they would be with a relative's? asked Confucius. It goes against human nature.
As Jesus (and that other successful preacher of selflessness, Buddha) knew, if you're going to tell people to so flagrantly go against their self-interest, you'd better back it up with some supernatural firepower. You are asking people to die to themselves, and you must reassure them that that kind of death is not simple annihilation. It leads to something better.
I've heard some progressive Christians argue that we should not even take the afterlife seriously; heaven and hell are simply metaphors for the worlds we'd leave our descendants if we behave well or badly. But if you're trying to build a good society, Jesus is a pretty lousy person to consult. He wasn't the least interested in building society; he told his followers to abandon their families and their jobs and be as carefree as the lilies of the field, and render the social order unto Caesar. That's why later builders of "Christian" societies wound up leaning heavily on the Old Testament, with all its helpfully detailed rules, and not on Jesus.
So I'm not inclined toward the "moral philosopher" idea of Jesus either. He was a real weirdo. Of course, so am I, so I gues there's something we have in common.
Thursday, February 13, 2003
The choice that isn't
So, some of you might be wondering, how did the second Alpha go? It went all right. As with last time, the most interesting part of it was the discussion, but I don't feel free to talk about it.
The subject of the lecture this time was "Who is Jesus?" Like the last one, it said stuff I've heard before. But there was one formulation it raised that's stuck in my mind, because it irritates me so much. It basically says that there are three logical possibilities for Jesus: either he was lying, he was crazy, or he was everything he said he was. So, the theory goes, if he was a liar or a lunatic, how could he have said and done so many good things?
This is another idea I blame on C.S. Lewis, though I don't know if he originated it or just popularized it. It is based on a rather antiquated view of mental illness, to say the least, which had it that you could divide the world into the raving loonies and the perfectly sane, with no ambiguities. It also doesn't follow that someone who does something nefarious, like start a religious cult to serve his own ego, is incapable of saying or doing good things. In fact, many of them do say and do good things, which is why they attract followers. I suspect that many religious figures in the world, past and present, could pass the liar/lunatic/Lord test pretty well.
I doubt that Jesus was actually a fraud. It's hard to see what he gained from wandering the countryside with his scraggly band of followers; and certainly any con man worth his salt doesn't let himself get executed. I expect that something did happen when he got dunked by John the Baptist that convinced him (and maybe the Baptist too) that God had chosen him. I'm less certain that whatever happened was caused by God or that Jesus interpreted it correctly -- a lot of spiritual experiences are pretty ambiguous.
When I raised my objections in the discussion, the lecturer agreed with me. Everything she said had been evidence, not proof, she pointed out. Which makes me wonder what the point of it was. But I suppose I'd have to take that up with Alpha's inventor, who's back in England somewhere.
So, some of you might be wondering, how did the second Alpha go? It went all right. As with last time, the most interesting part of it was the discussion, but I don't feel free to talk about it.
The subject of the lecture this time was "Who is Jesus?" Like the last one, it said stuff I've heard before. But there was one formulation it raised that's stuck in my mind, because it irritates me so much. It basically says that there are three logical possibilities for Jesus: either he was lying, he was crazy, or he was everything he said he was. So, the theory goes, if he was a liar or a lunatic, how could he have said and done so many good things?
This is another idea I blame on C.S. Lewis, though I don't know if he originated it or just popularized it. It is based on a rather antiquated view of mental illness, to say the least, which had it that you could divide the world into the raving loonies and the perfectly sane, with no ambiguities. It also doesn't follow that someone who does something nefarious, like start a religious cult to serve his own ego, is incapable of saying or doing good things. In fact, many of them do say and do good things, which is why they attract followers. I suspect that many religious figures in the world, past and present, could pass the liar/lunatic/Lord test pretty well.
I doubt that Jesus was actually a fraud. It's hard to see what he gained from wandering the countryside with his scraggly band of followers; and certainly any con man worth his salt doesn't let himself get executed. I expect that something did happen when he got dunked by John the Baptist that convinced him (and maybe the Baptist too) that God had chosen him. I'm less certain that whatever happened was caused by God or that Jesus interpreted it correctly -- a lot of spiritual experiences are pretty ambiguous.
When I raised my objections in the discussion, the lecturer agreed with me. Everything she said had been evidence, not proof, she pointed out. Which makes me wonder what the point of it was. But I suppose I'd have to take that up with Alpha's inventor, who's back in England somewhere.
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Trusting God, again
Mark Shea asked last week how atheists out there would feel if they met with incontrovertible proof of God (by which he meant the Catholic God), sparking a long, passionate comments thread. (Via Minute Particulars.)
He wasn't asking about seekers like me, but it got me thinking. It would, at least, simplify things. I would know to bone up on Catholicism, anyway, instead of going to a Pentecostal church and being haunted by the feeling that maybe I should really be off studying Catholicism or Buddhism or Islam. I would not have the same attitude as Jody, which is basically, "That God is a jerk, so I'm going to ignore him." I don't see how you could ignore him. And in any case, it seems arrogant to turn and judge your Creator in such a way. The human brain is a remarkable thing, but it's not capable of everything, and I would think assessing Supreme Beings would be outside its range. And if he created me, he could not have created anything unknown to him, including my morals.
Nonetheless, it would not put my worries entirely to rest. The questions and the problems that I've raised here (as well as many I haven't raised, and those raised by others, including Jody) would still be questions and problems. Yahweh's behavior has indeed been pretty alarming in a lot of ways. I think my biggest fear would be that he is not being honest with us. The Gnostics believed that the Old Testament God wasn't actually the Omnipotent Being, but one of a number of archons -- sort of limited deities like the Olympian gods -- who developed delusions of grandeur. That actually makes a disturbing amount of sense, judging by the OT. But if he were, how would we know? We humans are pretty puny, and a powerful being could flummox us without being the all-powerful being.
But I suppose the premise of Mark's question assumes proof of an all-powerful being (whatever that might look like). Even then I'd be worried, though, if God is really as he says he is. When I hear Christians go on about the goodness of God, and rationalize the suffering on earth and the concept of even more suffering in hell, I can't help feeling that they find God is so good to them that they can't deal with the idea that he might not be good to everybody.
This brings to sharp relief the difference between faith and trust. Even evidence that God exists would not make me trust him. What would? I don't know. I really wish I knew the answer to that one.
Mark Shea asked last week how atheists out there would feel if they met with incontrovertible proof of God (by which he meant the Catholic God), sparking a long, passionate comments thread. (Via Minute Particulars.)
He wasn't asking about seekers like me, but it got me thinking. It would, at least, simplify things. I would know to bone up on Catholicism, anyway, instead of going to a Pentecostal church and being haunted by the feeling that maybe I should really be off studying Catholicism or Buddhism or Islam. I would not have the same attitude as Jody, which is basically, "That God is a jerk, so I'm going to ignore him." I don't see how you could ignore him. And in any case, it seems arrogant to turn and judge your Creator in such a way. The human brain is a remarkable thing, but it's not capable of everything, and I would think assessing Supreme Beings would be outside its range. And if he created me, he could not have created anything unknown to him, including my morals.
Nonetheless, it would not put my worries entirely to rest. The questions and the problems that I've raised here (as well as many I haven't raised, and those raised by others, including Jody) would still be questions and problems. Yahweh's behavior has indeed been pretty alarming in a lot of ways. I think my biggest fear would be that he is not being honest with us. The Gnostics believed that the Old Testament God wasn't actually the Omnipotent Being, but one of a number of archons -- sort of limited deities like the Olympian gods -- who developed delusions of grandeur. That actually makes a disturbing amount of sense, judging by the OT. But if he were, how would we know? We humans are pretty puny, and a powerful being could flummox us without being the all-powerful being.
But I suppose the premise of Mark's question assumes proof of an all-powerful being (whatever that might look like). Even then I'd be worried, though, if God is really as he says he is. When I hear Christians go on about the goodness of God, and rationalize the suffering on earth and the concept of even more suffering in hell, I can't help feeling that they find God is so good to them that they can't deal with the idea that he might not be good to everybody.
This brings to sharp relief the difference between faith and trust. Even evidence that God exists would not make me trust him. What would? I don't know. I really wish I knew the answer to that one.
Monday, February 10, 2003
If you can't trust God, who can you trust, who can ya?
I'm going back to Alpha tomorrow, but without Telford, sadly. He has to get ready for an important happening the next morning. (Don't know if I'm at liberty to say what it is, but everybody pray or cross your fingers or whatever your belief system allows for him, OK?) In the meantime he wrote a post about how we have trouble communicating sometimes because he so implicitly trusts God, and I don't.
I think he had several reasons to be thinking that now, and one of them was probably the conversation we had at the last Alpha session. As I mentioned before, I started off talking about this post from Minute Particulars:
I didn't mean for this to be pick-on-Mark week -- really, I didn't! But I was thinking about that comment after my convoluted discussion about sin with Tom and Louder Fenn, as well as after reading Isaiah. It all emphasized the unworthiness of humans before God, and how he was responsible for everything good about us but somehow we were responsible for everything bad.
I said to Telford that I didn't like this idea that God owes us nothing because he created us. God is constantly being compared to a parent, but isn't a parent responsible for his children? Don't you feel responsible for your children?
"But before God," he said. "So the analogy breaks down."
I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I pushed on. If God is that powerful, the creator of everything, and yet we didn't turn out the way he wanted, isn't he responsible for that? Maybe not entirely responsible, but at least partly responsible?
Somewhat to my surprise, Telford warmed to the idea. When God makes a covenant with the Hebrews, he pointed out, he limits himself. He binds himself to keep his end of the deal, even when people let him down. That does seem to say something about God's character.
"I know," I said. "And actually, it's really tempting to think of Jesus as taking that responsibility. You know, coming down, taking on the burden of the world -- literally, in a way, taking up the cross... But no one ever spins it like that. It's all about how this was totally undeserved, and God just did it because he's such a nice guy."
We batted around the idea some more, and somehow got sidetracked on St. Anselm. Then the actual business of Alpha interrupted the talk. But after it was over we went on, lingering like the last couple drunks at a bar, sitting on a table because they were putting the chairs away. And to my surprise, Telford conceded still more. He said he thought this was something theology had not adequately covered, and he should look into it more.
"The thing that bothers me, though," I said, "is that you're always talking about the importance of looking to the tradition of the Church. And I don't see this in the tradition of the Church."
"It is in the tradition, though," he said. "Maybe not so much in the New Testament. But if you look at some of the Psalms, a lot of them are saying to God, 'Here's a problem. Do something.' Not 'Please please please help us,' but 'Well? What are you going to do?'"
"Yeah," I said. "You know, I don't know much about Judaism, but it seems to have more of a tradition of, I don't know..."
"Chutzpah?"
"Yeah. Actually, there's an interesting article in First Things this month by a rabbi, about the differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes about a lot of things. And part of it was about heaven. You know, Christians don't think they deserve to go there, so you can only get in by the grace of God. But Jews think they do deserve to go there. They followed the Law --"
"Yeah, but who gave them the Law, huh?" Telford said snarkily.
"I mean, I think they felt like they held up their end of the bargain. And he also describes how the Jews accepted the Law. God offered it to them, and they accepted by a sort of voice vote."
He smiled. "Yeah. That was pretty cool."
We haven't had a chance to talk about it further, but in an email the other day he remarked, "I haven't found a reason to take back my affirmation of your point that God has a responsibility to rescue the creation because he has invested it with his own glory. Hope that proves to be solid common ground for the conversations to come."
I don't know if that will help me trust God, but I do think I was put off by the feeling that God -- or his spokespeople on earth -- was evading a sort of parental duty by expecting the obligations to go only one way -- from us to him. Perhaps Mark's cosmic God who brings existence itself into being would look at it that way; it seems rather Calvinist, and hard to fathom how anything could have happened that he didn't intend. But if you're getting that cosmic, it's hard to see how we could deserve anything good or bad from God; what we deserve is what he decides we should have.
In any case, the God of the Bible doesn't seem like that. Otherwise, his anger and disappointment and regret would be an elaborate act. I don't know how to see such a human-seeming God as an omnipotent being. But as I said to Telford at one point in the evening, all I really have to go on is my sense of what's good. If the Christian God doesn't seem to harmonize with that, what can I do?
I'm going back to Alpha tomorrow, but without Telford, sadly. He has to get ready for an important happening the next morning. (Don't know if I'm at liberty to say what it is, but everybody pray or cross your fingers or whatever your belief system allows for him, OK?) In the meantime he wrote a post about how we have trouble communicating sometimes because he so implicitly trusts God, and I don't.
I think he had several reasons to be thinking that now, and one of them was probably the conversation we had at the last Alpha session. As I mentioned before, I started off talking about this post from Minute Particulars:
Our very existence is from God and is actively sustained by God, so much so that Aquinas claims that God could cause us not to exist, could annihilate us, without any prejudice to the goodness of His actions, i.e. He could annihilate us with perfect justice since He owes us, literally, nothing. Think about that for a bit because I think it's a very, very foreign notion. God creates freely and God creates everything that is. Not just all the "stuff" of the world, not just the space-time fabric of the universe, but existence itself if from God. There is no distinction sharper and simpler than that. God could reduce us to nothing with perfect justice.
Now consider that such a God has chosen to create each one of us, has given us free will to turn toward or away from Him, has chosen to send His only Son that we might know Him, has chosen to dwell among us, suffer and die at our hands, descend into Hell, and rise up in defeat of death.
There is no act more staggering in our history, in the history of all of Creation. It is staggering because it is something we could not deserve. It is staggering because every fiber of our being owes its existence to the One who created us and yet we can turn away from Him at any moment. It is staggering because He chose to redeem us from our turning from Him and show us the way back to Him.
I didn't mean for this to be pick-on-Mark week -- really, I didn't! But I was thinking about that comment after my convoluted discussion about sin with Tom and Louder Fenn, as well as after reading Isaiah. It all emphasized the unworthiness of humans before God, and how he was responsible for everything good about us but somehow we were responsible for everything bad.
I said to Telford that I didn't like this idea that God owes us nothing because he created us. God is constantly being compared to a parent, but isn't a parent responsible for his children? Don't you feel responsible for your children?
"But before God," he said. "So the analogy breaks down."
I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but I pushed on. If God is that powerful, the creator of everything, and yet we didn't turn out the way he wanted, isn't he responsible for that? Maybe not entirely responsible, but at least partly responsible?
Somewhat to my surprise, Telford warmed to the idea. When God makes a covenant with the Hebrews, he pointed out, he limits himself. He binds himself to keep his end of the deal, even when people let him down. That does seem to say something about God's character.
"I know," I said. "And actually, it's really tempting to think of Jesus as taking that responsibility. You know, coming down, taking on the burden of the world -- literally, in a way, taking up the cross... But no one ever spins it like that. It's all about how this was totally undeserved, and God just did it because he's such a nice guy."
We batted around the idea some more, and somehow got sidetracked on St. Anselm. Then the actual business of Alpha interrupted the talk. But after it was over we went on, lingering like the last couple drunks at a bar, sitting on a table because they were putting the chairs away. And to my surprise, Telford conceded still more. He said he thought this was something theology had not adequately covered, and he should look into it more.
"The thing that bothers me, though," I said, "is that you're always talking about the importance of looking to the tradition of the Church. And I don't see this in the tradition of the Church."
"It is in the tradition, though," he said. "Maybe not so much in the New Testament. But if you look at some of the Psalms, a lot of them are saying to God, 'Here's a problem. Do something.' Not 'Please please please help us,' but 'Well? What are you going to do?'"
"Yeah," I said. "You know, I don't know much about Judaism, but it seems to have more of a tradition of, I don't know..."
"Chutzpah?"
"Yeah. Actually, there's an interesting article in First Things this month by a rabbi, about the differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes about a lot of things. And part of it was about heaven. You know, Christians don't think they deserve to go there, so you can only get in by the grace of God. But Jews think they do deserve to go there. They followed the Law --"
"Yeah, but who gave them the Law, huh?" Telford said snarkily.
"I mean, I think they felt like they held up their end of the bargain. And he also describes how the Jews accepted the Law. God offered it to them, and they accepted by a sort of voice vote."
He smiled. "Yeah. That was pretty cool."
We haven't had a chance to talk about it further, but in an email the other day he remarked, "I haven't found a reason to take back my affirmation of your point that God has a responsibility to rescue the creation because he has invested it with his own glory. Hope that proves to be solid common ground for the conversations to come."
I don't know if that will help me trust God, but I do think I was put off by the feeling that God -- or his spokespeople on earth -- was evading a sort of parental duty by expecting the obligations to go only one way -- from us to him. Perhaps Mark's cosmic God who brings existence itself into being would look at it that way; it seems rather Calvinist, and hard to fathom how anything could have happened that he didn't intend. But if you're getting that cosmic, it's hard to see how we could deserve anything good or bad from God; what we deserve is what he decides we should have.
In any case, the God of the Bible doesn't seem like that. Otherwise, his anger and disappointment and regret would be an elaborate act. I don't know how to see such a human-seeming God as an omnipotent being. But as I said to Telford at one point in the evening, all I really have to go on is my sense of what's good. If the Christian God doesn't seem to harmonize with that, what can I do?
It seemed like a good idea...
I don't know why I get myself into these abortion debates, because I don't even have a firmly held opinion on the subject myself. But at any rate, Minute Particulars responded to my response to his post on the differing motivations of people opposed to and supporting legal abortion.
Well, you're right. I knew it was kind of weak to say that, especially since I don't have the study on hand and couldn't cite the authors or the methodology or anything like that. But it actually wasn't a data-points sort of study anyway; it was really a series of interviews with activists on both sides of the debate, illustrating their different worldviews. I just brought it up because I do remember many of the pro-life women they quoted really did sound personally threatened by abortion.
Well, if you say so. I just can't help noticing how most people's view of whether a fetus is a person seems to frequently coincide with a lot of other social and sexual attitudes. Just as Mark would say the pro-choice folks are blinding themselves to the fetus' personhood for their own self-interest, most pro-choicers think the pro-life side is puffing up the status of the unborn because it serves their own ideas of how society and gender relations should be. Who's right? I dunno. It's this sort of issue that makes me pessimistic about really seeing anything without your bias glasses on.
I don't know why I get myself into these abortion debates, because I don't even have a firmly held opinion on the subject myself. But at any rate, Minute Particulars responded to my response to his post on the differing motivations of people opposed to and supporting legal abortion.
When I see the phrase "a study of _________" in an argument my lies-damned-lies-and-statistics sense tingles and lots of concerns click into play: correlation is not causation, many good studies are contradicted by other good studies, models of human behavior are probable at best and hollow when applied to the concrete particulars of individual actions, etc.
Well, you're right. I knew it was kind of weak to say that, especially since I don't have the study on hand and couldn't cite the authors or the methodology or anything like that. But it actually wasn't a data-points sort of study anyway; it was really a series of interviews with activists on both sides of the debate, illustrating their different worldviews. I just brought it up because I do remember many of the pro-life women they quoted really did sound personally threatened by abortion.
Actually, I don't have to imagine what a "devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like" is like nor do I doubt the concern: I'm married to a mother and she combats it daily.
My wife's job makes demands on her that rarely include reasonable accommodations for nursing a child, general caring for a child, or even the plain fact that evenings and weekends -- time that she's not "officially" required to yield -- might be time she'd want to spend with her family, not with committee members who seem oblivious to the fact that she has a very young child at home.
I'm personally and painfully aware that our society sucks and that the world of work devalues motherhood and has reshaped expectations of what women are supposed to be like. But these are institutional trends and patterns, institutional concerns (cf. ENTERPRISES OF GREAT PITH AND MOMENT for an oblique comment on this) that are utterly trumped when compared with the concern for human life. My wife is not motivated in her position on abortion by discrimination or even the possibility of discrimination against her. She's motivated by the concrete reality of another human being unlike her in a predicament she'll never be in. And that motivation is different from the motivation of most moral issues.
Well, if you say so. I just can't help noticing how most people's view of whether a fetus is a person seems to frequently coincide with a lot of other social and sexual attitudes. Just as Mark would say the pro-choice folks are blinding themselves to the fetus' personhood for their own self-interest, most pro-choicers think the pro-life side is puffing up the status of the unborn because it serves their own ideas of how society and gender relations should be. Who's right? I dunno. It's this sort of issue that makes me pessimistic about really seeing anything without your bias glasses on.
Friday, February 07, 2003
Self and other
Minute Particulars has a post, whcih he admits at the outset might be half-baked, on the differences in motivation between those who favor and those who oppose legal abortion. The gist of it is that pro-choicers are motivated by self-interest -- I or someone like me might want to have an abortion -- while pro-lifers are only concerned for others, because no one's in danger of becoming a fetus.
That premise is half-baked, in my opinion. I actually blogged about this a while ago when Charles Murtaugh argued from the similarly half-baked premise that abortion is in the interest of all women and against the interest of all men. My post wasn't exactly baked to crispy brownness itself, but I brought up a study of pro-life and pro-choice women that I'd read about in college. Essentially, there was a disagreement between them about what makes women valuable. The pro-life women were heavily working-class, and found meaning and power in motherhood that they did not find in the workplace. The pro-choice women were the reverse: more affluent, more likely to see children as getting in the way of a career.
Now, you could say, that's all very well for women who choose not to have abortions themselves, but where the self-interest in trying to stop others from having them? The strong feeling I got from that study, as well as a lot of other pro-life rhetoric, was that the presence of abortion on demand leads to a cultural devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like.
Connected to this fear is the fear of male irresponsiblity. In another past post I half-jokingly proposed a quick-and-dirty test to predict a woman's view of abortion: are you more afraid of a man controlling you, or running out on you? Pro-choice rhetoric is full of scare language about "controlling women's bodies," while pro-life language often expresses the fear of men screwing around without consequences. Just today Jane Galt wrote:
She's not the only one to feel that abortion has women importing some of the worst traits of men. Eve Tushnet characterized this as "making women equal by making us men--adapting women to a man-made world rather than adapting that world to women."
It's also worth noting, in a First Things article a couple months ago, how quickly Federica Mathewes-Green slid from talking about cultural attitudes toward abortion to talking about cultural attitudes toward sex in general. For many -- probably most -- pro-lifers, legal abortion is tied up in a complex of sexual mores that they find deeply threatening.
None of this says, necessarily, that there isn't an altruistic reason to oppose abortion. Just that I don't think you can reduce it to the simple binary that Mark does. I think that pro-choicers know this, and so if you try to persuade them you're in the cause purely out of the goodness of your heart, they're not going to believe you.
Minute Particulars has a post, whcih he admits at the outset might be half-baked, on the differences in motivation between those who favor and those who oppose legal abortion. The gist of it is that pro-choicers are motivated by self-interest -- I or someone like me might want to have an abortion -- while pro-lifers are only concerned for others, because no one's in danger of becoming a fetus.
That premise is half-baked, in my opinion. I actually blogged about this a while ago when Charles Murtaugh argued from the similarly half-baked premise that abortion is in the interest of all women and against the interest of all men. My post wasn't exactly baked to crispy brownness itself, but I brought up a study of pro-life and pro-choice women that I'd read about in college. Essentially, there was a disagreement between them about what makes women valuable. The pro-life women were heavily working-class, and found meaning and power in motherhood that they did not find in the workplace. The pro-choice women were the reverse: more affluent, more likely to see children as getting in the way of a career.
Now, you could say, that's all very well for women who choose not to have abortions themselves, but where the self-interest in trying to stop others from having them? The strong feeling I got from that study, as well as a lot of other pro-life rhetoric, was that the presence of abortion on demand leads to a cultural devaluation of motherhood, and a shift in expectations of what women are supposed to be like.
Connected to this fear is the fear of male irresponsiblity. In another past post I half-jokingly proposed a quick-and-dirty test to predict a woman's view of abortion: are you more afraid of a man controlling you, or running out on you? Pro-choice rhetoric is full of scare language about "controlling women's bodies," while pro-life language often expresses the fear of men screwing around without consequences. Just today Jane Galt wrote:
More troubling, the feminist movement has not merely tried to render the legal ability to choose that men have always had (and pro-life readers should remember that while the choice of men to abandon their children is not quite as final, it is nonetheless horribly detrimental). Rather, it has sought to make the choice to abandon a child created through consensual sexual activity not merely legal, but also an acceptable, even laudable, moral choice. In doing so they have also legitimated the decision of men to abandon their children, which makes them sound a bit thick when they complain about gents who have decided to retroactively excercise some reproductive choice by failing to pay their child support.
She's not the only one to feel that abortion has women importing some of the worst traits of men. Eve Tushnet characterized this as "making women equal by making us men--adapting women to a man-made world rather than adapting that world to women."
It's also worth noting, in a First Things article a couple months ago, how quickly Federica Mathewes-Green slid from talking about cultural attitudes toward abortion to talking about cultural attitudes toward sex in general. For many -- probably most -- pro-lifers, legal abortion is tied up in a complex of sexual mores that they find deeply threatening.
None of this says, necessarily, that there isn't an altruistic reason to oppose abortion. Just that I don't think you can reduce it to the simple binary that Mark does. I think that pro-choicers know this, and so if you try to persuade them you're in the cause purely out of the goodness of your heart, they're not going to believe you.
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
In the beginning
So as I wrote yesterday, I went to this Alpha course last night. In case it wasn't clear, this was at the church I've been attending, the Christian Assembly. The program actually started at a church in England, I believe, but it's been picked up by churches all over the world in many denominations.
Telford was also there, which was a definite plus. I suppose given how often I mention him on the blog it sounds like we've been hanging out together a lot; but actually, our contact really fell off in the last couple months, mostly because his schedule is so insane. (His blog has suffered from this too, sadly.) So the Alpha course, which meets weekly for ten weeks, seemed like a good opportunity for us to meet and talk at length in a regular way. Also, Telford had heard about the course but never been to one, and he was curious about it.
Anyway, the event itself was a mixed bag. It started with dinner (a free meal is always welcome!) which allowed attendants to meet and greet. Although actually I wound up talking entirely to Telford, since we got into a lively discussion about what (if anything) God owes us, inspired partly by this post from MInute Particulars. The discussion deserves its own post, and I don't think it's quite finished yet, so I won't go into it now.
Then there was music. It was essentially a smaller, shorter version of the same singalong we do in the services, and it didn't really work in this format. The big, spirited, Pentecostal sound can be uplifting in a large room with an enthusiastic crowd, but it's too much for a small room full of people at varying stages of spiritual certainty. It may be, as Telford said, that this church can't do anything without an electric guitar, but I think they should have restrained themselves this time.
Then there was a...I'm not sure what to call it, I guess a lecture. A man from the church basically outlined the reasons why Christianity matters, at a grade-school level pretty much. I knew I shouldn't expect anything at the intellectual level I get from Telford (or any of my other favorite Christian bloggers) but I was disappointed at how condescending it was. Surely no one is going to want to come to church to be talked to like an eight-year-old.
After that, the crowd split up in three separate rooms for dessert and discussion. That was more interesting. Everyone introduced themselves and talked about why they were there. People were in rather different places. There was one person like me, just showing up and not sure of anything; a man who said he had always felt "called," but various things got in the way; a woman who'd fallen out with the faith after a divorce, feeling Jesus had let her down; a woman who had just converted via her boyfriend. I do not want to go into detail about it because there was a promise of confidentiality (even though I'm anonymous, the church isn't, so I'm playing it safe). But the people were very honest about their struggles.
Telford didn't really like it. He disapproved of the singing even more than I did, and he was disappointed the discussion "didn't go anywhere." I reminded him we were all just getting to know each other. (Since Telford is never shy about talking God -- or about much of anything, really -- this was not an inhibition to him.) He didn't openly pass judgment on the event, but I noticed when somebody asked him if he'd come back next week, he responded by asking me if I was coming back. I said I was. I think it's worth it just for the talking. I don't meet anybody in my regular life who's going through what I am. If meeting them means putting up with a little schlock, well, them's the breaks.
So as I wrote yesterday, I went to this Alpha course last night. In case it wasn't clear, this was at the church I've been attending, the Christian Assembly. The program actually started at a church in England, I believe, but it's been picked up by churches all over the world in many denominations.
Telford was also there, which was a definite plus. I suppose given how often I mention him on the blog it sounds like we've been hanging out together a lot; but actually, our contact really fell off in the last couple months, mostly because his schedule is so insane. (His blog has suffered from this too, sadly.) So the Alpha course, which meets weekly for ten weeks, seemed like a good opportunity for us to meet and talk at length in a regular way. Also, Telford had heard about the course but never been to one, and he was curious about it.
Anyway, the event itself was a mixed bag. It started with dinner (a free meal is always welcome!) which allowed attendants to meet and greet. Although actually I wound up talking entirely to Telford, since we got into a lively discussion about what (if anything) God owes us, inspired partly by this post from MInute Particulars. The discussion deserves its own post, and I don't think it's quite finished yet, so I won't go into it now.
Then there was music. It was essentially a smaller, shorter version of the same singalong we do in the services, and it didn't really work in this format. The big, spirited, Pentecostal sound can be uplifting in a large room with an enthusiastic crowd, but it's too much for a small room full of people at varying stages of spiritual certainty. It may be, as Telford said, that this church can't do anything without an electric guitar, but I think they should have restrained themselves this time.
Then there was a...I'm not sure what to call it, I guess a lecture. A man from the church basically outlined the reasons why Christianity matters, at a grade-school level pretty much. I knew I shouldn't expect anything at the intellectual level I get from Telford (or any of my other favorite Christian bloggers) but I was disappointed at how condescending it was. Surely no one is going to want to come to church to be talked to like an eight-year-old.
After that, the crowd split up in three separate rooms for dessert and discussion. That was more interesting. Everyone introduced themselves and talked about why they were there. People were in rather different places. There was one person like me, just showing up and not sure of anything; a man who said he had always felt "called," but various things got in the way; a woman who'd fallen out with the faith after a divorce, feeling Jesus had let her down; a woman who had just converted via her boyfriend. I do not want to go into detail about it because there was a promise of confidentiality (even though I'm anonymous, the church isn't, so I'm playing it safe). But the people were very honest about their struggles.
Telford didn't really like it. He disapproved of the singing even more than I did, and he was disappointed the discussion "didn't go anywhere." I reminded him we were all just getting to know each other. (Since Telford is never shy about talking God -- or about much of anything, really -- this was not an inhibition to him.) He didn't openly pass judgment on the event, but I noticed when somebody asked him if he'd come back next week, he responded by asking me if I was coming back. I said I was. I think it's worth it just for the talking. I don't meet anybody in my regular life who's going through what I am. If meeting them means putting up with a little schlock, well, them's the breaks.
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
Into the Alpha quadrant
I don't have much time to blog tonight because I'm going to Alpha, a program for nonbelievers and seekers and wobblers and what have you who want to learn more about Christianity. In other words, it's pretty much like what I've been doing on the blog, but more organized and in 3-D.
Speaking of which, I apologize to Tom and Louder Fenn for rudely ignoring their latest comments in our discussion. I meant to respond, but one thing or another drew me away. And now, frankly, I've kind of run out of energy for the discussion. But if I post about Alpha I wouldn't be surprised if it starts another one...
On another note, I'd been hoping biologist Charles Murtaugh would weigh in on l'affaire Dini, and he came through like a champ. He writes one of my favorite lines so far on the subject: "It may be true, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, but then nothing actually makes that much sense in biology."
I don't have much time to blog tonight because I'm going to Alpha, a program for nonbelievers and seekers and wobblers and what have you who want to learn more about Christianity. In other words, it's pretty much like what I've been doing on the blog, but more organized and in 3-D.
Speaking of which, I apologize to Tom and Louder Fenn for rudely ignoring their latest comments in our discussion. I meant to respond, but one thing or another drew me away. And now, frankly, I've kind of run out of energy for the discussion. But if I post about Alpha I wouldn't be surprised if it starts another one...
On another note, I'd been hoping biologist Charles Murtaugh would weigh in on l'affaire Dini, and he came through like a champ. He writes one of my favorite lines so far on the subject: "It may be true, as Theodosius Dobzhansky said, that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, but then nothing actually makes that much sense in biology."
Monday, February 03, 2003
School days
I recently learned about the site No Indoctrination, which lets students anonymously post complaints about ideologically bullying professors. It also gives professors a chance to respond, as at least one of them did.
Reading over the complaints reminded me of my own college days. Most of my professors were quite good; they were just about all liberal, but that's OK. I don't mind a professor bringing opinions into the classroom; after all, some of my favorite bloggers are opinionated professors. But there is a point where it crosses the line.
There were actually two rather different types of inappropriate behavior I remember. One basically comes from professors living in their own little society and forgetting there students aren't from there. So they make comments and jokes as if there aren't any conservatives in the audience, and we all agree on these things. That's irritating, but so long as they're willing to listen to students who disagree, it's not really a problem.
The second type actually stems from the opposite assumption. This type of professor often comes from the '60s counterculture or some other protest movement, and so assumes that students are brainwashed children of the Establishment in need of enlightenment. Often, what they fight against is laughably out of date. My sister's Asian Civ professor apparently spent a lot of time disabusing students of the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a hero, which he firmly (and wrongly) believed they all held.
But what's worse is that they often end up displacing the subject of the class with their own political rants. My Asian Religions professor was the worst offender I had this way. As any reader can tell, I'm keenly interested in religion, and his lectures were informative when he stuck to the topic. But he kept wandering off on left-wing diatribes. I was most bitterly disappointed the day before Thanksgiving, when we were supposed to have our lecture about Jainism. Many students had already left, so the class was small. Somehow, the professor convinced himself that this was reason enough to jettison the Jainism lecture and tell us his "personal thoughts on Thanksgiving." Which were a predictible rant about oppression of the Native Americans. Apparently, it didn't occur to him that the people who'd actually stuck around to hear the lecture might be more interested in Jainism.
No Indoctrination has examples like this. One student in a human geography course says the professor "will allow herself to stray so far off topic that by the end of the lecture she will have covered the reasons why the healthcare system needs to be nationalized, why the minimum wage needs to raised threefold, and why severely penalizing industries for their pollution is the only way to protect the environment." Oy, I can believe it.
Far scarier, though, is the Mesoamerican art professor:
As with all the stuff on the site, this story is unverified. But if it's true, it makes my Asian Religion professor problem look piddling by comparison...
I recently learned about the site No Indoctrination, which lets students anonymously post complaints about ideologically bullying professors. It also gives professors a chance to respond, as at least one of them did.
Reading over the complaints reminded me of my own college days. Most of my professors were quite good; they were just about all liberal, but that's OK. I don't mind a professor bringing opinions into the classroom; after all, some of my favorite bloggers are opinionated professors. But there is a point where it crosses the line.
There were actually two rather different types of inappropriate behavior I remember. One basically comes from professors living in their own little society and forgetting there students aren't from there. So they make comments and jokes as if there aren't any conservatives in the audience, and we all agree on these things. That's irritating, but so long as they're willing to listen to students who disagree, it's not really a problem.
The second type actually stems from the opposite assumption. This type of professor often comes from the '60s counterculture or some other protest movement, and so assumes that students are brainwashed children of the Establishment in need of enlightenment. Often, what they fight against is laughably out of date. My sister's Asian Civ professor apparently spent a lot of time disabusing students of the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a hero, which he firmly (and wrongly) believed they all held.
But what's worse is that they often end up displacing the subject of the class with their own political rants. My Asian Religions professor was the worst offender I had this way. As any reader can tell, I'm keenly interested in religion, and his lectures were informative when he stuck to the topic. But he kept wandering off on left-wing diatribes. I was most bitterly disappointed the day before Thanksgiving, when we were supposed to have our lecture about Jainism. Many students had already left, so the class was small. Somehow, the professor convinced himself that this was reason enough to jettison the Jainism lecture and tell us his "personal thoughts on Thanksgiving." Which were a predictible rant about oppression of the Native Americans. Apparently, it didn't occur to him that the people who'd actually stuck around to hear the lecture might be more interested in Jainism.
No Indoctrination has examples like this. One student in a human geography course says the professor "will allow herself to stray so far off topic that by the end of the lecture she will have covered the reasons why the healthcare system needs to be nationalized, why the minimum wage needs to raised threefold, and why severely penalizing industries for their pollution is the only way to protect the environment." Oy, I can believe it.
Far scarier, though, is the Mesoamerican art professor:
During the second to last lecture, when we should have been learning what was going to be on the final, he started with his usual lecture about understanding these "oppressed" people in the middle east. He made us out to be the evil oppressors and said that we don't understand these people (Islamic Terrorists) until they BLOW it into us (in reference to September 11). He then got very animated and began to pretend that he was a terrorist. He made the point to the class (evil America) that if we tried to buy him, he would tell us to take our money and shove it up our asses. This all culminated in him pretending to strap a bomb to himself, sitting down next to a student, and saying something to the effect of, "If you try to get rid of us, we'll take you with us."
As with all the stuff on the site, this story is unverified. But if it's true, it makes my Asian Religion professor problem look piddling by comparison...
The heart of the matter
Thanks, O mighty bringer of blog hits, for your kind words!
I wondered a little if I was getting carried away in my reaction to the Dini controversy, but it seems to have brought a lot of passion on both sides. When Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted about it, it generated 117 comments and counting.
Somewhere in those comments Erik Olsen, and I think a few other people, made an argument that got me thinking. He claimed that Dini's question was justified as a test of scientific thinking. The basis of science is being willing to put aside beliefs when conflicting evidence appears, so he was testing students' ability to do that. That chimes with Dini's own rationale: "...good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long?"
I have two problems with this. For one thing, this really only tests one group of students: creationists. Many people blindly accept Darwinism because they were brought up that way, so affirming their belief in it says nothing about their ability to think critically.
But the larger disagreement I have is with this attitude about "cherished beliefs" and data you don't "like." It's true that scientists often have their pet theories, and if they hang onto them in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, they make fools of themselves. But a pet thoery is a different order of magnitude than a religious belief. A scientific thoery (one hopes) does not give meaning to your existence or become central to your identity. But religion does that, which is why people are so loath to discard it.
Telford Work, in his FAQ section, wrote a number of responses to questions he commonly gets from creationist students (here, here and here). It's quite illuminating about how creationists think:
Clearly these students don't "like" creationism the way I like a good margarita, or even the way a physicist likes the mind-bending elegance of special relativity theory. Neither one of those things, if removed, threaten to leave a gaping existential hole in one's psyche. If students are lucky they'll have someone like Telford around to show them how they don't have to throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater, so to speak. But a lot of people don't have that, so it's not surprising they go through mental contortions to protect that belief from scientific scrutiny.
For that reason, I don't think it's fair to say, "Oh, if they're not willing to throw out that belief, they won't throw out any belief or theory that they don't like." It's because of the special nature of this belief that people like Clayton Cramer's petroleum geologist can think perfectly rationally about everything except that.
Reading Telford's essay also reminds me of why Dini's words sound so cold-hearted and mean to me. These are kids we're talking about here. The way some people have been carrying on in Patrick's comments, you'd think these barely-out-of-the-nest striplings were the dead-eyed foot soldiers of militant fundamentalism. But they're the victims of the culture as much as the perpetrators. If they need to reconcile their faith with science, they deserve better than this.
UPDATE: A new article mentions that Dini is a devout Catholic. This came as a surprise to the Electrolite folks, who seemed to assume this was a Christian/atheist conflict. But Christians can discriminate against Christians. Dini is a Catholic, and I'd bet money that about 90% of his creationist students there in Texas are Southern Baptists. These are two groups that have historically not liked each other, to put it mildly.
By the way, I tend to agree with most commenters that this isn't really worth a lawsuit. But I think it's crummy pedagogy and a dubious defense of science, so I say so.
Thanks, O mighty bringer of blog hits, for your kind words!
I wondered a little if I was getting carried away in my reaction to the Dini controversy, but it seems to have brought a lot of passion on both sides. When Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted about it, it generated 117 comments and counting.
Somewhere in those comments Erik Olsen, and I think a few other people, made an argument that got me thinking. He claimed that Dini's question was justified as a test of scientific thinking. The basis of science is being willing to put aside beliefs when conflicting evidence appears, so he was testing students' ability to do that. That chimes with Dini's own rationale: "...good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long?"
I have two problems with this. For one thing, this really only tests one group of students: creationists. Many people blindly accept Darwinism because they were brought up that way, so affirming their belief in it says nothing about their ability to think critically.
But the larger disagreement I have is with this attitude about "cherished beliefs" and data you don't "like." It's true that scientists often have their pet theories, and if they hang onto them in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, they make fools of themselves. But a pet thoery is a different order of magnitude than a religious belief. A scientific thoery (one hopes) does not give meaning to your existence or become central to your identity. But religion does that, which is why people are so loath to discard it.
Telford Work, in his FAQ section, wrote a number of responses to questions he commonly gets from creationist students (here, here and here). It's quite illuminating about how creationists think:
Lots of conservative churches have sold their people on this argument: If we can't trust the Bible to conform to our expectations of its accuracy in every detail, then we're allowed to disbelieve all of it. If there wasn't really a talking snake in the Garden, then Jesus might not really have risen from the dead, so we'd better hold the line and defend the fact that there was a talking snake in the Garden. I consider this strategy a form of theological coercion: Our faith in Jesus is used to hold entire churches hostage to literalism. But then the Bible (let alone Jesus) is no longer our ultimate authority; the ultimate authority is our presuppositions of what God's truth should look like. And under all this apparent confidence in the truth of the Bible runs a strong current of disbelief. Many churches have fostered not a calm confidence in Scripture, but a hard-line apologetic technique that I think secretly terrifies a lot of evangelicals: What if it's not all true? What if there really is a contradiction in Scripture, as liberals allege? Does it mean Jesus is still buried, and I'm still dead in my sins?
Clearly these students don't "like" creationism the way I like a good margarita, or even the way a physicist likes the mind-bending elegance of special relativity theory. Neither one of those things, if removed, threaten to leave a gaping existential hole in one's psyche. If students are lucky they'll have someone like Telford around to show them how they don't have to throw out the baby Jesus with the bathwater, so to speak. But a lot of people don't have that, so it's not surprising they go through mental contortions to protect that belief from scientific scrutiny.
For that reason, I don't think it's fair to say, "Oh, if they're not willing to throw out that belief, they won't throw out any belief or theory that they don't like." It's because of the special nature of this belief that people like Clayton Cramer's petroleum geologist can think perfectly rationally about everything except that.
Reading Telford's essay also reminds me of why Dini's words sound so cold-hearted and mean to me. These are kids we're talking about here. The way some people have been carrying on in Patrick's comments, you'd think these barely-out-of-the-nest striplings were the dead-eyed foot soldiers of militant fundamentalism. But they're the victims of the culture as much as the perpetrators. If they need to reconcile their faith with science, they deserve better than this.
UPDATE: A new article mentions that Dini is a devout Catholic. This came as a surprise to the Electrolite folks, who seemed to assume this was a Christian/atheist conflict. But Christians can discriminate against Christians. Dini is a Catholic, and I'd bet money that about 90% of his creationist students there in Texas are Southern Baptists. These are two groups that have historically not liked each other, to put it mildly.
By the way, I tend to agree with most commenters that this isn't really worth a lawsuit. But I think it's crummy pedagogy and a dubious defense of science, so I say so.
Sunday, February 02, 2003
The evolving debate
Minute Particulars has an interesting post on the Dini business, in which he describes current Catholic thinking on human origins. He sums it up thus:
Would Dini have accepted that? It's hard to tell. But one reason the whole thing smells fishy to me is that the professor specifically asked about human origins. If he were really concerned about things like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, he could have asked about them, or for a general explanation of evolutionary theory. But in asking about human evolution he's punching the rawest nerve in the whole debate. That's where even Catholics, who generally accept evolution, start getting queasy.
Mark Kleiman also has another terrific post on this subject. Says everything I would have said, but probably better.
Minute Particulars has an interesting post on the Dini business, in which he describes current Catholic thinking on human origins. He sums it up thus:
Human bodies give evidence of evolution (e.g. DNA similarities, vestigial organs, mammalian characteristics), but how a human being originated is not explained by evolution theory. A human being is an animal and has a principle of life that is similar to other animals in that it causes a body to be alive; but this same principle in the human being is responsible for operations like the ability to reason, understand, and choose freely, operations which any arrangement of matter cannot explain and which evolution theory cannot explain. Human beings are mammals and subject to biological principles as are other mammals and biological life in general. But, simply put, they are more than evolution can explain.
Would Dini have accepted that? It's hard to tell. But one reason the whole thing smells fishy to me is that the professor specifically asked about human origins. If he were really concerned about things like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, he could have asked about them, or for a general explanation of evolutionary theory. But in asking about human evolution he's punching the rawest nerve in the whole debate. That's where even Catholics, who generally accept evolution, start getting queasy.
Mark Kleiman also has another terrific post on this subject. Says everything I would have said, but probably better.
Saturday, February 01, 2003
Under the stars
A few years ago I did an article about the Mars Society, a group lobbying for a future mission to Mars. I talked to some of their members who worked for NASA, and a grad student in aeronautical engineering (I loved his T-shirt -- "Yes, actually, I AM a rocket scientist!") He and some other youngsters in the group nurtured the dream that they would one day be on such a mission. Even the older guys who figured their chance was past harbored a wistful yearning for space, like the old sailors' songs yearned for the open sea. They knew how dangerous space missions are, but death did not seem as powerful as the call of other worlds.
If there's some comfort for the loss of seven astronauts today, it's that they probably died happy. I'm sure they longed for space the way the Mars buffs I talked to did. Few people get to where they did, though many wish to. May they rest in peace in the heavens.
A few years ago I did an article about the Mars Society, a group lobbying for a future mission to Mars. I talked to some of their members who worked for NASA, and a grad student in aeronautical engineering (I loved his T-shirt -- "Yes, actually, I AM a rocket scientist!") He and some other youngsters in the group nurtured the dream that they would one day be on such a mission. Even the older guys who figured their chance was past harbored a wistful yearning for space, like the old sailors' songs yearned for the open sea. They knew how dangerous space missions are, but death did not seem as powerful as the call of other worlds.
If there's some comfort for the loss of seven astronauts today, it's that they probably died happy. I'm sure they longed for space the way the Mars buffs I talked to did. Few people get to where they did, though many wish to. May they rest in peace in the heavens.
Friday, January 31, 2003
Ever since Darwin
Mark Kleiman makes some excellent points about the Dini affair:
Right. I've been fussing in several recent blog posts over the question of what Darwinism does to our concepts of the human being and of original sin. That's the real conflict that the arguments over whether the earth was created in six days tend to distract us from. And Darwinism is so commonly misunderstood even by its defenders, and so closely identified with materialism and savagery, that it's not surprising many people object to it out of pure ethical distaste.
The problem is, a biology teacher has a good opportunity to cut through those misconceptions. But by stating upfront that he won't recommend creationists, Dini drives any creationist-leaning students out of his class. This is a cause he isn't helping.
Mark's "sermon" is also worth a read.
Mark Kleiman makes some excellent points about the Dini affair:
I think lots of people who say they don't believe in evolution don't actually have any fixed opinion about the origin of species; rather, they're denying an apparent implication of that belief: that, in reality, human beings are merely animals. Those people are holding out for the idea that humans have something of the divine nature. That view can be taken as a metaphysical proposition about human beings, but it can also be the expression of a moral stance: that it's wrong to treat human beings the way animals are treated. Neither the metaphysical proposition nor the moral stance is obviously false. (And if we take the the "divine nature" statement as an image rather than a propostion, a simple evaluation of truth or falsity isn't even appropriate.)
Linking those beliefs to a particular view about paleontology seems to me a mistake, but, given the intellectual history of the matter, not a silly mistake. Poorly understood Darwinian views can be, and have been, given very wicked practical applications. So if someone wants to make a principle of refusing to say that humans descended from animals by natural selection, nothing compels me to think the worse of him for doing so.
Right. I've been fussing in several recent blog posts over the question of what Darwinism does to our concepts of the human being and of original sin. That's the real conflict that the arguments over whether the earth was created in six days tend to distract us from. And Darwinism is so commonly misunderstood even by its defenders, and so closely identified with materialism and savagery, that it's not surprising many people object to it out of pure ethical distaste.
The problem is, a biology teacher has a good opportunity to cut through those misconceptions. But by stating upfront that he won't recommend creationists, Dini drives any creationist-leaning students out of his class. This is a cause he isn't helping.
Mark's "sermon" is also worth a read.
Thursday, January 30, 2003
All over creation
Eugene Volokh has an interesting series of post on a religious-discrimination suit. (Start here and scroll up for more comments.) I don't know about the legal issues, but as an amateur science enthusiast I can't get behind Professor Dini's supposed defense of science.
For one thing, this is a medical student we're talking about. Dini's explanation of why beliefs about evolution matter to a doctor is pretty flimsy:
First of all, Dini is ignoring the fact that many creationists accept micro-evolution, in the development of disease-resistant bacteria and such things. What they don't accept is the idea that evolution accounts for the appearance of all species on earth, including us. (That's Intelligent Design theory in a nutshell.) Second, as Clayton Cramer points out, the appearance of such bacteria is hardly the result of rampant creationism.
It gets worse:
A while ago I blogged about the question of whether science is a religion, and pointed out that the basic difference between the two is that science puts its faith in a method of knowing, not it in a particular set of beliefs. Dini seems to have missed this point completely: if you believe in science, he says, you must believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. This is a deeply unscientific attitude.
Consider the effect on scientific innovation if this were broadly applied. I am sure that before Einstein it seemed that no rational scientists could disagree with Newtonian physics. I am glad nobody excluded Einstein from the club. I don't think "creation science" is going anywhere, but that doesn't mean Darwinian theory is unassailable.
Intelligent, conscientious Christians are often embarrassed about the raving fundies who speak in their name, and that's how I feel about this guy. Why is he even asking students this before he'll write a letter of recommendation, and ranting on and on about it on his website? How can he say that not accepting Darwinism means you're incapable of rational thought about anything? We're all irrational about something. In Dini's case, apparently, it's about creationists.
Eugene Volokh has an interesting series of post on a religious-discrimination suit. (Start here and scroll up for more comments.) I don't know about the legal issues, but as an amateur science enthusiast I can't get behind Professor Dini's supposed defense of science.
For one thing, this is a medical student we're talking about. Dini's explanation of why beliefs about evolution matter to a doctor is pretty flimsy:
Whereas medicine is historically rooted first in the practice of magic and later in religion, modern medicine is an endeavor that springs from the sciences, biology first among these. The central, unifying principle of biology is the theory of evolution, which includes both micro- and macro-evolution, and which extends to ALL species. How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology? It is hard to imagine how this can be so, but it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the Darwinian aspects of medicine or the evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions. The current crisis in antibiotic resistance is the result of such decisions.
First of all, Dini is ignoring the fact that many creationists accept micro-evolution, in the development of disease-resistant bacteria and such things. What they don't accept is the idea that evolution accounts for the appearance of all species on earth, including us. (That's Intelligent Design theory in a nutshell.) Second, as Clayton Cramer points out, the appearance of such bacteria is hardly the result of rampant creationism.
It gets worse:
Good medicine, like good biology, is based on the collection and evaluation of physical evidence. So much physical evidence supports the evolution of humans from non-human ancestors that one can validly refer to the "fact" of human evolution, even if all of the details are not yet known. One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one’s understanding of science and of the method of science. Such an individual has committed malpractice regarding the method of science, for good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs. This is the situation of those who deny the evolution of humans; such a one is throwing out information because it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs. Can a physician ignore data that s/he does not like and remain a physician for long? No. If modern medicine is based on the method of science, then how can someone who denies the theory of evolution -- the very pinnacle of modern biological science -- ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist?
A while ago I blogged about the question of whether science is a religion, and pointed out that the basic difference between the two is that science puts its faith in a method of knowing, not it in a particular set of beliefs. Dini seems to have missed this point completely: if you believe in science, he says, you must believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. This is a deeply unscientific attitude.
Consider the effect on scientific innovation if this were broadly applied. I am sure that before Einstein it seemed that no rational scientists could disagree with Newtonian physics. I am glad nobody excluded Einstein from the club. I don't think "creation science" is going anywhere, but that doesn't mean Darwinian theory is unassailable.
Intelligent, conscientious Christians are often embarrassed about the raving fundies who speak in their name, and that's how I feel about this guy. Why is he even asking students this before he'll write a letter of recommendation, and ranting on and on about it on his website? How can he say that not accepting Darwinism means you're incapable of rational thought about anything? We're all irrational about something. In Dini's case, apparently, it's about creationists.
Hey hey Boo Boo
Minute Particulars points to a post by a woman who calls her baby "Boo Boo" because he was an accident. "Our teenaged kids are convinced that this will someday land him on a psychiatrist's couch, explaining, 'My parents didn't plan to have me, and then they called me "the Boo Boo" for my first two years,'" she writes.
This reminds me of a few weeks ago when my mother was here, and we visited briefly with Telford and his brood. My mother was cooing over the baby when she remarked upon the obvious: he sure has a heck of a lot of kids.
"This one's the last," he said. "Well, the last one was supposed to be the last, but this one's the last last."
I suppose if you want to send your kid to the shrink by calling him a redundant nickname, you could do even better than Boo Boo by calling him Last Last. But I wouldn't want to give anyone ideas...
Minute Particulars points to a post by a woman who calls her baby "Boo Boo" because he was an accident. "Our teenaged kids are convinced that this will someday land him on a psychiatrist's couch, explaining, 'My parents didn't plan to have me, and then they called me "the Boo Boo" for my first two years,'" she writes.
This reminds me of a few weeks ago when my mother was here, and we visited briefly with Telford and his brood. My mother was cooing over the baby when she remarked upon the obvious: he sure has a heck of a lot of kids.
"This one's the last," he said. "Well, the last one was supposed to be the last, but this one's the last last."
I suppose if you want to send your kid to the shrink by calling him a redundant nickname, you could do even better than Boo Boo by calling him Last Last. But I wouldn't want to give anyone ideas...
My reason for reasons
Tom from Disputations says in the comments to the previous post:
I hauled this out of comments to answer here because my response is going to be long. (Is anyone surprised?) First of all, what is "reason" in this scheme, and what does it have to do with goodness? In the context of this particular discussion, what rational causes are there for saying that homosexuals and hermaphrodites can't have sex? Lots of rational people think otherwise.
Reason can, of course, be helpful in ethics -- making them more consistent, for instance. But ultimate judgments about good and evil aren't based on it. Consider St. Paul's concise summary of ethics in Romans 13:9:
I don't see what reason has to do with that. (This line also, to my mind, goes against Louder Fenn's insistence that "what's right" can be abstractly detached from human suffering. But that's another subject.)
There also seems to me to be a fundamental conflict between what Tom is saying and what Louder Fenn said. LF says: "Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature ... Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world." He goes on to blame the imperfection of the world on human sin. Tom, meanwhile, seems to be saying there isn't anything sinful about, say, having certain feelings or being a hermaphrodite, you just can't act on it. Sin, apparently, comes from a lack of restraint on these things. Now, technically LF said "fallen" and "imperfect" rather than "sinful," but this seems like a distinction without a difference. LF seems to be saying that the need to control and suppress our feelings is an effect of our fallenness, while Tom seems to be saying that was in the original plan, we're just not doing it right. One version says being moral is fighting our nature, the other says it's harmonizing with it.
Both these views are problematic in terms of original sin. It occurs to me, now that I write this out, that Louder Fenn's argument is essentially circular. We sin because we give in to our fallen nature. Why is our nature fallen? Because we sin. Original sin is a chicken without an egg.
On Tom's side, we have the problem of what this "harmony" means in practical terms. In fact, homosexuality is an especially good example of this. This is an emotion that, in Catholic thinking, should never be acted upon. It serves no conceivable good purpose to feel it. So as a sin, it's an absence of...what? In a theoretical pre-fallen Eden, what happens to it?
It is the nature of feelings to impel action. They have no other reason to exist. In fact, in a sense feelings are actions. The physiologic changes that they bring to your body are preparing you to take a particular course of action -- fight, flee, have sex, etc. We can stop ourselves before it goes farther than that, of course, but in doing so we're already passing a value judgment over the feeling. So the logical wiggle that God didn't make us bad just because he gave us feelings that would be bad if acted upon seems nonsensical to me.
OK, gotta get back to work. Interview in 45 minutes...
Tom from Disputations says in the comments to the previous post:
When Louder Fenn writes, "it is sin that corrupts the world," I take him to mean "world" in the sense of human life and society, rather than the purely natural world of earthquakes and hurricanes. The nature sin corrupted is human nature.
One of the primary absences in fallen human nature is that our reason has been clouded and no longer rules our emotions. Emotions, including anger, are themselves neither sins nor sinful, but since we aren't very good at properly reasoning about our emotions, they often do lead to sin.
Hermaphroditism isn't sinful either, of course, although my impression is that a hermaphrodite lacks the good of being either fully male or fully female.
So what the first sin removed from human nature is, among other things, the proper harmony between reason and passion.
In this formulation, by the way, sin is a kind of evil. Evil in general is the lack of something that a thing ought to have, so blindness can be said to be evil in a human but not in a rock. Sin is the type of evil caused by a person's free choice to be less than they are supposed to be.
I hauled this out of comments to answer here because my response is going to be long. (Is anyone surprised?) First of all, what is "reason" in this scheme, and what does it have to do with goodness? In the context of this particular discussion, what rational causes are there for saying that homosexuals and hermaphrodites can't have sex? Lots of rational people think otherwise.
Reason can, of course, be helpful in ethics -- making them more consistent, for instance. But ultimate judgments about good and evil aren't based on it. Consider St. Paul's concise summary of ethics in Romans 13:9:
The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself."
I don't see what reason has to do with that. (This line also, to my mind, goes against Louder Fenn's insistence that "what's right" can be abstractly detached from human suffering. But that's another subject.)
There also seems to me to be a fundamental conflict between what Tom is saying and what Louder Fenn said. LF says: "Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature ... Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world." He goes on to blame the imperfection of the world on human sin. Tom, meanwhile, seems to be saying there isn't anything sinful about, say, having certain feelings or being a hermaphrodite, you just can't act on it. Sin, apparently, comes from a lack of restraint on these things. Now, technically LF said "fallen" and "imperfect" rather than "sinful," but this seems like a distinction without a difference. LF seems to be saying that the need to control and suppress our feelings is an effect of our fallenness, while Tom seems to be saying that was in the original plan, we're just not doing it right. One version says being moral is fighting our nature, the other says it's harmonizing with it.
Both these views are problematic in terms of original sin. It occurs to me, now that I write this out, that Louder Fenn's argument is essentially circular. We sin because we give in to our fallen nature. Why is our nature fallen? Because we sin. Original sin is a chicken without an egg.
On Tom's side, we have the problem of what this "harmony" means in practical terms. In fact, homosexuality is an especially good example of this. This is an emotion that, in Catholic thinking, should never be acted upon. It serves no conceivable good purpose to feel it. So as a sin, it's an absence of...what? In a theoretical pre-fallen Eden, what happens to it?
It is the nature of feelings to impel action. They have no other reason to exist. In fact, in a sense feelings are actions. The physiologic changes that they bring to your body are preparing you to take a particular course of action -- fight, flee, have sex, etc. We can stop ourselves before it goes farther than that, of course, but in doing so we're already passing a value judgment over the feeling. So the logical wiggle that God didn't make us bad just because he gave us feelings that would be bad if acted upon seems nonsensical to me.
OK, gotta get back to work. Interview in 45 minutes...
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Worms a-wriggling
Louder Fenn responds to my response to his post. Turns out he wasn't really responding to me originally, just to UnSpace, so I was getting a little excited over nothing. Now that I'm in, though, he has a few words:
OK, so they're objective realities. I don't see how that's different from what I said, but I'm not gonna sweat the semantics. Although one thing I'm wondering here is, why does something have to belong to a category in order to be good?
This is what drives me crazy about Christian arguments from nature. We can infer God's intent from nature by looking at it, such as the fact that male and female are objective realities. Except the bits of nature we don't like -- that nature was corrupted by our sin. Basically, you can argue anything you darn well please that way, because you get to rule out conflicting evidence. I realize this is not completely arbitrary -- it's ultimately based on moral law in the Bible -- but one wonders why Christians bother arguing from nature to begin with.
Also, I have discussed on this blog before, but it bears repeating, why I have trouble buying the argument that it was human sin that corrupted nature. Basically, it boils down to two reasons:
1) Unless you're a six-day creationist -- I don't know if Louder Fenn is, but I don't think any of my usual correspondents are -- you know that nature predated humanity by quite a bit, and evidence indicates it was always pretty much like it is now. I explicated that problem in this post. (Click here for Telford Work's response and here for my response to the response.)
2) It gives humans an inordinate amount of power. If humans basically created sin, and God did not, humans made it ex nihilo, and theoretically only God can make things ex nihilo. And if you buy into the notion that sin corrupted nature in this way, this is more than just "the choice to disobey God," as some have defined sin. It makes sin into a kind of creative entity itself, giving birth to defective children and weird desires and natural disasters and whatnot. As I complained in the November post I linked above, this seems to amount to a de facto dualism by Christians, as "sin" takes on godlike power.
Louder Fenn is right that this is a bigger topic then just sexual rules. It's the topic I've been worrying for months now, to no satisfactory conclusion.
Louder Fenn responds to my response to his post. Turns out he wasn't really responding to me originally, just to UnSpace, so I was getting a little excited over nothing. Now that I'm in, though, he has a few words:
Third, what I was trying to say regarding the categories of male and female is that they are the only categories. But I didn't say that very well. So let me try this: Male and female are not "archetypes" that are "real and meaningful" for the "vast majority of people" -- they are objective realities. Yes, there are those people who diverge; but such divergences do not constitute categories of being. They are -- to put it bluntly -- defects. Blindness is not a variant of sightedness. It is a defect. Being a hermaphrodite is not a variant of gender. It is a defect.
OK, so they're objective realities. I don't see how that's different from what I said, but I'm not gonna sweat the semantics. Although one thing I'm wondering here is, why does something have to belong to a category in order to be good?
Yes, you are asking them to fight their nature. We ask drunks to fight their nature. We ask rapists to fight their nature. We ask a child to fight his nature and not lie or punch his sister. We ask ourselves to fight our natures all day long. Morality is all about fighting your nature -- your fallen nature, that is; your nature which is imperfect due to the imperfection of the world.
I'm not saying God messed up in making anyone. He made the world and, yes, the world sucks a lot. Did God mess up? Or did we? Remember, it is sin that corrupts the world; our sin. You might ask why God would have made everything in the first place, if He knew we would sin, ruin everything, and essentially cause such pain and harship; but, as I said, that's a matter of theodicy, quite larger than the matter only of gay sex and gay marriage.
This is what drives me crazy about Christian arguments from nature. We can infer God's intent from nature by looking at it, such as the fact that male and female are objective realities. Except the bits of nature we don't like -- that nature was corrupted by our sin. Basically, you can argue anything you darn well please that way, because you get to rule out conflicting evidence. I realize this is not completely arbitrary -- it's ultimately based on moral law in the Bible -- but one wonders why Christians bother arguing from nature to begin with.
Also, I have discussed on this blog before, but it bears repeating, why I have trouble buying the argument that it was human sin that corrupted nature. Basically, it boils down to two reasons:
1) Unless you're a six-day creationist -- I don't know if Louder Fenn is, but I don't think any of my usual correspondents are -- you know that nature predated humanity by quite a bit, and evidence indicates it was always pretty much like it is now. I explicated that problem in this post. (Click here for Telford Work's response and here for my response to the response.)
2) It gives humans an inordinate amount of power. If humans basically created sin, and God did not, humans made it ex nihilo, and theoretically only God can make things ex nihilo. And if you buy into the notion that sin corrupted nature in this way, this is more than just "the choice to disobey God," as some have defined sin. It makes sin into a kind of creative entity itself, giving birth to defective children and weird desires and natural disasters and whatnot. As I complained in the November post I linked above, this seems to amount to a de facto dualism by Christians, as "sin" takes on godlike power.
Louder Fenn is right that this is a bigger topic then just sexual rules. It's the topic I've been worrying for months now, to no satisfactory conclusion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)