Tag: Christianity

Free will and fiction

Mike Duran lists the top five cliches of the Christian writer:

Having frequented Christian writing circles for some time now, I’ve
heard all the spiritualized slogans we believers like to regurgitate. Here’s my Top 5 clichés that Christian writers use.

5.) “God’s called me to write.” — Funny
how God never “calls” Christians to be sales assistants, lay reviewers,
work in circulation, be an advertising manager, or write obituaries for
the local newspaper. You’d think that writing novels was the top of the
Christian publishing holiness hierarchy.
4.) “It just wasn’t God’s will that I… (fill in the blank).” –
“God’s will” is a favorite “out” for Christian writers. Most often, the
saying is followed by things like “find an agent,” “sell a lot of
books,” “finish the manuscript,” or “advertize aggressively.” Poor God. I
wish He’d get His act together so your career can finally flourish.

I find the public profession of “God’s call” to be about as credible, in most circumstances, as the way in which people who recall their past lives always seem to have been some Egyptian princess or European queen; no one ever used to be a peasant girl who died of malnutrition and smallpox at the age of twelve.  It’s remarkable how often God is said to call people to do what they quite clearly want to do of their own accord.

As for God’s will, in this, as in so many things, we see the idea of divine omniderigence tends to remove both agency and accountability from the individual. 

Writing fiction is, in its own small way, an act of creation.  The author is the god of his own little world, which may be why the idea of writing fiction is so much more appealing to many would-be novelists than the actual act of writing it.  And yet, even the human author, who has complete and total control over his characters, often finds his control constricted by the desire to make them behave in a self-consistent manner.

In like manner, perhaps an all-powerful God might find Himself constrained, not by any external limits on His power, but rather by His desire for artistic consistency and aesthetic integrity.

Merry Christmas

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
 
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
 
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
 
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

WND column

The Mystery of Christmas

This Christmas is a season for despair and disquiet for many Americans. Approximately 47.7 million of them, one in every six, are on food stamps.  That is 16.1 million more than were being fed by government assistance in December 2008. More than 100 million working-age Americans do not have a job. The U.S. share of global wealth, as measured by GDP, has fallen from 31.8 percent to 21.6 percent in the last 10 years. A full 28 percent of Americans have no savings, not even for emergencies.

Most of us are having smaller and less luxurious Christmas celebrations this season. We are buying fewer and less expensive presents for each other. What has been a vague feeling of uncertainty has given way to the sober realization that we are facing more than an economic bump in the road; many are beginning to recognize that the decades-long party has ended, and the consequential hangover is just beginning.

The loneliest time of the year

A female commenter at Alpha Game describes how Christmas can be hard on the lonely:

This is my second Christmas with no family and no friends, and I’m at the point where I’d lay down my life for someone who made me feel like he or she cared.

This is one of the downsides of the secular aspect of Christmas that stresses holiday togetherness.  It can be very hard on those who don’t have friends and family to witness the merriment of those who do.  However, it is important to remember that in some cases, the apparent happiness is a mirage, or at least, a collective self-delusion.

When I was in college and for several years afterwards, my family had literally picture-perfect Christmases.  As the White Buffalo, an occasional guest at our Christmas Day dinners, once commented, the experience like living in a Christmas commercial for Neiman Marcus.  From the moment that the guest arrived in the beautiful white marble foyer amidst the softly falling snow and was immediately handed a hot buttered rum by my grandfather, to the postprandial arrival of Big Chilly and his family to partake in the devouring of the pumpkin and pecan pies, everything was aesthetically perfect and utterly enjoyable.

Those gorgeous images are now pleasant memories.  But the family is as dead as my grandparents, fractured by lies, greed, deceit, and sociopathic self-interest.

And yet, there is still no shortage of joy.  We have new traditions, with new family members who have never known what they are missing.  There is no snow; the grass is green as I look outside the window today.  Instead of the dulcet strains of Handel piped throughout the vast house, I hear Maddens on the PS/3 in the next room.  There is no one to serve hot buttered rum and no one will drink it.  No one will arrive after dinner, their eyes bright with anticipation and their cheeks red with the cold outside.

But the ham will arrive, massive and steaming and looking like something out of an Asterix and Obelix comic.  The wine will flow, white and red, and the egg nog will beat its predecessor hollow.  A dash of kirsch will enliven the fondue and if the presents are not stacked halfway to the ceiling, the good cheer of the recipients will be in no way diminished, not even by comparison.

And yet, these new traditions too are an illusion.  The children will grow.  The butcher will retire.  One day I will follow in the footsteps of that smiling server of hot butter rum.

The only thing that will remain, one thousand years from now, is the original reason for the celebration.  It is the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, we celebrate; that fact will remain as true tomorrow as it is today and as it was yesterday.  And no celebrant of that holy birth can ever be alone, because she is bound into the great shining web of believers, past and present.

So don’t allow yourself feel alone this Christmas season because you are not.  Buy some toys and sweets and bring them to a shelter.  Join the Salvation Army and help them feed the homeless.  Go to one of the midnight services that will be held around the world on Monday, preferably at a strange church where you know no one, and permit yourself to be engulfed in the worldwide joy at Jesus Christ’s birth.  Even if you have no hope, remember that the Word became flesh in order to bring hope to the hopeless.

Mailvox: Free will and Romans 1:24

JJ asks about an approach to omniderigence that is new to me:

I’m a long time VP reader and a believer in both God and free will
who has encountered the latter part of Romans 1 as an argument against
free will. My opponent claims that either God prevented jews before from
committing the various sins listed, or caused them by making them sin
as a punishment, when the Bible says that He gave them over to sin.

My take on the question is as follows: Paul does not explicitly state
that God was preventing the jews’ free will either before or after. By
abandoning them to their sin it simply means God gave up hope on them
and the sins listed after weren’t his causing nor will, and God didn’t
prevent them from committing the various sins listed at any time. This
raises the question if the listed sins were even happening only after
God abandoned them or did they go hand in hand with idolatry and
suchlike?

Am I twisting the Scripture to suit my wish to see free will when
there is none? What is your view of the latter part of Romans 1?

P.S. Please pardon my english if it’s clumsy, it’s not my native tongue.

 The obvious thing is to look first at the entire section, beginning with Romans 1:18 and titled “God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity”.  Romans 1:18-25 states:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  

For
since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal
power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from
what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave
thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts
were darkened.  

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

There are a number of interesting points raised by this passage.  First, God doesn’t treat everyone equally.  He deals with them in response to their actions.  Second, our thoughts are not always futile nor are our hearts always dark.  Third, our sinful desires are from our hearts, which are somehow distinct from God.  And fourth, this passage is indicative of the existence of free will, not evidence of its absence.

When one “gives X over to someone else”, one is not dictating their actions, one is withdrawing one’s own influence over X and permitting other influences to take precedence.  If Man had no free will, God would have nothing else to give him over to; He would simply be giving Man over to Himself.  But that would be to make God the author of the very sinful desires and wickedness that inspires His wrath. which would indicate a schizophrenic Supreme Being.

JJ’s opponent’s argument is easily dismantled because it depends upon the idea that the Jews were not committing the sins referred to in this passage prior to the giving over.  I don’t believe that to be the case, given the numerous references to sexual immorality in the Old Testament.  But the argument is also erroneous on the basis of the passage itself, as I suspect even some of those belonging to Team Calvin will agree.

God hates strength and beauty?

This post by Bruce Charlton on the evils of weightlifting strikes me as not only perverse, but downright irrelevant in the way that only the True Churchian can manage:

One of the evil signs of the times is the increased prevalence of intensive weight-training. This is part of a narcissistic, self-regarding, self-advertizing and physiologically- and psychologically-deranging package of extreme exercise regimes, extreme diets, and extreme chemical intake (especially androgen and growth hormones, but other drugs as well – continually expanding).

While Charlton points to the drugs as a useful red herring, it is clear that his argument is actually directed against all weightlifting and intentional body improvement.  If he lifted regularly himself, he’d know that the difference between a smoothly sculpted quasi-swimmer’s physique and a bulked-up bull’s physique is mostly in the amount of weight one lifts, not the time spent in the weight room and/or pool.  It would be interesting to know if he similarly objects to swimming and jogging, which can take up even more time than lifting does.  And while it cannot be denied that vanity plays a part in the pastime, he’s missing the personal challenge aspect that is much more important.  It’s not vanity that causes the lifter to go for that one more rep when his muscles are burning as if they’re on fire and his energy is rapidly dropping to zero, it is the desire to master the weakness of the body.

More importantly, he is spurning the manifold benefits of the discipline involved, discipline that is so obviously lacking in modern society.  It is simply ludicrous that in a post-Christian West, where a ludicrous percentage of the population has lapsed completely into gluttony and sloth, waddling from one sugar distribution point to another like addicts seeking their next fix, Charlton’s criticism is focused on one of the only elements of the population successfully resisting this decline into mindless obesity.

Who is giving into the flesh, the man who is ruled by his desires or the man who mercilessly tames them?  Indeed, the routine Charlton describes is more akin to those regarded as the holiest of men throughout most of the Christian era, the ascetics who mortified their flesh.  I am not saying weightlifting is akin to holiness; its purpose is not the glorification of God, after all, but neither is it the “rooted, habitual sin” he claims it to be.

Possibly influenced by the Greek ideal, Paul writes the following in 1 Thessalonians 5:23: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Chris.”   Because weightlifting strengthens and preserves the body, because it strengthens one’s ability to tame one’s bodily desires and temptations,  it is not only compatible with a Christian life, it is advisable.


Moreover, weightlifting provides more than strength and self-discipline.  I always appreciated the sign over the mirror in the free weight room at the Northwest Fitness Center in Fridley, which said something to this effect:

This place is for the weak, that they may become strong.  This place is for the strong, that they may become humble.

The iron knows no mercy.  The iron strips away pretensions.  The iron reveals character.  This is not the hallmark of evil. 

All that being said, I think Charlton’s position is born more from ignorance than fundamental wrongheadedness.  No man who is so sound on the weaseling and treacherous  mendacity of Rowan Williams can be totally misguided.

Mailvox: The evidence for God

I really fail to understand why so many Christian apologists have such a difficult time answering such easy questions:

Don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before.  In my opinion this little kid embarrassed Eric Hovind. Eric may even have a valid point he’s trying to make but I’m not sure exactly what it is. I know its hard to present a coherent summary of evidence for God very quickly (your debate with Dominic has really given me some food for thought when thinking about evidence for the existence of a deity) but what would you give as a very short, snappy answer to someone who asked “What is your evidence for God?”

I don’t know who Hovind is, but I tend to agree.  I stopped watching after Hovind said “without God, you can’t know anything.”  Even if that is perfectly true, it’s an incredibly stupid answer.  One might as reasonably answer “without oxygen, you can’t know anything”, and to as little effect.

The correct answer concerning the evidence for God is precisely the same as it is for practically everything else in the historical record, which is to say the copious documentary evidence available.  We can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than we can doubt the existence of Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, or any other human being who existed before the invention of audio and video recording and for whom there are physical artifacts that support the documentary evidence.

Can skeptics produce plausible explanations for why so much false documentary evidence of God exists if He does not?  Sure.  Just as I can plausibly explain that the myth of George Washington was invented in order to provide Americans with founding Romulus-style figure of reverence in order to compensate for their lack of kings and common history.  I mean, there were no cherry trees in Virginia.  And isn’t it ludicrous to take literally the myth of Washington’s rjection of the proffered crown when the story is a patently a straightforward imitation of the Roman dictator Cincinnatus.

As for the other part of the question, where the boy declares that communication with God is simply a part of one’s brain talking to him, I would have asked the kid how he was able to distinguish between one part of my brain talking to me and an alien transmission from Alpha Centauri.  I would have also asked him precisely what part of my brain was doing the talking, and to what, precisely?  I would have pressed him until it became obvious that he knew nothing of neuroscience, was simply parroting something he’d been told, and that his assertion was actually less credible than the God hypothesis.

It’s one thing to claim that your brain must be talking to itself when you’re the only one who hears it.  It’s another when other people hear it too.

Most modern Christian apologists are incompetent because they approach the discourse as a chance to explicate theology rather than understanding that it is a form of intellectual combat where the goal is to discredit the interlocutor.  So, like Hovind, they explicate a little theology that looks like an irrelevant evasion while simultaneously managing to get intellectually discredited by young boys.  Frankly, I’d be surprised and a little disappointed if I didn’t have the kid in tears and questioning his faith in science within minutes after asking such a pair of stupid questions.

First things first.  Destroy the interlocutor.  Answer every question directly, on his terms, and then go after the vulnerabilities they reveal with a flamethrower.  Only then, when you are standing upon whatever quivering ashes remain, can you explicate further if you wish.

Happy Thanksgiving 2012

I hope this Thanksgiving finds you with many things for which you are grateful.  Among the many things for which I must give thanks to God are my loyal and intelligent readership, who are as quick to correct my errors as they are to commend my insights.

Even though we dwell in a place where the American Thanksgiving is not celebrated, Spacebunny presented an impeccable turkey, accompanied by her excellent mashed potatoes and other side dishes, then followed that up with home-baked pumpkin and French Silk pies. 

Church of England delays suicide

I’m a little surprised at the result of the Synod vote as I was confident that the Anglicans were literally Hell-bent on following the Episcopalians in their death spiral into the historical dustbin of post-Christianity:

In a knife-edge decision at a special sitting of the Synod in London, bishops
and clergy voted through the change by large majorities.  But the measure failed to secure the required two thirds support among
representatives of the laity by just 6 votes.  Although 324 members of the Synod voted in favour of the change, 124 voted
against and 11 abstained.

It’s amazing that so many churches are determined to follow the world rather than the Word.  But then, it was written that they would do precisely that.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a nominally Christian denomination that ordains women isn’t Christian, merely that it won’t be Christian for long.

Christians and the Law

The responsibility of Christians to obey the Law of Moses is a subject
that comes up from time to time, which always surprises me because the
Bible is perfectly clear on the matter.  While it is understandable,
though not excusable, that atheists regularly confuse Christianity with
Judaism when attempting to criticize the former, it is absolutely
bizarre that some Christians are still under the impression that they
have an obligation to abide by Jewish Law.

Christians are not Jews.  Christians are not obligated to follow Mosaic
Law.  Ask any Jew, he should be able to confirm it.  As will the Bible, in Acts 15:

The Council at Jerusalem

Certain people came down from Judea to
Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised,
according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”  This
brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So
Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go
up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. The
church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia
and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news
made all the believers very glad.  When
they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the
apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done
through them.Then
some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood
up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the
law of Moses.” 
The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After
much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know
that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might
hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now
then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a
yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
The whole assembly
became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul telling about the
signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up. “Brothers,” he said, “listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

‘After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
Its ruins I will rebuild, and I will restore it,
That the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,
Even all the Gentiles who bear my name,
Says the Lord, who does these things,
Things known from long ago.

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead
we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by
idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and
from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

The Council’s Letter to Gentile Believers

Then the apostles and elders, with the
whole church, decided to choose some of their own men and send them to
Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They chose Judas (called Barsabbas) and
Silas, men who were leaders among the believers. With them they sent the following letter:

The apostles and elders, your brothers,

To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:

Greetings.
We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You
are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat
of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to
avoid these things.
Farewell.
So the men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter. The people read it and were glad for its encouraging message. Judas and Silas, who themselves were prophets, said much to encourage and strengthen the believers. After
spending some time there, they were sent off by the believers with the
blessing of peace to return to those who had sent them. But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, where they and many others taught and preached the word of the Lord.

The fact that Jesus Christ did not abolish the Law says nothing about
its continued inapplicability to those who are not Jews.  In fact, to
claim it now applies to non-Jews when it did not before on the basis of
Matthew 5:17-20 is clearly self-contradictory, for the obvious reason
that making it applicable to people to whom it did not previously apply
would be changing the letter of it.  Note particularly how Jesus states
even those who “sets
aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others
accordingly” will still nevertheless be part of the kingdom of heaven.