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April 12, 2002
Greetings in the name of
Greetings in the name of He With The Healthy Pantaloons!
There is now no reason to be fearful, because He of the Holy Wealth & Hellfare Department is come in a big ship of light bearing hundreds of pairs of black sneakers. Look, it's on the flickering box! With a 1-800 number and a website.
We are talking some SERIOUS SALVATION here, Saints! This is the kind of offer that only comes oh once every two thousand years or so. Time to jump on board the big MESSIAH SHIP and flitter off to the throneroom of Heaven!
god@eternity.com
Plus, if you act now, you get this free set of steaknives. They'll cut through a tin can and still slice a theologian like this! and that! and...that!
But wait--there's more!
Yes indeed! Try Judeo-Christianity for thirty days risk-free and receive Islam for only $4.99! Complete your collection and save a Whopping Eighty Percent! It's a small price to pay for COMPLETE COVERAGE. Act now!
[Quality of experience may vary. The distributer assumes no liability implicit or implied and is not responsible for misinterpretations, wars, sloppy thinking or mistranslation of original supplied texts. Manufacturer's warranty does not cover damage to exterior buildings, the smashing of temples, or the success of an ethnicity. Your results may vary.]
But wait--there's more!
NEW YORK TIMES December 31,
NEW YORK TIMES
December 31, 2006
NEW YORK - The man claiming to be Jesus Christ has apparently vanished, three days after his remarkable and unexpected appearance on "Nightline" with Ted Koppel. Many are already calling this a hoax. "The greatest hoax in the history of media," said Ted Turner, owner of the TNT and ABC cable networks. In an exclusive videophone interview with this reporter, Mr. Turner has denied any involvement. "I feel that the public has been defrauded, and that my networks have been used to perpetuate that fraud."
"I thought that it was
"I thought that it was the most...profoundly moving experience that I have ever had. It accounts for, in large part, my decision to retire from public life. I've had God on my program. With a career in media, where could I possibly hope to go from there?"
--Ted Koppel
So it happened pretty much
So it happened pretty much the way they thought it would. Some buncha nuts somewhere got all the right parts, and put them together, and built a bomb. They put it in a little dingy at the end of some dead-end Jersey City street, and one martyr putt-putted that little rubber boat across the water, right up against the West Side Highway, and pop! off went a tiny little 18-kiloton boomboom. Three million people died outright...another three hundred thousand within the week as the city descended rapidly into chaos. A much higher toll, it turned out, than the Government had accounted for in its projected fatalities reports. Fallout emptied Jersey City, Newark...
"I saw it coming from
"I saw it coming from the East. It went right over my head and then smashed into the hill over yonder. Then I seen the horses."
--Bud Atkins
farmer and witness
April 17, 2002
"In the beginning there was the head, and the head was God, and the head was with God. When in the course of the head's divine fruitiness there came the time within which to divide the land from the sea, it was done. When the fullness of unfolding had been reached with the meaning that now was the bit where the fusion furnaces of the stars ignite, it was so. When it was time for tea, it was had with a sugar and half a cream with a bit of lemon wedge, and a nice biscuit."
Big Big Book Of Bog
1:1
"It is plain to see from this creation account that the fruity head is indeed the essence of God, if not God itself. It is within the loopy nonsense of the head's divine commedia d'el arte that the firmaments are separated and the stars "ignited" with just enough time for a snack left besides. Surely this fruity heady God is worthy of obeisance and much slaughter."
from "Just A Terrible Mistake"
Ralph Hitler
"It is Mr. Hitler's continued insistence on the supposed transexualism of his infamous namesake that ultimately detracts from what is, after all, purported to be an exposition on the art of paper dolls."
Daily Telegram
Ipswich
"Certainly the time is now, if ever. There can be no denying that once we bang this fellow into a tree, there will be no more of this Apocalypse nonsense from the Jews or the Christians. And once the Muslims finish turning their deserts into biological wastelands, we can all join together in world harmony to help the mutant children of the Arabic Wars. It will be a great moment for the reconciliation of humanity."
Lord Alfred "The Bastard" Wembsley
London
"And he's not actually a Lord. He's just some fucking lunatic upper-crust dink that they let roam about the place. It's kind of grotesque, actually... like making fun of a crippled monkey."
Robert Willis
Gardener To The Queen
April 19, 2002
I'm tired. Of all the
I'm tired. Of all the endless debate. Thornton with his peculiar view that historical precedent ought to guarantee present acceptance. Sullivan with his insistence that it all boils down to Anti-Semitism. Buchanan's idea that terrorism has a venerable pedigree (which is a variation on Thornton's ‘historical precedent' view). Said's oh-so-ideological contention that it is the Israelis, and not the Arabs, who are bent on genocide. All of Europe wrestling with the ghosts of their past. America trying to find friends to go the war with.
Zoom out now, in true CGI style, and view the entire planet. Witness the big big bash that wiped out the dinosaurs, observe the spread of the green wealth of carbon-dioxide-hungry plants and the emergence of the furry mammals. Look! There in Africa, monkeys are coming down from the trees, and bashing each other on the head with rocks. See that one? He's bigger, with a bit of a bigger brain-pan, and testicles that produce just a dram or so more per bang than his fellows. Look at all his progeny! Leaping and swinging into the caves, beating in the heads of mastodons, they trek northward, and—speeding up now—look at them go! Spreading across the face of the earth, like mold on a rotting apple.
And now, witness the pattern: they gather together, finding affinity. The groups claim bits of land, plant crops, prosper, and invent many gods. Other groups wander through and try to take it from them; conflict erupts, blood is spilled, the victor's god-ideas are reinforced by their success, walls are built, buildings, temples, cities. Eventually, in one arid patch of desert, economy of thought kicks in and many gods become few, then one. All in an endless ebb and flow of swelling populations, conflict, disease, death, birth. Over and over.
Then the entire planet convulses, millions on the march, mechanical winged-and-footed creatures assist us as we all pound each other into the mud for important and meaningful reasons. Hot metal shreds us by the hundreds of thousands, then the tens of millions, ovens are built, greasy smoke belches into sky. Finally in a southern ocean the very stuff of matter is split and towering fire blooms…twice. Many tens of thousands flake into ash. We pause. We take a breather, occasionally swatting at each other. Waiting. Resting up for the next round.
And what is important and meaningful to us this time? What draws our attention?
That patch of desert, where a god-idea bloomed.
It's not about Israel, people. It's not about Palestine. It's not about self-determination, or oppression, or rights.
It's about god.
You want to solve the problem? Kill god, if you can.
July 26, 2002
Last night, I dreamed that
Last night, I dreamed that all of the gods returned to earth. Seems they had gone off on holiday for a week, and when they came back two thousand years had passed. There were the really big cheeses like Yahweh, and Allah, but there were also the long-forgotten ones, like Tiamat, and Marduk, and Anubis, along with the more famous Zeus and the rest of his crew. But most of them were has-beens, vaguely remembered for smiting this or that city or increasing the harvest in the fields of some nameless ancient king.
They strode this way and that across the face of the earth, searching for and visiting their various priesthoods. Yahweh accidentally killed the Pope just by showing up: his old ticker just burst like an overripe plum, which, if you're the Pope, has got to be a great way to go. He also visited all of the Jewish Orthodox here in Brooklyn, and they didn't fare too well. "You all look ridiculous." Imagine hearing that from your god when you've done your damndest to fulfill every jot and tittle of the Law. Then it was over to Israel, where he and Allah needed to talk some things over. Allah, for his part, had been running rampant throughout the Near and Far East: "It's just a book, you freaks! And Mohammed got half of it wrong because the man couldn't read!" Then he got into a tussle with Asar, Anbay, Gad, and that whole crew from pre-Islamic Arabia. You could see the dust and smoke from New York.
The most poignant, though, were the ancients: Alilat, Damu, En-uru, Aya, Kamrusepa, Hendursanga, Ama-arhus, Ebech...all of those, remembered now (if at all) only as an inscription on the odd bit of broken brick from a wall long turned to dusty rubble, or as careful incisions on a piece of clay tablet that's behind glass in a museum somewhere. They found each other in the remote deserts of central Africa and got drunk. They talked about old times, when the sacrifices were plentiful and nations rose and fell in accordance with the degree of their faith. The endlessly parched open spaces around them grew verdant with green wheats and burst forth with fruiting trees as the night wore on.
But it was a certain group: Ahriman, Belial, Afrit, Agas, Asmodaios, Edem and Jarri, Iblis and of course Saitan--all of the ones who shouldered the burdens of evil and calamity for so many millennia--who were most glad to see one another. They didn't hang out with the others in the desert. Instead, they shot off to somewhere quiet in the steppes of Central Asia, and they plotted. Most disturbingly, they had gathered with the old war gods--Attar, Chemosh, Burijas, Jamm, Wurunkatte, and the like. They all spoke long into the night, and the next day, and the night after that.
While the other gods were partying, glad to be in one another's company on this earth once again, and checking in to see just how badly their followers had mucked things up in their absence, this last group kept to themselves. They wanted to see how far along their old plans had gotten. And of all the old gods, they were the most pleased with how things were going.
August 25, 2002
There is a curious state
There is a curious state that I have been subject to for as long as I can remember. It falls somewhere between full wakefulness and deep sleep, and is composed of the conscious awareness of the former state combined with the hallucinatory reality of the latter. For want of a better term, I call the state “hypnagogic,” although that word carries with it a connotation of drowsiness and lack of awareness that is somewhat too strong.
Briefly: when in this state I see things that are normally confined to dreams, and I interact with them. This state often occurs late at night. Once, I awoke from dreamless sleep to discover that my bed was afloat on water, and that the bedroom wall next to me was the hull of a ship that I had drifted against. I pushed against the wall, and felt the sensation of my bed-raft floating away from the hull, while at the same time realizing that my efforts had no effect. When I was much younger, I would sometimes awake and see spiders or other vaguely unpleasant things, which would sometimes provoke me to leap from my bed, flinging the covers at whatever I saw. Generally, any physical effort on my part brings me fully into wakefulness.
Lately this state has taken a more curious turn: sometimes, I see gods. Old, ancient, primordial gods. Shapeless gods from before Yahweh, or El, or Anatu. Gods whose names can't even be rendered properly in our alphabets…approximations are kl'dk and skck, and strange, clicking, rushing, burbling sounds that remind me of what, perhaps, a thousand cubic miles of locusts might sound like underwater. Names that I feel in my gut but cannot actually hear. When I awake in the night and try to make muddled sense of how the light has filtered through the curtains from the courtyard, and the patterns then resolve themselves into these beings, I am deprived of speech. I cannot address them. I know the “deep dark dread” that came upon Abraham when Yahweh came to him, and it is even deeper, and darker, and more dreadful, for these are gods that cannot be truly present with us, cannot even speak to us. They are a form of age-old experience…collections of will, and intention, and knowledge, aware of neither human reason nor intellect. Which is not to say they are beasts. Far from it. But they are alien. We could never worship them, for their demands would be incomprehensible to us. Adrammelech demanded that babies be burned for him. The demands of these beings…I cannot even articulate them.
And yet, during these foggy, half-awake visitations, I receive the acute sense that, even today, they influence us. In the muddy pits full of corpses in Cambodia and the backwaters of Europe…they are there/not-there, in the peculiar way of a presence that is of the void. A chasm is an absence, yet it “is.” These beings are the same way…undeniably real, unaccountably absent. Since these…“visitations” began, I sense this there/not-there in the voids of downtown New York. Re-reading John Hershey's “Hiroshima,” I felt the there/not there as well. I suspect that the same could be found in Dresden, or Auschwitz, or the oil fields of Kuwait. There is something about the ever-increasing human capacity to both rend order into utter disorder and to create order from complete disorder that is now, to me, a constant echo of these old and ancient things. I can't quite put an image or word to the sensation, but I experience such echoes everywhere.
I expect that little or none of this will have relevance to anyone who happens to read it. These disturbances are my own. There is no priesthood that serves these beings, no context that will aid in interpreting the experience of them, no extant scripture that tells tale of them. They are from a time long, long before marks were incised into soft clay to tell of Gilgamesh.
Yet…they're here, now. And they were absent, for a very, very long time. Somehow, they have returned. I don't think that's a good thing. They are, at the last, frightening. They don't wish us harm…because the idea of harm does not exist for them. Neither do they wish to benefit us, for the same reason. They exist outside of any system of thought or morality that we have constructed. In fact, they cannot be said to “think” at all. Yet they act, in ways that defy our notions of causality.
As for the young gods—Yahweh, Allah, all of those other human constructions…they are just puppets. Weak, empty puppets. I suspect that it is through them that these old, unpronounceable gods will have their ways with us. We devalue these puppets at our peril.
October 15, 2002
God's Pushing Up Daisies
Andy over at the monkey-ridden World Wide Rant has had a loss of faith. Or, rather, his faith shrivelled up, sloughed off and drifted into the corner with the dust and cat dander.
I don't blame him. This notion of a God who operates in history, and affects the course of human events, is one of the more harmful ideas to survive the cauldron of the ancient Near East. From it springs the ethos of the Chosen People, the violence of Jihad and Crusade, and a few dozen other unpleasant mass human behaviors. Such instances of Monkey Mind are the flip side of prayer: for some folks, believing that God listens to you means that it makes sense to listen to God, and if your God tells you to shave off all your body hair, hop aboard a jetliner with a box cutter, and fly that sucker into a tall building, then you'll do it.
I don't believe in God, either, but I still pray. That's not quite the paradox that it seems to be, because God is just a word. A construct, best illustrated by the monotheistic myths, their polytheistic counterparts, and all of the other legends, creeds, and spooky beliefs produced by cultures the world over for untold millennia. All of them, it seems to me, are attempts by ambulatory packages of proteins and amino acids to explain the wrenching, terrifying, inexplicable experience of being aware of being. Rocks and doors and canisters of frozen orange juice don't get to indulge themselves in such fashion, and even if they did, we'd never know about it because they don't have the means of passing their knowledge of the Divine Inanimate on to others. That's the crucial bit, particularly for the text-based religions. Their idea of God survives independent of any one person's musing, and accretes onto itself thousands of years' worth of human culture and experience.
But that crusty verbiage isn't what I pray to, if I can be said to pray to any "thing" at all. Like Andy, I don't think it makes much sense to beseech the God-word to help you out of a jam: either you'll get out of it or you won't, and it's highly doubtful that the mighty being who toasted the top of Mount Sinai is going to change his plans just for you. Well, shoot: I was going to have Sally get broiled in jet-fuel this morning, but she's praying so nicely that I think I'll clear the smoke a bit, let her find her way to the remaining stairwell and get out just in time. But not that guy Andy. He is so dead. Peace out!
So what's the point of prayer, then?
It depends on what your sense of place in the universe is. For my part, I'm pretty amazed that my consciousness springs from a repeated pattern of atoms arranged into a twisty coil of of a molecule that directs the processes of protein synthesis. To me, that's miraculous. I think about the organization there, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Which doesn't mean that I'm praying to a watchmaker, mind you. But it means that I acknowledge the order of things. I try to be aware of it. Sometimes, I can tell when I'm working against it: I call that sensation "swimming upstream." Often, I can make choices and take actions in my life which relieve that sensation. Other times, I can't, or won't. A bit of praying helps me to figure out what needs doing, or, sometimes, what I should stop doing. And even if I get nothing out of it, I've acknowledged the order of things. That, to me, seems like a good thing to do.
So, what's prayer for?
Several things. It's not a kneel-by-the-bedside-and-primly-fold-the-hands thing that I do. It's an on-the-fly, intuitive, groove-with-the-great-river sort of thing: If it's OK, if it's the way things are supposed to unfold, I'd really like to be able to find my bike in the midst of this choking cloud of dust, and ride out of downtown on it, and find my girlfriend, and make it home to my apartment before they decide to nuke us or crash another plane onto my head. I consider that an effective prayer because, as it turns it, it was OK, and exactly the way things were supposed to unfold. The prayer kept me focused, kept me from dropping and losing the keys to my bike locks, kept me from turning the wrong way in the suddenly black morning and crashing into wreckage or some such thing. Very cool.
So yeah, I talk to God. Sometimes, God talks back, which is a different order of experience and one I won't go into right now, because it's freaky and probably means that I need a neurologist pretty damn quick. But I don't make the mistake of thinking that God's 'plan' is anything that I would like, or want, or need, or understand, or could possibly have any influence over. God's not hanging out in the sky keeping track of the sparrows and bodies as they fall. God's not hanging out anywhere, really. Which can be sad, and lonely, and small. But sometimes, like on a windy day five years ago when I heard a voice ask me Are you ready? and I answered Yes...I think, it's joyful, and expansive, and infinite.
November 22, 2002
Which Christian Theologian are you?
At first, I was Augustine, but then I realized that I wasn't being completely truthful with my answer to the first question, so I ended up being Martin Luther:
"Sin is incurable by the strength of man, nor does free will have any validity here,
so that even the saints say: 'The evil which I do not wish, this I do.' 'You are not doing the
things which you wish.' 'Since my loins are filled with illusions,' etc."
| You are Martin Luther!
Yeah, you have a way of letting everyone know how you
feel, usually with Bible quotes attached, and will think your way through the issues, although
sometimes you make no sense! You aren't always sure of yourself, and you can change your mind about
things, something you actually consider a strength. You can take solitude, especially with some music.
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A creation of Henderson
December 03, 2002
"They smear with blood the golden god, the wall, the utensils of the entirely new god. The new god and the temple become clean."
--Ulippi 4.38-40
December 19, 2002
Den Beste has put up a letter I sent to him in response to a previous post of his about the idealist and, ultimately, morally muddled positions of some contributors to the New Democracy Forum.
I won't reproduce my note here--go there to read it--but in response, he brings up the source of the vague unease I felt after writing:
"Their morality, like that of a theistic believer, is deontological; that is, they believe that the rightness of an action is determined by something other than its consequences. In this case, it's not God but their Ideal, their "cause." This is opposed to the consequentialist morality that you and I seem to agree upon: the rightness of an action is determined solely by its consequences."
The problem, as Den Beste rightly points out, is that word, "solely." He thinks that pure consequentialism leads to some terrible problems, which it does...the Spock's Death Scene "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" moral code being the least of them. It also lends support to things like infanticide and the general devaluation of individuals. So clearly, being too practical when considering moral issues is a problem.
My question, then, is simply this: if consequences cannot solely determine the moral value of an act, then of what is the balance of that value composed? Budziszewski argues for the impossibility of creating an ethos without God, and surely that's one answer. His ideas rest upon the notion of our obligations to God as our creator. I do not find his arguments persuasive, because many of his characterizations of anti-theistic positions are straw men, and he seems to appeal to a sort of common sense most readily available to theists, which to my mind doesn't truly answer the difficult questions.
Maybe it's because I'm tired and semi-full of cheap wine and Open House delicacies like warm cheese and small meatballs, but I'm supremely baffled at the moment. If one rejects pure consequentialism and utilitarianism, of what is the balance of moral value composed? Is it some abstract Ideal, in which case it bears more than a passing resemblance to an obligation to God?
From whence conscience?
Sometimes, when I really, really think about these matters, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I feel like God is about to burst forth and punch me in the head.
Hasn't happened yet.
December 20, 2002
In a comment to yesterday's post, Craig writes:
"I'm curious to know what characterizations you think are straw men, and what you think are the difficult questions that can't be answered by his brand of common sense."
Many of Budziszewski's straw men are built from words he places into his atheist's mouth. For example, he portrays the atheist's acceptance of genetic enginnering as follows:
"But our atheist will ask: What exactly is the objection to abolishing our nature? Why not abolish it? We won’t be around to mind. Our descendants won’t mind either, because we can build into their natures that they are satisfied with the natures they get. If we like, we can make an entire graded set of natures, along the lines of Huxley’s Brave New World. “I’m glad I’m a Beta,” say his Betas. So why should we reap the consequences that the tales of old foretold? Why should the pig–men use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters? Why should these litters be frightened by what, to them, would be the story of Genesis?"
Like many genetic engineering opponents, Budziszewski is ignorant of the true nature of genetic engineering--or, if he isn't, he doesn't let that knowledge interfere with his rhetoric. Implanting human genetic material from the nucleus of an aneuploid cell--which is chromosonally defective and therefore not viable outside of a petri dish--does not amount to "successfully crossing a human being with a pig." Rather than contemplate the possibility of growing new organs for humans in non-human hosts, which sounds freakish but would eventually save thousands upon thousands of lives every year, Budziszewski chooses to envision a mutant pig-headed servant class.
Like the spectre of porcine slaves, Budziszewski's atheist is a creation of his frightened imagination, a person with no ethos beyond the total exercise of human capability in all things and uncritical acceptance of all human technological advances. I could be mistaken, but I think that Budziszewski would be hard-pressed to actually find a thoughtful atheist who believes that creating a race of pig-men or a Huxleyan utopia is just dandy, and if he did, such belief would be representative of a failure of that person's critical thought processes in general, rather than a direct result of that person's atheism in particular.
He later writes,
"Trying to understand the nature of man without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas–relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion."
Which suggests what, exactly, about God? Ten fingers and ten toes? Bilateral symmetry? Of course not; that is too anthropormorphic an interpretation of imago. Then it must not be the physicality of humanity which is in His likeness, but something about our ephemeral consciousness and conscience...which, in turn, defeats Budziszewski's arguments against genetic engineering, which can only affect the physicality of humanity. We don't engineer minds, we don't engineer souls, yet Budziszewski warns that genetic engineering will change the nature of man. The two arguments contradict each other.
Of the "sophisticated atheist," he writes:
"But if he is to be a sort of Platonist, then what does he make of Plato’s problem? There are a great many patterns, not just one. This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design. We know of only one thing that is capable of Design, and that is mind—intelligent agency. It is not enough for the universe to resemble a mind in having design; let us have no tricks, like calling the patterns “ideas” when we have not earned the right to do so. Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing. That brings us back to God—God as the theist means God, God with a mind, God in the personal sense.
If our atheist accepts this implication, then he is back in the fold; he is no longer an atheist. But if he denies it—then it will not help him even if Pattern really is the deepest reality, because in that case “Pattern” is merely a fancy name for “patterns,” and plurality of patterns without Design is merely chaos; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
I believe that the key phrase here is "This raises the question of what organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design." Getting from "all together" to "unity" to "Design" with a capital "D" is a tremendous leap to make, albeit a very convenient one for Budziszewski. It does not follow that a "plurality of patterns without Design" is "merely chaos;" that's simply fallacious. Budziszewski's argument is: 'no chaos' requires Design; Design requires Intelligent Agent (it's the standard argument from design, like Paley's "watchmaker" argument). The argument is valid in form, but works only if you accept the premise that apparent order requires intentional ordering by some agent. A theist's sympathetic treatment of Hume's refutation of the argument from design can be found here, and an atheist's hostile treatment can be found here.
There is no reason to assume that some Agent has to deliberately bring a group of things into unity for it to be unified and appear orderly. His conclusion "Behind the universe there must be a real mind that is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing," is entirely unsupported by his argument, and simply insisting that this is true doesn't make it so. His hypothetical atheist is therefore quite able to go on being a Platonist, whether he's "earned" the right to call patterns ideas or not.
This is an example of the "theistic common sense" which Budziszewski uses and assumes on the part of his readers. Every theist knows that there's a Designer, and that the apparent order of the world demands it. Therefore Budziszewski feels justified in making statements like, "Behind the universe there must be a real mind" without really presenting a solid argument in support of the assertion. It simply makes sense to him, and he is is blind to its flaws. His "brand of common sense," as Craig calls it, is not akin to the colloquial "horse sense" or ordinary "common sense." It is a particular brand of theism, which like any other -ism has its own set of axioms and a position from which all of its arguments flow. Granted, Budziszewski is not engaged in an evangelical endevor here; he's preaching to the choir (except for me, of course--I'm in the vestibule). But this "common sense" is what allows him to write, with perfect aplomb:
"...I have suggested that one of the things about reality and goodness that we know perfectly well is the reality and goodness of God. Biblical tradition agrees: when Psalm 14 remarks, “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God,’” it doesn’t call him a fool for thinking it, but for saying it even though yet deeper in his mind he knows it isn’t true. From this point of view, the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he is not being honest with himself. He knows that there is a God; he only tells himself that he doesn’t."
His subsequent claim that we "need not take this from a theist like" him is disingenuous; in quoting biologist Richard Lewontin as an example of an atheist who admits "there is something not quite honest in their rejection of Him," he is really claiming the truth not of a god, but of the God. Budziszewski's portrayal of the person who is crushed by a full view of the moral law, and who "cannot escape the awareness of a debt that exceeds anything he can pay," is a reflection of his "common sense" knowledge that man will always fall short of the glory of God, and that redemption is required, which is received by the grace of God through Christ. Budziszewski is not just making the case for the innate and natural knowledge of God--a peculiar theological tic created by theologians of good conscience who were uncomfortable with condemning all of the !Kung bushmen and Hottentots of the world to hell because they had not been exposed to the Gospel--he is making the case for the innate and natural knowledge of the one true God, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, the God of Moses, the progenitor of Christ who is the Redeemer of us all.
Those who do not believe in this God are only "pretending" to be good. They are lying to themselves. It is this idea--the objective reality of the Monogod and His Book--that is at the very heart of the recent chaos and destruction we've finally been full witness to in the West. If the Arab culture had more fully mixed with Christianity instead of Judaism, we would be watching videotapes of Osama bin Laden exhorting his followers to Jihad in the name of Isa al Masih instead of Allah.
This actually forms the core of my objection to Budziszewski's claims about the impossibility of achieving any sort of "true" morality without the one, true God. If you followed the link above to the fractal image, you saw a brightly colored, orderly pattern that is graphical representation of an equation, executed by a computer program. It is true that the program has a designer. It is also true that the computer itself was designed. The whole process was set in motion by a series of keystrokes, but, once started, the visible organization of the pattern was a result of the equation's initial parameters. No further input is necessary; the patterns are self-organizing, and their unity is not a reflection of design in and of itself, but is visible because of design. Even if the universe itself was created by God; even if our innate sense of Him and His moral Law is an integral part of that design--sort of an equation the solutions to which are displayed on the computer of physical reality--there is nothing about that truth that in turn necessitates YHWH's existence in particular, or interventionist redemption through Christ, or a conscience based upon a moral law revealed on the firey mountaintop of Sinai, or the truth of the divine revelation contained in Scripture.
Budziszewski clearly believes in the need for redemption, which necessitates Christ, and of the validity of divine revelation as contained in the Old and New Testaments. He's not a Deist, or even a general theist. He's a Christian, and when he argues for the natural necessity of a moral law that is God's, and an innate conscience created by that God, he is arguing for Christianity.
That, in a nutshell, is the most difficult question that cannot be answered by Budziszewski's brand of common sense. Why Christianity? Why are the Buddhists wrong, and the Muslims misguided, and the Jews obstinate? Why this God as Designer, and not that god? Why this particular moral law, and not that one over there?
I don't expect to ever find an argument that will convince me of the true reality and nature of God, because in my opinion any such argument, framed in frail human language and circumscribed by the bounds of the human cerebrum, simply cannot approach what lies beyond human understanding. If there is a God, I am rather impatiently waiting for Him to come on down, tug on my ear and draw me to Him, to unheart and unself me, to be planted in His heart and soul.
As I said: hasn't happened yet.
December 22, 2002
Real Live Preacher serves up a seeker's faith. Definitely worth a visit if you're peering around looking for God.
December 26, 2002
See, now, this is the sort of freaky thing that happens to me all the time, and bolsters my faith--if not in God or gods, then at the very least in the underlying order of the cosmos at large.
Back on 12/23 I posted a Billy Fidget bit that had to do with an eBay item called God In A Box.
For Christmas one of the books I received was Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World. Vintage has been reprinting four or five PKD titles a year for awhile now; I've read all of their previous reprints, but this one (along with The Man Who Japed) was brand-new-fresh as of last month, and I haven't read it before.
So I'm sitting on the couch reading away, and I come across the following on page 78:
"I had a feeling she knew," Mavis said. "I've been conversing with her; she skirts the topic of the Anarch each time. Afraid of saying too much, I suppose. Tell me the work status of that apologia pro sua vita of Peak's, that God In A Box; is there still a typescript manuscript of it, or did you already turn it over to the Erad Council?
Stupid ordered Universe.
January 06, 2003
At a time when most boys my age were focusing on determining the broad outlines of their interaction with the opposite sex for the next decade or so--that is, between the ages of 15 and 18--I decided to join up with a local Jesus Jumper church. That's my own term, of course; technically they're known as Charismatics or Neo-Pentecostals. The distinguishing features of a Charismatic Christian church are--usually--threefold.
The first is restorationism, the belief that the supernatural gifts of the early aspostolic church (1st-2nd century AD) are still available today, particularly speaking in tongues (think Robert Tilton on your TV at 4AM going "hum daba ceeta da abba ta, Praise Jesus" ), healing (think Robin Williams smacking you on the forehead and yelling, "You Are HEALed, yay-us!"), and prophecy (think...well, there aren't many preachers actively prophesying on the TV that I can think of at the moment).
The second characteristic is continuing revelation, the belief that God still delivers revelation to his people, via the Holy Spirit, just as He did in the first century. This tends to piss off Bible-believing Protestants, who are a bit hung up on the sufficiency and completeness of God's revelation as found in the Bible. The idea that God might be toddling off and giving new, authoritative, extra-Biblical revelations to folks who aren't them is a bit off-putting, I suppose.
The third characteristic is a certain ecumenism, whereby charismatic Christians seek unity with other Christians of any denomination, based on a personal experience of God rather than on some of the core doctrines of the Bible.
A fourth characteristic, not usually mentioned in academic treatments of the subject, is that charismatic churches must meet in school auditoriums, other churchs' basements, or members' houses. Once they get a building of their own--usually a converted supermarket--the whole meeting in upper rooms to hide from the Romans first-century mystique tends to fade a bit, I think.
My particular church was big on numbers one, two and four but not so big on number three...there weren't many charismatic Protestants or Roman Catholics offering guest sermons while I was in attendance. And I doubt that I could've asked Pastor Larry or any of the elders about how restorationism figured into their personal theology and gotten a straightforward answer. Partly that's because, like a lot of Pentecostal churches in general and Charismatic churches in particular, ours was a lay ministry...no Masters of Divinity or Doctorates in Theology. It's also because I didn't actually know about terms like restorationism and ecumenism back then. But while the terms themselves weren't bandied about, on any given Sunday in the school auditorium you could witness people dancing before the Lord (hopping, really...there were a lot of, well, white people in the church), babbling in tongues and, if the Spirit was really cooking, falling over backwards and spouting a prophecy or two. Usually those had to do with the rewards due to the faithful and how the church was moving into a season of triumph and so forth...as far as I know nobody was ever told not to go to the grocery store after church because they'd get into a car accident or some such thing.
Ours was an experiential church, based on personal relationships with God and a certain amount of ecstasy, not that they'd call it that. Anyone who's been to Grateful Dead concert--sober or not--can probably imagine what I'm talking about. You put a bunch of people who are intent on having an ecstatic experience in a room together and you can be pretty sure that they'll have one. It's the result of a focused group dynamic, and people were doing it long, long before the followers of the Galilean began sprouting tongues of flame and speaking in other languages as the Spirit enabled them (Acts 2:3-4). For many people in my church, that regular injection of the "Holy Spirit" was the tie that bound them most closely to the community of the church, and there were those that couldn't get enough: church on Sundays, prayer meetings once or twice a week or more, if they could manage it. I know that was true for me--not the three-prayer-meetings-a-week part, but I definitely felt the charge and the allure of the weekly ecstatic experience, and did my part as a member of the group to bring it about.
Until, as Renita Weems has written, I began to feel that it was naïve to believe that "breaking out into goose bumps at talk of the sacred was a signal of intimacy with God." I am again projecting superior knowledge and sophistication backwards in time upon my floundering self: I certainly didn't frame my dissatisfaction in those words then. What I came up with, in the aftermath of breaking with the church, was that I objected to the feeling that I was supposed to turn my brain off. I had questions about faith, about Scripture, and about my personal experiences of God that were not being answered to my satisfaction by the people ostensibly placed there by God to shepherd my faith.
So I became my own shepherd. This process, as it turned out, involved large quantities of illicit chemicals, lots and lots of goose-bumps, and hallucinatory encounters with a sensual and ephemeral world that had all the hallmarks of ecstasy, but was, I think, a bit lacking in divinity. I'm thankful that I got myself out of that before I ended up like the author of The Keys To Death And Hell. He called himself Infek bin Laden and spent much of his life undertaking a psychedelic exploration of that sensual and occult ephemeral world, only to realize in the months before his death from cancer that he had completely missed something of vital importance. His information-age legacy is a freakish website hundreds of pages in length, full of deliberately disturbing imagery, inverted necrophilial eroticism, horror, and chaos, all of which is contradicted by his last statement before his death. As a whole, this statement is a plaintive attempt to explain the site's contents, to declare some sort of paradoxical meaning for it all: "But for any who would wonder, or wander lost in Temple Dahmer, I want to declare that the real secret of Deathandhell.com is Infinite Compassion." When real death stared him down--as opposed to the death that is the fetishized plaything of the fashionably depressed and the gothically hip--he was forced to attempt to reconcile the undoubtedly real experiences he had collected under the influence of drugs and occult practice with the undeniable sense that he had, quite simply, focused on the wrong things. But by then it was too late.
Which brings me back to the three Charismatic characteristics, all of which are experiential in nature. The apostolic gifts are spiritual powers, bestowed by God and experienced by the believer. These gifts were not limited to the big flashy ones like tongues or prophecy; there were people in my church known to have the "gift" of compassion, or of faithfulness, or some other no-less-worthy holy power. It was like Superfriends for Jesus, sometimes. After I gave a brief talk at a Youth Ministry meeting, the minister who ran the group told me, "You'll never be a preacher, but you'll sure be a teacher." That meant that I didn't have the gift of fiery oratory that could whip up a meeting, but that I did have an intellectual, "knowledge-based" gift. I remember feeling as though that was a backhanded compliment, of sorts...I wanted to be a preacher, the sort of person who could charge people up into a frenzy for God and bring the Holy Spirit down upon everyone. Preachers were exciting. Teachers were a bit dull and dry.
Revelation is an experience as well--after all, that's supposed to be God speaking to you, coming down on dove's wings and setting your mind aflame with insight into His Plan, or His Will, or what's in His Refrigerator. I've had some revelatory experiences, and while I won't claim that they're from the God, they were certainly memorable.
Charismatic ecumenism is sort of a combination of the previous two: if you experience the blessings of apostolic gifts and continuing revelation, you go and seek out other believers of whatever denomination who have had similar experiences.
Unfortunately, like most groups of this sort, it wasn't just the experience that bound people together as a community of God. There were other things, too, which were reflected in such terms as obedience and authority and order, and found expression in various political and social ideologies that I didn't necessarily agree with. All of those terms are found in Scripture, to be sure--particularly the bits attributed to Paul--but I eventually discovered that my experience of God wasn't quite as important as some other folks' experience of God, and of course was as nothing compared to the experiences laid down in the hardcoded pages of the Word Of The Lord.
Every group has boundaries that define it, even the most Unconditionally Loving And Accepting groups. Once you stray beyond those boundaries, whatever they may be, you find that there are conditions, and eventually it becomes clear that the acceptance--if, arguably, not the love--can be withdrawn, and replaced with judgment. This judgment goes by many names; I forget, exactly, what they called it at New Jerusalem Christian Fellowship. And if you're looking for acceptance--as I was at that green and tender age--then the love of the community no longer feels genuine. Wrap all of this up with even the slightest genuine desire to explore the Possible Divine, and it's quite easy to imagine the anger and bitterness that might result from anyone's bad experience with a church, a priest, or a proselytizer.
I'm often bemused by the raving atheists out there, the ones who make it their business to expose every hypocritical failing of every religious group, to mock the professed faith of all who dare voice it, and to defeat by logical argument every proof of God's existence ever conceived by humanity. I'm bemused because--even though I don't call myself a person of faith, or even a theist--I believe that I know something about faith, and about theism. These things are not about religious groups and their sins; they're not about professed belief; and they're certainly not encompassed by arguments made of frail words created by human minds. All of those are constructs. Words, made semi-imperishable, which in turn become the ideas that drive the creation and evolution of human cultures.
Beneath all of that, below the complexity, the philosophy, the ethos, and the words...are individual experiences and desires. That's why the committed atheist often expresses such frustrated incredulity when confronted with the truly committed theist: the theist has had an undeniable experience which the atheist has not. And while experience can be explained away, it can't be dismissed. Experience is a powerful thing, and can wrap a person up in a sheltered, solipsistic cocoon. That's what happened to Infek, and to this person here, who's off his nut in the same way but hasn't had the Uh-oh moment that Infek had.
That's why, when I happen to pray--which I do often, despite an acute lack of belief--there's always an element of Show yourself! in the act. Beguile me. Give me an experience. I've already dismissed the arguments of theist and atheist alike as beside the point. Ah, but to know, fully...that would be something, wouldn't it?
January 10, 2003
Sigh. I do like Andy--and not just because he was among the first to link to various A-head bits--but he's sure got a bee in his bonnet about God. Alvays vith za sarcasm und za bitter dismissals, dat vun!
At any rate, his 4,515th reason why God's A Crock--specifically: guy's boat sinks, guy prays to God to save his two passengers, everybody dies but him--spurred a whole bunch of comments over at World Wide Rant, so I of course jumped in with my pair of pennies. Which, in turn, I put up here, because I am satisfied with the verbiage I have produced. I will now return to my moss-lined cave.
You can argue about the definition of God all you want, and about the words people wrote about what they thought of Him, the words people claimed He spoke, the actions people claim He took, and the promises people claim He made.
However: claiming that an unanswered prayer is proof of God's nonexistence only reflects the limits of those words, which are bounded by the limits of human language, which is in turn an artifact of the human mind.
Treating the monoGod concept as the only concept of God is limiting in and of itself. But treating the monoGod concept as though it promises endless happy sunshine days and the granting of all wishes--as though God is a big Blarney Stone in the sky--is to misunderstand and trivialize the concept.
The monoGod concept isn't something that fell out of the sky bound in a quality imitation leather with the words of Our Lord Jesus in red ink. It's an incredibly complex, ever-evolving artifact of human attempts to understand the world, which necessarily includes attempts to explain the evil and suffering in the world.
It didn't begin in Galilee 2,000 years ago, or in Babylon 2,500 years ago, or in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, or at Mount Sinai 4,000 years ago. It's a process of human thought and enterprise that dates from the time we first turned our monkey-brows skyward and went, "Mmmrgh...?" in vague contemplation.
In this culture we routinely behave as though all things religious have no value, because we have worked to ostensibly separate religion from governance. But there is a continuous thread of human intellectual endeavor that runs straight from our Constitution, through the New Testament, and is anchored firmly in the ancient Near Eastern cultural morass from which Judaism emerged. This same morass also produced Islam, and to devalue all things religious under the guise of maintaining secularity is to sacrifice any hope of understanding and countering the threat posed by that particular worldview.
In short, treating the 21st-century portion of this process as a finished totality, and then glibly dismissing the entirety of that process, is profoundly anti-humanist. Would you call every single person before you who has believed in God a fool? Doing so would make a fool of you, I think.
There's far more going on in Scripture than can be found via the search engines at BibleGateway.com, and you don’t have to be a believer to explore it.
Now: I believe I need more coffee.
I didn't get to spend as much time in my mossy cave today as I would have liked.
Raving Atheist checks his referral logs, apparently, and picked up my mention of his site on January 6. Unfortunately, he seems to have missed my point a bit, which may be because he thought that "bemused" and "amused" are synomyms, and that I was "chuckling" at him in some smug sort of theist way. They're not and I wasn't. Some of his readers similarly missed my point; I suspect that this is because they didn't actually read anything I wrote beyond the three edited paragraphs excerpted on the RA site.
So, I thought I'd comment to clarify:
Actually, if you'd take a few moments to read the entire post of which you quoted the final three paragraphs, you’d see that I'm not attempting to make an argument to prove the existence of God, because I think that it's a pointless exercise. I'm not a "spokesperson" for faith or for theism, which is something that "the talking dog" might have grasped if he/she had read what I wrote in its entirety. Simply claiming to know something about the terms doesn’t make me an advocate, any more than claiming to know something about fascism makes me a fascist.
Anyone can argue with what people have said or written about God. I think that people who have fully committed themselves to either defending or debunking such arguments are simply working out in mental gyms. Those who defend seek to bulk up their faith; those who debunk, their intellect. Within this context, I'm not really interested in either. I haven’t got any faith and I’m quite happy with my intellect as it is, although it is getting a bit soft around the middle as I age. I'm well aware that there isn't a theistic argument ever created that makes any sense except to those who already believe. So to me, debunking them is an exercise in knocking over straw men, and hence "beside the point.” Such activity demonstrates a grasp of the methods of argument and rhetoric, which is fine, but again, not really what I’m interested in.
Therefore--like anyone confronted by someone who seems to be talking about the same thing, but whose purpose for doing so turns out to be not at all comparable--I am bemused by your devotion to such activity. It doesn’t mean you’re foolish for doing so; it just means that it’s not what I’m after.
I'm "in a position to know that the experience is undeniable" because I've read the writings of people who have had such experiences throughout history, and it seems fairly obvious. If I had a small capillary burst in my brain right now and had a big, whooshy, voices-a’calling, pink-beam-of-light experience, the experience itself is fairly concrete and hard to dismiss; it can, however, be "explained away," either by myself or someone else, such as a neurologist or a dedicated skeptic like yourself.
However, as one who does not claim to know whether a God of any sort exists or not, I am not entirely convinced that all such experiences are necessarily the result of some neurological event, nor am I convinced--as many people here so emphatically are--that "startled, unfocussed, muddleheaded confusion" are the only terms that can be used to describe what might otherwise be called theophany.
So no: to me, “Faith and theism are not about 1) religious groups, 2) religious beliefs or 3) religious arguments,” and yes, I believe this is so “because those things are merely ‘words’ and ‘constructs.’” And, as you helpfully pointed out, so are the words “faith” and “theism.” There are plenty of people who profess both, without the benefit of an undeniable whack on the head from God or anything even remotely resembling such an experience. There are plenty of people who make the same profession with the benefit of a sensual ecstatic experience of the sort that can also be had from chemicals of various kinds, a neurochemical imbalance, or group dynamics, but which they choose to attribute to God.
All I’m saying is that maybe—just maybe—there’s another sort of experience that doesn’t quite fit into those categories. If I have an experience that is truly ineffable, then--almost by definition--words wouldn't suffice. Why would I want an experience that I could explain away as a bubble in a blood vessel, a catastrophic failure of neurochemistry, or a sharp blow to the head?
February 04, 2003
"So one day mom and me were walking along the road back to town and there were these thieves hung up on crosses, right? Broken legs, bloat, ravens picking at eyesockets, the whole deal. So I asked her, 'What happened to those men, mommy?' And she goes, 'That's what happens to bad little boys who play with themselves and then lie about it.' You think being the Son of God is tough? Try having a 'virgin' for a mother."
--Jesus Christ
March 13, 2003
Q: Please state your name for the record.
A: The name I'm using now is John Smith.
Q: You have other names?
A: Of course. I've been around for awhile.
Q: I see. John Smith will do for now. What is your current address?
A: Well, currently I seem to be residing at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, but I keep my stuff at 31-92 Steinway Street, apartment 4-M, in Long Island City, New York.
Q: And your occupation?
A: I am an angel of the Lord.
Q: I see. And what is it, exactly, that an angel of the Lord does?
A: We do what we're told, generally.
Q: We?
A: Yes, there are six of us. One each for Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Australia. There used to be fewer, but now that you're everywhere, we had to share the workload a bit.
Q: When you say "you're everywhere," to whom are you referring?
A: You all. Humans.
Q: I see.
A: There used to be just three of us, in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Africa, but now...well, it's a big job.
Q: And what, exactly, does that job entail?
A: Lately? A lot of death. Not so much with the guarding of empty tombs and the revelations to bearded prophets anymore. The plan involves lots of death.
Q: You've mentioned this "plan" before. Can you elaborate?
A: Not really, no. I'm just an angel.
Q: But you have claimed that this "plan," which comes from God, accounts for your actions on the night of February 22 of this year?
A: Sure. And on every night of every year for the past twelve thousand or so. By the way--your son is going to be diagnosed with bone cancer next week. Terribly sorry about that.
Q: What?
A: Your son. That's why he's been complaining about his legs hurting. I know he's only eight, but that's the way it goes, really.
--From God On Trial: The Peculiar Case of John Smith of Queens
August 20, 2003
I'm always interested when someone lands on an old post and comments. In response to this Godbabble post from January, Doug comments and writes,
As a scientist/logician (computer guy), artist (music, specifically jazz), and believer (very liberal Christian), I'd like to ask what you think of faith as an act, or decision."
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I admire genuine conviction, because there is so much behavior in this world that is rooted in cynicism and nihilism. On the other hand, I am troubled by conviction that too often lends itself to dogmatism and irrational certainty.
Spiritual faith represents a kind of personal certainty coupled with a dual epistemological stance; that is, one chooses to believe, but very often the "bar" for what constitutes sufficient evidence for that belief is lowered. For example, as a computer guy Doug is probably familiar with the workings of hardware and software, which follow definite rules no matter how erratic their behavior might seem. If there is a system problem, there is a logical solution to it, and the problem can be solved by using machine-like reasoning. But that same level of logical rigor cannot easily be applied to the certainties of faith. So, in one instance, he believes what he believes about computers because they are explicable and knowledge about their workings is readily obtained. In the other instance, he believes what he believes about God, but uses a different, "good enough" standard of proof.
November 17, 2005
Mmmm...Fake Popes
Two fake Popes, actually.
Both are alive, and both are out of their gourds.
[Via Reverend Sensing, who links to Jonathan Last's "God On The Internet" over at First Things.]
September 15, 2007
Theology
September 22, 2007
Amazing Jesus!
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