I Thought Katrina Was Bushitler's Fault

Now that His Eminence St. Albert has officially won the coveted Nobel Peace Prize for discovering that the Law of Cause and Effect has been reversed when it comes to global warming (see Climate Myths), the truth about Hurricane Katrina is safely protected from the evil oil companies and the apologists they fund.  Yes, the Dark Lord Bushitler continues to be the servant of a much darker conspiracy, a secret society of global oil interests and their allies in the military industrial complex, bent on warming the oceans to the boiling point so that Super Storms wreak havoc throughout the world and plunge civilization into a totalitarian nightmare...errr...or something like that.

It shouldn't be a surprise that these evil forces have succeeded in fooling the ignorant folks in Louisiana.  The fair and balanced LA Times reports that Republican Bobby Jindal has won the Louisiana governor's race.  The LAT states:

Jindal, 36, will be the nation's youngest sitting governor. The son of Indian immigrants, he will also be the first Indian American governor in U.S. history, and the first nonwhite to hold the job in Louisiana since Reconstruction.

The LAT was not fooled.  These hicks may have elected a Conservative, but they couldn't quite buy into his heritage:

Jindal has made a few stylistic concessions to suit the electorate: For instance, he goes by Bobby, though his given name is Piyush.

That should at least take care of the NASCAR crowd.  So it's the Ballad of Piyush Bobby in Cajun Country.  Too bad his name isn't Barak.  Having served in the Bushitler Reich, he has all the Conservative credentials he needs, so in spite of his dark complexion, the David Duke state still managed to vote for him.  The most stunning factoid comes in this admission by the even handed LAT:

Democrats make up about half of the 2.8 million registered voters in Louisiana, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 2 to 1. But the number of registered Democrats has dropped by nearly 57,000 since the 2005 hurricanes. Residents have criticized the state government, which is dominated by Democrats, as incompetent and corrupt.

So there you have it.  Bushitler sends a vicious monster hurricane into the Democrat heart of Louisiana and in a few days erases all of the political progress made by those loving, caring Democrats.  For years they served up a hearty helping of panem et circenses to a voting block with undying loyalty to the memory of FDR; but the evil Bushitler literally washed them all away -- into the open arms of his home state Texas, no less.  It was a stroke of Rovian diabolical genius, and although they still managed to keep their pandering Mayor, the Governor was toast.  This was just enough margin to send the perfect Uncle Tom ( or is it Uncle Sambo ) to Baton Rouge to serve those evil corporate interests, especially the ones drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

There is one small problem.  How is it that the good folks of Louisiana blame their governor for incompetence, when everyone in the rest of the country knows it was Bush?  How can the victims of this climatic man-made outrage blame the innocent Kathleen Babineaux Blanco?  Didn't the Feds secretly blow holes in the levees?  Didn't Bush's failure to sign the Kyoto Protocols cause the Goddess of Tropical Cyclonic Activity to swirl and twirl and unleash the fury of Katrina on a hapless population?  Didn't Bush forbid federal aid from arriving until the outcry was impossible to ignore?  Didn't Sean Penn do more to awaken our numb consciousness than our own Commander in Chief, whose evil eyes was yet focused on oil grubbing escapades in Iraq?

One of the problems with creeping socialism is that it is run by creeps.  Those of us who just want to live our lives don't fully realize that inaction leads to further enslavement by those who think they are entitled to our property.  If New Orleans is one of the most illiterate cities in one of the most illiterate states in the United States, it doesn't take a Nobel Peace Prize to figure out the striking correlation between the condition of the city and the party affiliation of the people who have run it.  Perhaps there is a small element of truth to St. Albert's propaganda; the tragedy of Katrina was man-made, at least in part. New Orleans is a city below sea level protected by substandard levees and with a large population of families who have become either partially or totally dependent on a corrupt and cynical government run by populists and swindlers.  The Big One came as expected.  Everyone knew it would come eventually.  Nothing was done to prepare, and damn little when it was on their doorstep.  It must be Bushitler's fault.

So now the backlash has come.  By a large margin, the voters of Louisiana have elected a Conservative governor, not because of, or in spite of, his race, but because of his stated beliefs and intentions.  The Leftist template has trouble passing this data; how can ignorant rednecks vote for an Indian immigrant?  The answer to this question turns the Left on its pointed head.  Conservatives are far less racist than the Left.  The Left looks at politics though a fragmented lens of race, gender, ethnicity, class and sexual behavior.  Conservatives are searching for genuine champions for freedom: free markets, free speech, freedom from terror, freedom from the slavery of excessive taxation and intrusive government, even the freedom to fail.  This is the fault line in American politics.  Jindal is solidly against abortion, strongly supports the war in Iraq, and strongly supports the expansion of offshore drilling.  In other words, he has made no attempt to distance himself from Bushcheneyhalliburton.

Given the extent of the hydrocarbon riches of the state, there is no reason why the Louisiana economy and infrastructure should not be on par with Texas.  The main difference is years of poor government and corruption.  Louisiana is a microcosm of where the Leftists are taking us as a nation; a banana republic.  We can only pray that the new governor will be up to the task of genuine reform and reconstruction.  Good luck Bobby!

'til the End of Time

Although science does not claim any authority in the realm of good and evil, it is uncanny how the Fall of Man still echoes in our purely secular world view.  The Christian church continues to retreat on all fronts -- Secularism, Islam, Eastern mysticism, Hedonism and even Dialectical Materialism -- not because people reject the message, but because the Christian church is falling apart from the inside.  Yet the underlying message of the church still molds and nurtures new expressions of morality, salvation, and even eschatology.  Science fiction and futuristic drama have replaced Scripture as the vehicle for moral expression.  These expressions in turn inform the world view of the scientific academy as well as the increasingly blurred intersection between science and politics.  The greenhouse effect was once simply a quaint description of the electromagnetic transmission characteristics of atmospheric gases; now it has become one of the Four Horsemen (along with Nuclear War, Overpopulation, and the Coming Plague.) Mankind's greatest sin is not rebellion against God; oh no, that rebellion was fought and won in the 19th century.  Our greatest sin is the desecration of our planet, or perhaps even worse, if we are to believe Professors Krauss and Dent in their paper titled "The Late Time Behavior of False Vacuum Decay: Possible Implications for Cosmology and Metastable Inflating States."

It is the last line of the paper's abstract which causes one's brows to knit:

"Several interesting open questions are raised,  including whether observing the cosmological configuration of a metastable universe can constrain its inferred lifetime."

Surely they had to know that this would bubble to the surface of popular scientific controversy.  Does humankind have the capacity to alter, or shall we say corrupt, the Universe simply by observing the deep forbidden secrets?  Have we, in our arrogance, already opened Pandora's box, or plucked the fruit from the Tree of the Unified Field Theory?  Perhaps this theory can be expanded.  For example, is it possible that the reason atheists don't believe in God is because the act of searching causes God to recede at ever increasing velocity (at least for an atheist)?

This is not the first time that scientists have speculated on the godlike powers of humanity.  In the mid 90s, Frank Tipler speculated on the possibility of future machines altering the heat death of the Universe, reversing entropy, and restoring physical replications of all humans who have ever existed, thereby presumably resurrecting the dead.  Tipler is the exceptional optimist, believing that a future of ever evolving machine intelligence will ultimately be moral and compassionate.  A more likely scenario would be Matrix or Terminator, in which machines prove to be almost as diabolical as humans.

If the balance of visible and dark matter and energy can be so easily and disastrously disturbed by the mere observation of the dark side, then perhaps this says something about the underlying cosmological framework, like maybe we are dividing by zero.  On the other hand, if it is at all possible that the lifespan of the Universe could be altered by mere observation, then why is resurrection from the dead so unbelievable to materialists?

We sneer at faith as superstition to be tolerated at best, or to be suppressed if possible, but then we turn to the High Priests of Cosmology and find that the Grand Fulcrum of the Universe is actually located right here on this speck of dust we call Earth.  Like Saruman peering into the palantir, we have searched too deeply and greedily for knowledge, and now the Great Eye has awakened and looked back at us.

But mankind's sin is not the desire for knowledge, but rather our desire to be God.  A man-become-God is a self negating reality because such a man would ultimately think a thought which would annihilate both himself and the Universe.  God gives us freedom but restrains our power because we cannot be trusted with it.  A God-become-man is a much more desirable situation...

It would seem that we are hopelessly trapped in our own mythos.  Even Freud filled his office with statues and figurines of gods and goddesses, after first denying the existence of the only God who matters.  So while Science appears to push back the frontiers of ignorance and superstition, it does so by recasting those superstitions as future horrors and man-made catastrophes.  We will not allow God to bring Apocalypse, but by God, we'll create our own Nuclear end time.  Noah was a Hebrew reinterpretation of Gilgamesh and no more than an exaggerated account of a real flood in ancient Mesopotamia, but the catastrophic man-made ice age caused by our evil consumption of fossil fuels is going to happen if we don't restrain the evil corporations and their evil accomplices.

Now our search for knowledge has stumbled upon the darkest secret of all.  If we observe the wrong thing, the Universe will die early.  It reminds me of the librarian Evelyn in "The Mummy"  as she reads the forbidden words in the Book of the Dead to awaken the monster.  Had Krauss and Dent not written their own magic incantation, perhaps there would not be a rip in the space-time fabric. Alas, it is too late.  The Force has been perturbed and the ripples will expand and amplify to the ends of the Universe.  Game over, man.

The Neurological Basis for Morality?

In a recent Wall Street Science Journal article, Robert Lee Hotz reports on recent findings by neuroscientists that there is a link between morality and neuroanatomy.  Before all you radical materialists allow your neuro-enthusiasm centers to be energized, let me first state that this is nothing new.  If you don't believe me, then just have a drink to calm yourself.

Regarding the findings, Hotz quotes Harvard philosophy student Liane Young, "It tells us there is some neurobiological basis for morality."  I doubt Ms. Young fully appreciates her own sleight of hand in using the words "basis for" rather than something less provocative like "linkage with".  It is one thing to say that there is a relationship between anatomical cognitive centers in the brain and their corresponding mental functions.  It is quite another to say that these centers form the basis for abstract thought.

A simple analogy will serve to illustrate the distinction between linkage and basis.  Software programs or operating systems can be reduced to ones and zeros, and ultimately these ones and zeros can be reduced to binary electronic (or now optical) signals.  There is clearly linkage between specific memory locations, firmware, video memory, processor memory, etc., and the code which runs on the hardware.  It is also obvious that the program will either be impaired or not run at all if certain hardware is defective.  Can we then extrapolate and say that the hardware is the basis for the code? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the code exists apart from the hardware, but requires the hardware in order to function?

It is a leap of faith to assert that linkage and origin are one and the same.  This is the science of merely, in this case, the mind is merely a neurological network.  So too, this short essay is merely a patterned collection of photons stimulating your retina.  (Sometimes we give more dignity to computers than we do to human beings.)

Harvard neuroscientist Joshua Greene states that the brain is split into competing neural networks, the altruistic and the selfish.  By disrupting the emotional center, moral judgment becomes sterile and logical.  One hundred years earlier, Sigmund Freud described a model of the human mind in which the Id, Ego and Superego exist in a dynamic but overall balanced tension.  This balance can be disrupted when we fail to resolve deep psychological conflict in our childhood, thereby impairing one of the three centers.  In the one case, we have a neurological model, in the other, a psychological model.  Although the models are very different, the underlying worldview is similar.  Our highest thoughts and concepts have mechanistic origins, and serve functions which at best have survival value for our species, or at worst, are vestigial.  I wonder what mutant twist in the double helix causes human beings to undermine their own humanity.  Perhaps one day we will identify the locus of neurons in the cortex which cause us to define ourselves downward.

Much like the professor who leaves the proof to the student, the materialist describes the material origins of non-material entities, then waves a magic wand and says "Presto!"  By taking the "proof" to ever more granular levels, the materialist believes that this narrows the ravine between the physical and the mental or spiritual.  He makes progress by expanding the boundaries of the known into the unknown in the belief that the unknown will lose its power and mystery.  This is the materialist creed, that science will tell us all we can possibly know, and the rest is simply unknown, unknowable or silly.  Unfortunately for the materialist, the unknown is as infinite as God, and progress is "merely" an illusion, or perhaps caused by an unresolved Oedipus complex or a conflict between neural networks.

Somewhere along the way, the modern scientist forgot the meaning of "meta" in metaphysics.  Materialism itself is wholly contained within a much larger reality of information, logic, thought, spirit and even Being itself.  An electron microscope will never extract the "two-ness" of the number "two" by ever increasing scrutiny of the paper, the ink, or the psychological difficulties of the person who wrote it on the paper.  Morality, moral truth, our ability as human beings to discern right from wrong; these are thoughts which exist apart from the firmware which supports the software.  Clearly our thoughts can be affected by material influences, and the interaction between the hardware and the software is very real and intimately so, but we should not confuse the two.

Why are materialists so desperate to ignore the truth that the Word existed before the Creation, that Information transcends space, time and matter?  If anything, it would provide some comfort to know that the act of knowing is not merely a meaningless interaction of electrochemical impulses.  Alas that peace and comfort themselves are illusions, perhaps a truce between warring neural networks.  Speaking of which, my neural networks are in a bit of a snit, so it must be time for a bourbon.  I wonder what sort of vapid audiovisual stimulation is on the tube tonight?

Losing His Religion

A Response to William Lobdell

When Job demands an account from God for his suffering, God's responds with a question:

"Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone -- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'?"

Job 38:2-11 New International Version

So God continues in four chapters to remind Job that he is but a creation, not the Creator.

As with a child who demands to know why he has to obey a father's command, the father replies, "Because I said so." Sovereignty doesn't answer the human longing for an explanation for suffering; yet the same God who giveth and taketh away also created us in His image. We pine for justice and an explanation for the misery in the world He created.

In his essay Religion Beat Became a Test of Faith, William Lobdell (LA Times) painfully recounts how he lost his Christian faith after a career of reporting on the horrible crimes and hypocrisy within the Church. From child molestation, rape and sodomy by Catholic priests to false teachings, fake healing and outright stealing by televangelists, Lobdell explains his disillusionment with organized religion. He ends his piece with these words:

As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

Clearly, I saw now that belief in God, no matter how grounded, requires at some point a leap of faith. Either you have the gift of faith or you don't. It's not a choice. It can't be willed into existence. And there's no faking it if you're honest about the state of your soul.

A Christian response to Mr. Lobdell's critique might be that he made the mistake of putting his faith in the church, rather than in Christ. The prophet Jeremiah asks who can understand the utter corruption of the human heart, be it popes or paupers. But Lobdell isn't questioning the human condition of sin; rather, why does God's transforming power seem so weak within the heart of His kingdom on earth? Why does the church itself exhibit such extreme corruption? How can people who profess Christ be so evil? His conclusion is unusual for a Catholic: faith is a gift rather than a choice. The elect will believe and the unelect will be damned. If you don't make the leap of faith, then it is because you don't have the gift which allows you to make the leap.

This creates a curious paradox for the doubter. If faith is a gift from God, but as a doubter, I assert that God did not give me that gift, how can I even make the statement since as a doubter, I doubt the existence of God? If God does not exist, then the "gift of faith" is nothing of the sort; it is merely a form of self deception. If I insist that God did not grant me the gift of faith, then I am a liar, because I still believe in God, albeit, a cruel and merciless God.

This is the God which Ivan presents to Alexey in the Brothers Karamazov. Ivan is an intellectual and a nihilist, while his brother Alexey is a novice monk. As the two brothers discuss their beliefs over dinner, Ivan explains that for him it is not a matter of faith. Like Mr. Lobdell, Ivan Karamazov taunts Alexey with stories of horrendous atrocities, mainly against children in 19th century Russia. Even if he believed in God, he could not accept God's justice.

"And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don't want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket."

The bedrock which underlies this house of outrage somehow does not get mentioned in Ivan's scorn. He talks about truth, oppressors, forgiveness, suffering, and harmony. By what standard does he measure the significance of the injustice? Who planted a longing for justice and truth in his skeptical soul? Who gave him the very opportunity to choose either submission or rebellion? And although he is a fictional character, Ivan represents us all. Inspired and informed by the standard of truth which God places in our hearts, we judge God and question His justice. God's response to Job is more than bluster, it cuts directly to the existential heart of the matter. Our questioning, our longing, our sorrows and joys, our suffering and ecstasy all derive from being itself, an infinite gift because it is an eternal one. As for God's means of righting the wrongs, Alexey says it best in his response to Ivan:

"...you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed!' "

Every single day, a hundred local newscasts describe some horrific event in which an innocent child is brutally tortured, sexually assaulted, and/or murdered. We like to call it news, but it is really an acid eating away at our collective soul. It isn't really surprising that Mr. Lobdell has lost his religion by reporting on the macabre and twisted side of the church. We can even blame God, but in a strange and mysterious way, God has already taken the full blame. For every dark and sinister story about pedophile priests and kinky voyeuristic evangelists in hotel rooms, there are a thousand stories of goodness, kindness, love, service, worship, devotion, honor, humility and truth. The real leap of faith is believing that there are only naturalistic reasons for the vast majority of people to behave morally, with so many opportunities to be dastardly. It is the nature of journalism that the evils of the world get amplified, and the good things taken for granted. Earthquakes make news, but the solid earth beneath my feet is boring.

We all make a leap of faith. It is where our feet land that matters.

Undermining Our Mines

We like to think that common sense and common values provide a solid and unquestioned foundation, so that even the most obtuse and cerebral academician might find some conversation possible with Joe at the bar. Real life always intrudes and leaks the helium from almost any metaphysical balloon. Most of us find unconscious comfort in the belief that deep down inside, we are all the same. But are we, and how can we know?

In an interview with Salon.com, Richard Dawkins said:

"[The] child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected."

But like the stranded Antarctic scientists in "The Thing", how can we tell who is carrying the infection, or even the nature of the infection? Using Dawkins insidious logic, once we are infected we no longer have the intellectual capacity to recognize the disease. Dawkins impales himself, and latter day Western civilization, on a pike with two sharp ends. If human beings are susceptible to "bad logic" and the virus alters our perception and understanding of the world, then we cannot know truth unless it is pure empirical fact. There is no meta-anything, only observation and prediction, stimulus and response.

Once rationalism becomes unhinged from objective truth, we can no longer discern the difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts. If the code with which we process our information has itself been altered, then how can truth be known? If truth cannot be known, then how does Richard Dawkins know that his own mind has not been infected with a sinister viral agent, causing him to place blind faith in naturalism and rendering his soul incapable of knowing God? Who is fooling who?

In his classic book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

The new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore, he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus, he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then writes another book, a novel, in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then as a philosopher that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality, and in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

Once we doubt our doubting machine, no doubt we will lose our minds. Perhaps the virus was consumed long ago in some primordial garden, and we have never recovered from the deadly effects. Without a transcendent super-rational Being as a reference, how can we know one way or the other?

By calling religion a disease passed on from generation to generation, Dawkins cleverly discounts any need to discuss the matter. It now goes without saying: the poor chaps are simply deluded and out of their minds. Their rational being has been infected and distorted by parental implants; their worldview has been altered in such a way that they cannot escape from their imaginary God unless... Unless what? Unless they worship Dawkins? Like Frazier in Walden Two, he is very smug about his ability to discern the truth, but who plans for the planner? Or using his own metaphor, who determines which virus is healthy DNA and which virus is malignant?

Strident atheism has replaced reasonable discourse with cheap shots. Why bother with discussion and debate when an ad hominem slam against all who have faith will do the trick. Let us go further and do the Spartan thing; take the children away from their infected parents so that they can be raised in a healthy and rational environment by benevolent Master Planners. Let us outlaw churches and their bilious ideologies so that the plague can be brought under control and ultimately purged from human consciousness.

Oh my! I forgot, we tried this already, in two different flavors, Stalinism and Maoism. Well, mistakes were made, as with all scientific experiments. We need to learn from our failures and try again.

Letter to a Popular Atheist, Part Two

In response to my essay Letter to a Popular Atheist posted March 25, many readers objected to my assertion that atheism cannot defend an objective moral standard, but must borrow from a legacy of theistic culture. Some readers concluded (with indignation) that I was accusing atheists of being immoral; many simply restated Harris' assertion that mankind does not need an Imaginary Friend to tell us what is right and what is wrong.

When Jesus confronted the Pharisees, He accused them of failing to understand the heart of the law in spite of their intricate understanding and practice of the law. They had an epistemology but no ontology. This imaginary friend, who appeared in the flesh, did not come merely to explain the moral law, but rather, to identify Himself AS the law, as the way, the truth and the life.

Common sense and consensus, self-evident truths and social order, these are the atheist's evidences that morality can exist without a moral lawgiver. If God has knowledge of good, but good is an intrinsic property of reality independent of God, then we do not need God in order to know good. This is quite different than saying God embodies good, that good derives from the nature and being of God. God's transcendent and eternal nature are the ground of good, beauty, truth, virtue and all moral attributes. It isn't that we need an Imaginary Friend to tell us what is right and what is wrong, but the very existence of good derives from God's nature (just as evil derives from the absence of His nature.) Only in an eternal context do moral attributes possess weight or significance.

The Darwinian justification for ethical behavior reduces all that is good and noble to survival instinct. It amuses (and saddens) me that Darwinists become outraged when a theist states that there is no ontological basis for atheistic ethical behavior; their own system of value has been drained bloodless by determinism. Whence the outrage? The human heart yearns for more than perpetuation of the genetic code, and yet the Darwinist interprets ethical behavior as mere plumage in a courtship ritual. These mechanistic explanations of human value consume themselves like the ouroboros. Human beings are reduced to merely this or merely that, where even outrage has no foundation other than a violation of social norms or propriety.

The problem with atheistic morality is that it ultimately becomes a circular pragmatism. If it works, then it must be right. What is right? That which works, i.e., that which insures the survival of the human species and the maximization of human happiness. So why do I want to maximize human happiness, why not simply maximize my own happiness? Wouldn't this also be moral? Wouldn't the survival of a particular class or race be equally desirable? Survival of my family, or clan, or organization would also increase the likelihood of my own survival and personal fulfillment. Why would this be less moral than extending Darwinian love to the entire species, or even to other species? Regardless of where we draw the line of sanctification, whether we worship ourselves, family, clan, race, species or Mother Earth, we cannot escape personal death and non-existence. So what is the point of the perpetuation of a molecule?

The Darwinist can talk about the empirical mechanism of natural selection, but fails to explain the existential meaning of it. The Darwinist defends this as rational, but all this really means is that he can provide a materialistic explanation of the origin of ethical behavior. In the spirit of David Hume, this sleight of hand is also circular: that which is empirical is knowable, that which is knowable is empirical. The only exception is the statement "that which is empirical is knowable". It is one thing to say that we are genetically or socially compelled to behave in a certain way; it is quite another to say that we SHOULD behave that way. The Darwinist can only say that we SHOULD because we are predisposed or compelled by firmware.

Sam Harris either misunderstands or intentionally misrepresents ethical theism. He, like many atheists who have responded to my previous essay, believe that theists need a Big Daddy to tell them what to do. This view recasts the demeaning Freudian interpretation of the super-ego, and presumes to set the ethical atheist above this childlike state. Ethical atheists have therefore transcended the need for such a crutch and behave ethically on the basis of reason and evolution. Even this hierarchical view of human development implies some external reference by which to measure our presumed advancement from primitive totemist to exalted neuroscientist. Did we design the yardstick by which we have exalted ourselves? How convenient. The ethical theist believes that moral law exists as a property of being itself, because it is part of the nature of God Himself. That is the reason these truths are self-evident.

Human thought begs for an end to infinite regress, circular justification and the despair of self-definition. As Augustine said, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

Letter to a Popular Atheist

This post was originally published on March 25 at The American Thinker.


In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris, an outspoken atheist and author of "Letter to a Christian Nation" once again presents the case that the moderate believers shield the fundamentalists from public criticism and analysis. Although much of his diatribe against faith is simply a regurgitation of historical atheism, this one idea is a new twist on the Enlightenment. Harris presents the case that if we take the Bible literally and fully, that the God of the Old Testament would be rejected outright by any thinking person. In his editorial supporting Congressman Pete Stark, he likens him to a modern day Cicero:

"Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo."

Harris' complaint is that honest public discourse on the subject of faith is forbidden for political and social reasons, and that it is time to call faith what it is -- a delusion. It isn't clear to me just who is preventing Dr. Harris from exercising his First Amendment rights, but obviously he feels threatened by the forces of Medieval Darkness. Popular culture and popular media are much more likely to condemn James Dobson than Sam Harris; nevertheless, Harris hopes to rally the broad base of closet atheists to speak out and denounce all religions as pathological mythology. Go for it, Sam.

Let's assume for a moment that Harris is correct, that is, believers are delusional and misguided, faith is false, God does not exist, and the greatest threat to human survival is the irreconcilable conflict between the major world religions and their inflexible and delusional beliefs. What then is the basis for his desire to save humanity from itself? At the end of his screed, Harris says:

"There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know."

So what does it mean to be ethical, or especially spiritual, with an atheistic worldview? The underlying premise of Harris' disdain for believers is that delusional beliefs threaten the existence of mankind. What are these "better reasons" for helping the poor, feeding the hungry, and defending the weak? How does empiricism support the concept of compassion? From an evolutionary point of view, what is the advantage of helping the poor, feeding the hungry or defending the weak? Nietzsche had a more rational answer for a God-less world, and his atheism was at least intellectually honest. The superman does not need an objective moral standard -- he makes his own and imposes it on the weaker. So it is that Harris falls by his own words; he pretends to know things he does not know. He does not know what is good or what is evil; he only knows what is socially normative. He does not know anything spiritual, because the spirit is imaginary, or at best a mental construct.

Francis Schaeffer said that secular man can only live in the lower storey (secular world) by borrowing from the upper storey (spiritual world). In other words, atheists can only talk about ethics because they are immersed in a social structure sustained by the "mythology" they reject. They borrow ethics from God and then claim that these ethics exist without a transcendent law-giving God to uphold them. What the atheists cannot explain is how they justify their ethical standards. What does it mean to say that compassion is deeper than religion? Perhaps we should adopt the behavioral model and realize that in a world without God, compassion does not really mean anything, just like freedom and dignity. Maybe compassion is behavioral conditioning and has evolutionary value, but if so, we can hardly call this deep. It is worse than shallow, because it is something we pretend to know which we do not really know. We only respond to stimuli.

I agree with Dr. Harris that compassion is deeper than religion. Compassion is as deep as God, and begins and ends with God. It cannot be any deeper or higher than that. Perhaps Dr. Harris should talk to Jesus; if I am not mistaken, I think He had a distaste for religion as well.

The Suicide of the West

Many years from now, history (if there is any) will conclude that Western democracies were not capable of waging preventive warfare. Only when their existence was threatened did the great democracies set aside their social fantasies and confront the pure evil of totalitarianism. Even now, in the middle of the battle, a pattern has emerged. Korea, Cuba, Central America, Somalia, the Balkans, and the Middle East demonstrate that we only want the problems to go away, and will take the most expedient route to stalemate or even defeat.

During the Cold War, it appeared that the threat of nuclear annihilation prevented the United States from exerting the necessary force required to resoundingly defeat evil in regional conflicts. What would the Soviet Union have done if we had occupied Syria in 1973, thereby strategically altering the Middle East for the foreseeable future? Nothing except complain. Would the Soviets have come to Castro's aid had Kennedy committed larger forces to the conquest of Cuba? No. Did either China or Russia do a thing when we launched a massive attack against a far inferior foe in Iraq in the first Gulf war? No. They only laughed when we stopped short of Baghdad and effectively doomed ourselves to years of anxious avoidance of the inevitable.

Our half measures have cost more in American (and enemy) lives than would have been lost expending the full fury and might of our nation against the threats at the edges of democratic empire. Look at the carnage in Korea which continues to this day. Look at the tragedy of Indochina and the killing fields in Cambodia. Our inability to respond with power and authority has only emboldened the totalitarians. They smell weakness, just as the foes of Rome tested the borders of the empire until the darkness finally descended on civilization.

It was never the threat of nuclear war which stayed the hand of the greatest military the world has ever known, backed by the most powerful economic engine the world has ever known. Nor did we lack the strategic vision and the moral authority to do what needed to be done to push back the totalitarians. So, what prevents the United States and its allies from acting with firm conviction in the face of forces which threaten to destroy the civilized world? Lassitude, self-doubt, expediency, the natural human desire to take the path of least resistance - all these play a role in neutralizing the will of the West, but there may be a simpler and perhaps more sinister explanation for the thickening fog.

In a world of incalculable comfort and leisure, dominated by media and abstraction, the reality of poverty, war, social misery, crime and imminent danger fade beneath the day to day yearning for entertainment. The fear and consequent alertness of the watchman on the ramparts has been replaced by a vague but incessant anxiety, an anxiety relieved by drugs, food, and recreation. The Western mind is daily saturated with images of distant and artificial death and danger, but these are only images on a screen, only words and pictures, unreal, easily changed or ignored. We get our news and philosophy from comedians. We exercise our emotions with movies. The party goes on, the drinks and drugs get stronger, the music louder, the food richer, the games and sex more risky, and the laughter deafening. We have become "comfortably numb".

Our radical Islamic enemies have a single minded hatred for what we call civilization, and would like nothing less than the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah for our decadent cities. In a sense, they see more clearly than we do because they instinctively reject the narcotic influences which deaden our awareness of physical and moral reality. Unfortunately, they have chosen a more deadly path, a mixture of nihilism and utopianism which will lead to nuclear world war.

Only in a self deluded society such as ours would 911 be perceived as a singular act by a group of zealots, rather than as a threat to Western civilization sponsored by the oil rich fiefdoms of the Islamic caliphate. The average American who wants to nuke Mecca in response is actually closer to understanding the reality of our danger than those who seek to understand why "they hate us." But nuking Mecca will not hold back the jihad, nor would such a malicious action serve any good purpose. Nevertheless, the West will ultimately be faced with either acting ruthlessly in our self defense, or choosing dhimmitude. The longer we fail to neutralize the threats from Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and the Saudis, the fewer and more horrible will be our available choices of action. There is no middle way and there has never been one. The failure of the "Bush Doctrine" was not a failure of the doctrine, but rather a failure to consistently implement the doctrine.

Our civilization is dying, not because we are under attack, but because we are in a self induced stupor. Only a trauma like 911 can jolt our system enough to raise our level of awareness, and then only for a short time, a year at best, and that has proven to be insufficient. Perhaps it is inevitable. Certainly history predicts it. Spengler predicted it almost a century ago.

Fiddle About

Listening to the Leftist-Main-Stream-Media-and-Duped-Conservatives disgorge on the political battlefield reminds me of the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes jingle. Just like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo before it, this latest insanity matters so much precisely because it matters so little. How surprised can anyone be that a "Prominent Republican Congressman" who only some Floridians and virtually no one else has ever heard of has been captured on disk playing Uncle Ernie with interns (oops, I meant to say pages, interns are fair game, right?)

Meanwhile, Attila pillages the outlands and bears down on Rome.

In a previous post I talk about our greatest export, i.e., self-loathing by our intelligentsia. The world watches and spits it back in our face. This is no different. One of the unfortunate consequences of our open society is that we live in a beautiful mansion with transparent walls. Everyone in the world knows what goes on in the bedroom, the bathroom, and the laundry. Even worse, the things they cannot see are embellished, amplified, and distorted by an entertainment media disguised as news. Yes, "they" DO hate us, but not because we are rich or imperialistic. "They" hate us because "we" hate ourselves.

If we have lost touch with reality, the groundwork was prepared by all the usual suspects: Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Skinner and the horde of intellectual barbarians and anarchists who ripped reason to shreds over the past two centuries. When a belief in objective reality disappears, all perspective is lost as well. What matters doesn't really matter. All that matters is how loud someone screams, not the message they convey. Right and wrong? Depends on your context. Depends on your goal. Depends on your enemy.

Western civilization has been raped so many times that we no longer notice the intrusion or the abuse. Like a masochist, we think we deserve it and learn how to take at least some pleasure in the violation. So the irony of the feigned Left-wing outrage over "Uncle Ernie" Foley could almost be funny if it wasn't so deeply depressing. In order to understand why Nancy Pelosi can be outraged by Foley and still retain her San Franciscan constituency, we must consider the following Leftist axioms:

• Nations are evil, the root of all human conflict
  
• Corporations are evil, but are a necessary means to an end
  
• Conservatives are evil because they love nations and corporations and because they are intolerant
• Evangelical Christians are the worse than any of the previous because they claim to know the truth and want to impose their truth on others
• Anything which opposes America, corporations, conservatives or evangelical Christians is good

We have reached the point where the counterculture has become the Left, not just in America, but throughout Western civilization. The counterculture defines itself not with ideals, but by opposition to ideals. This is why the Democrats only oppose. If they had a direction, an alternative plan, then they would be in violation of the Leftist belief that truth cannot be known, and that it is arrogant to believe in objective truth and objective reality.

So what is the truth about Mark Foley's virtual pederasty? The most important Leftist concept is that you shall be judged by your own rules. If Foley was a social liberal, an avowed member of the Leftist cadre, then he would be innocent and entirely consistent with the social rules of his calling; however, as an evil Republican, he is to be judged by a socially conservative standard and therefore cast into the outer darkness.

The reason America is evil is because we are judged by our own high standards. Totalitarian regimes are to be judged by their own standards, and by definition, are entirely good because the standard is set by the dictator.

This is the vapid and senseless intellectual heritage of the West. It would be one thing to say that there is no right and wrong and to embrace moral chaos, but this oversimplifies the philosophy of the counterculture. Right and wrong do exist as subjective entities: fluid, expedient, self-serving, and even contradictory rules which achieve dominance through raw power alone. Foley should never have resigned, he should have simply switched parties.

Too old for Communion

Matthew 26:26-30

While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, "Take, eat; this is my body." Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

My youngest daughter once asked me why she couldn't have the bread and the wine during communion.  Rather than try to explain something which doesn't make any sense to me, either, I just told her that soon she will be old enough to participate.

Isn't it interesting that we want the communicant to be old enough to understand the sacrament, and yet we don't understand it ourselves.  Who can really say that they understand this mystery?  Better still, who can explain it to someone who knows nothing about it?  Whose heart is truly prepared to receive God's grace, when it is God's grace which blasts through the hardness of our hearts and heals us from the devastation of daily sin.  I daresay that my daughter has a better understanding of God's grace than I do because her faith is simple and direct.  Jesus commands us to allow the children to come to Him, and yet we hold them back because they do not understand or are too young to take it sincerely and with reverence.  As for sincerity, who shall read the lie detector readings as we trudge our way toward the chancel?  As for reverence, what thoughts flit across our internal screen as we eat and drink the body and blood of our Lord?

A wise man reminded me that we do not require understanding when we baptize infants, although there are many denominations which require a child to be cognizant of the meaning of their salvation.  Having grown up as a Baptist, I can tell you that although I accepted Christ when I was eleven, I rejected Him shortly thereafter.  So much for comprehension and free will.

Somewhere between mindless ritual and qualification testing we find the truth of that horrible and wonderful night in which our Lord was betrayed.  Imagine the deadly silence which must have permeated the upper room as Jesus gave His body and His blood to His inner circle.  Imagine their thoughts as they realized what He was offering.  Did they truly understand that this was more than symbolism?  Perhaps not in that moment, but later that evening the impact of their last meal together must have begun to sink in, as Judas betrayed his beloved Master.  Then, the real meaning of eating the body and drinking the blood of our Lord became a nightmare as His frightened disciples watched Him die on the cross.  Perhaps they were thinking, "We killed Him.  Our Lord that we love, we killed Him.  We ate His body.  We drank His blood."

Is this too much for a little girl to understand?  You betcha!  It is too much for her dad as well.

By the Word or by the Sword

Humiliation in Abu Ghraib.  Koran desecration at Guantanamo.  Mohammed cartoons in Denmark.  Now we have papal insensitivity in Regensburg.  The Horror!!

Did Pope Benedict XVI innocently believe that he was talking to a sophisticated and learned audience at the University of  Regensburg, or did he deliberately poke the ant bed of Islamic intolerance?  In his address to the school where he once taught theology, the Pope refers to a dialogue between a 14th century Byzantine Emperor and a Persian scholar.  Following his address, the "Islamic street" (as defined by the world news media) erupted in protests and outrage.  Here is the excerpt which has caused all the furor:


In the seventh conversation [between Emperor Manuel II and the Persian scholar] the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.

But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the 'Book' and the 'infidels', he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: In the beginning was the logos. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos.


This whole argument is far over the heads of the Muslim street punks who scream at the cameras and burn effigies.  The meat of the discussion is whether or not God is limited by His own nature.  It is the same thing as asking if God can create a stone too heavy for Him to lift.  The Christian answer is no, God cannot act against His own nature.  God cannot violate Logos because He IS Logos.  Jesus says that He IS the truth.  God is entirely good and holy because this is His fundamental nature.  In the beginning was the Word, the Logos.  The Pope asserts the congruence between the Jewish and Greek philosophies which culminated in the theology of Paul.

But for the Muslim, God is not bound by anything at all.  He is free to violate His own nature because He is utterly transcendent.  Allah is a profoundly different god than Jehovah.  The God who makes covenants is completely trustworthy because He cannot be otherwise.  The God who spoke to the prophet Mohammed is not obliged to fulfill His covenants, so that truth and rationality, although they may be manifestations of God, are not intrinsic to His nature.  For the Christian, God is King.  For the Muslim, Allah is Absolute Ruler.  This difference in world-view is the heart of the philosophical divide between a diminished  and secularized Christendom and an increasingly malignant Islam.  The Pope asks the question whether or not it is God's nature to bring people to faith by the Word or by the sword.

So with a sound bite from the hungry news media and a radical Muslim clergy bent on forced conversion of the infidel, the weapons of mass deception lie ready to turn on the Roman Catholic church, as well as Christianity in general.  The secular Left screams INTOLERANCE while militant Islam screams BLASPHEMY.  They are taking it to the streets.  It is the latest propaganda campaign in a long series of campaigns, seeking to weaken the resolve of the West by undermining those leaders who speak truth in a pluralistic world.

The Pope has since apologized for quoting from a medieval emperor, declaring that these are not his personal views.  Is it possible that the Pope did not note the irony in quoting the leader of an expiring empire in dialogue with a Persian/Muslim scholar?  Could there be any analogy less apt?  Modern Europe is roughly two generations away from an Islamic takeover.  The ancient heart of Christendom crumbles and the message of the desert Prophet fills the void left by two centuries of intellectual and spiritual suicide.  Rather than issue a clarion call, the Pope selects the most benign venue for his profound remarks, and then recoils because of the barbarians clamoring outside the walls.  "Bring us his head!!" they cry.  So let us be clear -- when Western civilization finally dies, it will be our own leaders who open the gates to the hordes.

Do we worship a God who is bound by His Word, or do we worship a God who makes no Covenant with His people?  This profound schism between Christendom and Islam is a tale of two histories.  On one side we have  arbitrary rulers with absolute authority.  On the other, we have constitutional and democratic governments.  These world views emerge directly from each culture's understanding of the nature of God.  Western civilization has been a continual struggle between the autocratic power of leaders and the constitutional and representational forms of government.  Planting a democracy in Iraq will take at least one generation, but we may not have the patience, or the time.

If the Pope wished to begin a dialogue between Islam and Christianity, his apology has only emboldened the radical theocratic forces who control the streets and the cameras.  It would have been better left unsaid.

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Paul could not possibly be speaking to the church.  Isn't church where people go to argue about theological and political issues?  Isn't it that place where the pastors and staff always want more money, and the members feel guilty and resentful for not giving enough.  Yes, I know what a church sounds like.  It is the sound of complaining because something in the service is different.  It is the sound of people talking about other people's shortcomings.  Then there are those self righteous and pompous windbags who talk the Jesus talk, but their walk is a little wobbly (hmmm, not me!).

I know that Paul could not have been writing to the church in Corinth, because he speaks of agreeing with one another.  Members never agree with one another, nor do they live in peace.  They share the peace because the pastors tell them to, but within an hour they are yelling in traffic or yelling at the kids or getting mad at the waiter for screwing up the order.  And what is this "holy kiss" stuff.  Sounds fruity to me.  Hugs and kisses and all that are fine, but what I mostly see at church are people rushing to and fro, meeting impossible schedules, or struggling with their children, or sitting next to each other in the pews and trying to avoid physical contact.  No holy kisses for me, thank you!

Do I know any saints?  I certainly don't feel like a saint.  Saints have wings on their backs and haloes on their heads.  Saints never swear, never think lustful thoughts, never get mad, never lie, never criticize, never doubt....they can't possibly be human.  They can't possibly be in the church I know.

Or so Satan would have us believe.  We live in an age in which no one can speak of good and evil without being condemned for their own hypocrisy.  No human being can withstand the microscopic examination to which we subject those in authority, or those who try to live by faith.  Nor can any church withstand the critical analysis performed by its members, whether well-meaning or malicious.  Only the power of God can hold it together.

Within these walls we nevertheless find saints.  In spite of the ugliness of these earthen vessels, we somehow manage to serve God's purpose.  We minister to one another in spite of our petty judgments.  We pray for one another, in spite of our quarrels and debates.  Somewhere in this body of flawed human beings we find love, and every time I take communion, I know that Christ binds us all together in a sacrament beyond understanding and beyond criticism.  If you are angry with the one who stands before you offering the bread or the wine, then what can you do except submit to the divine grace of God which for a split second obliterates all conflict and binds soul to soul in what can only be a "holy kiss".  It is more than magic.  It is as real as the water in the font.  For a moment, as we eat the body and drink the blood of our Savior, the evil one crawls back into his hole and hides from the light of Christ.

Tear these critical words to shreds.  They are the lies which Satan uses to try to steal our joy in Christ.  And dear brothers and sisters, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Isaiah 53

Isaiah 53

Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.



I did not understand the purpose of suffering until I first read this prophecy from Isaiah.  I feel the power and know the fear of the Lord when I read that it was His will to crush Jesus with pain.

We must conform our lives to the life of our risen Lord.  We will be crushed, if not by pain, then by death itself, and then we will rise again.  Why?  Because only through death, and many times through pain, can we rid ourselves of the sin of this world.  We must be born again.

I have begged God to take away the doubts which often plague me.  I have pleaded that my mind would become clear and my faith become firm.  I never know when I will be smitten by the darkness of fear or skepticism, or when memories of those who have hurt me or whom I have hurt overwhelm me.  Yet these words from Isaiah take away the doubts and somehow justify the pain in life.  If God wills His own Son to be crushed with pain, then pain must in some way be the doorway to eternal life.  Pain and death, joy and life, they cannot be separated.  We cannot live without dying and because Jesus died we cannot die without living.  Faith and doubt cannot be separated, just as sin and righteousness coexist in our muddled lives.  The crucible may be clouded with dross, but beneath the crust God has refined us into purest gold.  We can only catch a glimpse of that which God intends us to be.

Only through the living Spirit of God could Isaiah have uttered these words of mystery and hope beyond death.  No possible reconstruction of the myth could have resulted in such amazing congruence between these words and the crucifixion of our Lord.  Without the death and resurrection of Christ, these ancient words of Isaiah read like the ravings of a madman.  Who indeed has believed what we have heard?  Who could ever believe that a good and righteous God would destroy His only Son, would humiliate Him, would abandon Him for a time, would send Him to Hell, and then, with love and power which bring tears, would raise Him, so that we might also be raised.

God, if we must suffer, then let our suffering be to your glory, as all of our actions and words should also be to your glory.  We cannot understand it unless we see it through the words of your prophet.  Thank you for giving us this revelation so long ago.  Take our suffering and refine us to be like Christ, and give us the courage and faith to persevere.

Resurrection

Luke 24:5b

Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.

In one of his last works, "A Grief Observed", C. S. Lewis takes us real-time through his grief over the death of his wife Joy, whom he anonymously refers to as "H". Knowing that Lewis is a profound Christian apologist makes the reading all the more difficult. Just as Christ cried out on the cross, "My God, why have you forsaken me?", so Lewis spends the first half of the book walking through Hell in utter despair.

It was St. Augustine who said, "Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all." One reads the bitterness Lewis records and wonders. It is the nature of being human that we can savor our joy of life while holding the bitter end in our mind like a bomb in a closet. Jesus tells us that we should let today's troubles be sufficient for today, but we cannot entirely look away from the forecast of tomorrow's weather. God created us with a heart for eternity and with a knowledge of mortality; it is what differentiates us from His other creatures. Do not worry? How?

In a previous post, I wrote:

Smoker's smoke because they delude themselves into believing that they will avoid cancer. Overweight people continue to eat or not exercise because they think that they might avoid heart disease. Or maybe the reason is even more disturbing. Maybe human beings are fatalistic at the core. We recognize that we have three scores and ten (give or take a few years) so why does it matter?

Human beings are not only fatalistic, they are purposefully self deluded. We ignore the broken trestle because if we didn't, we wouldn't be able to simply enjoy the ride. This is why secularists hate Christians, because they don't want to be reminded of the approaching train wreck. It is so much simpler and so much more practical to bracket our lives between our personal Alpha and Omega.

Most people are pragmatic. They will attempt to make the most whatever time they have, regardless of the quantity or quality. Almost everyone would do almost anything to extend that time. We agree with St. Augustine implicitly, almost without thinking, and only the most morose or depressed person would think otherwise. Of course it is better to savor even a few moments of delight or joy, rather than never experience at all.

Long ago I came up with an insipid mathematical way of measuring the quality of life. If we could somehow plot satisfaction versus time, then the total quality of life could be measured by integrating the area under the satisfaction curve. In other words, a short but highly satisfying life has the same quality as a long but modestly satisfying life. This seems ridiculous when one puts it into words, but it is our calculus nevertheless. We make our life decisions based on this calculus. We completely ignore the "treasure in the field" when it comes to the practicalities of maximizing the quality of life.

So what does this have to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well, the most obvious answer is that the area under the curve is infinite for those who are resurrected. If we live forever, then the quality of our life is infinite as well. I forgot to mention that suffering counts as negative satisfaction, so the area under the curve could be negative, or in the case of Hell, infinitely negative.

Yes it sounds stupid, but this is how we think. Lewis' journal of grief is an account of his personal death and resurrection. He descends into the Hell of doubt, despair, confusion and blinding misery. He finds the door to God locked tight. He questions God's motivations and bitterly ponders God's sovereignty. Then, as if born again, he awakens to find that God did not abandon him, and that life, memory, joy, and peace remain beyond death. His demeanor changes so dramatically that one wonders if this is the same author. From Joseph to Job to Jesus, the promise of the Resurrection renders our calculus useless.

My own spiritual life is a seemingly neverending cycle of death and resurrection. When the darkness falls, all hope and faith diminish until there is nothing left except a single point of light, but the light never fails and I rise again because God pulls me out of the pit. I want to believe that it is nothing more than psychochemical, but I know better. I would also like to wear it like a badge, but it feels more like a curse. It is the Valley of the Shadow, the anticipation of the end. As the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes 1:17

And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.

Long ago two women went to visit a grave, to give honor to a pile of dead flesh and bones. Their lives were probably hard in a hard land, oppressed by tyranny, holding out for a mythical King to come and free their people. Then a man came who was more than a man, and He told them about how God had come to live among them, and that the Kingdom of Heaven was here and now, and their lives were filled with joy they had never known.

Then He was murdered and all was lost, and maybe it would have been better if He had never come.

But He came back.

Our Greatest Export

The United States has long carried a trade deficit. Assuming that the definition still holds, a trade deficit means that we import more than we export. So why haven't we gone broke already? We must be accumulating wealth through some other means. This should be obvious, since so much of our wealth accumululates in investment and real property. For example, my trade deficit at home has been negative for as long as I can remember, but my family has more wealth today than we did 20 years ago. Only farmers have a "trade surplus".

Unfortunately, our biggest export cannot be measured in dollars, and it has by far the greatest influence on our reputation in the world as well as our national security. We export ideas. We import them as well, but with characteristic Yankee ingenuity, we learn how to replicate these ideas and build on them, then spew them back at the world one hundred fold. The poisonous ideas which emerged from the collapse of the Christian church in Europe have captured our intelligentsia at all levels. We now teach the world, and what do we teach? The United States is the root of all evil. There is no God. Man is not a creation, but an evolving system, perfectible and designable. Capitalism is evil, socialism is Heaven on Earth.

America is suffering from an autoimmune disease. Our great institutions of thought have turned inward to destroy America and everything it represents. Nothing escapes the non-stop worldwide self critique. From Hollywood to Harvard, on every major television network, in every major newspaper, the drumbeat continues and the world consumes the vomit. We barely even see it anymore. It has become a part of our intellectual landscape, briars and weeds and ugliness, cynicism and skepticism, anti-establishment, anti-faith, anti-capitalist, anti-everything. America sucks.

Is it any wonder that we stand almost alone in the world? If anything, it is a backhanded compliment to our true greatness as a nation that the United Nations, residing on our free soil, opposes virtually everything we do and everything we represent, for it too is one of OUR institutions. America is like a doctor who decides to operate on himself but fails to realize that self-administered anesthesia may well be terminal.

Our intelligentsia is dominated by the Left: the faculties of our liberal arts universities, the press, most state and local governments as well as the federal government, our law schools, our courts, our mainstream churches. Those institutions dominated by the Right are mostly part of the private sector: business, engineering, finance, and most of the middle and working classes. In other words, our leaders in the world of ideas are leftists.

Because our schools have worldwide recognition, we have become the world's teaching center for anti-Americanism. The American liberal arts institutions are of one mind with their European counterparts. They exercise contrarianism for its own sake. To be the opposition is fulfilling in itself. Knowing that they are secure behind a wall of nuclear defense, they are free attack the wall and cheer on the barbarians on the other side. Knowing that Western democracies are safe places to grouse without retribution, they relentlessly criticize the institutions which protect them and take sides with totalitarian monsters.

Meanwhile, middle America continues to shop at Walmart and watch insipid television, seemingly oblivious to the intellectual warfare. We feel vaguely manipulated by big business, big government, big media, and big academia. We know that we have become the policeman of the world, and we know that we are hated, but we just want to live our lives. Why can't we all just get along? Maybe if we stopped bullying other nations. Maybe if we weren't so rich. Maybe if we weren't so arrogant. Maybe if we didn't have all those ugly nuclear warheads, and nasty evil jets and tanks and other destructive stuff. Maybe we could just replace our flag with a big smiley face and everyone would love us. Where do we get these vague impressions, these implicit ideas, this dangerous naivete?

We "sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." We can no longer afford this self-immolation, because we don't live in a bubble. The little tyrants of the world cannot defeat the giant, unless the giant defeats himself.

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

Romans 1:19-21

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

This passage and others like it form the Christian apologist's argument against honest intellectual doubt. It is an ad hominem attack on the doubter because it asserts that the doubter's argument is not honest, but rather is driven purely by a desire to disobey God.

I know that there are rational reasons to believe in Jesus Christ, and their are rational reasons to doubt the existence of God. I don't need to undermine the arguer to win (or lose) the argument. It is a cheap shot either way.

Paul is saying that sinners don't want to believe in God because then they have to confront their own misbehavior and the consequences thereof. This is often the case, but is it the only reason for unbelief? It may well be the other way around. Maybe people are more likely to sin because they do not believe. This would seem to be common sense, and Paul even says this in 1 Corinthians 15:32

If the dead are not raised, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

It is no coincidence that Christianity is in decline in the post industrial world. The "cheap shot" would be to blame it on the increasing permissiveness of society, moral decay, the culture of death (abortion and euthanasia), drugs, and multiculturalism. But, is it possible that these are symptoms rather than causes? Is our society any more decadent than the Roman Empire? Yet, Christianity grew from the cesspool of a dying antiquity, consumed by narcissism and corruption no less prevalent than in our time.

In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus says,

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

The heart of doubt, the real shadow of doubt, lies in those precious words, for the converse is also true. The merchant who finds the pearl, but does not fully believe the value of the pearl, may go and buy other less expensive pearls. If he believed in the value of the pearl, what would he not sell to have it? Most people recognize the potential value of the pearl, but they aren't going to pay the price because they aren't quite sure. Some of those other less expensive jewels might be OK.

We live in two worlds. We want to follow Christ, but we also want the pleasures of this life. We see our faith as a matter of degree, not as a binary choice. We recognize our own fear of death when cancer or war or murder or some other shade crosses our happy-go-lucky path through life, but if death means jumping from the frying pan into cool water, then why do we tremble?

In my personal faith journey, I have met no one who doesn't make the same compromise between faith and living in a secular world. No one. Christians don't want to talk about it. It is like a disease that you catch if you talk about it, so it is best to keep your mouth shut. All the while our mainstream churches are dying because they have lost the ability to be honest with themselves. They are slowly changing into social service organizations while their hierarchies obsess over leftist agendas.

No sin is worth the agony of doubt. The sickening darkness of life without meaning cannot be partied away. The vast majority of people long for meaning in their lives. They long for certainty and security. They long for life above all other things, for those they love and for themselves. Doubt is the threat of losing all, and Satan is the author. So does the unbeliever choose to deny the existence of God in order to sanction a libertine life?

In the parable of the merchant and the pearl, Jesus summarizes our real life dilemma. It is true that there are many people who will pass over the pearl because they don't want to pay the price. If they purchase the pearl then there will be nothing left for pleasure. But if the merchant really KNOWS the true value of the pearl, then the choice should be clear.

If the djinn grants you one wish, wouldn't you wish that all your wishes would come true, or would you wish for a million dollars? Choosing infinite possibility over finite possibility would seem like the better choice. But now change the rules of the game: if you choose between palpable and achieveable lifelong pleasure and comfort versus the uncertain possibility of eternal life, which would you choose? Furthermore, if the society in which you live urges you daily to indulge in life's pleasures, while scoffing and ridiculing the belief in God and eternal life, which are you more likely to choose?

Smoker's smoke because they delude themselves into believing that they will avoid cancer. Overweight people continue to eat or not exercise because they think that they might avoid heart disease. Or maybe the reason is even more disturbing. Maybe human beings are fatalistic at the core. We recognize that we have three scores and ten (give or take a few years) so why does it matter? The sinner chooses to sin because he too is fatalistic, which takes us back to 1 Corinthians 15:32.

For a believer, sin is a consequence of doubt. Satan encourages us to rebel just as he did in the garden, by tempting us to first doubt God's promises. Rebellion is the product of our trusting the wrong authority. We trust the solid world rather than the two thousand year old record of witnesses who never made it into our secular history books.

Peter sums it up in John 6:68-69 when Jesus asks the disciples if they plan to abandon Him:

Lord, to whom would we go? You alone have the words that give eternal life. We believe them, and we know you are the Holy One of God.

Our lives radiate from this ultimate core. Every decision we make derives from whether or not we believe in eternal life or whether we believe that this finite existence is all we have. It is a pendulum which swings between ultimate meaning and ultimate nothing. We sin because we are in the darkness cast by the shadow of a doubt.

Let it die

Romans 6:9-14

We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.


Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life

I remember one morning -- that morning was a real morning and one I can never forget -- I was upstairs sitting at my desk reading the Word and praying, and I said, `Lord, open my eyes!' And then in a flash I saw it. I saw my oneness with Christ. I saw that I was in Him, and that when He died I died. I saw that the question of my death was a matter of the past and not of the future, and that I was just as truly dead as He was because I was in Him when He died. The whole thing had dawned upon me. I was carried away with such joy at this great discovery that I jumped from my chair and cried, `Praise the Lord, I am dead!' I ran downstairs and met one of the brothers helping in the kitchen and I laid hold of him. `Brother', I said, `do you know that I have died?' I must admit he looked puzzled. `What do you mean?' he said, so I went on: `Do you not know that Christ has died? Do you not know that I died with Him? Do you not know that my death is no less truly a fact than His?' Oh it was so real to me! I longed to go through the streets of Shanghai shouting the news of my discovery. From that day to this I have never for one moment doubted the finality of that word: "I have been crucified with Christ".



Most of the difficult problems in my life have been solved almost effortlessly, because the solution was always simple. The difficulty of a problem is not in the complexity, but rather, it is seeing the solution. We learn in school (this is especially true in engineering) that problems can be solved methodically, by applying technique and working hard, by being precise, by being very careful. With enough persistence, any problem can be solved. So why is it that we bang our heads against the same walls each day, expecting the bricks to magically crack. We only get another headache.

I present this excerpt from Watchman Nee's "The Normal Christian Life" to point out the necessity of revelation in our lives. He describes in his book how for seven years he pondered these words in Romans 6, how he could still not understand the meaning of being dead in Christ. The more he struggled, the less he understood. Then one morning, a simple prayer and a miracle from God opened his eyes to the truth that for those who believe, we have already died in Christ, because we are truly born again.

Nicodemus struggled with this, and the more he questioned Jesus, the more cryptic was the response from the only One who truly understands it. How can you be born again? How can you die and yet live? Are these just symbolic words, and if so, then what do they mean? If they are only symbolic, then what's the big deal?

If we say we have no sin, then we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. So what does Paul mean? We cannot be free from sin because Scripture tells us that we are in bondage to sin, we are born into sin, we are hopelessly sinful in our deepest nature. And that is why we must die with Christ in order to live with Him. We cannot keep our old selves. We must be born again so that the power of Christ can free us from sin. We cannot try hard enough to solve this problem. There is no technique which will unravel the string. We must "see" this solution rather than work it.

Perhaps we should all go running in the streets shouting, "I have been crucified with Christ", but no one would understand this apparent nonsense. I am not sure I do, but I do know this much. I cannot change me. I have failed so many times, I have given up. We all want to change each other. We all want to "solve the problems". We all want to fix what is broken. It cannot be repaired. It has to die.

As long as a drug addict loves the drug, he cannot break the habit. No amount of persuasion or coercion, short of total isolation, will cure the addict. The addict self has to die. If a doubter wants desperately to believe in God, then he cannot believe hard enough to be convinced, he must let the doubter die. The desire to doubt, the need to despair, the actual craving to wallow in melancholy has to die.

The first step in escaping from the quicksand is to stop struggling. Nevertheless, even if you stop struggling, you will not escape without help. Look up and find the hand of Christ.

Sometimes we need to stop trying to solve the problem or fix what is broken. In fact, for the things in our lives which are broken, for the things in our church which cannot be repaired, there is and has always been only one answer. Pray for revelation. Pray for God's divine intervention. Pray and trust that God will not only answer our prayer, but will do far greater things than we could ever accomplish on our own.

The Sinister Encoded Gospel of Blither

Long before Dan Brown ever even dreamed of Leonardo's secret clues or recycled the ever popular conspiracy of the Templars, there was Bob. The parody of the "Church of the Subgenius" creatively trashes Christianity (and any other religion for that matter) much more effectively than "The Da Vinci Code". So while the Catholic church hyperventilates over the DVC, along with numerous evangelicals, a far more blasphemous comedy has been standard fare for agnostics and atheists for many years.

As with any parody, the truth behind the parody gives it power. Parody is cheap because it requires no defense. Whatever message it conveys is derivative from the original message it mocks. The same can be said of the DVC. No one would care about the royal bloodline of Isaiah or Matthew, but in our enlightened age it is scandalous to suggest that Jesus had sex because it taints His divinity. Ultimately, this is the whole point of the theme. If Jesus is God, then why would He have sexual intercourse and conceive a child? Are the children then partially divine? Is history nothing more than complex manipulation by hidden forces and conspiracies?

While dining at a restaurant, a friend of my daughter walked by our table with her family and asked her, "We just went to see the Da Vinci Code, have you seen it?" My daughter replied that she had not, to which her friend said, "It was REALLY COOL."

It was really cool. And that is the end of that. What more can be said?

I've considered writing my own gospel, hence the title of this blog entry. It would be about how our distant descendants discover time travel and manipulation and intervene in the past in order to bring about the future heaven. All religions would simply be myths based on actual future visitations by those who were engineering their own present in order to redeem all of history and bring back all those who have died. In this gospel, the future civilization is god, perhaps some infinitely wise and benevolent cyber-intelligence, or some engineered spiritual being culminating in the perfect wisdom entity. In my gospel, a secret group of social architects have been continuously intervening throughout history in order to bring about this utopian future. Unfortunately, one of them wants to destroy the future, and so the plot develops around the struggle to prevent this marauder from destroying heaven.

Actually, this story has already been written, in a much more believable form. It is called the Holy Bible. A transcendent God intervenes in His temporal creation and steers His-story in order to accomplish His purpose. An all powerful God casts out the rebellious Satan and his armies, and though the forces of evil want to destroy Heaven, all that they do ultimately brings glory to God. No conspiracy is required because the Hand of God has already been revealed. No secret knowledge is required, because the necessary truth has been written for anyone to read. We are certainly free to discover hidden codes within the text, but no codes are necessary because access to a living God does not require hidden knowledge or encryption. The most mysterious message of God's revelation comes in the form of prophesy, most of which describes events which have already occurred.

We love conspiracy as long as it is secular or demonic. We want to believe that our world is controlled by either capricious men or capricious spirits. What we don't want to believe is that the world is controlled by a sovereign God for His good purpose. We can fight and struggle with capricious men or spirits, but how can we fight with an omnipotent Creator? If the die is cast and the battle won, then what is left other than a bumpy ride without a steering wheel?

Why is a dark conspiracy more believable than a divine purpose? People would rather be unwitting victims than culpable free agents. Little Johnny would rather be paranoid and think that everyone is out to get him rather than believe his troubles begin with his own behavior, or even worse, his own inherent nature. A sovereign God who allows us to freely choose between life and death cannot be blamed for the consequences of our behavior, whereas if we are being quietly manipulated by forces beyond our awareness, we are innocent.

There is only one catch in this endlessly regressive blame game. Who manipulates the manipulators? Do they have perfect freedom while the hapless slaves make bricks from mud? If George W. Bush belongs to a secret society and consults his plastic decoder ring to receive his orders from the temple of low men, then how far do we trace the conspiracy until we find the ultimate earthly (or heavenly) power? If Pope Benedict hides the true nature of Christ, is he in control, or is he just another pawn? Where is the real hidden hand and what is its purpose?

Some people like small, sinister gods. I will worship the One True God.