I have been wanting to start a new series of posts on this blog, a series that I have come, at least in my mind, to call Why. Why do things work the way they do? This is not an attempt to explain the mysteries of the world and the universe and existence, just to ask questions, and maybe to find some possible answers. To explore. If I could answer such questions with certitude, I’d either be certifiably insane or the supreme dictator of the universe. I’m clearly not the latter and I hope I’m not the former, so I’m looking at this as an exploration – a journey – rather than a destination. So these explorations will typically take the form of ‘Why does [some phenomenon] happen?’ or, the shorthand ‘Why [some phenomenon]?’

Why blog about this at all? It keeps me accountable to actually asking questions – questions l may otherwise avoid out of laziness or complacency – and doing diligence to find reasonable answers. And then, ideally, I could engage in lively conversation with you in the comments and we could all come away more enlightened. Although I have some ideas of the first few things I want to look into, including some that I happen to have some insight into (for example, Why software sucks – and no, it’s not because Microsoft is evil, my Maccy and Linuxy friends, or anything so simple as that), I’d like to take suggestions of what to look into. So if you have an idea, submit in the comments or contact me.

Today is a rather light one: why economics? Not why does the economy work the way it does (clearly almost no one understands that or we wouldn’t've gone through the subprime-mortgage-induced credit crash), but what is economics and why does it exist in the first place?

Wikipedia, the world’s best source of eighty-percent accurate information, defines economics as “the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” That’s a decent enough definition, and I’m willing to accept it with one caveat: that we define the term “goods” to include all scarce resources, real and socially-agreed upon. Let me unpack why I defined it this way. General “resources” so we are not limited only to manufactured goods, but we can include natural goods like beaches, gold, fresh water, and even (in a society with slavery) other human beings. “Scarce” so we can safely exclude goods which are, for present purposes if not in reality, unlimited (e.g., air or solar energy). “Real or socially-agreed upon” because this allows us to consider things like beaches and computers alongside patents (one socially-agreed upon “thing”), and sunlight rights (which is in fact a scarce commodity among the towering buildings of Tokyo). My definition may not be expansive enough, but I feel it’s a good start.

Depending on what terms your favorite science-y author likes to use, humans are hypersocial, supersocial, or ultrasocial creatures. I first came across this concept in Jonathan Haidt’s phenomenal book The Happiness Hypothesis, where Haidt looks at the science of social animals before looking at human sociality, and applying that to human happiness. Although a discussion of how animal ultrasociality works is far beyond what I want to look at here, suffice it to say humans are the only animals we know of that demonstrate sociality that extends beyond kin altruism (helping out other individuals that share a significant amount of genetic material). Humans have developed a complex series of reciprocity-based moral intuitions and tribalism to handle altruism beyond kinship, and the upshot is that we can band together and better survive as a group but still attempt guarantee a benefit to the individual. And this also means that we live in a world formed not only (or even primarily) by our physical environment – grass and trees and apartments and grocery stores – but also in a world of complex social ties of reciprocity and altruism and betrayal and kinship and love. You and I are not cats or horses, who are concerned only with next-of-kin and finding food and copulating. We have these webs of social interactions which give rise to non-kinship relationships like friends and nations and the mafia and a thousand other things. The fact that these social webs exist, regardless of what evolutionary or other process created them, I regard as so obvious it doesn’t require defending. But here we are, and these things exist.

So if economics is the travel and distribution of goods, where do they travel? Obviously among these social webs. This distribution of goods exists in other animals too (a pack of African Dogs may “own” the meat of a kill), but at nowhere near the level of complexity as humans, because African Dogs do not have the same set of complex social interactions. Sometimes goods travel in one direction (e.g., through extortion or bribe or military conquest), but typically two entities come together and they both exchange something that the other entity wants. This is why economists say things like “economics is not a zero sum game” – usually, everyone gets something they want.

But however the details of economics play out in different societies and between societies, we have this thing called economics because we have scarce resources and we are ultrasocial beings. We don’t all simply horde what we have and refuse to exchange goods with one another, and we can’t magically create everything that we want and so are limited by how much of a good exists. And so we engage in distribution and movement of goods, and everyone tries to benefit themselves and their social webs. Economics exists because of scarce goods and human sociality. These two things both give rise to economics and they are the rules of the game.

If I were a being only slightly lighter I could lift myself above the earth and run my hands over the froth of the stratus clouds covering this country as running my fingers across the surface of a lake.  And if I were a being only slightly heavier I could descend into the sun and wrap myself in the deepest eddies and currents of its nuclear heart and let out a relaxing sigh as a man in a hot tub.  But I am a being neither heavy nor light; for I should pass through the clouds and the weight of the sun should crush me, and only water is my domain.

I cannot comprehend a bounded universe.  I am told it has an age, of a certain number of billion years.  I am told it has a width, of a certain number of billion light-years.  But I am small and long before a billion has any meaning it becomes infinite.  I cannot spread my arms and measure a billion anymore than I can spread my life and measure a billion.  I may believe in these numbers and figures, the way a man believes in the god of his father, but my heart tells me the universe is infinite.

What does it mean to me that the universe is infinite?  I am of a people and in a technological society that I might expect to live for eighty years.  If time is infinite, what are eighty years compared to two or to eighty-thousand?  Any life is only a breath in the crisp air, which is emitted as a formless fog, and perhaps if it is clever it begins to come together to make a shape, but in the end it must come apart and vanish.  But my heart knows it is better to live to be eighty than to live to be two.  How does it know this?  At two I have known so little of life.  I am nothing much more than the repository of what my environment has put into me.  I am still a child.  But I am twenty-two and think I only began to be an adult at twenty-one.  And it is still new to me, with a wide and an open domain still to be explored and understood.  What is sixty years of knowing, and ten in the prime, or perhaps twenty if I am strong?  But still it is better than only living to two, or to twenty-two.  If time stretches on and on, what does it mean to live for eighty-thousand years, and is it better than eighty?  In eighty years, most of it not at my prime, I can never truly understand what the best choice is.  Because of the shortness of it, most opportunities come only once.  Little is grasped, little is explored, only a series of baffling selections that must be made and lay incomparable one to the other: what is behind the one is left unknown and what is behind the other is a mystery only unwrapped after I choose it.  The soul may grow tired of life given long enough, and eighty-thousand years may be too long, but only those living in the harshest times – or those bitter and feeling trapped – have grown tired of life, and no one has lived enough to see if there is a limit upon the possibilities of its freshness.  But eighty is short.  Ten, or twenty, in the prime is even shorter.

What is the meaning of a person?  Meaning is all a matter of scope.  In my immediate social circle I may have some meaning, because I have some impact on the ones around me, something that is that would not be if I had not been there.  But pushed out beyond that circle to a national or international realm, my change and my impact are lost.  And so also in the scale of time, past one hundred years where I may still have some effect on to a scale of a thousand or ten thousand.  If I become a political leader or a military commander or a writer who affects the world visibly and greatly past my death, what then does that mean?  The scope may have been increased, but it is still nothing, for beyond the world to the solar system and that on one arm of one galaxy in a cluster of galaxies in a countless myriad of clusters, which acts in time-frames not of thousands or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of years, and more still.  Push the scope of meaning out far enough and even the greatest any person could ever aspire to be is no more significant than the reflection of a dust mote in the eye of a flea.

The religious person may be forgiven if at first blush it seems to him that God solves this problem of his meaning.  But this is only an illusion.  For regardless of how personal his God is, the believer is still a speck among the billions of souls damned to hell or blessed to heaven.  There was a time when she was not, and her impact is still nothing: push the matter out from herself and the few souls she knows to the many and then to the incomprehensibly infinite God, and we see very clearly that the matter of eternity has not been changed one iota through her.

But the call to existence is irrevocable.  I can no more undo my own creation than make two and two equal to seventeen.  And to attempt it is to despise the call and the existence.

What is there for me in a universe whose physical and temporal size dwarfs me to nothing, or where I find myself, constituted as I am, neither heavy nor light, and have no say in the matter?  I can no more change any of this than I can become God.  I can no more make my existence less fleeting, less a breath, than I can undo the Big Bang.  I must do what I can with what I have, and be the best that I can be.  One of the most wondrous things about sentience (to me) is not the capacity to ponder one’s own existence – that just leads to existentialism (the end of all philosophy, as nothingness is the end of any system too near a black hole) and, excepting cases of extraordinary courage, it leads to despair.  But rather the greatest thing is the capacity to choose.  I can choose whether to serve the poor or not, whether to attempt to increase the amount of good in the human experience in general and that of the people around me in particular, or whether to increase the amount of bad – be it because I don’t like them, or they believe something different than me, or they vote Republican, or whatever it may be.  This mystery of choice is the heart of all morality.  It is not sad that my life is (inevitably) meaningless in the scope of the universe – there is nothing that can be done about that – but the real tragedy is if my life is meaningless in every scope other than my own.  If the meaning is there in the scope of my friends, of those close to me, then it is beautiful.  And it can be a terrible beauty, like a well-evolved virus or parasite, if I make it a terrible life and destroy the meaning and happiness of others; and it can be a glorious beauty if I increase the meaning and happiness of others.  I cannot say that I am particularly exhilarated by the thought of snuffing out like the flame on a candle after eighty years.  I am not.  Nor am I convinced that there is any God watching over this to appreciate the art of my life (for whatever skill or beauty I can imbue it with), or who will extend it in an afterlife.  But this is what I have, and I aim to do well by it, both for myself and those around me.

The reason, or one of the reasons, I enjoyed Coldplay’s most recent album was that I found it spoke to me of the problem of human-perpetrated evil. The album is titled after two songs, and these are two ways of looking at the human experience: ‘Viva La Vida,’ (live – or long live – life), ‘or, Death and All His Friends’. But baby, it’s a violent world.

The album is musically bookended by Life in Technicolor as the opening, and the dénouement of Death and All His Friends, which mirrors the former and brings the album to a circular close. Between these two, the music ebbs and flows, with many hidden tracks and titles bleeding from one into another. It is a complete thought, a forty-five minute thought, which aims to cover as much ground as possible, and to show death in as broad strokes as possible.

The first lyrical song starts us off ‘at home’ – that is, for the British band, in London. And we find the album’s theme: death (obvious from the title, Cemeteries of London), the most universal aspect of life. And the side-themes are introduced as well: love (At night they would go walking until the breaking of the day); confusion or uncertainty (which is inherent to some degree in the lyrics, I would argue); and religion, both facilitator and abrogator of violence:

God is in the houses and God is in my head
And all the cemeteries in London
I see God come in my garden, but I don’t know what he said
For my heart, it wasn’t open, not open

It is impossible to detail the subtle ways the music adds to the lyrics, or look at all the lyrics in depth. But I will attempt to hit the highlights of the album’s theme, and its chief sub-themes.

Death is present not as a man’s release in old age with his grandchildren all around him, but as war, chief of the four apocalyptic horsemen. Death is ever-present from start to finish. It is only a reminder in Lost! (Every gun you ever held went off, and I’m just waiting ’til the firing’s stopped), Lovers in Japan (Soldiers, you’ve got to soldier on), and even in a song that is at its heart about love and life being good, Strawberry Swing (Everybody was for fighting). But while in these it is peripheral, in most of the album death is front and center. 42 is a mockery of traditional comforts in the face of death:

Those who are dead are not dead
They’re just living in my head
And since I fell for that spell
I am living there as well

This ‘comfort’ only lasts as far as reality is suspended – and one can go ‘live there as well’ in the unreality of that answer. The first half of the song ridicules this secular comfort in death, but the religious comfort, which comes with the second half, fares no better. So we’ve rejected any solace in death, deciding that there is no paradigm and no thought to console us as we take a hard look at it.

Yes is unique within the album, and I think is best interpreted from the perspective of a soldier off to war, far from home, and in the throes of sexual temptation to the warm arms of a prostitute, or just a loose woman of the village. After all, how many soldiers came home to America after the Vietnam War with Vietnamese wives? Or what are the stories of WWII soldiers in France? This song explores the connection between violence and sex (not love, mind you – but sex), and why it is that those two so often go together. And the song’s title hints at what the answer to the soldier’s central question is. The music has a very eastern flair to it (the song has been compared to ‘I am the Walrus’), and steady percussive instruments throughout, making it very march-like, emphasizing the war in the background. With this in mind, the song begins:

When it started we had high hopes
Now my back’s on the line, my back’s on the ropes
When it started we were alright
But night makes a fool of us in daylight

There we were dying of frustration
Saying, Lord, lead me not into temptation
But it’s not easy when she turns you on
So stay gone

If you’d only, if you’d only say yes
Whether you will’s anybody’s guess
God, only God knows I’m trying my best
But I’m just so tired of this loneliness

Viva La Vida most of you are familiar with by now. It too explores violence, but from a different viewpoint: from that of a deposed dictator. I can very easily imagine it being sung by Louis XVI (and the album’s cover art blatantly depicts the French Revolution).

It was the wicked and wild wind blew in the doors to let me in
Shattered windows and the sound of drums, people couldn’t believe what I’d become
Revolutionaries wait for my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string, oh who would ever want to be king?

If we’ve looked at war as war and found it an awful thing, we’ve not asked the question of whether war may yet be a good thing when used to depose awful regimes. If we are indeed considering the French Revolution, the answer is decidedly no. Yet ‘Viva La Vida’ remains tantalizingly ambiguous and eludes any easy answer to the question.

‘Viva La Vida’ fades seamlessly into Violet Hill, which is again a song by a soldier, this time not in the middle of war, but at home looking back on it, and addressing his love, whom he knew before the war. The soldier deeply regrets going to war:

I don’t want to be a soldier
Who the captain of some sinking ship
Would stow far below

So if you love me
Why’d you let me go?

Death and war have filled his memory with unpleasantries, and destroyed his relationship with his love. The solid drumbeat of the song lets us know that while the war out in the world may have stopped, for this soldier it is a persistent reality and will not go away. And it has tainted everything.

Death is not death alone, but affects the sub-themes as well: and it makes love an intransient thing. Lovers in Japan (and also its hidden track Reign of Love, which I disliked), while a disorienting song, speaks directly about love, beginning with Lovers, keep on the road you’re on. But it’s a love under fire, it’s a love that is a joint-dreaming about escape from the present circumstances:

But I have no doubt
One day we’re gonna get out

Tonight, maybe we’re gonna run
Dreaming of the Osaka sun

And love is again, in Strawberry Swing (which sounds like an Irish jig), a wonderful thing: They were sitting, they were sitting on the strawberry swing, and every moment was so precious. But as in ‘Lovers in Japan’ there is an undercurrent to it, and here that love is alienating. Society is mentioned twice – above, I mentioned the hints of a society at war in this song; but the second mention is about the separateness of society from the lovers:

People moving all the time inside a perfectly straight line
Don’t you want to curve away, when it’s such,
It’s such a perfect day?

Why is it that the singer and his love alone see it as a perfect day? As in ‘Lovers in Japan,’ even within the rosy colors of love, there is something deeply wrong with the surrounding environment.

The perfect song to demonstrate the sub-theme of confusion, which may also be my favorite from the album, is clearly Lost! It is impossible for me to pinpoint a perspective that the song is sung from. This may even be impossible for the singer. The chorus is enough to demonstrate its inherent confusion:

I just got lost! Every river that I tried to cross
Every door I ever tried was locked
Oh and I’m just waiting ’til the shine wears off

And the singer sees no way out for anyone. There is no stop and no win:

You might be a big fish in a little pond
Doesn’t mean you’ve won
’Cause along may come a bigger one

And you’ll be lost!

As mentioned above, ‘Lost!’ alludes to war (Every gun you ever held went off), and even if it refers to a greater sense of disorientation besides war, there is no doubt that violence is one of the most disorienting factors in life. Violence may make us lost, but we know it always leads to death.

God and the concept of God come into and out of the experience of violence. I already quoted the mention in ‘Cemeteries of London’, but this is by no means the last of the album’s religious notions. The second half of 42 addresses the religious aspect of death, the afterlife:

You thought you might be a ghost
You didn’t get to heaven but you made it close

This is sung jeeringly, refusing to give in to an easy answer to death (and mocking it just as it does the secular answer). With more seriousness and a great deal more sadness, the dictator in Viva La Vida says, ‘For some reason I can’t explain, I know St. Peter won’t call my name.’ So heaven remains some unattainable thing, either through personal evils or as some sort of cruel illusion for those of us enmeshed in violence here below.

But there is more to God than varying thoughts on the afterlife. If Cemeteries of London listens to God (or fails to listen to God), the soldier in Yes cries out to God, lead me not into temptation (and as I suggested, he gives the song’s title reply ‘yes’ to temptation anyways). And so in the face of death, God remains elusive and distant, little or no help, perhaps through mankind’s own actions or inactions.

But there is more to God than the afterlife and divine-human interactions. There are human-human interactions, and how we invoke the name of God on one another. There is the cryptic biblical allusion in Lovers in Japan, Lovers, keep on the road you’re on, runners ’til the race is run – at least, I cannot figure what else the runners could refer to, and this is a Pauline metaphor deeply entrenched in Western thought. And much more negatively, in Violet Hill, God can be used to propagate war:

Was a long and dark December
When the banks became cathedrals
And the fog became God

Priests clutched onto Bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And the cross was held aloft

Clearly we are not expected to believe that this violence is what God, if there is a God, would want. But if there is some God, he seems notably absent in the face of wicked men speaking about him, and emptying out their religious icons for the purpose of perpetrating war and death, and nothing is said here beyond the farcical mask of God used by men.

The last song of the album, Death and All His Friends, begins with what I suspect is a lyrical coda to Strawberry Swing before beginning a full minute and a half crescendo to what is the album’s musical and lyrical climax. Starting at home in London and going abroad to view man’s many ills in war and death, and seeing how this affects our relationship with others, our sense of order and meaning, and our sense of religion, this climax is finally conclusion, reflecting upon everything that we’ve surveyed before. What possible reply could there be to all of this? The music reaches its highest point:

No, I don’t want to battle from beginning to end
I don’t want to cycle or recycle revenge
I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends

This is the only answer a sane person can have to the world, but it is hopelessly incomplete. How does one not follow death and all of his friends, given how entrenched we have seen violence is in the world? It’s a strong statement, but a statement by one man in one society among many societies, and its reach may not ever go beyond the man who speaks it. But he seems to realize this, because in the final tail of melody, coming off the album’s mountain where the denouncement of death is given, in the music reprising ‘Life in Technicolor’ and bringing the album to a close we hear the soft realization of this futility: And in the end, we lie awake and we dream of making our escape. In the end what can we do in the face of such death? But the force and intensity of the preceding conclusion is too strong to leave it willingly as a daydream, and I am left with a stupefying tension between the evil of death and war and the seeming impossibility of stopping it.

I have often spoken about these sorts of things with a friend of mine, and we both have realized that the problem is humanity. Humanity is the reason for violence and the manner in which death reigns in the world. And I, in my better moments, might say that humanity can also be the solution. Every once in a while I see in individual people and even in history the darker side of humanity put away and a side that is beautiful come out to demonstrate that a different world is possible, and that humanity can truly contribute to the good there is in the world. But the darker side is so much greater, and seems to have done so much more, and it is only in my better moments that I think humanity has anything in it worth saving or worth praising. The greater amount of time we just appear a sorry species that has managed only to bring damage to anything we have ever touched, and an even greater sorrow among ourselves. Is there really any solution? But I can at least say that I will not battle from beginning to end, I will not cycle revenge, and I will not follow along behind death, and all of his friends. But I am hopelessly fond of humanity, and I want to see them succeed.

This is about the writings of others on (Christian) religious matters.

Let us start with the beauty. It is a post on hypocrisy by PoserOrProphet (or, as is his real name, Dan). It’s not about others being hypocritical, but is very much focused inward – on the temptation to use the appearance of being ‘radical’ rather than actually living out a godly life (Dan works in the inner city and is thus often seen as a Christian ‘radical’). I can’t recommend you enough to go read the whole thing – this is precisely the kind of Christianity that I can respect and still, in some way, aspire to its goals.

Now for the wingnuts. I found this little gem on women from the ever-informative Challies, whom I use as a sort of Christian wingnut repository. What is it about this article you may ask. Well, the author – one Dr. James MacDonald, who holds graduate degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Phoenix Seminary, and is the founding pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel, a conservative evangelical megachurch in Illinois – begins with the observation that men are (generally) physically stronger than women. He then assumes that relative physical weakness means vulnerability and it is part of God’s ordained plan for women to be ‘vulnerable to’ (and thus – though he does not come out and say it explicitly – inferior to) men. Of course, there are a couple of obvious upshots of this: a woman is either vulnerable to/beneath her husband, or if she is single, to her father or male church leaders. The raw patriarchy in this post is astonishing, and I say this quite despite the talk about honoring women in their weakness. Money quote:

God created the woman to be vulnerable and dependent upon the man as a reflection of the Church’s vulnerability and dependence upon Christ. It should not be our goal to help women be less vulnerable before men—which is physically impossible anyway—but rather to work toward the realization of the image of Christ’s self-sacrificial relationship to the Church. Women by their very nature will always be vulnerable before men. The call of Christ is not to pursue an ill-fated attempt to abolish this vulnerability, but rather to protect and honor women in the midst of it.

To put his metaphor in more explicit terms, man is the God to woman’s humanity. This is not just scary because it’s something that one man believes, but because it is something that a large number of people (not a small percentage of evangelicals) in this country believe, and what its implications are for how they live their lives, teach their children, and how they treat and view women. However, living in what is largely an egalitarian society (or attempting to be one), this leads to some odd paradoxes in worldviews (e.g., women, who represent the church, are weak before men, who represent God, but Sarah Palin is nevertheless fully capable of being president).

The next and last wingnut is none other than our very own Focus on the Family, and in case you thought they weren’t crazy, just you wait. Focus on the Family Action – the political arm of the organization – released a fictitious letter from a conservative Christian living in the year 2012 after four years of an Obama administration. The letter, which you can read a synopsis of here, or download the entire 16-page pdf here – details an end-of-the-world scenario in which activist liberal judges actively persecute Christians (and Boy Scouts – no joke!) by making up laws forcing gay marriages and abortions upon unsuspecting Christians. Since the letter is long and I do not expect you all to read it (though I encourage it), I will proffer a few quotes from it, in order, to give you an idea of the tone:

We are not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Many of our freedoms have been taken away by a liberal Supreme Court and a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate and hardly any brave citizen dares to resist the new government policies any more.

On (Focus’ favorite topic) homosexuality:

The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that homosexual marriage was a “constitutional” right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws barring same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. … This was a blatant example of creating new law by the court …

The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys. …

The Bible can no longer be freely preached over radio or television stations when the subject matter includes such “offensive” doctrines as homosexual conduct or the claim that people will go to hell if they do not believe in Jesus Christ. …

While churches are still free to turn down homosexual applicants for the job of senior pastor, churches and parachurch organizations are no longer free to reject homosexual applicants for staff positions such as part-time youth pastor or director of counseling.

On homeschooling:

The Court declared that home schooling was an illegal violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents (a) had an education certificate from an accredited state program, (b) agreed to use state-approved textbooks in all courses, and (c) agreed not to not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong, or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment and acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs, and to run counter to the state’s interest in educating its children to be good citizens.

On foreign policy:

Since 2009 terrorist bombs have exploded in two large and two small U.S. cities, killing hundreds, and the entire country is now fearful, for no place seems safe. … In early 2009 [Russia] followed the pattern they had begun in Georgia in 2008 and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. … Then in the next three years Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the UN. … In mid-2010 Iran launched a nuclear bomb which exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of that city.

And much, much more, including the shutting down of Christian booksellers due to the popularity of the pro-homosexual agenda (the menace behind everything!), the author reprimanding naive evangelicals for voting for Barack Obama, Christian leaders thrown in jail for non-compliance with the new liberal laws of post-apocalyptic America, children unwillingly exposed to pornography, and that’s just the start! If this isn’t a piece of populist, Christianist (tip o’ the hat to Andrew Sullivan for the word) drivel, I don’t know what is. I particularly enjoyed the fanciful thoughts about what the Supreme Court could and could not do, and the link drawn (as is common in these spheres) between homosexuality and pedophilia. I can tell you I’ve worked with kids a plenty and not once thought anything less innocent than ‘oh, I really do want to be a father, don’t I?’

I don’t criticize this out of any great love for Barack Obama – viewing myself as something rather close to a libertarian, I have problems with many of his positions (and that does not mean anything about whether I support him or not). But seriously people… I mean, are you serious?

Nevertheless, this is the kind of material put out by a leading organization within evangelical Christianity, and one of the wealthiest, too. This sort of thing, along with my own reflections, has led me to believe that religious fundamentalism of whatever stripe (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and yes there are Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalists) is one of if not the most dangerous challenge of our time. And if you want more information on fundamentalism as a worldwide phenomenon, might I suggest looking in your local library for the University of Chicago’s Fundamentalism Project, a multi-volume set of on-going releases looking at various aspects of all sorts of fundamentalisms – examining their differences and their similarities. As the ideologies of fascism and (a very loosely Marxist but in reality totalitarian) communism were destructive forces in the 20th century which had to be resisted in order to secure the future of the globe, so is fundamentalism in the current era. The answer is emphatically not, as much as men like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher may like to think otherwise, the destruction of religion. Human beings are religious creatures – and have been since the beginning. But rather, the alternative is for religious moderation and rationality, a religious perspective that seeks to understand and integrate itself into reality and to be for the positive, demonstrable benefit of mankind, rather than the harmful attempt at molding both mankind and reality into its pre-conceived agendas (and this is what, at some level, all fundamentalisms aim to do).

Rant over.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about ethics, human socializing, and (the loss of) faith. It got me to thinking afterward, lost in myself and semi-oblivious to the day’s lectures.

I have heard by now many stories that go along these lines: 1) I accepted I was gay, which 2) led to a crisis of faith, which 3) led me to abandon that faith, but after a time I 4) reconciled my faith and sexuality, and 5) came back to some form of Christianity. But my journey has been that: 1) I accepted I was gay, which 2) led to a crisis of faith, which 3) led me to reevaluate my philosophical assumptions, which 4) led me to a different (and admittedly liturgical-emergent) form of faith, but 5) textual criticism, historical and early Christianity, and philosophical problems led me to 6) uneasily abandon the forms of that faith that were known to me. Casting about, it doesn’t seem as if those who share similar stories to mine typically end in happy reunion with religion. I am not opposed to reuniting with my mother-religion, and I am very much in the middle of my story, and I am going to be spending a significant amount of time this semester seeing whether such a reunion is possible. But to use technical jargon, this is a semi-decidable problem: if the answer is yes it is possible, then my search will at some point return a yes, but if the answer is no, because the search space is (nearly) infinite, I will never return an answer, neither yes nor no. That is, if the answer is in fact that such a reunion is not possible, I could search – futilely – forever. I do not think that there is a solution to this problem (there isn’t in the theory of computation), which is why I have a time limit, at least for the time being, on how long I will spend on this matter before moving on with my life. No doubt if I don’t find anything in the allotted period (this semester), I will come back to look at times, but I do not want to waste my life on what may be an infinite loop, so there needs to be a time when I, however tentatively or temporarily, make an end.

But I wonder, and I wonder very much, about not finding anything by the end of this semester, but only exhausting the commoner paths to Christianity. At times I am laid back about it – and increasingly so. At times I have apprehensions – but less and less. Time will tell, and life will go on, and will be good, and the Bottomless Pit (which is one name I have come to call the object of my periodic existential fits) will be vanquished. And if God is real and God is merciful and good, don’t I have to walk the best I can and trust in his mercy in the end, since none of us are all that good ourselves? I don’t much fear leaving what I know, only to be surprised by a loving God, and to say without hesitation ‘My wonderful God’ at the end of all things.

For ethics, I suppose it shows how few secular gay friends I have, but I am continually surprised at what seems to be the commonly accepted sexual behavior among secular gays. Although a discussion of those reasons would be rather lengthy and I will not go into them just now, I still think fidelity, monogamy, and abstinence are the most fruitful, and philosophically defensible ways to live. And because I know my reasons for this (unlike other things such as religion) I think it is somewhat less likely that I would significantly change my mind.

Sexual ethics are an interesting thing. We are sexual beings – or most of us are (I have met one or maybe two gentlemen who I genuinely believe are asexual). And because both sexuality and emotion are part of our biology, and are themselves intertwined, one can’t very well separate the two. I see those who are gay and trying to live without acting on their sexual orientation often making one of two mistakes: getting emotionally involved and invested in people of the same sex, which not uncommonly leads to a sexual misdeed; or becoming increasingly emotionally detached and guarded from the outside world, a sort of numbness that does in fact avoid misconduct and a lot of temptation, and closeness and intimacy, too. The best solution to this seems to be monastic living, which allows regular, intense (I would even perhaps go so far to say sexually-grounded or sexually-rooted, though not sexually active) fellowship guarded against misconduct by strong communal taboo and agreement. But such a life is not practical for most people, and I do not see any Christians seriously suggesting that those who are gay should adopt a monastic life.

While I do respect those seeking a celibate life, I still don’t understand how one accepts what this says about God. For I do see much good come of healthy spousal intimacy (and likewise much ill from unhealthy spousal intimacy), and, for those of us who are not asexual, much bad from prolonged spousal isolation. So for what does God demand permanent homosexual chastity? For to say that he is not interested in the benefit of human beings means that he is cruel or capricious, neither of which is appealing or worthy of worship. And I am suspicious at the reasoning and (lack of) evidence for inherent harm in homosexual relationships (and further, for such case to be made ethically, gay relationships must also be shown to be worse for the person’s well-being than the alternative of permanent celibacy). Perhaps then there are other considerations to take in hand that are more important than personal human benefit, such as the development of virtue (or congruence with the divine character, same thing), or treating others with justice and mercy. But homosexuality does not violate justice or mercy, and for it to violate virtue, one would have to state that heterosexuality-itself is a virtue, and this seems to me rather wrong. For then those who are inclined toward the opposite sex are inherently more virtuous. But even assuming this were so, why should heterosexuality-itself be a virtue, bound as it is to particular biological realities, when the other virtues (justice, self-control, self-discipline, mercy, truthfulness…) could conceivably be applied across any physical or biological system? I do not see any way of coherently incorporating an understanding of an ethic of heterosexual-expression-only into a larger system of ethics. And so like other issues in the Christian Scriptures (including items such as slavery or banking) while it may at first glance appear a straightforward command, I think the matter of the morality of homosexuality is complex and can and should be properly contextualized and understood holistically within the framework of all ethics. And in the end such a view creates a more coherent system of ethics in general and Christian ethics in particular. (And in the latter case, it creates a nuanced understanding of the interplay of Scripture, experience, context, and authorial intent.) This was part of what drove me to a Side A position (that gay sex in circumstances equivalent to heterosexual marriage is not a sin).

But virtue development is something I do find important, along with chastity in singleness and fidelity in marriage, and these I do not see highly extolled in gay culture in general and even, to my great consternation, among a majority of Side A gay Christians. (An active concern for virtue development I also find astonishingly lacking in heterosexual marriages too, by the way.) Though there are some gay Christians I do have a respect and occasionally even a fondness for, there are a great many whose position I find only personally convenient, and the depth of their religious and philosophical (and even sexual-moral) convictions shallow. They were, the vast majority of them, raised in the church and found that the church’s position in their lives was inextricable, and that settled the question of the nominal place of Christianity in their lives (if the question was even raised).

How’s all that for cynical and blunt?

Besides, I can’t exactly call myself a Christian at the moment. And I don’t.

On the matter of the church’s position in people’s lives, I often find myself thinking that it exists simply as a facilitator for socialization, itself a complex thing I will not dare to try to consider in detail here. As a theist and a good friend of mine has put it, most people have three places in their lives: work, home, and church. Each of these serve their own purpose: productivity, relaxation and safety, and socializing. For this reason, the church could persist in a variety of forms so long as it is meeting this particular need in human life. But what is the third place for those of us without church? I don’t know. But I don’t like dishonesty for the sake of convenience, and so may find myself seeking out a new third place.

And I’m still thinking on all this.

I recently finished Philip Pullman’s ode to Milton. It was my fantasy/fiction ‘break’ from other readings that I have pursued this summer.

First things are first, and it was very well written. Northern Lights (yes I will be pompous and use the proper English name for The Golden Compass) especially did what I have seen so rarely done in fantasy: it showed me its world rather than telling me about it first. Pullman does not start off with ‘And what is a dæmon?’ though that is a perfectly legitimate way to begin a novel. No, he drops you straightaway into Lyra’s world and, rather than expositing its workings to you in detail, he shows its workings as the story permits opportunity, and he does so quite skillfully. It was refreshing. As the series went on, however, this diminished. New discoveries about the universe were handled more clumsily, or just plainly told to the reader. And the overall narrative consistency of the story faltered, as well, creating an uneven experience at times. That said, there are parts of The Subtle Knife (the second book) that far outshone Northern Lights, but again the narrative feel was inconsistent sometimes – a problem that worsened in The Amber Spyglass, where I got the feel that even with the book’s lengths there were parts that were too rushed. Nevertheless, the ending was quite perfect, and even choked me up a bit.

On to the matters of philosophy. The goal of His Dark Materials is quite clearly to kill God. And Pullman is not circumspect about this. He does use ‘Magisterium’ and ‘The Authority,’ but also ‘Church’ and ‘God’ and ‘Pope John Calvin’ (who, in Lyra’s world, moved the papacy to Geneva before abolishing it in favor of a bureaucracy). It is interesting that nearly every person in Pullman’s universe gets a three-dimensional character, who we may at sometimes love and at other times loathe, with the exception of God, and especially his zealots. The character who plays the role of Satan (I have said this is heavily inspired by Paradise Lost, no? though there is also not an insignificant amount of Homer, too) is allowed outs, heroisms, despite the odium of certain of his acts, and given character complications that God is not.

But I have been helped to understand, through Pullman and through a conversation with an ardent Calvinist (though really a nice guy), that what I have really rejected, with almost as much force as I can muster, is the God of Calvinism. Pullman’s God and Calvin’s God, despite their great differences, share this: that he is God only because he is powerful. In strict, logically coherent Calvinism (so far as I can discern it), God creates the rules and decides (arbitrarily) what is and isn’t good. God could’ve done this or that or the other, and any way he might’ve chosen would’ve been good, because he is God, the Almighty, the Sovereign. To say God is good is tantamount to saying God is God. And this is an argument I bought for quite some time. But now I think that it is extremely mistaken, for whether or not one is very powerful, and whether or not one is creator, right is still right and wrong is still wrong. Should mankind succeed in creating true artificial intelligence, we would have moral obligations in our interactions with them, though we would not be morally obligated to interact (this is actually a point my conversation partner argued against, saying we would have no moral obligations at all to sentient beings of our own creation). And there is no moral exemption for ‘holding all the cards’ so to speak – it is still a horror to willfully do injustice to another, and capricious to extend (when all circumstances on behalf of both parties are equivalent) mercy to one and not to another. Shall we say then that God, in his dealings with most of humanity, is like the priest or Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan? (In Christian theology, or at least that which I can appreciate, it is here that the freedom of the will, and the necessity for that freedom in forming what is human, permits the morality of the doctrine of hell.)

And yet it is all these moral concerns which I have heard vociferously denounced and even ridiculed, and spent a good portion of my time as a Christian, and also the time in my adolescence when my worldview was developing, in the company of those who denounced them, though some with more thought to what they were doing than others. And I find myself agreeing with Philip Pullman: I am not impressed with God’s power, and I have no desire at all to worship him because of it. He may very well damn me to hell for it, and I have no illusion of holding up under torture but I imagine that I would be absolutely torn to pieces under the weight of it. And so be it. If I am to worship God, I desire to do so only because of the far-surpassing excellence of his good character and his nature, not because of his power, though no doubt his character and nature move through and are expressed by means of his power. And I hope that in so saying, that if God were not the all-powerful God, and Satan were God instead, I would still despise Satan and love God. But I will not worship a monster.

Now that brings up the question of whether or not a human can tell what is and is not a monster. I think it is fairly obvious that finite beings, much smaller than the universe they live in, cannot fully appreciate or understand goodness, with all its various shapes in an endless sea of possible circumstance. But that does not mean that we cannot know any of it. In order for me to be able to worship God I must be able to see and perceive not only that he exists, but that he is also good, even if the entirety of that goodness passes out of the realm of my understanding. And if he is Creator, and Sustainer, and if he is good, then there should be no problem in my being sufficiently enabled to see enough of his goodness to know it.

I am wary of writing off God altogether, for two reasons best elucidated through quotes, one Scriptural and one Lewisian. The first, a parable I’ve written about before: the parable of the talents, in which Jesus judges poorly the man who expects him to be ‘hard,’ but well those who expect to see him well (and live their lives accordingly). It may seem silly at fist blush, but I have no qualms at the possibility of my inner expectation of the deity shaping my own character, and thus my response to that deity on that Day (permitted, of course, that this deity exists). It should be no surprise that thinking the foundation of goodness to be bad should warp a soul beyond its ability to savor or accept the presence of God.

And the other is the quote I shall leave you with, veering wildly from Pullman’s His Dark Materials with its (in my view, somewhat proper, if inappropriately generalized) indictments of Calvin’s God, to the end of Lewis’ The Last Battle where a circle of dwarfs sit in the open fields at the gateway of heaven. Lewis’ God inspires more affection and awe in me than Pullman’s, and so do Lewis’ heaven and hell inspire more love and fright, and here I am pondering their different concepts of the Almighty:

‘Aslan,’ said Lucy through her tears, ‘could you – will you – do something for these poor Dwarfs?’

‘Dearest,’ said Aslan, ‘I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.’ He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, ‘Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!’

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’ But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarrelling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:

‘Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.’

‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. But come, children. I have other work to do.’

I just got back from an excellent and honest conversation with a gentleman at the church I used to attend here in the city. I am very thankful for the conversation we were able to have, and that not all Christians are fundamentalists (thank God!). That is one way to abate the stem of thoughts flowing in my head. But there are still more, flooding my consciousness. Perhaps a Sunday-installation, given that I’ve blogged more lightly, may also alleviate the explosive tension of my thoughts. And perhaps not.

‘Numinous’ is a term that was coined by the German theologian Rudolph Otto in an attempt to categorize and define human sentiment and reaction to perceived or imagined spiritual forces. The numinous is something that is ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ – mysterious in that it is wholly Other, stupefyingly different and beyond comprehension; tremendous in the size and scope of its power, mighty and awful and unapproachable; and fascinating in that despite the previous two qualities it draws the human viewer in, possessing a strangely attractive quality.

The experience of the numinous is not constrained to a particular religion or belief set, but is something universally experienced, Otto maintains, and different in quality from other feelings. One may feel a sense of dread and terror and awe and attraction to a tiger, for instance, but this is an entirely different emotion from that experienced when telling ghost stories around a dim campfire late at night and deep in the woods; and in the same way the sense of awe at the tiger is distinct from the religious experience of acknowledging, witnessing, or even participating in divine processes.

I, for example, when I was very young, was for a time filled with the sensation of the numinous when I considered the skeletons that, after my parents had gone to bed, would inevitably inhabit the half-bathroom in our house next to the home office. This would lead to my, when for some reason I needed to wake my parents (usually because of bad dreams), running past the office as quickly as possible, not stopping or slowing until I launched myself cannonball-style into my parents’ bed. Sometimes in my haste I tripped while in the hallway, adding to my terror of That Awful Something that might come and get me. But the numinous, while remaining on the verge of presence, is always just out of reach.

This is also the emotion evoked in suspense or thriller movies, at least when they are successful. I thought there was much good about Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds for this precise reason. The aliens were discovered to have buried giant machines deep underground, which were always there as we were building our cities and going about our business. We are never told the whys of the aliens’ actions, or what their motives are, but only shown what it is that they do, while we are powerless to do anything in return. (The brief disclosure of the aliens’ physical form later in the movie does much to spoil this.) But their presence, just out of direct human knowledge, and their inexplicable actions, made the aliens very numinous indeed. Other films evoke the same reaction in different ways; Hitchcock was of course pretty darn good at it.

But the existence of this emotion does not mean that its object really exists. The skeletons in the half-bathroom of the house of my childhood were not real. But neither does the existence of this emotion mean that its object does not exist. I imagine it could have been felt as the Plague ravaged Europe, or as the Native Americans on the east coast of the continents first encountered white Europeans. Both of those were very real things. The experience of the numinous does not confirm or deny its object but only confirms that the experience itself (to be a good existentialist), simply Is. What else besides this emotion Is remains to be discovered.

I wonder sometimes whether religion depends wholly on this experience. It may be that religion is not so much about the object of its worship as it is about the state of the worshiper. And certainly some spiritual realm, in whatever shape, filled with whatever kind or kinds of spiritual being more powerful than we, unknowable and incomprehensible, at once attractive to us and dangerous, fits neatly with the numinous experience. But does that mean it truly exists?

Experiments in human sensory deprivation in the past century have demonstrated how much we rely on our connection to the physical world for the functioning of consciousness. While brief periods of sensory deprivation may result in relaxation, extended periods of time cause hallucination and psychological damage. It seems like our physical senses ground us in reality – or as a professor of mine in artificial intelligence put it, they ‘keep the hallucinations away.’ Our senses allow us to gather information about the world around us, but since we are finite beings with a finite number of ways of experiencing the world, there is always to some extent a ‘sensory deprivation’ that we experience – that is, the things we don’t know. As a child it may be what is behind the closet door when it closes. As an adult, and throughout life, it may be the closed door of Death, or the myriad possible futures we could possibly experience, or the purpose behind strange circumstances, or any one of a thousand ‘grown-up’ things. One wonders if it is here, among the Unknown Things that our sense of the numinous originates, those vague hallucinations and ponderings that dance at the edge of knowledge yielding in us a sensation of awe, perhaps congealed into a somewhat familiar form by our cultural conditioning. And perhaps this is where spirituality and religion begins, and comes into our lives through all the things we can’t know or explain. This experience requires a lack of knowledge on the part of the beholder, and in that sense, science truly is religion’s enemy, for it takes what once may have qualified as the object of our numinous experiences and demystifies it, pushing our spiritual experience further out into the realm of what is still unknown.

But yet again, what if the numinous is a reflection of something that actually exists? Is it a vague, as-yet undirected but real emotion toward Some Thing which does exist, of which we have some degree of awareness but are not adequate enough to grasp its source? Or is it just the experience we have as human beings of living with finite knowledge? But if it exists, then like H.G. Wells’ (and Steven Spielberg’s) aliens, however incomprehensible and numinous That Thing may be, to know of its existence it must intrude somehow into the physical and knowable realm of human knowledge, so that while it may not be possible to fully demystify it or strip it of its awe-full-ness or curious fascination, it may be possible to know That Thing really Is, and it is not just our experience, but an object and perhaps even subject of it.