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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.’

‘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.

Andrew is back to the online world, for which I am somewhat happy. I wish I had his knowledge about church history (which he finds depressing), for then I could say more than just that Christianity became progressively a political force, and it did, but also such things like ‘Cyril of Alexandria is an “uber-super-unmatched-bastard.”‘ Although I am not as knowledgeable as he, I have wondered about the ‘heresy’ of Nestorianism as it seems to deal with erudite matters over which ‘heresy’ is an overstrong word. And anyone willing to rationally defend Pelagius (who does seem to have far more in common with the early Fathers than Augustine!) gets automatic addition to my list of cool people. I don’t know why I still have so much interest in all this. Perhaps I really am turning into Bart Ehrman.

On another church-related note, it deeply saddens me to see the looming schism in the Anglican church. Honestly, for a church that remained united despite the issue of slavery, I find homosexuality a rather trivial thing to schism over. In fact, are they splitting over what it means to be a Christian, or who Jesus is, or the nature of God, or (for God’s sake) even over how to organize a church? No – it’s that members of the Global South can’t stand that there are congregations that disagree about whether it’s okay to advance a sexual ethic of monogamy regarding approx 3% of the human population. This may become a contentious issue to debate, but schism over it, really? Akinola I find to be a rather harsh and intolerable man, who has supported and advanced the passing of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws, which I should hope one opposes regardless of one’s ‘position’ on the morality of the issue. In light of the sort of legislation he backs, I am even more appalled that many US episcopates have switched allegiance to the Global South – I’d like to think that they are blind to Akinola’s political policies, as sadly few people know or care about this sort of thing, but that does not fully excuse them.

The world food crisis has me progressively concerned. And as Dan of Poser or Prophet points out, we typically find entertainment in stories of horror and exploitation when we should find transformation. I have been lax about finding a place to dedicate myself to the underadvantaged (a too-weak word: poor and exploited) this summer. I don’t know where to go through if not through a church, and don’t know whether to go through a church, but these are no excuse. And then at times I find myself wondering what the good is of working where I am, and if it is not just an exercise in selfishness.

Other deep currents in my mind have been spun off by listening to a very interesting interview of Jonathan Haidt by Will Wilkinson on the topic of happiness and morality, from a social sciences and, at least on Wilkinson’s end, libertarian perspective.

Well, that wraps it up for this installation of The Blog.

Hardball delenda est.

The first thing I would like to address is that evil actually does exist, whether or not God does. It is interesting to me that Christian apologists will try to make the claim that without a God there is no such thing as evil, only atoms moving and waves waving which happen to do things we dislike. I find this claim absurd. Just because evil may boil down, in the end, to the materials of the physical universe does not make it any less than evil, any more than that the functioning of your brain boiling down to chemistry and biology makes you any less intelligent. When I speak about evil, what I mean is nothing less than, and nothing more transcendental than, the doing of harm to sentient, self-aware beings. This includes, in many cases, the animal as well as the human realm. So on a personal level, the dying of a baby in its mother’s arms is an evil; also, the torturing of a cat. On a more corporate level, the systematic genocide of a group of people (or the same accomplished by a malicious and deadly disease or set of diseases, such as what decimated the American populations) is an evil. I think these things being recognized as evil should be evident regardless of one’s theistic or atheistic beliefs.

On a final note, I’ve tried to keep this post from rambling and making it more coherent, but it is difficult to do, so apologies in advance.

Why Worship God?

I think this is a good question to ask whenever dealing with evil. Ought God to be worshiped simply because he is powerful, or is there another reason he is worshiped? To the answer that God ought to be worshiped because of his omnipotence, then if Satan were more powerful than God, should Satan be worshiped instead? My point – as I tried to make in the Euthyphro posts – is that God should be worshiped for the supreme excellence of the quality of his character. There are many governments in the world that wield a power over their people, some mostly for good and some mostly for evil. At present there is a government of the country ‘Myanmar’ which through its policies has knowingly and willingly killed many of its citizens in the aftermath of the recent typhoon. Should these citizens still respect (or ‘worship’) their leadership because of the absolute authority they have over their lives? Hell no! It is not by reason of power that we worship or even grant respect to individuals, but by the quality of their character. Why should this be different with God, or do we wish merely to be sycophants and cynics, doing at all times what will get us most ‘on the in’ with the powers that be? But for God to be a worship-worthy god, he must (in my view) possess a character the greatness of which cannot be imagined or surpassed. This does not mean human beings must be able to understand this character in its fullness – on the contrary, such would be impossible – but that his character must, inasmuch as it is fathomable, be manifestly good.

And this is much the picture the Jewish and Christian Scriptures give, from Psalms to gospels, though they often intermingle fear (of his power) with goodness (of his character):

The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him,
and he delivers them.
Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’

That last passage – found both in Mark and Luke – alludes to the transcendent goodness of God about which I spoke: that he must be (and is) good to the highest extent which it is possible to be good, so that no one is ‘good’ as God is truly good. And so you may fear him for his power, but God is to be worshiped because of his character.

In A World Such as This, Can There Be a Good God?

By ‘a world such as this’ I mean one which, as experience proves, contains evils. The typical atheistic argument is that a God who is good, and is both omnipotent and omniscient, would be able to prevent evils. That there are evils means that God is not good, or he is not omnipotent and omniscient. Hence, if he exists, he either ceases to be capable of solving our problems (benignly benevolent), or becomes the source of them (malevolent).

This argument is however a gross simplification. There is a caveat that it omits: that a God who is good, omnipotent and omniscient would prevent evils unless he had a significant moral reason to allow them. Humans allow this caveat all the time – especially in medical procedures – and it may well be that, just as by omnipotence we shouldn’t mean to say that God can make a being more powerful or ‘better’ (in any sense) than himself, there may be some things for which even God requires the existence of evils. Nevertheless, to be good, God must use these evils, as a doctor administering pain amid a medical treatment to save or drastically better a patient’s life, to capitalize on a greater good.

Sub-Problems: Unintended and Natural Evils

The greatest problems associated with evils are not those that one brings upon oneself, but evils capable of completely destroying one’s life that are outside one’s control. While intentional evils are bad enough (such as the holocaust of the Jews under Hitler), unintended evils are at least as common. For a child to be born during a famine in sub-Saharan Africa is quite outside both that child’s control and that of his parents, as is the hunger he feels as he dies at the age of four, severely undernourished and ridden with intestinal worms (skeletal images of children with bloated stomachs come to mind). On the other hand, some children are born in wealthy countries and never know life-threatening hunger, living to a ripe old age. Now suppose we could trace the source of this famine to the over-farming of the land fifty years ago by inept farmers living under the partial-disinterest of a colonial government. Even then, the death of that child cannot be laid wholly at the feet of those farmers, for what they did they did not out of malevolence but largely from ignorance not having the capacity to understand the ramifications of their agricultural decisions, and likewise the colonial powers did not foresee or intend the long-reaching ramifications of its policies. And so while it might have been prevented, the evil of the painful life and death of this child, and thousands like him, is the unintended consequence of the actions by others. And this does not even touch on entirely well-intended perpetrations of evil, such as ignorant or experimental attempts at medicine (or failed surgeries), or, as a book I am reading is fond of citing, the father who unintentionally and non-negligently runs over his infant child whom he loves.

Natural evils on the other hand are those not caused by any choice, but merely by the structure and fabric of the world we find ourselves in. There are many parasitic worms which are human-specific: that is, in order to complete their life cycle, they must have a human host. I do not know what it means to call God ‘good’ and acknowledge the existence of creatures whose lives only cause pain to others, particularly to humans (though if one has ever seen an animal in pain, they must also be included in this). And aside from specific creatures, it is the same physical laws of this universe that allow for combustion and cellular metabolism that cause hurricanes and tornados, which by their co-existence with humanity and animality cause much pain and difficulty to both. The nature of the material universe is self-destructive. Stars live out their ‘life cycle’ through nuclear fusion of their own materials, continuing to exist at the expense of their own substance until it is nearly all turned to iron, at which point they die, destroyed by the very process by which they lived. And similarly for biological organisms: we exist, at least most of us who are capable of thought, by the destruction of other organisms to provide our metabolism, by the division and recycling of our cells which each time are slightly degraded; species make their existence in ecological niches at the expense of other species vying for those niches; these species evolve at the expense of many genetic screw-ups, individuals being born deformed and not quite working out, the better ones doing better and progressing at the expense of the poor. Simply put: matter builds itself up by tearing itself down. The universe is inherently self-destructive, and if the laws of thermodynamics are to be believed, not for a greater end. And it is by this process that we live.

In the face of both of these it becomes difficult to affirm the existence of a good God. The first – the far-reaching consequences of choice, both malevolent and not – seems to fly in the face of the notion of a present and participatory God. The second – the natural evils seemingly built-in to the universe – seems to fly in the face of the notion of a creator God. These both are in need of answering, the first for theistic claims in particular, the second for deistic claims in general.

The Non-Answer of the Fall

The most typical Christian answer to these two sub-problems under the big problem of evil – unintended evils through choice and natural evils – is that, to quote a cliché, ‘we live in a fallen world.’ The notion is this: our forefathers (foreparentalunits?) disobeyed God and, as a result, we live in a world with the terrible and persistent evils that we currently see. It is not because God created the world that way nor that God delights in evil, but that we have (in some mysterious way, corporately through our forebears) disobeyed God, and these are the natural consequences.

However, I think this actually fails to explain the natural evils it sets out to explain – particularly those of the sort including the parasites that I mentioned above. If God is Creator (and most adherents to this explanation would emphatically say yes), where do these bits of creation come from? Did God ‘just get pissed off’ at Adam and Eve to such a degree that he went off and specifically created hundreds of species for the specific purpose of inflicting misery on them, and the rest of creation as well? These sorts of living creatures take some time to just ‘arise’ (if we are to hold to the scientific theory of evolution), and so their simply coming into existence as a result of the withdrawn presence of God after the Fall and within the scope human history is simply not a possibility. No, these creatures had to come into existence concurrently with the species they live off of; or otherwise God created them out of an act of spite. And a God who acts out of spite is, arguably, not good. A further warning against this explanation (of punishment or, as I would say, of spite) is that God’s wrath and judgment, at least in the New Testament, is described not as active retribution but as his withdrawn presence: ‘I tell you the truth, I never knew you’, and as a place of ‘darkness,’ e.g. outside of his presence.

As I said earlier, these natural evils are simply a result of how matter works, including how we function as a biological species. These are so deep-seated in the laws of the universe that it is just not enough to say that God made specific alterations, but to account for a prior existence sans natural evils, we must say he reorganized the entirety of the universe’s composition, raising the ‘punishment’ from specific consequences to a basic recreation of Created order. Furthermore, given the ‘Tree of Life’ imagery both in Genesis and Revelation, and the existence in both places of a ‘wilderness’ or a place that is ‘outside the city,’ I would propose that the Bible itself suggests not that the material universe has fundamentally changed in its structure but that its participants (namely, human beings) were sustained in it and despite its inherent self-destructiveness in a supernatural way by God. This meshes nicely with the concept of wrath described above, but leaves outstanding the problem of Creation containing natural evils in the first place.

But worse than all this, even if God is good in such retribution for Adam and Eve’s sin, he is still at least partly morally culpable for the Fall, and so also culpable for evils. Imagine that I take a child into an active nuclear silo. I set her down in the room, which contains many colored knobs and blinking buttons, and warn her not to touch any of them or else she will unleash a holocaust on many people. I then leave the room. Now suppose she does push buttons and turn knobs, and kills millions of people. When I return to the room, how much can I blame the child? Surely some, for she did what I had told her not to. But am I not chiefly to blame for putting a child at these controls? One might say that if she was fully aware of her consequences, she is to blame, but I don’t think such is possible for a child. Nor for Adam and Eve. Our ability as human beings to perpetrate evil far outweighs our ability to be held accountable for it. I may describe for you the death of a person’s child as they hold them in their arms, and I may do so quite vividly, but your ability to commiserate with this is limited by your experience of it. So also with the evils we perpetrate, we are incapable of fully understanding the depths of what we have done unless we have already experienced their equivalent at the point we commit them. Surely Hitler, though one of the most evil human beings in history, was not capable of fully understanding the evils that his policies perpetrated; and so forth. As we grow older, through the wear and tear of the world, we are more able to relate with those experiencing evils, and so understand them, but when we are younger, this is less true. How much more so for Adam and Eve, human beings who had never experienced evil and so could not have had any true conception of the horrors of it! So without serious modification being made to this argument, a portion of responsibility falls on Adam and Eve, to be sure, but the great bulk of it still falls on God.

The Non-Answer of Calvinism

Though often building on the previous answer of the ‘Fall,’ the answer of Calvinism is separate and distinct from it. The Calvinistic response runs something like this: but people deserve the evil things that happen to them. This means that the four year old who dies from hunger, because of his ‘sin nature,’ fully deserved the wretched end that he came to. And while it may be tempting to dismiss this answer as too horrific and making a monster out of God, it was an answer I held to for some time, and I think it is one that deserves serious consideration and a serious response.

One problem I see with Calvinism is its attempt to pass off moral blame for stative conditions. They say that people are ‘by nature objects of wrath’ where ‘wrath’ is imputed with moral valuation. Even given that human beings are ‘born evil’ it is not possible to blame the individual for how they were born any more than it is possible to blame a dog for being a dog. We may make the argument that the world is better off without dogs (I would disagree, but I do think the world is quite possibly better off without tapeworms and viruses), but we cannot place moral blame on each individual dog – or tapeworm or virus – for their being what they are. It is silly to say that a child ‘deserves’ death in any moral sense because of her putative sin nature, though this is precisely what I hear most Calvinists try to pass off as true. It only makes sense, given the theory’s premise, to take a utilitarian view of humans as objects and leave moral judgments out of it.

Which leads me to the greater problem I see with Calvinism, and that is that it incorporates malevolence into the nature of God. The Calvinist typically responds by saying that, without divine intervention, we are all damned, and in that situation God is still just. So if God intervenes and scoops some but not all from the jaws of hell, he is still just, and also now he is merciful for he did not let them all perish. One can argue all day about the meaning of justice and mercy in these thought-experiments, but the short of it is that such a God fails Jesus’ ‘Good Samaritan’ test. Remember, Jesus gives this story in Luke as a response to questions about righteousness and the Law! So like the priest and Levite in the story, God, seeing and knowing the man on the side of the road dying (for he is after all omniscient), passes by on the other side, saying ‘I have not chosen you.’ Worse yet, that ‘it is to my glory for him to suffer thusly forever’ – blatant malevolence. But the Samaritan – that dirty heretic – is better than God, for he stops to assist. Shall we say then that Jesus is less good than the heroes in his own moral parables? And what of the Sermon on the Mount, loving and doing good to one’s enemies, and giving to the needy? If God’s enemies are truly incapable of turning to righteousness apart from his intervention and saving themselves, then there too he also fails to live up to Jesus’ morality in failing to help them. There are more reasons I have abandoned Calvinism – taking Romans 9 out of context proves nothing (and that book may suffer more than any other from having complex arguments taken out of context!) – but I found this one, to me, to be a compelling reason. Making malevolence part of the character of God is not an answer to anything, least of all an answer to evil.

Grasping for an Answer

For God to be good (benevolent), omniscient, and omnipotent, and for there to be a world such as ours in which there are great and life-destroying evils uncaused and unasked for by their victims, God must make good to the individual, inasmuch as he is capable of doing, on their life experiences. How that may be possible is quite outside the capabilities of my mind. For God to be good, he must somehow (as the Good Samaritan does) assist every human being in their need, regardless of their personal sin. And for there to be a hell, or place without God – as I believe there probably is, should theism be correct at all – that hell can only be populated after the Samaritan’s object of affection has, being picked up from the road, said thank you very much but if this should mean spending time with you I would rather find my help somewhere else. And so they may be free to do so as long as they wish. This is why I love Lewis’ ‘The Great Divorce’ so much: he takes seriously God’s goodness and the doctrine of hell, and he does so in the only known way how, and that is taking human individuality and freedom to make choices seriously.

Another way to overcome the problem of evil is to say that God is impersonal, and so not beholden to personal concepts of morality. One way to do this is assert a complete Tillichian God-as-Ground-of-Being. Though Tillich would say that God is supra-personal, he is nevertheless impersonal, and so God has no moral obligations toward Creation, but only sustains it being by his Being. (How Tillich squares this with the Incarnation I do not know, but I think he would have to accept docetism.) Although I find God-as-Ground-of-Being to be a tantalizing answer, I can only accept it partially without becoming a deist. I see very little substantive difference between the God of Being and Einstein’s God of Order. While it is one answer, it destroys the ability of a person to relate to God, pray to him or feel anything from him. He becomes the background across which the universe moves.

But to make God personal, and good, I find it difficult to conceive of him as Creator in any specific sense, largely because of the natural evils I mentioned above. At best, I can only say that he set the universe into motion and largely let it do its own thing, in order to, at a later point in time, come to it and woo it and unite himself with it. That this material universe is not the product of a God who spent tender loving care in its creation, but the product of its own ungodly rules and regulations, producing good and evil, and that an otherworldly God comes now from outside of it, into its chaos, to unite himself with it in a particular way, namely with its greatest product, sentient and competent beings capable of comprehending and communing with the divine. And to make this process occur, God must become more earthy (incarnate), and matter (via people) must become more divine (self-giving, rather than self-destructive). This is a partial solution which very much intrigues me, whatever it does to the biblical Genesis account.

The Upshot of All This

I cannot adhere anymore to the common Christian and theistic answers to the problem of evil. I believe evil is sufficiently deep, sufficiently integral to the universe, and sufficiently problematic that it deserves greater attention and better answers than I have seen it given in theistic systems. This is not to say we should not fight evil: most certainly we should, bettering the world as much as we are possibly can, whether or not there is a God. But the universe as we find it is a great challenge to the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and good God.

An Uncertain Way Forward

In case this post and its predecessor have not been explicit enough, I am at this point in my life an agnostic. I know where I have come from and I know what I have rejected, and I know my reasons for rejecting them. And so being clear of the reasons, the likelihood of my returning to any of the precise systems I have rejected is slim to none. This is not to say I am rejecting Christianity altogether: I have detailed the items I do reject, and do not understand how to hold to Christianity as a whole without them. However, in the realm of beliefs this leaves me with more problems than solutions, and seeing the problems are so great, I wonder whether they have solutions. I very much appreciate Christian thought, and in general I find it so far superior to other religions (or at least the ones of which I am sufficiently aware) that it is almost not worth comparing with them. But, in my heart, not being able to accept biblical testimony carte blanche, even about Jesus (thinking it eerily likely he was a mistaken apocalyptic preacher), and not quite being able to say that God exists, given this universe, I cannot claim myself currently as a participant in Christendom. That may someday change; I certainly would not protest to a change. There are many things about Christianity I would like to be true: its kernel – Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection – is beautiful to me almost beyond expression. But I do not want to accept something because it is convenient for me or because I would like it to be true, but only because I believe it to be true. And if I do return to the faith, I fear I will be so far outside of the mainstream it will be difficult for me to commune with other Christians (in a way in which I can actually let them know me or what I believe), and I will almost certainly be heretical to most – if not for the gay part, then for something else along the lines of what I’ve mentioned. But for now, I am a better skeptic than believer.

What I do know about life is that theism alone is not the only reason to live well. Other reasons in particular are another topic altogether. I desire still to do good to others with my choices in life, and may and shall still pursue that, falteringly, in what I do. My morals are surprisingly very similar, if not the same (minus the morality of worship), to what they were. How to go about fellow-human relationships, further inspection of belief and reality, how and whether to relate to the communion of religious believers of which I have made myself a participant, and pursuing the betterment of others, is mostly an uncertain way forward. But that I do want to pursue such things, at least, is certain.

I questioned whether to voice these thoughts, but in the end I have found too much doublespeak in Christianity, people affirming in public what they do not really affirm in private, going along with the crowd mostly to save face, asserting confidently that they have no doubts while, among those they know, confiding that they are haunted by doubt, and I at least do not find that hiding one’s beliefs or thoughts for the sake of popular acclaim to be an altogether healthy or worthy enterprise. Simply put, I typically find it cowardly. My intention is not to cause others’ beliefs to crumble – far from it – but to articulate the doubts of my own. So if at any point in reading this you feel an uncontrollable urge to call me a heretic, shout out that this is proof that people cannot be both gay and Christian, or simply feel too uncomfortable, please jump ship and hit that X button or back button on the browser window (though you are of course free, as always, to skip it all and leave feedback). But if reading this is not of any benefit to you, and it is a harm to you, then there is no point in continuing. So with that said, let us walk boldly into the realm of doubt…

My problems with the Christian religion are twofold, though I do not say this to limit the tremendous problems this religion faces to a mere number of two (I am quite sure there are those I have not yet thought of or encountered), but I mean to say that these two are of sufficient magnitude and seriousness to disturb the foundations of what I believe, or what I thought I believed. And the problems are these: the text of Scripture, and the existence of evil. The problem of Scripture is that it is not inerrant, it discusses differing concepts of God amongst its various books and authors, sometimes making contradictory claims in these, others portraying God in radically different manners; the problem of evil is that the world contains evils of such magnitude and distribution that, on the surface, are incompatible with a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, as well as good. While the first is Christian-specific, the second applies to all theistic and deistic systems, and neither is negligible in terms of constructing one’s view of the world, or considering the possibility, probability, or reality of God. And so while a complete answer to either is not necessary (though a sufficiently partial and reasonable one is), I do not feel I can honestly proclaim God with these left outstanding. I am splitting these two issues into two posts, since they are each the size of a baby rhinoceros, and if I combine them in a single post, their combined weight might cause a singularity in my database and collapse my blog.

I. The Text of Scripture

Examining the Christian Scriptures thoroughly, it is difficult for me to understand how claims of inerrancy can be made outside of ignorance. I do not mean this to suggest that all those making such claims are ignorant or that they are stupid – they may well have attained an understanding of Scripture which my mind has not – but that I simply do not comprehend how this is possible. Sticking to the New Testament (which is more my stomping grounds than the Old), I think it will be sufficient to show, from my understanding, a lack of literal, moral, and foundational inerrancy.

Literal inerrancy

The matter of literal errancy can be shown in cross-references (such as the infamous Mark 2:26 debacle), but a trivial, yet important example, can be taken from the three Synoptic accounts, in the sending out of the Twelve:

Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.
(Matthew 10:9-10)

He told them: ‘Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’
(Luke 9:3)

These were his instructions: ‘Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic.’
(Mark 6:8-9)

The Matthean and Lukan accounts agree in what they say, but Mark is at odds with the other two.

If we are to say, along with most scholars, that Mark is earliest, are Matthew and Luke working with a corrupted version of the story, or do they correct the error contained in Mark? Whatever the case is, I think the contradiction is pretty evident in the text and it is not possible to work around it. There is no manuscript data of which I am aware that harmonizes these. I have heard with surprising frequency from those holding to biblical inerrancy that the original documents were inerrant, but what we have are not those originals, so that the documents at first agreed on all matters, but later were corrupted (even if there is no evidence for specific cases, we may take on faith that God inspired them perfectly, though we cannot tell in every situation how that plays out). But whether this is just me or whether it is a more important consideration, I do not understand the practical difference between an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon. Was God just negligent in his upkeep of the text (being sovereign one moment over its inspiration but not over its preservation)? And how does it mean anything to appeal to a hypothetical, largely imaginary inerrant original when we do not have that original nor any way of appealing to it besides the critical methods which have gotten us even this far? That is, I see no way that the interpretation of an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon differ from one another. And I further fail to see how an inerrant canon now-corrupted makes anything but a mess out of God’s interaction with mankind for the sake of his self-revelation.

But this error is pretty negligible, right? I mean, none of this affects the interpretation of the passage but only that some details may not be exact. This is a fair assessment, but this example cannot be passed up, I don’t think, without conceding the literal errancy of the Scriptures.

Moral Inerrancy

But what about moral matters? Surely there is agreement there. Again, for sake of simplicity (and sticking to where my knowledge is more complete), I will only look at New Testament examples, for considerations about Old Testament moral commands, their relevancy, and the scope of what is called Covenant Theology is very complex. But let us take one issue: the eating of meats sacrificed to idols. The first instruction concerning this matter comes in the book of Acts, in the letter from the Jerusalem council to the Gentile believers.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

I think it is clear from the context this occurs in that this was more of a command from church authority than a suggestion. And I think it not without reason (as some do on other matters) to say that ‘contextually speaking’ we cannot affirm eating meat sacrificed to idols without bringing the morality of sexual immorality into question.

Paul, however, takes another view of this altogether, alluding to this matter in Romans and more fully addressing it in 1 Corinthians, essentially saying the same thing in both places:

Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.

Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.

Paul is saying, clearly, that eating meat sacrificed to idols is a non-moral issue, but that those who do this need to be sensitive to their fellow believers who do view it as a moral issue, for these persons and their consciences are more important than an individual’s freedom. But in saying this, does he not explicitly flaunt the decree given only a few years earlier by the council at Jerusalem? Is he not suggesting that those who made this ruling were brothers with ‘weak consciences’? And what of the other matters in that decree? Or do the Scriptures not always speak with one voice on moral matters?

But the New Testament is not done addressing this topic, for we have two more mentions on this from the mouth of Christ himself, in the book of Revelation, first to the church at Pergamum and then the church at Thyatira:

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality.

Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.

In the above passages from Revelation, as is arguably the same in the Acts passage, eating food sacrificed to idols is inextricably linked to sexual immorality (I suspect, particularly given the OT references in the Revelation passages, that this refers to the context of pagan mystery cults). However, there is not an out in the passage to say that food sacrificed to idols is wrong only when it leads to sexual immorality, but both are unequivocally condemned. Like my friend from whom I stole the title of this entry might say about other matters, it is not that eating causes sexual immorality per se, but that there is a link between rejecting giving thanks to God by eating food sacrificed to pagan gods, and rejecting the true God’s instruction on other matters, including sexual ones. Only because of Romans and 1 Corinthians can we, strictly within the scope of Scripture, seriously question this reasoning. So what are we to say? Shall we say that Paul disregards the clear instruction of the church and the Lord Jesus Christ? Or shall we say that Christian thought developed on this matter over time, to approximate the truer morality of the matter, and that likewise the commendation in Acts did not represent God’s perfect will, but a first attempt thereat, hedged by invisible (in the text) cultural constraints, even though the council claims this ‘seemed good to the Holy Spirit’? (For we cannot easily contextualize away the command given in Acts, seeing that it was to the whole of the Gentile communion.) Shall we also then say, despite the most straight-forward hermeneutic of the Revelation passages, that food sacrificed to idols is condemned only because of its fundamental link, in that context, to sexual immorality, and it is not condemned for all people at all times, such as to the Corinthian and Roman churches to whom Paul wrote? My purpose here is to show that despite clear moral injunctions, Scriptural commands change, are reevaluated, and evolve over time and in the minds of its various authors, creating anything but a clear moral standard on all issues, but a complex and altogether human dialogue between authors, authorities, and congregants, at the very least obscuring, if not destroying, any universal moral inerrancy inherent in the text.

Foundational Inerrancy

Surely then, if literal and moral inerrancy are in question, we can depend on Scripture to tell us without erring the most important matters. The Resurrection, which along with the Incarnation and the Atonement forms a necessary trio for the Christian faith, would fall easily within this category. This, I fear, I also find more complex than meets the eye, and quite possibly lacking in inerrancy. The post-resurrection accounts have, to say the least, given me great pause concerning the validity of Christian claims. The variance in the accounts are rather infamous, including who was at the tomb and what they saw there, whether there was an earthquake, whether holy men from the past wandered around Jerusalem in-between the Lord’s death and resurrection, as only Matthew mentions – a rather noteworthy occurrence one would think for the other gospel writers! But there is one fairly large discrepancy I want to hone in on. Matthew, Mark, and John all have appearances by Jesus to the apostles in Galilee. Though the original ending to Mark is lost (that note in your Bible that ‘the earliest manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20’ is quite correct, though the details are outside the scope of this document), the trajectory to Galilee is evident from 14:28 and 16:6-7:

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he [the angel] said, ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” ’

Matthew and John have similar accounts at the end of each of their gospels, which I (rather grotesquely) abbreviate here:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said […]

Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias [Galilee]. It happened this way: […]

It is striking to notice agreement between two Synoptics and John with one Synoptic missing out, for usually the Synoptics agree and John is the odd man out. One might say there is a gap in Luke except for the way he recounts Jesus’ first (recognizable) appearance to the disciples at the end of his gospel:

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. [… Jesus speaks, eats a fish to prove his corporeality …] Then he [Jesus] opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

(emphasis mine)

Luke-Acts does not record any apparition of Jesus in Galilee, though the other three gospels say there was such an apparition. Furthermore, unless we are to assume the disciples disobeyed their risen Lord (which does not much fit the literary mood at the transition from Luke to Acts) or that their Lord rescinded his command and led his followers to Galilee (which does not much fit the description of him), there is not much room for Luke’s account to agree with the other three. The geography makes sense within the thematic scope of Luke-Acts – a Jewish messiah and his message spreading from the Jews to the world (thus beginning in Jerusalem, the center of Judaic life) – but I’d rather not think the evangelist altered the story to suit his theme. And as I mentioned, there are other notable discrepancies on the matter of the Resurrection. How could God, in a divinely-inspired writing for the purpose of giving men and women his truth, allow such contradiction in narratives seemingly necessary for his message to lodge themselves into his canon?

The Upshot of All This

The examples I have given are only that: examples of a class that exceeds the particular instances given here. I did not even touch authorial issues in the New Testament, which are another very difficult can of worms. But the gradual accumulation of examples – an umbrella I think it is fair to call ‘textual criticism’ – has wreaked on my faith a damage I did not anticipate, and has crept up on me and surprised me unexpectedly. I should not attempt to say anything other than that I was raised in a fundamentalist belief system that placed highest possible value on the inerrancy of Scripture, and that this background has, no doubt, significantly shaped how I have handled all this. Like every human, I am influenced by my upbringing. But the result is that the faith that I was brought up to have – that what the Bible says is true and beyond doubt, and it is the only source from which one can truly come to know God – is no longer tenable. The Bible is all too much a human document, containing our errors, our disagreements, our disputes…

This leaves me, hermeneutically, on unsteady ground, or rather on ground that has already collapsed and left me nowhere. In order for me to still consider the Bible ‘of God’ in any real sense, it must hold to a certain set of standards, and while it may be a mixture of human and divine elements (much like orthodox voicing of Jesus’ dual human and divine natures), it must at minimum speak about true interactions between God and the physical world. The Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection are non-negotiable: for any of these to be less than real material interactions between God and mankind, to which we have some reliable testimony, Christianity is ruined (for the Atonement, the material interaction may possibly be postponed to a future, glorified state, alongside the present experience of the Holy Spirit). I am not content to water away the narrative as internal personal experience, for internal personal experience is notoriously subjective and tells us more about ourselves than it does about God. No: we are material beings and as such any story giving glimpses into the character of God must ground itself in the same matter that our beings are made from, so that it becomes approachable to us.

What such a hermeneutic, or such a requirement, looks like when it pertains to the Christian Scriptures is quite beyond me. But I certainly know that if it is synonymous with the old requirements, then the very religion flounders before them and is thrown out altogether. I think that, to pursue this, I might be well-advised to pick up some Karl Barth (perhaps ‘Church Dogmatics’), for he along with many neo-orthodox theologians of the 20th century is one of the few who I know to have taken this matter seriously, and he and his kin may offer the only way of answering such questions. Nevertheless, at present this matter remains to me an incalculably high impediment to a conviction on Christianity containing the remotest degree of certainty.