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Mashed together posting.
I have too many things running through my head right now to put together a coherant post on each, so I’ll just throw out a few things here.
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First, in further response to my previous post, Consuming God, a few questions have come up in my head, and my wife Becky’s head, I’d like to throw out two of them.
With the ideal form of love being love simply BECAUSE instead of over certain aspects we find loveable, is it even possible for love to start out that way. For example, I certaintly didn’t love God just because when I first felt towards Him, but instead this (more) perfect form of love grew over time (and of course the same can be said for the love of my wife, and essentially any other love I have).
And if perfect love is loving a person just because (and do we even all agree on that point?), we must also then say that we love a person (At times) in spite of that person. Love doesn’t end when that person does something to wrong us, instead love forgives, and if it’s perfect love it must forgive even without that person asking for forgiveness. How does that reconcile with your views of salvation?
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Second, I finished How (not) to Speak of God, and have moved on to, The Fidelity of Betrayal. The first was enlightening and phenomenal, and the second thus far has been provacative and similiarly delightful. These books, however, make me feel a bit alone though. Sometimes it stinks being only Becky and I here (in our part of GA at least) that are where we are at in this journey. I don’t have any friends (that I know here in Georgia) that are either understanding of postmodern theology, or willing to read a book about postmodern deconstructionism.
Don’t get me wrong, I both love my friends (who aren’t into pomo-theory), and love to read the writings of my blogging buddies (who are), but sometimes I wish there were more people down here that I could sit at a bar with and talk about the Betrayal of Judas.
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Third (and final).
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.
Philippians 2:3 (Emphasis mine)
… All I can say to that is “Ouch. Thanks God, always like those ones.”
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Bailouts and such.
700,000,000,000 Dollars. I always get tripped up with the last set of 0’s, I seem to want to stop at Seven-Hundred Million. By the way, does anyone think it’s easier to type out “Seven Hundred Billion” than it is to type out “700,000,000,000″? Maybe I’ll go the slacktivist route and type 7 x 10^11, but that might not compute with everyone, so the eye popping $700,000,000,000 it is.
Oh, did I mention $700,000,000,000 yet?
I’m sure we could buy some universal health care for that… but we’ll move on.
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I’m not against the bailout, rather I am in favor of it. We need to do all that we can to ensure that we don’t end up in another depression, and the collapse of the credit industry would have a large chance of resulting in some form of depression or another.
We do need, however, to ensure that there are also provisions protecting the citizens from financial collapse. The citizens who have fallen into the predatory loan system are (for the most part) as at fault as the lenders who approved them for loans they could not repay, but they deserve the same amount of protections as the large firms who enabled them to screw themselves over.
We need a cap on the salaries of firm CEOs and presidents that are being bought out by this bailout. To continue to pay for shoddy management doesn’t help the issue at all. It would be like keeping a disaster of a president in the office for two terms, once you realize he’s a screwup, he should probably not be paid by the taxpayers for a second term. (Oh wait…)
Third, we need to look at overhauling the entirety of the credit industry. At some level I’m inclined to say credit is indeed necessary, but that may be due to my usage of CC’s and such. We need to educate citizens on responsible credit, and avoidance of credit if it’s possible. I say possible becuase I haven’t ever met anyone who was able to purchase their first home without a mortgage. In fact, I highly doubt I’ll ever be able to purchase a home without a mortgage.
Fourth, we need to realize that as bad as the situation here could get, we shouldn’t lower our giving to NPO’s like Kiva, Compassion International, or church giving, wherever you choose to funell your money to change the world. I know the gut reaction is to cut out giving because it’s the easiest thing to do (And doesn’t hurt you personally), but I would implore you do to so. C.S. There is far worse suffing goin on that we need to help alleiviate, and cutting of our charitable giving is not the way to go.
Just my thoughts, but hey, I’m a crazy liberal. I doubt you’ll see many similar ideals on a conservatives blog.
Consuming God
I haven’t really attended a church service up until recently. I went to two in one day… on purpose. I even enjoyed one, it was crazy. But it got me started thinking about Church services in general, and why we partake of them.
I grew up in a somewhat Fundamentalist church (I viewed it as fundamentalist, until I went to a school that was truly fundamentalist in a way that this would have fit right along side the “preaching” that went on there) before moving onto a more modern evangelical church that my friends were going to. These two institutions have ideas as to why we attend church, so lets look at them first.
The fundamentalist says we should attend church because we are commanded to do so, after completing our portion of the commitment God will then complete his and bless us, or grow our knowledge base, or some other ideal that falls in line with the legalistic thinking that you get from these sorts of institutions. The more moderate fundamentalist (does that seem oxymoronic to anyone?) realizes that we are not compelled (legally or morally) to attend church, but they say it is the right thing to do, and in doing such things (along with reading the bible, pray, etc) compels God to, again, grow us. The theme here is the legalistic ideal of compelling God to bless us if we fulfil certain conditions on our end.
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The modernist evangelical understands that God isn’t necessarily compelled into action based upon our actions, but instead feel like we should attend church because it offers an opportunity for growth itself. While this may be true, the idea that we can learn in a large ecclesiastical setting, often times evangelicals seem to backslide into the legalistic approach, that we should go to church because we are told to. (Doubt me? Tell an evangelical that you don’t attend church, nor enjoy doing so, and watch their face.) There are, however, subsections to the evangelical movement, you have the “seeker” group, and the group that doesn’t have the cool name but wants to “experience God.”
You can extract from these streams various ideas on how to best consume God, which we will shortly be doing.
First a note on consumerism
We are all consumers. It is in our very nature to consume, otherwise how do we survive. I am not condemning consuming itself, but I will resoundly condemn the idea that we can consume either people or God, as well as the propensity that we have to consume as much as possible.
Now, lets look back at the fundamentalist. The idea behind the fundamentalist (And the moderate fundamentalist) is that if we consume God through our actions we will be able to improve. (Improve what? Our lives, our souls, or anything of the like.) The fundamentalist, then consumes God because He gives back.
The evangelical tends to consume God not through an act such as attendance, but through acts such as “Worship” (musical) or learning (via Sermons or reading of scripture), or praying. In the first form of evangelical consumption, the evangelical consumes God in return for an emotional high (intrinsic to music is its ability to manipulate the emotions, when we let ourselves ‘go’ into the music, we get that emotion that makes us ‘feel’ in-tuned to God). The second form of consumption (and the one that I partake of the most, but not through sermons) is consuming the knowledge of God. The idea behind the consumption of knowledge of God is, that via knowledge, we are able to see more of Gods being (not literally, but you should get the idea) and thus understand him better (enabling us to feel more in-tuned to him). Finally via praying we open ourselves up to “leading” by God (which ends up being quite similar to learning about God) as well as an emotional connection (which feels much like musical emotional manipulation).
In and of themselves, I’d say the evangelical forms of consumption aren’t inherently evil, but we must look at the reasons why we wish to consume if we are to judge good/bad actions.
In his book, How (not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins delves into the topic of love. If you haven’t read the book, stop reading this blog now, go read the book, and I’ll see you in a few days.
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Done? OK good.
Remember when Peter talked about loving God for salvation is loving salvation? Or loving God for ______ is actually loving _____ ? The idea was, if we love God for what we get out of the deal, we don’t really love God, instead we love what we get out of the deal. The same principle applies when it comes to the consumption of God. Do we consume God because it grants us favor with him? (Fundamentalist) Do we consume God because it makes us feel good? (emotional manipulation) Do we consume God because we crave knowledge? (Oh… that’s me). Or do we love God because we find him infinitely loveable. Is it because of our love of God we crave knowledge of him? Is it because we love God we desire that closer connection through prayer?
Let me bring this down to a more mortal level, so we can better equate the idea to the understanding of God. I had this friend, way back in middle school, about whom we said “He isn’t in love with girls, he is instead in love with the feeling of falling in love.” He was “in love” with an emotion. He didn’t feel towards anyone because they were loveable, he instead felt feelings for people because he loved the emotion that it brought.
Fast forward a few years.
I love my wife. I don’t love my wife because she helps provide for our (two person) household, nor because she helps provide me with a clean house, nor because of the emotion I feel when she walks through the door. Instead, I love my wife because I find her infinitely loveable. It is because of this love I feel for her I respond with emotion, and even when emotion isn’t there, or the whatever acts are brought about by her love for me, I still love my wife.
It is this principle of Love that is central to our love of God. It shouldn’t be because of Salvation, because of emotion, or because of Blessing, but instead because He is infinitely loveable.
My Thoughts on Palin
Now that we’ve had (just under) three weeks to get to know Governor Palin, I think it’s time I posted some of my thoughts on the whole thing.
I’ll start by saying that I was quite shocked when the Governor was announced, and was somewhat convinced that the whole thing was a joke. I assumed that the election was going to be quite over with after reading about her stances on the issues, but I have been quite surprised as to the outpouring of support that she has garnered John McCain. I had assumed that McCain was already going to receive the support of the conservative base (as he has sufficiently changed his stance that he does fall under the umbrella of conservatism now), while I may have been wrong (or perhaps not) it does appear that the final nail in the coffin (… not the best analogy) has been driven in, and the conservative base will indeed support John McCain quite willingly.
In the first few days after the announcement, websites like Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and yes, even my beloved Huffington Post, engaged in some deep attacks against Palin (that was after they were able to find out something about her, other than she was a woman, which seemed to be all anyone knew the first few days). Looking back, these attacks are about as bad as I’ve seen against McCain (and on conservative sites such as Fox News Town Hall, Drudge Report, and the awful site World Net Daily against Obama), but seemed much worse because of the short amount of time in which they were perpetrated. Some of these attacks were laughable, but others were, I think, quite important to the office of the President of the United States.
Now, as far as Palin as a person/the Palin “worldview.”
One quick side note on worldview- I am getting tired of that term. It was cool at first, now it’s quite overplayed, yet I can’t really think of any simple world to use interchangeably, thus worldview stays (for now… your days are numbered overused phrase!).
One other side note- Proximity to Russia does not an experienced Foreign Policy resume make.
Ok, back on topic. Here is my reasoning for the lack of (my) support for Palin.
First, Palin does not believe Global Warming is man-made (link), or at least pre-VP pick she expressed doubt over the issue. This would coincide with her worldview (I may be off base right here, but she appears to fall in line with the Darby-ist end time escapist eschatology) that the world’s going to end anyways, so why bother doing anything about it? The environmental issue holds a big spot in my heart, so I want politicians in office who will work for environmental change. Sarah Palin seems to fall short here.
Palin on Iraq as God’s will (link) is another issue which she is severely at odds with me. I’m not of the opinion that the murder war on anyone is God’s will. Now, I know that she went was hit with this by Charlie Gibson, and responded by invoking Lincon (and politifact finds that these two phrases are similar), I would say that her statement doesn’t ring like Lincon to me. She does seem to be (in her speech) implying that Iraq is, in fact, God’s will. I can admit there is some room for budging here, but I’m calling like it appears to me.
On the issues Palin appears to be a lock-step conservative, both economically and socially, an idealogical viewpoint that I find myself more and more distanced from each day. John McCain, you could make the argument, is more of an independent (I say could, I feel like he’s moved more to the right whilst chasing the Presidency). Because of this staunch conservatism, I don’t think I’d ever bring myself to vote for Palin, nor encourage anyone else to do so.
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A note about the comments section, lets keep it clean in here, now vicious attacks against Candidates (or other commentors), if your family I’m gonna request you read over your comment BEFORE posting it. I’d prefer not to have to shut down a comment section on another one of my posts.
The Parable of the Fish and the Fishermen
Disclaimer: I am neither a writer, nor Jesus, thus the following parable is of shoddy craftsmanship, and barely sufficient to convey my point.
There was a rich man who had three sons. He decided that it was time his sons left his household to make their way into the world. Growing up rich, these sons never learned to provide for themselves, but still, their father told them it was time to make it on their own.
The three sons decided to move to a town known for its fisheries, under the impression that this was the best course of action to provide for both their stomachs and wallets. When they arrived at the town, the three sons went their own ways.
The first son was met by a local fisherman, who taught the son how to fish, thinking that he would then be able to provide for himself. But this son would run into days where he couldn’t catch sufficient fish to both feed himself and sell to make a living, so days went when the son starved.
The second son met a fisherman who agreed to provide enough fish for him to both eat and sell at market. On some days, however, this fisherman could not provide enough fish to support both the son and himself, so days went when the son starved.
The third son met a fisherman who taught him how to fish, and also offered to provide him fish on the days when the son was not able to bring in enough to get by. This son worked hard and was never forced to starve.
In these months when the donkey fights the elephant on the workings of the economy, it’s important for us to remember that neither teaching a man to fish nor giving a man a fish is enough to help that man out. We need to be able to do both.
The Wall
Sometimes, it’s just so big. You look up, and it never seems to end in that direction, you look to your right, and see it fade in the distance, to your left the same depressing scene plays out. That wall, however, is stopping you from reaching your goal. That wall must come down.
And with a nod to the great poet Lewis Carroll, how do you eat a whale?
I was at work today and made an offhand joke about saving the environment to a co-worker of mine that is a prodigious right wing christian. Were she to read this blog I wouldn’t doubt her thinking I was the anti-christ himself, but that would be giving me too much credit, not enough people like me for that. (On a similar vein, if I hear one more reference that Barack Obama is the antichrist, I might snap). Back on track now, she had the retort “Only one person can fix the environment, and your not him.”
After my brief “What the f…” moment I lost my opportunity for any sort of retort, so I just let it ride. But let’s upack that statement, and it’s implications if we can.
The most obvious implication is that we fixing our world on our own, becuase it’s the destiny of the world to die. While I’m not denying the evidence of a New Earth written in the New Testament, I am questioning the veracity of this opinion that we should be doing nothing about it now, becuase it’s all going away later. To simplify my response to this as much as humanly possible lets throw this out…
You’re going to die. That is an optimal truth, an inescapable fact. You’re body has come down with a sickness, do you seek to cure it, or do you continue on your merry way knowning full well that you’re going to die eventually?
The next implication is that we are not capable of fixing what we’ve destroyed. While this may be true on more ethereal ideas such as sin, the state of the physical world, while no doubt stemming from a “sinful society,” is something that we can attempt to fix. Maybe the idea is that God wants us to stubbornly continue in the path we’re currently taking and wait for God to fix things, I’m not quite sure there is any Biblical support of this idea it does seem to be quite popular. While, undoubtedly, we are called to wait upon the Lord. Numerous Biblical references can be applied here) we are also called to action (as far as the earth goes the most poignant is in Leviticus 18:
24 ” ‘Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. 25 Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. 26 But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things, 27 for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled. 28 And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.
If anything we’re called to protect the Earth, and as Christians we should be at the forefront of Creation Care, instead of being swept up in the coat-tails.
Live Blog: McCain’s speech
This’ll be my fist live blog, so I don’t know how well it’s going to go over (and the fact that it’ll go late and I will be up at five in the morning), but we’ll give it a shot and see how it turns out. I think I’ll do a test run during the O’Reilly factor interview with Obama, if that doesn’t go over we’ll I’ll probably cut it off.
Wish me luck.
Open Question
Had a debate with my parents tonight about the question of Sex Education in schools, wanted to throw it up here and see what comes of it.
I know I don’t have a ton of readers to make this anywhere near exciting, but we’ll try it out anyways.
So here’s the question:
Should public school systems be required to teach sex education, and if so, should they be required to follow an abstinence only program or a program that encorporates safe sex as well.
Perfection
The idea of perfection has been something that has bothered me for the past few weeks. It started about three weeks ago when I heard Limbaugh (yeah, I listen to conservative talk radio) bashing Obama for admitting that the US isn’t perfect. Gasp, oh no, we might let the world in on a secret that they already know.
Anyways, at the time I thought about posting a quick note, but later decided it wasn’t really worth my time. Then last week during the DNC I heard a Clinton delegate talking about his displeasure with the way things had gone for the Clinton campaign, but if Clinton told him to do so, he would vote for Obama, saying “That’s my leader, and I’ll do what my leader says.”
I think we’re looking at two very closely intertwined viewpoints here, and it doesn’t stop with these two, there are plenty of Obama fans out there who truly and sincerely believe the man can do no wrong. Then there are people who believe their church can do no wrong, or their denomination, or their religion.
Let’s face it, when we come into contact with human systems, and individual humans themselves, the expectation that no wrong can be done is way off base. We need to realize that if our individual consciousness is telling us that something is wrong, we should be listening to that, if a candidate is wrong, we need to be willing to accept that point and find a way to bring the candidate to change, or perhaps find a candidate more in line with our beliefs.
We need to move beyond this idea that being wrong is an awful thing. It happens, we’re fallible. Clinging to the idea that any human (or human system) is perfect is only going to net more pain and heartbreak when the system or human that we have elevated so highly comes crashing down to Earth. Failure to admit wrongdoing when its there isn’t going to make the wrongdoing go away, it’s just going to let it fester until the problem is entirely to large to be dealt with in a way that is better for everyone involved.
We need to be willing to look critically at the systems that we place in the infallible category, and sometimes stop blindly defending a position just because it’s the position we hold. Politics comes to mind here, just as much as people who blindly defend their church just because it’s their church.
Criticism sucks, I know (Trust me, it really does), but without being open to it, and without being open to the fact that I/we/systems can be wrong about something, we’ll never change or grow.