Monday, October 31, 2005

The Patriot Act

Just in case you missed the absence of media buzz this week, the House of Representatives is meeting now to discuss what to do about this year's expiration of laws in the Patriot Act granting government increased rights to perform wire taps, obtain search warrants, and set certain crimes punishable by death. In reaction to 9/11, the House of Representatives passed a law called the Patriot Act without much debate, or media opposition. That law made it legal for the government to access personal information such as medical records, tax records, information about the books you buy or borrow, and the power to break into your home and conduct secret searches without telling you. The problem is, all of these searches are legitimate even if the investigating organization fails to prove proabable cause if they are gathering information on Terrorism. Meaning, if a government organization is looking into "Terrorism" it may, without proving why, undergo of what would otherwise be considered an illegal search.

The Patriot Act is set to expire later this year, and in preparation, the House of Representatives is meeting to discuss what to do. In face of the expiration of these laws, the House of Representatives, (again without much attention, or discussion) is increasing the number of offenses that could result in the death penalty from 20 to 61. Meaning that if you gave money to an organization which later used that money to fund a terrorist action, you could be put to death. Even if you didn't know where that money was going.

I'm not trying to say anything about the government's role in permitting illegal searches and siezures (which are expressly forbidden in the Constitution), nor am I trying to say anything about the death penalty (which, as a pacifist, I do not support), all I am saying is that this issue should have a greater audience. The issue is far to important to carry on without debate and attention. When we begin to enact laws which expressly restrain rights enumerated by the Constitution itself without discussing such actions, we begin the decline of true democracy. I know it sounds a bit drastic, but undermining the Constitution itself is no small potatoes.

Friday, October 28, 2005

What we want

I found a photo by Gregory Colbert in a discarded copy of The New Yorker today outside of the campus library. I looked at this picture for a very long time, thinking and reflecting on several issues that it brought to mind.

I would like to open up for discussion on this picture. What does it say to you?

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Reactions to What is True?

Let's review what I have said is True:

1. There is a God.
2. We are separated from Him.
3. We want to come back to Him.
4. We can't get back to Him on our own.
5. God wants us to get back together with Him.
6. God knows we can't get back to Him on our own.
Therefore
7. God incarnated Himself on Earth and died in order for us to be able to get back together with Him.
8. If we believe that He really did that, we can rectify our separation from Him.

Now, my question is: I have been a Christian my whole life, so these truths seem to be self-evident. And they all rely on some fundamental unprovable beliefs. Such as:

1. God exists
and 2. I feel distant from Him.

I have contended that everyone finds these two things to be true, and that's pretty bold. I know. So my question is, does anyone honestly disagrees? I have yet to find anyone who really disagrees with these two truths, but that doesn't mean that no one does. I know it sounds crazy but I assure you, I have had no shortage of conversations with both Atheists and Agnostics, and none of them really believe in their heart of hearts that I'm wrong about these two. Most of the time they have a problem with the Christian God, or the Muslim God, or the Jewish God... I wonder though if there is someone who really, honestly disagrees with these two truths in the depths of their heart. If you do, let me know.

Because I think if you agree with these, then you have to agree with 3 and 4.

3. We want to come back to Him.
4. We can't get back to Him on our own.

I think these are also things that everyone feels. If I'm right in thinking that you agree with the first two, am I being too bold in assuming that you agree with the second two? Because I guess it would logically follow from these that

5. God wants us to get back together with Him.
6. God knows we can't get back to Him on our own.

He is God afterall. The real leap of faith seems occurs in the last two.

7. God incarnated Himself on Earth and died in order for us to be able to get back together with Him.
8. If we believe that He really did that, we can rectify our separation from Him.

If we believe in 1-6, I really think 7-8 would logically follow. It just doesn't seem that there would be any other way. The real leap of faith I guess would be, did God really do it yet?

The big problem with this truth system is that it all relies on a fundamental belief that stems from your own experience. If you experience 1-4 to be true... then I guess it would only make sense for 5-8 to be true. But then again... the whole thing sounds a bit too easy, or a bit too hegemonic to be true. That's when I say... "Well, He is God. It should be easy, and how could He not be hegemonic?"

Your thoughts?

So... What is True?

Well, our discussion moves to the next course. What is True? Here's the question. Here's the thing that people have been talking about since people realized that there was such a thing as truth.

Here you go. It is true that there is a God. It is also true that we all feel some kind of separation from that God. I don't care about finding some astounding proofs to get you to believe these two things through some incredible bit of philosophical logic. I just assume that you feel them both to be true. I think it is "true" that we all recognize these two things to be true. Just don't think about the Christian God when I make these claims, and I think you'll probably agree. At least, I've never talked to anyone who disagreed. I don't care if you call yourself an athiest, agnostic, jew, muslim, taoist or Christian, you think it is true that there is a God, and you are separated from that God.

At any rate, we have the first two things that are true.

1. There is a God.
2. We are separated from Him.

Now there are some truths in between these that we'll leave out through the rest of this for simplicity, but I want you to be aware of them. They go like this.

1. There is a God.
1a. That God made everything.
1b. That God loves everything he made.
1c. That God made us with a free will
2a. We used that free will to separate ourselves from Him.
Therefore
2b. We are separated from Him.

I still don't think anyone would honestly disagree with these truths. I'm sure I'm being naieve.

This leads us to the third truth: We need/want to get back together with Him. Everyone who recognizes the gap between themselves and God, has the desire to bridge that gap. The problem is, we can't. No matter how hard we try, we will never be holy enough, dedicated enough, or disciplined enough to come back to Him on our own. I think this is something everyone has felt in their own lives as well. If you haven't let me know.

So we have the first five things that are true.

1. There is a God.
2. We are separated from Him.
3. We want to come back to Him.
4. We can't get back to Him on our own.

This is the one where we might begin to disagree. That's why I believe the Bible exists. In a way, it's a big long story proving that we can't get back to God on our own. I'll give you the quick-and-dirty.

The Bible begins with what we want. Man and God together. That's what we really hunger for. Then, there's the fall. A fancy word that says we were separated from God. (Adam, garden of Eden, Snake, apple...) After the fall, God tries just straight up ignoring the separation, and letting us exist separate from Him. That doesn't work. We start going crazy, doing our own thing, and in our sin and debauchery nearly annihilate ourselves. And that makes Him sad. (Everything that happened before the flood.) Then God says, alright, there are bad people and good people. What if we just got rid of the bad people, and left the good people? Then everything should be okay. So, the flood. God wipes out every bad guy in the world. (Isn't that what we want Him to do sometimes even now?) Well, the result is a small group of people that make it through, and the Earth is now left with only good people. Well, in less than a few years, the good people do bad, and everything goes to pot again. So, God says, I'll bring up a group of people who will do my work, and they'll follow a system of laws, and through that system of laws they'll come to deserve fellowship with me. (Israel.) This is, again, what many of us want. Pretty much every one of us wants to find a way to God on our own. We want to do something that proves us worthy to be back together with him. Doesn't work. We try and try and try, and He forgives and lets us try again and again and again, but no luck. We keep wandering away. We just plain old can't be good enough. It's not possible, He tried it.

Now, let's look at how God perceives this whole thing. Because there is a God, it must be the case that He made everything. It is precisely because He made us that He loves us. (Remember this is truth 1a... am I loosing you?)

On to the next things that are true. It is true that God loves us and wants us to get back together with Him. (Truth Six) And, it is true that God knows that we can't get back together with Him on our own. (Truth Seven.) So where are we?

1. There is a God.
2. We are separated from Him.
3. We want to come back to Him.
4. We can't get back to Him on our own.
5. God wants us to get back together with Him.
6. God knows we can't get back to Him on our own.

So, God decides that because we can't do anything to come back to Him, he decides to step in. He incarnates Himself on the Earth and through the system of rules that He has set in place, reconciles us to Him. (The system of rules said from the very beginning that the penalty for sin would be death. "Don't eat the fruit Adam or you'll die." Because the penalty is death, He has to die.)

So, God comes to earth, sacrifices Himself for our sins, and we are allowed to come back to Him. Here's where some of those other truths come into play. We can't get back to God on our own, so He died in order to bring us back. But that doesn't negate truth 1c. (God made us with a free will) Because we still have a free will, we have to choose to come back to God. Because the only way back to God is through the sacrifice He chose to make, we have to believe that He did it. If we believe that He really did it, then we can lean on that belief to find ourselves back with Him. So, there you have it. What is true? It is true that:

1. There is a God.
2. We are separated from Him.
3. We want to come back to Him.
4. We can't get back to Him on our own.
5. God wants us to get back together with Him.
6. God knows we can't get back to Him on our own.
Therefore
7. God incarnated Himself on Earth and died in order for us to be able to get back together with Him.
8. If we believe that He really did that, we can rectify our separation from Him.

There you go. Truth. More thoughts in the next post.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

PoMo Posts: What is Truth?

In my quest to posit a response to "How can we be Christians in a Postmodern world" I want to begin with answering, "What is truth."

Truth must exist. We cannot go off the Postmodern deep end by saying that there is no truth. That is not Postmodernity, that is skepticism, and while interesting and possibly quite valid, skepticism does not do anything for us. I am not going to address skepticism. So, before you read any further, remember that it might be the case that you are really just a brain in a petri dish on an alien ship and when they turn the correct tooth picks, you think you are reading my blog.

Now, assuming then that we are actually in our bodies, and that we can (roughly) trust our senses, where do we go from here. Naturally it must be that the basic truths exist. Everyone's experience allows for "cold" and "hot" and "hard" and "soft". These truths exist, and we can all attest to them. However, when I say hot, you might not hear the same objective truth that I hear.

Our experience of truth alters its exact definition. For example: In fall, when the temperature dips to 65 degrees, we see a lot of people throwing on their parkas. And yet, in the spring, when the temperature hits 65 degrees, people are wearing tee shirts and shorts. The reason is because we define "cold" based on our experience. If we have experienced a particularly hot summer for several months in a row, sixty-five is "cold." And yet, if we have just held out through a bitterly cold winter, sixty-five is "warm." The temperature outside is defined by our experience. Now, this doesn't mean that the objective truth of sixty-five degrees is relative. The objective truth of sixty-five exists, however if we don't interpret that sixty-five to mean cold or warm, it has no bearing for us. The objective truth is useless to us until we have ascribed a subjective meaning to it.

All that to say that while truth is not relative, our interpretation of truth is relative to our experience with it. This means that we each have a relationship with truth. So, the question was, "What is truth?" My answer to this question is, Truth is a reality.

The problem with certain truths is that they are immeasurable through the scientific method. Because the scientific method is pretty much the only agreed upon mode for truth gathering, this means that there are certain truths that remain merely theories. There is an objective truth behind these theories, but that objective truth lies either in the immeasurable, the purely theoretical, or the past.

If the objective truth upon which a theory is founded lies in the immeasurable, then we are left with theories based on incomplete data. I am thinkiung of the current theories around gravity. The nature of gravity is immeasurable, and we do not know what it really is. We do know that it exists, but we do not fully understand it, so the nature of gravity remains an unmeasurable theory.

If an objective truth is based in the purely theoretical, then the truth is in fact relative to the culture in which the truth is found. These would be truths that center around cultural norms such as piercings, or tatoos. In one culture it is true that slicing open your lip and using a plate to extend the tissue over a period of years is a beautiful thing. That is not true in our culture. Such truths are merely theoretical.

Truths that are based in the past are unverifiable because they happened in the past. We can know a lot about the past, but it is impossible to scientifically verify the events of the past. Try proving that Ghengis Khan existed. It is impossible. We can prove that there are texts that attest to his existence, and that someone in written history is said to have taken over most of Asia, the middle east, and Western Europe in under thirty years, but we cannot scientifically verify that it was Ghengis Khan that was responsible for those things. This idea gets trickier when we talk about supernatural events from the past. We cannot scientifically verify that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, nor can we scientifically verify that Muhammed ascended into Heaven.

The trouble comes when we start lumping all of these theories into the same category of truth. We tend to look at unverifiable truths and claim that they are all social constructs. We say that truth in these things is relative to our experience. But this position is really just an extension of modernity. We become frustrated with our inability to verify or logically prove the truths we hold, so we claim that they are not truths at all. Modernity told us that we could verify everything through science. In this postmodern world, we see that science cannot prove everything, and so we take everything that is unprovable, and we claim that it must not be truth. Our current position is really just the logical conclusion of modernity. In this manner, Postmodernity is really just Ultramodernity.

If, instead, we are truly postmodern, we can understand that there is an objective truth behind some of these that we will never be able to verify. It is either true or false that Jesus rose from the dead. If it is true, then Christianity is true. If it is false, then Christianity is false. We will never be able to verify this claim with certainty, so we must accept our beliefs on faith. We must have faith that Jesus was the Christ, or we must deny that Jesus was the Christ. There is no other option. The problem with Postmodernity arises when we equate the truth about the resurrection of Christ to a truth such as the beauty of tatoos. One culture thinks it is true, another culture disagrees, so we claim that whatever one culture believes is true for that culture. This is fine for truths based on theoretical concepts such as beauty or courage, but it is unacceptalbe for truths based on history. It is not acceptable for Americans to disbelieve in Ghengis Khan merely because we don't want to. It is acceptable for Americans however to disbelieve in the sex-appeal of penile gourds.

So, if we answer "What is truth?" by saying "Truth is a reality." we are then left struggling to answer "What then is True?" More on that later.

Postmodernity Pt. 2

Let me start by saying that, by no means do I have this figured out. What follows is really just a stumbling, rambling attempt to fall down a pigeonhole that might answer our question. Keep in mind that the Postmodernity I am embracing to answer this question might retort that because no one is going to come at the question from the same angle, everyone will benefit in varying degrees from the answer my experience has generated.

Anyway...

The Question:

How are we to be Postmodern Christians?

Answering this huge question demands that I consider many other questions. This question begs, "How do we believe truth exists in a Postmodern world?" It also asks, "What is scripture?", "Why is Christ the only way?", "What about all those other religions that popped up around the same time and pretty much said the same thing?" and "What do we do about the people who are raised in a Muslim world and are socially conditioned to detest the very notion of a messianic Christ?" I'll try to get at the first three questions here. I'm going to answer each of these questions in separate posts. Please keep in mind while you go through the discussion that I don't know if any of my answers hold water. These are just the ideas I have.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Postmodernity

The following post is pretty much a book report on Truth is Stranger than it Used to Be by Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh. I thought by writing a response I would retain the book better, and I would get the thoughts in the book out to you guys. If you are interested enough, I would encourage you to read the book. I found it quite impressive.

In my readings I have found myself pretty much agreeing with the authors as they discuss Modernity, and Postmodernity. For those of you who do not know what the difference is, here's a quick run-down.

Modernity teaches us that through knowledge and technology, we can achieve the common goals of human kind. Technology and Science will eventually answer all of the questions about how the world works, will provide us with medicine to cure all of our ills, and will grant us a mode by which we will inhabit other worlds. Technology will generate an excess of liesure, money, food, and comfort. If we invest in these things, we will all live full happy lives. If we dedicate ourselves to these endeavors fully, we will be able to spread those same benefits to the rest of the world.

Modernity failed. Plain and simple. It is no secret that Modernity is a big fat lie. Science cannot answer all of our questions. (Scientists still do not know what gravity is.) Technology will not give us more liesure time. (I think of the steady stream of commercials starring the characiture a mother-as-motion-blur running from appointment to appointment.) Technology will not grant us long healthy lives. (I think of the modern debate over euthanasia. Technology has the ability to keep us alive, but some people are asking whether or not the life Technology can grant us is worth living.) Technology does not give us enough food. (Thousands in America are starving. Better food production does not mean better food distribution.) Technology will not make us all rich. (Bill Gates might be the richest man in the world, but America's vast technological advancement has not levelled the economic playing field.)

In the dust of the crumbling Modern hegemon, Postmodernity is the blood on the ground. The megolith of Modernity is not going to be rebuilt. The tower has been abandoned because we have realized that it doesn't do what it promised. At the base of the ruins of Modernity the blood of the fallen laborers is spreading. The puddle of Postmodernity cries against the lies of Modernity and it screams "Science is full of it, and Technology is going to over take us."

The result is a contagious postmodern viewpoint that I have found myself more and more fully believing in. Postmodernity says many things, but mainly it says that "Truth is experiential." Many anti-PoMos have said that Postmodernity is characterized by saying "There is no Truth" or "Truth is relative" I don't buy that PoMos believe that Truth is Relative. None of the PoMos I know would fall into that trap "If truth is relative then the truth that 'Truth is relative' is relative." Most PoMos I know would say that there is such a thing as truth. There might even be something such as objective truth for everyone. The problem with that objective truth is that we all see it through the windows of our own individual experiences. The result is a factioned world. Postmodernity has brought us from a global goal for the unionization of man and the global adoption of democracy, capitalism, and freedom to a worldview of allocation. We allocate truths to those willing to take them. We allocate liberty to those who desire it. Postmodernity basically teaches us that the world sits together at a smorgasbord of ideas and possibilities. We each grab for the ones we want, and no one slaps anyone's hand. If you want to eat dessert and no broccoli, by all means, you may.

The problem with this worldview is that it seems to go completely against Christianity. Christianity teaches that there is ultimate truth. Everyone must believe in Christ, and if you don't believe in Christ you go to Hell. Like it or not that's what our unfashionably elitist religion teaches. Think about it. Someone in a Postmodern world comes to the Christian Bible and he is confronted by people claiming to be mouthpieces of an allpowerful God. These people then tell stories about the glorious days when God helped them commit genocide. Then they move on to the new testament where one man suffers himself to death for all of mankind, and then the apostles advocate that those who do not believe in Christ will go to Hell, and those that do believe in Christ must abide by a life of love and forgiveness. In this life of love and fogiveness, women are told to submit to men, slavery is advocated, and children are to be subserviant to their fathers. Of course the patriarchs are told to be responsible with this authority, but the fact of the matter is, the New Testament (Like it or not) "Posits a divine authority that structures and orders the world in a certain way, attributes an authority to itself, wipes out any opposition that suggests things might be looked at differently, puts clear restrictions on personal and communal life, and then tops it all off with a divine sanction for patriarchy and slavery. And you want a postmodern person at the beginning of the twenty-first century to read this text, learn from it, and maybe even receive it as divinely inspired Scripture? I don't think so!" (Collosians Remixed, 18.)

The question becomes, how may we be Christians in a postmodern world? In a world which screams against all encompassing hegemonic worldviews, how are we to respond? How are we to approach scripture? How are we to live, to spread the message of love an acceptance in scripture without throwing away the message of necessity? How do we tell the whole world that we love and accept them while simultaneously believing in Hell?

Good questions. More on that later.