Tool is among the most amazing bands around. They are certainly not everyone's cup of tea. Their official videos are bizarre, disturbing, and do not feature the band at all. They seem anonymous. Yet, they are accomplished songwriters, rhythmically complex, and lyrically dealing with themes of alienation, the struggle to feel in a world that seeks only to destroy feeling, rage at hypocrisy, and (occasionally) offering a positive glimpse of life and its possibilities.
"Rosetta Stoned" off their release 10,000 Eyes, however, is different. The story of a man's encounter with an extra-terrestrial, it might also be the dictation of a man out of his mind. Which is it? The nice thing is the song refuses to answer the question of whether or not the encounter is real. The man is certainly insane, and admits he was on a combination of chemicals ("Dead Head chemistry") bound to make anyone perceive things . . . differently.
In short, there aren't too many songs like "Rosetta Stoned" out there. Were I given the opportunity, this song would be the first piece of evidence that Tool belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and its singer/lyricist Maynard James Keenan deserved to be our poet-laureate.
Two things. Because of the recording technique (multi-tracking the lyrics slightly out of synch), the words are printed below the video. Some of the video images, taken from the film Fire In The Sky, might be disturbing to some viewers. This being Tool, should anyone out there be offended by dirty words, you might just want to skip right on over this one.
All righty then. Picture this if you will.
10 to 2 AM, X, Yogi DMT, and a box of Krispy Kremes,
in my need-to-know post just outside Area 51
Contemplating the whole chosen people thingy when
just then a flaming stealth banana split the sky like one would hope but
never really expect to see in a place like this
Cutting right angle doughnuts on a dime and stopping right at my Birkenstocks
and me yelping... HOLY FUCKING SHIT
Holy fucking shit
Fucking shit
Holy fucking shit
Holy fucking shit
Holy fucking shit...fucking shit...fucking shit
Then the X-Files being, looking
like some kinda blue-green Jackie Chan
With Isabella Rossellini lips and breath that reeked of vanilla chig champa
Did a slow-mo Matrix decent outta the butt end of the banana vessel
and hovered above my bug-eyes,
My gaping jaw,
And my sweaty L. Ron Hubbard upper lip,
And all I could think was,
I hope Uncle Quark here doesn't notice
That I pissed my fucking pants.
So light in his way
Like an apparition,
He had me crying out,
Fuck me!
It's gotta be
the Deadhead chemistry!
The blotter got right on top of me
Got me seeing E motherfucking T!
And after calming me down with some orange slices and some fetal spooning
E.T. revealed to me his singular purpose,
He said you are the chosen one.
The one who will deliver the message.
A message of hope for those who choose to hear it
And a warning for those who do not.
Me, the chosen one
They chose me
And I didn't graduate from fucking high school!
You had better
You had better
You had better
You had better listen
Then he looked right through me
With somniferous almond eyes
Don't even know what that means
Must remember to write it down,
This is so real
Like the time Dave floated away
See my heart is pounding
'Cause this shit never happens to me!
Can't breathe right now
It was so real
Like I woke up in Wonderland
Also a bit terrifying
I don't wanna be all alone
When I tell this story
And can anyone tell me why
ya'll sound like Peanuts parents
Will I ever be coming down?
This is so real
Finally it's my lucky day
See my heart is racing
'Cause this shit never happens to me
I can't breathe right now
You believe me don't you
Please believe what I just said
See the dead ain't tourin'
And this wasn't all in my head.
See they took me by the hand
And invited me right in
Then they showed me something
I don't even know where to begin
Strapped down to my bed
Feet cold and eyes red
I'm out of my head
Am I alive am I dead
Can't remember what they said
God damn shit the bed
High eye (repeated)
I believe you (repeated, heard faintly in background)
Overwhelmed as one would be
Placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be the one
Born to bear and bring to all
The details of our ending
To write it down for all the world to see.
But I forgot my pen
Shit the bed again
Typical.
Strapped down to my bed
Feet cold and eyes red
I'm out of my head
Am I alive am I dead?
Sunkist and sudafed
Gyroscopes and infrared
Won't help the brain-dead
Can't remember what they said
God damn shit the bed
IIIIIII can't remember what they said to me
Can't remember what they said
to make me out to be a hero
Can't remember what he said
Bob help me!
Can't remember what he said
Don't know, won't know (repeated)
God damn shit the bed!
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
I Started It, So I Might As Well Try To Do It Right
This quickie post I did last night has attracted a lot more attention than I anticipated. To be honest, I think it's a mish-mash, partly the result of having been written on the fly. I think, however, that have some kind of obligation to move the discussion forward a bit.
We got a bit bogged down in ad hominem amateur-hour psycho- and sexual-analysis of Neil, something I tend not to like on principle (and, yes, I did some of it, too; doesn't make me so much a hypocrite as human). Yet, considering Neil's well-mannered, thoughtful, in-depth, and honest response, I think we have done remarkably well trying to keep the whole subject on track.
In order to do so, however, I am strapping on my virtual, rhetorical Kevlar and wading in to the thick of Neil's territory. Specifically, this comment, which I shall reprint in full, without additions or subtractions, without interspersed commentary (one of the minor annoyances of Neil's), and with the link above provided just so he can't get all upset and claim I didn't post the whole comment:
Rather than deal with the substance of the criticisms I leveled at his post on the DNA of human beings and chimpanzees (actually a pretty interesting subject, but one Neil handles poorly), he addresses the three of us in odd ways. First, he claims that he never "banned" Erudite Redneck, yet in the quoted section above, he specifically "disinvites" my Okie pal from posting at his, Neil's, blog. I don't even know what to make of this kind of inconsistency (to be generous).
As for his treatment of Alan, what he gives with the left hand, he takes away with the right. He says he wasn't banned for being gay, but for being nit-picky. He denies an obsession with gay sex, yet spends the bulk of the paragraph writing about an innocent post of Alan's on a camping trip. Only a mind fettered with odd images of what happens when gay men go camping could have turned Alan's post in to something lurid and lascivious. Yet, Neil did do, and continues to do so. He also says that Alan's belief that the Church should be open to all people, regardless of sexual orientation is a "lie".
Finally, me he dismisses off-handedly, in a way that sounds intelligent and insightful but smacks of a certain reluctance to take another person's argument on its merits. To say that my beliefs "self-destruct" is at once silly and begging for proof. Everyone's belief system destroys itself. Mine is in constant need of the most basic infrastructural investment and improvement. That is what it means to live a life of faith; continually challenged by life, when I find that something I have held to be part of my life of faith can no longer stand the strain I, obviously, discard it.
He calls us "pagans". ER is a member of the United Church of Christ, a branch of various Reformed Churches in the Congregational tradition. Alan is a Presbyterian, and I don't hold that against him. Like Neil, I am a United Methodist, and my wife is senior pastor at Poplar Grove United Methodist Church, Poplar Grove, IL. I don't know how that qualifies as paganism, but there you go.
Anyway, I print all this not so much to have the last word, but to redirect the conversation to the substantive issue that began this discussion. I am asking those who have participated in this discussion to do so with an eye on that issue. I will not delete comments; I will not ask people to stop posting. I only ask that a serious subject be addressed in a serious manner (well, OK, there can be humor involved). There is no mandate here to like, or perhaps even respect, one another. I am asking that we deal with the issue at hand.
I realize Neil will in all likelihood not darken my doorway. More's he pity, because I am offering an opportunity for him to revise and extend his remarks in his original post for us. I also think, in all fairness, that he does need to address the personal comments he directed at us. I also think he needs to address his . . . inconsistencies . . . that have been pointed out. I, for one, will be happy to admit I am wrong if evidence is given to show that I was, indeed wrong.
Anyway, there it is, and let the games begin. I hope some games begin.
We got a bit bogged down in ad hominem amateur-hour psycho- and sexual-analysis of Neil, something I tend not to like on principle (and, yes, I did some of it, too; doesn't make me so much a hypocrite as human). Yet, considering Neil's well-mannered, thoughtful, in-depth, and honest response, I think we have done remarkably well trying to keep the whole subject on track.
In order to do so, however, I am strapping on my virtual, rhetorical Kevlar and wading in to the thick of Neil's territory. Specifically, this comment, which I shall reprint in full, without additions or subtractions, without interspersed commentary (one of the minor annoyances of Neil's), and with the link above provided just so he can't get all upset and claim I didn't post the whole comment:
ER, Alan and Geoffrey,
Thanks for making my day. I’ve been laughing on and off since clicking on the incoming link from Geoffrey’s post. Wow, what an obsession! But I must say I am cheered. It is a best case scenario: You are reading your “enemy’s” writings here and I don’t have to waste time with your comments.
ER, you are seriously mistaken about me saying I would edit your comments. What I said in my last email was this (go check for yourself): “I’ll just moderate you and approve what I feel like. I just wanted to give you fair warning.” That was after I had said, “I let you have the last word, but please don’t comment again. Nothing personal, but I’m tired of having the same conversation over and over. It’s all been said. We’re both wasting our time, and we both have better things to do. Feel free to criticize me all you like from your blog.” ER, you’re a nice guy and probably a great neighbor and friend. I wish you well.
Alan, just for the record, you weren’t banned for being gay, or liberal, or a phony (again, I love it when a guy who blogs on the joys of gay camping and hanging out with lots of naked guys in a pool - including his “husband” - likes to pose as an orthodox Christian. I mean, pro-gay theology is bad enough but even if you bought those lies you couldn’t justify that kind of behavior. And don’t deny it and say I’m lying. I zinged you on that back in the Wesley Blog days and you came back with a lame “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet line. I do believe what you wrote on your own blog.). I knew all those traits before. I just got tired of your endless nit-picking. It sucks the fun out of blogging. And you saying I’m obsessed with gays is comical. Just because I blog on the most divisive issue in the church doesn’t mean I’m obsessed. By that definition I’m obsessed with pro-life, theology, evangelism, etc., and if you look at where I spend my time I’m much more obsessed with my wife, my kids, prison ministry, CareNet, church, Bible study, mission trips, giving, prayer, accountabilty groups, guitar, etc.
Wow, I’m really an obsessive guy! Thanks for the free diagnosis.
Geoffrey, your bits typically self-destruct with po-mo reasoning. I’ve found it is easiest to let you do your own refutations.
Seriously, I hope you guys see the light someday and repent of your pagan belief systems. In the mean time, keep reading here! And gossip all you like about me at your places.
Rather than deal with the substance of the criticisms I leveled at his post on the DNA of human beings and chimpanzees (actually a pretty interesting subject, but one Neil handles poorly), he addresses the three of us in odd ways. First, he claims that he never "banned" Erudite Redneck, yet in the quoted section above, he specifically "disinvites" my Okie pal from posting at his, Neil's, blog. I don't even know what to make of this kind of inconsistency (to be generous).
As for his treatment of Alan, what he gives with the left hand, he takes away with the right. He says he wasn't banned for being gay, but for being nit-picky. He denies an obsession with gay sex, yet spends the bulk of the paragraph writing about an innocent post of Alan's on a camping trip. Only a mind fettered with odd images of what happens when gay men go camping could have turned Alan's post in to something lurid and lascivious. Yet, Neil did do, and continues to do so. He also says that Alan's belief that the Church should be open to all people, regardless of sexual orientation is a "lie".
Finally, me he dismisses off-handedly, in a way that sounds intelligent and insightful but smacks of a certain reluctance to take another person's argument on its merits. To say that my beliefs "self-destruct" is at once silly and begging for proof. Everyone's belief system destroys itself. Mine is in constant need of the most basic infrastructural investment and improvement. That is what it means to live a life of faith; continually challenged by life, when I find that something I have held to be part of my life of faith can no longer stand the strain I, obviously, discard it.
He calls us "pagans". ER is a member of the United Church of Christ, a branch of various Reformed Churches in the Congregational tradition. Alan is a Presbyterian, and I don't hold that against him. Like Neil, I am a United Methodist, and my wife is senior pastor at Poplar Grove United Methodist Church, Poplar Grove, IL. I don't know how that qualifies as paganism, but there you go.
Anyway, I print all this not so much to have the last word, but to redirect the conversation to the substantive issue that began this discussion. I am asking those who have participated in this discussion to do so with an eye on that issue. I will not delete comments; I will not ask people to stop posting. I only ask that a serious subject be addressed in a serious manner (well, OK, there can be humor involved). There is no mandate here to like, or perhaps even respect, one another. I am asking that we deal with the issue at hand.
I realize Neil will in all likelihood not darken my doorway. More's he pity, because I am offering an opportunity for him to revise and extend his remarks in his original post for us. I also think, in all fairness, that he does need to address the personal comments he directed at us. I also think he needs to address his . . . inconsistencies . . . that have been pointed out. I, for one, will be happy to admit I am wrong if evidence is given to show that I was, indeed wrong.
Anyway, there it is, and let the games begin. I hope some games begin.
Outdoing Oneself In Absurdity
Oh dear God in the most high heaven. Charles Krauthammer's column in today's Washington Post has perhaps the silliest, most absurd line I have read by a so-called "serious" political pundit. This is an instance where reading just one line makes me want to stop, because the line is so silly, the rest of the column might actually be kind of good. If you bottom out early, you have no where to go but up. I will present the wind-up, then the pitch, in italics (added by me, of course):
One can earn money. One can earn a reputation. One can earn a nickname. One does not "earn" a national monument in another country.
Now, I realize this is literal nitpicking. Or, at least sounds like it. Yet, if we are to take Krauthammer to be speaking metaphorically, it might be important to rephrase what he intended, as follows:
Is that true, however? Is it necessary to have achieved . . . something . . . in . . . someone's . . . eyes before one should be allowed to do something that others have done before? What, after all, had John Kennedy done when he stood at the Gate and said, in very bad German, "Ich bin ein Berliner!"? What had Ronald Reagan done when he stood in the same spot and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"? Obviously, Kennedy wasn't really a resident of West Berlin, fenced in by a foreign power (ironically enough, the wall was built to keep the East Germans from getting in, not West Germans from heading east; old satellite photos taken before the wall fell showed East Germany to be pretty dark, except for a small smudge of light - West Berlin). Reagan's exhortation to Gorbachev had an ironic coda, because Gorbachev (and Reagan) had nothing at all to do with the tearing down. The people of East Berlin did it on their own.
Krauthammer's notion that one can only "do something" once one has "done something" else is silly. Barack Obama happens to be the de facto Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States. Germany is a united country, an ally, and the plaza (or, to be properly German, der plast) around the Gate is a nice wide open space that would hold a sizable crowd. One should assume that Obama, being a historic figure, would attract a sizable crowd. Only in the minds of someone as silly as Charles Krauthammer does the sentence above have any meaning or significance.
If there's anything more in the column worth mentioning, let me know.
Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.
What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn.
One can earn money. One can earn a reputation. One can earn a nickname. One does not "earn" a national monument in another country.
Now, I realize this is literal nitpicking. Or, at least sounds like it. Yet, if we are to take Krauthammer to be speaking metaphorically, it might be important to rephrase what he intended, as follows:
What Obama does not seem to understand is that only after proving oneself should one be allowed to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
Is that true, however? Is it necessary to have achieved . . . something . . . in . . . someone's . . . eyes before one should be allowed to do something that others have done before? What, after all, had John Kennedy done when he stood at the Gate and said, in very bad German, "Ich bin ein Berliner!"? What had Ronald Reagan done when he stood in the same spot and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"? Obviously, Kennedy wasn't really a resident of West Berlin, fenced in by a foreign power (ironically enough, the wall was built to keep the East Germans from getting in, not West Germans from heading east; old satellite photos taken before the wall fell showed East Germany to be pretty dark, except for a small smudge of light - West Berlin). Reagan's exhortation to Gorbachev had an ironic coda, because Gorbachev (and Reagan) had nothing at all to do with the tearing down. The people of East Berlin did it on their own.
Krauthammer's notion that one can only "do something" once one has "done something" else is silly. Barack Obama happens to be the de facto Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States. Germany is a united country, an ally, and the plaza (or, to be properly German, der plast) around the Gate is a nice wide open space that would hold a sizable crowd. One should assume that Obama, being a historic figure, would attract a sizable crowd. Only in the minds of someone as silly as Charles Krauthammer does the sentence above have any meaning or significance.
If there's anything more in the column worth mentioning, let me know.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
I'm Not Sure What To Say About This (UPDATED With Additions)
I have a confession to make. I have chided ER in the past about his occasional need to travel to fundamentalist Christian websites and get embroiled in arguments. Yet, I, too, commit the same sin. Neil's 4Simpson's blog is a favorite of mine to visit.
Why?
If I knew the answer, maybe I would avoid it.
Anyway, I saw this post, and was wondering what, exactly, Neil's point was in posting it. The title is misleading, because it attempts to dismiss an article that points out the fact, well-known among scientists and those scientifically literate, that human beings and chimps share all but %1.5 percent of their genetic code. That "45,000,000" number represents the differences. Now, this has been known for some time, and is unremarkable. This makes chimps far closer, genetically, to human beings than any other living creature, which is important for all sorts of reasons.
Yet, Neil, being a creationist, attempts to make something out of nothing here. The analogy he uses as a closer is about as dumb as it gets.
Neil also notes that there are common genetic strains among all life on earth. Nothing surprising there, since the biochemistry that governs evolution would provide for carrying all sorts of material that is just baggage. Birds have genes for teeth, yet those genes are chemically "switched off"; scientists have developed birds with teeth by turning those genes on.
Again, this is no big deal.
Was Neil's point that this article was not scientific in some way? Was his point concerning what he calls "the unproven assumption" about common ancestry for humans and chimps? Since the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is far closer than any other related species, it seems to me pretty clear this proves the whole common ancestry thing. It isn't about using an unproven assumption; it's about using science to test a theory.
Now, I know that Neil says truth is correspondence to reality. He and I have gone down that road before. Since this is a case of reality not corresponding to Neil's understanding of truth, I just wonder how he deals with it?
Oh, that's right. He wrote this post to show that he deals with it by showing off his lack of scientific literacy.
UPDATE: Maybe this isn't fair. Maybe it isn't even nice. The following partial paragraph contains what, I am quite sure, Neil accepts as devastating, unanswered questions that refute the whole concept of evolution.
The scientific ignorance behind these questions is staggering. The idea that "only" could be applied to the phrase "a few million years" by a human being genetically programmed to live no more than 120, and limited to less than that by a variety of environmental factors is surprising. Human beings think of a couple millennia as a long time. Even a couple centuries is almost beyond our comprehension. A hundred millennia? A thousand?
The whole "male and female" thing just defies credulity. Does he honestly believe this is some kind of devastating question? If so, that only shows how truly ignorant of contemporary science he is.
How sad.
Why?
If I knew the answer, maybe I would avoid it.
Anyway, I saw this post, and was wondering what, exactly, Neil's point was in posting it. The title is misleading, because it attempts to dismiss an article that points out the fact, well-known among scientists and those scientifically literate, that human beings and chimps share all but %1.5 percent of their genetic code. That "45,000,000" number represents the differences. Now, this has been known for some time, and is unremarkable. This makes chimps far closer, genetically, to human beings than any other living creature, which is important for all sorts of reasons.
Yet, Neil, being a creationist, attempts to make something out of nothing here. The analogy he uses as a closer is about as dumb as it gets.
Nearly all cars have 4 wheels. That doesn’t mean they were genetically related, just that the designers have a model that works well so they replicate it. Perhaps next time the Chronicle will have headlines stating that “chimpanzees and humans are both carbon based life forms” or “Houston is hot in the summer.”
Neil also notes that there are common genetic strains among all life on earth. Nothing surprising there, since the biochemistry that governs evolution would provide for carrying all sorts of material that is just baggage. Birds have genes for teeth, yet those genes are chemically "switched off"; scientists have developed birds with teeth by turning those genes on.
Again, this is no big deal.
Was Neil's point that this article was not scientific in some way? Was his point concerning what he calls "the unproven assumption" about common ancestry for humans and chimps? Since the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is far closer than any other related species, it seems to me pretty clear this proves the whole common ancestry thing. It isn't about using an unproven assumption; it's about using science to test a theory.
Now, I know that Neil says truth is correspondence to reality. He and I have gone down that road before. Since this is a case of reality not corresponding to Neil's understanding of truth, I just wonder how he deals with it?
Oh, that's right. He wrote this post to show that he deals with it by showing off his lack of scientific literacy.
UPDATE: Maybe this isn't fair. Maybe it isn't even nice. The following partial paragraph contains what, I am quite sure, Neil accepts as devastating, unanswered questions that refute the whole concept of evolution.
It would have been nice if they had explained how the DNA could have tens of millions of changes in only a few million years (according to their theory), as well as how it kept changing at the same pace throughout the human population without us veering off into multiple species. Or if it changed at a rapid pace, why did it do so for some and not others? And how did the males and females just happen to evolve similarly and simultaneously?
The scientific ignorance behind these questions is staggering. The idea that "only" could be applied to the phrase "a few million years" by a human being genetically programmed to live no more than 120, and limited to less than that by a variety of environmental factors is surprising. Human beings think of a couple millennia as a long time. Even a couple centuries is almost beyond our comprehension. A hundred millennia? A thousand?
The whole "male and female" thing just defies credulity. Does he honestly believe this is some kind of devastating question? If so, that only shows how truly ignorant of contemporary science he is.
How sad.
Some Liberal Theological Thoughts On What Happens When We Die
This is part of a larger project, I guess, on giving a positive statement concerning what I believe. Rather than be all critical, or at least only critical, I thought it might be important to talk about what I believe in a positive manner.
One subject that really gets me - and I am serious about this - is the whole issue of heaven. When I was but a wee little lad, I wondered where, exactly, in the Bible people found detailed information on what happens when we die. All this "believers go to heaven, non-believers go to hell" business has no basis in Scripture. I see no way one can even tease it out through an interpretive scheme.
The best counter-argument I come up with is to discuss the passage in which Jesus debates the Sadducees on the resurrection. At the time Jesus lived, two of the main bodies of Jewish thought were the Pharisees (with whom Jesus often sparred, but mostly over details rather than in any serious break) and the Sadducees. The latter were a group that held official posts in the Temple. They were seen as compromised politically and religiously because the Temple was desecrated by the image of the Emperor in the forecourt and the Roman flag flying over the top (for details, see N. T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God). A main difference between the two groups was that the Pharisees held a belief in the resurrection of the dead; the Sadducees denied such a belief. When questioned about the resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees got all literal and legal and asked Jesus what happens to a man after the resurrection who has remarried because his first wife predeceased him; to whom is he married? Like most literalists, they thought they had him there . . .
Jesus responds by telling the Sadducees they were thinking of the time after the resurrection in the wrong way. The old rules will not apply.
Paul, educated by the renowned Pharisaical rabbi Gamaliel, embraced he idea of the resurrection of the dead, and expands upon the notion, in most detail in 1 Corinthians 15.
As Jurgen Moltmann points out in the first section of his The Coming of God, in which he deals with the question of personal salvation in light of Christian eschatology, even these detailed accounts leave many questions unanswered and unanswerable. He wrestled gamely with them, but the results are as much speculation as anything.
These detailed discussions do not contain anything about pearly gates. They do not speak of a place in the clouds. The "streets of gold" reference comes from the New Jerusalem passages in Revelations, which deals with the final consummation of history.
I will be honest enough to say that, even though I say it every time I recite the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed, I am troubled by the whole "resurrection of the dead" thing, Paul's argument in 1 Cor. 15 notwithstanding. Perhaps it's true. Perhaps not. Yet, I feel far better being troubled by my misgivings over an actual historical doctrine of the church than I am about whether I will float away on wings to a cloud city or spend eternity stoking the furnaces of hell. These are myths, the syncretistic result of melding various incongruous non-Christian myths and beliefs about the afterlife and baptizing them.
The clearest thing I get out of a reading of Scripture about what happens when we die is this. At some point, those who have died "in Christ" will be raised from the dead, gather around the throne of the Father and the Lamb who was slain, and sing a hymn of praise. Those who are not so lucky get chucked in to the pit reserved for the devil and his angels, but once that bundling and chucking occurs, the entire thing gets wiped away, annihilated. Since the alternative - that when we die, our bodies are worm and fly and bacteria food, and anything that makes us uniquely "I" becomes energy for new life on a bit of a smaller scale - results in the same thing as the Bible's description of what happens to unregenerate at the end of time (annihilation, the removal from existence), I fail to see how this is, well, scary or frightening. Since I will be no more, worrying, caring, being sad about it, mourning my loss - these are among the myriad things on the endless list of things I will no longer be doing. Indeed, it makes no logical sense to speak of an "I" in this state at all.
More to the point (at least for me), is that I really am not all that vexed by the question of what happens after we die (if that sentence has any meaning at all). I do not believe that is why Jesus taught what he did, and suffered and died. I do not believe the Church exists to make sure I, or anyone else, ends up with a harp floating on a cloud. I do not believe that a God defined by the prodigal grace we see in Jesus would, through some arbitrary decision unrelated to any act or decision on my part, would separate us from that prodigal grace.
I suppose spending time writing what I believe about something I don't think about all that much might sound odd, even self-refuting. Yet, final questions, including about our own finality, are part and parcel of living. Different belief systems offer different answers, and I really don't know how to deal with them except to say the Bible offers this as an answer, but whether one believes the answer (and its underlying premises) is neither here nor there. Since all we need do is confess that we believe Jesus is the unique manifestation of God for all humanity, I really don't see what the big deal is.
One subject that really gets me - and I am serious about this - is the whole issue of heaven. When I was but a wee little lad, I wondered where, exactly, in the Bible people found detailed information on what happens when we die. All this "believers go to heaven, non-believers go to hell" business has no basis in Scripture. I see no way one can even tease it out through an interpretive scheme.
The best counter-argument I come up with is to discuss the passage in which Jesus debates the Sadducees on the resurrection. At the time Jesus lived, two of the main bodies of Jewish thought were the Pharisees (with whom Jesus often sparred, but mostly over details rather than in any serious break) and the Sadducees. The latter were a group that held official posts in the Temple. They were seen as compromised politically and religiously because the Temple was desecrated by the image of the Emperor in the forecourt and the Roman flag flying over the top (for details, see N. T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God). A main difference between the two groups was that the Pharisees held a belief in the resurrection of the dead; the Sadducees denied such a belief. When questioned about the resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees got all literal and legal and asked Jesus what happens to a man after the resurrection who has remarried because his first wife predeceased him; to whom is he married? Like most literalists, they thought they had him there . . .
Jesus responds by telling the Sadducees they were thinking of the time after the resurrection in the wrong way. The old rules will not apply.
Paul, educated by the renowned Pharisaical rabbi Gamaliel, embraced he idea of the resurrection of the dead, and expands upon the notion, in most detail in 1 Corinthians 15.
As Jurgen Moltmann points out in the first section of his The Coming of God, in which he deals with the question of personal salvation in light of Christian eschatology, even these detailed accounts leave many questions unanswered and unanswerable. He wrestled gamely with them, but the results are as much speculation as anything.
These detailed discussions do not contain anything about pearly gates. They do not speak of a place in the clouds. The "streets of gold" reference comes from the New Jerusalem passages in Revelations, which deals with the final consummation of history.
I will be honest enough to say that, even though I say it every time I recite the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed, I am troubled by the whole "resurrection of the dead" thing, Paul's argument in 1 Cor. 15 notwithstanding. Perhaps it's true. Perhaps not. Yet, I feel far better being troubled by my misgivings over an actual historical doctrine of the church than I am about whether I will float away on wings to a cloud city or spend eternity stoking the furnaces of hell. These are myths, the syncretistic result of melding various incongruous non-Christian myths and beliefs about the afterlife and baptizing them.
The clearest thing I get out of a reading of Scripture about what happens when we die is this. At some point, those who have died "in Christ" will be raised from the dead, gather around the throne of the Father and the Lamb who was slain, and sing a hymn of praise. Those who are not so lucky get chucked in to the pit reserved for the devil and his angels, but once that bundling and chucking occurs, the entire thing gets wiped away, annihilated. Since the alternative - that when we die, our bodies are worm and fly and bacteria food, and anything that makes us uniquely "I" becomes energy for new life on a bit of a smaller scale - results in the same thing as the Bible's description of what happens to unregenerate at the end of time (annihilation, the removal from existence), I fail to see how this is, well, scary or frightening. Since I will be no more, worrying, caring, being sad about it, mourning my loss - these are among the myriad things on the endless list of things I will no longer be doing. Indeed, it makes no logical sense to speak of an "I" in this state at all.
More to the point (at least for me), is that I really am not all that vexed by the question of what happens after we die (if that sentence has any meaning at all). I do not believe that is why Jesus taught what he did, and suffered and died. I do not believe the Church exists to make sure I, or anyone else, ends up with a harp floating on a cloud. I do not believe that a God defined by the prodigal grace we see in Jesus would, through some arbitrary decision unrelated to any act or decision on my part, would separate us from that prodigal grace.
I suppose spending time writing what I believe about something I don't think about all that much might sound odd, even self-refuting. Yet, final questions, including about our own finality, are part and parcel of living. Different belief systems offer different answers, and I really don't know how to deal with them except to say the Bible offers this as an answer, but whether one believes the answer (and its underlying premises) is neither here nor there. Since all we need do is confess that we believe Jesus is the unique manifestation of God for all humanity, I really don't see what the big deal is.
Since Bush Dirties Everything He Comes Near . . .
There has been quite an uproar in my denomination over the decision to put the Bush Library (what possible books would be included in such an institution?) at Southern Methodist University. At General Conference there was a resolution demanding the South Central Jurisdiction do something about this travesty. Well, the report came back, and it seems the denomination's hands are tied.
Apparently, SMU went and signed all sorts of contracts and legal documents that limit the ability of the denomination to keep this pus-filled boil off one of the flagship institutions of higher learning our denomination has going. While some members of the SCJ committee have said that "it's not over", the best they can hope for is to put up some firewall to protect the "integrity" of SMU from the threat of infiltration by an institution dedicated to furthering the Bush-view of the world.
Since Bush has no respect for the law, I see no reason why the UMC should. Get out from under the weight of this contract, by hook or by crook. Keep that monstrosity away from anything having to do with my beloved denomination.
Apparently, SMU went and signed all sorts of contracts and legal documents that limit the ability of the denomination to keep this pus-filled boil off one of the flagship institutions of higher learning our denomination has going. While some members of the SCJ committee have said that "it's not over", the best they can hope for is to put up some firewall to protect the "integrity" of SMU from the threat of infiltration by an institution dedicated to furthering the Bush-view of the world.
Since Bush has no respect for the law, I see no reason why the UMC should. Get out from under the weight of this contract, by hook or by crook. Keep that monstrosity away from anything having to do with my beloved denomination.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Some Liberal Theological Thoughts On The Bible
I suppose a bit of context is in order here. Over at Marshall Art, they're all in a dither about a stupid lawsuit a man is bringing against two Bible publishers. I fail to see what's to get upset about, but then again, I don't view the Bible in quite the same way as Marshall and some of his commenters.
As a source of authority for the Christian Church and its teaching, the Bible has no equal. All the silly, meaningless debates about what, precisely, it means to call the Bible "the word of God" are beside the point; the issue is, simply put, one of where we rest our case for what we believe. It took several hundred years for the final canon of the Bible to be settled, after serious disputes and not a little robe-renting. Fifteen hundred years later, Martin Luther took the extraordinary step of removing from the Bible several books, and portions thereof, that he felt had not place, including the wonderful book of Tobit, and the Wisdom of Solomon. He also had issues with the Epistle of James (all that works-righteousness stuff) and the Apocalypse (it was so dense and confusing even a trained scholar like Luther had problem figuring it out). Since then, we've had the LDS add an entire Testament, and the general trend to downplay the Hebrew Scriptures (all those New Testaments with the Psalms, you know).
There is nothing magical about the Bible. There is nothing inside the Bible that creates through reading some instantaneous change. People get out of the Bible what they put in; if they are reading looking for wisdom or insight or some key to a particular problem, more than likely they will find an answer. If they are looking for the inerrant Truth about Life, the Universe, and Everything, provided they are willing to suspend all that we now know about the way the world works, they will find it. Neither of these things are reasons to venerate the Bible; neither of these approaches to scripture make it what it is.
Simply put, the Bible and the Church were birthed together. What the earliest adherents of a belief that, in Jesus, something unique and unprecedented in human history had happened did was set down their impressions of what this event meant. For some, even most of the people then alive, it meant nothing at all because they had never heard of it. For those exposed to it, some found it silly, some found it blasphemous, and some found it life-transforming. These last bequeathed to us a testimony of their own struggles with what, exactly, this meant for them. It has been offered to us as a guide. No more, no less.
Making more of the Bible than it is has been a curious pastime among many Christians. Whether that means imbuing it with magical powers or seeing it as some kind of magic wand to be waved for our edification, instruction, and judgment, we are transferring to the Bible qualities that reside in God alone. The Bible is "Holy" because it is a testimony of who God is. It is not "Holy" in and for itself. The Bible is the source of our understanding of what it means to be a Christian because human beings need a source.
I suppose in the eyes of some this diminishes the Bible in some way. I suppose I should be honest and say I don't understand why.
As a source of authority for the Christian Church and its teaching, the Bible has no equal. All the silly, meaningless debates about what, precisely, it means to call the Bible "the word of God" are beside the point; the issue is, simply put, one of where we rest our case for what we believe. It took several hundred years for the final canon of the Bible to be settled, after serious disputes and not a little robe-renting. Fifteen hundred years later, Martin Luther took the extraordinary step of removing from the Bible several books, and portions thereof, that he felt had not place, including the wonderful book of Tobit, and the Wisdom of Solomon. He also had issues with the Epistle of James (all that works-righteousness stuff) and the Apocalypse (it was so dense and confusing even a trained scholar like Luther had problem figuring it out). Since then, we've had the LDS add an entire Testament, and the general trend to downplay the Hebrew Scriptures (all those New Testaments with the Psalms, you know).
There is nothing magical about the Bible. There is nothing inside the Bible that creates through reading some instantaneous change. People get out of the Bible what they put in; if they are reading looking for wisdom or insight or some key to a particular problem, more than likely they will find an answer. If they are looking for the inerrant Truth about Life, the Universe, and Everything, provided they are willing to suspend all that we now know about the way the world works, they will find it. Neither of these things are reasons to venerate the Bible; neither of these approaches to scripture make it what it is.
Simply put, the Bible and the Church were birthed together. What the earliest adherents of a belief that, in Jesus, something unique and unprecedented in human history had happened did was set down their impressions of what this event meant. For some, even most of the people then alive, it meant nothing at all because they had never heard of it. For those exposed to it, some found it silly, some found it blasphemous, and some found it life-transforming. These last bequeathed to us a testimony of their own struggles with what, exactly, this meant for them. It has been offered to us as a guide. No more, no less.
Making more of the Bible than it is has been a curious pastime among many Christians. Whether that means imbuing it with magical powers or seeing it as some kind of magic wand to be waved for our edification, instruction, and judgment, we are transferring to the Bible qualities that reside in God alone. The Bible is "Holy" because it is a testimony of who God is. It is not "Holy" in and for itself. The Bible is the source of our understanding of what it means to be a Christian because human beings need a source.
I suppose in the eyes of some this diminishes the Bible in some way. I suppose I should be honest and say I don't understand why.
Beyond Satire
In light of the New Yorker cover kerfuffle, I thought it would be interesting to investigate the reaction of some seriously funny folks to our right-wing fellow-Americans. Thus we turn to this post yesterday at Sadly, No!, in which Brad, in the midst of attempting to make fun of some seriously stupid words and acts lets loose a "Dean Scream" and pronounces himself at the end of his rope:
This is the problem with satire and humor. Insanity isn't funny. It's sad, and it's frightening, and that there are those who take insane people seriously isn't funny, but frightening. Whether it's Michelle Malkin or the folks at RedState or the usual suspects who get a coal-raking at Sadly,No!, there just comes a point where laughing at them makes no sense, because they honestly believe that the satirical things said about them are true.
There are people on the right who honestly believe that Barack Obama is a closet terrorist, who will invite more plane-flying terrorists to take down our buildings, institute shari'a, and abort all Christian fetuses in the 38th week. There are people on the right who honestly believe the Democratic Party hates the United States, despises our military, and would subsume our Constitution under the supranational authority of the United Nations. There are people on the right who actually believe that George Bush has never lied to the American people, that our current Iraqi adventure is a noble good that has accomplished so much, including recently discovering the true whereabouts of Sadam Hussein's WMD arsenal, thus legitimating the entire enterprise.
I could go on and on with the list of insane things people on the right believe - I recently asked an interlocutor what, exactly, is "the homosexual agenda" I keep hearing about - but I hope my point is clear. It is impossible to laugh at people who, when confronted with the fact that the things they proclaim are true are only worth mocking turn around and say, "But, but . . . it's all true!", we have reached a point where the relationship between what occurs in the real world and what occurs in the minds of those who want to be a part of our public discourse has been severed so completely that repairing the damage seems beyond hope.
There are those who see the New Yorker cover as depicting reality. That is why the Obama campaign is miffed. Yes, it was an attempt at humor. The problem is, for some, this is no joke, but a clear and present danger to our nation and the world; Obama has to fight this kind of crap coming from the right on a daily basis. Why should he have to deal with an attempted lampoon of the right that only reinforces this nonsense?
I find it interesting that so many on the right paint liberals as humorless. There was a time, I think, when earnest lefties and liberals drew some imaginary line and said, "Thou shalt not make light of [insert pet project/issue]", and that only made people see them as humorless. Thus, George Carlin, in an attempt to drive home the point, did an entire routine in which he tried to show that rape could be the subject of humor. Tasteless? Probably. Unlike John McCain's stupid joke unearthed yesterday, the difference is the Carlin was trying to make a point, whereas McCain was merely being an ass.
The major difference, as I see it, is this. In the past, these "humorless" liberals were young, idealistic folks who saw attempted humor at their expense as an attack upon their views. The right, currently, sees satirical takedowns as confirmation of the things they say and believe. They don't get the joke, because they don't realize they are the joke.
* …I actually find it a very enlightening piece of commentary that exposes the Nazi Left’s tendency to coddle our enem…
YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OK, I can’t take it anymore. The layers of sheer insanity on display at all of these right-wing blogs is really getting me down, to the point where satirizing them becomes nothing more than a joyless, reflexive compulsion. It seems that every time I come up with some ridiculous new way to lampoon these crazy fools, they somehow manage to write something that make Hunter Thompson’s infamous mescaline-and-ether binges look positively tame. Life is horrible.
This is the problem with satire and humor. Insanity isn't funny. It's sad, and it's frightening, and that there are those who take insane people seriously isn't funny, but frightening. Whether it's Michelle Malkin or the folks at RedState or the usual suspects who get a coal-raking at Sadly,No!, there just comes a point where laughing at them makes no sense, because they honestly believe that the satirical things said about them are true.
There are people on the right who honestly believe that Barack Obama is a closet terrorist, who will invite more plane-flying terrorists to take down our buildings, institute shari'a, and abort all Christian fetuses in the 38th week. There are people on the right who honestly believe the Democratic Party hates the United States, despises our military, and would subsume our Constitution under the supranational authority of the United Nations. There are people on the right who actually believe that George Bush has never lied to the American people, that our current Iraqi adventure is a noble good that has accomplished so much, including recently discovering the true whereabouts of Sadam Hussein's WMD arsenal, thus legitimating the entire enterprise.
I could go on and on with the list of insane things people on the right believe - I recently asked an interlocutor what, exactly, is "the homosexual agenda" I keep hearing about - but I hope my point is clear. It is impossible to laugh at people who, when confronted with the fact that the things they proclaim are true are only worth mocking turn around and say, "But, but . . . it's all true!", we have reached a point where the relationship between what occurs in the real world and what occurs in the minds of those who want to be a part of our public discourse has been severed so completely that repairing the damage seems beyond hope.
There are those who see the New Yorker cover as depicting reality. That is why the Obama campaign is miffed. Yes, it was an attempt at humor. The problem is, for some, this is no joke, but a clear and present danger to our nation and the world; Obama has to fight this kind of crap coming from the right on a daily basis. Why should he have to deal with an attempted lampoon of the right that only reinforces this nonsense?
I find it interesting that so many on the right paint liberals as humorless. There was a time, I think, when earnest lefties and liberals drew some imaginary line and said, "Thou shalt not make light of [insert pet project/issue]", and that only made people see them as humorless. Thus, George Carlin, in an attempt to drive home the point, did an entire routine in which he tried to show that rape could be the subject of humor. Tasteless? Probably. Unlike John McCain's stupid joke unearthed yesterday, the difference is the Carlin was trying to make a point, whereas McCain was merely being an ass.
The major difference, as I see it, is this. In the past, these "humorless" liberals were young, idealistic folks who saw attempted humor at their expense as an attack upon their views. The right, currently, sees satirical takedowns as confirmation of the things they say and believe. They don't get the joke, because they don't realize they are the joke.
To Prove A Point
I said the other day that I tend to gravitate to sad, melancholy songs. That is true, but I also love real good love songs. I have had this song going through my head for the past couple days, oddly enough, so I thought I would share it, first, to prove that I'm not exactly a sour puss. Second, this is one of those great songs that disprove the notion that music in the 1970's sucked. In fact, some of the greatest music ever recorded made it out of giant record companies in those days, partly because they were flush with cash and could invest time and money in such a variety and still see a return on investment.
The best love songs weren't the "power ballads" of the 1980's. The best love songs came earlier, and most of them were soul ballads. The stupid, bland "Adult Contemporary" sound is an attempt to make a formula out of what is really a hit-or-miss proposition. They don't make songs like this anymore, and that's OK, because this song is already out there, and it's perfect for dancing slow, or other, more private moments. This is the Manhattan's with "Shining Star":
The best love songs weren't the "power ballads" of the 1980's. The best love songs came earlier, and most of them were soul ballads. The stupid, bland "Adult Contemporary" sound is an attempt to make a formula out of what is really a hit-or-miss proposition. They don't make songs like this anymore, and that's OK, because this song is already out there, and it's perfect for dancing slow, or other, more private moments. This is the Manhattan's with "Shining Star":
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
It Isn't Nothing, But I Don't Have Much
The President had a news conference today. I think his approval ratings dropped while the ten people who watched it paid attention. Why does the press even cover this joker anymore? Seriously. If we ignore him, maybe he'll take the rest of his Presidency off, staying down in Crawford and looking over his poll numbers from 2002.
An old "joke" of McCain's surfaced today.
What a despicable human being. If this is the best the Republican's can do, I do hope they are ready for a beating. If Obama doesn't win at least 35 states and have a margin of at least 75 electoral votes, I will consider it a McCain victory.
Finally, John Boehner managed to prove how stupid he is, and by extension most conservatives. Eight years ago, we were told "the adults" would be in charge when the Republicans went on to victory. These aren't adults, but emotionally stunted child-men and -women, who feel quite free to just get up and say and do whatever they want without any remorse, without any sense of decency, without any need to worry about accountability for their actions. Only children act that way.
Rant over.
An old "joke" of McCain's surfaced today.
Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, “Where is that marvelous ape?”
What a despicable human being. If this is the best the Republican's can do, I do hope they are ready for a beating. If Obama doesn't win at least 35 states and have a margin of at least 75 electoral votes, I will consider it a McCain victory.
Finally, John Boehner managed to prove how stupid he is, and by extension most conservatives. Eight years ago, we were told "the adults" would be in charge when the Republicans went on to victory. These aren't adults, but emotionally stunted child-men and -women, who feel quite free to just get up and say and do whatever they want without any remorse, without any sense of decency, without any need to worry about accountability for their actions. Only children act that way.
Rant over.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Music Monday
Ask and you shall receive (except for "La Vida Loca" and Sheryl Crowe, so sorry). First up is DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince before Will Smith tried acting, with "Summertime":
I always liked Toad the West Sprocket. Just the band's name was pretty cool (even more cool that Hootie and the Blow Fish). I liked their melancholy songs. I guess I just gravitate to that kind of thing. My only problem was they were lumped with the whole phony "alternative rock" thing in the early and mid 1990's, and they weren't at all. I like this song because it traces the deterioration of a relationship in a realistic way. The man is mourning the fact that his lover and he just cannot connect, "Something's always wrong," even though he can't see it. It's a very sad song, in many ways, because it tells a real story, rather than relying on cliches. I especially like the image of the guy beating himself with a "penance rope". How many of us have flagellated ourselves needlessly? This song is a good antidote to romanticism.
I liked Smashmouth until I saw them on Letterman at some point. I realized watching them they couldn't do it live. But, there's just something fun about their music, especially this song that is all retro late-60's psychedlia (the organ and guitar remind me of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky"):
Next week I would like to do something completely different - recent or contemporary performers of classical music (no, I do not mean Sarah Brightman, although her CD covers are hot). Glenn Gould is an obvious choice, as is Yo-yo Ma, so I would like to avoid them if at all possible (although Gould's cocaine-soaked rendition of Bach is wonderful). Choral groups and directors (except for Leonard Bernstein) are also acceptable because, especially the latter, are interpreters in their own right. Any Rostropovich fans out there?
I always liked Toad the West Sprocket. Just the band's name was pretty cool (even more cool that Hootie and the Blow Fish). I liked their melancholy songs. I guess I just gravitate to that kind of thing. My only problem was they were lumped with the whole phony "alternative rock" thing in the early and mid 1990's, and they weren't at all. I like this song because it traces the deterioration of a relationship in a realistic way. The man is mourning the fact that his lover and he just cannot connect, "Something's always wrong," even though he can't see it. It's a very sad song, in many ways, because it tells a real story, rather than relying on cliches. I especially like the image of the guy beating himself with a "penance rope". How many of us have flagellated ourselves needlessly? This song is a good antidote to romanticism.
I liked Smashmouth until I saw them on Letterman at some point. I realized watching them they couldn't do it live. But, there's just something fun about their music, especially this song that is all retro late-60's psychedlia (the organ and guitar remind me of Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky"):
Next week I would like to do something completely different - recent or contemporary performers of classical music (no, I do not mean Sarah Brightman, although her CD covers are hot). Glenn Gould is an obvious choice, as is Yo-yo Ma, so I would like to avoid them if at all possible (although Gould's cocaine-soaked rendition of Bach is wonderful). Choral groups and directors (except for Leonard Bernstein) are also acceptable because, especially the latter, are interpreters in their own right. Any Rostropovich fans out there?
John 8: 12-19
Lisa's latest sermon series in on the "I Am" statements of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. As these are directly related to the proclamation of the name of the LORD in Exodus ("I am who I am, or I will be who I will be"), there is a radical association of Jesus and the God of Israel in these statements, even as Jesus is distancing and dissociating himself from Pharisaical interpretations of who this God is. Lisa used this passage, in which Jesus proclaimed himself "the light of the world", and John 15, where Jesus proclaimed himself "the true vine". She preached on the latter image, but it is the former one of which I wish to speak. The exchange with the Pharisees here is interesting. First, from the Revised English Bible (oh, those nutty Brits and their translations!), here is John 8: 12-19:
One thing to note here is how Jesus creates distance between himself and his Jewish milieu, by referring to "your own law". There is, in the Fourth Gospel, this distancing between Jesus and the Jews, and it most likely resides in early (Gentile) Christian anti-Jewish feeling (I refuse to use that anachronistic term "anti-Semitism" here). Without surrendering to such prejudice, nonetheless, I think we can use this distancing in a less problematic fashion, perhaps. That is to say that Jesus is here not so much separating himself from his own Jewish roots so much as he is offering to the Pharisees a dose of their own medicine; they are quick to paint themselves as the true interpreters of God's law, and on this basis call Jesus and his life and ministry in to question. Jesus here is turning the tables on them.
To that end, it is important to realize that the Pharisees do not take the time to deal with what Jesus has to say. They become nit-picking lawyers, claiming that his testimony is out-of-bounds because he is doing so on his own behalf. Jesus does a double-whammy on them, first, by saying that they are judging based on "human standards" when in fact they are using the Mosaic code, which is supposed to be God's law. Further, he says that he does not judge, even as they are judging him.
How often do we get all caught up in discussions that hinge on how others insist our words are to be interpreted? How often do we hear people say they were "misquoted" or "misunderstood"? Jesus here is showing how to deal with these problems. Simply throw it back on those who would try to go all "meta" on us, telling us how wrong we are. Jesus does not defend his words in some kind of reasoned argument. Rather, he say, in effect, "Your criticism is illegitimate because you do not understand what I am saying. If you understood, you wouldn't be all critical. Your criticism is evidence of your willing ignorance."
I like this. I like Jesus showing how to ignore an argument started by others by saying, "Homey don't play that way." He is telling the Pharisees their rules no longer govern the way human beings are to live in relation to God. He is offering people the possibility of getting beyond legal nit-picking and the trap of literal belief. By telling people that, in following him, Jesus is offering them a light to freedom, a light that will never be extinguished, he is telling people that his, rather than the authority of others, even of the tradition of which he is himself a part, is the way God wants people to live. By arguing with Jesus over the whole issue of the legitimacy of his own words, the Pharisees indict themselves, hoist on the petard not of their own, but Jesus' words.
Once again Jesus addressed the people: "I am the light of the world. No follower of mine shall walk in darkness; he shall have the light of life." The Pharisees said to him, "You are witness in your own cause; your testimony is not valid." Jesus replied, "My testimony is valid, even though I do testify on my own behalf; because I know where I come from, and where I am going. But you know neither where I come from nor where I am going. You judge by worldly standards; I pass judgment on no one. If I do judge, my judgment is valid because it is not I alone who judge, but I and he who sent me. In your own law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. I am a witness in my own cause, and my other witness is the Father who sent me." "Where is your father?" they asked him. Jesus replied, "You do not know me or my Father; if you knew me your would know my Father too."
One thing to note here is how Jesus creates distance between himself and his Jewish milieu, by referring to "your own law". There is, in the Fourth Gospel, this distancing between Jesus and the Jews, and it most likely resides in early (Gentile) Christian anti-Jewish feeling (I refuse to use that anachronistic term "anti-Semitism" here). Without surrendering to such prejudice, nonetheless, I think we can use this distancing in a less problematic fashion, perhaps. That is to say that Jesus is here not so much separating himself from his own Jewish roots so much as he is offering to the Pharisees a dose of their own medicine; they are quick to paint themselves as the true interpreters of God's law, and on this basis call Jesus and his life and ministry in to question. Jesus here is turning the tables on them.
To that end, it is important to realize that the Pharisees do not take the time to deal with what Jesus has to say. They become nit-picking lawyers, claiming that his testimony is out-of-bounds because he is doing so on his own behalf. Jesus does a double-whammy on them, first, by saying that they are judging based on "human standards" when in fact they are using the Mosaic code, which is supposed to be God's law. Further, he says that he does not judge, even as they are judging him.
How often do we get all caught up in discussions that hinge on how others insist our words are to be interpreted? How often do we hear people say they were "misquoted" or "misunderstood"? Jesus here is showing how to deal with these problems. Simply throw it back on those who would try to go all "meta" on us, telling us how wrong we are. Jesus does not defend his words in some kind of reasoned argument. Rather, he say, in effect, "Your criticism is illegitimate because you do not understand what I am saying. If you understood, you wouldn't be all critical. Your criticism is evidence of your willing ignorance."
I like this. I like Jesus showing how to ignore an argument started by others by saying, "Homey don't play that way." He is telling the Pharisees their rules no longer govern the way human beings are to live in relation to God. He is offering people the possibility of getting beyond legal nit-picking and the trap of literal belief. By telling people that, in following him, Jesus is offering them a light to freedom, a light that will never be extinguished, he is telling people that his, rather than the authority of others, even of the tradition of which he is himself a part, is the way God wants people to live. By arguing with Jesus over the whole issue of the legitimacy of his own words, the Pharisees indict themselves, hoist on the petard not of their own, but Jesus' words.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Saturday Rock Show
Germany's Van Den Plas sounds an awful lot like Dream Theater. The problem with this comparison is the former band has been around a bit longer. This little video, of their song "Iodic Rain", showcases the way a good live performance can make a song that might not be as interesting on CD and give it life. I especially like the way the drummer never stops smiling. He, at least, seems to be having fun.
McCain's Very Bad Week
Were ours a functioning representative democracy, where elections were about substantive issues, and had we a press corps that could actually pull its collective head out of its singular anus, John McCain's hopes of winning the White House would have evaporated like rain in the Sahara this week. As I wrote earlier this week, McCain called the structure of Social Security "a disgrace", displaying an ignorance of one of the best constructed, best functioning government programs in history that is breathtaking. As Bob Somerby reports, however, there was much more in McCain's little talk that, in his words, come out of a "fever swamp". This alone would have been a candidacy killer in any normally functioning election cycle.
Had this been the only "oopsie" McCain had experienced this week, it would have qualified for a very bad week indeed. Yet, this hardly begins to touch on what happened. There was Phil Gramm, still looking like Deputy Dawg, insisting that ours is a "mental recession" and that we have become a "nation of whiners". These words came the same week the price of oil continued to climb to new highs ($147 a barrell on Friday), the two federally-created mortgage guarantors almost went bankrupt (they haven't yet, but they have lost billions of dollars in market value), and one of the largest bank seizures in history happened only yesterday, another victim of bad, bordering on criminal, lending practices during the housing bubble. While the United States may not - yet - be in a technical recession (two straight quarters of economic contraction), there seems little doubt that we are perched on the precipice of an abyss. That McCain would consider the words and advice of Phil Gramm worth anything, particularly at a time of economic crisis, shows a certain lack of judgment in who he picks as an advisor. Again, were this the only thing that happened this week, this would have been a very bad week indeed for the very senior Senator from Arizona.
Through a campaign staffer, McCain lied about Obama's tax plan, insisting that the presumptive Democratic nominee would raise taxes on small businesses. This is demonstrably false, and the Obama camp ran out an ad across VA and OH highlighting McCain's refusal to tell the truth.
McCain was unaware of his own voting record vis-a-vis health care for women. When challenged on his "no" vote on a measure mandating coverage of birth control, even as insurance companies cover Viagra for men, McCain stammered through a non-response that showed he had no idea that he had voted against a proposal he was touting to a group of Wisconsin business women.
In an interview in Pittsburgh, McCain mangled published accounts of his time as a POW, telling a reporter that he named part of the starting line-up of the Pittsburgh Steelers to his North Vietnamese captors. In earlier accounts, including his memoirs Faith of our Fathers, McCain claimed he named the Green Bay Packers. This is such serious, and obvious, pandering, one almost cringes with embarrassment.
If Obama had a week like this, we would be reading and hearing obituaries of his candidacy all over the place. If Obama had a record of stupidity, ignorance, bad judgment, and outright pandering all in one week, it might be considered good form to just close up shop and return to the US Senate. McCain, however, isn't and won't. Now, this might mean some good, nasty fun had by the rest of us as we laugh at the next few months of howlers, lies, ignorance, and off-the-cuff stupidity that flows from McCain and his surrogates. At the very least, however, it might be nice if the press took note of this very bad week and did a bit of, I don't know, reporting on it.
Had this been the only "oopsie" McCain had experienced this week, it would have qualified for a very bad week indeed. Yet, this hardly begins to touch on what happened. There was Phil Gramm, still looking like Deputy Dawg, insisting that ours is a "mental recession" and that we have become a "nation of whiners". These words came the same week the price of oil continued to climb to new highs ($147 a barrell on Friday), the two federally-created mortgage guarantors almost went bankrupt (they haven't yet, but they have lost billions of dollars in market value), and one of the largest bank seizures in history happened only yesterday, another victim of bad, bordering on criminal, lending practices during the housing bubble. While the United States may not - yet - be in a technical recession (two straight quarters of economic contraction), there seems little doubt that we are perched on the precipice of an abyss. That McCain would consider the words and advice of Phil Gramm worth anything, particularly at a time of economic crisis, shows a certain lack of judgment in who he picks as an advisor. Again, were this the only thing that happened this week, this would have been a very bad week indeed for the very senior Senator from Arizona.
Through a campaign staffer, McCain lied about Obama's tax plan, insisting that the presumptive Democratic nominee would raise taxes on small businesses. This is demonstrably false, and the Obama camp ran out an ad across VA and OH highlighting McCain's refusal to tell the truth.
McCain was unaware of his own voting record vis-a-vis health care for women. When challenged on his "no" vote on a measure mandating coverage of birth control, even as insurance companies cover Viagra for men, McCain stammered through a non-response that showed he had no idea that he had voted against a proposal he was touting to a group of Wisconsin business women.
In an interview in Pittsburgh, McCain mangled published accounts of his time as a POW, telling a reporter that he named part of the starting line-up of the Pittsburgh Steelers to his North Vietnamese captors. In earlier accounts, including his memoirs Faith of our Fathers, McCain claimed he named the Green Bay Packers. This is such serious, and obvious, pandering, one almost cringes with embarrassment.
If Obama had a week like this, we would be reading and hearing obituaries of his candidacy all over the place. If Obama had a record of stupidity, ignorance, bad judgment, and outright pandering all in one week, it might be considered good form to just close up shop and return to the US Senate. McCain, however, isn't and won't. Now, this might mean some good, nasty fun had by the rest of us as we laugh at the next few months of howlers, lies, ignorance, and off-the-cuff stupidity that flows from McCain and his surrogates. At the very least, however, it might be nice if the press took note of this very bad week and did a bit of, I don't know, reporting on it.
Reflections On An On Faith Forum Piece
David Waters has a little column on the recent passing of John Templeton, a successful business man and founder of the Templeton Foundation, which seeks to bridge the gap between science and religious faith. The Templeton Foundation, according to its founder, uses the scientific method to investigate various human phenomena such as forgiveness and humility, the latter virtue exemplified by its founder in a quote Waters uses: "We should admit that no human being has ever known one percent of the infinity of God. We are terribly ignorant."
I found the article interesting not so much for the rather soft-spoken nature of its subject, or for the fact that we have here an example of a very wealthy individual interested in religious belief but quite honest about his and our ignorance of much of what we claim to think about the Divine; what interests me are some of the comments that show some people did not hear the message of humility, insisting they have all sorts of answers to questions human beings have struggled with, even fought and died for, over the centuries. In contrast to the subject, these folks might benefit from a dose of humility.
From commenter "Spiderman2":
"Meg" wrote:
"Andrew" wrote:
Finally, the best comment of all:
These are the voices of people that need, not to be ignored so much as not heeded when subjects such as these arise. There is no thought here, no consideration for the wisdom of others, not even a glimmer of seriousness. Yet, these are the voices that dominate so much of our phony debates. We believe that these positions, extremes bordering on parody, actually reflect serious option, the only options, available. Yet, how is it possible? How can it be that such mutually exclusive positions exist within the realm of human possibility, without that phenomenon itself being something to be viewed in wonder?
So many people have so much invested in being "right", in having the "correct" way of thinking about the world without ever once realizing that what they see as "correct" might not be so for others, and that's OK. It's OK there are Muslims who believe there is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. It's OK that there are those who believe in the transmigration of souls as we seek to rid ourselves of attachments to the physical and achieve enlightenment. It's OK there are people who believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, correct in all matters of fact, faith, and ethics. It's OK there are people who think all religions are a bunch of hokum dreamed up by the powerful and exploited by shysters to rob the common people of their power and their money. All of these are real human possibilities, and therefore, by their very existence, they are all right.
I realize the above sentence would seem to make no sense; that is so only if you are convinced there is only one right way of being human, only one right way of living a fully human life. I do not believe this is so. Rather, I believe that human beings are remarkable creatures, who have the capacity to use whatever tools are at hand to try and help them survive. Since all these possibilities (and so many more) have been and are being used right now, rather than demand the elimination of all those that don't fit "our" way of thinking, wouldn't it be far better, far wiser, to celebrate those differences, and recognize all of them as equally legitimate human responses to life and its travails? It seems to me John Templeton was doing exactly that.
I found the article interesting not so much for the rather soft-spoken nature of its subject, or for the fact that we have here an example of a very wealthy individual interested in religious belief but quite honest about his and our ignorance of much of what we claim to think about the Divine; what interests me are some of the comments that show some people did not hear the message of humility, insisting they have all sorts of answers to questions human beings have struggled with, even fought and died for, over the centuries. In contrast to the subject, these folks might benefit from a dose of humility.
From commenter "Spiderman2":
John Templeton said "I want people to realize you shouldn't think you know it all."
The problem John Templeton has is he didn't realize Jesus Christ know it all.
If he knew that, he would NOT have been wasting much money to seek the Lord.
Jesus said "Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come." (John 7:34)
Many religions would NOT find him and that's the truth despite them claiming to have known Him.
"Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, AND FEW THERE BE THAT FIND IT." (Matthew 7:14)
Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, having billions of followers would fail by that criteria alone. You study their doctrines and you would know that Jesus was accurate when he said that.
"Meg" wrote:
All those different religions can't all be right.
There is no way any two of them can be right.
Is it likely that any one of them is right?
The likelyhood is that none of them are right.
They are all superstitions, and all equally wrong.
Ask a scientist. There are no gods.
"Andrew" wrote:
Here's John's smarter namesake, who was an evangelist and Billy Graham's partner, but up and quit one day on realizing the nonsense that religion is;
"Is it not foolish to close one's eyes to the reality that much of the Christian faith is simply impossible to accept as fact? And is it not a fundamental error to base one's life on theological concepts formulated centuries ago by relatively primitive men who believed that the world was flat, that Heaven was "up there" somewhere, and that the universe had been created and was controlled by a jingoistic and intemperate diety who would punish you forever if you did not behave exactly as instructed?
Is it not more likely thst had you been born in Cairo you would be a Muslim and, as a billion people do, would believe that 'there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet?
If you had been born in Calcutta would you not in all probability be a Hindu, and as a billion people do, accept the Vedas and the Upanishads as sacred scriptures and hope sometime to dwell in Nirvana?
Is it not probable that, had you been born in Jerusalem, you would be a Jew and, as some 15 million people do, believe that that Yahweh is God and that the Torah is God's word?
Is it not likely that had you been born in Peking, you would be one of the millions who accept the teachings of the Buddha or Confucious or Lao Tse and strive to follow their teachings and examples?
Is it not likely that you, the reader are a Christian (or Muslim etc) because your parents were before you?"
From "A Farewell to God" by Charles Templeton, as reprinted in "The Portable Atheist". page 285. Pub.DaCapo press
Finally, the best comment of all:
Paul :
John Templeton sounds like a real sleazebag.
These are the voices of people that need, not to be ignored so much as not heeded when subjects such as these arise. There is no thought here, no consideration for the wisdom of others, not even a glimmer of seriousness. Yet, these are the voices that dominate so much of our phony debates. We believe that these positions, extremes bordering on parody, actually reflect serious option, the only options, available. Yet, how is it possible? How can it be that such mutually exclusive positions exist within the realm of human possibility, without that phenomenon itself being something to be viewed in wonder?
So many people have so much invested in being "right", in having the "correct" way of thinking about the world without ever once realizing that what they see as "correct" might not be so for others, and that's OK. It's OK there are Muslims who believe there is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. It's OK that there are those who believe in the transmigration of souls as we seek to rid ourselves of attachments to the physical and achieve enlightenment. It's OK there are people who believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, correct in all matters of fact, faith, and ethics. It's OK there are people who think all religions are a bunch of hokum dreamed up by the powerful and exploited by shysters to rob the common people of their power and their money. All of these are real human possibilities, and therefore, by their very existence, they are all right.
I realize the above sentence would seem to make no sense; that is so only if you are convinced there is only one right way of being human, only one right way of living a fully human life. I do not believe this is so. Rather, I believe that human beings are remarkable creatures, who have the capacity to use whatever tools are at hand to try and help them survive. Since all these possibilities (and so many more) have been and are being used right now, rather than demand the elimination of all those that don't fit "our" way of thinking, wouldn't it be far better, far wiser, to celebrate those differences, and recognize all of them as equally legitimate human responses to life and its travails? It seems to me John Templeton was doing exactly that.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Some Liberal Christian Thoughts - A Response To Democracy Lover's Comment
Down the page a bit, Democracy Lover and I have been having a discussion on God and Jesus, and I have been so heartened by this particular little conversation, I thought I would move my response to his last comment out of the comments and in to a post all its own. In order to make clear that to which I am responding, here are his words, in full:
The first thing I would say, specifically in regards to the "heavy-hitting" theologians, only Tillich is really so immersed in the kind of dense German bad writing that he can be off-putting. One of Bonhoeffer's many virtues is the clarity of his writing and exposition. Richard Rubenstein is all-American, meaning he has not been translated from the angular Teutonic with its weird sentence construction. Also, I don't think he quite "gets" some of what he is writing about; rather than render his subject matter opaque, it renders it more easy to comprehend, because he is trying to translate the concepts for himself. Start off with Tillich's The Courage to Be and Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers From Prison; they shouldn't be too hard to find. Rubenstein's After Aushwitz is, I believe, out of print. Some of his other work, The Cunning of History and The Age of Triage is available through Beacon Press, the UU publishing house in Boston.
Before I get to the deeper theological concepts of immanence and transcendence and your own trouble with them (believe me, I have trouble with them, too), I want to address specifically the term "supernatural" and why I find it meaningless. I have said before that the word implies a clear understanding of "nature" in order to insist that something is "above" or "outside" the natural order. Yet, what constitutes "nature" is never clear. Earlier this week I posted a couple interesting recent scientific findings that deal directly with this issue. One of them is the black smokers, the vents on the sea floor where gas is vented through holes in the earth's crust. Because they occur so deep, the water does not vaporize, but exists in a superheated state, usually around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The area around the smokers is not only superhot, but highly acidic due to the presence of various chemicals in the water. Had anyone said there was an entire ecosystem based upon the existence of these vents in the early 1970's, most biologists would have laughed. Simply put, the combination of acidic water and temperatures far in excess of the boiling point of water would melt the protein bonds that enable life. It is quie literally impossible, by a previous understanding of what is "natural" for these vents to support even bacteria, let alone complpex organisms.
Yet, they do. Through the arduous process of natural selection, organisms have developed that can live quite happily in an environment that is, at its most basic level, hostile to all life on earth. Indeed, the creatures that exist at these smoking vents could not survive elsewhere on the planet. While certainly now considered "natural", because they exist and thrive, they still defy any previous understanding of the word and its application.
Another quick example. In 1980, the Voyager I spacecraft did a flyby of Saturn. It took thousands of photos, making many remarkable discoveries. One of those discoveries was the existence of a pair of small moons orbiting just outside a thin outer ring. Called the "shepherd moons" because their gravitational interaction with the particles that make up the ring they border seems to keep it as it is, one of the things they do that astonished those who studied them was they orbit in helixical fashion. That is to say they spin around a common center of gravity perpendicular to the orbit of the planet. One of the mission scientists was quoted in a 1981 National Geographic magazine article as saying that this violated several laws of orbital mechanics. Yet, it was apparently the laws that were wrong. Again, this would have been considered "supernatural" before its discovery.
All this is not to argue the whole "God of the gaps" nonsense. Rather, it is to point out that before we can be clear about what is supernatural, we should be clear that we don't even know what constitutes "nature" in a way that is either clear or consistent.
As to your lack of comfort with my use of the term "participating" and the inference that, prior to this participation, God was somehow external to human, and presumably other, life. I suppose I should confess here that this was a clumsy way of trying to intimate one of the deepest mysteries of Christian religious belief, what has traditionally been considered the dichotomy, or to use a favored theological term "dialectic", of immanence and transcendence. These are fancy words that refer to the strange, contradictory idea that God is, of necessity, "outside" our understanding of time and space, yet we confess an experience and understanding of God as intimately involved in time and space, indeed in our very lives. Tied to these thoughts are the notions of grace, the incarnation. Lying behind these is the whole covenant tradition going back to the Hebrew people escaping Egypt (we do not need to deal with historicity of this event at this point; it is enough to speak of the tradition as it applies to their own self-understanding).
The kind of penentheism you offer is a common response to the dialectic. It is a difficult position to maintain, and can elide far too easily in to pantheism, which is a far less preferable answer to the conundrum. After all, the red maple tree out front, the small hive of bumble bees in the ground under our picture window, and my St. Bernard usually do not show any sign of divinity with which I am familiar. Yet, one can affirm a certain divine presence within them, yet separate from them. We do not need to get in to the whole "soul" phenomenon here; suffice it to say that this is both a problem and a mystery. We are here at the deepest, most basic roots of religious belief of any type. The liberal Reformed theologian Friederich Schleiermacher referred to it as the "whence" of the felling of absolute dependence human beings experience. Part of the genius of this formula is that is boils down so much of both Christian thought and life to a single word that is generic. He said we call this "whence" God, and spent close to a thousand pages unpacking this in a Christo-centric, highly Biblical fashion that nonetheless denied much of what went before in the tradition (if you're thinking of reading his Glaubenslehre, forget it; try his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, a series of sermons he published in 1799). Schleiermacher gave short shrift to anything we might call "supernatural", yet nonetheless affirmed the most basic Christian claims that, in Jesus, God was present in human life and history in such a way that the relationship between humanity (I suppose, to be all pomo, I should add "all of creation") and God was radically altered.
Part of the problem with delving in to this realm is that we are the very heart of the mystery. There is no solution that is adequate. One can even deny the mystery has any relevance or meaning at all. I am not suggesting one should accept it. I am saying that you should be aware that, right here on this point, we are standing over the abyss that, for Christians at any rate, offers only one lifeline out - profession of Jesus as the unique embodiment of the Divine love and grace for the world. I do not subscribe to any traditional metaphysical formulae for unpacking that particular phrase, yet I stand by it nonetheless because of that "whence" that Schleiermacher spoke of. I am quite comfortable ignoring the "two natures" theology, the ontological status of the incarnation, and those sorts of questions because, to me, they ignore the reality of the experience that is too deep for explanation, too profound for language to capture.
Finally, I would say that I do not want you to believe anything. I am offering these responses as a guidebook because, it seems, you are confessing (!!) that you are open to certain possibilities that you might not have been comfortable with before. Even if you decide to chase some of these ideas down, and decide they are as nonsensical after dealing with them as you did before you did so, that's OK. I am far more interested in the process than in any result. Also, remember this as well. Pretty much every answer possible - including outright rejection - has been given over the course of the history of the Christian Church. Your answer will hardly be new, but it will be your answer, and that is what counts.
I will look around for some of these theologians and see if I can manage to read them. I find a lot of the philosophical work heavy going.
I also have trouble with the concept of God "participating" in human life in the way you describe. It presupposes a God external to human life, and that is a slippery slope. At this point, I could say with the Quakers that there is something of God in each of us, but that something does not have an external presence except as individuals share their "somethings" with one another.
I can agree with you and Spong that there must have been something astounding about Jesus for people to have retained a commitment to him after his execution. Finding ways to describe that without reference to the supernatural eluded them, but it doesn't have to elude us.
Jesus was clearly concerned with the ethic of human life as being lived around him. He (or his followers) described that in religious terms, but it seems to me the emphasis in Jesus' teaching is not belief in God (regardless of how that is defined), but in right action here and now. It seems just as valid to view his use of God imagery as a way of validating his moral and ethical stance, rather than viewing the morality as flowing from God.
Much of our discussion here is about language, or perhaps semiotics. How we describe our internal process is not as important as how that internal process shapes our external life. To use traditional language, "by their fruits shall you know them".
If we lived in a different part of the world, we might look for inspiration to Mohammed or the Buddha or Kahili ("the ring, he's wearing the ring"). Jesus is a powerful image to us because of our cultural tradition but the mainstream of that tradition has worked feverishly for 2 thousand years to make his image conform to their understanding of power, rather than his. Unless we can recapture some of that original power (not an external force in my book), Jesus is not useful to us.
The first thing I would say, specifically in regards to the "heavy-hitting" theologians, only Tillich is really so immersed in the kind of dense German bad writing that he can be off-putting. One of Bonhoeffer's many virtues is the clarity of his writing and exposition. Richard Rubenstein is all-American, meaning he has not been translated from the angular Teutonic with its weird sentence construction. Also, I don't think he quite "gets" some of what he is writing about; rather than render his subject matter opaque, it renders it more easy to comprehend, because he is trying to translate the concepts for himself. Start off with Tillich's The Courage to Be and Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers From Prison; they shouldn't be too hard to find. Rubenstein's After Aushwitz is, I believe, out of print. Some of his other work, The Cunning of History and The Age of Triage is available through Beacon Press, the UU publishing house in Boston.
Before I get to the deeper theological concepts of immanence and transcendence and your own trouble with them (believe me, I have trouble with them, too), I want to address specifically the term "supernatural" and why I find it meaningless. I have said before that the word implies a clear understanding of "nature" in order to insist that something is "above" or "outside" the natural order. Yet, what constitutes "nature" is never clear. Earlier this week I posted a couple interesting recent scientific findings that deal directly with this issue. One of them is the black smokers, the vents on the sea floor where gas is vented through holes in the earth's crust. Because they occur so deep, the water does not vaporize, but exists in a superheated state, usually around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The area around the smokers is not only superhot, but highly acidic due to the presence of various chemicals in the water. Had anyone said there was an entire ecosystem based upon the existence of these vents in the early 1970's, most biologists would have laughed. Simply put, the combination of acidic water and temperatures far in excess of the boiling point of water would melt the protein bonds that enable life. It is quie literally impossible, by a previous understanding of what is "natural" for these vents to support even bacteria, let alone complpex organisms.
Yet, they do. Through the arduous process of natural selection, organisms have developed that can live quite happily in an environment that is, at its most basic level, hostile to all life on earth. Indeed, the creatures that exist at these smoking vents could not survive elsewhere on the planet. While certainly now considered "natural", because they exist and thrive, they still defy any previous understanding of the word and its application.
Another quick example. In 1980, the Voyager I spacecraft did a flyby of Saturn. It took thousands of photos, making many remarkable discoveries. One of those discoveries was the existence of a pair of small moons orbiting just outside a thin outer ring. Called the "shepherd moons" because their gravitational interaction with the particles that make up the ring they border seems to keep it as it is, one of the things they do that astonished those who studied them was they orbit in helixical fashion. That is to say they spin around a common center of gravity perpendicular to the orbit of the planet. One of the mission scientists was quoted in a 1981 National Geographic magazine article as saying that this violated several laws of orbital mechanics. Yet, it was apparently the laws that were wrong. Again, this would have been considered "supernatural" before its discovery.
All this is not to argue the whole "God of the gaps" nonsense. Rather, it is to point out that before we can be clear about what is supernatural, we should be clear that we don't even know what constitutes "nature" in a way that is either clear or consistent.
As to your lack of comfort with my use of the term "participating" and the inference that, prior to this participation, God was somehow external to human, and presumably other, life. I suppose I should confess here that this was a clumsy way of trying to intimate one of the deepest mysteries of Christian religious belief, what has traditionally been considered the dichotomy, or to use a favored theological term "dialectic", of immanence and transcendence. These are fancy words that refer to the strange, contradictory idea that God is, of necessity, "outside" our understanding of time and space, yet we confess an experience and understanding of God as intimately involved in time and space, indeed in our very lives. Tied to these thoughts are the notions of grace, the incarnation. Lying behind these is the whole covenant tradition going back to the Hebrew people escaping Egypt (we do not need to deal with historicity of this event at this point; it is enough to speak of the tradition as it applies to their own self-understanding).
The kind of penentheism you offer is a common response to the dialectic. It is a difficult position to maintain, and can elide far too easily in to pantheism, which is a far less preferable answer to the conundrum. After all, the red maple tree out front, the small hive of bumble bees in the ground under our picture window, and my St. Bernard usually do not show any sign of divinity with which I am familiar. Yet, one can affirm a certain divine presence within them, yet separate from them. We do not need to get in to the whole "soul" phenomenon here; suffice it to say that this is both a problem and a mystery. We are here at the deepest, most basic roots of religious belief of any type. The liberal Reformed theologian Friederich Schleiermacher referred to it as the "whence" of the felling of absolute dependence human beings experience. Part of the genius of this formula is that is boils down so much of both Christian thought and life to a single word that is generic. He said we call this "whence" God, and spent close to a thousand pages unpacking this in a Christo-centric, highly Biblical fashion that nonetheless denied much of what went before in the tradition (if you're thinking of reading his Glaubenslehre, forget it; try his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, a series of sermons he published in 1799). Schleiermacher gave short shrift to anything we might call "supernatural", yet nonetheless affirmed the most basic Christian claims that, in Jesus, God was present in human life and history in such a way that the relationship between humanity (I suppose, to be all pomo, I should add "all of creation") and God was radically altered.
Part of the problem with delving in to this realm is that we are the very heart of the mystery. There is no solution that is adequate. One can even deny the mystery has any relevance or meaning at all. I am not suggesting one should accept it. I am saying that you should be aware that, right here on this point, we are standing over the abyss that, for Christians at any rate, offers only one lifeline out - profession of Jesus as the unique embodiment of the Divine love and grace for the world. I do not subscribe to any traditional metaphysical formulae for unpacking that particular phrase, yet I stand by it nonetheless because of that "whence" that Schleiermacher spoke of. I am quite comfortable ignoring the "two natures" theology, the ontological status of the incarnation, and those sorts of questions because, to me, they ignore the reality of the experience that is too deep for explanation, too profound for language to capture.
Finally, I would say that I do not want you to believe anything. I am offering these responses as a guidebook because, it seems, you are confessing (!!) that you are open to certain possibilities that you might not have been comfortable with before. Even if you decide to chase some of these ideas down, and decide they are as nonsensical after dealing with them as you did before you did so, that's OK. I am far more interested in the process than in any result. Also, remember this as well. Pretty much every answer possible - including outright rejection - has been given over the course of the history of the Christian Church. Your answer will hardly be new, but it will be your answer, and that is what counts.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
A Little Touch Of Barack In The Night
From TPM, here's Sen. Barack Obama on former Sen. Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" comment:
One hopes the campaign starts using this in commercials. Over and over and over and over again, so that Gramm's hang-dog visage and words of idiocy get yoked to John McCain now so the story becomes one about McCain's lack of judgment in picking those who will advise him.
One hopes the campaign starts using this in commercials. Over and over and over and over again, so that Gramm's hang-dog visage and words of idiocy get yoked to John McCain now so the story becomes one about McCain's lack of judgment in picking those who will advise him.
McCain Lie Watch
I decided that a statement McCain made earlier this week, as reported by Ezra Klein, is in need of amplification.
This particular piece of fiscal nonsense is a bugaboo of Bob Somerby. The reason it is a bugaboo is that it is repeated ad nauseum and no one in the press has the gumption to point out that this is just false. McCain's little lie - don't people know when we cut taxes we increase revenue? - is so often repeated it is considered conventional wisdom. That there is abundant research proving the exact opposite (which is common sense; when you get a pay cut, do you earn more money? Neither does the United States government), but it is ignored. This is Somerby's problem with this particular bit of fiction.
I just wanted to show that the Lie Watch is alive and well. And here we have an example that, when all else fails, choose a lie everyone knows is a lie and no one bothers to contradict with the facts. It makes everyone's job - McCain, his spin/spokesfolks, the press - so much easier.
Every time we cut capital gains taxes, there has been an increase in revenues.
This particular piece of fiscal nonsense is a bugaboo of Bob Somerby. The reason it is a bugaboo is that it is repeated ad nauseum and no one in the press has the gumption to point out that this is just false. McCain's little lie - don't people know when we cut taxes we increase revenue? - is so often repeated it is considered conventional wisdom. That there is abundant research proving the exact opposite (which is common sense; when you get a pay cut, do you earn more money? Neither does the United States government), but it is ignored. This is Somerby's problem with this particular bit of fiction.
I just wanted to show that the Lie Watch is alive and well. And here we have an example that, when all else fails, choose a lie everyone knows is a lie and no one bothers to contradict with the facts. It makes everyone's job - McCain, his spin/spokesfolks, the press - so much easier.
Faking It Real Well
Through a wonderful accident, I am rereading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor (which, if you clicked the link, you will discover is an ongoing project via blogs). The book explores the overwrought notion of what it means to be "authentic", "keeping it real" as the hip-hoppers say. In the process they discuss Kurt Cobain, Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis, John Lennon's explorations in primal scream therapy, the tormented soul of John Lydon, and Donna Summer's exploitation and the dismissal of some of her best work because it is associated with disco. It is a wonderful book, full of both insight and delightful trivia (jazz impresario John Hammond was instrumental in "discovering" Bruce Springsteen).
One of the most troubling aspects of this quest for authenticity, and one dealt with in a chapter dealing with Mississippi John Hurt and the cult of the bluesman, is the racism inherent in the notion that there is something more real in certain life stories, certain behavior patterns, as well as the use of musical ideas. This idea is carried over from those whites who adore the blues, R&B, and jazz too often for the wrong reasons (what they hear as the "primitive" "jungle beats" of the complex rhythms of jazz and R&B and its variants, as well as the musical complexity of the blues that extends beyond mere instrumental virtuosity and emotional openness) music critics who too often demand of an artist both an emotional transparency and a lack of musical subtlety as true marks of what it means to be a great rock, soul, R&B, or rap artist. While I admire some of his work, the late Lester Bangs was among the worst offenders when it came to this kind of mindlessness; he actually considered Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a contractual obligation record he put out, featuring nearly thirty minutes of unlistenable guitar noise, a piece of musical genius, high art. Reed, as a sometime protege of Andy Warhol, no doubt laughed behind his hand whenever he talked to Bangs.
I must confess, at the same time, that I feel a bit defensive when this entire issue arises. One thing Barker and Taylor do make clear is that "authenticity" in art is something that is an unrealizable goal; by its very nature, all art mediates meaning between the artist and the public addressed by a work of art. John Lee Hooker sitting and stage and chopping the same chord for twenty minutes while he sings about hard times is no less mediatory than is Bach's B-minor Mass; it is a difference in audience and intended affect, rather than any substantive difference between the blues as an art form and sacred music. Furthermore, the reverence for simplicity, it seems to me, whether it be simplicity of harmonic structure, of tone palate, of rhythm, or of lyrical content is often considered goods to be pursued, rather than stages. The Ramones, for example, began as three-chord, two-minute rock-and-rollers, wearing leather jackets a la Fonzie and James Dean, but recorded a great cover of the Brothers Johnson's great psychedelic hit "Time Has Come Today" that is remarkably faithful to the original. John Lydon, while disdaining Pink Floyd at a time when they had become far too bloated and pretentious for their own good, nevertheless loved the dark, brooding songs of the progressive rock band Van Der Graf Generator. Kurt Cobain gave props in various interviews to King Crimson's Red, particularly the grinding guitar work on the title track.
All of this is to say that "authenticity" very often can lead an artist to a place that many critics just don't get. Among my favorite bands are some of those most reviled by rock critics (and I will admit there are times that critical distance is necessary). Yes; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; King Crimson; Pink Floyd; Dream Theater; The Grateful Dead; Rush; Metallica; Black Sabbath - all of these bands have been heavily criticized (sometimes correctly; no artist, however gifted pulls it off well all the time). The basis of the criticism, to my mind, is based upon the a priori notion that precisely because of the music they create, they do not conform to what it means to be a rock musician or rock band. Yet, is it not possible that John Anderson, Steve Howe, Mike Portnoy, John Petrucci, Tony Iommi, Robert Fripp, Roger Waters, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Jerry Garcia, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, James Hetfield, and Lars Ulrich all create the music they do because that is the music they hear? In what ways are their artistic offerings somehow less worthy of consideration than that of Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Barry Gibb, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, or Neil Young?
I would argue that we are entering a realm where we should not so much leave authenticity behind as a criterion in judging music, but redefine authenticity to include not just a certain transparency, but a dedication to one's muse, even if it doesn't conform to certain canonical modes. Dream Theater produce the music they do because the core members of the band dedicated hours and years of their lives to studying the craft of playing their instruments, and then dedicated more years of their lives to the even more difficult art of writing songs and performing them before an audience. The results are sometimes uneven (I think they have matured as songwriters over the past decade; reaching a peak with Train of Thought and Octavarium), but that hardly matters. As Barker and Taylor point out, one artist most (including myself) would consider one of the great talents of rock, Neil Young, sucked for the entire decade of the 1980's. Similarly, ELP put out one of the most remarkable albums of all time - I would not necessarily call Brain Salad Surgery rock; I think it's unclassifiable, really - and also one of the worst, Love Beach. Yet, John Lennon put out "Imagine", but he also put out "Woman is Nigger to the World". At what point do we stop pretending that John Lennon was no less earnest than Keith Emerson in his desire to be considered a "serious" artist?
My point in all this, while slightly self-justificatory, is simple: I think the entire issue of authenticity is too often drawn far too narrowly to include the entire question of the product a musician creates being an authentic result of hard work, dedication to the crafts of musicianship and song-writing, thus leaving outside whole bodies of work that are too often dismissed out-of-hand as "inauthentic". While Barker and Taylor do the difficult work of making us realize that disco, bubblegum, Europop, and early techno (Kraftwerk) were all legitimate musics that offered something to the tastes public that liked them, the avant garde, art rock, progressive, heavy metal are still outside the boundaries because these are populated by ironists (Brian Eno, David Bowie), trained musicians (Rick Wakeman, Carl Palmer), and working class whites who distort the blues beyond all recognition (Tony Iommi; Black Sabbath, like another later heavy metal band Judas Priest, began life as a blues band). Yet Eno, Bowie, Wakeman, Palmer, and Iommi all have produced exceptional music that received at one time or another a wide hearing by large segments of the music-buying and -listening public. Unlike, say, Sonic Youth or (one of my favorite bands) Fugazi, they achieved success by "keeping it real" in a way that was different from the hyper-romantic and self-defeating demand to always be a suffering artist.
Or, perhaps, is my argument one for abandoning the entire concept of "authenticity" as a category for considering the worth of popular music? Perhaps it is, because the word is too ill-defined for serious discussion.
One of the most troubling aspects of this quest for authenticity, and one dealt with in a chapter dealing with Mississippi John Hurt and the cult of the bluesman, is the racism inherent in the notion that there is something more real in certain life stories, certain behavior patterns, as well as the use of musical ideas. This idea is carried over from those whites who adore the blues, R&B, and jazz too often for the wrong reasons (what they hear as the "primitive" "jungle beats" of the complex rhythms of jazz and R&B and its variants, as well as the musical complexity of the blues that extends beyond mere instrumental virtuosity and emotional openness) music critics who too often demand of an artist both an emotional transparency and a lack of musical subtlety as true marks of what it means to be a great rock, soul, R&B, or rap artist. While I admire some of his work, the late Lester Bangs was among the worst offenders when it came to this kind of mindlessness; he actually considered Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a contractual obligation record he put out, featuring nearly thirty minutes of unlistenable guitar noise, a piece of musical genius, high art. Reed, as a sometime protege of Andy Warhol, no doubt laughed behind his hand whenever he talked to Bangs.
I must confess, at the same time, that I feel a bit defensive when this entire issue arises. One thing Barker and Taylor do make clear is that "authenticity" in art is something that is an unrealizable goal; by its very nature, all art mediates meaning between the artist and the public addressed by a work of art. John Lee Hooker sitting and stage and chopping the same chord for twenty minutes while he sings about hard times is no less mediatory than is Bach's B-minor Mass; it is a difference in audience and intended affect, rather than any substantive difference between the blues as an art form and sacred music. Furthermore, the reverence for simplicity, it seems to me, whether it be simplicity of harmonic structure, of tone palate, of rhythm, or of lyrical content is often considered goods to be pursued, rather than stages. The Ramones, for example, began as three-chord, two-minute rock-and-rollers, wearing leather jackets a la Fonzie and James Dean, but recorded a great cover of the Brothers Johnson's great psychedelic hit "Time Has Come Today" that is remarkably faithful to the original. John Lydon, while disdaining Pink Floyd at a time when they had become far too bloated and pretentious for their own good, nevertheless loved the dark, brooding songs of the progressive rock band Van Der Graf Generator. Kurt Cobain gave props in various interviews to King Crimson's Red, particularly the grinding guitar work on the title track.
All of this is to say that "authenticity" very often can lead an artist to a place that many critics just don't get. Among my favorite bands are some of those most reviled by rock critics (and I will admit there are times that critical distance is necessary). Yes; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; King Crimson; Pink Floyd; Dream Theater; The Grateful Dead; Rush; Metallica; Black Sabbath - all of these bands have been heavily criticized (sometimes correctly; no artist, however gifted pulls it off well all the time). The basis of the criticism, to my mind, is based upon the a priori notion that precisely because of the music they create, they do not conform to what it means to be a rock musician or rock band. Yet, is it not possible that John Anderson, Steve Howe, Mike Portnoy, John Petrucci, Tony Iommi, Robert Fripp, Roger Waters, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Jerry Garcia, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, James Hetfield, and Lars Ulrich all create the music they do because that is the music they hear? In what ways are their artistic offerings somehow less worthy of consideration than that of Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Barry Gibb, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, or Neil Young?
I would argue that we are entering a realm where we should not so much leave authenticity behind as a criterion in judging music, but redefine authenticity to include not just a certain transparency, but a dedication to one's muse, even if it doesn't conform to certain canonical modes. Dream Theater produce the music they do because the core members of the band dedicated hours and years of their lives to studying the craft of playing their instruments, and then dedicated more years of their lives to the even more difficult art of writing songs and performing them before an audience. The results are sometimes uneven (I think they have matured as songwriters over the past decade; reaching a peak with Train of Thought and Octavarium), but that hardly matters. As Barker and Taylor point out, one artist most (including myself) would consider one of the great talents of rock, Neil Young, sucked for the entire decade of the 1980's. Similarly, ELP put out one of the most remarkable albums of all time - I would not necessarily call Brain Salad Surgery rock; I think it's unclassifiable, really - and also one of the worst, Love Beach. Yet, John Lennon put out "Imagine", but he also put out "Woman is Nigger to the World". At what point do we stop pretending that John Lennon was no less earnest than Keith Emerson in his desire to be considered a "serious" artist?
My point in all this, while slightly self-justificatory, is simple: I think the entire issue of authenticity is too often drawn far too narrowly to include the entire question of the product a musician creates being an authentic result of hard work, dedication to the crafts of musicianship and song-writing, thus leaving outside whole bodies of work that are too often dismissed out-of-hand as "inauthentic". While Barker and Taylor do the difficult work of making us realize that disco, bubblegum, Europop, and early techno (Kraftwerk) were all legitimate musics that offered something to the tastes public that liked them, the avant garde, art rock, progressive, heavy metal are still outside the boundaries because these are populated by ironists (Brian Eno, David Bowie), trained musicians (Rick Wakeman, Carl Palmer), and working class whites who distort the blues beyond all recognition (Tony Iommi; Black Sabbath, like another later heavy metal band Judas Priest, began life as a blues band). Yet Eno, Bowie, Wakeman, Palmer, and Iommi all have produced exceptional music that received at one time or another a wide hearing by large segments of the music-buying and -listening public. Unlike, say, Sonic Youth or (one of my favorite bands) Fugazi, they achieved success by "keeping it real" in a way that was different from the hyper-romantic and self-defeating demand to always be a suffering artist.
Or, perhaps, is my argument one for abandoning the entire concept of "authenticity" as a category for considering the worth of popular music? Perhaps it is, because the word is too ill-defined for serious discussion.
McCain Stupid Watch
I had been running a "McCain Lie Watch" Series, but it got to the point that I was bored by the daily presentation of his utter disregard for anything resembling the truth. Yesterday, however, we entered new territory. Via Talking Points Memo:
As Avedon puts it at Eschaton, "McCain thinks the problem with Social Security is that it's Social Security."
This is a gift, manna from heaven to the Obama campaign. McCain is now on record declaring that he is fundamentally ignorant about one of the most successful and popular government programs in history.
To add some funny to the stupid, McCain's spokesfolks are trying to spin away all the idiocy, and in so doing only shining a bright hot spotlight on it. Again, Talking Points Memo has the "clarification":
Now, Josh Marshall's adept deconstruction of the bullshit coming from the McCain camp, which follows directly from the above quoted blurb:
Straight talking maverick on the loose!
Americans have got to understand that. Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace and it's got to be fixed.
As Avedon puts it at Eschaton, "McCain thinks the problem with Social Security is that it's Social Security."
This is a gift, manna from heaven to the Obama campaign. McCain is now on record declaring that he is fundamentally ignorant about one of the most successful and popular government programs in history.
To add some funny to the stupid, McCain's spokesfolks are trying to spin away all the idiocy, and in so doing only shining a bright hot spotlight on it. Again, Talking Points Memo has the "clarification":
[T]he disgrace is our failure to fix the long-run imbalance in Social Security -- a failure of leadership evidenced by our willingness to kick to problem to the next generation of leaders. He's also describing the looming and increasing demographic pressures confronting the Social Security system and Washington's utter failure to address it.
Now, Josh Marshall's adept deconstruction of the bullshit coming from the McCain camp, which follows directly from the above quoted blurb:
Now, this goes against the plain meaning of the words. But everybody has words come out the wrong way sometimes, or they say things they don't really quite mean. IN other words, if it's just tripping over your words, who cares. But digital video recording is a wonderful thing. And that's why we can know pretty clearly that Rogers' explanation is bogus and that this is precisely what McCain meant.
The townhall meeting where McCain said Social Security was "an absolute disgrace" was on Monday in Denver. Just yesterday McCain went on CNN and said more or less exactly the same thing on CNN.
In response to a question from CNN's John Roberts, McCain said, "Let's describe it [i.e. Social Security] for what it is. They pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That's why it's broken, that's why we can fix it."
He doesn't use the flamethrower language of "absolute disgrace" but he says very clearly that what's wrong with Social Security -- "why it's broken" -- is the way it was designed to work and has worked for almost 80 years, because it's a pay-as-you-go system, "pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees." In other words, there's no question that John McCain thinks that the problem with Social Security is the way it was designed at the very beginning, the way it was always designed to work. Sometimes he just uses more flowery language than others.
Straight talking maverick on the loose!
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