Strait Gates and Broadways

Driving back from Camp yesterday I blew through a rural area where some religious organization had posted this portion of a Bible verse:

Matthew 7:13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Since I've been under the influence of ecumenism, I got to wondering how the above applied to my context. I don't know which little country church put up that sign, but I can imagine it's vastly different from the mega-suburban Blythefield Hills Baptist Church that I attend. What exactly constitutes "strait gates" versus "broad ways?" In my separatist days, I would have answered that "strait" means rejecting the world and all its wisdom. But now I don't think that's the answer.

What I like most about Camp and what brings me back every year is theological conversations around the campfire. Usually these conversations involve something interesting and philosophical. This year I was surprised when a friend's daughter mentioned "Lordship salvation." I hadn't heard that term in decades. It's funny how some problems just don't get solved but the confusion remains over decades.

If you don't know what "Lorship salvation" means, let me refresh. Some teach that there is a distinction between asking Christ to be one's Saviour and asking Christ to be your Lord. If such a distinction is possible, then those who ask Christ to be Saviour but not Lord, can be termed "Carnal Christians." Carnal Christians who wish to improve their spiritual lives can do so by upgrading their Saviour relationship to a Lordship relationship. Others teach that Salvation means more than just a fire insurance policy, but conversion of the whole person and that Salvation means rescue from one's current life of sin. This second group would term the "Carnal Christian" a "non-Christian."

The first group claims that the second group makes "Lordship" a work that must be added to one's faith in order to be a Christian. The second group asserts salvation by "faith alone" but it is a "faith that is not alone." Surely, everybody in both camps claim that one is justified before God by "faith alone." (This is a Protestant argument.) This leads to a two-tier Christianity with mere fire-insurance policy holders looking up to their spiritual betters who have "rededicated their lives" to the Lord Jesus.

Coversely, the second group claims a causal relationship between good faith and good works. Good faith will cause good works and thereby I justify my good faith before myself and before other Christians by my good works. This is how the Protestant interprets James 2:24. (The Protestant distinguishes between Paul's use of Justification before God, and James use of Justification before Man. Luther failed to make this distinction and thus sought to remove James from the canon of scripture. Catholicism defers Justification in order to bring James and Paul together.)

I happen to be a Reformed Christian who asserts this causal relationship between good faith and good works. I think that identification with Christ as Saviour in true saving faith alone suffices to justify a man before God. Causally, faith alone causes justification before God. This is how I read Romans 5. Moreover, I think that true saving faith has its root in the supernatural creative act of God within the believer's heart. God causes a change of heart and that changed heart starts functioning by believing. At this point, logically, the believer is Justified. The righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer at this point. This changed heart that believes then obeys. This obedience is the way in which the righteousness of Christ inheres within the believer and this is termed Sanctification. Thus one is saved by faith alone, but it is a faith that is not alone.

You'll note that there is no room for über-Christians or Saints in this second way of looking at things. Every Christian is identified with Christ to the same extent.

Good faith causes good works. You can distinguish between them, but you cannot separate them. If you belong to a "cannibalistic church" that doesn't quite get around to keeping Christ's double-love command, you've good reason to doubt the bona fides of that church.

Christ is in the forgiveness business. He does so by means of putting his righteousness into the lives of his followers. The WWJD bracelets are nice if we keep in mind what exactly it was that Jesus actually did. I suppose the broad way that leads to destruction is to try to "do what Jesus did" and latch onto this bit of his life or that and copy it. Jesus said "woe" to evil doers. and Jesus fed the five thousand. and Jesus did the all the stations of the Cross. The strait gate is to ignore all that and rest in Christ alone by faith.

Periodically, we should test our faith asking whether our lives fit what Christ taught. We need to periodically revisit the Law that Moses revealed and that Jesus interpreted on the Sermon on the Mount. The Law is a mirror that should point out the dirt on our face and metaphorically drive us to the soap of Christ's righteousness claimed by faith. This self-critical introspection and this utter dependence upon Christ doesn't come naturally. I hope this is what Christ called a "strait gate."

Hatred And Mistrust In The Moslem Community

The Australian Prime Ministry contradicted multi-culti dogma by asserting that moslem communities in Australia must assimilate into Australian society, including notions of equal rights for women and other things that characterize Western values.

The response was that these statements "fueled hatred and mistrust" of Moslems.

Let's see, John Howard calls on immigrants to act civilized. Those are words. Even if they were lies, instead of fairly practical common sense, they are only words.

Moslems seized airplanes and flew them into buildings. Moslems routinely strap bombs to their children and send them into Israeli coffee shops and pizza parlors. Moslems use dead children as props in their manipulation of Western media coverage of the war they start.

Question: what cases more hatred and mistrust of Moslems? The words of that last paragraph, or the actions that those words describe?

The Most Useless Guys In The Bible

I recently came to the conclusion that the most useless guys in the Bible were Job's friends. You may recall the story. Job is put through some serious hurt. In the midst of his misery, his friends arrive and "comfort" him.

The nature of their "comfort" is to rise to defend God, claiming that Job's misfortune is the consequence of Job's prior bad acts. They are useless for a couple reasons: 1) they are mistaken in their explanation of Job's misfortune. There is a tacit assumption underlying their remarks, God is under suspicion of wrongdoing in permitting Job's misfortune and must be defended. 2) God doesn't need their help to assert and vindicate his righteousness. As a result, the friends "comfort" consists of accusing Job of prior bad acts.

At the end of the story, God shows up and instead of vindicating Job, he discloses that there's plenty of blame to go around. It's improper to engage in theodicy. It's improper to demand of God an explanation. God is God. If God is not good, there is no Good. If God does that which hurts us that we don't understand, he doesn't owe us an explanation, we owe him the benefit of the doubt. And incidentally, Job's friends were wrong to suspect Job.

Let's suppose you're Job. It's altogether proper to lament the negative circumstances. There is a whole book of the Bible filled with Lamentations. Do that.

Let's suppose your friend is Job. How can you be something better than useless? For one thing, don't assume the negative circumstance is due to your friend's sin. If you love your friend, you owe him the benefit of the doubt. Assuming the negative circumstance is a judgement for sin indicates that you're using your doubt about your friend to think the worst of him. Don't do that. If your friend hurts, you should hurt. Compassion means sharing someone's passion, suffering alongside.

Encourage your friend. The Navy Seals are a tough, elite group. Every Navy Seal goes through training and part of that training is Hell Week. Now, let's suppose you're idling on the beach and you see your friend the Seal struggling up the beach burdened with some heavy military equipment. He's suffering, but he's suffering because he's BETTER than most of his peers. And you are idling on the beach. You can't deny your friend is suffering, but you can remind him that hard training is only for elite troops, and despite the present suffering, there will be something better on the other side of it.

Pressure makes diamonds.

The Accidental Puritan

One of my fave Catholics tells the story of an explorer who went sailing in search of adventure, whereupon he landed upon an island that he found quite marvelous in its geography, climate, and the culture of its natives. After marveling for a season about this find, he came to realize this island was England. (If you've not yet read "Orthodoxy," by all means quit reading this and read that instead!)

I had something similar happen to me. I grew up with WFUR playing in the background. There was Carl McIntyre "20th Century Reformation Hour" and I learnt to roll my eyes at the appropriate times when that old demagogue was in full sail. And Kent City Public High School assigned as reading, "The Scarlet Letter" and they did the "The Crucible" as a high school play. I didn't believe Christianity at the time, and I most certainly wanted nothing to do with that kind of hatefulness. I rather enjoyed having fun, and I had absolutely no fear that "that someone , somewhere , is having fun." Had you asked me what I thought of the Puritans, I'd have rolled my eyes.

I kept this attitude when I started reading my Bible again and ended up identifying myself as a Christian again. In the intervening years, I was blessed to receive an excellent, Christian education chock full of Intervarsity Press apologetics and some world-class philosophical theology at the feet of James Grier who was teaching at Cedarville at the time. In the course of those years, I had a bunch of humanistic notions wash out of my brain. "Hmmmm, I suppose God doesn't need my permission to save me." Stuff like that.

Whereas my world-life view had once been a patchwork of bits that fit on Sunday, but not on Monday, or fit in Physics class but not in Old Testament class, instead I came to find a single integrated way of thinking where everything fit--even the parts that can't fit in a box. Superficially, I became a five-point Calvinist. I liked the rationalism and I found no place where my Reason overturned scripture. And I loved books, and a friend turned me onto a mail order bookstore that had the kinds of books I found most interesting. Contemporary stuff from Banner of Truth, and the old stuff, too.

The name of the bookstore was Puritan Reformed. That name bugged me to no end. I grew up in Grand Rapids, MI where the Reformed guys were all liberal or believed you were a Christian because you were Dutch, or something like that. And then there was the Puritan bit. I like to have fun to much for that to make any sense. And that Reformation thing was something that made total sense. It translated Christianity into the language of the Age of Reason. And I was fine with that. And the Puritans were the 2nd generation Reformers. Semper Reformanda and all that.

Yeah, I identify with the Reformation, and with Reason, and that made me a Puritan.

But that word, Puritan, has lots of overlays of meaning that have been added by Puritanism's enemies over the centuries. I don't buy into any of that. So, maybe I'm not a Puritan. It depends on what you're thinking when you use the term.

The Antichrist

Years back I encountered some local apostates. These were people who were raised in Baptist churches like me. In fact, one had been a pastor for a while. They all had one thing in common, disbelief and a hostility to the gospel.

I have had cause to reflect upon my early religious experience and I think I have found a new lens through which to view it. Gospel is supposed to mean "good news."

Let's suppose you weren't raised in a bible believing church and you've never heard the gospel. What comes to mind when you think of "good news?" Let's see, I see the oncologist tomorrow. Good news would be that he finds no sign of cancer. Let's suppose I stop by the Quickie-Mart and pay the Michigan Voluntary Tax On The Stupid, and unlike every other time, I win a few million bucks. That's good news, too. Or someone gives you a car, tax-free.

Good news should put you in your happy place. So, why is it that the gospel doesn't put you in your happy place? I remember looking at a little book my mom left laying around that contained a plain summary of the gospel. I remember being afraid and avoiding that book. Why? From my earliest age, I associated terror and pain with this thing called the gospel.

Was this Good News business just a cruel lie? "Here, kid, have some bread. Ooops, it's a stone. Hahaha."

The thing that makes the downer of the gospel, is that it only makes sense in context. That context is like that Cancer thing. "Hey, I got a cure for cancer. Oh, by the way, you have Cancer."

The two word definition of the gospel is "repent and believe." You can't sugar-coat the need for Repentance and everybody needs to Repent. Most folks don't naturally want to Repent. Great evil occurs when someone tries to force it.

Repentance isn't rocket science: one the one hand, I try to get away with doing wrong and/or rationalize it away. On the other hand, I want to quit doing wrong and enjoy a clear conscience. Change your mind from the former to the latter, sincerely do that and you've Repented. Was that painless?

If you were raised like I was, the Repentance evokes discomfort, despite the fact that the last paragraph defining the term isn't particularly scary.

Given the fact that the visceral reaction that I felt is not rational, we've got to go beneath the surface to find an explanation.

Let's go back to that Cancer analogy. Imagine comes up to you and says, "Hey, buddy, you got Cancer. I got the cure. Want the cure?" Then the guy gives you a placebo. You still feel that gnawing ache in your gut. The sugar pill didn't do any good. And then you look at the guy, and he's got huge tumors growing out of his neck.

This is horrid, but should not be surprising. AND YOU SHOULD NOT IMMEDIATELY DISMISS THE POSSIBILITY THAT YOU ARE THAT GUY. I've spent a good part of the day contemplating several "former baptists" I've known. In the worst case, they're angry atheists collecting factoids and arguments that atheists collect. In the best case, they found the cure elsewhere. And there are a lot of hurting people who live someplace in between.

Paul curses these people in Galatians 1:9. I've a friend who "wrote the book" on ecumenism. She's distrustful of interfaith stuff and we're on the same page there. I had bought into her challenge to love the brother who happens to come from a different Christian tradition. But the I saw the preaching of another gospel by spiritual fifth-columnists in my own church. The double-love command requires me to give every benefit of the doubt. But I have no doubt that a different gospel was being preached.

Now, you may be wondering how my metaphor of the guy witholding the cancer cure looks in the specific case of the Baptist churches I've been in. Short answer: Finneyism. Also known as Revivalism.

Review: Wikipedia says "Revival is a work of God by his Spirit through his Word..." That's close enough for our purposes. What did Jesus say about the Spirit? Does the Spirit blow on command? To the contrary, Jesus said the Spirit is like the wind that blows from you don't know where and to you don't know. So, who you going to believe, Jesus or the revalist? Deity will be summoned to make a preacher look good in the last minutes of a sermon.

But how is a Revivalist going to keep the donations coming in? How is the preacher going to convince his deacons that he is God's annointed? If you were raised like I was the answer is in your memory banks: an emotional appeal to perform a Baptist Sacrament using every method of psychological manipulation known to man. Is this God's Spirit or is it a man-made show?

This "gospel" that does not feel like Good News and that chases people out of Baptist churches and that innoculates it hearers against the true Good News of Christ is anathematized by the Apostle Paul, but it makes money and empowers preachers.

This false gospel starts with the truth of God's Justice then distorts it into an everlasting cruelty perpetrated upon those who don't cooperate. All this is played up in the most terrifying terms and young children are exposed to this sort of abuse. When they grow up, they're only sane to want to avoid hearing it again. Instead of preaching God's law that perfectly reflects God's character, there are exhortations about obedience and pride and lust cast about in vague terms. "Here, jump through this hoop. No, jump through that hoop. Bad bad, you jumped through the wrong hoop."

There is no mention of the perfect merit of Christ perfectly performed on our behalf and imputed to us by faith alone.

Instead, there's a load of guilt followed by a call to submit. No, this doesn't advertise itself as Islam, but it walks like it and it quacks like it. And what is the action you are called upon to submit to? Is it repent and believe? Often it's something the hearer doesn't quite understand like asking deity to haunt a pump. (Have you asked Jesus into your heart?) And what exactly does it mean to "accept Jesus?"

The true gospel call is that Christ has erased guilt on the Cross and offers to take yours gratis. Claim Christ, claim Christ's righteousness as your own. Let no man steal what Christ has given you. Trust Christ and none of yourself.

Certainty and Precision

One lesson of Post-modernism is that you can't know everything with certainty. I have a friend in my writing group (with whom I share a first name) who takes that to mean you can't know anything for sure. And I disagree with that. There are some things you know for certain, but the edges can get a little fuzzy. No problem with that, really. We know that two plus two is four. And we know you can define Galois Fields of order 4 where two plus two is zero. And we know that two apples plus two bananas almost equals one fruit salad.

I have heard it said, "you can't put God in a box," and that's true. But does that mean we can know nothing of deity? I think not. I think there are some things about God that are certain and there are lots of things that get a little fuzzy. It's a mistake to insist that we know things for certain that the Bible is silent about or only obliquely touch upon.

A good example is evolution versus creation. I'm of the mind that takes whatever the Bible says as certainly true. I'm also of the opinion that most fossils are not fakes like the Piltdown Man bones. (However, you'll note that there's always a risk of being taken in by a fake fossil, given what we saw in Piltdown.) I am also of the opinion that I make mistakes and so do all humans now and then. The job of the scientist and of the theologian is to take whatever's known and try to construct a coherent logical framework that explains it. This is a matter of "interpreting" what's' known to come up with theories or theologies.

Frankly, I have become relatively annoyed with the Creationists because they tend to put too much time into proving that their interpretive constructions are better than the evolutionists constructions. Humans make mistakes, and it is unwise to take our notions of how the first 10 chapters of Genesis should be interpreted, and treat them as infallible. Genesis is infallible, not my notion of it.

Same goes for the end times. The Bible says that if a strong man knows you're coming, you won't be able to rob his house. So, when talk about the Rapture and the End Times, and we point to this or that and say, "that's it." You can bet the Enemy knows this, too. This leads me to think a lot of the Hal Lindsay stuff I read won't work out the way we think.

Besides, there's a difference between Revelation and Dispensationalism. The former is infallible word of God. The latter is an interpretation thereof, a human construction, and subject to error. And no, I don't know any specifics that I can point to as erroneous. I'm saying here's a theoretical framework that will explain our surprise when a popular end-times scenario plays out unexpectedly.

Trouble is that often things are a little fuzzy, lacking a solid biblical mandate, and we forget that. We affirm those things as if they are gospel. The gospel is infallible, I'm not. I may forget that, or I may well know that things are a little fuzzy, but I don't bother to bog down the conversation with a disclaimer every other sentence.

Now, when you hear someone say something, and it seems a little fuzzy to you, but you think he's stating it as if it is gospel. You owe him the benefit of the doubt. 1) He might know something that you don't, but didn't bother to buttress his case with some factoid he thought obvious. 2) He might not know he's on thin ice. 3) He might know it's a little fuzzy, but he forgot to add a disclaimer. 4) He might know it's fuzzy, but doesn't want to open that can of worms because he wants to make another point. 5) He hasn't learned when to be intentionally ambiguous. In all these cases, you owe him the benefit of the doubt.

The Christian ethic is summarized in the double-love command. Practically, we do that when we give the other the benefit of the doubt. If you find yourself where you can't do that, run away.

When I finally learned how to get an A in philosophy, I discovered something I've found useful ever since. I found that depending upon how I worded the answer on an essay test, I could avoid or open a can of worms full of things I didn't know. There were bits I was certain about and there were bits I were fuzzy about. So, I phrased things that would cover the fuzzy bits. Ambiguity is a good thing to cultivate when you're teasing about the fuzzy bits, but if you know something for certain, you ought to be clear and unambiguous.

You're On Your Own

I think of myself as a Christian and I hope those who know me agree with that assessment. Christianity exists in tension between mercy and justice. The mercy business is for when you fail to obey God's law. And justice is how well we all measure up against God's law. I think that's fairly simple.

I go about confident in the imputed righteousness of Christ that I claim by faith alone. And I try to do what's right, as an expression of gratitude, as a matter of obligation, I figure I have to live right. Living right means obeying God's law. Nothing more or less than that: God's law. God's character is imaged in God's law and it an unconditional perpetual ethical obligation. That sounds bad but it's Good. It's the baseline against which the Good is measured. If I'm a good person, I'm obeying God's law as well as possible.

But law gets cluttered. There's the "law" of Roe v Wade that says a woman's privacy gives her the legal right to abort her unborn children. There's the "law" of my alma mater that said not to listen to the Moody Blues in the dorm and keep my hair cut length short enough it didn't touch my ears. There's the "law" of whatever my mom said about smoking and drinking. Is a pattern emerging?

Jesus condemned the Pharisees. Consider the Sermon on the Mount where he explains what God had in mind in Torah about God's moral character. Contrast with what the Pharisees did to fulfill all righteousness. It was something different. They made their own law to keep instead of God's law that they clearly could not keep. That's what damned the Pharisees, they substituted their own legal framework for that of God.

There's more. What is the purpose of God's law? It serves as a target, a benchmark that illustrates how we fail to measure up. A mirror that shows us our face is dirty. You wash your face with soap. Don't try to use a mirror, it breaks and the shards cut you up. I used to stop there in my condemnation of legalists. Now I go one step further.

You can't use the law as a basis of competition for social status. Think about a gathering of fairly upright people. The book of James condemns deferring to people on the basis of riches. Ah, but consider spirituality. How does the Evangelical acquire status and lord it over his peers? By being more holy than they are! How does he do that? Why by keeping to a stricter ethic than they do! That's what *I* do. When I utter one of those bad words you shouldn't say, I go "oops," and look around at who heard. Any Evangelicals? No, whew.

"That's a pretty cavalier attitude about sin, isn't it brother Poling?" Actually, it's the whole point of this essay. (Another Evangelical status seeking behavior is use affected language like brother or sister or beloved.)

(I don't think saying those vulgarities and rude words are violations of the 3rd commandment. That's the command not to say the NAME in a useless fashion. Consider how people say, "Oh my God!" or "God, no!" That's what I think the 3rd commandment prohibits.)

I figure that God helps people keep HIS law and use HIS law to become more like HIM. I used to get all bugged at the sins I'd pray about and get absolutely no traction on overcoming. And I was quite insistent about how God was't keeping his promises about improving me. But then I started asking myself, are these God's laws or are they Baptist laws? I looked through the Bible and I didn't find anything on the subject. But I saw all kinds of real things God commanded that I didn't keep and that didn't bother me.

When you try to keep God's law, by faith God provides grace to live out Christ's righteousness at that point. When you follow any other rule set, you're on your own.

Will The West Lose?

It's pretty clear that either there is some big-time denial of reality among the "reality-based" community, OR there's a radically different paradigm in play among our brothers on the Left.

When I was a lad, the Cold War pitted Capitalist West against the Communist East. It was more than a disagreement about politics and economic systems. With exceptions such as Checkoslovakia's "Communism With A Human Face," we saw a more humanistic West and a more statist East. A side aspect in all this was the relentless Atheism of the Communists versus the freedom of religion, or more accurately, indifference toward religion of the Capitalists.

Overlapping the end of the Cold War was the beginnings of our current world conflict. Carter let the Iranian mullahs get away with acts of war against our embassy. Reagan pulled troops out of Lebanon after a Hezbolla car bomb flattened a barracks and killed a couple hundred Marines. Bush Sr. sent troops to Mogadishu to deliver pizza. And Clinton cut and ran after the "Blackhawk down" firefight. Add to this the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. And a half-dozen major acts of terrorism against the US in the 1990s. This non-response convinced some Moslems with lots of petrodollars that the West was cowardly and corrupt--too soft to respond to a renewed efforts to establish the Califate (that hit the cosmic Pause Button sometime around 9/12/1683 at the gates of Vienna).

Now, let's suppose the Left is not as totally inept and boneheaded as they're acting. What we on the Right call "Islamofascism" may well be regarded by the Left as a mere "nuisance." Though this makes no sense to me, I'm going to try.

Let's think like a Lefty for a moment. First, we're grumpy because the "New Soviet Man" business didn't work out and that human nature isn't as malleable as we'd hoped. Second, despite the failure of worldwide Communism, we're convinced that Rationalism is more ultimate than Religion. The godless Atheism is kept under cover, but the Lefty sees all the evils of the world stemming from the backward followers of ancient myths. To the Lefty, there's little difference between the Fundamentalist Christian protesting the abortion clinic and the Fundamentalist Moslem blowing up the Israeli coffee shop. (No doubt, said Christian would be blowing up the abortion clinic if he could get his hands on some explosives.) They're both crime problems.

Suppose the Lefty thinks this business of Religion is just a phase an immature humanity just has to grow out of. When the rest of humanity catches up in its Evolution to the enlightened ubermench level of the Lefty, religion will decline as fast as the membership rolls of the Episcopal church. Suppose that the Lefty thinks that ultimately, the Islamist and snake-handling rednecks will be as extinct as the dodo bird.

Then QED. There's no need to start WW3 to defeat evil in the Islamist who straps bombs to his kids and sends them off to school. (That whole idea of good and evil is just so passe.) Simply appease the savages while they enslave or murder their neighbors, secure in the knowledge that we don't live in those countries, or in those immigrant ghettos of our cities. We'll just patiently wait for their children to evolve out of their pesky alliegence to Islam.

Conversely, suppose (like me) you're not so evolved nor enlightened. Suppose you know smart people who adhere to all sorts of odd ideas including religious ones. In this case, you won't just pat the savages on the heads secure in the knowledge that they'll "evolve out of" their murderous doctrines. It was the Conservative, Edmund Burke, who said that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

This is why I can't take the cut-and-run Democrats seriously. I fear the next time the US has a president as feckless as Israel's Ehud Olmert (or most of those mentioned in the third paragraph of this essay.

A Modest Proposal

As you may know, in any electoral system, there are records kept of voting patterns. Political boundary lines are drawn that identify these voting patterns. One can, via gerrymandering pretty much guarantee any kind of electoral outcome.

We have in the Middle East a unique situation. The government of Lebanon is roughly divided into two Islamic parts, Sunni and Shiite and one Christian Maronite part. The government of Lebanon disarmed all the parties of the last civil war EXCEPT Hezbollah. And recently Hezbollah went to war with Israel. This is sort of like the Republicans or the Democrats deciding to attack Canada. Since these political parties do not go around with weapons, Hazbollah is probably a bit more like the brown shirts of the mid 20th century.

Of late, Hazbollah has made a point driving into non-Hezbollah neighborhoods, intimidating the populace, and then launching a bunch of rockets at Israel. When Israel attacks the launch points, a bunch of non-Hezbos are screwed.

In World War 2, the United States Air Force learned how to create fire storms in cities like Tokyo and Dresden. There is a precedent for this kind of thing.

What say that some guys in Jewish intelligence get hold of the voting patterns of the last Lebanese election, and turn those districts that voted most heavily for Hesbollah into scorched earth. Since Israel will be damned for inflicting civilian casualties, they might as well go after Hesbollah's supporters in Lebanon. This will help motivate the Hesbos to defend their own neighborhoods instead of taking their show on the road.

There's a story of two guys in a forest who see a bear charging. One guy stops to lace up his running shoes. The second guy asks why he's doing that b/c neither of them can possibly outrun the bear. The first guy replies that he need not outrun the bear, merely the second guy. This is the kind of dynamic that's needed in Lebanon. The non-Hesbollah folks of Lebanon need to find ways to drop a dime on the Hesbos. If they don't, they're just cannon fodder for the Syrians and Iranians.

movies i'd like to see

I just left the family room in disgust. The TV was playing some movie. The blonde woman was being chased by some crazy guy with murderous intent. Let's see... a) will she run backwards from the guy and trip on a tree root? b) will she get into the car and it won't start, or no keys, or whatever? c) will she pull out a large calibre hand gun and put daylight through him? If you've seen any scary movies in the last couple decades you know the answer has only once in the entire history of cinema been #c.

And in juxtapose with the blonde demonstrating a total mastery of murphyesque ineptitude, there is the crazy guy. Whereas she does everything in haphazardly, he glides through the scene finding a rock of exactly the perfect size to bash the car's windshield. The glass is a marvelous tempered non-safety variety that shatters immediately into little crumbles. Obviously, the movie gods are merely toying with this crazy, because despite his invincibility and total command of the scene, and despite the utter ineptitude of the girl, YOU KNOW he'll be dead at the end of the scene after the girl demonstrates plucky determination and dispatches him in an utterly implausible fashion.

Hollywood needs to get out of its rut. Instead of showing the same tired scene over and over again with different types of slashers and different sorts of blondes with plucky determination, show us something new. Here are some suggestions:

1) the blonde dials 9-1-1, locks herself in the bathroom, and the cops arrest the crazy. He is locked up in some mental hospital and spends the rest of his days in counselling.

2) the police show up, put daylight thru the perp, and then are sentenced to prison for their "disproportionate" response.

3) the crazy proceeds to kill the blonde and everyone else who stands in his way. A grateful nation makes him supreme leader and the UN gives him a seat on the Security Council.

C'mon Hollywood, let's see #3. Bonus points: make the crazy Iranian and the girl Jewish.

Don't Judge Me

On two occasions I've seen someone on television say, "Don't judge me..." The first occasion, I was watching "My Name Is Earl" and the person who said it, Brett Butler, would perpetrate some aweful thing and immediately say mantra-like, "Don't judge me." Moments later, she'd do something equally bad and repeat her mantra. The second occasion occured when my daughter was watching a teen show, Gilmore Girls, and the young mom said to her teen daughter, "Don't judge me..." and then supplied some reason I forget.

In the first case, Brett Butler plays someone who screws up time and again, then uses the "don't judge me" line as a vaccination against self-improvement.

In the second case, the Gilmore mom is merely inarticulate. She mispoke. She intended to say "don't condemn me." And she gave reasons to justify herself. Judging is different from condemning. Best to remember that.

Self-justification is related to judging. When Brett Butler on My Name Is Earl said "Don't judge me" she had already judged herself and condemned herself.

We all know what Jesus said about judging: The way you judge others is the way you should expect to be judged. I want to be judged generously and mercifully. I hope I judge others that way. Tell me whether this is so or not.

I know the only way I'll improve is if I get feedback, positive or negative. Go ahead and judge me.

Cheeks and Teeth

Last week we had a discussion at work about whether the Christian ethic is inconsistent or not. Moses said, "Eye for an eye" and Jesus said, "Turn the other cheek." But Jesus endorsed the law of Moses.

What gives?

I've always regarded apparent contradictions as an opportunity to learn. These are generally resolved by finding distinctions. And one learns as one finds distinctions. (If you know how to distinguish between Monza Red and Candy Apple Red, you've learned something about cars.)

Resolving the "eye for an eye" versus "turn the other cheek" problem involves distinguishing between large injuries and small injuries. There's an old saying that, "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye." If you're messing with a Red Ryder BB gun and someone puts an eye out with that thing, it's a big deal. You should get into legal trouble if it wasn't an accident.

But not every injury rises to that level. There's a popular book entitled, "Don't sweat the small stuff." When Jesus says to turn the other cheek, he's talking about a small thing that's best not blown all out of proportion. The Romans had a law that said that a Judean could be forced to carry a Legionaire's gear one mile. Jesus told people to go the extra mile. If everybody is doing more than what's required of them in a million small ways, society will get along better. I think of this as social lubricant.

Thou shalt cut the other guy some slack, give him the benefit of the doubt. We are imperfect beings who work with partial knowledge. Jesus's ethic of social lubricant provides a coping mechanism for this.

I once told someone this and she said, "Does this mean I should be a doormat?" And I replied, "No, sometimes you run out of doubt." There are times when there is no doubt that a crime has been committed. There are times when whatever social framework within which you find yourself, e.g. the laws of the state of Michigan, specifies sanctions and punishments for specific misdeeds. In those cases, you pursue justice.

The Christian exists in tension of Mercy and Justice. We care about right and wrong, so we recognize and we embrace Justice. But we acknowledge we're sinners and we seek Mercy.

So, where do you draw the line between small things that you make a point of mercifully letting things slide versus large things where you pursue justice? It depends upon you. Jesus said that the same strictness by which you judge others will be the strictness by which you will be judged.

The Billion Dollar Hamburg

If you're a private pilot, you've heard of the "hundred dollar hamburg." This is what you get when you climb into an airplane and burn a hundred dollars' worth of aviation fuel to fly to some locale to buy lunch--a hamburg. It's not about the hamburg; it's about the flying.

I just watched the Space Shuttle land. When it did, a NASA flack said, "Discovery's crew completing a 5.3 million mile mission to restore the International Space Station to an assembly-ready status and proving they can use a fifty-foot boom as a heatshield repair platform." Last night I heard Matt Drudge say the former consists of "taking out the space station's garbage." And when they were playing with the fifty-foot boom I heard it described as standing on it and jumping up and down a lot. This business about repairing the Space Shuttle heatshield is important because one Space Shuttle has been lost because a bit of foam nicked the fragile bricks that serve as the Space Shuttle heat shield. (Of course, if you didn't fly this turkey, you wouldn't have to worry about its heatshield failing.)

I've been watching Space Shuttles take off and land on TV for a quarter of a century. That's twice as long as I watched the "moonshots" on TV for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects combined. During the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects NASA was working toward an identifiable goal articulated by JFK. The accomplishments of this Space Shuttle mission is fairly typical. NASA has spent billions of dollars in low earth orbit growing soybeans and watching spiders spin webs in zero gee.

It's not as if they haven't accomplished anything in this quarter century. They've built the International Space Station.

When I was a kid, the Space Station was this spinning wheel in high orbit that served as a stopping-off point on the way to the Moon or Mars. (NASA has little more than paper studies--that they've paid millions for--to go there.) And the International Space Station? It's an unfinished tin can that circles the earth in low earth orbit doing stuff like growing soybeans and watching spiders spin webs in zero gee. It's "International" because the Russians send cosmonauts up there and we send astronauts up there. I suppose they spend all day shaking hands and toasting each other in the other-guy's language for world peace. The International Space Station must do something more significant than that, I hope they serve great hamburgers.

Greenhouse Effects

If Al Gore is to be believed, global climactic change caused by human activity is an inconvenient truth. Mr. Gore has spent the last couple of decades claiming that we are just ten years away from the point of no return. I recall claims of environmental devastation, just ten years away, dating back to the 1970s.

Let's suppose for a moment that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. What is to be done about it? There was that Kyoto thing that levied carbon taxes on the countries that create wealth (while burning fossil fuels) and didn't do anything to poorer countries that also emit as much or more carbon dioxide. (I am uncertain where carbon tax money would be spent, but I suppose Mr. Gore has an idea.)

The whole idea underlying this is that since CO2 emissions cause global warming and reduced CO2 emissions will undo the badness. I think such a notion of causality is simplistic. Life is full of effects that are not negated when you negate their causes. A divorce can be caused by unfaithfulness, but subsequent faithfulness will not necessarily cause reconciliation. Is restricting CO2 emissions the most effective way to counter global warming? Are there ways to reflect more solar energy into space? For instance, clouds are white and provide shade. It's fairly easy to create clouds. Don't like clouds? OK, there are other ways. Let's treat global warming as an engineering problem.

"But, but, but," the environmentalist says, "we don't understand atmosphere dynamics well enough to 'engineer' climate." Is that so? Then how can you pontificate about global warming with such certainty?

My complaint is that Mr. Gore has his legion of Lysenkos who chant impending doom. The impending doom is too dire to wait until they understand the problem well enough to prove it. They say that emitting CO2 causes global warming and offer nothing more substantial than to stop emitting CO2. That wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that we're talking about committing trillions of dollars to unproven hypotheses.

Caveat eBay

Earlier, I wrote of my little problem with a no-name thumbdrive I bought on eBay. To summarize, I found a 4GB thumb drive on eBay that checked out fine, and it reported 4GB capacity, but when I started copying files onto it that were greater than or equal to 1GB, the files read back corrupted.

I repeated the experiment with a 2nd no-name thumb drive (also 4GB advertised capacity). This time I found that it flaked out when I tried to write more than 1/2GB to it.

Now, maybe the vendors in question, obscure Hong Kong operators I've never heard of, are honorable and honest businessmen. But I now I have reason to doubt. Two no-name thumb drives each flaked out in roughly the same way and they flaked out in a fashion consistent with the manufacturer fraudulently substituting a cheaper 1/2GB or 1GB chip for the advertised 4GB memory chip and then hiding the fraud via firmware.

So, I thought, maybe this is a problem with WinXP or with my hardware. Easy enough to verify, I stopped by Best Buy and I bought a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB thumb drive. It's pretty cool. It has no cap to get lost, instead the USB socket retracts into the body of the thumb drive.

I repeated the above experiment with this drive, too: I copied 2.39GB worth of large MP3 files to the thumb drive. Then I checked each file for goodness. It was fine.

So, I learned something. Caveat eBay. If a deal on some big of cheap electronic gear seems like it's too good to be true, it is too good to be true.

Could I cause trouble for the two Hong Kong vendors who screwed me out of the difference between a 1GB and a 4GB thumb drive? I don't rightly know how. And I'm not highly motivated to take on the role of avenger of justice.

I am not happy with myself for having been taken. I am also unhappy with eBay for not shutting down these guys. On the other hand, I am quite happy with the 4GB thumb drive I just got from Best Buy.

The Bible and Immigration Policy

My wife pointed me to Leviticus 19:33-34 and asked if it applied to the debate about border security and amnesty for illegal aliens in the US. It reads like this:

33 " 'When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. 34 The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

This sounds more like the Senate version than the House version of pending immigration reform legislation. Of course, in this fight I've been more interested in the corporate lawbreakers who get a cheap workforce to exploit via illegal immigration. If the guy's illegal, how can he sue you for OSHA or Minimum Wage violations. So, my first application of this passage is to corporate welfare queens, not my Bircher friends who want to secure the borders with some kind of wall. (This reminds me of Hadrian's wall, or the Berlin Wall, or the Great Wall of China and I'm not wild about it. Before 9/11, I'd be perfectly happy to dispense with the whole business of borders. I know it is impractical because other countries don't have welfare and laws regulating emergency room medical care and lawyers aiming to get rich suing corporations, etc.)

But the Bible says I'm not to mistreat immigrants, legal or otherwise. So, is this why Mr. Bush is screwing over the House of Representatives? Just begging them to make him a lame duck BEFORE the mid-term elections? Maybe. Mr. Bush's hijinks as well as those of various RINO Senators have transformed me from a free-borders type to an immigration hawk.

So, what about Leviticus 19:33-34? I looked at the fine print and then my eyes happened to spy Leviticus 19:28. " 'Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.

Hmmmm, this verse generally gets quoted by those who forbid all body piercing along with tattoos. So, I told my spouse to go ahead and cite Leviticus 19:33-34 when you're debating immigration policy, but when you do, you'd best not be wearing peirced earrings.

Mystery of the missing 3 Gigabytes

Months back I was looking on eBay for a cheap thumbdrive. I noticed something odd. A lot of no-name Chinese vendors were selling higher capacity thumb drives than American vendors I'd done business with before (Sandisk and PNY). And these drives were cheap, too! So, I bought a couple 4GB drives and they worked fine. I was one happy camper.

That was until I replaced the hard disk in my basement computer and that entailed reinstalling a bunch of software, including that of my RadioShark. I don't use my basement computer much. It basically sits down there and waits until Sunday morning whereupon it wakes up and runs a Tivo-like program on my RadioShark that records Jazz Brunch on my local classic rock station, WLAV. About a month went by and I had a lot of recorded stuff downstairs piling up. (Jazz Brunch runs when I'm in church and I figure it's a fair use to time-shift it for listening during the week. Disagree? Sue me.)

After a while, I copied the recordings to a thumb drive and took it upstairs to my laptop to listen to. Didn't work. I was distracted and I let more time pass. I figured the problem was some stupid DRM on the Windows WMA recording format. I switched to WAV. It seemed to work at the expense of massive files. After working once, that failed, too. A week later, I switched to MP3s. Still no workie.

Hmmmmm. I really am not dumb, though I act that way occasionally. I finally got bothered enough by what was obviously something that should be working not working that I payed attention to what I was doing. And I couldn't find my no-name high capacity thumb drive, so I picked up a 1GB drive from PNY. It took all the files and carried them to my laptop safely.

This is what they say in the detective business is called a clue.

(Oddly, I had already done an XCOPY/v and it said everything was fine. Liar.)

Then I formatted the cheapo 4GB drive and carried files to my laptop just fine. I copied more files and this time I tested each file after copying it. After a dozen or so files, everything I copied afterwards would be corrupted. Strangely, even if I deleted some files, subsequent files would be corrupt. So, I reformatted the 4GB drive and copied a bunch of MP3s thereto. I looked at each file to see where the file corruption started.

Turned out that the first bunch of files were OK, but the next one was bad half-way through and all files copied thereafter were bad. I deleted just the bad and half-bad files and then checked the properties of the good files. They summed to 933MB and the half-bad file had been over 100mb.

OK, the drive lets me format and thereafter copy up to 1GB of files thereto correctly. After that WinXP, and even DOS's XCOPY, say that all is fine while copying data into corrupt data. Just writing to that 2nd GB and beyond causes the thumbdrive to thereafter store corrupt data without warning. Not good.

Is this a cautionary tale? Not to buy el cheapo thumb drives off eBay from insidious Hong Kong merchants, but to stick with known vendors like PNY or SanDisk?

Idunno. I'm going to repeat this experiment with a different cheapo drive. And I'm CERTAINLY going to be more thorough about testing thumbdrives in the future.

Update: I performed these experiments on the 2nd el-cheapo thumb drive and also on a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer drive as described here

Atheist/Agnostic Evangelical Christians

I received some spam just now. The subject line said, "Christianity in America Won't Survive Another Decade..." There's part of me that resonates with this sentiment. This is an atheistic and/or agnostic sentiment.

The spam continues: "Christianity in America won’t survive another decade… unless we do something now."

I think that if Christianity in America didn't survive the next decade, that would be a catastrophicly Bad Thing.

This spam message starts by saying Christianity in America WON'T SURVIVE. But then it says Christianity in America won't survive UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING NOW. Which is it? Will Christianity in America NOT survive or not survive UNLESS I do something? I suspect that the SOMETHING includes sending money to whoever spammed me.

All this is an atheistic sentiment because it presumes the success or failure of Christianity depends upon something humans do (or fail to do).

Does God get any say in this matter?

I've had the opportunity to visit a couple Baptist churches whose membership has rapidly declined of late. I feel a little bad about this. But my bad feeling is moderated by the knowledge that every true church is the property of God--not the preacher or the board or the membership.

I believe in the Sovereignty of God and I believe God works through people. But the ultimate ownership of a true church lies in God's hands. If you're someone like Kierkegaard or Bonhoeffer and you think there's something wrong with your church, it might be that it's not God's church. If there's any message we should take from Kierkegaard or Bonhoeffer, it is to make your calling and election sure, and apply that not just individually but corporately.

I'll grant that false churches may belong to the preacher or the board or the membership. And most probably such churches will not survive unless their owners do something. If you're in the business of selling Christian-oriented kitsch this will probably hurt your bottom line.

Therefore, here is my modest proposal for all those churches that won't survive unless we do something now: Get corporate sponsorship from those people who make so much money selling Christian-oriented kitsch. It's clearly in their financial interst.

Messengers we're not allowed to reply to

Months back I read a book by a New Yorker columnist that I found quite apt. And last week, a friend sent a book review this guy had written in the New Yorker. It looked interesting and decided to buy this book. I'm on vacation. So, I had to find a bookstore in Grand Haven, MI. The Bookman is a nice place. Not as mega-huge as Barnes & Noble, but bigger than most mom and pop stores. I like book people. The girl behind the counter looked up the book I was seeking in her computer and led me to it in the stacks. Since it was the first day of my vacation, I asked her where I might find the penny dreadfuls. She led me to the Science Fiction section and I accepted her recommendation. I was pleased to work with someone who like myself loves books and reads widely. As I was paying for the books, I looked arount for my daughter to let her know we'd be leaving soon. My eyes fell upon the visage of a beautiful blonde in a low cut blouse: Ann Coulter.

I had just read one of my favorite right-wing bloggers criticize her (agreeing with Mrs. Hillary Clinton) for insulting about the 9/11 widows. In the narrow context cited by the critics, Ms. Coulter's prose was indefensible.

When someone gets condemned by BOTH the Left and Right, I figure I'd better see for myself what's up. (For instance, I read The Duh Vinci Code, and found out that, yup, both liberal and conservative scholars were right that it's historical fantasy.) Thus, I added "Godless: The Church of Liberalism" to my purchase. I recited the reasons above to justify my purchase. Nevertheless, I sensed disappointment/disapproval.

Yesterday, I started reading Ann Coulter's book and I started laughing. This is red-meat for conservatives. If you're a liberal, you'll froth at the mouth. If you're a liberal with a heart condition, Yeah, read this book BEFORE the next election. I joked to my daughter, "Ann Coulter is crack cocaine for conservatives!" And I've been reading aloud passages and laughing ever since.

Then I came to chapter 5 "Liberals' Doctrine Of Infallibility: Sobbing Hysterical Women." This is the exact point where everyone criticizes Ann Coulter, so I paid closer attention. Here is the first sentence of this chapter: "Liberals are perennially enraged that Republicans are allowed to talk back."

I'll grant that the junior Senator from New York is enraged. I also see that this thesis cannot be attacked directly.

Ms. Coulter goes on to say that liberals have sought "sobbing hysterical women" to carry their message. When Ms. Coulter refers to "sobbing hysterical women" she is (figuratively) referring as much to Mr. Max Cleland and Mr. John Murtha as she (literally) referring is to Casey Sheehan's mother or any 9/11 widows. Ms. Coulter writes, "Finally, the Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to. That's why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can't respond to them because would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering."

Now, that's an interesting point that hasn't made it into the open! Mrs. Clinton certainly does not want us to dwell upon this point and would dearly love to distract us from. It is a point that my friends on the right should not miss.

Let's suppose Mr. Michael Moore posits some goofball policy position. With the advent of Fox News and the non-traditional media, we can have a dialog whereby his ideas can be critiqued. Ms. Coulter has identified a key trick in the liberal playbook: select mouthpieces (sobbing hysterical women) who cannot be contradicted. If a "sobbing hysterical woman" proposes policy that doesn't hold together, like proposing we move our troops from Iraq to a quick-deployment staging point 5,000 miles away, I can't critique it because I am not a Vietnam veteran like Mr. Murtha. (How dare I be insensitive to Mr. Murtha's post-traumatic stress disorder!) We really can't trust the judgement of "hysterical sobbing women." We owe them a modicum of courtesy and sympathy, but that's it. When "hysterical sobbing women" make a career of their victimhood, we mustn't forget the limits of courtesy and sympathy.

Is Ms. Coulter over the top? Yes. If you agree with her, you'll get a huge laugh and if you disagree, you'll foam at the mouth. However, she has a point: Policy positions should be the subject of open discussion and debate. Shame on the Democrats for exploiting "hysterical sobbing women" to squelch policy debate.

Should Rush Limbaugh refer to the 9/11 widows as the "Jersey Girls" and should Ann Coulter refer to them as "harpies" or "witches of East Brunswick." Probably not. On one hand, I like the idea that such things give liberals an excuse to underestimate the Right. I enjoy the laughs that such over-the-topness evoke. On the other hand, I prefer civility in public discourse. It's enlightening that the Right manages to say some very tough things about the other side while never uttering vulgarities. However, I've never been able to scope out a Lefty blog without being exposed to multiple obsenities. Ms. Coulter does not use dirty words when she eviscerates her political opponents. Nevertheless, she does coarsen the discussion.

I think that Ms. Coulter muddies her thesis that "Democrats choose only messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to" with a second thesis that "personal tragedy does not immunize against criticism." I agree with both theses, but lament the fact that the first hasn't gotten more attention.

An Inconvenient Unit Of Measure

It's wise to double-check your prejudices from time to time. I did this when I googled "How much have sea levels risen?"

I was rewarded with this link that graphically shows how sea levels have risen over the last 120 years. If you click the link you'll see a curve with the sea level inexorably and relentlessly rising. The article says this:

"From 3,000 years ago to the start of the 19th century sea level was almost constant, rising at 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr; since 1900 the level has risen at 1 to 3 mm/yr ; since 1992 satellite altimetry from TOPEX/Poseidon indicates a rate of about 3 mm/yr. This change may be the first signs of the effect of global warming on sea level, which is predicted to cause significant rises in sea level over the course of the twenty-first century."

You've perhaps seen the movie "Waterworld" where the entire planet is flooded.

However, when you look at size of the numbers something startling appears: that is not 3 meters/year. It's 3 millimeters/year. By fortuitous coincidence, I have had to make some close measurements that reminded me how small a millimeter actually is. 3 mm is width of a capital letter E on the printed page. During the entire modern era, sea level has risen 7.87 inches.

Mt. Everest is 8,850m (29,035 feet) tall. If present trends continue, it'll be underwater in less than 3 million years (2,952,339 AD)!

Ecumenism and Virgins

A friend from my youth group wrote the book on Ecumenism. During college years I turned right and she turned left. In the olden days of my youth, Carl MacIntyre (when not waxing eloquent about the virtue of killing a Commie for Christ) railed upon the World Council Of Churches and other aspects of the apostasy that sprung from German Rationalism commonly called Modernism or Theological Liberalism.

Red baiting notwithstanding, I bought into Dr. MacIntyre's rejection to ecumenism. The reasoning is trivial: If you and I disagree on some point of faith, at least one of us has to be wrong. If you aren't going to change your beliefs to agree with me, and vice versa, then we can only fellowship if both of us compromise our faith. This compromise demonstrates a contempt for the content of that faith, or at least a subordination of one's faith to the end of organizational "unity."

This contempt for doctrine has taken on many forms over the years. In Evengelical circles, you see it expressed with hymnody bereft of any content, save, "Jesus loves me, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" (and it means so much more because they do the Powerpoint flying logos in a bigger typeface). It's also seen in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School materials that are so "gospel lite" that they can be sold to any church worship center that doesn't use a Crescent or a Star of David as a logo. The program of compromising doctrine that we rejected in the World Council of Churches has snuck in thru kitsch-dealing "Christian Stores."

Having anathematized one form of Ecumenism, I want to vindicate a second form of it.

I will not compromise the Baptist distinctives you can find expressed in the London Baptist Confession, the Philadelpha Baptist Confession or the New Hampshire Baptist Confession. I will gladly and enthusiastically assert them without qualm or reservation. And if you're not a Baptist...

Then what?

There's a joke by Emo Philips that suggests a "Die Heretic!" response. But this overlooks the fact that Baptists assert the soul liberty of the believer. You have a right to be wrong. So, don't look to me to run any Spanish Inquisition to change your mind.

To the contrary, if you disagree with me, I have an opportunity to learn from you. You don't ask the fish about the water. By talking to an Atheist, I was able to understand why it's necessary that the righteousness of God be inhumanly high. Similarly, talking to non-Baptists who I presume to be closer to God than my Atheist friend provides insights into how to approach scripture and how God relates to mankind. These insights only come out in dialog. This dialog and cooperation with non-Baptists could be construed to be Ecumenism, too.

Ecumenism can be construed to come in two flavors: 1) organizational mergers that compromise faith or 2) trans-denominational dialog that discovers and even sharpens theological distinctions with neither rancor nor bitterness.

So, I pointed out this to my Ecumenism book writing friend and she agreed that the first sort of Ecumenism was bad, but the second sort of Ecumenism is good. (She agreed with me so she must be right.)

I drank this Ecumenism flavored kool-aid a couple years ago. Right before my former church had a Revival. (That disaster deserves its very own essay.)

This brings us to this morning's sermon on the Parable of the Ten Virgins. There's a term Ecumenists use: Christian Identity. It's alien to my Evangelical ears, but I think you can get the idea. If I say I'm a Christian, and I do, it's an assertion of my Christian identity. You may think I'm a back-stabbing hypocrite, but i think I'm a Christian. Christian identity short-circuits considerations of bona fides or mala fide. Christian identity makes no distinction between wheat and tare. Ask Judas on Palm Sunday if he is a disciple of Christ and he'll sincerely say yes.

Same goes for the Ten Virgins of Matthew 25:1-13. All are invited and all respond affirmatively. But five are foolish and five are wise. The difference is only in preparation. The sermon is very good and you should listen to it for yourself. This is a scary thought because my Christian identity may not correspond to Christ's opinion of me. Louie said that if you name the name of Christ, you have a lamp: you're one of the virgins in this parable.

This is scary. I mentioned to my wife that the parable seems to indicate a 50-50 split between wheat and tares. And she fired back, that means one of us... And of course, I hadn't doubted my wife's bona fides until that point. We all like to think ourselves OK and if anybody is fooling himself it's the other guy. Reflecting further, I realized that 50-50 is likely an average-case ratio. There is good reason to think that there are frequently more wheat than tares (or vice versa). For instance, the small group of 12 people with Christ himself as facilitator had a 11-1 wheat to tare ratio. Presumably, groups led by tares would have more tares, too.

Sometimes I'll talk to someone who'll ask me if I think Catholics (or fill in any other denomination) are going to heaven. I can't answer, because I can't tell from here whether they've packed the extra oil like parable says of the wise virgins. But I will invariably answer that I believe for certain that some Baptists are going to Hell. I've written an essay on the subject (How To Go To Hell).

I believe the Wise and Foolish Virgins of the Parable represent individual believers, but it's harder to be an foolish virgin when everyone around you is reminding you to bring extra oil, and it's easier to be a foolish virgin when everyone around you thinks it unnecessary. That puts an onus upon each denomination to do everything they can to help as many as possible go past mere Christian Identity to actually identify with the Wise Virgins of the Parable.

The Duh Vinci Code

OK, Dan Brown wrote a potboiler/thriller about some super-secret conspiracy to suppress a story about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail is really his blood line. This is supposed to be based on the history of the Gnostic heresy and has been covered up because everybody knows the winners write history and cover up whatever the losers said.

My church is overreacting to this. A couple generations ago Baptists overreacted by camping outside theatres, getting mad, organizing boycotts and generally doing the work of the movie's publicist. Now they're trying to make this into some kind of "outreach" thing. "People will ask questions, blah, blah, blah."

I have some observations:

1) If, instead of Jesus, this movie was talking about Mohammed, you'd see riots, etc. Dan Brown would be rooming with Salman Rushdie in some witless protection program. Imagine the HOLLYWOOD sign with flames wicking up the letters. This says that either Islam is a lot more childish or that Christianity is a lot more wimpy. You decide.

2) The gnostic heresy was 180 degrees out of phase with what the Duh Vinci Code claims in two critical points: a) the gnostics were not feminist-friendly, claiming a woman had to become a man to get to heaven. b) the gnostics were heretical because they asserted the Divinity of Christ, while denying the Humanity of Christ. Orthodox Christianity claims he was fully Divine And fully Human. Contemporary heresies including the Duh Vinci Code claims Christ was just a really good teacher, but not God. ((And if you're not God, but say you are God, how does that really good business work?))

3) The Duh Vinci Code's story about the Holy Grail is as historically accurate as Monty Python's Holy Grail. The Duh Vinci Code should be taken just as seriously.

It is ironic that the contemporary heresy tries to assert the sacred feminine in Mary Magdalene while ignoring the sacred feminine in the Blessed Virgin Mary. Trouble is that the BVM fails to deliver for contemporary heretics because she's not as cool and edgy as the demon-possessed hooker who was rescued by Christ.

There's an agenda and it's very simple: ABC. Anything But Christianity.

C.S. Lewis said in "Funeral For A Great Myth" that there was a pent up demand that reversed the normal flow of information from laboratory to popular culture when Darwin found a naturalistic explanation of origins. Here we're seeing another such inversion between pop culture and history. All the historians say that the Duh Vinci Code is bunk. But people want to believe something new and hidden and different that helps explain the phenomenon of Christianity without having to grasp the prickly bits of God's law and sin and redemption.

Political Hacks In The Intelligence Community

On the heels of the disclosures that the NSA had recorded the telephone calls of foreign nationals suspected to be al qaeda terrorists dialing into the US came another embarassing leak, this time from CIA, that terrorists were being held in secret prisons somewhere in Europe. Probably in the countries that used to live under Soviet domination. Distressing stuff. The Wingnut in me says, "yeah right!" and the Moonbat in me says, "just like those Bushies."

It's been my opinion that the CIA has spent the last couple decades being "the gang who couldn't shoot straight." Starting with the total surprise of the collapse of the Soviet empire and leading to 9/11 made me think the humint side of the intelligence community was woefully inept. This isn't new. When he was in his cups ole Tailgunner Joe MacCarthy thought the place was full of commies. (Until he sobered up and whereupon he issued a retraction.) But I try not to ascribe malice when mere incompetence explains.

Speaking of MacCarthy, a McCarthy named Mary McCarthy is, depending upon who you listen to, either a demon of MacCarthy-like dimensions or a saint along the lines of Joseph Wilson or Valery Plame. Seems she dropped the dime on the CIA prisons deal. Heroic leaker, right?

Based on this morning's reading this is what happened:
She worked in CIA and when the Clinton's took power, she was quickly promoted. According to financial statements, she gives money to their kind of people. All the Clintonistas she worked for and who advised Mr. Kerry (who incidentally served in Vietnam) in the recent election describe her in glowing terms. But there are veiled murmerings from the right side of the blogosphere that she's a political hack.

Now, imagine a hypothetical. (Extended hypotheticals are best read while wearing tinfoil headgear.) You're Porter Goss who was a former spook before becoming a politician and you take over a politicized CIA. Spooks are certifiable "sneaky bastards" and if you're not a spook, remember you're only an amature sneak. (Ms. McCarthy has spent her career in the non-spook side of CIA.) Pause hypothetical.

When you work for the government and you see something bad going on, you can follow several procedures short of leaking the story to the New York Times. There will be an office of the Inspector General to whom you should file a complaint. Ms. McCarthy went to some kind of seminar that put her in contact with CIA officers in the Inspector General's office.

Resume hypothetical. Suppose some sneaky bastard files a false report about human rights violations in covert Eastern Europe prisons. After abu ghraib, the story is not only plausible, but "too good to check." Someone from the analytical side of CIA, who couldn't catch a clue if it were delivered by a hijacked jetliner at several hundred mph, would take the complaint at face value. End hypothetical.

I find it an interesting coincidence that on the very same weekend that Ms. McCarthy was indicted for disclosing classified information, the feds disclosed that they can find no proof of the these covert prisons.

With the aforementioned hypothetical in mind, I suspect that the CIA is getting back into the covert ops business.

useless cable news

Someone down south has charged some jocks with having raped her. Racist and sexist politics are all in play. What I found most annoying just now is (beside the fact that I was watching this tripe) that in the same sentence where Alan Colmes accuses Sean Hannity for being sexist for mentioning that the accusing party is a stripper, he says she's a mother.

Now, if it is sexist for Sean Hannity to say the woman is a stripper. Isn't it also sexist to say she is a mother? To my knowledge, you have to be a member of the female sex to be a mother.

I don't care what anyone says. The only thing that's pertinent is what happened in this case. Since the case has not yet gone to trial, nothing of what happened has been established. There's nothing but hearsay and gossip until facts are brought out in court.

The bottom line of all this is that 24x7 cable news coverage needs a new "trial of the century" every three weeks or so. At this rate we can look forward to a total of 1733 trials of the century between now and 2106.

ABC Gnosticism

i read the Da Vinci Code months back and thought it an amusing potboiler. A few scenes made me think, "this will cheese off the Catholics." But the rest just read like fiction, Harry Turtledove kinds of stories where the premise is "what if so and so didn't happen."

But Da Vinci Code gets a lot of traction. There's talk of the "sacred feminine" that some people take seriously and apply it to Mary Magdalene, but never to the Blessed Virgin Mary. (I've said before that there's a reason why there's so much goddess kitsch in the PBS Wireless catalogue.) I think this is because of something I call ABC religion: Anything But Christianity.

There's a lot of people who want to put forth a different ethic than that personnified by the God that Is. And adopting a different ethic, one that's more politically correct about homosexual acts, for instance, is something contemporary culture wants very much, but contemporary culture doesn't have the guts to openly pull out a golden calf. So, there's a lot of effort that goes into redefining Christianity and its ethic to fit their social agenda.

This worked a century ago when the Social Gospel had its expression in theological Liberalism had a primarily economic thrust and we didn't know that socialist economics was the Road To Serfdom. The commies at least had the guts to throw off those ancient myths. But Liberal Christianity has been unable to get traction of late.

So we're seeing different attempts at ABC replacements or redefinitions of Christianity along different lines. Since Christianity has an inherently Historical component, redefinition of Christianity has looked to the historical losers who fought to define Christianity in the first place.

Enter the Gnostics. That was a long time ago and their gospels are coming out of obscure historical places to serve in a contemporary attempt at redefining Christianity. Indeed, it is easy to look at Gnostic texts out of context and put together things that serve the contemporary redefinition/reinterpretation of Christ and his religion.

There's just one problem, when you interpret the Gnostic texts, it is easy to forget why they wee rejected in the early centuries of Christianity. Whereas orthodox/traditional Christianity makes a big deal of the dual human & divine nature of Christ, the Gnostics got his human nature wrong. The 1st century Gnostics would say Christ's humanity was a facade or illusion. Because matter to the Greek mind was inherently evil, Christ being good and God required Christ to be non-material.

In today's context, the heresy of Liberalism said Christ was a nice teacher, a human on spiritual steroids, but not wholly divine. Unless you mean by divine this panentheistic notion where there's a Newage sense in which everything is god. Contemporary society has rejected metaphysical notions that are the linchpins of Gnosticism.

The result is a sort of cafeteria theology where bits that advance the cause of the day are incorporated whilst conveniently ignoring the bits that don't fit. Nor is there any attempt to adhere to any systemmatic thinking to explain the connection beetween the bits you embrace. Sounds like a Cargo Cult, but that's another story.

Moreover, if you are to use the Gnostics to advance some feminist agenda, you've got a little problem with the antifeminist assertions of the Gnostic gospels themselves.

This shows a real risk of dealing with old texts. You can't read an old text with contemporary eyes. You have to understand the old text's philosophical-historical context and read it with that in mind. The ancient greeks had odd notions of substances and essences. Those notions drive a lot of the arguments of the early church fathers. But we're modern scientific rationalist readers, and we should take pains to interpret old texts in their ancient context before trying to translate their message into our contemporary context.

This applies to the traditionalist Christian as well as the new gnostic heretic. I leave it to the reader to supply examples.

Does God Reject People?

So, I'm watching TV and there's this ad with these people sitting in church and you see a finger hit a button and this spring under their chair shoots them off into space. They show a black woman with a baby. Then two guys who look like they want to make out right there in church. Then an arab looking guy. Then you see a handicapper's walker go sailing off. The last scene shows a homeless woman and the white bread folks next slide away.

ha ha ha.

Then the screen goes black and you see letters say, "God Doesn't Reject People" followed by a few seconds then "Neither do we."

Sweet.

So, I turned to my son, and asked, "I wonder what would REALLY happen if you got a bunch of Nazi storm troopers and sat them down in the pew?" And we got our own laugh.

My opinion about what's right or wrong is completely irrelevant. But God's opinion about what's right or wrong is most important. God has either spoken or he has not. And if he has done so, it is unwise to confuse our own moral opinions with whatever God has said.

Story-Driven Development And Cargo Cult Science

Recently at church the Sunday School teacher asked, "does anyone have a story about what that means?" I have noticed a shift to the post-modern emphasis upon narrative over the old-fashioned emphasis upon doctrine. Thus I started thinking thru a thesis/antithesis with "story" at one end pole. What was the other pole? I figured "explanation." A generation ago, the teacher would ask the class for an "explanation" instead of a "story."

Story-driven methodologies appear at church and in software engineering. In both contexts relevant facts are brought to light in a narrative descrptive structure. In church people tell their stories or use stories to point to something deeper--an encounter with the divine or some insight into our nature. This approach has pushed aside doctrinal or dogmatic teaching.

Similarly, some software development teams have adopted a story-driven development model. The software engineer interacts with the customer to discover "stories" that guide the software development process. Each story is a Use Case of the system expressed in narrative form. A story provides a scenario of stimuli from users or external systems and responses by the software solution. The narrative provides a structure whereby phenomena can be elaborated upon and described in measureable, repeatable terms. The distinction between Story Driven Development and Use Cases is that UML is the domain of Big Up-Front Design whereas Story Driven Development is more incremental and iterative just as Test Driven Development is so.

Stories are good in software engineering because every software project is a learning exercize. It invariably starts at "the point of maximum ignorance" and proceeds from there. Similarly, religion today is characterized by more doubt than faith.

Stories are a strategy for coping with incomplete and imperfect knowledge. This seems apt during requirements discovery. At this point, the client is more likely to know less consciously than he knows unconsciously. When a conscious explanation is demanded from him, he may offer something spurious. Conversely, if he were to offer a narrative description, implicit and unconscious information is more likely to slip into the "story." (See Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink: The Power Of Unconscious Thinking." )

Story or testimony places only one demand, that of honesty. The reader has to trust the story reflects the phenomena as perceived by the story-teller. This approach is very post-modern. It arrogates to itself minimal demands of "truth" or of "how" the phenomena come to be.

Reductionism is a necessary survival trait in both religion and in software engineering. Nothing will turn a pleasant philosophical/theological chat ugly faster than the assertion of some point of dogma someone else in the room anathamatizes. And I cannot say how many times a productive engineering meeting has ground to a halt upon getting bogged down in the "hows" while the "what's" remain only partially known. Story-based approaches focus everyone on the "what." This focus lets us all describe and clarify these things most immediately pertinent while deferring the deeper parts to the experts.

Mention of the experts brings us to note that story-based techniques work best in mixed company: in the mixed multitude of believers and skeptics in the theological domain, or in the mix of customer and solution-provider in the software domain.

The Bible was written by and to pre-scientific people. A lot of trouble springs from ignoring this point. The current approach is to interpret it phenomenologically. If the Bible says "sunrise" or "sunset" it means the same thing the weatherman on television means. Neither is making a statement about astronomy, both are saying when the day starts or ends.

There are at least three models that describe the motion of celestial bodies. Ptolemy articulated a system of wheels within wheels with the Earth at the center of the universe and everything moving around it. Copernicus created a model with the Sun at the center of the universe with the earth moving around it. Meanwhile, the Babylonians had created a purely mathematical description that made no attempt to get to the underlying mechanisms underlying the observed phenomena.

In his 1974 Caltech commencement address Dr. Richard Feynman described the Cargo Cult of the south seas. He describes them with this: "During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land."

This shows a risk of the story-driven approach. The Cargo Cultists grasp phenomena, they know the story. We must not stop there. We understand why cargo planes came to remote islands and we understand why with the war over, they quit coming.

You have to think about the stories, put them together and underlying mechanisms that explain the phenomena. It is hard to go beyond phenomena we all agree about and add something to it. It paints a target on you. People will argue and your explanation will compete with others' explanations. A few centuries ago folks got burned at the stake when their explanations were shot down. As you may recall the competition between heliocentric and geocentric models gave rise to a lot of angry debate. Had it not been for Galileo's invention of the telescope, the debate might still be ongoing.

Feynman says that real science requires honesty. There will be parts of the story that don't fit your explanation. In fact, when Copernican astronomy specified circular instead of elliptical planetary orbits, its predictions fit the phenomena worse than Ptolemaic astronomy. Galileo's telescope added stories about Jupiter's moons. It's said that some refused to look through his telescope. No honest. Honestly dealing with the bits that don't fit replace some theories and correct other theories.

There is a certain arrogance in an "explanation" emphasis that's absent from "story" emphasis. "Explanation" presumes that one knows more than what's immediately apparent. "Story" acknowledges the limitations of perspective and scope. And it is much less likely to be contradicted by things like Copernican revolutions. On many software projects one learns that the underlying model formulated at one time is inadequate when you learn more later. Thus I think a "story" with its focus upon a sequence of immediate phenomena is less likely to prove wrong than an "explanation". Later stories will elaborate details latent in earlier stories, but not contradict them. (See Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolution.")

Stories should feed theories. Theories inspire disagreement and argument. Debate may scrape the frothy bits off a theory, but the real advancement comes as more stories are incorporated into those theories. This iterative process is the synthesis of "story" and "explanation."

Hypocrisy is cancer

A running sore may lie under a purple robe. -- Stephen Charnock

Last week in church I saw the above quote. I didn't like it. The notion of a running sore is disgusting. I guess that's why the quote works. We like to think ourselves something nice when our inner natures are in truth disgusting.

I own a book by Stephen Charnock. He's a cool dude. He's also been dead for a few centuries. Let's see, Mr. Google? Born 1628. I figure in those days one might have more occasion to encounter running sores than in antiseptic America. So, I arrogated to myself the task of updating Mr. Charnock's metaphor to something I could more directly relate to.

A running sore is a wound that does not heal. One of the interesting findings of recent medical science is that Cancer hijacks the healing mechanism of the body. The body sees the cancerous tumor as a wound that does not heal. So, it grows. Cancer I know something about.

Hypocrisy is cancer.

When you look at a cancer patient, you see someone whose skin looks deathly, their hair is falling out, and they look bloated and puffy. The cancer does not do that. It's chemotherapy that does all that bad stuff.

I don't know how long I had cancer. I didn't feel particularly bad for the years I now know that I had the disease. For most of the time, I looked pretty healthy. The cancer caused some blood loss through my colon but it was reabsorbed so the net effect was a bit of anemia. And the anemia didn't feel that bad except for the weakness and loss of stamina. And a craving for ice chips.

The functioning hypocrite probably doesn't notice anything either, just a little spiritual anemia. I don't know about the ice chips cravings.

The hypocrite looks as healthy as an undiagnosed cancer victim. He's probably as unaware of the hypocrisy as I was of my cancer. When you're fooling yourself, you can't try to fool God, because you've fooled yourself and think you've nothing to hide. That's what the prophet meant when he said the heart is deceitful.

Another thing about cancer and hypocrisy is denial. Both my parents died of cancer. So, when I felt chest pains, I thought it was heart disease, not anemia caused by cancer. Hypocrites are the people Jesus beat up on the most. Our unchurched friends tell us the church is full of hypocrites. And we say or think to ourselves, maybe where you were, but not my church, not me. A lot of self-image is tied up in NOT being a hypocrite. So, this business of fooling myself into thinking myself free of hypocrisy is just denial.

But what about my accountability partners? Won't they proof me against hypocrisy? I suppose if you're trolling the web for porn, they'll catch you there. But if you're doing that, you know that's wrong. To get denial right, you have to hide all the yardsticks. The great evil of any society is its replacement of God's law with its divergent standards. My philosophy teacher said that Idols define a culture. The Pharisees replaced the law of God with their traditions. God's Law reflects God's character, replacing the law with tradition is a form of idolatry. If you have replaced God's Law with prohibitions against smoking, dancing and drinking, all your accountability partners have done the same. You probably got that from your parents. Which is why God said that idolaters are cursed through several generations. (And if you have replace God's Law with the tradition of deprecating others who have those prohibitions, see above.)

To detect whether you're a hypocrite or not, you can't trust your heart and you can't trust your traditions. You can only trust God who defines the goodness you are trying to show the world. I believe God has spoken in the Bible. It says things about God's character and God's law. If you want to know what God's character is like, know the Ten Commandments. If you want to know how those commands should be lived out, know how Jesus taught them in the Sermon on the Mount, know how Jesus lived them in the Gospels.

You may object, "But all this focus on God's LAW is legalism!" To which we add the subtext, "And not only were the Pharisees hypocrites, they were legalists, too! I mustn't be that!!!"

I am not talking about how to go to heaven. I am talking about how to detect whether you're a hypocrite or not. I'm talking about getting over denial. I'm talking about finding out whether you're fooling yourself or not.

A lot of Baptists just aren't Zen. God's law is not soap. God's law is a mirror. You do not wash your face with a mirror. Legalists try that and they only break the mirror and cut themselves with the shards.

You look in the mirror to see whether your face is dirty. You use the mirror to see which spots you missed shaving. And that's how you use God's Law. It is the way to disclose how you are fooling yourself.

Gentle reader, you are a hypocrite. I know that I am.

What are we to do about our hypocricy? There's something in us that's wrong and killing us and it has to die. If we don't kill it, it'll get worse and kill us. Even if all we notice now is a craving for ice chips. Hypocrisy is cancer. Our unchurched friends are right, church is full of hypocrites.

Chemotherapy kills cancer cells. That's good. Chemotherapy also kills healthy cells. That hurts. When I looked like "death warmed over" during chemotherapy, don't blame the cancer. Blame the chemotherapy. The part of me that was wrong had to die. It bothered me most when my hair fell out. At that point, I had to show to the world that I was dying. My mom bought a wig. My dad shaved his head. I didn't lose all my hair, but it got thin and I had that cancer patient look. But would I do, cancel chemotherapy for cosmetic reasons?

I said I'm a hypocrite, right? Getting rid of hypocrisy could hurt my reputation. Or enhance it, I imagine my adoring fans whispering to themselves, "He's such a great saint for admitting he's a hypocrite. He's probably just oversensitive about teeny little sins." Hypocrites like to imagine adoring fans whispering like this.

Ever have one of those times when you and the Mrs. have a little tiff that settles into a slow burn? Both of you don't obviously yell at each other, but things aren't right either. That's where my heart was when I sat down to write those deathless words of purple prose atop this page.

That's why I'll give short shrift to howto cure hypocrisy. Don't read about soap from me, pick up your Bible. I'm going to trust God's grace. Ask forgiveness and confess the trivial sin of mistreating my wife.

On The Efficasy of Prayer

I was reading an essay by C.S. Lewis whose title I've chosen for this note. He proposed a few experiments whereby one might test the efficasy of prayer. Things like praying for all the patients in one hospital and none in another hospital. Lewis dismissed these experiments. Lewis notes that prayer isn't magic. It's a request between persons. God is a person and he responds to our prayers in a personal way.

Science works in a mechanistic, impersonal fashion. F=ma always works the same way in an impersonal fashion. If God were the Force, there might be a way to do some religious rite, recite some prayer, and you'd get a predictable result. But God is personal. When you ask something from a person, the person may or may not comply.

The reliaility of the person, the character of the person, is revealed by how he keeps his promises. The business of salvation, forgiveness and redemption is applicable here. God has made promises on our behalf and we can count on him to keep them. How he keeps those promises is how he makes it personal.

Nevertheless, I am enough of a fan of science that I've thought about those experiments whereby one can measure the efficasy of prayer given the limitations described above.

I've observed two things that indicate the efficasy of prayer. First, my mother died back in the late '70s. I didn't notice it until much later, but I felt the loss of her prayers on my behalf. If Mom's in heaven, the's going to be too busy with heaven's busines to bother with me. I suppose if I were Catholic, I'd think that the saints in heaven pray for the living, but I'm Protestant and think they do not.

The second thing I noticed was years back when was first elected to serve as a deacon at my old baptist church. I felt some kind of uplift/support that I later realized was that someone in my church was praying for me. A few years later, I went into surgery for cancer. I asked for and got a lot of prayer from a broad spectrum of folks. It was an amazing sensation that I could feel.

Of course, citing anecdotes does not science make. Nevertheless, I think that one can directly and unscientifically gauge the efficasy of prayer when it goes away. And when it starts.

When you consider the nature of God, remember that God exists outside time. It seems hard to realize that all our prayers reach God simultaneously. This boggles the mind that God hears all of us talking all at once and all of our talk arrives at the same time. How shall God reply? And why would God reply?

First, God doesn't need anything from us. That's the nature of God. God is motivated to reply to our prayers to disclose something about himself. To do so he's got to be understood. This means God has to virtualize his responses to our prayers. God then shows his character through his answers.

In his essay Lewis notes that God seems less inclined to answer the prayers of those who know him best. He seems to withdraw. It's clear that God has nothing to prove to the faithful. They already know his character and have a relationship with them. Lewis seems to suggest that God's strong followers don't need coddling.

I think of those prayers that others have prayed for me. I know their prayers were answered. But they don't. And what of the prayers I pray for the stranger I see suffering or someone on the news or in another country? I'll never know how those prayers are answered.

That comes to the basic nature of prayer. It's relational. If I trust and love God, there's plenty of room to give him the benefit of the doubt. When there's things I know I'll never know, there's doubt. And love entails giving the benefit of the doubt. Thus considerations of the efficasy of prayer aren't necessary, if I trust and love God.

Mark Twain's and Bill Bennet's Racism

Years back when I was a grad student at Michigan State, there was this huge liberal professor who wrote a column in the college paper. One time he wrote a sarcastic attack on racism. It was a clever use of irony and I recognized it immediately as such. However, a superficial reading of the column could give a stupid reader the impression that he was endorsing racism.

It was embarassing, because he got into big trouble when the Usual Suspects in the Racism Business jumped up and denounced him with anger and passion.

Maybe you've read that racist tract, Huck Finn, but Mark Twain. The author makes liberal use of the dreaded N-word as he describes the wise black slave Jim and the underclass Huck and their interactions with a menagerie of white fools.

Today, Mr. Bill Bennet is being condemned by the White House for making some kind of racist statement. I've heard the remarks in context. And I've heard others condemning stipulate that Mr. Bennet is not a racist.

In logic there is the notion of a reducio ad absurdum argument. A reducio argument follows this pattern: "If you believe 'a' then some absurd thing follows." For example, "If murdering Jews is a good then, then Hitler is a saint."

Perhaps the White House critics of Mr. Bennet will now accuse me of numbering that murderous tyrant among the saints.

Sabbath Keeping

I was with a group of friends and the topic of Sabbath keeping came up. Grand Rapids has a lot of Dutch Reformed folks and they treat Sunday like a Sabbath. You know, that commandment right after misusing the name of deity and honoring parents. But the Hollanders go hog wild and may make you wear a green "L" on your chest if they catch your mowing your LAWN on Sunday. (OK, they won't, but they are intense about such things. And the Scarlet Letter allusion is probably unclear, either. I should delete that last sentence.)

One friend complained that his father enforced rules about Sunday behaviour that seemed inconsistent. He could shoot hoops in his driveway, but he couldn't go down to his neighbor's and play a game. Other stories of Sunday rules were exchanged the general tenor of which was bemusement at the oddness of divergent standards of conduct.

This eventually reminded me of a story that my philosophy teacher, another preacher's kid, told about how HIS father kept the sabbath long ago: The family would sit quietly reading in the living room until Father would nod off, and then Mother would pull out her knitting and the kids could listen to the radio or otherwise occupy themselves while Father napped.

It sounds intolerably strict. But it WAS consistent. My friend's father and my philosophy teacher are roughly the same age and have both been Baptist pastors of note. So, I imagine some kind of generational process is going on. I think the previous generation rejected Strict Sabbath Keeping of the '40s and relaxed things a bit in the '70s. But that commandment is still around in the '00s. And WE'VE got to figure out what to tell OUR kids.

Loosening things up didn't evoke gratitude (because the kid never had to live under grampa's stricter standard), but it did evoke frustration at the inconsistency of the looser standard. The parent thinks his kid has it "a lot better" than what he had to put up with. But the kid doesn't appreciate it because the looser standard just moves the boundary, but it's still a boundary. And it's inconsistent, to boot!

I think the issue, the real issue, is in understanding God's Commandment. If you're the kind of guy who works 24x7 and never takes a break, you're not reflecting the Sabbath part of God's character. Something has to be different on Sabbath. But what is it?

My work calls upon me to sit in front of a keyboard (when I'm lucky on my deck) in a comfortable chair and write software. I love to write software and I think I'm good at it. Conversely, I got quite sweaty this afternoon digging a trench alongside my deck. That's not my day job and it was work, too. But I've done other things that make me sweaty that I thought were fun. They're not work. Can I do those non-trench-digging sweaty activities on Sunday? It's not simple. Jesus said that Sabbath was made for man, not vice-versa. Thus I think my relaxation and recreation is a legal Sabbath activity.

But I think that this line of thinking, "can I do this or not?" misses the point and falls into the Pharisee trap. You keep God's law not as a means to stay out of hell, but because of what kind of person lawkeeping makes you into. The ten commandments are a reflection of God's character. If you think someone who consistently acts like that is a fuddy-duddy, you really don't want to go to Heaven, because you'll find the place intolerable because the center of attention, God, is just like that. (And you don't want to be saved from your sins, just their penalty.)

My church meets on Sunday and it stresses is that the worship service is a particular time and space where the body's intention is to fellowship with God. Sabbath is an extension of that. The whole day should be lived mindful of God. Indeed this is like every other day, but this is a day to do so without the cares of work.

This results in an ethic that seems even more incoherent. The basketball game with the neighbor is legit provided it's a mindful-of-God game, but isn't if its not. I suppose that means you'll have to call your own fouls.