A Short Hiatus

While I am ruminating on Part 2 of my previous post I want to draw attention to the discussion that has been going on at profundus ignarus.  He has been debating Dr. Robert Gonzales Jr., Dean of Reformed Baptist Seminary.  The topic of the debate has been one largely on the topic of a kind of apologetic prolegomena including representations of the evidentialist and presuppositionalist perspectives on Christian apologetics.  I highly advise jumping into the debate especially those of you who are philosophically inclined.

The Impulse to be Ubiquitous (Part 1)

Having just finished The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevesky I am struck by the picture that the great Russian author paints. The paradise portrayed gives a vision of a perfect world dominated by love and unity. Inherent to this unity is a unity of humankind with the world itself. Here I am given pause because of how often I have come across this notion of unity with nature.

It seems to me that the idea of unity with nature is based on an assumption, namely that we are currently at odds with nature. This assumption fits neatly into an evangelical mindset within the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Genesis 2:17-19 reads, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground…” This edict presumably has an impact on the entire animal kingdom along with the precedent set immediately after the quote in which God strikes down an animal to clothe Adam and Eve. From then on the animal kingdom and the ground together are at odds with humanity.

The evolutionist seems to assume from the start that the universe is adversarial to life (yet, despite this assumes life to be the stronger force). I draw this assumption from the popularized evolutionary saying “the survival of the fittest.” It is assumed that life is hard and therefore only those strongest, most able to fight against nature, are those that achieve the triumph of surviving and passing on their genetics to the next generation.

Buddhist philosophy is the most direct, seemingly, to address the antagonism of the world to life in the first noble truth or Dukkha. It is from this that we must escape and against which we must struggle.

(Of course I leave out many points of view in this truncated summary of worldviews towards the issue but my assumption is that most readers of mine are either Christian or Atheists. Buddhism and eastern philosophy make their appearances chiefly because of the strong correlation to the topic.)

So, there seems to be dogma (or assumed truth’s) to describe or explain the underlying assumption of this idea of unity of mankind with the universe in three major worldviews I have addressed.

A Question Concerning Happiness in Christendom

It occurred to me while reading through 1 Peter the other night that we as Christians have not come to a consensus over what general attitude we should have in life, be it happy, frustrated, sorrowful, etc.  In this post I have chosen to work through my current thinking concerning this issue.

A coworker of mine is of the rather simple vein of Christianity, thinking outside of his Pastor’s message only minimally and certainly not in an overly critical way towards the message itself.  From my conversations with him come statements that stick to my mind.  “There is no bad day for the believer,” is one of them.  My response to his statements is to grunt or nod a bit, unaffectedly, mostly to avoid positioning myself on this notion of the ever smiling Christian.

The truth is in my Christian experience I generally hold an existential outlook where underlying melancholy bear down my indefatigably happy personality.  By this i mean to say that I, as a person, generally have the ability to move through life with a smile on my face from the sheer force of my personality.  When I pause to think about my life, however, a more somber wave of experience washes over my thoughts.  My mother died at a young age before she saw my marriage, before she was able to watch me succeed as a man.  My father has been far from the righteous exemplar I wish him to be.  My own habitual sin weighs upon my soul like a battleship’s anchor on a small skiff.  What do I have to be happy about?

Now, I do not need lectured about the glory of the new day, the wonder of the next breath, etc.  These are things that I am aware of.  I am also aware that my parents are not perfect, that my mother is in heaven, and that God saved my soul from the weight it still tries to bear.  These things are reason to praise.  How, on the other hand, are we to be carried through life without experiencing the sorrow of imperfection, the heartache of loss, and the pain of broken hopes?  These are inherent to the human experience and do not disappear when we pray for salvation.  Are we as Christians to deny these things, to ignore them and focus on the final state of sinless bliss, standing before Christ with all things made to praise he who sits on the throne?  There must be room for us to experience the here and now, if for no other reason to be able to communicate with our fellow men who do not know or do not share the hope that we have.  Was it not Christ himself who was said to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief?

The scriptures seem to be about hope, being less emphatic about suffering and grief because these need not be emphasized to humans living with suffering and grief every day.  Scripture focuses on the hope that it has to give to the grief stricken race of men.  However, it is of note that the vast majority of the Psalms do not focus on the hope of God but on the suffering of man, with a reminder at the end of most of them that God is still there.

So, there must be balance in the midst of it all, between the pain of the human experience and the hope of the Lord’s return.  Where that balance is, that is the question.

Free Speech

If there is one thing that always impresses me deeply when I read the international news it is that free speech is a gift that Americans, really most of the west, take for granted.  Today bbc.com ran a story, “China admits Tibet monk protests.”   In the article there is talk about the Chinese “crack(ing) down on dissent” by means of tear gas.  Now, I don’t know many Buddhist monks, but from what I hear they are not the most raucous guys out there.  That they were forcibly deterred for the sake of unanimity amongst the Chinese in the province is embarrassing, especially since for all intents and purposes they were nonviolent.  It makes me thank God that I live in a place where I can yell and scream all I want as long as I do not harm anyone and not expect retribution to be at my front door when I go home.

A Job Worth Doing…

I have now been working at a factory for two months.  My job takes me into a variety of different departments doing a variety of different tasks.  I have directly observed nearly every department of a medium sized company.  On observing the various employees I have noticed there is a difference between them.  Some individuals take care in what they do, performing their appointed tasks with attention to detail and a certain amount of finesse.  Others simply accomplish the task at hand in the way that is most convenient and expeditious, not necessarily producing an mechanically inferior product but definitely departing from a standard of the highest quality.  It turns out that to some people a job worth doing isn’t worth doing well.

Universal Health Care, Colossal Necessity or Colossal Mistake?

Much ado has been made over the issue of universal health care in the current presidential primary races.  Universal health care is an issue that has overshadowed all other domestic issues in the media and therefore in the minds of Americans.  The question among republicans is whether or not universal health care is a good idea, with a resounding no being the response. Among democrats it is a question of semantic and programmatic differences between the plans that have already been made public, especially residing on whose plan is truly universal.

Having just watched the current Speaker of the House’s remarks concerning the President’s veto of the S-CHIP legislation it seems that the democratic leadership wishes to place the idea of universal health care in the realm of a moral imperative.  Paraphrasing the Speaker, “Veto means ‘I forbid’ and that is what the President is saying to America’s children by vetoing this legislation.”  I believe it is safe to say that from the rhetoric out of the democratic candidates and leaders that this is an accurate representation of their party’s position on all health care, taking the S-CHIP program as a drop in the larger bucket.  The ability for Americans to obtain life saving medical services is a moral issue, this is not a question.  Whether those medical services ought or ought not to be on the public dime however is a question of both legal, specifically constitutional ramifications.  Books worth of commentary are available online and in print about this issue so I will only emphasize my two most significant points.

The first is a question of where the money is going to come from if we universalize health care?  Currently as the Clinton Health Care Plan and the National Coalition on Health Care claims there are 47 million uninsured Americans. If we as a country are already spending way more than other countries (16% of GDP according to the NCHC report cited above) how is the government going to spend so much on insuring even half of the 47 million uninsured?  This is especially poignant in light of the oppressively bad state of another government program, social security.  If we cannot afford to support social security how are we to afford both social security and universal health care?

The second is what is the consitutional authority on which the idea of universal health care is resting?  The only possible phrase I could consider is the catchall of “promoting the general welfare.”  I see no place where it is allowed for congress or any other branch to provide for the health services of American citizens.

It’s a media’s life…

As I have been soaking in the conversational milieu as the primary season looms on the political horizon it is remarkable how the media seems to focus and direct the attention of the nation.  Public opinion seems to follow the news far more than the news follows public opinion.  Naturally this is a situation that in unavoidable in a nation where the seat of government is thousands of miles away from some of the constituents.  But the situation is not good in my estimation for the following reasons.

Two major factors make this situation a negative one.  It seems that stories that appear in any single major avenue of news output make their way into the others shortly thereafter.  Amazingly, the attitudes towards the parties involved in any given story are normally very similar in subsequent renditions of the story unless you were to hear it from the “other side.” The ability of major news sources to spin a story largely in the direction in which it was already aimed is uncanny.  So, with the lack of departure from the first version, a single take gets trumpeted throughout the known world.  A situation such as this is conceivably the result of one or both of two sources.  The first possibility is a lack of evaluative chutzpah from the media correspondents, a possibility I find highly implausible.  The second option is that there is a remarkable unanimity among those who report the news.  This option of a homogeneous media structure is what I feel the more likely option.  Through whatever cultural or political means a great extent of the media ranks are of like mind giving rise to the commonly used designation of the “liberal media.”

The other observation that I have may be cultural as much as it is political.  For all intents and purposes the news is decidedly glum.  While no news is good news it seems that the converse is also true.  This is always shown in the amount of time given to a negative vs. a positive situation in the stock market.  When is the last time you saw a lengthy dialogue about how good the stock market will be in six months, or just how successful the government is being in, well, anything?  The negative is the only information that is newsworthy.  Comically, this is displayed in the one human interest story that the average NBC Nightly News show ends with each night, willing its viewers to have a positive outlook on life despite the negativity they have just been subjected to.  Truly, good news is no news.

The Silence of Reason

Science has claimed to have the corner on truth. Even as I sit here, I just saw The Colbert Report, on which a man maid the claim, “Science is truth.” This precarious position has come forth after a variety of factors have gone unchanged for years. These factors include

1. Science’s dominance of the classroom through the legal establishment of the non-religious answer to the meaning of life irregardless of the irreligious nature of the worldview from which it is derived.

2. Religious intellectuals’ nearly complete absence from the ranks of Occidental intelligentsia for the past 100 years.

3. Religious culture’s past and present refusal to engage the secular ideas.

The claim “science is equal to truth” is a tremendous overstatement, of course, but it is an overstatement that is, amongst the common American (maybe all of Western culture), widely held to be true.  This is despite that the realm of any supernatural religion is outside of the scope of science. 

Science is a search for patterns through a theoretical framework of investigation.  This framework is the scientific method and the patterns are the laws and theories found at the conclusion of the method.  The method is based off of sensory perception and is bound to the physical realm.  Supernatural religionists claim that the processes of the natural laws or theories are interrupted by miracles and that, while the higher/spiritual realm is able to be experienced, it is not in the measurable and repeatable way that the scientific method is based off of.

So,  religion is outside of the bounds of science yet is commonly considered to be the end all of truth: not a position I hope lasts.

Church and State

Now, this is a terribly important and controversial issue to title a post with but there is something that I think needs discussed.  Most people find that the separation of church and state is important for both bodies: the church people find it true for the church and the state people for the state.

There are two things that I have noticed however, as I have been reading some things about the Creation vs. Evolution debate. The fist is mainly semantic.  That observation is that the current public policy regarding creation vs. evolution has even gone outside the title for the debate.  The Church vs. State debate is better titled the Religion vs. Government debate.   If it were Church vs. State we would be talking about organizations, instead we are talking about ideas.

The second and more important observation  is that we have surpassed the wording that is in the Constitution.  The exact wording is

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof…”

The current way that these words are enacted is to prohibit the free exercise of religion inside of classrooms, namely Science classes.  The definition of Religious according to Merriam Webster is

1 : relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or
deity <a religious person> <religious attitudes>
    2 : of, relating to, or devoted to religious beliefs or observances <joined a religious
order>
    3 a : scrupulously and conscientiously faithful

Evolution is the answer to a question, the question where to do we come from.  But, it is not just that, it is the answer from a certain perspective.  That perspective is Naturalism or the idea that only nature or the physical world, the scientific world, exists. Science as a whole seeks answers that are based on observation, experimentation, and hypothesis.  Anything supernatural is therefore outside of its bounds, being not observable (beyond its effects i.e. religious experience) and certainly not being testable by experimentation.  The catch is that Naturalism, according to the above definition, is religious due to the fact that it names an ultimate reality.  That that ultimate reality is physical and therefore universally recognized blinds the eyes of the judicators who have overseen tests of the first Amendment.

Some will say that I have a false sense of religion, that religion is that which includes a god.  Well, aside from Webster above I would give you Buddhists to argue with.  Buddhism is not openly taught in schools yet Buddhists claim no God.

So, in answer to the Evolutionists: Take your religion out of Public Schools and I will let you keep out mine.

Art as Art Ought to Be…

As a continuance of my last post I want to delve into some of my views on artistic expression in light of the shift that I have undergone.

Art, in my opinion, is about communicating ideas, even if those ideas are confusion or randomness; without an idea behind it and the ability to communicate that idea all you have in a piece of what some deem art is a visual stimulus.

It is in this vein that I find the vast amount of contemporary art to be something of a confusion.  In an effort for something new and provocative movements like Cubism, Dada, and Impressionism play more to the immagination than to the mind and more to a bludgeon of color than to subtle hue variation.  I do not think that these methods of art are worthless because I find them most enlightening on the state of the contemporary mind.  They  do have the ability to communicate greatly in ways that realism is unable.

However, I find that the artists in these movements, in an effort to achieve artistic greatness went amiss by delving further from reality.  I suppose it is much more difficult to communicate across a canvas propositions when you limit yourself to realistic scenes.  Regardless, I find that the meaning taken from realism is richer, deeper, more subtle.  Not only this, I find that the communication is in a language that is universal, whereas there is more to be deciphered in a contemporarily styled painting.

I think this is first of all evidenced by the immortality of classical art.  In the classical period artists communicated to people through the images and scenes that their patrons and pupils were aware of, communicating emotion through facial expression and lighting, rather than the opaque coloration and blotches that seem to enrapture the modern soul.

It is in everyday life, through the common person’s body, face, and effects that I find the most art may be found.  The stories and emotions, the tragedies and ecstasies of Everyman are where the stuff of art truly lies.  It is here, in the depths of you and I, where lie all the thoughts and all the emotions that artists try, mostly in vain, to capture.  In a way then, art is merely a way of reflecting the lives that we know, of organizing it by color and stroke, and of prompting different ways of looking at it.  So, when I tire of glancing at blots and lines, shades and hues I go to the heart of art and walk a park glancing at faces or have a conversation with a worn man or woman.  In those scenes, in the stories and emotions that surrender themselves from the faces of my passersby, there is art as art ought to be.