Godpuddle

Re-Direction

2007-03-24T12:25:00.000-06:00

If you have been directed here via my profile area, well, this is my site but it is not my MAIN one. I have not written on godpuddle for quite some time.
My apologies to anyone who might even possibly, remotely wish I had!
My main site is at Bookpuddle.

All the best to you, dear reader-friend.

New Ehrman Interview

2006-11-16T00:46:00.000-06:00

Hey, the recent Bart Ehrman interview, on Tapestry, is now available.
CLICK HERE!

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Be Fruitful and Overpopulate.

2006-11-05T12:50:00.000-06:00

John Shelby Spong.
This retired Bishop of Newark (Episcopal Church) once claimed that he was finished with the writing of books. I am so glad that here in what he calls his “third half of life” he has given us yet another insightful look into the relevant theological issues of our day and age.
His most recent book [2005] is called The Sins Of Scripture: Exposing The Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love.
Scorcher of a title huh?
Spong, on the face of it, can appear to some to be almost “anti-Christian” but when you really examine his work and read of his personal convictions, you find that a much better summation of his ideas would be “anti-ignorance”.
He is all about asking the needful questions, and doing what he can to dispel the ignorance of invalid answers.
As a “believer in exile” myself, I find in my own life that I am increasingly identifying with Spongism.

Anyhoo... the specific issue that I wanted to point out from this new book is neither all that controversial nor potentially divisive nor heretical enough to burn anyone at the stake over.
It is just.... interesting.
It comes from Section 2 of the book, in which Spong is discussing The Bible And The Environment, and for his “terrible text” he is looking at Genesis 1:28, which says “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.”

Spong’s argument is that at one time (namely, the time at which this Scripture was written, and several millennia thereafter), the injunction had a certain validity and purpose which our current environmental situation can no longer support in an ad infinitum sort of way.
In ancient times, it is understandable that population growth was a necessary part of human survival. There just weren’t that many people around. Not only this, but they died a lot earlier (younger) than people tend to die today in most parts of the world. Nowadays worldwide population is growing so exponentially, that if the earth were a bus, someone ought to put the brakes on!
In a nutshell, the age-old enemies of human survival have been largely defeated, one after another.
He says:
The proof of this is recognized when one looks at the statistics of human population. Human life emerged on this planet, according to the best estimates of anthropologists, between one and two million years ago. [This is me here, not Spong... cutting in to say that I am fully aware that biblical literalists reading that statement would already be giving birth to a sacred cow over it, but I would remind them that it is ignorance we are trying to expel here, not cattle! Back to Spong now...] Yet it took from that point of origin until 1750 CE [Common Era, same as saying, AD, except more religiously correct to say CE] for the number of human beings to top one billion. It then took only about one hundred and eighty years for the human population to reach the two billion number plateau, which demographers believe was achieved around the year 1930 CE. It then took only forty years until 1970 to add the third billion. Since then, in the thirty-plus years between 1970 and the present, the world’s population has doubled to approximately six billion people. Even now, when the rate of growth has finally begun to slow, the actual expansion of human beings has not.
Current estimates are that before the twenty-first century fades into history, the human population will reach a figure somewhere between nine and ten billion people. There are still some who do not see this as an impending disaster.
-- from page 36-37. The Sins of Scripture, John Shelby Spong, 2005 –

Spong is not telling people here that there is something wrong with their desire to have children, nor is he implying that people ought to quit having children, or feel guilty that they are contributing to the end of the world because they are impregnated or are impregnating. He is merely pointing out that at one time, the biblical injunction presented in Genesis was necessary to enable the human race to survive.
Those days are over. How long are we going to continue being fruitful?
Till there is standing room only?
Millions of people around the world are still interpreting this particular scripture as though it were a present-day command to avoid methods of contraception, and I believe that this is very much a distortion of its original context and intention.
I agree with Spong when he says:
Now it [Gen.1:28] must be seen as as nothing less than a prescription for human genocide. Once it was accepted as the “Word of God.” Now it must be viewed as a terrible and life-threatening text.

If followed literally and applied worldwide this biblical verse would guarantee our annihilation. Therefore we need to be careful of what we mean when we declare that it is the “Word of the Lord.”

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Wise Words

2006-10-28T22:55:00.000-06:00

The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of the truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the truth. It is not possession of truth but rather the pursuit of truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all truth concealed in his right hand and in his left hand only the steady and diligent drive for truth, albeit with the proviso that I will always and forever error in the process, and to offer me the choice, I will in all humility take the left hand and say, “Father, I will take this. The pure truth is for you alone.”
-- Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781) --

The God Delusion

2006-10-07T15:03:00.000-06:00

So far, two friends of mine [I only have four, so this constitutes a full 50% of my entire social network…] have asked me, on separate occassions, about the shiny new Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion.
Basically, I’ve been asked, “Should we, [the Believers in Exile], read this thing?”
And both times my answer has been, “I have no idea.”
I’ve never read anything by Richard Dawkins, and I know next to nothing of him. There are so many authors writing nowadays about the ideological war between Science and Religion that it is impossible for me to keep up to what is being set out on the bookstore shelves.
However, I am at a bookstore right now, as I write this. So I am taking a look at the book.
It is very shiny. Wonderfully matches my Mac Powerbook G4!

Just leafing through the thing, and reading here and there, I guess I will take the jacket blurb’s description of Dawkins at face value. It claims that he is “the world’s most prominent atheist.”
And a scientist. This book seems to be quite forcefully arguing that a belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. Dawkins argues for the abolition of religion as the only hope for the healthy maintenance of mankind. In the preface, we read, “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no Gunpowder Plot…” etc.
As readers of this blog will know, I am no stranger to this argument, because it is similar to the writings and ideas of Sam Harris, an author I have come to greatly appreciate. I think it must be admitted by all rational-thinking people that religious zeal can cause a multitude of “sins.” At one point, Dawkins even quotes Blaise Pascal [yes, he of the wager] as saying, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Yes, yes, assuredly, and verily verily…. yes.
So I am paging through the book, browsing, as it were.

Then, a neat thing happened as I walked over to the Starbucks section of the store, to get another coffee. I glanced down at a table where someone had left a copy of New Scientist, the magazine. Picking it up, I opened directly to a review of The God Delusion, written by moral philosopher and author, Mary Midgley.
Fascinating stuff.
The general tone is a bit critical [of Dawkins] and I will get to that part, soon.
But first, Midgley points out that in the three evilist [← my word] regimes of the 20th Century [Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Stalinist Russia], the removal of religion had not helped at all. She says, “The roots of great crimes plainly lie far deeper than the doctrines people use to justify them.”

I keep reading…. walk back to my own table with a new coffee, and this magazine….

I will greatly summarize here by saying that she…. hmmm, how can I say it…. she points out that Dawkins has a very difficult time with the type of “believer” who may say they do not care much for the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. ← I myself am this type of mysterious quasi-believer, so my antennae go up here…! Dawkins declares flatly that people like me [who would say the above, and much more] cannot possibly mean what they say. We cannot be “believers”. As scientists, we must be atheists. Midgley says, “It seems not to have struck Dawkins that academic science is only a small, specialised, dependent part of what anybody knows.”
Aha!
See, she goes on to point out that when we use the term “fundamentalist” to describe the sold-out, nutso-believer/fanatic out there, we ought to realize that there is also another type of “fundamentalist” running amok! This would be the atheistic “fundamentalist.” [By the way, Midgley does not use this terminology, I am wildly paraphrasing at this point, utilizing a combination of rabid eisegesis and possibly illegal bloggistic license!]
In other words, we [including Dawkins himself] can err just as badly on the opposite end of whatever spectrum we are dealing with here.
The spectrum of “belief ← → non-belief” I will call it.
And to elucidate her reasons for saying this, please allow me to quote directly from the latter part of her review itself. It is, in my opinion, such good stuff that it merits regurgitation in its fullness, here:

“Most human knowledge is tacit knowledge – habitual assumptions, constantly updated and checked by experience, but far too general and informal ever to be fully tested. We assume, for instance, that nature will go on being regular, that other people are conscious and that their testimony can generally be trusted. Without such assumptions neither science nor any other study could ever get off the ground, and nor could everyday life.
When we build on these foundations we necessarily use imaginative structures – powerful ideas which can be called myths, which are not lies, but graphic thought-patterns that shape and guide our thinking. This is not irrational: the process of using these structures is a necessary preparation for reasoning. Thus the selfish gene is a powerful idea, so are the Science-Religion war, Gaia, natural selection, progress, and the hidden hand of the market.
With the largest, most puzzling questions, we have no choice but to proceed in mythical language which cannot be explained in detail at all, but which serves to indicate what sort of spiritual universe we percieve ourselves to be living in. This is the province of religion. Adding God is not, as Dawkins thinks, adding an illicit extra item to the cosmos, it is perceiving the whole thing differently.
For a long time, this kind of language was reasonably well understood. Since the mid-19th century, however, there has been a disastrous attempt to get rid of it, keeping only literal statements of fact. This is, of course, the root of religious fundamentalism, which tries, absurdly, to treat the whole of that strange compilation, the Bible, as literal fact. Yet in so doing it is only responding to a less obvious fundamentalism on the scientistic side, which claims that our knowledge reduces to one fundamental form – the literal statements of science. Both extremes show a similarly crass refusal to admit the complexity of life.
Dawkins is, of course, quite right to express horror at Biblical fundamentalism, especially in the neocon form that centres on the book of Revelation. But it is not possible to attack this target properly while also conducting a wider, cluster-bomb onslaught on everything that can be called religion. Since this particular bad form of religion is spreading rapidly in the world, we urgently need to understand it: not just to denounce it but to grasp much better than we do now why people find it attractive. It is not enough to say, as Dawkins does, that they are being childish.
We also need to ask why they have found the other attitudes that are open to them inadequate. As I have suggested, this means becoming more aware of the inadequacies of our own way of life, which are obvious to them and which put them off the opinions that we profess. What we need, in fact, is a bit more self-knowledge.” **

Amen to that!

Having said all this, and having read all of this… does it make me, as a reader, want to read the Dawkins book MORE, or LESS?
→ MORE!
Like a cat, I am drawn to shiny things.

** From Imagine There’s No Heaven, by Mary Midgley. -- A review of Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. New Scientist Magazine, Oct.7-13, 2006. pp.50-51.

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On Certainty

2006-10-05T20:11:00.000-06:00

“Of coffee I am certain. Of tea? Not so.”
-- Cipriano –

Been thinking about certainty, as of late. The reasons are many, but they would include a “certain” confluence of ideas being bandied about by fellow bloggers, along with the haunting relevance of a statement made in the first chapter of the book I am currently reading.
The book is John Shelby Spong’s (1996), Liberating The Gospels: Reading The Bible With Jewish Eyes.
In setting out his objectives for the book, Spong states, on page 20-21, “…I offer you something that I have come to believe is better than the religious security system of the past. I offer the exhilarating insecurity of a journey without boundaries or goals. I offer the radical nature of honesty and the intense humanity that is found in seeking truth freely apart from the authoritative pronouncements of yesterday.”
Wow.
When I read that, I was reminded of why I like his books and his ideas.
“The exhilarating insecurity of a journey without boundaries or goals.”
That is exactly the kind of journey I want to be on [and believe that I am on] in my process of never-ending idea displacement.
By “idea displacement” I mean that [in the formation of one’s spiritual map or ideological structure] one never arrives at a place where the journey is over. One never closes up shop and believes that they are “done lookin’!”
Along with this, [and it is evident in what Spong is suggesting, above] one does not attach oneself to a limiting ideology [“religious security system”] that will restrict the reception and/or rejection of ideas that are either surfacing or becoming obsolete. And in all of this, it must be emphasized that we are, at all times, talking about the individual. True spiritual enlightenment has nothing to do with groupspeak. Neither has it anything to do with the maintenance of harmony within the phalanx. Idea displacement [and subsequent spiritual enlightenment] only occurs in the individual.
Whether we are aware of it or not, idea displacement is the most individual act any of us perform, or should.
Simply put, it is an attitude of willingness, whereby less tenable ideas are exchanged for better ones.

Anything less, is certainty.

And what is certainty?
Well, I like the way Ambrose Bierce defines it, way back in the 1800’s, in The Devil’s Dictionary. → “Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.”
Exactly.
And who can deny the truth contained in this following statement, spoken by Bertrand Russell: “Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”
Now I turn to my fellow bloggers, who are acknowledging similar things, to prove that it is not only geniuses like the above-mentioned notables, but also just everyday absolute yahoos like myself and these other guys here, that are catching a whiff of the stench of certainty, and choosing to turn toward the fresher air of knowing that there is some junk we just can’t know.
Like the following statement, found on the most recent [excellent] blog from a place called Prospecting God. The “prospector” said:
“One of the things that is clearer to me today than ever before is that too much certainty can be misleading.”
And I love the way he said the following:
“I like the analogy of masks – God can be seen through different masks, one of which is Jesus. For Christians, the decisive mask for us is Jesus. He is our decisive revelation of God. And note that this does not require affirming that Jesus is the only adequate revelation of God. But Jesus shows us, as Christians, what a life full of God is like, and is our ultimate sacrament of God. Through Jesus, we see the heart of God.”
A reader may disagree with the personal conclusion of the author, but it is virtually impossible to criticize the WAY IN WHICH IT IS SAID!
This is the author’s [the individual’s] current journey.
And because he is not shoving his opinions down the throat of anyone else, nor claiming that anyone else need to accept them, it would be the critic that errs on the side of certainty, if he/she dismissed this author’s opinion as being invalid!

Here is something from The Age of Reason Café:
“I was thinking more about certainty over the past 24 hrs. One point I would like to make is that I believe that certainty goes hand-in-hand with credibility. Those who say they are certain about their religion or belief system have no credibility when you think about it.”
Yes….. “when you think about it.”
That is the problem though. So many people are simply not “thinking about it.”
So I am encouraged by my fellow bloggers.
They are doing it.
Thinking about it.

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The New Intellectual

2006-09-10T15:09:00.000-06:00

I don't know all that much about Ayn Rand, but I do know this. I like what she is saying here, in this very brief videoclip, where she defines her term, "the new intellectual."
Hopefully, this link will work for you -- Click here!
For so long now I have had her novels piled up around me. I regret that I have not yet gotten around to reading her.
For more Any Rand info -- Click here!

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New Harris Book

2006-09-05T22:16:00.000-06:00

Here’s a new book [coming out this month] that I will definitely be interested in acquiring and thoroughly reading. Sam Harris’s first book, The End of Faith was nothing short of fabulous.
This new one is called Letter To A Christian Nation, and here is how it begins:

“Thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.”

Cold Molasses, Rantandroar, Sanyavich... should I order three extra copies and have us gang-read it?

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Arbitrariness!

2006-08-11T18:11:00.000-06:00

The latest issue of Newsweek magazine features legendary evangelist Billy Graham, as their exclusive cover story.
The subject line reads, Billy Graham: In Twilight. His New Thinking on Politics, The Bible & The Prospect of Death.
So I picked the thing up, and read the article.
I must admit that I have always liked Billy Graham, and still do. I even attended one of his gi-normously stadium-packed meetings, a number of years ago.
Of all of the famous television evangelists out there, he has always seemed to me to be the least “nutty” of them all. Down-to-earth [so to say], respectable, trustworthy, sincere, calm. ← These are all words I would use to describe Billy Graham.
However, the great majority of other television preachers conjure an entirely opposite grouping of adjectives in my mind. Words like → shyster, crazy, greedy, prejudiced, ignorant, and severely unintelligent, would top the listing.
Sad, but true.

Billy Graham, ordained in 1939, has preached the Gospel to more human beings than anyone in history. He is now 87 years old. Earlier this summer, upon awaking in the night, Graham tried to recite the 23rd Psalm, and found that he lost his train of thought after the very first line, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” Speaking of it later, he said, “I missed a sequence, and that disturbed me.”
Clearly, the years, the decades of ceaseless traveling, are taking their toll. He has undergone several brain operations and must rely upon shunts to fight hydrocephalus. He has had a broken hip and a broken pelvis, and is now suffering from prostate cancer.
I will not recount all that this article covered here, but I do recommend it to anyone interested in the current state of Mr. Graham.
[In fact, the article is available, here]!
However, I read the piece because the subtitle seemed to promise a bit of a glimpse into some specific theological areas where Mr. Graham may have somewhat changed his perspective [his viewpoint or conclusions] over the years.
That is to say, what interested me most in the cover headline was the mention of His New Thinking on…. → The Bible.

Here are a few pertinent extracts [quotes].

“There are many things that I don’t understand. Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology – absolutely.”

“I’m not a literalist [about the Bible] in that every jot and tittle is from the Lord. This is a little difference in my thinking through the years.”

“It would be foolish for me to speculate on who will be [in heaven] and who won’t… I don’t want to speculate on all that. I believe the love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have.”

To me, these are very significant statements, [the last one, especially so] and reflect a more rational, mature approach to Scripture than is often represented by fundamentalist types that are too often ranting on our airwaves… be it on television, radio, or in person!
I am speculating here, but Graham’s second statement seems to suggest that an earlier [younger] Graham would have been more hard-line on the 100% 24-hour-a-day literal interpretation of Scripture.

The article is clear to point out that in no way do these above concessions imply that Mr. Graham is questioning the fundamentals of his faith.
Jon Meacham [the author of the article] states that Graham “is not saying that Jesus is just another lifestyle choice, nor is he backtracking on essentials such as the Incarnation or the Atonement. But he is arguing that the Bible is open to interpretation, and fair-minded Christians may disagree or come to different conclusions about specific points. Like Saint Paul, he believes human beings on this side of paradise can grasp only so much. ‘Now we see but a poor reflection in a mirror,’ Paul wrote, ‘then we shall see face to face.’ Then believers shall see: not now, but then.”
I would point out that even this latter statement, however, [this reference to the original verse found in 1 Corinthians 13:12 and the subsequent interpretation one attaches to it], is, in itself, the result of a literal rendering of the figurative illustration originally presented. [ie., images in a mirror].
In other words, it becomes a literal expectation of a future event, that “event” being the believer’s future state of near-omniscience!
And so it is that I am reminded of the arbitrariness with which we [all of us] approach our understanding of Scripture and/or sacred texts.

For instance, Billy Graham accepts [in the article] that the exact meaning of the word “day” in the creation account of Genesis is figurative. Yet, on the other hand, he believes that Jonah was swallowed by an actual whale.
With all due respect, the decision to NOT see the story of Jonah as equally symbolic or metaphorical seems arbitrary, to me.

In a similar example, one may [choose to] believe that the creation account does not refer to a literal Adam and Eve [ie., to the idea of the procreation of the entire human race as being generated from these two prototypical people]… and yet believe that the account of Jesus walking on the water refers to an actual literal space-time historical event!
But what would one be basing this [seemingly, to me] arbitrary distinction upon?
Mere preference? Some sort of inner acceptance valve?
Of course, some things [even etymologically so] are more obviously figurative than others. For instance, when the Gospel writers have Jesus claim that he is “the bread of life”, they do not mean to imply that at some point in actual history, Jesus thought that he was an actual [literal] loaf of bread.
It is symbolic.
But that’s just it. That’s my point. What is symbolic [metaphorical] and what isn’t?

I am not meaning to criticise Billy Graham’s insistence upon believing that Jonah was swallowed by a real large fish… but what I am emphasizing is that even after nearly a CENTURY of his study of the Bible, there is no consistent way of PROVING [once and for all] the difference between literal and figurative.
How do I know this?
→ → I know it by simply acknowledging that there are theologians who have written BOOKS in the defense of the argument that the “days” in the creation account of Genesis are referring to LITERAL 24-hour long DAYS!
In other words, they would argue that Billy Graham….. BILLY GRAHAM…. the man who has spoken about the Bible to more people than anyone else in history…. is WRONG on this particular point!
Isn’t that mind-boggling?

Arbitrariness!

Anyone who thinks I am dissing Mr. Graham here, is missing my point, and missing it entirely!
I have nothing but respect and admiration for the man.

By the way, he faltered a bit with the 23rd Psalm, but, according to the article, in the end, the last line did come back to him…
“Surely thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

And thus relieved, he drifted back to sleep.

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Wise Words

2006-07-28T19:02:00.000-06:00

"If a god showed up every time you put a quarter in the prayer slot it wouldn't be God, it would be a puppet that you could control by doing that...that would make the deity subservient to you. So it wouldn't be a deity would it?"
-- Margaret Atwood --

Wise Words

2006-07-23T23:30:00.000-06:00

Ideas matter much more than we commonly think they do - especially our world-views and values, namely our ideas about what is real and how we are to live. We receive such ideas from our culture as we grow up, and unless we examine them, we will not be free persons, but will to a large extent live out the agenda of our socialization.
-- Marcus J. Borg --

Cause for concern?

2006-07-19T23:38:00.000-06:00

I know that I run the risk of being dismissed by 97.34% of any readers of this blog, for placing the following link on this page.
I run the risk of being labelled a non-thinking, no-mind, conservative.
Anyone who knows me, would literally LAUGH out loud at anyone calling me a "conservative" though.
But, they would also [at the same time] have a real difficult time pinning ANY sort of downright descriptive and applicable label upon me, and that is because [in my opinion] I maintain a rather thoroughgoing disinterested stance toward things religious and/or political.
I am not partisan, about much.
It is maybe the only thing I am proud about, about myself.
As far as I am concerned, if something makes sense and is true, I don't care what the hell ideological stripe or political party has discovered that it is true.
It ought to be rightfully DECLARED as true.
In my opinion, a good 50% of our over-spending in the political realm is due to our not being able to admit [because of partisan policy commitments] that the other guy has a pretty good idea, when it comes down to it! In fact, he's pretty much doing what we would [or should] do, except that we are paid to argue against him!

All of this, to say that I think there is a danger of profound absurdity emerging into the realm of terrorist-logic, as of late.
Or "terrorist-speak" as it were. [Or is].
We are so fearful of saying ALL MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS, that we are in danger of not realizing that very nearly ALL TERRORISTS ARE MUSLIMS!
There is a tremendous difference in these terms, OK?
The former [capitalized] phrase has no truth to it whatsoever.
But, the latter statement has a tremendous amount of truth to it. And we need to take a damn hard look at this truth.
Muslims, and non-Muslims alike, need to look at it, if we all [together, as human-beings sharing a planet] want to to continue living while alive, on this planet.

Ann Coulter, [shown above] you can love her, and you can hate her.
Yeah. Yeah. Don't waste my time by telling me how that she is a long-legged, sexy, opinonated bitch, exploiting the furthest realms of her blonde-haired, long-leggedness.
I already know that part.
And the first portion of her speech can [admittedly] be seen as quite flippant and even uncalled-for.
The really important thing though, to ask, as you listen to this blurb is..... is what she is saying in the latter 3/4's of it, TRUE?
If it is [and BTW, it is].... then is it a cause for concern?
And my mind and my heart says that it is.
And that is why I post it, here.

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Wise Words

2006-06-27T21:08:00.000-06:00

A scientific or a rationally valid statement means that the power of reason is applied to all the data of observation without any of them being suppressed or falsified for the sake of a desired result.
-- Erich Fromm (1900-1980) –
-- excerpted from Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, 1947. –

Speaking Some Sense...

2006-06-23T19:36:00.000-06:00

Readers of this blog will know that I have a profound respect for the writings [and opinions] of John Shelby Spong.
I subscribe to a weekly emailing from him. And you can too. I will provide a link, later.
He always has such good stuff to say, along the lines of non-stupid theology.
And this week’s mailing was no exception:

John Ruddick from North Sydney, Australia writes:
"Is it possible that Jesus was inferring that some people were born gay in Matthew 19:12? It reads, 'For there are different reasons why men cannot marry: some because they are born that way, others, because men made them that way and others do not marry for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.'"

[The Bishop responds...]

Dear John,

It is very difficult for anyone living in 2006 to say what Jesus meant in the early years of the first century of this Common Era.
First, to the best of my knowledge, Jesus left no written records and there were no tape recorders to record his words for future use. Our best estimates are that the earthly life of Jesus was lived between 4 B.C.E. and 30 C.E. He spoke Aramaic.

Matthew, who is the only gospel writer to record the text you cite, wrote between 80 and 90 C.E. or 50 to 60 years after the life of Jesus. He wrote in Greek not Aramaic. So, if Jesus actually spoke these words that Matthew attributes to him, someone had to remember them and pass them on by word of mouth for 50-60 years, translate them from Aramaic into Greek and finally to the English words that you quote. If that process can be navigated successfully and literally, we might begin to answer your question.

The next thing we need to raise is the issue to which Matthew is speaking when he had Jesus utter these words. The truth is that some people are born gay and others are born straight. Some have powerful libidos and some weak. Some are male and some female. Some are born with an xxy gene and others with only xx or xy. Some are castrated by religious zeal. Some are rendered impotent by sickness and others by surgery.

I find those who think that a particular text in the Bible addresses a specific issue today are operating out of a very superstitious view of the Bible. It is only when the weight of the Bible is employed in a particular human arena that I think it can be legitimately used. By this shall people know that you are my disciples, that you love one another. If you say that you love God and hate your neighbor, you are a liar. Love your neighbor as yourself. Welcome the stranger, care for the weak, embrace the outcast. Jesus is even made to state his purpose in the Fourth Gospel as "I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly." These are some of the biblical texts that have cumulative power, that build a consensus and that counter the limited, mean-spirited prejudices that we human beings have used so often in the name of religion to violate the humanity of another child of God.

I know you probably wanted a yes or no answer. Unfortunately, the Bible does not lend itself to that kind of response.

-- John Shelby Spong

Couldn't have said it better myself!
You can subscribe, here.

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Wise Words

2006-06-01T05:29:00.000-06:00

I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul, Because having look’t at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul.
-- Walt Whitman (1819-1892) –

22 Years [and a day!]

2006-05-28T20:00:00.000-06:00

I have only thought of it now, but yesterday was the anniversary of a significant event in my life. My spirit-versary, the anniversary of the evening when I “accepted Jesus into my heart as Lord and Savior!”
Whoa! Whoa!
WHOA!
Don’t change the channel folks!
Let me explain!
No… you have not all of a sudden been re-routed to Pat Robertson’s 700-Club or the nearest Benny Hinn charade-fest!
I am being serious here though. On the evening of May 27th, 1984, I heard the Gospel message being preached and I bowed my head, raised my hand, and prayed the prayer. If you think that I am going to make light of that decision, well, I am not.
But at the same time, I am going to take a look at it from the perspective of 22 years later. [Well, 22 years and one day!]
For some readers, the term “accepting Jesus” is a term denoting nothing more than a bunch of religious chicanery, double-speak, or outright nonsense. For some others, there are no connotations that come to mind. The phrase is void of all meaning. For others, it may even constitute blasphemy. Typically though, there are few of us that have not heard the phrase “born-again Christian” at one time or another. You yourself either are one or know someone who claims to be one, am I right?
Well, inasmuch as no one has ever knocked on my door and asked me to hand over my membership card, I still am a born-again Christian myself.
But am I? I mean, really?
Well, if I were put on the Hotseat [wherever this is]… if I were interviewed by the Orthodox Christian…. Interviewer-Guy… probably, fairly soon into it, a big buzzer would sound and the floor would open up underneath me!
I would fail the standard quiz.
Why?
Because I have changed in my opinion [my assessment] of a lot of fundamental doctrinal points. [I’ve talked about this before, on godpuddle, so I will not go on about it again].

To the steadfastly orthodox, [in any of the big-three Western religions, really] change [deviation] is not seen as some sort of umm… beneficial option.
In other words, focusing on Christianity, when looking at what it typically MEANS to say “I accepted Jesus Christ into my heart as Lord and Savior” it may be best to begin with what it does NOT mean.
On the day that one becomes a “born-again Christian” one is NOT saying:
“Today I begin an open-ended spiritual quest wherein I will be allowed to embrace all that resonates most soundly with my own inner being, and will encompass that which most fully enhances my evolving understanding of truth and harmony.”
No.
Quite the opposite is the case, in fact. [Again, what you are about to read is my own personal opinion, not an actual established creed].
But typically, when one accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior, what one is saying is:
“Today I begin a boundaried spiritual journey that puts an end to any previous or future spiritual mystery, for Jesus Christ is now my Savior which is to say my All in All, and I shall seek to conform the questions found in my inner being to the answers provided in the Bible, to the exclusion of other spiritual truths that may be available elsewhere.”

Essentially, this is what being a born-again Christian is.
Finding a big huge ANSWER.
Not asking a big huge QUESTION.

The effect of such a decision can be profound, and radically life-changing, as was the case in my own life. This is why I do not belittle it, in any way. Finding big-huge answers can sometimes be the very thing one needs.
And really, there is no religion that does not acknowledge “need" even if expressed as “desire” in its devotee, its adherent, its follower.
Such a decision can contain within it, immense power. Mind-boggling power.
Martyr-making power!
It can be, as with other faith-based decisions one may make, something that only intensifies [grows, builds] as time goes on.
Then again, it may wane.
It may waver, undulate. For most people it most certainly does this.
With time, it may fall away altogether.
With others, it may mutate. Change.

This is what it has done, with me. This last thing.
It has changed.

I wonder sometimes if the catalyst for change [religious change] isn’t plain old insatiable inquisitiveness. The return of the questioning aspect.
Curiosity.
What I am wondering, nowadays, is how it is that some people can live the next 100 years of their life, never asking another single question regarding their initial faith-experience. I’m not saying that there is something inherently wrong about living this way.
I am just wondering how it happens.
I am just saying that any faith… any religion that requires us to quit asking questions…. and I mean ANY questions… that religion cannot be my religion.

So…. cut to the chase…. WHAT AM I nowadays, 22 years later?
Am I a person denying my initial faith experience?
Not at all.
Faith-wise, I do not regret a moment of the last 22 years. All of it is a harmonious part of who I am today.
Am I still a born-again Christian?
My answer to that would be….. WHO CARES?

What I am most concerned about nowadays is whether my inner being is at odds with my outer being.
Do I believe what I believe because I believe it, or because I am supposed to believe it? [This is merely another way of asking if what I believe about spirituality and “God” is congruent with the most honest and deepest levels of my inner being.]
This is what I see now, as being of utmost importance.

Someone: “My friend, you could be very content in your inner being and be totally wrong about your overall spiritual state.”
Me: “Perhaps, but that’s for me to worry about. Not you.”

Back then, 22 years-and-a-day ago, the most important word for me was “salvation.”
Nowadays, [and I am not exaggerating] I think it should be a non-word.
Why?
Because I can’t know who is saved [even if it’s me] without also knowing who isn’t.

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A Clear-Thinking Gen-X'er!

2006-05-28T07:51:00.000-06:00

I am still recovering this morning from a day of being radically sunburned, chopping wood for a friend. And with friends. It was fun, but exhausting.
I came back home only to fall down onto my bed like a split log.
This morning I happened upon a really neat clip of a girl by the name of LaDonna Witmer, [shown here] speaking her mind on matters religious... and identity in general.
It was my Sunday church service.
I hope you like it, too. [Click]

Wise Words

2006-05-25T20:24:00.000-06:00

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
-- Carl Sagan –

The Heaven Club

2006-05-21T22:48:00.000-06:00

Note: The following blog was previously posted on the Award-Winning blogsite called Bookpuddle©.

The Heaven Club!

One of the things I love most about weekends is that I can sleep in like crazy. Like a tranquilized rhino, on Saturdays and Sundays I just stay in bed until I totally don’t want to.
Then, when I finally do get out of bed, I flick on the TV and there will be back-to-back re-run episodes of one of my favorite shows of all time.
Will & Grace.
Few sitcoms make me actually laugh out loud. Will & Grace is one of them.
I just think that the premise of the show is so good, the writing is so witty, and the actors are so fabulous.
This morning…. well, early afternoon, I just roared! [Like a rhino].

Scene: Jack and Grace were in the kitchen where Grace was preparing supper for Will and Karen, who would soon be returning from a gruelling day of legal work.
Jack is so impressed with Grace’s preparations.
He turns to her and says, “You know Grace. You’re so nice. If you weren’t Jewish, you’d go to heaven.”
During the live audience’s uproar of laughter [and mine too], Grace quits stirring the bowl of whatever-it-is. And then, perfectly timed, she says, “Thanks Jack. And if you weren’t gay, you’d go there too!”
LOUDER laughter, as Jack nods and has that “touche” look on his face.

Why does that scene so work?
Why is it so funny?

Well, I think that it is so hilarious because it plays right into the absurdity of the notion that we can KNOW [or think that we know] who it is that will or will not go to heaven!
When all the while we simply cannot possibly know such a thing!
Believe me when I say that I know there are people… zillions of them in fact, who think that they DO know exactly the groundrules for membership in The Heaven Club.
In other words, they know that if a person does not hold to a particular precise belief system, this fact alone guarantees that the Gate will be shut to them, later on.
I would not at all dispute that we can BELIEVE this.
But I would totally argue that we can not KNOW this.
I would tend to say that we cannot even possibly know this for ourselves, much less apply it to the future disposition of other people.
And you know what is funny?
There are people who, hearing me say the above, would conclude that such a personal statement ensures that I myself will not make it in!
Because surety is Rule #1.
And that statement hacks it to shreds.

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Wise Words

2006-05-17T05:33:00.000-06:00

God can do anything. Except change Himself into a rock with no powers, then change Himself back again, because then He would never have been a real rock.
-- 8-year old Madeleine McCarthy, in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies --

Meeting Manji

2006-05-14T21:41:00.000-06:00

Today I finally purchased this one book I have been ogling and flipping through for a long while now.
It’s called The Trouble With Islam Today. Perhaps yesterday’s movie [see previous blog] inspired me to look into it a bit closer today. The book is incredible, and the author [shown here] fascinating as all get out.

Irshad Manji.

She’s been dubbed, “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.” She takes that as a compliment.
[I have a hunch that Monsieur Osama has a few nightmares worse than any involving Irshad Manji though…!]
I am just amazed at how fearlessly outspoken Manji is! I am only partway into the book but it seems there is nothing about the Quran or Islam in general that is going to escape criticism of one kind or another. And she is so witty about it, while maintaining a deadly seriousness. One of the things that I find so interesting, is that Manji retains her faith. In other words, she is a Muslim…. but not in a conventional sense. No, she calls herself a Muslim Refusenik.
She makes me think of me.
I call myself a “Christian” still. Yet I am extremely critical of so many aspects of conventional Christianity. Perhaps I am a Christian Refusenik, and I know it not!

One thing, early on in the book, is very worthy of note.
Manji answers the question implied in the title…. she says, “The trouble with Islam today is…..” [I pause… so that you all can say it with me, before even reading on…. come on now, if you’ve been reading this blogpage for any time at all, you will know what she is going to say………]
Manji says that the trouble with Islam today is... “that literalism is going mainstream, worldwide.” [p.3].
Literalism.
There it is again. Literalism.

If someone were to ask me what the biggest trouble with Christianity is today…. I would say the very same thing, for starters.
Literalism.
It’s going mainstream, worldwide.

The Tom Harpur lecture I attended recently was no different. When asked why he calls himself “an uncomfortable Christian” Harpur replied that it was because he is grieved about “the large pond, or lake, or slough of literalism into which Christianity has fallen and cannot extricate itself from.”
I so agree.
[Interestingly, at this same lecture, Harpur directly referred to two authors who should be read in a far greater measure than they are currently being read. One was the iconic Harold Bloom. The other was Irshad Manji]!

In my own outlining of what I call The Three Pillars, my first point is this very thing, concerning literalism.
1) The thoroughgoing literal interpretation of Scripture. That’s got to go.

I am excited about this book.
The next chapter I am about to read is entitled “When Did We Stop Thinking?”
Hah!
I ask myself this question every day, and endeavor to make it apply to myself as little as possible!

Meet Manji, here.

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United 93

2006-05-13T21:55:00.000-06:00

I went to this movie today.
How would I describe it?
Probably the word “important” is the first word that would come to mind.
And important is an understatement. It’s a movie I think that everyone should see.
I know that there are those who feel that United 93: The Movie is a gross exploitation of a horrid event. A theatre-izing of something so tragic it should be left alone.
Why though?
Is it because someone will make money from the movie? Is that it?
Is that why we should leave it alone, and not try to put it on the screen?
Or is it because it was about something in which real people were involved… in other words, because it is based upon an actual event so tragic that it is offensive to even think about what happened on Sept.11th, 2001? [It should be noted that the movie was made in the full support of the families of those onboard that fateful morning.]
Is it [any objection to the very existence of the movie] based upon the idea that portraying it like this, on the big screen, cannot possibly relate what actually went on, and to do it in this almost docu-drama type fashion [falsely] implies that this is pretty much exactly what occurred? Hence, because of unavoidable innacuracy and possible misrepresentation, we should leave it alone?
Would we say the same thing then, of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List?
No one got all upset about the possible inaccuracies of say, James Cameron’s Titanic, even though the film is also based on a very real tragedy. Are these two examples irrelevant because they were not ever claiming to be docu-drama? Is it because the events are so distant in time?
Is Sept.11th still too fresh then, is that it?

Director Paul Greengrass does a tremendous job of taking us through the events of United Flight 93, dovetailing in real time the confusion ensuing as Air Traffic Controllers and Military Command Centers struggle to make sense of what is happening.
To say “you are really there” would be wrong.
Only the people that were there, were there.
But I would say that I think it is about as close as we can get and still be alive afterwards.
In the last portions of the movie I was crying.
And then I was the last person to leave the theatre.

I have never in my lifetime heard such reverent silence, at the end of a movie.

I went to see United 93 based upon several outstanding reviews, along with reccomendations from a couple of friends. Plus, I will admit, I went to see the movie because of my own interest in trying to get within a million miles of grasping how or why something like this event happened in the first place.
In this last sense, the movie did, I think, portray in an “important” way, the true nature [as I see it, and understand it] of why Sept.11th, 2001, happened.
To some, this [what I am about to say] may seem like an insanely stupid oversimplification, but I am going to say it anyway.
The catastrophic human events of Sept.11th, 2001 were a result of certain people being so certain of their religious beliefs that they felt entirely justified in destroying not only themselves, but other people as well.

Click to see more.

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Wise Words

2006-05-11T18:06:00.000-06:00

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.
-- Graham Greene –

Giftings Revisited: HUNCH vs. PUNCH!

2006-05-08T20:23:00.000-06:00

Regarding my Saturday blog entitled “Giftings” I received some great comments that I would like to sort of respond to.
Anyone who is reading this current blog and has not read the previous one, I would encourage you to do so now.

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In response to that blog posting, Cold Molasses [who happens to be a personal friend of mine… no less than one of the Ents, as it were…] said the following:

I struggle with your blog entry. Not because I don't share this belief. No, moreso because I struggle with the logic of it in the context of your other postings. Now, it doesn't need to be logical, so don't get me wrong. It's fine for you to believe whatever you believe. My challenge, though, is understanding the "hunch" factor.

Let me explain my curiousity. In other posts, you talk about God not being a hands-on God (if I can refer to it as that)...you know, not (usually at least) interfering in our lives directly. So I struggle with your premise that now God has directly impacted EACH of our lives in the MOST INTIMATE way...by defining for us what our gifting (or bliss) is...which will, to a large degree, influence our happiness and contentedness for all our lives.

Again, this is not a criticism but moreso raises a question I'd like to explore more with you. And that question is...what drives your "hunch" factor? What is the basis for the "hunch"? Is there a thought process you go through along with the "hunch" factor or is it solely a "hunch"?

He raises some really good issues.
I will start with the last paragraph, and answer the questions.
What drives my “hunch” factor, and secondly, what it is based upon, is mostly feelings. I guess that is what I mean by using the word “hunch.” Also, it is why I prefaced my comments at the time with the proviso:
My belief that God “gifts” us, is a belief that I hold in faith.
There is no tangible reason I should believe this.
Really, I am being sincere, there is no tangible reason I should believe that God “gifts” us. A lot of my feelings on the subject are based upon my own acknowledgment of personal giftings, followed by the question that I ask myself, “Where do they come from?”
If I go with the genetic answer, or even that of early childhood conditioning, I am always struck with how different I am [in my giftings and general temperament] when compared to any of my four siblings. When it comes to it, we all of us might as well be from different planets.
[I would venture to say that any parent with more than one kid can vouch for the fact that they often wonder if the Milkman really did slip one past the goalie somehow! No?]
Is there a thought process that I work through to come up with my “hunch” regarding giftings?
Not really.
Being totally honest here. It is [I admit] one of those things I am somewhat CHOOSING to believe.
In my blog, I went on to say, in a sort of hyperbolic way… All of this blog, and not only this one, but all of the previous ones…..is a hunch!
In a one-on-one conversation with my friend [the writer of the comments, the asker of the questions] he implied that if this is the case… if all of my blogs on godpuddle ultimately constitute sort of a “hunch”…. an “opinion” [if you will]… then this fact [or admission maybe is the better word] sort of nullifies the PUNCH of what it is I am saying.
In other words I have violated a standard of consistency.
I tend to disagree.
The reason I disagree is because when we are discussing theology, really there is never any point where a final conclusion is much more than a hunch or a deeply felt decision that is fraught with all mannner of subjectivity and personal opinion. What are we to say? “I base my beliefs on……. the Bible?”
Well…… is that not…. a HUNCH?
None of my previous blogs have been ex cathedra statements about anything that could be construed as ULTIMATE TRUTH.
Rather, what the blogs on godpuddle are intended to convey is an element of questioning that is too often [in my opinion] lacking in most theological discussion.
What I am saying here, in a roundabout way, is that for me to posit anything as being objectively true [as true and applicable to you, dear reader, as it is to me] it is necessary for me to appeal to something beyond myself [as in God, or Scripture or the authority of the Church or its representatives]…. and this is something I will no longer do.
I have done it, yes. But I will no longer do it.

And so, what I mean to say is that even in my former blog, entitled “The Hand Of God” where [yes] I am proposing that God does not directly intervene [interfere] with the affairs of our lives anywhere near to the extent that we attribute His involvement…. even my stating of such a thing is based upon a “hunch”. My feeling about the issue at hand.
It is then up to each reader to ask themselves how this [and not only that one, but all of these blogs] measure up to their own “hunches” about things [theological principles].
In the end…. all we have are our hunches.
Anyone who declares something about God as being unequivocably TRUE, is in danger of SEVERE WRONGNESS.
The answers are out of reach.
But the questions are not!

This is why [in my blog] I qualify even my own statement about beileving IN God, by making sure that readers understand that I am declaring Him to be, “the indescribable, indefinable, ineffable, God.”
Even in ascribing those three words to Him, I am declaring that I believe in Him, based upon a “hunch.”

So, moving on to the topic of “interference”…. or, more specifically, my apparent contention that there is no incongruency involved in believing that God “gifts” us, yet does not seem to “intervene” in our lives.
Firstly, I think this is a very valid issue to explore further. I see where the question is coming from. I admit, it does seem that I am either schizophrenic, or high on benzene!
However, I would point to the analogous situation of my belief that God is the creator of the world, yet He seems to not interfere with our potential to destroy it.
For instance, if I believe that God created the world [which I do, based again, upon a hunch when it really comes down to it], does this mean that I [ipso facto] believe that He sustains it?
No.
Not in my way of looking at it anyway.
What I mean by this can be illustrated by the fact that my belief that God created the ozone layer around the earth does not necessarily mean that I believe He will protect it from the fluorocarbons and carbon monoxide that are currently intent upon destroying it!
No. I believe that He does not intervene, as such.
I believe we could literally fry ourselves to death with UV rays because of our love of hairspray!
Similarly though, if God “gifts” us, as human beings, with the gift of having propensities and abilities that not only make us unique but allow us the potential of living valuable and fulfilled lives… do I necessarily believe that He is “forcing us” [as another respondent said] to REALIZE these giftings?
No.
But the respondent [rantandroar] went on to suggest that if we, in fact, do not fulfill these giftings, then this implies that God is deliberately “frustrating” our lives.
I disagree again.
I do not see it that way. I would say that WE are the ones who are frustrating our lives.
God gives… but His only other option is to NOT GIVE. Which would be the better thing?
If I give my nephew the bike he always wanted for his birthday, and, instead of riding it, he throws it off a cliff…. I think it is pretty much a waste of time to go on and on about the deficient intentions of the gift-giver.
In my own life, I am profoundly aware that to the extent that I have not realized [actualized] my giftings it has always been an aspect of my own fear or [I’ll say it]…. STUPIDITY that has thwarted my degree of fulfillment.
If I have not followed my bliss or been able to follow my bliss, the reason lies at my own doorstep.
Never has it been God [granted, my conception of God] who has tripped me or thrown something in my way. Again, even this is a personal opinion. [Hunch].
Someone else may feel that it is “God” that has kept them from realizing goals, but I will never believe that this person is travelling down any sort of Transcendent Highway I myself want to be on!
Another respondent [who does not appear on these pages, does not write to my blog but writes to me personally] suggested that the reason I feel the way that I do about this issue has everything to do with my own experience in life, regarding “giftings.”
With that I agree.
I myself am a textbook case of unrealized potential.
A prototype of personal failure, in many ways.
But I can honestly say that I am not bitter about it. I am saddened, but not bitter. Bitterness requires external projection. [What is known as “blame.’] You can only be bitter towards something, while sadness is more inward.
Sadness means I can be honest about something that is less than it ought to be, while remaining thankful and utterly grateful for what might have been, and what still could be.
And in this sense, external blame [or projected frustration… the fist shaken in some direction] is non-existent!
And having said this, it is for all of us to come to terms with the way we “feel” in regard to our current levels of “life-fulfillment.”
The great psychologist Abraham Maslow would have called it “self-actualization.”
Joseph Campbell called it “following your bliss.”
What I find difficult to deny is that every person is unique, and has giftings that transcend our rational explanations as to why these giftings, these abilities, should exist as they do.
To go back to the “creation” motif… I would say the same about my belief that God is the designer of the human body.
I believe He is.
But... not all people are healthy.
He does not intervene as much as we would like to think He does. But [it is my "hunch"] that only God can come up with the design of the body, even if He chooses to let evolution be His wheelbarrow.
Thing is, if I smoke cigarettes and live on a diet of wieners and other foms of lard-cylinders, I am probably going to be gasping for air a lot sooner than the non-smoking vegan-jogger over yonder.
And yet, that guy may keel over long before I do!
I may be around to toss my sixteen millionth cigarette butt into his grave and walk right on over to the nearest hot-dog vendor for a juicy bratwurst!
I find that there is often very little observable correlation between what OUGHT to happen to us, and what in fact, DOES happen to us! In this sense, what God intends for us may never, in fact, be realized. I have a hunch that the greater majority of people never experience it. Never live to their full potential. Never truly follow their bliss. And whether they do or not [in my opinion] has very little to do with God's direct up-to-the-minute intervention in their lives.

The questions that have been raised by not only these two readers regarding this blog, but other readers, regarding other blogs, are the very reason that I write what I do on this page.
*** May the above, this response of mine, never be construed as an ANSWER.***
But just some further hunching about my hunches.

**********

Giftings

2006-05-06T23:54:00.000-06:00

“For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.”
-- Romans 11:29 --

Wanna talk a bit about giftings.
Is that OK?

The New International Version is a bit clearer than the old King James Version, above. The NIV says:
“For God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable.”

First of all, I believe in the existence of God. A “god” that is separate from us human beings… in other words, not a figment of our imagination. Rather, this God is the reason that we HAVE an imagination! Having said this, the God I believe in is yet subject to our imaginations, and hence, diverse! This God does not declare Him or Herself unequivocably. The indescribable, indefinable, ineffable, God.
Capital “G”.
The god who deserves upper-case designation.
Let me call him He.
He gifts each of us.
He gives each of us special giftings. Things that we are especially attuned to.
Things that we can especially do. Things that we can especially perform or desire to perform. Things that we can understand in greater depth than someone else, whom He has gifted in some other area, where we are most likely deficient.
GIFTINGS are the reasons we differ, as humans.

My belief that God “gifts” us, is a belief that I hold in faith.
There is no tangible reason I should believe this.
Someone else may acknowledge that different people gravitate to certain abilities as a result of other reasons, even if those reasons have no ultimate god-like source. Even if those reasons are entirely random, conditioned, or the product of a healthy or inhealthy womb, as the case may be.
And granted, an impregnated woman who drinks pure orange juice every morning is more likely to give birth to a “gifted” child, than one who drinks turpentine for breakfast.
I acknowledge that fact, and I do not make light of either contingency.
A mother who is “on crack” is less likely to push out an Einstein after baking the thing for nine months.
Point taken.
But, on the flipside of the coin…. there is no commensurate sort of corrollary principle to apply to those completely doltus-headed mothers who have birthed geniuses! Sometimes “giftings” go far beyond progenitry.
Children surprise us, time and again.

The reason I am even looking at this thing [this issue] at all, is because I have become intrigued by Joseph Campbell’s phrase, “Follow thy bliss.”
It is something he used to tell all of his students.
“Follow thy bliss.”
Follow that which most moves you. Follow that which most excites you. Stirs you. DO that which you are most suited for, FOLLOW that which most makes your heart beat!

Let me back up, before I get too far afield.
[Some of you may be already saying to yourself…. “Oh, this time, he does not have a clue what he is talking about.”]
Let me assure you…. you are right!
All of this blog, and not only this one, but all of the previous ones…..is a hunch!
But I have a hunch that there is something within all of us that speaks most directly to the core of who we are. There is something for which we feel we are most suited, most equipped.
Because of diversions, roadblocks that get thrown in the way of our true heart’s desires, we get thrown off these paths, and thrust into occupations that so take us off of our true path, that we even forget what we were meant to be.
But the angst is there. We know we are missing something.
God, if there is one at all, in your schema….. this God must be chagrined at your confusion. Yours and mine. He put you here for a purpose.
I am not talking about being a missionary in Borneo, or being a nun, or being a priest, or being an evangelist….. NO.
I am talking about being an actor, a plumber, a computer technician, a guitar-player, a sheet-metalist, a boiler-room operator, a songwriter, a graphic artist, a politician, a poet, a cab-driver, a surgeon, a dentist, a pilot, a veterinarian, a greeter at Wal-Mart, a teacher, an astronaut, a popcorn expert.
In other words, there is no reason [I really believe there is no reason] why we need to assume that the giftings that God grants us are limited to some sort of God-ish thing.
God’s greatest desire [I believe] is that we are fulfilled in our lives. In that which occupies our greatest amount of time spent on earth. Our vocation.
If we cannot find a way to “follow our bliss” in that which comprises the bulk of our time and energy [our jobs] I believe that we need to seek these areas out in the other time we are given.
For me, this [currently] means the other time of the day and night. The time when I am NOT at work. That is sad….. but it is not TRAGIC.
It is not a death sentence!
Many people are in a similar place.
They spend the greater part of their active day in a place where they are not especially “gifted.”
I am one of those people, so I know what it is like.
For me, “following my bliss” would mean firstly, being a professional musician.
Secondarily, a writer.
But I am not professionally employed in either of these pursuits.
Should I go kill myself, then?
No, I should acknowledge the fact and then do what I can, within reason, to compensate for, or change it! To redeem the rest of my available time and energy.
It is profoundly important though to be aware of those realms in which we are most gifted, and to do the most with them as we can…. not so much to PLEASE GOD, as to please OURSELVES!
And in this, I think we, in turn, please God!
Why?
Because these gifts COME FROM HIM. From God! This being said, He is ALREADY pleased with us!
Our acknowledging our giftings is going to please US, more than it pleases God.
He is not jealous of this. This is His gift to us. Ourselves. We are our gift. He is the giver.
If we cannot fulfill our giftings in our place of employment, I believe it up to us [individually] to seek their fulfillment elsewhere.
And to the extent that we succeed in doing this, we enjoy life.
In turn, we are one with God. Harmonious.

When a NASA scientist launches a mission, is he [or she] doing what God has gifted them to do? Only they themself can answer that question. Maybe that person comes home afterwards, and feels more fulfillled in writing a poem about the sunset that day. Only they themself know what is truer to their inner being. To their inner bliss.
When Mick Jagger swings his hips on stage in front of 50,000 screaming fans, is he doing what God placed him on this earth to do? Only he [Mick Jagger] is able to answer that!
When a cab-driver goes home at night after navigating a thousand streets, does he know that he did what God put him on this earth to do? To deliver ten drunk people home safely? Only he [the cab-driver] knows this.
When a cable TV installer solves a crucial problem for a client, putting a TV where a TV was previously thought impossible….. is he or she doing what they were put on this earth to do?
I don’t know.
Only THEY know!
All I know is, I could not do it. I would have drilled holes in every wrong part of every wrong wall, till the entire house could drain spaghetti! So this other guy, the cable-guy is “gifted” in ways that I am not! It’s quite obvious.
“Well, he did not get an ultimate fix out of it!” says the Devils' Advocate.
Well…. then [I believe] he is obligated to find out where his ultimate fix comes from, and go there, after work…. because this is what God has called him to! This…. this thing, this other thing is why he is here, among us!
Find it.
Do it!
It is thy bliss!
Follow thy bliss!

Any time we can look at someone else, and recognize something in them that goes beyond what we ourselves could do, we are recognizing God’s unique gifting in them.
This means that when I am at a Sheryl Crow concert and I see her playing guitar in a way that I could never play it, and singing a song that I could never sing, and she wrote it in a way that I never could have written it… then, in all of these aspects of actuality, I should acknowledge God’s gifting in her.

I could say so much more, along these lines.
But I won’t.
Suffice it to say that what I believe the verse in Romans [above] is telling us [rather unequivocably] is that once God gives us these gifts, He does not take them back.
He does not charge us for them for being overdue, in their non-usage.
This is good news.
I’ve got gifts.
You’ve got gifts.
They come from God, and God’s not interested in taking them back.
He does not need them.
So……. use them.
Follow thy bliss.
Would that someone preached this to me, when I still had my custom-built Milestone drumset.

**********

Wise Words

2006-05-03T05:24:00.000-06:00

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.
-- Arthur Miller (1915 – 2005) --

Tithing

2006-04-30T18:30:00.000-06:00

I am writing this from a Chapters store, while sipping a Starbucks coffee.
[Big surprise!]
While browsing the shelves I happened to notice this book, shown here to the left. Finding Financial Freedom: A Biblical Guide To Your Independence.
It’s by Grant R. Jeffrey.
I set my coffee down and flipped through the thing, landing upon chapter 3, entitled: The Importance of Tithing and Charitable Giving: The Key To Financial Success.
I guess, one of my first thoughts is… the “financial success” of whom?

Tithe, the word itself, means “tenth.” The tenth part of something is a tithe.
In Christian circles the word is known to represent the tenth part of one’s income, or more specifically, one’s “increase.” Christians committed to active church life are not only encouraged, but often commanded to surrender one-tenth of all their financial increase to the church, for the furtherance of its work.
As a minumum! As a commandment found in scripture.

Do Christians do it?
Well, lots of them do, yes.
Jeffrey’s chapter 3 begins with these words:
“A recent study of giving habits found that only 4 percent of all church members tithe. Not only does this lack of generosity rob Christians of the joy of giving; it also prevents them from experiencing God’s promise of financial blessing.”
I must admit, I myself have quite a different take on this conclusion.
The way I see it, what this opening statement shows me is that a clear 96 percent of church members are a bit smarter than the other 4 percent!

I mean, come on!
To me, it is clear that Christian advocates of “tithing” are basing their admonitions on Old Testament laws and principles which are no longer applicable to modern-day people.
And Mr. Jeffrey knows this also. He says, “While we are no longer constrained by the Old Testament Law, God’s principle of blessing our obedient giving remains as His unchangeable law.” [p.39].
But whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold thy oxen!
I contend that this is a claim that goes quite beyond our mutually understood convictions. By that I mean, it is an interpretive statement, and as such, subject to investigation!
Just prior to making that statement, Jeffrey cites Leviticus 27:30 as a reference point. The passage says, “And all the tithe of thy land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the Lord’s: it is holy unto the Lord.”
How lovely.
But I have just re-read the entirety of ch.27 of Leviticus, and I can assure you that there is not even one other verse in that chapter that modern mankind would claim as some sort of culturally normative practise!
So why single out this one thing about tithing?
In fact, this whole portion of Leviticus is rife with laws that deal specifically with the Hebrew people of an ancient era in time. Are we to follow all of these scriptural passages with the literal exactitude that Jeffrey is suggesting?
What then should we make of this one, found a few pages earlier, in Leviticus 19:19? “Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.”
Holy Moses! Should I check the tag on my T-shirt now? Run home and rend my poly-garments? Should I call my mom and tell her she needs to decide whether she wants carrots or cabbage this year…. because scripturally, she can’t have both?

A favorite passage that people like to cite [regarding tithing] is the one about Abraham and Melchizedek. From Genesis 14:18-20.
But the thing is, Melchizedek is reported to have made this gesture prior to Moses revealing the Law at Mount Sinai. [To be fair, Jeffrey acknowledges this]. But my point would be, if we are going to use this passage at all, why not use it to emphasize the difference between tithing [according to Law, which I contend is defunct], and donating, [according to the heart, which I contend is valid].
Certainly we should donate, certainly we should give of our increase and income to causes that are worthy of our concern and charity, but we should not do so based upon some alleged God-given law. Nor should we do it based upon some returned blessing we are expecting to receive as a result of our obedience!

Jeffrey teaches [in this chapter] that, “God promised that we would reap his blessings in direct proportion to the amount we sow.” [p.40].
Then, when he is asked in his seminars HOW MUCH people ought to be giving, he answers: “do you want God to bless you in proportion to your net income or your gross?” [p.40]
How ridiculous is that?
Like God is this Accountant in the Sky, balancing a ledger on a cloud.

But of course Mr. Jeffrey is going to say this.
Why?
Because that is WHY HE WAS ASKED TO SPEAK AT THIS SEMINAR!
It is his current VOCATION to say this.
Afterwards he shakes hands with all of the conference organizers backstage, and receives a check for saying it! And he was asked to speak this very message by a committee of people who not only totally agree with that answer, but who want him to say it because they are going to [in turn] financially gain from it.
Pastors are forever inviting guest speakers like Mr. Jeffrey to their congregations in an attempt to motivate the saints to become Old Testament tithers. All pastors dream of ways in which they can educate that other 96 percent!
Another common dream involves convincing people that the local church is the equivalent of the “storehouse” of Malachi 3:10!
[I’ll save that exegetical discussion for another day].

Why is the word “increase” preferred over the word “income”?
Well because this covers an entire other swath of stuff that the faithful are supposed to hand over to the church!
For instance [p.40]… if you sell your house for $300,000 but you only had paid $200,000 when you purchased it, you now owe your local church $10,000.
One tenth of the “increase.”
You know, if we are going to be entirely consistent here, the ancient Hebrews usually BURNED their offerings! Would any church ever advocate such a thing? Set up a large barbeque in front of the pulpit, and have everyone fling their cash onto the grille?
Well?

You know what I find extremely interesting? At the front of Jeffrey’s book is a list of his previous publications. There are twelve books listed.
However, this one, shown below and entitled The Millennium Meltdown is conspicuously absent.

Do you know why it is not there?
Because it was whacky!
It was all about the Y2K computer crisis. It adamantly held that on midnight of New Year's Eve, 1999, millions of computers worldwide would crash. Power grids would fail. It would result in the most devastating and costly problem in history. It would probably even set the stage for the coming world government that was biblically prophesied to arrive in the last days.
Well, as you and I both know, this greatest of all technological disasters to ever hit the surface of the earth proved to be about as menacing as a fuse with no firecracker at the end of it!
That’s all I will say.
I just feel that this author likes to deal in hyperbole.

[Fast-forward six years…]
Chapter 3 of Jeffrey’s LATEST book ends with this:

A story is told about a man who died and went to heaven. He was met at the Pearly Gates by Saint Peter, who led the man down the golden streets. They walked past mansion after beautiful mansion until they finally reached the end of the street, where they stopped in front of a modest wooden shack. The man asked Saint Peter why he got a shack when others were enjoying so many gold mansions. Saint Peter replied, “We did the best we could with the money you gave us.”

He obviously hasn’t learned much from the Y2K storytime-session… because this one, above, is equally bogus and unwarranted.
Besides not even being very humorous, the little vignette makes me angry, and I will tell you why it does.
It makes me angry because too many people hearing it, believe it.
And the person telling it, knows this. He knows that many will believe it. That’s why he tells it.
He knows that for many hearers [not all, but many] it will be much more than a little story. And I think it is unfair to wave metaphors like this around in front of [certain] people who do not know what metaphor is.
It amounts to what I would call, spiritual abuse.
When he tells this little anecdote to faithful parishioners, so many of them will get their checkbooks out and start calculating, and writing… and dreaming of their mansion.

**************

Wise Words

2006-04-25T20:27:00.000-06:00

Nature does not, in the long run, favour life. If nature is all that exists -- in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature -- then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it.
-- C.S. Lewis --
***********

The Hand of God

2006-04-23T16:17:00.000-06:00

“If you make the Most High your dwelling – even the Lord, who is my refuge – then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways, they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”
-- Psalm 91:9-12 --

Often I begin these blogs with a sort of disclaimer statement and I am going to do so again, here. It’s just that I think it is important, as regards TONE!
Whoever reads what ends up appearing here on godpuddle should know right up front that I have not the slightest desire to poke fun at anyone’s personal beliefs, or belittle their statements made in faith.
At the same time though, my motivation is to merely point out what a rational perspective may look like, when placed alongside such statements, and beliefs. To apply a bit of logical reasoning, congruence, or [yes] outright opposition at times, to some things that are commonly held to be truisms about God or theology.
So here is my current disclaimer.
Nothing that I am about to say in this article is said with malicious intent, nor is it said to belittle or otherwise poke fun at anyone.

Having said that, let me tell you about a phone call I recently received. It was from a friend, telling me of an accident that occurred.
An out of control car overshot the roadway, and smashed into the very office building where someone very dear to them was working away, at their desk. The vehicle came through the building and very nearly ran right over the person, working there. The impact sent her hurtling from her desk and she suffered considerable trauma and injury, requiring hospitalization.
That is about enough detail. I think it provides an adequate picture of the sudden seriousness of such an event.
My friend then proceeded to say, “It is so obvious to me, to our whole family, in fact, that ______ was spared by the hand of God.” [Name withheld].

That is the firmly-held conclusion of my caller friend.
At the time, I just said…. “Mmm-hmm!”
Now comes the part where I want to repeat that it is not my desire whatsoever to make light of the situation we are discussing here. Truly, someone could have been killed.
But what I want to point out is the inherent logistic absurdities of my friend’s conclusion. [Strictly speaking, the statement itself is what I want to critically investigate, not the person who said it.]
I maintain that to interpret the event in this fashion, is to also assume that God CAUSED the accident!
Why?
Well, simply because of the absurdity of the only other possible option, which is that God was SURPRISED by it!
In other words, God was not at all aware of the accident’s possibility until it began happening, and then [at that moment] God sprang into action, slowing the out of control vehicle down, so that the person behind the desk would not be killed, but merely injured.
When all of the events came to light, it was found that the driver of the vehicle made the mistake of hitting the accelerator rather than the brake pedal!
Hence, my own conclusion [were I asked] would be more along the lines of:
Extremely poor driving skills were the cause of the accident, and rapid decrease in momentum the cause of any vehicle stoppage whatsoever.
My question therefore becomes the following: If God is as directly involved in this story as my friend assumes, would it not have been much more easier for God to have directed the placement of the foot of the driver? I mean, rather than doing nothing, and then having the car smash into the building and causing all of that mayhem and destruction and injury?
I agree that God is intimately concerned with the welfare of the person working away behind their desk. If the God that my friend believes in exists at all, then of course that God does not want anyone to get run over by a car.
But, nonetheless, people are run over by cars all the time! Every day!
Even now as I have typed these few paragraphs, several people [and of this there can be very little doubt] have died in tragic motor vehicle accidents, the world over!
So again, I am not making light of the intense gratitude one might be expected to want to send off in some sort of a direction after being “spared” such a potential tragedy as is herein being described, but at the same time, to attribute this gratitude to the hand of God is absolutely absurd.

To me, it is far more logical to simply conclude that the reason the car stopped when it did is a combination of:
a) Its momentum being slowed from the impact of having to drive through the wall of the place.
b) The driver, in that moment, probably realizing which pedal was the the one for the brake.
c) The initial speed of the vehicle in the first place.

Some people might say, reading those three unemotional facts…. “Hah! Your reasoning powers are tempered by the fact that it was not close enough to home! It was not your own family or friends involved.”

But that is not true at all. Let me tell you another true story.

A number of years ago, my mother and father drove out to Vancouver Island to visit my sister and her family. One day, they all decided to go up-Island on a scenic tour.
Just as they were leaving the house, my brother-in-law said he would prefer to drive my father’s van. And so it is that all seven of them piled into the thing, and set off.
Not far into it, my brother-in-law noticed that an oncoming vehicle was swerving towards them in an erratic fashion. As anyone who has ever driven a vehicle at highway speed knows, there is not a lot of time to figure out what to do. Within one or two seconds he had to negotiate a near-roll-over swerve to avoid the car, and as he looked into his rear-view mirror the out of control vehicle slammed into the car behind them.
The result was a number of fatalities in this tragic accident that my own family had avoided by mere inches!
Almost assuredly, if my 70-year old father was driving the van, all seven of the passengers in it that day would have been killed in the head-on collision. He would never have achieved the reaction-time necessary.
But I cannot possibly come to the conclusion of God’s hand being upon them unless I am at the same time able to explain why God’s hand was so intent upon killing the other people….. the people in the rear-view mirror!
If God was so involved, and loves people without partiality [as I, in fact, believe God does]… would it not have been better, and even easier, for God to have nudged that sleeping driver into an awake state, so that no-one at all needed to be killed?
In the above scene, am I to conclude that God loves my own family more than he loves the families of the other people? The ones that were killed that day on the highway?
Am I to conclude that it was God who told my brother-in-law to drive the van, as they all left the house? If so… wouldn’t it have been even better for God to have told the sleepy driver of the other car to pull over to the side of the road and have a little bit of a napsie-wapsie?

Some people [speaking of partiality now] might even conclude that the other people [the ones who perished] may not have had God’s protection upon them, because they were not “believers” whereas my family [which is, in fact, the case] WERE!
But again, this explains absolutely nothing unless at the same time we can point to the immunity of all “believers” when it comes to tragic events that happen every single day of the year! And we simply cannot do this. Horrifically tragic things happen every single day to “believers” and “non-believers” alike!

So what am I saying?
Am I saying that God does not care about us?
Am I saying that there is no such thing as “God’s hand” protecting anyone, at any time?
No.
I am not saying either of those things because I do not know either of them to be true or false.
What I am saying is that what we are meaning and believing when we employ the phrase “God’s hand” is most of the times….. utterly absurd.
There is absolutely no empirical or experiential cause and effect correlation between our belief in the protection of “the hand of God” and any actual real-life protection.

This will surely sound cold of me to point this out, but in my friend’s initial statement to me on the phone, what is essentially being said is that even if the car in question had been travelling at a speed of 350 miles an hour when it hit the building, it STILL would have stopped before running over the person behind the desk.

Hmmm… maybe in the pages of the Bible yes, but not anytime since!

************

Wise Words

2006-04-19T20:23:00.000-06:00

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
-- Helen Keller --

The Uncomfortable Christian

2006-04-17T19:52:00.000-06:00

Tonight I attended a seminar entitled Modern Faith & The Historical Jesus.
The speaker was Tom Harpur, and as many readers of this blog will know, Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ was very influential in the process which I call my own spiritual renaissance. I have described the process in a previous blog.
The picture shown here is of Harpur. I’ve heard him speak before, but only tonight did I notice how tall he is.
The guy is like some kind of Philistine giant! [There was a sign, as you walked in... "Check Slingshots At Door"]!!
I was expecting Mr. Harpur to lecture upon the topic written across my ticket, but instead, the format of the evening was a brief reading from one chapter of his new book, followed by an interrogative interview by a moderator and then a roving microphone, fielding questions from the audience.
I would have liked to hear more outright lecturin’!
Thankfully though, the questions were pretty good, and the answers even better. Right from the get go, the moderator asked Tom to elaborate about the use of his phrase “uncomfortable Christian.”
Harpur replied that he describes himself as an “uncomfortable Christian” because he is grieved about “the large pond, or lake, or slough of literalism into which Christianity has fallen and cannot extricate itself from.”
He said that it embarasses him, and then cited several reasons for his chagrin if he were to go no farther for illustrative ammunition than the Easter service he attended just yesterday, in some un-named United church in rural Ontairo. He said that it was literally plagued with literalism, and clarified by saying that not one mention was made concerning “the first Bible ever written.” [I was all ears!]
By this term he meant, the heavens.
He explained how that Easter, the very timing of Easter, has everything to do with events in the heavens, as does Christmas, and that a full understanding of either of these religious festivals cannot possibly be understood without reference being made to the vernal equinox and winter solstice [respectively.]
In response to another question, Harpur again focussed on the topic of literalism, saying that if there is a planetary cataclysm [end of the world] we need to realize that it will not come about due to political upheaval or breakdown, but rather, it will come about because of “people taking a few words of ancient text and pushing those words to the limit.”
[This so confirms to me the idea behind the writings of Sam Harris, alluded to a while ago on godpuddle.]
Harpur was asked: “Is there a role for the churches today…. any relevance they can offer a true seeker of spiritual truth?”
His answer was that the “potential” is there, “but not along the path they are currently following.” By this he further explained that “symbols need to be revived, but revived subjectively.” He stated that “99.9% of sacred text is symbolic, allegorical, metaphorical, or meant as imagery.”
He followed this up with citing several examples; the 40-year long wandering of the Israelites, Jesus’s walking on the water, etc. These are metaphors, not references to historical events.
When asked why the churches are so fearful of allowing the metaphorical approach to biblical interpretation, Harpur said “It’s really a power thing. Fear!”
This [he went on to say] is why the Gnostics hid their texts, and these texts are only being found in recent history, by modern-day archaeologists. The Gnostics hid their texts because “they heard the tramp of Christian footsteps behind them”… Gnostic-thinking is not about heirarchy. They knew that true spirituality came from within, and this was a doctrine that flew in the face of Christian leaders of the day, who felt that their positions would be threatened if the common person got hold of such teachings.
Harpur had very little good to say about The Jesus Seminar, when asked. This may be the point at which I most differ from Harpur, in my current spiritual journey, his contention that there was no such person as the “historical Jesus.”
In the midst of one comment, Harpur paused to highly endorse the work of Harold Bloom, and specifically his latest book, entitled Jesus And Yahweh: The Names Divine.
In a lighter moment, towards the end of the evening, Harpur, a firm believer in an afterlife, was asked what Good Friday and Easter mean to him?
He said, “You’re as dead tonight as you’re ever going to be.” [Laughter.]
We, all of us, go through crucifixions and resurrections, he said. “I myself have gone through many of each.” There is no life that has not been through them. The current way that Easter is celebrated is an example of far too much emphasis being placed upon one ancient story of such a crucifixion and resurrection. [My paraphrase].

All in all it was an enjoyable evening.
Was it worth it?
Definitely.
It is always worth it, to think, and to listen to someone who has thought.

*************

My Easter Service

2006-04-16T13:45:00.000-06:00

It is Easter afternoon….
About three minutes after I woke up this morning, my phone rang. I should have let it keep ringing, but I thought it might be my mom, so I answered it.
The person on the other end told me I was going to hell.
I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
To be more precise, they said, “Where did you go to church this morning?”
Me: “Ummm… I didn’t, actually.”
“You’ve told me you’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.”
“Yes, I have,” I replied, while filling my coffee-maker up with water….
“Well, you should be worried then.”
“What?” I said.
“Not going to church on Easter morning? How do you think God feels about that?”
Needless to say, this conversation was not exactly enlightening to me.
It got progressively worse than above described, and ended with me hanging up on the person.

Only afterward did I think of what I should have said. You know how that happens? Always too late?
I would have liked to ask the person. “Is this what they instructed you to do after your Easter service today? Go home and call the first hellbound friend you can think of? Is that what Easter means to you?”

I am over it now. But I must admit, it was unnerving. It really was.
I do not like to hang up on anyone.

Thinking of the scene makes me recall something from the Tillich book I am currently reading.
Paul Tillich was a German/American theologian (1886-1965) and some say he was the most influential theologian of the 20th Century.
Reading Tillich is like wading out into an ocean, honest to God. Very soon you realize your feet are not touching bottom anymore, but the very salinity and undercurrent are bearing you up. You are swept along.
For me, I will always remember Good Friday, 2006 as the day I finally began reading Tillich.
Anyway, concerning the events of my own Easter morning here, the first chapter of this Tillich anthology comes to mind, as I said.
It is called Invocation: The Lost Dimension, and was written in 1958, five years before I was born. As I read it, I had to marvel… “How has this been here all my life, without my knowing it?”
Tillich argues that the Church (Christianity) has lost what he calls “the dimension of depth.”
I cannot possibly capsulize all that he says, but honestly, it is just so fascinating, I must regurgitate a bit of it here, for you.

If the dimension of depth is lost, the symbols in which life in this dimension has expressed itself must also disappear. I am speaking of the great symbols of the historical religions in our Western world, of Judaism and Christianity. The reason that the religious symbols became lost is not primarily scientific criticism, but it is a complete misunderstanding of their meaning; and only because of this misunderstanding was scientific critique able, and even justified, in attacking them. The first step toward the nonreligion in the Western world was made by religion itself. When it defended its great symbols, not as symbols, but as literal stories, it had already lost the battle. In doing so the theologians (and today many religious laymen) helped to transfer the powerful expressions of the dimension of depth into objects or happenings on the horizontal plane. There the symbols lose their power and meaning and become an easy prey to physical, biological and historical attack.

I am way out in the surf here, in the depth.
Buoyed though, not drowning…. aware that I should keep reading.
And a couple pages later, he says:

Is there an answer? There is always an answer, but the answer may not be available to us. We may be too deeply steeped in the predicament out of which the question arises to be able to answer it. To acknowledge this is certainly a better way toward a real answer than to bar the way to it by deceptive answers. And it may be that in this attitude the real answer (within available limits) is given. The real answer to the question of how to regain the dimension of depth is not given by increased church membership or church attendance, nor by conversion or healing experiences. But it is given by the awareness that we have lost the decisive dimension of life, the dimension of depth, and that there is no easy way of getting it back. Such awareness is in itself a state of being grasped by that which is symbolized in the term, dimension of depth. He who realizes that he is separated from the ultimate source of meaning shows by this realization that he is not only separated but reunited. And this is just our situation. What we need above all – and partly have – is the radical realization of our predicament, without trying to cover it up by secular or religious ideologies. The revival of religious interest would be a creative power in our culture if it would develop into a movement of search for the lost dimension of depth.

Amen!
Reading this the first time, and now re-reading it again, has been my church.
My Easter service.

The realization is all.
Separated but reunited.
I’m so glad my phonecaller friend knows so much about all of the details in between, and how these apply to someone else. And I assure you, I feel as much spiritual guilt about consuming my next cup of coffee here, as I do about letting the answering machine retrieve my next call.

************

Getting Extreme About Extremism...

2006-04-12T19:52:00.000-06:00

A while ago, I mentioned that I had been reading a book called The End of Faith, by Sam Harris. I quoted, at that time, an excerpt from the book. [The blog itself is here, if you would like to refer back to it.]
When I posted that same excerpt on another blogsite, I got a response that was arguing for the fact that the excerpt itself was a tad bit whacky.
I do not think it is whacky at all.
And I have since found that someone else had written something along the same lines as Harris, opinion-wise.
The ever controversial Salman Rushdie had written a piece in the New York Times, on November 2, 2001. His article was entitled, “Yes, This Is About Islam.”
What he is referring to in the title is the fact that so much of the media had been saying [of the Sept.11th attacks on the World Trade Center] that “this isn’t about Islam.” And [admittedly] this rhetoric was for good reason: to keep innocent Muslims from being harassed and to keep the peace with other Muslim countries.
Rushdie said: “The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn’t true. Of course this is about Islam.”
But then he explained his comments by saying it was not so much about religion, as religion in politics. Again…
“The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.”

Can there even be a more significant statement than that last one, in light of the American [and coalitions] effort to inject or instill some kind of a sense of “freedom” in the areas where they are now so committed, and involved?
I agree with Sam Harris, and I agree with Salman Rushdie.
‘Taint gonna happen, this “freedom” that the West is trying to politically impose upon a problem that is inherently religious, at its root.
The WAR on terror?
The term itself [to me] is ridiculous.
Terror defeating terror?
Impossible.

The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal.
I am ALL FOR IT!
Not only when it comes to politics, or some kind of national concerns, or my neighbor across the ocean, but even when it comes to my neighbor next door or across the street.
KEEP YOUR RELIGIOUS NEEDS AND CONCERNS TO YOURSELF!
Granted, what Muslim extremists want is for their religion to be imposed upon the West, or for that matter, the entire world. And that is wrong. It is just plain wrong. Yes, we can talk about political problems till we are blue in the face, but I agree with Harris and Rushdie, that when all is said and done, Sept.11th, 2001 was about RELIGION.
It was about FAITH!
And what was done, in the name of religion and faith, and God, was wrong.
But, it is equally wrong for the West [Christianity, if you will], to even begin to want its own brand of “rightness” imposed upon someone else, be it the nation or religious grouping that represents this specific event [Sept.11th] in particular, or any other one!
The current state of things between these two worldviews should not be viewed as being linear, which would imply something with an eventual endpoint. No, we are now currently thigh-deep in something that is cyclical. A vortex.
Contrary to popular [Western] belief, Christian extremism is no better than Muslim extremism. Both are currently proving that they will kill to achieve their “extreme” means.
The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal is the only hope for mankind.
I agree with Rushdie. The only point at which I differ is his use of the word "restoration." Historically speaking, when has religion ever been merely personal?

************

Peace. Be still.

2006-04-09T19:41:00.000-06:00

I want to say a few things about peace.
But first, a disclaimer.
The things I am going to say about peace [inner peace] are not meant to be read as some kind of definitive and/or exhaustive canonical treatise on the subject.
They are merely the imperfect personal musings of an imperfect guy sitting in a nearly perfect coffeeshop. OK? Deal?

Be still, and know that I am God. (God, in Psalm 46:10)

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (Jesus, in John 14:27)

I think that these are two of the most beautiful scriptures in the entirety of the Bible. And now I am going to say something that may sound a bit crazy.
I think that I know this peace, described here.
By that I mean to say that I know when I have it [experience it] and I know when I don’t. And the difference between the two states is so tangibly felt within me that I jealously guard the maintenance of the former thing…. the peace.
Peace, [I find] is much better than non-peace.
When I am still, I know that God is God.
Stillness though, is not a hot commodity nowadays! But it does exist. Sometimes you’ve got to go find it. Other times, it sneaks up on you. More on this in a bit.
But of the second scripture, what could Jesus have possibly meant, by saying that his sort of peace was unlike that which “the world” might give?
I believe that what he was implying was that his peace was not dependent upon favorable circumstances!
It is a peace that runs deeper than things, deeper than accomplishments, status, attachments, even deeper than happiness. It is a peace that breaks through all of these things to declare itself as superior to them all.
We all want it, [inner peace] but sometimes we don’t know that we want it until it is really hard to get it. Most often the way it goes is we live our lives oblivious to the call to inner peace. We clutter ourselves with so many attachments, so many bills that cannot be paid unless we work seven days a week for the next 95 years, we rack up so much INNER DEBT that our adrenaline cannot keep pace. We get so many inner scars from looking for peace in all the wrong places!
Sooner or later, we are disappointed. Why?
Because we did all this stuff, and now the thing that is most important is missing.
There’s no inner peace.
This is the time when a lot of people run to religion.
If you do not believe me on this point, just go to an evangelical church on open-mike testimony night!
What a litany of horror stories you will hear!
And you know what? Religion works for a time. [In some cases, so would winning the lottery.]
But overall, it’s a diversion from the real issue, because basing one’s need for inner peace on religion is still placing too much emphasis on externals, on things that will disillusion you, and disappoint you.

The thing is, the type of peace Jesus was talking about has virtually nothing to do with religion.
In fact, religion is the very thing that is keeping virtual hordes of people from experiencing true inner peace. Instead, it is causing them inner turmoil. There are tons of people who would experience an immeasurable increase in their level of inner peace if they completely abandoned their religious practises. For some people, a relaxing morning walk along the river would do them more spiritual good than the next 100 church services rolled into one! Each of us have a responsibility [to ourselves] to recognize if we are that person, and then act accordingly.

Someone might say, “But what about salvation? What about being saved? Isn’t that the ultimate concern? The thing we should fret over? Isn’t that why we practise religion?”
Salvation is an issue I am not really going into here, this evening.
What I am focussing on is inner peace.
Salvation and inner peace are apples and oranges.
I am not saying that inner peace brings salvation. [For one thing, how many opinions are there, concerning what salvation is?]
But, conversely, neither does “salvation” necessarily involve lasting inner peace! Point being, that some of the most “saved-est” people have the least inner peace within them.

Well then, what am I suggesting one ought to do, to get inner peace?
I don’t know.
But the way that would come closest to the way I would perceive the beginning stages of some sort of answer would be this:
SHUT THINGS DOWN!
What?
BE STILL.
I don’t get it.
BEGIN BY BEING STILL.
That is the one thing I cannot do.
AHA! THAT IS WHY YOU ARE ASKING THE QUESTION!

It is something that must be deliberately cultivated.
Why?
Because the world, [or life itself, as Jesus inferred] will suck it right out of you in ONE DAY’S TIME if you are not serious about jealously guarding it.

Let me provide a fictitious scenario...

You are out at a work-related party, being held at a beautiful resort, outside city limits. The atmosphere is electric. You are even more witty tonight than you usually are. Your spouse is over yonder, mixing it up, and also having a great time. Soon, you drift over to the verandah, drink in hand. The cool night air tempts you thitherward, so you descend the few steps to the long, winding gravel driveway. And you walk.
It is just you and the crunching gravel underfoot, and soon you saunter far enough away that the noise of the party is just a faint hum on the breeze, with the odd laughter poking its way through. You are just noticing how clean and fresh the air is tonight, when peripherally, your eye catches some movement, off to the left, through a clearing in the trees. You stop and see that a deer is as startled to have seen you, as you are, to have seen it.
You gaze at it for a long long while, until it feels safe with you and continues to nibble at some leaves in the brush. The deer turns and leaves before you do.

Anyone who does not [even now, reading this] appreciate that sort of a moment for what it is [a veritable epiphany] does not at all understand what inner peace is, in any experiential sense.
When the person in this scenario stops and marvels at the beauty of this deer, he or she is being still and knowing that God is God.
What if I don’t really believe in God, though?
It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of what I am discussing here.
When the person in the scenario stops and considers how thankful they are for the undeserved beauty of that moment, they are praying.
What if I have never really prayed before in my life?
It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of what I am discussing here.

My point in even mentioning this scenario is to now provide a possible counterpart to it.
Let’s say that another person has walked down the same gravel driveway, on the same evening, everything just as described above… but all that floods their mind is how alienated and out of place they feel to be alone, walking down a gravel driveway while a party is going on. The only reason they stop is to turn around and go back, [and because their drink needs replenishing]… and nowhere along the way have they really dialogued with themself. They were not living in a state of awareness. No freshness of appreciation. They would not have been able to tell you if the fenceline was to the left or the right of the road, and when they happened to see the startled deer, only thought of how nice it would be to shoot and eat it.
Lingering is not their style.

Which of these two people would you describe as someone who has a greater level of inner peace?

The thing is, what I mean by shutting down and being still is that you do not wait for those moments described in the first scenario, to come to you.
You go out and get them. You purposely seek them out.
You do what you have to do to get them. They are EVERYWHERE!
EVERY DAY!
All around us.
And they are not religious, yet profoundly spiritual.

************

Water

2006-04-07T22:08:00.000-06:00

To the left is an image of the beautiful stained glass window of the Methodist Church in Findlay, Illinois.
It depicts Jesus walking on the water, a New Testament story that can be found in Matt.14:22-33, Mk.6:45-51, and Jn.6:15-21.
Today I made the mistake of reading the paper.
You think the Bible is crazy sometimes? Try reading the paper. It’s more crazy. Anyway, there was this article, out of Miami (Reuters). And I quote:

The New Testament says that Jesus walked on water, but a Florida university professor believes there could be a less miraculous explanation – he walked on a floating piece of ice. Professor Doron Nof also theorized in the early 1990’s that Moses’s parting of the Red Sea had solid science behind it. Nof, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University said this week that his study found an unusual combination of water and atmospheric conditions on what is now northern Israel could have led to ice formation on the Sea of Galilee. Nof used records of the Mediterranean Sea’s surface temperatures and statistical models to examine the dynamics of the Sea of Galilee, which Israelis know now as Lake Kinneret. The study found that a period of cooler temperatures in the area between 1,500 and 2,600 years ago could have included the decades in which Jesus lived.

_____________

With all due respect, that entire premise involves a real lot of could haves!

Here is the problem I personally have with this kind of research.
First of all, it assumes that what is recorded in the Bible is an actual event that occurred in history.
Then, moving from there, it begins to try and discover possible ways in which what is described as a miraculous occurrence may have been the result of natural events. [Professor Nof is doing the same thing with the Red Sea study as he is with the walking on water episode].
So far, this is not so bad, it is not anything for which anyone should be summarily euthanized or whatever [even though I really think it is already quite bad]… but granted, even if God performed miracles through men in these instances, we can assume he [God] may have used a sort of acceleration of natural forces to accomplish what he [God] wanted to accomplish. After all, this may be the very definition of “miracle.” Something like, “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”
A temporary bending of the rules, yet something that USES the rules, nonetheless. For instance, uses a mighty wind to part the waters of the Red Sea. Winds occur elsewhere, in much less dramatic fashion, in other words.
But to assume [in this instance] that Jesus hopped aboard this extremely serendipitous Middle-Eastern iceberg [and there are so many of these, you know]… well, it misses the whole POINT!
Either the event described was a miracle in the sense of being clearly UNDERSTOOD as a miracle, or it was not!
In other words, what Nof’s research fails to address is the very intent of the writers of the biblical account[s].
Was this perhaps an exaggeration of an actual event? An exaggerated legend that developed between the time of the event described, and the writing about that event? [Which I happen to believe is the case regarding the story of the crossing of the Red Sea].
But my point is simply this… when we read of Jesus later healing the blind man, by smearing mud upon the eyes, and telling the person to go and wash it off in the pool of Siloam [Jn.9:6-7]… are we now going to have to wait for some special modern Siloamian Mud Research Team© to tell us how Jesus accomplished this?
When he cast demons from demoniacs, are we going to have to wait for someone to tell us how this person was actually an epileptic, having a seizure which simply ran its course at about the time Jesus prayed about the situation?
If you apply this sort of…. logic…. to the long list of miracles attributed to Jesus, you begin to realize that his greatest "miracle" is being in the right place at the right time, when all of these confluences of nature happen to be happening! He’s there, wanting to surprise his disciples by walking out to them on the water. JUST AT THE SAME time as the iceberg floats by.
It is ridiculously absurd.
It is National Enquirer stuff, and nothing else!
Miracles are meant to defy logic, not support it!

But here is how it goes, as I see it.
There are only so many possibilities, and we all have to make our decision, as to how we are going to perceive the many miracle stories of the Bible.

Either:

1) They happened just as described. I mean, in real time. Not only did the Israelites make it through the towering walls of water on either side of them [Charlton Heston made it look so easy] BUT the Egyptians got drowned, as it closed down around them, directly afterward.
Not only did Jesus walk out to the disciples, but Peter got out onto that iceberg too, for a while!
Not only did the mud heal the blind man, but no man since has been able to heal blindness by smearing mud just like Jesus did that day. And this, taking into account that he promised that his followers would do “even greater” things than he did [Jn.14:12].

2) The miracles happened, but they happened as a result of natural laws that went haywire for a moment, and these haywire events took place just at the time that certain people wanted them to take place. This is what many scientists, including Professor Nof today are trying to tell us. In other words, God was not the source of the miracles, several freaks of nature, were.
Or, God's role was to bring the freaks of nature near enough to be accessible to those who were privy to their presence.

3) The things themselves [the miracles] did not actually happen in real time, AS DESCRIBED. Things happened, yes, but not at the magnitude described. Much legend and hyperbole developed between events described, and events written, as is the case with all folklore and oral tradition.
The fish that was caught got bigger and bigger, until, when it was reeled in, it was found to have a coin in its mouth [Matt.17:27].

As you know by now, I am currently favoring this third sort of route, and if anyone can come come up with a fourth or fifth set of possibilities, please let me know. I will add it to the list.
But I have come to the conclusion that my choice of option #3 does not mean that I love God any less, nor appreciate his [her, its] goodness in my life any less than the person who is trying so desperately to walk across the swimming pool yonder….
You can’t do it, my friend.
And neither can I.
And [I believe]… neither has anyone.
Little "a" or capital "A".

*********

Wise Words

2006-04-04T22:13:00.000-06:00

Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.
Faith... Must be enforced by reason...When faith becomes blind it dies.
-- Mahatma Gandhi --

God or Nothing

2006-04-02T16:13:00.000-06:00

I ended my last blog [yesterday] by saying, “I want to talk a little bit about some interesting things surrounding the mention of the heavens in the Bible, and maybe say a bit about what I think of Balbus’s contention that the world must have been made for us since only we can appreciate it.”
The heavens fascinate me.
I love a starry night.
This is why I have a gigantic print of Van Gogh’s painting of the same name, on the main wall of my apartment.
What I want to mention today are a couple things almost in the realm of mere trivia. I am not postulating any grandiose theological conclusions or anything. Just pointing out a couple of things I notice in the Bible, as regards mention of the heavens.

The gist of where I am going with this is simply that if the Bible is the Word of God [and I am not arguing one way or the other on this]… but if it is the very Word of God and not tainted by human ignorance or mere human speculation, then when it mentions the heavens, we would expect it to be accurate about things only God would know.
Do you follow what I am saying here?
For instance, if the Bible said somewhere that the earth is in orbit around the moon, when in fact later scientific data reveals that the opposite is true, that the moon orbits the earth, then I think it would be fair to conclude that the original biblical writing [the autograph] was the result of the musing of ancient minds, rather than information passed from God to man, [ie, from God to writer of text].
The only other option for consideration is that God [the Transmitter of Things Only He Could Know], when inspiring the biblical writers, deliberately spoke down to them, in other words, spoke to mankind only at a level they could currently grasp. In other words, endorsed their current scientific ignorance.

Two scriptural examples come to my mind, as I muse upon these possiblities. [I know there are many many more examples that could be discussed. If you recall any, please let me know, in the comments section of this blog]. My examples argue for each possibility.
The first passage I mention seems to suggest that God in fact did reveal something beyond the writer’s own intelligence level.

Isaiah 40:21-22 says, “Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.”

Isaiah here says that God is camped out in this area “above the circle of the earth” and I find this terminology interesting. Like I said at the start, I do not want to make some sort of theology out of this, I am just merely pointing out that it does seem that Isaiah is saying something that only God could know. At the time of writing, mankind certainly had no concept of the curvature of the earth, much less its actual spherical overall shape.

However, the second of my examples is quite different. It seems to suggest that the writer had been granted very little inside information about celestial things.
It is from Joshua 10:12-13. There was a great battle going on….
“On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel:
‘O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the valley of Aijalon.’
So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jasher.
The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.”

So the sun stood still. It stopped in the middle of the sky.
No it didn’t!
What I mean is that even if this story actually happened, this is not the way in which the actual events would have shaken down, simply because it is not the sun that moves around the earth, but the earth that moves around the sun. In other words, if anything, the earth would have stopped moving, to grant Joshua more time to brutally slaughter people.
My point being…. “Does God not know this?”
And if he does, then how can we believe that he inspired peope to write this?
All I am saying is that this is an obvious example of the human element drastically poking its way through what is so commonly perceived as the literal Word of God.

So, I present the above two examples, the best examples I can think of, to argue each position.

Now, what of Balbus’s claim that the world must have been created for us since only we can appreciate it?
Amazingly, here on April 2nd, 2006, I think that there is some merit to that statement. [I cite the current date, because my thoughts are in constant flux. That is to say, they change.]
In order to approach why I think it has any merit, I think I would have to go further back, to say a bit about WHO or WHAT God is to me.
[This question has been asked of me, rather frequently, as of late].
I have not come across a better sort of description of who or what God might be, than that of the theologian Paul Tillich, who calls God “The Ground of All Being.”
I like that.
To explain what Tillich is meaning by his use of the phrase would require the writing of books. That is why there are so many books on the topic.
But suffice it to say that the way I put it, is that God, to me, is EXISTENCE!
In this sense, God is what would be here, if we weren’t.
I do not believe in the premise [often argued] that we (mankind) have created God. However, I do believe that we have created things about God.
Yes, most definitely we have done this latter thing.

For now, let me just pose the following question to you.
What would exist, were we not here to ask the question, “What exists?”?

My own current answer to that question is “God.”
And the fact that we do exist, [as opposed to the possibility of not existing] makes me even more sure of that answer, not less.
Some would say, “What you are saying, Cipriano, still does not address the most relevant aspect of Balbus’s original statement, the part where it says ‘for us’”!
But I think it does address it.
If God is truly the Ground of All Being, then God is the source of all that is.
In other words, whatever is, exists because it has been deemed to exist.
“Deemed” by who or what?
By Existence.
Existence [read “God”] was fully aware that we would be the only sentient beings able to appreciate existence.

We must realize [I think] that there are only two possible answers to the question, posed above: What would exist, were we not here to ask the question, “What exists?”?
And those answers are either:
A) God. [The God who transcends our every human effort to describe. This includes the Christian effort. The God that every world religion has fallen short of knowing in fullness.]
or
B) Nothing.

To me, even the mere fact that you are reading this blog makes B) an impossiblity.

Later, alligators.
Cip

***********

De Natura Deorum

2006-04-01T14:44:00.000-06:00

Cicero was murdered exactly 2006 years before I was born.
When I say exactly I mean that my birthday is December 4th, and that is the very day that Cicero got on the wrong side of Caesar Augustus, and was executed in Formiae, Italy.
The year was 43 B.C.
But two years prior to this, Cicero began writing a book called De Natura Deorum [The Nature of the Gods] and to look at this profound work of his is to lift back the pages of history and see that people back then asked the same sort of questions that I am asking now, two millennia later!
I am horrifically summarizing here for the sake of making this blog of a reasonable length, but suffice it to say that The Nature of the Gods is basically a fictional discussion [presented as non-fiction] of a meeting of Cotta [a Skeptic orator and priest], Velleius [an Epicurean], Balbus [a Stoic], and Cicero himself, sort of a neutral arbiter of the other three.
Cicero begins by saying that most philosophers have affirmed the existence of the gods and that this assertion is “plausible and one to which we are all mutually inclined.” But he moves quickly to a reminder of several thinkers who have questioned this affirmation. Then he explains that even among those who assert that gods exist, disagreements abound as to their form and character.
This sort of kicks off the discussion. In my imagination, the tankards of coffee are poured and these guys blab all night long, in their toga-like jammies.

Everything said, by all, is interesting.
But I want to focus on what this Balbus guy, this Stoic dude, says.
He cites four reasons to believe in God. The last one is the one he considers to be the most important. It is:
The regularity and motion of the heavenly bodies.

He says, “What could be more clear and obvious, when we look up to the sky and contemplate the heavens, than that there is some divinity of superior intelligence, by which they are controlled?”
Elsewhere: “Their constant and eternal motion, wonderful and mysterious in its regularity, declares the indwelling power of a divine intelligence. If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.”
And: “If you see some great and beautiful building, would you infer, because the architect is not immediately visible, that it must have been built by mice and weasels?”
This “power” according to Balbus, “is not devoid of sense and reason.”
As we incline our eyes upward and acknowledge that it exists, we ought to, at the same time, acknowledge that this power is superior to us, as men/women upon the earth.
His argument goes on to posit that the world must have been made for us since only we can appreciate it.

Now I will say something that may surprise some readers who have read this blog on a consistent basis.
I agree with Balbus.
Definitely, at their little coffee-session tete-a-tete, the current “me” would have been in agreement with him. [More likely, I would have BEEN him!]
It is a matter of personal choice, maybe even one of faith. Well, actually, it must be “of faith” because my adherence to it cannot be based upon anything empirically proven.
What draws me is the focus of the belief.
It stays away from the tangled weeds that are twisted around the moral attributes of God and God’s actions. Stays away from the problems of theodicy.
It just says “LOOK! THINK!”
Admittedly, there are so many ways to look at Balbus’s stated conviction about the heavens.
One must remember that back then, [two millennia ago] the world was thought to be an unmoving object. Movement itself was intricately connected with whatever was perceived of as being a living intelligence. The earth was at the center of things, in a universal sense, with everything else moving around it.
Nowadays, we know better.
But has our scientific knowledge really diminished the wonder of pulling over to the side of a country road, turning the headlights off, getting out, and cranking your head upwards on a cloudless night?
I think not.
And if it has, then that can only be rather sad.
What would the next step consist of, in that line of progress? Preferring robot-friends over human-friends?
If so, I hope I do not live that long.

In the story, Cotta [the Skeptic] tells Balbus, “You are right to wonder at them [the heavens] but that they are amazing does not mean that they can’t be natural phenomena.”
Of course he has a good point there. But, rising to get yet another coffee, I would ask Cotta, “What are we meaning when we say that something is a ‘natural phenomena’?
For instance, much less the heavens at night, but I myself could say [and I, in fact, do say it] that our own human bodies are a wonder on an equal scale as the heavenly bodies themselves. By that I mean, the intricacy with which our [properly functioning] bodies are constructed boggles the mind.
Boggles SCIENCE and SCIENTISTS.
I myself do not see any absolutely necessary incongruency between believing that they evolved to be this way [of their own accord, natural phenomena] while at the same time maintaining that a divine being which I call ‘God’ set that natural [evolutionary] process in motion.
Who is to say that God’s process of creation is so incongruent with science’s process of evolution? Aren’t both things “theories” when all is said and done?
To me, it is neither of these things, but certainty of either, which is in the balance. No?

At the end of it all Cicero concludes that we cannot know if the gods exist – that the scales are tipped in favor of lack of evidence, and a summary conclusion of “Not likely!”
Two millennia later, we are still discussing the same things as these four dudes were discussing. Admittedly, it is great coffee-drinking fodder.

I feel that I am not quite finished with this topic. I want to talk a little bit about some interesting things surrounding the mention of the heavens in the Bible, and maybe say a bit about what I think of Balbus’s contention that the world must have been made for us since only we can appreciate it.

Later, alligators.
Cip

**********

A Good Question

2006-03-30T19:34:00.000-06:00

The poet Diagoras of Melos was perhaps the most famous athiest of the fifth century. Although he did not write about atheism, anecdotes about his unbelief suggest it was self-confident, almost teasing, and very public. He revealed the secret rituals of the Eleusinian mystery religion to everyone and “thus made them ordinary,” that is, he purposefully demystified a cherished sacred rite, apparently to provoke his contemporaries into thought. In another famous story, a friend pointed out an expensive display of votive gifts and said, “You think the gods have no care for man? Why, you can see from all these votive pictures here how many people have escaped the fury of storms at sea by praying to the gods who have brought them safe to harbor.” To which Diagoras replied, “Yes, indeed, but where are the pictures of all those who suffered shipwreck and perished in the waves?” A good question. Diagoras was indicted for profaning the mysteries, but escaped. A search was put out for him throughout the Athenian empire, which indicates that the charges were serious, but he was not found.
-- Excerpt from Doubt: A History, by Jennifer Michael Hecht, Harper San Francisco, 2003. p.9-10. –

All We Like Actors...

2006-03-29T21:34:00.000-06:00

All We Like Actors…

God,
honoring our freedom to ignore Him
slips quietly backstage,
and while the play goes on
marvels at how often the actors
flub their lines…
chuckles… even applauds
the surprising ad-libs, but
by curtainfall is disappointed
to have overheard how badly
(how unprofessionally and needlessly)
so many things in the script
had been
re-written.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2006

**********

The Scale of Doubt

2006-03-28T19:45:00.000-06:00

As most readers will know, I have been reading the book, shown here.
It is called Doubt: A History. The sub-sub-title is The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.
The author is Jennifer Michael Hecht.
The thing is just absolutely fascinating. I am only on chapter 3 [of 10].
[I read a lot, but nothing quickly]!
Early on in the book, the author suggests that readers complete the following quiz.
It’s very easy. [I have posted this quiz before, on bookpuddle… some of you may remember it from there].
But I encourage you to get a paper and pen, and do the thing. It is real neat. The assessment will come later.
For now, all you need to know is that you can answer each question YES – NO – or NOT SURE.

The Scale of Doubt Quiz

1. Do you believe that a particular religious tradition holds accurate knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of human life?

2. Do you believe that some thinking being consciously made the universe?

3. Is there an identifiable force coursing through the universe, holding it together, or uniting all life-forms?

4. Could prayer be in any way effective, that is, do you believe that such a being or force (as posited above) could ever be responsive to your thoughts or words?

5. Do you believe this being or force can think or speak?

6. Do you believe this being has a memory or can make plans?

7. Does this force sometimes take a human form?

8. Do you believe that the thinking part or animating force of a human being continues to exist after the body has died?

9. Do you believe that any part of a human being survives death, elsewhere or here on earth?

10. Do you believe that feelings about things should be admitted as evidence in establishing reality?

11. Do you believe that love and inner feelings of morality suggest that there is a world beyond that of biology, social patterns, and accident – i.e., a realm of higher meaning?

12. Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?

13. If someone were to say, “The universe is nothing but an accidental pile of stuff, jostling around with no rhyme nor reason, and all life on earth is but a tiny, utterly inconsequential speck of nothing, in a corner of space, existing in the blink of an eye never to be judged, noticed, or remembered,” would you say, “Now that’s going a bit far, that’s a bit wrongheaded?”
___________________

And so, I hope you have answered these questions for yourself, otherwise, reading on will be fairly useless to you. The author explains:
“If you answered No to all these questions, you’re a hard-core atheist and of a certain variety: a rational materialist. If you said No to the first seven, but then had a few Yes answers, you’re still an atheist, but you may have what I call a pious relationship to the universe. If your answers to the first seven questions contained at least two Not Sure answers, you’re an agnostic. If you answered Yes to some of the questions, you still might be an atheist or agnostic, though not of the materialist variety. If you answered Yes to nine or more, you are a believer. But more than providing titles for various states of mind, the questions above may serve to demonstrate common clusters of opinion."
- Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History. HarperSanFrancisco, 2003. –

I think that the last statement is important. The Quiz is not meant to label or definitively brand anyone. For one thing, there may be discrepancies in how the questions themselves are understood by various readers. However, generally speaking, it can serve to identify “common clusters of opinion.”
Perhaps you would like to submit in the Comments section what you “are” according to Hecht’s criteria.

Incidentally, my own results are that I have slipped from “Believer” into the “Agnostic” category.

************

A Matter of Emphasis

2006-03-26T18:40:00.000-06:00

In all of my four years of Bible College training, one phrase stays with me, and capsulizes what ought to be in the forefront of any serious approach to theology. It was spoken [repeatedly] by one of my professors, and I am hesitant to reveal his name here, for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I do not know if the phrase originates with him.
It goes like this:

All theology is a matter of emphasis.
Oh, how often Professor J.S. mentioned it, as he strode about the room in his brown, chalk-stained, corduroy jacket. And I think that the importance of the phrase cannot be…. overemphasized.
I have used it often, since. And more and more frequently during these past couple of years of my own spiritual renaissance.
As such, many people have asked me what it means, ie., what I am meaning when I use the phrase.
So I want to talk about that for a bit, today.

What it means, or rather, what I mean, when I use it… is simply that if we begin from a perspective of topical intention, we can find scriptural precedence and/or scriptural justification for the defense of what are in essence mutually divergent ideas.
What?
“Dude… you have just made the whole thing even more confusing.”

OK, hang on. Let me give you an example.
If we take a topical intention of say, for instance, capital punishment, we can appeal to scriptures such as Exodus 21:12 [along with verses 23-25] to show that such an action as demanding “life for life” is sanctioned by the God of the Bible.
However, the pastor down the street may be preaching an entirely different message, choosing as his text that morning something along the lines of Matthew 5:39, where Jesus advocated the unmitigated forgiveness of those who do evil unto you.
In both of these cases, the resultant theological message becomes a matter of EMPHASIS.
In other words, what is it that you want to emphasize?
Some would argue that the forementioned example [capital punishment] is a very shallow and isolated case. Also, some would point out that any confusion over the issue is merely a result of a dispensational misunderstanding between Old Testament and New Testament principles.
Yes. Exactly. It may well be!
But this does not settle the fact that there are (I assure you) myriads of people who advocate (and preach) the Exodus stuff as being culturally normative practise in our day and age!

Let me back up a pace.
I am not saying that if a person wants to emphasize the value of injecting heroin into their veins they will be able to find scriptural precedence to advocate such an action.
No.
Scripture does not specifically address that issue.
But what I am saying is that when scripture does address a specific issue, it is almost always possible to find another vantage point from which to observe that same issue, within scripture!
[Offhand, I think of issues such as divorce and remarriage, attitudes toward homosexuality, the ordination of women in ministry, God’s preference of Jew and/or Gentile, the order of events in the account of the the creation of the world, the process and result of being filled with the Holy Spirit, the governmental structure of the church, re-instatement of “fallen” ministers, etc.]
What constitutes premarital sex? What is witchcraft? Infant or adult baptism? The list could be endless. One can create wildly opposite theological conclusions involving all of these things, while citing scriptural reference to validate and support each.
In all things the matter of interpretive technique and presupposition [ie., the desire to arrive at foregone conclusions] as well as the disabling situation of an inadequate grasp of the totality of scripture... these are all very important factors to consider.
Regarding this last point, let us examine the following scriptural scenario.

Most of us who have spent time in church life will be quite familiar with the text found in Matthew 12:30.
In it, Jesus says:
“He who is not with Me is against me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters.”
I have always understood this text to mean [and have heard it preached as such] that if I am not in complete agreement with Jesus, then I am [ipso facto] against him. Furthermore, there is no hope of being neutral about his cause. If I am not actively advancing the cause of Christ, I am actually thwarting it.
As you can imagine, a preacher can really have a whale of a time with such a verse.
And they do.
This text can very much be used to emphasize the fact that I have an obligation to not only evangelize and/or proselytize everyone with whom I am in contact, but also that I myself must be “with” Jesus, at all times. Else I am “against” him, and I am a scatterer.
There is no grayness here. This is black and white. You are either in the Christian corral, or out of it. And if out of it, lost!

But let us back up a pace, and observe the parallel text, as found in Mark 9:40.
In it, Jesus says:
“For he who is not against us is for us.”
Whoa, doggies!
It is readily apparent that this is something radically different than the previously mentioned text. In fact, it is its very opposite.
Is Gandhi now inside the corral?
Here, Jesus seems to be saying, “Look. Only those who actively oppose me [us] are against me [us].”
The question I want to ask at this point is this: Which of these two texts do we want to emphasize?
Which of these do we want to select for this morning’s message?
Because, most assuredly, we are going to have quite different sermons, based upon that selection!
If it is “Missionary Sunday” and I am trying to compel people to go overseas to some, as yet, under-Christianized land…. I am probably going to turn to Matthew.
However, If I want to emphasize a sort of more inclusive brand of Christianity, I will probably choose Mark as a launch-text.
But, among other things that this very divergence of parallel texts points out, one that cannot fail to capture our attention is that what is recorded here is not a verbatim account, as transcribed after listening to a replay of the cassette recording!
[For even further evidence of this, one can turn to Luke 9:50 for yet a third way of saying the same thing!]
Which one did Jesus REALLY say?
Well, that depends.
Which topical intention do we want to emphasize?

In any decision regarding this text, we may want to pay attention to the fact that Mark is the earliest writer, so this may suggest that his version is the original one. At any rate, it is the one closest in time to the event it allegedly describes.
In other words, both Matthew and Luke have the book of Mark in front of them when they do their writing. And Matthew and Luke both felt the need to revise what Mark had originally written [Matthew moreso than Luke].
Mattthew’s intended audience was predominantly Jewish.
Luke’s intended audience was predominantly Gentile.
Could this have something to do with it, I rhetorically ask?
But this observation of timing of the actual writing raises yet another important question.
Why is it that the Matthew version is the one we hear of, 99% of the time?
[I venture to say that most readers of this blog have never even heard of these other ways of saying the same verse.]
If it is true that “all theology is a matter of emphasis,” then I suggest that what Matthew was emphasizing in his account of Jesus’s words is something that our modern-day church still wants to emphasize.

All the best to you.
Let us keep looking at things.
Cip

**********

Too Interesting....

2006-03-25T00:18:00.000-06:00

Too interesting to keep to myself for too long....
If you are at all interested in the way that biblical interpretation ought to be approached, you can do no better than to have a listen to this INTERVIEW with Bart Erhman, author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible And Why.
[Quicktime format].
Thanks to Susan at Pages Turned for turning me on to these audio pages!
The specific blog is here.
There is SO MUCH to learn.... so little time!

*********

Matters of Ultimate Concern

2006-03-24T20:27:00.000-06:00

No, this is not a picture of Ben Stiller!
It is Sam Harris, author of the incredibly important book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. (2005, Norton Paperback). I recently read the thing, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in an examination of what it means (and what it could possibly cost us) to willingly suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs.
There is this one excerpt, this one portion that I cannot get out of my mind. Not only do I totally agree with what he is saying, but furthermore, I just think that the time has come for us to come to grips with several negative aspects of the religious tolerance we continue to highly value in our modern culture.
Harris has certainly made me think with more clarity upon the subject of faith.
Yes, faith is what the dear old grandmother is utilizing when she rocks in her chair and says little silent prayers regarding the well-being of her children and grandchildren.
But faith is also the following….

A man’s faith is just a subset of his beliefs about the world: beliefs about matters of ultimate concern that we, as a culture, have told him he need not justify in the present. It is time we recognized just how maladaptive this Balkanization of our discourse has become. All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts – of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener – inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity; between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. In fact, we should take the perspective of thousands of such men, women, and children who were robbed of life, far sooner than they imagined possible, in absolute terror and confusion. The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith – perfect faith, as it turns out – and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
-- Sam Harris, in The End of Faith –

See my brief review of the book here.
All the best to you!
Cip

Wise Words

2006-03-23T01:27:00.000-06:00

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
-- Aldous Huxley –

"into the adult geometry..."

2006-03-21T20:11:00.000-06:00

Emergence

Not as in the old days I pray,
God. My life is not what it was...
Once I would have asked for healing
I go now to be doctored,
I would have knelt long, wrestling with you
Wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord hear
my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads
of mortals have kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your stillness by
their unfitness.

It begins to appear this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of differences,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me; the emerging
from the adolescence of nature
into the adult geometry
of the mind...
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

-- R.S. Thomas, Welsh poet/priest (1913-2000) --

2006-03-20T21:45:00.000-06:00

Displacement: “The difference between the initial position of a body and any later position.”
[Penguin Reference English Dictionary].

In the comments thread of the blog entitled The Fundamentals [below] someone made what I think to be a very good request.
It was this crazy crazy social-butterfly/cartoonist/artist/writer dame named Patricia, [a la BookLust].
Nosey as hell, she is.
She said: "Nosey person that I am, I'd love to know the catalyst which started you on the path to where you are now. Those are some pretty strong-held beliefs, and to have them change so dramatically in two years....well, it would be interesting if you could actually site specific moments in your life in the past two years as to how and when you began to see things differently."
To answer this question adequately, I must go back to a time when my mother read Bible stories to me when I was yet in the womb…..
No, just kidding.
But seriously, I addressed a few of these “specific moments” in my blog entitled The Three Pillars [also below]. So I won’t rehash that here.
But Patricia’s use of the word “catalyst” really got me to thinking….
Hence, the blog you are now reading.

See, I have always believed in something I call The Theory of Displacement.©
I’ve believed in it, and practised it, in as much as I was aware of it, but had never named it, till now.
The Theory of Displacement is quite simple.
It simply posits that when better information makes itself available, one ought to avail oneself of the opportunity to acknowledge, apprehend, and assimilate it.
All of those steps are very important, but the last one, especially so.
To assimilate is to “take in and understand fully (information and ideas.)” Also to “absorb and integrate.” [Oxford]. I like how the Penguin Dictionary puts it, a) “To take in or absorb (a substance) esp as nourishment. b) To absorb facts or information with complete comprehension.”
Nourishment.
I like that.
When plants utilize photosynthesis in the conversion of light to energy, they are assimilating!
When I concern myself with adopting a faith that makes sense, I am trying to “absorb and integrate.”
OK, English lesson is over.

If we are going to know something, assimilation is very important.
At this point, pretty much everyone will still be riding by, merrily pedaling, and waving and nodding in agreement….
However, let me throw seventeen wrenches directly into the spokes of that bicycle by asking…. “What if the assimilation process involves a radical re-adjustment, revision, or even abandonment of previously held ideas?”
[People careening into the ditch in every direction....]
What if the learning process now involves the displacement of former beliefs?
Many people would answer by saying, “If that’s the case, then I would rather not have been made aware of the better idea!”
There is nothing inherently wrong with that answer, really.
If that is the way a person wants to be, and to remain, that is entirely their business, and I have ZERO desire to change them.

It's just that I myself can’t BE any of those people [anymore].
Many people would want to keep riding that busted-up bike, denying even the existence of the causative wrenches and resultant bent rims.
But not me.
For the sake of intellectual integrity, I would sooner walk forevermore, than get back on that thing and pretend it’s as good as ever it was.
It’s busted.

[He pauses to go and get another coffee....]

As regards “faith” some would say the entire argument [mine] falls flat.
They would point to all of the points in The Fundamentals, and argue, “All of these things here are believed upon IN FAITH, brother!”
They would argue that religious idea [religion] is not now, nor has it ever been, an intellectual enterprise.
They may even be correct on that score.
But it is just that inadequate terms are being used.
Because [in my opinion] spirituality, which ought to be the very bedrock of religion, is an intellectual enterprise, or ought to be. What I mean by that is that I am convinced (and increasingly convinced) that what we believe about spirituality does not necessarily have to be absurd!
It should make sense.
It can make sense!

This brings me, Patricia, to your use of the word “catalyst.”
What a perfect word.
The Penguin again [don’t you just love penguins?] says of the word, “Somebody or something whose action inspires further and usually more important events.”
Ahhh, you’ve gotta love a dictionary!
“I’d love to know the catalyst,” she says.
Hah!
You do!
You do, my dear.
The catalyst is something we all posess in various measure, and it is something without which the entire world would right now, right this minute, be plunged into the most cavernous abyss of ignorance.
The catalyst is…….. DOUBT!
I doubted!
No knowledge has ever been born, but from the womb of doubt.

I asked questions.

And here [now, finally, he gets to it] is the real interesting thing.
I was ALWAYS THIS WAY!
Asking questions, questioning things, is what brought me into the Christian fold in the first place.
And at that time [mid-1984, again, I refer all true archaeologists out there to read the Introduction and The Three Pillars, below, in previous blogs. Both of these, by the way, are classics in a sort of Kahlil Gibran-y sort of way....] Where was I? Oh yeah.... at that time, Christianity, and what I had been told about Christianity, wonderfully answered every question I then had about spirituality.
Every question I had, about God.
My spirit rejoiced, and my intellect truly “overflowed-eth”…. it really did!
I embraced those answers as fully as anyone could have, I suppose.
But the important thing to realize is that I embraced this newfound enterprise rationally (intellectually) as well as embracing it irrationally, ie., by faith alone.
What one might call IN faith. But also with my mind.
And the important thing to realize, is that the Gospel, the Good News of Christianity “saved” me, back then. I had the salvation experience described by all dedicated believers in Jesus Christ.
I still cherish that experience, in retrospect.
I do not belittle its revolutionary importance in my life, at that time.
It did not merely SEEM to answer all of my questions…. it DID answer all of my questions.
So….. [Patricia, and all those listening in...] what is it that has really changed over these past two years?

MY QUESTIONS HAVE CHANGED.
The questions have profoundly changed.

When we are young, I mean real young, we may ask our mother what to us [at the time] is the most important-ish question in all the world… we may look at her and say, “Mom, why is my pee-thing different than Jennifer’s?”
[It really helps for verisimilitude if we imagine that the interrogator here is a boy OK? Just follow me for a moment.....]
And then my… I mean OUR mother may say something like, “Well dear. It’s just that God decided to…. umm…. leave the stem on your apple!”
Hey, that’s good enough for me.
AT THE TIME it is totally good enough.
[No, I am not going to now go into the reasons why it wasn’t till way after high school that I found out the real answer to the question….]
But the point is, hopefully when I am now 42 years old, I am not still asking questions, and believing answers, of a similar caliber!
Are we on the same page here, or have you drifted off to sleep, dear reader?

My rational mind (my intellect) which was once satisfied with Christianity’s traditionally accepted answers to certain questions… that mind is no longer satisfied.

When I think of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, I ask myself stuff about the thousands of people that perished there, in an instant, as the buildings collapsed.
Am I to imagine (as a Christian) that there was some sort of immediate celestial partitioning of extremely freshly dead people into eternal abodes of bliss or torment?
Was someone, invisible, [yet dressed like Gandalf], floating there, hoisting fortunate souls upward while kicking other ones back down, muttering to these latter unfortunates…. “Nope! Not you, buddy! Your wife told you to watch Billy Graham last night but you didn’t did you! You had to turn it to 20/20, and NOW LOOK!”
I am saying this stuff in jest, but to me, it is not thought of in jest whatsoever, I assure you.
But this exact nonsense is what a thoroughgoing adherence to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures must conclude. Is, indeed, FORCED to conclude! [see Acts 4:12].
On that morning, all kinds of people floated upward, but a great majority did not, and are even now, in hell.
And all because someone else decided it would be a great thing to try and park a passenger jet on top of the guy’s desk that morning!
It is many things, including sad and ignorant, but mostly… it is ABSURD to believe in such idiocy.
It is one reason for the existence of my Pillar #2.
My questions have changed.
And as for answers, more and more, I want to say, “I don’t know” where I once said, “I know!”

If I read in National Geographic that even a great blue whale has a hard time swallowing anything larger than a grapefruit, I’m going to have a tough time believing that a fish swallowed an entire man and then belched him up on the beach three days later.
Similarly, if I discover that the books of the Old Testament [the first five] which attribute their authorship to Moses were penned hundreds of years after the man’s own death…. what am I to make of that?
Am I to continue to cherish a sort of Hallmark card depiction of Jesus’s birth, when there is such incongruent biblical disparity as to the specifics surrounding the event, not to mention his subsequent upbringing?

I could go on for three days and nights.
Displacement.
Displacement means that the better thing pushes the less-good thing out of the way.
And the new thing does not set up shop.
The new thing is also subject to movement, to future displacement.
To truly live The Theory of Displacement, one has to embrace an intentional attitude of disinterestedness.
I’m not finished.
The scary thing is that the above [this current blog] is just a very preliminary approach to dealing with Patricia’s question. Actually, her request was not even a question, and I like that.

I will never be finished walking… after all, the old bike in the ditch is way behind me.
I will never complain about, or be angry with.... the walk.
I will never sit down, and play the part of guru.
I am not on pilgrimage, because pilgrimage implies a destination.
I am on a journey.
On a journey, you keep moving.
Hopefully we can all stick around, and be nice, and continue to ask each other the post-pee-thing type of questions that are commensurate with the maturity we [hopefully] apply to every other aspect of our adult lives.

***********

Wise Words

2006-03-19T21:23:00.000-06:00

"All positive religion rests on an enormous simplification of the manifold and wildly engulfing forces that invade us: it is the subduing of the fullness of existence. All myth, in contrast, is the expression of the fullness of existence, its images, its signs; it drinks incessantly from the gushing fountains of life. Hence religion fights myth where it cannot absorb and incorporate it."
-- Martin Buber, in The Legend of Baal-Shem --

Can't Please Everyone!

2006-03-18T14:06:00.001-06:00

This picture to the left is of John Shelby Spong.
I consider Spong to be my own personal STM [Spiritual Transformation Mentor] and I have chosen this particular photo because here he is holding two of my favorite things in his hands.
A book, and a coffee!
A while ago, a friend sent me Spong’s autobiography, entitled Here I Stand: My Struggle For A Christianity of Integrity, Love, & Equality.
I have not read the thing yet, [it is a serious brick] but have every intention of doing so. But I have flipped through it, and something in the very first pages so captured my attention that I want to share them here, as an example of how incredibly impossible it is to please every person, when we are speaking of spiritual matters.

Nothing… not politics, not love of country or family, or sometimes even the love of life itself, can come close to the resolution with which some people hold their deeply felt religious beliefs. People will martyr themselves over it, as we all know. [Or make martyrs of others!]
Bishop Spong had written more than a dozen books prior to this autobiography. Among the thousands of letters he had received in response to his writings, he placed excerpts from a few of them here at the start of Here I Stand. They alternate between feelings of profound indignation/vehemence and profound thankfulness/gratitude. The disparity, the WORLDS of irreconciliation expressed in these letters…. well, I will just shut up and let them speak for themselves.

“Your words are not just heresy, they are apostasy. Burning you at the stake would be too kind!”
-- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Your book was like manna from heaven – God-sent! I cannot adequately express my gratitude.”
-- Richmond, Virginia

“You rail against the church’s doctrines and core beliefs while you accept wages from her. Even whores appreciate their clients. You, sir, have less integrity than a whore!”
-- Selma, Alabama

“You have made it possible for me to remain in the Church and have taught me how to believe honestly its creeds even in the twentieth century.”
-- Boston, Massachusetts

“Bishop Spong, you are full of shit. We are going to clean you up.”
-- An orthodox Christian

“Reading your book is like eating a delicious Black Forest cherry birthday cake. It has made me vulnerable while increasing my desire to worship.”
-- British Columbia, Canada

“Remember as you prance about disguised as a minister of the gospel, that you will pay for your sins eternally in the lake of fire.”
-- Charleston, South Carolina

“Your book is a transcendent work of brilliance and, I am sure, permanence.”
-- Pasadena, California

“I hope the next plane on which you fly crashes. You are not worthy of life. If all else fails, I will try to rid the world of your evil presence personally.”
-- Orlando, Florida

“I believe you are a prophet and I will strive with you to answer God’s call to live fully, love wastefully, and be all that I can be. Thank you, thank you, and may your life continue to be blessed.”
-- Grosse Point, Michigan

________________

Isn’t that just a wild assortment of coagulated opinion?
At any rate, the sentiment that comes closest to my own is the last one, from Grosse Point.
I so believe that Spong’s voice is one that is VITAL to any sort of maintenance of “Christian” spirituality in our day. As silly and/or insignificant-ish as it may sound, I consider even this blog here, godpuddle, to be my one of the ways that I myself can be “all that I can be.”

All the best to you.

***************

An Endlessly Fascinating Man

2006-03-17T17:19:00.000-06:00

“Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypotheses of God is the God before whom we stand continuously. Before God and with God we live without God.
…God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us.”
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter to Eberhard Bethge, dated July 16th, 1944, from his book Letters And Papers From Prison, p.219.

I have read so many of Bonhoeffer's books, and so many about him. I find him endlessly fascinating.
He was a German Lutheran pastor/theologian, executed April 9th, 1945, by Hitler's Nazi-henchmen.
I intend to write at length one day of Bonhoeffer's idea of "religionless Christianity."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945).

The Fundamentals

2006-03-16T19:08:00.000-06:00

I have really enjoyed the comments that all contributors to this blog have made, thus far.
To be honest, the downside is that I end up just wanting to come home after work and read what you all are saying, rather than write anything myself!
[That's not entirely true, but almost so.]
Last night, there was a comment from "rantandroar" in the Three Pillars thread, and the word “fundamentalists” was used. It got me to thinking about the word itself.
What does it mean, and what do we mean when we use it?
Of course, there exists “fundamentalism” in all religions… but primarily, when we speak of “religious fundamentalism” or “religious fundamentlists” we are usually referring to the big Western religions. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Without question, fundamentalists abound in all of these groupings.
As regards Christianity in particular, where did the term originate, and what does it refer to?

Well, between 1910 and 1915, in response to biblical criticism in general and the emergence of Darwinism in particular, a group of conservative Christians published a series of pamphlets entitled The Fundamentals.*
From these pamphlets the term “fundamentalism” entered our religious vocabulary, and referred to the literal beliefs held by conservative Christians.

The five fundamentals** were [and still are]:

1) The inspiration of Scripture as the literal, revealed word of God.

2) The virgin birth as the miraculous and literal means by which the divine nature of Christ has been guaranteed.

3) The substitutionary view of the atonement that was accomplished in the death of Jesus. The affirmation of the saving power of his blood and the gift of salvation that was accomplished by his death.

4) The certainty of the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The accuracy of both the empty-tomb and and the appearance stories in the gospel tradition.

5) The truth of the second coming of Jesus, the reality of the Day of Judgment, which would be based on the record of one’s life, and the certainty of heaven and hell as eternal places of reward and punishment.

*Dixon, A.C., and R.H. Torrey, eds. The Fundamentals. Chicago: Testimony Publishing, 1910-1915.
**Meredith, Lawrence. Life Before Death: A Spiritual Journey of Mind and Body. Atlanta: Atlanta Humanics Publishing Group, 2000. p.31.

A Christian fundamentalist is therefore someone who believes rather unequivocably [without question] in all five of these tenets. As a minimum entrance requirement.
As recently as two years ago, I fully believed in all five of them myself.
Today, I can subscribe to none of them, as traditionally understood.
I mention this merely to say to you, and to myself, that this change represents a radical, life-altering, [some would say “after-life altering”] quantum leap for me.
I am still in the infancy stages of learning what it means to not believe in these things after having believed them. [To me, this constitutes a very different scenario than that of never having believed them at all].
I hope that you will continue to journey with me into greater and greater questions and mystery… what I am going to here call “the exhilarating beauty of not knowing stuff.”

I am currently re-reading, for the second [and not last] time, John Shelby Spong’s excellent book (2001) called, A New Christianity For A New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith is Being Born.
Of all the heretical authors I’ve encountered in the past two years, I like Spong the best. The things he says resonate deep within my own inner heretic.
I thought I would close with just two simple things he says in the preface of this book:
“To suggest that God and one’s own understanding of God are the same thing is not only to stop growing, it is to die to the quest for truth.” [xviii].
I could not agree more.

“Christianity will always be the pathway to God on which I journey, but I am now convinced that no human system, including Christianity itself, can maintain the exclusive power-claims of its past. The world is far too small today to offer a haven for that kind of tribal religion.” [xxi].
Amen!

***********

Chef's Oven Overheats!

2006-03-14T20:29:00.000-06:00

Not that I am a regular watcher of South Park or anything…. OK, so I watch it all the time!
I am just wondering if any of you have heard about Isaac Hayes’s throwing in of the spatula.
Hayes announced on Monday [yesterday] that he was quitting his job as the voice of the lusty character Jerome "Chef" McElroy because he found the show's attacks on religion to be inappropriate.

“The Chef” said:
"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs of others begins.
As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices."

In fact, it seems that Hayes was really upset with an episode aired in November, "Trapped in the Closet". This episode made fun of Scientology, including depictions of celebrities with known ties to the organization, like Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park, is quoted as saying: “This has nothing to do with intolerance and bigotry and everything to do with the fact that Isaac Hayes is a Scientologist and that we recently featured Scientology in an episode of "South Park". In 10 years and over 150 episodes of 'South Park,' Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons and Jews. He got a sudden case of religious sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show. To bring the civil-rights struggle into this is just a non sequiter. Of course, we will release Isaac from his contract and we wish him well.”

In a GQ interview earlier this year, Stone's partner, Trey Parker, said, "To be honest, what kept us from [parodying Scientology] before was Isaac Hayes. We knew he is a Scientologist and he's an awesome guy. We were like, 'Let's just avoid that for now.' ... Finally, we just had to tell Isaac, 'Dude, we totally love working with you and this is nothing personal, it's just we're "South Park," and if we don't do this, we're belittling everything else we've ripped on.' "

Any opinions?
Should "South Park" leave religion alone altogether?
Or continue to lay into it, as it does?
The reason I mention this news item here on godpuddle is not at all to ridicule Mr. Hayes in any way, but quite the opposite, just to provide an example of how devoted devoted religious followers are devoted to being devoted.
And stuff.

[In a related story, Ned Flanders is reported to have recently converted to Wicca!]

The Three Pillars

2006-03-12T20:44:00.000-06:00

In my Introduction [previous, and first godpuddle posting] I referred briefly to what I called “The Three Pillars” and today I would just like to say a few words about what I mean by the use of that phrase.
But first I think it may be important to say a wee bit more about my own personal religious history. I do this mostly because I think it may really help with a reader or two who may come to the conclusion that I am a poor benighted soul who has not been correctly instructed in the higher realms of salvation-theory. [Soteriology, for those way in the loop!]
There may be another reader [or perhaps the same one] who feels that my other problem is that I only started thinking about theology the day before yesterday, or maybe as far back as Wednesday or Thursday of last week!
But neither of these things are the case, I can assure you, and I want to set your mind at ease on that score.
From a Christian perspective, there is nothing about being properly evangelized and/or “saved” that I not only know, but have also thoroughly experienced. Not only so, but in the course of my life, I have brought many others to similar points of life-changing “decisions to follow Christ.”
For now, suffice it to say that since mid 1984 I have been on a very conscious journey. As I have mentioned earlier, this is when I began to read and study the Bible, began first to pray and “seek” God, and attend church.
In short, to be a Christian.
[For more about my illustrious Christian life, see the Introduction, below].

There are many “types” of Christian…. really there are, I hope that we do not ever need to argue that point.
Someone: “We’re all the same, if we love Christ, brother.”
Me: “Sorry. I do not agree.”

What I mean is that you may come in the Christian door through Catholicism, or through Pentecostalism, or Presbyterianism, or even some of the more diverse types of “churches” such as Mormonism or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Point being that all of these people are “loving Jesus” in their own way.
And that is just it. On finer points of theology, members of these various sects and groupings can have viewpoints as irreconcilably different as are tractors from peacocks!
The door I went in, was the door of Pentecostalism.
One way that I would define Pentecostalism [and there are many ways to categorize it, this just being one] is that God is a being who intervenes in the daily life of the believer. Very much so, in fact. Or perhaps it may be more correct to say that He can do this, according to Pentecostal theology… and furthermore, He ought to be doing this.
Why ought He to be doing this?
Well, because that’s what Pentecostalism is based on. The “baptism” of the Holy Spirit into the lives of believers, the initial evidence of which, is the fact that these believers speak in other [earthly] languages, as God, through the action of the Holy Spirit, grants them the supernatural power to do so.
Does that sound to you a little bit whacky?
Well, it sounds whacky because it is whacky.
But this is the door I opened, and the room into which I stepped.

Now, I say all of the above to get to the point where I can now tell you that the real cornerstone of my “faith” as I percieved it was that the Bible is the “literal” Word of God, and by that, I am saying that I took it to mean that every single story… yea, every single sentence in the Bible that was not CLEARLY understood as “metaphor” was “literal” or, to be understood in a literal sense.
By this I mean to say that if [just to choose one example] the Red Sea parted in the book of Exodus, if you were there that day with a camcorder, you could have got the whole thing down on videotape.
It not only really happened, but it really happened exactly as described in the Bible.
Similarly, if Genesis tells us that there was a point in history when there was only two human beings on the face of the earth, and they were named Adam and Eve, then that means that there was a time in history when there was only two human beings on the face of the earth, and [by golly] their names were Adam and Eve.
For me, this story was not telling us anything of “type” or “archetype.”
It was delineating literal historical truth.
As you can imagine, I could go on nearly forever with examples.
I believed in the thoroughgoing literal interpretation of Scripture as 100% surely as I would have believed that I am not an aardvark!
Some of you reading this will be, by now, snickering to yourself and simply saying that I had some sort of brain damage.
Uh-huh.
The thing is, there are seriously not only millions, but BILLIONS of people that have this exact same sort of brain damage, and they exist not only in Christianity, but in many other religions as well.

OK, fast-forward the tape to August of 2004.

While there are several other factors that lend themselves significantly to my overall RE-CONVERSION experience, I am going to focus upon one that proved to be truly cataclysmic.
While other things had been moving me forward (and I do believe it is forward, and not backward, as some may see it), this next thing sort of catapulted me forward, so to say. Launched me into new and invigorating realms of understanding.
I was at work when the phone rang, and a friend of mine told me that he had just heard Tom Harpur interviewed on a radio program.
“We should go out and get his new book, and read it together,” my friend suggested.
At first I was hesitant because I had already observed the book in the bookstore and I dismissed it as being scary, and/or too heretical, or [at the least] too New-Agey-ish for my tastes.
But curiosity prevailed, and I met my friend within the next hour, and together, we each bought Tom Harpur’s controversial new book, The Pagan Christ: Recovering The Lost Light.

I [we] read the thing.
I [we] have never been the same since.

The book revolutionized my thinking in so many ways that at many points in the reading, I wanted to set the thing down and weep for joy. The only reason I refrained from doing so was because I was wary of leaving one form of brain damage to possibly embrace another.
I did not want to become a Harpurite, or join any kind of thing ending in “ism”.
I have zero desire to be fanatical about religion, or lack of religion.
Neither am I [now or ever] angry at God or angry at religion. [Well, actually, I am angry at religion, when religion makes people do harmful things to other people.]
This may be a good place for me to say that I do not currently attend church of any kind, nor have any desire to do so.

I do not even fully endorse every single aspect of Harpur’s book, nor am I even recommending it here, to other readers.
What the book DID for me, however, is that it allowed me to see that there are other ways than the purely “literal” to approach and examine Scripture.
Revering the Bible as a sacred text does not necessarily have to mean that we treat it as the infallible WORD OF GOD.
And I guess that the first time I really grasped this concept was when I read The Pagan Christ.
Hence, I think of it as my [no disrespect intended]… my being born-again again!
I have, since that time, been on what I would call an exciting journey of reconciling faith with understanding. Harpur’s book set me on a course whereby I can still believe in God, but not necessarily the kind of God who values most our unwavering ability to believe things that do not make sense.
In other words, when things that are meant to be religiously believed, do not make a shred of actual sense, I am now free to acknowledge that.
And that is a tremendous, wonderfully liberating experience.
It is no exaggeration for me to say to you that since I have opened my brain pathways to the possibilities inherent in the non-literal interpretation of Scripture[s]… I feel as though I have been born-again again.

Since reading Harpur, and subsequently hearing him speak in person, I have read the writings of numerous other well-known and respected authors, and continue to find that there is an entire WORLD of scholarship out there that was not granted entrance into the narrow hallways of my former mind.
These would include the writings and ideas of people like Leon R. Kass, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Elaine Pagels, Marcus J. Borg, Karen Armstrong, Joseph Campbell, and many others.

In all of the various reading I have done since August, 2004, I have noticed a grouping of three central ideas, at turns covered one way or another by all of these authors. Combined with all of my own thinking upon the subject of God and our human spirituality, I have come to think of these three things as “The Three Pillars” or somewhat of a common denominator of a new and liberated approach to “the spiritual” side of life.
These Three Pillars constitute the three areas in which my own thinking has shifted the most, as a result of my study:

1) The thoroughgoing literal interpretation of Scripture. That’s got to go.

2) The exclusivity of Christianity, or for that matter, any one religion. That’s definitely got to go.

3) The ineffable nature of God. That’s got to displace the dual fallacy that we can know everything about who God is, and adequately define God in human language.

On this blogpage, I want to take each of these “pillars” and elaborate upon them, outline for you why I think they are such important areas to focus upon if we are ever to [personally] make sense out of what sectarian religion has made to look like so much utter nonsense.
It is not nonsense.
It only looks like nonsense.
God is not ever going to make sense in a collective sense. For that to happen, every human being on earth would have to be on the same spiritual journey, and because of differences of religion and ethnicity, not to mention history and a myriad of other factors, it is simply unrealistic for religious and/or spiritual harmony and accord to ever exist on this planet.
I believe that all true spiritual understanding is only experienced and understood by an individual.
In this realm, mine is not yours.
And yours is not mine.
Nor, when we get together and find that our experiences are quite similar, does that make them, in a collective sense, TWICE AS GOOD!
This latter perception is the very error of religion, from time immemorial.
The horror of Religion is that, by subscribing to it in one of its many forms, we deny God the very diversity He has seen fit to allow us.

[Here is a disclaimer that I only want to mention this one time. I use the pronoun “He” in reference to God, not because I think “He” has a penis, nor even because I think “God” is otherwise more male than female, but simply because using “It” seems sort of wrong in some way, and using “She” is no better nor worse than using “He” in my opinion. God, given that one believes “He/She” exists at all, surely transcends all gender, and gender, when all is said and done, is merely a terrestrial condition that exists in the first place because of the need for procreation…. and because someone, after all, needs to do the dishes!]

Just wanted to end with some humor there….

***************

Introduction

2006-03-10T23:44:00.000-06:00

Well, I have really wanted to get this “godpuddle” blogsite off the ground for a while now. My hesitation, my reticence, has been a combination of simple lack of time, coupled with the fact that the subject matter is not something that I want to be hasty and/or flippant about.
The truth of the matter is that nothing could be more serious to me, than matters of a theological nature. And that is what I want to cover here, in godpuddle.
Theology.
The word means, quite literally, “study of God”.
But how can we really STUDY “God”?
Good question.
At godpuddle, I want there to be no such thing as an illegal question. But I DO want there to be such a thing as an illegal answer.
And by “illegal” I really mean “invalid”.
I guess that I, as the controller [to a certain extent] of this site, will be the Grand Arbiter of what is valid, and what is invalid.
But I am easy to get along with.
All I want is for every approach to things “theological” to be disinterested.
What do I mean by disinterested?
I mean that no one, not you, or not I, are trying to convince anyone of anything, and/or sell something to somebody. Your thoughts, your opinions, are as important as mine are [provided you stay disinterested in any agenda].
Our business is to talk and make sense to each other. Can we agree to do that?
Godpuddle is not going to necessarily be a place where you go to find answers to questions you’ve always pondered. But my hope is that it can be a place where you and I can ponder questions we’ve never had answered.

Lately, I have come to believe [and I want to talk about this word “believe” and what it means, and how it differs from “knowing”], I have come to believe that some questions are better left in their interrogative state, than forcing them to contort and conform to an answer that bristles with prejudice or biased untruth.
I have no axe to grind, nor am I angry with anybody or any institution, nor with “God” him or herself.
The truth is, I LOVE God. I “believe” in a Creator-god. I merely want to discuss questions of real relevance, all rhetoric thrown to the four winds.
My background is Christian. However, I dislike “Christianeze”…. terms that mean nothing except to those who are real initiates of the jargon.

This may be as good a place as any to tell you a wee bit about myself.
My name is not important, nor is my address or pin numbers.
So I will avoid posting anything about all of those things.
What I feel is important is the following stuff:
I am 42 years old, a single, male human.
I am Canadian.
I studied “Christian” theology, exclusively, full-time, in a fullly-accredited college, for four years, between 1987 and 1991.
I graduated with an “honours” Bachelor of Theology Degree, and was subsequently involved in church ministry, as a licensed minister of the Pentecostal Church.
Currently, I am in secular employment.
My interest in theology has never waned. Rather, it has only really grown more and more intense and focused, over the years.
“Focused,” while “broadening.”
I have read the Christian Bible through several times, and have intensely studied it for over two decades, as of this current writing.
There is never a time when I am not pondering some aspect of theological mystery. Hence, this site…. godpuddle.

I consider the Christian Bible [Old and New Testaments] to be the most personally relevant religious text, in existence.
[But the word “personally” in the above sentence is quite relevant, in and of itself, and that relevance is not lost on me, and the subjectivity of such a preference is something I always want to keep in mind.]
In the past several years, I have undergone what I would consider to be a radical change involving my perception of what “faith” is, and in what “faith” means to me now.
To some who know me well, I have become a heretic.
To myself, I have become more real than I have ever been.
These changes, these things that I am tempted to call “The Three Pillars” are what I am most interested in telling you about next, in future blogs.

For now, I will just end off by saying that I think it is very important to LISTEN to what is being said…. being said by a fallible human-being, here in Isaiah chapter 55, verses 8 and 9:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

How I wish that we could leave these verses, leave them to their own glorious self-proclaimed mystery, rather than lean so very heavily upon our own stupidity… and with the next breath that we expel, try to explain everything that these very verses declare, unexplainable.

Stay tuned.

**********

Godpuddle

Re-Direction

New Ehrman Interview

Be Fruitful and Overpopulate.

Wise Words

The God Delusion

On Certainty

The New Intellectual

New Harris Book

Arbitrariness!

Wise Words

Wise Words

Cause for concern?

Wise Words

Speaking Some Sense...

Wise Words

22 Years [and a day!]

A Clear-Thinking Gen-X'er!

Wise Words

The Heaven Club

Wise Words

Meeting Manji

United 93

Wise Words

Giftings Revisited: HUNCH vs. PUNCH!

Giftings

Wise Words

Tithing

Wise Words

The Hand of God

Wise Words

The Uncomfortable Christian

My Easter Service

Getting Extreme About Extremism...

Peace. Be still.

Water

Wise Words

God or Nothing

De Natura Deorum

A Good Question

All We Like Actors...

The Scale of Doubt

A Matter of Emphasis

Too Interesting....

Matters of Ultimate Concern

Wise Words

"into the adult geometry..."

The Theory of Displacement©

Wise Words

Can't Please Everyone!

An Endlessly Fascinating Man

The Fundamentals

Chef's Oven Overheats!

The Three Pillars

Introduction