Straight, No Chaser

Because I have nothing of importance to say right now, and nothing in the news will give me anything to bounce off of for a post, I decided to recycle an old post. This is from a blog I worked on with several other people a couple of years ago called Barnes Ignoble (you can check out the ruins here). The point of the blog was to discuss books. We made it through two, I believe, before it collapsed. At any rate, I was happy with this post on the book Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen, and have re-posted here for your reading pleasure:

Straight, No Chaser

The discussion that grew from the previous post was one that cut to the heart of Christianity. As I've mentioned before, it is essential to define our terms lest they become void of any real meaning. Christianity is a term that necessitates solid definition. Machen realized this and composed Christianity and Liberalism for this very purpose. We may not agree with everything he says, but we cannot deny its importance. To this end, and jumping off the previous post, I'd like to analyze, briefly, the person of Jesus and why it is important to solidify the essentials.

It doesn't take a scholar to notice the increase in attention that is being focused on religion in general in recent months and Christianity specifically. First it was The Da Vinci Code and the numerous television specials probing its claims. Next we had the election and the supposedly grand victory of "moral values", whatever that means. Also with the recent passing of the Pope, the mainstream media has brought religion to the forefront more than any time in recent memory. Machen saw a similar trend in his own time in response to the tumultuous time of war during the early 20th century. He had this to say: "such considerations [that previous solutions have not worked] have led to a renewed public interest in the subject of religion; religion is discovered after all to be a useful thing. But the trouble is that in being utilized religion is also being degraded and destroyed. Religion is being regarded more and more as a mere means to a higher end." (150) This is the crux of the problem. The more we look to religion as a means to an end the more we lose the importance of the message. We tend to water down Christianity in an attempt to derive from it what we want. Recently I read an article about a church in Arizona that has become a "Mega church" (the article has been taken off the site unless you want to pay for it, however if you'd like to read a copy let me know and I'll email you the text). The church was built to avoid looking like a traditional church at all costs. There is no iconography, however there are X-boxes and plasma TV's. Let me preface my next point with an old adage from Seinfeld: "not that there's anything wrong with that". I am not one to doubt that God can work through anything and if this church is bringing people in to hear the real message of Christ then more power to them, I certainly will not scream about the speck in my brother's eye lest I forget the plank in my own. However, there was one part of the article that disturbed me: "Almost half of each service is given over to live Christian rock with simple, repetitive lyrics in which Jesus is treated like a high-school crush: 'Jesus, you are my best friend, and you will always be. Nothing will ever change that.' Committing your life to Christ is as easy as checking a box on the communication cards that can be found on the back of every chair. (Last year, 1,055 people did so.)" Again, I will not deny that God can work through pop music and communication cards, but the message the church is putting across is one of a watered down Christ. Yes, Christ loves us, and yes nothing will ever change that, but to compare him to a high school crush not only demeans our Lord, but it demeans us for worshiping such a Lord. Machen says it this way...it is a long quote, but important:

"Yet such a God has at least one advantage over the comforting God of modern preaching--He is alive, He is sovereign, He is not bound by His creation or by His creatures, He can perform wonders. Could He even save us if He would? He has saved us--in that message the gospel consists. [...] It all seems so very local, so very particular, so very unphilosophical, so very unlike what might have been expected. Are not our own methods of salvation, men say, better than that? [...] Yet what if it were true? [...] God's own Son delivered up for us all, freedom from the world, sought by philosophers of all the ages, offered now freely to every simple soul, things hidden from the wise and prudent revealed unto babes, the long striving over, the impossible accomplished, sin conquered by mysterious grace, communion at length with the holy God, our Father which art in heaven! Surely this and this alone is joy." (134-135).

Okay, you say, so the love expressed in pop songs is not of this magnitude, but it is still love. True, I would respond, however you are also forgetting something else. Machen continues:

"But it is a joy that is akin to fear. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Were we not safer with a God of our own devising--love and only love, a Father and nothing else, one before whom we could stand in our own merit without fear? He who will may be satisfied with such a God. But we, God help us--sinful as we are, we would see Jehovah. Despairing, hoping, trembling, half-doubting and half-believing, trusting all to Jesus, we venture into the presence of the very God. And in His presence we live." (135).

When we water down Christianity we destroy its beauty, its truth, the very thing that makes it worth devoting a life to. We take God and make him manageable and make Him a thing not worth our worship. This is why Machen's book is important and why a constant reiteration, with discussion, with prayer, with thought, of Christianity is important. You may choose to believe or not to believe, this is not an argument to convince unbelievers, but if you choose to believe...believe. Do not make God manageable, let God manage you. If you choose to worship something make sure it is worth your worship.

Ars Poetica

The other night I read the introduction to the most recent book of poems edited by Garrison Keillor, Good Poems for Hard Times, which just recently came out in paperback. This is the follow up to Good Poems (which is an excellent place to start if you want a good collection of poetry). In the introduction for his new book, Keillor writes:

"A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader are obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right."

I think this description hits the nail on the head. Poetry has become to so many people that boring thing they had to study in school, or that thing they just don't get. It's true that a lot of poetry is lofty and inaccessible, and it has its place, but there is so much powerful, beautiful, heart breaking, fist pounding poetry that makes you yell, "Yes! That is how it is!" Does that phrase sound familiar? It should, it's in the quote at the top of my blog, which is precisely what Keillor is saying here. Poetry is one of the most pure forms of communication. Its beauty lies in the fact that a reader from another place and even another time can pick up a poem and read it and feel the connection of humanity. This is its purpose, and it's a shame that has gotten lost in academic speak and post-modern criticism. Don't worry, though, there is good stuff out there, you just have to find it.

Poem of the Day IX

Riveted
by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end--riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

© The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc

A Good Way to Kill Some Time

There's a really cool promotion going on right now for the new Treehouse of Horror Simpson's episode coming on in November. You edit together a promo clip for the show using existing video, audio, and whatever titles you want to add in. You can create your own here. After creating your clip you can submit it to win prizes, the grand prize being a trip to LA for the Simpson's 400th episode party.


If you want to see my entry, you can check it out here. I'm actually pretty proud of it. (Yes, I realize I'm a geek, no need to point it out.) Hope you enjoy!


(BTW, the line in the attached poster is one of my all time Homer favorites. Maybe someday I'll get around to doing a post on best Simpson's lines ever. More for me, than anyone else.)

The Future of Humanity: Coffee Colored Giants

Recently the television network Bravo commissioned Dr. Oliver Curry to predict the evolutionary changes in humanity over the next 1000, 10,000, and 100,000 years. You can read more about it here and here. After reading through his findings it makes me wonder, how do I get on the list to be commissioned for lame studies?

Anyway, it is kind of funny, so I’ll elaborate. In 1000 years time, according to Curry, we will all be taller, as tall as 7 feet on average, more attractive, and “coffee colored” as we will have lost all aspects of distinctive races through interbreeding. I guess the modeling industry will have no short supply of eligible candidates, but I do feel sorry for the beauty products industry because women will apparently all already have glossy hair and smooth skin.

By the year 12,000 we will all have lost almost all our ability to socialize or communicate well because of technology. Emotions such as love, sympathy, and trust will all cease to exist. This in turn will lead to the collapse of the greeting card industry, and the end to made up holidays. No wonder we don’t socialize anymore. Also the flower shops will suffer: “Sure, I’d have bought you flowers, honey, but the thing is, love doesn’t exist as an emotion anymore, so, sorry!” Oh, and we’ll also have receding chins because processed foods will require less chewing. Less chewing…I guess the future is looking brighter after all.

Finally, 100,000 years from now, we will have developed into two distinctly different sub species. According to the BBC article: “The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the ‘underclass’ humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.” All I can say is that I’m looking forward to the movie about the goblin revolt in the year 104,562. I’m sure it will win Best Picture at the Intergalactic Academy Awards, unless the academy votes for the remake of “Titanic”. Man, wouldn’t that be a shame. The Goblin community could really use the boost.

North Korea at Night

This is an amazing photograph I stumbled across on this site. It was taken by a satellite in October of 2000. While Kim Jong Il is spending billions on his military and chemical and nuclear weapons (not to mention his affinity for lavish living, such as expensive wine) his country of 23 million people does not even have light at night. The website notes that the lights in the Sea of Japan are fishing vessels which use bright lights to lure squid. Yes, a satellite photo of Asia shows fishing vessels with more lights than the entire country of North Korea. It's hard to comprehend. Please pray for the people of North Korea.

Amish Faith Shines

There was an excellent article in the Dallas Morning News last Friday about the faith of the Amish after the tragedy that occurred there. There really isn't anything more I can say; the article speaks for itself.

Poem of the Day VIII

Autumn
by Rainer Maria Rilke from The Book of Images

The leaves are falling, falling as from far,
as though above were withering farthest gardens;
they fall with a denying attitude.

And night by night, down into solitude,
the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all falling. This hand's falling too--
all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

And yet there's One whose gently-holding hands
this universal falling can't fall through.

© 1977 by New Directions Publishing

North Korea Part II

The headline of this article on CNN caught my eye this morning: “N. Korea Sees US Pressure as an Act of War”. The official quote from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry:

"If the U.S. keeps pestering us and increases pressure, we will regard it as a declaration of war and will take a series of physical corresponding measures."

North Korea is not getting the reaction they wanted from their nuclear tests, so they’re upping the ante. They either want the US to make a dumb move and win some public approval, and then bargaining rights to get more free stuff, or they want to force the US into bilateral talks. North Korea is trying to force opinion against the US by saying things like, “the issue of future nuclear tests is linked to U.S. policy toward our country.” You can tell they don’t want war (though a North Korean diplomat did offer this gem, "we hope the situation will be resolved before an unfortunate incident of us firing a nuclear missile comes") they just want more leverage in bargaining. Also from the Foreign Ministry statement:

"Even though we conducted the nuclear test because of the U.S., we still remain committed to realizing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and negotiations."

It would almost be funny if it weren’t such a volatile situation to everyone in the region and the suffering North Koreans. I remain hopeful that the situation will be resolved without anything blowing up (there is still speculation that perhaps the test wasn’t a nuclear warhead at all, or a dud that shows they still are not quite there yet), but nothing changes the state of the North Korean people. They are being held hostage by a crazed dictator waving nuclear weapons in the world’s face. Kim Jong Il knows the world has sympathy for his people and he uses this to gain even more from the world. As I said before, I hope this is just a mind game, but also one that we can win, not just for our sake, but the sake of the Korean people.

Update: Monkey see, monkey do...Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said this regarding Iran's nuclear program during a televised speech Wednesday: "these three or four countries are bullying and have no right to interfere in these issues and the Security Council has no right to interfere." Guess he thought Kim Jong Il had a good angle.

North Korea

I just read a fascinating, albeit lengthy, article from the Atlantic Monthly about the situation with North Korea. Of course tensions have been high in Korea for over 50 years, but especially as of late with the recent nuclear tests. It seems to me that the Kim Jong Il is doing everything he can to get leverage in an increasingly failing state. This is the reason for the very public announcements of missile tests and nuclear tests. The more aid he can coerce out of the world, the more time he has as leader. How to deal with North Korea is the difficult question. No one wants war with a country that has a million-man army and an extensive stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, while at the same time economic sanctions that cause the country to collapse could create an enormous humanitarian crisis and a very dangerous security crisis with nuclear and chemical weapons up for grabs. Whatever we do, it needs to be well thought out. While Kim Jong Il may be crazy, he is more in line with “evil-genius” crazy. The article describes him thusly:

Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. “The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” [professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University Andrei] Lankov says.

Kim Jong Il is ready for the game, I just hope we are as well.

The Yankees Failure

I'm not normally one to revel in another's loss, unless, of course, that loss is by the New York Yankees. The Detroit Tigers beat the Yankees 3 games to 1 to win the divisional series and eliminate the Yankees from the playoffs. Below is Yankees owner George Steinbrenner's statement:

"I am deeply disappointed at our being eliminated so early in the playoffs. This result is absolutely not acceptable to me nor to our great and loyal Yankee fans. I want to congratulate the Detroit Tigers organization and wish them well. Rest assured, we will go back to work immediately and try to right this sad failure and provide a championship for the Yankees, as is our goal every year."

I guess $200 million just doesn't buy what it used to.

More on 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

I read an interesting article, by Edward Feser about the 9/11 conspiracy theories and why people are so inclined to believe them. The author's main point is that the tendency towards conspiracy theories comes from Enlightenment thinking that authority should inherently not be trusted (he does make the point that this comes from the faulty view that the middle ages was a dark and unlearned time, but that is another post for another day). His point is not that we should blindly follow authority, but that it is the foundation for any further thinking. The fallacy is that it is impossible to discount any previous authority and start fresh as you must start somewhere. He draws a parallel between this fallacy used by conspiracy theorists and one used by secularists to discount Christianity:

Even very radical shifts in worldview typically presuppose a deep level of continuity between the view that was abandoned and the one that comes to be adopted. Hence the Protestant who converts to Catholicism (or vice versa) does so on the basis of religious premises both traditions have in common. Hence the secularist who rejects Christianity as a whole typically does so on the basis of scientific and moral principles that developed out of the Christian tradition itself. (See here, here, and here.) And hence the conspiracy theorist who claims to believe that the government and the media are in thrall to some purportedly sinister force or other (the military-industrial complex, the Mossad, or whatever)invariably bases his theory precisely on materials drawn from these sources (such as newspaper accounts and television news broadcasts, and even the Warren Commission and 9/11 Commission reports, which JFK assassination buffs and 9/11 fantasists, respectively, comb for evidence to support their case).

So the conspiracy theorist cites evidence to his case from the very sources that he seeks to disqualify. The author goes on to cite a similar fallacy that the authority the conspiracy theorist questions is very often only the authority that disagrees with his point, while authorities that agree are cited without question. This is obviously faulty thinking, but an interesting side note would be to show the below video. Very often the end of 9/11 conspiracy theories is to show that the Bush administration was one of the main benefactors of 9/11 and so must have been involved in causing or at lease allowing it to happen. This is a very attractive view for those on the left that are blindly against the Bush administration (as an aside, I am in no way saying the Bush administration is without fault or has handled everything well. They have made many mistakes, but to say that they caused 9/11 or other such nonsense is only to deny your purpose because then honest criticism is often overlooked as more lunacy from the left). At any rate, perhaps the best argument would be to show the below statements by leftist darling Noam Chomsky. But then, I suppose he would be an authority and must be questioned, right?

Pervez Musharraf

The president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, has been a name we have heard here for several years now. After 9/11, Musharraf pledged support for the US in the battle with terrorism, and specifically against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Recently, we have heard his name pop up with more frequency. He was here for the UN conference and also spent some time promoting his new book: In the Line of Fire. The majority of the rhetoric surrounding Musharraf has always been positive, and as this article notes, perhaps too positive for a man who seized control of his government in a coup and where there are questions about how "democratic" the elections have been to secure his control in the years since, but on the whole he has been seen to be a strong ally. The past week, I've been reading articles here and there relating to Musharraf, and the interesting idea I've stumbled across is that the seeming contradictions in Musharraf are really contradictions in many of the Muslim countries as a whole. What we see is a paradox of ideas: that of traditional Muslim ideology and values, and the ideology and values of the West that are being spread, directly and indirectly through them.

With all of the positive rhetoric we have heard, I always assumed Musharraf was pretty solid in our court. I suppose this was naive optimism, but during an interview with the president on The Daily Show, the fact that we are dealing with a man, running a nuclear country that could very easily change his mind about his support became clear. I'm not saying he's going to go against us, but the recent controversy surrounding whether former deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, told a key official in Pakistan after 9/11 that they had better support us or else we would bomb them into the stone age has shown some cracks of division. Armitage has claimed this statement was false, and I'm sure he would never use the phrase "bomb into the stone age", but I also don't doubt that he was surely a bit on the firm side in the conversation, and it does make you wonder how much support is due to goodwill and how much is due to force. At any rate, the interview is an interesting one to watch, so for your convenience see below:



And so the paradox I mention shown in Musharraf is really a reflection of the country he leads. My friend Christina was in Pakistan last April and two posts on her blog really capture this separateness, this paradox of Middle Eastern and Western ideas, very well. The first is about Islamabad, which is a thoroughly modern and westernized city. The second is about the trip taken to the earthquake zone. The picture with the entry says quite a bit by itself.

All of this is not to question our alliance with Musharraf and Pakistan, but to realize that situations are usually more complicated than they appear on the surface. Having an understanding of a culture like Pakistan's is essential to understanding the alliance, and the entire global situation.