Lucifer Jones

God = Good

2011-03-24T21:12:00.001-07:00

Understanding of this equivalence in my early childhood is what makes me what I am today which is a great admirer of Christian ethics an quite enough of an Episcopalian to pass, but not interested in being either evangelistic nor passive to atheists.

So the question was asked can atheists and theists find something to agree on. It's actually very simple; they merely need to agree that God = Good. Now comes the question of ego, which is whether any atheist or devotee can assert with certainty that they know everything any human needs to know about Good God. The failures of atheism and faith come from misapplication which is a function of arrogance. It's something atheists ought to know considering the scientistic awe at the greatness of the Universe.

I find it interesting considering this proposition of equivalence that with respect to arrogance and overproduction that two books come to mind. The first is that by Hitchens: God is Not Great. The second is the famous business book Good to Great. In the stretch between saying that God is Good to God is Great is perhaps that fudging of the supernatural that Spinoza weighed against. Does God have to be Great, or is Good enough? Why, in fact, does God have to be so incredibly transcendent? Is not the proposed greatness of God merely the whip across our backs to get our donkey attention? Perhaps so. The summation of Good is so far and away from us. It ought to be enough for eternal inspiration in our present. But somehow we are not satisfied with that. God must be great, man must strive to understand transcendental greatness. Great becomes unimaginable, which is just enough to twist all the rest of the rules.

I invert something in this passage I read this week.

One of the books I am currently re-reading is C.S. Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. For those that haven't read this classic, it is a collection of letters from a senior and experienced satanic demon, Screwtape, to a junior and struggling satanic demon, Wormwood, on how best to snare and keep ensnared the souls of men; how to hold them in thrall until such souls can be harvested into Hell for all eternity.
As I was escaping from the unremitting BS flow that oozes out of the government when it comes to BS budgets yesterday, I found myself reading this passage from Chapter XV of The Screwtape Letters:
We sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make [humans] live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

All afterlife is the Future. And while I don't quite understand the author's use of 'eternity', we can surely see how the overly pious wring their hands in anticipation of a Judgment by a Great God at some point in the Future. A bit of passive aggressiveness I think.

A Good God, the summation of Good, the concept and the entity only need to be that. Our duty, whether deist or atheist is to approach that good, remembering Cobb's Rule #11: Perfect is the enemy of Good.

Joy to the World

2010-12-24T21:15:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere that Christmas isn't mandated by the Church as a high holiday. It's truly not a solemn occasion. If you think about that which might be a co-opted pagan celebration, this one has probably been the one that most often does not use Christian symbols. Happy Birthday Jesus doesn't quite fit so much as Happy Birthday Baby Jesus. And so the word Joy best describes what this time of year is all about. Joy to the World.
It's not actually even a message we Christians are likely to be known for. There's always an evangelical hook in there somewhere - or for me in my blend, a Jesuit mind trick. Proper Christianity challenges your mind and soul, but in late December the challenges are more about getting a parking space and all other sorts of preparation for joyous celebration. This year we got duck.

Right now, everything is as perfect as it gets. All the family phone calls have been made and all the news is good. People are healthy and in good spirits. Them that had no jobs, now got jobs. Some travelling has been done and old faces have been seen, warm embraces had in defiance of winter and quiet talk over hot drinks have given us another chance to pause, smiling and look down at the table for that moment when we say to ourselves nodding, "that's really good". The confessions are done as well. People like to come clean around this time of year. According to the guy on the radio, almost nobody breaks up on Christmas Day, but starting at Black Friday if your affair is in jeopardy, be prepared to handle the truth. The truth is that we know and we admit it finally, that human beings can be awesome, and sometimes we have to just let go of our fears and tell the honest truth. We play that game when the family is in a good mood and as parents we promise to forgive confessions of mischief - we call it BOL, for blurt out loud. Blurt. That's a good and giggly word. You just can't wait to talk about everything so that you can tell your good news, and feel good and prepare for the joy.

There's a kind of inevitability about Christmas joy. This year it was a long time coming. As it turns out, I'm between jobs and have had lots of time to think about other things, a good seven week sabbatical it turns out. Christmas couldn't sneak up on me this time; it felt like it took forever to get here. I started singing carols in public last week, and although I didn't burn a CD for the car, I did have it on the home system. The first thing I did yesterday morning was I listened to several renditions of O Holy Night. Whitney Houston, Celtic Woman, Celine Dion, Susan Boyle, Charlotte Church, Mariah Carey, Carrie Underwood, NSync, Alicia Keyes, another Mariah Carey version. Right there in bed on my iPhone via YouTube. No matter how many times I listened to it, I still love the song. I still don't know all the words, but man when they get to the 'fall on your knees' part, it just melts me when they do it right. And yeah I have to say, Mariah does it best. You know the words are coming, and it still gets you in the gut. Advent. What a wonderful word.

We're at that family age with three teenagers. They know what they want, we know what to get them. It's wonderful watching all the bubbly subterfuge as we raid the bag of ribbons and wrapping paper. Everybody snatchs the roll of scotch tape from my desk and scampers off to their rooms to wrap another gift. We color code the sticky bows, if it's red it's mine. It seemed to take almost no time at all to get the tree and decorate it and now it's surrounded. There have been sleepovers and videogame parties. We baked cookies and made many runs to the stores.

.and that's all I'm writing this morning...

Merry Christmas, and may your thoughts be more coherent and complete than mine. Pass the eggnog.

Dissonance & Faith

2010-12-10T21:19:00.000-08:00

Dissonance is a keyword in the story of my life. For me, it is the experience of living the truth of the false claim that blue is not blue. It is the experience of the epistemological nightmare, of hearing people tell you after you have explained something profound with precision that you have nothing to say and are at any rate incapable of saying it.

I have, like you, wished that I could read people's minds and that they could read mine, because I hate dissonance. So writing has become an indispensable part of my life. I have, in my adult life, always considered myself a writer - a writer for people and for machines with the emphasis on people. In every opportunity to write software for machines, I have always discounted the value. Software that doesn't engage the end-user was never interesting to me. The machine was a logical substrate. It was never my desire to escape the complications of humanity. In fact, I never grew to learn enough of the mathematical universe to appreciate the ability to get a computer to think mathematically, nor enough about any scientific discipline to feel rewarded by shaping the computing tool. What I have learned instead are matters of finance and ethics.

Roger Ebert writes about the experience of being mute and of being blind, and then conveys a letter sent to him by someone rendered mute by surgery. Both the blog entry and the letter are longish, but I understood them implicitly. In my ethical journey, the first intellectual country was characterized by the landscape of race. What I discovered early on was how the hunger of those wanting to understand and sympathize led them to jump to whatever seemed to lead them to a proper conclusion, to forge instantaneous brotherhood at the first hint of commonality. But this kind of sentiment was never sufficient to bear the burdens of reform implicated by the scope of anti-racist politics and action. Most everything became symbolic. The dissonant supply and demand of dialog on the matters of race in America sometimes ossified over time into the kind of hostility that could be called racism. That characterizes our epistemological nightmare well, because it isn't true racism but most people do not possess the words to make this clear. They only possess the sentiments appropriate towards the ethics of anti-racism. Smarter folks substitute culture for race and welcome culture wars often to the point of the political and the politics of difference underlies a great deal of what sparks frustration in American public life. This is all dissonance to me. It is dissonance until it is crime.

I don't believe that man is a social animal in the way many do. I think that we are evolutionarily hardwired to be constrained in our affairs to Dunbar's Number. Everything else is maintained by hegemonic forces and, of course, ignorance & incuriosity. You have your number of Facebook friends, and that's about it. You either fit the profile of the person you always wanted to be or you suffer from the ignominious underachievement. You don't need to communicate to more people, and in fact you cannot. You can only be leveraged by the impersonal, which means you will be interpreted. The French have a verb for that. Connaitre. Connaitre is for people. Savoir is for things. Both verbs mean 'to know'. When you write a program and compile it, the computer knows what you are telling it - almost instantaneously. Savoir. You, on the other hand, will be interpreted.

You will be interpreted.

Interpretation is imprecise, and there are for humans very distinct advantages to being interpreted. For in dissonance is the ability to play both sides of the coin. Human social identity should be worn, as James Baldwin wrote, loosely like the clothes of the desert. Give a little room for the mind to shape the body. Let some ambiguity in. We don't want to live in a bot-mediated world. We want to live in a world where we have permission and license to be what we want to be, to go where we like and to behave as we please. If we strive to achieve a precise goal and redefine ourselves in pursuit of that goal it is only to ultimately attain that freedom. At least, that's my philosophy. It is about the Dosh Point.

Next year I'll be 50. I'm slimming down and realizing that I look more like I did at 35 then at 45. I've been a bit too chubby for a bit too long. Dr. Sakurai tells me, even after I shed 20 pounds this year, that I'm too fat. He's over 80 years old, so perhaps I should listen. Do you see all of these unambiguous numbers? Why do we try to express ourselves that way?

Dissonance is a permanent factor, and I've been thinking about the epistemological problems of the age. It's a constant itch for me since I have continually evolved my thinking and so span political, geographical, religious, class and racial lines. I've gotten to the point at which I'm convinced that I have achieved a level of mature wisdom which is the result of years of writing and thinking. I've more than done my 10,000 hours on the blog, writing for people. Now I get people. I am people. People are me. Like Chaka Khan. No, actually deeper still without the flash, like the people who wrote it. Ashford & Simpson.

Humans have faith, but they often forget their faith in themselves, in humanity. We need to interpret each other with faith in mind. Then the nightmare dissolves.

Spinoza

2010-11-30T21:20:00.000-08:00

I have been unable to sleep lately. For one thing I've been staying up late and waking up later and extending a cycle of madness. For another I just got rid of a bad tooth after a weekend of suffering. So in a bold attempt to get some sleep, I decided to put on the most boring podcast I could think of. I made a mistake and put on Will Durant.

Will Durant is one of those names from my childhood that used to arise whenever people asked who was the smartest man in the world. Aside from the typical answer of Einstein, people used to say it was Bertrand Russell who was such a super-genius that took a genius to appreciate him. It seemed that only Will Durant was smart enough to understand Russell, whereas once the bomb was built anybody could steal the blueprints. But I've already talked about information thermodynamics...

So I put on the podcast and this time, unlike the last time I had insomnia, I actually absorbed a bit of it. And so decided to play it during the daytime as well. So now I know what the big deal about Spinoza is, and I am happy to say that I have found in Spinoza's remarks, precisely some of the same troubles I've had with lesser forms of Christianity.

I'll boil it down thusly. If you are like me, then you simply refuse to gamble that there is no possibility for the existence of God. To put it simply God's mind is the Universe. God's law is physics. God's name is Pi. Or maybe e. Or better yet, e to the power of pi. People struggle mightily to understand the universe, and the lazy people think such knowledge will be Revealed, in the meantime industrious people are figuring it out. It's not wrong to have faith, but the real value of faith is not found in its ability to explain the working of the world. Spinoza recognizes as do I, the false dichotomy between the natural world and God's miracles and explains religious dogma as the dumbed down version of communicating the nature of things to lazy or otherwise non-brilliant people. If God created everything, why would he need to suspend the rules of nature in order to make himself known? 'He' doesn't and he wouldn't. It's just superstition maintained for the interventions of religion. Something lazy thinkers need to believe.

There are a great number of other quotations I have forgotten, but that one is a stunner I have long believed myself, without of course, the ability to put it concisely before my encounter with Spinoza.

Thanksgiving Haps

2010-11-25T21:22:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is one of those days that is very telling in that it's also the one holiday that nobody can do for you. I have found that you really can't wish people a happy Thanksgiving, they either have something to be thankful for, know it and are given comfort by that or they don't. Every Thanksgiving wish is therefore a dual-edged sword, because you can't really evade the fact that there is nothing else to do but look to your family and assess what life has brought you.

Christmas has been externalized to fit every different shape. You can objectify it and get through it without having to deal with its deeper implications. If you're Jewish, you probably have a tradition of eating Chinese food. If you're an atheist, or a materialist you can do the unreformed or reformed Scrooge act according to your mood without bothering to think about Christ in the Spirit of Christmas(tm). If you're a harried parent, you can get caught up in the busy work of it while getting more or less satisfaction depending on your budget and mall traffic. New Years Day, you can get your kiss at midnight and party like it's 1999, or just watch the ball drop eating cheetos in a bean bag chair in your underwear. It gets easier now that Dick Clark has finally become the ghoul he has avoided appearing in the prior century. On the Fourth of July, you don't have to call it Independence Day. On Memorial Day and Veteran's Day you're not expected to *do* anything but take the day off. They've changed President's Day and MLK to fit the schedules of ski venues, and the white sales of JC Penney. But while Black Friday gets more and more like Wall Street's triple witching hour, Thanksgiving still has that unavoidable weight and presence. You *have* to think about giving thanks and family. There's not much else you can do except be with your intimates and deal with the your measure of gratitude.

Dennis Prager and I share a definition of happiness in that we recognize that it cannot be faked. Happiness is the end result of accomplishment. It is in a three legged stool with gratitude and goodness. You cannot be happy if you are not grateful. You cannot be happy if you are not good. These are two qualities that I cannot wish for you or grant you. They are things you must accomplish for yourself. So in that way, I cannot really wish you a happy Thanksgiving, if you are not grateful and good, then you won't have happiness on this or any other day. While you might be able to fake some cheer on the other holidays, and there is something to be said for having that positive attitude because at least you are spreading cheer, Thanksgiving makes you think seriously about what you have to be happy about.

All that sounds like an elaborate excuse for me to be stingy with my holiday greetings, and to be honest, that's how I started off. I mean I just wrote about North Korea and Neil Farage, two rather in your face bad news subjects. So I said, well so many people are wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving, oh crap I better write something. But what am I doing, and why is my Thanksgiving going to be happy no matter what people say? Aha. Happiness.

There are not happiness chicklets dropping from heaven in my happy Thanksgiving so much as there are happenings in my life that are more or less under control that are contributing to my sense of accomplishment. Some fraction of those efforts are bearing fruit and I am grateful for that. So I will be happy, and now is the time to recognize. Every day should be the time, but today is the day to speak up and share that recognition and that means recognizing how the people around you have contributed to that sense of achievement and real accomplishment. Our better selves know this and live in the moment, recognizing real accomplishments as they happen, championing them along their curve to success and anticipating that success by spreading cheer before the fact.

So the haps are good. I'm learning again. I'm enjoying good health, although I really need to check a few things. I'm finding ways to stay home and stay here as my kids finish high school - the most important matter of all. I'm finding satisfaction in simple things.

I'm grateful for the attention I get here and for the opportunity to share. I'm grateful that my car didn't break before I paid it off (fingers crossed, one more payment on the Transporter). I'm grateful for the backup on my files, and that I have a record of my children's early lives. I'm grateful for the good things people see in me - that I've been able to turn my obsessions into knowledge and work and that work has helped others accomplish what they desire to. I'm grateful for all of my baseball caps sitting over in that box. I'm grateful that I can afford my electric bill and that nobody has come over to my house to steal the things that use all those kilowatts. I'm grateful that my children are mine, that I possess them and that they possess me. I'm grateful for my wife, for that woman who was patient with me and that we made it work 22 years now. I'm grateful for the teachers who work hard to discipline this community's children. I'm grateful for the gifts of the intellectually generous, and for the spirit of people whose faith in humanity encourages us all. I'm grateful for my cultural inheritance - that I have music to hum to over a dinner whose ingredients we all know, speak it in a word.

I know in every way how I have worked to make all of those things work - that I have no right to it, but that I made efforts that might not be fruitful to attract those virtuous blessings towards me and mine. It's all a part of something we all control and I know that. We do for us. We've done pretty well. So I believe we all have something accomplished. So I just ask you to look at what your work has done.

I'm going to say something else here that I have come to understand, I think. It would be easy, and I almost did it on reflex to say 'All things work together for good for those who love the Lord'. That trips off the tongue a bit too easily. My Christian education helps me understand a great deal, but I also know that I cannot impart that education on others. If I could only speak English then I would never speak anything else. If I could only understand Christian ethics then I would speak only in that dialect. But I am beginning to know things beyond that and with any luck will be able to communicate beyond that argot. So I call attention to the spirit of God in every man even to men who do not see it as God's grace or doing. In doing so I am aiming to be consistent to the ends of faith and reason and the laws of the universe, all as one, all that is seen and unseen. All ends of proper faith and proper reason are the same.

And that's what's happening today. I wish you the peace you require.

Death & Dishonor

2010-09-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

"If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels."
-- John Donne

I'm still riffing off the idea of Hitchens that some civilized people must remain to civilize religions, or at the very least police them. I am not convinced, as Hitchens is, that this is a permanent matter. I observe that we simply have a poor set of self-selected clergy on the whole, and that the organization of organized religion is not quite as our regimes of say bond trading. Hitchens' Boesky is the Pope, and so it goes.

If you ask me why I don't like Islam, it is because I don't think it scales. What is truly admirable about Islam is that it appears to me to be the kind of religion I would invent were I to live on a desert island with 1000 others. And apparently this is a sentiment shared around the globe, because Islam does a fairly fantastic job of working in tribal areas like Afghanistan. And in such tribal areas seeking to add a bit of supernatural gloss to their authority and mores, Islam accommodates such pre-civil taboos such as tyranny over women. Without much getting into it, tyranny over women is appropriate in desert island situations so long as they are the sort of women who can't do pull-ups, kill snakes or stand still when spiders crawl over their bare feet. To the extent that women don't feel compelled to manage such tasks, it falls to men, and in reciprocity men will define power in such brutally ignorant terms. That's the basic exchange when it comes to the basics, and such arrangements work in small clans and tribal situations. But I think Islam doesn't scale, and thrives best in such enclaves. But then again, so does any faith, fable, superstition, or wives tale. And for the counter-exemplary women who flip the snake over the bar, snap it in two after 10 pull ups, then squeeze the blood out of it's dead head to drown the spider on her big toe, well they tend to be one in 10,000. And in many places around the world, they get stoned.

If you read Robert Fisk's latest piece in the Independent, you will come to understand how gruesome stoning is. All the heinous details are there. 20,000 women per year are murdered for preposterous reasons around the world.

This is the evil that men do. My point is not to suggest anyone indulge in any sort of outrage, but to toll the sad bell that reminds us that although life is precious, there are a million convolutions of logic inspiring men to forget that. And if there is anything to the universality of the defense of liberty and human rights, then there are a few good ideas that counter all those convolutions. At our best, we will fight with that in mind.

Here in America we do have our liberty, and we also have our million convolutions and corruptions of moral logic over our million channels over the air and through the broadband. Each tiny corruption is a small piece of evil doing its work chopping away not only our virtue but our ability see the virtue of justice in action. We can watch horror movies and then just go home and watch romantic comedies to soothe them away. Americans watch the true crimes of these killings and those of every other preposterous rationale around the world as if they were nothing more than lessons and fables. We can excuse ourselves from the action of justice as if we were grossed-out teenagers at the slasher flick. Eww. Let's get outta here. So the skill of intervention atrophies. Justice is considered but not clear and present.

I sometimes have difficulty explaining my friends why America is exceptional. It is a combination of complex interweaving threads that makes for that fabric. It's not just "we are a Christian Country". It's not just "we revere the Founder's and Original Intent". It's not just that we are a Global Policeman. It's the emergent force we can be and it is the reason men like Robert Fisk write to us in our language, alerting us to what happens out there. America is expected to do something, to act, to bring justice. Because we can. Because we must. America is a civilization, and here, like no other place, we civilize ethnics and languages and religions into a highly robust plurality. We have secured the blessings of liberty.

Our domestic liberty is our wedge of gold, and as we withdraw our forces from the world, we hoard it without coining into the money of moral intervention. The world dies without justice, in small bloody pieces. So are we in a Long War Against Terror or not?

A Pleasant Sociopath

2007-10-13T13:31:00.001-07:00

Part of being Bowen is being philosophical. Deet is no exception, and so last night in Pasadena he expounded on the spiritual ramifications of the journey of self-discovery in Krakauer's story of Chris McCandless. I haven't read the story but my take on this dude was that he was a pleasant sociopath.

We have a number of physical journeys in our contemporary life that substitute for moral journeys. So whenever I hear stories about people who are bound and determined to discover the world and go adventuring in any sort of extreme or 'authentic' way, I am always drawn to the conclusion that it is some part of rejection. It is a trope in the modern West we have seen. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of which of the classics in our literature stands as the best accounting of this impulse although I suspect Rudyard Kipling is close to that mark. Whether it was Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet or Forrest Gump jogging across America or W. Somerset Maugham's character, someone is always searching to live on the razor's edge and thus prove that they are more alive than their slugwort contemporaries. I imagine myself in younger days attracted to that selfsame social rejection, seeking a higher moral order than seems accessible or even possible despite our privileged upbringing. However self-serving, it is a journey better taken than ignored.

The pleasant sociopath is a personal revolutionary. He has the good sense to understand that his reconciliation with society must begin with himself. Sometimes a physical journey can initiate the purification, but it is the idea that isolation in extremity from society is the sine qua non of spiritual purification that gives me a headache. That is why I suggest such an adventurer is sociopathic. There is an implicit cynicism that suggests that this can only be done without assistance. It implies that nobody else has similar desires. Ultimately is is a rejection of one's one social circle which is an admission that one has lived too close to home. Inevitably, those sojourners, having found Truth or Enlightenment or whatever golden epiphany they were chasing returns home to find in the very people he rejected some true measure of humanity. Suddenly, he is more sure of those things he only had a vague sense of propriety about and he becomes in deed the man he thought should have been there in his own youth. In the end, such journeys are about a crisis of faith, not an absence of truth. It would be more noble to resolve one's crisis of faith in community with one's fellows rather than in splendid isolation from them.

For much of my younger days, I lamented the absence of the 'noble arena'. I too, wanted men to be men and women to be women instead of dudes and babes. I have always sensed an imbalance in myself as I strove to exemplify what I desired to see in others. I have always feared becoming completely isolated within society as the last moral man left on earth, doomed to obscurity for following my conscience to spite the ignoble throngs around me. But I have somehow regained my faith in mankind and have found in simple ways and manners the means by which I can believe the best about my neighbors while being prepared for the worst. Perhaps this is a lesson sunk into my head subconsciously from 'A Man for All Seasons', because this is the essence of the Law. Let me find the quote:

Roper:

"So now you'd give the devil the benefit of law?"

More:

"Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?"

Roper:

"I'd cut down every law in England to do that."

More:

"Oh, and when the last law was down, and the devil turned on you, where would you hide, Roper, all the laws being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man's laws not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

"Yes, I'd give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake."

In this regard, should we disregard every man and be faithless in our fellows in order to make some journey to perfection, how will we be to them upon our return? We have cut them all down in turning our backs to them.

Bearing No Cross

2007-09-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

This weekend I needed to go to church and I needed to save time. I managed to do both and neither.

I went to a local Episcopal church near the beach. It took me about 20 minutes to find a parking space. When I finally arrived, after a 4 block walk, I found an empty pew near the back. I looked all around. The place was filled with young people and I was in the pre-school section. I've been observing the demographics and liturgical conventions of churches I have visited this year. So far, this one was the most light and airy.

Just as was getting used to the crowd, the rector announced the blessing of the backpacks. Two dozen children emerged from all over the congregation with their backpacks and brought them to the alter. One man was late as the priest asked that they raise them into the air. He literally sprinted down the aisle to get his child's backpack into the circle. I have never seen a grown man run through church before. It was as if he were trying to catch the last ferry to Cancun. He made a joke and people laughed.

There was no organ music. There were bongos and tambourines. I'm not sure I heard a piano, nor an acoustic guitar. I'm not sure exactly what kind of music was coming to me, except that it was happy music. Like summer camp.

My burden requires a great deal from my priest, and I know that I cannot get it here. I'm not even sure that I can say that I should be happy for the parishioners. It was only one service, it might not be representative. But I know enough for myself. Still I continue to read murder mysteries and stories from the front in Iraq. I need the kind of faith for the people who bear the cross, not for people who dance around it. At least that was what I needed Sunday, and expect to need again.

It was odd being there - odd being in that particular portion of the body of Christ. I wonder how I will reconcile myself to it.

A New South African Friend

2007-08-19T14:18:00.000-07:00

Deacon Lester McKenzie doesn't know it yet, but I think we are going to be good friends. I hope we are at any rate. He's the new priest at St. John's Church, my church of old that I've attended three weeks in a row, this week at the church retreat at Big Bear Lake.

As usual with my attractions to people, there is an ulterior motive which can be traced to a question I am uncomfortable theorizing in complete confidence by myself. I need the experience of other people to give weight or devastate my preliminary conclusions. Through this weekend's convergence of events my question is about the matter of moral reckoning. So first let me tell you the story that gives this priority.

On the way to the lake, I listened to Offramp on NPR. The story "Dad's in Jail" began about the School of the Americas, and how it was complicit in the murder of several clergy in a South American (or Central American) nation. The vague parameters of this story is familiar to all of us from the 80s. It is why we made so much noise over the Contras. The School of the Americas is where our military advisors train allies in special forces operations and such, and gave us people like Manuel Noriega. As I have said at least a dozen times here, and now once more to underscore the point, all of the horrors we were indirectly responsible for including, if applicable, the murder of those nuns, has been repudiated by GWBush. Never send a proxy to do an American military job.

So the Dad of this story full of moral outrage about these murders decided to cross the line and stand to be arrested trying to close down the School of the Americas. This Dad was about 70, he was, I believe, a teacher and obviously his son a professional journalist. And, convicted of a misdemeanor for tresspassing, was sentenced to serve 2 months in a minimum security Federal prison here in LA County.

It's a quaint little story about moral outrage with a beginning, middle and end. The end being that a precious lesson about conscience was applied to us in the radio audience, me while I was driving 80 MPH in my BMW headed to a weekend campout by a lake. Of course Dad had to learn some prison etiquette, he got his shirts ironed in trade for some Snickers, and released on time and unharmed to his son, earned greater respect - his civil disobedience badge of courage, time at Club Fed.

I could not be impressed by this. I wonder if you caught that in my tone. But is this not the measure of our dissent? Have any of us sacrificed even this much over a murder? What good is my blogging, or your reading my blogging when it comes down to the quality of our dissent? Indeed of what value is our moral reckoning at all?

Needless to say, Dad would have never turned himself into the authorities of the country where nuns get shot. That Americans have the luxury of not having all of their assets confiscated and can pretty much pick up their retirement where they left off after a stint in jail, well, it doesn't get much more civilized than that does it? Let us recall the context of an Iraqi interpreter just for kicks. Or not. Let's get back to Big Bear.

It turns out that the Deacon and I have a lot in common superficially. We are both middle aged black men, he a bit younger than I, both Episcopalians. We both love Los Angeles. He says "It's just like Capetown only 10 times bigger." We both began our careers in IT, we're interested in the online presence of St. John's. We both love music by Ladysmith Black Mombazu and at various times in our lives done road biking, body surfing and capoeira. We sat up in front of the dying fire last night revealing these things to each other one sleepy sentence after another. I think that I will find that there are deeper similarities between us as well, at least I'm hoping so. He spoke about the chaos of 1986 when I mentioned that was about the first time we heard LBM here in the States. It wasn't time to go there, but inevitably I will.

And so in the context of all of the moral analysis I do at Cobb, for what it's worth (and I've been reading Hitchens on Jefferson with my daughter - the power of words can be immense), I wonder what strength our moral reckoning has. Are we exercising liberties that are meaningless in the face of the suffering that goes on in this world? Are our best efforts at making moral stands merely pithy exercises of privilege? How does one from the Apartheid era of South Africa take our moral actions? Why indeed would he come here of all places to serve as a priest?

At this morning's service I offered up a prayer in public for those who do not have heroes, for the undefended, for those who suffer anonymously or off the record. Because I know that Iraqis have defenders, the finest our nation can afford. Not military advisors working through proxies who might murder men and women of the cloth, but our own sworn officers and their dedicated charges fighting in the name of the sort of liberty we would wish upon Iraqis, ready or not. Someone ahead of me whose cousin is in that fight offered up the prayer for our soldiers.

I am looking forward to being local. I didn't know that there was a place in the Valley where I could get great South African food. I didn't think I'd find someone from halfway around the planet who would dig Unomathemba like I do. I didn't know there was a beach called Dungeons where the waves get up to 17 feet off the Cape of Good Hope. This is a good sign. It is indeed a very good sign.

Chaos, Order, Emergence, Evolution & Intelligence

2007-05-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Fisher and I are having a great philosophical and theological discussion and he has hit on a theme that I think requires some digging into. It's an interesting theory that I'm thinking about here which gets into a lot of interesting corners of thought. He says:

At the core of everything all matter is the same. In [fact] at one point all matter is not only identical, but becomes movement in and of itself. Thus there is no fundamental difference between a granite rock and an organic being such as a human.

Now SOMETHING has to organize these completely identical basic components into a rock on the one hand and into a human being on the other.

That something [might] be innate to these components and thus self-organizing, or it might acts upon the components from outside of the components. Whatever it is, it MUST exist.

OK now we're getting deep.

Part of this logic goes directly to the question and theory of Intelligent Design, which I consider to be an interesting if misguided and undisciplined set of arguments for the existence of God which spites the theory of evolution. Firstly, I would say that as a Christian, I disagree that the theory of evolution is heretical. I make that point of disagreement with Dr. Arnn. I don't believe that man will evolve beyond a need for those things which are fundamental to our spirituality, but I understand the fear implied in the idea that mankind might have evolved from apes who have no spirituality. All I can say to that is why did God bring Jesus into the world at that particular moment? If apes needed God in their image, who is to say there is not Jesus of the Apes? And if we evolve beyond what we think of as humanity, who is to say that Jesus' second coming wouldn't be that of some trans-human being? I am not concerned with the idea of the changing or evolving nature of the soul or of intelligence and that is because I do not believe in an anthropomorphic supreme being.

One of the things that leads me into strange waters is based upon my conceptualization of consciousness. When I was an undergrad I read The Mind's I which had a profound effect on my thinking. Indeed what is thought if not computation of some sort, and what are the physical rules of computation? I extrapolated this idea vis a vis Moore's Law once and made the conjecture that God might be the Sun.

Huh? What?

What if the nuclear vibrations of the massive fusion reactions in the Sun made patterns? Some physicist might help me out here, but if all of the nuclear activity of all the atomic particles in the Sun could be thought of as a computer, what kind of compute power would a star have? I'd say it would be infinitely more powerful than the "infinite monkeys" theory. The Sun does indeed absolutely provide for and sustain life on earth, but might it not be a super intelligence which only spends a fraction of its energy doing so?

The conjecture of God as Sun also depends upon a theory of emergent behavior. Ants don't recognize the beauty of the lines they make across the forest floor. They only smell the butt of the ant in front. Humans don't recognize the patterns they make across history, we can't even all speak the same language. (I don't mean to imply Sapir Whorf here, just accounting for dissonance across time and distance). Intelligent behavior is only intelligent when there is intelligence to perceive it. In that regard the morality of human history only makes sense to God. The fate of the city only makes sense in the context of the state. The fate of the one in context to the many.

A robot cannot be a human being because a robot is powered by electricity. It therefore can only simulate hunger, its emotions are of a different character. It needs what it needs but not things that humans need. If humans each had multiple sexual organs we would behave in completely other ways. So one has to be human to interpret human intelligence. Again, this is consistent with Christian ideas about God.

I'll Take Hitchens

2007-05-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Baldilocks gets a bit of dander up over Christopher Hitchens' predictable tirade against the life of Jerry Falwell.

What Hitchens forgets about the only faith-based religion he could be talking about--assuming he ever knew it--is that if faith were not the sole criterion to get into Heaven, then no one could go since no one is capable of not doing wrong whether accidentally or willfully.

Perhaps Hitchens does take this into account but, as many do, finds it easier to believe that there's nothing else but the physical world. Understandable. However, judging from his many tirades against religious persons, especially faith-based Christians, I suspect that Hitchens does believe in the existence of God. And hates His guts.

I've been watching Hitchens closely enough to know that he doesn't hate God, in fact I don't think Hitchens cares whether or not there is a God. And unlike more foolish folks like, Hitchens doesn't bother to try and disprove God's existence. Rather Hitchens is an historian, and a damned good one who has a remarkable memory and candor about man's inhumanity to man. Where Hitch goes off the deep end in when, based on such evidence of evil, religious leaders or followers claim divine inspiration.

Hitchens, I believe, like the most thoughtful philosophical readers of humanity is perplexed by the awesome silence of God. And like most atheists he is absolutely intolerant of the supernatural. This combination makes him fundamentally question the validity of revelation. He is very precise and logical about that condition. I remember enough of my symbolic logic to recall that accepting the truth of a false premise justifies everything. It is a sufficient condition to doubt the truth of claimed revelations which justify any sin or barbarity. One needn't go all the way to God. Logically, one could argue that 99.9% of humans throughout history have been false prophets without denying the existence of God. This would put you exactly in Hitchens shoes as an extreme skeptic.

What Hitchens does not do is go out of his way to denounce spirituality or to hubristically spit in the face of blameless holy men. I doubt you'll find him saying much against the works and deeds of MLK. And it is in that regard that Hitchens is useful completely outside of any religious influence. For if there was ever any unanimity of religious opinion we would be doing our duty to challenge their conclusions a great disservice without a neutral or dissenting party.

From my perspective, I find it a revelation accepted on faith and reason that God created in man a fully developed sense of morality. The tree of knowledge let us know our nakedness and the meaning of our sins. It's not remote controlled. It's a feature of our design. It is a feature of Hitchens' design as well, one he has nourished as we all should. I cannot imagine that Falwell has lived a blameless life, and I don't think that just because he, or anyone, is dead, that they should escape criticism. He was 73 and his death was not some great tragedy, probably less so than MLK's eldest daughter who also died this week at the age of 51. We are right to respectfully debate the political contributions of such people, and I'm not sure that the basis upon which Hitchens would judge Falwell merit the outrage I'm hearing.

Apparently Dobson on Hugh Hweitt's show today was very upset that Hitchens called Falwell a 'toad'. Oh horrors.

Tangentially, yesterday Dennis Prager, who is stumping for Giuliani against the putative conservative majority on the issue of abortion sat for an hour trying to reason with the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. It may well have been Rush Limbaugh who also weighed in on the matter. But this leader suggested very forthrightly that Giuliani would not have his vote if it came down to a choice between him and Hilary Clinton because of Giuliani's position on abortion. My sympathies are with Dennis Prager who is trying to talk sense into Republicans who are having such a difficulty.

But this only illustrates a sentiment that I think has gained legitimacy through the success of the electoral machinations of Karl Rove. I continue to believe that the very notion that the soul of the Republican party is what Hitchens appropriately calls 'Christianist' evangelicals is a myth. That 2% (or whatever) of the American electorate has been motivated to swing the Right way and that may be the critical difference in many states, but don't mistake a swing minority for a core majority.

I do not know how much credit to give Falwell for politicizing evangelical Christianity. Nor do I know exactly how much credit to give political evangelical Christianity for energizing conservatism. But it's clear that conservatism has made Republicans the majority party. Surely Richard Vigeury and Ralph Reed had something to do with it. Surely Newt Gingrich and Lee Atwater had something to do with it. Surely Thomas Sowell and Alan Keyes had something to do with it. Surely Colin Powell and Condi Rice had something to do with it. Surely Richard Sciafe and Rush Limbaugh had something to do with it. Surely Tom DeLay and Trent Lott had something to do with it. Surely Ronald Reagan and Ross Perot had something to do with it. I could go on. My point is all of these folks are not of a piece and they don't all pray the way Falwell did or Hitchens might believe them to.

Despite all of the noise, the principles of Conservatism do not originate whole cloth out of Christianity, evangelical Christianity or Falwell's brand of evangelical Christianity. The more political defense I hear of Falwell, the more annoyed I become.

Oh. And a 'Christianist' is one who thinks politically the way his church tells him God would have him think politically. That is one who is more likely to ask what would my Bishop say, rather than what does the Constitution say. I've mentioned my beef before.

At any rate, there is no question in my mind that Hitchens' irreverence is a net benefit to Western Civ, because despite his pet peeves, even Sharpton could see that Hichens is not on about God so much as he is about false prophets and evil deeds done on the basis of dicey revelation.

Islam vs The Black Church

2007-04-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Reading Mark Steyn's 'America Alone' is an exercise in frustration. He hacks and hacks and won't leave you alone, and the implications of his work are ugly and dangerous and impossible to ignore. It's one of those books where you can only read 20 pages at a sitting and then you want to run out into the streets and pick an intellectual fight.

I have just been under the tear jerking influence of an extraordinary Passion Play done in black under the direction of a crackling minister named Alton Trimble. As well, I have been watching Roots on TV One. I am convinced that there is a vitality to the black family that will persist despite our own dysfunctions and those of our nation. But that doesn't change several important facts about the history of how black politics has contributed to the strength of multiculturalism in America.

Let me say a few things about multiculturalism in America so I can move on to the point. I have written that the best multiculturalism is nothing short of diplomacy, and that's all good. But need to amend this ultimate form and perhaps back off of it to the extent that it subverts nationalism, which I am tending to believe is a price I cannot abide. So for the moment let us conclude that the following is the best that multiculturalism can get.

Class Two - Diversity & Pluralism
Diversity is one step up from PC and makes perfect sense. However it is misapplied as a principle when it's really just a strategy. The value of diversity is that it stands as an indicator of a willingness to make the effort to be inclusive. The best of diversity delivers a kind of robustness, it fortifies an institution by giving disparate groups an interest in its success. But this need be done purposefully with the intention of maintaining that robustness without losing links.

Pluralism is not a consequence of diversity, rather I think it the proper result of a non-chauvinistic secularism in a democratic society. You can have a healthy pluralism without the attempted mutual understanding of diversity. I think they reinforce each other but that they are not the same.

And for my religious conservative Christian defenders and apologists, I don't think we should subvert or disown the free exercise of religion, nor discount the moral rationality of doctrine.

Now to the point. Will the black church defend America given that American Muslims will take the opportunity to demand sharia? That is to say how much black culture and Christianity will resist a spineless multiculturalism that accommodates Islam at every turn?

I say that blackfolks are way too strong and way too deeply ingrained in American life and history to be profoundly persuaded by the visions of Islamists. Despite the fact that blackfolks are comfortable with Muslims among us and that we have strong ties to multicultural politics and we have strong critiques of America, black self-interest cannot and will not be undermined by jihad.

This is a subject I haven't really investigated and there is only one specific episode I can recall there being black commentary. That was the issue of the French laws demanding that Muslim women remove their headscarves in public school. That was a tricky question. I supported Chirac's ban and then I reversed myself. I only considered, in the final analysis, the context of French racism against Algerians. I had not considered the context that Steyn and recent history brings, which is the subversion of the social contract by non-integration and the capitulation of law and tradition brought on by the triumph of multiculturalism over nationalism.

There is no question in my mind that black self-interest is aligned with the American national culture and the American interest. While it is facile today for most black Americans to be against the war they are so primarily because this is "Bush's war" and they are against Bush, but not because they are in trans-cultural sympathy with Islamists. There are black voices who do sympathize with Islamists against the West and America in particular. They are merely political squeaky wheels and like gangsta rappers they are tolerated at a distance. They may delay the final decisions black Americans will make but they will not change our inevitable course, which is patriotic and will stand against creeping Sharia.

Most Americans black or not have yet to recognize how capitulations to Islamic traditions will send waves of conflict through American society if multiculturalism triumphs over nationalism here the way it has in many parts of Europe. But the black church will be a strong conservative force against that multiculturalism and directly against Islam. Stark divisions will arise in black communities as radical Muslims attempt to impress blacks that their cultural ways are superior. Our experience with the Nation of Islam is instructive in that regard. We have already become the transformed nation that swallowed the Negro. We are the new people we had hungered to be, and no sort of Islam is going to change that.

As I watch Roots now 30 years later, I sense the tension in the writing of the about the life of the adult Kunta Kinte as he takes Belle for his bride. Kunta is proud of being an African, Belle rejects being called one despite the fact that Kunta sees her resemblance to his own tribe. She claims three generations of American heritage in opposition. Kunta is a devout Muslim and has spent most of his life trying to escape the plantation, but he chooses family first. It is a deeply symbolic union and it is the beginning of a very deeply felt narrative. All black American men will claim the courage and persistence of Kunta Kinte, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has raised his child to the heavens shortly after their birth. But we also know that it is our bond with the land and the people of America that makes our journey to freedom our own.

Islam has nothing to teach free black Americans about their own liberation.

America: Christian Nation?

2007-04-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

On several occasions as I visited Ofaris, now two long years ago at least, I can recall one particular gent among the conservatives who would consistently defend America as a Christian nation. I've heard the argument before but never so pointedly and often as from this guy. Everything it seemed depended on our recognition of his assertion. I've always been rather uncomfortable with his emphasis although I could certainly see the merit of his position. I've only more recently figured out how to deal with that class of debates.

Though my frat brother JC Phillips was often at the same functions, and familiar with the same arguments I never was quite sure if he was pressing them until he wrote the following:

God made man free and independent. As free men, we must own our bodies, our ideas, and the fruits produced by same. It is upon this concept that we properly define rights and upon this rock America was founded. Rights are those things to which we claim by virtue of simply being human -- by belonging to God – and are therefore things that cannot be granted by other men.

In response to that I wrote a bit offhandedly:

What I'm afraid many Christians, and especially fundamentalists don't understand is how the same inviolability of conclusions can be [derived from] secular philosophy.

He followed up for some clarification and so I turned my full attention to the question of whether America, at its founding was or should be considered a Christian nation.

I think that the secular case for our founding is clear - taxation without representation, and I am not particularly convinced that the founding of the US was an act anointed of God. I am not familiar enough with the case of Israel to say, but I believe that in that case and others, they see their nation existing as it does and where it does as fulfillment of a holy covenant. America, by contrast, was never a 'promised land'.

I do believe, however, that the founding principles of the US were a natural consequence of the understanding of the purposes of man. That is to say this country's founding was exceptional in that the Founders did their level best to assess the nature of man and his needs in the world and organized a nation around the defense of those needs. The concepts of the Rights of Man, thus is central. But I am not so sure that the French were any further off from the truth of those definitions as they overthrew their monarchy. I've yet to hear anyone declare Robespierre as a divinely inspired character or that France is similarly a Christian nation.

I believe that a more comprehensive accounting of the Enlightenment values of democracy, citizenship and inalienable rights will find a combination of secular and inspired sources in their proponents. But I do believe that faith in God was totally integrated into the thinking of many Founders. In fact, I have recently come to appreciate that Christianity's strength is found in its consistent practice in reconciliation with reason. This is something I learned only last year thanks to Benedict and Larry Arnn. So it makes perfect sense to me that the highest form of rational, moral thinking can indeed be considered Christian and divinely inspired. God inspires men to think. I do indeed trust in American theodicy, but I don't believe it to be an exclusive parent of our rights. Further I do not believe that patriotism is the full and final expression of our souls.

With regard to our contemporary dilemmas, I think it is facile to suggest that our devotion to the life of Christ is near enough to those so inspired in history (William Wilberforce comes to mind) to argue that our faith will defend such founding principles as rigorously as their faith did. We therefore must depend on the constancy of atheists, heathens and even imbeciles to their unreflective self-interests as well as the thoughtful defenses of our nation that come from non-religious study. Christians may desire America to be a Christian nation but if today's American Christians were the only defenders of our core principles, we would be in poor shape indeed. In this I am constantly reminded of the life and efforts of John Brown who stands above all in my thinking as the model Christian of his time. He clearly saw what his fellow Christians did not, which was the inherent corrosion of a nation with a double standard for inalienable rights, citizenship and democracy. And while I don't now doubt that the Founders recognized the extent to which their vision was compromised by the reality of slavery, none of them stands as tall as a divinely inspired operator as does John Brown, Harriett Tubman or Sojourner Truth. So this is an indictment of the failings of Christians to their earthly duty in understanding and defense of the Rights of Man even as they are divinely inspired. Even as we are called, as I was yesterday, to Worship, Glorify and Praise the Holy Name of Jesus, I am acutely aware of how little patriotic sacrifice is demanded of us from the pulpit. God inspires us to think but do we think hard enough to be considered worthy?

My reading of the accounts of "The God of Nature" is that thoughtful men of the period did indeed grasp the profundity of creation and I believe most felt morally obligated to understand the workings of nature. My details are kind of sketchy on this as my best references are 'Master & Commander' and Stephenson's excellent Baroque Series, both fictional works of verisimilitude. I see the accommodation of Christianity to scientific discovery as a form of revelation. Think of it this way, today when we bless our meals, we know that they contain vitamins and minerals essential to our health, it even gives us more reasons to be thankful. We would be foolish to thank God for Twinkies. (I guess). My point is that I don't see any fundamental conflict between Christian faith and reason. The Church accommodates and grows as it must with the growth of knowledge and still the core of faith remains. We believe that our ethics are constrained, but not our knowledge, and so this is why we conflict with radical Islam, which forces its adherents to be circumscribed and defined as souls in submission to an absolutely arbitrary God, a God who might defy nature, a God who might black out the Sun tomorrow for no humanly comprehensible reason. If we must respond to an arbitrary God who would defy nature and the world, then there are no reasons for good works in the world, all we could do is worship, glorify and praise the name of God, and what do worldly things matter?

So I think I may have shown the parallel between religious fundamentalists who would claim that all man can and should be is a vessel for worship. God could just as easily worship Himself were that all we could be. Why bother with Creation? Why make us apart from dumb animals? God could look in the mirror and give Himself perfect worship and not be bothered with the Universe at all. Instead God created the Universe and set us on a path of discovery, and that righteous path will lead us back to Him, and I think we have galaxies to conquer before that journey is complete, and yet in all our ignorance we can still feel close to God. We can still know, down to the smallest most insignificant act, which direction is towards Good and which is towards Evil. In that we are profoundly blessed. Because no matter how small our life and efforts, we can still know the love of God.

America is different from a nation of worshipers and its greatness as a nation in the affairs of the world does not owe from the piety of its Christians. It is from our freedom to engage the world and our experience of the life of liberty that gives us the knowhow and wherewithal to be an agent for positive change. I think the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her choice to become an American is ample and adequate testimony to that, as are the lives of millions of other immigrants who have had to undergo no religious conversion to recognize and respect what it is great about America.

America needs the devotion of all its citizens engaged morally in issues of liberty and freedom in a tradition not only established by the founders, and not only by Christians. We need to be a nation dedicated to the purposes of a continuing defense of liberty for ourselves and for the world. If Christian charity motivates you towards that end, fine. I expect that conservative Christians engaged in the moral issues of the nation will understand these things implicitly or come to very fine conclusions in their study of Natural Law; I support that tradition and I admire it. I don't think that is the only way to discover the truth about what's great in America and I hope that those who may be put off by a shallow understanding of this tradition get their heads on straight about it. As I tend to say, it's about do not about be.

The Current and Future Black Church

2007-02-18T11:57:00.000-08:00

Ahh the Black Church. What a huge subject. Let's dive in.

The Spousal Unit and I are dealing with our issues of traditions. I like angelic choirs and organ fugues, she likes rocking gospel and tambourines. We both love God but we cannot find a house with the right flavor. We have both experienced the humiliation and embarrassment of watching each other be uncomfortable and alienated in the other's house of worship. I think that our petty differences serve to illustrate something of the alienation of many people from Church and it brings me close to some fundamental questions that I have decided to deal with at length during this period of my life. It is not the cause, but a serious reason for me to undertake matters of theology.

It was therefore providential that at the last minute, the topic of debate for my episode of 'Black Men Revealed' was switched to 'Why Black Men Don't Church'. While I would much rather have talked about politics or culture I had to deal with how I thought other black men deal with such matters of the spirit in relation to the Black Church.

I'm Episcopalian. There aren't many black Episcopalians, but the Anglican Church is ascendant in Africa, and the number two man in the Episcopal Church (which we often refer to as the Body of Christ), the Archbishop of York, is too African. As with every other branch of Christianity, what Africans bring to worship ultimately changes the character of church. Churches change. Christ remains the same. How do we reconcile the two?

When we talked about this, my wife and I, she said something that I think very well exemplifies the problems of the Black Church. At least, I can get my head around it. I'd like to share that insight with you and kick off a bunch of discussion. But first let me give you one of my overriding concerns.

The biggest concern I have with Christian Churches are their flexibility. I can't explain exactly how it makes me feel (other than awful) to read Bible verses today in something other than the King James Version. So I don't. I grew up getting gold stars first in Bible School, by memorizing the denotation and the connotation of Bible verses. I did so in the Foursquare Church, which was a Pentacostal Evangelical sect of Christianity. Everything I knew about God, and I was a precocious little twerp, meant people getting the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues, dancing all over, faith healing and the whole kinetic experience. My Bible was a black leather King James red letter edition with a zipper that had a cross on it. That was, unquestionably, The Word of GOD! The same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

And then I went to Catholic School.

So who was this Virgin Mary, and how come we didn't talk to Jesus any more? What are these Stations of the Cross and what is Confession all about? I asked every question and I got every answer and I realized there was more to God than I had ever known. Because if God could accept these Catholics into his Heavenly Kingdom, there are more ways to God than I could ever believe possible. And I watched Catholics writhe and pain at the passage of Vatican II, and lament the fact that Mass was said in English instead of Latin. And I freaked out when they said the Lord's Prayer with different words. These things were happening at the same time that President Nixon was being kicked out of office and air raid drills rang out every first Friday at 10am. The world was upside down, and they even changed the Bible.

How could all of God's people be so misled when deep down in their hearts they wanted to be faithful? How could an entire church be wrong? How could a minister, oops I mean priest be wrong? The Catholics had an answer that satisfied me in the definition of a Sacrament. A Sacrament is an outward expression of an inward commitment. Suddenly I understood that it was the inward commitment to God that mattered most. Churches could change, Bibles could change, prayers could change, but one's love for God and God's love could never change. Church then, is all about getting you to that moment. To quiet your mind and open up your heart to be at one with the Holy Trinity.

I can't know that this is what brings other people to tears as it does to me when I write it. But that beauty and peacefulness of the Spirit is here with me now as I do. It's difficult for me to understand why everybody wouldn't want that same blessing. But I know that people don't. I acknowledge that there are many different traditions that get different people to that holy moment, those moments of numinous oneness with God. And so when we are brought to speak about black people, we must know that amongst all of us those differences are real. Which brings me to the Spousal Unit.

She says that the problem facing the Black Church is what to do with young people. She knows as we all know that there are far too many blackfolks who need God in a desperate way, but are not getting churched. And she says that the Church is struggling with that mightily.

When I was a child, she said, it was inconceivable that some kid with baggy pants, sneakers, football jersey, gold chain and a baseball hat could come into Church. "You don't come in here looking like that." And therein lies the paradox because this is the child who needs church most. Because they don't have spritual guidance and they don't have decent community and they don't have people they can trust when America doesn't have their back. These are the people, she said, that we are losing. And that is the core dilemma faced by black Churches. Do they take these people in as they are? Do they change the music to attract them? Do they change the way Church is done to accommodate the sinner? How does the black minister of today appeal to the black youth of today? What difference does it make?

I'm conservative. I think the Catholic Church is more conservative than the Episcopal Church and I have half a mind to switch to it. I do so because I want my church to be unchanging as God. I want to feel conformed with the infinite in the company of men and women who feel the same. For me that means ritual. I can meditate and pray and reach God when I feel like it. I don't need church for that. I need church for those other things - to reach that holy moment in communion with others. So for me the very idea of changing any church for the sake of black youth or Serbian grandmothers or Chinese farmers or Malaysian miners is crazy foolish in the extreme. Church isn't supposed to change for you, church is supposed to change you. And yet I acknowledge and recognize that every church is different. God gets through.

When it comes to the Black Church, the dilemma then is who should initiate the change. Given that change is inevitable and that the church will reflect the desires of the people to express themselves as they do, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Who picks which version of the Bible? Who says whom is certified to be a minister? All these things are changing dynamically in African America. People here in Los Angeles are going to church where the Lakers used to play basketball. In my world, that's unthinkable. But it's real. By the thousands it's real. Church is marketed. Congregations are target markets. Reaching out with the Word means reaching the masses, by radio, by television, by podcast, by email, by video game. Have it your way. Why not?

The Conservative in me says that something is amiss. There is something about the harvesting of souls that's not quite right. The fishers of men are using huge nets and dumping all of the souls on the decks to be processed.

My indictment goes to the minister who does not have a sect. I see nothing wrong with the storefront church. Every ministry starts somewhere. But I have a hard time understanding where the Methodists disagree with the Mormons or the Baptists with the Anabaptist and the Presbyterians with the Seventh Day Adventists. I have a hard time understanding how these Protestant traditions are losing ground to today's Faith Domes. I have a hard time understanding how the institution of the black church is changing and why and which direction it is headed.

I understand that the Black Church has been overloaded with responsibilities it alone shouldered in the days before civil rights. I understand that a great deal of black tradition has been lost to integration, that our freedom and empowerment to employ mainstream institutions has weakened and specialized the Black Church to be little more than a church. Where it once might have been a school and a political organization and a graveyard, blacks can now use the public facilities.

But is the Black Church on the right track? Are the traditions growing stronger or is it all a New Jack thing? What's the difference? Is that old time religion good enough for anyone? On the whole are blacks closer to God because of the Black Church or is black America losing spiritual ground? I think there is a looming crisis. What is the institutional future? Is it bright? If not, what is to be done?

Darwin & The Emergent Soul

2007-01-07T22:58:00.000-08:00

I'm finding a world to talk about in the wake of Larry Arnn's shout outs on the Hewitt Show. There are at least six or seven new ideas I'm considering. This is one briefly.

I think Arnn is in error to be concerned about the evolution of man. More specifically, I think he draws an incorrect inference from the theory of evolution. He says that if man is not perfect and unchanging, then the soul is not either. I think he seeks something fixed about knowledge and man's capacity to know that is somewhat 'presentist'.

I think that the spirit or the soul of mankind is a vessel for the divine in ways not fully comprehensible. However the ways and means of salvation and of moral thinking are relatively easy. If one takes it for granted that God is an infinite being, then nothing of God's is threatened by the infinite increase of man. Which is to say so long as God pushed the button that started this universe, he will always be greater. Given the glacially slow pace of evolution and the indefinite size of the human soul, there is nothing to suggest that our being a being in transition alters our ability or capacity to recognize God's message.

If Arnn suggests that theology and revelation doesn't improve, then there may be a problem. I'm not sure he does, but I do wonder why he worries about the evolution of the soul.

One does have to wonder, if one is not an Historicist, as Arnn claims not to be why God chose to send Jesus at that particular moment in human history. Why not in the time of Abraham? Why not before? Why not 5,000 years from now? And who's to say Jesus is singular? I'm sure that Acquinas must have wrestled with that one...

I find it difficult to square with the idea of the infinite God, that a changing set of hardware specs for the human animal would make the operating system of the soul obsolete. If so, I think God would think nothing of adding yet another holy service patch for us to download.

The Nativity

2006-12-23T23:04:00.000-08:00

The Nativity is a film which goes just far enough from the hokey to be satisfyingly profound. It's a nicely rounded period film that doesn't try too hard to be documentarily authentic, but gives just enough detail to get you right into the story. I think this one will stand the test of time.

The strengths of the film are obvious. It is the story of Mary and Joseph told very well, and it makes one appreciate exactly what kind of tribulations he faced as a young betrothed husband. I think nobody has quite appreciated Joseph as has this director. Similarly the actress portraying Mary demonstrates her fragility and humble simplicity. It is something of a breakthrough portrait of the Blessed Virgin. Films always approach them as if they are completely dumbfounded by what is about to happen or strangely calm and precient, full of capital D Dignity. In this film the right balance is struck. Their dignity and strength comes from their simple honor in the ways that simple folk must honor social traditions. They face the extraordinary burden in the way that people must; all you know is that by doing right by your family and community you must have faith that you can bear up. You give it your all. In this Joseph has a great line in the film 'I will give my all to protect your daughter and her child'. There is little more you can ask of a good man.

Director Catherine Hardwicke has a straightforward yet deft touch and there is a little something extra in every scene with the Magi. But nothing quite compares to their expressions when they come to present gifts at the manger. It is, for all its predictability, a scene that defies dry eyes.

It is hard to explain.

You see there is, in my filmic vocabulary and experience, almost nothing to compare such a scene of divine reverence. You don't see acting like this precisely because you don't see stories in which wise men are humbled by the realization of a prophesy. No matter how many times you have heard the phrase 'king of kings', I swear that you've never seen it acted like this.

So the last time I got this weepy at a film, it was the battle scene in Kurosawa's Ran. Well that was just a couple months ago. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but this film was an emotional experience for me, especially since I saw it with my brothers and some of their kids. My mother was there too and the 11 of us took up an entire row at the theatre.

It's a very good film that moves along well. There's a great deal to see and talk about in this film although the dialog gets fairly sparse sometimes. It dips very shallowly into some hokum but more than redeems itself with some stunning honesty, insight and gravity on the Holy Story. I highly recommend this for families and kids over 10, with qualifications for those who might not quite understand the dilemma of a virgin birth.

Very good film.

My Bar Mitzvah

2006-12-16T23:07:00.000-08:00

One of the boisterous boys that Boy hangs out with carried the Torah around the congregation today for the first time. It was also a first for me, the first time I'd attended a Jewish ceremony. It left me with several interesting impressions.

The first thing I noticed about today's Shabbat was the number and frequency with which the congregation gives praise to God. In the 2.5 hours I attended, with my head covered in reverence to the presense of the Almighty, I could almost recite Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha'olam oseh ma'aseh vereshit. Already the rhythm of that incantation is lost to me, but I'm sure that I could pick it up within a few minutes of hearing it again at another service.

I'm struck, as most folks probably stereotypically are, at the arcanity of the rites which are certainly deeply known to the devout and yet almost entirely unknown to the rest of us. We know something happens in Temple. We know our Jewish friends are different somehow (If we know they are practicing Jews), but what it is we don't quite know, until we go. What struck me was the offhandedness with which much of it is referred. I asked a co-worker last week what might be considered an appropriate gift for this ceremony and he sounded completely dismissive when he suggested a videogame. I tend to believe this is a subtlety, perhaps even a defense mechanism I have never recognized before.

I love the interplay between the rabbi as celebrant and the Cantor and the extent to which they call and respond in bumpy unison with the congregation. I am intrigued by the calling to the people by the rabbi when he teaches the lesson of the day. What did Joseph do next, and why was Jacob's withdrawal from criticism of his vision important?

There was little surprise at the reverence paid the Torah itself and not much of a revelation in how much Hebrew shares in common with Arabic. The standing and sitting on cue as well as reciting from the prayer book was perfectly familiar.

The extent to which the expression of worship is literal was underscored to me, and also the extent to which Jews take their example to the world seriously. Both of these qualities were enormously refreshing to me. There is more than sentiment at work with their affections towards Israel and a great deal of confidence expressed in their choice to take what their faith offers. It's something I would expect to find much parallel agreement to the comments of the Pope this year as regards the putative coercion of Islam. As well, these Jews take very seriously their integration with the West, with the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Somewhere in my universe are 613 commandments. Undiscovered, undeclared perhaps, but awaiting discovery in my lifelong call to living in light. It is good to know I have brothers

Desert Island Islam

2006-10-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

In approaching Mark Steyn's opus America Alone, I considered for a moment the idea of the 'Clash of Civilizations'. I don't think matters are so dire, but a lot of it depends upon some issues of technology transfer and longevity.

We've recently noted vis a vis Operation Paperclip (is Germany a nuclear nation?) that a significant field day was had for American business in the wake of the WW2 victory. A huge amount of intellectual property was made available to the public domain, or cheaply, after which mumblings of 'plastics' became commonplace in the post-war era. Aside from that, I previously noted that advances in American catalytic cracking made the Allied supply of gasoline more plentiful and cheap, and that helped literally drive Patton to VE.

While mumbling to myself, self-satisfied that I am not one of the retards that the CT folks concern themselves about, I considered what I have prior to 9/11 considered positive about Islam. It was some incident about not saluting the American flag or standing for the pledge of allegiance that got some NBA baller in trouble. I liked his fidelity to his religious discipline and that he felt an obligation to sacrament, an outer expression of an inner commitment. But there was no question that his discipline was out of step and alienating to American society. The difficulty with interpreting that is that generically, one is inclined to say that the American society is wrong, but I differ. The strength of American society is its unique inclusiveness, and openness. To no be inclusive, to not be open, to not subject oneself to the scrutiny and critique of the mainstream is to, by definition, be anti-social. And this is how Islam runs afoul of open society, it requires a conformity which is alienating. There is no clearer example of this than the matter of Hijab, which places women apart from society, hides them away from the crowd. I am reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's 'Book' in which she says that the greatest thing about coming home to America from being abroad is her ability to go incognegro, to become one with the crowds in the streets of New York and be an ordinary person and not a standout. I think very much of this when I speak of the modernity of the West, our interchangeability and the necessary amount of assimilation required of us to live with each other in harmony. It is a necessary component of Western equality, and very much in line with Baldwin's edict of nakedness. To that end I said:

We all carry the poetry of our souls into our conversations and debates. Additionally we carry our experiences into our decision making. We will always have to translate nuance are resist the temptation to immerse everything that really informs us in our favorite metaphors. We can't apply Malcolm's rhetoric to Lebanon. We can't describe house Israelis and field Israelis. The only way communication across cultures and boundaries works is with just a little bit of flavor. You have to strip down and be naked. One thing I truly believe is the premise of modernism - that we can strip down and be naked and that in that nakedness our humanity can be seen. That when we put on the old clothes of old arguments and metaphors we become stereotypical. Our opportunity to assert brotherhood comes from that willingness to occasionally show our asses and in that effort we all can admit at bottom we are the same.

But very little of this applies to a desert island. If I were lost on a desert island with 500 or so people, I would not be so interested in encouraging diversity. I would want to discipline the ways of living to a spiritual anchor. I would want the system to be spartan and focused on the efficient survival of my people. I would want all the stories to relate back to us, I would have much less tolerance for dissent. I would cultivate intense personal relationships, I would imbue the simplest tasks with great meaning. If the desert island grew poppies, I would probably be in the Holy Opium business.

When Mark Steyn goes there, suggesting as I think he does, that Europe is in trouble and thus the West is in trouble, there is this to consider. Does a desert island mentality work in a large society? Is Islam actually scalable? Could Sharia handle Enron? If the Caliphate were to be established, who would control the patents on electric turbine generators? Would they end up in the hands of publicly traded companies and be open to search on the web?

Europe gets old and we all get old, and we all live long and most notably our childhoods are very long. We in America have absolutely no faith in the wisdom of 18 year old women having babies; we know for a fact that they forgo the opportunity to learn what is learnable in college - they become pegged into a lower socio-economic rung in our large and complex society. You practically need a masters degree to understand anything of significance, like where your electricity actually comes from and whether EC85 is actually a cheaper and more sustainable fuel than other alternatives. Not to mention what kind of job you need to be able to purchase a hybrid vehicle. If you're on a desert island none of these things matter. But on this planet which has evolved human intelligence there's a whole lot of history, technology and culture to be understood and communicated. History is never going to get smaller. If you think about the scope of humanity, openness is required.

So there's something to the notion that what we've created in America is useful. I think we understand better than most people the scope and breadth of human experience. We know that in order to allow all of these ideas to benefit the people, that they must be open to the people, and we have to let the people experiment and try to make use of them.

If you believe, as I do, that the long arm of history bends towards justice, then doing well by the people will ultimately win. That means that the banks will have to stay open and the courts will still have to uphold contracts, that the patent office has to share information and that public education remains good enough and cheap enough. It requires that we be pro-social and open and modern. That is the challenge that we face equally whether we are muslims or not.

Loving God More Than Loving Me

2006-09-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

After Cobb, where? Well, to Lucifer Jones. But that may not be until I'm in my 50s at this rate. I'm going to have to be done with a great number of family/community/political work before I can get too deeply into those matters. Getting and spending requires focus, and I don't have all that right now. Nevertheless, I was asked if I love God more than myself or my family? Hmmm...

The priesthood has a very difficult task, which is to reconcile their interpretations of the divine with their understanding of human needs. How do you dumb down the Infinite and put human beings into the middle of it such that their core moral values are lined up with what any priest or Church says is God's Will? Very difficult indeed, especially when human knowledge ebbs and flows.

If you take it as a given that God is indeed Infinite, then you have embodied in the mind of God, all the laws of the Universe - the very order of everything, whether or not we humans are able to understand it. God is purpose. God is the purpose of the universe. God is the source of human capacity to understand the Universe, such as we can, such as it is. So loving God is a difficult proposition. Unless you anthropomorphize God, you cannot 'love' God in anyway like you would love a human being.

Of all the jobs the priesthood has, invoking God's name to call the people to worship seems like the easiest. What is entailed in worship... ah there's the rub. If one worships God by serving his purposes, there are certainly different abilities of humans to do so which other humans (and presumeably God) is aware. If God's purpose, as described by The New Covenant of Jesus, is transparent to humanity, then it is very unlikely that you could fool humans and decieve God at the same time. In other words, since we are commanded to love our neighbor, we could not love them falsely. Our neighbors would be able to correctly percieve our love with the same facility as God would judge our love of them. This is a very key thing. If love was embodied in the gift of a red rose, then it is important that God gave us all equal facilities to see that the rose was indeed red. Otherwise how could we spread the Gospel? My entire point here is that I am asserting that human beings must have the same facility for interpretation of love and good and evil as God would have. We couldn't arrive at different conclusions; this is utterly fundamental and the meaning of the Tree of Knowledge which kicks off Genesis. We do know.

But certainly the love we owe God is different than the love we owe each other. Certainly we should demonstrate it in different ways. Isn't much of human love in the form of mercantilist self-sacrifice? We give to others out of our pockets, out of our own expense. We take time from our own lives and give it to others as an expression of love. But surely God doesn't need anything from our pockets. God doesn't need our time. He owns time, he is time.

Here's where it gets ambiguous.

I am not an evangelist, but I clearly understand that it serves the Church to give glory and honor to God in your earthly works. By loving your neighbor, by doing the God-given red rose, you are showing the kind of universally understood love that God and humans understand. Is that showing the love of God if you don't say so? If you anonymously donate a million dollars to the victims of a tsunami, is it less worthy in the eyes of God if you don't send it in an envelope that says 'In the name of Jesus, only Son of the Father'?

Are we to be evangelists at all times? Are we press flacks for the God Corporation? Does God need marketing? Is prayer answered if silent?

I have concluded that we know implicitly when we are serving God and when we are not, whether or not there is a Church or a priest involved. It only takes a moment's reflection - it must be something very close to our biology, the very idea of God spontaneous within us. If indeed we all have souls, then our understanding of good and evil must be like our understanding of fear, hunger, laughter and music.

At this point in my life I have answered some questions about being selfish, in terms of knowing what I need to maintain my own integrity and spirit. The same things that keep my head up are about my existentials. Am I being the kind of person worthy of my powers and abilities? Do I have enough power and ability to achieve the kinds of goals I wish to pursue? Are those goals worthwhile? These are introspective questions against my own soul and the value of my life. I try to be conservative and pay attention to those things that I might change and I shape my ambition to get in position. I am moving towards doing greater things with and for my neighbors, to improve things. If I'm not, then all the writing I've done at Cobb is empty sophistry and matters not whether nobody reads it but God.

So I will make the selfish and perhaps self-serving statement that God does indeed understand and bless my purposes. I do so without the assistance of the priesthood, which in fact I'd rather have and will most assuredly seek later in life. My love for myself is conditional upon my ability to achieve those goals and discipline myself to their noble purposes, but I defend myself at the expense of a more communitarian altruism. I'm not handing out red roses to everyone I meet, but engineering a Rose Bowl, and to the extent that I am not loving my neighbor on a daily basis in my garrett, I hope to compensate for with the size of my ultimate gift - or die trying.

I am aware that this is the cop-out of every tyrant, God understands me. I'll have a better explanation when I actually do become Lucifer Jones.

To Act Against Reason

2006-09-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

OK now I'm going to revert. The reason is because in about 90 seconds, on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Father Richard John Neuhaus has not only clarified the entire context of Benedict's Regenberg Lecture, but demolished a fallacy I thought Christians in America have obsessed over for years.

The kernel of this axiom asserted by the Pope is this:

To act against reason is to act against the nature of God.

And Neuhaus continues..

That religion and particularly Christianity presents itself on the basis of reasonable truth claims that are to be engaged and to be presented as persuasively as possible in a reasonable manner. His lecture at the Regensberg University was directed chiefly against ideological secularists on the one hand who want to radically divide faith and reason and directed against Christian thinkers who want to assert a kind of pure Biblical Christianity against the great achievement which is the synthesis of Greek philosphy and revealed truth. So those were the primary audiences. Along the way, and this is what got all the news attention, he asked the question whether or not there is not a fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam on precisely this point. Whether Islam's understaning of God who is a god who is disengaged from what we mean by reason. A god who is radically sovereign, radically transcendent and whose will is exactly what he declares his will to be no matter how arbitrary or capricious. That Allah could even command that you worship idols and you would be obliged to worship idols.

So he is asking a question whether there is a difference and is it an insurmountable difference...between the Christian understanding, that as the first verse of the prologue to the Gospel of John says: en arche en logos in the Greek. In the beginning was the logos, in the beginning was the word, and logos means also reason, and therefore there could be no place in religion, in authentic religion, Christian, Islamic or other for the use of violence.

That was the question he was posing. And of course unfortunately, the response, the reaction of much of the Islamic world simply confirmed the worst of the possible answers to that question. Namely, you say we're violent and we'll kill you for saying we're violent. This I think means that this statement in Regensberg, will in retrospect be looked back upon as a benchmark in which certainly in the most important statement by a world figure since 9/11 with regard to what may be the biggest single question facing Western civilization in the next century. And it turns out finally to be a theological and philosophical question about the nature of God.

Just wow. I came out of college as one of those ideological secularists (thanks to Ayn Rand), which I remained until I came to understand religion as a fundamental civilizing pedagogy thanks to Ishmael Reed. At that point I claimed polytheism in order to embrace the multiple sources of moral agency across human history. I did so not realizing that the theology of Christianity had resolved this (or even addressed it). Nevertheless, later in reading Cornel West's "American Evasion of Philosophy", I came to recognize the nexus of what he calls 'Emersonian Theocidy' and agreed that some very fundamental ideas about God and America were self-reinfocing, and thus began a new level of patriotism. But Neuhaus cites the opening of the Gospel of John, one of the only passages of the Bible that I've ever really made an attempt to memorize. And yet in all that memorization, I failed to understand the implications. I have to say this is truly a remarkable day for me in faith because for so many years I have been engaged in debate about faith vs reason.

This is fabulous and timely. I wonder what it is I need to do to be able to get to this kind of theology on a regular basis. I'm completely jazzed. For me it goes back to what I've been asserting, and by doing so thinking I have been angling away from Christianity as preached here. Here's the best way I put it before:

The priesthood has a very difficult task, which is to reconcile their interpretations of the divine with their understanding of human needs. How do you dumb down the Infinite and put human beings into the middle of it such that their core moral values are lined up with what any priest or Church says is God's Will? Very difficult indeed, especially when human knowledge ebbs and flows.

If you take it as a given that God is indeed Infinite, then you have embodied in the mind of God, all the laws of the Universe - the very order of everything, whether or not we humans are able to understand it. God is purpose. God is the purpose of the universe. God is the source of human capacity to understand the Universe, such as we can, such as it is. So loving God is a difficult proposition. Unless you anthropomorphize God, you cannot 'love' God in anyway like you would love a human being.

Of all the jobs the priesthood has, invoking God's name to call the people to worship seems like the easiest. What is entailed in worship... ah there's the rub. If one worships God by serving his purposes, there are certainly different abilities of humans to do so which other humans (and presumeably God) is aware. If God's purpose, as described by The New Covenant of Jesus, is transparent to humanity, then it is very unlikely that you could fool humans and decieve God at the same time. In other words, since we are commanded to love our neighbor, we could not love them falsely. Our neighbors would be able to correctly percieve our love with the same facility as God would judge our love of them. This is a very key thing. If love was embodied in the gift of a red rose, then it is important that God gave us all equal facilities to see that the rose was indeed red. Otherwise how could we spread the Gospel? My entire point here is that I am asserting that human beings must have the same facility for interpretation of love and good and evil as God would have. We couldn't arrive at different conclusions; this is utterly fundamental and the meaning of the Tree of Knowledge which kicks off Genesis. We do know.

Neuhaus also says the enemy is Jihadism, and he recommend some books. This is absolutely amazing stuff. The synthesis of Greek philosophy and revealed truth is a fundamental element of modern Christianity. I should know this, but I've never heard it said that way. The implications are enormous, but most importantly and most directly Neuhaus is dead on with regard to what Benedict has put out there. Where muslim clerics stand on this is going to be telling for a long time to come. This, plus a better understanding to the two streams of Jihadism, the Salafist and the Khomenist will go a long way in determining the proper shape of this ideological conflict.

But do you think it will stop Lefties from blaming everything on Bush? Hmmm.

Why Black Men Don't Church

2006-09-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

It turns out that my topic has been switched. Instead of talking about black male myths, I'll be talking about something akin to a black male fact, which I can only come at from a personal angle. This fact? Black men ain't at church on Sunday, at least not with the frequency and regularity of black women.

I can only speculate as to why, but I'll give you several semi-serious reasons and excuses that black men like me have difficulties with being in church every Sunday.

The Personal Reasons
These are the reasons I think I share with a lot of brothers, some of them admittedly trifling, but I'm telling you honestly what goes through a mind that's in bed on a Sunday morning.

You Can't Preach
My number one reason for avoiding church is the low quality of the oration of some of the preachers out there. How many times have I heard ministers drone on and on about Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus and how we must make our own transformations and leave our prior lives behind? How many times have I heard ministers talk about their own temptations and how they were worthless sinners and skirt chasers and how all us men are dogs like they used to be? How many times have I had to sit through the junior minister stumbling or the guest pastor from out of town.

It's My Money
Yeah that's right, and guess what? God doesn't need my money. The Church needs my money. They've always needed my money and they've always tried to convince me that God wants me to give it to them. I've been praying to Jesus since I was 8 years old and never once has He told me, "can you help a brotha out?" I understand that I owe something to my less fortunate brothers, but I'll be damned (I guess so) before I give it to a minister who drives a better car than me. I don't mind supporting ministries, but I've got my priorities.

It's My Day Off
A brother works hard all week long. Now if I could go to Church at 10am and be done at 11am, I'd be fine. But you know and I know some ministers act like we have nothing else to do all day Sunday. OK I understand that you slaved over a hot desk working on that sermon all week and you just can't wait to rock our worlds with your message, but uhm... some of us are just checking in.

Church is Just Church
And I've got options. Now I could envision one day, perhaps after I have paid my debt to society and get out of jail and don't have a job or any friends or anyone who trusts me, I will be in church all the time. I'll come on Sunday, and I'll hang around and eat all the cookies, and I'll stare lovingly at the homely single women in their 40s, and I'll be back for Bible Study. And I'll come on the day we read to the shut-ins, and I'll volunteer to drive the church bus. I'll always help put away the chairs in the parish hall and I'll straighten out all the fliers on the bulletin board. But until then I actually do have a busy life to enjoy that centers around my family and community, not church. I got places to go and things to do.

The Sectarian Reasons
I've got some sectarian reasons too. See I grew up going to Catholic School and was confirmed Episcopalian. So although I have also gone deep into the black protestant tradition, me and evangelicals have issues. These have become a great deal more important to me than I ever thought they'd be, and it's somewhat surprising to me that I feel them with some passionate depth. The first two are very important, the others.. well I'm just being partisan and persnickety.

Spontaneaity vs Tradition
One of the deepest spiritual moments in my life came to me as I visited the cathedral in Milan, Il Duomo. I was just in time for morning chapel service which was being held behind the main altar. Being a kid of Vatican II, I could only vaguely understand the words of the traditional Latin mass. But structurally I knew everything that was going on. And I felt immediately and intimately connected to a tradition hundreds of years old in a massive church halfway around the world.

We all know that Jesus said that when two or three are gathered together in prayer that He would be in our midst. So anywhere and everywhere can be 'church', including a park bench or the little storefront. But what makes church extraordinary is the service, the Mass, the Rite. I want ritual and reverence. I want my religion to be old time, unchanging and static against the unpredictability of this world. When I walk in the door I want to know exactly what to expect. I want to know all the songs, all the words, all the movements. I want a calendar that says this is the second Sunday of Advent, this is the Bible verse and lesson for this week.

I can get this in the Black Church, and AME does it well, but straight black Anglican does it best. And I am pleased to see conservative Africans in the Anglican Church making their presense known and felt, but I'm getting off on a tangent. Most black churches, however tend to be much more spontaneous.

No Communion
There are people who really do get spiritual sustenance from hearing the music or the preaching. I don't know how they do it. I am renewed without fail, without fail I say, by recieving the sacrament of His precious body and blood. Without the Eucharist, church is just a bunch of people. I'm sorry.

Alter Call
I have been to some extraordinary services in which the minister has such a loving and empathetic presence that you just want him to touch you. It's something you can tell within the first few paragraphs of their sermons. And when they wind up, you cannot wait to get up front and get a taste of God's power flowing through him. I particularly remember one like this at St. Paul's AME in Cambridge, MA and the woman who ministers at Church of the Advent in LA on Adams Blvd. But some ministers simply cannot swing it. They just never hit the right note and it sounds like begging. That's embarassing.

Revving up the Spirit
Have you ever sat in Church and it's hot and nobody is really catching the spirit and the minister just won't quit? I mean this is just like a hiphop concert and the dude on stage is telling me to make some noise. No brother, I came here for you to deliver your words unto me. Not for me to stroke your ego by making some noise. Sorry but I'm not jumping up and down for you.

Golf
Need I say more?

The Single Man's Reasons
Church is society too. When I was single my reasons for going to church, and not going to church were different than they are now. I think you'll find some of these resonating with you. But let's make it explicit. I'm talking about going to black churches in search of black women. There are reasons to go, and there are reasons to stay away.

The Soul Patrol
You all know what happens the first time you go to church with your new girl. You're a visitor. Stand up. Oh you're a nice looking young man, we hope to see you again. Then they process you. You get the forms and the schedule and scrutiny. Everybody is after your soul. Is this going to be your new church home? You know we can use a stand-up brother like yourself. You don't drink alcohol do you?

Then if you come back a second time, you all must be serious. People start hinting at marriage and telling you about her old boyfriend. Plus you know that your girl is subjecting you to all this to pull you in. It's part of the grand scheme. Basically, you can't 'just' go to church. Because if your girl and your church aren't both a match, it's downhill.

Talent / No Talent
Now I'm going to admit it and you might as well admit it too. If you don't have a girl, church can be a pretty good place to find one. Especially if there's a wedding or it's Easter or some special occasion. In the Cobb MBA Program (master of babe acquisition), Rule 23 states:
If you have to go to church on a babe hunt, don't go on an ordinary Sunday. All you'll find on an ordinary Sunday are Church Girls. They have no life and they will suck you into their emptiness. Go on Easter, go at Christmas, go to weddings. That's when the Church Girls can convince their more interesting girlfriends that *you* are going to be there. Don't disappoint them.
It only takes a minute to fall in love. But it takes less than that to know when there is no talent. I mean we pretend that there are possibilities but some churches just... well I think you know how blunt is the brunt of my implication.

I Was Out Really Late Last Night
So the 8:00 service is out of the question. So I lay down and stare at the cieling as it spins. Hmm. Maybe 10:30 service. And then you start trying to remember which church has an 11:00 service. Then maybe you can come in late.. then.. nevermind, the game is on. Sunday is the day God gave man to lie around in his underwear before he has to go back to work. Thanks God. Are we cool?

The Rebel Period
All of us go through a rebel period. If we don't, then we are only half the men we might otherwise be. The rebel period is generally characterized by a severe haircut and/or attitude which is entirely inappropriate for church. For some of us, that attitude is called Atheism and the rebel period lasts all of our lives. We know it and we don't pretend otherwise. We're bad men and we jaust ain't going to church. Period.

I Wasn't Out Really Late Last Night
Meaning I scored. And I'm not about to push this lovely young lady out of my bed. So don't even ask me what I'm doing this morning, OK?

Deep Self

2006-08-27T23:12:00.000-07:00

A mysterious person has pierced the veil. Somebody from the company I'm working with has found the blog and presented themselves as such, commenting on a recent diary entry. It brings up an interesting angle about me, and I kinda feel like writing personally for a moment.

I spent a lot of time yesterday in public, which sets me into one of three primary moods. These three are in effect when it's just me, if I'm with somebody else then I pay attention to them. They are center of attention cool guy, alien observation mode, or counting the five dozen reasons a person like me does not belong here. I'd rather be in mood one, two is cool if I can think of an interesting literary angle, three is often not bad, unless it's a business meeting, church or some other serious affair where I'm supposed to be paying respectful attention. Yesterday was mostly three with a bit of two interspersed.

It is when I am in mood three, which I'll call 'logical rejection', that I become introspective. And my introspection is usually brief (since I know myself very well) and what follows is explication. I was at the African Marketplace in LA yesterday and I got hooked on one sentence repeating in my head as I became bored out of my gourd:

I was 8 years old when I accepted Jesus as my personal savior (pause, waiting for the audience to warm to this) and I prayed all the time. By the time I was 10, we were on very good speaking terms, Jesus and me. (warm and cuddly now). In fact, I finally asked Jesus whether it was him or my conscience talking. (turning somewhat intellectual and deep-like). Jesus told me that I already knew the answer to that, but to check back whenever I had a question my conscience couldn't answer. (whoa, deep). (extended pause). I haven't talked to Jesus much since then (uh oh) because as far as I was concerned Jesus blessed me. He left me in the hands of my conscience...

Now I'm being unfaithful to yesterday's thought. Although all of this is true, what I wanted to say yesterday was a slam right after telling people that I was saved at age 10, which is that much of Christianity only requires the emotional maturity of a child. And that is what I truly think every time I hear someone use the phrase 'heavenly father' and 'personal savior'. What is a personal savior but an invisible friend?

That is not, incidently, how I think of Jesus. It is not the kind of Christian I am. I am not a 'take all of your troubles to Jesus' kind of Christian. I do not respond to calls to redemption. One day perhaps I'll need that like oxygen, and I'll be eternally grateful that there's a balm in Gilead, but I don't sing that song today. Swing Low Sweet Chariot has always sounded to me like the very anthem of the defeated soul.

Instead, I look to Jesus as the Christ. People who say Jesus is sweet, that Jesus is love, who constantly bless and glorify the holy name of Jesus, almost never say Christ. I cannot tell you how deeply that aggravates me as a Christian. Christians, as the name implies, ought to follow the life of Christ. That has nothing to do with the Cult of Jesus.

---

It's odd that I get to that point this morning. There are a huge number of daunting tasks on my agenda and I should be about them. But my mysterious stranger has prompted this, Nulan too and the responses at my other new and personal blog about my Report From the Lower Upper Middle Class.

I don't have a lot to say about myself. I do, but I'm a fundamentally low key individual about myself. Sure, *I* pay a lot of attention to me, but I don't spend a lot of time trying to get other people to pay attention to me. I'm not sure why that is, but I could guess, or I could invent another true story that explains it. Another time.

So because I don't get other people to pay attention to me, my interactions with people, even over long periods of time tend to be surprising to them. And I think that when people find thing out about me it tends to make them mistrust me - being someone full of surprises is not good. That is why I wish I had something, or one thing, that could communicate me beyond the barrier. It's this blog of course, which is fairly complete about my thinking these days, but it's really not. I once wrote, back in 1999, I came to the Internet to influence people, not to make friends. That's absolutely true, and still is. But it is inevitable that a Socratic march towards philosophically consistent reasoning about the worlds of culture and politics can be deeply revealing of the self. And that self, presented here at Cobb is one I am perfectly comfortable with.

And yet it is somewhat troubling to be all that I am here, and those few things I am at work. That is because I am a consultant, and I am working for a not inconsiderable chunk of change to be a catalyst for my clients. I don't have time for a lot of small talk, I work, I prove, I facilitate, I move on. It's a painful thing to separate from a client when you've actually made things work for them. I am accustomed to being the accelerated part of other folks' jobs. Part of me longs for the pace of my old white collar world of Nordstrom shirts and suspenders when I was executive staff and the top floor pace was that sustained by executives using the force of their personalities and relationships to steer a giant ship of a 3% annual growth company. I'd have a hell of a golf game by now. Moreover people would expect to know my personality and be constantly judging my character in terms of the way I lead and motivate and discipline my team. But that's not what kind of career I have now, and I have become at long last comfortable with my inner geek - perfectly willing to be that as the situation demands.

But then there's this blog. Where the philosopher and the profane raconteur and the blistering political firebrand, and the haughty raceman and the... yeah whatever. You guys ought to write better intros of me. In fact, I'll have a contest. Shay has her quote column, I need a 'people are saying' thingy too.

Yesterday before I left to the African Marketplace, for the first time in a couple years, I looked to see if I had any Cobb business cards. The last time I went, I saw my old friend Art McGee. This time, I was out of Cobb cards, so I took some old Vision Circle cards. But the whole event was disappointing and I gave cards to no one. I wandered around through tents set up by the 50 Page Book Men and the Scientologists(!). But I'll write more about that separately. The point is that once again, I didn't feel like sharing. I kept seeing echoes of things and places where I was mentally and spiritually a really long time ago, and it sounded like.. it sounded like yesterday, and I wanted to be in the now. I wanted everybody to see Christ as I do. I wanted them to see blackness as an emergent behavior. Well, I say that now. What I wanted was to get out of there.

It's the discomfort I have in making the case for the differences that keeps me quiet face to face. I am much more comfortable being a strong silent type who responds to pointed questions rather than bogarding my complex agenda up front. What I've said before is that a rapper wants $17 of respect from a million people; I want a million dollars worth of respect from 17.

And so I'll sadly say goodbye, sometime in October to all the folks at my client, having been only who I've been. And with the exception of the mysterious stranger that's likely all they are to know. Ironically, I am perfectly comfortable with that.

Moderate Islam: A Good Idea

2006-08-21T23:14:00.000-07:00

Gandhi famously replied to the question of what he thought of Western Civilization: "It would be a good idea". I'm thinking the same thing of Moderate Islam, but not exactly so wryly.

I caught a snippet of Krista Tippet's show yesterday. It was Karen Armstrong's voice and verbaige that attracted me once again as I was flipping through the radio station presets. As I tuned in she was relateing a story of how she and a panel of experts were stunned into silence when a Christian Fundamentalist addressed them in horror and pain. I didn't catch what the details were but it didn't come as a surprise that the man in question was hauled away by security for telling them they were all going to Hell.

We've all seen these guys. Right where my eye doctor is, in a place called the Hollywood Riviera (yes it's kind of all that) there is a man with a van that defies description who daily prophesies about the end times. He's the Man in the Jesus Van. And we ignore him. And if he one day ran himself off a cliff in Palos Verdes or set a parking lot on fire, we probably wouldn't be too surprised. He's 50 or 60 years old. But what if he was 20 and needed more action than that?

I'm an Episcopalian and I have very little to do with evangelism. I personally find evangelism arrogant and sometimes repugnant. That's because I basically grew up secular before I grew up Catholic. I was smart enough to figure out how to pray and live with my conscience as something of Lutheran intellectual exercise at a pre-pubescent age. Did I talk to Jesus? Yes. Did I accept him as my personal savior? That was between me and Jesus and none of your business. What's it to you? I thought it took a lot of nerve to ask such questions of kids, but I was asked, and told how much I needed Jesus like most smart-ass kids who actually memorize their Bible verses with a smirk. I chose which Jesus I would talk to, and He was eventually the Christ as presented by the Jesuits. I chose which traditions I would share in the Body of Christ and those were eventually the Episcopal Liturgy. My Jesus, My Religion, My Church. Not yours.

I am absolutely convinced we all do the same thing. And so it comes as no surprise that I cannot recall any sermons from the Episcopal pulpit feeling a need to explain away the behavior of Jimmy Swaggart or Pat Robertson. I've listened to the most extraordinary message about racism in the American Christian Chruch presented by Rev. Frederick Price, but I don't recall much discussion about that anywhere even by those who insist that America is a Christian Nation. Oh yeah? What kind of Christian Nation?

Jerry Seinfeld is not going to take orders from the Lubavichers. Baptists of the Southern Convention are free to ignore the Pope, and they will. Mennonites are not going to make excuses for Methodists. I think you get the idea. Moderate Islam is not going to moderate other types of Islam. 'Moderate' is an adjective, not a verb. Moreover it is an adjective of American origin. American politics are not going to make 'moderate muslims' influence Islamic Fascists.

"Some of my best friends are Sunni." Start from there.

We simply have to call spades as we see them and deal with the dirt done by those doing it. America's moral leadership on the matter is not really at issue. Even if we were a Muslim nation, we would still have sectarian and class barriers to deal with. There is something very specific that muslim fascists want to accomplish and we can resist that directly and keep our own house in order without being authoritative on Islam or Fascism. Let's stick to the religion of Freedom and let the other mullahs and popes say what they will. We can only come correct in a firm and honest defense of who we are.

A Useful, Meaningless Dichotomy

2006-06-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

Church vs Science.

It's probably better to think of the dichotomy as one between Religion and Progress. It is useful in order to make a utilitarian distinction between these twin providers of the Things Man Needs. People need answers, we all need rationalization. At the end of reason lies the Divine. And the great conceit of human intelligence is that we tell ourselves that we can appreciate and appropriate the Divine. We may or we may not. It's impossible to tell. We simply believe or not.

God Explained

2006-05-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

I wonder if Daniel C. Dennett knew all along that he was going to write the book that is 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon'. You see Dennett along with Hofstadter and several other authors of the collection that was 'The Mind's I' in 1982 captivated me and helped me to understand that Computer Science was more than just programming machines, it was programming people. If there is one thing that has been constant in my life from that long ago, it has been my understanding of the deep resonances and bonds between Religion, Computer Science, Philosophy and Law. It is no accident that these subjects continue to be compelling to me mired as I am in their descendents, morality, IT, ethics and politics. If you ever wondered why Cobb spends so much time in front of the screen typing into the abyss, the answers are in that mix. So it comes as no surprise that Dennett has come to explain Religion in terms of Science. What surprises me is that I've lived with the same notion for quite some time, and perhaps it was Dennett who put the idea in me.

Back in about 1986 or so, I was on the verge of breaking up with my buppie brotherhood. I just didn't know it yet. Just fresh from State and Computer Science undergrad, I was eager to understand the other. That is the cultural stochastic stuff I didn't bother with while pursuing the soul of the machine. And one of my first stops on the way was reading Ishmael Reed. First stop: 'Yellow Back Radio Broke Down'. By the time I had finished about four of his books, I had been convinced to be polytheistic. In my way of seeing it, Reed, finally and convincingly in 'Japanese By Spring' made it perfectly clear that a measure of extraordinary wisdom is only achievable through a disciplined comparison and contrasting of multiple cultures, languages and traditions. I probably took him a bit too literally and my patriotism may have suffered for it, but I was convinced finally that there was room for all religions in my worldview. And so you will have heard me say in those days in response to the question 'Do you believe in God'? Yes, I believe in all Gods. For what I came to understand was that everyone had a reason to believe in God, and make order of the unknown. It has always been man's way to overcome the fear of death, to put the unknown in a very understandable position.

But it was that very same recognition that gave me a new reason to distrust reason. And so as part and parcel of my acceptance of the philosphical underpinnings of animism, I found it rather unsettling to discover a phenomenon I call 'scientific animism'. This is what I think people are talking about (especially critics of Dennett's book) when they speak of 'scientism'. The gist of scientific animism goes a little something like this. A man hears from his doctor that his cholesterol is too high. So now he eats foods low in cholesterol. But if you gave the man a microscope, he wouldn't know cholesterol from a colony of ameobae. He thinks he is being rational but he is acting on faith - faith in the test of his doctor, and faith in the labelling of the food in the supermarket.

In the end I have been satisfied by the social implications of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. You cannot know everything there is to know. Religion cannot be disproven without science. Science cannot be disproven without Religion. Human logic is incapable of knowing all. There was also another out for me, which was that computers or some non-human intelligence might figure it out. The answer would be 42, or some such, which humans would reject.

So that basically left me at equilibrium which has tilted towards Religion for me in the past several years for two primary reasons.

1. I deeply admire the stability of the ancient and the ritual. In the same way that Danny Hillis finds the numinous in the Long Now, I find it in religious tradition. Pollution notwithstanding. I think there is as much bad religion as there is bad science.

2. I find, like Einstein, beauty in the finite quality of life. And I find technological attempts to prolong human life and human youth quite distasteful, and somewhat unethical. Science fails utterly to give meaning to death. Next time you're on a battlefield, let me know how many people mumble the name of Stephen Hawking as they charge the enemy.

But as readers of Cobb (aka Lucifer Jones) know, I am analytical and cannot simply accept a simple explanation of things, including the very religious traditions I uphold. So I am not put off at all, as a believer, in Dennett's provocation. Indeed, I hope with some fervor that I might be able to engage theologians at this very level. It is the direction in which I am turning my attentions.

I also want to throw in a dig at Christopher Hitchens, whose impeccable logic is rather annoyingly wrong when it comes to religion. He is fond of the axiom that we all learned in symbolic logic which is that if you assume a false premise to be true, you can prove anything. It has rather nice implications to undermine the authority of anyone whose religious premises are supernatural. I've always had a problem with this argument, and now I know how to express it. Religion is not supernatural, it is natural. In that regard, God is a theory which is just about as explainable as the Universe. QED.

I don't have time to read Dennett, and so I probably won't. The annoying fact of the matter is that I have three children to raise and not quite so much time to blog and read as I would like. There it is.

The Natural Power of Prayer

2006-04-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

For much of my life I have looked people in the eye at the most crucial moments. Most of the time, I'm multitasking when you are talking to me and I'm going 'blah blah blah get to the point'. But when you make a promise or declare something to be true, that's when I look up and stop humming and look you dead in the eye. That means most of the times during public sermons and prayers I am looking you dead in the eye. This is discomforting, I think, to those who would rather I bowed my head in penitent silence. I've only recently, that is within the past 2 years, actually come around to obeying the custom. There was never any sense of disrespect, it's just that if somebody is suggesting we all do something in the presence of God, I'll be damned before I let that person off without my strictest scrutiny. Plus, I want to see who else might be cracking jokes while people have their heads down in respect.

These days when my head is down, it is in respect for the practice. And quite frankly, I'm doing a lot more internal 'blah blah blah get to the point'. Many ministers and public prayers are invoking ritualistic phrases, few of which have a determined logic. But I think there is a very logical way to pray and I'm going to develop that here.

But the implications of the looking or not looking, the bowing or not bowing, is that it matters to the people standing in the circle or down on their knees in the pews. But should it? If you believe as I do that prayer is a discipline - that it is an opening of a channel to the divine within, and a concious reminder of a sacred duty, then really all one needs to do is pray to God with your mind and that's it. So what are we to make of the idea that when two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there? I'd say the distinction is that you are praying for those who hear, and in that way a prayer is very much like a speech.

A public prayer must be a mutual dedication. It is a public reminder and invocation of the divine to our commitment before God. It is not the same as a sermon, which is one way, or a blessing which is a passthrough proxy kind of thing. It is best a hand-holding, a huddle, a briefing, a pinky swear. And so the power of prayer in this regard has nothing to do with the power of God but rather with the ability of the person leading the prayer to properly invoke the duty of the faithful. It is a mutual promise to act as God would have us act, and in that it has great power.

Talk about Religion, Not Faith

2006-04-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

It's going to take me a while to get a straight look at all that I'm doing here. But as I peek around, I've noticed that a lot of people don't talk about Religion so much as they talk about their faith. It's not easy to have an honest theological conversation.

Most folks are actively apologizing or evangelizing or testifying or basically being pompous and pious in public. But a nuanced discussion about the meaning of this or the history of that is hard to come by. I think it's something we need. Just saying...

The Long Tail of Christianity

2006-04-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

Here's the subtext of Lucifer Jones. Coming as I do from the model society of secularity which is slightly overwhelmed by a cloying blonde meritocracy, I'm trying to open up that which is heresy to a more open debate. But it's not so much a debate as an expanded conversation. There is nothing quite so petty as fundamentalism and having been an active participant in a decent number of Christian sects, it's simply a pain in the butt for me to have to deal with various didactics. So why not have more? Simply more Christian lore.

So if Christianity could be reduced to the machinations of the Alter Call and the profession of faith then it is reductive indeed. The Golden Rule is comprehensive enough, the message of Christ's sacrifice is universal enough but what does this do to our ethics? It flattens it if everything in Christianity is reduced to songs about those two things. So while a number of folks have felt threatened by the Gnostics, I'm wide open to them. Is it so difficult to imagine that Christianity is much richer than most Christians experience? I think not.

It seems that our culprit is Athanasius. He's the dude responsible for taking Iranaeus seriously, and as Bishop ordered the throwdown.

Many of these secret writings, however, were still read and revered by Christians 200 years later when Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, an admirer of Irenaeus, wrote an Easter letter to Christians in Egypt. He ordered them to reject what he called those "secret, illegitimate books" and keep only 27 approved ones. The 27 he named constitute the earliest known list of the New Testament canon, which Athanasius intended above all to be a guideline for books to be read publicly in church. The New Testament Gospels, which contain much that Jesus taught in public, were the most obvious books to put on that list. The secret books, which contained paradox and mystery akin to the mystical teachings of kabbalah, were not considered suitable for beginners.

Not suitable for beginners. OK makes sense in a world where maybe five percent of the population was literate. We've got a little more bandwidth than that. So I'm excited about secret knowledge as much as the next guy, not because it is hidden, but because it requires work and discipline. What else would you expect of a programmer and writer? Let's ratchet up the complexity and depth of the Christian message and practice beyond the realm of 'broadcast ministry'.

Introducing Lucifer Jones

2006-04-07T01:06:00.000-07:00

I've been putting off this matter too long.

It's time for me to integrate my religious philosophy and theory of everything. I'm going to be wreckless and provocative and kick up dirt and dig holes in sacred ground. I really don't know much of any other way to get to the point besides something of a heartless inquisition.

I am not an enemy of faith or religion. Nor am I a crusader against hypocrisy. I am an investigator and anthropologist into what I hesitantly call 'regimes of truth'. I don't wish to give any special credence to post-modernism and I certainly have no truck for moral relativism. But I think that too many of us are floating above suspicion - literally we are too satisfied with a decent explanation rather than understanding the dynamics of knowledge production, inheritance and structure. I'm trying to discover the difference between "I'd like to believe.." and "I know that the reason for this is..". In other words, I'm trying to get rid of wishful thinking about religion.

I am therefore an amateur theologist on a goalless mission. I am digging up bones and planting seeds in fresh fields. I expect to bring light even as I will be accused of doing evil. I do not wish to uproot or banish what I see as a fundamental expression of human curiosity and intellect - that thing which is our recognition of and reconciliation with the what Sagan called 'the numinous'. I wish to expand my vocabulary and enter this rich and deep tradition of human history.

So watch out.

Holy Ghost vs Holy Spirit

2006-01-05T23:17:00.000-08:00

As an Episcopalian, we don't do faith healing, speaking in tongues or do anything having to do with the Holy Ghost as it's understood in various denominations of African American Christendom. I want to get deep into this question from a black cultural perspective starting with the following provocative statement.

The Holy Ghost is Voodoo.

I think that I am on pretty solid ground when I suggest that the tradition of speaking in tongues evolved from the early black Christian church as a way of communicating around slaveowners. I don't know exactly where I picked up that bit of knowledge, but I've heard it enough times to believe that it is credible. I am more certain, however, that the idea of spiritual possession, is definitely rooted in West African traditions.

When I was a kid, and after the birth of my youngest brother, my mother started shuffling us off to the 'born again' Christian Church - specifically the Pentacostal Evangelical Foursquare Church - I was fascinated and a bit repulsed by the practice of men and women in the congregation jumping up and down and falling down convulsing on the floor as filled with the Holy Ghost. I understood it, and on occasion when the music was just right and the minister hit his rhythm, I could feel it. But it never overwhelmed me so that I put my hand up like a spiritual antenna and got struck by the lightning of the Holy Ghost. Not that kids were permitted to do so.

As well, I witnessed my mother speaking in tongues and recognized which tongues she was speaking. I also understood, although could never confirm, that this was something that was agreed on in some way with the pastor. The ritual was basically at some part of the service, spontaneously to be sure, someone would start speaking in tongues and then somebody else would translate it into English.

We could get into all that, but the essential question has to do with the variability of practices. What is Christian, and how is that changing? I expect a religion to get dogmatic and ritualistic about such things as the definition of the Holy Spirit. I mean, it's at least as important as God and Jesus if we believe in the Trinity. So how can this be considered worship if on church allows people to go into conniptions if another's priest would go into conniptions if some congregant had a fit?

So what's up with that?

Godless Evolution

2006-01-04T23:17:00.000-08:00

How does one believe in God and Science?

They seem to be divergent but they are not. For me they are reconciled. So I find it disturbing that some are following a line of reasoning that will take them into battle with the scientific community of which I am a part. Over at Palos Verdes Blog I found the following:

Among the intellectual elites in the National Academy of Sciences, 95% of biologists are materialists and therefore atheists. Those at the top of the profession have a profound influence on what is taught in the schools.
Is there any doubt that these “proponents of evolutionary biology go well beyond science to claim that evolution both manifests and requires a materialistic philosophy that leaves no room for God, the soul or the presence of divine grace in human life.” No wonder many parents are legitimately concerned about what their children are learning.

To many religious conservatives, Darwinists are “hell-bent on cramming atheistic materialism down the throats of impressionable children, in the guise of science, thereby robbing their children of the faith that has saved Western civilization from the fate of godless nations.”

To answer the second paragraph, I have doubts, and these doubts are born of (what I hope to be) a sophisticated understanding of human nature and the aims of religion and science. Nobody quite put it so simply as the Dalai Lama in his 'Ethics for the New Millenium', but he didn't put it so briefly that I'd like to retype it here. I'm simply say that I believe that people inherit attitudes about Science and Religion and then gradually learn some corner of their offerings.

For one thing, I don't believe that scientists can design away or argue away the soul. Whatever the soul is, it is inevitable. Simply because one might have an extra-relgious explanation doesn't change the materiality or nature of it. When people's souls are satisfied, that's the ticket. And people will continue to satisfy that hunger. There's another scientific explanation for not acknowledging or explaining away the soul, denial.

Secondly, I believe for scientific and religious reasons, that we are inherently moral. My understaning of one theory of evolutionary biology, as well as hearsay from my brother Doc, the cop, is that after you beat somebody unconscious it takes a very deliberate effort to move from aggrevated assault to murder. We are instinctually averse to killing. As I have said before, I believe that we are endowed by God (in his image) and as a consequence of the fall of Adam, the very same moral capacity as God - the ability to distinguish good from evil. This corresponds to God's own sense of good and evil exactly in the same way everybody sees red as red, otherwise free will makes no sense at all. It is because of this identical correspondance that we understand religion as good beyond the personal reclamation of the soul.

Think about it from another way. If all we were required to do is 'steal into heaven', that is to say do the very minimum that Jesus required, we all might as well be the theif on the second cross. But we understand that the Good News is useful in the affairs of mankind while we are here on Earth. That's why weighing in against atheists is considered a good thing in the first place.

Evolution is what it is. That Christians fight it is pure silliness.

In His Image

2005-10-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

One of the difficulties of being arrogant, as I am, is that it takes some measure of arbitrariness to decide whom is worth hearing out. Since I am on a constant quest for wisdom, I don't often hear out evangelists. I figure I already know what they are going to say. I am reminded of this today by an (arbitrary) collision of three interesting things.

The first is conversation / apology I had with Mickey which George alludes to on his blog. The second is this thread of memory from the Evangelical Outpost. The third is a referral that I got today on my old post about The Gospel of Thomas. Tangential to that is a search I am on for 'Mel'.

When I finish up here - and who knows when that will be. I intend to begin looking at America (the world is too big, I think) strictly from a moral and philosophical standpoint. As I do so, I anticipate a great number of conflicts to be initiated and hopefully resolved with Christians, Agnostics, Atheists and Buddhists of all stripes. But right now there is a powerful idea that I cannot resist, and that is the idea of God creating man in His own image, coupled with my interpretation of the Forbidden Fruit, the value of Earthly Works and Predestination.

It essentially boils down to this:

If human beings have free will, then God has endowed us with His own sense of Good and Evil.

The implications of this are as about as profound as I can imagine anything being. In the context of mathematics and philosophy, I am saying that man's sense of his morality is complete. Another way of thinking of it is that if salvation were a matter of picking out the colors of the rainbow, God has insured that human eyes all see blue as blue and green as green. Our sense of morality is innate and perfect. It is the same as God's own. Without it, we physically could not understand God's message, or our purpose.

Having a sense of something, even a perfect sense of something, is distinct from having an understanding of something. You may know something to be blue, but you may not understand its significance or what exactly to do about that percieved fact. But the underlying fact remains. All non-defective humans develop this moral compass just as surely as they develop eyesight. Morality is our seventh sense.

The first place to take this idea is to the heart of the Protestant Revolution. But I'll not do that today. What I'll do today is explain a little bit why certain things trouble me about church. They trouble me because I believe that any man is capable of gaining understanding of their moral and spiritual purpose without the assistance of formal theology or the community of Church. However I give a great deal of credence and respect to theology and spiritual community. The difficulty is found in the conflict between the three. They force a considerate person to make choices which can be rather upsetting.

It is the upsetting nature of these choices that have me at odds with various orthodoxies, notably the fundamentalist nature of Christian evangelicals in the American public, and the libertine progressivism of various sects regarding the matter of Holy Matrimony. I am between two rocks, neither of which are particularly comfortable. Above and beyond this is the practical nature of the original Gospel and the ways and means by which this information comes to us through various instruments of theology and tradition. Whatever happened to the Sacred Feminine? Was Jesus' decentralization of Judaism a device appropriate to the times or a model for all time?

These are all things I would imagine I could engage some friendly theologian over time, and perhaps one day I will have the luxury to invite such an individual over for a regular Sunday dinner. It's an Old School dream of mine - I should live so long. In the meantime, I have faith that I'll be doing enough good, so as not to pollute my chances with the vanity of knowing for certain. I'm not in a rush to figure it out.

But I sure wish I knew the answers.

Avignon on Ratzinger

2005-04-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

For the second time in a week, I have found a reason to read some cat named GK Chesterton. Good. The latest spy stories I've picked up are a bore, and I am really looking hard for a source of new ideas to perk me up. Recently I've grown tired of today's domestic affairs. Here we have a nation of dimwits incapable of arresting the retarded regression that is the gaping mediocrity of Tom DeLay, and yet within 17 days we have seen the transition of the Catholic Church from pope to pope. It is a miracle of limited democracy, even if the smoke isn't quite the right color (and I thought Italians were fairly good pyrotechnicians).

Be that as it may I have found the most succulent tidbits of Ratzinger's ideas written by a thoughtful Amazon reviewer by the name of Nathaniel Avignon. Suddenly my admiration for the new pontiff has moved into the realm of excitement. This only prods me further to communicate my meditations on Servitude & Mastery. And so I will underscore my premonitions about his conservative philosophy as exemplified in the following:

In an age when Truth has come under unceasing brutal assault, he has become a target of attack worldwide. He is routinely caricatured in the worldwide media as the new Grand Inquisitor, unthinking and dictatorial. This book will discomfit his enemies. It shows a deeply learned man moving carefully and deliberately across all the issues of the "Canon of Criticism," forthrightly defending the Church. It shows a man with a keen understanding of our present age and the ideologies that animate it.
The Roman Church is contemptible to so many precisely because it stands in unabashed reproof of so much of what passes as wisdom today, including the central "truth" of our post-modern era: that only truth is that there is no Truth. This reminds us that the Church is now, as always, a scandal. But it is necessary, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds, us to distinguish between the "primary" scandal and the "secondary" scandal. "The secondary scandal consists in our actual mistakes, defects and over-institutionalizations . . .." (124) The Church is made up of men who are subject to all the frailties to which flesh is heir. But the Church aspires for more. That she occasionally fails should not surprise us. That she aspires for more should inspire new generations of saints. Yet the very idea that man is not naturally good and should aspire for more through self-abnegation is a deep offense to the modern mindset that man is good and is always, inexorably, getting better. This makes the Church an object of contempt and, in time, hatred.

"[T]he primary scandal consists precisely in the fact that we stand in opposition to the decline into the banal and the bourgeois and into false promises. It consists in the fact that we don't simply leave man alone in his self-made ideologies." (124) Substitution of transitory political ethics for Christian ethics leads to despotism, the exaltation of a mere man as God: Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min. "We can say with a certainty backed up by empirical evidence that if the ethical power represented by Christianity were suddenly torn out of humanity, mankind would lurch to and fro like a ship rammed against an iceberg, and then the survival of humanity would be in greatest jeopardy." (227) "For this reason . . . the Catholic Church is a scandal, insofar as she sets herself in opposition to what appears to be a nascent global ideology and defends primordial values of humanity that can't be fit into this ideology . . .." (124)

"[I]f we give up the principle that every man as man is under God's protection, that as a man he is beyond the reach of arbitrary will, we really do forsake the foundation of human rights." (204) The sacred tradition of the Church is arrayed in defense of the dignity of mankind. Contrary to fashionable caricature, the Church is not an ossified tree, subject to being felled by the latest gale. It changes, but slowly, deliberately, organically. "[T]here are various degrees of importance in the tradition [of the Church] . . . not everything has the same weight . . . [but] there are . . . essentials, for example, the great conciliar decisions or what is stated in the Creed. These things are the Way and as such are vital to the Church's existence; they belong to her inner identity." (207-208) As to its essentials, its First Principles, or everlasting verities, the Church is powerless to change even in face of popular demand.

Ratzinger was Avignon's choice at least 3 years ago, and I find him drawn to the same kind of rationale as I in centering the eternal verities of Christianity in human destiny. Importantly, he is an enemy of post-modern relativism. In this I daresay he has many allies.

Within the past two years, I have encountered two Orthodox Christians whose thinking has impressed me. If indeed this Benedict will make some adjustments and bring Catholicism closer to Orthodox Christianity, it will be something extraordinary in the history of the world.

Here is the great clincher and it represents to me the very essence of conservatism.

Bringing to mind Edmund Burke and G.K. Chesterton, Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that "the Church lives not only synchronically but diachronically as well. This means that it is always all - even the dead - who live and are the whole Church, that it is always all who must be considered in any majority in the Church. . . . The Church lives her life precisely from the identity of all the generations, from their identity that overarches time, and her real majority is made up of the saints." (189) Our present age cannot cavalierly discard the wisdom of this great communion of the living and the dead, of one hundred human generations of the Church, confident that it has somehow achieved superceding wisdom. Instead, it must, as must all generations, submit to the essentials of the Church, to revelation and the Church's sacred tradition. "Every generation tries to join the ranks of the saints, and each makes its contribution. But it can do that only by accepting this great continuity and entering into it in a living way." (189) The Church does not need additional "reformers" of institutions. "What we really need are people who are inwardly seized by Christianity, who experience it as joy and hope, who have thus become lovers. And these we call saints." (269)

Love it.

I Am The Resurrection

2005-04-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

This past week I witnessed the birth of two new Christians, my oldest two children who are 11 and 10. Their decision to be baptized was rather sudden and came about within the past 60 days.

When my daughter first spoke about it, I didn't quite know what to think. In one way I was disturbed by the idea that she had decided to do so without much input from us. Today, I am nicely reconciled to the idea that my kids like different churches for different reasons than I. My wife is a midwesterner with Southern Baptist roots, but she mostly enjoys the African Methodist Episcopal liturgy. She goes to Faithful Central on occasion but mostly attends (the famous) First AME in LA.

Me, I like the traditions of the Catholic and Episcopal Church. If I can't recite the liturgy from memory, I get uncomfortable. For me, it's all about being part of a tradition that is hundreds of years old and universal. I like the rite. As for Christian life, I have a very Jesuit orientation about being Christlike.

So my wife and I have come to a standoff when it comes to our practices. Our kids go to Awana every week at the local Baptist church which is crawling with friends and schoolmates. They attend our churches on occasion, but it's actually rare that we all will go to the same service. There's an interesting story behind that which is none of your business.

Picking them up several weeks ago, I began to ask those questions of the kids. Which church do you like and why? I expect them to make some personal and responsible decisions about their own spiritual development and growth, and this is working. But even I was in for something of a revelation when I read their essays.

You see I had been putting off the whole matter of worrying about how to deal with the fact that my kids were not going to be die-hard Episcopalians like me. I was trying to not take it personally, yet still give some weight to their decisions. Are they grown-up decisions? Of course not. Well then how seriously should I take them? Who knows? Finally, it was about time for them to commit to the training program for the Baptism, so I basically sat everyone down for a little talk. I was generous. I am glad that you guys want to make this decision, and it's yours to make, but I need to understand a little bit more about what you are thinking. So I asked them to write a 100 word essay on why they wanted to be baptized.

The answers came back within five minutes, and I tell you it was rather astonishing. My daughter, felt a lot like me. She wanted to belong to the community of Christians and she felt that she needed to make the commitment and be a part of it all. My son came from a completely different angle. He is thankful for the peace that Jesus gives him and that peace enables him to cope with the stresses of life, plus he gets the happy happy joy joy. I was rather knocked over by the clarity of it all. (sob) My babies are growing up.

Easter Sunday was the big day and the baptisms were the first part of the liturgy. They rolled up the curtain in front of the alter to reveal the elevated tank which is recessed into the wall underneath the large colorful cross. Pastor Lee, dressed in white, came to the center and introduced brother and sister. They entered from the sides. My daughter was first and then the boy. What was special about hers was that today was her birthday. What was special about his was that he recited 4 verses.

After the clapping was done, Pastor Lee who isn't the most flamboyant guy did a fairly decent job on the lecturn. It is part of my upbringing to give a critical evaluation of the delivery of the Sermon, and today was no different. Yes, I'm a second-guesser. And I have to say, even though I appreciate what these guys are doing with the structure and contemporary intepretations of the Bible, there's something about Powerpoint sermons that just rubs me wrong. But in his message, I was struck by the soundness of his lesson about Christ that I have never quite heard that way before.

It was the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. And in the telling, Lee explained how Jesus sucker-punched his apostles. Mary and Martha, weeping and moaning, complained that Lazarus had died. Martha challenged Jesus telling him straight up that he should have been there. When I was a kid, the story was told in such a way as to make us all want to slap Martha and never be her, the audacity! But this time Lee focused on Jesus' manipulation of the situation. He sandbagged. He let the bases fill up in the bottom of the 9th just to face Death, the cleanup hitter.

Jesus says that Lazarus will arise, and Martha intellectualizes with a religious fact. Sure, at the last day we will all arise in the time of Resurrection. Martha answers in the passive voice, giving agency to the idea, to the doctrine. Then Jesus goes BOOM! I AM the Resurrection. I AM the Life. Right here, right now. He embodies the prophesy and takes agency away from ideas and doctrine and brings it down to the personal. It has got to be one of the most dramatic acts in the life of Jesus, and to think that it was Pastor Lee who made me see it that way. I tell you, whoever wrote those powerpoints knows where to put the italics.

And so it is with Life. We think we know something and suddenly here are two new little Christians embodying it in a way you never quite imagined. It's a reason to be glad, and so I am. Moreover it is a reason to think about the leadership of Jesus, which is something I began considering back when Mel Gibson attempted to hijack the Gospel with his gorey vision. It is also something embedded in the Gospel of Thomas which is, in my estimation, the missing puzzle piece of Christianity in the global world.

More later...