February Prayer Letter

2_08.pdf

Civil Servants

Recently I renewed my drivers license (it expired in July). I also applied for a passport a few days later. I know what kind of service we all associate with the DMV and the post office. I would normally expect to use all my patience and rage suppression exercises. But not this time.

The first visit was to the Bloomington DMV for a fresh license. The staff was friendly and cheerful. We were all smiles and jokes. When I mentioned to Karen that I needed to register to vote and that I wanted to get a motorcycle license, the guy came out with the forms for voter registration and a booklet for attaining a motorcycle license. Most helpful.

The next stop was at the Bloomington Post Office for passports for Karen and I. We walked up to the counter and had a good time with the employees, bantering about the honeymoon location (Cancun) and joking about the photos we brought. It was a very nice experience.

Maybe I was in a good mood so it was a combination of my attitude affecting those around me and I had rose colored glasses on… or it’s because civil servants treat white people better.

The Importance Of The Character Of God

This is a difficult subject to breach, but it is extremely profound in it’s implications. None of the ideas I am putting forward here reflect the stances of Cornerstone or Great Commission Ministries, and I am unprepared to conclusively defend them. Having said that, I am looking to spark ideas of what it means to worship God.

The central question is how do you define God? Defining God by a proper name alone leaves a gaping hole in theology. For example: “I worship Jesus, he sits atop Mt. Olympus and sometimes meddles in the affairs of mortals, and is the father of all other Gods.” That example is too simple but makes a few points. The ‘Jesus’ described here is the Greek god Zeus, I hope you caught that. The proper noun for God is only useful if used to refer to to the common definition. That needs some more examples.

The central claims of Christianity is that God is the good creator of the universe whose union with man was broken by the sin of man, and sent his Son to Earth to teach us the character of God and to die for our sins. That is really an over simplification. It is much clearer in the Nicene Creed. That is why all Christians bond over this.

King James Version Bible proponents have made the claim the name of God is in the KJV, and it is therefore the only true bible. Well, that is strange. Because if we got the name just right, but regarded God as a self-interested, aloof member of a pantheon (referring to the Zeus example), we would not be worshiping the God of the bible. This is quite orthodox, except for the KJV people.

Where we get ‘out there’ is the contrapositive statement: If we get the character of God right, than the name is not important. Well, that’s not so out there so long as we are in the realm of Christianity. But what if a non-Christian defined God as a good creator and redeemer of humanity but continued to call it something else (for fun, lets say he called it ‘the unknown god’)? This is all very entertaining to think about.

C.S. Lewis, in his book The Last Battle described a situation like the one above. I’ll just briefly describe what happened in the book. It was the end of the fictional world of Narnia, and some were allowed to pass into the ‘new’ Narnia based on there devotion to Aslan (the Lion you probably saw in the movie trailers). There was, in that world at least a second religion that worshiped a god named Tash, and to everybody’s surprise a worshiper of Tash was in the new world (including the Tash worshiper, but not including Aslan). The explanation given by Aslan is nothing short of C.S. Lewis’ coded theology for the nature of worship. Aslan said that as the man worshiped Tash honestly, whole heartedly, selflessly, and lovingly he was not worshiping Tash, because Tash was none of those things. A person who worships must worship with the character of God.

That is just an idea, maybe too close to unitarianism.

This is an interesting site I stumbled upon.  It makes some interesting points about God’s name, but then starts to use it like a chant (or mantra) to reveal God to you.  In fact that short of chant is definitively called a mantra.  So, I would not regard that site as orthodox.

But this is food for thought and perhaps deeper worship.   I would say a person who claims to have wholly defined God has done nothing of the sort, but has only spit in His face.

Repressive Left

French air-bag convicted of downplaying the Nazis

The person in question is historically wrong, and morally suspect. But that is not the point. When we say thing like, “We have the right to say what we think.” It would sometimes be followed by an example to the contrary of a notorious county (USSR, East Germany, China). But this is France, the cradle of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man.

Can a people be so concerned about protecting the population from oppressive ideas, like fascism, they become oppressive?

Update: What the hell is going on in France?  French Police ‘made Nazi salutes’ 

A Return To Simpler Times

Putin vows ‘arms race’ response

Is the devil we know really better than the devil we don’t?

Sméagol/Gollum

My last post on dragons got me thinking about my favorite villain in all of film and literature: Gollum of “Lord of the Rings“. In the title I included his other name which reflects his fair nature. As a person he is conflicted (mostly apparent in the film), he doesn’t know if he wants to be good or evil. I also like to think of the Iraqis in “Three Kings” as humans we sympathize with. Or Doc Octopus in the second Spiderman film. Villains who don’t want to be villains.

In my opinion this makes the best villain ever. I like Gollum because he makes me feel conflicted and confused. Like going to a horror movie to feel scared or a romance flick to feel warm and mushy. I enjoy these characters because in life bad people are three dimensional too.   A story is no good if it only affirms what you already think.

So a good guy does good and you feel good. So what?

To wish for simpler characters is to wish for a tepid world.  I do not wish for a tepid world.

Dragons

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” the characters encounter the dragon Smaug inside the Lonely Mountain. They send Bilbo in to see the treasure hoarded inside. We, the readers, don’t know what to expect of the encounter. We know Smaug is powerful and breaths fire (literally, but we will also explore it as a metaphor). What will happen to the halfling? Will he be eaten? Cooked by the breath of Smaug? Or will he fight and slay the foe?

No, the dragon speaks eloquently to convince Bilbo to betray his friends and take enough treasure for himself and only for himself. This is the true evil of the dragon: He brings people into evil, before destroying them physically. This is also the characteristic of the serpent of Genesis.

These two examples of dragons have sent me searching for more villains of the same archetype. I don’t think the “dragon” of a story has to be a scaly beast, just as a Christ figure doesn’t need to be a man, or human. It is an evil character who, with words like honey, convinces others to do evil. This can be done using appeals to good or bad values held by the coerced character.

I recently watched “Apt Pupil“. What the former Nazi (skillfully played by Sir Ian McKellen) passes along to the young man (the “pupil”) is not the values of the Nazi party. What he teaches him is to lie cheat and steal for self preservation and self promotion. The dragon here succeeds in creating a new dragon. The worst case scenario, for the good people of the world.

The dragon becomes more than a simple monster, it becomes the corrupting element on Earth, and a most excellent villain.

The Shoe Is On The Other Foot

If you are old school like me, than you think of the Republicans as being the effective fund raisers, and the Democrats as the sorts who rely on their message to gain votes. Well, look at this CNN page, it seems the Democrats have raised more money than the Republicans. If I am misunderstanding the stats, please correct me.

So does this mean the Democrats are simply learning how to win in this political system? Or does it mean the left is losing some of it’s integrity?

I cannot speak for where the funds are coming from. For example, Howard Dean in 2004 was funded by many individuals giving small amounts. Is this what is happening?

The House Loses on the Super Bowl

Gambling Article

From the article:

World Vision, a Christian aid organization, plans to take the T-shirts, sweatshirts and hats that the Patriots, Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers never got to use and send them to poor children in more than 100 developing countries, in what has become a feel-good footnote for losing teams in the past few years.

Or as Rachael Boyer of World Vision said in a news release, “Even though they didn’t win the Super Bowl, the New England Patriots will still be champions in several countries around the world.”

It has been a funny fact to me for years every time those championship hats and t-shirts are on the spot, and I get to point out those items have useless counterparts that turn up in pictures of the third world.

Is God Good?

Two men were discussing current events, wars here, disasters there, and other events that cause human suffering. The first man asked the second, “How can God watch all this evil in the world and do nothing.” The second man quipped, “I am more troubled by God asking me how I do it.”

This will only touch on a small corner of one of the biggest questions for those who 1) think about God, and 2) live or have lived on Earth for some amount of time during the past 10,000 years.

Harald Kushner, a rabbi, wrote in his book, “When Bad Things Happen To Good People” , there are three things in the Book of Job which we all understand to be true: God is good, God is all powerful, and that Job was not at fault. Kushner points out that only two of the three can be true at once. Take a moment to arrange them in the different sets of two. This is the conflict of the whole story in Job. The big question he answers is that we are not God’s defenders. When people go through trying times, times of suffering, bad times, we are not responsible for shifting the blame from God. God does not need your defense. When we do this, we end up shifting the blame to the person. The result is their suffering only increases due to our help. Read Job for yourself, he really lashes out at his friends for the things they say.

Kushner concludes that God has to let all things happen here because of free will. For example, stopping a man from hitting his wife would be an intrusion of his choice to do either good or evil. I don’t assign that amount of idleness to God. What Kushner does rightly assign is that pain is a crucible, from pain we can draw two different lessons. The easy lesson is that you are alone and suffering defines the universe. The other lesson is that you are not the center of the universe, you are not in control, and pain is temporary.

This is an ongoing topic, I will explore it again and again.