Pornography and Our Insufficiency In Discussions

In this post, I am mainly referencing this post by RELEVANT Magazine.

I tweeted a few days ago (a few weeks ago now) that the natural conclusion from a post from RELEVANT Magazine on pornography was to never have sex again because it could cause us to become addicted to dopamines. The post is centered around the idea of the brain producing dopamines when we are stimulated by various activities. In this particular post, Internet pornography was targeted as producing dopamines, and through repetition, we slowly are wired into a routine in our mind.

To break out of this routine is increasingly difficult, as the brain “learns” to act a certain way, causing compulsion and addiction.

The Invention of Truth

I’ve been catching various fragments of the Invention of Lying. 

My brother has been watching it on the hard drive recorded off the television. It is a relatively old movie and was released quite a while ago, but I haven’t mustered up the inspiration to sit down and view the entire movie.

The premise of the show is set in a world where no one knows how to lie, and this is fraught with philosophical impossibilities that I don’t really understand. The idea of the movie is that “telling the truth” is limited to speaking frankly, and without restraint. This limits the idea of truth to an impossibly small circle, whereas people are not allowed to be genuinely mistaken. Moreover, what if people know the truth, but are not compelled to voice the truths? Is that not considered lying, unless we are all naturally gossipers and to not gossip is to lie to our human nature (I could live with that).

Anyway, Ricky Gervais lives in a world where everyone tells the truth, no one has discovered how to lie yet. 

Building Contentedness Every Day

“This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

These words came from King David in the Psalms, it speaks of the thankfulness he has toward God, because He is the source of all things (Psalms 118:24). And whether, this thankfulness is arising from the circumstances at the time that he found himself in, or in the greater goodness and grace that God bestows on us continually. David shows how there are a great many things we can be thankful for. It is this thankfulness that arises from answered prayers and knowledge of the saving hand of God.

Through the notion that God is the source of all things, he proclaims that we should rejoice. The context speaks of a cornerstone that was rejected and the builder tossed aside. While this could apply to his own situation, that it seemed to him that he was the stone that was ignored and set for destruction, God saw him and lifted him out of his sin.

Shane Claiborne Post-9/11

I thought in the weeks following 9/11 this quote was especially relevant about the world we live in.

“I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, “Kill them all, and let God sort them out”.

A bumper sticker read, “God will judge evildoers, we just have to get them to him.”

I saw a T-shirts on a soldier that said, “US Air Force…we don’t die; we just go to hell to regroup.”

Others were less dramatic–red, white, and blue billboards saying,”God bless our troops.” “God bless America” became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, “God bless America–one dollar burgers.” 

Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles.

This burst of nationlism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thrist for intimacy that liberals and progressive Christians would have done much better to acknowledge. September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual. and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community–for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to alone in their sorrow, rage, fear.

But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallied around the drums of war. Liberal Christians took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you would dress a wound. A people longing for a saviour placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God.” [1]

[1] Page 198. Claiborne, Shane. The Irresistible Revolution. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan.

Socrates on Morality and Loving Your Enemy

“Isn’t a moral person a good human?”

“There is no doubt abouut that.”

“It necessarily follows, Polemarchus, that people who are harmed become less moral.”

“So it seems.”

“Now, can musicians use music to make people unmusical?”

“Impossible.”

“Can skilled horsemen use their skill to make people bad horsemen?”

“No.”

“So can moral people use morality to make people immoral? Or in general can good people use their goodness to make people bad?”

“No, that’s impossible.”

…

“So harming people is not the function of a good person, but of his opposite.”

“I suppose so.”

“And is a moral person a good person?”

“Of course.”

“It is not the job of a moral person, then, Polemarchus, to harm a friend or anyone else, it is the job of his opposite, an immoral person.”[1]

What Socrates argues here is a interesting precursor to what Jesus would preach a few centuries later. The dialogue begins with Polemarchus arguing that morality is doing good to those who are your friends and doing harm to evil. The dialogue evolves and Socrates tears apart Polemarchus’ arguments through various means including question who is a friend, and whether a insane man could determine what a friend or foe is. The conclusion is clear though:

““You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’”But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” Matthew 5:43-44 (English Standard Version)

[1] 14. Plato. Republic. Oxford University Press: London. 1993.

Fighting Against Sin The Wrong Way

“Our first problem is that our attitude toward sin is more self-centred than God-centred.

We are more concerned about our own “victory” over sin than we are about the fact that our sins grieve the heart of God. We cannot tolerate failure in our struggle with sin chiefly because we are success-oriented, not because we know it is offensive to God.

W.S. Plumer said, “We never see sin aright until we see it as against God…all sin is against God in this sense: that it is His law that is broken, His authority that is despised, His government that is set at naught…Pharaoh and Balaam, Saul and Judas each said, “I have sinner”; but the returning prodigal said, “I have sinned against heave and before thee”; and David said, “Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned”.

God wants us to walk in obedience—not victory. Obedience is oriented toward God; victory is oriented toward self. This may seem to be merely splitting hairs over semantics, but there is a subtle self-centred attitude at the foot of many of our difficulties with sin. Until we face this attitude and deal with it we will not consistently walk in holiness.” (1)

I am learning more and more how the simple act of being a Christian has been transformed into a complexity of emotions and self-help. I am convinced that the webs of self-help and Biblical counselling have become so ambigious, that we cannot see between the two. Where the Spirit’s work has been replaced with self-help trash and the self-help trash masquerades itself as the work of the Spirit–I don’t know why we are not finding ourselves content in God. Is it not because we have not God within us? Yet, the two are distinct because we look for our righteousness in Christ, and not within our sinful hearts. And this is only through opened eyes from a genuine experience of the true God, not empty spirituality of this world.

Maybe our attitudes towards sin are more tempered by our minds instead of the exact nature of God. In Isaiah, God says that we should be holy because He is holy. I find that especially within myself, my attitude toward sins are more a set of rules to follow than to follow and conform more and more to the image of God. Because only then do we realise how much larger this fight against sin is than just me (Hebrews 12v.4). Keeping our fight against sin to ourselves rejects the gifts of God through the Church, it pushes away the wonderfulness of fellowship with other believers in Christ and the communion of the Holy Spirit. Because surely an army is the collective of soldiers, not just one man against the world.

Why does the Church of Jesus Christ so often seem to be more conformed to the world around it than to God? Is it because we are not fighting sin the right way?

(1) p20-21.  Bridges, Jerry. The Pursuit of Holiness. NavPress: 1978.

Prayers For The Wicked

I’ve been playing a bit of Mass Effect 2.

Okay, that’s a lie–a lot of Mass Effect 2. I am really enjoying it a lot, it really brings back the joy into playing video games where you play one which you connect with immediately. It’s just the right amount of fighting (not too much gore) and open-ended nature of the story line.

I’ve clocked in about 20 hours in the past 3 days or so, which is a lot considering that is probably the amount of video games I have played this whole year combined. The storyline is wonderful, being able to control every action of your player who is going around picking up soldiers to join his team. Going from planet to planet, there is an assembly of diverse creatures that you have to convince to join your team to fight a group that is threatening the existence of the universe as we know it.

One of these is Thane Krios–”a drell assassin, the most skilled in the galaxy. Unlike most assassins, who prefer to snipe their targets from a distance, Thane prefers to get up close and kill his target personally, utilizing a mixture of stealth, firearms, and hand-to-hand combat abilities. Despite his profession, Thane is a deeply spiritual man who prays for success in his missions, and asks for forgiveness after each kill, even going as far as to ignore those in his immediate vicinity until he is finished doing so.” (s)

The spirituality of Thane is what fascinates me. He is an assassin, yet he is deeply spiritual. Meeting him for the first time, he gives an interesting insight into what he does:

Shepard: Can we talk? I came a long way to talk to you.

Thane: One moment, prayers for the wicked must not be forsaken. 

Shepard: She certainly was wicked.

Thane: Not for her. For me.

It is a wise saying that he muses–if we take the vengeance of God within our own hands, do we become the judges, not God? Who then, is the wicked one if we judge with partiality?

Two Perspectives On Love

Image via Wikipedia

This first perspective is from Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand is what you would call an Objectivist. That is, that reason and logic is the only true way through which we can acquire knowledge–implicitly rejecting religion and faith. She arrives at this through the subjectivity of human experience, that reality exists outside of human consciousness and our perceptions of the world can be defined only through inductive and deductive reasoning. Of course, that statement cannot be proved through reason or logic, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. Moreover, a myriad of other things cannot be proved through empirical evidence–love is the first that comes to mind.

Objectivism means that the human pursuit in life (a human assignment, mind you) is aggrandizement of the self. Therefore, her perspective on love are somewhat different from what we are used to, to the point where it is almost Stoic. She says:

“Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.” -Ayn Rand.

The second perspective is from Don Miller.  

I know I’ve been speaking about Don Miller a lot recently, and I know that I am quick to say state my disagreements with him as well. Yet, to his own protests, I would define him as an Emergent. Hence, I do dislike some aspects of his work, but most aspects of his work is quite wonderful. He provides a wonderful foil to what Rand has said above, defining love purely by what it can do for you. After all, what is the point of loving someone if they don’t love you back?

In her book, “An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, Rand argues that love is measurable–it is only Romanticism that muddies the waters. A man may not marry a person because it would affect their class or other people’s perception of him–”still another man may risk his life to save the woman he loves, because all his other values would lose meaning without her.” (33-34) She uses this to define varying amount of self-sacrifice to create a hierachy of love. Yet, what is love if it is not all love?

Don Miller provides the antithesis to Rand, and proposes a selfless love–one that would love if there was going to be no return, nothing good inside the person you love. Loving purely because it is our inherent nature as humans to love.

“Mr Spencer asked us about an area in which he felt metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We value people, I shouted out. Yes, he said, and wrote it on his little white board. We invest in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listen an entire white board of economic metaphors. Relationships could be bankrupt, we said. People are priceless, we said. All economic metaphor. I was taken aback.

The problem of Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money…if somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless.” - Miller, Don. Blue Like Jazz. pg 218.

What is Love? Is your Love really love, if it isn’t love to the end?

The Cross Is The Perfect Statement

“The cross is the perfect statement both of God’s wrath against sin and of the depth of his love and mercy in the recovery of the damaged creation and its damagers.  God’s mercy, patience, and love must be fully preached in the church.  But they are not credible unless they are presented in tension with God’s infinite power, complete and sovereign control of the universe, holiness, and righteousness.  

And where God’s righteousness is clearly presented, compassionate warnings of his holy anger against sin must be given, and warnings also of the certainty of divine judgment in endless alienation from God which will be unimaginably worse than the literal descriptions of hell.  It is no wonder that the world and the church are not awakened when our leadership is either singing a lullaby concerning these matters or presenting them in a caricature which is so grotesque that it is unbelievable.

The tension between God’s holy righteousness and his compassionate mercy cannot be legitimately resolved by remolding his character into an image of pure benevolence as the church did in the nineteenth century.  There is only one way that this contradiction can be removed: through the cross of Christ which reveals the severity of God’s anger against sin and the depth of his compassion in paying its penalty through the vicarious sacrifice of his Son. 

In systems which resolve this tension by softening the character of God, Christ and his work become an addendum, and spiritual darkness becomes complete because the true God has been abandoned for the worship of a magnified image of human tolerance.” (1)

I think at every moment there is a tendency to rush towards one or the other. The cross is love poured out; the cross is wrath poured out. Binaries fight out in our mind, and we become ingrained on one side of the expanse. We have tried to create a dialogue between the two extremes, but it is impossible. And it is impossible except through what we have known. Then, we remember that Jesus’ sacrifice is sufficient for the sins of the whole world–great enough to cover the great expanse, and wash our doubts away.

Enough for my haughty heart, enough for my lifeless soul.

Great enough to cover my lack of love, and my lack of righteousness.

Is the cross meaningful if you remove the wrath of God away from it? Is the cross meaningful if you remove the love of God away from it?

(1) (Lovelace, Richard. Dynamics for Spiritual Life, 84-85) the irony is that both those buildings could readily be defined as modernist.

King of the Hill on the Megachurch

There is a scene in “King of the Hill” where Hank and his family are trying new churches.

Repeatedly to no avail they cannot find one that they fit in exactly. After much effort, Peggy asks Hank if they could try the local megachurch as an alternative. She describes all the amenities and the programs that this church was running: “It pampers all of them. They have their own coffeeshop, florist, minimart, bank and a drycleaner that accepts all competitor’s coupons.” Hank’s response is classic:

“If I wanted to go that route, I could just walk around the mall and think about Jesus!”

I’m not sure why people outside of the church have greater understanding about the church than the people inside. If I didn’t know better we are getting more honest commentary outside of the church than within. I wonder how thick the walls of the churches are that we cannot hear the laughter of the people outside.