What You Really Need This Christmas

Let's face it. According to the wisdom of men and women, Jesus Christ is a religious option, at best, or a delusional opiate for the weak-minded, at worst. But according to Jesus' own words, He is life, rather than a life-boost. Is He wrong? Or maybe a tad over-exagerated? What if, after all is considered, we are the ones over-exagerated? What if we are filling our lives with our diversions trying to feed the vast emptiness that only He could possibly fill? In our daily desperation to leave a mark, make a dent or difference, we have forgotten that these things were originally latched on to create diversions for something much deeper within us. It's a troubling place that usually hits us when things quiet down, lights go off and everyone goes home. Something that is at the core of our being that consistently creeps into our psyche queuing us to quell it...push it way back down...with diversions of our choosing, to keep from getting consumed with it. When it creeps in, it follows with questions like "What is the point to anything?", "What am I really here for?", "Where am I going?", "Is this all there really is?"

Granted, many diversions are commonly considered destructive and taboo, like drugs, reckless permiscuity or violent tendencies. But our diversions aren't always taboos. Sometimes our diversions are good, in and of themselves, but diversions used in the same way as drugs, reckless permescuity or violence. I know that whether or not you admit it, you know that dark void that seems to always threaten to invade in the quiet hours of the night or during desperate times. We all recognize it. We also, whether we admit it or not, divert ourselves away from it with whatever we can use within our grasp. I want to list some of those diversions....not the sorded ones, but the ones most of us identify with. Only after calling into the light, what we whisper to ourselves in the dark, can we deal with the void.

Diversions

Power & Influence
One diversion type is the pursuit of accumulation of power and influence, whether it is to bring thriving commerce to a sleepy suburb or export a worldview halfway across the globe. Immortality is the myth that fuels this diversion. Two of the most successful people in world history, in terms of power and influence, were Alexander of Macedonia and Gaius Octavian Caesar. The first exported his version of sophisticated Mediteranean culture worldwide and the latter, international civility, peace, law and order. Today, their names are hardly recognized by many. Their influence may still be felt today, but in a more anonymous fashion than either ever contemplated. They are peppered throughout history texts and Wikipedia servers, but have become more associated with salad dressing, a less-than-mediocre Oliver Stone movie or the nameless statue in Las Vegas, pointing oblivioulsy at the Boingo Wireless billboard above the boulevard. Their empires are now ruins, advertised in colorful cruise ship excersion brochures browsed by vacationing consultants, paralegals and dental hygenists, not to pay homage to the gods, but to find something completely different than the familiar and mundane of Atlanta, Cincinatti or Dallas. The pursuit of immortality ends in death and memories long forgotten, swallowed up by time and Outlook calendar reminders. With great power comes great responsibility and the position and infuence in and of itself isn't bad. It's our fuel behind gaining the position and influence to manipulate and control that takes a neutral thing and makes it clinical.

Societal Prestige
What is this? It's the membership to the Petroleum Club, New York Athletic Club, officer of the Neighborhood Association, Chamber of Commerce, membership in SBC voting delegation or simply being close friends with Bono. We pine for these things to give our life significance by comparison to other lives. We do that to disguise our bankruptcy and we know it. The fact we all do it is our excuse for not having a problem with any of this, as insane as it all really is. The myth this diversion provides a false sense of importance and being a member of a group also provides the comradery of others in the same boat to aid in the diversion. I wrote about this in a previous post entitled Inner Rings and it doesn't just include our desire to be in those rings, but also our desire to fight against them....or keep them in our psyche, regardless of whether we are in or out of them. One potential argument in favor of membership in these rings could be the good things the rings themselves provide to society. But, outside of church and possibly the Kiwanis or Masons, much of the 'good' is really window dressing for a much more selfish desire, that of being noticed. When the doors to the Petroleum Club are locked, lights go out, and we all head back home, the addictions, hang-ups, neglect, manipulative and abusive relationships are back within sight, assuring us they never really left us...have always been there...just dimmed a bit by the photo ops and mingling around the champaign fountain. Maybe you get up in the night, fix a numbing drink, turn on the television or step outside the garage and smoke a joint, trying to sort things out, waiting for day to come. Depending on how well we have diverted our attention away from reality of the grit and heart of life with the memberships and status, will determine just how desperate we become. There is nothing wrong with the Inner Rings or the memberships, in and of themselves. Our use of these things to hide, deny and divert ourselves from our true condition and from Him is wrong and will catch up with us sooner or later.

Profession
How many times have you said that you work 18 hour days for your family? Do you? How many family members have been sacrificed on the alter of the business or profession? In many homes, the blood may not run as red as the steps to Mayan pyramids in days of old, but the daily sacrifice is probably more efficient and magnified as home computing, PDA's and broadband allow us to ignore the most important people in our lives in the comfort of our living rooms. Of all the diversions I write about, this one strikes me the most. And for many of you reading this, it strikes you as well. Worry about making ends meet is almost always a cop out. We work to keep our minds and schedules busy so we can avoid the questions, the relationships that might force us to adjust our lives or have us deal with things that really need to be dealt with.

Work is an ethic. Even before human beings fell from grace, we were given work. When His Kingdom is consumated, we who have decided to follow Him, will have an entire universe and eternity to fill with creativity and work of our hands and minds to glorify Him. But our popular definition of work is nothing more or less than a form of diversion to keep us away from dealing with ourselves in a proper way. We can justify it, like we think we can justify deifying our families. But what is worse, is that at least family is a higher priority. It makes this diversion almost as clinical as the others.

Family
This is a touchy one. I love my wife and daughter more than anyone else, outside of Jesus Christ. But it's unavoidable to see two strong and sometimes subtle diversions regarding family: 1) Staging or masking happy lives with wide smiles, pretending to be alot more content than you really are, at the expense of your children and 2) Worshipping your children or spouse and the inevitable dissapointment that follows sooner or later. With regards to the first issue, it is almost normal and natural to portray our family as perfect or carefree. We have bought into the myth that disguising our pain and problems with fake smiles and manipulative busy schedules is no different a diversion as the others. It's actually worse because the fact it is family can make us never question it....because it is family and family comes first. Actually, family will not fill the void either. Our children don't need to push their questions, disappointment and pain deep down underneath saccarine smiles. It will become a boiling cauldron and eventually burst forth because life is filled with great things and awful things. Our marriages need to be seen by our children as authentic, rather than contrived, especially when stress is put on the mother and father. How your children deal with real life will be heavily influenced by how well you dealth with it in their youg presence.

Speaking of deifying family, let's take our kids, which leads me to the second problem. They are precious and a huge responsibility for us to raise them as best we can. But even if they never fall into drugs and alcohol or something of the like, they will eventually grow up and leave us. They will start their own lives and families and we will be left and pushed back into a further priority. That is the way it should be. But because that is the way things are, we can't make our children the 'be all end all' for our lives. It has to be even bigger than our children, or else even our decision to pour our life's meaning into our own offspring will bring us to despair. I would imagine the first day of college for such parents would either bring stress on the marriage and lead to divorce, or else a nervous energy to find something big enough to keep things together in the midst of an empty nest. Deifying a spouse isn't any better. If you place your very existence, meaning and purpose into your spouse and they die or leave you, all of your existence, meaning and purpose die or leave with them and then where are you? If you remarry, how does that work out for your new wife or husband? You need something bigger than family and spouse to deal with your emptiness. Otherwise, things that are good in their proper perspective, get perverted and misused.

Politics/Justice
If this isn't a postmodern shibboleth, I don't know what is. It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative. Everything is about empowerment, justice, and equality but....without any foundation at all. In fact, any foundation for whatever cause smells so much of a metanarrative or absolute, universal truth, that we almost slap ourselves in the face to keep from falling back on them and then ignore the fact we never have abandoned those things in the first place. We live in an age where we walk around like intellectual schitzophrenics, tipping back and forth between reason and madness in order to keep walking an impossibly fine line between the good life and no objective truth that overarches all our lives. I've read about the progressive humanist movement that culminated in 1919 with it's own Manifesto, only to have it re-written years later, after another world war and holocaust reflecting progression that turned out to be inverted and very deceptive. I read about the third world revolutionaries that fought against oppresive imperialism only to install a madness and cruelty that hasn't been seen since Ghengis Khan. In the wake of Imperial French reign and an American occupation to follow, the likes of Pol Pot arise as an answer, which left millions of bodies rotting on roads, fields and farmland. Even Jean Paul Sartre, who was considered a much cherished father to many of these movements, recanted his own philosophy upon the tragedy that ensued.

But what really gets me, especially after this last election, is that without Jesus Christ, we have no other choice but to bet on the next huge disappointment. We kid ourselves into thinking we have finally chosen hope, vision and progress knowing. But, really, we prefer the risks that have shown us more incompetence, corruption and malice than to face objective truth, real justice from a power transcendent from ourselves and, most importantly, salvation that provides us the grace and power to actualize alot of the rightly placed judgment we have of the mess we are in. Our private definitions of justice and our campaign to empower our brand of justice over others, is the same thing the Nazi's pursued. We haven't re-heated any ovens yet, but we have already begun to tinker and legally redefine quality of life in terms of how much trouble we are on those who would have to take care of us, whether infant or aged. Our sense of justice was originally intrinsic part of our evidence for God. But, as Paul apply stated in Romans 1, instead of giving credit where credit is due, we decided to become stupid, seek our own self-interest and in the process, God has given us exactly what we desired. Our sense of political justice has not filled a void, but has revealed our foolishness.

On the other hand, conservatives wish to use the church to forward their political agenda. It doesn't matter which side I am on. The church is not a means to a political end. And I can promise that if you treat her that way, the worm will turn on you. Just ask Ralph Reed. There is nothing more sad and pathetic than someone who is staunchly conservative yet happens to be Christian. When you replace the eternal spring of life from a committed relationship with Jesus Christ with a political agenda as the main course, then life becomes vaccuous and stale. And when life gets that way, the urge to hide it behind saccarine smiles false contentment and puritanical tendencies kicks up a notch. Any criticism will be met with resistance that comes from a manipulative urge to control what was ultimately in His hands and never controlable by you in the first place. I am a huge fan of Francis Schaeffer, and his work in the late 70's and early 80's using his films and books to promote biblical Christian worldview and principles was awesome and probably added to the huge wave that knocked out a liberal president and congress in 1980. But within a few short years, those who won the battle had begun a slow decent in losing the war by placing the political cart before the horse and using the pulpit as a political means, rather than a source of Good News and reason for a hurting world.

Our Bankrupt Alternatives
Blaise Pascal stated that we all have a God-shaped hole in our center that can only be filled by Him and until we do, we are restless. Augustine of Hippo stated that our hearts are restless until we find rest in Him. Jesus told us that in Him we have rest for our souls, in the midst of living our lives no matter how hard they may be. But we are far too clever for that. I tried to find out how much money Cornell, the US government and private industry and philanthropists have spent on SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) since it started. I still don't know, but I assume billions is not too big a word for it. The task of SETI was stated by one of it's prophets, Carl Sagan, when he was teaching at Cornell, when he said that all they needed was one single message from outside of our world....just one message. Then we will have the answer to the vexing question of intelligence outside of humanity in our universe. Yet, all the while, Watson and Crick's discovery nearly 25 years earlier had spawned research into DNA in which we have discovered that a single strand of this complex structure contains over 600,000 pages of coded information. Yet SETI waits for pulses from Andromeda....so we can find some evidence of extra-human intelligence. Like Paul called us years ago...fools, with our hearts darkened and dead to the things of God.

Science hasn't disproven the existence of God. It hasn't even made a dent in the argument for God, as can be witnessed in debate after debate. Within the past 40 years, major universities have seen, not the death of God, but a rise in numbers of extraordinary minds forging new fields in Christian thought, whether it be Dallas Willard at USC, Alvin Plantinga at Notre Dame or Richard Swinburne at Cambridge. These men will tell you they stand on the shoulders of giants....those cast aside at the advent of Kant and Darwin, but recently re-earthed and presented again as an alternative to the philosophically bankrupt pursuit of modern naturalism and scientism, resting on both Kant's agnosticism and Darwin's theory of natural selection. And their work has spawned new interest in Christian philosophy, Christian thought in all professional areas.

In the meantime, Discovery Channel, et al, still think the underlying philosophy of verificationism...the theory that even finds itself as the basic, fundamental assumption in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, is still viable even though it has been debunked and considered shelved for almost 60 years (Einstein's Theory is remarkable and useful in understanding time-space dynamics, but denies the existence of absolute space and time for no other reason than because Einstein was a fan of Ernst Mach and Mach was prophet for empericism/verificationism, which denies anything that isn't verified. It turns out that maybe Lorentz had a better handle on these things after all).

Even the theory of evolution has been retained as superior over intelligent design, even though it's own rationality is undermined by the very theory (no scientific explanation guaranteeing or even improving probabilities of correlation between accurate beliefs and behavior). But the general public (fans of Good Morning America, Oprah and People Magazine) believe this debate has been over for years and the only good Christians are those that don't seriously believe in God as a real knowledge claim.

And yet...violence in schools...political and corporate corruption on unimaginable scales...redefining quality of life at the margins of human development...farming of body parts for profit...divorce, abuse, neglect at all time highs. As technology improves each year, our depravation reaches new heights and technology has turned its attention to hiding our shame than improving our lives. Great minds in research and business come together and cure....baldness and a limp weinee. Homosexuality is being forced on a public that constantly votes against measures to make it equal to hetersexuality...but the broken and torn up lives of spouses, children, mothers and fathers, in the wake of a loved one 'coming out' is totally ignored. And as candidates drone on about nothing, their accumen is weighed in terms of delivery, rather than content. We are adrift on a sea towards nowhere but nowhere gets darker each year. And as it gets darker, our voyeristic interest in famous people's private lives gets more and more accelerated. Someone may know that Madonna and A-Rod say they are just friends, that Jennifer Aniston's year is 2009 or that little Suri Cruise is turning heads in Europe. But that same person may be unaware that their son has tried meth for the first time...that their spouse has been entrusting themselves to a co-worker instead of them or that their daughter's depression is causing her self-mutilation to spiral.

His Kingdom Hasn't Been Slowed

Jesus Christ isn't just the best answer for life. He's the only answer out there. Everything we have come up with has either slowly turned on us or fizzled into oblivion. It all looks clean, happy and together for public consumption. But we all hurt. We all have our secrets that, if they were revealed, we'd be suicidal. We are all hiding behind a mask to keep up appearances. But those broken with nothing left to lose and who have recklessly abandoned themselves to Jesus Christ seem crazy or weak or stupid to us. But they are the heirs of His Kingdom. They know His voice and they follow Him. They don't have it together. They are probably not going to attend the inaugural parties. Many are simply forgotten shadows in a world drunk with ambition and desire. But He knows them, calls them and will make them co-heirs with Jesus. The unwanted, undesirable and hopeless who realize it and have turned over everything they are to Him....whether they be homeless or the CEO...recognize that outside of Him, there is no meaning, no purpose and no value, even to things that should have them.

That's because He created the show, allowed us to stray, then sacrificed more than we will ever know to give us a way back to Him, if we so choose. And once we do that, we can have life....real life, not the facade. And we can begin to truly make a dent in this ugly place. It is happening now. Did you know that last year in Pakistan, more Muslims accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior than ever before? Did you know that churches are exploding in places like Korea, China, Southeast Asia and Africa....and that most of them are preceded by miracles? The Kingdom of God is more active and vibrant in our world now, than it was when the events that took place in the book of Acts. We can't see it because it is too fantastic for our consideration. We have educated ourselves and entertained ourselves into a drunken stupor. The UK, Germany and France have seen Christianity marginalized. But in Bhutan, Pakistan and Thailand Jesus is afoot and taking this world by storm. I realize that this probably will never happen, but mathematically, if you take the rate of conversions to Jesus Christ from 1970 to now and then extend it another 30 years, every living person will be a believer in Jesus Christ as Lord? We live in astounding times, well hidden by our own diversions and foolish thinking.

My Own Conversion

The day I gave everything I was to Jesus Christ, was also the worst day of my entire life. The minute I gave my life to Him, my own son's life slipped through our fingers. For me, I had to be brought to my absolute bare minimum in order to give up my well thought out strategies for survival, desires to become famous or infamous...all my diversions...I gave up what I began working on since I was a little boy when I first experienced the coldness of this life for the first time....laid it down and cried out to Him. But unlike testimonies you hear from many, it was not a day that I mark down as one of gladness. I had new life in Christ and a son to bury. He was born premature and remained very sick for over 9 months. We were in and out of the hospital and the amount of poking, prodding, medicating and cutting they had to do on Jamie was too much for him and he died October 25, 1996. Prior to Jamie's death, I had been reading alot and delving more into Christianity and the Bible. But it was pretty much a veiled mystery to me...far out of reach. It wasn't until early morning of the 25th of October, that He invaded my life, turned on the light switch and became my friend, my teacher and my savior. It was the best day and the worst day. And, yes, as David said, if my son can't come to me, I will go to him. In the meantime, I experience a lifetime of growing and learning from the One who salvaged me 12 years ago and I have never looked back, through thick and flush.

Ever since that day, I have struggled to communicate what He has done for me since then, all the while realizing that unless He invades your life, He will remain a veiled mystery hidden behind all of your diversions, hangups and masks. You have no idea how clever you are. It takes an enormous amount of thinking, strategy and energy to plan out everything from how to keep yourself from getting hurt by others, how to protect what you have, get more and continue to appear content for a watching public. It doesn't matter if your story begins in kindergarten when the bully teased you for the first time, or if you were abandoned by Mom and Dad completely or if the neighborhood kids excluded you from fun and games. At some point, the ugly of this world hits a very young person and the project for protection and significance begins, built entirely on mistrust and self interest. And until we find Jesus Christ at the end of our rope, we continue into the grave.

He told us that He knocks at the door and is ready to enter, if we let Him in. I don't know what you are going through. How could I? But I know you are going through a mess, whether it is of your own making, of someone else's making in which you inheret it or something in between. I want you to know that I understand how hard it is to accept Jesus Christ's message. But after October 25, 1996, I know why it is so hard....and it isn't because it is impossible to believe. It's because it costs too much for us. But after October 25, 1996, I can also tell you that the real cost is in not running to Him now. What may seem to you as a reasonable way of life...is actually a cleverly disguised way to hide pain, disappointment and destructiveness. He offers you real rest....real peace....not the kind you are accustomed to, but peace that is beyond understanding. When you see some of us praising God in the middle of horrible circumstances...we aren't being pollyanish or naive. We recognize that whatever has been taken from us will grow us closer to the One who calls us every day and give us the strength to withstand whatever He has for us to deal with. There is nothing we want more than to be closer to Him and to adjust our lives where He wants us to adjust.

He knocks, just like He has every Christmas before. Open the door, give all you have to Him and realize that this holiday isn't just a religious observance. It is celebration of when God came in human flesh to dwell among men. In Luke 4 He introduces Himself by quoting Isaiah:

"He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

If He hadn't come, we would all be a hopeless bunch.

He loves you more than you will ever know or understand.

He patiently waits for you to open your heart and let Him in.

There is no safer place in this universe, regardless of what your circumstances are.

Merry Christmas!

Ravi Zacharias on God and Science

this is good...but pay close attention to the story of the Vietnamese interpreter who found Ravi in the US 17 years after their ministry together in Vietnam.

Intermission - Camile Paglia on Obama & Palin

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee -- what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan -- nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.

The entire article can be found here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/index.html

Postmodernism: A Sentence Rather than a Foundation - Part 3

Proverbs 28:26:
Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered

"You can change your beliefs so they empower your dreams and desires. Create a strong belief in yourself and what you want." - Marcia Wieder

Either Proverbs is wrong and Marcia is right, or its the other way around, but they cannot both be right. If you are committed to postmodernism, you might consider both of them right, in order to either avoid conflict or further your cause. In either case, it is all boiled down to power struggles. Postmodernism is such a dry term and bantered around like it was a satellite channel or an expensive magazine periodical. In fact, instead of treating it like I did scientific naturalism, I'll just stick with the familiar and see if I can make my point. But we are all taking it in and breathing it out, so my goal is to at least point it out, what it means, and then you can agree or disagree.

Before I do, I have to summarize where we are with modern science. All modern science is guided by Principle of Verification and Falsification. But that has to exclude an enormous portion of life, including both principles, since they fail their own test. It leads to a reductionism that sometimes also leads to dehumanization. When human beings are reduced to animals, minds to brains, etc., the value is drained and a door is opened to alot of very scary stuff. But because the philosophy that underguirds modern science is too restrictive to live out, in addition to being self refuting, hardly any scientifically minded people live it out too consistently, with few exceptional cases like B.F. Skinner, as one example.

Most others turn to postmodernism to escape this reductionism without having to consider Jesus Christ's Gospel. In some cases, Christians turn to postmodernism, as a means to avoid rejection as well as respond against abusive Christians. In fact, because of postmodernisms advent into alot of the church, an entire political reshaping of our country is taking place as I type this. It is basically a return to the democratic party and liberalism but is touted as a change we have never experienced. I am very skeptical, but time will tell.

Postmodernism has actually provided some good things in that it has fought against scientific reductionism and tried to induce a value system of some sort, as a stop gap means of keeping us all civil and happy. Politically, it has tried to keep other people from manipulating and forcing themselves onto others. Literararily, it has tried to encourage and empower people to think and apply rather than to blindly submit without question. Artistically, it has given us some great music, architecture and cinema...alot of which I am a huge junkie. But just because postmodernism has good points, the bad far outweigh the good. Naziism provided a strong education system, employment and national pride, but should anyone conclude it was anything other than a horrific political movement? Of course not! That is, unless you are a consistent moral relativist, in which case, who's to say?

What Does It Mean?
Postmodernism is hard to define because there are so many offshoots, tributaries and different academic disciplines that fall under it. A good way to look at it is this: postmodernism believes:

1) If there is a reality out there, we can't get to it because of our bias.
2) Rationality is simply sentences. Where there is no language, there is no truth.
3) Truth is relative to other truths in your social setting. So long as it coheres to them, it is true.
4) Like modern science, there are no universals, like redness, roundness.
5) If there is a "reality" it is really reduced to a social construct that can be deconstructed.
6) There are no absolute truths, only relative truths, based on social considerations.
7) Scientific naturalism is correct, in that the only actual knowledge is emperical knowledge.
8) By changing language, individuals, groups, societies can be empowered.

I am sure alot of these things have a ring of familiarity or are even things we hold dear. But they are false. Not only that, by holding to them, we throw out the baby with the bathwater and exchange fears of what we want to avoid with greater evils that were unintended. Alot of the 20th century is a historical case in point.

Regarding personal bias and getting to reality: postmodern folks deny that it is possible for a person to make an objective judgement discerning between good and bad information. Every decision is hopelessly clouded by personal bias and restrictions of sense perception that keeps us from ever getting to 'the thing in itself'. Postmodernists get confused between psychological objectivity (being emotionally committed to something) and rational objectivity (being able to objectively discern something). You can be psychologically biased and make an objectively rational decision. It's usually called making a decision even though you may not like it. Once more, psychological objectivity isn't necessarily a good thing either. How good would it be to maintain psychological objectivity for Naziism or cancer? Of course it wouldn't be good at all. Can you make objective decisions without psychological objectivity? You sure can, despite postmodern theory. That means reality is out there and we can know something about it, despite any bias, and the fact that sometimes we do that begrudglingly is a sign that psychological bias isn't too high a wall to scale.

Postmodernists also are big into language....so much that truth is really language...sentences, actually. They believe that truth is comprised of sentences that obey arbitrary cultural linguistic rules. What that means is that unless someone speaks it, writes it or reads it, there is no such thing as truth. What's wrong with this? Can you hold to a truth or fact in your mind without associating language with it? Sure you can. I could give several examples. First of all, when you show an apple to a baby, then point to a picture of an apple in a book, that baby associates the thing with the picture, absent language. It isn't an apple because the baby said it was....the baby can't speak any language yet, but she can know what an apple is. Truth is not bound by language.

They also believe that if you want to talk about truth, the only way you can, in meaningful terms, is in the context of how well one belief or proposition coheres with all other beliefs or propositions in your social context. For example, if you are a Buddhist and believe that there is no soul, that would cohere to other Buddhist believes about suffering, self discipline as defined by the Eight Fold Path, etc. It would cohere and since it coheres, it would be true....for you. However, it would not cohere for a Christian since Christians beliefs would not cohere to a 'no soul' theory and so it wouldn't be true for them. But there is a problem with coherence theory for truth...if all truth is defined by how well it coheres with my other beliefs, how can one know if the coherence theory of truth is true? Especially, how can it be true if it doesn't cohere to my other core beliefs and does it end up trying to be a transcendent, absolute truth above all other belief systems, against basic postmodern principles? You see how faulty coherence as a primary truth test becomes? You can believe something false and it will cohere with other beliefs. For example, say John believes he is a Ninja Turtle and that he further believes that everyone who says he is not is conspiring against him. John would have consistent beliefs that were false. Coherence just doesn't work as a truth test.

They also reject universals. They hold to what is known as nominalism or extreme nominalism. All that means is that they believe there is really no such thing as redness, for example. They believe that what we call 'redness' is having something appear to us a certain way we describe with a word 'red' and nothing more. They also reject essentialism. Essentialism means that something is essentially what it is, regardless of how many changes it goes through. Francis Magnolia Nowlin was the same person in 1918 as she was in 1996 as my grandmother, even though she aged, her hair color changed, all her cells had been replaced many times over, etc. Postmodernists would reject essentialism and say that my idea of Francis Magnolia Nowlin was defined in my mind and that as she changed, there was no surviving 'essence' of that woman. It is basic and self evident that substances, like self and other people, endure through change. It makes no sense and goes against basic understanding to reject essentialism. But this is a postmodern commitment.

They believe that reality is reduced to a social construction. Your reality as an American Democrat is different from the reality from a Sudanese farmer. It's true that these two examples have vastly different cultures, experiences and backgrounds. However, the 24 hour day, changing weather, birth, death, aspirations, etc., are common and transcend all local experiences, cultures and backgrounds. There is an over-arching reality that contains us all and it is also self evident, contrary to the belief of social construction of reality. There are absolute truths, despite postmodern relativism, because simply asserting there are no absolute truths is itself an absolute, universal truth. I can't really see why I need to address that much further because it is so self evident. If someone ever tells you there is no absolute truth, ask them if they are absolutely sure. But make sure you buy their lunch for them, because they may get agitated. Sometimes truth hurts.

They side with scientific naturalism in that the only possible experts out there are those that deal with emperical knowledge. You can have experts on the topic of physics, biology or chemistry. But there can be no experts on God, theology, morality, politics, etc. That's because all those things are not based on emperical knowledge. That is why Oprah can be just as much of an expert on Jesus' teachings as Louis Berkoff. Peter Jennings can provide just as much of a detailed trace of the historical Jesus as the Apostle John. It's also why political programs are like a food fight. It's not a matter of facts and knowledge, but opinion and perception of things that cannot be emperically verified or falsified.

The last item is something I will deal with in the next section, because all these philosophical ideas and beliefs the postmodernist accepts and proposes is, to a great measure, to obtain to the last item, self empowerment and/or the goal to keep other dominant individuals or groups from manipulating or dominating non-dominant groups. There is an ethic to it, but without a proper grounding in truth and knowledge, it will end up in chaos. With the empowerment movement in this country, it can already be seen.

What it looks like in your life...
If you try to consistently live as if objective truth about reality was unattainable, then what is left is raw power. Power in politics, power in vocation, power in...everything. It is winner take all. However, the postmodern goal is to make sure people don't use language and societal constructs to run over anybody and that through changing language and subsequently our thinking, we can empower the weak and protect them from the strong. But that hasn't happened. It has turned all of life into the Orange Bowl. You end up with billions of vested interests competing in the market place of ideas, each one vying to overturn the prevailing view. You have postmodern thinkers who deny dichotomous thinking (right/wrong, good/bad, protagonist/antagonist) living out dichotomous strategies of claiming power and control. You have Republicans dodging truth to place themselves in a better light. You have Democrats dodging the truth and placing Republicans in the worst possible light. In the end, what matters is who wins. Whoever wins is right and whoever loses is wrong.

The idea of protecting those who can't protect themselves, without realizing who is doing the protecting, turns into granular bedlem and as the pressure of the contest and the pressure of reality begins to tighten, the gloves come off and pretty soon, more damage is caused than what was originally the concern. That's because Jesus was absolutely correct about the human heart:

"But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person." Matthew 15:18-20

What naturally comes out of the human heart? Place human beings under extreme pressure and you can easily tell our nature. It isn't to protect the weak, extole the good and empower the exploited. It's to protect our own butts and how hard and nasty we protect ourselves depends on the pressure placed on us. All the while, we try to do it as if we were innocent and well-meaning people, which means we're habitual liars as well. We recognize what is right and good and even pretend to desire it for others as well as ourselves. However, once the warp and woof of reality set in, we fall off the wagon and begin to excuse ourselves. Postmodernism begins by breaking all its own rules and making sweeping generalizations about human nature....that end up clashing with the evidence.

So, you try to empower the weak to offset the exploiter, and all the sudden, it is you who are the exploiter. You want to end abusive manipulation of the system, by abusively manipulating it yourself. You want to end the reign of tyrants by becoming the worst of their kind. You wish to rescue the company, nation or community from what is considered abusive neglect only to install an abusive neglect of your own and anyone who gets in the way will be demonized. The intentions may have been initially noble ones. But it just never turns out that way, because human nature is not conducive to achiveing those goals, without each individual having a radical change in within their hearts. Only God can do that. No social construct, deconstructed narrative or politically correct legislation can make a dent.

In short, postmodernism seems to have figured out the problem of scientific naturalism, but is far from being a sufficient answer to the problem scientific naturalism brings about (dispassionate reductionism). In fact, it ends up exascurbating it, rather than resolving it. Recognizing what ought to be and our inability to naturally achieve it should cause us a problem...a rather big problem. Only biblical Christianity can provide sufficient answers to the problems postmodernism unwittingly brings about. It provides an answer up against the self-refuting and restrictiveness of scientific naturalism. It also provides condemnation for the original abuses within historical Christendom that were condemned by both scientific naturalists and postmodernists. It is simply left untried because it requires relinquishing autonomy, and we would rather face hell than give that up.

Postmodernism and Emergent/Emerging Church
Because of the recent popularity and political impact, I want to say something about postmodernism within the church. Since 2000, the emergent/emerging church has risen to great success within evangelical Christendom. It's unofficial titular head, Brian McLaren has taken the lead in writing his trilogy prodding a deconstruction and reconstruction of biblical Christianity. Brian McLaren is no philosopher, but has a precommitment to postmodern thought. In his books, McLaren asks Christians to abandon dichotomous thinking, even to the point of no longer distinguishing between absolute truth and relativism, which is impossible to do even if it is easy to write. Needless to say, his ideas are not that great. But there is something in McLaren's work that seems to 'emerge' that is relavent to the emergent/emerging church in general...its precommitment to politics and power as its essential message, with reconstructed biblical Christianity as an aid to that political idealogy.

Because the religious right has been associated with the Republican Party, the emergent/emerging church has taken great effort to disassociate the church with the party. I am actually glad to see that. But what concerns me is the commitment to postmodern ideas, which is manifest in the emergent/emerging church's bottom line, which is political power. Power, because of an abandonment of objective truth, is McLaren's gospel, which is no gospel at all. He defines Jesus as a political liberator, which he certainly was not...He was much more...making politics in general a side bar to what His real purpose is. But this is nothing new. It is the picture painted of Jesus by Liberation Theology, which has Marxist roots. Liberation Theology is interested, primarily, with political empowerment of minorities and exploited peoples, and using Jesus, rather incidentally, as the vehicle of choice to help obtain that political power. Truth, particularly the truth of the Gospel, is not even incidental, but an arbitrary vehicle.

I hope the reader can understand where I am going with this. When it comes to style of worship or the casual encouragement of many of these churches, I am in full favor. I am actually a proponent of localized worship styles, individuality in preaching and to be as comfortable in church as possible. The idea of starched shirts and hard pews is sort of sadistic to me. I also like the disdain of marrying politics to Jesus. Politics are the matters of men and pass away through time. Jesus' Kingdom reigns forever. Rather, my problem is the content of the message and the philosophical foundations that underguird it. Jesus is a person and His Gospel is a personal relationship with that person, living in His Kingdom now, through accepting His finished work on the cross, done on behalf of those who accept that work and Him personally. Politics is incidental to that, not the foundation and goal behind it. When you get that backwards, you are no longer a follower of Christ but a follower of man. And we can see history littered with those results.

Because of their recent power, I attribute the outcome of the election to their work. They will be the reason the religious right has lost alot of steam. Maybe that is a good thing. The religious right tended to worship conservative politics over Jesus, just as the emergent/emerging church has worshiped liberal politics over Jesus. They have taken all the worst aspects of conservative Christianity, adopted it for themselves, to fight conservative Christianity and have exchanged the frying pan for fire. There has never been a political season more charged with contentless language. Nothing is defined and presentation is all that matters. We will see if reseating liberal politics in power is really a change that is unfamiliar to the people of the United States, rather than just another stab at power lost in 1980. Time will tell. But because of the postmodern state of mind, we can see power as the remaining factor when the baby and the bathwater are thrown out.

In Part 4, I will conclude with this series by presenting the Biblical foundation as not the best alternative to scientific naturalism and postmodernism, but the only alternative that exists.

Scientific Naturalism: A House without a Foundation - Part 2

Jesus talked about two houses....one built on rock and another built on sand. In the parable, the storms came upon both, but the house on sand couldn't withold the power of the storm, while the house built on rock could. The foundation represented the object of our ultimate trust in life. The houses were the lives we lead on those foundations we choose. The storms come on both, representing the pressures of reality. Any foundation that is man-made will not be able to withstand the storms of reality. The part of Jesus' parable that is sometimes overlooked is that even though the house built on sand doesn't last, at first, it sits side by side with the one built on rock. It isn't until the storm comes that it washes away. There are other foundations that have lasted...some nearly 800 years...but eventually were washed away by time. Today, we have many foundations to choose and, if Jesus is right, all but His will not last. You can disagree with Jesus, but the conclusions of His teaching on this are pretty clear.

I watched a guy talk about his year of living biblically. He was an agnostic. But he decided he would try to follow the bible, strictly, and see how it worked out. Well, since the bible is 66 books, starting with patriarchs, then the Law, then the Kingdom(s), prophets, exhile, return and then Christ, the Apostles and the new church, this guy picked a few books out of the Law and called it living out the Bible.

Needless to say, anyone who reads the Bible at all would have thought it insipid and short sighted. After all, his conclusions were that living strictly according to the Bible is to grow a beard, obsess over mold color and avoid shellfish, among many other regulations. There wasn't anything mentioned about the Gospel of Jesus Christ or what living that out looks like and especially how it relates to those regulations. Could be he was just trying to be a consistent Jew. Or it could be he intentionally ignored the other 63 books, particularly the Gospels and how it addressed those old regulations. Why?

One clue for this is in what he said in his speech. He appealed to the difference between science and faith. Knowledge and truth about reality is found in science and faith is something that has little to do with reality but keeps us going, according to this guy.

He represents the thinking of this age. We are taught that science or, more particularly, emperical knowledge, is about reality and that any other knowledge claim that can't be touched, seen, heard, smelled or tasted wasn't real knowledge or far inferior to emperical knowledge. It's called naturalism or scientific naturalism. It goes like this: the only truth there is is that which can be reduced to chemistry and physics....the only knowledge we can obtain is that which can be verified (Verification Principle)...we are basically bodies, rather than persons, with brains, rather than minds, whose every behavior is reducable to evolutionary survival instincts. The universe is all there was, is and ever will be. Science is soveriegn over all thought, especially metaphysics and philosophy in general.

The question is this: have we simply evolved our thinking to arrive at something far better than any other worldview held prior to it?

The answer is 'no'. Naturalism, as defined above, holds no water at all, even though it is prevailing thought in which we have all been educated.

First, it's foundation is....well, doesn't exist
It claims science is sovereign over metaphysics and philosophy in general. Science is not soveriegn over philosophy but relies on it for its practice and theory. Logical Positivism was a movement that begin in the 1920's and from it came several theories that aided scientific theories up to our day. One of them was the Verification Principle or its modifications, which states that there is no knowledge unless it can be verified. It was debunked over 60 years ago, and the only reason science still relies on it today is because it is essential to modern science's very existence. The Verification Principle, itself, is self refuting. The statement itself cannot be verified. In response, its adherants revised it to come up with the Falsification Principle....the only meaningful knowledge is that which can be emperically falsified. If you can't possibly falsify a proposition by emperical observation, it was considered meaningless (several agnostic thinkers fall back on this). But that too was self refuting. Go back to the guy who tried to live out the bible in a year. He thought that was restrictive. But if you wanted to live out the Verificiation/Falsification Principle for a day, how much better would you fair? It would be so restrictive that vast amounts of knowledge and theories and truth would have to go out the window, because they would not be able to pass the test. What sort of knowledge fails this test? Knowledge of moral values, politics, theology and even more mundane things like the mind, other minds, self, numbers, secondary qualities or properties like colors and pain, etc. It would also be a huge contradiction to try living out your life with a theory that can't be verified or falsified itself, let alone everything else. The only way to continue believing in naturalism, is to presume atheism, prior to anything else.

Does that mean science is itself too restrictive or self-refuting? Of course not. But you have to separate scientific from the philosophies that underguird modern science that lead to theories that have no room for any knowledge but emperical knowledge...and when you do that, you realize that not only can science be free to move forward less restricted, but several 'theories' whose existence relies on these self-refuting philosophies now open up again for questioning.

Second, naturalism cannot provide a basis for living
If the definition of truth and knowledge for the naturalist is accepted, then an enormous amount of essential things have to go. There can be no objective moral values. Any moral values we hold are simply reduced to behavior for survival purposes. Torturing babies, for example, may 'feel' wrong to us, but in fact, the only reason we hold this is because of how natural selection works on our nervous systems to get us at the right place at the right time. In a universe that is only matter, energy in space and time, there simply cannot exist moral values because they fail the test of emperical knowledge. We can live a 'moral' life if we choose, but under the naturalistic view, the morals we live by simply cannot exist in reality.

There can be no such thing as love, unless it is reduced to natural behavior to propogate genes. When you spend a romantic get-away with your spouse, what you are doing, in purely naturalistic terms, is behaving in a way for your species as a means to propogate your genes. You can call it 'love' if you wish, but 'love' doesn't really exist. It is just a concept we created prior to figuring out our survival behavior through evolutionary theory. The same thing can be said about your children. What you term as 'love' for your children is reduced to the very same thing....they have your genes and you want them to grow up and propogate as well. It is instinctive within human animals to propogate for survival purposes. Love, the way you understand it, does not exist. Thank goodness for evolutionary theory to help explain old wives tales, like essential love relationships we hold dear, so we can better understand reality of natural selection at work in our species (sarcasm).

Under naturalism, there is no such thing as a mind. It is only a brain. All abstract thought is reducable to chemical reactions in the nervous system. All beliefs...all beliefs...are reducible to biological reactions to stimuli. There are different naturalistic theories behind this. One theory believes that all thought is reducible to brain reactions and doesn't exist on its own. This is called Physicalism. Another believes that thoughts exist, but only 'supervene' over the brain activity, much like wetness supervenes over the accumulation of water molecules. This is called Epiphenominalism. Both are common in that the mind and thought itself are totally reliant on the body and stimuli. So, the idea of liberatian free agency....the idea that you have freedom of thought and choice, is illusion. So, mind and thought have to go or be reduced, and freedom of thought and choice have to go, in favor of a scientific fatalism. So much for voting this November! Richard Dawkins has tried to bridge the gap between mind and brain by introducing 'memes' into the English language. However, memes are theoretical entities and were created, not through scientific method, but a stop gap measure to try to hold to essential things while not abandoning naturalism.

Under naturalism, there are several other problems. Numbers, properties and several other things that cannot be proven emperically, have to go. There are at least four things that have to go, if science is sovereign, in addition to the above: 1) Mathematical truths. Since science relies on mathematics, it can't prove mathematics. 2) Aesthetic truths. Science can't prove why some things are beautiful and other things aren't. 3) Proof of other minds. There is no way to emperically prove that other minds exist outside of your own. It is a brute assumption based on faith. 4) Other basic truths, like the past...that it isn't really just 5 minutes with the appearance of age.

I could go on forever. In a nutshell, the very 'wisdom' of our age is no wisdom at all, but foolishness.

Evolutionary Theory Is, Ironically, Incompatible with Naturalism

Believe it or not, it is. Alvin Plantinga has done an incredible job explaining how naturalism/materialsm and evolution are the strangest of bedfellows. I won't get into the details, and if you want to get into them, post it or email me. Bottom line, according to Plantinga, is that evolution is concerned with behavior, not so much belief, particularly the content of belief. Natural selection works on nervous systems to get a behavior conducive to survival. Unless evolution can provide a scientific explanation necessarily correlating behavior with belief, any belief, particularly the belief in evolution, cannot be held with high probability. To date, it is still struggling with this correlation and has yet to provide a sufficient explanation. In fact, the probability of any belief being true, particularly evolutionary theory, is low or inscrutable. There's more detail to it, to put meat on the bones, but I provide this as a mear skeletal structure of Plantinga's arguments. So, if one holds to scientific naturalism, they have to either abandon evolutionary theory as a probable theory, or abandon scientific naturalism, which calls evolutionary theory into question.

Why Hold To It, Proclaim It and Chide Anyone Against It?
So why is scientific naturalism a brute given in our age? I think one clue is because it gives us the ability to live out our erotic and political desires. It rips the rug out from under alot of things we can't live without, but with it we can abandon 'restrictions' to what we want to do, think or say, without impugnity. We accept scientific naturalism as a moral decision. There can be no God and any God-Talk is considered meaningless because it fails the Verification/Falsification test. But no God is liberating to do, think and say what one wants. However, with every gain comes a trade off. And the trade off's mentioned above are titanic.

But because they are so titanic to give up, we can't. So, does that mean we abandon scientific naturalism and start believing things we actually already knew before we educated ourselves into stupidity? Nope. That's where we turn to postmodernism. Postmodernism stands alongside scientific naturalism, but because naturalism fails in large respects for the reasons I gave, postmodernism steps in as a way to fill in the gap and try to ease the tension. What we end up with is a billion 'meta-narratives' that conflict, create more tension and end up, after the dust settles, a world-wide power struggle among different opinions, none of which being any more superior or less superior than the others. But I am jumping ahead. That's all in Part 3.

Truth and Knowledge - Part 1

I always feel yucky after any heated argument, whether it is politics or theology or the price of tea. I think it's called sin :-)

Anyway, after repenting before God and my debate antagonists, I get back up and try again...I'm just hoping my getting back up instead of letting an avalanche of shame take me to new lows points to Someone greater than me. If not, all I can say is, believe it, without Him, this blog would probably have been taken down by your's truly after the first week.

Trying to transcend political issues without abandoning critical items, I would like to strip away all the names, parties, platforms and talk a little about truth and maybe explain alot of how we think in our times. So, I want to talk about truth and knowledge.

I know, philosophical is passe and far too overwhelming. So let me try to at least attempt to deal with truth and knowledge as best I can without boring or losing anyone. I want to try because I think it is very critical, whether we look at politics, literature, theology, philosophy or simply conversations on the golf course.

Did you know that if you send your child to college....and that child shoots for a PhD, the university that you spent so much money for tuition and books and room and board will end up teaching your child that no one can attain objective knowledge? To our universities, knowledge is limited to science. The only knowledge obtainable is emperical knowledge....knowledge gained solely through the five senses. To the universities, there exists no such thing as non-emperical knowledge. Any knowledge claims that are beyond the five senses, simply cannot be determined or known. So the university is split between naturalistic materialism (hard sciences with the underlying philosophy that nothing exists but matter, energy and time) and postmodernism (study about 'meta-narratives' rather than study of knowledge outside of hard sciences).

You see this with the studies that come out. Government grant money is spent for universities to crank out emperical studies (remember---emperical means the five senses--only knowledge we can have, according to the well educated). Studies reflect statistical results that arrive at inductive conclusions regarding self-esteem, work force productivity, impact of gender-based thinking on children, etc. Because universities have become overwhelmingly atheistic or agnostic regarding God, a study about prayer with statistical results claiming that prayer helps people feel better about themselves and even aids in fighting illness....not because God exists, but because the statistical result this human behavior has on the sample group.

The studies are released to the media, the media releases the studies and continues to pervade and lead 'conventional wisdom' based on new statistical results. You will hear a PBS documentary discuss how marriage is reduced to evolutionary propogation of genes (based purely on emperical knowedge). Turn the channel and you can hear Oprah bridge the gap, as she discusses god and whoever he, she or it may be (non-emperical 'narratives'--rather than knowledge--created to help us make sense beyond what the PBS documentary reduced everything to).

You get the picture? The picture is that when it comes to morals, meaning, God, spirituality, there can be no knowledge claims...only personal speculation, which is why there are no experts on God on Oprah or much of any other talk show. There are no experts on God, because there is no one with knowledge of God, let alone His existence. C. S. Lewis had called people with this same situation, in his day, 'men without chests'. We are fragmented people who, on the one hand, believe there is no such thing as non-emperical knowledge (knowledge that can't be obtained through the senses--like morals, politics, God, spirit, purpose, etc.), but can't practically live as if that were true and create our own stories to ease the tension, understanding such stories are not in the realm of knowledge.

So, what's left? Power. Pretty scary, but that sums it up. And power is gained through politics, not as a way to help weed out poor information, assess the truth and help lead a city, state or nation in the right direction. Albiet the same language is used, but only tools to win. Remember, we are taught through universities, media and culture itself (even in many churches--like the UCC), there is only emperical knowledge. Once we get outside of that realm, there are no experts, no right or wrong, no up or down...just winners and losers, those in power, fighting to keep it and those struggling to take it away. Bottom line, it is about power.

Nieztche may not have been the most original philosopher, but he was a prophet for our age. It is the age of the new superman.

So, that power is obtained by any means necessary. For example, even though insurance fraud is a crime, in and of itself, if you can do it and not get caught, so long as it aids your gaining more power and influence, it is a means to an end....and that end is solely your creation. Our current generation breathes in and exhales out this thinking and way of life...and it is propogated from the institutions of learning, through the media and politics, to our family living rooms, daily paper and talks by the coffee machine. If you think I am overreaching, consider the current Obama-Ayers controversy, looking into Ayer's past and the Annenburg Foundation (Ayer's was into bombs in his early years, which he has no regrets. He even lost a past girlfriend while constructing a bomb). You can't excuse that, unless you admit the non-existence of non-emperical knowledge, especially objective moral values...and especially if it gets in the way to power.

I want you to think about this and think about it again because in the subsequent parts of this stream, I want to tackle a couple of incredibly important things: 1) what is truth and knowledge? 2) does non-emperical knowledge and truth claims exist? 3) what impact does this have on our culture and lastly 4) what is the unavoidable conclusion of such truth actually does exist?

I hope you remain patient with me and keep me honest. This is a hard issue to tackle, but the more I observe, I truly believe this is the #1 problem with our nation, universities, churches, families and workforce. The issue of knowledge is about as basic and pervasive as the issue of eating or walking. But because it can get weighty and because I am not very good at communication, let alone issues this weighty, I need you to meet me half way....and I promise it will be worth the investment.

Political Peas and Carrots

This is in response to a rather rabid attack on the Sarah piece: The original comments are in italics and my responses are not. I'll keep responses short as I can:


No Experience…
At least you have the honesty to ADMIT she has NONE. But making the argument that this is a good thing?? Breathtakingly irresponsible.


Keep in mind, she's running as Vice President, but since she is 'a heart beat away' from the presidency, let's look at what we have. Sarah Palin was elected twice to the Wasilla, AK city counsel in 1992 and 1995. She then ran for Mayor in 1996, winning that contest and the subsequent re-election. She served 2 terms as Mayor of Wassila, AK (1996-2002) and part of a term as Governor of Alaska (2006-present), spanning a brief 16 years of public life. Her education is in Journalism, (which is well accepted expert testimony on all subjects to many folks....ok, sort of tongue-in-cheek). It is true that of past presidential candidates, she is one of the youngest and inexperienced (public office held 16 of her 44 years). According to Article One of the Constitution, the only legal prerequisites for president are to be 35 years old, American born and to have had the US as a permenant residence for at least 14 years. No prerequisites about years as being a lawyer, senator or even governer....in fact, anyone could become president if they recieve majority of the electoral vote, which makes America very unique in world governments. The lack of experience in Washington, D.C. has, ironically, been one of her biggest criticisms and also one of her biggest virtues among her supporters.


In short, she does have experience and much of it executive. In addition, the voters of Alaska seem to have approved of her performance as both Mayor and Governor, prior to being chosen as McCain's running mate. Her performance at the Republican Convention and the Vice Presidential debate in Saint Louis has also shown her ability to perform well under extreme pressure. With regards to foreign affairs, it is fair to say that not many presidents have experience with foreign affairs prior to becoming president. Lastly, experience in things such as foreign affairs or in politics in general, is not necessarily or even sufficiently a virtue.


Won’t address the media…
Good plan here. Don’t like tough questions – just don’t talk.. If the questions are really to be as stupid as you suggest, then her going out and taking them head on would be to her credit. But maybe her handlers have gotten to know her better than any of us have had the chance to and think better of it. Maybe she is awesome and want to wait to play this card as their “October Surprise”. We will see..


The period of supposed sequestration from the media was between the last Couric interview and the debate in St. Louis, which spanned 7 days (September 24 thru October 2). The speculation about her 'handlers' is inventive, but doesn't seem to match either the period of 'silence' nor the results of her performance at the debate, even by democratic pundits (never said she did great--but 'held her own'). I think this was purposefully overblown to begin with. But keep in mind, before Couric and Gibson cut out all the hours of interview to arrive at the 30 minute bits they broadcast, they were clamoring for anything, from the real mother of her infant son, her husband rumored to being a pedaphile, to her firing her ex brother in law in Wasilla....not much at all. They needed a weakness....anything. Getting an all day interview with anyone, let alone her, with hours of footage to work with, is wonderful for you, if you are looking to place someone in a bad light. Another journalist could have taken the same footage and come out with something vastly different.


Lacking in Economics…
Although she has a short track record, she speaks often about cutting spending, lowering taxes and gives plenty of lip service to the other Regan era economic philosophies. But her actions tell another story, and by cutting taxes AND doubling spending she has left the small town of Wasilla with a 20 Million dollar deficit. Let’s see, can we think of another President that talks about Regan Economic principles but actually dramatically INCREASES the size of government AND the national deficit? I can think of one ..:)


Actually, this is incorrect. A deficit is like a net loss for a business. Dustin is refering to bond debt for city projects, rather than tax deficits. Approximately $14.5 million was to build a sports complex for Wasilla. The complex contains an ice rink, indoor track and soccer field, in addition to office and conference room space. Another $5.5 million was for improvement of roads (probably more expensive and frequent in Alaska than the lower 48) and $1 million to build a park. That is considered debt, not a deficit, and is normal for growing cities. Palin cut property taxes, raised sales taxes and created city improvements during her term. Based on the 2007 Independent Auditor's Report, the City of Wasilla cleared $7.4 million, after debt interest, in surplus and the $22 million dollars in business bond debt has been reduced to $13 million.

It goes to support her qualifications, rather than her lack of it. It will amaze you to see just how much revenue has increased from the tax cuts she made. Historically, tax cuts increase revenue, rather than decrease revenue. That's because the more money we keep, we spend and produce more tax revenue than we would have otherwise. Obama doesn't understand this basic fundamental. Sarah does...and has implemented a great case study in her home town. This charge you make is a perfect example of drinking far too much media Kool-Aid and not checking it out for yourself. There wasn't any response to her dealing with oil companies and the resulting surplus, so I guess you agree.

To be fair, I kind of like her to. She is probably a good person and her success is a good story. I also like the idea of electing a woman to a high office. But making her the Vice Presidential choice behind the oldest first time Presidential nominee in history is scary. Not just scary, but IRRRESPONSIBLE. For the record although I will vote for Obama, I am not in love with him. I believe he has the potential to be one of the all time great ones, but like most propositions that have a big upsides – the risk is equally as big.


I'm not sure your first sentence has much power of persuasion. It seems clear you are not fond of her. The comments also do not suggest you think she is a good person nor her 'success story' very succesful. Her position as second behind McCain is only irresponsible if you can show her as totally unqualified, which you haven't.


With regards to Obama, based on his economic plan, especially in light of our current delimna, he probably will go down as one of the greats, along with Jimmy Carter and Martin Van Buren. Increasing income and payroll taxes when cash is tight is a disasterous and irresponsible economic position. You can't tax losses and if there are any profits, increased taxes mean less cash to hire more staff or service debt for new projects, which are usually referred to by politicians as "jobs". I think his popularity is mainly due to the war in Iraq and the media's constant favorable publicity as well as people without hating people who have. People who have never seen battle are tired of hearing about others in battle and want to focus on more happier things. There's also a feeling of vengence against the super wealthy. The abuses reported have fueled an already existing tension between those living under tight budgets from those with several homes. And with nose diving real estate values, forclosed loans and tight lending policies, it is intensified. However, Obama's policies have had little investigation from the media and the general public is 'generally' ignorant of them. I concede that he will probably win and time will tell how our positions bear out.


I gave in and swam in the peas and carrots, which I vowed to myself I would not do. My apologies. I just felt very frustrated at the sheepish way people have formed opinions and anger at the bastians of media who control those opinions. We place far too much trust in the media, let alone congressmen and women. We consider a sound bite or video bite as an adequate replacement for knowledge gained through personal investigation into a matter, like a remote control. If there is anything to my comments in this blog about Sarah, it is not as much about her or the race, as it is our need to stop placing so much trust in institutions that have proved themselves questionable....and to ask questions, don't be afraid to sound stupid to others and think for yourself....critically, but for yourself. We have bills to pay, soccer games to attend and job functions to perform....but these things are still important and can bleed over into the bills, family events and the job.

Sarah

No experience....

Actually, that's a wonderful thing. It's sort of like saying she has no real organized crime or money laundering experience. That's a reason to write her name above her running mate's.

Not knowledgeable....

I am waiting for another Fourth Estate interview where the questions are suddenly put to her in Esparanto....or to name all the Osmond siblings. Because anyone could answer those questions....

Won't address the media....

Probably because questions about love children, pedaphelia accusations, etc., would probably qualify as 'irresponsible' in any other parallel world....or maybe a point blank question about the Clinton Doctrine may not seem all that surprising.

Lacking in Economics....

She gave a respit on state gasoline tax, increased graduated corporate rates on oil companies and flowed the surplus back to taxpayers.....seemed to work pretty good for United Arab Emerites.

I like her. I like her better than John and Obama on their best day.

Matter of fact, after the past week, it should be obvious that around 97% of the clowns in Washington are far less qualified, transparant and honest to run a high school supply store, let alone a country.

And I am not interested if the enlightened think these opinions are naive. I actually consider that a compliment. Otherwise, I would feel the need for several showers.

Soak it up....that's about as political as I will probably get on this blog.

Focus On The.....

Ok, the past couple of months have been sort of tough. Everything has turned out well, despite me, but still a rough couple of months. When that happens, I emerse myself in Christian radio, ministry devotionals, Scripture reading, practice more spiritual disciplines. Seems like I have stretched out this bout of sudden devotion longer than any other time. But it has been a weird couple of months. I won't get into it, but covet prayers for myself and particularly my family.

Anyway, while driving back and forth in the Great State of Oklahoma, I listen to BOT radio and even listen to alot of programs that I would have never listened to before last March. However, I am soaking it all in. It's good stuff, for the most part. I don't care if Charles Stanley isn't as expositional in his preaching as some wish he would be, he's still great to me. Chuck Swindoll has some good stuff. Even though I am not sure I would accept a dinner invitation from MacArthur, I listened to him off and on and he has had some good stuff too. So all in all, Christian radio (at least the station I have been listening to) has been a benefit to my walk and growth in Christ.

But I am a hopeless skeptic.

I guess when the station replays the same programs several times during the day....and guys like me are on the road several hours a day to hear them repeat, you notice things you didn't pay attention to the first time. That plus I am a hopeless skeptic.

I was listening to Focus on the Family. Not a huge fan, but not a naysayer either. They had Kirk Cameron on interviewing him and others for a new Christian movie coming out this fall. After all the talk, I began to wonder something.

Honestly.....

If everyone salvaged the marriage, kicked the habits, cleaned up the entertainment and became reverent to parents, would James Dobson care if they had a personal relationship with Christ?

I know his anwer....but I am not asking for the pat answer but a deeper question based on what I hear. Everything is about well adjusted families....well behaved children and faithful parents. But Jesus is sort of peppered into the conversation here and there.

I don't get it. Not that I am against well adjusted families or in favor of elicit porn on the family PC.....but what about the Gospel? I haven't gotten any better from someone else telling me the right way to behave. In fact, when I am told that, I tend to find loopholes or fake it, in order to appease and still get what I want. Sorry. It's facts. But I am better.....but not in a measurable way based on my efforts. I am better SOLELY because I know Jesus and He is working miracles in my life (I call them miracles because I am a case for the files), I focus on Him, our relationship and everything else I am not conscious of....compassion, faithfulness, good habits, kicking bad ones....seems to happen without my notice until I look back and usually as a prompting from Him when I mess up bad, so I don't become too despondent.

That's a whole different enchilada than what I hear on Christian radio. I hear about the Gospel and I hear Jesus peppered here and there....but the message is essentially how to live a good life. Buddhists teach that too and most are probably better than I am.

Is that the point? Could it be likened to a health show where the focus was on low blood pressure but only occasionally pepper the discussion with diet, excersize and relaxation? How can anyone truly be good, essentially good, unless they are changed from the inside out? How can that be done without a radical relationship with a Power able to effect the change in cooperation with my will? How can it be done without some (or alot) of humility?

My relationship with the Man who lived, died and rose again....created heaven and earth and everthing in it....just for me....that is my Gospel. That is the good news. And it is the only thing that has the power to change me. Believe me, no one else can and I won't otherwise....period. Ask anyone.

And I am not ashamed to say that you can have the same thing I have. I don't care how far fetched you think it sounds. You aren't that smart anyway :-) And you do need Him. You aren't good. You just play that on TV. You are messed up and need a mircale too. In fact, 'success' could be the only thing standing in the way of much needed spiritual chemotherapy. We all need Him. If we can't see that, hell makes tons of sense.

You may say Christians are all hypcrites. True. Probably not as big of one as you have been, but very true....that explains our need for Him.....and it explains your need for Him too, rather than proof against His existence.

He loves me and if He loves me, He loves you too....but you have to accept His free gift of that relationship, with empty hands. There is nothing you can do. You can patch up all the scars and scratches in your life and still destruct and gain nothing. Dobson puts the cart before the horse. First, call on the name of Jesus. Call Him LORD and Savior. Accept His gift of new life, entering into this wonderful relationship He offers.....THEN Focus on the Family and never without Focusing on Jesus first. Otherwise, you are just pissing in a fan.

Sorry about the language. I could have changed it, but then I'd rather just work on straightening that out without editing, if that makes sense. Call it a unorthodox spiritual discipline. My tendency to pretend to be somone I'm not is about as strong as yours :-)

Just some thoughts for now...

Why do people who are atheists or enthusiastic skeptics always end up in a vitriolic and passionate Great Commission of their own? If they really do not believe in Christ, why bother?

Why do so many evangelicals short circuit the depth of their relationship with Christ, in order to fit a mold made by men? Lots of nervous energy out there, disguised as joy. And it isn't really fooling anyone but us.

I have yet to figure out what a 'good person' is, for naturalists and skeptics. It's sort of like a chop shop of worldviews....a VW fender, Cadillac seats, Schwinn wheels, a toaster engine and gravy for fuel...and somehow it is supposed to gel into something better than Christ.

Why do people think a British accent equates to incredible intelligence? Christopher Hitchens is an twit.

Richard Dawkins' new book is Richard Dawkins' old books. But the cover looks very cool.

The college football stadium replaced the old university chapels. The coach and coaching staff replaced the ordained. The game replaced authentic worship. School Spirit replaced God. When a Barry Switzer autographed football equates to a medieval relic, regular life looks stranger than anything Alice saw Through the Looking Glass. The preachers of the new age tell us this is better and more meaningful than anything we ever had in the past. The harder we try to accept this, the more bumper stickers we buy, like a band-aid for a broken arm.

The only thing a presidential candidate can really promise to do, in our place, is fight the system from the top down until he or she dies or succeeds. The rest has always been up to us, and we refuse to accept it. We are to blame for our problems, not a politician. Why do teachers make $25K and ball players $5MM? Look no further than us.

Postmodernism, as the actual defined school of thought, is stupid. To think this is the best the brightest and most intelligent minds of our age can muster makes the Gospel shine all that much more in the darkness that surrounds us.

If John MacArthur believed so much in repentence, he wouldn't bloviate so much from on high. In fact, neither would I.

If politics and power is what it is really all about, kill me now.

Evolution is a great story. So is Lord Foul's Bane, from what I hear.

Death is the number 1 cause of all tooth decay.

After all is said and done, I can still see Jesus working in this world. And that keeps me sane and involved. I love Him more than I thought I ever would.

Confidence for the Buzzsaw

If confidence were likened to crude oil, sometimes I believe I would be importing 100% from abroad. It's just not a plentiful natural resource for me.

I do have a nasty version of what many folks would call confidence, but really isn't. It's more of a false confidence and usually ends up creating a bad scene or making a bad scene worse. Here's the natural inclination (and for those of you with confidence problems, please chime in): start taking inventory.

Say that for some reason, yesterday's confidence is shaken. As a natural means of regaining a confidence that is lost, you start going down the list of natural abilities, circumstances, etc., till you are once again blissfully confident. It's idealistic, even for the ultimate realist, but we do it. The mind starts to go through every possible argument, every possible event and every possible response, with incredible detail.

Problem is, if you are like me, such inventory-taking never succeeds. And it isn't because the natural abilities and good circumstances are taken for granted or ignored. It doesn't work because you can't take inventory without alot of negative stuff that hasn't been fixed yet, the circumstances that could happen outside of our control or people that are outside of your sphere of influence, circling the wagons, also invading our thoughts and feelings, from showing up too. And some personalities can suppress those thoughts and feelings, put on their best grin and find a happy place. It's not a regaining of confidence but a false confidence to stay in the game, keep the meeting going or to simply 'fake it till I make it' sort of strategy.

Others just can't do that, and spiral into a deep despair. For them, it is almost sort of a handicap. For many, prescription drugs are required because for some folks, it simply is a clinical problem. I lean towards that group rather than the other. But, it really is universal problem too. After all, as a commodity, confidence or the desire to get it, is the thing that gets alot of us out of bed each morning...or lack of it keeps us in bed.

Juxtapose those who take Zoloft with those who seem to have an unending supply of confidence. Just as the world begans to implode, you never see them sweat it or lack ingenuity in dealing with the slings and arrows.

When I think of confidence, I don't necessarily get a universal ideal. I mean, sure, I consider someone like Clint Eastwood as confident, but then so is Inspecteur Clouseau. The former is (in character) confident in spite of circumstances and the latter is confident in spite of himself. I am sure we could all think of real people in our lives that represent both and I am equally sure we can see both in ourselves.

I also don't think confidence is something we can simply have. It's like feeling good or sad or angry. It's sort of an involuntary thing, even though there are things we can intentionally do to spur or suppress them. But even if we intentionally do things to spur confidence or suppress low confidence, it seems sort of out of our control.

Simon Peter sticks out in my mind as a great example of confidence. The "Rock" exemplifies how confidence can destroy you and also how it can save your life. Simon Peter was originally called just Simon. Jesus gave him the name Peter, which means rock (petros, caiphas). I realize Catholics disagree with my (and Protestant) exegesis of Matthew 16:17-19, but when Jesus tells Peter, "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church...", Jesus isn't meaning Peter, but Himself, by means of analogy with Simon's given name. The church (Peter, et. al.) would be built on the true Rock. Looking at the text by itself, it could go either way, with regards to who Jesus refers to by 'this'. But when you go to Acts 4, Peter quotes Psalm 118:22, "the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone", referring to Jesus as the capstone. Peter, again, refers to the same text in his first letter to the churches in Asia Minor (1 Peter 2:6-8). Lastly, go read what Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about the laying the only foundation (1 Corinthians 3:10-15). When placing Matthew 16 in context with the rest of Scripture, including Peter's own pen, it appears the capstone and foundation is Jesus, in which the church is built, not Peter. Besides, even Peter had recognized the authority of James as the leader of the church in Acts 14. Enough of that. I will leave it up to the persistent catholic apologists to retort.

In any case Simon was "The Rock." But Simon was also not a rock at all. In fact, when looking at Simon Peter in several parts of Scripture, the name defies the man. Check out the shameful display of machismo and smack in Matthew 16:22, just after the name analogy. Peter, unlike the rest of the disciples, was never going to let anyone lay a finger on Jesus. Jesus tells Peter that not only does he have in mind the things of men, rather than God, goes ahead and informs him of just how brave Peter will turn out, when the chips are down. In Luke 22, Peter tells Jesus that he was ready to go with Him to prison and to death. In fact, The Rock was given three chances at fulfilling his promise, and scurried away each time, just as predicted. Not only did Peter refuse to go with the authorities, he denied the very One he swore to protect three consecutive times.

Now, for those of you reading this that haven't ever screwed up like Peter, this lesson is really not for you. I really don't think you exist in the first place, but I am hedging my bets. Everyone has screwed up like Peter. Everyone has denied Him, more than three times. Think about the gathering of friends where Christians or Jesus were lambasted. Did you defend Him or His Bride? Did you join in on the fun? How about a confrontation with someone who doesn't believe and the person calls your 'religion' in question or ridicules belief in Christ in general? Are you uncomfortable talking about Him in any other way? Why? To be honest, we all stand with The Rock, whether we are too deluded to admit it or not. We all recognize preferrence of acceptance over risking rejection and even ridicule, for the cause of Jesus. We've all been there with Peter.

Where do we place confidence? Confidence in ourselves is destruction. It will go fast or slow, but it will be sure. Such confidence is unfounded and it also rejects the grace given to get as far as we have. It might give us immediate returns, but long term slavery and bondage, leading to things we never thought we would do. It's called our natural inclinations and the ancient Greco/Roman world understood it as 'the flesh.' Take a look at what Paul says in Philippians 3. He equates those with confidence in themselves as 'dogs, men who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh.' Strong words. Paul goes on to show that a natural self-confidence would be in his sparkling resume (Philippians 3:4b-6) then tells them that because of Christ, he considers all of it shit (verse 8). Try that out at your next office party, industry golf tornament, church comittee meeting or night out at the bar. You will quickly see just how rejection of this sort of confidence seems alien to our way of thinking and a sure way to not get invited to any more 'events'.

But if that happens to you, it will be alright. It may not seem like it, but it is. If you fall into the temptation of denying Christ and promoting you, as I do, then believe it or not, it will still be alright, if you are His. Let me explain:

Paul isn't implying that if you ever fall into the same delimna Peter faced, you are a dog and mutilator of the flesh. His delineation was between those who relish in it and those who struggle against it. Those who struggle have something to rejoice about. Christ paid for all sins, past, present and future, on the cross. Our acceptance of what He did on our behalf covers all our mistakes, no matter how bad they are. The only way to be sure of our salvation isn't to see if we have tried and failed, but if we have tried at all and struggled at all. I am talking about an existential struggle between the mind and the body....what we want and what we do, just like Paul outlines in Romans 7. That, not our record, is the true test of adoption. If it were our record, then everyone would still be dead in their wrongdoings and no one would have a relationship with God...we would all be fakes. The relationship has to involve struggle and hardship, as well as the peace and assurance, not because God is a killjoy, but because we are really messed up and need fixing. Without the struggle, there can't be any fixing, because there is no one working on us, from the inside out.

That means that we can step out, warts and all, fail, stumble, screw up and cause all kinds of disasters, and still have a confidence to get up, clean ourselves off and try it again. And that is our confidence in Christ. Without the struggle that should result in changing our minds where and when they need to change, as well as the grace assuring us of our belonging, we would be some hopeless people. But that isn't the case. We have a confidence in Jesus that will get us through far worse than anything that can be thrown our way. He has obliterated the recording of rights and wrongs for those who accept Him, through God's grace. His Spirit also resides in our deepest regions, working on us night and day, whether we feel that presence or not.

Simon Peter eventually knew this. If you read after his denial of Christ, he went into a deep depression. He knew his macho attitude was a fraud. He knew that all the big talk and manipulative controlling of Jesus' fate was idiotic and shameful. He felt like a fraud and a failure, to the point that he shelved all his ministry and went back into the fishing trade. The last chapter of the Gospel of John gives us that impression.

But like I said, Jesus shows up. He always does. It was The Rock who jumped in the water first to swim and meet Jesus at the shore. They all had a huge breakfast with the risen Savior and it seemed as if things were as they were. But the reality of what The Rock had done, rose to the surface. Instead of skirting it, Jesus brings it up by asking The Rock if he loved Him. He asked him three times. Jesus didn't bring it up to reopen a wound, but to lance a boil. Peter was hauling that pain and shame around with him. Jesus died and paid for all sins, so that Peter could be healed of it. By asking Peter three times to watch over His sheep, He was assuring Peter that despite Peter, he was adored by the One who saved him. He was also going to so much more than he ever thought, not through confidence in himself, but in this incredible unconditional acceptance of Jesus, regardless of his failures. That is good news. Probably what the term really refers: God's grace, giving us His Son to bridge the gap between us and Him and the grace to continue in Him, not based on our works, but on the finished work of His only Son.

So, confidence....it is good, depending on where it lies. If it lies in the One who purchased you, no matter where you are or the circumstances you are in, either good or bad, it is a power to sustain and get you further along in this messy world, then you ever thought. If it lies in your own strength, wisdom, goodness, understanding, track record or resume, then enjoy....this is as good as it gets.

Check out the new confidence Peter has, beginning in Acts 2. There is no comparison. It wasn't a confidence in the fact he would never screw up again. Check out Galatians 2 and see that Peter was still a 'work in progress' even then. No. It was a confidence in Jesus over everything else, especially himself, that gave him power. The early church fathers wrote that Peter was arrested by Roman authorities and by refusing to pay ultimate homage to the Emperor over Jesus, was sentenced to crucifixion. Tradition has it that Peter, upon his own request, was crucified upside down. Did Peter's cause succeed? Well, we name our kids Peter and our dogs Nero. Even though this sort of trial is experienced by millions around the world today, we may not individually be called to make this sort of sacrifice. But, we will be called to our own trials. All of our trials further Jesus' cause and we may not get to see victory develop from them in our lifetime.

______________

Regardless of whether our trials are facing execution or our job, where will our confidence come from? Jesus stated that we will have tribulations because the world hated Him before they even knew of us. But He also said that because He conquered even death, we don't need to fear it. If you belong to Him, there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do to destroy you. You may get fired, you may lose clients, you may lose family and you may even face death. But in Him, you are victorious and will never perish. That sort of confidence is available to everyone who has surrendered their project of survival and promotion, given themselves over with abandon, and recognize what is gained (and can't be taken away) in return. We were meant for Him and as my friend Augustine said, "our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Thee."

I close with a quote from another good friend of mine, Isaiah:

"...no weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed,
and you shall confute every tongue that rises against you in judgment.
This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD
and their vindication from me, declares the LORD."