Christians are suckers for pain, not so much physical or financial pain, but emotional, mental, and maybe spiritual. We just love to be “challenged” or “convicted”. A good sermon is generally followed with comments of “that sermon was a kick in the shins” or a deep feeling of guilt followed with a proportionally shallow resolve to change things. Churches that preach the “prosperity gospel” (that God loves you and God wants you to be filthy stinkin’ rich) are shunned for various reasons, but partially because people are not being changed by that sort of preaching, they are watering down this message and we want it raw and uncut. But choose your metric, pick your measuring stick, and I’m willing to bet that within 10 or 15%, the result anywhere is exactly the same. Walk out those doors, get in the car with the family (or yourself), drive home, maybe sleep, and the feelings are really gone. Heavy, “kick him while he’s down” oratory will get immediate results. You will get people to pledge to change their lives, you will get numbers for your tally, you may even get crying, but it won’t last. I think it was David Hume (or possibly Ben Franklin) who said that there are some highly ethical people, some wretched people, and the vast majority are just in between. The preaching I see very rarely shifts that curve. Feel free to disagree. There will be people to do stupendous things, but they probably would have anyways. There will be people doing horrible things (even in “great” speaking), but they probably would have anyways. I’m told that God’s word does not return void, so I continue searching. I’m told that Paul’s preaching wasn’t with persuasive words, but with power, so I keep looking.  I’ve met a spirit who’s preaching brings results.

What I’m coming to find is that there is a very sharp distinction between first and secondhand religion (and apparently, I’m not the only one). When God speaks to your soul, that is firsthand religion. When you have “one of those experiences”, one of those times that you really cannot tell anyone else about without wringing it dry of all it’s juiciness and richness and centrality in your life, that’s what I’m talking about. Secondhand religion is what comes from other people. It’s the product of Johnny’s experience with God and his story about it. It pales in comparison to direct experience. Once you’ve had just a sip of God, it’s impossible to turn away. I think some of us spend our entire lives looking for that intimacy with God that is unparalleled in anything we can produce here. The more we taste, the more we hunger, but what we end up consuming is regurgitated and old. We’re constantly looking for something fresh, something that will cut us like that initial experience did, something that will put us in another world for only a moment. But what we get is sugar-substitute. Sugar has very little merit on its own, but sugar-substitute? Can anyone say cancer? (I don’t think that’s true anymore, don’t quote me on that).

There are a lot of people in this world with a God-shaped crater in their lives. They may not recognize it as such, but we will spend our lives trying to fill it, and most of the time we will only be marginally successful. Secondhand religion just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Time magazine and Slashdot will continually run stories about how we are biologically “wired” for God. Take what you will about the origins of that (I’m AASG trained to come up with three or four evolutionary models for its development), but the satisfaction of that deep desire becomes our lives.

As Christians, “we have the answer”. The answer is to find God by following these steps (or any variation thereof, I’ve heard them all):

1) Recognize yourself as sinful.
2) Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.
3) Other denominational doctrinal differences.
…
10) God!

I didn’t include a promise that life will go well, no I didn’t. But what I tend to find, if I dig really really deep, if I can get complete honesty from people I know and trust, is that we are still parched. I’m not prepared to make a judgement on salvation (or even what that means), and I’m not saying those things are worthless at all. But what I am prepared to say is that my subjective experiences of the divine…my world-shaping, life-changing, ground-breaking moments are still a rarity. Agreed, life is not about these emotional experiences. Agreed, there are times when the boring, petty, day-to-day affairs have to take place. But the holy grail of it all, knowing God, is elusive, and I’m not alone.

Your “first century Christians” knew God. They were martyred not for some far away principle, but for a God who was very close. Moses knew God, or at least what was written about him seems to suggest. He lead with an authority that said plainly, I just talked with something bigger than you, and here’s what I have to say. Jesus knew God. But what everyone around is so afraid to say is “I…don’t.” I don’t know God. Not to say you’ve never heard from him, or experienced him, or “got saved”, but is it entirely possible that the reason we so suck at everything because we just don’t really get it? Can you make the jump to say you don’t know God like Jesus, and then Moses, and maybe somebody like Meister Eckhart or San Juan de la Cruz and finally say that you know Him little if at all?

Sometimes I think I’m just missing something, that there’s some key ingredient out there that I’m skipping over. Maybe somebody can come to me and tell me what I’m doing wrong, and I can let everyone else know. Othertimes I suppose that this is just how it is(tm). But I’ll keep looking, because I’ve got no other choice.

An interesting question to ask Christians these days is “Would you give up your religion to save someone else’s life?” It’s not funny to ask if they would give their own lives, dying for your own cause has a certain (and powerful) yet costly appeal. But that supernatural love that Christ apparently embodied, that we are to follow, which goes first? Funny thing.

I think the same question is just as hard when it comes to friendships. Do you love that person enough to not see them ever if that’s what it takes?

You love your boyfriend? Would you give him to some other girl if that were best for him?

I once heard that the best relationships (romantic I suppose) are those which both parties consider themselves unworthy of the other, but I’m forced to question whether such a relationship exists? If you are indeed unworthy, and you love the other person, why not let them go to someone who could offer them so much more? If you are the best person for them to be with because you love them most, are you unworthy? Is it merely an attitude of humility?

From Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything. While the particular passage can be read in a number of ways, and each way seems to be fully suited to extracting a titanic amount of truth from so few words, today I find myself stuck on “a time to tear down and a time to build.”

I think it was Calvin who described the mind of man as a perpetual forge of idols. Through the old testament prophets, history seems almost cyclical and for every peak there is the chore of destroying the idols and high places that routinely creep into the nation of Israel. For a long while, the exchange has seemed almost comical to me, that immediately after the exodus from the bondage of Pharaoh that the Israelites would create a calf out of their jewelry…how stupid could they be? Or that anyone, being forewarned of the consequences of their actions might go ahead with it? Many pages of curses for disobedience vs a few sentences of blessings? How foolish could they be?

Initially I reasoned (or was taught, don’t know which came first) that this was a type for my own life. And this idea still holds exceptionally true. Despite conventional wisdom’s promises of prosperity for virtue and poverty for vice, I continue to manipulate and lie, become greedy and unsatisfied, to desire what I can never have, on and on. And to that end, I find nothing wrong with seeing our reluctance to yield to “right living” as the rationale for idols, it is certainly true.  Maybe the whole thing could be summed up with the greek word hubris, but in the spirit of deconstructionism I look deeper.

Religion can be defined in hundreds of ways, depending upon how you want to argue, what you would like to include or exclude, or how specific you would like to become. But to a degree, I believe all religion to be some sort of response to the divine. Whether or not we acknowledge them as such, or whether you have them at all I cannot say, but humans throughout history have been hit with experiences that go so far beyond words and description that they influence the very heart of a person. Abraham Heschel described the situation in this way:

The certainty of the realness of God does not come about as a corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the real of ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transistion from an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness to a definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the presence of God to an awareness of God’s existence.

Whether it is proper to blame this on language or not, I do not know, but any attempts to articulate these experiences generally results in a product that may be somewhat accurate, but drops the ball in terms of the power and sheer force of the experience itself. These experiences shape us in ways that few things can.

In such a way, I think that people begin to group together with those of other experiences to try to generalize as to the cause of these happenings. From the voice of God, they attempt to draw a picture (logically, artistically, etc…) of God’s face, and the problem lies in listening to the created face rather than the voice that inspired it. That constancy that we all desire so deeply is rarely fulfilled with a voice that comes and goes, so it’s difficult not to find solace in some sort of God of induction, who’s manner of acting will be as it always was. And that is the problem.

Peter Rollins in How (Not) to Speak of God acknowledges some sort of tension between God who is so beyond our words that it is an injustice to try to force him into them, and God who we must speak of because he is so central to our lives. In similar fashion, while God is unfathomable, it is impossible (using the term loosely) to cease to try and contemplate him, to fill our minds with whatever he might be, and in some cases to model our lives after who we perceive he wants us to become. But by the same respect, each step attempts to place another wall of conceptualization that not only limits God, but sets up a thicker and thicker filter for what we allow of the voice of God to flow through.

For a while, I’ve seen the destruction of certain premises of my “faith” as absolutely harmful, as heretical and maybe even apostasy, but I simply could not stop. It was not by my own volition that these things were happening (some would debate that), these things seemed to have been torn from me, and where I would love to have believed them again to soothe the anguish of having lost them, it was impossible for me. Now, I’m beginning to see them in a light of purification. Marcus Borg quotes Martin Buber in what is a far more poignant (and conveniently located chronologically) way of putting my own thoughts into words:

Time after time, the images must be broken, the iconoclasts must have their way. For the iconoclast is the soul in us which rebels against having an image that can no longer be believed in, elevated above our heads as a thing that demands to be worshipped. In longing for a god, we try again and again to set up a greater, a more genuine and just image, which is intended to be more glorious than the last and only proves the more unsatisfactory. The commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee an image,” does not, of course, refer merely to sculptured or painted images, but to our fantasy, to all the power of our imagination as well. But we are forced time and again to make images, and forced to destroy them when we realize that we have no succeeded. The images topple, but the voice is never silenced.

Later on he says “it is of the utmost importance not to lose one’s openness. But to be opens means not to shut out the voice — call it what you will. It does not matter what you call it. All that matters is that you hear it.”

The good news is that it’s not all bad. There can be some peace in knowing that while conceptions may go down the tubes, and it may be a painful process, it’s not the end of the world. The bad news is that again, what is required is an almost daily death to self, but has that ever been new? Augustine sums up the conundrum wonderfully, and any chance I have to delegate the responsibility for arranging words, the better.

If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain it. Let him be content to say “what is this?” So let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you discoverable.

It is something of a delight to know that I am no closer to having this whole thing figured out than when I started. Have a great day.

Two posts in a day, scroll down if you’re interested so you don’t miss anything.

Oh boy.

The Promulgation of Absurdities in Quantum Mechanics was by far my favorite article in AP Physics (a class that I would highly recommend if you want to skip class for two semesters of college physics). In it were the words of a (now deceased) expert arguing what my gut was telling me, that this was all absolutely ridiculous. I may not totally agree with myself anymore (haha), but the principles that puzzled me still do so today. Apparently, when we observe light shooting through a double slit on the quantum level, it’s a particle…a photon. But as it goes through the double slit, it acts like a wave, creating a nice pattern on the other side. The technical jargon is the “wave-particular duality” and nobody really cares, honestly. In a similar way, I believe there to be varying degrees of corruption that we do to thoughts and ideas as we try to pull them through the slits in our eyes and ears and into that abstract metaphysical entity known as the mind. What once was a particle becomes a wave when it’s time to consume.

When I was younger, as I picked up books I started by looking at the back cover to judge the worldview of the author. Mind you, most of the things I read were religious, and it was pretty easy to judge from a short biography, a summary, or glowing reviews like “God-lovers will HATE this book!” where a person stood. From there, I would either let my guard down and simply soak into the text or bust out the sword of truth to hack through any logical (genuine or not) fallacies I could find to declare victory over this abomination of a book. I think I got some jollies from being able to tread carelessly over those books that believers would avoid like the plague, and those jollies sustained my journey…for a while, at least.

A while back, I was talking to a student named Martin, who was working on his PhD in Nuclear Physics. He was upset about the Veritas forum at A&M, where some educators got together to debate Intelligent Design vs Evolution. In the end, I believe the consensus was that the “forum” was really just a place to market books, but Martin couldn’t believe how one of the scientists would say certain things in light of his educational background. His assertion was that the man must have been dishonest with himself on purpose in order to sell books, and I thought that hilarious. I’m sure there are plenty of people in this world who can play the two facer, who can lie through their teeth to maintain a good image while generally abusing people at the same time… there just aren’t many who could do it that well. But from my perspective, the man could have been entirely honest with himself amidst all the evidence, and even if he was wrong. The problem: GIGO, garbage in, garbage out.

I can write the most amazing computer program to compute square roots, but if you feed it “garbage”, it will almost definitely throw back trash. The man at Veritas was probably bringing certain assumptions to the table (or we are), and the result certainly agreed with those assumptions. His subtle (and most likely subconscious) manipulation of the data in his head allowed his results to appear all too clearly, and his conscience is clear. Similarly, I’m willing to bet that even were God to somehow make himself visible, despite all claims to the contrary (“Why won’t God just show me himself?”), there are few atheists today who would see him. There will always be that subconscious manipulation of data in the background telling us that what we’ve seen is what we will see. Of course, it’s open to changes, but these changes are slow, and the principle at work is what I’ve come to know as religious inertia.

Within humans, we have a framework within which we see the world called a worldview. It is very necessary this this framework have a degree of constancy to it, for if it changed with every circumstance, it would cease to provide any useful information. The challenge of becoming “open minded” is, as I’ve come to see it, totally impossible. For me to see things your way requires that I destroy my worldview, erect one to mimic your own (or at least one that comes close), and no longer can I see things the way I once did. There is a certain problem with this situation though, because when I see things from within my frame of reference, I continually bolster it, and it becomes stubborn. Children are easily swayed, but adults rarely change their mind. From what I know of artificial neural networks, their capacity to “learn”, and how accurately they model a real brain, I don’t think this idea is totally abstract.

So now we have a problem for all religious and non-religious people, and we best just hope that how we are now is absolutely right because otherwise we are totally screwed. Our mental fortifications are operating like two nations in the Cold War. And I really really hope that’s not the case, because someone (or most likely both) will die without some sort of compromise. In a totally baseless assumption (note that every person alive exists upon certain baseless assumptions, like induction, so don’t slam me here) I’m going to assert that I believe God will direct those willing to heed his direction in the way they should go. In a more biblical sense, the “stiff-necked” Israelites were the antithesis of this ideal. What is required is that we maintain a fluid worldview, that we hold fast to our beliefs with unparalleled strength while still allowing for them to be wrong, and to change. It’s paradoxical at best, why die for something that might be wrong? or why change something that my life rests upon? but I believe it to be absolutely necessary for our survival in a pluralistic society where God speaks to every man in his heart instead of through prophets and seers.

Evangelism takes a huge hit here, and I’m sort of glad it does. By tricking people into attending concerts to trap them into some presentation of a message they’ve heard countless times before, or fooling people into thinking you’re doing something nice just to do something nice, I think we’re just doing crap. What is required is a certain trust that “god’s message” is universal, because if it’s not, it’s worthless, and that the capacity to see it doesn’t require an absolute destruction of a person into a cookie-cutter Christian. I am obliged to surrender my personal pride and desire to be right on every count, and allow for the God of everything to speak differently to another person in certain cases. I must recognize that the drive to change people to be like me is probably due to deficiencies within my own character, rather than some sort of divine duty. And finally I must become less like a pharisee, and more like Christ, knowing that in order to worship God is love, I must first love, and not excuse dogmatic assertions full of hatred for love simply because they lined up with what I knew to be true at the moment.

Maybe I’m just some sort of postmodern-Christian mutt?

I wrote this last year, but I like it today.

On Windows Sept. 29, 2006

Windows are good. By adding a window to a room, you allow natural light to pass in that diminishes with the onset of night and the expectation of sleep. You also add a certain dynamic to an otherwise square, and flat, and boring room. I’m by no means an interior decorator, but it is hardly a jump into the unfeasible to say that adding a window to an empty room takes something from it. Obviously there are exceptions.

I have a window in my otherwise small and dank dorm room that looks out over Northgate, the party section of Texas A&M. I really like the window for a number of reasons that I won’t get into (but may later). What I will get into is how this window becomes something of a symbol of my perception of reality.

I’ve always held to the view that our beliefs and views of eternal consequences, ironically never hold the weight that they should in our day to day living. Whether you believe in heaven and hell, or the absence of God, or any number of other views, these things simply do not play into your normal pedantic living. If I believe God to hold me accountable for the things I do in my life, what am I doing playing videogames, or even worse sinning in varying degrees? If I believe God absent and the universe meaningless (though one does not entail the other), how can I possibly continue living? The answer is simply  “don’t think about it” (or if you delve deeper, don’t believe it), blissful ignorance seems like such a trite response to our rationale for living, but as an actual answer I’ve gotten, it’s horrifically honest.

The window makes a nice example of this. My window is pleasant because it keeps me from seeing the train wreck not a few hundred yards behind the building. It blinds me to the wars going on in other continents, the poverty killing millions, and even to the wedding that’s probably taking place a few blocks away.

In addition, the window pane prevents me from seeing the picture as a whole. I can either see Burger Boy, or the parking garage, but I can’t see both together without a schism between them. The human tendency to categorize and break down, both mentally and physically is evident in the small strips of metal that fly across the glass.

Lastly, the screen behind, though hardly a nuisance until you focus in on it, puts a tint ever so slight on what you see that it’s hard to become aware of its existence. The biases we hold, what we are told, they all play into this shading of our reality. A couple days ago I thought I saw a softball on the roof of Burger Boy. No, I’m not so lame as to sit around for hours peering through this window, but a softball is a nice find (and a good reason to try to climb on top of the building later to get it). The funny thing is that inside my head I was convincing myself there’s no way there’s a softball up there. About 30 seconds later, with heavy concentration (sweat dripping off my forehead, eyes locked to its position): it’s a pipe. Wow.

My resolve is to install a few more windows in my life. To be able to see things from different angles, with different tints and different boxes of things cropped out. As many as I can, windows everywhere. This would make a terribly crappy room, but I’m more for function than form anyways, and nobody else has to see it. Maybe I can see just a bit more, a bit deeper, a bit more holistically. Who knows.