I Have More Important Things To Do

I Have More Important Things To Do

    Throughout the history of Christianity we are faced with a rather difficult dilemma.  We are constantly bridging two lands, there is a land that we have already been to and must keep going back to and a land that is our future.  The concept is frustrating to the human mind, but completely necessary.  In essence we are beset by a rather horrible dilemma which is how do we live in a world over which we have very little control.  Therefore, I am not going to argue my Christian belief with anyone who is not willing to listen.  It isn't arrogance, quite the opposite.  It is humility.  I am not in charge of getting people into heaven, but rather I am just in charge of playing my part.

    In this area, Christians have a wonderful advantage.  Our point is being made through us not by us.  We do not have to prove the validity of our arguments.  The first Christians lived in a culture whose hostility makes our current culture's hostility towards any opposing viewpoint look positively quaint.  The atheist dismisses the Christian as being a fool, the "theist" dismisses the atheist as being damned.  Round and round we go, well, at least no one is dying.  No one is being nailed to crosses or fed to lions or having his or her country leveled to the ground.  In short, the only thing we Americans have to worry about is the momentary discomfort of having someone look at us as if we have just uttered the most absurd nonsense.

    This is not to say that I do not believe atheism to be problematic at best.  It seems to have certain errors that grind my philosophies in particular ways.  Atheism could very well be true.  A world absurd enough to have a God would certainly be absurd enough to not have one.  And if there is no God, well, Pascal's wager finds me quite well.  However, I am digressing.

    Nonsense though.  Is that all we Americans have to fear?  This is a country that stood up to the most powerful empire in the world because it thought "hey, just thinking out loud here, but what would happen if we elected our leaders?  Just a thought."  This is a country that fought itself to end slavery.  This is a country that braved torturous months to go West into an uncertain future.  The list goes on.  Now, however, we are a country that is afraid to simply ask questions at a dinner party.  Perhaps Americans have never been the best philosophers or theologians, but we are still human and that means we can buck the systems and cultures around us and say, "well, why not?"

    I am not going to argue faith with anyone.  People who argue against someone else's belief systems are almost always in it for the wrong reasons.  We must argue for our own ... but even that is not quite it.  We must share our happiness.  A long standing belief in Western Thought is the centrality of happiness.  Aristotle put happiness at the chief aim of humanity and Christ talked about "happiness" in the beatitudes.  St. Thomas Aquinas would synthesize the two thoughts by calling the ultimate happiness: God.  We all should believe that the most happy place we can think of is the thought we are most willing to share.  And, to a Christian, that happy place is God.  Don't bother trying to argue that that particular place is unhappiness to you or a certain group with whom you associate.  To the Christian, God and all the things that go along with him are simply happiness.

    I can imagine that there are many calling into question certain checkered spots in Christian history while seeming to leave out all the good its caused.  By this "logic", systems apparently must be executed perfectly by human beings in order to be true; as though all of nature can operate from a completely different origin.  Nothing in this world is perfect, one merely has to read the Bible to see that.

    However, there is a great danger that all human beings share, both nontheist and theist alike, because we are all of us homo sapiens.  We all wish for everyone to follow along with what we think is best.  Christians identify this, quite rightly, as wanting to play God.  And whether or not you believe in God or not, you must come to the realization that each and every one of us wants to dominate over the other person.  Nietszche called this the "will to power" and the real question is if it is right or wrong.

    It seems to be manifest that it is wrong.  Societies that follow a cult of a leader who wishes to dominate and control everyone seem to lose their luster sooner or later.  Be it the atrocities of Nazi Germany or velvet-fisted animal brutality of Augustus' Rome, people catch on that there is a sickness to the domination.  (What has been the main problem with the current American wars has not been that they have happened, but that they may have happened for the wrong reasons and executed with the wrong ethics.)

    Yet we know the opposite to be true as well.  We love cultures where the leader, as selflessly as any human can, gives himself or herself over to helping others.  We swoon over Gandhi and Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. because they wished to live in societies that valued the greatness of humanity and not the greatness of the self.  The Christian finds that perfection in Christ.  India and America and Christendom have done brutal things when these cultures have looked out for the interest of single individuals or privileged groups, but these are aberrations and because they are aberrations we find them so sickening.  These aberrations are not the beliefs to which we want to adhere.

    In Western culture the aberrational sickness was all we knew.  Carthaginians with human sacrifice, Greeks with xenophobic racism, Romans with bloody games, and Gothic tribes with familial loyalties; this was the world into which Christ entered.  He entered into the mess that human pride had erected.  He told us what to do and for the most part we tried to do it.  The result was that the most barbarous hodgepodge of people ended up a little better than before.  And for all our talk of how that was just white-wash over our real history, we have never been able to escape the myth.  If that is the case, than everyone believes the myth and denies the truth that we are all selfish people out to dominate one another.  This is what is commonly known as crazy talk.  If humble and self-giving love were a lie, and everyone knew it was a lie; it would have been dead quite some time ago.  However, everyone really truly wants to believe that they are good and benevolent people and not really wanting to steamroll over someone else.  Even Nietzsche didn't make it very far with his own will to power.  It seems that only Christ seems to stand alone as the great, inescapable "superman" of Western culture.

    What does all this mean?  To be perfectly frank, nothing at all.  Each and every human being will believe in something regardless of whatever evidence is before them.  Atheists pull out their hair at the stupidity of theists, while pharisees in false theistic clothing rant and rave about how atheists and theists just won't accept their evidence.  Such people have limited imaginations and no real faith.

    I know I am not going to change anyone's mind or heart.  I believe in a God who will do that if people will let Him.  My faith is not in a powerful personal will.  My faith is in a God who, in spite of all the odds, went and became a little nobody from a backwater of a vicious empire; and turned Himself into the greatest engine for change in all of human history.  I have more important things to do than quibble about the reality of what I believe.  I don't know if I am right, but each and every day it seems to make more and more sense that this thing I believed in stupid faith might actually be the truth and happiness I need.  If anyone disagrees, that is fine; but please, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.

Life with Google

Life with Google

Many of you may remember my blog post discussing why I am glad for companies like Google, Apple, Toyota, and Nintendo.  There is something called the "halo effect".  This is where an item is so good that it is used to raise the prestige of the other objects that the company is trying to sell.  It is a good marketing technique and usually works pretty well.  But sometimes a company's ethic goes beyond an halo effect.

Apple computers are often considered top notch only because of the tremendous appeal of the iPod.  However, an Apple computer more than pays for itself.  A prime example of this is longevity.  Apple customers are not loyal to Apple because of the iPod or because of better marketing.  It may lead them to buy their first Apple computer, but it is far from the reason why they are loyal.  They are loyal to Apple because they feel like Apple is loyal to them.

However, some companies seem to go far beyond this.  The ethos of the people at the top want to push the boundaries of what can be done.  There are companies that seem to break even these rules.  They go farther and desire to do bigger and bigger things.  Google seems to be such a corporation.

While visiting friends, I installed a copy of Google Chrome on their computer.  The speed at which it ran far exceeded the speeds of the Internet Explorer.  The point I am trying to make here is that we hope and desire for companies and people to do things they love for the sake of what they love.  However we usually put in our time at jobs, but live secret lives outside of work.  We escape into other people's fantasies about what our lives should be with movies and television, and yes, even books.  However, what if we lived our lives for the sheer joy of living them?  What if we pushed the envelopes of human understanding?

Thus it is good to have companies like Google who could rest on their laurels (like Microsoft) but instead choose to innovate and make things work better.  It is ironic that the companies that succeed the most in capitalism are usually the companies where the profit is only a part of their understanding of what it means to be a business.  If this is so, than the holistic approach to making money is bar far better than the more libertarian form.  To not do evil, the motto of Google, not only produces an halo around Google, but it produces innovation and thus wealth.

It is good to return again and again to the things that deserve encouraging.  While I disagree with Google's China stance, I am quite happy to report that I use blogger and typed this document on Google Docs.  I find their web browser to be quite good and I use their search engine constantly.  Such innovation deserves public kudos and I am glad to support their ethos.

A Late Night Thought

A Late Night Thought

Well technically its early morning.  I was doing some baking and a bat flew into the kitchen hovered around and left before I could get a blunt object with which to bash its brains in.  Yes, this is where I live and this is my life.  (Still no sign of the bat.)  So, like Estragon and Vladimir, I am waiting on some guest that will never show up or like Elliot Templeton waiting for that final invitation.  So, to while away the time I listened to Mike Duncan's podcast entitled, "The History of Rome."  I'll give you three guesses and an hint: I'm an history major.

Duncan's podcast has gotten better over time.  The early shows sound quality stands out as poor when one listens to it compared to the more recent episodes, and there are a few episodes in the middle with an almost intolerable buzzing; but nevermind all that, it has truly been fascinating listening to them.  I honestly don't know what I am going to do pretty soon because I am almost completely caught up with the series.  (Yeah, I know, most people try and catch up with Lost and The Officed and I am trying to catch up with a one man production of the history of Rome.)

Duncan is flippant and you can tell he really loves what he's talking about.  This, along with a handful of other things I have read and a couple classes, have made me realize just what an history major I actually am.  I began reading an history of New York City and hope to delve in depth into all my books on history.  It is great when someone reawakens a great enjoyment in us.

However, it is sad how very little we know of the past.  The late eighteenth century early nineteenth century Americans had a far better grasp on Ancient History than we do today.  They respected it and learned from it; and thus were better for it.  A great deal of why we fail as a society today is our inability to learn from history.  The dangers of not knowing history are obvious to all, not just the paranoid lunatic fringe.  Yet very few of us really learn anything outside of a few small tidbits that back up some of our desirous claims.

From the history of Rome we can learn how nepotism and cronyism destroy a society.  We learn that optimates and plebeians fight their power battles and reduce a culture to its worst character if left unchecked.  We learn how we would be wise to not give our power to special interests, or the masses, or business men, or emperors; but rather that we should try to form a more perfect union.  Perhaps the most important thing to take away is the knowledge that things could be and have been much worse.  We should be thankful to live in the time and country that we do now.

It is far too late and I am tired of waiting for the bat to appear.  I am going to go to bed and dream of:

 the beauty of fair Greece, 

And the grandeur of old Rome.

Have a great night.

Mr. Duncan's site is:  http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

I encourage everyone to look it up.

Guess Where I Am

Guess Where I Am



So, I had some paperwork that I needed to finish up for seminary.  I had thought I had finished it, but I got a call recently saying that they never got it.  After having the program close on me on my Macintosh, I racked my brain and decided to fire up the old Dell using the Windows Operating System.  It worked out okay after that.



Now many of you Mac haters will use this as an example of why Windows is better.  However, it is obvious what happened, the people making the program rushed out the Mac version while focusing on the Windows Version (because 95% of the world uses it).  I think there is a lot to be learned from this.

I live in constant fear that one of my programs on my Window's machine will crash.  I live with the fear that my entire system will crash in fact.  The notion of saving early and often came with the rise of Windows.  One never hears of NASA in the space age¹  or the old punch-card machines needing to be backed up early and often.

In addition to this, I fear a lot of viruses.  I fear inadvertently having my identity stolen. 

I guess its nice to come back to Windows, kind of like coming back to a part of town you used to live in, but that is now run down and dilapidated.  We like seeing where we grew up, but we make it back to our homes on OS X or Linux before nightfall to get the real work done.

I guess my biggest problem is that in order to really do what needs to be done with a system, people have to be bold.  America is a country that has become a shadow of the innovative powerhouse it used to be.  We used to make bold steps with this innovation or that innovation, but now the only innovations are introduced by Billy Mays and tell how we do can live a life with more stuff that will make it simpler.

It would be nice to see large companies really try and make OS X and Linux viable for the workplace.  There are thoughts that such a changeover would be expensive and problematic.  It would save money in the long run though.  (Switching to Linux would be practically nothing.)  It seems that with all our screaming and squawking for corporate freedom, we forget that the innovations they preach are rarely ever the innovations they practice.  The corporation will work much harder at keeping everyone down as compared to work to innovate.

If we move to a more efficient, secure, and intelligent system, it will not solve all our problems; but it will drive us forward to capturing the ideals we used to hold.  It may even allow us to get paperwork in on time.

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1. Though one might be able to make an argument why those guys were such ... well for lack of a "G" rated word ... awesome heroic people.  They might have been using Windows and just been tired of all the crap. that went on with it.  Maybe a predecessor to Windows caused Apollo 13.