The Non-Evolution of Communication

The Non-Evolution of Communication

    Perhaps one of my favorite thinkers is Stephen J. Gould.  An atheist and proponent of evolution, I still find Gould a great thinker and one whom both theists and nontheists should emulate in their arguments about God.  However, I am not writing about Gould today.  I am rather writing about a discussion I had in African Theologians two days ago.

    While in that class we talked about the importance of writing down history.  In the European Post-Enlightenment Mindset, we live in an age when it seems necessary to look at documentation as the only verifiable form of reality or at least the highest.  My bookshelf, floor, and the basement of my parents' home is a testament to this belief.  In some ways I think the only thing holier than a library is a church (and I have many friends who would probably agree with me save the church part).  In many ways books are the pinnacle of Western Thought.  Our collective history (read: memory) appears to be documented and placed in physical repositories such as the local bookstore, warehouses, or libraries; or it seems to be placed online on sites and portals (i.e. Project Gutenberg or CCEL.org).  Whatever the case, if one were to ask what is the most accurate (ergo truthful, ergo right) form of relaying memories, a Westerner would tell you that it is probably the written word.

    However, throughout the world many stories and memories and histories are still spoken.  We hear of epics being passed down from generation to generation in the form of stories.  In the Western European mindset, this is less accurate (ergo untruthful, ergo wrong).  We have a tendency to boil everything down to saying "its like a game of telephone."  We say one thing to one person on one side of the telephone and get a completely different answer.  From a certain standpoint, this viewpoint couldn't be more right.  Numbers and scientific data charts are hardly things I want to leave to the fragile memory of the "post-enlightenment European Brain," just as I would hate to be in front of a math test without a calculator.  (Okay, I just hate being in front of math tests period.)  Yet, we are confronted with a rather troubling reality if we start going down this road.  We must ask ourselves what we are really saying when we establish value judgments to such things.

    I have told many of my memories to people.  I have said, this and that happened to me once upon a time.  I will tell the facts of the situation that occurred in my life to someone and they will listen.  Yet, I have noticed that the more times I would tell a story the more things I would find that I could add to it.  Perhaps I wouldn't remember what a person was wearing or what the food tasted like, but I could begin to understand why someone did something.  Subconsciously, as we retell a story, we find ourselves psychoanalyzing everything about the event.  I can imagine that the myth stories that people tell one another are much the same.  In some African, or Latin American, or European, or any human culture; the people begin to tell the story and find that they understand a character in just such a way.  They begin coloring in the details of why someone did something and weaving it into the myth.  My question is, does it make it any less real?  If someone espouses a great psychological insight about someone and the reason for why someone does something, does that mean it is less true than just giving the facts.

    I know many will criticize Christians for our belief in Genesis.  There are things in the Bible that just don't make sense and perhaps that backs up the authenticity of the book.  The writers wrote in such a way that people were able argue and debate the meanings and motives of the people in the stories, but they never went so far as to give great detail about how things were done.  They wrote as if it were poetry and not as if it were scientific data.  (There are obvious reasons for doing this, but the irony is that the people most willing to believe that the Bible is scientific fact are atheists: be they scientific atheists or Christian fundamentalists of the furthest pole.)

    In addition to the validity of myth, we should also look at the validity of written word as compared to spoken conversation.  Most of us, in the Western European world would say that the written word is far more verifiable than a conversation.  However, I would like to ask this question: who is more accurate the writer of a book which espouses a different political viewpoint than yours in the most vapid manner or a close friend having a conversation with you?  Chances are you are going to listen to the friend far more readily than you are going to agree with the author of the book, yet your friend has not put his or her thoughts down in written form whereas the author has a publishing contract.  Now one can argue that the friend got his or her information from books, but that is a dangerous argument to make since it shows that information and communication are fluid and can originate from all sorts of media.

    This leaves us with the notion that information and data can be relayed in many ways and no way is inherently better than another.  So, to bring up Mr. Gould finally, human communication works much like his notion of biology works.  In Gould's mind, evolution does not move us closer to some pinnacle, but adapts for diversity.  Our communication is not getting better (i.e. face-to-face conversation, writing, phones, texting, video-conferencing), but rather is just getting more diverse.  Each aspect has a certain benefit and detriment.  The living fluidity of a conversation is counterbalanced by the static definitiveness of the written word.

    Furthermore we have not moved into "the digital age" so much as "digital age" has been added to our repertoire of human communication. We still live in the age of face-to-face communication, just as Gould argues we still live in the age of bacteria and insects.  We just believe that since are the most advanced, we should call it our age.  This is nothing more than intellectual arrogance and should be noted as such.  The same is true with any form of communication.  Lies and truth will exist on the page of a book just as they will issue from the mouths of imperfect humans, the question is about faith and what you believe.

The Silence of it All

The Silence of it All

    There is a common myth that Christianity tells you that if you just believe, all your problems go away.  Another equally adhered to myth is that "God helps those who help themselves."  The first is blatantly absurd due to all those who suffer and the latter makes God pointless because He doesn't do jack.  Both are reviled by their opponents and both are boring philosophies.  Clearly God wants what is best for us because we desire what is best for us and clearly a relationship is more than getting a bunch of useless junk.

    However, there are times when we just don't feel it.  Bills come due, our jobs feel monotonous at best, and we come to the realization that we have to wait for things we really want.  The grinding suffering of life carries with it another problem, we cannot tell anyone about it because other people suffer in such excruciating ways that far exceed mere ennui.  I know of a girl who is suffering from cancer, I know people who witnessed the devastation in Haiti, and I know of one friend stuck in loveless marriage.  In the end, my problems seem so insignificant.

    And yet they are not insignificant to me.  Like wave after wave of unfulfilled hopes and unrealized joys, the spirit finds itself constantly attacked.  And we have to admit, what is so hard to admit, that we cannot really speak of our problems.  It isn't so much that we are afraid to sound like whiners or ungrateful people, we just don't see what it will accomplish.  The problems we have are the constant ones that hang over our entirely lives.

    And perhaps that is the reason for belief.  I don't believe in some sugar-candy-mountain.  Truth be told I don't think of heaven all that much.  I believe that for the longest time of suffering and anguish, the people who have gotten the answer best are found in the Old and New Testaments.  These are people who suffered everything from hostile-take-over to the long dark night of the soul.  The religious books of the Greeks and Romans aren't this honest, while the books of the other religions are offering ways out and transcendence as if anyone can transcend their problems.  I don't want to be free of the universe that I was born into any more than I want this to be all there is.  Accept, reject, transcend, digress, live life to the fullest; these are empty promises of a world that wants to drown out the pain with innumerable opiates or liquors.  At the end of the day whether we are on pain killers or not, we are still dead.  The Prophets knew this.  What was it that made them still worship?  What was it that made them still believe when they had God come right out and say, "You are going to suffer"?  

    I suppose I want to know that.  I want to know what makes a person tick like that.  Perhaps the funniest thing is that most of us today lump all religions together.  But Christianity, right down to its Hebraic roots, is utter madness.  The answer it gives isn't "do this," its "believe;" and that is what the world finds the most unbelievable despite all the evidence that it seems to be the most correct answer.  We don't cure cancer by doing something, but we do something because we have belief that we can accomplish something.  I believe in God not because I will be free of my suffering or because everyone else is doing it, I believe in God because life is pretty nice with a bunch of crap along the way and to be perfectly honest its nice when Someone just listens.

    I don't write this with any belief that this will "win" anyone to Christ.  I write this to say, I'm still standing.  I wish there were some other way or path or logical system.  There isn't.  God is God.  Life doesn't work our way.  That's the answer.  In that way, Christians are far from close-minded, but rather open-eyed.  We're done looking for systems or the sweet by and by, we just want to live life in good times and bad times.

Freedom (A Reformation Day Blog Post)

Freedom (A Reformation Day Blog Post)

Today found me wandering the streets of Bexley, Ohio in aluminum foil with a foreigner in search of food.  It isn't everyday I do this mind you.  My friend and I commented that it would be impossible to do this in a month or so, but halloween affords people a great chance to do things that are normally frowned upon by society.  Of course neither of us were going to a party.  I had been invited to one, but I just didn't feel like going.  However, I had also heard about Chipotle and aluminum foil and so at seven o'clock I found myself in a line waiting to get a burrito.

    It had really started at work when someone told me about the goings-on at Chipotle.  All I needed was a piece of aluminum foil and I could get a free meal.  I got off work and promptly went to sleep.  Upon waking up I got a piece of aluminum foil from my roommate, Seth, and figured that would be the end of it.  I would just turn it into a necklace and throw it around my neck.  I would get by with the bare minimum.  Indeed while waiting in line I saw people who had done just that.  I took a nap, got a shower, and called my friend from another country.  He and I picked up groceries and then we decided to buy aluminum foil for the event.

    But what to be?  Well, in case most of you don't know, its Reformation Day.  Most Americans (Christians included) don't know about this day.  It is the day when Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the doors of Wittenberg Church protesting the sale of indulgences.¹  Though the work wasn't meant to be circulated throughout Christendom, the invention of the printing press pretty much led to this end.  Rome and Luther went back and forth, and that children is where Protestants come from.

    I got back to my room, opened web pages with Martin Luther's German mug on them, broke out my permanent marker, and drew Luther on one side and the Lutheran Seal on the other.  I put it on and walked down the street.  It was fun standing in line and I got to talk with some kids about Reformation Day, Monty Python, and history in general.  I came back and finished my burrito with my friend and we watched Gladiator.  The movie throws out the word freedom a lot and my friend and I got to talking about what it means to be free.

    Of course I can talk about the Freedom to wear aluminum foil in public or to talk about my faith, but freedom means a lot more than all that.  Too often we view Freedom as the ability to do what we want, rather than the ability to be who we were meant to be.  My friend told me how he was glad to have come to the United States to study, but how homesick he could be.  He told me how he regretted not going to a concert, but at the time didn't know how he could have gone.  I find it interesting how both incidents have joy and pain.  Each of our decisions is like that.  With every choice we get some pain along with the joy; which is one of the most overlooked aspects of freedom.  I can remember hating to get up in the morning to fly to cities when I worked for the airlines, but I wouldn't trade one of those trips for an extra hour of two in bed.

    In 1517, when Luther nailed the ninety-five theses to the doors of Wittenberg he was captive to the freedom on the Word.  He would sacrifice everything even "life, goods, honor, children, or wife."  We are so removed from that time that freedom is taken for granted.  If one looks around one can see that everywhere people are in chains.  We like chains, they feel comfortable after awhile and we don't mind the excuse for boundaries.  We say that the simplest things are courageous, but real courage is not in what we do, but in who we are willing to become.  And it is sad that in that regard we Americans who have so much are upstaged by a medieval monk from nowhere.

notes

¹ The last thing I want to do is to misrepresent the other side, but here is a brief history of indulgences.  During the crusades people in Western Europe were worried that if they killed they would go to Hell.  In order to counteract this, the Pope said he would pardon anyone involved and give them an indulgence.  That worked well for the crusaders, but not for people who could not fight and yet still were worried about their immortal souls.  So the church of Rome said that with a donation, the people wouldn't have to worry about Hell.  Years later, Rome would still be giving out indulgences for donations.  In Luther's time, Pope Leo X wanted to build a new church in Rome.  He thought that indulgences (and borrowing money) was the perfect way to handle it.  However, Luther took issue to the fact that people were paying to, in essence, get out of Hell.  Ergo, the ninety-five theses.  Oh, and the church that Leo built can still be seen today.  It's called St. Peter's Basillica.  It is amazing what you can buy if you are willing to split apart Christendom.

When is Too Far, Too Far?

When is Too Far, Too Far?

P.Z. Myers threw the Holy Qur'an and Dawkins' God delusion in the trash with some coffee grounds and took a picture of it.  He drove a rusty nail through a communion wafer and took a picture of it.  What was the point?  What did he hope to achieve?  One could argue, as Myers did, "that nothing should be held as sacred" and yet we all have lines that we cannot or will not cross. We all have some sort of sacred line that will end a conversation.  To not acknowledge this is to be both foolish and willfully disrespectful.

    In science we human beings are required to question everything but have respect for the answers that manifest themselves.  In religion we are required to question everything but have respect for the answers that manifest themselves.  Some atheists have tried to get to God and cannot.  I am glad I do not sit in judgment of them.  I cannot judge others and I am reproached if I ever do so.  One will find that most Christians adopt this viewpoint (difficult as it is).  However there is a portrayal of Christians as being close-minded bigots.  I would like to say that everyone in church is a Christian, but as one wise Christian put it, "just because a mouse is in the cookie jar, doesn't make it a cookie."  We all know Christians whose grasp on the Bible is as tenuous as an atheist's grasp and once again, I am glad I do not sit in judgment of them.

    So what does one mean when one dumps the Holy Qur'an in the garbage with coffee grounds and The God Delusion?  It means that the opposing view offers nothing at all.  If we live in a world with P.Z. Myers' and such, I would say that we live in a world of close-mindedness.  I have on my computer copies of works by great Muslim philosophers, but I am very much not a Muslim.  I want to know what a person thinks and how their feelings are going to interact with their thoughts and culture.  I want to know what makes a person a person; and if I just look at science for this, I miss a great deal of life and the human experience.

    I love science.  I believe when certain scientists tell me something and certain scientists tell me other things.  Our belief in science, if we are truly honest, has little to do with the scientific method and a great more to do with faith.  We put our faith in scientists because we believe they have done their homework and thought things through very carefully.  Sometimes our faith is well-placed, but most of the time science experiences a paradigm shift every fifty years or so.  It is no big deal, it is just alternating opinions.  We are left with technology that is less efficient or useful and the technology based off of the new science is better, the technology of the future is usually better still.  Science doesn't so much move from strength to strength, but rather from opinion to opinion.  A great scientific mind will be open to new theories and humble to not being the smartest person alive; but they share something in common with the Christian fanatic when they fail to be open to different ways of thinking.  Einstein was brilliant but became foolish with his outright denial of quantum mechanics.  (I suppose the question is, if he is proven right, will we still think of him as foolish?)

    But the matter still stands of a Qur'an, an atheist book, and coffee grounds in a garbage can; and what that means.  To Mr. Myers it may mean one thing in his mind, but deeper down it means quite another.  I suppose that his notes on a particular task he is trying to achieve in his work are sacred in a way.  I suppose that his marriage certificate is sacred to him.  And if they are not, than what is a human beings life without some bit of the sacred, the thing which is set apart.  There has to be some sort of core to what makes an human an human.  The philosophers come back to this time and time again.  What is it that makes us so special?  One could argue it is the fact that we have something that is uniquely sacred to us.  We may disagree on what that is, but we can all agree that there is a sacred core to the human experience.

    I believe Mr. Myers did this subconsciously as an act of provocation.  As if provocation had meaning in and of itself.  He was not looking to bring enlightenment to people, but to set himself apart.  Christianity has always wrestled with this but, because humility is so interwoven into what we are supposed to believe, we have never been able to divorce ourselves from the need to be humble.  Mr. Myers action does bring up a good point on one level to always question, something all people are called to do; but his motivation was not to do this.  His motivation was to call attention to his own enlightenment.  If you are an atheist, I pray you do not read this next part because I am going to let you in on a secret that has made Christians the most dominant force in the world, namely: be humble when you reach out and always do good works with the love of God.  My best friend is an atheist and because of his brotherly love for me, I can never dismiss him or his belief.  He gets into trouble when his beliefs which stem from his desire to be right try and dominate me and put me into a box.  I know that my "Christian witness" when driven by my desire to be right and not show love or commune with my friend, drive him further from the cross.  When Jesus was giving the Great Commission he did not say "Go into the world and make disciples of all nations..." but rather, "as you are going out into the world make disciples of all nations ..."  This means that we are to humbly live our lives in ways bring people to asking the questions.

    It is hard to dismiss an atheist who humbly serves a world in need and has entered his or her decision with great fear and trembling, just as it is hard to dismiss a Christian who reaches his or her conclusion in such a manner.  However, it is easy to dismiss a Christian who condemns you to Hell.  It is easy to dismiss an atheist who throws books into a garbage can with coffee grounds.

On Pointing to Hidden Things

On Pointing to Hidden Things

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

                                                    -Genesis Chapter One Verse One

Its only a small word made up of two Hebrew Letters.  It can be pronounced with just one sound, "eth".  It is the word אֵ֥ת.  It is untranslatable into English.  Some would say it is because its meaning is too obscure for English.  Our language can do a lot of things, but from time to time it runs into some word out there that is so foreign it just cannot process it.  However, I don't believe that this our problem with אֵ֥ת.  The problem is that the word means too much.

    You see, it is usually viewed as the sign of the definite direct object, not translated in English but generally preceding and indicating the accusative.  What does that mean anyway.  It means that this is a word that is constantly pointing to something.  "In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth."  In the Greek the phrase goes a little something like this: ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν. In this version God is first and, like in good English, it is in the active voice. God is the actor and acts upon the "heaven and the earth."  It works out about that same way in the Hebrew.  In reading the Hebrew wrong it would appear that the sentence starts with what we see and know around us, the heavens and the earth, and then proceeds to tell us the author with the little word  אֵ֥ת pointing the way.  I even read it that way at first.  Then I remember when you are reading in the language of God's people, you have to start reading (and thus thinking) backwards.  So rather than the world creating a God, we see that the Greek, the Hebrew, and the English translators believe God comes first.

    In fact in this little word can be the seen the entire Gospel and good news for us all. It is uncomplicated, unassuming.  It is found near the beginning of our story but does not have to be first to show its important.  It is with the first words.  Does it sound familiar?  In the beginning it was with the words that made creation and it was the word that shows who made creation happen.  In fact it is made up of aleph and tav.  These two letters begin and close the Hebrew alphabet.  They are the A to Z.  For the Jewish people (and I would hope for Christians as well) the A to Z of life is the Torah.  The Mishlei, or as we know it: Proverbs says, "The Torah is more precious than pearls."¹  The Midrash states that the "Torah is more precious than the first born."  Truly, the Torah is the Judeo-Christians A to Z.

    However, we Christians believe in another A to Z.  We believe in the Alpha and the Omega who is the beginning and the end.  In Christ, Christians have a unique relationship with Torah because in Christ we see that Torah wrapped itself in flesh and walked among us.  In Matthew 15 we get the sense that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets.  We get the feeling that like a pin-prick on a balloon or a jar that flips in water to finally let it all in, Jesus burst a hole in our world with finite beginnings and finite endings and let the whole of God's Kingdom come rushing in after Him.  We are drown by the fact that The ΑΩ put on the clothes of we human beings and, as Gene Peterson puts it, "moved into the neighborhood."  The Word that made the world dwelt among us.

    So moving away from the letters, we should move towards the word.  What exactly does  אֵ֥ת do.  Well it connects God to the Heavens and the Earth.  It is an arrow that shows the flow of how God made the Heavens and the Earth.  One might even say that it is the Word that God breathed out to make the Heavens and the Earth.  A Word that was with God and somehow this Alpha and Omega became God's presence.  All things were created through this word and without it ... well ... you can't have the Heavens and Earth created; at least not without the beginning and the end involved.

    This is only what the word  אֵ֥ת is and does not even begin to address what that word does.  It points.  One of the best translations for Torah is "Way."  A way is usually something that points us down a certain direction.  Here the Torah was pointing towards something ... something BIG.  It was pointing us its fulfillment.  It was writing about something big that had happened once long ago and was making itself known all over again.  It was pointing to itself not as an end, but as that which is waiting to be fulfilled.  The Laws, beautiful though they are, could never bring us into right relationship with the Author of creation.  The Laws were band-aids to a broken and bruised world that could only see the Torah, and the world that was built on top of it, dimly.  So, we ask ourselves, what if this Way became human and walked among us?  What then are we to do?  The word that God used as the way to create creation that showed He was the creator and pointed to His handiwork is the same Word, Way, Alpha and Omega, Aleph and Tov that we Christians worship and find peace and rest in today.

    The early Christians, or People of the Way as they were called, saw all this clearly.  They marked the letters Chi and Rho, two other letters that mean their salvation, where they were.  It is amazing how two little letters bring us back to a right relationship with אֱלֹהִ֑ים, the Strong God, Elohim, who is so powerful and big that He surrounds the entire universe and so majestic that our words are often forced to do things that only our imaginations can glimpse of, just to speak of Him.²

notes

¹ It should also be noted that Jesus once said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a pearl of great value that one would sell everything to possess."  I believe a good association can be made between the words of the Torah and the Kingdom of Heaven.  Christians and non-Christians can argue the aspects of this for as long as they want, but is dialogue with the Holy Scripture something to be rejected?  By no means!  If we are to argue about trivial matters and amongst our closest friends, how much more are we supposed to argue about deep matters and amongst God in Heaven?

² My Greek Professor who loves Hebrew will know about the roots and origins of Elohim, however it is a plural verb always used of and considered as One or perhaps is like how we use the royal singular that speaks of itself in the plural (i.e. Queen Victoria's famous statement, "We are not amused."); and it means powerful and strong.

Now What?

Now What?

    Yesterday couldn't have gone better.  From beginning to end it was a great day.  I spent time with friends, was able to work, and saw a movie to boot.  Yesterday's over and I guess I am dealing with its fall-out.  Yes, there is the awareness of homework yet to be completed and a rather lengthy day at work to look forward to; but what am I to do in the good times.  Truth be told I listened to Sara Grove's song, "Painting Pictures of Egypt," a song about what to do when we are thrown into the chaotic beauty of real life.

    I have lived too many years in a dormant winter place, a slave to the routine of it all.  It wasn't good, it just wasn't frightening because it didn't require too much.  I could take the bad; I really could!  Not just the mediocrity, the bad!  I could stand the rejections, and firings, and even the ennui that mediocrity heaps out upon us.  Now that I am in Greek and working at Starbucks, I can take that too.  It is painful and the rewards aren't that noticeable.

    But what am I to do with a day as wonderful as yesterday?  What am I to do when I get blown away by one good thing after another?  I felt close to God in my suffering of futility.¹  But, when things shake out for good, I am totally at a loss.  Perhaps, just as we are to give our problems to God, maybe we are to give our good feelings back to God.  I am not talking about "giving thanks" here.  I am talking about something else that I just can't quite put my finger on.  Maybe things were just too out of the ordinary that my brain is having trouble taking it all in; or maybe it was so good that I would rather not know how good things could be when I contemplate how mundane my life usually is.

    In any case, I will give thanks to God and ask for His help, even on the good days.

---

1. I really ought to learn German.  I am sure they have words that mean "suffering caused by futility" or "suffering from too much joy."  If anyone knows  words to describe these things (besides "emo"), let me know.

A link to: What's the Other Guy Saying, by Spencer Troxell

My good friend Spencer wrote a post that I believe is handles this question even better than my own. It is good to have friends who can say things better than we can. Here is the link: What's the Other Guy Saying