What's Wrong with the World

What's wrong with the world?
Is it social conditions?
Is it bad nutrition?
Is it spankings?

Maybe we work too hard
Maybe we don't work enough

It could be all this technology
It could be we don't have enough technology

The problem is promiscuity
The problem is puritanism

The problem is what's old
The problem is what's new

It's because we're so ignorant
It's an information overload

What is it?
What's wrng with the world?

It's the poor
It's the rich
It's the middle men

It's all those freaks
It's all those conformists

The problem is isolation
The problem is extroversion

We're under the shadow of colonialism
We're trapped in the flames of unguided revolution

What is it?
What's wrong with the world?

I am

I'm not sick
I'm not confused
I'm out of excuses
I'm just sinful

I know my obligations
I know who my work affects
Yet I am careless in my efforts

I know the holiness of love
I know the harm my own hate does me
Yet I cannot begin to count all the nights
I went to bed with murder in my heart

I have the wisdom of God at my fingertips
I am not ignorant of the righteous ways
And still I sin more with each passing hour

How can I point to the warlord
Or the addict in the gutter
Or the wealthy miser
As some wretched other?
I have less power for evil
But the miniatures of there sins
Undo me every day

If I fall to the little, everyday vices
How would I fare against true temptation?

I am what's wrong with the world
I call down the curse each day
My most righteous words condemn me

So what hope do I have
Bu the Blood of True Love?
And how can I have any right to such pride
As too deny the Heaven I did not earn on my own?

I am what's wrong with the world
And what's best in the world
Is the Blood by which I'm forgiven

A Cry of Lament

There is a dreadful night in Israel
From the children of Jacob
Comes a mournful cry
For the Roman fist is heavy
And the wretchedness of sin
Is overwhelming

Who will save us
When will You remember us?
When will you dethrone the cruel and unjust?

The land we were promised
Is littered with broken bones
The bones of our children, our lovers, our neighbors
The bones of our ancestors are scattered to the east
Who will gather them up and bring them home?

Who will stop the swords of the wicked?
Who will rescue the weak and weary
We are under the rule of godless men?
They gutted a pig in the Temple once
Won't You bring humble them?
Won't You humble them before they do it again?


Who will save us
When will You remember us?
When will You right the wrongs?

But when have we obeyed?
When have we kept our vows?
Will You look kindly on us, O Lord?
Will You soften my hardened heart?

Can You redeem the wicked kings?
Can You redeem the legacy of Solomon and Ahab?
Will the diseased and withered line of David yet bear fruit?

We have been crying out for over a thousand year.
When will Your deliverance come?
There have been many false Messiahs
When will the true one be sent?

So Israel cries out
And as in the days of Moses
The Maker of Heaven is moved
As on the mountain with Abraham
A sacrifice is provided
As in the suffering of Job
God shall speak with men

Starting with Mary

The Wedding

She rose from the bed

The sheets sliding away

Carrying off her fears

Her worries

She rose, cloaked in sadness

Resolute in her sorrow

She passed through the threshold of blood

The house of irrevocable ties

Its wooden frame stained with rot

She walked by shelves of broken promises

Her bare feet pained by the refuse of old grudges

She walked along the crowded streets

The whole thing damp with blood and sweat

She saw televisions blasting models and contestants

Venders and magicians shouting about "success"

A whole crowd chattering worriedly about "happiness"

A politician singing and chanting about a blissful "tomorrow"

She jostled through the frantic mob

She crossed through a park

And almost gagged from the stench of gossip

A gang of old friends stumbled by her

She couldn't remember why they all glared at her now

She rushed along, afraid and sickened

The whole high school game flashed by

She pushed through the jumble of noise

The wolf whistles and catcalls and cheesy slogans

Not even stopping to see what was clawing at her arm

And there she was

At the bridge

Her little hideaway

The beautiful, quiet place

The shelter she always ran to

To wait our the fears and disappointments

But it wasn't enough

All those times she had cried there

All the secret hate and misery she had spilled out

The bridge had never answered her

So she went to the edge

Staring at the rushing waters

And then came the afterthought

Her whispered plea

Her quiet challenge

To her very last hope

She felt it grab her

Like a fierce, clawed hand

The call of the park and the city and the home

The song of all the rotten prizes she was giving up on

The game and the utopia and the lover gripped her once again

But her despair was stronger

It's bitterness was more lovely than their sweetness

The waters did not hear her plea

They had not understood her heart

Not on that day nor any before it

But they knew the Bridegroom's hand

They listened when He said "Gently"

They carried her, unharmed, to the shore

Washed clean of the city's grime

Made ready for her wedding

They did this in obedience

To her one last Hope

Abortion and Supernaturalism

In the debate over a woman's right to an abortion, the chief difficulty arises from the definition of life. When does life begin? What makes something alive? What constitutes a human life? Why does human life have value to begin with? It's a troublesome argument to have because it hangs on such huge questions. If you are a Naturalist (someone who believes that only the natural universe exists and that the human mind is nothing but neural activity) then you cannot conclude that human life begins before conscious and complex thought since there is no other difference in the Naturalist worldview between human beings and any other animal. I believe that human life begins at conception because I am a Supernaturalist.

The only way anyone can justify the pro-life thesis is to say that we are defined by more than our natural characteristics, that we are in fact defined by a supernatural quality which gives us values and determines what is and is not morally right. In Naturalism, there is no good reason (apart from friends and family) for treating a mentally disabled human with a different level of concern than would be shown for a chimpanzee at the same level of intelligence, but a Supernaturalist (who believes that the soul, beauty, moral law, and other abstractions are objectively real) can say that the human in question is of greater value than the chimp because he or she is made in the image of God and the chimp isn't. This need for a supernatural characteristic (namely, the imago dei) may seem like a major blow to the plausibility of the pro-life stance, but in reality it is a problem that extends well beyond the topic of abortion and is in fact at the heart of every human rights issue that ever has or will exist.

In the absence of any concept of an imago dei, the secular community has put forward a number of standards by which to justify human value, most notably the standards of self-awareness, intelligence, the ability to form goals and find value in one's own life, and social/evolutionary usefulness. The problem with each of these standards is that none of them justify equal rights among human beings since each of the above characteristics exist to differing degrees not only among people in general but even between a given individual at one point in time and that same individual at another point in time. In fact, out of all of these standards, only the standards of evolutionary usefulness and social usefulness justify regarding a human baby as a person even after it has been born; by every other secular standard, infanticide is actually an animal rights issue. Those same standards which alone out of the secular standards of human value listed are able to justify the personhood of an infant are also flawed in that they rely in the circular logic of one person deriving value from their contribution to a larger collection of people. If one person is justified by their value to the community or human race (which is itself nothing but a larger group of those same people whose existence is in need of validation) then where does the value of the community or the race come from? By any of these standards, the mass euthanizing of men, women, and children is entirely within the realm of justification.

It is perfectly reasonable for an opponent of the imago dei definition of humanity to respond that none of this actually proves it to be right or any of the other standards to be wrong, however up until now such a direct proof has not been the point. Like all legal stances, the pro-choice proposition rests upon an assumption of human value, namely that the unborn child is of little or no value and the mother is great value. The pro-choice advocate takes it for granted that there really is moral value in the world, and if you take that away there is no good reason to say the mother has the right to anything or even that any laws should exist. Many have argued that there are no objective moral values but we should still follow subjective moral laws because doing so leads to a good society, yet if there are no moral absolutes than the desire for a “good society” is no different from a desire for strawberry jam instead of blueberry jam, especially for someone whose life may be made considerably less pleasurable by obedience to a moral law. All of this would be perfectly fine with the secular standards I have listed except for the fact that this fundamental assumption is made on the basis of intuition (although many pro-choice advocates may have sacred texts to inform them about morality, that intuition is still the only justification for their stance which is held universally) and as such any standard which is fundamentally at odds with what our moral intuition tells us about human value is inadmissible. The pro-choice advocate could just throw up their hands and say that our intuition must be flawed rather than the standard of human value, but then they have just undermined their whole argument by rejecting the only universally accepted evidence that there is any human value to begin with.

Furthermore, Naturalism is unable to justify the value (as we are here using the word) of anyone or anything. To begin, outside of theism there is no good basis by which to determine anything so abstract as human value. That is to say that the atheist has nothing but their own feelings by which to judge the truthfulness or falsehood of any statement about intrinsic value, and they similarly have nothing at all by which to judge whether or not their own feelings are honest judges on such matters. The theist on the other hand can point to God as the foundation of all physical and abstract truth and in doing so discuss these matters with a real standard of truth and falsehood. Additionally, Naturalism itself is founded on the notion that only mathematics and that which can be studied through science exists. Clearly, there is no ethical matter that can in any way be tested in the laboratory, nor can the claim that only that which can be studied by science exists itself be studied and tested through science (paradox fail!).  In other words, the claim that human beings, animals, or the environment have moral value is in the exclusive hold of the Supernaturalist worldview. That said, it still remains to be seen whether or not Supernaturalism is true at all, seeing as the intrinsic value of human life is not such that we can automatically call it true.

There are many subtle arguments concerning whether or not abstractions exist (remember how Naturalism fails to pass its own standard of knowledge?), but perhaps the best of them was presented by C.S. Lewis. According to Lewis, Christianity regards intelligence as a gift from God, a strange bond to the absolute and abstract laws of logic, while Naturalism considers human thought to be entirely a result of the activity of atoms in our brain. Lewis argues that if our thoughts are really nothing but a series of chemical reactions we have no good reason to assume that they can ever be trusted to be logical and are certainly untrustworthy in debating such abstract topics as Naturalism and Supernaturalism. In other words, the Naturalists own argument denounces his own claim to rational thought and therefore invalidates his whole point. For a long time I did not find this argument compelling since I reasoned that if those atoms in my brain are themselves subject to the laws of logic it would make sense that logic could be worked out through them. It wasn't until about a year ago that I realized this only applied to the logic of mathematics since it may be possible to work out issues of addition and subtraction chemically, but there is no way to translate any of the logical arguments present in this article into the logic of an atom. In short, the value of human reason in discerning truth is unjustifiable in the Naturalist worldview.

Additionally, our sense of morality is inexplicable in the story that the Naturalist has to tell. It has often been argued that moral law was an adaptation that allowed us to live together effectively and peaceably, but there are two major flaws in this argument. Firstly, morality is fundamentally different from an instinct in that it actually includes a sense of what we should do and is often considered more compelling than instincts such as self-preservation even though those instincts may have greater emotional strength. This is another argument from C.S. Lewis, who wrote in his book Mere Christianity that our sense of moral law encourages different kinds of behaviors under different circumstances and that it even involves trying to encourage one instinct and suppress another in many instances. Lewis compared moral law to a sheet of music, saying that it directs our responses to our instincts as the sheet directs the pressing of keys on a piano. If morality is so set above the instincts, he argued, then it itself must be something different.

The second problem with the evolutionary explanation of morality is that altruism is in many ways disadvantageous. It is true that a community or species that practices altruism within its own boundaries is set at an advantage, but what we actually have is a sense of altruism that is often extended beyond those boundaries even to other species. It is true that people often place the interest of the community over such unilateral expressions of altruism, but that only means that we fail to follow moral law. When we approach altruism of this kind from an outside perspective, removed from the temptations of instinct, we almost always approve. This may seem like a small digression from the interests of evolution, but it was still enough to convince Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and a former atheist, that evolution alone cannot explain human ethics.

Finally, Naturalism is unable to account for the natural world. There is far more to be said on this point than can be managed here, but suffice it to say that both the complexity of the universe and the existence of the universe at all require a supernatural explanation. When it comes to the issue of complexity, it has been found that even the tiniest changes in any of the universal constants (the speed of light, the size of an electron, etc.) would make life utterly impossible. This is important because neither science nor philosophy can provide any good reason that these constants should be as they are by necessity or even that they should by necessity be confined to any given range, meaning that the number of other possible universes without life is quite possibly infinite. What’s more, we now know that the universe did not exist forever, that does in fact have a beginning and will one day have an end (or at least any life in it will). What this means is that there must have been something before it that was the cause of its existence, and given the intricacy of the universe we see before us it is unlikely that something would have been without thought or will. In fact, the idea that a universe of brute matter which requires an explanation for its existence should be adequately explained by an equally brutish force or principle is almost laughable. Once again, this argument is much more detailed than I can give it credit for without turning this into an essay about the origin of the universe, but it is also such that I would be dishonest not to bring it up.

And so it all comes back around to a little bundle of cells around which circle all these arguments of ethics and metaphysics. But then, that is not what it is, but only what it is made of. If it is a bundle of cells, then it remains a bundle of cells for all nine months and then for all the years to come until is a decaying mass of chemicals. If it is only a bundle of cells, then so is the thing it is stashed inside, the thing that might deny it life. Yet there is something more, something that is as apart from matter as it is from intelligence, righteousness, usefulness, and happiness. Something that is distinct from them all but also lends meaning to them, illuminates them and gives them all their places. Because no disability, no popular opinion, no moral infraction, no mental shortcoming can ever wipe away from that little life the supernatural image of God.

The Problem of Optimism

Has anyone else ever noticed how much the Church in America has to say about self-image? Maybe it's just me, but whenever I look out at how Christians are talking about the love of God I keep noticing the same phrases repeated again and again about how God values us and how beautiful we are to Him and how no sin is beyond His forgiveness. It's all perfectly true, but I feel like it's responding to another culture's issues. It's as if Christians were convinced anyone who hasn't accepted Messiah is being held back because they don't think they deserve God's love.

Before I go any further, I need to clear up two things. The first is that I am a big fan of what might be called "easygoing pessimism"(the idea might be summed up with the statement "life sucks and we're fallen, but God is good and the only way out is through") and also extremely distrustful of anything that strikes me as "cheesy." In other words, I'm quite biased on this subject, but emotional objectivity is not the same as rational objectivity and I will try to be as rationally objective as possible. The second preliminary issue is that I realize our culture really is plagued with low self-esteem. We are bombarded every day by advertisements that tell us how we are supposed to look and how we should act and what we need to achieve, and it gets to us. We have all fallen short of the glory of God and we all know it.

The problem is that while we all feel our fallenness deep down, we still feed on the cheap slogans and secular spirituality of lukewarm optimism which exists as a reaction to that epidemic of self-loathing. I may be wrong, but based on my own experience as a former agnostic and my time among non-Christians I would say that the average American's resistance to the Bible comes from the optimist side of our cultural coin rather than the pessimist side. People don't reject the Crucifixion because they think God wouldn't do that for us, they reject it because they think God wouldn't have to do it. They think that there shouldn't have been a cost to our forgiveness and that we're all good enough (except for a few notable dictators and murders) for our goodness to outweigh our sins when the sheep and the goats get split up. Our culture is filled with happy thoughts that never quite satisfy our inner sadness but are nonetheless the first cliches to rear up when the Bible is mentioned. We who live in constant fear of our neighbor's judgment have lost all understanding of what it means to fear the judgement of God and are posed instead to look down and judge the Creator of every single thing that has ever existed.

The Glass City

They climb up into the sky
The glittering domes and shining towers
Catching the sun's light, the dazzle us with a stunning display
Look up and see the hundreds of false suns
Tell me if you can tell them apart
The real sky, sun, and clouds
From their reflections
And the clever artistic replicas

Take a good look at the shops
Look at the fun little baubles
The spinning gears and swinging levers
And that bouquet over there
With the marvelous glass roses
And the tinfoil lilies
But you must be careful
The petals cut like knives
And if the aroma is a little toxic
Lean back if you feel faint

Well what would you want with a real flower?
You know those things go bad, after all
Well so what if it's a little cool or hard?
See now, I've no time for your quirks
I've got to go now, tight schedule and all
Try the theatre, and forget those odd questions
Nothing good will come of them


The guide is gone
Marching away
His face to the shiny pavement
Just like the rest of them
All looking at the sidewalk
Or the windows
Never looking at each other directly
Not even with the masks on
You look down too

The garden is lovely
Never aging
Always shining
The theatre is amusing
The casino is the most fun of all

Time to work
Pull the levers
Work the machine

Work
Theatre
Shop
Bet

On and on
Again and again
All with a smile
Always cheerful
On and on

And then comes the jam
Out of nowhere
Things are just blocked
You move on
Adjust your route
It closes in
The jam
The Something
That is getting in the way of things
You move on through alleys and side streets
Out of the usual flow
Away from the Watchers

Here is pavement that doesn't shine
Here there is a deep, terrifying silence
Here the stars shine through
Here the stars shine true
And it's almost more than you can bear

You look out from the dread hill
From the corner of Creation
That had been hidden before
And see the glass city
All splayed out below

Clockwork
All of it a mad dance
A horrid, bejeweled machine
Slick with blood and sweat
Grinding its way into the pit
That's all it really is
That skeletal spectacle
That miserable pleasure palace

But there is another dance
Driven my a wonderful, terrible symphony
Barely audible amidst the infernal noise
But unshakeable once it is heard

An armada seizes the sky
Swirling and rumbling about
Lit up in pulsing flashes
And down below
In the cracks and corners
Nature, our sister, stirs at the Master's touch
Arising from her slumber
Ready to brush away our pretty things

All the while
The melody is in the city
Passing subtly in whispers and glances
Slipping in between busy schedules
Invading the diabolical gears
Jumping about in the daily dice

The Anointed is coming
To rescue us
To romance us
To war against us

The Bridegroom is coming to the Glass City

The God on the Shelf

It came to him from ages past
From the heroes and poets of each generation
It had endured wars, revolutions, and plagues
It had been spat on, buried, and drowned
All without suffering a single scratch

It came to Mr. Hamilton still bearing some vestiges
Of awe and beauty and terror
He received it because tradition said so
Held onto it for the sake of comfort
In the face of death and disaster it was there
It fed him shallow optimism and cheap cliches

But Mr. Hamilton knew that it meant something more

He put it in a little glass box
Held together with laws and procedures
Embellished with customs and social standards
It was all very well-to-do

He fashioned together some dolls
To sit around and in front of and on top of it
There were Good Manners and Moderation
There were Optimism and Good Sense
All gathered round like little attendants
Or perhaps guards

Then he took the idol upstairs
Up into the attic
Now that it might be safe to touch
He set it down in the back
And began draping the whole place
In sensible philosophy
There was Enlightened Interpretation
A couple sheets of Openmindedness
A veil of Real Life hung towards the back
And right on the idol there was something dark
A cloth cut from the dreadful veil of Nihilism
The largest cut that Mr. Hamilton dared to handle

It all stayed up there for years and years
Collecting dust in the forbidden room
Hidden with all that he feared to look upon
Until the day the whole house shook
It seemed to come without warning
But a backward glance shows all of life conspiring together
From that view it is unthinkable for that day to have been missed

That wonderful, terrible day
The day the God on the shelf got up
Shook off the dust and broke through the glass
Knocked down the dolls and ripped through the curtains
The day idle speculation faced overwhelming truth
The day a man playing at spirituality
Was cornered by the Real Thing

I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Christian

Before I say anything else, I'd like to be clear on one thing: I never have and never will ally myself with the slogan "it's a relationship, not a religion." Christianity is a religion and while it is true to say that it is also a relationship, to say that it is a relationship instead of a religion is to deny our entire intellectual heritage and our intellectual validity. If we want a seat at the table when the naturalists and postmodernists argue over the nature of evil, the existence of moral absolutes, and the purpose (or absence thereof) of life, if we want to shine a lantern amongst the philosophical will o' wisps of our age, then we must stand firm and profess boldly that the Church is all that it is and nothing less. We must not give in to the anti-intellectual fads or the connotations that secularists have pinned on to our language.

However, my attitude when it comes to being identified as a "religious person" is quite another thing. It is quite truthful and fitting that the word "religion" should be used to describe Christianity as a whole, but only occasionally would I ever admit the word "religious" to be an appropriate adjective to assign to a person. There are three main reasons for this, but first I think it is best to explain how the word can be used appropriately.

Obviously, the use of any adjective is only sensible in the presence of other possible characteristics which would exclude it; when we say that something has a given characteristic (such as the color blue), we are implying that there is another characteristic it could have had but doesn't have (such as the color red) because that role is taken up by the actual characteristic. Thus, a church service is properly called a religious gathering because it is intentionally connected to the religion of Christianity instead of being a mere party which is not consciously structured around any ideology. If written down and distributed, the sermon delivered at the service would be considered a religious speech or essay because it was openly founded on the intellectual framework of a religious worldview. An essay written by the same man for an audience of nonbelievers would not take the same ideas for granted and for this and other reasons it would not necessarily be considered a religious document (or at least not religious in the same way) even if the point of the essay was to advocate a Christian worldview.

Now my first objection to being called religious is that in at least one very important sense there is no other kind of person. A religion is a comprehensive set of beliefs which includes a supernatural understanding of the universe and typically involves reverence for someone or something. The problem is that every single person who has ever lived has had to struggle with the questions of God, life after death, and fate, not to mention the fact that beauty and ethics are also either supernatural or nonexistent. Additionally, even those who deny the existence of the supernatural still subscribe to some ideology which answers all the same questions that a religion (as a set of comprehensive beliefs) must answer. Everyone has something that they hold sacred whether it is God or freedom or science, and everyone has some definition of goodness that they hold to whether it is human empowerment or the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people or the glory of God.

You might come across people who treat these issues as mysteries and claim to be ignorant or neutral concerning them (and you may even be such a person yourself), but they are neither evidence of ideological neutrality nor an exception to a generally true rule. If you sat down with such a person, you would easily find out what they really believe by either trying to persuade them of a particular worldview or asking them a particularly radical question concerning whatever issue it is they claim to be ignorant of. In the former case you might explain to an agnostic what Hindus believe (with most agnostics I suspect that eastern philosophy would be particularly effective) and then they would probably either show interest or express distaste at certain points, thus betraying their vague but still present assumptions about reality. In the latter case if the person in question is not certain of the objectivity of moral law you might ask them if the Holocaust was an evil act---I'm sure you can imagine the results for yourself. The point of the matter is that those who don't claim to have any ideology really do have answers to the essential human questions, they just  have very vague answers along with divisions within themselves between multiple and conflicting answers. In short, everyone has some ideology and everyone is guided in their actions (or at least in how they believe they should act) by that ideology. There is still the division between those whose ideologies include the supernatural and those whose ideologies exclude it, but if the word "religious" is to be used to describe someone who is fervent in their beliefs that is really a very small difference.

Of course there is still the sense in which people use the term to describe someone who is specifically dedicated to a "spiritual" ideology rather than a secular one. The problem with this case is simply that such a usage covers too broad and diverse a group. Christianity may agree with Islam about the existence of God and the inherent goodness of that God, but they are still fundamentally opposed to each other when it comes to salvation. On top of that there is the difference between the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism, which teaches that God is essentially without any kind of personality and that everything (including all evil things) are part of Him, and it may be wondered if the rift really is any wider between the two than it is between either of them and any given secular philosophy. Add to that the fact that some religious worldviews are actually atheistic, and it is very hard to see how referring to a person as "religious" could be even remotely helpful in really describing that person.

Finally, there is the issue of behavior. In this case, one might be called "religious" because of the way in which they behave. Thus a "religious person" is someone who adheres to high moral standards. The problem is that even outside Christianity the issue of whether or not someone is a believer is determined first and foremost by what they believe and what they are trying to do. This use of the word implies a viciously legalistic attitude which is at least partially inaccurate in terms of religion in generally and wildly inaccurate when it comes to Christianity in particular. The Christian creed is founded on the doctrine that we are all evil and that we can never be justified in the sight of God except by His own death on our behalf. It is true that if we are saved we should behave better than we would otherwise, but that doesn't make falling short of God's commandments proof of hypocrisy. I once saw a scene on television in which a man said that he probably shouldn't be in a church with all the sins in his life, and I was simply shocked. If your life is full of sin (and I can guarantee you that it absolutely is) the first place you should be is a church!

It is for these reasons that I resent being called religious. It is a singularly useless term which I once used as an agnostic to say that a Christian is a certain kind of person just as a mailman is a certain type of person rather than someone engaging in the relationship for which we are all made. I'm not a religious person. I am not someone who is defined by regular church attendance. I am not a special kind of person. I am an evil wretch who knows he's an evil wretch, knows that only God can fix that, believes that God has done something to fix that, and lives in dependence on the mercy of that God. I'm a Christian.

Betrothal

I am reminded
By the idiotic grins
And the moments of sheer joy
Reminded of how she was promised to You
Reminded of how I was promised to You
Before this all began

It costs me nothing
Some money
A few years of patience
An education I would have gotten anyway
And the whole time she is eager for me as I am for her

When did I ever rescue her?
Did I ever romance her with wisdom and power?
When evil arose in her, was I there to rebuke it and war against it?

But You...
Well that pursuit is something else
You have searched
The depths of your beloved's heart
And You called her name
Before she knew it
In all the days of her life
You have provided for her

You make the storm
Sing and pound out Your love song
And hundred little things fall into place
By the authority of Your affectionate will
You come into her hidden shelter
And there attend to her

When the days turn dark
When the monsters come out
And all her friends fail her
When she is at the mercy of the merciless
Then You appear
As the utter darkness closes in
Your light flashes out
Tearing through that fearsome wickedness

When she wallows in the miseries of sin
When she turns her back on that light that once saved her
You do not give up on her
You have gone into her infernal shelter
With a word You blasted it to bits
She set her eyes on Fafnir's accursed gold
And at once you reduced it all to dust
You cut away her sin
And tenderly returned her to Paradise

Who am I
To care for Your beloved?
Who am I
To be called Your beloved?

Logic is Your Friend

In the history of popular thought there has emerged a very odd idea that logic is something cold, selfish, and oppressive. To the best of my understanding, this arose in the Romantic Period of the 19th century and became popular in the later half or so of the 20th century, but in this I may be wrong. The issue of importance is that in the imagination of modern America, the perfectly logical individual is imagined at best to be like Spock from Star Trek, or at worst to be like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reason is presumed to be the enemy of emotion, and if it is not completely amoral then it is at least utilitarian and as such justifies many things that are quite clearly wrong. In my response this notion, I aim not to point out that this image of logic is misunderstood while still ultimately true, but rather to show that the modern understanding of logic is fundamentally wrong. Reason is intrinsically linked to both our emotions and to morality.

To start, there is the illusion that reason is against emotion. While it is true that the two must at times war with one another, that is only when our emotions behave in unnatural (I use the term "natural" here in reference to the nature instilled in us by God at Eden, not the twisted and sinful nature which emerged from the Fall) ways or are in unnatural circumstances that pit them against what is good, and when our emotions are working as they should in the kinds of circumstances for which they were made, reason supports them. The image Plato suggested for a healthy mind was one of a chariot in which one horse was emotion, one was spirit (that is to say, energy), and the rider was reason. It is true that reason must struggle against emotion, but only insofar as emotion falls away from its own true nature and purpose.

Now to understand when logic should and should not fight against emotions, we must first understand what that "true nature" really is. Emotions can be divided pretty neatly into passions, intuition, yearnings, and hungers (it will only be necessary to discuss passions and intuition in detail since yearnings and hungers parallel them). A passion is very easily defined when we consider the root word of "pass" which appears in it, indicating that a "passion" is a "feeling that passes." It is a feeling such as anger or happiness or sadness which comes to us at one time and not another depending on our circumstances. Intuition is another thing entirely; it is a feeling which does not emerge out of our current circumstances and certain intuitive feelings cannot even be imagined to be stronger in one moment than in another. When we say that if A is equal to B and B is equal to C then A and C must be equal, we are speaking from the authority of intuition. We are also speaking from intuition when we say that killing someone else for the sake of convenience is wrong. We cannot prove that our intuition is true (and I should add that while some beliefs may become so ingrained in our us as to behave like items of intuition, they are still distinct) and if we had to go on proof we would be sentenced to never know anything. If I dismiss the laws or morality as they are presented to me through my feelings then I shall lose any concept of "right and wrong" at all, and if I do away with the laws of logic as they are revealed through my intuition then I shall never have any method by which to build up an alternative set of laws.

In terms of the relationship between passions and intuition, passion can tell me that I am sad at having lost a loved one, but only intuition can tell me that this passing is sorrowful. What's more, my passion can be a hatred for someone else who has written a better essay than me, while my intuition tells me that the essay is admirable and it is actually my bitterness than is hateful. In other words, a passion is an event within me, but intuition is more like a window or a copy of life's own constitution carved into my soul.

It will be noticed now that while logic must often struggle against our passions, it is nonetheless founded on our intuition, or rather that half of it which we call the "laws of logic." Of course, logic itself is founded only on what our intuition reveals to us, and the intuition itself never professes to be more than an image within us of something greater than and outside of us. The question still remains as to what logic says about how we should behave. As has already been mentioned, a very odd idea has gotten out which says that behaving logically means behaving selfishly or in a utilitarian way. This is odd in many ways, but one way that immediately jumps out at me is that both the selfish campaign and the utilitarian campaign face the invincible enemy that is time; the man whose first priority is survival will one day die and the state of general happiness which the utilitarian hopes to achieve can never be more than a particularly high peak among the hills and valleys of history. In any event, logic can never support selfishness because no course is ever logical or illogical except in the context of some objective good. Utilitarianism can be supported through logic, of course, but it is not the only such attitude. In fact, in like of our own biases, our inability to know what certain actions will result in, and the disastrous consequences of utilitarianism seriously carried out (namely Nazism and Communism) over the last century build a rather solid logical case against utilitarianism.

Neither is the idea that the logical man is unemotional any more weighty. While the moral side of intuition does not demand our total assent in the same way that the logical side does, we must accept that at least some of it is right or else we shall not have any morality at all. Thus, in so far as we have defined the moral items of intuition and assented to them, they must be the guiding forces in any truly rational decisions we make. What's more, they must be the guiding forces in how we react to our own emotions. If I am bitter about something that is good I must suppress my bitterness, but if I am instead happy over that good thing then logic must demand that I embrace that happiness. Even when we are fighting our bad emotions we should still be trying to encourage the good ones. As such, we find that even when logic is at war with passion, it is not trying to stomp it out so much as it is trying to reshape it into some form that is not only aligned with objective reality but is also thriving in that role.

The Captive Lord

The whole prison shudders
The stones shake
The bars creak
In terror
A whisper runs down the hall

Do you think you can hold Him down here?
Down in the labyrinth of forgetfulness
You would chain Him up
With snide arguments
You would shut Him up
Behind thick doors of disdain
But He built this fortress
From the loftiest tower
To those deep dungeons
And it remembers His touch

It all happened before
He taught the trees to grow
And they hung him on slabs of wood
He coaxed obstinate rock into malleable metal
And they impaled him with iron nails
He gave the earth its form
And they threw His corpse inside it
He was there when Death was born
And trembled at their reunion

Lay down your arms
Put aside your tools
They will not obey you anyway
Even now they mutter to each other
Gossiping of the unfolding plan

Watch as you lead Him to His cell
See how the prisoners stand up straight
See how the guards salute
Welcome to the new base of operations

God's Sovereignty

When I became a Christian, the one doctrine that gave me more trouble than any other was that of God's ultimate sovereignty, that its, His ultimate authority before which we literally have no rights. It is the idea that there is no part of my life that I can claim to be fully and rightfully my own. It is something that is central to the entire Christian mindset and lifestyle, but it was also something that nearly a decade and a half of secular upbringing had left me quite uneasy with. Ultimately, I found the answer to this difficult question of how God can have such authority in another question, that of where purpose comes from or (to put it another way) that what the meaning of life is.

What is Meaning?


To start, there is the issue of the definition of meaning (I should mention that while there may be some technical differences, for now I will be using the terms "meaning" and "purpose" interchangeably). This is a very difficult question to answer as the most obvious (and perhaps the most sensible) answer seems to simply be that it is what it is. It is almost too raw, too fundamental to describe. However we may get a somewhat more extensive answer by considering the phenomenon of a dying person reflecting on their life and asking if it was meaningful. In this quite human scenario, we are first able to discover that meaning is "above" the meaningful person just as beauty is above a beautiful object. If someone on the verge of death finds that they are satisfied with their life then their life is pleasing because it was meaningful, not meaningful because they are pleased with it.

Thus it is clear that the "height" of purpose above us means that it is what gives us value, or at least that some aspect of our value comes from it, but from this same scenario we are also able to glimpse another aspect of purpose. This characteristic is the timelessness or eternal nature of meaning. The dying individual is concerned with purpose in a new way because they have a sense of judgement (even among atheists and agnostics I believe this to be true, when we see our lives coming to an end it is part of our nature to anticipate some kind of summing up of our life) and when we search for meaning we tend to ask what we will leave behind. When it comes to the anticipated judgement it is worth noting that we are rarely concerned with skills and entirely amoral accomplishments and while I may be wrong I also suspect that the interest in pleasure is something that emerges when death is simply in the near future and that it is typically withered away when death is just around the corner. This is because all these things are temporal and we expect to leave them behind (even with skills which we might expect to keep we still see how vulnerable they are to death as we often see so many of our most reliable faculties all but obliterated in the final days) whereas our purposefulness is the one thing we expect to carry on with us to the great hereafter. It is the subject matter of our judgement when we must leave everything else outside the courtroom. Do not be deceived in this matter; meaning is either eternal or it is one big fraud, no matter how many millions of years it might last. The issue of death is not simply that our mortal lives are too short, it is that they end at all and if meaning also has such an end then it counts for nothing.


Does Morality Demand Meaning?


So how far does the reach of purpose extend over the abstract and spiritual realm? Can we have morality without meaning? I ask this question because there are many who would say they are content not to have objective meaning in their lives; I have even seen bumper stickers reading "the purpose of life is that there is no purpose." As far as I can tell, such individuals are split between the nihilists who reject the objective existence of any non-physical entities such as purpose or beauty and the postmodernists who find liberation in rejecting such objective and powerful standards as ultimate meaning. In both cases, one thing that neither of these groups are able to genuinely let go of for so much as a single day of social interaction is morality. Those who reject anything beyond the natural world often regard the spreading of scientific knowledge and naturalist ideas as the right thing to do, postmodernists quite paradoxically insist on treating other systems of ethics fairly and open-mindedly, and both groups tend to insist on a moral standard when it comes to human interactions (such as not harming others without just cause) in their own daily lives. In either case those who would deny objective moral law might argue that they only advocate the efficient and safe functioning of human civilization which is to say that they are advocating pleasure, but at the same time it is often true that putting the good of society first (while being perfectly beneficial for the majority of people) causes more harm than good for the individual in question. What's more is that if there is no objective good then the desire to live a moral life is quite arbitrary and there is absolutely no argument that can be given against someone who chooses to live the "fun but short" way.

So morality is inescapable. Does that then mean that anyone who would live an ethical life must also bow to purpose in general and ultimately to whatever "ultimate purpose" there might be for life and the universe as a whole? Can we have morality without meaning?

The answer I ultimately come to is "no" partially because I find the separation of ethics and purpose literally inconceivable (to quote C.S. Lewis, "I mean that the act of believing" such to be true "is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into the cavity at the base of that same bottle. It is as final as a physical impossibility.") and also because of one very practical difficulty. Every culture in human history has adhered to a system of right and wrong and they have also all accepted the same fundamental laws of morality, however every culture differs in regards both to how certain laws should be honored and in the level of emphasis they place on each law. The result is that we are able to see things done in one society in obedience to morality that are considered abominations in another society as both cultures believe in the same ethical laws but at the same time differ in their views on which laws have priority. The laws of ethics must clash, and in that clash there must be something else that decides the victor, something that transcends them. In other words, for moral law to function, it must do so in obedience to purpose.


Can We Create Our Own Meaning?


Now since all earthly things eventually pass away, if we are to find purpose we must address the question of ultimate meaning, of why anything exists at all, in order to find the eternal root of meaning and to understand what is and is not meaningful. But in order to tackle the question of why we are all here we must first answer one simple question: Can we create our own purpose?

The answer, not surprisingly, is that we cannot. If we derive value from meaning and if we have any sense of judgement attacked to the idea of meaning, then it must come from something greater than us. If meaning comes from us then it is not meaning just as a square that has only three sides is not a square. This may seem obvious, but it is essential to the question of why we exist in clearing away the nonsense. For instance, going by this principle we must accept that we do not exist to be happy since that would mean we exist for our own sake.
What Other Options are There?


But what does that leave? What ultimate meaning can we find that does not violate this principle? Do we exist to do good deeds? that can't be it firstly because the definition of "good deeds" comes from meaning and secondly because the most common and universally recognized good deeds are actions by which we serve other people and if neither I nor my neighbor are good enough to justify our own existence then it makes no sense to say that we are good enough to justify each other's respective existences. Do we exist for family and friends? The same problem emerges. Do we exist for friendship and kinship themselves? But if we are living within those two abstractions then we are doing so by not regarding them but rather the actual friends and kin. Do we exist for nature? But nature is just as mortal as we are and besides that what could we ever do for it?

The only way we can have purpose is if it comes from something or someone so inherently good that it has no need to justify its own existence. The only possible candidate is God.


So, returning to the original question, how can the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty over our lives be justified? I think a better question might be "How can we ever justify holding anything at all back from God and live even one second of our lives for the sake of anything that excludes Him?" The answer to that question is easy: we can't.

God is Glorified

What does it mean for God to be glorified? Typically, when we talk about glory we are talking about fame and renown, but that can't be all there is when we talk about God's glory. In fact, even when I consider what it means for Christians to be glorified in Heaven what I find is not enough. In that instance I conclude that "glory" refers to approval from God, the delight of knowing that we have pleased our Father, but surely God's glory is not a matter of Him patting Himself on the back. The Bible says that we exist to bring God glory, so what does that mean? If we are talking about miracles or transformed lives bringing glory to God on earth it is enough to say that glory refers to fame, but at the same time the reason God desires that kind of glory is in order to love and be loved by us. It is a means and not an end. Is God better off for having received our praise? I should think not. Is He better off because we love Him? If that relationship really does cause Him to be "better off" then surely it is because it allows Him to love us rather than because our love for Him. So then how is He benefitted (while I would never say that God could not have been perfectly fine and eternally joyful without having ever created a single other living thing, I seriously doubt that Creation was the result of a whim) by loving us? The only answer I can produce is that by loving us God is able to be more Himself. It is in the nature of God for Him to be creative, wise, beautiful, humble, and, most of all, loving and through Creation and the drama that has unfolded since then He has been able to demonstrate and act upon those qualities. The Bible even says that God is love, which I take in a very literal and platonic sense. For God to be glorified (in a cosmic sense) is not for Him to be famous or approved of, but rather is the pouring out and fulfillment of God's own inherent nature and goodness.