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?