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