It might make you feel better. Don't believe me? How about NFL Defensive Lineman Rosey Grier.



FYI - Grier played with the Giants from 1955 to 1962, during which he led the team to a NFL Championship in 1956 and the Eastern Conference Championship in 1958, 1959, 1961 and 1962. Grier was selected for the Pro Bowl in 1956 and 1960, and was named All-Pro at the defensive tackle position in 1956 and 1958–1962. Grier was traded in 1963 to the Los Angeles Rams. He was part of the "Fearsome Foursome", along with Deacon Jones, Merlin Olsen, and Lamar Lundy,often considered one of the best defensive lines in football history.
(Oh, and he also tackled Robert F. Kennedy's assassin. Now if that don't qualify you for the man card, I don't know what does.)


Still don't believe me AND Rosey Grier? Read the post below. If that won't convince you, nothing will. :gcryingsmiley:

Why so many expend such sweat and precious breath to fluidize and demonize Christianity is simply quite beyond me. Surely there are infinitely more negative and disruptive forces at work in the universe than something that gives hope and comfort, let alone refuge, aid and medical assistance to countless millions. I imagine it’s pretty much the same old bag of rattling bones, the detractors and stone throwers bitch and whine while negativity and selfishness runs rampant in their insular worlds. When was the last time you heard of “The American Atheist Association” building schools and housing for the homeless and disposed on the frozen slopes of China or bringing in medical supplies and vaccinating poverty stricken tribes in the African wilderness while warring factions try to kill them?

That's from a dizzying -- and quite bold -- rant by Bernie Taupin, perhaps best known as Elton John's longtime songwriting partner. You should read the whole thing.

(HT: Daniel)

Scientists are trying to figure out why evolution put a spark of the divine in every man.

Jesse Bering's mother died of cancer on a Sunday, in her own bed, at 9 o'clock at night. Bering and his siblings closed her door and went downstairs, hoping they might somehow get some sleep. It was a long, hard night, but around 7 a.m., something happened: The wind chimes outside his mother's window started to chime.

Bering remembers waking to the tinkle of these bells, a small but distinct sound in an otherwise silent house. And he remembers thinking that those bells carried a very specific message. "It seemed to me ... that she was somehow telling us that she had made it to the other side. You know, cleared customs in heaven," Bering says.

The thought surprised him. Bering was a confirmed atheist. He did not believe in any kind of supernatural anything. He prided himself on being a scientist, a psychologist who believed only in the measurable material world. But, he says, he simply couldn't help himself.

"My mind went there. It leapt there," Bering says. "And from a psychological perspective, this was really interesting to me. Because I didn't believe it on the one hand, but on the other hand I experienced it." Why is it, Bering wondered, that even a determined skeptic could not stop himself from perceiving the supernatural? It really bothered him.

It was a very good question, he decided, to take up in his lab.

God, Through The Lens Of Evolution

For decades, the intellectual descendants of Darwin have pored over ancient bones and bits of fossils, trying to piece together how fish evolved into man, theorizing about the evolutionary advantage conferred by each physical change. And over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way: they've started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.

In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system. And when a human behavior is so universal, scientists often argue that it must be an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of standing upright. That is, something so helpful that the people who had it thrived, and the people who didn't slowly died out until we were all left with the trait. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of believing in God?

Or possibly, there might be another reason the human behavior is so universal. Obviously Dr. "Presupposing Naturalism" probably never read the appendix to C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man." I can hear Jack yelling now, "It's the Tao, you nicompoops. And God put it there. These things don't just happen by themselves. Being scientists, you probably ought to know that."

Bering is one of the academics who are trying to figure that out. In the years since his mother's death, Bering has done experiments in his lab at Queens University, Belfast, in an attempt to understand how belief in the supernatural might have conferred some advantage and made us into the species we are today.

Bering has a credo, a truth he says he's learned after years of studying this stuff. "I've always said that I don't believe in God, but I don't really believe in atheists either," Bering says. "Everybody experiences the illusion that God — or some type of supernatural agent — is watching them or is concerned about what they do in their sort of private everyday moral lives."

In fact, Bering says that believing that supernatural beings are watching you is so basic to being human that even committed atheists regularly have moments where their minds turn in a supernatural direction, as his did in the wake of his mother's death.

"They experience it but they reject it," Bering says. "Sort of override or stomp on their immediate intuition. But that's not to say that they don't experience it. We all have the same basic brain. And our brains have evolved to work in a particular way."

Or maybe God made your brains, Captain avoid-the-obvious.

Through the lens of evolution, a belief in God serves a very important purpose: Religious belief set us on the path to modern life by stopping cheaters and promoting the social good.

Why would the human brain have evolved to work in that way?

For Bering, and some of his friends, the answer to that question has everything to do with what he discovered in his lab — the way the kids and adults stopped cheating as soon as they thought a supernatural being might be watching them. Through the lens of evolution then, a belief in God serves a very important purpose: Religious belief set us on the path to modern life by stopping cheaters and promoting the social good.

God And Social Cooperation

Dominic Johnson is a professor at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and another one of the leaders in this field. And to Johnson, before you can understand the role religion and the supernatural might have played in making us the people we are today, you really have to appreciate just how improbable our modern lives are.

Today we live in a world where perfect strangers are incredibly nice to each other on a regular basis. All day long, strangers open doors for each other, repair each other's bodies and cars and washing machines. They swap money for food and food for money. In short: they cooperate.

This cooperation makes all kinds of things possible, of course. Because we can cooperate, we can build sophisticated machines and create whole cities — communities that require huge amounts of coordination. We can do things that no individual or small group could do.

The question is: How did we get to be so cooperative? For academics like Johnson, this is a profound puzzle.

"Explaining cooperation is a huge cottage industry," Johnson says. "It dominates the pages of top journals in science and economics and psychology. You would think that it was very simple, but in fact from a scientific academic point of view, it just often doesn't make sense." It doesn't make sense because there's often tension between the interests of the group and the interests of the individual. Johnson gives an example.
...
On the other hand, Johnson says, if there are Gods or a God who must be obeyed, these strains are reduced. After all, the punisher isn't a vigilante; he's simply enforcing God's law. "You have a very nice situation," Johnson says. "There are no reprisals against punishers. And the other nice thing about supernatural agents is that they are often omniscient and omnipresent."

If God is everywhere and sees everything, people curb their selfish impulses even when there's no one around. Because with God, there is no escape. "God knows what you did," Johnson says, "and God is going to punish you for it and that's an incredibly powerful deterrent. If you do it again, he's going to know and he is going to tally up your good deals and bad deeds and you will suffer the consequences for it either in this life or in an afterlife."

So the argument goes that as our human ancestors spread around the world in bands, keeping together for food and protection, groups with a religious belief system survived better because they worked better together.

We are their descendants. And Johnson says their belief in the supernatural is still very much with us.

Wow! To borrow from Robert Jastrow's famous quote, I think this may be one of those cases when the scientists will finally ascend to the top of the mountain to find C.S. Lewis, Blaise Pascal and Augustine sitting there saying, "It wasn't evolution that gave each of you an inherent, automatic belief in God, you dummies." Of course they won't be recognized by the new arrivals. The scientists will ask, "Is one of you Charles Darwin?"

"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." - Ecclesiastes 3:11

Heeeeere's Helmut:

‘The conscience is not serene or troubled according to what we have done or not done. Peace of conscience depends solely upon what we are, i.e., on whether we believe – and the extent to which we believe – in the boundless unconditioned mercy of God … It is theologically wrong to try to pacify a conscience-stricken person by talking away his sins. To do so is to try to cure him by means of the “outer tent.” But there is no healing here, and cannot be. In fact the heart of his problem is that he is still loitering in this forecourt. The only way we can help is to point him to the εφαπαξ that which took place once-and-for-all for him in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ’. – Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics Volume 1: Foundations (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979), 310.

There's nothing more to say except, "Amen."

The question in this post is a bit tougher than the one in my previous post. It also comes from a college student; a friend of my eldest daughter. I have posted the question below. I'm a bit conflicted because the questioner doesn't even know I've read her question, but I'm assuming/hoping her question is general enough that it's OK for me to post it. I've re-worded it slightly.

For context: this College student grew up (as far as i know) in an evangelical church, was involved and even a leader in her youth group, etc. She read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in her senior year of High School and this began what, to my understanding, was her journey away from the core of her faith. She is, by the way, extremely intelligent and is attending a prestigious ivy league school in the northeast.

Here's here question:

So, right now I'm trying to reconcile the goodness of God in relation to the problem of evil, so I had written down some things I thought about this and some other questions. Tell me what you think.

Things i don't understand:
Original sin, morality, and salvation (in relation to each other)

1) Original sin: I think Rand summed this one up nicely. how can I be corrupted before I exist? If that is the case - that I'm born guilty or have "tendencies," then I am not free. If that is determined by outside forces, I am not free. If I am not free, but merely acting under compulsion, how can I just be held responsible for anything I do, good or bad?

This leads into the next question, which will lead to the last one:

2) Morality: certain moral issues arise when considering the idea of creation. If God is all-knowing, he would know what we would do, whether he determines it or not, through that knowledge he could (should?) select certain people to exist or not exist. In this sense, God would have to be not omniscient (can he be god w/o omniscience?) or evil, not merely by "omission" but by actively creating people he knows will do evil. For instance, inventors of weapons. If the latter, there is no reason to worship him except maybe fear. If the former, why is he God? though, the lack of omniscience could be a product of pure freedom, in which case, I suppose that could work or it could work depending on whether or not the future exists.

Mildly unrelated: Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God want relationships with people? this seems to be some sort of desperately lonely god or people who decided to raise themselves up to be friends of God. The first seems illogical, the second, petty. however, this only deals with God's morality, what of that of the people? In many cases, it would seem to be irrelevant: God picked them to do certain things [leibniz: best possible world] and therefore they deserve no credit or blame.

3) Salvation: how can a moral, just, omniscient God create people who will reject his truth? Isn't that the best definition of evil - rejection of truth? Furthermore, how can he punish them if he created them to do just that? it doesn't make sense. How would he pick those who would go with him, those he would call?

Possible resolutions:
1) Determinism is true and God is evil
2) We are free and God is not omniscient
3) We are free/physically determined and there is no God

So, that's what i was thinking about earlier. if there are other resolutions, do tell, but i haven't been able to think of them.

I realize the questions above have been wrestled over for centuries, and that there are no easy answers. But I'm definitely interested in any thoughts you might have. Leave them in the comments thread. Thanks!

Author Ayn Rand has had a resurgence in recent days. As a reaction to the obnoxious, creeping statism of our government, people are talking about the libertarian icon more and more, inspired by the idea of "going Galt", etc.

My knowledge of Rand was, for many years, limited to a dusty copy of Atlas Shrugged in my parent's house that looked far to thick to read, and a reference to "the genius of Ayn Rand" in the liner notes of Rush's album 2112. But in the past year Eldest Daughter saw a reading of The Fountainhead take two of her close friends down a path from Christianity to some form of self-serve Deism, and Eldest Son has also expressed frustration with the growing Rand cult amongst conservatives (and had a mini run-in with an atheistic Objectivism fan at an evening lecture last week).

On this subject, Peter Wehner weighs in: Objectively, Ayn Rand Was a Nut:

Ayn Rand was, of course, the founder of Objectivism – whose ethic, she said in a 1964 interview, holds that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.” She has argued that “friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite; whereas, if he places his work first, there is no conflict between his work and his enjoyment of human relationships.” And about Jesus she said:

I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. Isn’t that what it does mean? Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.

. . .

Yet there are some strands within conservatism that still veer toward Rand and her views of government (“The government should be concerned only with those issues which involve the use of force,” she argued. “This means: the police, the armed services, and the law courts to settle disputes among men. Nothing else.”), and many conservatives identify with her novelistic hero John Galt, who declared, “I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

But this attitude has very little to do with authentic conservatism, at least the kind embodied by Edmund Burke, Adam Smith (chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow), and James Madison, to name just a few. What Rand was peddling is a brittle, arid, mean, and ultimately hollow philosophy. No society could thrive if its tenets were taken seriously and widely accepted. Ayn Rand may have been an interesting figure and a good (if extremely long-winded) novelist; but her views were pernicious, the antithesis of a humane and proper worldview. And conservatives should say so.

Spoiler Alert - If you haven't seen the Season 5 Premiere, then go watch it, then come back in time and read this...

Having been a Sci-Fi junky for more years than I can count I have read and watched more time travel stories than... (a comparison fails me here. Suggestions?)

Here's what I've noticed. There are two basic theories/philosophies of time travel.

Theory 1- "The Timeline is changeable." According to this theory, you can go back in time and change the past, which in turn affects the future. In other words, if you go back and do something different than what happened the first time, then a new reality is created. Most time travel stories follow this theory. Back to the Future is probably the best-known illustration of this theory. Star Trek uses this one a lot too. To put it another way, if you went back in time and killed person A's grandfather, then when you returned to your own time you would find that person A "never existed".

Theory 2 - "The Timeline is unchangeable" According to this theory, you can't go back in time and change the past. Because if you go back to do something you will find that you were a part of it all along, or circumstances will thwart you. In other words, you can't go back and do something different, because if it happened a certain way, it happened a certain way period. There is only one timeline... the one you move back and forth on. Anything you do will turn out to be the way it happened in the first place. Some stories that follow this theory are "12 Monkeys" and H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" and Christopher Reeve's "Somewhere in Time" and "Kate and Leopold". To use my previous illustration, according to this theory, if you went back in time to kill Person A's grandfather you would be thwarted and you might very well find yourself being the catalyst of what actually did happen, say causing Person A's grandfather to fall in love with Person A's grandmother.

I subscribe to theory 2. It's my favorite for two reasons.

First, I think it makes for good drama, though sometimes depressing, when someone tries to change something in the past only to find that they and their time travel was the original catalyst all along.

Second, if time travel is ever possible, I believe that theory 2 will be reality. Think about it. If you can move back and forth on a timeline, that would mean that the events in time would have to be constant (i.e. static) in order for time travel to even be possible. If events on the timeline were dynamic, you couldn't move back and forth. It would be like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that shining light to look at the smallest known particles moves them, so you can never know where the object is, only where it was. You couldn't land on the timeline anywhere if it kept changing.

Still I like Time Travel stories no matter the theory it subscribes to as long as it is consistent and follows its own rules! It really bugs me when a Time Travel story tries to use both theories one and two, which are mutually exclusive, depending on what is convienient. I attribute that to intellectual laziness on the part of the writer. It's ridiculous. You can't have it both ways!

So which theory do you think Lost subscribes to? It's beginning to look a lot like theory 2. As Daniel puts it, "If it already hasn't happened, it can't happen." I wonder if LOST will stick to this rule. If the writers get inconsistent and make it so that there can be multiple timelines, I will be hacked.

I really like how a friend of mine put it once: "You can't go back in time and meet yourself, because you would remember having met yourself before."

I think that's true. What do you think?

During the primaries I remember hearing Hannity interview Dobson. At the time, Dobson was saying that he was ready to endorse a third party candidate... Hannity argued with him saying that that was a losing deal, because there was no way a third party candidate would win. But for Dobson it was a matter of integrity. If there was no candidate he really could believe in (as opposed to the "least worst") he thought it was better not to support any Republican at all. He thought it was better to stick to your principles and lose than to compromise to win. Hannity on the other hand thought it was better to win 89% of the battle than 0%.

What do you think? Are you more of a pragmatist or more of an idealist? What's more important winnabiity or best qualified?

I think we all take both into account but with varying degrees.For example, I know some people who I think would make great presidents, but writing them in would be silly because their unknown status makes them unwinnable. On the other hand, I don't vote for the candidate that's purely winnable, because then it's nothing more than a popularity contest.

Do you vote for who you really want in the primaries, or who is most likely to beat the other party's nominee? (Obama and Clinton were arguing over who could beat McCain, in the last debate. Winnability is an actual rallying point!)

The purpose of politics is winning. But I believe that it can be conducted with integrity, like being a lawyer. Think about it: do lawyers spin the truth in favor of their client? You bet! But it is possible to argue for your side with integrity. I really believe that.

OK, that's politics. Do you see how pragmatism fights idealism in other aspects of life? In church? At home? At work?

What do you think? Are you more of a pragmatist or an idealist? Are you someone who sticks to "all or nothing" for the principle of the matter? Or are you someone willing to give a little, to get most of what is right?

I think we all sway back and forth. It becomes more of a spectrum for us. And yes it does depend on the issue. Here are some examples to illustrate how this applies to different issues:

Abortion - The idealist will only vote for pro-life candidates and will not compromise one iota. The pragmatist will be willing to work with someone who is pro-choice in some matters, if the person will help further the pro-life agenda - say against late-term abortions or Gov't funding.

Politics (at work, in Gov't and in church) - The idealist sticks to the spirit of the law. The pragmatist is willing to use the rules for a different purpose than their intent if it accomplishes a good goal. (Like moving to adjourn before a particular motion comes up. Or filibustering. Or refusing to ever take a vote on a judge the President has appointed when you know you'll lose.)

I know this is a weird post but I am the thinkling "social scientist and philosopher" after all. I think about stuff like this, and I see patterns in how people behave and in the decisions they make. And I see the war of idealism vs. pragmatism everywhere.

Do you idealists think pragmatism is always wrong?j
Do you pragamatists think idealists are naive?

What do you think about my theory? What other examples can you think of?

My latest SearchWarp piece is up:

7 Ways to Complete Your Tasks More Efficiently

You're welcome.

Thanks to the Holy Spirit, and Richard J. Foster, I've recently dipped my toe into the waters of various Christian disciplines. Unlike my previous toe dips, this time it's on the deep end of the pool, and I have every intention to jump in, or at least slowly acclimate myself to the water.

Yes, by God's grace this lifelong endeavor will not be a superficial pursuit. Its exciting to learn the value of such disciplines as fasting, prayer, study, simplicity, solitude, etc. I'm intrigued now by writings of Christians throughout the centuries. To borrow a phrase from Justin Martyr, "What anybody has said about truth belongs to us, the Christians."

(Of course, Justin was talking about Christianity in relation to philosophy, and while it's a controversial statement in that regard, I think he's right. I also see real and true correlation between the best of Christian thought being something that has accumulated, through various Christian writings, throughout the centuries. I think it's likely erroneous that we spend so much valuable time pursing the latest and greatest of the Christian writings, rather than the treasures that are in print from throughout the centuries. Of course, that's something that I'm barely learning to do myself. The attraction of modern advertising campaigns is easy to get sucked into, even with Christian literature.)

In case anyone's curious about where to start with something like this, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence is a good place to begin.

[Also published on The Mind's Eye.]

This guy, like, is, you know, onto something, don't you think?



[Via The Anchoress]

Glenn Lucke on illegal downloads:

My own experience in discussing this topic with students, including Christian students? Overwhelmingly they refuse to stop stealing, even when they acknowledge that they have stolen. I engaged literally hundreds of students about this topic at UVa, and after all the discussing, two root reasons would emerge from the students: 1) I can (technology enables me) and 2) I want to.

With a few exceptions, Christian students engaged in the same stealing, and deployed the same anti-Christian reasoning. One student finally became persuaded that it was stealing, so resolved to steal no more, but wouldn't pay for the 1,000+ songs she had already stolen, nor delete them.

Again, with a few exceptions, the only way to make a dent in the Christian students? Tell them of my personal friendship with Caedmons Call, and how Caedmon's band members related to me their perspective about having their hundreds of hours of hard work taken from them for free. Then the students would say, "Oh. Well, I won't download their stuff. I'll buy their stuff."

Meaning, these students were incapable of submitting themselves to abstract principle, but, if they felt some sentiment for a personal connection, then they might adjust their behavior. Effectively, the Ten Commandments only had force in their lives if they had positive sentiment for the person wronged in a violation of the Commandments.

Some reader will write in, as often happens here, and defend this state of affairs.

It happens almost every time we discuss it here, as well. In a post on lawsuits about four years ago, one commenter even suggested, should I ever be published, it'd be okay to buy a copy of my book that was illegally photocopied by someone selling his copies cheaper.

"I can" and "I (might) want to" was in full effect there, and the concerns of the artist (me!) over supporting his family with his work wasn't in play.

The Boozeheads are discussing abortion today.

Some selected quotes . . .

Abortion is always sad. Abortion as routine birth control is a miserable sign of a numb and promiscuous culture. Third trimester abortion is horrendous. But, these are not reasons to erase the right of women who along with their physicians make decisions that determine their physical and emotional well being.

Some of us view abortion as a medical procedure that by design kills 50% of its patients, thus by definition is “unsafe.”

[A]ssuming we protect a woman’s right to do as she chooses with her body, the question still remains: What about the right of the child growing inside her? This is the primary reason why so many of us are opposed to abortion. We don’t really see the issue as one of a woman’s choice. For that matter, let her do as she wishes to herself. But when you look at the child in her as a separate human being from conception on, abortion is no longer a matter of a woman making a choice about her own body, but a choice about the body of one who is utterly dependent on her for survival.

I’ve never quite understood why so many pro-choice advocates preface their statements with “abortion is bad, but”. It what sense is abortion bad? If abortion is what its advocates say it is, a safe, legal elective procedure, then who cares? Why restrict it at all? Why try to lower abortion rates? It is pretty effective birth control and is probably highly profitable.

I don't get that either. "It's a tragedy, but . . ."

I totally understand the logic of not believing a child in the womb is alive and therefore making an allowance for abortion based on that belief. What I am consistently confused by is the logic that acknowledges a child in the womb is indeed a life but that abortion is nevertheless okay, dependent on the mother's choice. I don't track with that at all. (Despite that I personally am "soft" on the gray area of a legitimate threat to the life of the mother, which actually accounts for a tiny minority of abortion cases in the U.S.)

The BHT discussion is timely, because I was reading on a friend's MySpace blog last night (I know she's reading this, so I might as well acknowledge the impetus to post this discussion was partly inspired by her piece) her rant against "anti-choicers" and I just couldn't follow the logic at all.
In a comment, she ridiculed a "superbly annoying" youngster who failed to see how the war in Iraq causing civilian deaths rendered his support of the war inconsistent with his opposition to abortion. Maybe that does make him a hypocrite, but the logic seems to swing the other way, as well. How is the collateral damage of war any less a gray area than the difficult deliberations of teenage unwed mothers? How can one be so stridently against the war because of the taking of innocent lives but so stridently for "choice" despite that its very purpose is the taking of an innocent life?

Via Shaun Groves, from "An Atheist in the Pulpit" at Psychology Today:

Charles Templeton, the late Canadian evangelist turned journalist, argued that a disjunction between what clergymen say publicly and what they believe privately is so common that serious cognitive dissonance comes with the territory. “Most intelligent clergymen preach to the right of their theology,” Templeton wrote..."They are more conservative in the pulpit than they are in private conversation or when counseling a parishoner.”

Shaun adds:

The article hurls loads of anecdotal evidence at us but none of it supports the theory that this cognitive dissonance is the reason some pastors deconvert. The evidence instead points to a dissatisfaction with the way they’ve been treated by Christians and with various social/moral positions taken by their denomination.

Still, poor argument making aside, they’re right about one thing: The beliefs held by some (many?) pastors are to the left of those they lead and keeping that a secret can jack one up.

I don't think the Church talks about this enough. At least, I don't hear anyone talking about it.

Bob Myers at the BHT confirms some long held suspicions of mine on the state of Christian counseling.

I’m starting to doubt all Christian counseling. I’m so sick of referring people to counselors who just take their money and fail at being directive. And it seems not to matter what the counselors philosophy of counseling is. They just can’t seem to get at the big issues, they rarely if ever call to repentance, and they are timid and passive. I just realized that I have almost never referred anyone to a counselor that they wound up being helped by. Either 1. The counselor was too wimpy. 2. The counselee didn’t like the advice. 3. The counselor was un-Biblical and just gave out psycho-babble.

I do think that spiritualizing every relational (and mental) issue is a very real danger, but I am concerned one of the reasons for the impotence of evangelicalism is a lack of gospel-driven pastoral counsel.

David Bentley Hart goes Ginsu on Daniel Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

"[T]he good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life . . . that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it's fashionable, into the dark abyss."

- John Gardner, On Moral Fiction

Thoughts?

[via Charis Connection]

Whoa.

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”

- Soren Kierkegaard

What do you think?

[Hat Tip: That ramshackle rumhouse across the road]

Doug Wilson:

For the academicians, incarnational means being able to talk about incarnational, preferably with words like incarnational. But for the genuinely incarnational, it means being able to laugh at the people who always write big fat books full of words. Faith without works is dead, and this includes the faith of intellectuals. Intellectual faith without incarnational works is dead. But such works would not include poring over one another's books, handing them back and forth with compliments or critiques, circulating them in a small band of irrelevant smart people. That reminds of the time someone threw a bunch of Scotsmen down into a pit and they all got rich selling rocks to each other.

. . . Now this is why intellectuals (high rpm) and pseudo-intellectuals (pseudo-high rpm) can sit up until two in the morning talking about how a particular French filmmaker was deconstructing the suburban instantiations of gnosticism with his gritty authenticity, while down the street another man puts them all to shame by getting up three hours later to go duck hunting with his son.

Dr. Greg Bahnsen was one of the great modern apologists for the Christian faith. He engaged in a number of debates with unbelievers prior to his death in the 1990's. Probably the most famous of these is "The Great Debate" with Dr. Gordon Stein on the existence of God.

While working late tonight, I was listening to that debate. Dr. Stein, a scientist, found himself forced to deny the absolute and consistent character of the laws of logic in order to maintain the notion that the concept of immateriality and existence are mutually exclusive. Not to mention that he was completely unprepared for Bahnsen's "Transcendental" argument for the existence of God. The debate contains this memorable exchange:

B: I heard you mention logical binds and logical self-contradictions in your speech. You did say that?
S: I said it. I used that phrase, yes.
B: Do you believe there are laws of logic then?
S: Absolutely.
B: Are they universal?
S: They are agreed upon by human beings. They aren't laws that exist out in nature.
B: Are they simply conventions, then?
S: They are conventions, but they are conventions that are self-verifying.
B: Are they sociological laws or laws of thought?
S: They are laws of thought which are interpreted by men and promulgated by men.
B: Are they material in nature?
S: How can a law be material?
B: That's a question I'm going to ask you. (Laughter)
S: I would say no.
Moderator: Dr. Stein, now you have an opportunity to cross-examine Dr. Bahnsen.
S: Dr. Bahnsen, would you call God material or immaterial?
B: Immaterial.
S: What is something that is immaterial?
B: Something not extended in space.
S: Can you give me an example of anything other than God that is immaterial?
B: The laws of logic. (Laughter)