A Wonderful Atheist Life? or, Atheist Delusions, Abridged

While I'm not sure that capitalism and the Enlightenment are entirely wonderful things, there's a lot here that bears pondering. You might say it's a Reader's Digest version of David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions

http://stkarnick.com/culture/2010/12/27/it%E2%80%99s-a-wonderful-atheist-life/

It’s a Wonderful Atheist Life?

Watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the zillionith time last weekend, and still loving every minute of it, a thought struck me: Could an atheist or an atheistic culture have produced such a movie? Most of us would probably consider that a rhetorical question, with no as the obvious answer. This is also partly inspired by a book I read not long ago, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, and one I’m reading now, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West.


Many modern atheists and agnostics, especially the most vociferous, argue that religion is a dangerous delusion and mostly destructive force. Yet what exactly has atheism given the world? What does asserting a Godless universe inspire in human culture? Your average atheist would probably say, saving us from religion, and mostly Christianity. And being a Christian, living in the West, that is what I refer to when I say religion.

The enemies of religious belief are fond of citing the Inquisition as an example of the evils of religious intolerance and dogma. Recently I heard a figure of 3,000 people being killed, but even if we say that number is 30,000, or 300,000, and even though Christians have done other nasty things over the centuries, that record isn’t even in the same universe as the number of casualties of state-sponsored atheism in the twentieth century.

For some reason, which atheists alone claim to own (i.e., reason), Christianity bears complete blame as a de facto cause of something like the Inquisition, yet atheism stands blameless for the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, et al. So in the contest of producing evil, death, and destruction, atheism wins hands-down. Atheism claimed more than 100 million victims in a single century, a staggering number that our atheist friends simply ignore or claim, on their spotless authority, doesn’t matter, doesn’t apply, or says absolutely nothing about the atheistic faith.

Does that sound logical to you?

In addition to that Christian-inspired holiday favorite film and many others, what else has Christianity given the world? How about Western culture, and all the art, music, and stories that have come down to us because of Christianity’s influence? Does anyone really think that atheism would have given the world Shakespeare? Or Bach? Or Michelangelo or Rembrandt?

Who was it that saved the documents and knowledge of antiquity? Medieval monks and the Catholic Church. We would know very little of ancient Greece and Rome without them.

How about science? Despite what atheists continually assert, the foundations of modern science were produced by men of faith in a personal, creator God. It was the only worldview that could have and in fact did result in science.

How about hospitals and charity? The former were started by Christians, and the latter is acknowledged as a central element of living a Christian life. To this day, those who attend worship services more often give more to charity. What a coincidence!

How about universal literacy? After the Reformation, people were motivated to learn to read because the Bible had been finally made available in the vernacular.

How about schools? One hundred and six of the first 108 colleges founded in the United States were founded by Christians to teach, among other things, the Christian faith. Those include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Without the Christian faith there would have been no “Enlightenment,” no Hume or Locke, no Adam Smith and no capitalism. There would not have been any Puritans fleeing persecution to found America, no Washington, Jefferson, or Adams, no liberty and freedom in the founding of the United States. Atheists love to minimize the Christian influence on the Founders, but all the philosophers and thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries swam in a ubiquitously Christian Western culture. Their thinking could not exist without the Christian faith.

Of course the atheist will say this is all beside the point. None of it means Christianity is the truth. Fair enough. But what is it, again, that atheism has given the world? Certainly not a wonderful life.

Christmas Blessings: He's on His Way

BABY SCAN JESUS

AN ICONIC POSTER published by a U.K. organization called ChurchAds launched a Christmas billboard and advertising campaign called “Christmas starts with Christ,” using an image of an ultrasound of a baby in utero with a halo circling the child’s head.

Statement from the Trustees of ‘ChurchAds.net’

Our on-going campaign theme is that: ‘Christmas Starts with Christ’. The ‘Baby-scan Jesus’ poster communicates this by cleverly placing the historic birth of Christ in a modern context and providing an arresting and thought provoking image for the public in the run-up to Christmas. It announces the imminent birth of the Christ child in the way that many modernday parents choose to announce the coming birth of their own child.

Theologically, we aim to convey something of the humanity and the divinity of
Christ, while pointing to his relevance for today. In the light of some misleading items in the media, we would additionally like tostress that the poster is not, in any way, designed to either support or campaign against abortion.

Statements from the ChurchAds.net Council of Reference

“For many parents pregnancy gets real when you see the image from the ultrasound scan. It tells you something is actually kicking off. We've got so used to the tinsel wrapped cosiness of the carefully packaged 21st century consumer-fest Christmas, that its astonishing reality - an actual pregnancy, a God come down to earth - is easily missed. But this image demands attention. So does this child. He's on his way”.
Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Reading

“This poster is designed to arrest the attention of the usually disinterested. It is aimed at awakening the imagination, teasing the curiosity and provoking fresh consideration of the heart of Christianity – precisely what Jesus did with parables, images and stories. No, it doesn’t cover all the bases and deal comprehensively with every theological nuance; but it gives a huge kick start to thinking about what
Christmas is all about”.
Nick Baines, Bishop of Croydon

“Our society is trying to airbrush Christ out of Christmas, but this imaginative poster reminds people that Christmas is all about Jesus. I encourage every church in the land to join me in supporting this exciting campaign, and buy a poster site in theircommunity to get people thinking about Jesus this Christmas”.
Mark Russell, Chief Executive, Church Army Member, Archbishop’s Council

“I really like the ad and I think the execution is strong; it’s a super ad”.
Mark Greene, Executive Director, London Institute of Contemporary Christianity

‘Christmas for me starts with Jesus Christ, who is not just a historical reality but a present experience in the midst of the contemporary world. As a scientist and a Christian, this poster reflects in a brilliant and provocative way my belief that Christ was born as a real human being, but is of relevance to every human being today. I’m excited to be able to commend this campaign’
David Wilkinson, Principal, St John’s College, University of Durham

Wallbuilders, Tea Partiers, Christians and Cynicism

The Apotheosis of Washington, by Constantino Brumidi, 1863

Many years ago, before such things as Glenn Beck and Tea Parties, I had a student who was a fanatical Wallbuilder. He believed that David Barton was a model of Christian scholarship and that anyone who disagreed with Barton's line was neither a good Christian nor a good American. Of course, that made me suspect in his eyes, especially when we read the chapter on Deism in James Sire's The Universe Next Door.

This student and that episode came to mind today as I read Brad Boydston's comment on his blog: "I'd define the Tea Party Movement as the apex of American cynicism."

Isn't it strange how the same people who are suspicious of government can worship its Founders? Now that's a recipe for cynicism! 

Am I the only one disturbed by  the fresco painted on the dome of the United States Capital Building, and statements like the one by John Quincy Adams gracing the Wallbuilders webpage : "In the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior."  No doubt our sixth president was a pious, bible-believing Christian. But it is a dangerous business to conflate the city of man with the city of God.  We need to be careful where we place our hope. Our country has had some great and good statesmen, but they are not worthy of even a tenth of the praise due the Prince of Peace! 

Stewart's Tribute to the 9-11 Non-Responders

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Lame-as-F@#k Congress
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

"Here's a tribute to a few Republican senators who find comfort and advantage in invoking the heroes of 9/11 but refuse to give them health care."

I wish I could cut the first 40 seconds from this, and all the #$*(&#% words...aside from that it is a brilliant piece worth watching, particularly the final part, 6:40-8:15

"When a party stands together, there is nothing it can't prevent from getting done!"

"all our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are technically 9-11 responders!"

The Digital Story of the Nativity

Scientism and Philosophy

A while ago, Michael D. Aeschliman wrote an article in First Things entitled
"C. S. Lewis on Mere Science." Every so often I have occasion to remember it, and today it comes to mind again. We are tempted either to deify or defy science. Either way, our Enemy wins. Jeffery Shallit is prone to the former.

First there was this article in the Globe and Mail: "Science Still Can't Explain the Color Red

Then came Jeffery Shallit's blog entry, criticizing it: "Yet Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Philosophy"

Now comes Michael Egnor's response to Shallit:
"Another Reason to Doubt the Relevance of Jeffrey Shallit:"

The Globe and Mail article raises some important issues in the quest to understand the mind. The article opens with the question:

Has the Western world succumbed to the disease of scientism - a misguided belief in the infallibility of science?

So says philosopher Peter Hacker, emeritus research fellow at Oxford's St. John's College.
Hacker:

[scientism] "pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that, if there's a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. [This prevailing scientism] is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience ... people nattering on what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious - anything but trivial."

The journalist Michael Posner observes:

Mr. Hacker's remarks form part of a larger critique of how neuroscience is grappling with human consciousness, the great divide for philosophers and scientists.

Posner writes:

Consciousness, of course, is one of the great, unsolved conundrums of modern science. Where, if anywhere, does awareness reside? How, if at all, can it be explained? Is the mind separate from its body? Or does everything, ultimately, reduce to biochemistry and quantum physics, including our private, inner-most experiences of the world?

From the time of Aristotle and Plato, these questions have largely been the preserve of philosophy. But the past several decades have witnessed the steady rise of cognitive neuroscience, which maintains that all human faculties, including consciousness, can now (or one day will) be explained by neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex - accountable by simple measurements of neurons and synapses.

Questions about the mind-body relationship are still the preserve of philosophy, but today that preserve is mostly bad philosophy. Materialist theories of the mind are beset with insoluable problems.


Posner:

But the philosophers are refusing to go down without a good conceptual scrap. Mr. Hacker, for one, says it's nonsense to attribute consciousness, knowledge and perception to mere physical processes in the brain. "One sees with one's eyes and hears with one's ears," he insists, "but one is not conscious with one's brain any more than one walks with one's brain. The brain is not an organ of consciousness. ... The brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain's thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing."

Posner and Hacker are right. Scientism -- the philosophical assertion that the empiric methods of science represent the only valid method of ascertaining truth -- is a transparently mistaken ideology that has greatly impaired our efforts to develop a coherent valid understanding of the mind. Scientism is of course self-refuting: the claim that empiricial science is the only valid method of ascertaining truth is itself not a claim that can be evaluated by empirical science. Scientism is an effort to circumvent scrutiny of the materialistic philosophy that underpins it.


Modern materialism arose several centuries ago with the emergence of Mechanical Philosophy, which is based on the metaphysical assumption that only material causes and truncated efficient causes exist in nature. Materialist philosophers truncated the classical four causes of change in nature -- material, efficient, formal, and final -- to just two, and in doing so, eliminated the concepts of essence and teleology from the study of nature. For materialist scientists, nature was understood as mere matter in motion.


Mechanical Philosophy got along passably with Newtonian physics and Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, but in the 20th century its inadequacy began to show. Big Bang cosmology and quantum mechanics were a devastating blow to mechanism in science (creation ex-nihilo and quantum indeterminancy are inexplicable by appeal to materialist presuppositions), and the problem of the mind-brain relationship will ultimately prove fatal to mechanism.


Here's why. Mental acts have properties such as intentionality (the aboutness of a thought) and qualia (the subjective experience of color, taste,etc) that are utterly inexplicable if nature, of which man is a part, is understood to be mere matter in motion -- material and efficient causes. Intentional "aboutness" is teleological (final cause), in the sense that thought is directed at an end, and qualia is most adequately understood as inherent to mental experience, an "essence" (formal cause) of mental experience, as it were.


In order to account for formal causation (qualia) and final causation (intentionality) in mental acts, a much deeper understanding of nature is needed. One framework for such understanding is classical hylemorphism, which is the understanding of nature as composites of form and matter.


In the hylemorphic understanding of the mind, the mind is a power of the soul, which is the form of the body. What actually exists is neither the soul (form) nor the body (matter) independently, but the person, who is a composite of soul and body. Thus, the brain is merely an organ associated with cognition; the subject of cognition, that which understands, is the person, not the brain or even the mind, understood in isolation.


Cognitive science can tell us much about the properties and function of the brain. But it will not tell us about the metaphysical status of the brain or of the mind or of the truth or falsehood of materialism, because empirical science (natural philosophy) can't address such issues. Only other disciplines of philosophy can. The profound philosophical questions about the nature of the human person are in the realm of metaphysics, and must be answered by metaphysical inquiry.


Dr. Shallit is of course ignorant of all of this and sees nothing absurd about the assertion that the brain, rather than the person, is the subject of cognition. Dr. Shallit isn't one to let philosophical insight interfere with his philosophy. A notable and peculiar characteristic of scientism is the arrogant Luddism of its half-educated practitoners.

Lessons in Photographing Your Kids

Here's a dad who loves his daughters, and who photographs them in all sorts of fun ways.

A Father Who Creatively Captures His Kids (20 photos)

Illustrating 1 Kings 19: Elijah and the Storm

I Kings 19: 8-12

Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. 9 There he went into a cave and spent the night.


The LORD Appears to Elijah
And the word of the LORD came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
10 He replied, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”


11 The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.”


Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.


Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
_____________________________________________________________________

Next time you need an illustration for Elijah and the Storm, look here

Income Inequality: Towards a Banana Republic?

Slate has an important series about income inequality in the U.S.  If you go to the article, you can launch a helpful slide show that gives a visual guide to this matter.

What will the Great Divergence mean for the Church? What sort of virtues will we need as Christians to meet this challenge? Is it a matter of justice for Christians to work for income equality? Or should we accept it and direct our energies toward ministering to individuals? Do any of the popular finance programs evangelicals host address the connection between income inequality and consumer debt?

From the first installment in the series:

...[In 1915, ] the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income. What caused this to happen? ...
Income inequality in the United States has not worsened steadily since 1915. It dropped a bit in the late teens, then started climbing again in the 1920s, reaching its peak just before the 1929 crash. The trend then reversed itself. Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. (During the 1930s the richest 1 percent’s share of the nation’s income dropped. Overall, the income-equality trend of the Great Depression was somewhat equivocal. On the one hand, the rich lost income. On the other hand, middle-class incomes stagnated and a high level of unemployment (which peaked at 25 percent) hit those at the bottom of the income scale especially hard. I note all this to emphasize that it is neither necessary nor desirable to achieve equality through economic catastrophe.)  Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have termed this midcentury era the "Great Compression." The deep nostalgia for that period felt by the World War II generation­the era of Life magazine and the bowling league­reflects something more than mere sentimentality. Assuming you were white, not of draft age, and Christian, there probably was no better time to belong to America's middle class.

The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade's end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the "Great Divergence."

It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is," Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth: ­ the "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.

Here is a snapshot of income distribution during the past 100 years:

Chart of the Top Ten Percent Income Share, 1917 - 2008.

All my life I've heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul's classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: "You've got to insulate, insulate, insulate."

But income inequality is a topic of huge importance to American society and therefore a subject of large and growing interest to a host of economists, political scientists, and other wonky types. Except for a few Libertarian outliers (whose views we'll examine later), these experts agree that the country's growing income inequality is deeply worrying. Even Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman and onetime Ayn Rand acolyte, has registered concern. "This is not the type of thing which a democratic society­a capitalist democratic society­can really accept without addressing," Greenspan said in 2005. Greenspan's Republican-appointed successor, Ben Bernanke, has also fretted about income inequality.

Yet few of these experts have much idea how to reverse the trend. That's because almost no one can agree about what's causing it. This week and next, I will detail and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of various prominent theories as to what has brought about the income inequality boom of the last three decades. At the same time, I'll try to convey the magnitude of its effects on American life. The Great Divergence may represent the most significant change in American society in your lifetime­ and it's not a change for the better. Let's see if we can figure out what got us here.

------

(from the final installment in the series: )

The United States' economy is currently struggling to emerge from a severe recession brought on by the financial crisis of 2008. Was that crisis brought about by income inequality? Some economists are starting to think it may have been. David Moss of Harvard Business School has produced an intriguing chart that shows bank failures tend to coincide with periods of growing income inequality. "I could hardly believe how tight the fit was," he told the New York Times. Princeton's Paul Krugman has similarly been considering whether the Great Divergence helped cause the recession by pushing middle-income Americans into debt. The growth of household debt has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the growth in income inequality (see the final graph). Raghuram G. Rajan, a business school professor at the University of Chicago, recently argued on the New Republic's Web site that "let them eat credit" was "the mantra of the political establishment in the go-go years before the crisis." Christopher Brown, an economist at Arkansas State University, wrote a paper in 2004 affirming that "inequality can exert a significant drag on effective demand." Reducing inequality, he argued, would also reduce consumer debt. Today, Brown's paper looks prescient.

Heightened partisanship in Washington and declining trust in government have many causes (and the latter slide predates the Great Divergence). But surely the growing income chasm between the poor and middle class and the rich, between the Sort of Rich and the Rich, and even between the Rich and the Stinking Rich, make it especially difficult to reestablish any spirit of e pluribus unum. Republicans and Democrats compete to show which party more fervently opposes the elite, with each side battling to define what "elite" means. In a more equal society, the elite would still be resented. But I doubt that opposing it would be an organizing principle of politics to the same extent that it is today.
I find myself returning to the gut-level feeling expressed at the start of this series: I do not wish to live in a banana republic. There is a reason why, in years past, Americans scorned societies starkly divided into the privileged and the destitute. They were repellent. Is it my imagination, or do we hear less criticism of such societies today in the United States? Might it be harder for Americans to sustain in such discussions the necessary sense of moral superiority?
What is the ideal distribution of income in society? I couldn't tell you, and historically much mischief has been accomplished by addressing this question too precisely. But I can tell you this: We've been headed in the wrong direction for far too long.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence....

okay, I admit it...this is my favorite advent hymn


Here's part of the reason why.

I recently went to an interdenominational evangelical Thanksgiving service in one of the largest, newest churches here in Eugene. I really appreciated the segment where we we divided off into random groups of three or four to pray together. But it seemed that even then, there was not a moment where there wasn't music! Of course the worship team was centerstage (not an altar or pulpit in sight!) but someone was noodling on the keyboard the entire time, even during prayers.   I remember this occurring in the church that in grew up in...except the "background music" was on an organ, not a keyboard.  

As Brian Thomas writes below, it is as if we are ignorant of how to be silent, or unwilling to be silent. We are so culturally conditioned to expect noise and activity, even in worship. We crave amusement, novelty, celebrity, sensation and immediate gratification of our every desire. We are expected to be "productive."

Advent stands in stark opposition to all that. It is a time for hollowing ourselves out: for  waiting, watching and listening, rather than scrambling, consuming and producing.  It is a time for being patient/patients. May the Holy Spirit bore through our defenses and bare our souls to His still, small voice.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the Best Things Our Sunday Morning Gathering Can Do Is Bore “The Hell” Out of You
writes David Fitch  (via Brad)

Recently, I was meeting in the corner booth (of the local McDonald’s) with the men in my triad (spiritual formation group) and we were talking about our Sunday morning gathering. I said “one of the best things our gathering can do for people is bore the hell out of em.” Sorry if this seems counter intuitive but I nonetheless believe it is true – literally true. Let me explain.

We had just finished discussing the intense pressures of managing all the details it takes to make it through a typical week in our American suburban lives. Some of us discussed how we can’t sleep because we keep remembering things we need to take care of in the middle of the night. We discussed the many mundane little things we have to do just to live normal everyday life – including sending in receipts for expenses, sending in receipts for healthcare flex accounts, filling in never ending forms for a mortagage re-fi, take children to the doctor, sign them up for sports/music programs, and so far we haven’t even got to what we need to do to fulfil responsibilities for our jobs. We’re not complaining so much as reflecting and evaluating. For many of us, this the state of our tormented lives.

Then what about church? Well, it seems church demands some additional things of us well? yes? Or is church the means by which we make God fit in to this crazy pace? For many, I fear, church has become a Christian necessity we perform on Sunday. Sometimes we pastors try to make it more appealing by selling it as a goods and services of the religious kind that might help each person better sustain what has become the rushed existence of our suburban lives. As a side note, sometimes, even more “stupidly,” we try to make church a place to take care of our kids, attract them to Christianity. We actually choose a church because of its appeal to our kids in the midst of this hectic American life because we do not have the time to patiently connect with and present with our kids. Church becomes an accoutrement that enables our families to survive the empty pace of Americana life.

In response to all this, what we may need is the opposite. We need a place where we gather to be trained out of these cultural insanities to encounter the living God.

It is stunning to me how many many people I encounter in a month who cannot even acquire even a modicum of mind space cleared of societal clutter to meet God. We live in a society where God is being organized out of our life experience (and this is most certainly true of our young people). If we don’t have the means to discipline our lives from societal noise, real living with God, listening and responding to his voice is lost from our horizon. God becomes an item to believe, an obligation to take care alongside the many others. And then, and I am dead serious here, other demons take over our lives. Our loneliness/our emptiness becomes filled by multivarious forms of fake pornogaphic substitutes. Demons take over. I see it everywhere.

In the midst of this, sometimes the best place (the only place) I can point people to is the gathering on Sunday morning. Go to the gathering. Not to get pumped up and inspired. Not to take some notes on the three things you can do to improve your Christian life. NO! Go to the gathering to shut down from all the noise – to submit yourself to Christ – the practice of confession – the listening to the Word – the submission to the receiving of the gift for life at the Table – to then once you have seen God again, praise Him as the one true source of your life in Jesus Christ. Go to the gathering to connect to the world that is all around you but somehow you have completely become lost to. Here is where the demons can be revealed and expelled. It is with all this in mind that I suggested that maybe the worst possible sign that our Sunday morning has got off track is to see that our youth are mesmerized (in the wrong way) and actually love listening to an entertaining sermon. For there is some learning here that we must lead out children into if they are not to fall victum to the “demons.” This is when I dared to say that sometimes “one of the best things our gathering can do for people is “bore the hell out of em.”

The challenge at Advent is not to have a show that will entertain everyone into romanticizing Jesus (although celebration is very important – we’re partying at Life on the Vine this weekend). Instead, the challenge at Advent is to learn how to wait for Him. Learn patience and wait. Prepare the place where He can come into our lives. It is in this Spirit that I say, one of the best things our Sunday gatherings can do for us this season is to “bore the hell out of us.” What say you?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I really appreciate Brian Thomas' comment:

I love the idea of going to church to shut down from all the noise, but when I have planned for this as a part of our service it is incredible how uncomfortable it makes people. I used to think it was because we have lost the art of being silent in our verbally intoxicated world. Yet, as i was reading this I was thinking about the ways that we as a society tend to shut down from all the noise (alcohol, pornography, mindless video games, movies, books, shopping, etc.) I wonder if our discomfort comes from the fact that we don't know how to shut down in healthy ways or if its because we are afraid that in our silence that God might speak to us, and that is what really scares the hell out of us. Maybe that's the real reason we feel compelled to be so polished musically or so entertaining in the pulpit. We just don't know what we might do if God actually showed up. Scary things happen when he shows up and you just never know what he might say.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

and with fear and trembling stand;

ponder nothing earthly-minded,

for with blessing in his hand,

Christ our God to earth descendeth,

our full homage to demand.

 

King of kings, yet born of Mary,

as of old on earth he stood,

Lord of lords, in human vesture,

in the body and the blood;

he will give to all the faithful

his own self for heavenly food.

 

 Rank on rank the host of heaven

spreads its vanguard on the way,

as the Light of light descendeth

from the realms of endless day,

that the powers of hell may vanish

as the darkness clears away.

At his feet the six-winged seraph,

cherubim, with sleepless eye,

veil their faces to the presence,

as with ceaseless voice they cry:

Alleluia, Alleluia,

Alleluia, Lord Most High!

The Varieties of Electronic Instruments

I stumbled upon this page...it's a fascinating list chronicling of the development ofelectronic music. For those of us who only know about Moog synthesizers, theramins and Hammond organs, this site offers a real education.

The Magic of the Marketplace and the Wisdom of the East

Tom Toles:

Why do we mistrust government, yet have complete faith in the market? "All have fallen short of the glory of God."  Two years ago Sandy Goodman wrote:

"Another big problem is the almost blind faith that Friedman's followers and most other present-day economists have in Adam Smith's "invisible hand." They believe that the free market, unimpeded by government, will almost inevitably produce good outcomes. This kind of thinking substitutes theology for economics. And many times, it just isn't true.

Smith, a Scottish philosopher and college professor, was, of course, the founder of modern capitalist economic theory. In context, it is clear that when he writes about "the invisible hand" in his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and again in his more famous book, The Wealth of Nations, he is referring to the hand of God or some equally inexorable force of Nature. In "Moral Sentiments," published in 1759, he ties the invisible hand directly to God. In "Wealth," 17 years later, he is less specific. But here too, Smith portrays "the invisible hand" as a powerful, superhuman force that makes things turn out right, in spite of human selfishness and rapaciousness. Either way, Smith's premise is based on faith, rather than on observation.

If, however, one looks at human experience rather than invoking faith or religion, one must observe that all too often things do not turn out right. All kinds of economic calamities, not to mention genocides, natural disasters, disease pandemics, and other catastrophes have afflicted humankind since its beginnings, punishing good people as well as evil ones. In economic matters as in others, the invisible hand that makes things turn out right is often nowhere in evidence. The market often works, but sometimes it doesn't.

Actually, Smith himself acknowledges this when he writes that despite their purely selfish intentions men "frequently" end up promoting the common good. "Frequently" is a long way from "always." So even the founder of capitalist theory was not nearly as optimistic about "the invisible hand" inevitably creating "the magic of the marketplace" as are many of today's conservatives. Despite this, they continue to insist on citing him as the authority for their nonsensical claims about the infallibility of laissez faire capitalism.

Would that some of Smith's admirers also keep in mind other things he wrote. Earlier this month, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, made the outlandish statement (especially given the proliferation of corporate scandals and the number of executives in jail) that "we bank on the self interest" of business people to be honest to "protect their reputations."

Adam Smith knew much better. He was quite properly suspicious of businessmen. "People of the same trade seldom meet together" Smith wrote, "but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." Had he lived two and a half centuries later, he might have been referring to predatory lenders and dealers in credit default swaps.

Update: In his testimony on October 23 before a Congressional committee, Greenspan admitted that the current financial crisis had shaken his faith in free markets. He confessed:"I made a mistake in presuming that the self interest" of banks and other financial institutions would protect them from chaos. And when Congressman Henry Waxman suggested to the former Fed chairman that his ideology was not working, Greenspan agreed: "That's precisely the reason I was shocked," he replied,"because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working very well." Apparently, Enron, the accounting scandal and many other gross defects in free markets over the decades made no impression on him."

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"Enron's collapse...will remind everyone - some conservatives painfully - that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather it is a complex creation of laws and mores..." --George Will, 2002

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Why must our economic policy be an either/or? Why not a both-and? Kishore Mahabuani, dean of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy writes in Newsweek:

"Crucially, as they opened up their markets, neither China nor India threw the proberbial baby out with the bath water--instead, they balanced capitalism with judicious government direction. As the Indian economist Amartya Sen has wisely said, "the invisible hand of the market has often relied heavily on the visible hand of government."

Contrast this levelheaded middle path with America and Europe, which have each gone ideologically overboard in their own ways—and whose utter lack of pragmatism helped precipitate the global financial crisis. Since the 1980s, America has been increasingly infatuated with the ideology of unfettered free markets and dismissive of the role of government—following Ronald Reagan’s dictum that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Former U.S. Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan took this ideology to the extreme by refusing to regulate the large new market in derivatives that emerged under his watch and that quadrupled between 2002 and 2008 to 12 times the size of the total world economy. Of course, when the markets came crashing down in 2007, it was decisive government intervention that saved the day. Despite this fact, many Americans still espouse a deep ideological opposition to “big government,” as evidenced by the current wave of antitax Republicans and Tea Party candidates who swept into Congress during the midterm elections.
If Americans could only free themselves from their antigovernment straitjackets, they would begin to see that the U.S.’s problems are not insoluble. A few sensible federal measures could put the country back on the right path. A simple consumption tax of, say, 5 percent would make a significant dent in the country’s huge government deficit without damaging productivity. A small gasoline tax would help wean America from its dependence on oil imports and create incentives for green energy development. In the same way, a significant reduction of wasteful agricultural subsidies and other earmarks could also lower the deficit. But in order to capitalize on these common-sense solutions, Americans will have to put aside their own attachment to the rhetoric of smaller government and less regulation. American politicians will have to develop the courage to follow what is taught in all American public-policy schools: that there are good taxes and bad taxes. Asian countries have embraced this wisdom, and have built sound long-term fiscal policies as a result."