shawndumas

A Thought Experiment For The Misandrous Church

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Yes -- Minds are changed by argumentation and prayer for illumination.

Romans 10:14-17 "How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!' But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, 'Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?' So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ."

The question is asked, "how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?" The answer, "faith comes from hearing" -- argumentation -- but, and this is most important, whence comes hearing?, "hearing [comes] through the word of Christ" -- prayer for illumination -- for, as you see, I take the phrase "word of Christ" as Christ's decree that the one being preached to be able to hear and so have faith in what is preached. I say that from the context: continue to chapter eleven and you will find "God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that would not see and ears that would not hear, down to this very day", and, as you know, John 12:40 quotes "He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them."

No one, Christian or otherwise, can hear truth unless it be decreed that they be able to hear -- no one can believe what they cannot hear. Truly, "faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ". And so, it is a both-and situation; illuminated argumentation produces saving transformation -- in all the senses of the term 'save'.

But that is not at all what I want to converse about. Speaking-to and praying-for the listener are both things that the speaker is obligated to do. I want to discuss what the obligations of the listener are. But I note with interest that many cannot seem to leave the true and necessary obligations of the speaker out of the discussion. It is a modern magnet of immense power this idea of detailing in fine minutia the very intricate obligations of the speaker, so much so that I think we can safely say that we have spent sufficient time boxing in the motives, methods, and means of the speaker to the point of boxing the ears off of them so that they shut up -- which seems to me to be the whole point of the exercise. Iron sharpening iron involves things getting banged off in loud, hot, and flashy collisions; too masculine for the misandrous church.

The Bible commands us to prefer being offended to not being sharpened. We are instructed to bear just indignation that is leveled against us. We should speak of the ones that have whipped us to the point of producing life long scars as loving friends.

"[I]f one asks him, 'What are these wounds on your back?' [received for false prophesying] he will say, 'The wounds I received in the house of my friends.'" ( Zechariah 13:6).

Also, "Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend [...]" (Proverbs 27:5-6a).

Would a Christian beat someone up (literally) over thinking so wrongly that sin results? Nehemiah did; and then asked God to remember him well for it:

"I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. [...] And one of the grandsons the high priest was himself [in sin] and was by me, therefore I chased him from me. Remember me, O my God, for the good I have done."

Ah, but would Jesus beat someone up (literally)?:

"The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, 'Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.'"

Here's a thought experiment: If someone were in sin and a brother beat them up, cursed at them, pulled their hair -- or whipped them and chased them and kicked over their desk at work what would you say to that brother?

Want Your Heart to Sing Unbidden?

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:29:00 +0000

C. S. Lewis:

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

A Peculiar Love of Hierarchy

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:43:00 +0000

How the New Films Subvert Lewis’s Hierarchical World

by Steven D. Boyer

As everyone knows, two Hollywood productions of recent years bear the titles of two of C. S. Lewis’s famous stories from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. The third installment in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is scheduled for release this December, with The Silver Chair slated for 2011.

Many Christians are very excited about these developments, believing (quite rightly) that Lewis’s stories are shot through with deeply Christian imaginative themes. What can be wrong with disseminating the stories more widely in this way? The answer is: Absolutely nothing—so long as it really is Lewis’s stories being disseminated. But there’s the rub. A thoughtful investigation suggests that the Narnia films are very far from being a faithful representation of Lewis’s own Christian vision of reality.

This is a serious charge, so let me focus it a bit more. I shall not object to the quality of the movies simply as movies, nor to the interpolation of much non-Lewis material into both movies, nor even to the appropriateness of film, in principle, as a vehicle for telling such stories. Objections might be made (and have been made) on all three points, but I shall not make them here.

Instead, I have a larger and more basic question in mind. Do these film versions “do” what Lewis’s books themselves “do”? Do those who see the films come away nourished in the same way that readers of the stories do? Do the films give us, or do they try to give us, something recognizably like Lewis’s comprehensively Christian vision of the world?

A Peculiar Love of Hierarchy

In order to address questions like these, we have to ask first what Lewis is trying to do. What is his “Christian vision of the world”? We could address this question by focusing on the Narnia tales specifically, but it ends up being more productive (and avoiding some of the twists and turns of scholarship on Narnia) to begin with a broader account of Lewis’s basic theological outlook, and so that is what we shall do.

Understanding this basic outlook does bring with it, however, one really substantial obstacle: we have to think carefully about a significant element in Lewis’s vision that does not play very well in our world, even among contemporary Christians. That element is Lewis’s peculiar fondness for hierarchy.

The word “hierarchy” does not have very pleasant connotations in our day, so to speak of someone being “fond of hierarchy” sounds very “peculiar” indeed. It is like admitting that your great-uncle Jack, really a fine old gentleman, never got over his childhood delight in pulling the wings off flies. Of course, this odd and even repulsive idiosyncrasy might be ignored by members of the family, out of their affection for Uncle Jack.

The only problem with treating Lewis this way is that his particular oddity reappears everywhere in his work, usually quite explicitly, and it has an exceptionally strong bearing upon the way he understands orthodox Christianity. If we are going to understand Lewis’s deeply Christian vision of the world, we will need to try hard to understand how this suspicious attraction to hierarchy is a part of it.

Two Interlocked Principles

Lewis’s thinking begins with the Christian understanding of God as the Creator of the world, and of the world as God’s creation. The historic Christian doctrine of Creation requires Christians to insist on uniting two fundamental principles, and oddly enough, two principles that the contemporary outlook is often prone to separate.

First, it insists upon hierarchy. We might not use this term very often, but it is clear that any serious doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) involves the recognition of a very real hierarchical distinction between God and world. The difference between the great Creator who gives reality and the cosmos that receives reality is absolute. The one is utterly independent, the other utterly dependent. The one is worthy of all worship; the other rightly offers this worship. There is here a hierarchy of the deepest, richest kind, for in every imaginable respect, the world is subordinate—and rightly subordinate—to the God who creates and constantly sustains her.

Yet right alongside this affirmation of hierarchy in the Christian doctrine of Creation, we find the insistence that creation is fundamentally, unambiguously good—and with a goodness that grows directly out of its unqualified dependence upon its Creator. Note the surprising interpenetration of these two principles. Creation is not good in spite of its subordination to God, in spite of the hierarchy; it is good because of its subordination, because of the hierarchy. It is good because it is created, and to be created is to be glorious precisely by virtue of reflecting or showing forth the greater, higher glory of the Creator.

Indeed, as soon as any created thing ceases to be rightly subordinate to God, that creature ceases also to be good. It becomes a competitor with God, like Molech or Baal or Satan, rather than a servant of God. This is the essence of sin in Lewis’s mind: it is a turning away from our true creaturely status. It is an attempt to replace the goodness that naturally comes from being subordinate to God the Creator with a different, independent, autonomous goodness. It is a rejection of God.

Delight in Hierarchy

So hierarchy, by its nature, is fundamentally good. And Lewis follows the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition by going further, by believing that the goodness of hierarchically ordered relationships extends all through the world that God has made. Relationships of all kinds are ordered, Lewis thinks, with an appropriate kind of giving and an appropriate kind of receiving. When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result.

Now we don’t have space here to pursue this idea very far, but the point is absolutely crucial: in Lewis’s mind, hierarchy is the source of freedom. This means that, as odd as it sounds to most of us, hierarchical order is something that we all ought not to hate or to fear, but to delight in.

To be sure, hierarchy has been abused, and Lewis is well aware that, in a fallen world, we need equality as a protection against that abuse. But it is one thing to protect ourselves from the abuse of hierarchy, and it is another to reject outright the thing that is abused—and it is this latter error that the modern world has fallen into. Finding that hierarchy has been abused, we have rejected hierarchy in principle.

But this is a dreadful mistake. It is like discovering that some of our food has been poisoned and therefore resolving never to eat again. Worse still, if Lewis is right, this rejection of hierarchy is nothing less than a rejection of a fully Christian way of seeing the world.

Countercultural Creativity

Of course, it is another question whether Lewis really is right about all of this. It seems to be a pretty important question. Unfortunately, it is also a question that most of us have very few resources to answer honestly, for the simple reason that, for most of us, “good hierarchy” is a contradiction in terms. The very word hierarchy usually has a ring of doom to it in our culture: it reeks of domination and oppression. For most of us, even to consider the possibility that something called hierarchy could be a good, edifying thing will take an intentional, countercultural act of creative imagination.

Enter The Chronicles of Narnia. At last, we are in a position to see at least part of what Lewis is up to in these delightful tales. He wants to remind us what a beautiful, elegant, adventurous, festive place the world can be, and he thinks that right order is a part of that good world. Through these stories, Lewis gives us the imaginative tools to think critically—he would say to think more Christianly—about our own cultural assumptions regarding hierarchy, equality, and so on.

We can see Lewis’s strategy at work if we just think for a moment about what his original stories are like. Narnia is a great repository of hierarchical images and relations—of good kings and noble knights, of laborers who are not disgruntled and servants who are not demeaned, of Aslan the great Lion who rules over all, who is never safe, but always good.

One can hardly turn a page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or of Prince Caspian without encountering compelling images of royal authority and knightly virtue—and we see now that both of these themes are intimately connected with Lewis’s positive construal of hierarchy, which in turn is foundational to his distinctively Christian vision of reality.

Hollywood Shifts the Center

So, what about Hollywood? Is the Christian vision of the Narnia films anything like that of Lewis’s own Narnia stories? That is the question we turn to next.

Let us begin with some brief attention to Walden Media’s 2005 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—very brief attention, since we need to spend more time on Prince Caspian. This brevity is unfortunate in a way, because I think there really is a fundamental shift in focus in this first film, a shift from a story that is chiefly about Aslan to a story that is chiefly about the children, and especially about Peter as he grows toward maturity. To be sure, Aslan is quite helpful along the way, but he is no longer the center—and that is big news, if we are thinking about Lewis’s Christian worldview. So there is much more to be said about this first film, even if we do not have time to say it here.

Yet we must take time to note one aspect of Peter’s growing up that turns out to be especially relevant to our concerns. The greater part of Peter’s maturation is his learning to take responsibility for his situation rather than just quietly acquiescing in it. He must learn to take risks even in the teeth of Susan’s ever-so-rational good sense; he must learn to follow his own judgment, not just do what “Mum” would want him to do. This is not a bad lesson: unquestionably, maturity does involve this kind of growth toward independence. But consider the way this growth is formulated in the film.

The opening scene shows us an air raid in London, and we find Peter very angry at Edmund because the younger boy, rather than running to the bomb shelter as he has been instructed to do, runs back into the house to retrieve a photograph of his father and then has to be rescued by Peter. Peter performs the rescue all right, but he also savagely chastises his brother: “Why can’t you just do as you’re told!?”

A Strange Sign of Maturity

These are very significant words, for the movie as a whole consists in Peter learning to think and act independently—learning, in fact, not to do as he is told. The value of this kind of “disobedience” reappears frequently, but most significantly near the end of the film, in the high, climactic moment when the great battle against the White Witch seems all but lost. In despair, Peter commands Edmund to “get the girls and go home”—that is, to abandon this losing fight and get their sisters to safety. But the reformed Edmund now shows his own new maturity and virtue, and he shows it by disobeying.

It is a good move: by staying in the battle, Edmund is able to break the Witch’s wand and thus to contribute in no small way to the Narnian victory. In the celebration immediately after the Witch’s death, with everything now won and Edmund proved a hero, Peter offers a teasing, tongue-in-cheek “rebuke” to Edmund that takes us right back to the opening of the movie: “When are you going to learn to do as you’re told?” he hollers. Of course, he doesn’t mean it anymore. By now, he has grown enough to realize that receiving orders and following them is a sign of immaturity and weakness, whereas independent action, especially when it involves not doing as you’re told, is the sign of strength, maturity, and success.

Note well: disobedience is the sign of real maturity. This quiet, unobtrusive devaluation of humble submission to rightful authority is a significant omen of things to come in the later film.

Which brings us to the 2008 production called Prince Caspian. This film once again makes Aslan peripheral, and it also includes a greater number of departures from Lewis’s original story, including a sixteen-minute siege on the castle of the usurper Miraz that is nowhere in Lewis’s text. This film also addresses much more frequently and explicitly the important theme of hierarchy. Yet it is a hierarchy much different from that of Lewis’s books, and different in some pretty far-reaching ways.

This difference is evident absolutely everywhere in the film. One could look at Caspian himself, who is transformed from a noble and honorable young king in Lewis’s telling, into a tortured warrior whose unchecked desire for personal revenge against his father’s murderer leads to the deaths of scores of his Narnian subjects. Or again, one could look at the virtuous Red Dwarf Trumpkin, whose cheerful, good-humored embrace of obedience in Lewis’s story is quietly dropped from the film, replaced by the more modern virtues of sarcasm, irony, and cynicism.

Peter the Problem

But let us pass over examples like these and focus instead on that one character who demonstrates most clearly in the film that Lewis’s positive vision of hierarchy is not merely being overlooked by his Hollywood interpreters but is being self-consciously attacked. That character is the High King Peter.

The Peter we meet in the film version of Prince Caspian is a very different Peter from the one we saw grow up in the earlier film and certainly very different from the one in Lewis’s story. In the first place, it is hard to describe Hollywood’s Peter as anything other than a bumbler. He is not part of the deliverance that comes from the blowing of Queen Susan’s magic horn. He is instead part of the problem, a stupid, proud, boorish, arrogant fool who speaks and acts with ridiculous vanity and, far from delivering others, needs to be delivered himself. His arrogance and vanity are explicitly highlighted in the film:

• We first encounter Peter as the cause of a brawl in a London subway, which he started simply because someone bumped him.

• Once in Narnia, Peter sets out to lead the other children and gets hopelessly lost, but he keeps insisting (with stereotypical male vanity), “I’m not lost,” “We weren’t lost,” etc.

• When he finally assumes command of the Narnians and then is confronted by Lucy, who tries to talk sense into him and get him to wait patiently for Aslan, he condescendingly replies, “I think it’s up to us now. . . . We’ve waited for Aslan long enough.”

• In the enemy castle, in the midst of their failed attack, Peter stupidly and obstinately refuses to call for retreat, crying out instead, “No, I can still do this!”—which prompts Susan to ask, “Exactly who are you doing this for, Peter?”

These instances could easily be multiplied. At every point, the Peter of Hollywood’s Prince Caspian is the problem, not the solution. The high king of Narnia seems to have devolved into a young, handsome version of Homer Simpson.

Adamson’s Aim

But how has this happened? The point here is absolutely decisive. The makers of the film leave us in no doubt whatsoever that the brashness and insolence and haughtiness of Peter in the second film are precisely the result of his having been exalted as king in the first one.

Our first encounter with Peter in Prince Caspian makes this point quite intentionally. The scene opens with a general mêlée in the subway station, of which Peter is the cause. Order is finally restored by the intervention of the police, and then the four children are left waiting for a train. Susan takes this opportunity to ask Peter caustically, “What was it this time?”—giving us an unmistakable hint that this clash was only the latest in a series of conflicts that have had Peter at their center. After Peter explains what happened (including the satisfied acknowledgment that he himself threw the first punch), Susan sighs and asks, “Is it that hard just to walk away?” Peter snaps back, “I shouldn’t have to!”

Then follow some remarkable lines. Says Peter, “Don’t you ever get tired of being treated like a kid?” “We are kids,” Edmund wryly observes. “Well, I wasn’t always,” Peter retorts. He is obviously remembering that he used to be a king in Narnia—and he wants the kingship back.

Director Andrew Adamson helps us understand just what is going on in this scene in a commentary that is one of the bonus features on the Prince Caspian DVD. Adamson explains,

I always felt . . . how hard it must have been, particularly for Peter, to have gone from being high king to going back to high school, and what that would do to him, do to his ego. . . . I always thought that would be a really hard thing for a kid to go through.

Adamson acknowledges that this emotional turmoil was “not something that C. S. Lewis really got into,” but as director he wanted “to create more depth for the characters, more reality to the situation.” He wanted “to deal with what all the kids would go through having left behind that incredible experience and wanting to relive it.”

This emotional realism was Adamson’s explicit aim, and as a result, the screenwriters who put this scene together were actively encouraged to think about what it would be like to go from “king” to “schoolboy”—not a pleasant prospect, of course, and one to which any of us might react with bitterness and resentment, just as Peter does.

Right, any of us might react that way—but that is because we have not breathed the air of Narnia. We are thinking like ordinary persons (and worse, like self-sufficient, twenty-first-century, Western intellectuals) instead of like knights or kings. In Lewis’s telling of all of the Narnia tales, the children’s experiences as kings and queens in Narnia consistently transform them into nobler, more virtuous people in their own world. They are not spoiled children wanting to be kings again; they are noble kings who carry that very nobility back into their non-royal roles as schoolchildren.

But not so in Hollywood. To be a king at all is to hunger for power forevermore, like a tiger that has tasted human blood and ever afterwards is a “man-eater.” To lose imperial power by being transported back to England is to become a bitter, sullen, acrimonious brat. That is just what Peter has become, and his folly is the driving force behind most of the action in the movie.

Two Royal Stinkers

The difference between Lewis and his Hollywood interpreters could hardly be greater on this score, and it is demonstrated most clearly in the astonishingly different ways that the relationship between Peter and Caspian is portrayed in the film and in Lewis’s own text. The film version shows us a relationship of almost unrelieved hostility, suspicion, and animosity. It begins when Peter and Caspian first meet and mistake one another for opponents. They finally realize that they are fighting on the same side, but the civility that is practiced thereafter is obviously a thin veneer that masks a seething competition between them.

The conflict comes to a head after the failed attack on Miraz’s castle. As we have already noted, part of the fault for the failure lies with Caspian for abandoning the original strategy in order to pursue his own plans for vengeance, and part of the fault belongs to Peter for his proud insistence that no retreat be allowed until it is too late. But given what we have already seen of their characters, it is no surprise that each of these royal stinkers refuses to recognize his own part in the fiasco and instead blames the other.

The result is a fierce public quarrel that finally descends into a childish exchange of insults. When Lucy asks what happened in the battle, Peter spitefully replies, “Ask him.” Caspian is shocked to be blamed, and he retorts, “You could have called it off. There was still time.”

Peter: “No, there wasn’t, thanks to you. If you had kept to the plan, those solders might be alive right now.”

Caspian: “And if you had just stayed here like I suggested, they definitely would be!”

Peter: “You called us, remember?”

Caspian: “My first mistake.”

Peter: “No, your first mistake was thinking you could lead these people.”

(One can almost hear the “Nah-na-nah-na-nah-nah!” in the background.) The insults continue and escalate, until Peter even insults Caspian’s father—at which point swords are drawn in rage, and violence is barely averted.

Two Noble Kings

This account of hatred and rivalry and mutual recrimination is about as far as it could be from Lewis’s own account of the relationship between these two noble kings. For Lewis, that relationship is overwhelmingly marked by support, trust, and generosity.

Consider just a few lines from the drastically different story that Lewis tells of the first meeting of the kings. In Lewis’s story, that meeting takes place just after Peter has leaped in to help Caspian in a fight with the deceitful Black Dwarf Nikabrik. As the heroes catch their breath after this deadly clash, the following remarkable exchange occurs:

“We don’t seem to have any enemies left,” said Peter. “There’s the Hag, dead. . . . And Nikabrik, dead too. . . . And you, I suppose, are King Caspian?”

“Yes,” said the other boy. “But I’ve no idea who you are.”

“It’s the High King, King Peter,” said Trumpkin.

“Your majesty is welcome,” said Caspian.

“And so is your majesty,” said Peter. “I haven’t come to take your place, you know, but to put you into it.”

We are clearly in a different world, with a conversation like this one. Caspian is not overbearing and self-important; he knows that his army is in trouble, and he is glad for assistance. And when he learns that the assistance comes from the High King, he is not put off or threatened: “Your majesty is welcome,” he easily declares. Peter’s reply is equally striking: “So is your majesty.” Each side happily welcomes and supports the other. There is no pompous ego or arrogant competition here. Instead, we find nobility, authority, courtesy, and humility all wrapped into one.

The Outlook of Miraz

Indeed, for Lewis, the whole notion that kings must live in competition and suspicion of one another reflects the outlook not of Peter or Caspian or the noble Narnians, but of Miraz. It makes all the sense in the world that Miraz should be threatened by any authority other than his own, for his own authority is only that of a tyrannical usurper. Miraz doubts the very existence of such a thing as legitimate authority; for him, there is only power. And power is always threatened by any other power.

In fact, when we first meet Miraz in Lewis’s story, we find him disbelieving the ancient tales of Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy on precisely these grounds. He cries out in a rage, “How could there be two Kings at the same time?”

How could there, indeed! Such a harmonious, supportive, virtuous understanding of hierarchical rule is foundational to Lewis’s deeply Christian worldview, but it is utterly incomprehensible to Miraz—and also to the unwitting disciples of Miraz who wrote this Hollywood screenplay. In Miraz’s view, kingship is all about who calls the shots, who gets his way, who is top dog. Those who adopt this view cannot but find the notion of courteous, cooperative kings to be impossibly unrealistic.

And this, of course, is exactly my complaint. Everywhere you look in the first two Narnia films, you find incontrovertible evidence that the creators of those films take exactly this view. They simply have not seen the vision that Lewis saw. They have never tasted the joy, the power, the life of hierarchy—and so they drop all such foolishness and replace it with a more modern, more sensible story that reveals the dangerous, oppressive thing that hierarchy really is.

Bad Medicine

But hold on a minute. If there is a possibility that Lewis was right—even a bare possibility—then this loss of the original Narnia, this domestication of Aslan, is distressing indeed. It signals nothing less than an invasion by a foreign and hostile power. The creators of this “new improved” Narnia have taken the single element in Lewis’s tales that twenty-first-century viewers most need to be instructed in, and they have recast it so that it contributes to the error rather than correcting it.

Lewis the physician prescribed a strong medicine to treat our imaginative ailment, but the pharmacists in Hollywood have substituted a different medicine of the same name, and one that exacerbates the sickness instead of healing it. As a result, viewers encounter what they think is Narnia, and they get mere entertainment instead of the richly Christian view of the world that Lewis himself provided.

I confess, in closing, that I do not really know what anyone should do about all of this. There is a faint chance, I suppose, that future Narnia films will be more faithful to Lewis’s own vision. The next installment, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is scheduled for release in December under a new director (Michael Apted, who directed the film Amazing Grace in 2006), but since the same screenwriters are in place and since Andrew Adamson is now serving as one of the producers, I am not hopeful.

Moreover, if my experience with my own children and with students whom I have casually surveyed is any indicator, the damage is already done. When one refers to The Chronicles of Narnia, most people already think of the films, not of Lewis’s own stories.

The Needed Insight

In many ways, the damage has probably even been done inadvertently. Remember the comparison I mentioned earlier: Lewis is like a member of the family whose idiosyncrasies we try to ignore or smooth over. I suspect that Doug Gresham and the filmmakers are simply doing what every polite, kind family member would do: they are telling “Uncle Jack’s” stories without all of the bothersome quirks and eccentricities. This is a generous, benevolent way to handle the flaws that appear in all of our characters, is it not?

Yes. But what if the flaw we are trying to smooth over turns out to be the very heart of the person? Further, what if the flaw turns out not to be a flaw at all, but a supremely countercultural insight that the world desperately needs? What if the kooky opinion turns out to have been right the whole time?

One can think of another well-known figure, this one of Jewish descent, whose well-meaning family was happy to talk about him to anyone who would listen: “Oh, Yeshua? He’s a fine young man . . . an excellent carpenter . . . quite pious in his own way . . . always cared very deeply for his mother . . . yes, a fine young man. What? Oh—well, yes, there is that silly business about him thinking himself the Messiah. . . . Let’s just let that pass, shall we? Did I mention what a skilled carpenter he is? . . .”

“Yeshua” without “Messiah” is just another carpenter. So also “Peter,” without the wisdom and dignity and nobility appropriate to “ High King Peter,” is just another struggling leader—and we already have plenty of those. Aslan, without his appallingly hierarchical claws, is just another pussycat. I myself would prefer to hear him roar. •

A Gospel That Is Too Small

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 20:52:00 +0000

A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small.

A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small.

A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small.

A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small.

A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.

— Fred Sanders

Maximize Disorder

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:30:00 +0000

...your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder...

...Think of the universe as a box of scrabble letters. There is only one way to have the letters arranged to spell out the Gettysburg Address, but an astronomical number of ways to have them spell nonsense. Shake the box and it will tend toward nonsense, disorder will increase and information will be lost as the letters shuffle toward their most probable configurations...

NYTimes.com

Also the Books

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:25:00 +0000

When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments. – 2 Timothy 4:13

"Even an apostle must read. [...] He is inspired, and yet he wants books! He has been preaching for at least thirty years, and yet he wants books! He had seen the Lord, and yet he wants books! He had had a wider experience than most men, and yet wants books!

He had been caught up into the Third Heaven and had heard things which it was unlawful for a man to utter, yet he wants books! He had written the major part of the New Testament, and yet he wants books! The apostle says to Timothy, and so he says to every preacher, 'Give attendance to reading' (1 Tim. 4:13).

The man who never reads will never be read. He who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains proves that he has no brains of his own.

Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all our people. You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers and expositions of the Bible." --C.H. Spurgeon

Magic

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:35:00 +0000

“I consider the appropriate role of magic in kid lit to be the same as the appropriate role of magic in reality—though it will look different. This is, after all, an extraordinarily magical place. Sunlight makes trees out of thin air (literally), tadpoles turn into frogs, human love turns into children, and you can trick the air into lifting an enormous steel bus full of people up to thirty thousand feet if you know how to curve a wing and harness explosions. And it’s not all cheerful, happy, kittens-in-baskets magic either.

What happens if one of our wizards splits an atom? I think magic in children’s books is at its best when it wakes kids up to the mind-blowing magic all around us—when it overcomes the numbness of modernity and makes them watch an ant war on the sidewalk with all the wonder it deserves. Ironically, Christians, who profess outright to believe in magic (what else is water into wine, resurrection from the dead, calming storms, etc?) are the most upset when you put it into a book, while authors like Pullman (a materialistic atheist who believes reality to be all mechanism as far as I can tell) works with it comfortably and well. It really should be the other way around.” -N.D. Wilson

Totally Like Whatever, You Know?

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:36:00 +0000

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

HT: Jeff Brewer via Justin Taylor

Events Are Proclaimed With Words

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:31:00 +0000

(Author: John Piper)

What the Bible teaches keeps us in line with reality. But what the Bible includes keeps us balanced and protects us from ill-advised overstatement.

As he came to Christ C. S. Lewis was learning from J.R.R. Tolkein that Christianity is "true myth." "It really happened."

Then he says, "The ‘doctrines' we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

My Bible awareness triggers a response: "More adequate" for what?

Certainly the events of incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection are "more adequate" to accomplish redemption. These events accomplished my redemption. No concept or idea could do that.

But these events are not "more adequate" for proclaiming the meaning of the events. Events are proclaimed with words. And words only have meaning when put together as concepts or ideas. This is how the apostles proclaimed the events so that people could grasp what happened and embrace the meaning of them and be saved.

For this we need words. Deeds are not adequate to communicate the meaning of deeds.

How do I know this? Why do I react this way to Lewis' comment? Because the Bible is more than deeds. The Bible is dense with conceptual explanations of what God was doing in the deeds.

I infer from this that God considers the concepts and ideas of the Bible to be essential for grasping God's purposes in the "true myth."

I am protected from overstatement and imbalance by knowing what the Bible includes.

I encourage you to measure your favorite authors and your favorite quotes by what the Bible teaches and what the Bible includes.

Offended

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:23:00 +0000

It’s no wonder that Christian books for the hurting top the charts. It's no surprise that counseling offices are overwhelmed with the offended.

Our pride and our stubborn refusal to continually contemplate the truth of the gospel forces us to run from book to book and counselor to counselor, always seeking a form of 'spirituality' that will value us as highly as we value ourselves; instead of seeing ourselves as justly deserving of so much more offense than we will ever receive.

Christianity is not a religion meant to cater to the constantly offended: we don’t need any help for that kind of hurting; we need a Savior. A Savior that said, if they offended Me they will offend you, and a Savior that never once needed anyone to heal His bruised ego.

Brethren, they spat upon His face. He stood in our stead and took what we deserved. If all our secret thoughts and all our secret deeds where found out, apart from Christ, we ought to be spat upon.

We don’t need to be pitied or to be more respected; we need to continually die and be resurrected by the life-transforming truths of the gospel so that we don't get offended in the first place. That's the kind of help we need.

And we don’t need the transformation of our minds just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need this transformation every moment of every day; that's true spirituality.

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:55:00 +0000

". . . [Mr. Winters] attribute[s] to me the very reverse of what I hold about whether science can resolve the abortion debate. I believe science cannot resolve it. Modern embryology and developmental biology can show, and have shown, that the human embryo or fetus is a living individual of the species Homo sapiens---a human being in the earliest stages of his or her natural development. And that is important, But I agree with Peter Singer (and just about everybody else who knows anything about the science) that the question of the morality of abortion is not about when the life of a human being begins---the answer to that is clear enough---it is about whether and, if so, when a human being's life has value and dignity---in other words, it is about whether all human beings are persons (i.e., possessors of dignity and a right to life), or whether some human beings (e.g., those at the earliest developmental stages) lack the attribute or attributes of "personhood," and may therefore be killed if they are unwanted or perceived as burdensome. I believe in the fundamental equality of all human beings. I believe that on the basis of philosophical arguments that I have advanced in various writings, including my book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (with moral philosopher Christopher Tollefsen), and my article "Embryo Ethics" (pdf attached) in the 2008 issue of Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In defending my position, I engage the arguments advanced by Singer, Jeffrey McMahon, Michael Tooley, and others who believe that some human beings are not yet persons (i.e., those in the embryonic, fetal, and early infant stages of development); others are no longer persons (i.e., those in irreversible comas or minimally conscious states and those suffering from severe dementias); and some are not now, have never been, and never will be persons (i.e., the severely mentally retarded or disabled). Sophisticated pro-choice advocates such as Singer, McMahon, and Tooley, do not suppose or claim that the being killed in an abortion is something other than human. (Singer, in a letter published by the New York Times, quite properly reprimanded Mario Cuomo for claiming that the debate about abortion reflects doubts or differences of opinion about whether the fetus killed in an abortion is a human being.) Their claim is that the human being killed in abortion is not a person. There is agreement on the science---the feuts is a human being. The disagreement is philosophical---are human beings in the fetal stage of development "persons"? I hold that every member of the human family, irrespective not only of race, sex, and ethnicity, but also of ages, size, location, stage of development, and condition of dependency, possess inherent and equal dignity; it is precisely this claim that serious and sophisticated pro-choice people deny. As I've said in dozens of places, science can show only that the developing child is a human being. It cannot resolve the question of whether all human beings or, indeed, any human being possesses worth and dignity. Science cannot prove that it is wrong to kill a five month old fetus. By the same token, science cannot show that it is wrong to kill a two-year old child or a healthy fifty-three year old professor. Science cannot tell us whether the death penalty, or genocide, or killing in war is right or wrong. Science can tell us whether a creature is human; it cannot tell us whether deliberately killing humans (be it by abortion or in embryo-destructive research, or in war or as a punishment) is justified or unjustified." -Robert P. George

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.29.001.pdart

Mother's Day Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sun, 10 May 2009 14:05:00 +0000

“Whoever strikes [...] his mother shall be put to death.”

“Whoever curses [...] his mother shall be put to death.”

“For anyone who curses [...] his mother shall surely be put to death; he has cursed [...] his mother; his blood is upon him.”

“If one curses [...] his mother, his lamp will be put out in utter darkness.”

“The eye that [...] scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures.”

“Buy truth, and do not sell it; buy wisdom, instruction, and understanding. [And by doing so] [l]et your [...] mother be glad; let her who bore you rejoice.”

“[A] foolish man despises his mother.”

“Honor your [...] mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

“Honor [...] your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”

“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of [...] his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen [...]. Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”

Why such dramatic and seemingly harsh consequences for treating Mothers this way? 

Because God’s glory is at stake:

“Rejoice with [God’s bride], and be glad for her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in joy, all you who mourn over her; that you may nurse and be satisfied from her consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious abundance.

For thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her hip, and bounced upon her knees.  As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.  You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice; your bones shall flourish like the grass; and the hand of the Lord shall be known to his servants, and he shall show his indignation against his enemies.’”

You, mothers, have chosen poverty, by going without, for the sake of your little ones. You have been meek when presented with the arched back of your infant. You have dug deep and mined mercy in the face of rebellion. You have sought peace in the midst of strife.

At times painfully pure of heart, hungering and thirsting for righteousness so that you can be the living and breathing sermon on the mount, the very embodiment of Christ; Mothers, you are the living Gospel.

And so, to curse motherhood is to curse God, to spurn mothering is to spit at God’s hand; Mothers mourn for your children when they revile you for they are reviling Christ.

Thank you, Father God, thank you for mothers that we might know more of Your heart towards us. Thank you for Your Word that makes this all clearer.

Consistant, Evolutionary, and Atheistic Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:40:00 +0000

[...] I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I've developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life -- I've used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I'm not a naysayer. I'm a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change. [...]

[Read it all...]

Magical, Image Baring Creativity

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:10:00 +0000

This is an extract from Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month. This is one of the best explanations of why programming is so interesting.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. [...]

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

No End in Sight

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:46:00 +0000

"Unfortunately, it is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including—or especially—the experts. Every problem in contemporary society calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy. The ostensible purpose of the bureaucracy is to solve that problem. But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct and no more wishes the problem to disappear altogether than the lion wishes to kill all the gazelle in the bush and leave itself with no food for the future. In short, the bureaucracy of drug addiction needs drug addicts far more than drug addicts need the bureaucracy of drug addiction"

(Theodore Dalrymple, Romancing Opiates, pp. 9-10).

[Douglas Wilson]

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:52:00 +0000

Yes, that's me breakdancing.

It's Been A Long Time...

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:27:00 +0000

... I should't 've left you without a strong thought to step to...

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

- Nerds

Clearly Perceived

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:00:00 +0000

without excuse

Creation

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:59:00 +0000

reflection

Newt Gingrich: Let's End Adolescence

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:44:00 +0000

It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.

The solution is dramatic and unavoidable: We have to end adolescence as a social experiment. We tried it. It failed. It's time to move on. Returning to an earlier, more successful model of children rapidly assuming the roles and responsibilities of adults would yield enormous benefit to society.

Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood. Whether with the Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremony of the Jewish faith or confirmation in the Catholic Church or any hundreds of rites of passage in societies around the planet, it was understood you were either a child or a young adult.

In the U.S., this principle of direct transition from the world of childhood play to the world of adult work was clearly established at the time of the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Franklin was an example of this kind of young adulthood. At age 13, Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood.

John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution.

Daniel Boone got his first rifle at 12, was an expert hunter at 13, and at 15 made a yearlong trek through the wilderness to begin his career as America's most famous explorer. The list goes on and on.

It is true that life expectancy was shorter in those days and the need to get on with being an adult could be argued. Nevertheless, early adulthood, early responsibility, and early achievement were the norm before the institution of adolescence emerged as a system for delaying adulthood and trapping young people into wasting years of their lives. To regain those benefits, we must develop accelerated learning systems that peg the rate of academic progress to the student's pace and ability to absorb the material, making education more efficient.

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.

The costs of this social experiment have been horrendous. For the poor who most need to make money, learn seriously, and accumulate resources, adolescence has helped crush their future. By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. As a result, we have ruined several generations of poor people who might have made it if we had provided a different model of being young.

And for too many middle-class and wealthier young Americans, adolescence has been an excuse to delay work, family, and achievement—and thus contribute less to their own well-being and that of their communities.

It's time to change this—to shift to serious work, learning, and responsibility at age 13 instead of age 30. In other words, replace adolescence with young adulthood. But hastening that transition requires integrating learning into life and work. Fortunately, innovations in technology and in financial incentives to learn offer hope.

The Information Age makes it possible for young people to learn much faster than our current failed bureaucracies and obsolete curriculums permit. New systems such as Curriki, founded by Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and now an independent nonprofit, allow a community of teachers and learners to collaborate via the Internet to create quality educational materials for free—giving every American access to learning 24 hours a day.

And experiments such as the one my daughter, Jackie Cushman, is running in Atlanta—where poor children are paid the equivalent of working in a fast-food restaurant to study and do their homework—are examples of a more dynamic future.

In math and science learning, which are among the most important indicators of future prosperity and strength, America lags far behind such emerging powers as China and India. Studying to compete with Asian counterparts in the world market is going to keep U.S. teens busier than anyone ever imagined. This will require year-round learning, with mentors available online, rather than our traditional bureaucratic model of education. But we must go further, toward a dynamic, real-world blueprint for learning.

Indeed, going to school should be a money-making profession if you are good at it and work hard. That would revolutionize our poorest neighborhoods and boost our competitiveness.

The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children. So consider this simple proposal: High school students who can graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to attend. If they graduate two years early, they get two years of scholarships. At no added cost to taxpayers, we would give students an incentive to study as hard as they can and maximize the speed at which they learn.

Once we decide to engage young people in real life, doing real work, earning real money, and thereby acquiring real responsibility, we can transform being young in America. And our nation will become more competitive in the process.

Alan Keyes On Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:35:00 +0000

Marriage is the God-ordained covenant between one woman and one man that provides the essential societal support for families.

As we look at attempts to change that definition, we need to be very, very clear that it's not a question of being against individuals, per se. It's a question of looking at traditional marriage and what it requires, and saying we cannot allow, in principle, an understanding of marriage that excludes procreation.

Because, that was God's plan. Marriage exists for the sake of procreation, for the commitment made, man and woman, to God's will as it is then exemplified in the child when the two become one flesh, and that is also a commitment of responsibility and self-sacrifice for the sake of respecting God's will for the future.

And that is, I think, the serious understanding of marriage. If we were to adopt a view that just says, "Well, sex is pleasure for pleasure's sake," and we can actually base marriage on that understanding of human sexuality, we would be lying to ourselves. We would basically be telling people marriage is about what you get out of it, marriage is about whether you're taking pleasure from it. And you and I both know that there are times in the course of raising children when there's a lot of sacrifice, a lot of grief, a lot of pain that we're putting aside the things that we would think at some level of our own pleasures we would want, because we're willing to be responsible under God's will for doing what we need to do as parents to satisfy our responsibilities.

Now, that can be a source of great joy at the end of the day, of great satisfaction, of great contentment, of great true happiness — but it involves a willingness, also, to take on great sacrifice and great responsibility.

You can't credibly advance an idea of marriage that sells short the need for that kind of lifelong, serious, and responsible commitment to God's will in the form of your commitment to be responsible parents.

And I think that's what's involved in our debate right now — people trying to substitute an understanding of human sexuality that is really incompatible with the moral foundations of marriage life.

The assault that's now taking place on traditional marriage should be taken seriously by everyone, because I think that it represents the last and final step in the surrender of the true understanding of marriage — the commitment to childbearing, childrearing, and the future. And if we allow folks who are pushing for things like gay marriage to have their way, we will abandon the moral mentality that is necessary to sustain decent family life, and that will be disastrous.

[This post in no way represents an endorsment of Alan Keyes' Theological views.]

Against slavery? Don't own one.

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:09:00 +0000

According to the standard argument for saying that nobody is pro-abortion is the notion that everybody would prefer a world without abortions. After all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an abortion? But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby would present significant problems for them. So even if abortion is not medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers' money.

The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people - Thomas Jefferson was one - reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn't think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.

Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as ''pro-choice''? Of course we would not. It wouldn't matter to us that they were ''personally opposed'' to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were ''unnecessary,'' or that they wouldn't dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said ''Against slavery? Don't own one.'' We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.

[more...]

I <3 Thomas Sowell

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:06:00 +0000

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.

Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience — but experience is precisely what the young are lacking.

"Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain — whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary — can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity.

Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when surrounded in their work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded people.

Even people born into normal lives, but who have been able through talent or luck to escape into a world of celebrity and wealth, can likewise find themselves in the enviable position of being able to choose whether to grow up or not.

Those of us who can recall what it was like to be an adolescent must know that growing up can be a painful transition from the sheltered world of childhood.

No matter how much we may have wanted adult freedom, there was seldom the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens of adult responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world that hemmed us in on all sides, long after we were liberated from parental restrictions.

Should we be surprised that the strongest supporters of the political left are found among the young, academics, limousine liberals with trust funds, media celebrities and federal judges?

These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring on the revolution. The working class are in fact today among those most skeptical about the visions of the left.

[...]

The agenda of the left is fine for the world that they envision as existing today and the world they want to create tomorrow.

That is a world not hemmed in on all sides by inherent constraints and the painful trade-offs that these constraints imply. Theirs is a world where there are attractive, win-win "solutions" in place of those ugly trade-offs in the world that the rest of us live in.

Theirs is a world where we can just talk to opposing nations and work things out, instead of having to pour tons of money into military equipment to keep them at bay. The left calls this "change" but in fact it is a set of notions that were tried out by the Western democracies in the 1930s — and which led to the most catastrophic war in history.

For those who bother to study history, it was precisely the opposite policies in the 1980s — pouring tons of money into military equipment — which brought the Cold War and its threat of nuclear annihilation to an end.

The left fought bitterly against that "arms race" which in fact lifted the burden of the Soviet threat, instead of leading to war as the elites claimed.

Personally, I wish Ronald Reagan could have talked the Soviets into being nicer, instead of having to spend all that money. Only experience makes me skeptical about that "kinder and gentler" approach and the vision behind it.

More D. Wilson

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:50:00 +0000

[T]he Reformers identified three keys marks of the Church -- the Word, sacraments, and discipline. The three areas above were corruptions of each of these -- tyranny instead of discipline, images instead of words, and superstition over generations instead of covenanted and disciplined faithfulness over generations.

Cherry Picking - Doug Wilson

noreply@blogger.com (shawndumas) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:31:00 +0000

"If I profess, with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battle fields besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point."

-Martin Luther