This is my final post. Why? Because the world ends today.
What better way to end it than the way it all began? With the very first heavy metal song.
The track is Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath. The band is Cultura Tres, leaders of the New Wave of Venezuelan Psychedelic Doom/Sludge Metal.
I’ve scheduled a post for tomorrow. Just in case. If I’m still here Tuesday, I’ll resume blogging.
Here’s a snippet of a conversation I had earlier today.
C: You’re a christian, so of course you believe in a disembodied consciousness.
Me: That’s a non sequitur.
C: You’ve got me beat then. I’ve never heard of God having a body before.
Me: Heard of Jesus? (John 1:14)
C: Well yes, but God was around before Jesus.
Me: Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8)
C: And that’s supposed to tell me what? That God had legs? God was the creator of the Universe, apparently, so he was around before there was any need for legs, before there even was legs.
I find it hard to get my head around the idea of a disembodied consciousness. I’m pretty sure that my consciousness can’t be disembodied and remain … conscious. As for the mind of God … I have absolutely no idea.
But I reprise this snippet of a conversation to make the point that the label ‘Christian’ makes people assume all sorts of unwarranted things. It gets annoying after a while. I’m not given to angry outbursts and acts of homicidal violence, but please don’t push your luck with, “You’re a Christian, so you must be a socialist!”
Anyway, in an apparent synchronicity, blogger Glenn Peoples posted an excellent post today on something he calls minimalist Christianity. Here are a couple of paragraphs (but do make sure to read the whole thing).
A number of times the Apostle Paul warned first century Christians about getting into foolish controversies over doctrine. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t believe what they find most convincing about a whole range of things, but they were taking it further, making those things points of contention that threatened to divide the church. When writing to Timothy, a young church leader, Paul urged him no fewer than five times to stay away from – and to urge others to stay away from – unproductive quarrels over such things. But this is what really grabbed my attention recently, prompting this blog post: When Paul was in Athens preaching the Gospel, a number of philosophers asked him to come and speak to them because, here it comes, they wanted to know what the Christian faith was. They were accustomed to examining different worldviews but they had not yet heard of Christianity, so they said to Paul, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean” (Acts 17:19-20). Every evangelist and apologist reading this passage should be on the edge of their seat: They are about to get a bona fide New Testament example of what it actually looks like to sum up the Christian faith. And what does Paul say? I assume that Luke’s record is not intended to be verbatim, and only sums up what he thought was important (which in a way helps me to make the point even clearer). Here’s the whole talk as recorded in Acts 17
Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for
‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
Every time I have made this observation, I have been met with almost immediate misunderstanding, so let me labour the point: Nothing that I have said here implies that Christians should believe as few things as possible – or even that it’s a good thing to only believe the bare essentials. I think holding a lot of bad theology is bad for you. It has “knock on” effects into other things you believe and do. When I talk about theology at the blog and podcast, hopefully I make it obvious that I do care about what I believe – and what others believe too – beyond the bare essentials (just as a dietician cares about what you eat beyond the bare necessities needed to keep you alive). There is much growth, intellectually, spiritually and practically, in moving beyond the bare essentials of Christian thought and into the riches of biblical theology. But I have become convinced of this: The acceptance of the Christian faith does not require that anyone shares your convictions (however important they might be to you) on everything you believe that you have found among those riches.
The post in its entirety is well worth reading. Thanks, Glenn.
Here’s some further reading.
I am a Christian
Jesus, Jesus, what’s it all about?
Contentious Christians (exploring the faith)
What if I strongly disagree? … (explorefaith.org)
Christian Agnosticism (Beliefnet Forums)
P.S. Don’t expect Paul’s advice not to get into “foolish controversies over doctrine” to be taken much notice of around here!
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them. (NIV)
A five-year-old kid from Minnesota has patented a way of swinging on a child’s swing. The US Patent Office issued patent 6,368,227 on 9 April to Steven Olson of St Paul, Minnesota for a “method of swinging on a swing”. Olson’s father Peter is a patent attorney.
The award has generated a mixture of chuckles and frustration at an overworked patent system unable to catch absurd applications. The patent covers moving a swing side to side or in an oval pattern. Children can get bored by swinging back and forth, or by twisting the swing to make it spin, the patent says.
“A new method of swinging on a swing would therefore represent an advance of great significance and value,” it reads. Olson’s alternative is to pull on one chain at a time, so the swing moves towards the side being pulled.
Peter Olson told New Scientist: “I had told him that if he invented something he could file a patent.” His son had not seen sideways swinging because the swings at his school are closely spaced, so he asked his father to file the application.
The patent office initially rejected the application for prior art – citing two earlier patents on swings – but Peter Olson appealed, noting that neither was a method for swinging sideways. The patent was then issued.
The US swing patent does not match an Australian patent on the wheel for sheer absurdity. However, in that case, an Australian lawyer was able to sneak the wheel patent through a fast-track application system. The US patent went through the full application procedure.
Peter Olson says he was not trying to prove anything, just show his son how inventions and patents work. The Australian lawyer who received a patent on the wheel was trying to point out how poorly the system operated.
The US Patent Office says it does not comment on individual patents, leaving it unclear how such an obvious idea won approval. A spokeswoman did say that the patent office uses a legalistic definition of obviousness: “That is not necessarily the conventional definition.”
The swing patent could face reconsideration at the request of the inventor, third parties, or the patent director.
When the laughter stops, silly patents filed by individuals are less a problem than trivial ones filed by large corporations, says Gregory Aharonian, publisher of the Internet Patent News.
As an example, he cites US patent 6,329,919, a business-method patent issued in December 2001 to four IBM developers for a system that issues reservations for using the toilet on an aeroplane.
An Australian man has registered a patent for a “circular transportation facilitation device” – more commonly known as the wheel.
Melbourne patent lawyer John Keogh said he registered the patent to show flaws in an intellectual property law that came into effect in May, the Australian newspaper The Age reported.
The new law established the “innovation patent” system, which Mr Keogh said did not require sufficient oversight from the patent office.
The new innovation patent can be prepared without professional help and only requires claimants to show “innovation”, not “invention”.
Mr Keogh said it represented the government caving in to claimants who said it was too expensive to obtain a standard patent.
“The government decided to find a way to issue a patent more easily,” he said.
“The patent office would be required to issue a patent for anything. All they’re doing is putting a rubber stamp on it.”
But Commissioner of Patents Vivienne Thom said: “To obtain the patent the applicant must make a declaration that they are the inventor.
“Obtaining a patent for the wheel would require a false claim, which would certainly invalidate the patent,” she added.
Selling records … not so much.
Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”
Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (NIV)
In the beginning was the Mash-Up.
Wikipedia says
[John Oswald’s] 1975 track “Power” married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern US evangelist years before hip hop discovered the potency of the same (and related) ingredients.
Amen!
Ayn Rand said
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live.
For those unfamiliar with Randspeak, Rand’s “morality, the morality of reason” is Objectivist ethics. The axiom “existence exists” is metaphysical naturalism. Rand denied the existence of the supernatural. But it is not metaphysical naturalism that defines Rand’s moral system. Naturalistic moral theories are a dime a dozen. What distinguishes Objectivist ethics from other moral systems, and that which is its very foundation stone, is the choice “to live.”
Lindsay Perigo, the southern Pope of Objectivism, explains this (here and elsewhere) very clearly.
Objectivism holds that the choice to live, while it is the basis of morality, is itself pre-moral. If one chooses to live, then morality becomes necessary; if one doesn’t, then, surely, morality has nothing to say about that? How can it have anything to say when it has not yet entered the picture?
If one chooses to live, then the book of morality opens. If one chooses to die, one can just lie down and do it … one is [then] simply irrelevant to morality and vice versa. The key to this and the fact that it keeps on coming up is that Objectivists, being intrinsicists as they usually are, cannot accept that the basis of morality is an “if”—if one chooses life. Even though Rand herself spells it out repeatedly.
Life is neither good nor bad. It simply *is*. It’s the standard of good and bad. If you choose life, then x follows.
The choice to live is pre-moral … and the basis of “moral.” The code of morality that flows from such a choice precludes murder. …
As far as I know, Perigo never does explain how the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” flows from choosing something that “is neither good nor bad,” but “simply *is*.” But it’s not, in fact, hard to explain.
Consider the following remark by impolite, badly flawed Objectivist Tom Burroughes.
Tara Smith’s focus on the issue of human flourishing … is an absolutely vital aspect of Tara Smith’s book. It is, if you will, the punchline.
When people mock the Objectivist focus on life as the reward and standard of value, they seem to ignore that “life” is not just about dodging a morgue or just dragging oneself through the day at a miserable, but not-dead, level. It is about trying to reach the maximum one can in life, in all aspects, over the course of a life. And to do that requires, inter alia, that one cultivates the virtues, and as a consequence, treats others justly and rationally. It is, in fact, a pretty demanding way to live …
Burroughes does not describe something that “simply is” “neither good nor bad.” His is a rich description of the good life, a life that requires that one cultivate certain moral virtues … whereby, one treats others justly and rationally. His is, in fact, a description of Christian living (which is, notoriously, “a pretty demanding way to live”).
Was Ayn Rand a Christian? Yes, she was. She smuggled Christian values into her concept of “life,” at the ground level. She then chose that life, one suffused with Christian virtue. Objectivist ethics is an edifice built on the sure foundation of Christian ethics.
It’s no wonder that good Objectivists and good Christians are both proponents of a broadly libertarian political ideology, such being the only basis of a just system of government.
[Cross-posted to SOLO.]
