All posts by j'bug

I teach philosophy and build web pages.
digital world

disabled mac app store

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OK, so sometimes on the bleeding edge, you get cut. I am a user of Keynote 5.3 (iWork ’09). I use it every day! The new version, which I installed with Mavericks took over my presentations and wouldn’t let them go. In fact, because I had installed Mavericks with my laptop screen down, and was using the external monitor, Mavericks thought that the external monitor was the main monitor. So it wouldn’t/couldn’t show the slideshow at all in an alternate monitor. Bad decision on its part. I had to reinstall Mountain Lion, then reinstall Mavericks with my laptop alone to force it to treat my laptop as the main monitor. Then, even with Mavericks forcing me to use the external monitor to show my presentations, Keynote 6 captured my presentations and wouldn’t let them go without a lot of stupid workaround. The chief insult was the huge shift in workflow it required.

I thought that allowing Apple to test my system to upgrade me when it thought I needed it was fine, because, well, Apple has normally been sensible. But now that it wants to upgrade me to Keynote 6 every time it detects that I have trashed Keynote 6, it is time to turn off the automatic updates.

Power users of Pages and Numbers are whining also. But since I only use Pages for billing, and haven’t left Excel (after a short dalliance with Numbers), I don’t care so much about them. But Apple forcing me to change my workflow because it thinks I’d be better off with Keynote 6 is a little much.

theology

perfection is a process

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Christ was not yet perfect as a child. At least that’s what Hebrews 2:10 says, “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.” (ESV) (pathéma Strong’s: (a) suffering, affliction, (b) passion, emotion, (c) an undergoing, an enduring). The mystery that God would require that Jesus suffer as a means of training is not lost on us who suffer.

But, let’s be clear, suffering for doing wrong is not the same as suffering as training. It is similar in that suffering for doing wrong can teach us a lesson, but it brings us no closer to perfection, since, in some brutish fashion punishment brings us to ground zero in the scheme of things, purifies us to begin again. Tho wounds we sustain, however, debilitate us from achieving possible heights. On some account, pleasures have to be paid back. As John Stuart Mill suggests, the abuse of lower pleasures makes one unfit for higher ones.

The movement toward perfection comes from suffering that comes to humans as strong emotion in conflict, suffering for doing good. As trite as it sounds, we have a saying for that, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But to ennoble the phrase, it is an ordinary experience for humans to be misunderstood, and to be treated badly for good deeds.

Up until the point where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he mostly tells people whom he performs miracles on not to spread the news. Why does he do that? It’s obvious he’s not successful, people tell stories and he becomes famous for doing these things. But there’s a moment of strong emotion before he raises Lazarus from the dead. He raises Lazarus in front of people who will initiate his crucifixion in response. One must wonder at his sense of timing, his knowledge of what must lie ahead. He is not stoic. He must recognize the price he must pay for the designed perfection. In the garden of Gethsemane we are told the emotion was crushing, enough so that he dripped with sweat. Is this the press that brought Christ to perfection? I think so, and I also think that something like this is the thing that brings us to perfection as well. But I think, most of us dodge the necessity of it, not filling our role as humans in the design of God. At least, we do not drink the full cup of it.

Hebrews 6:1 tells us to move on to maturity, to perfection (teleiotés) not going over the axioms of faith again, but moving to their logical conclusion in the action faith requires. The reason why people refuse to grow up is that it requires suffering. The Greek word is one that is part of a constellation of ideas surrounding the belief that there is a future destined for individuals, and in the Bible that is in God, especially in the Church, and only in exceptional cases, outside of it. In general it is to become like Christ in full Christian character. For a person in Christ, in the Church, a further destiny must discovered by each individual. That particular path must be taken in cooperation with God through, again, suffering of strong emotion and perhaps physical stress, harm, or death. However, for Christians in the USA, the suffering does not often lead to death.

The conclusion is that Christ suffered, we will too if we are following him. The puzzle is to sort out whether we deserve the suffering as a consequence of our misuse of the world’s goods, or as a consequence of being a person who is following Christ. And then there is suffering for others, the task that perfection must carry out. It is in this that there is reward for eternity, and not without it.

digital world

misplaced confidence

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I believe that software has two test phases. The first is in the confines of trusted groups, developers, and beta testers. The second test phase is the initial release, where customers find bugs that couldn’t be found without them. That is, the software company has clean machines that test basic functionality. The customers have dirty machines with sometimes terrible defects. The software tested on those machines in the real world is more likely to show whether the software is robust or not.

Well, I can’t make up my mind on this problem. I downloaded and installed Apple’s Mavericks on top of a Mountain Lion installation. Foolishly, I trusted it, and didn’t do a complete backup before I started. I haven’t in the past found Apple’s software to be buggy in any really devastating way.

But when I went to project my slide show the next day, the show refused to project properly. I found a workaround, but it really sucked and was inconvenient. This is what happened. I use Keynote for my presentations. Keynote has been a robust and on many accounts, flawless, piece of software. Mavericks allowed me to update my version of Keynote to version 6. It was an easy installation, and that part went fine. I was a little distressed that the user interface was so different, but I knew I would find my way around eventually. I thought that it wouldn’t stop me from presenting the next day, the shows I was using were already set in place, and didn’t need editing. I was wrong.

At home, I have a single external monitor. I plug my Macbook Pro into a 40″ Samsung TV. It works great. No issues. But it looks like Mavericks thinks my external monitor is the primary monitor. When I do my presentations, the external monitor is my secondary monitor. So when I tell the presentation to play on the external monitor, it plays on my laptop. I will have to figure out a way to fix this. Unfortunately, I think I will have to revert to the prior installation on a week old backup, then restore newer files, reinstall Mavericks without the external monitor hooked up, then we’ll see what happens.

digital world, philosophy

limits of rationalization

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The problem of what we can think and how we systematize what we think, the boundaries between what we teach and what we know always emerge when I run into people, (students, professors), who think that they have all the categories in place and a place for each bit of knowledge that can be acquired. This is a form of foundationalism that immediately calls up the process of our discoveries in the twentieth century, that an exact interpretation of our world, the proofs we might offer, and the certainties we might give as answers to the issue of what we can know must be left to the fuzzy borderlands that stretch beyond our technologies.

By technologies I mean not only the physical reach of our civilizations, but the practices of the self that enable us to live within that reach. Not only is our physical technology extremely dangerous to those who will not control their interface with it, but the technology itself, a prodigious intelligent machine thinks nothing of the beings that inhabit it, and can’t will their safety. Its automatic responses reduce the freedom to move, act and choose a future course of events, limit and restrict what can be known.

In a similar fashion, the rational technology of our civilization, reduced to axioms and formulas, both create a comforting residence for the unimaginative servants of that technology, and a dangerous limitation on the expansion of our knowledge. Definitions and categories, themselves useful in turning words and ideas into technologies, fail to extend themselves to the possibilities that lie beyond that technology. Just as a label restricts the movement of an individual by subjecting that individual to a set of written, spoken, and unspoken rules, so categories and definitions set boundaries on what is knowable, and limitations on the discovery of truths. Categories and definitions, not true of themselves, are but artifacts of our civilization or some previous one, whose use is to create some technology that gives us ability to manipulate our world. Reliance on them is particularly helpful for managing ordinary issues, but of no help for discovering how to manage new knowledge. Attempting to do so would be something like reverting to Newtonian mechanics for solving some riddles that arise in Einstein’s theories, or, as Galileo famously criticized the proponents of Aristotle for appealing to authority when faced with the results of his empirical examination of the heavens.

Don’t get me wrong, when our theorizing reaches a certain level of competence, we find it useful to turn it into technology. But we have to recognize the limitations of that technology in order to look beyond it. We must be cautious not to try to answer questions that are no longer being asked. Why should we still ask how the laws of physics changed when the universal flood took place according to the biblical record? Well, we shouldn’t. Not only do we know that there wasn’t a universal flood, but that the timeframe for local Mesopotamian floods is perfectly coherent with the biblical record. Add that to the forms oral history took, the local nature of their cosmos, and the explanation for the record as it stands in the Bible do not require a transformation of physics into something unrecognizable. Add to that the fine-tuning argument (anthropic principle as yet unresolved) and you retain a universe with constant physical laws. The worried believers will then place this discussion outside of their reality and dismiss it. But have I valued the text less than they by understanding the context under which it was written? Not really. I have valued it more for what it is instead of what I wish it to be on the basis of a faulty hermeneutic. I have retained the truths inherent in the Bible while they have manipulated the text to create an alternate universe.

What I am asking the reader to do is to consider the use of our rational technologies, philosophies, theologies, psychologies, scientific theories, et al with their axioms and rules of inference, with their ability to map out the rational landscape. We must recognize the limitations of such approaches to philosophical knowledge. They have great powers but by their nature restrict. They forbid asking questions of a certain kind, because those questions are double edged. They not only speculate, but worry the certainties and coherence of the systems they are part of.

One standard presupposition in my repertoire is that reality is richer than any of our theories can draw out. In all of history, the wonder of new discoveries and the profligate productivity emerging from them has never disappointed this presupposition. The greatest value of this metarule is that it doesn’t create rules, but incites us to permit curiosity and explore the wonder that the natural world and our minds provide.

So as much as I explore the reaches of our ancient and current theorizing, I never let it rule possible theorizing. I remain open to the wonder that emerges naturally without saying beforehand where it will lead. This is risky behavior, because it could lead me to rebuild my core beliefs. But the risk I turn away from is that of being turned to stone, trapped in a system from which I may not be able to escape. What poverty.

family, friends, rants

public space, private space

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My discussion of this issue, at least the inner dialogue that takes place whenever my private bubble is breached, is foremost an internal one. I wonder how people think of their spaces when they live in an obviously public space. So this discussion about public and private space revolves around the psychology of living in public with other people.

This churning of my soul may just be a private dialogue, but it comes when people stick their bodies, voices, cars and other things that they have some control over into the space that I should have control over but don’t because of them. So this begins by thinking that my preferences are just pet peeves. It continues when I think that it can’t just be me who has these thoughts. It becomes an obsession when traffic of all sorts gets backed up around their preference, or failure to form one.

I believe that society would be a better place without these transgressions, but I also think negatively that serendipity and chance acquaintance would suffer from the lack of accidental contact brought about by a less strict adherence to Doug’s rules of order, or even a complete ignorance of them altogether. That said, and I do believe my own self criticism, there is much that people could do to make the lives of those around them less arduous. But a good bit of this only resolves itself in negotiation between competing interests. However most of the necessary groundwork has already been done.

The first principle of space, is being aware of other’s needs for space. And this involves use of the golden rule. Let’s start with an example. Our architecture sometimes attempts to mollify the effect of this particular breach of public space.

After a meeting of some kind, people often gather in small groups and talk. This seems perfectly normal and good as far as it goes. But when people stand in the doorway or the only available aisle to do this talking they breach the public space if people want to get by. Heaven forbid that the conversation is broken up, but frequently the only way to get these transgressors out of the way is to say something and interrupt the conversation. If it is rude to breach the conversation, it is far ruder to force the breach of the conversation by inhabiting the public space as if it were private.

What is private space? Even though every culture has its own constraints on private space, private space is defined as the boundary that should not be crossed by another person unless explicitly obtaining consent. The way people keep their private space is various in different cultures but it remains a sphere that cannot be breached casually without offense. Each culture has a combination of rules either formal or informal that determine the circumstances under which one person may touch another. Breaking those conventions between equals is seen as too friendly, pushy, overly familiar, domineering, abusive, assault, or even rape.

For example, in the US, pregnant women almost get used to affectionate (male or female) strangers touching their pregnant belly without eliciting great offense. It may be uncomfortable, and the touch can be resisted without offense, but it is also an introduction into a world where breaches of private space by the child will be the norm for the expectant mother. But for a stranger to touch the belly of a non-pregnant woman is an offensive breach of private space. Why the difference between the two events?

If we can learn what that difference is, I believe we can obtain a clue to the character of the difference between public and private space.

philosophy, rants

barnes & noble

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I was browsing the racks in Barnes & Noble for a book I might give to my daughter Eden. I thought there might be a thoughtful and interesting book in the philosophy section. I was right. I got a book called The Hobbit and Philosophy. There are lots of interesting article titles there. But I noticed a disturbing trend, and I don’t know whether this is just the local store (my suspicion), or some edict from corporate headquarters.

I am not one to worry about what people think or express, as long as the tone is even and well crafted. And I am willing to listen to rants when it comes to the abuse of someone’s rights or a breach of morality. But I noticed that many of the books whose covers were facing the audience were of the new atheist persuasion. Don’t get me wrong, I like reading their rants and buy their books just to argue with them. I am a theist, and their thin dismissals of my experience and education (as prodigious as some of theirs) mark a failure of both their imagination and understanding. But from the display, it seems there is a clear intention to promote these works as central to philosophy.

Again, don’t get me wrong, the standard works of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Hegel are there alongside some of the newer lights like Zizek, I’m just grumbling about the promotion of peripheral works as if they were central to philosophy. Maybe this is a passing fancy of a particularly angry store manager, a momentary promotion, and if so, I should just chill. Over the ages, who will ever know.

I understand the need to scream at stupidity. This rant may be an example of that. And the new atheists (NA) often are screaming at the stupidity of lots of incoherent theism. Americans seem pretty dull-witted when it comes to changing their minds, and many branches of Christianity seem dedicated to shooting themselves in the feet, giving the NA plenty of ammunition. It’s laughable, really. But then, I weep, because it really tells how the mighty Christian culture has fallen from its previous dominance. With the curious mix of rationales in the NA rhetoric of bad behavior by Christians, overconfidence, and incomplete science and statistics, they nonetheless have a point. That doesn’t mean that they have achieved the truth, only that as long as the Christian church chooses to live and argue on the old terms, it will leave room for criticism.

Part of that criticism arises just because responsible people in the church are just not interested in carrying on the conversation with those who oppose Christianity. I understand that. The outcome, however, is that the church carries on as if the opponents don’t exist. That is a bad thing. But with the absolute impossibility of keeping up in this era, we often must be content to keep aware. I don’t think this blog is much more than that.

drugs, politics, rants

“the problem with pot”

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I speak in response to an article in the Pentecostal Evangel dated a few days from now. I get them as a courtesy of AGWM Communications where I work. I am entirely sympathetic with the goals and aims of the Assemblies of God World Missions team and their claim to be founded on the Bible as the Word of God. This denomination is one of the most progressive and vigorous groups aimed in this world at the propagation of the good news of Christ non-prejudicially to the whole world. There is complete and sincere concern for the welfare of people and a flourishing future for individuals. I happily subscribe to their missions philosophy, the leadership, and working people engaged in this ministry.

That said, I do not always subscribe to the less than clear thinking of the magazine they put out, though for the most part it is well researched and carefully produced. The Evangel this time, focussing on Convoy of Hope has a distracting little article near the end called “The Problem With Pot.”

Let me start with a good part of the article. Andrew Carpentieri’s story is that he first became acquainted with illegal drugs through marijuana. This is not an unusual story. The good part of his story is that he found salvation in Christ and was released from the bondage of addiction to much stronger drugs into a life of liberty in Christ. I applaud him and God for this transformation. I do not dispute the facts of this story.

Now, to the bad part… Andrew’s story is woven into a fabric of half truths and misinformation that makes it look like marijuana is at fault for his downfall. Information is offered in the article that blames marijuana for Andrew’s inevitable decline into a criminal underworld, captive to addictive substances and contrary to all good sense. The chief argument used is that marijuana is a gateway drug.

In case you haven’t been listening for the last 43 years since Richard Nixon started the war on drugs, marijuana is a gateway drug that leads into the inevitable decline and further drug abuse of anyone who uses it. Dr. Mitch Earleywine1 asks the question whether marijuana use can be a “cause” of further drug abuse. He concludes that on David Hume’s criteria of causality, marijuana cannot be a cause of further drug abuse because studies do not show that. Instead there is no statistically relevant correlation between marijuana use and, as Earleywine demonstrates, cocaine use. If the gateway theory is to be believed, then there should be a strong correlation between marijuana use and cocaine use. But Earleywine shows good statistical evidence that only about 2% of all marijuana users go on to use powdered cocaine on a monthly basis. (I am condensing the statistical arguments here.) Even fewer have used crack cocaine in the last month.

If then it is statistically improbable that marijuana is the cause of addictive monthly cocaine use, then, what is the reason for calling marijuana a gateway drug? It certainly is a gateway, but not in the way the author John W. Kennedy wants you to think, (as the federal government also wants you to think). Marijuana is a gateway into the criminal underworld of illicit drug use, thievery, robbery, fraud, etc. that permeates the gray areas of modern American life. Once a person uses marijuana, they have entered the underworld economy. Outside the distaste this brings to some of us, and the harm to people it actually causes, what does it mean that marijuana is a gateway to this realm?

The story is fairly simple. It has to do with whether someone in authority is a plausible witness to the truth. (The government claims that it is a plausible witness to the truth. It claims that it knows the truth about currently illicit drugs and can decide for you how to behave when it makes laws to punish you for using them.) There is a moral sense in all of us, atheist and theist alike, that knows when it is being lied to. When the government and those who agree with it about marijuana tell the public that marijuana has no medically redeeming virtue, it is lying. We have 5000 years of evidence that people have been using marijuana for medical purposes. There was even a large section on marijuana in the medical compendium before the 1940s in the USA that described the medical value of marijuana.

Here’s the modern kicker. When a teen tries marijuana, they often say that the D.A.R.E. program has mislead them. Marijuana is not as harmful as is claimed.

[Is marijuana not harmful as the Evangel article says people claim? No, marijuana, as a psychoactive drug has potentially dangerous effects that make it necessary to avoid exposing undeveloped humans. Every group seeking legalization of marijuana, including N.O.R.M.L., Drug Policy Alliance, and the Marijuana Policy Project insist that any legalization scheme must follow a similar trajectory as lawful alcohol restrictions, preventing underaged persons from purchasing the drug. No considerate adult would recommend allowing the use of marijuana to minors except in cases of medical expediency. The Evangel article states that marijuana may cause the early onset of schizophrenia to minors who use it. That has been attested in statistically relevant ways. But in these cases, schizophrenia would have presented for those individuals before the age restrictions on legalized marijuana would have allowed them to use the drug, usually by the age of 18. But statistically relevant also is the fact that the increased public use of marijuana shows no increase in the incidence of schizophrenia. Here’s a bit I know you will like, most high school students find it easier to acquire marijuana (black market) than cigarettes or alcohol (both regulated by law). I digress…]

The young person who tries marijuana and finds that it is not as harmful as they have been told, will believe that they have been lied to. They will believe that they have also been lied to about heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine, about which they may not have been lied to. You must see the dilemma this places the users of illicit drugs and the authorities in.

Marijuana has been drafted as the gateway drug. It is certainly not the cause of further drug use if we’re to take the statistics seriously, though it has been claimed to be. But the lie of the authorities leaves young people unprepared to encounter stronger and more dangerous drugs and the criminal element they have been introduced to. The legitimacy of the government message has been diluted by a patent lie and further obfuscation. It has disqualified itself from making claims of the sort it does. The fault here lies with the government not with the drug itself.

In the end of the article, Kennedy almost comes clean. He claims that the only authority that suffices to redeem a person is God, and that other authorities are not efficacious. He also moves people toward self-control. I applaud these remarks. They are correct in the best biblical and moral senses. So, I ask why has he bought the terrible story the federal government tells. Why has he woven his story into theirs, when they have done nothing well concerning this drug. He has told truths and half truths, but obscured the real truths that would cause suspicion on the authority of our government. Agreeing with the naughty government, he therefore waffles when it comes to committing to Christ the power of our own resurrection, our healing and security.

Kennedy recommends trusting Christ, but he damages his claim by siding with the fallible and clearly problematic government view about a drug it has lied about for over sixty years. Is Christ and self-control sufficient for living the life of freedom, or do we need the government to control our behavior?

My suggestion is to stick to the message of Christ and avoid the faulty “conservative” bent that seeks to lord it over people. The war on drugs is in reality a war against people who use drugs, people that we as Christians claim to care about. What a terrible hypocrisy. “The greatest among you is the servant of you all.” The federal government, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is in its own service lately, not yours.

Note: If you or anyone you care about is entangled in addictive behaviors, you may find this page or this page helpful. A look at this well documented page of effects of drugs on neonatal development, and attendant complications is useful partly because the scientific papers referenced are also linked. My inclusion of these rehab sites are not endorsements of them, only a place to start for those who are interested. In contrast, some rehab institutions (not necessarily the ones noted here) have been accused of turning addicts into profit. Read this article. (note inserted 5/6/2019, edited 6/5/2019 and 9/4/2019.)

(I added this post on October 6, 2015 to mjmemo.com my blog dealing with marijuana prohibition.)

1 Mitch Earleywine, Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), pps. 50-60.

digital world, rants, student

the evils of wikipedia

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I keep hearing from my academic colleagues that Wikipedia is problematic, faulty, and unreliable. The last time I checked, Wikipedia was judged to have 5 errors per article while the Encyclopaedia Britannica had only 3 errors per article. So if Wikipedia is so bad, why do we consider the Britannica to be a model?

Frankly, I would like to see student papers with only 5 errors. That would make my grading so much easier. I would also like to see scholarly books with only 5 errors, misstatements, or problematic conclusions.

I think the critique of Wikipedia is problematic. First of all, anyone who does scholarly research processes errors with a grain of salt. The author may have claimed to know something that turns out to be false. Knowledge at the time of the writing may fully support the error. These errors are forgivable, and we forgive them all the time. But, to accuse the author of intentionally deceiving the reader tangles the critic in an endless argument about intentions, which can’t be proven. There is a strong bias in our reading of factual, scholarly material that the author intends to tell the truth. The argument posed by the author may be good even though the evidence cited for it is faulty.

Second, though the material in Wikipedia is crowd sourced, it is nonetheless more than often vetted by multiple viewers. I read many summaries of arguments in Wikipedia and find them to be often useful. There are also summaries of materials I have read that I don’t necessarily agree with, that need modification, that need references and links. I would not know that without my expertise, and yet, the article may be useful even with the errors.

Third, if we are looking to Wikipedia for the whole picture, we are being unfair. Why should we expect more than it is able to provide, even though it provides a great deal? It has many resources not easily available in a library book or journal, and links to internet resources that include books and journals.

Fourth, the articles are uneven in treatment. That may be so, but there are also warnings on the pages to tell you if the arguments proposed need support, or editing to provide additional resources.

It may be a good starting place for research, resources, links, definitions, and catalogs of books and articles to be read. That’s a powerful argument for using it. It is not the only resource, but with our internet presence it is the most readily available one. In addition, it is a trivial procedure to get answers there. Most often, when doing a web search on some arcane subject, or a popular author, et al, the first link that pops up is wikipedia. Trying to get information from online school libraries, or libraries paid for by schools is a multistep process, often guarded by passwords and byzantine web portals. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be used for serious research. But if they should, it would be helpful to take the resistance away from the system, and require a password only when someone wanted to access a particular document after the search and preliminary investigation pointed in that direction.

For those who complain about the quality of the articles in Wikipedia, I have one suggestion: Get involved. It is often the experts who complain. I ask then, why they are not contributing? Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

friends, theology

my friend spencer

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My friend Spencer commented on my previous post in Facebook. I quote it here because it is important to address this sort of objection to my dismissal of Calvinism.

Spencer Griffin: Isaac Watts Hymn, “How Sweet and awefull is this place, with Christ within the doors” in its entirety, as an expression of the best of evangelical Calvinism… enjoying the mystery of prayer, which is, after all, where God’s sovereignty and our participation in His Work somehow mix. “People should be converted though our prayers”……and the victorious word of the Gospel!!!! I have been praying to understand how God’s sovereignty infused Edwards and Whitfield to compel men to come to Christ…..The use of people to reach people, what a weak plan Lord! I do not understand God’s ways, its like asking why he let men fall— “there is none that seeks for God” Romans 3:11, and yet the Son of Man came… “in the fullness of time” to seek and to save the lost….through you and me??? how does that work….Good griief!!!! even St. Paul says what appear to be contradictory things on the same page!!!! A world in which contingency surrounds God leaves no room for the wonder of the Gospel any more than does a missapplied Calvinisim that does not pray. But why pray if ultimate contingency surrounds even Jesus…….we need an omnipotent Savior! And scripture says we have one!

I applaud the actions of our brothers and sisters who, inconsistent with TULIP make an effort to seek and save the lost. I have no argument with those who at first (theologically) refusing to do the master’s bidding at last go to do it. I have an argument with those who insincerely preach the love of God to those who they believe are lost by the determination of an almighty God. God to the TULIP is impassable, incapable of any movement in response to our prayers. Yet we know he does respond to prayer, and the best of us prays like they mean it.

I never suggested nor will I that God in Christ is surrounded with contingency. That is a straw man used to argue against any possibility of free will. It is a set of false alternatives: TULIP or absolute contingency. We know more today about the things of our lives that are materially out of our control, yet we are responsible for our behavior implying legitimate freedom. But that freedom is only partial. Jesus suggested we cannot change the color of our hair by willing it. So, being unable to choose in this fashion was never in our hands. TULIP denies that any expression of freedom will change the mind of God.

As I state here and elsewhere, I am not arguing with Calvin or any of his followers’ devotion, or obedience, but the theory he and his followers espoused is just a form of philosophical determinism. Sovereignty does not imply determinism. What a pitiful unqualified god that would have to make people be as he wanted them, and punish others to prove his power. That’s not what we understand as being human, or understand as the loving God.

The point of this exercise is to recognize that God’s purpose in hardening Pharaoh’s heart had everything to do with proving his power to national Israel,(and yes to Pharaoh and the Egyptians) and nothing to do with Pharaoh’s eternal destiny, which, by the way, is never mentioned in scriptures anywhere, even Roman’s 9, though it is assumed he is on his way or already is in hell.

But it wouldn’t even matter if God were surrounded with contingency. Can you imagine him wringing his hands at the infinite possibilities that are out of his control? Nonsense. The God I choose who manages the entire creation, (which, by the way is unimaginably larger than any tiny cosmology our forbears imagined) is capable of managing a few puny humans whom he gave freedom to reject him with. He also gave them freedom to accept, worship, love, and fellowship with him, even though we can’t do the simple magic of changing the color of our hair by our will alone. (Some people really look good in shocking pink or green hair.)

I think the argument about Calvinism as opposed to Arminianism is so over and done with, that some of us hold on to it like some hold to a young earth cosmology. There is better theology, better science, better philosophy available than Calvin or any of his modern cronies have imagined. I would be happy to abandon the project of proving or disproving TULIP as a shibboleth of our allegiance to the living God. But some are so convinced that preserving the debate ensures conservatism, that they fail to challenge the ugly presuppositions that hold it together.

Spencer suggested that the mystery of God using men to bring the good news to a lost and dying world is equal to the mystery of God letting men fall. Look at the assumptions that back this remark. First, God could have prevented us from the “fall.” OK, then we would not be the humans we are today. We would be smart animals, guiltless, cunning, capable. But I answer that the mystery lies in why we are convinced that God had no idea what we would do when he set us on the earth this way. The answer to that is that TULIP wants a vengeful God, a God who made Adam sin so he could punish him. That would be consistent.

The only other answer is that God knew all along that his creation would stray, and that, as Hebrews tells us, provided the savior from the foundation of the world not as a contingency, but as the preparation for salvation that would be required. Why would it be required if God set us up so we would sin? We would be blameless on that account. However, the acts in the garden were freely chosen, (even as ours are) irrespective of the lack of foresight they reveal, so Adam and Eve become morally culpable, and responsible, cannot pay for their sin, and require a savior, which God provides.

Either, the God of the Calvinist could not stop men from falling, making him less than omnipotent. Or, God, as Augustine suggests, gives people freedom as a legitimate, active cause in the world, for which each is responsible.

One of the reasons I reject Calvinism, which I mentioned above, is that the theoretical underpinnings of Calvin’s theology are medieval, scholastic, universalizing, absolute, and mistaken. We have more to work with today, better theology, better philosophy, better science.

We can get more by obeying what Jesus commanded us, than what results from a theologically sophisticated Calvinism. In fact, I argue that we could get the participation of a devoted Edwards or Whitfield without the screwy theology which renders their actions futile attempts at saving people God had already determined were going to hell.