Category Archives: rants

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.

interpretation, rants, theology

why did god harden pharaoh’s heart?

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Excuse the lowercase g in the title. It’s a stylistic affectation that I have always used in this blog. (I’m putting off my homework tonight to ruminate about this.) I thought that a bit of musing I made about this subject while I was young could be useful. I have read some of Calvin’s Institutes and found them logically problematic while devotionally stimulating. I have no bones to pick with Calvin himself, but his theories have participated in too many holy wars.

Now to the question: Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart. To listen to a TULIP Calvinist, God was revealing in Romans 9 that some people are purposively sent to hell to prove a point, and as Jerry Wallis suggests, the sharp edge of a consistent TULIP Calvinist requires the destruction of some people to prove he is God. Immediately, I reject any characterization of God that smacks of pettiness. God doesn’t need any of us to do anything for his glory to be completely full. The God that would condemn some to hell and choose beforehand to bring some to heaven, is just philosophical determinism in sheep’s clothing. I reject it out of hand. I actually reject the god that Calvinism requires. He doesn’t qualify.

So it seems that Pharaoh, on the TULIP’s account is doomed to hell. But I offer an alternative. Reading the Bible through “in a year” this year, I just passed the account in Exodus where Moses recounts the plague events. Over and over Pharaoh rejects Moses’ plea and keeps the Israelis in Egypt. The Bible says that God is the one who hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Does God therefore have a personal vendetta against Pharaoh? Or, does he count Pharaoh among those who are predetermined to go to hell, and so uses him to resist the Israeli’s? After all, who cares about Pharaoh’s soul?

But I think if we examine the story, we see that the purpose of God in hardening Pharaoh’s heart has nothing to do with Pharaoh himself. He is not a sociopath when he mourns the loss of his firstborn. He is actually human. The arrogance of the TULIPs makes them think they know the eternal destination of Pharaoh. They are certain that God’s hardening was personal and that God was getting glory in the negativity of Pharaoh’s circumstance.

I will argue that God hardening Pharaoh’s heart had everything to do with demonstrating to National Israel that the God who they were only peripherally acquainted with, YHWH, was the real and demonstrably sovereign Lord of Creation, not Ra and his pantheon of subordinate gods. We know, since they tried to return to Egypt and built replica’s of Egypt’s gods, that they were henotheists. They were not loyal to YHWH and needed something of a boost in their faith to make the move. God provided that boost by the miracles he did in Egypt and the desert. The demonstration of the plagues was not Pharaoh centered. It was Israel centered.

So where does that leave Pharaoh? Well, just about the same place we are all in. We have sinned; we have hurt and offended the creation, people, and God himself. But, we are redeemable in Christ. These arrogant determinists write Pharaoh into oblivion because of his bad behavior (yes, motivated by God). But which one of us has not done what Pharaoh did on some small scale. In fact the hardening of the TULIP’s heart against those who are obviously damned, looks an awful lot like Pharaoh’s hardened heart against Israel.

I appeal finally to the thief on the cross beside Jesus. Did Pharaoh have a moment of repentance before he died? We’ll never know. Honestly, we won’t, despite all the howling of the TULIPs who condemn themselves by their haughty absolutes and deterministic god. What a sorry lot, even with the devotional appeal of Calvin, and the wonderful propositional logic of their declarations.

Are they going to be saved. I don’t know. Some of them will be, I’ll wager. But I don’t know who of them will be; God knows. Like Socrates, though, I am smart enough to know that I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to know whether I will persist until the end with Christ, even though I think I’m elect, elect in and because of the Son of God.

Finally, I take a page out of C. S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. In The Last Battle when the Calormene servant of Tash came to the doorway, Aslan let him in because the servant’s faith was more worthy than Tash, his proclaimed god. With respect to mercy, I believe God is generous. With respect to vengeance, I believe God doesn’t wish things to come to that, though he will exact vengeance on those who positively refuse his proffered gift. And though he exacts vengeance on some, I don’t believe it is with joy, or pleasure. Regret is the emotion that I think most closely resembles the disposition of God in that case.

Don’t take me as mean-spirited, I think it is the TULIPs who are. I reserve further criticisms of Calvinism until later. I’ve exposed my soft underbelly quite enough for tonight.

family, philosophy, rants, theology

a better ethos

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I grew up in a house where respect for science was common currency, not unlike many houses in the United States. My mother, before marrying my father, was a research chemist. Both my parents took it as gospel that science and reason give us useful access to the world and its wonders. I grew up believing the earth was ancient and the universe even older. As readers of National Geographic, we all followed the exploits of the Leakey family as they fleshed out a plausible narrative of ancient paleontology. Louis Leakey was both a follower of Darwin and a devout Christian, not an unusual combination in the circles my parents traveled in.

When I became a believer in the early 1970s I began a long and sometimes tortuous relationship with the evangelical church. I had no problem with Jesus, but some of his followers weren’t so happy with me. God, however, saved me in many ways by the blood of Christ and fellowship of the saints. I needed the church and devoted my life to serving God.

My evangelical adoption came with many things as a package deal. Short hair (no big deal, I was in the Air Force anyway,) a literal interpretation of the Bible, and a deep devotion to God. I’m sure you can guess where we are going with this. I adopted with my new family a literal interpretation of the Bible, itself a very modern method, and struggled to reinterpret the world in those terms. I have to say that in my euphoria of early salvation, I glossed over the troubling consequences of literal interpretation and because of my grateful reaction to God I rebuilt my world with a young earth view.

None of my education at Valley Forge Christian College prepared me to face the consequences of such a naïve view of the scripture, though I was learning that not all scripture could be read literally. I did adopt an old earth view during that time, seeing that it was one reasonably supported view in Christianity. The curious thing was that I defended it with a strange logic of scripture. God perceived that a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. So, if time was relative to God, then I also would count the six days of creation to be relative. This realization did nothing to dissuade me from literalism, if I could import a reasonable argument to defend what, on the surface, appeared to be true, that the earth looked like it was very old.

I discovered later that the young earth creationists, many of them my brothers and sisters in Christ, also believed that the earth appeared to be very old. What seemed strange to me was that they spent most of their time proposing arguments more gimmicky than mine to prove that the earth was actually very young. I rebuffed their nuances when I realized that they were not as interested in doing science as they were in discrediting it. I started to see those people as one would see a dull witted uncle who still argues that the New Deal of Roosevelt’s era was a bad idea. You still invite him to Thanksgiving dinner but hope nobody brings up politics. My problem is that I like to get him going and ride the excitement, even though sometimes it turns sour. I don’t think he gets it.

When I was doing my doctoral studies at Temple University, I became interested in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. I discovered that within these disciplines, a critique of science was emerging that at once acknowledged the middle state of our knowledge and the embeddedness of the scientific enterprise within human limitations. Science, on this view, could not declare its findings with certainty, even though it had mastered technologies of many kinds. I found comfort in the realization that unlike the young earth creationists, the scientists, with many exceptions, were able to critique their own work. That seemed to be a much more honest way of engaging the world, and I adopted that ethos wholeheartedly. I hadn’t abandoned Christ, but believed that he would prefer this sort of humility against the principled dishonesty of the young earth creationists. I call it principled, because it resides within a tradition of biblical interpretation that had for a large part been a profitable means of exploring scriptural truth. I call it dishonest because its participants were not interested in the truth of the world any longer, but building a rational citadel against infidels. Their method had become naïve propositional logic and not faith in God.

In order to enter the kingdom of God one must become like a little child. Between the scientists and the young earth creationists, the scientists were more like little children being guided by wonder, beauty, and curiosity. I am not suggesting that scientists are blameless and more holy than the young earth creationists, but rather that they model an ethos that leads to the kingdom of God. They are also continuing to obey the command of God to subdue the earth.

rants, student, theology

an old rant

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You may or may not be surprised to know that the insular character of modern conservative church life is one of the chief reasons people reject the gospel. If you are really interested in helping people find Christ you will expand your borders beyond the default comfort zone. As Isaiah said, “Woe to you who are at ease in Zion.” People need saving, and closing ourselves off from them and their ideas is a sure way to get them to ignore us.

We permit football (the modern equivalent of bloody gladiator sports) into our Christian homes, not only because it will get people saved if they realize some of the players are Christians, but because we like it. To shut off science because it somehow sullies our Christian thinking is a bit hypocritical. Some of you may also shun the sports arena. That’s fine. I admire your purity. But Jesus went where the people went. He didn’t sit in the Temple and wait for people to come to him.

rants

things that irritate me

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I am sorry for the negative note, but there are things that irritate me. Do you know that there are conventions in place for driving that tell us before we ever come to a stop sign or stop light what to do? Well there are, If there is a four way stop, and you come to a stop before anyone else, you can go first. If you and somebody to your left arrive at the same time, you can go first. If you and somebody else to your right arrive at the same time, you must wait till they go before you do. Here is the thing that irritates me. People who, thinking they are being polite, or giving you something, or according you privilege of some sort, and wave me on irritate me. They think for some reason that you need to be allowed to do what you are, by convention told to do anyway. Or breaching convention they wish to allow you to go first when you arrive at the same time or later from the left. I try to ignore these people, but when it is really my right to go first, by convention, I feel angered because it looks like them waving me on is something I am obeying. I feel like stopping in the middle of the road to prevent them from going. I feel like getting out of the car and asking them if it is OK to go now. I feel like getting pissed off. I realize that there are so many people doing this completely idiotic thing, that I would spend my day being angered by them and reacting to them. I feel like giving them the finger. I am far too polite and respectful, however, to do any of these anger-induced things.

I thought I got over road rage in Birmingham AL. But this is a new thing. I haven’t found the zen of traffic at stop signs, yet. I will. There is no fruit in revenge, or violence, or trying to shame them into doing what comes automatically for a socially conscious driver. They are just humans, and they may really be trying to be courteous. Who am I to stop people from being courteous in such a rude world? Well, it certainly would be counterproductive to be violent when much of what my life is concerned with is peace.

To the idiot drivers who never went through driver’s ed, I am sorry for my anger, sorry for my anxiety. But I will continue to ignore you even as you continue to ignore common sense. I will not try to tell you that green means stop and red means go. You would not believe me. That is too obvious. The more subtle things like traffic conventions are beyond your ability, even as being kind towards idiots is beyond mine.

How about people driving with cell phones attached to their psyche? It is illegal in some states for good reason. How about tailgaters? How about drivers who pay more attention to their passengers than to the road, or traffic? How about people who take half a mile to accelerate to 35 miles an hour? The list is not endless, but long enough for me to desire even more horsepower to get around you, and away from you.