The Jolly Green Dragon

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2009-03-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

And which world is the world that I belong to?

The world where you are never what you seem

The world where people forget and ignore you

Because you bear no resemblance to who you are?

Or the world of make believe and masks

Of painting one’s face simply to be seen

To create a face for them to recognize

So maybe they’ll see beyond your disguise

Which world do I belong to

The unseen or the mis-seen

The fake and the forced

Or simply the ignored

Is there any in between?

I am not of either persuasion

To neither world do I belong

Though the pull of each is strong

I am myself, myself alone

My outside will betray my inside

Though I remain unknown

I will not create a false face

To grant myself effortless visibility

I will be myself

Who I was made to be

Not a mere shadow of a thing

Or some fake mannequin

I am an image bearer of the eternal God unchanging

I am his child, his creation

What I once was is behind me

Who I am to be before me

I will press on

That I may be a vessel, forgotten

In the wonder of the image I bear

That I might be a light

Shining in the darkness

Then will I be truly seen

Hi again!

2009-03-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

So, my apologies for having postponed posting for so long. School has been really busy, and my life outside of that hasn't been exactly sane. There have been so many thoughts rolling around in my head that I couldn't even sort them out enough to write them down. The more I think and learn, the more I am convinced that there is so much that I don't know and don't understand. Even things that I thought I was certain of, that I knew inside and out have been discovered to be other than they seemed. Yay for chaos. I catch myself wondering if I will ever reach a point where I feel like I can see, where I can rest. I'm not entirely sure that I want to, because quite honestly, as tiring as all this is, it is quite fun. I am learning so much. Still, it might be nice to reach a place where I can catch my breath and take the time to catalog all the things that I am learning.

This semester we are reading about learning and knowledge. When I found out that the title of the semester was "On Learning and Knowledge", I thought it would be something like how we learn. Hah. well, I guess we did think about that a bit, but so far most of the semester has been about whether it is possible to learn anything or to know anything. Talk about confusing and mind bending. Oy. So far, we've read Plato's Meno, Aristotle's Metaphysics (only Zeta, thank heavens...it wasn't in English, it was halfway between English and Greek--Eek, as the translator called it), Augustine's On the Teacher, Aquinas's On the Teacher, Descartes's Meditation on First Philosophy, Blaise Pascal' s Pensees, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Really interesting reading, but quite a bit of it. It really is amazing to watch how things changed over time. Plato started out saying that we never learn anything entirely new, but that everything that we "learn" is simply being remembered from our past lives, and Locke says that we are a blank slate when we are born (tabula rossa) and our only source of knowledge is sensory. Hume takes this even further to question our ability to really know much of anything because he can't figure out how we make the intuitive leap to cause and effect. Right now I'm reading Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and I think he's trying to solve that problem, but I haven't gotten far enough to tell (in fact, I have to finish reading him today...and that, of course, is why I am posting. Isn't procrastinating useful).

It is insane trying to stay sane while reading so much that calls into question the very basics of human reasoning and human identity. I'm still pretty sure that I believe what I did, but I am a bit less sure why. Or else more sure why, because I've seen the madness of the other side and that is part of why I believe what I believe. One thing that I realized is that the existentialist worldview is something that had bugged me for a really long time, but because I didn't know enough about it I couldn't quite figure out what it was that was driving me nuts. Last year, a couple of my friends and I wrote a paper trying to address the need for chivalry in our culture. We all could see where we were trying to go, but unfortunately, we couldn't quite put our finger on it (which led to a rather frustrating time writing that paper). Now, with all the reading we are doing about the basis of existentialism, I am realizing that that is part of what we are trying to attack. We were trying to come up with an alternative to Sartre's Nausea (which is basically about what happens when you truly believe existential skepticism). I'm still not quite sure where that takes me next, but I am sure it will...

Anyway, given the amount of Kant I have to read before I sleep, I think I will end this long and rambling post here...

Or perhaps here....

Note to Self: Drink More Water or, How to Find Out if Your Friends Really Love You

2008-09-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

So, guess what I did last night?

I got my requisite hours in the ER out of the way.

2008-09-26T10:54:00.001-07:00

I was sitting in class and suddenly realized that if I didn't lie down, the world was going to become very, very dark. So I spent the last twenty minutes of class lying on the floor, and then proceeded to spend the next hour and a quarter lying on the floor. After lots of figuring, we finally left for the ER, where we proceeded to spend the next several hours. Except for the whole being really sick and getting stuck with needles, and being thoroughly questioned, and the indignity of a hospital gown, it was great fun!

No, seriously: my friends are amazing. they hung out with me as I lay on the floor, brought me food, water and information, transported me to the ER, and transformed what is normally a horrific experience into something kinda fun.

Lets do this again sometime....

...or not.

2008-09-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

So, I was browsing through some files on my computer and I came across a paper that one of my friends posted a while back on his blog and thought that it would be nice to re-post it. So without further ado, I give you:

Submit Woman!

(The Decline of Manhood in Contemporary Society)

By Jason Vawter

With the peak of the feminist movement in the late seventies and the growing trend toward homosexuality, there has been a major shift away from gender based roles in society. In many eyes, there is no longer a need for “manhood” as defined traditionally and/or biblically. Furthermore, this concept of manhood is seen by many (both male and female) to be a veritable “thorn in the flesh” of the general trend toward complete equality of the genders. The term “manhood,” however is oft misunderstood and prejudged. Many times it is only seen in the light of male dominance. For Christians, there is always difficulty in dealing with how the Bible addresses this issue of equality between the genders in conjunction with their differences and similarities. Does the Bible endorse gender roles, and must one sex be greater than the other? In this grand and oftentimes convoluted concern, biblical integration of both female equality and submissiveness can only be addressed with a correct understanding and a humble as well as generous display of manhood through appropriate servant leadership.

First of all, the term Manhood:

Merriam‑Webster’s Dictionary defines manhood as “qualities associated with men” or “the condition of being an adult male as distinguished from a child or female.” However for the purposes of this discussion, John Piper’s description will serve even better. He offers this definition, “At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships.”(35) He uses the term “mature masculinity” in line with Moore when quoted by Mohler, who explains that manhood, “is not simply a matter of being male and reaching a certain age. These are acts of nature; manhood is a sustained act of character.” (Barbarians) In this day and age, it is obvious that some people don’t see manhood as being defined in this way. Some women have even become lesbian separatist: so fed up with a male dominated society that they strive to rid their company of anything but. In cases of a more acute nature, when a lesbian couple gives birth by artificial insemination to a male, the consequences can be extreme. One lady “even feared that her lesbian partner would leave her,” and later “their friends largely left them” because their house “exuded maleness.” What type of maleness could incur so much hate and aversion? Jess Wells, the lesbian writer of Lesbians Raising Sons, tells of doing everything in her power medically (referring to sperm selection) to keep from having a boy. When she found out that she was going to have a boy, her only consolation was this thought:

“My son cannot take me away from the struggle for women’s rights, nor can he force me to take an interest in anything that I don’t deem interesting. He cannot be my oppressor because he is my child, and he cannot be a second chance to relive my life because he has his own life. He and I will explore each other’s cultures, sharing what we can and respecting what we can’t…Both of us, respecting each other’s sovereignty, can rejoice in our foreignness and celebrate our diversity.” (Mohler FIRST)

This woman plainly points out what kind of maleness she (and others like her) wants to avoid. In her mind males are oppressors and tyrants forcing women to do things against their will. That is without a doubt the definition of male dominance, but it is starkly opposed to the definition of manhood given by Piper.

Now to Equality and Submission:

According to Wells’ quote above, equality means mutual and complete personal sovereignty and submission is seen only in the actions of a servant or a slave. There are two verses that are central in biblical teaching on these issues. Galatians 3:28 states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This very evidently speaks on equality; the surrounding context speaks on coheir-ship and the similarities of childlike obedience even to slavery itself. So even when the New Testament speaks on equality, it seems to do so in the context of servant-hood, not sovereignty. Likewise, the most quoted passage of scripture when it comes to the differing roles of a husband and wife, Ephesians 5:21-33, is preceded with an exhortation to all believers to submit to one another. Therefore, rather than submission being the degrading task of a slave or a yard-dog, the Apostle Paul elevated it to the high calling of the very children of God.

Equality never necessitates there be no differences in the people being equated. A musician can be equally good at music as a baseball player is at playing his sport. Their separate proficiency would be a very difficult thing to measure and compare and relatively pointless at that, but no one should argue that the musician is a better person than the baseball player (or vice versa). Similarly, Johnson points out:

“We excel at different gifts, and all the gifts are needed. Let us hope that, by recognizing the existence of gender differences, we can better understand each other and help to maximize each other’s potentials. Likewise, by accepting our God-given gifts, we can resist cultural pressures to become what we are not, to seek to master gifts we don’t possess.” (Piper 293)

Compare that to this quote from Mathews, a pro-feminist writer, on what he believes to be the anti-feminist reasoning’s:

Feminists had defiled women by attempting to force equality upon them whether wanted or not. Antifeminist women were saying in essence, “You have done men’s work. Fine, if you can do it. You have invaded men’s clubs, although it hardly seems worth the effort. And you have become, in effect men. Since you have already achieved what you want without ERA [Equal Rights Amendment], there must be some secret agenda that we women don’t know about. But we can guess. The only think left is to change the traditional norms of behavior so that you can become the model of what women out to do and be. You mean to make us like you, that is, like men. You have defiled us!” (166)

This seems to be a fair paraphrase of anti-feminist women’s reasoning except in one sense. The words “force equality” do not resonate with that line of thinking. One would be hard-pressed to find a woman, or any person for that matter, who doesn’t want to be considered equal in worth or value to the rest of humanity. This quote shows Mathews firmly believes that in order to be equal one must be devoid of difference. He is right that anti-feminist women don’t want to be forced into the same standards of performance as men, but wrong in thinking that these same women don’t see themselves as equals with their male counterparts. “Equal” does not have to mean “completely similar to.” Roles can still differ.

It is apparent that Wells could not in anyway endorse the combination of the two traits: equality and submission. To her the answer is either-or, but one must wonder, why does she see it this way? It seems that she and countless other women like her have seen a grand pattern of male dominance and a tragic lack of godly manhood.

Servant Leadership?

Men must be leaders. However, once again, a definition is needed. John Piper points out that leadership must be exorcised in many different ways. Here are a select few of his points on leadership that will assist this argument:

·1 Leadership never “demands to be served,” but to the contrary, takes the initiative to be the servant.

·2 Correct leadership does not “presume superiority,” but instead does it’s best to utilize the strengths of those it serves.

·3 A man should not feel compelled to be the sole initiator (leader); however, though the woman should have plenty of say in every issue (and should be allowed opportunities to lead), it would be a disservice to her to be forced to take initiative out of apathy and a lack of gumption on his part.

·4 As always, a good leader doesn’t tyrannically push and shove, but instead gently provides guidance and precedents to follow. (37-42)

Furthermore, a good leader offers solutions and choices but doesn’t impose them on those who chose to follow him. Piper closes his section on leadership with this point: “Mature masculinity recognizes that the call to leadership is a call to repentance and humility and risk-taking.” (41) Correct leadership is not easy because it is servant-hood. It is a service provided. Whether or not this opportunity to be served is taken up by the woman should continually be her choice. Male leadership that is forced upon a female is male dominance, not servant-hood.

Dominance:

In response to biblical evidence, Sanday considers even the Bible itself to be an example of patriarchal tyranny. She considers the early church leaders (whom she points out to have been all male) to have unfairly and systematically squelched the Gnostic tradition that was just as biblically sound as the traditions of orthodox Christians. She sites The Gospel of Phillip, The Dialogue of the Savior, The Apocryphon of John, and The Gospel of Mary as examples of Gnostic beliefs about the role of women in the church. She believes very adamantly that these books were excluded from the cannon mostly for their pro-feminine qualities. (227-231) The original canonization councils gave many other, more persuasive reasons for the books’ exclusion which they considered to be much more pressing. The pattern she speaks of in church leadership however is clearly that of male dominance and not that of servant leadership. Her problem isn’t with male servant-leadership, but with a perceived tyranny of the male gender within the church (and elsewhere). Lesbian separatists also speak of a patriarchal society dominated by male leadership that is completely against the advancement of women in any form (Mohler FIRST), but once again, this is male dominance, not servant leadership.

If there had been correct, servant leadership by responsible males, the issue of feminine equality wouldn’t be an issue. Females cry out for equality because the males they work with don’t have a correct understanding of servant leadership. Many men in America today often go to one of two extremes as pointed out by Mohler, they tend to be either “barbarians” or “wimps.” Barbarians have little consideration for the female gender. They “demonstrate a crudeness, profanity, and violence that treats women merely as objects for sexual pleasure. Barbarians show women no respect, and are completely lacking in the manly virtues of protection and respect for the well being of women.” (Barbarians) These seem to be the type of males that the feminists are mainly against (though they often find many other fault-full men), and rightly so. This attitude flies in the face of Christianity and any red-blooded female as well. However, the type of male that the feminists seem to approve of the most (or have the least objections towards), is one that stands for nothing. Mohler quotes Moore’s description of wimps: “whiny, incapable of making decisions, and in general of ‘acting like men.’” Why do feminist seem to like this type of male? Wimps constantly “look to women for emotional support, consider girlfriends to be conversational partners, and look to women for pity.” (Barbarians) In general this seems good—a fine improvement—but it is still lacking something. What happens when a woman looks to this man for emotional support? He can’t give it. He “is always looking for the easiest way out of a problem.” (Mohler Barbarians) So what is left?

The Gentleman:

A gentleman has to stand between these two types, firmly grounded in a correct understanding of “manhood.” He knows what true equality is. He understands that equals are almost never completely devoid of difference. He would never expect a woman to do a “man’s job,” but would be more than willing to give her that opportunity, if she wanted. In a personal relationship of any level (intimate or casual), the gentleman would do his best to lead the woman in a way that she would be comfortable following. As a servant leader, he must look out for her first and himself last. He would protect her interests, her safety, her purity, her emotional well-being, and most especially her relationship with God. He would do this at the cost of his own interests and desires. A true Christianly gentleman in a deeply committed, intimate relationship with a woman would sacrifice most anything but his own walk with God for her benefit. When a leader strives to be worthy of the task of leadership, his team is much more willing to support him and follow his lead. This is true in any leader/team relationship; how much more so in the most important and team of them all: a team that was instituted by God Himself.

But why Male Leadership?

A marriage, or any committed, two-person relationship for that matter, is undoubtedly a team of sorts with a leader and a follower. This is seen easily even in gay and lesbian relationships; though the two consider themselves fully equal, one generally leads and the other generally follows. This is easily seen in the existence of “butchish” women and effeminate men. In these gay situations, who leads? For lack of a better term, the more “manly” of the two. This has been the pattern from the beginning. Some believe that man’s “dominance” over women was Eve’s part of the curse, during the fall. Ortlund states that, “It follows, in this view, that a woman’s redemption in Christ releases her from the punishment of male headship.” So if “male headship” was part of the curse, then why did God make them “male and female”? (Gen. 1:27) He did not have to make the difference of gender; humans could have been asexual beings: both completely equal to one another and completely similar. But He did. In Ortlund’s essay, he points out the following:

·1 God created Adam first and gave Adam charge over the garden.

·2 When the fall happened, God went to Adam first.

·3 It was clearly Adam’s responsibility to take care of the garden and keep it in order.

·4 Adam, the first and only male, had the sole leadership role. (95-112)

However, Ortlund is also uses the pre- and post-fall episodes to carefully point out the inherent equality between male and female. He states this, “They [man and woman] are spiritually equal, which is quite sufficient a basis for mutual respect between the sexes. But the very fact that God created human beings in the dual modality of male and female cautions us against an unqualified equation of the two sexes,” (emphasis is mine, though he adds it later). (99) He goes to great pains to point this out, later stating, “There is no necessary relation between personal role and personal worth,” (emphasis his). (111)

As a wise friend pointed out, “Either way, in a team of two, one person is going to end up being more of a leader; why shouldn’t it be the one God intended all along?” Doesn’t this make since? But once again, it can never be correctly realized without a mutual understanding of the full equality of the genders. Both man and woman are completely equal, while at the same time completely different.

Conclusion:

Without an understanding of what a true gentleman should embody, there can be no understanding or apprehension of the idea of submission. The Bible never instructs women to submit to “barbarians.” And submission means nothing unless both manhood and leadership are defined. It is only once these terms are grasped and their false ill-connotations rejected, that the biblical perspective can rightly fall into place and men can stand up and be the men that God has called them to be.

Works Cited

Holy Bible, New International Version. International Bible Society, 1984. BibleGateway.com. Gospel Communications International. 23 Oct. 2005 .

Mathews, Donald G. Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA : a State and the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Merriam‑Webster Online Dictionary. Merriam‑Webster, Incorporated, 2005. MERRIAM‑WEBSTER ONLINE. 23 Oct. 2005 .

Mohler, R. Albert. “Barbarians and Wimps: America’s Boy Problem” Commentary by R. Albert Mohler. 12 July 2004. 19 Oct. 2005 .

Mohler, R. Albert. “FIRST‑PERSON: Lesbians raising sons; got a problems with that?” BPNews 30 Dec. 2004. 20 Oct. 2005 .

Piper, John, and Wayne Grudem, eds. Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1991.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Female Power and Male Dominance : on the Origins of Sexual Inequality. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Calling All Heroes Spoiler Warning

2008-09-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

(btw, the spoilers are for the movie Hancock)

I just watched a movie tonight, and it really made me think. One of the over arching themes was the idea that if we don’t ‘fess us and do what we are made to do, we will be miserable. Failure is not an option, and incompetence in no excuse. If we are called to change the world for the better, it doesn’t matter if we are a superhero, or a business person, or a failing PR person. In this movie, one character is a PR guy who is trying desperately to change the world. He is failing miserably, but in general, he has a happy life. And then there is the superhero with all the power he could want, but he spends his life drunk, and instead of being adored by the city he (sorta) protects, he is hated and rejected by them. When these two very different lives collide, one of the things that the PR guy says to the superhero is that he will never be happy unless he does what he was made to do, save people. Slowly, with the help and encouragement of the PR guy and the adoration of the PR guy’s son, the superhero learns what it means to be a human being, to value others and show them respect, how to be valued and respected in return. Because of their compassion and care for him, he learns how to respect himself, to stop hating himself. Later in the film, he is mortally wounded and both he and the woman that he was made to protect and love are dying. If they move further apart, their powers will return, and they will recover. But he is wounded, damaged almost beyond recognition. Somehow, he finds the strength to do what he was made to do, and he drags himself to his feet and slowly totters to the window and jumps out, knowing that that distance just might saver her. He discovers as he is falling through the air that he still doesn’t have the power to fly and plummets to the ground. With great effort, he picks himself up and launches himself through the air, only to plummet to the ground yet again. Yet despite this repeated failure, he doesn’t give up, he doesn’t just stay there, he keeps going, and eventually saves both her and himself. The movie ends with both men changing the world, and both living happy and contented (although not easy) lives.

We live in a culture that tells men to be predators, tells them that is all that they are, that that is what they were made to be. “Men are pigs,” I hear it all the time. IT’S A LIE. Yeah, it isn’t easy to get out there and be what you were made to be, but it is a whole lot more satisfying than living the easy life of the exact opposite. Men are not pigs. They were made to be protectors, kings, heroes. True, when they are not what they are made to be they become predators, despotic dictators and brigands, but that is not what they are made to be. Please, stop believing the lie that all you are is a monster, that all you are is good for nothing, that all you are is worthless. It’s not true. You are the precious creation of God Almighty, who formed you for a purpose, who equipped you to fulfill your purpose. The world needs you to step up and be who you were made to be. We need men to lead our country, to fight for our country, to fight for our dignity, to fight for our very souls. We need boys to grow up, to chose to mature, to step out of the realm of videogames and into the real world, to start building their own character instead of their virtual characters. We need you.

And this goes for women too. Step up and be women, not whiny little girls and wannabe guys. We need to encourage the guys around us to be men of honor, courage and character. We need to give them something worth fighting for. We need to protect their backs instead of shooting them down, appreciate the effort it takes for them to be gentlemen instead of asserting our equality by not allowing them to be gentlemen. We need to respect them, and demonstrate our respect for them. We need to be women of character, courage, and honor. We need to be willing to do our part in changing the world.

In the end, what is comes down to is this: we were each made for a purpose. We desperately need to figure out what that is, and to do it. Otherwise, it will destroy our very souls.

Bah! Humbug!

2008-05-23T22:49:00.000-07:00

I hate endings. I know that if nothing ever ends, there can be no new beginnings, and we would miss so much, but be that as it may, I hate endings like the plague. Maybe it is just that I am so very tired from the last big push of the semester, but the end of this semester seems so much harder than last year. Saying goodbye to my friends is so much more heartrending than it was last year. I have the comfort of knowing that I will see them again, but...that won't be for a while, and in the meantime, my life gets turned upside down and shaken. A rather extremely unpleasant feeling if I do say so myself, and much more so now that I am no longer used to it. When I was younger, I got quite good at dealing with moving all the time, at learning to attach and unattach and reattach and unattach myself to people and places. I was very adept at making my home where ever I was, or where ever I happened to have left my stuff, or where ever the people I cared about were. But now, well, I'm out of practice. I've gotten used to being here, used to being with this set of people, used to caring deeply about these people. Ripping myself away hurts. A lot. And this is different. I'm not leaving people behind, I am being left behind. I know I'm coming back, but last year taught me that it will never be the same. It isn't like when I was a kid and we were simply yo-yo's going back and forth between homes and people often enough that whatever changes there were were gradual. No, when we come back in the fall, we won't be the same, and it will take us an entire semester, give or take a bit, to get to know each other again. The friendships we have now may be better, may be worse in the future, but they will never be just what they are now, and they will have to be rebuilt after this separation. Somehow, this ending leaves me feeling lost, and feeling that I lost something that I didn't know how much to treasure until it was gone. As each of my friends leave, they take a piece of my heart with them, and as I drive away tomorrow, I will leave a piece of my heart behind. Having pieces ripped out of one's heart and scattered far and wide is rather unpleasant. I hate endings, or at least...I hate this one.

2008-04-06T23:52:00.001-07:00

So, I am sorry for my longish absence from the blogosphere...life
here has been rather lacking in time. I have an archery tournament in
two weeks, so almost all of my spare time has been going into practice
or recovering from practice. For some reason, after five hours
straight at the range I was exhausted. Oh yeah, and then there is that
little thing called school...and I do occasionally want to spend time
with friends...so not much time for posting...

Anyway, I would
really appreciate prayer the next couple of weeks. I have a lot of
practicing to get in, and I really do need to make sure that I don't
get behind on school, and I would like to actually get some sleep...
Also, my dog is pretty sick right now....like really sick...

Funfulness....

2008-03-11T18:36:00.001-07:00

So, my sister tagged me with this fun thingamy....

THE RULES:
Look up from the computer, look around the room where you're sitting and pick up the closest book. Open the book, turn to page 123, count down to the fifth sentence on that page, and then post the next three sentences.

"you will discover, as I have, that it is no less painful to withhold knowledge from your fellow scientists. When you watch them struggle with a question, knowing that you have the information that could easily reolce their delemma; when you see them come very near the truth and then for lack of information retreat form their correct conclusions and return to error--you would not be human if it didn't cause you great anguish.

"you must remind yourselves, always: It is their law, their choice"

Given that I have about six books sitting on my desk directly behind my computer, it was rather difficult to decide which book counted as being closest to my computer...so I went with the book that looked closest (there were several behind my computer screen, and therefore not visible). So this is from the eighth chapter of Speaker For the Dead by Orson Scott Card (one of my favorite books).

Oh, and I tag...um....Parmandil....and...um....well, I can't think of anyone else right now...so yeah...Parmandil it is..

2008-03-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

so, I just realized that I am a verbal processor. That makes things make so much more sense now. I guess it never dawned on me, because I really can just think to my self, and I can write. But if I am thinking to myself, odds are I will be talking out loud as I think. If I am writing, it is the same thought process for me as talking, with it being a sort of stream of consciousness thought process. Organized writing is so much more of a challenge for me, because I can't just spew thoughts on to paper, I actually have to make them into a coherent whole first.

I am currently writing a paper with some friends, one of whom at least is not a verbal processor. It is highly entertaining to watch how differently the three of us process our ideas, and the rhythm of how we process them. I take in, take in, take in, then spew. One of my friends seems to spew and then have to digest, and processes ideas much better on paper. I think my other friend does most of her processing internally, so I haven't really been able to work out the timing. But it takes so much effort to get us all thinking about the ideas and coming up with good new ideas at the same time. I think today was the first day that it really dawned on us how very differently we process ideas, but I think now that we know, we will be able to get the hang of it. Tonight I was having a really hard time focusing because my friend kept saying thoughts, but only fully formed ones, so there was nothing for me to latch onto and complete and get interested in. So I told him to just kinda spew thoughts, and what do ya know, it worked, and we got some of the most important parts of our paper hashed out. pretty fun, eh?

BTW, yes, this post was rather stream of consciousness, so I apologize for the the lack of coherent whole...I just felt like spewing these thoughts out onto the web....

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

2008-02-22T00:29:00.001-08:00

Praise Him all creatures here below!
Praise Him above ye heavenly hosts!
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!

Tonight I got to go out and enjoy the glories of the rain, and remember yet again the greatness of God's goodness. I am alive right now in a way that I have not been for far too long. But tonight, as I looked up through the rain, it somehow clicked that this was a gift, something made possible through Christ's work of redemption, joy completely undeserved. God is so good. And He gives good gifts, if only we will look around us and notice them.

I wish that I could capture in words the splendor of the night, of the rain, of the constant contrast shown between the death of winter and the new birth of spring, the joy, the glory...but words fail me....so go, open your eyes, look around, take it in. Even in the night, there is beauty, if only we can see it.......

2008-02-12T00:43:00.000-08:00

*sigh* almost a month since my last post....being back at school and actually having friends is apparently really bad for my actually succeeding in posting regularly. So Romney's dropping out of the presidential campaign was rather unexpected. I am rather excited to see what continues to happen as the presidential race continues. However, I have almost no doubt that by the time the national election rolls around, I, and most Americans along with me, will be thoroughly sick of the whole campaigning thing. Alas...I really hate how early the whole campaigning thing started.

On another thought, I have been realizing how insulated I have been all my life from the racial issues swirling through our country. I mean, when racism came up, it was always in the past tense, as something that used to be a big deal, but had gotten dealt with and resolved sometime shortly after the civil rights movement. The more I listen to the news and watch the world around me, however, the clearer it becomes that racism is very very far from gone. It makes me sad, and I wish I knew how to get involved, to help change things. To me it seems so bizarre that people would place such store in the color of someone's skin. I guess I am really lucky to have grown up in a world where my skin color (white) was a minority, and yet people didn't treat me differently for it.

So just for the record, I would like to apologize for the racist attitudes seen in so many who share my ethnicity.

The Oresteia: How do the Furies become the Eumenidies?

2008-01-15T21:26:00.000-08:00

In the Oresteia, the furies are monsters that are gods, but yet are denied their place as gods. They are hideous, and delight in death, destruction and torture. They have nothing better to do with their time than hunt down patricides and matricides regardless of the justice of their actions. However, in return for their ceasing to hunt down Orestes, they are given a place in the city of Athens, and become the Eumenindes, rather than the Furies. So how does their being given a place in the city turn them from being the Furies into the Kindly Ones?

The Furies are just what their name implies—the goddesses of fury. So in asking what place the Furies have in the city, one is actually asking what role fury itself ought to play in society. Fury has a bad reputation, being the thing that has spurred lots of unpleasant events. Fury, however, can be quite useful if used properly. For instance, fear of vigilante justice, or fury, helps to keep the crime rates down and justice rates up.

The Furies, when acting without an aim, were almost exclusively destructive. Fury that is not aimed in the right direction is like a gun shot straight in the air. One can rarely predict who it will hit, but innocent people usually get hurt. Unfocused fury is bad for society.

Fury that is aimed at promoting justice and protecting the city, however, is good. It has a strong restraining effect on crime. If criminals know that the only thing that could happen to them is that they could get caught by police, they are a lot more likely to do criminal acts than if they know that their victim might have a gun, and might shoot them, or that some random vigilante might come after them.

When the Furies are not given a place in the city, they will show themselves as a somewhat random destructive force. When, however, they are given a place in the city, they act as a form of vigilante justice, adding to the power of the law, and also providing a reason for the law to stay just. The Furies become the Kindly Ones.

Logs, anyone?

2008-01-06T22:09:00.001-08:00

Something I have been thinking about lately is what to do with new believers who just don't quite get it yet. How do you tell someone that, quite honestly, that they are living in sin, especially when they don't seem too open about taking advice or admitting that they might be at fault? How do you tell someone that they need to stop yelling at others, especially non believers, for the specks in their eyes, when they have a log or several in their own eyes? How do you speak the truth in love, letting them know that you've been there too, and that this doesn't mean rejection from yourself or from God?

In the Epistles, Paul and the other writers were not afraid to be blunt, and even harsh. They sharply rebuked the churches for their gross misbehavior, and the churches responded by shaping up (at least as far as is made clear in the scriptures). Part of me wants to say that the risk is too great, that they are too used to being hurt to take being repremanded, but then I look at scripture, and wonder if our society has made us cowards, and if people will take being repremanded better than we fear.

I also think that we have a tendancy to play down the import of helping others to grown in their walk with Christ. As brothers and sisters in Christ, we have the responsibility to help our sibs. It is not just our comfort or discomfort at their actions that is at stake, but their very souls, and eternal future. What if, becaus of our silence and cowardice, they are saved only as through the fire, and live a wretched life here on earth? Is that really of less consideration than that they might get mad at us?

This is not to say that care and discression should be taken when dealing with such things. It is only to say that such things, ought, in fact, to be dealt with, and in a timely manner. Which, I'm afraid, is much easier said than done.

How does Mark illustrate the importance of proper desires properly prioritized?

2008-01-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

Throughout the book of Mark, Jesus continually rebukes the people, the Pharisees, and even his disciples for their wrong desires. He offers them eternal life, and they want party tricks. One desire that reoccurs a lot is a desire for physical healing. This is a good desire, but they focus on it to the exclusion of what else Jesus has to offer. They are so caught up in trying to be perfect on the outside that they completely miss the fact that they are rotting on the inside. The Pharisees focus so much on the law, trying to avoid even coming anywhere near to breaking it that they loose all sense of perspective. In the process of trying to be good, they become evil. They blew their desire for external goodness out of proportion, and their good desire made them bad. Similarly, the people desire healing for their bodies, but in the panic to get external deformities fixed, they miss their internal deformities and end up with whole bodies and lost souls.

Jesus is continually fighting this predisposition in those around him throughout the book of Mark. He points out that nothing is gained by getting the whole world if it costs you your life. He attacks the Pharisees as whitewashed sepulchers, pretty on the outside, and rotting on the inside. When the paralyzed man is lowered through the roof for him to heal, he starts out by forgiving the man’s sins. That was more important than solving his physical problems, although Jesus did that too. When the Pharisees are trying to get after Jesus for breaking the Sabbath when heals the man with the withered hand, he points out that it is more important to do good than to follow the minuscule bits and pieces of the rules that they have made up. Even though Jesus is trying to pound this point in, nobody seems to really get it until after his death and resurrection. They get that he is the Christ, but they have no idea what it would mean for him to save the world, or even the Jewish nation. They never seem to get past the physical realm to see into their spiritual brokenness that the Lamb came and was sacrificed to mend. It becomes clear through the epistles that they eventually do get it, and this becomes a major theme of the whole New Testament.

2008-01-04T22:27:00.000-08:00

Well, having dial-up internet is not very good for my poor blogs...*sigh*

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and a happy New Year. I know I did. It is so lovely to be home with my family. It is, as per usual, rather odd getting used to living as part of a family unit, and having my decisions effect other people more than simply who gets to go to lunch with me. Ah well, I guess that is part of life.

I am hoping to be able to write my torrey term paper before I get back to school. I am rewriting my paper from last semester, which was on the similarities and differences between Machiavelli's ideas in The Prince, and Thrasymachus's ideas in Plato's Republic. I am going to be exploring how Machiavelli's ideas of justice fit into the dialoge in Republic as a whole, and which character speaks for Machiavelli. That should be fun.

Well...I was gonna write more, but sleep is calling me....

Proverbs

2007-12-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

So, we were assigned to come up with some proverbs of our own after reading proverbs...here are mine.

A fool takes his identity from other people.

The wise man finds his identity in his Maker.

True love is deeper than the ocean.

In time, even a hamster wheel makes sense.

Cynicism is a cowards escape from reality.

A wise man can see past the thorns and into the beauty of a rose.

To marry a virtuous person is culmination of wisdom.

People are rarely thinking what you think they are thinking about you.

Why are Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon called wisdom literature?

2007-12-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

Why are Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon called wisdom literature? I mean, Proverbs is obviously about how to be wise. It even says so in the beginning. But Psalms? Their just songs, right? Ecclesiastes? Isn’t that just a spoiled king whining about how having everything isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Song of Solomon? Please. Isn’t that just an erotic love poem? It is not even clear why it is in the bible, let alone part of the wisdom literature. This really does not make any sense.

This is what it looks like at first glance, something odd and apparently random…they call it wisdom lit just because they can, and in order to confuse us. It just does not make any sense.

On a closer examination, things become a bit clearer. After looking at psalms in depth, it began to appear that the purpose of psalms is to teach us to have the proper emotional responses to things, to give us an example of proper emotions, and via poetry help us to conform to the ideal.

With study, the purpose of Ecclesiastes also becomes clearer. While at first the author seems to be merely whining, on closer examination, it can be seen that the author might be point out the intrinsic value of wisdom, being good, etc. That despite how crazy it all looks from here, God is in control, and there are indeed absolute standards.

Song of Solomon seems a harder nut to crack. I mean, it is a love song. How much of a deeper meaning can there be? The task of delving deeper into Song of Solomon is made much more difficult by our squeamishness. We are afraid to delve into the depths, because it is ‘gross’ or even ‘immoral’. We have a hard time dealing with how sexually charged it is. But this is the very reason that why song of songs is so important. We do not know how to think about love, especially erotic love. As Christians, we tend to shy away and try to shut it down completely because it is so strong and dangerous. But it is a part of us, something from deep within our very souls. We cannot silence it without loosing a part of our selves. Love is a powerful, dangerous thing, but it can also be beautiful. We need to be taught how to handle this part of us, because on our own we seem to be very good at only triggering the explosively damaging nature of love, and missing entirely the beauty.

Song of Solomon, then, is an instruction book. Not on the art of seduction, but on what love is, what it is supposed to look like, and how we are supposed to respond. As well as teaching us how to love, Song of Solomon teaches us about beauty. It is a story about a beautiful love for a beautiful person told with beautiful words. To categorize Song of Solomon as ‘merely an erotic love poem’ is to categorize the David as ‘just another nude statue’. There is such a depth to the beauty of Song of Solomon that I do not think it would be easy to come to the end of it. It is a textbook on the appreciation of beauty.

Proverbs, then, seems the least profound of the wisdom literature, the least worthy. It only helps us to see truths in the patterns of reality that we have a hard time seeing ourselves. While Proverbs schools our minds, the other members of the wisdom literature school our very souls.

What is wisdom that schooling our souls fits into it? Or rather, how does one become wise by training one’s soul? What is wisdom? What differentiates it from knowledge? Is wisdom the ability to properly respond to knowledge and other external stimuli? In that case, training one’s soul is helping it to respond properly to external stimuli and knowledge, or growing in wisdom.

Ecclesiastes: Why can't we ignore the cynics?

2007-11-09T23:15:00.000-08:00

I fond that when I was reading Ecclesiastes, it was really hard to not discount what he says simply because it sounds so cynical. This, however, prevented me from listening closely enough to understand what he was saying. Because I judged the book so naturally, I couldn’t see the truth that is in Ecclesiastes.

I think that this tendency to ignore cynicism on principle is dangerous because although the picture that cynics see is often incomplete, it is usually true to life. We need to know the truth that is there, and we have to find the missing pieces whose absence led to despair.

In the case of Ecclesiastes, although it seems really cynical at first glance, I do not think that is the point of the book. As we discussed Ecclesiastes and got beyond the apparent cynicism, we found that Solomon was asking some really deep questions. One question is what is the meaning of life. Another is what does it mean to be wise. Yet another is whether things have objective value.

The last verse of Ecclesiastes seems to be somewhat of a non sequitur, but it is an answer to each of these questions. “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”[1] The meaning of life is to serve God, and wisdom is knowing and doing that. There is objective value to our deeds, and God will judge them in the end. Thing are crazy right now, but in the end, God will make everything right. The world is not as senseless as it seems.

I missed this when I read Ecclesiastes because all I could see was his apparent cynicism. We can’t ignore people who are apparently cynics, because we don’t know what truth they have to speak unless we take the time to listen, and to think about what they are saying.

[1] Ecclesiastes 12.13-14

Civilization and Its Discontents

2007-10-09T12:29:00.000-07:00

To what extent can we baptize Freud? To what extent can we use Freud’s mechanisms of guilt and conscience to explain Christian conception of sin?

When Freud talks about the human conscience, he is using the term to describe a part of the self that exists for the express purpose of attacking self for doing things that are instinctive, but that it has been trained are ‘bad’. This contrasts greatly with the Christian definition of conscience, a part of ourselves that responds to the Holy Spirit’s prompting about the intrinsic value of an action. While there are several problems with Freud’s analysis of the conscience, a major one that stands out is his lack of absolute values. The reduction of the perceived value of actions to an acquired flinching that has nothing to do with the action itself, and only with the punishment, is dangerous. It sounds plausible. It is a comforting thought, to think that everything that we feel bad about having done is just us being mildly neurotic. It is something that we want to believe, because then we are not responsible, and there is nothing wrong with doing whatever we want. We are free.

The thing is, it does not work. Humanity self-destructs when anarchy reigns. Also, contrary to Freud’s assertions, it does not kill us to exercise self-control, and in the long run we are happier when we do so. This lines up with his comment on pages twenty-five and twenty-six, “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.” To deny one’s self is to create a contrast in which good things are even better, causing one’s self to be happier overall than one would be if one stayed in a continual state of self indulgence and moderate happiness.

Another of Freud’s fallacies is that denying a temptation only makes it stronger. I know from experience that denying a temptation makes subsequent denials easier. We grow in strength, not our desires, and eventually we can weed out desires almost entirely.

There are many things in Civilization and It’s Discontents that are similarly appealing and wrong. It is tempting to try to baptize Freud, and to pick out the truth from among the chaff. The problem is, he is so clever that it is ridiculously hard to find all of the places where he goes wrong. Each place he goes wrong, however, is major in itself, and even missing one would lead to major problems. While it might be possible to salvage the truth in Freud, it is not to be taken lightly, or to be thought easy.

2007-10-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

Due to the general insanity of life at the moment, my posting schedule is rather random. My apologies....hopefully sometime in the near future I will be able to remedy that, but for now I will try to at least post once a week.

Anna Karennina: What separates Levin from Anna? What sends her to her doom, and allowed Levin to be saved?

2007-10-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, Levin and Anna seem similar, except that Levin is in a state of panic over Kitty, and Anna is happily married. They both have morals, and are moderately self-sufficient. Suddenly, however, things change. Anna breaks. She finds that the love and respect that he has for her husband and the love she has for her son are not enough to control her passionate desire for Vronsky. From then on she is doomed. Even when she repents after a brush with death, her penitence cannot stop her from going back to Vronsky. Levin, on the other hand, goes on to win Kitty, and eventually to find faith.

Why does Anna fall prey to her desires, and Levin never seem to? They have a similar beginning. The thing that separates them is the temptation. Anna had morals, but her thinking was not strong enough to make her actions follow when push came to shove, and eventually even her morals changed. Levin too had a discrepancy between his head and his heart, but because he was never faced with a strong enough temptation, his actions followed his heart until finally his head caught up. Levin got lucky, and Anna really didn’t. The major temptation that Anna faced seems to be the one thing that separates the two characters. They were both unstable, but only one got pushed over the edge.

The consequences of a discrepancy between what one believes and what one thinks can be seen in young Christians without a strong theological and apologetical background who have been raised in the ‘Christian greenhouse’, and are then thrust into an environment that is intellectually hostile to Christianity. Without an intellectual foundation for their beliefs, they crumble, and loose their faith. Their heart ends up following their head.

There are other young Christians who also are raised in a reasonless Christianity who are never challenged strongly and eventually figure our why they believe what they believe, and find an intellectual basis for it. Their head catches up with their heart.

Programs, like Torrey, that seek to unite the head and the heart, are then immensely important. They help to equip students to stand firm against the attacks of the secular world, both intellectual and otherwise. They equip students not only to survive, but also to excel and to change to world.

2007-09-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

2007-09-07T02:03:00.001-07:00

God is good. He will give me strength to make it through today, tomorrow, and as long as I live. Somehow I have to keep that at the forefront of my mind, especially when I am tempted to try and go it on my own and fall splatted on my face. I am so thankful for friends who come along side me and spur me to be more like Christ. I am so thankful for a savior who walks this road with me, who knows what I am going through, and how icky I get on the inside and loves me even so. I am so thankful for the grace of God and his hand in my life. I would not be here if it was not for him. I would not make it through tomorrow without him. He is good.

That being said, be praying for me like mad tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day of add/drop, and I might be switching my major tomorrow. But I really have no clue. and I have an 8:30 am class, so it is gonna be crazy as far as sleep goes 'cause I have a bunch of homework left to do before sleep can happen. And several more really hard things to deal with right now. So yeah, prayer would be appreciated.

People search for the oddest things...

2007-09-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

The fun thing about having a blog tracker on my blog is that I get to see how people get to my blog. Usually people come here from the nav bar thing, or from searches for a green dragon pub. Today, however, I found a new one. Someone got here from a search for "green dragon Pentateuch". Perhaps I am am just missing something, but that seems like a very random search. Whaddaya know, my blog happens to be the first thing that come up with that particular search.

1 p.m. to 7 a.m.

2007-09-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

I just got back from one of the most amazingly odd things we do here at college, the Homerethon. We started reading the Iliad at one pm Sunday afternoon, and read through it and the Odyssey, ending at seven in the morning. While incredibly insane, it is one of the most amazingly fun things ever. But now I need to go sleep......

hurrah!

2007-09-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

I noticed on my tracker thing that someone ended up here by searching for a picture of a green dragon. That sparked the idea of finding a pic of a dragon for a mascot, so I googled green dragon and found this amazing website that has pictures specifically for people to put in their blogs. Pretty spiffy, eh?

Anyway, I am pretty fond of my new pet, even if he does look a bit more dangerous than jolly...

The best conversations happen during car rides...

2007-09-01T23:10:00.001-07:00

I went shopping with one of my friends a few days ago, and as we were driving around looking for stores that would have the things that we were looking for we were able to just talk. Both of us came into college pretty sure that we knew what we were gonna do with our lives, and what majors we should be to accomplish that. Now that our sophomore year has rolled around, it feels like someone yanked the rug out from beneath our feet and we are now in free fall. We don't know what we want to do, or how to accomplish it. It is so disorienting after having been so sure for so long. Her comment was that it is so tempting to curl up in a ball and wait for someone to put something else under her to stop the falling. The only problem is, this is our life. We are now the ones responsible to find something to base our lives on. And the discovery that we have no idea what we are doing makes it terrifying.

It is so weird. I knew for most of my life that I want to be a doctor. Then I started getting a bit closer, and started to see more clearly what it will require of me. Quite honestly, a large part of me says it is not worth that much of my life. I actually want to have a life, not spend most of it inside a hospital or med school. I am confidant that I will survive college, but another six years of mad crazy deadlines and really ridiculously hard work does not sound like something that I am gonna be interested in. I want to get out there an get my hands dirty making a difference while I still am alive enough to do it. Quite honestly, I am not even sure that medicine is the difference I want to make in the world. There are so many other ways to change the world. I have spent so much of my life watching the kids around me destroy their lives, and I have been powerless to do anything about it. I hate the thought of living the rest of my life in that same position of watching the unbearable. I want to save even just a few of the kids who are headed for destruction. I have no clue, however, how on earth I am supposed to do that. I have no idea what God wants of me, and what he wants me to do to equip for it. And I hate that. I desperately want the reassurance of knowing where I am going, what I am doing, and what the end result is supposed to be. This whole navigating blind thing is not fun. Yet in the midst of the chaos I know that God does have a plan for me and for my life, and even for this time of blindness. Though right now I see through a glass darkely, I know my God sees my life clearly. I just have to trust him, even though it is hard right now.

Brother’s K: Is it possible for God to be good given that he created creatures with free will who turned to evil?

2007-09-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

God created creatures with free will. Does that make God evil, to create creatures with free will? No, because he isn’t creating evil. He knew that the free willed creatures were going to turn against him, and he created them anyway. Does that make God evil? No, because he didn’t make them with no choice to do ill. They still had the option to chose good rather than ill. It was their own choice, not God’s. What of the evil done here on earth? Humans have free will. God, having created them with said free will, does not interfere directly in humanities choices. He has, however, set up boundaries that were not to be crossed with definite punishments if they were crossed. When humans choose to cross those boundaries they reap the consequences. However, it is not God who makes the choice to inflict them. It is their own choice to break the rules that inflicts the punishment. Unfortunately, the consequences are of a wide reaching nature, so the world is full of ills as we have seen. But that does not mean that a good God and the ills here on earth cannot co-exist. In fact, the particular nature of the ills on this earth cannot exist save a good God, and if God is good and humans disobedient then these ills are unavoidable. If God allowed evil to go unpunished then he would be unjust and no longer good. The other question is that of the existence of disobedient free-willed creatures and an omniscient and good God. If God is omniscient, then he knew before creating free willed creatures that they would turn out evil. If he knew that before their creation did he create them for evil? If one’s actions are foreknown does one have a choice? I think one does. If I know that if I present you with an apple and a chocolate bar and tell you that you can only have one of them, I know that most people would choose the chocolate. But I have a friend who despises chocolate. I know without a doubt that she would refuse the chocolate. That is not to say that she cannot choose the chocolate, but that she doesn’t want to. I did not force the apple upon her. Also, if God is omnipotent and omnipresent as well as omniscient then the whole question of foreknowledge and doom may be academic. If God is not trapped in linear time as we are then it doesn’t matter that he can see something before it has happened, because not only is he there when it happens, he is there before and after it. What happens happens, and God just happens to be able to see everything at once because he is not human. Also, do the ends justify the means as far as God is concerned? If he allows evil to exist for a time, and creates creatures with free will that he know are going to fall into disobedience in order that when the evil is vanquished he is brought glory, is that wrong? If he is the standard by which everything is judged, can anything he does be wrong? Did he create us with moral sense that is in alignment with his own? If so, does it seem wrong for him to allow a problem to develop in order that the solution could be unveiled for his glory? Is it like a parent allowing a child to do something painful so that the child will learn a lesson and learn to listen to the parent? That kind of seems like that is what it is like. You can tell a child not to do some things and almost guarantee that they will do it. But they will learn so much from the results that it is worth whatever they suffered. It seems like that is what God was doing in creating human kind. So then what he was doing was for our own good? How was it for the good of the souls in hell that he created them? Are they worse off than if they had never existed? I suppose that they are. But those who are not condemned are greatly elevated. So is it worth the sacrifice of the damned souls in order to create the subcategory of humanity: redeemed saints? What about the creation of Satan? If his creation was just, the creation of humans could simply be seen as the creation of weapons against Satan and the means of his destruction. Satan was created to serve God. He chose not to, and chose to fight him instead. When God created him, he knew that was going to happen. If he foreknew does that necessitate predestination? How can God who is all powerful and all knowing be good and yet create creatures who he allows to do evil? If God doesn’t stop the evil thing from happening isn’t he a party to it? Isn’t the evil at least partially his fault for not stopping it? Is it like when you give a little kid matches in a dry field and tell him not to play with it? If he sets the field on fire it is your fault for giving him the matches. I mean, it is the kid’s fault, but he should never have had the matches. Little kids are not responsible. I guess it comes down to God is the adult. Are we kids or adults? Was Satan a kid or an adult? Which court do we try ourselves in? If we are responsible, then it isn’t God’s fault. However, if we are not fully sufficient to stand then it is God’s fault? I guess it comes down to that. If God know that we are going to fall, are we truly sufficient to stand? Was Satan truly sufficient to stand? How then was he able to fall? Somewhere in here we have been lied to. I am not sure, but some of the reasons that God might be culpable sound like the excuses of a five year old or of our culture of lawsuits. “It was the neighborhood I was raised in. People weren’t nice to me. It’s my parents fault, etc.”. What about personal responsibility? Are we responsible? Why or why not? If we are not responsible for the ill that we do, then there is no such thing as justice. If we are not responsible for what we do, then we have no right to punish those who do wrong. But God set up a justice system. Whether or not we say that we believe that people are responsible for their actions, we live like we believe that they are. If this is so, then we are responsible for our fall. We were sufficient to stand. If this is the case, then it follows that Satan too was sufficient to stand, and is culpable for his own fall. This means that God is not culpable for the fall of either Satan or of humanity.

2007-08-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

Hey ya'll, I am gonna try to get back to posting a bit more regularly, and possibly even adding posts from my other blog to mix it up a bit...but that requires me having the time and inclination, so we shall see. Right now the semester is of with a running start, so I'm finding that I don't have a ton of spare time. I should be posting something at least once a week though...

John Donne: Why is love poetry dangerous? Can it be redeemed?

2007-08-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

Donne’s pre-Christian love poetry is captivatingly beautiful. It captures some of the intensity of love, the beauty and power of love. His sacred poetry, however, while being beautiful, passionate and stirring, seems to lack the fire of his love poems. His sacred poems are beautiful and true, but they lack the laughter, the true to life absurdity of the human heart and of human love. His sacred poetry is dignified. While we can relate to his sacred poetry in a deep way, it is dealing with something other than humanity. There is something a bit foreign about loving God, whereas loving other people is loving something like us. Human love is comfortingly familiar, and loving and being loved by God seems a bit disorienting.

This tendency to prefer human love over loving, and being loved by, God, is dangerous. It is placing a lesser, albeit more well known, good over the greatest good. Yes, human love is familiar, and comfortable, but God is God. While his love is less comfortingly familiar, it is perfect, the ultimate good.

Love poetry, and especially excellent love poetry, is potentially dangerous because it tempts us to idolatry. It shows us the most beautiful aspects of the human heart, and unless it points us back to God, it tempts us to make love our highest good.

Non-Christian love poetry in particular is dangerous because poetry has the power to shape our emotions. It is a dangerous weapon, and used for ill it is deadly because of its power to shape our emotions without our conscious consent. If it not subject to God, it has the potential to corrupt its readers by shaping their emotions into something bad.

King Lear: Were the Deaths of King Lear and Cordelia Futile?

2007-08-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

Because King Lear is killed by events that he himself set in motion, it can be argued that his death is futile. Cordelia’s death, as well, is arguably futile because although she dies to save Lear, he dies anyway. These arguments, however, fail to take into account that death is not the worst thing that can happen, and the implications of a character’s death do not end with the character themselves. If one takes the larger context into account, neither King Lear’s death nor Cordelia’s death are in vain.

Although Cordelia failed to save her father from death, she did save him from the power of her sisters, and from his disgrace. In the brief time before his death, he regains some of his honor, and is once more like a king. Cordelia, however, gave her life not only for her father, but for her country. Cordelia’s actions that led to her death saved England from the drawn out civil war that would likely have taken place as her sisters fought for the crown. Her actions also saved the kingdom of England from being ruled by one of her sisters. In this light, Cordelia’s death was far from futile.

In a similar way, Lear’s death also saved the kingdom of England. Lear was a fool, and although he regains some honor near the end of the play, he was a broken man. Such a man should not be king, lest he destroy the kingdom, and Lear starts off the play by doing. If Lear had survived, it would have been bad for England. Even if he was wiser from having seen the results of his folly, he was mentally unhinged because of the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his daughters. Because of his previous actions, it would have been questionable how much power he should have, and whether he should be obeyed as king. Quite likely, someone as cunning as Edmund would have seized the opportunity to take the crown, and England would be faced with revolt. It was much better that King Lear die in peace before he could cause any more damage.

As You Like It: Jacque or Rosalind?

2007-08-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

In As You Like It, we are made to sympathize with three seemingly incompatible characters: Jacques, who is a raving cynic, Orlando, who is a raving idealist, and Rosalind, who is down to earth but not stuck there. Jacques is disgusted with the many characters who fall in love, and says that they have gone mad.

It is tempting to side with Jacques when he starts complaining about the madness of those in love. They are, after all, acting quite out of their wits. Things like hanging poems on trees, claiming that one girl can posses all the virtues and none of the vices of the most acclaimed women in mythology and history, pretending to be what they aren’t, and many other such oddities become commonplace when the characters fall in love. Jacques would have us believe that they have lost their senses, and ought to be whipped until they find them. He would have them prefer earth to heaven because the heaven that they have found is intangible.

Some would dub Jacques a realist for this preference of the tangible world. The proper title for such a man, however, is cynic. Humans are more than the carbon and water that their physical bodies consist of. As You Like It itself is evidence for the fact that humans have been given imaginations, minds, and emotions. Humans are also not solitary creatures. We need love.

Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone, Celia and the others who happily fall in love are the happy ones. They have something that Jacques doesn’t have and doesn’t even want, love. He claims that the others are mad as he stubbornly chooses to be unhappy and ‘sane’. It would seem that he chooses what he thinks is reality over love.

The dichotomy that Jacques faces is not as real as he thinks it is. It is possible to be a realist and still be an idealist. He doesn’t have to choose between reality and love. Rosalind is well aware that women are not all that Orlando has been taught that they are, so she carefully works to instruct him in who she really is. She loves him, but she is also capable of dealing with reality. Jacque is less of a realist than Rosalind because she sees reality enough to understand that it is worth loving.

Confessions: Is Augustine right to condemn story?

2007-08-04T15:10:00.001-07:00

In Confessions, Augustine talks about theatre and story, and argues that they do more damage than good. His first argument against theatre in particular and story in general is that it is stupid to want to sympathize with a character. We are not invited to help, but only to enjoy the pain. We are inflicting ourselves with pain that is not our own, and Augustine argues that it is pointless[1]. Seeing someone else’s pain, however, prompts us to look at our own lives, and helps us to see what causes such pain. It helps us to see where we need to change.

A second argument Augustine gives against stories is that when you sympathize with the characters you love them, and the stories that he was exposed to taught you to love the immoral characters, and to feel badly when they got their just desserts. The problem, however, is not with the idea of story itself. The problem was with those particular stories. Story is a powerful tool that affects us deeply. It changes the way we think and feel about things, often without our consent or knowledge. Stories that teach bad things are pernicious because without our conscious consent we are changed for the worse. Good stories, however, are helpful, because they train our emotions in a good way, and help us to change in a way that we cannot consciously change. They are a way to communicate the truth to people who would not otherwise listen.

Augustine was right to argue against the theatre of his day, and the stories that were told then, because they were pagan and used as the mind control tools of demons. With the advent of Christian stories, however, story has been redeemed. We now have a wealth of Christian stories with which to combat the old pagan stories.

[1] Augustine Confessions III.ii(2)

2007-08-04T15:10:00.000-07:00

[1] Augustine Confessions III.ii(2)

Plato's Symposium: Which speech is the most dangerous to the city?

2007-07-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

There are six speeches in the symposium. There is Phaedrus, who proposes that love is a goad towards virtue, Pausanias who proposes that there are two loves, and that love is only as good as it makes us[1], Eryximachus, who proposes that love is central to everything, and that good love must triumph over bad love, Aristophanes, who says that love is a desire for oneness because we have been split in half, Agathon, who proposes that love is the best and most beautiful god, and Socrates, who says love isn’t a god but rather a search for the true form of beauty. The first three speeches share a focus on love being linked to virtue, which is beneficial to the city. The last two focus on the attributes of love and the focus of love, which seems neutral in its effect on the city. Aristophanes speech, however, is different. He teaches that love is a force that is intrinsic, unstoppable, and should never be resisted. That is deeply dangerous.

If Love is nothing but the longing of two halves to become a whole, and becoming whole is the ultimate good, then everything else is going to go out the window. If ‘becoming one’ is all that people do in a city, and all that they are interested in, the city will fall to pieces. Literally. The city needs people to do things like building things, growing food, keeping things in order, and defending the city against invasion. Those aren’t going to happen unless there is a higher moral good than becoming a whole. Virtue is necessary.

Aristophanes’ speech is all the more deeply dangerous because it is very difficult to defeat. The idea of allowing love to rule is very appealing, and throws out all need of logic. There is no good evidence that he is wrong in his history of human kind, and it actually does sound like the kind of thing that the gods would do. There is nothing but the ruin that it will cause that I can think of that is a good argument against it, and even that is on shaky ground.

[1] 465

Three Theban Plays: Is it right to defy authority for the sake of a higher authority? If it is, what is the appropriate way to go about it?

2007-07-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Antigone presents a way to examine this question in an environment that is not as charged as the modern day. Looking at this issue through Antigone gives perspective, because it is not one’s own city or life that is at risk. In Antigone one is able to see the issue from both the perspective of the authority and also of the defying the authority.

Creon is looking out for the city. He holds up the unburied body of Polynices as an example of what happens to those who betray their city[1]. This is a safeguard against anarchy, and a very good incentive for the people to never betray their city. To allow someone to disobey this command and live is to invite anarchy. For the good of the city, that decree had to be enforced.

Antigone knew that she had a duty to her kin. She knew that the gods and common decency demanded that she not allow the body of her brother to rot, unburied. She had to bury him, decree or no decree. Better to die than to betray this familial duty.

I think that Antigone was right to bury her brother, but she was wrong to try to destroy Creon’s authority. There is line between obeying a higher authority and promoting anarchy. If a higher authority conflicts with the governmental authority it seems appropriate to obey the higher authority. If one disobeys a lower authority for the sake of a higher authority, one ought to be willing to accept the consequences of having disobeyed the lower authority. For the good of the city, disobedience, no matter how well meant, must be punished, or anarchy reigns. Creon was right to punish Antigone for her crime. He, however, might have been wrong to make her deed a crime. This is why it is so important that leasers be just, and that they not make rash laws. Stupid laws are an invitation to anarchy just as much as unenforced laws.

[1] Antigone 222-235

Psalms: How do they help us grow emotionally and in our relationship with God?

2007-07-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

The Psalms are beautiful, full of passion and skillfully written. But they are more than that. They are a window into the soul of those who wrote them, beautiful people of God. As such, they offer us valuable insight into who we aught to become as followers of God.

I can’t put my finger on why, but it seems that Christians aren’t supposed to feel certain emotions. I think it comes from Puritanism, but I am not sure. This stigma that is placed on certain emotions is really unhealthy, because we cannot control our initial emotional reactions. We can control how we react to those emotions, whether we encourage them or not. If then, we are trained to feel shame for having certain initial emotional reactions despite the fact that we have little or no control over them, we are forced either into hopelessness, or into squelching or ignoring emotional responses. Neither of these options are healthy.

Psalms provides us with a way out of that trap. The psalmists felt and were honest about feeling rage, hatred, fear, and other emotions that we have stigmatized. They show us how to feel those emotions without being destroyed by them. It is true that those emotions are dangerous, and trying to be honest about them without indulging them is like walking through a minefield. The psalms provide us with a map. They show us how to respond, and how to find God in our rage, our despair, our hatred, our fear.

The psalms also show how we are supposed to interact with God. It is so weird to think of interacting with the Almighty God as our father, to actually talk with God. How are we supposed to do that? Isn’t it disrespectful, what if we don’t say things right, won’t he smite us or something? It’s frightening, because the stakes are so high. The Psalms show us that it is okay to be honest with God, and that it is the only way to find ourselves. They give us permission to be honest.

Psalms: Why are they included in the Cannon?

2007-07-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

The psalms are part of what we call the inspired word of God. There seem, however, to be many similarities between the psalms and things that are not considered as divinely inspired. What is the difference between the psalms and the well written songs of a believer now? One argument for the superiority of the psalms is that David was a man after God’s heart, and that he had the spirit of God upon him. If, however, the status of Psalms is based solely on the merits of David, then there is nothing to differentiate them from things written by the saints, because the saints were really godly and Christians have the Holy Spirit. There is another problem, however, with basing the status of the psalms on David, which is that David didn’t write all of the psalms. Another reason that the Psalms should be counted as part of the cannon is that they are riddled with prophesy. While it can be argued that because the authors were not prophets per se the passages that seem prophetic are just a coincidence, there are too many instances where the Psalms clearly are referring to events in the future for them to simply to have been a coincidence. Whether or not the authors themselves knew what they were doing, there is something more organized than chance in the prophesy of the Psalms. However, while the presence of prophesy in the psalms is evidence of some supernatural intervention and inspiration, is that enough reason to include a book in the cannon?

I am really not sure then, why the Psalms are included in the scriptures and are counted the word of God. I really couldn’t think of good reasons why it should be included. However, I trust that there probably are some really good reasons to include it since the early church fathers chose to include it.

*edit*

After discussing psalms again with my group, I realized that the psalms provide us with examples of proper emotions and the proper way to interact with God. They are the real thoughts of godly people, and they show us how to be godly people. This is very different than the rest of the bible, which is either stories of people’s lives, or God telling us what to do and how to live through other people. The psalms, then, fulfill a very important and unique role.

sigh

2007-07-17T22:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I thought that I was gonna be away from my computer untill next wednesday. Life, however, happened, and I am back. I am also beginning a new series of posts based on the essays I wrote about the books I read last semester. This should be fun.

oops

2007-07-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

My apologies for my sudden disappearance form the blogosphere. I thought I was gonna be away from my computer for only a couple of days, and a week at max. Plans changed however, and now it looks like I will be able to resume regular posting on Monday.
Have a great week!

What ties together the different books in the Origins Semester?

2007-07-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

We started the semester with Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. These books taught us that the gods are arbitrary, unjust, and chaotic. Ovid in particular portrayed the gods as being immortal and powerful humans, more human than we are.
Then we moved on to Dante, who even in Hell offered us hope. Here was a system that is ordered. Hell is not a random pile of all the humanity that ever offended a God. It is instead a carefully organized and orchestrated system of punishment based on a very detailed moral system. In Purgatory and Paradise, we got a glimpse of a way of escape from the doom that we all seem to deserve.
Spenser's Faerie Queen was next. Here we saw the possibility of redemption displayed in myth. Here was a good human wanting to accomplish his quest, but he is incapacitated by weakness. Then he is healed, and equipped to conquer, redeemed.
Milton then went to the root of everything, the very beginning. He showed how the thing that brought this chaos in the first place was that Satan wanted to be God, and then brought mankind around to his way of thinking as well. Satan is the ultimate Homeric hero. He is in it for the glory. In Paradise Regained, we see the perfect man being the perfect hero: Christ is in it for God's glory, not his own. So here we see the problem begin, and how to defeat it, but we are incapable of being the perfect man. We cannot beat this problem.
Then we move on to the Pentateuch. Here we see God show an insane amount of mercy. Even as he punished mankind for their disobedience, he shows mercy. He saves us from immortality. If the gods are what we would become if we were immortal, than this is a mercy indeed. Humans, in this weakened state cannot stand immortality. Also, from the midst of the horror of the Canaanite and Egyptian gods, we see him rescue a nation. He calls them his own people, and says that he will be their God. He gives them these laws that separate them from the other nations and mark them as his. Some of these laws must have seemed so arbitrary at the time, but with modern technology, they make perfect sense. The laws he gave them protected them from many ills, both physical and societal. He offers them a way to atone for their rebellions so that he can live among them without destroying them. His mercy seen here is exquisite.
But then comes Hebrews, and the world suddenly becomes painfully beautiful. In Hebrews we see that the mercy show in the Pentateuch is nothing compared to the mercy that has been shown us. We thought that the sacrificial system was merciful. Christ accomplished more in one death than the death of all of the animals killed in the history of the world. In the death of the perfect man, the debt owed by sinners was forever paid. In the resurrection of the triumphant sacrifice, death was forever conquered. We may die, but there is no longer any need to fear. The sort of immortality we were created for awaits us on the other side. In the continual perfection of the perfect man sin was destroyed. Suddenly we are no longer trapped in the chaos. The door to heaven has been unlocked, and all that is needed now is to enter it.
How is that we miss this? God is good. infinitely so. He is not safe, but he is good. The beauty of what he has done and who he is is breathtaking and so much more than we can even begin to imagine...I am blown away.

Joshua: How did God relate differently with the people of Israel after Joshua became their leader?

2007-07-02T13:07:00.000-07:00

It seems God relates to the people of Israel differently in the book of Joshua than he relates to the people throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There are three major differences. The first is who God uses as a mediator between himself and the people. The second is whether God is the judge and executor in sins against God. The third is his reaction when the people don’t follow his instructions.

In the first books, God spoke face to face with Moses and Moses would then relate the messages to the people. Moses served as a high priest to both the priests and the people, as well as the leader and judge of the people. When he died, he passed his duties on to not one but several people. His priestly duties went to Eleazar, the high priest and son of Aaron, his leadership duties went to Joshua, and his duties as a judge went to the heads of the tribes. This decentralization means that Joshua was not in as much contact with God as Moses was. God was communicating with three separate parts of the government rather than only one person.

Also, in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy when sins were committed against God, he intervened to execute the guilty. In Joshua this seems to change. When Achan disobeys God by keeping things from Jericho for himself, it is the leaders and the people who execute the guilty. They stone him, burn him, and then stone him again, leaving a pile of stones to remind their children not to repeat Achan’s mistake. An argument against this is the case of the person who broke the Sabbath in Numbers 15:32. In this instance as well the people punish the lawbreaker. So in this case, there does not seem to be much difference between the earlier books and Joshua.

There are also the cases of mass rebellion that are found frequently in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that God dealt with through mass deaths. There are no examples of this in Joshua, so it is impossible to compare them.

In Joshua the people make a covenant with the Gibeonites without consulting God, and broke his command not to make treaties with the Canaanite people. However, instead of striking them dead like would have been expected, God leaves them to experience the curses he gave regarding that particular sin. In the other books, however, there isn’t a similar example, so it is hard to compare the ways that God interacted with them on that type of sin.

In conclusion, while there is a clear difference between God’s interaction with Moses and Joshua, there is not such a clear difference in the punishments of sins. In the case of sins that are directly against god in the case of only a few people, God tends to require the people to exact justice. In the case of mass sins against God there are no examples found in Joshua so the two cannot be compared. Concerning the people as a whole making a mistake and not following what God said in a way that is not challenging his sovereignty, there are only examples in Joshua, so the two cannot be compared.

Leviticus

2007-06-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Given that it has been prophesied that they will fall, if I were transported into the land with the Israelites during a time of rebellion, but with knowledge of the future, and the blood of Christ, would there be any significant difference between them and myself with regard to ability to follow God? Why or why not?

Transported back in time to the land of Israel at the time of judges just in time to see the people falling away from God, I think that I would be able to withstand the spreading evil better than most of the Israelites. While those under the old covenant and those under the new covenant serve the same God, we who are under the new covenant have a much closer relationship to God than those under the old covenant. Those under the old covenant mostly serve God out of fear or respect. Because of the distance between them and God, it would be a lot harder for them to serve him out of love. It would be especially hard to know that God was loving if you had watched him kill thousands of your people. From the new covenant, however, it is much easier to love God. We have his sacrifice on the cross to look to, and we are drawn much closer to God than those in the old covenant. He is our father. This means that when the fear begins to get old, and God’s people begin to forget what happened a few generations ago, those in the old covenant lose most of the reason why they serve God. However, for those in the new covenant, we have survived for many, many generations because we love him for what he has done.

Another difference between the old and new covenants is that while the sacrificial system of the old covenant dealt with the external consequences of sin, it was powerless to loosen the stranglehold of sin on the people. In the new covenant, Christ conquered death and gave us the Holy Spirit, so we have a new nature. We have been changed from the inside out. This means that while those under the old covenant are still prone to sin, we are less so. When the people begin to forget why they are following God, those under the new covenant still have the holy spirit in them to remind them, and their changed nature to remind them, while those under the old covenant have neither of those, and only have exterior reminders that are easily ignored.

Also, in the moments that God doesn’t make sense, when life is not fair, those in the old covenant can only cower and wonder and remember God’s past deeds. We in the new covenant have direct access to God, and we have the bible, including the new testament. We have a much more obvious reason to believe that God loves us in Christ’s death and resurrection than the Israelites had at that point.

For myself in particular placed in a time of complacency and forgetfulness, I think that I would have a pretty hard time until things got rough. It is so easy to forget when things are easy. I still think that I would be able to stand where the issues are clear cut. I suppose it would depend on what stage of decay was present at that time.

Numbers: Why the Wandering?

2007-06-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

Although forty years of wandering in the desert may seem like a waste of time, and detour from fulfilling God’s purposes, there are several possible objectives for sending the Israelites out into the desert to wander that are not simply about wasting time. One is to purge the people of evil, another is to make them grateful. Yet another reason is to make them obedient. Other possible reasons are to give them time to recover from the large numbers of people who got struck dead, or to strengthen their resolve to enter the land so they don’t run at the first tight of a fight, or to discipline the people. While some may argue that that the given objectives are adequate to explain the forty years of wandering, each of these possible objectives leaves the question of why these things need to be accomplished unanswered.

There is, however, an objective that answers the question of why these things need to be accomplished. If the forty years of wandering in the desert were to bring God glory, then each of the above tasks are to bring God glory. They fit under and support this overarching purpose This is also an objective that does not beg the question of why it is necessary.

While it may seem to be a bad witness for God to be killing large portions of his people, purging evil from God's people does bring glory to God's name, both at the time, and in the future. At the time, it shows that he is a just god who doesn't tolerate evil, and punishes sins accordingly. A purified nation is also more capable of bringing glory to his name in the future by providing the nations with a good witness of who the Lord is throughout the generations than a nation that God doesn't purify.

It also beings glory to God’s name for Israel to learn gratitude. If they are grateful for what he had given them, then they will praise him and give glory to His name. The forty years in the wilderness gave them many things to be thankful for. God guided them safely, and they survived the wilderness. He fed them for forty years on manna. He gave them water. If forty years of miracles is not enough to produce a grateful nation, nothing will. Also, forty years of doing amazing things for his people will cause future generations to praise him. Other nations will see what he has done for his people and will praise him for that as well.

The objective of making the people of Israel obedient is similar to the objective of purging them of evil, except that it is aimed more at changing the actions of the survivors than stopping the spread of evil. It too brings glory to God by providing a witness to the nations. He has chosen the people of Israel to be his representatives among the nations. Forty years in the desert watching God strike thousands of people dead because they didn't obey him is a really good incentive to obey him, and to give him the honor he demands.

Reflections

2007-06-18T00:23:00.001-07:00

This summer I am undertaking to read a semsters worth of books for Torrey (the honors program I am in), write the essays that go with them, and learn calculus and physics. It is a daunting prospect, but I think it should be doable if I don't procrastinate too much.

It makes me wonder though, why I never bothered to apply myself during highschool. I could have already taken the calculus and physics, and I could have read these books and thought about them. But no, I graduated by the skin of my teeth, having spent most of my summers working on school. I always had such good intentions, but life was so much more interesting than studying. I wasted so much time doing things that were trivial. I know that some of my 'wasted' time was actually well spent enjoying nature, friends, and my imagination, but the majority of my time was spent procrastinating and making tasks I disliked take as long as possible. I wish I had known, I wish that I had realized just how much of my life I was frittering away by refusing to give the effort necessary.

This past year I wasn't that much better, wasting my time on pointless things like youtube and videos. Yeah, I spent time with friends and had a life, but I could have invested so many more hours on relationships or studies. Instead, I found myself feeling worked to the bone with a workload that I know I could have carried easily if I had been willing to work.

How is it that we manage to waste our time so thoroughly that we have no time to play? It is just redicuous.

So, this summer I hope to take the first step towards learning to invest my time, and not throw it about...I'll keep ya updated on how it goes....

Exodus: Why the Promised Land?

2007-06-15T20:21:00.000-07:00

There are three possible reasons why God is so determined that Israel will have Canaan: that the Canaanites need to be kicked out; that God promised Abram, Isaac, and Jacob that their descendants would have Canaan; that and a nation must have land to be stable.

The Canaanites are desperately wicked, and God, being a just god, has decided to destroy them. This is the region that Sodom and Gomorrah were in before they were destroyed. God has promised to give this land to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’s descendants, however, and if the land is abandoned, it will not be a lush and prosperous land anymore. God wants the Israelites to come and be his implements of justice on the Canaanites so that then the Israelites can take possession of the land.

As was mentioned above, God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their descendants would eventually own Canaan. Israel is the nation that is descended from them, so it makes sense that Israel should get Canaan.

However, while these reasons seem logically sound, they are not adequate to fully explain why God promised a land in the first place when he promised a nation from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Why was it so important that the nation to come was to have a land, and why that particular land? Perhaps the answer is that having a land is one of the prerequisites to having a stable nation, and Canaan is particularly suited for starting a nation.

In order to have a stable nation, there are several things that are necessary. First, one needs people. This seems rather obvious. Second, one needs a code of laws that are agreed upon by the people and a means of enforcing them. This is necessary to prevent anarchy and the self destruction of the nation. Third, the people need a land to live on that can support them that is moderately defensible. Without a land, a nation will necessarily splinter. It is not practical to have a nation sized group of people wandering around. The land would be incapable of supporting them. Once a nation splits into traveling groups, they will grow separate, and after a few generations will cease to adhere to a single identity or God. Also, a nomadic nation is at risk of being destroyed because they have no cities in which to hide the noncombatant members when attacked.

God is creating a nation out of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He provided the people, the Israelites. He also provides the laws, and the method of enforcement. All that is left is the land. He has promised them Canaan, and Canaan is ripe for the taking. It is a prosperous country in the middle of the desert. It is also a place that is the crossroads of several trade routs. Because of the terrain, it is quite defensible. Canaan is the best land that there is in that area, and God is not a god who gives shoddy gifts, so Canaan is the land that he chose to give them.

Genisis: God's mercy

2007-06-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

God, in the beginning, made man in his image, and gave him the Garden of Eden, a woman, and only one command. That command was not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Death was the punishment for disobedience. Eve, however, was tempted by the serpent and ate the fruit and Adam ate it too. God expelled them from the garden and cursed them. Death entered the world, and as our ancestors died eventually, so must we. This could be the entire story, the end of the story.

This, however, is not the end of the story. When people become so evil that God wants them all dead, he spares Noah and his family. Then, when humanity again erupts into evil, he changes their languages, protecting them from their own power. People still refuse to follow him, and instead turn to gods of their own creation, gods who demand obscene rights and horrendous sacrifice. Gods who live on fear and blood. From this chaos God pulls one man, Abram. When Abram follows him in faith, God promises to give him children and a land for them to inherit. After Isaac, the child of the promise, is born, God tells Abram to sacrifice Isaac to him. To those who have been steeped in the Bible, this may not seem a big thing. It is a test of Abram’s faith. That’s all. The idea of child sacrifice is horrifying, and of course God would never make Abram actually kill Isaac. To Abram, however, this was very different. Abram lived at a time when child sacrifice was common, expected. The fact that Abram believes that somehow he will come back down the mountain with Isaac, and that he believes that the god he serves is good is what is really weird. It was the logical assumption. Abram, however, is right. God provides an animal to sacrifice instead of Isaac, a substitute. This is weird, different. God’s mercy and compassion are seen in stark contrast with the other gods, who would have simply demanded Isaac’s blood.

God is good. It is so easy to read Genesis and just see the things that are taught in Sunday School. It is so easy to miss the wonder of how different God is from any other God. What other God is both just and merciful? What other God demands sacrifice for atonement of sin and then becomes his own creation to pay that debt with his own blood? What other God died for the very people who have rebelled against him? How is it that we find it so easy to ignore what we have been saved from. The world of Genesis seems so very far from our own that we cannot see that it is our world. We serve gods that demand child sacrifice, obscene rights, the very destruction of our souls. We serve ourselves. We need a savior before we are destroyed by our gods. God has provided a savior, but we find it the story clichéd. God have mercy.

Paradise Regained: Why this ending?

2007-06-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

At then end of Paradise Regained, Jesus wins a tremendous victory over Satan, causing Satan to fall from the sky[1]. After this great victory though, he “unobserved, / Home to his mother's house private returned.”[2] He went home, back to life as usual with no fanfare, nothing to mark that the Son of God had just defeated Satan. This seems an odd thing for a victor to do. The expected course of action would be for him to return home in a blaze of glory, declare his victory and claim his throne. Christ, however, simply and sedately goes back to his duty, back to obscurity.

One possible reason that Milton ended Paradise Regained this way is to continue to show the very marked contrast between Jesus and Satan. Throughout both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Satan is shown to be in pursuit of glory. Jesus, however, is not seeking glory for himself, and has submitted himself to his fathers will, to bring glory to his father[3]. For Jesus to go home asserting his victory would have been looking for glory for himself. In having Jesus return home unobserved, Milton is showing that Jesus still is not concerned with his own glory even when he has something to glory in. God’s glory is more important to him.

Also, for Jesus to have come out of the wilderness declaring his victory would have cost him that same victory. He won over Satan because he was not in it for his own glory. For Christ to declare himself victorious would have been seeking glory at the expense of the father.

The ultimate glory that Jesus could bring to God was his crucifixion. If he had conquered Satan but not beaten sin and death, all he would have accomplished was showing that he was stronger than Satan. Satan, however, would still have had the last laugh because he took humanity down with him. It was not just about Satan. It was about undoing the damage that Satan had done. To do that, humanity had to be restored. If Christ had gone back and proclaimed his victory, at that point the Romans might have crucified him, but he would not have been the innocent sacrifice for sins. Declaring himself king and then getting killed would have changed the meaning of his death. He would have died for insurrection, not because he was eerily innocent. Also, having declared himself king, it would have been abdication to let himself be killed. He would have looked like just another failed revolutionary. The amazing, different thing about Jesus was that he was not another revolutionary. He knew his kingdom was of another realm, and admitted it readily. To come out and declare victory over Satan would have been to claim his kingdom then and there, thereby losing it. He had to go back and be a carpenters son who could do miracles, read minds, cast out demons, and who was eventually killed for being too good, and for threatening with his very goodness the corrupt powers that were.

[1] IV. 560-581

[2] IV.638-639

[3] IV286-364

Spiderman 3

2007-06-09T19:47:00.001-07:00

So, back when I was still at school, a couple of friends and I went to see Spiderman. I really meant to post about it, but somehow, life was crazy enough that I just never got around to it. So, although it has been a while, and my thoughts are not as together as they were, I shall try to say what I thought of the movie.

First off, I enjoyed it immensely. I do not claim to be a good media critic. I could see that there were some flaws in the movie, but viewing it for the sake of the story told, I enjoyed it, and thought it did well.

I thought it was interesting how the movie made a point of jerking the viewer around emotionally. That is something that not a lot of movies made nowadays do, at least that I have noticed. It was skillfully done, and heart wrenching.

The story, however, and the characters themselves, are what made me think the most. Peter Parker was a good boy, or at least, he had good intentions, but he bungled so badly, especially with Mary Jane. I have heard it said that she was simply a spoiled brat who needed to grow up and let Peter be Spiderman. While perhaps she was weak, I do not think that this allows Peter off the hook. To be blunt, if Peter was not prepared to protect her, to be there for her and to listen, to put her needs above his own, he had no right messing with her heart. She knew what she was doing when she chose him despite his being Spiderman. She chose to give up a whole lot because she loved him. What, however, was Peter willing to give up for her? In the first half of the movie, he does not even seem willing to give her the few minutes she needs to talk to him about her job. She needed him, and he was too busy being caught up in his own coolness to hear her out. Yes, maybe she should of spoken up, but if he had been actually paying attention, her face screamed that she was broken, bruised, and battered, that she needed him to listen, to just be there.

The culmination of Peter's bumbling idiocy was his letting Gwen Stacy kiss him upside-down. True, he didn't know how special his upside-down kiss with MJ was to her, but is that any excuse? He should have known. That he did not was a sign that he did not really even know her. Why not? How long had he known her? How long had he thought that he loved her? Can you really love someone you do not even know?

Oddly enough, for me I think the hero of the movie is Harry, not so much Spiderman. True, as the Green Goblin, he was a beast, but as himself, he conquered the monster inside himself and helped save his friends. He knew what it was to be popular, but it did not consume him. He was there for MJ, and honestly, before he remembered what he had become, he was more worthy of her love than Peter. His love demonstrated that it ran deeper, beyond mere words and into actions.

Spiderman's battle against the darkness within himself was very interesting. I like how the movie portrayed revenge...a desire that poisons you until you become the very thing you desire to destroy. It destroys you from the inside out. Regardless of what needs to be done to the person who has wronged you, revenge should not be an option. Justice, yes, but only for the sake of justice itself, not for one's own self-gratification. What good is it to destroy the one who harmed you, if you are eaten alive by your bloodlust?

I also thought that the dichotomy between Peter and Eddie Brock was interesting. Both of them start out the same, excepting Peter's being Spiderman. While Peter has prided himself on his virtue, Eddie shows himself to be not above ditching virtue to get what he wants. When the symbiote tries to take over Peter by playing on his desire for revenge, it cannot drown out the fact that Peter is a boy who wants to do the right thing. He may bungle, but he really does want to do the right thing. However, when the symbiote tries to take over Eddie Brock, Brock has no such defenses against it, and instead embraces his doom, even to the point of self-immolation.

So...thoughts? I think there was more I wanted to say, but it seems to have gotten lost....

Immigration

2007-04-23T17:02:00.000-07:00

Alas, my poor blog. I have been rather busy as of late, and have somehow not had much time to blog and even less time to think of something good to blog on...so it has been a while.

I have been hearing a lot about the immigration issue lately, and am not quite sure what to think. It is true that we need what immigrants have to offer, and if we expelled all of the illegal immigrants without replacing them our economy would be in trouble. But it is also true that one of the reasons that America is not a third world country is that we do actually enforce our laws.

It is a heart wrenching problem because this is not something abstract. People's lives and futures are at stake. There are a huge number of people here in the US who broke the law by choosing to enter this country illegally. Mexico is a third world country. Most of the people who have come here illegally from Mexico have come in search of a better life, and many have found it.

However, is it justifiable to flaunt the law and then accuse the government of unfairness when they enforce the law? Perhaps the law should not be there, perhaps we should have open borders. Perhaps. But that is not the case now.

If America was almost any other country, this wouldn't be an issue. But America is softhearted. America might actually respond to international guilt trips. This puts my country in a really hard situation with no obvious right answer. No matter what happens, there will be problems.

It is, however, the ability to deal with situations like this in a just manner that helps to make America great. I don't know what the right answer is, but I trust that given time, the answer will come, and things will change. I don't know that I trust the government to do that, but if they cannot, the voice of the people will be heard. It is the American way.

Having said that, I have thought of some possible options. The most logical way out of this situation seems to be to deport all illegal immigrants while drastically increasing the number of legal immigrants. That way those deported have a better chance of making it back into the country if they want to, and also the economy won't collapse from lack of a labor source.

One argument against this idea is that it is cruel to uproot people who are upstanding citizens and have lived in this country for a long time. Anyone who is in the US illegally, however, knew the possible consequences when they came (other than those who were infants or very small children at the time). They should be thankful for the time they did have here before they got caught. That is they way this country works....you break the law, you pay the price. The issue isn't the color of someone's skin, the issue is the enforcement of laws to avoid anarchy.

Oh What A Tangled Web We Weave

2007-03-27T10:07:00.000-07:00

I randomly came across some clips from general hospital and they got me thinking. The show itself looks like a typical sitcom or soap opera, and therefore probably not worth watching (not that I know much of anything about the show). It did, however, make me think. The clips that I saw were about the drama that happens when people sin. A marriage falls apart because the man is in drugs and is unfaithful. The woman turns to her best friend, who happens to be a guy, and they end up sleeping together. Not to unusual in the land of TV melodrama. What happens next is what made me start thinking though. The husband checks into rehab. The woman finds out she's pregnant, and it is her friends child, not her husband's. Now what? There are no right answers. Her husband is back, and has straightened out. They have a son from before their marriage hit the rocks. Her friend knows that it is his baby, but has agreed to what is best for the baby, whatever that is. Should she marry the father of her baby, separating her son from his father, and probably causing her husband to go back down the tubes? Should she just not tell her husband whose baby it is? Should she tell, and stay with him anyway? There is no right answer. No matter what they do, someone will be ripped apart. And no one other than the children is innocent. Everyone deserves to be ripped apart.

That is what sin does. That is why our world is what it is. When we disobey God, we rip the fabric of our lives and those we love, and it cannot ever be the same. God's mercy mends our rips and tears and creates something beautiful, but the consequences are still there. Our lives become a patchwork, and something of the original beauty is lost.

God's rules aren't about thou shalt and thou shalt not. They are about saving us from self destruction, saving us from destroying everyone we love. His mercy isn't just about fire insurance, it is about mending our lives now, healing us now, so that we can live as whole selves, not tattered shreds of who we were made to be.

2007-03-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

My utmost apologies for having neglected my blog so. I lost track of how long it had been since I had posted an essay here. Hopefully I will be able to continue posting them every week. I also apologise for the lack of an essay on Dante's Paradisio. I was assigned to read about Bernard of Clairveaux instead of writing an essay.

Paradise Lost:: Who is responsible for the fall of humanity?

2007-03-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

There are two aspects to humanity’s fall: whether it is God’s fault or the sinner’s, and whether it is the tempter’s fault or the sinners. The first question must be answered before the second can be attempted.

If God is omniscient, then he knows if his creature will fall. If God creates a creature that he knows will fall, it seems that it is God’s fault when his creature falls, because he knew and still created the creature. There is a flaw with this reasoning, however, as can be seen in the example of Satan. God made Satan. He gave him only good, and all that he asked in return was gratitude. That is perfectly reasonable. There is something very wrong with someone who will spit in the face of the one who has given them everything. In giving Satan only good, God did everything possible short of taking away Satan’s free will to prevent Satan’s fall. Since God gave Satan every reason not to rebel, Satan is culpable for his fall, not God.

Satan agrees with this reasoning. He dwells in depth on who is to blame as he watches the earth. As he thinks on his past, he vacillates between blaming God and blaming himself for his fall. He reasons, “Whom hast thou then or what to accuse, / But heaven’s free love dealt equally to all? / Be then his love accursed, since love or hate, / To me alike, it deals eternal woe.”[1] In the next line he goes on to say “Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will / Chose freely what it now so justly rues.”[2] Satan is sorely tempted to blame God for his fall, but then admits that is his own fault. While Satan’s logic is not to be trusted implicitly, he is inclined to clear himself of blame when stretching the truth. The fact that he came to the conclusion that he himself is to blame shows that even Satan has to admit that it is the sinner who is to be blamed, not God.

In the case of Adam and Eve, the question of who is to blame is a bit more complex, because not only are there sinners and God, there is also Satan, the tempter. In the case involving only the sinner and God, it is clearly the sinners fault, as seen above. In a case involving a tempter, however, it is not as obvious.

If God is omnipotent, it seems that he should step in and stop the tempter. This, however, is a faulty idea. God is not responsible for the choices his creatures make, tempted or not. If he is responsible at all, he is responsible to warn his creatures. Nothing more is necessary, and this still seems like a mercy. God does step in and warn Adam and Eve through Raphael[3], so completely absolving himself of guilt in that quarter.

Even if God isn’t culpable for humanities sin, Satan might be to blame for the fall. After all, he deceived and manipulated Eve. Milton, however, combats this idea in this passage:

Man, with strength entire, and free will armed, [was]

Complete to have discovered and repulsed

Whatever wiles of foe or deeming friend.

For still they knew and ought to have still remembered

The high injunction not to taste that fruit,

Whoever tempted; which they not obeying,

Incurred, what could they less, the penalty,

And manifold in sin, deserved to fall.[4]

Adam and Eve knew what they were doing was wrong. They did it anyway. According to Milton, they are to blame. End of story.

This may seem harsh at first glance, but God gave them everything they could have wanted or needed. He was so good to them, and asked only one thing of them. One thing forbidden in the mist of immense bounty. No matter what anyone said to them, they had no right to even think about disobeying God. They had what God had commanded. They had the minds that God had given them, and they should have used them. They didn’t. They were ‘absent minded’, and conveniently forgot everything that they owed him. As Milton said, they “deserved to fall.”[5]

[1] Milton Paradise Lost IV.67-69

[2] Ibid. IV.70-720

[3] Ibid. V.222-245

[4] Ibid. X.9-16

[5] Ibid. X.16

Amazingly funny

2007-03-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

The World According to Student Bloopers

Richard Lederer

St. Paul's School

http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~beej/bloopers.html

One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted together the following "history" of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eight grade through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.

The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cul- tivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked "Am I my brother's son?" God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Issac, stole his brother's birthmark. Jacob was a partiarch who brought up his twelve sons to be partiarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fougth with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.

Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in "The Illiad", by Homer. Homer also wrote the "Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athen was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought the Parisians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History call people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlic in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March killed him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyrany who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harlod mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by George Bernard Shaw, and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote liter- ature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.

The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the "Vir- gin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself be- fore her troops, they all shouted "hurrah." Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors. In one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Mac- beth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miquel Cervantes. He wrote "Donkey Hote". The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost." Then his wife dies and he wrote "Paradise Regained."

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and the was called the Pilgrim's Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their was hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porposies on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their pacels through the post with- out stamps. During the War, Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented elec- tricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

George Washington married Matha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Them the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, "In onion there is strength." Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also signed the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a sup- posedl insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called "Candy". Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are flaling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolu- tion, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish gorrilas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon's flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inheret his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear him any children.

The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. He reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick Raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code for telepathy. Louis Pastuer discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturailst who wrote the "Organ of the Species". Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

The First World War, cause by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.

So you call yourself a Christian?

2007-02-24T23:15:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be a Christian? Jesus cared about people. That’s why he died. Christians are called to be like him, so why don’t the majority of people who call themselves Christians care enough to do something about the people around them who are dying. How do we dare ignore what is going on all around us? We whine about abortions, but what are the majority of us doing to ensure that women have no need of an abortion? It is not enough to try to ban it. We have to make it unnecessary. We have to get involved in the nitty-gritty everyday fight to reach girls before they get pregnant out of wedlock, to reach them when they are pregnant with no idea what to do next, when they have no money to feed another mouth, when they are so strung out that they are not capable of caring for a child.

It is not enough to feel pity. It is not enough to pass laws, although laws are important. It is not enough to bicker about who is to blame. We have to do something. Unless you are willing to make a difference, you do not have the right to complain.

We have to get out on the streets and give the kids with nowhere to go somewhere to call home, someone to look up to. We have to show those who know nothing but death that life is possible beyond the painkillers. We have to step beyond propaganda and into people’s lives. We have lives to save. And it starts with one. When you see that homeless person asking for money, get them some food. When you see a need, get involved. You don’t have to start a movement; you just have to start moving. Our faith demands nothing less.

The Slave Trade

2007-02-23T17:49:00.000-08:00

And no, I am not talking about something that ended long ago. I am talking about something that is very real in our world today.

We just had a chapel on human trafficking. The guy who talked to us gave us information and statistics about the problem, and then played the film Fields of Mudan, a heart-wrenching tale of a girl forced into that world. A five-year-old in a brothel. In America. And this is the story of millions. This is not something that happens to a few people or that only happens in third world countries. This is something that is huge here in the US. Most people have no clue.

On the right under Make a Change is a list of links for more information. Get involved!!!

2007-02-13T13:52:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to my TA tutor's house along with a bunch of his other students. It was so nice to be in a small group of people who I had a lot in common with discussing things not because we had to, but because we wanted to. That is the one thing that I regret about college right now. I am in Torrey, so I get a lot of discussion time in, but sometimes it seems like we are just there because we have to. It's just another class. Lets get it over with so we can go do something fun. That is hard for me to deal with. I want our discussions to be fun, to be what we look forward to and don't want to end. But instead I find myself wanting to do the least amount of work and preparation possible so I can do something 'fun'. grrrr. I don't seem to be able to find a way around that, though I hope and pray that I can. I want to find my way back into the joy of the intellect.

Dante's Divine Comedy: Purgatory

2007-02-09T16:29:00.000-08:00

The soul is divided into three parts: the mind, the emotions, and the desires, and there are three categories of people: God, others, and self. The order of the soul should be mind in control of the emotions and desired. The proper order of persons is God, others, self. Purgatory is arranged according to the level of disorder of the souls, or of their disordered view of themselves, others, and God. The two main sections of purgatory are Love Perverted and Disordered Love of Good.

Those in the Love Perverted levels of purgatory have put themselves above others. They have also put their emotions over their minds. This is why they are on the lower levels of mount purgatory. They have a disordered view of others, and their souls are disordered. They must learn to see their sins for what they are, and to love others as they should, as they love themselves.

The Love Deficient and Love Disordered levels of purgatory are full of those who love God first, others second and self last, but have disordered souls. In the case of those whose love is deficient, they do not have the will power to do what they ought. Their minds are not in control enough to make them do as they aught. Those whose love is disordered love strongly, but love the wrong things. They love the things that feed their appetites, and are therefore controlled by their appetites. The penance that they are given in purgatory spurs the mind to further control, and subdues the desires by showing the souls what exactly their desires were in reality.

Unlike the souls in Hell, however, none of the souls in purgatory have put self over God intentionally. True, self indulgence is a form of idolatry, but due to the disorder of the soul, not to having intentionally put oneself over God. Purgatory is a place where order is restored to those who have sought it. Hell is a place where disorder is revealed for what it is, and the souls that chose it on earth dwell there continually wallowing in their horribleness.

New Paper and Topic

2007-02-03T00:38:00.000-08:00

I am currently writing a paper this semester on whether religion is necessary to society, and whether or not Christianity is particularly necessary, and for whom. I would love to discuss this, so comment please. The two texts that I am particularly looking at are The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

Dante's Divine Comedy: Hell

2007-02-03T00:33:00.000-08:00

The soul is divided into three parts: the mind, the emotions, and the desires. These three sections seem to fit nicely with Dante’s divisions of hell: the incontinent, the violent, and the fraudulent. The incontinence level is full of people who act based on their desires, the violent level is full of people controlled by their emotions, and the fraudulent level is full of people who are controlled by their intellect.

The incontinence section of hell is full of the lustful, the gluttonous, the greedy, and the wrathful. Lust, gluttony, and greed are by very definition, desire. People characterized by them are people characterized and controlled by desire. Wrath does not fit into the category of runaway desire so easily. Wrath, however, is a desire to exact vengeance. To be controlled by wrath is then to be controlled by desire. The circle of hell devoted to the incontinent is full of people driven by their desires, who refused to allow their minds to control their desires.

The violent circle of hell is contains those who were violent against others, against themselves, and against God and the things of God. Violence is the outward expression of emotion, the result of a failure to control emotions, namely hatred. Some might ask what the difference is between those in the wrathful part of hell and those in the violent part of hell. Hatred is the emotion that violence most often stems from. It is differentiated from wrath in that wrath is a desire for revenge, while hatred is a step beyond that into hating there person for who they are. Wrath can be satisfied when the other person gets what is coming to them, but hatred never dies. No matter what happen to the other person, the hatred will only grow. Hatred can grow out of wrath, but is much worse.

The fraudulent circle of hell is a bit more difficult to characterize. At first glance, there seems to be nothing wrong with the order of the souls here. Mind is in control, with the emotions and desires submitted to it. That, however, is why these souls are in the deepest part of hell. There are three categories of people: God, others, and self. The proper order of persons is God, others, and lastly, self. Those who are in hell have put self first above God and above others. This is why hell is organized with the most disordered soul at the top, and the ordered soul at the bottom. Sin is the result of disordering the order of persons, and the more order a soul, the more efficient it is at sinning, and the worse the sins. The fraudulent, then, are ordered souls who have chosen to make themselves their god, the very thing that condemned Lucifer.

Metamorphoses

2007-01-28T18:59:00.000-08:00

Although most likely there is a deeper message to metamorphoses, on the surface it teaches a worldview of mediocrity. The beautiful women all ended up raped by the male gods, and despised by the female gods. Those who did excellently were attacked and destroyed. It also teaches a worldview of submission to the powers that be. Those who refused to submit to the gods suffered. Those who were prideful, and thought that their deeds and accomplishments made them equal to the gods were soon disabused of that notion by a display of the might of the gods.

By portraying beautiful women as the objects of the gods, Metamorphoses is teaching that beauty is not to be desired. It teaches that beauty is, in fact, something that should be avoided, because when the gods desire a mortal, chaos results, usually including great loss to the object of that desire. So, following this to its logical end, beauty leads to pain.

In the same way, excellence is seen as resulting in suffering. Arachne is truly excellent at weaving. When she contested with Athena she did not loose. That gained her nothing, however, in the long run. In the end her excellence destroyed her. Arguably it was her arrogance, but it seems that since not even Athena could best her, her arrogance should have been forgivable. What destroyed her was that she was at least as good as the goddess, if not better.

When those who refuse to submit and are prideful are attacked by the gods, that teaches that those qualities lead to great pain by showing pain as a result of pride and insurrection. For example, Niobe was very prideful, and the gods smote her mightily. Penthius is an example of insurrection against the gods. He denied the deity of Bacchus, and threatened him with bodily harm. This resulted in him getting his head ripped off by his mother as she celebrated Bacchus. Insurrection equals death and pain. Pride equals suffering.

These stories are able to shape the worldviews the simple who read them because they are stories. Stories reach into our souls and allow us to think outside the box without hurting our minds, because they can be read without engaging our minds at all. Because we tend to suspend value judgments when we read myths, we are unable to combat the values presented. When we have no defense against something, it will shape us.

The Aeneid

2007-01-19T16:06:00.000-08:00

It is important to submit your emotions to your mind, because otherwise you will be unable to perform your duty. Dido is a perfect example of this. At the beginning of the Aeneid she is a very good queen[1]. By the time Aeneas leaves, however, she has forgotten her duty to her people, and thinks only of her pain and how to end it[2]. Because she has ceased to care, her city stops functioning and becomes vulnerable to attack[3].

Aeneas, on the other hand, does not sacrifice his duty for the sake of love. For a short amount of time he does forget his duty, but when the gods remind him of his fate he acquiesces[4]. He had to choose between love and duty, and picked duty, forcing his emotions to submit to his reason[5].

If you allow your emotions to reign, you may go mad. “And so Dido was overwhelmed by grief and possessed by madness”[6]. Dido’s love certainly seems to make her go mad. This is because if you submit your mind to your emotions it ceases to function logically because emotions are not logical.

If, however, you submit you emotions to your reason, your emotions, while paining you for a while, will eventually give up the fight. When Aeneas chooses to obey the gods and leave Carthage, it hurts him to leave Dido in such distress[7]. However, he does his duty and leaves, and when he sees her again while he is touring the underworld, while feeling pity for her, it does not seem that he is still madly in love with her[8]. His main response seems to be feeling badly about the injustice of her death[9].

So, in conclusion, “Love is a cruel master”[10], because it ought not be master. We were created so that our minds need to in control. Our emotions do matter, but they cannot be allowed control. When emotions are allowed to rule, chaos and anguish will eventually result. In the ensuing chaos, duty will be forgotten or ignored, and become nearly impossible to do.

[1] Book 1 lines 495-510

[2] Book 4 lines 450-553

[3] Book 4 lines 87-89(approx.)

[4] Book 4 lines 278-296

[5] Book 4 lines 331-333

[6] Book 4 lines 474-475

[7] Book 4 lines 332-333, 393-396

[8] Book 6 lines 450-477

[9] ibid.

[10] Book 4 line 413

The Odyssey

2007-01-19T16:00:00.000-08:00

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”[1]

So begins Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. As in the Iliad, the character trait described in the first line becomes a major theme throughout the book. Odysseus is a man of twists and turns, using his skill at turning phrases to twist almost every event to his favor. Other characters also are deceptive to achieve their ends.

Athena, for instance, often assumes the shape of a mortal whom every one knows when she is trying to get people to do things[2]. Athena’s bent towards deception may play a large role in why she favors Odysseus so highly. The similarities between Athena and Odysseus may also be why he alone has his appearance changed to aid his deceptions[3].

The theme of deception can also be seen back in Ithaca. Because Penelope is unable to secure peace from the suitors by force, she carefully works to secure peace and time by using deception. She tells the suitors that she will pick a husband when she has finished weaving a funeral shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’s father. Then at night, she unravels all the day’s weaving. When she is found out, she insinuates that she will marry the suitor who gives the best gifts[4].

Telemachus too is learning to be a man of twists and turns as he comes into his manhood. It seems at first that he lacks his father’s ability with words, but as his character grows, he begins to show that he has inherited his father’s excellence with falsehood. However, it is not until he is able to watch his father in action that he truly begins to exercise this gift.

When Odysseus arrives in Ithaca, deception plays a role even in Odysseus’s most intimate relationships. He at first hides his identity from Telemachus[5]. Then, he hides his identity from Penelope until the suitors have been destroyed[6]. When he reveals himself, Penelope tests him to make sure that it truly is him by telling him a falsehood that only he would recognize[7]. When Odysseus goes to Laertes, he again at first conceals his identity[8].

Thus, the Odyssey is laced with deception in much the same way that the Iliad is laced with rage. While in the Odyssey deception seems to be without major consequences, in reality deception often goes hand in hand with fractured souls and lives.

[1] Homer, The Odyssey, 1.1

[2] ibid., 1.22-23

[3] ibid., 13.492-500

[4] ibid., 2.94-122

[5] ibid., 16.13-214

[6] ibid., 23.1-110

[7] ibid., 23.110-230

[8] ibid., 24.260-364

oh dear

2007-01-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

well, I fully intended to post on wednesday or friday. alas, due to travel and hand surgery, that didn't happen. as soon ans I get the proper computer online (the one that hollds my essays) I shall post...Untill then, my apologies...

The Iliad

2007-01-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

This is the first essay out of many that I am gonna post about the books that I read last semester and am reading this semester. I think I will be posting one every Wednesday or Friday.

Iliad Pull Question

On the Proper Response to Homer’s Iliad

Pirous who heaved the rock

Came rushing in and speared him up the navel –

His bowels uncoiled, spilling lose on the ground

And the dark came swirling down across his eyes.[1]

This is just one small example of the violence displayed in the Iliad. In fact, the Iliad is so saturated in violence that there almost seems to be no point in reading it. However, we cannot ignore this book. It is only recent phenomenon that one does not have to read homer to be considered educated. For the past several thousand years, Homer has been a part of the educational curriculum of western civilization. His works did not survive through the ages simply because he was good at describing gore. No, there must be something more to the Iliad than how so and so speared so and so, something beyond the violence.

Homer very carefully guides our emotions as we read the Iliad. There are specific points where our loyalties shift (for instance when Hector is talking with Andromache[2] and the death of Patroclus[3]). This can hardly be accidental or without purpose. These points illustrate what is good and what is evil, what is honorable and what is shameful. Homer seems to be very deliberately training us, shaping our emotional responses to fit his moral standards.

Sometimes Homer’s shaping our emotions can be very uncomfortable because his standards are not our own. This is important to notice, because when someone else is influencing us sometimes what we are being taught is true and good, but sometimes it may go against everything we believe. However, in Homer most of the things that make us uncomfortable are true and good, at least on a surface level. One ought to be wise and discerning concerning the Homeric worldview, but also, one also ought to be careful not to throw out ideas and emotions simply because they make us uncomfortable.

For instance, honor plays a major role in the Iliad. Most of the plot centers around the honor of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector. However, in today’s culture, honor is not seen as being very important. People don’t fight duels to defend their honor anymore. The concept of honor being one of the most important things in life seems very foreign. Because of this, when Homer guides our emotions about someone based on their honor or lack thereof, it is very uncomfortable for us. Because this is uncomfortable, it is very easy to try to ignore it, to say that honor is not important and that Homer doesn’t apply anymore. This is not a good response. Whether or not honor is important, whether or not his works apply to our lives today, decisions about rational things ought to be made based on reason, not based on personal preference.

[1] Homer, The Iliad, 4.607-609

[2] ibid., 6.482-588

[3] ibid., 16.914-1009

Suddenly it all makes sense....and I am blown away

2006-12-08T17:49:00.000-08:00

We were having a lovely discussion in preparation for Don Rags, when I suddenly had the most amazing epiphany. God is so amazingly beautifully merciful. I had been getting inklings of it while I was studying the Pentateuch, and more as I studied Hebrews with Melanie, but I saw a much more full picture of it tonight. I shall try to explain it here, but I'm really not sure that I can do it justice.

We started the semester with Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. These books taught us that the gods are arbitrary, unjust, and chaotic. Ovid in particular portrayed the gods as being immortal and powerful humans, more human than we are.

Then we moved on to Dante, who even in Hell offered us hope. Here was a system that is ordered. Hell is not a random pile of all the humanity that ever offended a God. It is instead a carefully organized and orchestrated system of punishment based on a very detailed moral system. In Purgatory and Paradise, we got a glimpse of a way of escape from the doom that we all seem to deserve.

Spenser's Faerie Queen was next. Here we saw the possibility of redemption displayed in myth. Here was a good human wanting to accomplish his quest, but he is incapacitated by weakness. Then he is healed, and equipped to conquer, redeemed.

Milton then went to the root of everything, the very beginning. He showed how the thing that brought this chaos in the first place was that Satan wanted to be God, and then brought mankind around to his way of thinking as well. Satan is the ultimate Homeric hero. He is in it for the glory. In Paradise Regained, we see the perfect man being the perfect hero: Christ is in it for God's glory, not his own. So here we see the problem begin, and how to defeat it, but we are incapable of being the perfect man. We cannot beat this problem.

Then we move on to the Pentateuch. Here we see God show an insane amount of mercy. Even as he punished mankind for their disobedience, he shows mercy. He saves us from immortality. If the gods are what we would become if we were immortal, than this is a mercy indeed. Humans, in this weakened state cannot stand immortality. Also, from the midst of the horror of the Canaanite and Egyptian gods, we see him rescue a nation. He calls them his own people, and says that he will be their God. He gives them these laws that separate them from the other nations and mark them as his. Some of these laws must have seemed so arbitrary at the time, but with modern technology, they make perfect sense. The laws he gave them protected them from many ills, both physical and societal. He offers them a way to atone for their rebellions so that he can live among them without destroying them. His mercy seen here is exquisite.

But then comes Hebrews, and the world suddenly becomes painfully beautiful. In Hebrews we see that the mercy show in the Pentateuch is nothing compared to the mercy that has been shown us. We thought that the sacrificial system was merciful. Christ accomplished more in one death than the death of all of the animals killed in the history of the world. In the death of the perfect man, the debt owed by sinners was forever paid. In the resurrection of the triumphant sacrifice, death was forever conquered. We may die, but there is no longer any need to fear. The sort of immortality we were created for awaits us on the other side. In the continual perfection of the perfect man sin was destroyed. Suddenly we are no longer trapped in the chaos. The door to heaven has been unlocked, and all that is needed now is to enter it.

How is that we miss this? God is good. infinitely so. He is not safe, but he is good. The beauty of what he has done and who he is is breathtaking and so much more than we can even begin to imagine...I am blown away.

Alas....

2006-12-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

My utmost apologies for my lack of new posts...hopefully after finals week I will have time to post....

I have been updating my xanga though, so feel free to stop by there.

The Lady Is Not For Buning

2006-11-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

Christopher Fry's play The Lady Is Not For Burning is AMAZING!!! It shows us ourselves in a mirror, and gives hope to the hopeless, rest for the weary, and courage to the faint of heart. God is good.

Elections

2006-11-09T23:59:00.000-08:00

It was a very odd feeling to realize that I actually have a say in what is happening in this country. It is also a rather interesting feeling to realize that my vote is not included in the the current election results. Alas for absentee voting. Regardless, I now have the right to complain about the state of this country. I voted.

While I don't claim to know the statistics, the general impression that I get is that there are a whole lot of people out there who weren't willing to vote for some reason or other. I also get the impression that a lot of those people are pretty vocal about their disapproval of the state of our country. To them I say, if you don't like the way this country is being run, do something about it. Vote. If you are not willing to do so, then don't complain. You chose this state of affairs by refusing to make a choice.

To those of you that did vote, I salute you. Whether or not I agree with how you voted is immaterial, I'm just thankful that you care about our country.

To those who serve in our armed forces, and to their families, THANK YOU! With out your courage and sacrifice, this country would probably not exist as we know it. God bless you and keep you from harm and set his angels to protect you.

Monster House

2006-11-03T22:18:00.000-08:00

Today I took a break from studying and went with some friends to see the movie Monster House. It was a very interesting movie. I enjoyed it, but I think that it would terrify a lot of little kids...or at least, I would have been terrified. All in all though, I liked it. The plot was a bit predictable, but not in an ordinary way. I did find some of the unnecessary crudeness annoying, and disliked their stereotyping of law enforcement. But other than the usual annoyances....

*SPOILER*

In order to stop Constance, Mr. Nebbercracker had to become her. When they show
Constance before she falls, her reaction to the children is almost the same as Mr Nebbercracker's reaction to the kids on his lawn. So to stop her, he had to become her. But it didn't work. It ended up destroying her, and almost destroying him, and imprisoning them both for 40 years.

I also thought it was interesting that despite the occasional crudity, femininity played a very wholesome role. The mother is rather clueless, but she had a point in trying to make the dad tell his son that he loved him. "Z" had a point in kicking Bones out for disrespecting her (isn't it sad that like a lot of girls, she didn't have the confidence in herself to leave him out). Then you have Jenny spurring both Chowder and DJ to heroic deeds. They would never have had the gut to do what they had to if it hadn't been for her, but she didn't overpower them. They were definitely the main players.

Monster House was also a story about what it means to grow up. It starts out with DJ not quite sure of himself, somewhere between childhood and adulthood. He wants to be grown up, but somehow he's just a wanabe. But by the end of the movie, he has learned to be responsible, but is okay with having fun and acting like a kid. That is maturity.

Poems

2006-10-30T15:18:00.000-08:00

As I was looking through my poems for a particular song, I happened to find this hodgepodge of poems and thought that I would share them. (I just came up with the titles today to differentiate the different poems, so the titles are not the best.)

*EDIT*

I'm breaking them up into thier own individual posts to make them easier to manage.

Salvation

2006-10-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

Between us and despair
Is a cross that is bloodstained
A tomb that is empty
God, with holes in his hands.

Prison

2006-10-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

Eyes of ice and stone,
A soul protected by walls of steel
Barriers that bind and chafe

Lost

2006-10-30T15:14:00.000-08:00

Brown eyes, liquid pools of pain,
A soul drowning in agony,
lost in the dark

Wistful Hello

2006-10-30T15:13:00.001-08:00

As we past in the street,
Practically strangers,
I said hello.
He only smiled.
A slow, sad, wistful smile
That would break your heart

Weeping Laughter

2006-10-30T15:13:00.000-08:00

She laughs at me, herself, the world
Defiant, yet she cowers
The laughter, a cover for tears

My Friend

2006-10-30T15:11:00.000-08:00

The past, the tears, the terror, the fears
The memories that destroy

I weep for you, my brother, my friend
I weep for you, when will it end?
The hurt, the pain you try to deny
I see the path you walk, and cry

Joe

2006-10-30T15:10:00.000-08:00

I could have sworn there were tears in your eyes
When I turned to you and told you
Christ will not give up on you
A soul on the rack, your voice nearly broke
As you said, I’ve already given up on myself

You punched the wall till blood fell
Trying to forget.
Your face a mask of agony.
When I said Christ will not give up on you
You said “I already have”

Since that day, I’ve rarely seen you
I don’t know what you have been through
But on that fateful day
your allegiance you changed.
Your soul belongs to Christ,
and he will bring you home

He will not give up on you,
Even when you’ve given up

The road home will not be easy,
it rarely is
but through the fire he’ll bring you,
pure as gold.

Though we pass through the fire,
Or over us the waters roll,
He will never leave you
In his hands he holds your soul.

Broken Soul

2006-10-30T15:09:00.000-08:00

Defiance and rage
Combine in his face
Yet powerless to change
Destroy or erase
The terror of the past
The power it wields
How long will it last?
How long till it yields?

The power of the cross
Can heal this soul
Find this one who is lost
Make the broken whole

2006-10-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

No fairytale dreams for you
none of this dream come true
Far from a dream, your life's a wreck,
a nightmare of your own creation.
Where do you go from here?
Where's the prince charming to stop the spell,
save you. Awaken you once more.
All you have is what you have left
No less. No more
Your soul is sickened, weak and dying
who can save you, make you whole?
Where is prince charming to ride in and rescue,
to take you from this mess?
The sword you've been given, but you're too weak to lift it.
The power to break the spell you have but cannot use.
you are all that stands between you and certain death,
But you have no strength to fight
hope is lost. Darkness falls.

On a hill far away, long ago
another head fell, and lost all hope.
he breathed his last and died.
But that was not the end.
Nor was it the beginning.
This was no mere mortal man
This was god incarnate.
God all powerful became a helpless infant
Then, when he became a man
Other men betrayed and killed their creator.
But like I said, 'twas not the end
Three days after he breathed his last
three days after he was nailed to a cross
those lungs took in air
That still heart began to beat
and that once dead body got up and walked right out of the grave.

This one who died yet lives again
he let them kill him for you
he died so that you might live again.
He died to weild the sword.
He died to break the spell
He died your death you could not stop
He died to make you whole.
Your prince is out there
beyond the wall
Calling

Will you let him take you
from this place of death and destruction?
Will you let him take your place and bring you to life?

Hope in the Dark

2006-10-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

You hold the knife
And wonder how to stop this pain
You don't want to die,
You don't want to live.
You simply want the pain to end.
The pain you feel inside is killing you
This life is destroying you
You wonder if there is any reason to live
Is there a world beyond the pain?
If there is, is there anyway to that world?
Or is a knife your only answer?
You drop your head and weep,
Desperate for hope
Empty
Dying

There is life beyond this
Beyond the graveyard of dreams
There is hope
There is light to illuminate this darkness
There is a love greater than your pain
There is healing for your soul
There is one who died to give you his life
Life without this crippling agony
He suffered so you could go free

A (disturbing) Cinderella story

2006-10-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched A Cinderella Story. I liked the movie for the most part. Yeah, it was a Hillary Duff movie, meaning chick flick and a bit cheesy. But it was cute. Until the last 30 seconds. The movie ends with them driving off into the sunset, and then her saying something to the effect of that this is only a temporary state of affairs. That disturbed me. Aren't faerie tales supposed to end with a happily ever after? How can it be a happy ending if it is a happily ever until I find someone new? That is what disturbed me about Princess Diaries as well (or one of the many things). The first movie ends with her happily ever after being Michael. The second movie starts off with Michael completely gone. He's off touring somewhere...but he and Mia are definitely not still a couple. I've noticed that while in the old days happily ever afters ended in marriage, nowadays they end with a kiss. No commitment, just a kiss. That's a happy ending, but it certainly doesn't seem to last ever after...

To me, that is selling out, selling yourself short. Don't listen to Hollywood. No matter who you are, you are worth more than a happy ending. You are worth an ever after.

blue green dragon

2006-10-13T21:27:00.000-07:00

Help would be appriciated in figuring out how to change my blue title to a more appropriate green...

oh, and also how to monitor who sees my site when

Abortion and Breast Cancer

2006-10-13T16:55:00.001-07:00

For my sophomore term paper in high school I wrote a paper on the risks of abortion to the woman. Unfortunately, it is really hard to find scholarly reports on abortion risks because it is such a loaded issue. Almost every source that claimed that abortion is risky were also pro-life, while those who denied that there were risks worth mentioning were pro-choice. However, the more I researched it, the more it became clear that while there were mere propaganda sites on both sides, the better scientific arguments were on the side of there being risks. One of the risks that has been researched the most is the link between breast cancer and abortion.

It seems reasonable to think that risk of breast cancer would increase if cells are pushed to partial differentiation, and then the hormone that got them there (estrogen) is removed, leaving the cells very vounerable to carcinogens. It is also a reasonable idea that being exposed to large doses of estrogen will raise the risk of breast cancer. Another logical idea is that having an abortion would raise one's risk of breast cancer, since the later one has children the lower your risk is. These are, as far I have learned, factors that lead to an increased risk of breast cancer.

The above factors are all factors caused by an abortion. Some of these risks are lessened by having a late term abortion rather than an early to mid term abortion. The first two factors also are not caused by most spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) because most spontaneous abortions occur in the first trimester and are caused by a deficiency of estrogen. This, however, is just the logic of the link, not conclusive proof.

Conclusive proof one way or the other on this issue is really hard to come by. Most studies done on this link rely on women reporting accurately whether or not they have had an abortion. This, however, is not accurate. Women who have had abortions and have not been diagnosed with breast cancer are likely to hide their abortions. Women with breast cancer who know that they are participating in a study are less likely to hide their abortions. This leads to skewed results. Also, there are other factors that lead to breast cancer, so it is hard to test for just one factor. The research that has been done is not conclusive and there is a lot of disagreement among the different projects that have been done. As far as I am aware though, the majority of the reliable research supports the link between breast cancer and abortion.

Whether or not we know for sure that the two are linked, women should be made aware of the possibility. We have a right to know what the side effects of medical procedures are, whether or not they are morally controversial.

Wow.

2006-10-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

The world is so immense, and our every action is so huge. We are not insignificant. History is in our hands. All of creation waits with baited breath to see what we, chosen, created, beloved of God will do. The future of human kind is in our hand. How frightening. But we are beloved of God Almighty. He loves us so much, we are so important to Him that He became man, and died to redeem us. We are His children. What an amazingly beautiful thing. What a terrifyingly beautiful place we have. Praise him. Rejoice!

Education: The Purpose is…?

2006-10-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Throughout history, education has been a much-debated subject. There are many different views on what the purpose of education should be and what the best methods are. Some say that the purpose of education is to teach information, and that teaching how to use the information is unnecessary. Others, such as Dorothy Sayers, say that the purpose of education is to teach students how to think and use information. Some, like C.S. Lewis, argue that the purpose of education is to teach students morals and how to subjugate their emotions to reason. However, there are problems with using any one of these to the exclusion of the others. Each is valid, but none can stand alone. Although some think that education should center on only one or two of the following three things—information, reason, or becoming a proper human—education should focus on all three, because if any one of the parts is missing, the resulting education will produce people ill-equipped to be productive members of society.

The popularity of the conveying of information as the sole purpose of education varies from time to time and from place to place. Dorothy Sayers, writing in England around the time of WWII, says in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning, “modern education concentrates on teaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing and expressing one’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along” (10). At that time, teaching ‘subjects’—information—only was the popular purpose of education. Although unfashionable in some circles, teaching information only is in use here in the United States, sometimes under the guise of ‘teaching to the tests’. When questioned about educational methods in the United States, Elizabeth Pocock—a retired public school teacher—said that she taught her students more than just ‘subjects’. The catalyst for her resignation was a directive from higher officials demanding that teachers teach only what was required to pass the standardized tests.

Teaching information is vital to education, because without knowledge of information, people are ill equipped to fulfill their roles. Those who are illiterate, with no more than a rudimentary command of language, will find it very difficult to be responsible citizens because they will be unable to make informed decisions regarding public policy. Those with only a basic knowledge of math and economics will be an economic burden on society, since they will be unable to make informed decisions in business and personal finance. Those who know nothing of science and ecology are likely to wreak havoc on the environment, since they will be unaware of the ecological consequences of their actions. Those who are ignorant of history will be unable to learn from it, and will find themselves repeating it. All in all, lack of knowledge makes it very difficult to make responsible decisions, and therefore, to be a productive and responsible citizen.

However, although information is necessary, it alone cannot create productive members of society. If one knows facts, that does not mean that one is equipped to use those facts. Dorothy Sayers discusses the inadequacy of merely knowing facts, saying that although students who are taught only information may have knowledge, they may be unable to think, and to use or increase their knowledge (7-8). In order to use what they have learned, students need to be taught at least that it has an application outside of the schoolroom, and preferably to be taught how to use it.

Another educational purpose that some espouse is to teach reason primarily and information secondarily. This is what Dorothy Sayers advocates in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning. She points out the obvious failure of an educational system that produces a ‘gullibility rate’ higher than its high literacy rate (1-7). She goes on to suggest that perhaps education has been ‘improved’ much to its detriment, and that the cure of education’s woes can be found in a return to the medieval method of education (7-8). In medieval times, formal education was divided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium (Sayers 8). The purpose of the former was to teach the students to think and reason well, before moving on to studying primarily information in the Quadrivium (Sayers 8-10). In the Trivium, students were taught information, but information was merely a tool by which to learn to think, rather than being the focus (Sayers 8-10).

The advantages of teaching reasoning as well as information, as opposed to teaching only information, are readily apparent. Teaching reasoning plus ‘subjects’ has most of the benefits of teaching ‘subjects’ alone, with very few of the disadvantages, since students are not only taught the information that they will need to be productive citizens, they are also taught how to use it . Some might argue that spending time learning how to think takes away from the learning of facts, and that therefore teaching students to think is detrimental. Although it is true that there may be less time for facts, it is a choice between more time for facts with little ability to use them, or less time for facts with the ability to use them.

While much better than teaching only information, teaching reasoning plus information is not totally adequate either. Although it provides the skills required to become productive members of society, it fails to provide an impetus to use them productively. It is possible that a murderer could master the art of reason, and thereby escape capture for quite some time, but such a person is far from being a productive member of society, and is in fact pathogenic. C.S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, “It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (24). Without morals, one has no reason to be a productive member of society, and further, one is unable to be one.

As seen in his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis believes that one of the main purposes of education should be training in morals, or ‘just sentiments’— teaching students to like what they ought and dislike what they ought—because “the little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred to those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful” (Lewis 16). As was said above, Lewis argues that without such ‘just sentiments’, reason is incapable of controlling the emotions, and that therefore ‘just sentiments’ are very necessary.

The advantages of teaching ‘just sentiments’—or morals—are immense, since morals are what allow reasoning and information to be put into use. Morals are the catalyst that push people to become responsible citizens, to be honest, to work to conserve the environment. They are the reason why people choose to be virtuous. Without morals, there is no reason why people should not lie, steal, cheat, and murder their way to the top. Without morals, there is no reason why power should not be the ultimate goal, rather than filling one’s role well.

Although morals are a necessity, they cannot stand alone. Without a foundation in absolute truth, morals become merely a tool for creating human puppets, since without an absolute standard the only standard for right and wrong is that of the person in control. As Dr. John Mark Reynolds points out in his lecture Religion, Politics, and Culture: Late 18th to the 20th Century, morals alone cannot create virtuous people. If one relies on morals alone to create virtuousness to the exclusion of reason, one may succeed for a small amount of time, but if the reason is unconvinced the heart will follow eventually. Reasoning and information are also necessary since without them people are ill equipped to fill their proper roles.

Looking at these three possible purposes for education, it becomes apparent that although none of them can stand on their own, they work quite well together. Lewis says that the teaching of proper sentiments must be in place before rationality can effectively be used. Sayers says that without reason, facts are unusable. Facts, of course, must be taught in order for students to have the knowledge necessary to fill their proper roles. Therefore, education should have all three elements—moral instruction rooted in absolute truth, the teaching of reason, and the teaching of facts. None of these elements is complete in itself, but together they create a comprehensive educational system capable of producing truly educated people—people who are decent humans who can think and who know their facts—people equipped to be productive citizens.

In conclusion, while it is possible to focus on one or more of these three elements of education, only a combination can create a truly complete education which will prepare people to be productive citizens. If even one of the elements is missing, it renders the rest ineffective. Teaching facts alone is unproductive, since if one cannot think, one will be unable to use whatever knowledge one manages to gain. Teaching facts plus reasoning is better than teaching only facts, but it is still less than ideal, since without morals people have no reason to use their gifts and fulfill their roles. Teaching morals is effective, but only when based on absolute truth and paired with teaching reason and information. However, the three fit together quite nicely into a combined educational philosophy capable of turning out whole and educated people. This is much needed today when both morality and reason seem to be crumbling. If reason and virtue are restored to their place in education, there may yet be hope for humanity. If they are denied, what hope is there for the future?

Works Cited
Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Pocock, Elizabeth. Personal interview. 15 March 2005.
Reynolds, John Mark. “Religion, Politics, and Culture: Late 18th to the 20th Century.” Torrey Honors Institute. Biola University.
Sayers, Dorothy. Creed or Chaos? Including the Lost Tools of Learning. Eugene: Wipf and Stock 2004.

Welcome

2006-10-12T09:47:00.001-07:00

Well...the Jolly Green Dragon is now in existance. Now for some thoughts...and time with which to post them...