Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

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.......

*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?

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?

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?

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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[1] Ecclesiastes 12.13-14

Civilization and Its Discontents

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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!

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...

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?

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.

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...