Days go by and still I think of you.

Most Bible quotes are KJV or ESV.

 
A Search that Led Someone Here

"religion banning caffeine"

That would be the Mormons.


posted by Aaron at 11:21 PM

 
Post? Or Anti?

In Brian's Culture Blog, Brian Micklethwait meandered a bit about the movie Schindler's List before writing this:

I've been brooding lately on anti-Semitism, Hollywood, Christianity, Christianity (apparent collapse of in Britain), and such matters, and it seems to me that one of the Big Events of our time is the replacement of Christ's Crucifixion by The Holocaust as the Central Act of Cruelty and Suffering of our – now post-Christian – civilisation.

My first thought, also expressed in a link put in by one of the commentors, is the replacement of redemptive suffering with suffering that is simply bad.

But consider the attacks on The Passion. No doubt the controversy is why Micklethwait is brooding, even though he doesn't stoop to mention it. The movie is called anti-Semitic for following the Gospel account. Which can only mean that everyone who believes it -- which means all Christians -- is an anti-Semite. Merely to exist as a Christian is an existential threat.

Is this an exaggeration? No. I've talked to people who believe exactly that. What else can you make of saying that merely filming the Biblical account will inspire violence?

And this fits with the attendant blood-libel of the secular Crucifixion-substitute: Christians are guilty. Society blames its out-groups, and the fact that we're blamed exposes as dishonest whining the complaints you still hear sometimes from atheists about how oppressed they are. "But look at the fundamentalist religiousity of George Bush and his base." This is a man who wouldn't dare tell a Muslim imam that he's following a false religion.

The secular blood-libel substitute begins with the lie that Adolf Hitler was a Christian. This is so obviously false there's no need to go into it. The "proof" consists of a few quotes from Hitler. Anyone who thinks a few public statements -- by a politician, remember -- expressing respect for the faith of most of his constituents, while his whole ideology and platform contradicted it at every level, proves that he actually follows that faith should be ashamed at his own stupidity. The next lie is that the history of medieval anti-Semitic laws was a) the ultimate cause of the Holocaust and b) indicative of special hatred. Even as the ignorant Catholic hierarchs called the Jews Christ-killers, Jews were the only non-Christians tolerated in Medieval Christendom. Certainly they were treated better than Christian heretics or, when they could get their hands on them, Muslims. If there'd been any Nazis running around, the medieval RCC would've killed them too ("fuhrer", "heil" -- this is religious language, and not remotely Christian).

The whole end of this is that upholding even a minimal level of Christianity implicates you in the Holocaust. A useful position if you hate Christ, as all non-Christians must on some level.

A comment from the second link:

For my part, I still see modern religion as heir to that belief system whose followers burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and forced Galileo to recant. For me to treat it as something other than a poisonous enemy would be to disgrace the memory of those who fought so hard to give birth to the Enlightenment.

I still see modern secularism/paganism (paganism is more than sacrificing bulls to Zeus or some Earth Mother figure, you know) as heir to that belief system whose followers threw Christians to the lions and used us as streetlights after the fire that destroyed Rome and slaughtered Catholic priests during the French Revolution and tried to extirpate religion under Communism.
posted by Aaron at 7:20 PM

 
The Written Word and the Word

In English, we have two names for the written word of God, the Bible, and the Scripture. Both imply writing. Bible comes from the Greek word for book, and a script is a writing system. Faith comes by hearing, and the spoken language is natural to us. But the definitive message, the authoritative standard is written down in book form. This is more odd than you might realize.

The the first place, the very name Bible records something the ancients found unusual and difficult to accept, that the Bible was a book as opposed to a scroll. The whole classical literature of Greece and Rome was on scrolls. The Old Testament was on scrolls governed by elaborate rules devised by the Pharisees. The book or codex had the advantages of being less expensive, more durable and portable (especially useful if you had to travel a lot), and less linear -- instead of reading aloud from begining to end, you can flip back and forth. But in most of society's view, all high or worthy literature was on scrolls, which had the weight of tradition and precident. Books were a new -- and disreputable -- technology. Beside Christians, the other early adopters were the same people who are the main early adopters of new computer technologies: pornographers. By outward appearance, there wasn't much difference between a copy of the New Testament and a collection of dirty stories.

But there's a deeper oddness, the fact it was written at all. Vocal (and signed, if you have a big enough concentration of the deaf) language arises naturally and is acquired automatically. It's an instinct directly implanted by God. But writing is very much a human invention. It came into being by stages at identifiable points in history, starting in the West with accounting notations by merchants and writings by pagan priests in Egypt. Children don't pick it up naturally. No one ever came to it naturally; humans had to train themselves into literacy by stages. The whole system of writing is a human contrivance, from beginning to end.

So why would God make preserve His inerrent word this way? The Muslims say that the Arabic script isn't a human invention, but that the letters had been in some sense floating in Heaven before the world was created. But this isn't open to us, since we know Arabic is nothing special, and we know where Greek writing comes from. But we shouldn't take it if we could, as I'll explain. Or, in good Calvinist fashion, you could say that even if men invented writing, they did so only because the sovereign will of God directed them too. Obviously better than an Arminian God foreseeing writting and deciding to do something big with it, or worse an open theist God being surprized by writting and deciding ad hoc that He'd better starting writing stuff down. But it doesn't help us understand why God would make writing a human thing, instead of teaching it to a prophet.

Perhaps the specifically human nature of writing is the point. God, in His grace, has sent us His word in humanly understandable forms, choosing to use the human things, like prophets and dreams, as much as, and more effectually than, simple nature as described in Romans 1. The word of God was set down with human means, in a common-seeming format. Perhaps this is a type of Christ. Christ came in the flesh, human nature itself, and had "no beauty that we should desire Him". I think the written word of God is a type of the Word of God.
posted by Aaron at 10:30 PM

 
Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Not much later than I added a link to Aaron and Stacia, I found myself being quoted.

I only wish that when I felt down spiritually it was over something like that.
posted by Aaron at 1:04 PM

 
Miscellaneous Links

The Ten Commandments, in whose comment thread I discussed the philosophical basis of morality at length with several interlocutors.

Voting, wherein Aaron Haspel suggests literacy tests, poll taxes, making government employees give up the vote, and perhaps raising the voting age to 21. What I've never understood about the notion of literacy tests for voters is how an illiterate would manage to vote in the first place. I've never heard of a ballot with pictures.

Noah Millman on the two-sided regime analysis of foreign policy.


posted by Aaron at 4:35 PM

 
One Year Ago, Sometime Today

I looked for my Dad's e-mail address so I could send him the link to the Onion's "Second Birthday in a Row Ruined by Terrorism" (or something a lot like it, it's not online anymore), but I couldn't find it. It's his birthday today.
posted by Aaron at 10:47 PM

 
Two Years Ago Right Now

I was heading back to my dorm room, or getting something to read for a little while before going to sleep, after the computer lab closed at midnight.

Nothing had happened yet.
posted by Aaron at 12:11 AM

 
A Brief Argument For Perspicuity

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. (Luke 16:27-31)

If Moses and the Prophets were perspicuous (clearly understandable) enough that having an authoritative teacher (one miraculously risen from the dead, at that) is superfluous, how much more so now that we have the New Testament?

posted by Aaron at 1:56 PM

 
Check This Out

Andrew Sullivan Joins the Episcopalians (but not really)
posted by Aaron at 1:34 AM