On December Five-and-Twenty

Reposted from 15 and 10 years ago.

Well knock me over with a feather.

The commonly-told explanation for the early Christians choosing the date of Christmas - that it was piggybacked onto a gift-giving Roman holiday Saturnalia, in and effort to woo pagans over to celebrating the birth of Jesus? Turns out it's likely not true, according to Biblical Archaeology Review. It's a good example of how hearing a plausible theory that explains some of the data can cause you to forget what you already know. I had known that the very earliest Christians didn't pay much attention to Christmas at all. Easter was the big deal, as it should be. And if you'd asked the question in the right way, I would have answered that over the next few centuries, the Church were concerned with distancing itself from pagan customs, not embracing them and co-opting them. That came much later, when it was making a more concerted effort to convert my ancestors in northern Europe. But I breezed right by those known facts because the Saturnalia (plus a few other pagan celebrations) theory sounded so plausible.

The most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

(CWCID: First Things)

Too Easy

It looks like T99 really shone around here in 2011. Not only the inspiration for the post, but a good corrective in the comments.

********

Texan99, posting over at Grim's Hall (always on sidebar) links to a WSJ article with Steve Jobs quotes. Jobs had this on the networks, though it fits well for conspiracy theories in general.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

I had to chuckle. Conspiracy theories, though they rely on arcane knowledge, have as their root the idea that if we could just get rid of a few evil people who are gaming the system, everything would go smoothly.* It is not only liberals and fundamentalists who think that way - you can find libertarians, antisemites, greens, and just about any group with a swath of people who think like that. Beware the too-simple explanation.

Interestingly, while that has always been my strongest objection to the Religious Right, even while I have one foot in it, it is the too-simple gospel of the Religious Left that has me looking nervously over my shoulder these days. They seem to believe - or at least, they put forward the idea - that their program would be really hard, but worth it to get the church to improve itself and society. Giving up material things is hard. Tolerance is hard.  Being willing to forgive is hard work. Resolving to share requires commitment. These expressions of the radical gospel, radically following Jesus, are very hard, which is why people won't do it.

No they aren't. I did that.  You get all kinds of strokes from your pals for being that guy, and the warm self-righteousness is very precious and addictive. It's not humble at all. It's narcissistic. I know. I've been there.  The religious left is wrong, not because its gospel is too radical and difficult, but because it's too easy and hackneyed. 

*Is the phrase "99%" occurring to anyone with that?  Well, it should.

Post 9300 - Folk Songs

Republished from 2011, inspired by the comments about appropriateness for children under the "Train Songs" post.

I recall when Jonathan, and Ben after were in high school, being a little amused at their private Christian school's repeated stern warnings about the content of rock and other popular music. With me driving them to school, they were listening to folk music, especially Steeleye Span, and exposed constantly to themes of human sacrifice ("Tam Lin"), murder ("Edward," "Long Lankin," and "Lady Diamond"), rape ("Royal Forester"), abandonment (too many to list), infidelity (too many to list), drunkenness (too many to list), smoking ("Think On This"), witchcraft ("Alison Gross," and "King Henry"), grinding poverty, hideous disability, thievery, widowhood, forced labor and transportation, crows eating corpses, insanity, warfare, demons, shipwreck, and infanticide. And some very nice love songs and dance tunes.

Rockers and rappers are complete pikers when it comes to this stuff.

All in all, it may be one of the best parenting moves I ever made. Funny thing.

Distributism

Because it came up in the Chesterton comments, I bring this forward from June 2011. I was going to make some of these points in the comments, but see that I was smarter ten years ago.

*****

Distributism – You can catch wikipedia here. A more informal, modern take here.

All I had remembered about Distributism is that it had been championed by Chesterton, and its slogan was “three acres and a cow.” I hadn’t even gotten that right, actually, as I had misremembered it in an American fashion, “forty acres and a cow.” It was an individualist twist on the marxist idea of workers owning the means of production, in that individual workers would own their means of production, not The Workers as a group. Which is certainly an improvement, as The Workers always turns out to be a front for New Bosses. Hillaire Belloc was also a proponent (no surprise), and much of Catholic social action of the 30’s, including the Antigonish Movement, was influenced by the idea. My grandfather left Nova Scotia before the Antigonish Movement, and I don’t know if any siblings or other relatives he left behind were participants. But he moved to Massachusetts, and after some grim times and false starts, moved to Westford and eked out a living the rest of his days on…three acres and a flock of chickens. He usually needed another job as well, beyond selling eggs and strawberries. It’s an important addition to the discussion, as it was to Carl’s income.

Nestled in Chesterton’s thought was the belief that not only could a man support a family if he were given such means of production, but that a certain type of historical Englishness would be preserved. “Three acres and a cow” were not the only possible means of production distributism might provide, but the example was meaningfully chosen. He desired a return to bucolic England. So did Tolkien, if his Shire is any indication. There is certainly some element of unhealthy fantasy here – not the elves and magic-imbued artifacts, but the memory of England as it never was, only as it seemed to a child’s eyes. That the fantasy was sustained by continuing examples of charming smallholders even in their adult experience can be attributed to convenient data selection – confirmation bias.

It’s easy to see how the idea arose. Small farmers rented from large landowners, often hereditary, and often contributing nothing of obvious value to society. An observer might well think “if these farmers owned that land and didn’t have to support this ridiculous aristocracy, they could do much better.” By the late 19th C this was already under correction and breaking down, but that might have not been easy to see while living through it. Changes in the law made aristocrats less and less eligible for those rents, and they had to resort to other means of support. Investments was one, and the financiers and money-movers were reaping that reward. Perhaps this is what galled Chesterton and contributed to his early antisemitism – that the money was finally being redistributed, but not in a way that would preserve his myth of Merrie England. Someone else had cut in line, somehow.

Imagine if such a system had come in. It has a certain attractiveness to it, that an impoverished person in Detroit might be able to make a claim on the government and say “give me three acres and a cow further upstate” as a way of getting a leg up. Except you likely couldn’t live on that. A young man I have known since his childhood has forty acres, is very intelligent, works very hard, and is supporting only himself. He still needs outside work to get by. So this original distributism might allow one to subsist – which is historically accurate for preindustrial England but not what Chesterton was envisioning. If we had gone that route, we would be a poor nation. Americans in many cases actually do own their means of production now – a computer and a cell phone being the most obvious examples.

In the debate about job creation a similar, though updated myth has come in. The 1950’s of our imagination, where a man could go to work at a good union manufacturing job and make his way in the world is the same sort of fantasy: not only a type of job, but a type of life that should still be available, dammit! What’s wrong with America that we can’t do this anymore? Well first, we never did. The poverty rate was almost 25% for the 1950’s. My uncle whines about this all the time, and he’s not the only one, dreaming of a world that never was of manufacturing jobs dominating, not in any era. Second, even for those who had it, it is a life that people wouldn’t go back to. How do we know? Because even when it was still available, people got out of it unless they were in the most favored of manufacturing situations. When I was in school, no one waxed eloquent about the great joys of manufacturing jobs – they were referred to as soul-deadening assembly-line, or shoe factory, or electronic assembling employment. It was no more the great nostalgic time of American greatness than Chesterton’s bucolic fantasies were in his day. As Garrison Keillor wisely pointed out. “We think of those as simpler times, because we were children, and our needs were looked after by others.”

But third, and most important, even if we could, we can’t. We may think it a tragedy that manufacturing has gone elsewhere, or think it a great blessing, but either way, that world is not in any possible future. We may be pessimists who believe that 50% of us will be unemployed in 2040 or optimists who believe a technology-supported, human value-added economy is going to be the great liberator, but either way the change is coming.

Church-finding

You should pay attention to the sidebar of commenters' blogs on your own, of course, but sometimes I like to highlight one.  I don't know, but... tells the story of leaving one church and seeking another.  Key quote:

Questions have a way of ballooning into unexpected regions.

Exactly. A good motto for any blog, actually.

McLaren, Bell, MacArthur

Somewhat accidentally, I have recently encountered an essay by Brian McLaren, portions of Rob Bell’s farewell address, and half a chapter of John MacArthur discussing changes in the church. All three referred in rather general terms to other Christians who had disagreed with them or criticised them. In each case, I thought “Y’know, those people don’t put it like that. They have a better argument for what they do and why they do it.”

In each case there were additional comments available – the Amazon book reviews for MacArthur, the comments sections for McLaren and Bell. As these things go, those in agreement were more prominent in all cases, and they in turn were even more pronounced in misreprenting what “those other” Christians believe. But those in disagreement were no better. In all cases, the references were not to individuals, where one could perhaps discern whether the quoted person was indeed central to a Christian group or movement, or even – mad thought - track down an actual quote. It was vaguer than that: the evil old way or new way or other way of seeing things. And we’ve got their number. We can display why they are wrong in just a sentence or two.

Do we all do this? Render ourselves unable to give an accurate summary of other *POV’s, and embed ever more comfortably in our own nests?

*shouldn’t that be P’s OV? That is accurate but strange-looking. What is that acronym's protocol?

Tweet Theology

The recent “tweet of the year” in conservative circles was quite clever, and I don’t want to take too much away from it by being too literal.  In referring to the death of Kim Jong Il, Josh Trevino tweeted “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.”  Obviously, if you press this very far you come up against “Wait, what little-known heavenly loopholes allow Hitchens in this conversation?” Or, “Who says God is a grinning, clubbable old guy who likes revenge?” Ruins the fun – and it is fun, to think of Hitchens and Havel looking over the population and discussing who is going to be swept from the board.

I prefer to ruin this in a different way.  Who says that Havel and Hitchens were especially important souls to be given this honor, simply because they were famous here?  Far more likely that the greatest souls who died in the last few weeks, as measured by their honor when we see them in glorified form, are people whose names we have never heard, and never will in our lifetimes.  God is not a respecter of persons in that way.  The last shall be first.  I don’t say that to remind the great persons of the world of their true place – I doubt many of them drop by here - but for us, the medium and medium small people of the world, to remember that those smaller than us may be greater as well.

Atheists? Maybe Not

Sponge-headed Scienceman reports on a Rice University study revealing that 17% of atheists attend church at least occasionally, most of them "for the kids."  He comments on why this might be.  I concur with his reasoning, but would add that this group may indeed be one which is open to different ideas, as they claim about themselves.  Rather than being "believers" in some unexamined sense, who declare they believe in God but somehow never get around to doing anything about that, this group might have decided that on balance they cannot believe, but allow the possibility there might be something to it, and are the sort who are quite intentional in tying their behavior to their beliefs.  Perhaps I am painting them too rosily, imagining their thought to suit my own beliefs.

I am reminded of Michael Novak's essay of four years ago about different types of atheists - he identifies six.  These are not entirely distinct, but overlap, and in some cases overlap with believers.  I have known people in each of the first five categories - no one comes to mind for the sixth.  I suspect one would have to be a very thoughtful person, aware not only of the beliefs around one but one's own character as well, to make it through to this conclusion.

Hymnal

On The North River, a blog from or near Pembroke, MA, is unhappy with the new UCC hymnal, and the loss of the old Pilgrim Hymnal.

There are many issues tied together here, and best perhaps to separate them as best we can.  Each would be worthy of its own post, I imagine, but I'm not up to that.  I just like the clarity part.

That hymnals need to change and music needs to be updated is hardly up for discussion.  Some churches will be able to maintain a niche market of traditional music for a few decades, but will lose a majority of even the children who grow up there.  Of those who did not grow up with such music, they will attract none.

It is also true that whatever the change is, some people will not like it.  I barely remember the switch to the Pilgrim Hymnal in my childhood Congregational church, probably around 1961, but I remember being in choir in high school in the late 60's and the older members still complaining about it.  I forget why, or what color the previous hymnal was, but I recall that "Holy, Holy, Holy" was hymn #1.  My wife and I went to a Lutheran Church in the 70's and 80's and liked the Red Hymnal (1962) rather well.  The Green hymnal that came in in the 80's was rather PC and chirpy-cheery, but basically okay.  As the complaints came in about it, some of the old Swedes would chuckle about how it was the same when they switched from the Black hymnal (Augustana Synod, 1925) years before.  Some were more than half-serious when they said they still preferred it.  Then, as Covenanters, we were present for the switch from the Red Hymnal to the Blue.  Some of their old Swedes still pine for the old Brown Hymnal.  (Few pine for the interim softbound Silver, though I liked that reasonably well).  Get ahold of one of those denominational hymnals-before-this-one if you doubt the need to update.

More at issue is the quality of what replaces the traditional music.  Granted that people will complain anyway.  Granted that words become archaic and change subtly in meaning over time.  Granted that the emphasis of church thinking from 1850-1950 was not the pinnacle of Christian understanding.  Granted that we should be more alert to not offend with our phrasing, however beautiful.  I get all that.  Much of the new stuff is still crap.  I think we are moving to non-hymnal eras, and that's likely a good thing.  In an instant communicating world, things go out of fashion so quickly that there really isn't much sense in expensively preserving what we thought was hip in 2000, let alone 1980 or 1960.  It is good to preserve much of what has edified and uplifted the saints from 1500-1950.  Nothing to be added to that now - keep the best and move on.  The current age does not consider the ephemeral nature of its songs to be a negative.  Fine.  Let's not preserve it between expensive covers then.  Leave them available on the net and open to the air and let the best survive - rather like the old days, before the 20th C, actually.

Our attachment to particular songs is often not well-tied to good theology, poetry, or music, but to personal experiences and emotions.  There's nothing wrong with that for us personally, but we need to remember that this doesn't make them more valuable for others.  And most of that ain't so great, neither.  "Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved" may be profound, but many of the rest of the verses are pretty dumb.  They scan and rhyme: sun-begun.  Still dumb. Or...

3. Sinners, whose love can ne'er forget
the wormwood and the gall,
Go spread your trophies at his feet,
and crown him Lord of all.

 And that's one of the really good old hymns.  Imagine how you are going to bring in a tribe of even very obedient, devout, and intelligent middle-schoolers and try and build a life-changing theology for their future around such hymns.

Pinker and Anti-Pinker

I am a fan of Steven Pinker's thinking and writing.  Well, the first third of every chapter of his writing, I should say.  I don't know what happens to him, but he starts off beautifully and then becomes boring.

Pinker is in agreement with Chomsky that a good deal of the structure of language is embedded in us at birth (The Language Instinct, 1994).  There is not universal agreement with this among linguists, cognitive scientists, and others who study this, but I think the evidence is pretty strong.  Extending this idea, Pinker wrote The Blank Slate about ten years ago - it is actually a refutation of the blank slate theories of Rousseau - and did a wonderful job, really, of showing how much of human behavior is not learned but comes pre-loaded.

Now comes his The Better Angels Of Our Nature.  I haven't read it, only read his NYT article and excerpts from the considerable discussion about it at the moment.  But the argument seems to be that the dramatic decline in war, murder, and violence over the last few centuries, especially the last 60 years has been the result of ideas that have become more common.  Worse, the ideas he thinks are doing much of this good work are Enlightenment ideas - rather the heartland of blank slate thinking.

So which is it?  There can be balancing, mediating effects, and subtlety in all large ideas, of course.  We need not insist that a thinker taking a side in a discussion be always required to be at the extreme of that side, granting no sensibleness to his opponents.  But if he is going to largely switch sides, we want him to at least notice this, so he can explain his change.  Pinker doesn't seem to.  He thinks he's not very far from where he was two, or ten, or twenty years ago.  I don't get it.

Here is some of what I think is behind it.  Pinker is devoutly secularist, and believes that the Enlightenment comes from the application of nonreligious, humanist, scientific ideas to understanding humans.  Well, he's rooting for his side, whether he sees it or not.  Confirmation bias is powerful in history.  Let me root for my side, just for a bit.  I think a better case can be made that these Good Ideas can be seen growing, century by century, in every place that Christianity sits down and influences the culture.  The murder rate started dropping long before not only the Enlightenment, but even the Renaissance. 

We can't replay history and measure what would have happened if Christianity had not come to Europe.  But we can say that the growth of science, the rights of man, tolerance, and all the good stuff we take for granted in the modern world seems to have slowly grown up like this precisely once in human history, other regions falling back after progress.

Secondly, the violence of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions are left off the ledger.  They are not left out of his book, but they are absent from the calculation of the ideas affecting the world.

It's curious.

Oh Foolish Galatians

We finished week 4 of thirteen today. What I have learned, in no particular order.

I am increasingly convinced the South Galatian theory is correct. Thougb Acts 15 seems at first glance to be similar to Galatians 2, that is largely a result of our love for associating narrative and the sparseness of other accounts of meetings between Paul and Peter. Acts 9 and 11 certainly make as much sense, and likely more, as the associated meetings between them. The newer theory fits better with Paul's extensive use of Hebrew scripture in his proof and discussion of the matter of Law. This has always seemed an odd tack to take with pagan converts in the mountains of North Galatia, where there were few Jews, but makes more sense if it is the southern cities being addressed, where there were more Jews. Thirdly, the harsh tone Paul adopts seems over-the-top for a small rural congregation he purports to love. It does not seem out-of-place in addressing a entire region which has been involved in a controversy which seemed settled, but now some are falling back. Lastly, it makes more sense that it is Jewish converts who might be tempted to be Judaisers, rather than a group of pagan Gentile converts.

It is not only the 1st C church which falls into law rather than faith, of course. Every modern group - evangelicals, Catholics, fundies, mainstreamers - all find their own law to slip back into. We notice other people's failings in this remarkably well.

My class shot down my idea that grace is more often found in dealing with problems in community rather than in one-on-one dealing with the Lord. I think they are right and I was wrong. Both have their place, but I think I put them out of order.

Paul's tone is much like a parent's, starting with an irate "You have brought shame upon the family...use the brains God gave you...I can't believe you were so stupid..." but moving to "I have such high expectations for you...I don't like having to yell at you...you have done wonderful things in the past, why not now..."

Though we understand what the words slave, servant, free mean, and we know about inheriting estates that have been in the family for generations, we don't really understand this analogy of Paul's well. It is not our world, but one that we can only experience from afar. Our picture of "slave," includes cotton fields more than cooks and tutors, and "servant" conjures up English manor houses or Newport RI. Inheritance these days tends to be more liquid.

Demographics

National Geographic's September issue has an article on the fertility rate dropping precipitously in Brazil.  While the increase in income leading to fewer children per woman is noted, they spend a long time talking about the powerful women on steamy Brazilian soap operas and how few children they have as a major cultural influence on the fertility rate dropping below 2.1-2.3 replacement.

Okay.  And all those other countries without steamy soap operas who show a similar decline...?  Because...?

I thought it was half a joke, or a journalistic hook as an illustration of the larger cultural trend.  Nope.  The woman writing the article clearly thinks it's the soap operas that are a big factor in creating the change. I have learned from missionaries to Brazil that the soap operas are ubiquitous and a big cultural focus, so I can see how someone visiting could get that initial impression that they are driving, rather than reflecting culture.  But when you are writing for a reportedly scientific magazine, aren't you supposed to check other countries in similar situations and just sort of, y'know, look them over for what is happening?

The question whether it is fewer children driving prosperity or prosperity driving fewer children is an interesting place to start.  One quickly learns, if you follow world demographic trends anywhere, that the two feed off each other somewhat and the question is too simple.  Limiting children occurs on the basis of people's estimate of how many children they can bring to a certain level of prosperity. If you know that nothing you do is going to make any difference in how wealthy your children will be, why not have a bunch?  They're fun to have around, if you aren't going to invest time in their future anyway, and they might provide some material benefit to you in your old age, if you have one.

But if there is a chance at the brass ring, why not focus your energy?  You can't be a tiger mother, or even a typical-upwardly-mobile-suburban-mother with lots of children so easily.

That's what the phenomenon used to be called, and it is in turn, a derivative of the mothers from some ethnic groups, especially Jews.  Jonathan and Ben were never Tigermommed, but they were full in the older version: Montessori, private school, music lessons, hours of read-aloud, etc. 

Cultural optimism tends to influence how many children one has as well.  Long ago I offered a theory on the countries that were victors, perpetrators, and victims during WWII, and their subsequent fertility rates. That was five years ago, and I still haven't seen anyone else speculate on that. 

Mission:India

Rob Bell - Part I

It may be all parts, not just Part I.  But just in case.

I was tempted to call the post Sniveling Sells to make fun of his book title Love Wins.  But that would not only be childish of me, it would not be accurate.  The book is at least better than that, in general.  It has moments of sniveling, and I do not think they are unfortunate stylistic accidents that a good editor could have removed, but central to Bell's style.  He is clearly young, full of himself, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.

He is nonetheless still more right than wrong in what he is trying to accomplish, and irritating as he is, he deserves attention.  First, the preface is excellent.  It is not flawless, but it bears a message to evangelicals that they need to hear, and it is done with kindness, and earnestness, and even a fair bit of wisdom.  If you can get ahold of the preface and nothing else, I suggest you read it and contemplate it.  My guess is that your contemplation of the legitimate issues he brings up will be more valuable than what he writes.

I think that the garden must be weeded before we can judge how this crop is doing.

Bell's style of rapid-fire questions is not merely stylistically irritating.  It reveals an unfairness, even akin to dishonesty, in his entire approach.  He does not merely question, imitating Jesus's return questions to his critics, as Bell claims.  These are different questions, not at all like Jesus's.  We have seen this before, and I have mentioned it in a post about Chesterton last year, A Note of Interrogation. Or, you may pick up the thread of this by reading Bell, not from the perspective of a like-minded accuser trying to get general evangelical authorities to listen, but from the POV of a person who is hearing the questions and attempting to answer them.  Very quickly one understands: Oh, I get it, it's not just impatience that prevents you from waiting around for attempts at an answer.  It's that you don;t want answers.  You want to tell me answers.  Got it.  I get the impression, and perhaps it is an unfair leap on my part, that from the perspective of  Mars Hill, some people get to ask questions and others don't. 


Nor is it just a device in the first chapter to set out all his questions at once.  He's still doing it by page 103.  These are not bad questions.  In fact, nearly all of them are excellent questions.  They are just not being honestly asked to elicit discussion.

Second, two psychological bits that most readers are going to miss, but need to be pointed out by the few of us who have the necessary experience (not much wisdom needed) to notice.  Bell uses an image in the preface of black letters on a page, while he and others read into the "white space."  As if that is a good thing.  It sounds like a clever image, whose only flaw might be being too clever by half.  But "reading the white space" has a very specific, and not very complimentary, meaning in the Rorschach.  It refers to a person being unnecessarily oppositional, often in a showy way.  It is one of the most accurate bits of interpretation in that much-maligned projective test.  When the psychologist tells you "He saw four pictures in the white space, three different cards," diagnoses of personality disorder begin to float into the conversation as possibilities. One, maybe, but it better be pretty offhand.  It's not a good thing.  I'm not suggesting personality disorder, much less diagnosing it, in Bell.  I am noting that he is showing one symptom.

Also in the psychological sphere is his early quote of Renee - I intentionally do not mention her last name -  who has written a book, and in it are accusations that her father sexually abused her while reciting the Lord's Prayer, and such like.  Bell clearly takes this at face value in part of his accusation of evangelicals.

How does one put this nicely?  People with Borderline Personality Disorder sometimes make accusations that are poetically true, but not literally true.  Taken that way, there are indeed evangelical children who have had their perpetrator's Christianity as an inseparable part of their victimization.  I looked up the woman's name, went to her website and read extensively of her story, and found much to like about her.  I don't doubt she experienced horrible abuse, and has done well building some kind of reasonable life out of the broken pieces.  But her romance with victimhood, and how it still rules her and gives her a club of self-righteousness to bring to her social and political beliefs, remains obvious.  It's very typical.  Setting oneself up as a defender of the oppressed is a pretty good response to one's own history of oppression.  Except you can then never see the victim as having any part in their fate, nor the "system" that oppresses them as being any sort of a balance or compromise between goods.

Why then, would I object at all?  Isn't it true enough?  (See how my questions can be sly and unfair?)  Because it's a lie, and I have seen people ruined by accusations from people with that diagnosis, who will admit when in therapy that they aren't really sure what the reality of their past is and what people mean now, and that's part of their problem, yet are still quick to accuse.  I say this as one who counts well-recovered individuals of this type as among my favorite patients, most admired people, and even sometimes friends, as much as we can allow that in this business.

It was an unlikely accusation, wouldn't you have thought?  If you were going to use it to prove your own point, wouldn't you have wondered, just for a moment, whether you should perhaps make some effort to find out if it's actually, uh, true?

Of course not.  You need the victim to be a victim.  Case closed.  So by page 7 I am not only irritated by Bell's style, but I don't trust his judgement and honesty.

And yet.  And yet there is still much in this book that is wise.  It deserves to be noted that the criticisms of Bell have often been less Biblical, and display less ability to listen, than Bell does himself.  I wish someone else had written the book.

Evolution - Creationism Series

Reposted from July 2010. Nothing new to see here, but folks might like the review.

Creationism and Politics
There are some interesting practical considerations, however, and that might be fun. (For me, that’s who.) Volokh Conspiracy recently had a thread about a 7D creationist running for political office, and whether that should be an automatic disqualifier. As an evangelical and an evolutionist, the question interests me.

Thought Experiment: Genesis and Science
If the first eleven chapters had somehow gone missing for centuries and were only recently rediscovered, it would be academics telling Christians they should accept them gladly, and the fundamentalists who would resist this most strongly.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism
Impressions Versus Science

If you bing, google, or yahoo up “first humans” you get a collection of estimates of upright figures who lived somewhere further than 2 million years ago. Artistic images from the Olduvai and Laetoli discoveries likewise show bipedal creatures, a bit hairier than us, heads a little different, but clearly meant to emphasise their similarity to us. They hold hands. They look off to the horizon. I will call this the National Geographic impression, as that is the popular-culture representative of the textbooks and educational videos which teach that view.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism 1A
Journal entries for grad student assigned to watch earth develop.
2,100,000 years. No change to report. This batch got smarter than the other apes and then stopped dead. I think we should drop humans as a study.

2,200,000 years. There might be some hints of progress here, but I'm probably imagining things because I want to see it. Hope springs eternal in the Martian gazorninplat and all that.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism 2
It was pretty clear what I was driving at with the contrast between the National Geographic 2M+ years impression of the origin of humanity versus the Genesis impression. For 97% of that 2,300,000 years, those creatures didn’t have sophisticated language as we know it.

Rapid Language Development
There are lots of genetic and cultural foundations to language that likely developed in spurts over time. Yet some final genetic piece seems to have been a tipping point that sent communication from primitive to complex very rapidly

Founding Population
We pulled the beginning of behaviorally modern humans from over 2 million years ago down to something like 50,000 - perhaps even 10,000 years ago. But there are other objections to the Genesis account. It narrows the founding population to two people, Adam and Eve, for example

Location, Location, Location
When we compared anatomically modern humans (minimum 2M years ago) to behaviorally modern humans (max 60K years ago), I gave a hint that even stricter definitions of behaviorally modern humans might bring our definition even closer than the important dividing line of the emergence of language. Because Ice Ages forced the widely-spread peoples into now-tropical areas, we seemed to learn to interact more peacefully about 18,000 years ago.

Impossible Things
We change our thinking not because we find one impossible thing in our old beliefs, but because we find too many


To Correct Impressions
As historian Paul Johnson notes, both the Wellhausen (Critical Method, Documentary Hypothesis) followers and the fundamentalists had a comforting simplicity to their ideas: The fundamentalists that the Bible was always literally true word for word, the scholars that it never was.

New Harmony

New Harmony, Indiana, was founded by the Harmony Society, a German utopian, socialist, anarchist, pietist,,,well, you get the idea - group that got going around 1800. My favorite line from the description:

The experiment was established in 1825 and dissolved in 1829 due to constant quarrels.

Figures.

Heresies

Ben Quash and Michael Ward edited Heresies, a series of sermons on many of the early heterodox opinions in the church and why certain doctrines were rejected in favor of others. It starts out as a set of pretty decent summaries, then limps downhill.

I've always had a hard time keeping them straight, all the Montanists, Donatists, docetists, Marcionists and whatever. Some of the writers thought there was an observable trend that heresies were attempts to avoid one problem so thoroughly that an opposite error emerged. Others thought that the vagueness and ambiguities of heresies, especially those propounded by mystics, made it difficult to identify if there was much wrong for quite a few years. I don't think either generalisation holds for long. What did fascinate was the perseverance of some heresies in the folk beliefs around the Mediterranean, and modern emergences of old falseness.

What they did convince me was important about all this is that people putting forth bad ideas often insist on them and force a crisis. Rank-and-file believers would often just as soon be left alone - which is why many orthodoxies did not reach final form for centuries after Christ. But heretics often have that push, that bulldog tendency, or a desire to be a somebody and have followers (not all). Secondly, they often rely on a few scripture sections to the exclusion of others to prove their points.* They force the doctrinal issue, as everyone else has to sit down and thumb through a lot of NT books and argue to decide what, precisely, do we believe the right doctrine to be?

But all in all, you might do better just reading the Wikipedia articles. This has a lot collected in one place, which is nice, but not enough. I bought it for Ben and will send it along, but don't be surprised if you see his copy in a used bookstore in Spring, TX.

*Now there's something that continues into the modern day...

I Am Second

My son's department at The Woodlands United Methodist Church has uploaded a series of videos. These are not solo projects of Ben's but he did a lot of them. Their YouTube channel is here They have done this as part of a larger program "I Am Second." I don't pretend to know much about that. Ben speaks highly of it.

Tired of 9/11

I couldn't get away from memorialising 9/11 today. There was even a good-sized section cut into the worship service. The emotions are powerful enough that a lot of people feel that they just have to express them formally, or worse, use them to strike particular notes. Jonathan Last had a post that I think refocuses the perspective off the towers and onto the beginning of the resurgence, with Flight 93. HT: Steve Sailer

Heresies

I am finishing the last of the pile of used books I bought Ben for his birthday - one figures that out of six, at least a couple will suit - which I may discuss in some depth when I finish. Until then, two things caught my attention, It examines the early heresies of the church, with some discussion of how those have played out in later centuries. Yet it doesn't have a bad word to say about the heretics themselves nor the doctrines they put forward. Heresy is not used as a near-equivalent to blasphemy, sacrilege, or denial of belief, but as a precise term for doctrines that look at first as if they could be true. Heresies are theories about Christ that had a following at one point, and had to be examined closely for their implications and faithfulness to all scripture, not just one section.

The second interesting bit was an unpursued analogy to color in describing the nature of Christ. I pushed it a little further for my own amusement. Consider God to be blue, and humanity yellow. The dual nature of Christ, recognised quite early though a full doctrine of Trinity took longer, was difficult to get one's mind around. Still is. Was Jesus, then, essentially blue, but painted over to look yellow? Or essentially yellow, somehow covered in blue? After much wrestling, it was decided that neither was a true picture: Jesus was fully blue, and fully yellow. That led to a next set of questions: can we say that Jesus was green, then? Much debate, and as these things go, the debates were not often gracious. No, not green. Jesus is not a hybrid, new thing, but very blue, and very yellow. Hmm. Striped, then, whether in bold flag-stripes, concentric circles, or a million imperceptible, interpenetrated stripes? No, not that either.

Well then, what? Something can't be both blue and yellow. It has to fit one of the descriptions above. But it doesn't, and by AD 450 or so, there was eventual agreement that this is as close as we can get with our limited understanding. Analogies for mysteries are worrisome, but they are all we have. We like to come up with analogies for the Trinity. A Sunday school favorite is the apple, with skin, flesh, and seeds. It's a terrible analogy - we don't eat the seeds, the skin has no contact with the seeds, what exactly is the tree in this whole process... but we seem to feel we should try something to make it clearer. God as coach, putting down his clipboard and whistle and playing goal as a demonstration for we humans...well, it captures something, but it obscures just as much. The problem is with the arrogance of believing that we've got this mystery under control with our analogy - and yes, I have heard stupid persons, when discussing the Trinity, bring up some favorite analogy as if it settled everything, and the rest of us need discuss no more.

There is a tradition of mystic understanding of mystery call the apophatic, the understanding by negation. God is not this, God is not that. But its practitioners are quite clear that one cannot start from there, but must first build up a structure, from which pieces are discarded: not thus...not thus...not thus... The practice is more common in the Eastern churches, but CS Lewis fans will recognise that he uses apophatic techniques in his descriptions of God often*. We see something of this in the creed from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 - after several positive statements about the nature of God and Christ, a whole section turns to statements in the negative.

...inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten...

(An intro to the Creed of Chalcedon here.) *Start with Narnia, Screwtape, and Great Divorce, and very especially Till We have Faces for this.