in memory of Vincent Chin and of poems written long ago

Lucky Numbers

I saw six children
That might have sat around my chair
and asked their old ye-ye
to sing them songs
and tell them stories

I saw eight years later
where the 90's would have started
where I might have been deemed a
successful
rich
American

I saw nine eight-sided baguas
that might have been at my wedding
that my beautiful bride
might have looked in
to see her reflection

I saw the number four
over and over and over again
as the irony of the pun played
through my head,
as it leaked out onto the street

I saw the character for seven
or perhaps it first saw me
and named me after itself
(but I'm not really gone
you can't get rid of me that easily)

I saw two baseball bats
two blows, to the knee, then the head
two men without two sentences
and the two words of my name
that named a revolution

- June 23, 1982

bullsh*t!

I've recently become obsessed with the blog Experimental Theology by Dr. Richard Beck. I've linked to it before, but the more I read it, the more I wish I had found this blog perhaps a year or two earlier. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it right now. Among it's features - deep thinking outside the box on both obscure and well-known Christian doctrine, a solid understanding of the subjects discussed, and a fantastic sense of humor and sense for seeing God everywhere (see the Theology of Calvin and Hobbes section of his blog).

One post I recently read talked about hypocrisy and Christianity. A few lines from it...

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may pertain to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

...Lying is a distortion or hiding of truth. By contrast, BS is an indifference to truth. This distinction might make BS appear to be more mild than lies, but Frankfurt would disagree...indifference to truth is much worse than hiding it:

"[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

The quoted author claimed "liars at least care for the truth, if only to hide it. But when a culture gets saturated with BS then concern for the truth gets lost on a grand scale. What worries [the author] is that people are getting lazy and careless about the truth. And as we grow mentally lazy and careless the truth gets lost. All that remains in civic dialogue is BS, advertising, and spin." With the consequences of postmodernism still affecting culture today, this has never before been as relevant.

...BS is an indifference to truth. This indifference to truth is often caused by a kind of laziness, of failing to do the work to "get things right." This is what I see happening among Christians. I don't see a lot of willful hypocrisy, but I do see a lot of talk about righteousness and holiness and compassion with little energy devoted to examining how all that talking is cashing out in the real world. In short, Christians talk a great deal with little effort expended in moving from words to deeds. Outsiders hear all that Christian moral chatter and they also observe the lifestyle gap. The only word they have for what they are observing is hypocrisy, but I think a better word is BS.

I've often wondered how people could see the genuine, caring, friendly, and well-meaning people I knew in church could ever be construed as hypocritical. For a long while, I just assumed their criticizers were all bitter, angry people (I believe the correct linguistic term for them is "haters") or people that just misunderstood my friends and judged too quickly. I don't think this is the case anymore; I don't doubt my friends intentions, but neither do I believe that the accusation of hypocrisy is completely unfounded either. At this point, it might not even be the moral BS and carelessness that are at the root of criticisms, but simply a matter of priorities.

For example, Mark Noll wrote in "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" that even great intentions could encourage bad behavior. For example, part of Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, that "the things of earth will grow strangely dim", might be taken to incorrectly justify gnostic tendencies and irresponsibility towards the physical (taking care of the earth, mercy and urban ministries). If something is considered more important than everything else (i.e. God, Jesus, missions, etc), then logically, we should prioritize our time and effort towards those things as opposed to others. Beck makes the suggestion in another post that this tendency may be why Jesus refuses to divorce love for God from love for people. And loving people...well, that opens up a plethora of applications (including environmental concerns, I'd argue) and places a whole world of callings and responsibilities on the Christian's shoulders.

This is becoming a bit of a tangent, so I'll end with a last paragraph from the post.

The root cause of Christian BS is the disjoint between orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the Christian tradition. Specifically, for a variety of reasons, Christianity came to emphasize "right belief" over "right action." Being a Christian meant one believed certain things (e.g., that Jesus was the Son of God). Assenting to these propositions and mastering the God talk that surrounded them grew to define what it meant to be a Christian. But once orthodoxy became separated from orthopraxy the specter of moral BS entered...The disjoint didn't (and doesn't) emerge because of willful deception (hypocrisy). Rather, the disjoint was (and is) due to a kind of carelessness, a thoughtlessness that entered the Christian faith.

As if the sins I'm conscious of weren't enough, the Holy Spirit is needed to intercede for me on the behalf of these sins of my ignorance as well.

the difference b/w BS and lying

...and how it applies to Christians and morality in this Experimental Theology post.

shifting grounds of debate

A great post on the change in the debate over Christianity by Richard Beck. The main point that he tries to make is that while Christians have caught up to the last cultural shift apologetically, the change in popular thinking dominated by postmodern thought has caught us unprepared. In more concrete terms - we're prepared to argue the reasonableness of Christianity, but the debate has now moved on to arguing the trustworthiness of religion. Instead of arguing about whether or not Christ rose from the dead, the question has become more centered around "why would you feel the need to believe in life after death? what need is it fulfilling?" From the blog

Let me be more specific. What is the challenge posed by the question "Why do people believe in God?"? And what is so different about this question compared to the classic epistemological questions concerning the reasonableness of religious belief?

The destabilizing nature of the question comes from the fact that the query shifts the conversation from reasons to functions. In the classic apologetics debate the focus was on reasons, the warrants and epistemological justifications for belief. But during the Enlightenment a new critique emerged, a question that swept past reasons and asked about the social and psychological functions of belief. Might religion be doing some kind of useful social or psychological work for us? Perhaps religion was vital to keeping order or keeping the unwashed masses docile? Perhaps religion allowed us to be happier, more productive, hopeful and cooperative? Maybe, in short, religion had a function. A social and psychological reason for its existence and ubiquity. Religion isn't about metaphysics but about coping, socially and psychologically.

The sentiment is one I definitely have felt running underneath conversations I've had with a lot of people - an inherent suspicion of motives. However, the problem of underlying presuppositions influencing the way we think seems to be common to people of faith and nonreligious alike. I've heard Lewis answers this one way in Miracles by giving reasons why naturalistic worldivew may not be more philosophically attractive than a belief in God (and why belief in the Christian Triune God makes sense and can be trusted); Beck answers it a different way by examining different scientific theories used to "explain away" religion.

The primary goal of these essays is to examine the debate concerning the function of belief at the level of the critique itself. That is, we won't cede the sociological or psychological territory by responding to the critiques with theology. At least not until the data is in. That is, we'd like to not cede the facts to Freud prematurely, resigning ourselves to theologically spinning inhospitable data if things in the laboratory don't come out the way we like them to. Such a move might be logically coherent but, via Occam's Razor, would appear rather defensive. Rather, we'll wade into the empirical waters and deal with the claims at their most basic level: The function of religious belief inside the minds of believers.

James Emery White encourages all readers in "A Mind for God" to have at least a cursory knowledge of apologetics, the defense of the faith. 1 Peter 3:15ish commands us to "always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander." So, I hope this article helps us meet these encouragements and commandments by noting that while the command stays the same, the debate is not what it used to be.

ideas and action

From Os Guinness' "Long Journey Home"

[A] focus on ideas is in contrast not only to emotions but also to our craving for "practical action." Although ours is a pragmatic age, impatient with discussing mere ideas, we need only remember that ideas have consequences, beliefs influence behavior, differences make a difference. Seekers whose whole lives are invested in the outcome of the search know well that choices based on these ideas will not be useless or insignificant. The concepts we explore and articulate are like maps - they're only representations, but they point to solid realities just as maps lead to very real places and destinations.

With attention spans shortening (to 140 characters...) and openness to new, deep ideas closing (or at least not increasing), this kind of struck a chord with me.

Death is nothing at all

Death is nothing at all

I have only slipped away into
the next room
I am I, and you are you,
Whatever we were to each other,
that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way
which you always used
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity
or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes that we
enjoyed together

Play, smile, think of me,
pray for me.

Let my name be ever the
household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort,
Without the ghost of a
shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and
unbroken continuity.

What is this death but a
negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you,
for an interval,
Somewhere very near,
Just around the corner.

All is well.

- Henry Scott Holland

I dug through my house a few days ago and dug up the poetry I had written throughout middle school, high school, and the first year of college. In my middle school poetry journal, this poem (actually an excerpt from a sermon) is pasted onto the first page. I think I was much more fascinated by death when I was younger. At the very least, I glamorized the idea of dying, as it is still glamorized in movies, stories, cheap novels, and so on.

Either way, I've discovered that suddenly, I'm older now, and somewhere along those 10 years that went missing between middle school and now, my attitude towards death changed. Maybe I could think of death so easily then because it was so far from me, similar to the ways we can gossip about celebrities or people we don't know personally. But things change. You meet people and they might tell you how they've had to deal with life and the alternative to life.

Ever since my last college year, I feel like I've been scared. Scared to leave friends, home, and especially family now. I feel like I'm fearful all the time now, anxious about passing my tests and staying in school, finding a job in the future, finding friends to be with or someone to love, losing friends and family and loved ones, and (if this weren't bad enough) fearful of coming to the end of my life and realizing that I've wasted so much of it while being scared of everything.

I'm reading a book by Os Guinness, and the first few chapters talk about the human condition, and sort of the strange situation we find ourselves in. It mentioned life, death, the hard questions, and yet so did many books that I read during college. I find it kind of odd that before this, I had a grandparent and a freshman from Wiess both die, yet I never thought about it too hard then (maybe I couldn't back then). But now...it's as if everything hits harder, is more personal, is a little more painful to think about.

I used to think about my own death rather calmly, what people might say at my funeral, what I might say to them right before I die. Nowadays, I'm scared to think of the idea at all, for fear that I might have to consider that some day, I might have to say a eulogy for those I love - friends, grandparents, even my mother and father. The idea absolutely terrifies me, makes my heart ache so much I wish I could just turn off my conscious thought sometimes.

I don't know what exactly changed. Perhaps it's because I had things taken away from me during that last year of college - relationships, family, purpose, comfort, familiarity. Maybe I started to worry about losing things that I didn't think I could bear to lose. I think that after things started being easy, after Rice stopped providing me with everything I needed, after I got sent out on my own, I started being scared. During Rice, I felt the death of a relative and a freshman at Wiess, but recovered fairly well. However, after Rice, I've started to feel and fear deaths that haven't even come close to happening yet. I'm paralyzed by a fear things that may happen in a future that I won't change because I feel paralyzed, and so life goes by, I get nothing done, and time ticks ever on. Great.

I've heard pastors claim that the Bible's most often given commandment is "do not fear", and to paraphrase what Paul once said, the law is there to show me what sin and imperfection is. If this phase I'm going through is one that everyone hits eventually, I can understand why God would give this commandment so often.

I'm working on it.