Prolegomena to Gay Marriage

The California Supreme Court has just legalized gay marriage. Here's the 172-page decision. Rather than address gay marriage itself, I would like to look at one particular argument that is often given in order to show that homosexuality is amoral -- neither moral or immoral. The argument is that homosexuality is genetic, and is therefore beyond the control of any given individual. In other words, their attraction to the same gender is not something they choose, but rather is just the situation they find themselves in, and therefore homosexuality cannot be considered immoral.

Before I critique this argument, please bear in mind that I am not arguing here that homosexuality is immoral, I'm merely addressing an argument which claims to prove that it is not immoral. If this argument turns out to be false, it does not follow that homosexuality is immoral, only that the argument fails to demonstrate otherwise. To put it syllogistically, if A is false in the equation "If A then B", it doesn't follow that B is false as well. B might be true for other reasons.

At any rate, there have been some genetic studies which seem to support the claim that homosexuality is genetic. My understanding is that none of these studies have been conclusive. Personally, however, I would be surprised if homosexuality didn’t have some kind of genetic aspect to it. Genetic links to various kinds of behavior have been discovered, and I don’t see why homosexuality couldn’t be as well.

We must also make a distinction between being attracted to the same gender and acting upon this attraction. Christianity maintains that some actions are immoral, but the temptation to perform these actions are not. Since we all have different temptations and different degrees to which we are tempted, we are called upon to not judge the person who sins because we can't know how difficult it is for him or her to refrain from such behavior. For all we know, the person who sins exerts much more self-control than we do. However, we are also called upon to judge the actions themselves. Leviticus 19:17-18 has both sides of this right next to each other: "Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself". This is the idea behind the saying "love the sinner, hate the sin".

(As an aside, our society equates not judging people with not judging their actions either. So to condemn certain behaviors as immoral is to judge the people who perform them. This is the same error that was made in the Spanish Inquisition, but from the other direction. Our society and the Inquisition both identify the person with his or her actions. The Inquisitors recognized that the actions were not good, and so considered the person not good. Our society recognizes that the person is not bad, and so considers the actions not bad.)

The argument I have heard claimed in this context is that if something is genetic, it is a physical characteristic, since genes are made up of matter. To condemn actions that are simply the outworking of a physical characteristic is just as inappropriate as racism or sexism. Since they are physical attributes, it is just as illogical to call homosexuality immoral as it would be to call a certain skin color immoral.

I don't think this argument works. Behavior is simply in a different category than skin color or gender. When it comes to behavior, genes can only predispose us towards certain actions, not predetermine them. We still have free will. If it was possible for genes to predetermine some acts, then they may predetermine the acts of deciding or believing things. But if it's possible for our beliefs to be predetermined, then this could apply to our belief that genes predetermine our beliefs. It's a Catch-22. If the belief in genetic predetermination may be genetically predetermined itself, then it's not believed because of any actual evidence or reason. It undermines itself. The only way to avoid this is to reject the possibility of predetermination.

One of my ethics professors put it to me this way: if you take, for example, the freaks who run ultramarathons of 100 miles or so, you would probably discover that they share certain genetic traits. But this is not even remotely the same thing as claiming that they are unable to refrain from running these races.

Moreover, just because particular actions are easier for some people to engage in (or harder to refrain from), it doesn't follow that there is nothing wrong with the behavior in question. Alcoholism and depression, for example, are often genetic. But we recognize that they should be treated.

Again, don't misunderstand me: I'm not arguing here that homosexuality must be the same kind of thing as alcoholism or depression. All I'm saying is that the claim that homosexuality is genetic does not prove what some people seem to think it does. Genetics simply cannot tell us whether a given action is immoral or amoral. To answer this, we have to look elsewhere.

(reposted from OregonLive)

C. S. Lewis's Fiction for Adults

Since The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe film came out a few years ago, a lot of attention has been focused on C. S. Lewis and his children’s fiction, namely, the seven Chronicles of Narnia. With the second Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, opening up in the States this week (it won’t get to Belgium until July), I thought it would be a good idea to draw attention to his fictional works written for adults, which I appreciate much more. So below is a short summary of his adult fiction. Not included is his short story collection The Dark Tower and Other Stories, partially because there is a pretty silly looking controversy over whether it was really written by C. S. Lewis, but mostly because I’ve never read it.

The Pilgrim’s Regress
This was the first book about Christianity that C. S. Lewis wrote, not long after his he became a Christian. It takes its title and premise from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical story about the Christian life. The Pilgrim’s Regress deals largely with C. S. Lewis’s experiences as a non-Christian, traveling through various worldviews. It represents his journey from Christianity to atheism, from atheism to idealism, from idealism to pantheism, from pantheism to theism, and from theism back to Christianity (hence, a regress). It’s much harder to decipher than Bunyan’s, but every edition I’ve ever seen alleviates this by having a short blurb at the top of each page translating the imagery. The story is extremely rich, so I’ll just describe a few of the many characters and situations in it.

Lewis was raised a Christian, but abandoned it as a very young man. Similarly, the main character of The Pilgrim’s Regress, named John, is brought up in the land of Puritania, where he is brought to a Steward (a priest) and told about the Landlord (God). Here, Lewis brilliantly represents a child’s impression of Christianity, by having everyone put on a mask whenever they talk about the Landlord, and has John given a list of rules to obey -- "but half the rules seemed to forbid things he had never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing". The Steward tells him that if he breaks any of the rules, the Landlord will put him in a black hole (hell). When John asks if there is any way to avoid the black hole if he’d already broken a rule, the Steward "sat down and talked for a long time, but John could not understand a single syllable. However, it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext." I love this.

John has a vision of an island in the West, and so leaves home to pursue it. The island represents longing or sehnsucht, what Lewis later refers to as "joy" in his autobiography. The first person he encounters on his journey is Mr. Enlightenment, who greatly comforts John by telling him that there is no such person as the Landlord. When John asks him how he knows this for sure, Mr. Enlightenment exclaims, "Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!" I'm a big fan of science, so I really appreciate the way Lewis represents the alleged conflict between science and religion as pure bluster. In his nonfiction book, The Discarded Image, he goes into detail about some of the particular points of "conflict". Nevertheless, John believes (although does not follow) Mr. Enlightenment.

At one point, John is captured by the Spirit of the Age (Freudianism), and is thrown into a prison in the side of a hill. A nearby mountain turns out to be a giant who looks into the prison. The giant’s eyes have a property that whatever they look upon becomes transparent -- so when John looks at his fellow prisoners, he sees their brains and lungs and intestines, and basically, as just bundles of complexes. This is how Freudianism explains everything. When he looks down at himself, he sees his own organs. When John tries to argue, the jailer asks the other prisoners what argument is. One responds, it "is the attempted rationalization of the arguer’s desires". The jailer asks him how to respond to any argument proving the existence of the Landlord. The prisoner responds, "You say that because you are a Steward". Finally, the jailer asks him how to respond to any argument that two plus two equals four. The prisoner responds, "You say that because you are a mathematician".

John is rescued from the prison by a woman in armor, named Reason. She asks the giant three riddles, and when the giant can’t answer, she kills it. John leaves with her, but the other prisoners huddle together in a corner of the prison cell, wailing, "It is one more wish-fulfillment dream: it is one more wish-fulfillment dream". John quickly leaves Reason, though, when she points out to him that for many people disbelief in the Landlord is a wish-fulfillment dream.

John acquires a traveling companion named Vertue, but their journey is quickly halted by an unbridgeable canyon. The journey then becomes an attempt to try to find some way of crossing the canyon. They travel north, where they meet nihilism, and south, where they meet philosophy. Mother Kirk (Christianity) tells them that she can carry them across, but John doesn’t want anything to do with her.

Again, this is just a small selection of the imagery of this book. Towards the end of it, John travels through the land of Luxuria which represents sexual promiscuity. A beautiful witch offers him wine from a cup, and when he refuses, tries to convince him to drink. I do not know whether this will be true of women as well, but every man who has ever struggled with sexual temptation (as opposed to those who simply give in to it) will recognize their struggle in this passage.

The Space Trilogy
I love science-fiction, but many stories in this genre that mention Christianity at all are explicitly hostile to it; at any rate, there is considerably less written from a Christian perspective than from non-Christian (and even anti-Christian) perspectives. I suspect this is nothing intrinsic to the genre itself, but is merely a reflection of the perception mentioned above that science and Christianity conflict with each other, and so we allegedly have to choose one or the other. It never ceases to amaze me that some people can have such amazing imaginations as SF authors demonstrate, but when it comes to Christianity they substitute bogus slogans, clichés, and knee-jerk reactions for rationality.

Nevertheless, there are some Christian SF authors. Madeleine L’Engle (who died last year) wrote A Wrinkle in Time, the first of her Time Quintet series, although they’re really juvenile SF. Another is Jerry Pournelle, a C. S. Lewis fan, who wrote (with Larry Niven) an update of Inferno, Dante’s classic work of a journey through hell, with the added twist of the main character being a SF author -- in fact, he "lifted a good part of the philosophical stuffing" in this book from Lewis. Pournelle’s SF isn’t religious in nature, although you can sometimes see traces. He even mentions Lewis a couple of times in Footfall. Orson Scott Card is something of a theologically-liberal Mormon (I think), and he treats religion very respectfully in his books. In Xenocide, the third book of the original Ender series, Card has a Catholic missionary who essentially converts an entire alien race to Christianity. One of the main characters in the second Ender series is a Catholic nun who holds her own against skeptics. Christian authors I haven’t read (yet) include Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis, Elizabeth Moon, John C. Wright, Susan Palwick, and several others. If you want to read more about Christianity in SF, I strongly recommend skipping over to Claw of the Conciliator, and reading his important posts listed on his sidebar, starting with this one. I also began to read two books called The Sparrow and Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell (who converted from Catholicism to Judaism) which together make up a SF story about some Jesuits who encounter an alien race. I’ve decided not to go through them yet, because they deal with God leading people into abject failure and horror, and how such a person can ever trust God afterwards. My wife and I took a step of faith a few years ago, and until it’s resolved, I don’t think it would be good for my psychological health to read a fictional account of God leading people into abject failure and horror.

This is a rather long introduction into Lewis’s three SF books, which I think are his weakest writings (not so weak that they’re not worth reading though). They strike me as being "old-fashioned" SF, more in the vein of H. G. Wells than of Card or Pournelle. The main character is named Ransom, and I read somewhere that he’s modeled after one of C. S. Lewis’s best friends, J. R. R. Tolkien (I’ve also read somewhere that Treebeard in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is modeled after Lewis). All three books address an issue that Lewis explores more fully in his non-fiction book The Abolition of Man: namely, that the reduction of humanity to mere matter, and the desire to conquer nature both lead to the destruction of humanity itself.

The first book is Out of the Silent Planet. Ransom is kidnapped by some men who have built a spaceship, and is taken to Mars, or Malacandra. They kidnap him because they think some of the natives want a human sacrifice. Once on Malacandra, Ransom escapes and lives for several months among some different natives. He discovers that the intelligent races on Malacandra are not fallen and sinful like human beings. Earth is the silent planet because the endil (roughly, angel) in charge of it has rebelled against God, and so none of the other endil know anything about the earth. Ransom is eventually discovered by the first set of natives, who didn’t want him for a sacrifice after all. One of the kidnappers, named Weston, is later hauled before a kind of "court" where he extols the glory of humanity and how it will conquer the universe. The setting makes this speech sound very silly.

The second is Perelandra. A friendly endil transports Ransom to Venus, which is covered in water with many floating islands of vegetation. Ransom encounters a "woman" who is, essentially, the Eve of that planet. She and the Adam have been separated and are trying to find each other. However, they aren’t too stressed about it, since they are unfallen and trust God to take care of them. But then Weston takes his spaceship to Perelandra, where he reveals himself to be possessed. Weston -- now a rebellious spiritual entity -- tries to convince Eve why it would be best for her to break the laws that God has set for her, while Ransom tries to convince her otherwise. The tension here is overwhelming; when I read through this part of the book, I want to just step into the story and physically stop Weston from trying to tempt the woman. I’m also struck by the amazing contrast between the intelligence behind Weston’s attempts to convince the woman to rebel against God, and the sheer vacuity of his tauntings of Ransom when the woman’s not around. He just says, "Ransom, Ransom, Ransom, Ransom..." etc. until Ransom says, "What?" to which Weston replies "Nothing", then after a pause starts up again: "Ransom, Ransom, Ransom..."

The third book is That Hideous Strength. This is generally considered the best of the three, but I like it the least. Ransom is not the main character in it, but still plays a significant role. The two main characters are a young married couple who aren’t as enamored of each other as they used to be. The man is a low-level professor who is offered a job at an institute, but he’s not sure exactly what they expect of him. This part of the book is long and -- to me -- tedious, and deals with the man’s desire to be a part of the right crowd. Unfortunately, the crowd in this instance intends to overthrow society and replace it with machines. To this end, they have made a horrific attempt at immortality, and intend to dig up Merlin the magician of English folklore to help them. Meanwhile, the man’s wife has begun having visions, and is eventually taken in by Ransom and his people (including, interestingly, an atheist), who are planning to do battle with the institute. Merlin shows up and things get funky. Towards the end, one of the antagonists illustrates the main theme behind the whole Trilogy:

Frost had left the dining room a few minutes after Wither. He did not know where he was going or what he was about to do. For many years he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last year or so -- since he had been initiated -- he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. His mind was a mere spectator. He could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The nearest thing to a human passion which still existed in him was a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind. There was no tolerating such an illusion. There were not, and must not be, such things as men.

(I transcribed a larger part of this quote in this post, near the bottom).

The Screwtape Letters
This book is difficult to classify: it’s fiction, but not really a story. It purports to be a series of letters written by a senior demon in hell, named Screwtape, to his nephew demon, Wormwood, who is in charge of corrupting an individual human being. The letters consist of advice on how to best go about this.

Since it’s not really a story, it can’t really be summarized. Suffice it to say that it’s incredibly clever, hilarious, and painful. I, at least, recognize myself on every page. There’s an audio version of John Cleese reading excerpts from them which is, as my fellow Python fans can imagine, spectacular. I was going to avoid quoting from them, because I was afraid if I started, I wouldn’t be able to find a stopping point. But here’s one of my favorite passages from the first letter, before Wormwood’s "patient" becomes a Christian:

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don’t let him ask what he means by "real".

Here’s a passage from the second letter, which describes Wormwood’s "patient" going to a church. After this, I’ll close my book and put it back on the shelf:

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. ... Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Lewis later appended the Letters with an essay entitled "Screwtape Proposes a Toast", in which Screwtape addresses a group of young tempters upon their graduation from training college. Most recent editions of the Letters will include it at the end, and it can also be found in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays and Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces.

The Great Divorce
The title is a response to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The theme is that some people in hell take a bus trip to heaven. The twist is that they don’t like it. It’s too real. When they disembark, they find that they are translucent -- "ghosts" -- and they don’t even have enough substantiality to bend the grass that they walk on, since it’s more solid than they are. Lewis uses this theme to explore deep theological questions about heaven and hell. How could God allow people to go to hell? How can anyone be happy in heaven if there is a hell?

The story is told in the first person. Each of the travelers is met by someone they know who tries to convince them to go deeper into heaven. C. S. Lewis is met by George MacDonald, the 19th century author whose writings played a large role in Lewis’s life. One man is met by a former employee who committed murder. This shocks him, and he refuses to take part in any heaven that would accept a murderer, while keeping a "decent chap" like himself outside. Another man is met by a former student. The man was apparently a theologian who denied the central tenets of Christianity, and insists that "God" would never "punish" him for his "honest opinions". He refuses to go further into heaven, because he has a paper to read next week at a theological society that they’ve organized in hell.

A woman refuses to go into heaven because her husband is in there, and she doesn’t want anything to do with him. But as she talks about it, she says she’d be willing to come if she was allowed to have full control over him. Another woman only wants to see her son who died in his youth. She’s told she will be able to see him (not allowed to, but able to) as soon as she learns to want God more than her son. She responds by saying she will have no part in a God who keeps a mother and son apart. Her son is hers, not God’s. "I hate your religion and I hate and despise your God. I believe in a God of Love". She says this when she’s within walking distance of Love himself.

One man has a lizard on his shoulder who whispers things to him (representing lust). He is met by someone who offers to kill the lizard.

"Get back! You’re burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did."

"It is not so."

"Why, you’re hurting me now."

"I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you."

The meeting that just devastates me though, is two ghosts who are met by one of the most glorious beings in heaven. The glorious being was a nobody on earth, just a poor woman. The two ghosts are the remains of a single person who used to be her husband. They are a thin man, and a hunched dwarf on a chain. Upon closer examination, however, we discover that the dwarf ghost is actually holding the chain, and the thin one is shackled. The thin ghost is a seedy actor, a tragedian, who answers whenever the woman speaks to the dwarf. Basically, the man is a phony; he responds to every situation by acting, by striking a pose. He has been doing it so long that he has separated into two entities, which are dependent on each other. The reason this devastates me is that it hits a little too close to home.

The dwarf ghost spent his entire life making himself suffer in order to manipulate people into doing what he wanted out of pity. The glorious being who was his wife tells him that he can let go of the chain. He doesn’t have to continue manipulating people anymore, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to do so in heaven. No matter what he does, he won’t make anyone feel bad. He can be free of his self-imposed misery, because his reason for so imposing himself no longer exists: he can’t affect (or perhaps infect) others with his misery. But the ghost has been doing this for so long, he doesn’t know what it would mean to let go of the chain. "I do not know that I ever saw anything more terrible than the struggle of that Dwarf Ghost against joy".

Again, I think this book is brilliant. I highly recommend it.

Till We Have Faces
This is C. S. Lewis’s masterpiece. He thought it was the best thing he ever wrote. It’s basically the myth of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters. If you don’t know that story, there are spoilers ahead, so consider yourself warned. As The Pilgrim’s Regress, this book is extremely rich, so there will be, by necessity, much of significance that I’ll have to leave out in this summary. Orual, or Maia, is the sister in question; she is the oldest daughter of the king of Glome. She says she is writing the book as an accusation against the gods.

Orual discovers early in life that she is extremely ugly. Her father, a tyrant, buys a Greek slave (named the Fox, who represents rationality) to teach her and her sister. Eventually, the king remarries, and fathers another daughter, Psyche. Orual loves Psyche and her life becomes meaningful because of it. Psyche grows up and the people of the kingdom think she is a goddess because she is so beautiful. But then the kingdom falls on very hard times, and the people say she must be sacrificed for daring to present herself as a goddess. The priest of the kingdom’s pagan temple confronts the king with this, and he -- once he realizes that the people don’t want to sacrifice him -- agrees. They will take Psyche up to the mountain where the god, or Shadowbrute, lives and chain her to a pole. The god (they believe) will then consume her, but this is simultaneously thought of as a kind of marriage as well. Psyche is not depressed by her state, and considers it an honorable thing to die for a god; and who knows? Maybe she will be married to him. Orual, however, is devastated. There is very little love in her life, either to give or receive, and the large portion of it is to and from Psyche. She tries to stop it, but collapses, and is delirious for several days.

After Orual has recovered, she begins to train at sword fighting with Bardia, the captain of the guard. But just in case you think there might have been some sexual tension here, remember, Orual is ugly. After their first lesson, "one of the other soldiers (I suppose he had had a sight of what we were doing) came into the passage and said something to Bardia. Bardia replied, I couldn’t hear what. Then he spoke louder: ‘Why, yes, it’s a pity about her face. But she’s a brave girl and honest. If a man was blind and she weren’t the King’s daughter, she’d make him a good wife.’ And that is the nearest thing to a love-speech that was ever made me."

Eventually, she and Bardia decide to go up to the mountain to retrieve Psyche’s bones and give them a proper burial. But there is nothing at the pole where the priest had chained her, and it’s forbidden to go beyond it. She decides to go beyond it anyway, and immediately finds herself in a kind of hidden valley with a little stream, and on the other side of the stream is Psyche staring back at her with a surprised look on her face. They embrace and weep. Psyche tells Orual that she is indeed married to the god of the mountain, and that she lives in a beautiful palace with invisible servants who give her everything she wants. But when Orual asks to see the palace, Psyche looks at her in shock: they are already in it. Orual can’t see it. The wine is just water, the bountiful food is just berries, the marble pillars are just trees. When Orual asks about her husband, Psyche explains that he only comes to her at night, in the dark, and so she has never seen him; in fact, she’s forbidden from seeing him. Orual takes all of this to mean that Psyche has lost her mind.

When she talks to the Fox about all of this, he also believes that Psyche has lost her mind, and thinks that her "husband" is a mountain man, a vagabond, an outlaw, who "rescued" her and is now taking advantage of her insanity. This so infuriates Orual that she decides, without the Fox’s counsel, to go back to the mountain and prove to Psyche that her husband is not who she thinks he is.

Her plan is to use Psyche’s love for her, by telling her that she’ll kill herself unless she agrees to look at her husband once he’s asleep. She stabs herself through the arm to prove to Psyche that she’s serious about it, and then gives Psyche a lamp and an urn to cover the light. Psyche very reluctantly agrees to do this. Orual goes back across the stream and waits to see what happens. Late at night, she sees the light from the lamp appear and move a little, then stay in one place for a long time. Then suddenly there is a great roar -- "It was no ugly sound; even in its implacable sternness it was golden. My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things." -- and the sound of weeping. A huge storm immediately broke out, and a bolt of lightning flashed right in front of Orual. But it didn’t go away: the lightning bolt stayed in front of her: and "in the center of the light was something like a man". The god of the mountain was real, and he was beautiful, and she had just compelled Psyche to betray him.

Though this light stood motionless, my glimpse of the face was as swift as a true flash of lightning. I could not bear it for longer. Not my eyes only, but my heart and blood and very brain were too weak for that. A monster -- the Shadowbrute that I and all Glome had imagined -- would have subdued me less than the beauty this face wore. And I think anger (what men call anger) would have been more supportable than the passionless and measureless rejection with which it looked upon me. Though my body crouched where I could almost have touched his feet, his eyes seemed to send me from him to an endless distance. He rejected, denied, answered, and (worst of all) he knew, all I had thought, done or been. A Greek verse says that even the gods cannot change the past. But is this true? He made it to be as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessings, debatings, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my own eyes by myself. You, who read my book, judge. Was it so? Or, at least, had it been so in the very past, before this god changed the past? And if they can indeed change the past, why do they never do so in mercy?

The thunder had ceased, I think, the moment the still light came. There was great silence when the god spoke to me. And as there was no anger (what men call anger) in his face, so there was none in his voice. It was unmoved and sweet; like a bird singing on the branch above a hanged man.

"Now Psyche goes out in exile. Now she must hunger and thirst and tread hard roads. Those against whom I cannot fight must do their will upon her. You, woman, shall know yourself and your work. You also shall be Psyche."

The voice and the light both ended together as if one knife had cut them short. Then, in the silence, I heard again the noise of the weeping.

I never heard weeping like that before or after, not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.

This breaks my heart every time I read it.

This isn’t the end of the story at all, but this is all of it that I’ll relate here. Again, this book is rich. The title refers to a common theme in Lewis’s writings, that the earth and our lives are just shadows of reality (this is the imagery behind the title of the movie Shadowlands, about Lewis). In this book, the idea is that we demand to see God face to face; but how can we till we have faces? I’ve read through it a few times, and I’m not at all confident that I’m understanding the imagery; but despite this, I still recognize that I’ve come into contact with something deeply profound. Orual and Psyche clearly represent two different parts of the human being, but I’m not sure exactly what: perhaps Orual is the physical side and Psyche is the spiritual; perhaps Orual is the mortal side and Psyche the immortal; perhaps Orual is the person we are and Psyche is the person we want to be. The point being that the Orual side betrays the Psyche side, but will eventually be redeemed, glorified, and transformed into the Psyche side. More than that, I don’t know. Read it for yourself.

(reposted from OregonLive)

Slow month

I have a ton of papers to write, including a thesis, that are all due at the end of this month. Unfortunately, one of my primary distractions is the Internet. So for the next month or so, most of the posts here will be reposts, and will probably be less frequent. If you leave a comment, please don't be offended if I don't get to it for a few days. Also, any prayers you could offer on my behalf would be appreciated.

The Angel and the Monstrosity

There was once a man -- his name doesn’t matter; if you have to, call him Manny -- who was obsessed with whether he was going to hell. He was terrified of the idea of hell, and desperately wanted to avoid it, as we all do when we’re willing to think about it.

So, one day, he took to drastic measures. He prayed to God. He laid his heart open to him, saying he knew his terror of hell wasn’t the best reason to want to go to heaven, but he was sorry, and he’d do anything if he could just have some peace about it. He sat there, concentrating intently on the corner where the wall met the ceiling in his living room, waiting for God to respond. Every now and then, he caught his mind drifting, and this made him even more desperate, wondering if now he’d offended God, or perhaps the answer had come, but he missed it because he wasn’t paying attention. No answer came. Eventually he just went to bed.

He had a very strange dream that night though. It was impossible to put into words, but it was kind of like God saying, “You don’t really want to know whether you’re going to heaven or hell; trust me on this.” To which he responded, “Yes, I do, I really do.” God responded back, “Don’t you trust me?” And he said, “Well, no, not really, but I’d like to.” And after that it was just incoherent. At any rate, the dream was very different from that, but that’s as close as one can get to describing it. You know how dreams are.

When he woke up, the dream was the furthest thing from his mind. He drank some coffee and ate some cereal. He showered, brushed his teeth, got dressed. When he stepped out of his house, the first thing he saw was a monstrosity. His bile rose, and he almost screamed, but instead his terror froze him in place as it walked straight towards him. But at the last moment it passed by him, saying “hi” as it did so. The voice was that of a woman. In fact, it was that of his neighbor. His hot neighbor. That was his hot neighbor who just walked by. And then, without knowing how he knew it, he realized that he saw her as she would be. She was going to hell, and she was slowly becoming a monstrosity.

Then he looked around him, and realized that the street was full of monstrosities, the damned, moving about their daily lives. Now that he realized what they were, he wasn’t scared of them -- they were so completely pathetic -- but they were so ugly he was scared of being infected by them.

But then he saw…he didn’t know what to call it, it was so perfect. Maybe it was an angel, but if it was, the word “angel” didn’t communicate the beauty, the depth, the quality of life that this being did by simply existing. It was the mailman. He was seeing him as he would be, a heavenly creature.

As he walked to work, he saw more and more of them, monstrosities so ugly that he had to fight to keep from vomiting, and angels so glorious that he had to fight to keep from falling at their feet and worshipping them.

When he passed the grade school, it started getting a little strange. He saw the children in the playground, and they, like everyone else, were either monstrosities or angels. But then one of them switched from a monstrosity to an angel. As he stared at them, another changed from an angel into a monstrosity. Then back again. In fact, they were all flipping back and forth like that. What he was seeing then wasn’t their eternal destinies, but where they were headed at that moment.

But then why wasn’t everybody else doing it? Well, because as people get older, they become more set in their ways. That was all there was to it. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he did. As he walked around, he did notice a few people change, but they didn’t flip back and forth constantly like the children.

It wasn’t until he got home that the thought occurred to him: What would he see if he looked in the mirror? The thought horrified him, but once he had it, it wouldn’t leave him alone. Several times he walked into the bathroom, but then left without turning on the light. Finally, he went in, turned on the light, and saw his reflection.

As he gasped at the beauty of his reflection, it changed.

As he opened his mouth to scream, it changed.

He began to cry out with joy, but then it changed again.

His cry turned into a shriek of horror; and it changed again.

And by then, he was out of air, and his visage was constantly flipping back and forth. He finally turned away from the mirror, turned out the light, and ran out of the bathroom.

He hyperventilated for several minutes, trying to understand what happened to him. The children flipped back and forth, but not as quickly as he had. What was it about himself that caused it? That night, he covered up all the mirrors with tape. That’s hard to do without looking at them, but he managed it.

The next day, walking through a mob of demons with a smattering of angels, he realized he was walking next to a storefront with a window. Afraid to look, but desperate, he slowly began to turn his head. He could see his reflection now, but just as a shapeless form; he couldn’t tell whether he was a monstrosity or an angel. But he could see enough detail to know that, whatever it was, it wasn’t flipping back and forth; it was a steady reflection.

He turned his head the rest of the way, and the most glorious being he had ever seen turned into the most horrific and disgusting. Then back again. Fortunately, at that point, the storefront ended.

He spent several days trying to understand all of this. Why, when he looked in the mirror, did he change from whatever state he was in to the other? Why did it not happen when he wasn’t looking at his reflection? He wasn’t really that bright of a man, but he did finally come up with the answer.

For him, the terror of hell was the only thing that drove him to salvation. His terror was a sufficient impetus to make him heaven-bound. The knowledge that he was damned terrified him and turned him around so that he was no longer damned. But the knowledge that he was saved took away this terror and turned him back towards hell. So when he knew he was damned, he was saved, and when he knew he was saved, he was damned.

So…what could he do with this? In order to avoid hell, he would have to think he was going to hell. But then, if he thought he was going to hell, he would know that he was going to heaven. But if he thought he was going to heaven, he would go to hell. How do you make yourself believe something, if by believing it, you knowingly falsify it? Basically, he had no idea whether he was going to go to heaven or hell.

Which was exactly the situation he was in before. Except now, he wasn’t constantly terrified of going to hell.

Maybe he should have listened to God.

Drive-thru Ideology

We live in an age where intellectual discourse often peaks with the bumper sticker. This demonstrates two things: First, that we aren't a very thoughtful society. Second, that we are more interested in scoring rhetorical points than in honestly investigating an issue. This second point leads to another: We may be willing to quote scholars out of context in order to give the impression that our view is scholarly; and if such a quote can be made into a slogan, all the better.

A good illustration of this is Marx's famous statement that "religion is the opiate of the masses". I have heard this phrase used often in the public square to imply that religion is something that people use to escape from reality, in the same manner as recreational drug use.

But this isn't what Marx meant. Marx, it will be recalled, was centrally concerned with class struggles. The historical context of this statement was the Opium wars in China, in which the Chinese were made addicted to opium by the British in order to control them. Marx's statement, therefore, was not an intrinsic comment about what religion ultimately is. Rather, his statement was an extrinsic comment about how religion is used by those in power. Marx was an atheist of course, but that's not what he was trying to communicate in this statement.

(reposted from OregonLive)

Two self-referential jokes

A priest, a rabbi, and an Irishman walk into a bar. The bartender looks at them and says, "What is this, a joke?"

Q: How many lightbulbs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One, if it knows its Gödel number.

Code Guardian

Here's another video I first saw before starting this blog, and wished I had a blog to post it on. Here ya go.

Code_Guardian
Uploaded by Cee-Gee-Productions

If that's too choppy for you, here it is in two parts:

Quote of the Day

"As Jewish monotheism became gradually purified from anthropomorphic elements and increasingly abstract, the place of the God of Israel and even God Himself were identified with the whole universe, that entity identified in Stoic pantheism with the Supreme Being. The various components of this development are reflected in Philo's commentary on Jacob's dream. Here Philo ascribes three meanings to place, the third identifying place with God. A few centuries later this figure of speech, reminiscent of the second fragment of Pseudo-Archytas, is to be found in Jewish exegetic literature: "Why is God called place? Because He is the place of the world, while the world is not His place." "Place" as a synonym for God became a generally accepted expression in the Hebrew language from the first centuries of the Christian era onwards."

Shmuel Sambursky
The Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism

(cross-posted at OregonLive)

The Gender of God

While the Pope was in America last week, some folks thought it would be a good time for him to denounce the traditional masculine imagery used for God. Ignoring the false claims about the formation and content of the New Testament canon made in that article (that's a post for another day), it argues that such imagery is the result of patriarchalism, and since we live in a more egalitarian society these references are not as appropriate. This attitude has led to an issue within the Church known as the "inclusive language" debate, the extremes of which suggest that the classically male designations should be substituted with neutral ones: "Father" should be replaced with "Parent," for example.

Now obviously the history of the world (not just the Church) has been largely patriarchal, and the role(s) of women in society have been downplayed or ignored. And just as obviously, the members of the Trinity, including the pre-incarnate Christ, could not be understood as masculine or feminine in a physical sense. Moreover, it needs to be pointed out that the Bible does sometimes describe God with feminine imagery. The Father compares himself to a nursing mother, the Son compares himself to a mother hen, and we are "born again" by the Holy Spirit; "Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit". Indeed, we are told that God created both men and women in his image; therefore, either his image includes both genders, or gender has nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, feminine imagery is strongly outnumbered by masculine imagery in the Bible -- the process of spiritual rebirth is also described as being indwelled by the Holy Spirit. If we must assign sexual imagery to this, "indwelling" would more strongly suggest masculinity, since this is the role the man plays in the sex act, i.e., impregnation from without. Moreover, it is not only the Holy Spirit who is involved in this process, but the Father and Son as well: all three members of the Trinity indwell the believer. In fact, it may be this kind of imagery that leads to the descriptions of the Church as the "bride of Christ".

C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere (and I agree with him) that God has told us in his Word how he wants us to think and speak of him. Perhaps, one could say that our relationship with God more closely parallels the relationship children have had with their fathers than those they have had with their mothers throughout human history. Presumably, one could argue that this is "merely patriarchalism", and the traditional familial roles are purely arbitrary. But even if I were to grant this point (which I don’t), it would still be much more appropriate to use the title "Father" because it would be the more faithful image of our relationship to and with God, regardless of how or why this image is the way it is.

Finally -- and this is my main point -- I don’t agree with the claim that God is thought of in male terminology solely because history has been largely patriarchal. It seems to me that when we contrast theism with pantheism or panentheism a deeper significance of this imagery is revealed. We only think of "Mother Nature"; we never think "Father" would be an appropriate designation for nature. Why? Because nature brings forth out of itself -- that is, it "gives birth" to its constituent elements. This involves a close identification of the parts with the whole: we are within nature in a similar sense that the unborn child is within the mother.

But this is not the situation for those of us who view God as Creator. We don’t believe that God creates ex Deo -- out of himself, but ex nihilo -- out of nothing. God’s creation is distinct from him. If God created out of himself, then it would be more consistent to describe God as "Mother"; but this is not the Judeo-Christian concept of creation. God is Creator, thus Father, thus "male". And insofar as the other members of the Trinity play a role in creation, they are "male" as well.

In other words, there’s a reason why God and the Trinity are traditionally pictured as male rather than female, and this reason has nothing to do with the fact that men have usually been in charge. So I think this knee-jerk reaction to bring the Bible more in line with our culture by changing male terms like Father to gender-neutral ones like Parent is not consonant with the biblical concept of God. There's no need to go off half-cocked.

Mars Express Video

Here's a fascinating video containing images taken by the Mars Express spacecraft, in orbit around Mars (via Instapundit).

Your Own Personal Jesus

When I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago, I went to the Louvre for the first time. I only saw parts of their ancient Egypt collection and their Italian painting collection, but it was really amazing. I also discovered that if you have to use the bathroom there, and you say "the loo of the Louvre" really fast it sounds funny.

Anyway, my point -- I had one -- was that many of the Italian paintings portrayed Jesus, and they all portrayed him as a white European. You probably already know this. We recognize this now as understandable but inappropriate. Jesus was Jewish, and obviously Middle Eastern, so he probably had darker skin, black hair, more like what you imagine a nomad looks like than a European. Our desire to get back to the original Jesus is so strong that Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ in Aramaic in order to make it as historically accurate as possible.

But while I was looking at these paintings and thinking these thoughts, another came to mind. I thought of the book Bruchko by Bruce Olson, a true story of how, as a teenager, Olson flew to South America, walked into the jungle, and has converted entire tribes to Christianity. It's really amazing, and I wrote about Olson on my other blog several months ago. I don't have the book with me, so I can't quote it directly, but as I walked through the Louvre, I remembered how he had converted his first Motilone tribesman, who was also his best friend. The friend asked Bruce if he could ever "lose" Jesus -- I think his exact words were "Can Jesus ever be taken out of my mouth?" Bruce told him he didn't know; he'd have to ask Jesus himself. That night, as the tribe was laying in their hammocks in their communal hut and singing, his friend started singing about how Jesus walks the trails with him, how he has taken away all of his sin, and he can never be taken out of his mouth. It's very moving. While Olson listens to this singing, he realizes that, for his friend, Jesus is a Motilone. And when a Christian reads this, I suspect that her response will be very similar to mine: strong approval. Jesus transcends the particular culture he lived in during his sojourn on Earth, and he knows the Motilone tribe better than any Motilone could. So it's entirely appropriate for Bruce Olson's friend to sing of Jesus walking the trails with him, and thinking of him in the terms that are particular to Motilone culture. That's part of the glory of Christianity: Jesus speaks to us in our particular condition. We can think of him as one of us because he is one of us.

But then, how exactly is this different from what the European painters were doing when they represented Jesus as a European? They portrayed him as if he was one of them, and he is one of them, just as he is one of the Motilones. It's only after centuries of portraying him this way that we started getting focused on whether our portrayals were historically accurate. Of course, historical accuracy is important, and it helps us to understand more about the Gospel story and make it come alive. But one of the main points of the Gospel story is that Jesus meets us where we are. He knows more about our culture, our habitual thinking patterns, etc., than we ever could.

I'm not offering a resolution to this. As I say, historical accuracy is important. But I'm no longer "put off" by people of European descent portraying Jesus as a white-skinned, blue-eyed man. He meets us where we are. Some of us are white-skinned and blue-eyed.

Thought of the Day

Nietzsche said, "Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger".
Nietzsche went insane.

Ministries

I have put a short list of ministries at the top of my sidebar. The reason they're at the top (except for the Aristotle quote which explains what my blog's title means) is because they're more important than anything else. I won't be adding more ministries to this list, for the simple reason that there would be no justifiable stopping point. There are simply too many worthy ministries, and I would always be guilty of excluding very deserving ones. So I just put a few that I know and are encouraged by.

The first is International Justice Mission. I love these guys. They go to countries where child prostitution is illegal but the laws against it are largely unenforced, and work together with the local authorities to rescue children out of it. In other words, they go in and get the children out. They walk the walk. And it's not just with child prostitution; they get rid of manual slavery, and other forms of violent persecution. The president of IJM, Gary Haugen, has written two books, Good News About Injustice, and Terrify No More. I wrote a review of the second book on the old blog; I might repost it at some point. If you have some extra cash, you might want to consider donating it to IJM. Organizations like this are what money is for.

Second and third are Mercy Corps and Northwest Medical Teams. I know these organizations because they're both based in Portland, where I'm from. They go all over the world getting people the food, medicine, and amenities they need. Ditto with the money thing.

Finally, the Hunger Site. You might already know about this: you simply go to the site, click on the button, and food will be donated (by advertisers) to people all over the world who need it. You can only click once a day. You can make it your homepage to make it easier to remember. If you're wondering whether it's on the up-and-up, here's the Snopes article on it, demonstrating that it's valid. The Hunger Site also has a topbar linking to similar sites, which you can also click once a day, such as the Child Health Site (which donates vitamins and medicine), the Child Literacy Site (which donates books), the Animal Rescue Site (which provides food for abused animals), etc. In fact, I got an e-mail from my mother-in-law about a month ago saying that they were having trouble getting enough people to click on the Breast Cancer Site (which provides free mammograms to poor women). So get to it.

Update: As I say, I won't be adding more ministries to this list, but if you want to mention some in the comments (with links if possible), feel free.

The St. Étienne du Mont Church

One thing I like about living in Europe is seeing the churches that have been around for hundreds of years. Taking pictures of them makes you realize how impotent photography is. Below are some pictures I took last week of the St. Étienne du Mont church in Paris. The current Gothic construction dates back to the late 15th century, although an abbey was built on the site in the 6th century. It houses the remains and shrine of St. Geneviève (5th and 6th centuries), the patron saint of Paris, and is the burial place of two important 17th century figures: Blaise Pascal, one of the most important mathematicians and (Christian) philosophers in history, and Jean Racine the playwright.

Some Shorter Statements of the AFR

Below are some of C. S. Lewis’s shorter statements of the argument from reason. His longer defenses of this argument can be found in his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study, primarily chapter 3, as well as the essays “Bulverism” and “Meditation in a Toolshed” in God in the Dock, and “De Futilitate” in Christian Reflections. A more recent book defending it is C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason by Victor Reppert. I will only include quotes where he uses the argument in terms of reason; he uses similar arguments to defend the veracity of ethics (such as in part one of Mere Christianity) and aesthetics (as in part one of The Abolition of Man). I won’t include page numbers, as most of his books are available in multiple editions, and thus multiple paginations. I’ll precede each quote by the book it’s found in, and if it’s a particular essay in the book, the essay’s title will come after the quote.

All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927:
In his [Bertrand Russell’s] “Worship of a Free Man” I found a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty -- that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole. The Promethean attitude would be tenable only if we were really members of some other whole outside the real whole: wh[ich] we’re not.
(Saturday, 5 January, 1924; before he was a Christian)

The Pilgrim’s Regress (fiction):
In the warmth of the afternoon they went on again, and it came into John’s mind to ask the lady the meaning of her second riddle.
         ‘It has two meanings,’ said she, ‘and in the first the bridge signifies Reasoning. The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument.’
         ‘How is that?’
         ‘You heard what they said. If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true.’
         ‘I see. And what is the cure for this?’
         ‘You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.’

God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics:
Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?
(“Evil and God”)

The belief in such a supernatural reality itself can neither be proved nor disproved by experience. The arguments for its existence are metaphysical, and to me conclusive. They turn on the fact that even to think and act in the natural world we have to assume something beyond it and even assume that we partly belong to that something. In order to think we must claim for our own reasoning a validity which is not credible if our own thought is merely a function of our brain, and our brains a by-product of irrational physical processes. In order to act, above the level of mere impulse, we must claim a similar validity for our judgments of good and evil. In both cases we get the same disquieting result. The concept of nature itself is one we have reached only tacitly by claiming a sort of super-natural status for ourselves.
(“Miracles”)

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents -- the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts -- i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy -- are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.
(“Answers to Questions on Christianity”)

In so far as natural science can give a satisfactory account of man as a purely biological entity, it excludes the soul and therefore excludes immortality. That, no doubt, is why the scientists who are most, or most nearly, concerned with man himself are the most anti-religious.
         Now most assuredly if naturalism is right then it is at this point, at the study of man him