Blog Title: Prog(ressive)Nostications

Tolkien and Virtue Ethics

Here it is again with simplified footnotes and endnotes, with my apologies for the previous HTML disaster. Transferring Word formatting to Blogger is still a little dicey, but this should be much less of an eyesore. Enjoy!

Virtue Ethics in Middle-Earth
Douglas Hagler
Issues in Virtue Ethics

Virtue and Story

In our course of study, we’ve looked at a few different virtue-ethical systems, including those described by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and James F. Keenan. Aquinas, Keenan and others offer modified versions of Aristotle’s system of virtues, but they do so outside of the context of a narrative. Their virtue systems are presented and applied to various problems and subsequently analyzed, but life is not breathed into them. In order to do that, one requires a story. (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 121)

One might argue that for Christians, that story is salvation history as expressed in scripture, but this is not quite the narrative that a virtue ethic requires. A virtue ethic requires a story of ennoblement, wherein the virtues espoused are demonstrated to function. Scripture, on the other hand, is a wildly various collection of ancient genres of writing, usually seen as whole but not composed as a whole. Aristotle’s culture, in contrast, was steeped in these heroic and epic stories (Ibid, 122-125) constituting a rich storytelling tradition, the surviving fragments of which we still treasure thousands of years later.

It is my contention that, despite the great interruption in the development of virtue ethics, which MacIntyre identifies as the entire experiment of modernity, this storytelling tradition continues to this day. The difference is that we do not identify it as such, and it is not widely used as a source for virtue ethics. But we are still steeped in our own stories of ennoblement, and these can be a source for our ethical reflection in the context of virtue ethics.

The example I will focus on is the corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien, with specific focus on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with reference to this other works, books, essays and letters. Tolkien is a potentially superb example of modern stories as living virtue ethics because he is in an interesting position. On the one hand, he is steeped in the heroic storytelling of northern Europe – the languages, traditions, cultures and so on, from Beowulf to the Elder Edda to the Kalevala. He also set out, particularly in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, to create stories which reflected his own Catholicism (Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 172), including the tradition of Catholic moral theology in the tradition of Aquinas. Finally, his stories are avidly devoured by millions of fans worldwide, and have been adapted many times into various media since their publication. (Endnote 1) It seems that there is a clear potential here for one to find living, breathing virtues expressly located in modern storytelling.

Tolkien’s Intent

In Tolkien’s work, we are inoculated against some of the intrinsic ills of modernity which MacIntyre describes. Tolkien was profoundly anti-modern in almost every way, watching with horror and disgust as modern society devoured itself in two great wars, and then set upon devouring his beloved English countryside, one ugly building after another. (Letters, 88, 165, 190) You will not find many “witches and unicorns” (MacIntyre, 70) in his works – there is little reference to rights or rules of conduct, and only a light smattering of language one might call consequentialist. He is steeped in premodern values, and it shows.

But we must ask - did he intend to do what I am describing? Did he in fact set out to embody virtue in story? It is hard to say that this was his primary motivation, but there can be little doubt that his intent is there. He writes, in a draft of a letter, that “I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments.” (Letters, 194)

This is the best example of a theme in his letters when he is discussing the purpose behind his writing, particularly of The Lord of the Rings. He is doing what the authors of the ancient works he was so familiar were doing – clothing truth in story, for the purpose of “ennoblement”. (Ibid, 215, 237) In fact, this vision came to him and a group of friends very early in life, that he was called expressly to “rekindle an old light”. (Ibid, 10)

But was he successful? Because his virtues are expressed through story, and because the story is more than a simple virtue allegory, one cannot posit a comprehensive system of virtues in the works of Tolkien. Systematization is one thing and story is another. However, it is possible to identify embodiments of certain virtues, and also identify their opposite number, characters that fall and are destroyed because of their lack of the same virtue.

The three virtues I will focus on are fidelity, hope, and mercy. I will present Sam Gamgee as a character who is ennobled and saved by fidelity, and Saruman as a character who is destroyed by a lack of it. I will then go on to discuss Gandalf and his calling to foster hope in the world, contrasted with Denethor, who destroys himself for lack of hope. I will follow with a discussion of how Frodo is saved by mercy, and how Gollum is undone from the beginning by a lack of it. In all three cases, Tolkien has his own understanding of these virtues which needs to be discussed in order to understand how they function in his mythopoeia. (Endnote 2) I will then go on to a brief discussion of courage, in Bilbo contrasted with Boromir. Finally, I will discuss Tolkien’s understanding of the source and manifestation of evil, and how that affects his ethic at every level.

Fidelity

Tolkien describes Sam as a character who is saved by his fidelity to Frodo. (Letters, 161, 329) Not only is he saved by it, but he is empowered by it to go beyond the usual limits of his stature and accomplish great things. He is constant in fidelity when he is constant in little else, even putting the rest of Middle-Earth at risk for the sake of friendship and devotion. (The Lord of the Rings, 877-881) It is his fidelity which leads Gandalf, at the beginning of the story, to include Sam on Frodo’s quest, encouraging Frodo to take along friends he can trust. Gandalf sees that Sam has little else to offer in the way of help, but also correctly predicts that Sam’s virtue will be crucial to ultimate success.

The turning-point for Sam comes at Cirith Ungol, when he learns that Frodo is poisoned but not dead as he had appeared when he was attacked by Shelob. On the one hand, he should continue down into Mordor to destroy the Ring and save the world. On the other hand, he feels he can’t leave Frodo behind – but to rescue him he has to face an evil tower brimming with Orcs. He does not have a natural store of courage, but he is empowered to go beyond himself by his fidelity.

At the emotional climax of the Ring quest, Frodo collapses on the slopes of Mount Doom. Sam knows he can’t take the Ring again, but decides to carry Frodo the rest of the way up the volcano to the Cracks of Doom. He has already been moved beyond himself to great courage, but now he is moved to self-sacrifice as well, which we will see later is the heart of courage for Tolkien.

Saruman, in contrast, is defined by his “treason” and violation of all fidelity. His betrayal is revealed to Gandalf. Saruman, like Gandalf, was sent to Middle-Earth as an emissary of the Valar (Ibid, Appendix B, 1057), who are lesser gods in service to the one greater God, which is described in The Silmarillion in the Ainulindale (Endnote 3), which depicts the creation of the world. He is the head of the order of Wizards, or Istari, who are themselves supernatural beings called Maiar, servants of the Valar – the same kind of being as Sauron, or the Balrog.

In his betrayal, Saruman is not only violating his position among the Istari and peaceful relations with his neighbors the Rohirrim, but is also violating his position as emissary of the gods. He is breaking all bonds, the equivalent of oaths and blood ties, for the sake of personal power. He also spreads his treason, in particular through Grima Wormtongue, whom he sends to corrupt the court of the Rohirrim.

When Gandalf confronts him, he receives the first part of his punishment for his shattered fidelity. He is stripped of his position, and ultimately flees his tower at Orthanc. (Rings, 568-569, 960-962, 994-995) Ultimately, he comes to the Shire, and begins working corruption there as well. In a last ironic twist, he is killed by Wormtongue, who until that point was the only of Saruman’s servants who showed any fidelity to him. Saruman’s viciousness comes full-circle, and the most powerful of the Istari is stabbed to death on a doorstep in Hobbiton.

Hope

For Thomas Aquinas, Hope is a theological virtue, a gift from God, and this is essentially true in Middle-Earth as well. Gandalf is doubly charged with spreading hope in resistance to evil in Middle Earth. He is first sent as emissary of the Valar, but he is given particular training which the other Istari do not receive. He studies with Nienna, the Vala who represents wisdom that comes from suffering. (Endnote 4) She is something like the goddess of tears and grief, but in the mythological beginnings of Middle-Earth, her grief is a crucial ingredient in healing and restoring light to the world when it is almost snuffed out. (Ibid, 113) The connection between grief and suffering on the one hand and hope and wisdom on the other cannot be overstated where Gandalf is concerned.

He is charged with bringing hope again upon his arrival in Middle-Earth, when he meets Cirdan the Shipwright, an ancient and powerful Elf living on the western shore of Middle-Earth. Cirdan is the keeper of Narya, the Ring of Fire, but he gives it to Gandalf. He can see that Gandalf will be called upon to kindle hope in the coming darkness, and will need the help of the ring more than Cirdan ever will.

As a divine being, Gandalf is actually quite limited in what he can choose to do to affect change in the world. He cannot accomplish anything through a show of force or a direct demonstration of power. His task is primarily to call mortals to go beyond themselves in the resistance of evil. (Letters, 159; Rings Appendix B 159-160) He can only call upon his full power when battling other Maiar or spiritual beings, and even then only when others aren’t around to see. This is the case when he faces the Balrog in Moria and falls into the abyss. (Rings, 321-323)

In the case of Theoden, Gandalf is successful in fostering hope in the face of despair, exemplified by his healing Theoden of Saruman’s spiritual and psychological poison delivered through Wormtongue’s machinations. Because of the hope which Gandalf kindles, the Rohirrim are rallied to the defense of their own lands, and then mobilized for the defense of their old ally Minas Tirith. Tolkien describes the passage where the horns of the Rohirrim are heard on Pelennor Field, turning the tide of the battle for Minas Tirith, as one of the passages in the book that moved him when he re-read it throughout his life. (Letters, 376)

For Tolkien, hope is tied up in providence and in the concept of eucatastrophe. These are both complex and multifaceted concepts in their own right, but as briefly as possible: providence is not specifically identified with God in Tolkien’s stories, but it is without a doubt a primary aspect of Middle-Earth. When Gandalf talks about how “even the wise cannot see all ends” (Rings, 58), he is referring to providence. When references are made to the great importance of “chance meetings” (Endnote 5), which are often so crucial to Tolkien’s narratives, this is also in reference to providence. Fate is not blind but is in benevolent hands, not simply the sum total of chance and mortal decisions.

“Eucatastrophe” is a word that Tolkien invented to describe a sudden turn of events which could be seen as an act of providence. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, eucatastrophe is heralded by the same words: “The Eagles are coming!” (Hobbit, 256; Rings, 874) This is the point when the tide of a crucial battle turns in an unexpected way, bringing victory out of disaster. In his speech and essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien discusses eucatastrophe, using it to connect even the Gospel to what he describes as a fundamental aspect of “fairy stories” or fantasy – the moment when all seems lost, and then beyond hope, good enters into the story and overcomes evil. (Tolkien, J.R.R. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics) For Tolkien, the reason that hope can persist beyond all reason is the possibility of eucatastrophe, and providence is the theological category to describe this kind of hope.

In a parallel situation to his rousing success inspiring Theoden, however, Gandalf fails utterly to engender hope. When he comes to the court of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor is prepared to refute his encouraging claims. Denethor has already essentially abandoned hope, and he finally breaks when he sees the vast army of Mordor marching on the city. Denethor has given up all hope of any eucatastrophe, believing that he can see all ends and that defeat is inevitable. (Rings, 805-807) He abandons his position and attempts to burn himself and his son Faramir on a pyre in the ancient mausoleum of Minas Tirith before he is forcibly stopped by Gandalf.

Perhaps the difference between the two is that Theoden was poisoned by betrayal, whereas Denethor was poisoned from within by pride. He actively and consciously denied providence, and instead of eucatastrophe saw only catastrophe for himself and his city. This isn’t to say that he was being unreasonable. His circumstances were incredibly dire, and he had no rational source for hope beyond trust in providence. But when that hope was offered as a gift, he refused it, and was destroyed. In Middle-Earth, hope is still a theological virtue, offered as a gift of divinity, rooted in providence, rather than arising from personal effort and reflection.

Pity

“The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.” When Gandalf says this, he is of course speaking on behalf of the writer, but this is another instance where Tolkien is closer to Aquinas than to Aristotle. For him, pity, or mercy, is more important than justice. In fact, he describes pity as that which perfects justice (Letters, 191, 326), even when it contradicts what Tolkien calls prudence, which amounts to common sense. (Miller, Aristotle: Ethics and Politics, 196-197)

In The Lord of the Rings, it is the pity Frodo exhibits that is the most influential in the success of his quest, both in the short term and overall. In the short term, he reflects Bilbo’s treatment of Gollum, his pity on him which leads to mercy when prudence might demand a harsher reaction. Gollum is thus made a temporary ally, enabling Frodo to enter Mordor by a way he would never have found on his own. (Rings, 601-605, 623-624)

In the long term, it is pity which insulates him from the evil influence of the Ring for as long as it does. Because his ownership of the Ring began with pity rather than greed or a will to power, Frodo is able to resist its corruption far longer than others of much greater stature could have. (Letters, 327) In this, Tolkien is connecting pity to humility, a vice to Aristotle but a virtue in a Christian context. The Ring is the manifestation of the will to power (Letters, 160, 200), from Smeagol’s petty desire leading to murder to Isildur’s failure to destroy the ring when he had a chance, from Galadriel’s temptation to take the ring and make herself Queen of Middle-Earth to Boromir’s desperate grasp for the ring so he could use it to save his people. The Ring is power and the desire for power both made manifest. Humility is the best defense against this, and humility manifests itself in pity, in the understanding that it does not fall on an individual to judge a life as good or evil, as deserving or undeserving. Through pity, justice is perfected because ultimately justice is left to God, or to providence perhaps in the context of Middle-Earth. “Even the wise cannot see all ends”; therefore, justice must always be tempered by pity.

Gollum is a creature without pity. He does not even have true pity for himself (In the virtuous sense, distinct from self-pity, which he has in abundance), though he is clearly pitiable to anyone who meets him. He began his ownership of the Ring by killing is cousin Deagol, who was the actual finder of the Ring. Because of this lack of the inoculation of pity, he is lost almost immediately, turning to petty crime in his community until he is ultimately exiled, and then crawling down into the roots of the mountains to eat raw fish and strangle the occasional Goblin, muttering to himself in the dark until he meets Bilbo hundreds of years later (a good example of a “chance meeting”).

In more than one way, Gollum and Frodo appear similar. Even Bilbo and Gollum shared some elements of culture, such as the riddle game described in The Hobbit. (Hobbit, 69-74) They are racially and culturally from similar stock, though now many generations removed. (Rings, Appendix B, 1062) They also share the burden of the Ring, though it had far longer to work its evil on Gollum than on Frodo. The difference between them is Frodo’s pity. He is able to see another from their point of view, able to empathize, and able to see that good can come even from apparent evil. Gollum is almost entirely unable to see beyond his desire for the Ring, for the thing that has destroyed him and corrupted him beyond repair. His lack of pity, at the beginning, necessitated his utter downfall in the end.

Courage

Tolkien describes his characters as having that which he saw himself lacking – courage. Courage is the catalyst in much of his stories which enables characters to act despite fear which would otherwise hold them back. It is exemplified best in the character of Bilbo as he changes over the course of The Hobbit. Its redemptive power, beyond its power to catalyze right action, is best demonstrated by the heroic death of Boromir at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.

For Bilbo the first act of courage is one of self-preservation, when he kills a huge spider that is trying to poison and then eat him when he becomes lost and separated from his companions in Mirkwood. (Hobbit, 141-142) This act, defending himself against something monstrous and hungry, alone and in the dark, is described as working a great change in him. At this point, his position in the company changes significantly, and he goes on to rescue the Dwarves first from spiders and then from the prisons of the Elvenking.

His most courageous act that is described in The Hobbit also comes when he is alone, when he is going down into the darkness of Smaug’s lair. He is making his way down into the earth, and comes to a point where he can no longer see the light from above, nor hear his companions’ voices, but he is certain of the reality of a Dragon at the end of the tunnel below – he can see the red light that Smaug gives off faintly before him. Continuing onward down the tunnel is an act of bravery – almost for its own sake. One might say that it is for the sake of fidelity, since he has promised the Dwarves to do just what he is doing, but the courageous act itself is presented as having its own value, particularly when it is not a response to a direct threat but a conscious decision to do something despite being terribly afraid. (Hobbit, 193)

Boromir’s situation is quite different. He is already a person of proven courage, but by the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, he has fallen from grace, betraying Frodo’s trust when he is overwhelmed by desire for the Ring. He tries to take it by force, and Frodo escapes him and disappears. Soon after, Uruk-Hai attack the Company, and they are scattered. Aragorn commands Boromir to protect Merry and Pippin, who go running off to find Frodo and Sam in the confusion.

Boromir finds them being hounded by dozens of Uruk-Hai, and dies defending them. Though they are ultimately captured, he has time before he dies to speak with Aragorn again. He repents and is absolved, because in the end he died with courage, defending the weak and obeying a command given to him by someone he had accepted as his liege. (Rings, 395, 403-404) For Bilbo, courage is a catalyst, but for Boromir, courage is redemptive.

Evil

In Tolkien’s narratives, the will to dominate others is at the heart of all evil. It is not simply a Nietzschean will-to-power, but it is dominion in place of God. (Letters, 152, 200, 220, 262, 326) It is usurpation of divine sovereignty for one’s own purposes. The ultimate example of this is in the story of the creation of Middle-Earth found in The Silmarillion. In it, the music of Eru, or Illuvatar, or God, brings forth creation, and the Valar join in the music, each fulfilling their allotted part – except for Melkor, the most powerful of the Valar and a clear parallel to Lucifer.

Melkor corrupts the music to his own ends, and even turns to the outer darkness and seeks to create for himself. He fails in both counts. He cannot create on his own – for Tolkien, evil is ultimately impotent, and can only corrupt and twist what is good. (Letters, 146; Silmarillion, 50, 106) His attempt at corrupting the music of creation is also a failure, because Eru/Illuvatar/God finds a way to re-incorporate even his corruptions into the overall music. (Silmarillion, 4-5)
If you look into why characters fail to demonstrate virtue, the answer is essentially self-will.

Saruman succumbs in his study of Sauron’s crafts of control and mechanization and attempts to put himself forth as a second Sauron in a second dark tower. Denethor trusts in his own wisdom and his own visions through the Palantir as absolute, and his last act of control is to choose his own death, and to choose death for his son who is sick but could still be saved. Gollum’s ownership of the Ring begins with greed and petty desire – he lacks the stature of Saruman or even Denethor – but it is a species of the same sin – self-will.

The virtue of fidelity moves the focus from the self to the relationship with those you are bonded to. The virtue of hope is ultimately trusting not in your own power but in the power of providence to bring good out of evil, eucatastrophe out of catastrophe. The virtue of pity perfects justice because it puts ultimate judgment aside. It is the ability to identify with the one you might otherwise judge. Courage is expressed as self-sacrifice on behalf of others and never as recklessness. These virtues are set in opposition to domination in Tolkien’s works.

Story before system

In his essay and speech Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien helps redefine the study of Beowulf for a generation of scholars continuing into the present. What he espouses, in essence, is taking Beowulf at face value, rather than lamenting what it is not. He uses the analogy of a person who owns a plot of land covered with ancient stones. He builds a tower out of the ancient stones, but scholars knock the tower down in order to study the inscriptions on the stones. They never realize that, from the top of the tower, the man could glimpse the sea. (Monsters and Critics)

In engaging in analysis like this of a narrative, the danger is that the beauty and wholeness is sacrificed for the sake of analysis itself. Tolkien did not set out to present a comprehensive virtue system, and one probably cannot be derived from his writings. I think he did, however, present a functioning virtue system in his writings, once which, in the scope of the narrative, served to ennoble and even to sanctify. (Letters, 234, 251-252)

This may be a fruitful endeavor for anyone who wants to present virtue ethics as a functioning way of making decisions and living a life. When deontology is presented in narrative form, for example, it takes on the shape of a morality play, where the rules are broken and the consequences meted out predictably. But life is not a morality play. It is messy and indistinct and unpredictable. Virtue ethics finds in narrative its natural habitat, and our culture is no less steeped in stories than ancient cultures were. The success of Tolkien’s works is proof that there is a thirst for what those stories provide, which Tolkien observed when his books far outsold anyone’s expectations in his lifetime. (Letters, 98, 147) Among other things, his stories provide a living, breathing virtue ethic, not comprehensive, but certainly comprehensible. What else might narrative do to change the nature of moral discourse in our culture?


Endnotes

1. The Hobbit has been made into an animated feature. The first half of the Lord of the Rings was made into an animated feature, but the second half was never finished, so the Return of the King was made by the same company that made The Hobbit. Of course, there are also Peter Jackson’s recent films, and there is also a musical version of The Lord of the Rings in London. These are just the major examples of adaptations of Tolkien’s works (not including obscure rock albums and so on).

2. Published in Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien with Christopher Tolkien as editor.

3. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, 3-13; (Translation: “The Music of the Ainur”)

4. The Silmarillion, 21-22, 24-25; here he is still known as Olorin

5. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Annotated by Douglas A. Anderson., Appendix A, 376


Works Cited and Consulted

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Questions 49-64.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1985

Carpenter, Humphrey, Ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000.

Keenan, James F. Proposing Cardinal Virtues. Theological Studies 56:04, 2006.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue, Third Edition. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Miller, Fred D. Jr. Aristotle: Ethics and Politics. From The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy, Shields, Christopher Ed.

Pope, Stephen, Ed. The Ethics of Aquinas. Georgetown University Press, 2002.

Shippey, Tom. Author of the Century. Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002.

Tolkien, J.R.R. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Humphrey Milford for the British Academy (First Edition), 1937. Originally a Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit. Annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. Ballantine Books, 1977.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. Del Rey, 1986.

Tolkien, J.R.R. and Tolkien, Christopher, Ed. Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989.

Religulous

I saw the film Religulous a few nights ago. I don't have time for a long post, but I can break the film down pretty easily.

The first 80% is pretty funny, Bill Maher being Bill Maher, meeting various kinds of religious people and having conversations where it is clear no one understands each other. But is actually genuinely hilarious.

At this point, leave the theater.

Because the last 20% is a long-winded sermon from Maher, a bunch of warmed-over New Atheist crap, where, in constrast to everything that has happened in the film so far, he claims that religion will lead to a nuclear holocaust. Seriously - he has dramatic scary music playing and mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud in the background.

Its incredible hypocrisy - half of the conversations he had in the film were actually pretty amicable, and the head of the Vatican Observatory genuinely shut him down entirely. You can literally seem him thinking "Damn, I accidentally let myself talk to an intelligent, reasonable Christian. Back to the drawing board."

Look, Atheists - I totally respect where you're at. But you put out a film like this, and I realize - there's no reason to assume you're any more intelligent or reasonable than Fred Phelps or Pat Robertson - that you have your idiot windbags too, just waiting to disgorge a long sermon about the evils of every position but their own.

At the end, Pam turned to me and asked, "Can I have my money back?" I couldn't blame her.

Another Ending

My good friends Aric and Stacia left last night.

I was pretty emotional - everyone was pretty emotional. I knew how sad I was about it, so I didn't say that much. I'm not much of the public-crying type, and part of me was thinking "This is hard enough already", a thought that my CPE supervisor would certainly question, but I had it nontheless.

When I first "met" Aric it was over email. He had sent out an email to the other arriving studends at SFTS, and had mentioned that he was a gamer. I had already thought that coming to seminary would be the end of my favorite hobby since I was about 11 - playing roleplaying games with my friends. I was excited that he shared the hobby, and we met and talked for a bit of an evening before orientation had really gotten underway.

Since, he's been one of my two closest friends throughout seminary. I don't mean to leave out Stacia here either - but going through seminary does forge a particular kind of bond it seems. Maybe a modified type of Stockholm Syndrome.

Aric is, in the words of Lyndon Johnson I believe, "splendid in every way". That is of course hyperbole, just as it was when Johnson used those words. But...well, my experience of seminary was positive primarily because of the wonderful people I met, and Aric is at the core of those wonderful people I think of when I say that.

I got to know Stacia very well too (she is also a gamer, and therefore also splendid), and I watched one of their children grow from teeny critter to a smart, energetic toddler, and their younger child from microscopic to curious and expressive yearling.

I am so happy that I met them all, and so happy that I got to know them, and very sad that they have left. I know we'll keep up our relationships, and I tried not to say "goodbye" in so many words, but a goodbye happened all the same.

I will miss them. God bless them in their transition.

(And it doesn't help that this first night after they leave, I'm on call.)

Refuting Hell in A Contentious Age

I got this article via Adiaphora, which I thought I should note.

I think that this article makes a number of common mistakes in the discussion around Hell in the modern church, and I thought it provided a solid opportunity for me to point out these mistakes - if nothing else, then because I don't think what is described has much hope of actually reaching any thoughtful progressives or postmoderns.

While talking about the article and what it has to say, I'll be quoting portions of it rather than the whole thing because it is significantly longer than I want my posts to be on this blog.

As to when I'll have time to do this - we'll see. I've quit one of my three jobs after an 82+ hour work week recently and the realization that my work on the book has basically stalled out for a month now...so maybe I'll have more time now and then.

In the meantime, read the article. Its interesting - another traditionalist trying to deal with postmodernity. Where it mis-characterizes or seems condescending, I don't think it is intentional, and I assume it is well-meant. If you honestly believe God is waiting to throw us in hell (and that this is somehow good and loving), then keeping people out of that horrific situation is definitely a priority, so I understand that much.

I realized I've talked about this stuff before, so I'll try to only say relatively new things in this treatment of the article.

What sparked this new post is - the article is clearly aimed at someone like me, and it doesn't reach me, and I want to say why, because I think I have good reasons not to be reached here.

Nine Eleven

In honor of another anniversary of that attack that has so defined us since, in every wrong way and in very occasional right ways, I offer this email that I was sent...

My Dear Friends,

I apologize for the mass emailing, but I felt moved to do so on this particular day.

I remember 7 years ago, it was a clear and sunny day and not like the cloudy morning we have. It was an ordinary fall day without any ominous signs. It was this day that there was so much loss and destruction and horror. Four of my friends passed away in the two towers that fell that day. There was so much anger and hurt in the people who lost loved ones as well as those who survived and witnessed it. I believe we still suffer from it to this very day. I still smell smoke when I think of that day.

People were blaming and pointing fingers at the Persians and Arabs and imprisoning them for no reason. People saying God bless America and singing it in our churches. Yet my friends and I, who gathered every night to suffer together and make sure we were doing well, searched for Jesus in the midst of all this. Where was the Christ-like answer? Why only God bless America and not the World?? We were still unable to weep. Only until we heard Thick Nhat Hanh at the Riverside Church did we hear Christ. He said to give love in return for the violence and to end the cycle of violence. We all wept that night, and it was the beginning of many nights of weeping for us.

I hope that such tragedy will never happen again anywhere in the world. You have my prayers of love and support on this day. Thank you for allowing me your time to share my thoughts and experiences.

God bless us all, God bless the world, God give us peace.

A New Chapter

Tomorrow morning, earlier than I'd like, I start my new position in a year-long CPE program at a hospital in downtown SF.  When discipline breaks and I let myself think about it, I realize I'm pretty nervous about the whole venture.  Its a step up for me in a lot of ways, into a situation where I don't have any background or familiarity - which is one of the things that makes it different from taking over for the senior pastor during my internship when he went on sabbatical.  

The Baseline

One of the things I've learned through blogging is that there has to be a minimum baseline, a rapport if you will, between myself and another person before we can really talk about anything. Without this baseline, it seems that both of us are pretty much wasting our time. This is probably true of any conversation, any relationship - at a certain point, you're just too different. When speaking about God, two people who share all of the other markers - ethnicity, language, culture, educational level and so on - can immediately start butting heads.

This has been pointed out by others, but often it is couched in terms like this: "Unless we all agree to Orthodoxy, we cannot have a conversation." Here, as always, Orthodoxy is defined as what that person believes. If you've been reading this blog, or know me at all, you can probably imagine that my baseline won't be most people's idea of Orthodoxy.

I see this is a strength, of course.

The baseline seems to include:

1. God is bigger than our ideas. I meet a lot of people, through the blog and otherwise, who seem to think that God is exactly the same size as their ideas (or the ideas they'd claim to have inherited from the past, or whatever). This is alarming on a number of levels, and I find conversation with a person who believes this to be night impossible.

Of course we all have ideas about God, and we can even try to evaluate them (with little hope of success, given the history of such endeavors), but for me, there has to be the sense behind it all that we're dabbling in things we cannot possibly explain fully.

2. We cannot take ourselves too seriously. Few things are as painful as talking to someone who can't laugh at themselves. Its really quite sad, because I think it is a sign of brittleness, of a thin veneer stretched over a great deal of doubt and anxiety. Or its like talking to an assistant principal in middle school - often the definition of someone too big for their britches in my limited experience.

I've got that same load of anxiety myself, but the way I've found to deal with it is to laugh at myself - and to laugh at you too. The other option seems to be panicking whenever I say or try anything that I'm not already completely comfortable with.

Of course some things are serious - there are serious topics and serious times and serious situations - but the chance has to be there that we might get a laugh out of it now and then, or else I'm too uncomfortable to talk for very long.

3. This can't devolve into a measuring contest. If we start into 'my education is bigger than yours' or 'who has the longest Orthodoxy in the room', the conversation is long dead and its time to move on. I'm not really interested in spending time in a theological locker room whipping out doctrines and Christian resumes.

In situations like that, you're just stuck with someone who has something to prove to themselves. Let them prove it if they have to, and then maybe they'll move on, but don't get involved. This is their problem that they're overcompensating for. There's a wound somewhere in there, not a genuine cause for pride.

4. We're in this together. I am not interested in winning. In fact, I think if your goal is winning, you are failing at Christianity. We are the losers who God bails out. That's it. If you think you can benefit at my expense, you fail at Christianity. If you think we are all supposed to keep score, you fail at Christianity. If you want to tear someone else down to build yourself up, you fail at Christianity.

The only ethical option is for all of us to be in this together and to sink or swim together. We can't chop off parts of the Body of Christ that we don't like and let them sink. We can't turn into some kind of sick theological autoimmune disease, attacking ourselves because we can't recognize parts of our own Body. If we do this, we fail at Christianity.

So for me, this needs to be part of our conversation if we're going to have one that is even remotely meaningful.

I think that is probably a good lesson to have learned, and I need to remember to hold myself to my own baseline. I could do a lot worse.

The Apostolic Council and the General Assembly

Taken from Toby

Fail

Ok, so I am totally done talking or thinking about politics because, long after most others I don't doubt, I have discovered...

Fail Blog.

Purple

I think I'm a dark purple politically.

I agree with the core conservative principle of a weak national government that stays the hell out of our private business except to protect us from each other where we can't work things out ourselves. I also agree with fiscal conservatism - I want tax cuts and the government only doing what it does better than we can do ourselves - build roads, standardize schools, some social services, etc.

I am very socially liberal, but there are some exceptions on sexual issues and on some aspects of the abortion debate. Otherwise, I'm a hippie pinko greenie-weenie I suppose. I'm much less comfortable than most conservatives are on in-vitro fertilization (which leads to hundreds of thousands of destroyed embryos, which are for some reason completely ignored by the so-called Pro-Life movement). I'm a big supporter of the liberal viewpoint on the environment - for me, that falls under the government's job of protecting us from each other. Protecting me from your pollution and you from mine, as it were, because the alternative is the rich and powerful piling garbage on top of all of us.

Unlike liberals or conservatives, I'm strongly anti-war. I'd say that currently liberals are feebly anti-war and anti-violence in a patchwork way. As far as I can tell, conservatives are almost always pro-war and, frankly, pro-violence as I define it. But listening to, say, Obama and McCain talk about "national security", I find that I'm distant from both of them in my values.

I do agree with the general liberal principle that taxes partly function to re-distribute wealth in a society. The boot-strap millionaire is our most enduring myth, and one of the most profoundly false. The wealthy benefit from society far more than the poor do, through no merit of their own whatsoever in almost all cases, and some mechanism needs to also push in the other direction.

I'm in favor of the total dismantling of the US military on every level (part of what I mean by "anti-war"). I think that at most we should go back to state militias, which was the Founding Father's most likely intent with the Second Amendment anyway. Then, if our society decides to go to war, or we want to intervene in a place like Darfur, we send our state militias. I think this would go a long way to reduce the amount of bombs we drop on innocent civilians on the other side of the planet, or the number of right-wing dictatorships we prop up in the developing world. The gun-nuts could have their guns (they already do of course), and we could feel safe from foreign military threats, but our ability to be the world's bully/police force would be curtailed - which I think is a good thing.

(I already know how popular that idea is - that one probably doesn't even count as purple, but some other color. What color is Christian ethics? Because I basically get my position on war from Jesus and the prophets.)

I think that liberals have been right on almost every social conflict in our country in the last 100 years. They were right on child labor and labor laws in general, on unions, on sexism and racism, on education and social services, on safety regulations and environmental protections. They have been right again and again, and I think that should count for something. In every one of these conflicts, the conservative side stood for children in factories and no protections for workers, for mysogyny and disenfranchisement of women and minorities, for segregation, against equitable education, for abandoning the poor to the whims of the market, for unsafe products and work environments and for the destruction of the environment for profit. I think that counts for something too.

In some cases, like drugs for example, both liberals and conservatives were wrong, and I think our overcrowded prison system swelling with non-violent drug offenders should tells us that we're still wrong on that count.

I also want to say that conservatism has been "right" in that it provides a necessary counter-balance to the extremes of the liberal position. I'm not saying we should only have liberals, I'm just saying that if we had no liberals, we'd have no society that we'd currently recognize. (Well, we'd recognize it in history books)

Right now, I think that liberalism has totally betrayed itself in a massive act of cowardice and that conservatism has gone insane. The Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget. The Republicans are doing all in their power to increase the authority of the federal government to imprison without cause or explanation, to spy on us without warrants, and to torture with impunity. How did this happen? Are there actual small-government conservatives out there somewhere? Or real-life fiscal conservatives? Have they been scared into hiding by the neo-cons or something?

For some reason I have politics on the brain right now. It must be because I keep being told how important and exciting this Presidential election is. I'm pretty sure its actually neither, but who am I to decide?

Russia, Bush, Obama, McCain

What the Russian invasion of Georgia shows us, in stark colors once again, is the complete lack of integrity in the Bush administration. We learn, once again, that all of the high talk about freedom and liberty and democracy and defending our allies falls apart completely when we're not bombing a third world nation or, in the case of Afghanistan, a pile of rubble still smoldering from previous invasions. When it comes down to it, is neo-conservatism anything more than a bunch of empty words and excuses? Where's the freedom fairy-dust now, Bush? When a serious military contender stomps on a "beacon of liberty" like Georgia, where's the saber-rattling?

Oh, and don't forget the forged documents. Lying is like a religion for these people as far as I can tell.

In short, the Bush administration is utterly and completely hypocritical. They do not stand, in any meaningful way, for anything they say they stand for - not for fiscal conservatism, not for freedom and liberty, not for peace, not for genuine capitalism (hint - multibillion-dollar bail-outs of failed companies isn't capitalism). They're not even forthright, courageous warmongers. Like any bully, they are easily cowed by anyone who poses a real threat.

In other news, I watched some of the conversations that Obama and McCain had with Rick Warren. I realized that I'm not excited about either one of them, but I can't imagine anything that would lead me to vote for a Republican for president right now. The most important thing, for me, is washing the acrid taste of the bilious Bush administration out of my mouth as quickly as possible. Maybe, maybe, we can undo some of the damage they've done. Our grandchildren will have to pay for it, but maybe we can make an honest start at putting this country back together.

Right now, any mammal that has a pulse and isn't a Republican has my vote. My apologies to the actual conservatives out there - you must be pretty frustrated with Bush too. Maybe you should vote Libertarian or something. The best hope for fiscal conservatism remains the Democratic party, which has been the case for almost 20 years now, and would be funny if my teeth stopped grinding.

Realization

I just got home from a trip back to OH for a friend's wedding. It was a great time to see a lot of college friends again, party and so on. But during the festivities I had a few very important conversations that I've been reflecting on since then.

I always think of myself as someone who has never successfully proselytized anyone. That's not quite true. I encouraged one friend to move to Japan and become a Buddhist monk (last I heard, he was going to undergo at least some training before he came back to become a clinical psychologist) and another couple of friends to reconnect with their families' Judaism.

Apparently, this is only somewhat true. A few of my friends each independently took me aside sometime during the four days I was out there for the wedding and talked me about the impact I had on their lives. They talked about how they had more respect for Christianity and religious people in general because of what they saw in me. One of them is looking for a church to become a member of. One of them might be an ex-atheist in the future. One of them, still an atheist, was still willing to have a long conversation with me about faith and reason (his wife, a pastor, asked me to talk to him because their conversations were upsetting her).

What I realized was that the biggest impact I have on people's lives is by having relationships with them. Now, most of you are saying "well, yeah, stupid" right now, but I'm an introvert who has always been good at writing, so personal relationships haven't always been my strong suit or even my first choice for interacting with people. Let's...just leave it at that for now, because here it gets embarrassing.

I never thought I was having an impact on these friends until they talked to me about it. I wasn't trying to have an impact on them. On the rare occasions they had questions, I answered them to the best of my ability. I was myself around them because I trust them. I almost never made more than joking invitations to come to church with me at any given time. But somehow, I clearly had a big impact on three different lives.

If you had asked me, I would say that I left barely a ripple on their lives in the religion department. Apparently, I was completely wrong.

I'm so thankful, and...humbled isn't a strong enough word...that they told me all this. One of them had actually broached the subject before (he was a reference for my seminary applications) but took me aside to expand on what he had said then.

I talk about symptomatic, rather than systematic, theology because when doing theology you can't get away from yourself. A theology is so often a theologian writ large, and I want to remind myself that this is the case so I don't get carried away with myself (and so I can jibe others to do the same, if I may). I'm glad that, for a few people at least, my symptomatic theology was something they appreciated and that helped them.

I also talk about practice being more important than doctrine - orthopraxis over orthodoxy. It might be that real practice always comes from doctrine in some way, but I was glad to learn that, at least in little ways, I have actually been living out what I say I should be living out. By consciously and in a disciplined way putting practice before doctrine, I was able to reach people who had never been reached by any amount of doctrine (all three were raised Christian and were familiar with the basic tenets of the faith and had been approached by Christians in the usual way - doctrine first). I know this because they told me.

So I need to think about this a lot more. I need to be more intentional, to know better who I am and what I'm doing. In the meantime, I think that, with this blog coming to a close in the near future, this is a good note to end on personally. I'm not sure if this is self-aggrandizement. It isn't intended to be. I did my best to make the point that whatever good they might have seen or experienced is the result of my faith life, not the reason for it, but it seemed disingenous not to also say "thank you", biting back all the sarcastic comments I'd normally bury a compliment like this in.

A Comment

The following is a comment I posted to Tribal Church as part of a discussion that started on the subject of atonement. This is something I've said before in various ways, but I think this is one of the shorter and more efficient formulations.

***

“And yet, I cannot ignore power in the story of sacrifice that still impels me. There was, for some reason, this thought in so many ancient religions that in order to atone for our sins, in order to appease God, in order to make peace with the divine, we ought to pour out life-blood, whether it was a pigeon, or a lamb, or what have you. There is this narrative that we carry within us. It is part of who we are as human beings.”

In the book Lamb (which is comedy, but also very insightful at times), the idea is put forward that one of the things that Jesus sought to do was to abolish the human practice of atoning sacrifice. I think this is a compelling idea.

So is it not possible that, while there was a human need for sacrifice to atone, Jesus’ sacrifice was the ultimate, definitive demonstration that this need for blood before reconciliation is demonic and always counter to God’s will? I mean, the crucifixion is the worst case scenario. God becomes a human being and after we meet God, we decide to ridicule, torture and execute God publicly…and we do it with relish. What could *possibly* be worse?

In continuing to see substitutionary atonement as positive, then, we might be continually propping up something that God thought was so perverse that God underwent it personally in order to demonstrate how it is never redemptive, never justice?

If one takes this view, then there is still the necessity, theologically and in terms of narrative, that Jesus be crucified, because it has to go that far, it has to come to that terrible moral and theological impasse, before we are shocked out of our need for retribution, our need for blood as a prerequisite for reconciliation. So, Jesus “died to save us from sin”, and Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection function to atone and to reconcile, but not because the sacrifice was *good*, but precisely because it was the most terrible evil one can imagine.

Sharkwater Wins Another Award

I've talked about this film and the issues it brings to light before, and I'm glad whenever it gets recognition. Call it creation care; call it environmental justice; call it collective self-preservation or whatever you want to call it. We are living a wrong way, and we need to find a right way to live before its too late. Period.

Congratulations to Sharkwater. I hope it keeps winning awards until people start paying attention.

Podcast Recommendation

I like finding places where people who disagree are having amicable discussions about their disagreement. It gives me hope that that kind of thing can happen in the Church more often.

One thing I've stumbled upon, and have added to my long list of podcasts that I keep up with, is A Christian and an Atheist. It is a discussion podcast involving two eponymous friends, and I've enjoyed listening to it in the background of other things so far.

They also maintain a forum for their listeners. I haven't checked it out yet, but it might be interesting for those of you who like to discuss things.

Addendum:

I'm really impressed with this podcast so far, and I highly recommend episode 22, on homosexuality, and episode 35, which is a conversation between a pastor and the atheist of the duo about the meaning of life. Really good stuff if you have the time and inclination to listen.

Symptomatic Theology: Five Fundamentals

Here it is again. I didn't come up with a better way to say this, so I might as well say it in some way at least. (This is an interesting exercise. Please do not blow it out of proportion.)

The Fundamentalists' Fundamentals aren't that interesting to me. Some of them are answering questions I'm not asking and not very interested in (Mary's virginity), some are usually not well-defined ("inerrancy" is a wiggly word that means a number of things, surprisingly), and some aren't even consistent (is it Christ's miracles or his pre-millennial second coming?).

Its led me to the audacious task of naming my five fundamentals of Christian faith - five things that I think are sort of the "Christian minimum". This is an odd task because of the great deal of weight I usually give to self-identification (if you call yourself a Christian I'm very likely to give you the benefit of the doubt), but its an interesting exercise. I'll also try to put them in some sort of logical order.

Here they are - the Fundamentals!

1. God exists in a way that is not reducible to something else we can define

This is my issue and probably not an issue for many of you, but this is crucial to my faith. There are so many ways to account for religious and spiritual experiences, so many ways to interpret sacred texts and historical traditions, without believing that they are meaningful on any grand scale. This plays into my problems with orthodoxy when it is presented as objective truth - if I buy into "objectivity", there are a Hell of a lot of ways to account for everything under the umbrella of religion without any need for God at all. And I'm not prepared to go there - I'm not there anymore, perhaps, is a better way of putting it. So, as I've said in my comment threads before - God in mystery, God in paradox, or no God at all. And because of this, I discipline myself as much as I possibly can to be agnostic about my own beliefs and statements. I've been accused of false humility before - whatever. Its where I am, whether its humility or not.

2. God loves creation and love is God's motivation when God acts

I am simply not willing to worship a God who is evil. I will not bow down to a monster under any circumstances. This means that God cannot be in favor of torture or rape or genocide. I will not preach a God who is in favor of evil, or promotes evil, or accepts evil without calling us to resist with ever fiber of our being.

Even more than that, I will preach and teach a God of love. I will do this for a number of reasons, the most important being that this is the God who I know and love, who I believe knows me and who I believe, in my better moments, loves me. If I cannot account for an 'act' of God from the standpoint of God's love, then I do not accept it as God's action. This is a limitation that I am perfectly comfortable with. If God is not good then God is not God - if God is not good, God is merely another in a long line of ten thousand tribal gods who manifests the violence and ego of human beings writ large.

Do I realize that I am holding God to my moral and ethical standards? Absolutely. (Everyone does this, whether they admit it or not.) I am viscerally unable to worship a monster. If this means I am worshiping a figment of my imagination, at least it will be a figment of love rather than malice. There are a lot of worse things I can do with my time.

3. God is present to our experience primarily as the Holy Spirit

This is just stolen from scripture and the witness of the Church. If you want to know about what I think on this topic, ask. Why this is a fundamental is that you will note that I did not say "God is present to our experience primarily as Scripture." This is very intentional. I see way too many instances where the Holy Spirit gets subjugated to Scripture, and I think it is a dire problem. Scripture is one vehicle through which the Holy Spirit approaches us. Anybody who thinks She is locked up in there needs to get out more.

Or, to put it another way, if the Bible had never been written, God would still be present to us. How? We can speculate if you want, but I don't want to take up the space here.

4. God is most knowable through Jesus Christ

I say "most" but I do not mean "fully" because I think that Christ, being God, is un-knowable. Our minds can't even really grasp the enormity of our planet, and our planet is a tiny blue dot in a field of billions of dots dim and bright. We cannot possibly understand all there is to understand about God - not even close. We cannot even understand all there is to understand about a molecule. What's a tiny fraction of infinity? If you do the math, its essentially nothing. That's why our endeavour is described by terms like faith, hope and love. We are not dealing in definitives.

That being said, I do think that one can come to know God to some degree through Jesus Christ - enough to have a relationship, enough to change your life, enough to be "saved" if I must use that hijacked term. I say this out of faith, not out of any pretense to objective knowledge of some sort. I say this because I have seen it happen, because I have been told it has happened, and because I have experienced some of it myself.

5. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, God is making us more like Jesus Christ

This is, to be blunt, the point. Justification and sanctification. Being made more fully into the image of God, being adopted to be co-heirs with Christ; greater things shall we do than Jesus did - all that. Yes. That is what we is about. If it isn't happening, we are wasting our time. Our depravity is not more powerful than God. Our sin is not more powerful than God. Our fear and hatred are not more power than God's love. These are, again, statements of hope, of trust. But if we are not actually being made new, then this is a waste of time.

What is conspicuous by its absence:

Anything about the virgin birth

I don't think that sin lives in the female birth canal. That is a Medieval problem that we don't have to address anymore because we have a much better idea of where babies come from. I don't think that procreation contaminates us, and so I am agnostic as to Mary's virginity. It makes no difference to my faith either way. If its important to you, that's fine with me.

Anything specific about scripture

I'm not about to start telling everyone how they must interpret Scripture. In fact, I don't think anyone should have that job. There isn't a key or a glossary appended to the end of any of the books.

We have to grapple with Scripture - not bludgeon with it. I do not take well to being bludgeoned, and I will not bludgeon.

Anything about miracles, the pre-millennial second coming, etc.

On these topics I stay agnostic. My own experience, which has lacked any direct experience of a miracle, forces me to believe in God whether the miracle accounts are perfectly historically accurate or not - if I am to insist on believing in God, which I do.

The problem is, if you study world religions, you find that every culture is full of claims of miracles in its past. Present practitioners of every religion you can think of claim miraculous occurrences. Every single tradition has its claims. I have never found a compelling reason to believe that only our miracle claims are true. For those who want to cram God into their own little box, I say: "Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes."

On the other hand, I would never close the door on miracles. Well, that hasn't always been true for me, but it is true now. So, as I said, I remain agnostic on things like miracles and the second coming.

If, by the way, you can show me a genuine miracle, you will get to try to convince me, but you will no longer be able to win a million dollars.

End With A Whimper, End With A Bang

In contemplating a conscious end to this blog, I have been thinking about the various ways I can go about it. What it comes down to is that I lack the motivation - I'm not sure if it will come back. It might be that I just have too much on my mind, too much other writing I'm doing, too many jobs, too much laziness on top of everything. I don't know.

Anything you've always wondered, before I call it quits? Lemme know.

Paul the Subjectivist

I couldn't resist, preparing for my sermon next week:

Romans 9:1

"I am speaking the truth in Christ - I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit -"

Title.

So, I've thought about it, and I've decided that the last time I expect to post to this blog with any regularity is August 31st. At that point, I might start something entirely different to help me process my experiences in CPE, but that'll be the end of Prog(ressive)nostications for all intents and purposes.

For those of you who I have happily connected with and who have been supportive, or at least respectful and interested in a good conversation, I cannot thank you enough and I wish you the best.

For those of you who have taken this as an opportunity to make self-righteous personal attacks - well, I hope that I gave as good as I got, but I'm afraid you'll have to take your show elsewhere.

So I'll be finishing up a few thoughts and drafts that I have in the wings, and that'll be it.

Humorously, once this blog is done, I'll be down to only...nine blogs, not all of which are active at the moment, but still. Addicted, anyone?

Simmering

I don't know if I want to do this anymore. Parts of it have been rewarding, but I seem to get one of two general responses.

1. Affirmations, which always feel good and are great for my classically fragile male ego, and

2. Arguments which do not seem to lead to any greater understanding and which periodically devolve into personal attacks and which may, frankly, threaten my career in ministry.

I'm going to stick to assuming that this is because I am failing to be a good blogger. Something is not getting across. I know that I am easily provoked via text - what an odd thing, but altogether common - and so sometimes I boil over.

I've completed Seminary course-work, and I'll have completed my two-year parish internship at the end of this month. After that, I will be serving a year in CPE starting in September.

I started this blog to help me organize my thoughts and have a regular writing practice when I started Seminary three years ago. But that period of my life is ending. Maybe that means this blog ends too. I feel like I'm going over well-trodden ground, and getting into the same arguments over and over again.

I've lost a lot of sleep because of this blog.

I don't regret starting it, and I try to think of my friend who doesn't hold onto his regrets and try not to hold onto what I've regretted about it since. But that is contrary to my nature, which is to find every mistake and go over it again and again.

It might be that this blog is sort of an artifact from a period in my life. It might be that it is actually holding me back, because I feel I have to be consistent with other things I've written in the past when I write new posts.

Is the juice still worth the squeeze?

Hallelujah!...?

Here is a proposal on abortion that I might be able to get behind.

I've talked a bit in the past about how I am probably best categorized (if you must) as pro-life in the abortion debate, but that I do not associate with the pro-life movement because I think it is counterproductive. That is, a lot of what the pro-life movement is doing will not lead to fewer abortions, which, being pro-life, is my ultimate goal.

I've disassociated with the pro-choice movement over the last few years for similar reasons - I don't think that tack will lead to fewer abortions either. To me, both sides make good points, but an actual solution which will reduce the number of abortions occurring has to be a hybridization of the two positions, throwing out a lot of trash in the process.

This is actually one of those rare examples where a person has changed their mind because of what people who disagreed with him said over time. I used to be solidly pro-choice, but a combination of talking to people and doing my own research for an ethics final cemented my new position.

Anyway, explaining where I'm at would take a characteristically long time, but here is an interesting article putting forth a Democratic abortion-reduction plank. Its actually a little creepy and exhilarating, because the ideas they're (finally) putting out there could have been drawn from my ethics final almost exactly. It's a start, at least. I've got a lot more to say, and I'm sure the Democrats for Life have a lot more to say as well.

But maybe this is a start.

Thanks to the Bishop for the link.

Of Serotonin and Spirituality

I found this interesting (you might not). While I'm deeply suspect of a laboratory measurement of "capacity for transcendence", I think it is interesting if there is a biological correlation between religiosity/spirituality and serotonin. It makes sense that your brain chemistry would matter in your spiritual life, and it opens the door to a lot of fascinating questions. Are some people "wired" to be more religious? Can it be passed on genetically? Is it something that evolved in us uniquely, compared to other animals with complex brains?

The connection to psychotropics is also really interesting to me. There is definitely a subculture of people who take psychotropics and who also report all kinds of "spiritual" experiences while on them. I've done a little bit of research into this - with books and articles! don't get ideas - and found it fascinating overall. If you're interested in the...one might say neurological structure of religious experience, then its worth a look.

Of Serotonin and Spirituality
Scientists see a biological underpinning for religiosity, and it is related to the neurotransmitter serotonin.

By: PT Staff

Serotonin, the brain chemical crucial to mood and motivation, also shapes personality to make you susceptible to spiritual experiences. A team of Swedish researchers has found that the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively. Scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality because drugs known to alter serotonin such as LSD also induce mystical experiences. But now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element.

The concentration of serotonin receptors normally varies markedly among individuals. Those whose brain scans showed the most receptor activity proved on personality tests to have the strongest proclivity to spiritual acceptance.

Reporting in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers see the evidence as contradicting the common belief that religious behavior is determined strictly by environmental and cultural factors. They see a biological underpinning for religiosity, and it is related to the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Psychology Today Magazine, Nov/Dec 2003
Last Reviewed 8 Jul 2008

Flatfish Fossil Fills in a Missing Link

Bit by bit, the gaps that a six-day creationist God can inhabit continually shrink.

I think that a God who can be threatened by evidence for evolution is a God who deserves to be threatened.

July 9, 2008

Hidden away in museums for more than 100 years, some recently rediscovered flatfish fossils have filled a puzzling gap in the story of evolution and answered a question that initially stumped even Charles Darwin.

All adult flatfishes--including the gastronomically familiar flounder, plaice, sole, turbot, and halibut--have asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes located on one side of the head. Because these fish lay on their sides at the ocean bottom, this arrangement enhances their vision, with both eyes constantly in play, peering up into the water.

This remarkable arrangement arises during the youth of every flatfish, where the symmetrical larva undergoes a metamorphosis to produce an asymmetrical juvenile. One eye 'migrates' up and over the top of the head before coming to rest in the adult position on the opposite side of the skull.

Opponents of evolution, however, insisted that this curious anatomy could not have evolved gradually through natural selection because there would be no apparent evolutionary advantage to a fish with a slightly asymmetrical skull but which retained eyes on opposite sides of the head. No fish—fossil or living—had ever been discovered with such an intermediate condition.

But in the 10 July 2008 issue of Nature, Matt Friedman, graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and a member of the Department of Geology at the Field Museum, draws attention to several examples of such transitional forms that he uncovered in museum collections of underwater fossilized creatures from the Eocene epoch--about 50 million years ago.

"We owe this discovery, in part, to the European fondness for limestone," said Friedman. The fossils, which he found in museums in England, France, Italy, and Austria, came from limestone quarries in Northern Italy and underneath modern-day Paris.

Friedman examined multiple adult fossil remains of two primitive flatfishes, Amphistium and a new genus that he named Heteronectes.

"Amphistium has been known for quite some time," he said. "The first specimen was described more than 200 years ago, but its placement in the fish evolutionary tree has been uncertain ever since. Close examination of these fossils yield clues that they are indeed early flatfishes."

The most primitive flatfishes known, both Amphistium and Heteronectes have many characteristics that are no longer found in modern flatfish. But the one that caught Friedman's attention was the partial displacement of one eye, evident even in the first Amphistium fossil discovered over two centuries ago.

"Most remarkably," he said, "orbital migration, the movement of one eye from one side of the skull to the other during the larval stage, was present but incomplete in both of these primitive flatfishes." For both sets of fossils, the eye had begun the journey but had not crossed the midline from one side of the fish to the other.

"What we found was an intermediate stage between living flatfishes and the arrangement found in other fishes," he said. These two fossil fishes "indicate that the evolution of the profound cranial asymmetry of extant flatfishes was gradual in nature."

The Amphistium fossils were known and previously analyzed but not definitively linked to flatfish. Previous studies, relying on conventional techniques, did not detect the oddly shaped skull, but by performing CT scans on the fossils Friedman "unequivocally" demonstrated the cranial asymmetry.

Careful study of the Heteronectes chaneti fossil found that it represents a new genus. The genus name is derived from the Greek Heteros (different) and nectri (swimmer). The species, chaneti, honors Bruno Chanet, a pioneer in the study of fossil flatfish.

The two fossil sets "deliver the first clear picture of flatfish origins," said Friedman, "a hotly contested issue in debates on the mode and tempo of evolution."

Charles Darwin was baffled by what he referred to as the "remarkable peculiarity" of flatfish anatomy. "During early youth," he noted, the eyes "stand opposite to each other…Soon the eye proper to the lower side begins to glide slowly round the head to the upper side…The chief advantages thus gained seem to be protection from their enemies, and a facility for feeding on the ground."

Although the survival advantages of such asymmetry were clear, Darwin, when challenged, was unable to explain the mechanism of what appeared to be a rather sudden and radical change in morphology and suggested a Lamarckian adaptation in which the fish, through "muscular action," slowly pulled the down-side eye toward the upper side. The resulting distortion, he suggested, "would no doubt be increased through the principle of inheritance."

Darwin's explanation, which relied on the inheritance of acquired traits, preceded the discovery of genes, but geneticist Robert Goldschmidt, tackling the same flatfish issue in the 1930s, came up with a genetic explanation. He argued that such a sudden drastic change could be triggered by a single fortuitous mutation that triggered a deformity, which in some environments would prove beneficial--and then get passed on. He termed these sudden accidental evolutionary leaps "hopeful monsters," and made the mysterious origin of flatfishes the centerpiece of his argument.

Friedman's discovery eliminates the need for such optimistic accidents. It "refutes these claims of radical sudden change" he said, "and demonstrates that the assembly of the flatfish body plan occurred in a gradual, stepwise fashion."

The research was supported by grants from the Lerner-Grey Fund for Marine Research, the Hinds Fund, the Evolving Earth Fund, the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Wherever Our Treasure Is...

There our heart is also.