I wanted to present an additional idea to my previous discourse on First Principles and faith.
A First Principle is a philosophical term for a "basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption." An example would be the syllogism: Men are different from women. Kylie Minogue is a woman, and I am a man. Conclusion: I am not Kylie Minogue. The First Principle would be the starting point that we accept to be true, that men are different from women. Everything else logically follows from that stated truth.
I was having an extended discussion with my friend Willy about First Principles as applied to personal faith. At a certain point, he remarked, we all have a point where we decide to say, "Fuck it! I accept this as true." For a lot of people you run into, finding the First Principle might be as easy as the following hypothetical conversation:
Why do you call yourself a Christian? Because I believe in God. Why do you believe in God? Because the Bible says He's real and good. Why do you believe the Bible?
Because it's true. Why is it true? Because it's the Bible.
For that person, the assumed truth of the Bible is the philosophical starting place of faith. For a more curious or inquisitive type, it might go further:
Why do you believe the Bible is true? Because I've done a lot of research, and archeological investigation really corroborates a lot of the historical personages and events recorded in the Bible. Why do you take those as reliable? Well, these archeologists have described their methods and research, and they sound pretty legitimate, which I've decided is convincing enough for me.
The point being that everyone, after a series of "why" questions, has a point at which they base their faith on a First Principle. Does the fact that everyone, even Christians, might espouse a different First Principle for their faith or beliefs undermine the legitimacy of faith? On the contrary, that's the nature of faith. At a certain point, we decide to believe.
My friend Michael also made an incredibly insightful observation about the First Principle for Christians. He said that one day, he had begun, offhand, to question things by asking "why" in iterative succession. Why do I exist? To glorify and magnify God. Why is it necessary or right to do that? Because God is awesome and good and His glorification is the right thing to do, reflecting that magnitude of light and goodness. Why?
He found that at the very root of all these series of questionings lay the answer, as if from God: I Am.
He tried it several times, with a number of different starting points about life and the universe, and every time, after he asked why and why and why, Michael found himself at the basic First Principle that He Is.
Why is the sky blue? Because of the way the ozone and other chemicals emanate electromagnetic energy in specific wavelengths interpreted in bands by the cones in our eyes? Why do they do that? Because God designed them that way. What is the purpose and evidence behind that? Because He created all things for His glory. Why? Because He Did. Because, Michael, I Am.
Maybe if we ask why honestly, believer or nonbeliever, we'd find ourselves all in the same place. Maybe if we believe in Jesus, then all our First Principles are the same after all. Maybe God did more than tell us His name, and that's enough to anchor every question important enough to ask.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Obligatory Christmas Post
The real bailout happened 2008 years ago.
Boy, do I wish I could meet the person who came up with that. I think I'd smack him in the face and shake his hand at the same time.
Boy, do I wish I could meet the person who came up with that. I think I'd smack him in the face and shake his hand at the same time.
One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
My experiences with the Catholic Church have not been that extensive, but in the past few years, I have had the great opportunity to be friends with a few devout Catholics and thus the chance to actually ask some questions instead of relying on mostly negative stereotypes that had previously formed my conception of Catholicism.
Long sentence.
Like many Protestants (I'm not sure I fit that label in its truest sense, but I'm not Catholic, right?), I had grown up thinking of Catholicism as a hyper traditionalist, dogmatic, and legalistic institution. They prayed blindly to dead saints. They worshiped the Virgin Mary. They had extra apocryphal books that they considered Scripture. They held services in Latin, for seemingly no apparent reason, since the Bible was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. At one point in history, they sold indulgences and forced the real Christians to break off in a Reformation, for 95 reasons. They were monolithic in their stance against divorce, abortion, and fun.
I asked my first Catholic friend to explain the reasoning behind a lot of their ideas, and she partially answered my queries. She clarified that she doesn't pray to the canonized saints, but rather prays that they would intercede for her, the way we might ask a priest or parent or righteous person to pray for us. She cited James 5:16 as a biblical basis, where it states that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."
It seemed to me like the whole practice of praying to St. Christopher as a patron saint for travel is a large extrapolation from the associated Scriptural text. We talked about some more of the larger practices in the Catholic Church -- that the papacy comes from Scriptures like Matthew 16:17-20, among others -- and it seemed to me that Catholics would have to make a lot of leaps of faith from specific isolated verses of Scripture to the way they insisted was the right way to practice and apply them. Can you really go from "on this rock, I will build my Church" to having a pope seated in the Vatican who occasionally is infallible in Magisterium? Catholicism was more legitimate than I had thought, but only if you were willing to make big stretches in faith.
Also, any time I attended a Catholic service, I automatically think of that final montage in The Godfather where Michael Corleone has everyone whacked during the ceremony for his godson. Can't help it.
I went on a month-long road trip with another friend who had converted from Protestant to Catholic during his freshman year of college. He is one of the smartest guys I know. He was patient and answered a lot of my questions. Don't a lot of people in the Catholic Church just blindly follow a lot of tradition and dogma? Yes, that's true, and it's a problem, but it's also a problem for every denomination out there. Isn't it a huge stretch to derive the whole institution of the papacy from isolated Scriptures here and there? The Protestant denominations also have practices that are stretches of faith: the idea that tithing is a modern obligation, for example. And so on.
The most intriguing and challenging aspect of his Catholic faith was the validation (or not) of church history. We could argue doctrinal points all day, and we did. But a lot of his reason for belief was that he saw that the Catholic Church had preserved the things of God from Christ's first coming to the present day. That in the same way that Israel had preserved the Torah and been witness to the nations of God's law, love, and character, so the Catholic Church has been God's instrument over the last 2000 years. That the Catholic priests and scribes had been the ones to maintain and consolidate the canon of Scripture and that they had been the ones to make important decisions for Christendom in councils and diets. And if God had used the Catholic Church as His true body for the last 2000 years, then that was pretty compelling reason to join Team Catholicism.
I don't share my friend's view of history, but it was more legitimate than the blind loyalty to the Catholic Church that I had previously imagined.
Whenever a person believes anything, he or she makes a decision, at some point, to believe, no matter what the evidence or lack thereof dictates. Philosophically, every set of beliefs comes from an immovable "first principle," where you basically say, "I'm going to accept this as true." Wikipedia's example is that for the syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal," the first principle was "All men are mortal." You accept this statement as truth, and the rest follows from logic.
It makes sense to me that faith would also follow a first principle. Okay, we Protestants really like to believe that our faith is based on undeniable evidence and reason. But everyone has a different point at which they choose to believe something is the truth. For most people, you ask why they believe in God, and they say, the Bible says so, and you say, why do you accept the Bible is true? And they say, because it is, and you've reached the end of their paradigm. That the Bible is true is a first principle for them. For others, you would need to go further to find the first principle -- they have to put their trust in the fact that biblical archeology is true, or they would have to do further research to see whether the archeology was done legitimately, or they would have to do even further research to see whether the reports auditing the archeology were verifiable -- you get the idea. Everyone has a point where they say, "Screw it. I believe this much is true, and everything follows from this."
For the Protestant thinker, this identifying of first principles and taking small leaps of faith is a never-ending process. Every issue and every practice, I have to wrestle with why I believe it and how I should practice it and whether Scripture or doctrine really says what I think it says and whether it makes sense with the world around me, a recurrent process largely chronicled in this blog. And here is the main distinction I see with the Catholic faith. When they take it on faith that the Catholic Church is true, then they have made one astoundingly large conceptual leap of faith -- but everything else Catholic follows from that because they can then trust the Church's authority. Where I might have to question whether the Trinity is a real, necessary part of my belief, where I might have to question everything, the Catholic believer can trust the authority of the Church that he has chosen to subscribe to. The Protestant believer has to make many small leaps of faith and decisions to believe in whatever constitutes his day-to-day faith. The Catholic believer has to make one huge leap of faith.
For me, right now, that intellectual leap is too large, so I don't think I'm in any danger of becoming Catholic. I still don't agree with the history or a lot of their practices that seem to stray too far from their biblical bases. But here are two things I do like about the Catholic Church at large.
The first is their reverence in worship. I like the way they seem to take God seriously. I like the feel of Catholic services: it's hard to sit through all those prayers and liturgy and look at all the imagery around the churches and not ponder, with some sense of wonder, the God who is so much bigger than you. Sometimes Protestant services and gatherings have the atmosphere of having been thrown together at the last minute, like a barnyard shindig. I pray a lot in my boxers right after I get off the can, and I know I'm not supposed to be legalistic or self-righteous, but I feel like I do owe the King of the Universe and Lord of my life more reverence than I give Him most days.
The second is their strong emphasis on the importance of family.
I guess in the end, I'm happy where I am, and I'm happy I'm not a Catholic. But they're less ridiculous than I had thought they were originally.
Long sentence.
Like many Protestants (I'm not sure I fit that label in its truest sense, but I'm not Catholic, right?), I had grown up thinking of Catholicism as a hyper traditionalist, dogmatic, and legalistic institution. They prayed blindly to dead saints. They worshiped the Virgin Mary. They had extra apocryphal books that they considered Scripture. They held services in Latin, for seemingly no apparent reason, since the Bible was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. At one point in history, they sold indulgences and forced the real Christians to break off in a Reformation, for 95 reasons. They were monolithic in their stance against divorce, abortion, and fun.
I asked my first Catholic friend to explain the reasoning behind a lot of their ideas, and she partially answered my queries. She clarified that she doesn't pray to the canonized saints, but rather prays that they would intercede for her, the way we might ask a priest or parent or righteous person to pray for us. She cited James 5:16 as a biblical basis, where it states that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."
It seemed to me like the whole practice of praying to St. Christopher as a patron saint for travel is a large extrapolation from the associated Scriptural text. We talked about some more of the larger practices in the Catholic Church -- that the papacy comes from Scriptures like Matthew 16:17-20, among others -- and it seemed to me that Catholics would have to make a lot of leaps of faith from specific isolated verses of Scripture to the way they insisted was the right way to practice and apply them. Can you really go from "on this rock, I will build my Church" to having a pope seated in the Vatican who occasionally is infallible in Magisterium? Catholicism was more legitimate than I had thought, but only if you were willing to make big stretches in faith.
Also, any time I attended a Catholic service, I automatically think of that final montage in The Godfather where Michael Corleone has everyone whacked during the ceremony for his godson. Can't help it.
I went on a month-long road trip with another friend who had converted from Protestant to Catholic during his freshman year of college. He is one of the smartest guys I know. He was patient and answered a lot of my questions. Don't a lot of people in the Catholic Church just blindly follow a lot of tradition and dogma? Yes, that's true, and it's a problem, but it's also a problem for every denomination out there. Isn't it a huge stretch to derive the whole institution of the papacy from isolated Scriptures here and there? The Protestant denominations also have practices that are stretches of faith: the idea that tithing is a modern obligation, for example. And so on.
The most intriguing and challenging aspect of his Catholic faith was the validation (or not) of church history. We could argue doctrinal points all day, and we did. But a lot of his reason for belief was that he saw that the Catholic Church had preserved the things of God from Christ's first coming to the present day. That in the same way that Israel had preserved the Torah and been witness to the nations of God's law, love, and character, so the Catholic Church has been God's instrument over the last 2000 years. That the Catholic priests and scribes had been the ones to maintain and consolidate the canon of Scripture and that they had been the ones to make important decisions for Christendom in councils and diets. And if God had used the Catholic Church as His true body for the last 2000 years, then that was pretty compelling reason to join Team Catholicism.
I don't share my friend's view of history, but it was more legitimate than the blind loyalty to the Catholic Church that I had previously imagined.
Whenever a person believes anything, he or she makes a decision, at some point, to believe, no matter what the evidence or lack thereof dictates. Philosophically, every set of beliefs comes from an immovable "first principle," where you basically say, "I'm going to accept this as true." Wikipedia's example is that for the syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal," the first principle was "All men are mortal." You accept this statement as truth, and the rest follows from logic.
It makes sense to me that faith would also follow a first principle. Okay, we Protestants really like to believe that our faith is based on undeniable evidence and reason. But everyone has a different point at which they choose to believe something is the truth. For most people, you ask why they believe in God, and they say, the Bible says so, and you say, why do you accept the Bible is true? And they say, because it is, and you've reached the end of their paradigm. That the Bible is true is a first principle for them. For others, you would need to go further to find the first principle -- they have to put their trust in the fact that biblical archeology is true, or they would have to do further research to see whether the archeology was done legitimately, or they would have to do even further research to see whether the reports auditing the archeology were verifiable -- you get the idea. Everyone has a point where they say, "Screw it. I believe this much is true, and everything follows from this."
For the Protestant thinker, this identifying of first principles and taking small leaps of faith is a never-ending process. Every issue and every practice, I have to wrestle with why I believe it and how I should practice it and whether Scripture or doctrine really says what I think it says and whether it makes sense with the world around me, a recurrent process largely chronicled in this blog. And here is the main distinction I see with the Catholic faith. When they take it on faith that the Catholic Church is true, then they have made one astoundingly large conceptual leap of faith -- but everything else Catholic follows from that because they can then trust the Church's authority. Where I might have to question whether the Trinity is a real, necessary part of my belief, where I might have to question everything, the Catholic believer can trust the authority of the Church that he has chosen to subscribe to. The Protestant believer has to make many small leaps of faith and decisions to believe in whatever constitutes his day-to-day faith. The Catholic believer has to make one huge leap of faith.
For me, right now, that intellectual leap is too large, so I don't think I'm in any danger of becoming Catholic. I still don't agree with the history or a lot of their practices that seem to stray too far from their biblical bases. But here are two things I do like about the Catholic Church at large.
The first is their reverence in worship. I like the way they seem to take God seriously. I like the feel of Catholic services: it's hard to sit through all those prayers and liturgy and look at all the imagery around the churches and not ponder, with some sense of wonder, the God who is so much bigger than you. Sometimes Protestant services and gatherings have the atmosphere of having been thrown together at the last minute, like a barnyard shindig. I pray a lot in my boxers right after I get off the can, and I know I'm not supposed to be legalistic or self-righteous, but I feel like I do owe the King of the Universe and Lord of my life more reverence than I give Him most days.
The second is their strong emphasis on the importance of family.
I guess in the end, I'm happy where I am, and I'm happy I'm not a Catholic. But they're less ridiculous than I had thought they were originally.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Shorts, Part One
Some days, I have original thoughts:
If you do a respectable ab workout, then it really hurts to do pullups, which must mean that pullups are an ab workout.
When people say, "Happy belated birthday," the sentiment they mean is a belated happy birthday. The phrase unintentionally shifts the blame from the negligent person who forgot your birthday to you for having a birthday belatedly. Good job, latecomer.
If you've ever wondered why they put Indian fennel seeds in Italian sausage, you've probably speculated that it's to make the sausage taste better. But it's probably because Indian fennel seeds are phytoestrogenic, so the effective way to be able to ingest Indian fennel seeds without turning into a woman would be to accompany them with a giant amalgamation of delicious pig meat.
The lack of hair continuity between chest hair and facial hair is probably because the body is designed for heat exchange around the carotid arteries in the neck.
"Wasabi" could almost be a dyslexic kid's exclamatory equivalent of "I saw a bee!"
The next six months, and frankly, the next four years will involve a lot of isolated, shift work in the Navy. I may not have regular opportunity to attend church or to plug into Christian fellowship. I think an earlier version of me would have considered a period of my life where I didn't have both an active ministry and explicit spiritual sources and outlets a wasted time period. Maybe, maybe not. Is that why God let Moses sit in the desert for 40 years before calling him to do something? Is that why He let Jesus be a carpenter for 30? Sometimes you're supposed to do "Christian things," but I don't think you're wrong if it doesn't look like two discipleship meetings and a small group every week. You just have to be ready to up and move when God decides to "use you again."
Did Jacob the Patriarch do anything worthwhile for God? He stole a birthright, wrestled an Angel, and demanded a blessing. It seems like his most noteworthy accomplishment was fathering a dozen or so male children, which probably makes more worthy the fact that he worked diligently for 14 years for the right wife. [Women: Insert snide comment about the ratio of men's to women's work in raising children.] And yet somehow he became the namesake of Israel. Jacob have I loved, indeed.
If someone tells you, oh, they've been to China, you should probably ask what Beijing and one section of the Great Wall were like.
If you went to Japan for a few weeks and didn't eat any sushi at all, you're probably my girlfriend.
The idea behind the Advent Conspiracy is a good one, but I think for my grandparents, giving nice gifts at Christmas and birthdays is one of the few and best ways they know how to love us. And I've thought about asking for nothing for Christmas, or a donation to some cause, but I think they would feel sad that they didn't get to buy a gift for me. The more loving thing to do here, for them, is to receive a gift graciously with a smile.
It'd be interesting to see what percentage of people who saw the new James Bond film knew what the words "quantum" and "solace" mean. Probably all the 11th graders.
If anyone makes a Christian pun on the term "Crossfit," I might die a little on the inside.
In the Roman era, warriors and soldiers wore red so that if they bled on the battlefield, their crimson wounds would be disguised. Nowadays, most of the world's military forces have uniform pants that are khaki brown. What are they hoping won't show in brown pants?
I wonder if most men in the world would be better men if they had ever been in one good fistfight.
If you do a respectable ab workout, then it really hurts to do pullups, which must mean that pullups are an ab workout.
When people say, "Happy belated birthday," the sentiment they mean is a belated happy birthday. The phrase unintentionally shifts the blame from the negligent person who forgot your birthday to you for having a birthday belatedly. Good job, latecomer.
If you've ever wondered why they put Indian fennel seeds in Italian sausage, you've probably speculated that it's to make the sausage taste better. But it's probably because Indian fennel seeds are phytoestrogenic, so the effective way to be able to ingest Indian fennel seeds without turning into a woman would be to accompany them with a giant amalgamation of delicious pig meat.
The lack of hair continuity between chest hair and facial hair is probably because the body is designed for heat exchange around the carotid arteries in the neck.
"Wasabi" could almost be a dyslexic kid's exclamatory equivalent of "I saw a bee!"
The next six months, and frankly, the next four years will involve a lot of isolated, shift work in the Navy. I may not have regular opportunity to attend church or to plug into Christian fellowship. I think an earlier version of me would have considered a period of my life where I didn't have both an active ministry and explicit spiritual sources and outlets a wasted time period. Maybe, maybe not. Is that why God let Moses sit in the desert for 40 years before calling him to do something? Is that why He let Jesus be a carpenter for 30? Sometimes you're supposed to do "Christian things," but I don't think you're wrong if it doesn't look like two discipleship meetings and a small group every week. You just have to be ready to up and move when God decides to "use you again."
Did Jacob the Patriarch do anything worthwhile for God? He stole a birthright, wrestled an Angel, and demanded a blessing. It seems like his most noteworthy accomplishment was fathering a dozen or so male children, which probably makes more worthy the fact that he worked diligently for 14 years for the right wife. [Women: Insert snide comment about the ratio of men's to women's work in raising children.] And yet somehow he became the namesake of Israel. Jacob have I loved, indeed.
If someone tells you, oh, they've been to China, you should probably ask what Beijing and one section of the Great Wall were like.
If you went to Japan for a few weeks and didn't eat any sushi at all, you're probably my girlfriend.
The idea behind the Advent Conspiracy is a good one, but I think for my grandparents, giving nice gifts at Christmas and birthdays is one of the few and best ways they know how to love us. And I've thought about asking for nothing for Christmas, or a donation to some cause, but I think they would feel sad that they didn't get to buy a gift for me. The more loving thing to do here, for them, is to receive a gift graciously with a smile.
It'd be interesting to see what percentage of people who saw the new James Bond film knew what the words "quantum" and "solace" mean. Probably all the 11th graders.
If anyone makes a Christian pun on the term "Crossfit," I might die a little on the inside.
In the Roman era, warriors and soldiers wore red so that if they bled on the battlefield, their crimson wounds would be disguised. Nowadays, most of the world's military forces have uniform pants that are khaki brown. What are they hoping won't show in brown pants?
I wonder if most men in the world would be better men if they had ever been in one good fistfight.
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