Postmode

This video was interesting, especially in its observation about liberal versus conservative views of the role of government in charity.

Distilled essence: Conservatives are more generous with their own money; liberals are more generous with everybody else’s money. Socialism is government-sanctioned thievery, people.

I didn’t know until today that Abraham Piper (son of John Piper) has his own personal blog. I’m reading through the archives (not a long task, as every post is only 22 words long, I think - given the name “Twenty-Two Words”; see here). I’m very interested in the concise manner in which Abraham makes his points.

His thoughts from his post on March 27th (”Jargon is a whip to beat away the masses.”) brought to mind something that William Zinsser says in his book On Writing Well:

During the 1960s the president of my university wrote a letter to mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. “You are probably aware,” he began, “that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related.” He meant that the students had been hassling them about different things. I was far more upset by the president’s English than by the students’ potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred the presidential approach taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own government’s memos, such as this blackout order of 1942:

“Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.”

“Tell them,” Roosevelt said, “that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”

On Writing Well, p. 7

Abraham also found this excellent video (couldn’t embed, so you’ll have to visit the link to watch). He wasn’t sure whether this was satire or legit; I will make no claims to enlightenment on this matter either. In either case, watch and laugh.

I think that one misunderstanding of what I said yesterday about Isaiah 5:13 could arise, mostly just from the sort of example I used to typify the problem that I see with a lot of the people I know. I said, “It frightens me that we lack knowledge and that some even adopt an attitude of rejecting (at least they think they reject) systematic studies of the character and nature of God and his works.” This seems to suggest that the problem I get distressed over is the fact that not all of the people I know want to break open Wayne Grudem’s (excellent, I might add) Systematic Theology and read through the section on penal substitutionary atonement, careful to memorize every jot and tittle. I want to make it clear that my problem is not that people do not do this. It’s not that people sometimes reject the idea of a system of studies on the character and works of God. This happens, and I think it is a problem to be addressed for some individuals who are explicitly against this, but it is only a symptom (not common among those whom I know) of the underlying attitude; my problem is with the willful ignorance that underlies this problem. So this is a very bad example because this does not typify the sort of willful ignorance I see in a lot of the people that I know; it is only one example, which is on the far end of the spectrum of this problem. This underlying problem of willful ignorance shows itself in much more common attitudes.

Since this misunderstanding could result, I want to provide a better example of the sort of problem I see. In order to do this, it will be helpful to consider how Psalm 1 characterizes the “blessed man”:

Psalm 1
¹Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
²but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

³He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers. ⁴The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

⁵Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
⁶for the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

Psalm 1, ESV

In this passage, we are shown that there are two kinds of people: the wicked and the righteous. Some might be inclined to say that this passage only shows that it is far better to do the things that it talks about here because it begins with, “Blessed is the man”. They are inclined to believe that this means that this is not a characterization of the righteous, but that it instead is addressing the super-righteous people who are most blessed, or something along those lines. However, the entire conclusion of this Psalm, in verses 5 and 6, is aimed at contrasting the lives and fruit of the righteous with the lives and fruit (or lack thereof) of the wicked. It is said of the blessed man that all these things are true, and then it concludes with “So the LORD knows the way of the righteous”. In other words, the blessed man is being described as doing these things particularly because this is the way of the righteous. Yes, there are those who live in a way that is more righteous and there are those who live in a way that is less righteous, but what is being talked about here is a characterization of the righteous life - not people who are somehow the “most righteous”. So because of the conclusion, we can say that it is the righteous who do not walk in the counsel of the wicked, stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of scoffers; the righteous who delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night; the righteous who are like a tree planted by streams of water, yield fruit in season, and do not wither; the righteous who prosper in all they do; the righteous who are not like chaff that the wind drives away.

Now, if this speaks of all the righteous, then it follows that what is said in verse 2 is true of those who are part of the “congregation of the righteous”. The righteous delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night. “Meditate” here means something along the lines of “ponder” (MacArthur) or “muse” (Strongs). In other words, the righteous have a fascination with the law of God and delight in thinking on these things day and night.

Now, when it comes to the people I know, this is much closer to what I’m talking about. The rejection of the the systems of studies of God and such is only a symptom of this deeper problem of willful ignorance. Willful ignorance shows itself much more often in not making it a priority to meditate and delight in the law of God. I hope that clarifies what it is that distresses me.

If one is truly intellectually honest, I think that they will see that this strikes absolutely at the heart of Aminianism. Arminianism insidiously destroys any of the basis provided in scripture for trust in God and his goodness. How can we pray to God when all evil is the result of individual motivation and not the sovereignty of God? One might argue that God’s sovereignty means that it is useless to pray; this is not true, for we find that while God is sovereign this doesn’t mean he doesn’t use means, and we are commanded to pray not only to show his glory as provider, but also because it is commanded and is a means in his sovereign plan. Arminianism can’t even do that. It is truly a despicable portrayal of God. Why ask God for what he can’t do? Why have hope that he will do anything?

So why do religious believers pray for God’s help or healing? They ask for God’s action to come in to a situation and change it, yes; but if they are honest, they don’t see prayer as a plea for magical solutions that will make the world totally safe for them and others.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in response to the tsunami in Asian waters

In particular, the idea that if once we got rid of religion, all problems of this kind would vanish, seems wild. Whatever may have been its plausibility in the eighteenth century, when it first took the centre of the stage, it is surely just a distraction today. It is, however, one often used by those who do not want to think seriously on this subject, and who prefer a ritual warfare about the existence of God to an atrociously difficult psychological enquiry.

Mary Midgley, “The Problem of Natural Evil” in Wickedness

I’ve been watching The Moment of Truth on Fox since it started airing, and I’m still not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, I think that there is a place for truth to be told and that we should honor and thank God for those who are not only truthful, but more importantly have nothing to lie about. The only flaw in this concept, for Fox and America, at least, is that honesty doesn’t equal entertainment. We’re a nation of gossippers, and I think that The Moment of Truth has capitalized on this in its selection of contestants. Of all the contestants I’ve seen so far, only one didn’t have anything that was truly overtly shameful, a guy named Ray. Aside from lust, he was truly an honorable, honest man.

But even in myself I find that the thing I like about everyone else is seeing the hidden, inner parts of their lives revealed on national television. It tells me something about myself and about culture. In talking about this, it is necessary to consider the “long face” of “moral disenfectant”. Please note that I’m noticing this sort of sinful attitude in myself here, not trying to excuse it. Doug Wilson said in “Serious Filum” last month on his blog:

At any rate, here is the thought that came out of this, and is related to something C.S. Lewis said somewhere, I think describing the oeuvre of D.H. Lawrence (oeuvre is a fancy French word to describe the work of self-important people). Lewis said that there is a common fallacy out and about that thinks that a long face is a moral disinfectant, that basic moral considerations do not come into play just so long as you take whatever it is you are doing seriously. According to this odd theory, the sin is not found in the sin itself, but rather in any frivolous response to it. What we need around here is a furrowed brow, intensity of purpose, a willingness to talk about how “Americans need to become more comfortable with our bodies,” the tapping of the front teeth with a thoughtful pencil, and a desire to tie sexual liberation in with justice concerns for coffee growers in Central America.

These movie producers [Note from John: see the blog post for more about what he’s talking about here] were (or at any rate, wanted to be) serious artists. They were working with the contours of narrative (all rise!) and making art, you see.

The same thing happens with other professions too. This is why a blowhard like Bill O’Reilly can be waxing indignant about the moral degradation of (let’s make something up, but not far-fetched) having some pole dancer give a talk to a high school jobs fair assembly somewhere, and to prove his indignation is real, he shows us multiple clips of pole dancers prancing around in their skivvies. When Maude from Wisonsin [sic] writes in to say something along the lines of, “Hey!” he will respond that what he is doing is “just journalism, madam.” This is serious journalism, and it justifies what seriousness always justifies these days, which is whatever we have around here that needs some justifying.

I don’t think it’s immoral to be honest about the subjects that The Moment of Truth is dealing with in many cases. But I do think it is immoral not just to make entertainment and show out of it, but even more so to pretend it’s OK because we have the “long face” of “moral disinfectant” on. Hence, all of my comments below perhaps proceed from a sinful indulgence of maintaining this straight face and pretending it’s OK to be entertained by all of this. Yeah, I laughed at some of the things. Who wouldn’t laugh at a guy’s confession of padding his underwear to look better endowed? (Not that I think that this is necessarily sinful, although certainly concerning…)

What I can’t get over with all of this is that every single episode has an announcer saying, “Watch as he/she destroys their family…” Is this what we should be doing? The truth needs to come out, and it will destroy families in some cases because of the indiscretions and sins of man, but why in the world are we glorifying this? What is it about our society that we get an rise out of hearing that somebody’s next question is going to continue to destroy their marriage? It’s despicable.

But nevertheless, ignoring this it has been very interesting to see some of the things on the show. So far, to the best of my knowledge, there have been two separate Mormon contestants on the show. Neither of those contestants had not struggled deeply with sin. In the case of the one man, he had been a drug addict and was sexually unfaithful according to Scripture. And in the case of tonight’s finale, the Mormon woman said that she had lesbian fantasies and would pose nude in an adult magazine for several hundred-thousand dollars. (Correction: She lied about whether she would pose for $100,000, and lost. She said in her defense that she would do it for several hundred-thousand. Haha, sucker.)

It’s a given that people will struggle with things like these. But both of them, from what the show seemed to convey, had not made any progress whatsoever in getting past this. And in tonight’s finale, the Mormon woman said things that stuck out to me. She said that if her husband left the Mormon church, she would not stay with him. This is obviously unscriptural because Paul says that the believers should stay with their unbelieving spouses, because who knows how God will use the believing spouse? Is it any wonder? It is just evidence that they don’t believe what God says in Scripture. And Scripture says that if we have the spirit in us we will produce the fruits of the spirit: that is, our mindsets will be conformed to the image of Christ, so that we have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; and our hearts will be changed so that we seek to please and glorify God. Shouldn’t we think that this means something when we aren’t seeing this fruit? But I digress.

I wish, however, that I could say anything different of the one holy and catholic Church (i.e., not Mormons; I’m not Mormon…). There is nothing that differentiates us from the culture around us. So few of us seek to glorify God in our minds or in our actions. I myself struggle to do this, and it is bitter. How often have I been snappy and rude, without grace for the smallest thing? Is this what we’re called to? I think - although I don’t know and can’t confirm this from any extensive experience - that being grieved over sin as God is grieved and taking joy in God as God has made us to take joy are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, inherent in doing this is understanding not only how deeply we have sinned against God in our entire beings, but also understanding how great and amazing is his grace in having forgiven us and made us righteous before him. We need to understand this. But it is true of many in the church today what Christ said, that on judgment day he will say to those people, “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”

In many cases, the people explained (perhaps tried to excuse) their answers afterwards. But in the case of this woman and one other before her, their whole approach was to say, “Well, everyone does it at some point…” And above, I even asked with the joke I cracked about the guy padding his underwear to look more well-endowed, “Who wouldn’t laugh?” But this is just trying to make it sound as if we’re not that bad. “Oh yes, there are those people who are really horrible nymphomaniacs, but I only had sex with five people outside of marriage.” This is the fruit of a hard spirit that is not submitting itself to God.

As with everything, the answer is Christ. If we’re honest, the answer is the Gospel: that we once lived in covenant fidelity to God, that we screwed it up and in Adam inherited a sin nature that is corrupt, fallen, and cannot do anything good of itself, and so as a consequence we sin and incur God’s wrath on ourselves. And if we’re honest, we also say that the free gift of God is grace in Christ Jesus. But even once we have been saved by the blood of Christ, if we’re not grieved over sin and taking joy in the grace of God, we are shamefully sinning against God and need to repent of that. These things should not be happening here; this is not how it should be. But I thank God for his grace.

I’ll end on this note: Jars of Clay has a great song called “Oh My God” from Good Monsters that I think mirrors what I’ve been expressing here part and parcel. This song is epic not only in its musical brilliance but also in its lyrical profundity; observe:

Oh my God, look around this place
Your fingers reach around the bone
You set the break and set the tone

Flights of grace
And future falls
In present pain
All fools say
“Oh my God”

…

Sometimes I cannot forgive
And these days, mercy cuts so deep
If the world was how it should be
Maybe I could get some sleep

While I lay, I dream we’re better
Scales were gone and faces light
When we wake, we hate our brother
We still move to hurt each other

Sometimes I can close my eyes
And all the fear that keeps me silent
Falls below my heavy breathing
What makes me so badly bent?

We all have a chance to murder
We all feel the need for wonder
We still want to be reminded
That the pain is worth the thunder

Sometimes when I lose my grip
I wonder what to make of heaven
All the times I thought to reach up
All the times I had to give

Babies underneath their beds
Hospitals that cannot treat
All the wounds that money causes
All the comforts of cathedrals

All the cries of thirsty children
This is our inheritance
All the rage of watching mothers
This is our greatest defense:

Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God

A few wolves can do great damage in a naive flock.

- Mark Driscoll, “Putting Pastors In Their Place” (click to watch/download) - Text & Context, February 25th, 2008

There are many misconceptions that the common populace has about the process of design and development, especially for the internet, with website design and development (which is what I do for a living). Case in point: I’ve had people ask me to develop a fully-functional, large-scale site with features requiring highly-advanced programming - in one week. Part of the problem is that they don’t have a good analogous understanding of what the design and development process is like. Imagine it like this: you are on a hill. However, you are blind. Furthermore, every time you take a step somebody puts you on a portable merry-go-round and spins you until you’re confused enough that you don’t know which way is uphill and which way is downhill. The design process involves taking one step at a time. But since you’re blind and can’t tell whether the next step you take will be uphill or downhill, you don’t know whether it’s going to be uphill or downhill. Thus, the design and development processes amount to taking one step, evaluating whether it was worse or better, and then going backwards or forwards depending on whether your last step took you uphill or downhill.

Donald Norman touches on this in The Design of Everyday Things:

Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The folk artists change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it justs gets changed again on the next go-round. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take on step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill - or at least at a local peak.

Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things p. 142

Thus, a lot of these unrealistic expectations about the design process can be seen in light of this analogy. Smaller tasks are smaller peaks. They can be traversed more quickly than larger peaks. But the thing about larger peaks is that they often have more crags, cliffs, and inherent dangers. Thus, the user naturally expects that a larger project (say, a 5,000 foot peak, as opposed to a 500 feet peak) will only take 10 times longer to complete, not realizing the exponential factor included in increasingly large projects.