If a train leaves Los Angeles at 12:25...

I had to take a train to go to a job interview. It was just far enough away that taking the train made more sense than driving my own car. It might have actually cost a little less in fuel costs than the ticket ended up being, but who wants to deal with L.A. traffic? So train it was, and the interview went reasonably well. I just might get the job, actually.

The thing that turned out to be the real problem with the day was the return trip. The station nearest to where I interviewed is one of those stations where the train doesn't stop every time. I had to get up at five to drive to the station and catch the right train, which is not that big of a deal, but interviews take all of...well I couldn't imagine one going longer than two hours, tops. So about an hour there, about an hour with time in transit from the train to the office and waiting for my interviewer to get out of a meeting, then an hour and a half of interview and tour of the facility. It's about 10:30, and the next time a train stops at the local station is 3:30. I briefly bemoaned not checking the train schedule more carefully, but it was a tad less than four hours, and I was bound to have lunch anyway, so no big deal, right?

So, I get a ride to the central station, which should actually have trains stopping, but I'm faced with a choice. It turns out there's a train leaving the station at 12:25 heading my way, but it's not going all the way to my station. I can take this train and wait for a train about two hours later that will take me all the way, or I can take that later train from my present location.

Once again, this should be no big deal. It's really a matter of deciding which station I'd like to sit at for two hours. Of course, not being a regular train rider, I have no idea what the other stations are like. I’m thinking about lunch, as I said, and there are a couple of snack bar/hotdog stand-type places where I am, but I wonder, could there be something better at the next station? I decide to stay and have a hotdog, which wasn't bad, although perhaps a bit pricey, and I ended up spending all my cash. I went to the platform and waited.

Soon, I started to wonder if I'd made the wrong choice. I don't know if you've ever been in a big city and spent time hanging around the train station or bus depot, but you wonder (okay, I wonder, I can't speak for you) whether one of the big problems that people have with public transportation is the sort of people who hang out at train stations and bus depots. I suppose like everywhere else, the majority of the people there are fairly "normal" as fine as one can expect of your average citizen, but then...

Well, I'm sitting there, and this guy comes up and strikes up a conversation. No need for fine details, but the guy turns out to be this homeless ex-convict who just got kicked out of his rehab home, and is on his way to another one. Actually, as homeless guys go, he seemed to be set up pretty well: he had a big duffel bag full of clothing which seemed to be clean, and much of it new; he had some food and some books; he had some money and a ticket for the train; and he had spent the previous night in a hotel.

Still, he was obviously not in great shape. Rehab seemed to have done him good, as he was adamant that he wanted to stay away from drugs (although he wouldn't mind a beer or two) and out of jail, but still, drugs are tough on you, and after all, while it didn't seem likely that he was going to end up sleeping on a bus stop bench that night, he was still homeless. Already feeling wiped out from the day, I just felt eaten up inside for this guy who's unloading his problems on me, and I had nothing I could really do to help him. I kept thinking to myself I'd have rather taken the earlier train and not had to deal with this.

I realized something, though. If I'd taken the other train, I might have found myself sitting at a train station without even a hotdog stand, and nowhere to go to get any lunch at all. If that had happened, then surely this story would have been quite different, and no doubt I wouldn't have had the imagination to think that surely if I'd waited, I'd have ended up sitting for over an hour with some stranger telling me about his triumphs and troubles with Narc-Anon. I'd just be sitting there fuming at myself that I'd made a very poor choice, and surely if I'd stayed put, I'd have had a fine time waiting for the later train. Of course, I'd be wrong.

I’d have rather skipped lunch and not had to deal with somebody else's problems, but realizing now my situation and lack of imagination, it's entirely possible that even at a stop farther down the line I might have run into some much more unpleasant fellow, or found that the station had no shade to sit in, or by some random chance, I'd have run into some vengeful ex-girlfriend or the earlier train could have crashed. Who knows?.

I find it fascinating how human nature leads us to notice coincidence, and attribute it to "luck" or even sometimes "miracles". There's been a lot written on the fact that when a psychic makes twenty predictions, and one of them comes true, people say "Wow!" in response to that one, but forget the nineteen failures. Yes, I've heard a lot about this phenomenon, but not so much on its flipside: the noting of pessimistic coincidence.

The fact is, no matter which train I had chosen, I would likely have complained of whatever results I got, claiming that surely, I had made the worst choice possible. If I'd driven, I would have spent hours stuck in traffic, beating myself up for being so foolish as to not take the train. If I had decided not to bother interviewing for the job since it was so far away, I'd have wondered if I had been extremely foolish to not even try and see what my chances were.

Pessimism is easy, and I fall into it a lot. I don't know what the cure for it is, but I do know one thing. As I sat on the train writing this, heading to my home where I would spend the evening with a wife and kids who love me, I realize that somewhere along the line, I could have easily made some series of decisions that had led to me being a homeless ex-con drug addict standing on a train platform and telling my troubles to some stranger.

Hail to the Blog

I've been a lifelong Democrat (although earlier this year I tried to register Republican in order to vote in the GOP primary, but that doesn't count for much, especially since my registration didn't go through as far as I am aware), but I'm obviously not so taken with partisan politics as many people are in this country. In particular, I recall back in the day thinking that there was something wrong with the way mainstream media seemed to be criticizing the Bush/Quayle administration. I would often tell people, "If the best people can come up with to pick on Dan Quayle is that he spells 'potato' wrong, he must be doing pretty good!" I mean, think about it; our current Veep is shooting people in the face while on a break from supporting a highly immoral war that's funneling money to his friends at his old company. Could we get the guy who's a bad speller back, please?

So just this week, Anna Quindlen writes a column explaining how horrible it is that John McCain doesn't use the Internet. She points out that she herself goes online to see people's reactions to her work and, "...she's already been told many times that she's a left-wing idiot." This is what she calls being informed, or "tak[ing] the people's pulse." I was glad to be informed of this, as I myself have considered writing her many times to tell her that, and look! I managed to get informed about the issue without going online!

Quindlen is actually a very interesting writer, in no small part due to the fact that she is so very liberal. She's the sort of writer who can spout the liberal view on issues of the day in a very eloquent manner, far more eloquent than I can, and she can do it whether she's saying something insightful or spouting a load of crap. I remember clearly her saying many years ago that she was surprised there was controversy over the RU-486 pill; after all, it was a safe method of terminating a pregnancy without an abortion, and isn't that what everyone wanted? Seriously? Was she so dense that she thought the abortion issue was at heart about a surgical procedure? Crazed pro-lifers standing in front of abortion clinics are known to call abortionists "baby killers", not "questionable surgical practitioners". It was the first time I was tempted to write Quindlen and tell her she was an idiot, but not the last.

Of course, as I also hinted, she's written a lot of stuff that's come across as very intelligent, but I'm short a good example, mostly because we tend to remember things that upset us rather than things that are generally agreeable. Newsweek chose well when they signed her on as a columnist, I think. They seem to do very well in that respect. Even as someone who considers himself fairly liberal, though, even when George Will says things I don't agree with, he still doesn't ever seem to sound stupid.

But to speak to Quindlen's point, is it really so bad to have a President that doesn't use the Internet? Quindlen is right about a number of things. It makes McCain look old. But then, what doesn't? The guy's in his 70s, after all. Is it bad to look old when you are old? Hmm, maybe. I'm still out of work, and sometimes, on the few days I have an offer of an interview, I briefly consider buying some sort of hair product to get rid of my grey. Having grey hair is something I've actually always looked forward to oddly enough, but now I realize ageism happens, and I'd rather look my age or younger, not older. Ageism happens in politics, too. This is a year where one of the issues is that one candidate seems too old to be President, while the other seems (to some) to be too young. We like our presidents old, but not McCain old.

The more important issue, though, as Quindlen points out, is that McCain seems to be OUT OF IT, and may actually be so. Is it enough to have aides "take the people's pulse" for you? Heck, doctors do it. I can't remember the last time I had my pulse, temperature or blood pressure taken by an actual doctor! I think it's more important to have aides that will be honest about their findings. Often it seems the current administration is suffering from the problem of a President surrounded by aides that refuse to tell him anything is wrong. Imagine going to the doctor and having the nurse find you with a fever, but he tells the doctor you're at a perfect 98.6°F no matter what the thermometer actually reads! But is being "connected" necessarily going to change that in any way?

The Internet is like television, but moreso. You can sit and watch television and be blissfully unaware of what's going on in the world quite easily. There was a time not even so long ago when I'd have gladly watched the Cartoon Network 24/7, but will that make me any more or less informed than spending all day at icanhascheezburger.com? I happen to know for a fact that when Dick Cheney isn't busy shooting people, he spends a fair (and balanced?) amount of time watching Fox News. Would he really be more connected with reality if he took some of that time and spent it perusing foxnews.com?

The Internet is what you make it, both as a writer, and as a reader. From the long list of people who will probably never read my blog, we can guess the inclusion of John McCain, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Anna Quindlen herself, who probably is more "connected" than any of the others just named, and named more times in this entry than any of the others. It has nothing to do with being OUT OF IT or what amount of time one spends on the Internet. And if any of these people happened to come across my blog and read it, it's unlikely it would deeply change their lives in any way. We hear what we want to and see what we want to (and write what we want to!). When on rare occasions, a person reads my blog, they will come away from it with the same sort of benefits they come away from in reading a column in Newsweek: either "That's so insightful and true!" (because I agree), or, "What a (fill-in-the-blank-)wing idiot!" (because I disagree). Furthermore, as so many have observed, including Tim Berners-Lee himself, the WWW is largely a repository of crap, my own blog not excluded from that assessment. The Internet's new world of "pushbutton publishing" (is that Blogger.com's motto?) has some potential for changing the world, for people have observed that cream floats to the top. Crap floats, too.

In the modern world of politics, is the new rule "He who eats the most crap wins"? I guess you are what you eat, so why not? We know politicians are full of crap, so why not give them the Internet to help them mainline the stuff in its true, unadulterated form? (Did I just refer to "crap" as "unadulterated"? Man, I hope I'm single-handedly bringing blogging to a new low...) It's crap. Crap, crap, crap. The Internet has left-wing crap, right-wing crap, Christian crap, atheist crap, crap art, crap photos, crap news, crap fiction, crap discussions of current events, and of course just plain crap. Man, I feel better now that I've gotten that out.

Is it really such a handicap for a potential President to not be on the Internet? I'm on the Internet every day, and I have no idea what's going on in the world until Jon Stewart makes a joke about it, and I see the clip a few days later. Of course, then I still don't know what's going on, but at least I can laugh about it. Can I be President? I'm obviously not busy with anything else at the moment...

One government, two worlds

Many years ago, I had a pastor that was giving a series of sermons on hot topics of the day. Of course, many of those topics are still big, not least of which is the topic of abortion rights. You can probably guess what side of the issue he came down on, but many people might be surprised how he approached it.

Rather than simply standing up and blasting the opposition to his personal view, he took time to point out some things that most people don't think of. A person's views on abortion are really formed largely upon their opinion of the nature of what an embryo/fetus really is. If you believe it's a human being, then you're most likely going to want to see it protected. If you believe that it's just a lump of tissue on the wall of a woman's uterus, then removing that lump and disposing of it is no more of a moral issue than getting a wart removed. Until you take the time to understand those two viewpoints, you'll never understand those who stand on the other side of the issue from you.

My main point here is not about abortion, but about understanding the opposition on many, many issues. I find myself so often confused as to why the Republicans and Democrats seem to have so much animosity towards one another when there really seems to me to be very little difference between them. Where does this animosity come from?

I was thinking about the Libertarians, and I remembered something one of them once told me. (I have a lot of respect for Libertarians, although I myself am not one, because I tend to see them as perhaps the least hypocritical party for reasons that may become clear here.) This Libertarian pointed out that Democrats seem to think we can use government to solve all our problems, and openly admit it. However, while Republicans say that they are against "big government", if you watch them, you'll realize that they simply want a different kind of big government than the Democrats. I think there's a deep truth there.

We're not talking about a fetus now, we're talking about our government; what is it that Republicans and Democrats view the government to fundamentally be? I think that it's that view of government's fundamental purpose that not only forms the two parties' policies, but is the root of the animosity they have toward each other.

Take two issues; taxing the rich on the one hand, gay marriage on the other. Generally, Democrats are for both of these, and Republicans are against them. Why? The Republicans look at the government and ask, "What can the government do to protect me from things I think are wrong?" We don't like to see our money being taken, so less taxes for everyone. We have a moral system that says homosexuality is wrong, so we're not going to budge on that. The Democrats look at the government and ask, "What can the government do to create situations that I think are right?" We need money for social programs which the rich can afford to fund, so more taxes for everyone, especially the rich, and whatever my personal views on homosexuality may be, equal rights for everyone is a good idea.

So many Republicans and other conservatives seem to have this idea that liberals feel that wealth is evil. Why? Because they seem to want to just tax that evil right out of the rich. Now I'm sure there are a few people who do believe that, but not the majority. Where do Republicans get this idea? It's from their view of the purpose of government. The action of raising taxes on the rich implies to them that rich people must be wrong. That is not why Democrats do it.

Likewise, Democrats seem to feel that conservatives feel it's right to squelch the rights of others. Why? Because they don't take every chance possible to expand equal rights to everyone at every time. Once again, I'm sure there really are people who enjoy stopping those they dislike from enjoying their full freedom, but the aim of most conservatives tends to be different. They just want to stop what they view as being immoral. Democrats assume hatred of freedom and hatred of the poor on the part of Republicans because of a refusal to see eye to eye with them. But Republicans are just following their moral conscience, just like Democrats.

How do Libertarians view the government? To them it's just a tool for people to force their own morality on others, which is exactly what the Democrats and Republicans both do, albeit in different ways. My view? Does it matter? The fact is everyone thinks they're right, and the opposition is wrong, and it's all based on opinion. All I hope for is that people will stop mistaking a difference of opinion for a lack of morality, because there is nobody who is completely moral or amoral. We're all just trying to make things right.

The Third-Party Guru

So yesterday was our so-called "Super Tuesday" here in America, the day that most of the country has its preliminary round of voting before the official election. Often, it's a day that campaigns make final decisions as to how far they are going to be run, and candidates can either make a definitive statement that they fully expect to be the official candidate for their party, or they drop out and declare their work to be done. I suppose sometimes a losing candidate can be happy to simply have made it through a lengthy campaign without any major scandals. Although you may have not heard it on the news in the midst of talk about, there was another campaign afoot that had a major contender who dropped out of the race yesterday. I am of course talking about the death of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

It's a fascinating thing to me that to a great extent, religion and politics have a lot in common. Despite the efforts of various interest groups here in the U.S. such as the so-called "Moral Majority" (I say "so-called" as some have pointed out that this is a phrase like "Christian Science" in which two words are used to describe something in which neither word describes it at all.) there is not an easy mix between religion and political ideology, the now-defunct Natural Law Party notwithstanding. Even in ancient societies, we see struggle between religious movements and political movements: In the New Testament, Jesus, the Pharisees and the Sadducees represented differing religious viewpoints, but struggled not just against one another, but against political powers such as the Romans and the Herodians. Today, even in a country that supposedly supports freedom of religion, we argue about whether a Mormon or a (falsely-rumored) Muslim is fit to hold national office. Many have chided the silliness of the notion that somehow putting one's hand on a Bible while taking a vow makes that vow somehow more unbreakable. While the Bible is of supreme importance to a Christian, physically, it's just a pile of paper, and the moral law within a politician's heart is infinitely more important than the moral law under his or her hand.

But what of the Maharishi? Why do I bring him up, other than the fact that he has recently passed the way of all humanity? Well, although I don't really know so very much about the man, there was a comment made about him in the news report of his death I heard this morning that struck me as fascinating. It is very rare among either politicians or religious leaders to go through their entire career without being plagued by scandals, but the Maharishi is one of those rare individuals who seems to have done it. Other than an alleged sexual advance on Mia Farrow that seems to be unproven (and considerably less of a scandal than it would be for a Christian political leader, as Hindu sexual standards are somewhat different), his life and the Transcendental Meditation movement he founded seem to have a pretty clean record.

I remember that there was a TM center near the place where I grew up, and there was a teacher I had in junior high school who often passed on rumors to her students that these weirdos were somehow dragging off young impressionable souls and brainwashing them. I always found the stories rather improbable, myself, and whereas another Christian teacher I had in high school later was definitely part of what inspired me to look into Christianity, this particular Christian teacher was the sort that made me say, "If that's what Christians are like, I don't think I need to have anything to do with it, thank you." There's no doubt to me that as a Christian, there is a certain disdain one must have for all that is not of Christ, but choosing to see the deepest evil in any religious activity outside of your own narrow views isn't so much Christianity as paranoia. Later in high school, I had a friend who had a part-time job as a janitor at the TM center. His view on these people was that they were a bit odd, but mostly friendly and honest, and they never tried to push their views on him, an atheist.

I think that honesty and good-natured kindness that seems to have always been very present in the Maharishi and his followers is admirable. Sure, we may disagree with their spiritual beliefs, but when we look at their aims as a group, I can't find anything to criticize. The Maharishi believed that his methods brought not just peace to the practitioner, but also to the world around the practitioner. The Maharishi and his followers, although surprisingly influential for such a small group, don't seem to have been self-seeking, living modestly and quietly.

As a Christian, I suppose I am obligated to call the Maharishi a "cultist" or an "infidel", and technically, either or both descriptions fit. Still, on a personal level, as someone who tries to look at the world both from within and without my religious belief system, I'd have to say that if all cultists and infidels--and even many Christians--were more like the Maharishi, this world would be a much better place for it.

Jagged Little Pill

Rather than reposting the whole discussion--which wasn't long, but why bother--I offer up a link to a post I made on Goosing the Antithesis some time ago. It's a subject that, in a way, I've been thinking about a lot more in the last few weeks, ever since the Skeptic's Annotated Bible actually managed to surprise me. Is the SAB the red pill or the blue pill?

What if reality was not what you thought it to be? In many ways, this is a sticky question most of all on the religious front. Most of us feel we're logically justified in not expecting a "Matrix"-style awakening, and definitely, there is very little reason to think that the wool is being pulled over our eyes to such an extent. Yet at the same time, it's the intangibles of the world that are always on some level very open to questioning. How do you know that your government has anyone's best interests in mind, much less your own? How do you know how the people in your life feel about you, really? How do you know that your brain is functioning right, and you're not insane? And how do you know that your beliefs about god(s) or lack thereof are on the mark?

The thing is, the day I was writing the ASAB blog entry (not the GtA one) I was experiencing a great deal of mixed emotion. I've said it before, and I really mean it, that there are days that I wish the whole Christianity thing was just a bad dream I'd wake up from and find that the universe is somehow simpler. I'm not the sort of person who believes that morality cannot exist apart from God, but definitely in the absence of God, there are numerous moral obligations that completely lose their foundations. In various parts of the Bible, religion is referred to as a "burden" that it would be a shame to saddle someone with unnecessarily, and if the Bible says it, it must be right, eh?

Anyway, the prospect of finding a serious flaw in the Bible was exciting. I've said many a time that while I'm aware of minor glitches in the Bible, the real thing that most Christians worry about is the possibility that there might be a doctrinal error. It's one thing to not know how many chariots Solomon had, it's a whole other issue to not know whether performing a particular action, failing to perform a particular action, or performing a particular action wrong will cause you some sort of torment at the hands of an angry supreme being. So while I would stop short of calling the (potential) problem a serious doctrinal error, the idea that contradictory punishments might be doled out, not just for a crime, but for a rather dubious crime was extremely troubling.

I've always liked Plato's Allegory of the Cave: the idea that we in the world are like people in a cave who only see dark, distorted shadows on a wall when the truth is bright sunlight out side that we didn't even dream of. Plato hypothesized that anyone forced to leave the cave and come out into the sunlight would be essentially traumatized by the change, and might at first fight against it. The fact is, we all believe that our own world-view is correct; that's natural and healthy. Although there might be a better, bigger truth out there, a first glimpse of it might be blinding or painful, and it would inevitably be scary to face the prospect of having to change everything that you know to fit a new set of perceptions.

For myself, the journey into Christianity was like that, and if I should discover it not to be true at some time in the future, the journey out would be similar. Nobody wants to discover that everything they thought made the world what it is is only a lie, even if the world they know is unpleasant. When Morpheus sits before you and offers you those pills, he doesn't give you a glass of water to swallow it with, you've got to choke that thing down, and on the way down it scratches a throat that is straining to reject it.

Maybe you should reject it. Many Christians would tell you that anyone who is trying to lead you away from Christianity is only a servant of Satan in some direct or indirect way. While an atheist isn't likely to appeal to the supernatural, many of them consider evangelistic Christians in the same manner: just charlatans looking to pull the wool over your eyes so you can join the flock and be fleeced along with the rest of the sheep. Whichever position you personally take, it bears contemplating. When I saw The Matrix for the first time, I thought the scene in which Neo is offered the two pills was incredibly creepy. Imagine yourself in a strange house you've never been to before with a bunch of freaky people you just met that day, and one of them says, "Hey, if you take this pill, you're going to see some wild stuff!" My personal response would be, "Uh, thanks, but I tried that stuff in college, and I think I'm pretty much done with it, okay?"

Of course, as I mentioned in the notes of the original post, there was a similar scene in the movie Total Recall in which the hero of the story is also offered a pill that will supposedly make the fantasy world around him disappear. He rejects the pill, and although the ending of the movie is left with a touch of vagueness, we are generally led to believe that rejection was the right choice, and the pill was a deception. In a less philosophical (and cinematic) vein, some people believe that when they take LSD, they are having some sort of supernatural experience of expanded consciousness, while others simply believe that the chemicals in their brain are being made to fire randomly, and it's all garbage. Who in the end is to say whether an atheist or a theist is the one who is having a "bad trip"? Each is convinced in their own mind that they are seeing the true reality.

The funny thing is, it's like you're sitting there with Morpheus, he holds out the pills and says his little speech, and as you reach for the pill, someone chimes up, saying, "Wait a minute, I think you've got it backwards. I'm pretty sure it's the blue pill that makes you wake up from the dream." On a side note, something I've always wondered is what would have happened if Neo had taken both pills? (Edit to add: Apparently, I'm not the only one to muse on this.) Of course, the pills being essentially a metaphor even in the original story, I think the whole thing breaks down at that point. The only reasonable alternative to taking one pill or the other is to take neither and just walk away. (I suppose in my metaphorical take, that would be like agnosticism.) In the real-world scenario, I think that's the choice I would take.

But not too many of us find ourself sitting in a room with a mysterious man offering us two pills that represent radically diverging life-paths. Most of us live a very mundane life. Still, those choices are offered to us nonetheless. "I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't take the red pill," says one commenter on the old post, and yet every day, so many people turn their back on the possibility of knowing the truth, certain (metaphorically) that the blue pill is all the reality they need. This is not a criticism of atheism; this is a criticism of closed-mindedness. Whatever it is that you believe, you should know and accept the possibility that you might be wrong, as logical and well-founded as your beliefs may seem.

Elizabeth: "The Oath of God"

I had a few other topics I was considering blogging on, including the lovely but somewhat unusual seder I went to last night, the death of Anna Nicole Smith (which ought to be old news by now, but you'd hardly tell it by watching television) and actually something strange I recently saw at McDonald's; but I had something that really touched my heart in a surprisingly special way in the last 24 hours, and I intend to write on that.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, has recently had a remission of her cancer, for those who didn't manage to pick up that tidbit of information from between reports of Anna Nicole's death. Back in 2004, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and while it seemed for some time that she had managed to beat it, it seems that the cancer had spread to her bones, and this time, there is nothing that can be done about it.

The latest issue of Newsweek features a short interview with Edwards on the topic of her coping with cancer, and in reading it, I found a lot of truly inspirational stuff. The one thing that really jumped out at me was that the interviewer asked her essentially about how it had affected her faith. Years before, Edwards had lost her 16-year-old son in a car accident, and she started to speak about her reflections on God's treatment of her and her family.

I had to think about a God who would not save my son. Wade was—and I have lots of evidence; it's not just his mother saying it—a gentle and good boy.

This is the sort of thing that I hear so many people struggle with when they talk about faith. I've blogged on it several times. It seems so often that I hear people who come to this issue, and they don't so much "struggle" with the idea, it seems, but come to a quick conclusion: There must be no God. (Not that I want to cheapen the power of that conclusion; some people may not have jumped to it so easily, and yet still arrived there. Faith (or lack thereof) is a personal thing.)

Philosophers discuss it. Pastors preach on it. Complex theological concepts are batted around by both professionals and laymen like myself. However, there is something simple and profound that perhaps is typified in the book of Job.

Most of you are probably somewhat familiar, but let's review the basics of that book of the Bible, considered by many scholars to probably be the oldest book of the Bible, and one of the oldest philosophical discussions of the problem of suffering. (You may read it here, if you want to, but the book is rather long; you can get the gist of it by reading the first three and last three chapters.) There's this guy Job, and he's an exceedingly good man. God is discussing him with Satan, and Satan claims that Job is only good because he gets rewarded for his goodness by God, and if he had nothing, he wouldn't be such a great guy. So God allows Satan to take away everything Job has, and leave him in poverty. Job's response?

"Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised." (Job 1:21)

This alone is pretty impressive. Most of us wouldn't be so complacent. Satan is not satisfied, however. He claims that so long as a man has his health, he hardly is suffering. So God allows Satan to make Job break out in "painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head." Now Job has really sunk to a low point, and most people would expect him to give up his faith. Indeed,

His wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!"

He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" (Job 2:9-10)

To me, that is real faith, deep faith. Faith that doesn't just expect God to be like a genie that grants your every wish, but knows that God is good and righteous even when you can't see His justice in action. Faith that says,

"Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him..." (Job 13:15)

And that's really the point of the book of Job in many ways: that we have to accept God on His own terms, even if that means suffering for our faith. People will make accusations against people of faith (as Job's friends do, later in the book) and against God because they want and expect God to behave a particular way. But God does not live by our rules, if indeed He lives by any rules at all. Should we expect the Creator of the universe to live up to our expectations, or should we only expect Him to be who He claims to be?

What did Edwards come to believe as a result of her personal losses?

...I had to accept that my God was a God who promised enlightenment and salvation. And that's all.

This is what touched my heart. It sometimes made me seem like a pessimist to my fellow Christians, but in times past, when I had gone through suffering and loss, there were people who told me that I should expect things to improve, because God was looking out for me. My response? "God was looking out for Job, too, wasn't He?"

But for me, this wasn't pessimism, it was realism. If I take God and say that He's a powerful being who exists to take care of my problems, I don't think I'm being Biblical. Jesus Himself promised that we would have trouble (John 16:33), and who am I to say that Jesus is wrong? This isn't bad. Sure I should hope for the best, but just as I'm not going to limit God by saying that He can't fix all of my problems, on the flipside of that, I'm not going to limit Him by saying that He will fix them. Sure, it takes great faith to expect miracles, but doesn't it also take great faith, to say, like Edwards:

I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer. I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I've done the right thing, I will be enlightened. And if I believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me.

I pray that for so many of us unsure in our faith through hard times, that will be enough.

Membership hath its privileges

There's an interesting facet of Christianity that I find sometimes hard to swallow on an intellectual level, despite the fact that I take it on faith. People that are not Christians, mostly agnostics and atheists, complain that it's unfair for Christianity to make the claim that it has exclusive access to Truth-with-a-capital-T. If Jesus is going to say "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) then isn't he being rather intolerant? Well aside from the fact that I don't think that this technically fits the actual definition of intolerant, and that Jesus, being God, pretty much has the right to set the rules however He wants, the thing I think this objection misses very often is the fact that Christianity is not the only religion by far that makes claims of exclusivity. Lots and lots of religions claim to be the only "true" religion, and really, it's a whole topic in itself as to why I think that's not only acceptable, but desirable in a religious practice. But this topic of exclusivity is not the "facet" that I really wanted to talk about, although it's somewhat related, I suppose.

The thing about Christianity that I was pondering yesterday evening was part of the whole, "Don't say you'll believe it when you see it, but believe and then you'll see!" phenomenon. While I believe that there is a great deal of Christianity and its doctrines that can be intellectually understood without having to be a Christian, I think all (well, perhaps most) Christians realize that there is an element of faith that only true believers have a grasp on. We evangelicals have what we like to call "a personal relationship with God." What is that, exactly? I don't think I can describe it to someone who hasn't experienced it for themself, which is too bad, since it's what's really at the heart of Christianity when you strip everything else away.

Interestingly enough, and one of the reasons it's related to the topic in the first paragraph, I found myself pondering this in the midst of reading about Zen Buddhism. I realized that exclusivity is not the only thing by far about Christianity that's hard for an outsider to accept, yet is common to many religions. What is at the center of Zen Buddhism? The experience of zen. What is zen? Well, although philosophers of various religious beliefs can talk about it at length and discuss things about zen, zen itself is not something that can be put into words, even by those who have experienced it. In fact, the inability to describe zen is an inherent property of it, the word "zen" meaning essentially "wordlessness".

Such a concept is found in the Bible in a number of ways. Paul wrote about a vision in which "He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell." (2Cor. 12:4) But aside from that special incident, he writes more generally and practically that "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1Cor. 2:14) There is a concept in many religions that there is just a certain level of spiritual enlightenment that only the true believers will ever experience.

Interestingly enough, I'd say that it's a belief that even some atheists harbor in an odd way. I've been told by atheists that if only I would cease to believe in God for a moment, I'd see how ridiculous the Bible and Christianity as a whole are. Perhaps they're right, but if so, aren't they essentially suggesting that there is such a thing as special atheistic enlightenment that only true atheists can experience? What a concept! (It's hardly a common view among atheists in general, though. If atheists were a religious classification as Christianity is, there would probably be as many "sects" of atheism as there are atheists.)

I'm wondering if the only point of this blog is to toss out thoughts on unanswerable questions that I'm not really asking, nor looking for feedback on. I'm not sure what my point is here in general, and it sounds like yesterday's post, with a lot of "well maybe, or maybe not". Are these facets of Christianity logically unacceptable? Yet they're used by so many. I remember the irony of once having a discussion on the value of various "ex-gay" ministries. There was a lesbian who claimed that if any of these sorts of ministries ever had any successes, it wasn't that they were turning homosexuals into non-homosexuals, but that they were turning bisexuals into operative heterosexuals. How could she be so sure? Because if they were able to be attracted to women ever, then they were simply not homosexuals, nor had they ever been. I thought this was a very familiar concept, and realized it was from 1John 2:19: "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us." See, there's no such thing as an ex-Christian; if a person leaves Christianity, it means they were never really a part of it in the first place.

Christianity has its particulars that are strange and hard to understand, but they don't set it apart as particularly wrong so much as just one among many belief systems. Sure, Christianity is special, but not for any of the above reasons.