music/emotions/rambling
06.30.05 (6:20 am) [edit]I was driving home from the airport this AM and was listening to the radio; music keeps me focused when I am on the road. I have a broad range of music that I listen to; Rap, Heavy Metal, Country, World music and some classical. I am by no means a high brow when it comes to what I like to listen to. For the most part I like music that is heavy with the bass with a beat that wants me jump on top of my car and dance while I am going down I-75; a nice thought but not very practical by any stretch of the imagination.
I am not one of those people (never have been) were I need to listen to music all the time; I have no use for Ipods and mp3’s since I would simply not use them enough to warrant spending the money for them. However music is still important and I would like to share an example with you all.
My step-mother died last week at the age of 93. She married my Dad in 1984, not quite one year after my mother died at the age of 63 from emphysema; she was a heavy smoker and could not even stop smoking to extend her life. Now my step-mother was the one who introduced my Mom and Dad so in a since she was sort of a “mother” to begin with since I nor my brothers or sisters, would be here if not for her introducing them to each other. So Dad knew her from way back; she was also 7 years older than him when they married but at their age it did not matter at all. She had only one child and married into a family of 10 children and at the time 13 grandchildren (I think) and of course the tribe is even larger now. Not much chance of my family disappearing anytime soon I think. My dad asks me (just before he got married) what if some of my brothers and sisters did not approve of the marriage. I replied we are adults, get married and we will adjust; he did and we did, adjust. It was not hard to do, Niche was a wonderful women and everyone took to her right away, she fit in, which shows what a together person she really was.
Well since she came into our lives so late, and while we all loved her; I called mom and dad every week; her death was not the same as when our birth mother died, we were sad but not over come with mourning, she was 93 after all and ready to go. About three days after she died I was in the car listening to some music and while doing that I started to think back on Niche, you know remembering how she would laugh, how kind and generous she was with others, her love and caring for dad etc. I begin to fell very tender thoughts about her and it was then that I started to mourn for her. It was the music that opened the door for me to able to feel and experience her loss.
Music does get me in touch with a whole world of emotion that I would most likely never feel if there was no music in my life. I am comfortable with the “harder’ emotions; anger, fear etc; but the softer emotions are a whole world that I am still discovering a little at a time. I remember about ten years ago I bought a CD by “Drum Sister” called “Dadawa” and while listening to it felt something on my face; it was tears and I was amazed, I was crying something I have never been able to really do (as an adult). I have always been intrigued on how some people can shed tears; something I have always wanted to do…. and always thought what a relief it would be to be able to do that to just let go. I find it a mystery….crying. As I get older I find that movies and music helps me in this regard and helps to break the bubble that I have placed around my heart. I think this will probably shorten my life but I don’t think there is anything I can do about it but slowly allow myself to feel more on a deeper level. To bad it has to come through secondary causes; perhaps one day they will not be needed.
I often feel like a stallion that needs to be restrained when it comes to some of my emotions, something I have worked with all my life. I can really be a horse’s ass if I allow my anger full reign and could really make others miserable if I gave in to it. In the imitation of Christ it states that it is our temperament that is our greatest cross; that is true for me. I wish I was more of an “earth” person; one who is grounded instead of “fire” it wearies me at times. Of course perhaps it is my inner fire that allows me to feel such joy in music, dancing, movies…..a trade off.
I don’t know how many years I have left to live, but I will never stop trying to be a more loving and compassionate person no matter how many times I fail; like they say two steps forward and one step back. Some times I think it is for me one step forward and five steps back….well there is progress no matter how slow.
I feel God’s grace gently encouraging me, to get up and to focus on the journey, others and yes God.
Peace
mitch
tolerant/faithful
06.29.05 (12:33 pm) [edit]I have been interested in God all my life and as far back as I can remember, trying to develop some sort of relationship with this greatest of mysteries.....which is common enough I guess in the over all population. As we age our understanding of God and our inherited traditions can change and deepen, or wither and die, I suppose it mostly depends on our earliest experiences were and how we dealt with them. In any case not to move forward is to either slip back or to push off in another direction altogether.
Many people as they get older seem to move away from the "God" question and just live out their lives and follow whatever religious tradition that they grew up in. This can be a very good thing since it gives them a place to work from, and some direction on how they should relate to others, and also insight into the problems that come up that is common in all of our lives....also it needs to be mentioned that their faith gives them, and I guess all of us, a real sense of community and support, which goes a long way in helping deal with the ups and downs of life. So their faith is the background on which they live their lives some on a deeper level than others. However not much reflection is done by most in this group since the questions that they had are answered and nothing more is needed....which can be a good thing if they don't become too narrow and dogmatic in what they hold to be true.
Some grow in becoming deeply rooted in their faith path, through study, and are a great help to those who need to understand certain things about their traditions; these people can be good spiritual directors to those who wish to grow in their relationship with God by using the theology and tools used by their particular faith expression, and can also be a support when they enter the "dark night of the soul" experience and need to move beyond a static idea of God. They are deeply anchored in their faith and through their mediations and prayers grow into very wise and caring people.
Others who study become more "liberal" I guess..... don't have any other word for it.... and they try to incorporate their learning and experiences into their faith tradition. They may be less literal in their interpretation of scripture, become more inclusive in their understanding of how God works in the world, and because of that they may seek support from like minded people from other traditions who think along the same lines as they do. This group is also more open to doubt and use it to deepen their faith, and while it tends to be very broad in scope they still identify themselves with the religion that they grew up in.
Others move away from their religion altogether and become "spiritual" and draw from other systems of spirituality, or become agnostic or atheistic in their understanding of how the world just "is". These people can at times be difficult to dialogue or debate with, since 'some' of them have moved in one of those directions because of their past experiences, which causes them to remain closely chained to their past by their anger or strong negative feelings for the faith of their youth. Funny how anger does that, we would like to flee what angers us but in the end that strong emotion is the deepest kind of intimacy, not much different really from love at least in its binding power. I am not downplaying the pain that these people go through and I hope that those who find themselves in this dilemma will be able to find peace and healing. I suppose most of us carry some wounds from our past association with our faith, so it is easy to have compassion and empathy for those whose wounds go so deep that it has driven them away from their particular childhood religious community.
Now those who take the above path out of true conviction usually are easier to talk to and are more open to dialogue since they do not carry the anger or wounds that keep them bound to their past. The may still be knitted to the faith community of their past in some way but not chained.
Now I know that people cannot be boxed in to simple groups like the above but I think for religious people one of the above may be the main focus on their unique faith journey. I don't think one is better than the other since God's grace is operative and growth happens, just in different ways. The problem comes when the above groups cluster and look down on the others, for it is a common human fault to try to find some way to shine above "those others" who are not following the true path. This is a shame since balance is needed by all and one way of doing that is too simply to listen and learn from on another.
Really all it really boils down to is different personality types and also past experience etc. I don't think we are all that free to choose on how we relate to the world and others (though I think we have the choice to grow in understanding of others or choose not to), so it is useless to denigrate others who are different than I am. It all comes down to being able to ask the right questions and being able to listen in the right spirit, so to speak. Of course this is easier than it sounds and I do fail sometimes, hence the reason for this post, since I am writing about my own issues in some of my post and I suppose this is one of them.
All in all I guess it is good to try to be tolerant beliefs without having to step back from ones own. We all have rich experiences and if we could just learn to listen I guess we would all be richer for it.
One thing I have learned is this. If I want to find about atheism I will try to find a good intelligent author to read on the subject and not some tract written by some group outside that particular belief system. The same holds for other religions. If I want to deepen my understanding of Buddhism for instance I will try to find a Buddhist writer that is clear and can answer my question; I will not go to a Christian source for this information; later maybe but not at first. Atheist are not good reading for those seeking the truth or insights to other religions; in other words go to the source and don't get second hand information if it can be helped. Ones faith is not compromised by trying to be fair, open and even handed with other belief systems. Treat others as you yourself would like to be treated.
Peace
Mark
waiting/being seen
06.29.05 (7:16 am) [edit]Sometimes I get the feeling that life is about waiting, sort of like being in the waiting area of the airport. For me the wait sometimes seems long, and a certain fatigue comes into play; as well as boredom at times. I often feel that something is coming, or perhaps it is that I am moving towards an event that will change everything; for good or ill I don’t know. Is it death that I am waiting for (?), or is it a desire for a greater life that has been planted into my heart and soul? At times while I am waiting I get a feeling of homesickness for something “other” than what I am experiencing or have experienced so far in life. At other times when I am either taking care of someone an have a certain connection with them, or with friends I seem to get a foretaste of what I desire above all else. I think that desire is to simply be “seen” for whom and what I am wrinkles and all and still loved and accepted.
One of the reasons, in my opinion, for the loneliness felt in human interaction is our inability to be able to work thru our projections, and transferences with others; I can be so busy interrupting the other and then possibly reacting to that interpretation that I totally miss the one who is in front of me. Carl Jung once said that any relationship that begins with either a strong attraction or repulsion is based on our propensity to project and have the person mirror back to us things that we either don’t want to see, or beautiful attributes or qualities that we have but are not developed. So actual friendship is hard to come by; friendship can only happen when both parties know each other and that there is a calmness in the relationship; urgent need is a big hindrance to any kind of deep abiding union. So friendship and marriage involve hard work after the honeymoon is over.
Sex can also get in the way if entered into to early (my experience only) since the need to copulate will override the need to communicate and get to know one another one a deeper level. The sexual act is so powerful and the tension so great between to people infatuated with other that it totally eclipses the need for other avenues of growth. The sexual tension when gone often levels the relationship out side of sex, to merely hanging out but no real desire to know each other, but only building things up for next encounter in bed. If the relationship is stuck there then both parties end up using each other and when that happens then end is often near. Not always of course since some people like relationships to stay at that level; however I don’t know many who are like that.
We desire to be “seen” and also fear it. I suppose for those who believe in God, one hurdle to be overcome is the knowledge that God already “sees” everything, so nothing is hidden. The problem is allowing ourselves to be “seen” by God consciously, to open up our deepest being to the loving gaze of God, a gaze that is there already but not connected to on a level of conscious relationship. Again what is one to do with “infinite love”; I don’t understand it, it would be more than human love no matter how powerful and the experience of such love may not always be pleasant, especially the way life seems to pan out. God does not project or suffer from transferences with us, God “sees” truly and that is why God can show mercy to all. To understand all is to forgive all. What I desire is already there, it is I who often fail to trust the “see-ing-ness” of God.
I think I wandered a bit with this post but will post it anyway.
Peace
Mitch
Humor
06.28.05 (12:11 pm) [edit]I was reading Nocturn's blog (journalspace) this AM, in which he related his experience on the subway with what seems like the archetypal blond (in other words a goddess); so I can understand his reaction and also his shyness in talking to the young lady. What struck me is the tale brought back memories of my own fumbling in trying to interact with the opposite sex and with it a smile; in other words it was humorous. So the painful experiences I had as a young man seems funny to me know. Humor is like that. Like watching a sit-com or reading the funnies in the newspaper; something I love to do. The characters in the comedy or funnies are not having a good time, it is the reader or watchers who get the kick out of the situation, since it most likely resonates with some experience from our past and allows us to laugh at ourselves. Carl Jung said "never trust someone without a sense of humor", since such a person has no self-knowledge and is very fragile. Yes humor can be cruel at times but it also allows us to laugh at the ups and downs of life; humor is truly a quality that is underrated and I think should be studied more. For instance those who work with the elderly and dying do find certain situations filled with humor, that are at the same time tragic; it allows us to continue with our work. I would suppose that burn out would come much quicker if some kind of humor was not experienced by all of us in our lives. By the way, Nocturn's blog is well worth reading, a very good writer and gut wrenchingly honest in what he writes. (http://nocturne.journalspace.com/" title="http://nocturne.journalspace.com/" target="_blank"http://nocturne.journalspace....) There are sooooooooo many good writers out there; thank God for blogs that give them a chance for them all, to enrich our (my) lives. peace mitch |
Clinging
06.27.05 (11:05 am) [edit]| Clinging |
You would think, that with my working with the elderly I would get used to aging and death. I suppose in a way I am but there are times when I wish old age could be experienced differently by those lucky enough to reach that stage in life. While it is true that most people spend active lives until the last few months, this is not true for many who seem to live in a limbo like existence for many years. There are also people that I know who seem to have more soul, light and love than what you would ordinarily find in people; they have a grace about them that actually fills one with joy just to be around them. Francis X is one of the men I take care of who is one of these people and his sister is the same. Last night I was able to talk to Francis’s niece and her husband who were visiting him. After a few minutes of small talk I asked about Francis sister who is really very special to me. She is 85 years old and just had a stroke and though she has recovered for the most part, there are differences. She is ok for instance if she is around two or three people but if the number goes up she gets very confused; also she can’t cook the way she was to do in the past. As we were talking about her I was filled with a certain sadness at her diminishment and how her death is not far down the road. It is times like this that I wish I could stop time and extend life for these special people, for when they die a light truly goes out in the world. Having faith may give a certain meaning to our lives and also to our deaths, but it does not take away its “kick”; a kick that can take the breath away and leave one grasping in shock and pain. This world is beautiful but impermanent, time seems to fold in on itself when I think about not only my life, but the lives of those I loved and have moved on. Nothing can be grasped at, held or owned, even though we can fool ourselves that in fact we can grasp on to things and owned them, when in fact they own us. The paradox for me is that joy comes with letting go but that is very hard at times to do. Sometimes I will grasp on to something or someone even though I know that in the end it is not for my benefit nor for those I am attached to since it is based on a delusion. Faith is not something for the weak; it is a conscious choice not to give in to cynicism or despair, to believe in the light even if one is only surrounded by darkness, to love even when the experience seems to be the opposite. “God” is a convenient term we use for something that is unknowable that is not human (though as a Christian I believed the Word did take flesh), and that any revelation of God is just that, for we tend to forget that revelations are limited and not complete. Even humans never really get to know each other and when we think we do then the relationship is in trouble since listening and openness are lost. So life is brief, we live a short time, and what am I to do? Well for me to grow in love is the most important thing, to see the beauty in others and not to (or try not to) box in people in containers that are too small to hold them. Each person is a deep mystery and when we lose that then the “others” become card board figures that are in our lives to help us live out our own private drama. Empathy is the way out of that trap. For me empathy is like a switch in my soul that I can switch on if I am conscious enough of myself at any given time; when this is done a great weight drops off of me since I am freed of the pain and suffering of making myself judge over others. There is good reason why we are told not to judge, we simply can’t read the heart of another, only God can do that. However connecting with our common humanity allows us to be merciful and compassionate. So as I get older I am trying not to cling, since the nature of life is that it is impermanent and also it is our nature to wear out; loved ones wear out and I need to embrace that and find joy in that also. Pain is always with us but how I suffer is more of a choice based on attitude, faith etc. Peace Mitch |
Attaining happiness, joy, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy.
06.26.05 (5:47 am) [edit]This is probably not as easy as it sounds; a good read, I think it is more than just "positive thinking" which I really don't like; well maybe it was the book "the power of positive thinking"; I did not like for some reason
Peace
mitch
Attaining happiness, joy, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy.
This article is from Rabbi Zelig Pliskin's new book: "THANK YOU! Gratitude: Formulas, Stories, and Insights."
"I used to live in a dark world. I didn't realize how needlessly dark it was until I transformed what I saw and realized that I was living in a world of light the entire time."
This was told to me by an elderly gentleman many years ago. He radiated joy. He spoke with a deep sense of compassion and caring for others. I was fascinated. "Please tell me about your life and how you became to be the way you are."
"I was on the negative side. I easily focused on what was wrong with things. I saw what was wrong with what people did for me, and complained about what they didn't do. There were always things that were missing from what I would have wanted. I blamed other people for irritating me. Nothing was ever perfect enough. The sentences that would travel through my mind were consistently negative and full of complaints. I felt emotionally distressed most of the time. I felt that I was this way because of my personality, because of the way I was raised, because things are never perfect. But the main place I didn't look for my sense of happiness and well-being was in my mind.
"Then one day my entire world seemed to crumble. I was in a serious car accident. I was told I might not live. That was the most painful thing I ever heard in my life. It hurt me more than the physical pain. I thought about my entire life. The thought that was the strongest was that I had wasted much of the blessing in my life with my own sense of ingratitude. I was ungrateful to the Creator, ungrateful to the people who did the most for me, and ungrateful for everyone who did things for me my entire life. I was committed that if I would live, I would become a master of gratitude. I would appreciate all that the Almighty keeps giving me. I will appreciate His world. I will appreciate the opportunities He sends my way. I would appreciate everything and anything that anyone has done for me already and would do for me in the future.
"When I came to this realization, I felt lighter. I felt better than I had felt in a long time even though I was in pain and I didn't know what would be with me. I told myself that I wasn't going to make the mistake I had been making my entire life. I wasn't going to say that I will be grateful only if I get better and all is perfect. I was totally resolved to be become a totally grateful person from that moment on.
"The recovery period was long. But I felt grateful for every drop of improvement. I needed to come on to the kindnesses of others. I was grateful for all that everyone did for me. My entire life was filled with gratitude.
"People told me that they enjoyed being around me. My joyful way of being made them feel good. They were happy to do things for me; they gained by being in my presence since emotions are contagious. I am grateful to the Almighty for His wake-up call. I am grateful for the flow of spiritual and emotional abundance in my life."
Everyone has much to be grateful for. Gratitude creates happiness and joy. Gratitude helps you be calm and serene. Gratitude helps you connect with and love the Creator. Gratitude elevates your entire life.
By mastering gratitude, you will become truly alive. Here are 10 formulas to master gratitude.
1. Picture how great you will feel when you master gratitude. We all want to live happy lives. After studying happiness for over 30 years, I have found that a key element in every person who is truly happy is: They are grateful for all that they can be grateful for. A grateful person is a joyful person. People who are lacking happiness wonder about the missing ingredient. When you master gratitude yourself, you will easily recognize that the missing ingredient was: Gratitude.
2. Here is a one-sentence formula for becoming a grateful person: Think, Speak, and Act like a grateful person does. There is no mystery about how to become a person who has internalized the attribute of gratitude. Think gratefully. Speak gratefully. Act gratefully. When you consistently do these three things, you are consistently grateful. Even before this pattern has become consistent for you, every little bit of thinking, speaking, and acting this way makes you more grateful than if you wouldn't have thought, spoken, or acted this way.
3. You will notice what you are looking for. Someone who loves flowers notices them even though others would just pass them by. Someone who is looking for things to complain about will notice what he is looking for. And someone who hates litter will see the litter rather than seeing the birds and the flowers. Consider it important to be grateful. Then you will notice more and more kind things that others do for you. And you will remember more kind things that others have done for you in the past. These will serve as reminders for you to do similar things for others.
4. View yourself as being a person who is grateful and fervently wants to keep upgrading his level of gratitude. Your self-image creates you. Who are you? "I am a person who is full of gratitude for all that I can be grateful for." When this is how you consider yourself, you will say and do more things that will be an expression of gratitude.
5. A question you can ask yourself any time you wish is, "What am I grateful for right now?" How will it affect your life if you build up the habit of asking this question to yourself at least ten times a day? The only way that you can know for sure is to actually do it. Someone once told me that he felt annoyed by his father's habit of saying, "You know," every few sentences. He spoke to his father about it and his father found it too difficult for him to eliminate the "You knows." You know how it is, don't you? I suggested that each time he hears his father say, "You know," he should immediately ask himself, "What am I grateful for?" Not only did he become more grateful to his father, he added much gratitude and happiness to his entire life. He even became grateful to his father for having this habit.
6. Keep a gratitude journal. Thinking about gratitude is wonderful. But writing down what you are grateful for in a journal will have a much stronger effect. Seeing the items adding up on paper, gives you an ever-increasing realization that you have much for which to be grateful. Some find it beneficial to make a quota of at least five or ten things a day. Whenever you want an emotional lift, take out your journal and read it.
7. Be grateful for all your skills, abilities, talents, knowledge, inner resources and outer resources. As I am typing this, I am grateful that I can type and I am grateful to my mother for teaching me how to type when I was a young boy. When you read this, be grateful that you know how to read and that you are adding gratitude as one of your precious inner resources.
8. Be grateful for your memory and brain. The latest estimate is that we all have over 100 billion brain cells. Wherever you go, your brain with all its memories of gratitude go with you. You can access those life-enhancing memories any time you wish. What do you hear more often, people complaining about their memory or people being grateful for their magnificent, miraculous giant computer? The amount of memory the average person has stored in such a small area is mind-boggling. Some people tend to be upset by what they can't remember. Whenever you can't remember something, immediately, say to yourself, "I am grateful for all that I do remember."
9. Whenever you hear a telephone ringing, say to yourself, "I am grateful I am alive and I am grateful I can hear." The more often you will hear telephones ringing, the easier it will be for you to increase your level of gratitude.
10. Associate the word gratitude with: happiness, joy, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy. How do you do this? Whenever you feel positive feelings of gratitude, enthusiastically say, "Happiness, joy, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy." If you want to make this really work well, look in a mirror as you do so. Think thoughts of gratitude and see the smile of gratitude on your face. As you keep applying these 10 formulas, you will create yourself into a happy, grateful person.
© 2005 Zelig Pliskin
This article is from Rabbi Zelig Pliskin's new book: "THANK YOU! Gratitude: Formulas, Stories, and Insights."
Published: Sunday, May 22, 2005
Communication/listening
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Mitch
They're Back! Church Bulletin Bloopers
06.23.05 (6:05 am) [edit]They're Back! Church Bulletin Bloopers: Thank God for church personnel and volunteers with typewriters and word processors
These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services:
Bertha Belch, a missionary from Africa, will be speaking tonight at Calvary Methodist. Come hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa.
The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
The sermon this morning: "Jesus Walks on the Water." The sermon tonight: "Searching for Jesus."
Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 PM in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.
Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget your husbands.
The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.
Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community.
Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who doesn't care much about you.
Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.
Barbara remains in the hospital and needs blood donors for more transfusions. She is also having trouble sleeping and requests tapes of Pastor Jack's sermons.
The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing: "Break Forth Into Joy."
Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.
A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.
At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.
Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.
Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
Please place your donation in the envelope a long with the deceased person you want remembered.
Attend and you will hear an excellent speaker and heave a healthy lunch. The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.
Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow.
The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.
Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B.S. is done.
The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next week.
The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
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I'm Not Dead Yet by Gregory Koukl
06.22.05 (1:42 am) [edit]I'm Not Dead Yet by Gregory Koukl
Why are human beings valuable? What is a human being? You have to answer those questions before you can say that this child isn't a human being without value.
I had a fascinating discussion with some Christian friends and some non-Christian acquaintances last evening at a dinner party. It reminded me of something that Chuck Colson said last year when he addressed the Harvard Business School on the issue of ethics. He said, "Every person has an infinite capacity for self-rationalization." I think about that often. Although this immediate application has to do with how non-Christians often rationalize their unbelief, I think about it in another way. Am I just seeking some answer, any answer, for what I happen to believe now , grasping about for any solution to a problem Christianity presents, no matter how thin that solution may be? Some proposed solutions to questions people raise are just not adequate, yet we believe them because it assuages out doubt. "There's something I can hold onto," even though it may not be a real good solution to the problem we're facing. They're enough to calm our fears, our doubts, for the moment, but other people see right through them.
This is a good reason we should always be vigilant as we seek to justify our faith. We need to always come back to two things when we confront these issues: are our facts accurate and is our reasoning sound. That's the long and short of it when seeking correspondence truth, truth that corresponds to reality. If there's a problem with our thinking, either our facts are wrong our reasoning wrong. But if our reasoning is sound and our facts are right, then there's no escaping the truthfulness of our conclusions. It's the way reason and logic works. We all live in a world where our survival depends upon that. So that's why we should be vigilant and ask ourselves, "Is this a good explanation or am I just grasping for a rationalization that will help me cling to my belief?"
In any event, we had a discussion last night that reminded me of Colson's remark. It was a discussion about how we make ethical decisions.
I had made a comment, which I have made here, that people do ethics by determining what they want and then reasoning backwards and rationalizing their conclusion based on what they really want. I call it happiness as ethics. "This is what I want in my circumstance. This will cause me the least discomfort, this will make me happy. How can I justify this?"
Of course, I think that's reasoning backwards about ethics. We talked about not making ad hoc decisions about ethics. In other words, not facing an ethical decision and as they come up, thinking what sounds best and spouting off about it. But first examining in our lives what it is we believe, what is truth, what is right and wrong, and then reasoning from a foundation of truth to an applicational situation that we might face. And one came up yesterday.
In Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, three weeks ago a little girl was born with anencephaly. Most of her brain was missing and she only had a brain stem, but she was still alive. She had reflex functions but no cognitive functions. 95% of such babies are dead within a week, and virtually all die within two weeks.
The reason this case was so controversial is that anencephalitic children make great organ donors, but their organs must be removed while they're still alive, and that means the children must be killed to harvest the organs that will save the lives of other children. Technically this is called non-voluntary active euthanasia, in other words, a case where the life is purposefully taken from an individual who cannot decide for themselves. In this case, of course, the end in view was clear--saving the lives of other children with the organs of a child who was going to die shortly anyway.
When the parents sought the permission of the courts to allow this action, the courts ruled against them and the reasoning was that the child wasn't dead yet and therefore it would be against the law to take organs that would kill the child.
I listened to some radio discussions about this issue on a secular station, and characteristically people were not just in disagreement but enraged at the judge's decision. I heard remarks like:
"We're not killing a human being. This little baby is not a human being." "This may be a human body, but it's not a human person because it doesn't have that which distinguishes it from animals."
"Did this judge think the baby would grow a brain? She'll never develop into a person."
"This judge is killing other babies that will die without the organs."
"This is not a decision for courts but a decision for parents ."
Now, listening to those comments I'm struck by two things. First of all, they sound pretty sensible. There's a basic appeal to those sentiments. But also there are some things that are a tad curious. I quote, "This little baby is not a human being." Of course, before one can say this is not a human being, he must have a pretty clear idea of what a human being is before he can say that any particular child is not one. And it strikes me that there's something patently unusual about saying that it's possible that any particular child could not be a human being. A baby isn't a human being? A child isn't a human being? How can a baby or a child not be a human being? But what is it that distinguishes us from animals if it is not our innate humanness?
So this whole issue hinges on what a human being is and what, if anything, makes a human being valuable. Why are human beings valuable? What is a human being? You have to answer those questions before you can say that this child isn't a human being without value.
The pragmatic, utilitarian answer to this dilemma is clear: take the organs because of the good that will come out of it. OK, maybe we have to kill the little girl early, but she would die soon anyway and there's an advantage to others to taking her now and gathering the organs.
I don't mean to be irreverent here, but this reminds me of a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was a Medieval scene and a man was dragging a cart through town in the early morning chanting "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead." People were bringing out the corpses of those who had kicked the bucket during the night and throwing them on this old haywain. And some young guy comes over and he's got an old man over his shoulder. He's about to throw this old man into the pile with all the other corpses and the old man says something. He says, "I'm not dead yet." The young man speaks to the man gathering the corpses and says, "He'll be dead soon, anyway." The old man says, "I'm getting better." So the young man picks up a log, bangs him on the head, kills him and throws him on the pile.
The way this story relates to the issue is that this unfortunate little girl was not dead yet. Because she would be dead shortly was no justification for hurrying the process along simply because there was a convenience to her earlier demise.
And this is where we start reasoning backwards. We first think about what it is that we think is right or what it is that we want and then seek to develop some ad hoc justification for it. If we reason that way, instead of first starting with the fundamental question "What is a human being and why are they valuable?" then we're in for all sorts of trouble.
I was asked point blank last evening if I thought it was OK to harvest the organs in this case. I said no, and then explained why. And for those of you who are utilitarian on this issue, this isn't going to sit well with you, but please hear me out. I start from a certain premise. My premise is that I believe human beings have infinite worth and are not to be treated merely as a means to an end, even if the end itself is a good one.
If we were to take the case of this little girl, we would have to say that her life is not as valuable as the end to which we will use her organs. It is not a trade off one life for five lives, if her organs would save five other children. We must view her life as infinitely valuable in and of itself and not a means to an end. And it may be true that killing one person would save the lives of five, but we won't look at human beings that way.
During the Vietnam War, if a man was wounded, they would send in helicopter after helicopter after helicopter to try to rescue that one life because it was so valuable. The loss of other life was risked to save the one.
It's the same with this little girl. We don't have the right to say her life is forfeit to save the life of someone else.
The fact is, we're all going to die eventually. If we transfer this reasoning, there is a slippery slope that is deadly in all of this. We can see this slippery slope happening. Whenever you argue quality of life, it ultimately has a poison pill buried in it. The only way you can argue quality of life is to say the life as a life, the human being as a human being, is not valuable in itself. And it has value in as much as it leads to a certain quality of life. Once you argue that way, you've destroyed something. Something that is the foundation of our Constitution and all our fundamental rights, that all men are created equal.
The only way I can illustrate this clearly is by asking a question I asked last night and I've also asked rhetorically here on this program: Are all humans created equal? Of course, it's in our Constitution. How are all men created equal? Men are not equal except in one way--they are all men. This statement "all men are created equal" is tantamount to saying all men have inherent dignity apart from any other quality they can experience or value they bring to society. Upon that truth our system of justice and human respect and dignity stand. If we remove that, there is no reason to treat people with respect, there is no reason to protect human rights, there is no reason not to treat human beings as animals. There is no reason not to treat human beings as simply a means to another end.
That's the circumstance that prevails whenever a quality of life argument is used. That's the poison pill.
Pardon me for using this illustration because it's oft over used, but that's precisely what happened in Nazi Germany. There was an idea that there was such a thing as a life unworthy to be lived. If that's the case, then human beings are expendable.
If you ever watched the TV mini-series "The Holocaust" with James Woods as an artist. In that movie they depicted the destruction of people not just in concentration camps, but prior to that. Before they started to destroy Jews and Gypsies and political dissidents, they first started destroying retarded children, people with brain defects. And they put them into vans and piped in carbon monoxide and killed them all. They looked on it as good because these people were difficult, they were expensive, they were awkward. They didn't have the quality of life required of the Third Reich. They were expendable. And from that came the Holocaust.
I submit to you that we're thinking the same way. Every time you raise a quality of life argument or discussion you have this poison pill of the fundamental loss of human dignity and the loss of the foundation for all human rights.
At least that's the way I see it.
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He walks in the silence
06.21.05 (4:45 pm) [edit]He walks in the silence |
God walks the dark hills The ways, the by ways He walks through the billows Of life's troubled sea He walks through the cold dark night The shadows of midnight God walks the dark hills Just to guide you and me Chorus: God walks the dark hills To guide my footsteps He walks everywhere By night and by day He walks in the silence On down the highway God walks the dark hills To show me the way. God walks in the storm The rain and the sunshine He walks on the billows On through glimmering light Helps us walk up the mountain so high Cross our rivers through valleys God walks the dark hills 'Cause he loves you and me Repeat chorus Music: Iris Dement "God Walks The Dark Hills" |
The study of death and dying
06.18.05 (4:26 pm) [edit]The study of death and dying
When we talk about studying the process of dying one name stands out, that of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (EKR). Born and raised in Switzerland EKR came to America in the late 1950s as a young, newly married doctor. Being a woman and a foreigner meant that she got the less attractive jobs at American hospitals, but her compassion and empathy for her patients became legendary.
EKR did not understand the way dying patients were treated in American hospitals. In Switzerland the dying were cared for at home and they remained part of the family until the end. There death was a natural part of life, but this did not seem to be the case in the USA. Here the dying were treated as outcasts and once impending death had been diagnosed the patients were left to die all by themselves. The dying were the lepers of the American society and did not fit in well with its youth culture. They were a lost cause and nobody seemed to care what they thought.
Courageously Elisabeth Kübler-Ross set out to change all that. Through her work with the dying she realized that something had to be done to focus on the needs of people approaching the end of life. She initiated a project in which she interviewed a number of dying patients in the presence of medical students and nurses. Although her work did not meet with the approval of the established medical profession, the dying patients loved her for the attention they suddenly got. This work led to her book "On Death and Dying" which was published in 1969.
In this book EKR analyses the stages of dying and suggests that the dying patient goes through the following stages: First stage: Denial and isolation, Second stage: Anger, Third stage: Bargaining, Fourth stage: Depression and Fifth stage: Acceptance. The book became a great success and gradually the focus shifted towards putting more emphasis on the needs of the dying. Innumerable seminars were held and EKR became a very sought after lecturer all over the world. She has published close to twenty titles to this day. Hospices where the dying are cared for according to her ideas have been established in numerous countries.
After having been present at a very large number of deathbeds and after watching a large number of people die, including many children, EKR was able to conclude that there is no final death. At the hour of death something, which we could call the soul, leaves the physical body behind just as the butterfly leaves its cocoon and flies away. What is left is the cocoon, the physical vehicle, the discarded mantle, but the real "I" has flown away.
EKR recounts the case of a child who had been seriously wounded in a car accident in which, unknown to him, also his mother and brother had been fatally injured and had been taken to a different hospital. Just before passing away the child looked at EKR and said that now everything was all right, as his mother and brother were waiting for him in heaven and he would now rejoin them. Then he died peacefully.
EKR's body of work is a strong argument for the non-existence of death. Based on her own lifelong experience as a doctor specializing in death and dying, her writing establishes a strong case for revising our traditional view of death. Death is not the end, but merely a transition of our self to another plane of existence.
Among Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' many excellent books the following stand out: "On Death and Dying", "Living with Death and Dying", "Death: The Final Stage of Growth", "To Live Until We Say Goodbye", "On Life After Death", "On Children and Death", "Death Is of Vital Importance" and "The Wheel of Life" (her autobiography).
An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson
06.18.05 (6:24 am) [edit]Berkeley’s Radical
An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson
James M. Kushiner interviewed Johnson while attending a conference on Intelligent Design at Yale University in November 2000.
Touchstone: Dr. Johnson, tell us about your upbringing. Were you raised in a Christian home?
Phillip Johnson (PJ): Well, I grew up in Aurora, Illinois. We went to Sunday school because it was good for us kids. We’d drop my dad off at the golf course on the way. My mother told me I had to stay until I got confirmed, then I could go my own way. During high school I went to a liberal Congregationalist church, but I never took Christian doctrine seriously. It was just part of the culture, like the Boy Scouts. It was about being nice.
I went to Harvard at 17 and assumed I was leaving all that behind. I had every intention of simply adopting the Harvard philosophy, which was secular, pragmatic, and rational, because that’s what you did if you wanted to be a big deal.
When did you go to Harvard?
PJ: In 1957, which was a significant year, the year of Sputnik. Sputnik created a completely new situation in American higher education because it scared the government; they thought we were going to lose our scientific preeminence. So they poured an enormous amount of money into the universities, especially for science. That’s when the biological sciences curriculum really got started.
When you were at Harvard, were you on the “left” or the “right”?
PJ: I played at being the leftist, but I came from a conservative Midwestern background, so my instincts were always in that direction. I was just trying out my wings.
But when I got to the University of Chicago Law School, I discovered that all the bright people weren’t liberals. I heard about Milton Friedman and George Stigler and other leading American economists whom I was never told about at Harvard. It was a bit of an eye-opener.
But unlike many people who go to Chicago, I didn’t quite “eat the whole enchilada,” which allowed me to be more flexible. I didn’t completely buy into the market ideology, though I respected it.
I did well in law school, which put me in line to get top judicial clerkships, and then eventually became a professor. One of the biggest decisions I made in my life was choosing Berkeley instead of Yale. When I was a Supreme Court clerk, I was eagerly recruited by both, but I decided I’d rather live in Berkeley. The Berkeley law professors were more like me—public-school types. The Yale professors were a little too preppy for me. I thought, “Well, I’ll never be a member of the club there,” so I went to Berkeley.
I was a perfectly ordinary, middle-of-the-road secular rationalist, and a half-educated intellectual. I did well on tests but never worked very hard at my studies. I look back now and see that I didn’t really know very much. I probably was a pretty ignorant person.
When did you go to Berkeley?
PJ: I started teaching law at Berkeley in 1967. In the 1970s they had even more student unrest at Harvard and Yale than at Berkeley. After I was at Berkeley and saw the student revolution up close, I found it wasn’t very interesting. The leftist riots were old hat, and I got fed up with the irrational self-righteousness. This experience, which would have been the same at Yale, pushed me into a much more conservative set of views.
How did you come to realize the secular view lacked something? Obviously, one of the most important decisions you made was to become a Christian. How did that happen?
PJ: I became disillusioned during my thirties. The whole idea of the exciting campus ferment and student ideas became a disappointment. The academic career was also a disappointment. I think my motives for going into it, for everything I did, were rather shallow. I was basically an academic careerist seeking tenure, writing law review articles and a casebook. I had the career, but I was bored with it. I thought life ought to be more fulfilling than that. I was beginning to grow up.
I had been very happily married for some years, and then my marriage went bad. My wife got a heavy dose of the ideas that were rolling around in the ’70s. She lost interest in our home and family and went off into artistic politics. After we split up, I took care of the kids. So I was disillusioned with my home life, my marriage, and my academic career.
In terms of my religious views during this period, what I usually say is, “I was raised as a nominal Christian and then I became a nominal agnostic.” I didn’t have any passion for it. In fact, I had read some of C. S. Lewis’s books when I was in college and law school and admired them. I thought that they were attractive but not for people like me in modern times. “Too bad they aren’t true” was my reaction.
When my marriage ended, I wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life. That’s when I had my conversion experience. This, I think, is true of many people; what leads you to a conversion is the loss of your faith in something else. My faith had been, “If you’re a bright person with the right credentials, you’ll have a happy and meaningful life.” I expected that I would go from one distinguished position to the next, advance my career, be happy and satisfied, and that’s what life would be about. It seemed to me that wasn’t happening, and I was just going to be a law teacher for the rest of my life. It wasn’t very meaningful or as good as I thought it would be. So I lost faith during that pragmatic period. Instead, I thought, “What makes me think that what I have is better than the Christian life?”
So I became a Christian when I was 38 and met my present wife, Kathie, at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. Our lives were centered in that church. Kathie had been raised in a nominal Methodist home, and her first husband, like my first wife, had been very anti-Christian. So you might say we were negatively evangelized by our first spouses.
My conversion was gradual, not dramatic. The central issue for me was whether Christianity was real or imaginary. I lived in a society at the university that mostly assumed an easy-going agnosticism. So I felt it was necessary to come to a conclusion on whether Christian metaphysics were real or imaginary, or if I would be throwing my brains out the window and adopting a myth because it satisfied my personal needs.
How did you resolve that question?
PJ: First, I took up jurisprudence, the philosophical roots of law. That was in the wake of the emergence of what we call the Critical Legal Studies movement, which was the postmodernist, deconstructionist, epistemological relativism and Marxism that were in the English departments and had just come into the law schools, especially at Harvard and Stanford. I found it quite interesting. I was asked by the Stanford Law Review to contribute a negative piece to a volume of articles by leading members of the movement because they wanted an outsider’s view.
I spent a whole year on that, reading these dense 120-page law review articles, studying continental philosophy, and so on, and developed a love-hate relationship with neo-Marxism. I disliked the infantile leftist politics intensely. I did agree with their critique of liberal rationalism and legal scholarship—where the law professor and the judge say, “Well, you there, you have your passions and your prejudices and your interests, whereas I just peer into the Constitution and decide what justice is.” It’s what I called the sham neutrality of liberal rationalism.
One of the leading examples of that was in the section on religion. In my article—my study guide of sham neutrality—I used as my textbook example the decision of the California Supreme Court on the government funding of abortions. The US Supreme Court said, “You have the right to get an abortion, but it’s not unconstitutional for Congress to refuse to fund abortions as part of medical care.” However, the California Supreme Court decided the issue the other way around; they said, “You do have to fund it.” The justification for that conclusion began, “Now, we’re not saying anything about the morality of abortion, we simply don’t take any stance on that. All we’re saying is that abortion has to be treated like other forms of child-birth decisions.” So I said, “Well, why don’t you say, ‘We’re not saying anything about the morality of abortion, we just feel it has to be treated as the equivalent of other forms of homicide?’” The classification was a moral statement, so it was a sham neutrality.
I used to refer jokingly to myself as the entire right wing of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which in their view was a contradiction in terms. Their critique was purely the instrument of a left-wing political program, which was chosen arbitrarily and presumed to be good. It was a faith commitment.
I picked up the same critique these Marxist law professors were making and turned it against a different set of subjects. My aim always was to demystify the kinds of doctrines the Critical Legal scholars wanted to protect. It never would have occurred to any of them to apply this sort of critique to a case promoting abortion because in their book that was a good thing. So it occurred to me, “Well, this can just as well be used to a different purpose. Let’s deconstruct Marx.” So that got me into jurisprudence and prompted a skeptical attitude towards rationalism.
I see the fruit of that now, 20 years later, in the first chapter of The Wedge of Truth. The young man I wrote about, Philip Wentworth, goes to Harvard, where he learns to keep an “open mind,” but all that’s really happened is that he’s gone with the fashionable crowd and adopted their fashion, as he meant to do from the start. (I recognize so much of myself in that story.)
I became acutely aware that what we think is reasoning is very often rationalization. When you speak of rationality, there are two very distinct components. One is logical reasoning, which is about going from premises to conclusions, conclusions that should be as good as your premises. Thus, logic will get you into insanity if you’ve got the wrong premises.
The other component of rationality is having the right premises. How do you get them and how do you determine that they are right? Not by logical reasoning, surely, because then you would be reasoning from other premises in order to justify them. There is an instinct, or revelation, or whatever you want to call it, that underlies your thinking, and the only interesting problem in philosophy is how you get that.
After figuring that out, it was the death of rationalism, as far as I was concerned. The problem with rationalism is that it isn’t rational. It fails to give sufficient importance to the development of the choice of the right premises; it tries to justify them by circular reasoning. Once I was alert to that distinction, I was able to critique the things that previously I felt I had to take for granted.
Such as?
PJ: Eventually, the theory of evolution. Remember that my interest was in finding out whether the Christian gospel was rational. Of course, it wasn’t rational by the standards of the academic world. One of the good things about the Christian life was that it opened up a whole world of intellectual input that previously had been closed to me. I began to understand what was actually wrong with the academic culture, and to put a name on my uneasiness. It was the seed of what would later be a full-blown critique of Darwinism. It “evolved” in a directed and purposeful manner!
I am now primarily dealing with people who have incorporated naturalist metaphysics into their definitions of science and reason. I’ve learned to identify that tendency, and I understand it very empathetically because I lived there for so long. I’m very different from most of the people I associate with now because they grew up in a Christian subculture, whereas my roots are in the academic subculture. I have a different set of experiences and thoughts.
“Where do the givens come from?” was the question I often asked myself. Eventually, that led me to the whole question of the gospel, and the way Jesus deals with people. “Follow me,” he said. He gave a new set of premises, a new foundation. One of the very interesting things about Jesus is that when he deals with people, whether they are believers or unbelievers, friends or foes, they are supposed to know who he is. It’s perfectly understandable: “I am who I say I am.” When you see the truth, when you meet it face to face, you’re expected to know it. If you refuse it, you are refusing to see the truth. I found that very fascinating—“How can that be?”
Much later I discovered Lesslie Newbigin, which was like meeting a long-lost twin brother from whom I had been separated at birth. We’d had totally different lives—he was an older man and a missionary—but I recognized in what he was writing the same line of thought that I had independently stumbled upon. Either the gospel of Christ is the centerpiece of a new order or it’s nothing. That was so fascinating to me. Then I saw how this was the right principle and starting point. In all of my writing, I concentrate on that starting point. “In the beginning was the Word.” A few simple principles. If you stay with those, you’ll be all right.
When you say “the givens,” do you mean the revelation that we have in Scripture, or is it something larger than that?
PJ: Something larger. The gospel is not the writing. It’s described in the writing, but the Book of Mark isn’t “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”—Jesus is. It’s apparent in the Christian gospel that he is a living presence with whom you can make contact today. I sometimes say, when speaking in Christian circles, that I’m convinced that Jesus was who he said he was and did what he set out to do, but I’m not always sure that Christianity is a good thing. People erect the structures, which are partly divine in origin and incorporate part of the truth, but they also manufacture part of it and bring cultural influences to it.
Do you see anything of value in pre-Christian philosophical thinking?
PJ: If you read the Socratic dialogues and some of the things Socrates said, it’s really eerie. Socrates says extraordinary things like, “If the perfect man ever lived on earth, you know what they’d do to him? They’d crucify him.” Where did that come from?
From insight?
PJ: Yes. It’s the most profound kind of insight at times. The critique of the common understanding of justice, the conspiracy of the weak against the strong in Book Two of The Republic, is something I review every year in my classes. It’s the most profound analysis of human nature that you can get. On the other hand, there are a lot of dregs in Greek philosophy, too, so I wouldn’t swallow it whole.
Humanly speaking, you have to understand all of their ideas in the light of tradition. Nobody should try to think entirely for himself; you learn an enormous amount from what has gone before. That there were other early important Christian thinkers was news to me. I didn’t know whom I was reading about when I first encountered the Fathers of the Church because the version of Christianity I knew goes from St. Paul to Augustine to Aquinas and then to Calvin and Luther. So I think it’s just wonderful that many Christians are rediscovering the church fathers.
So as a Christian you moved from philosophical considerations to an attack on Darwinism. Why Darwinism?
PJ: I wanted to know whether the fundamentals of the Christian worldview were fact or fantasy. Darwinism is a logical place to begin because, if Darwinism is true, Christian metaphysics is fantasy. That’s why it’s so marginalized and is considered to be of no intellectual interest.
I was surprised last night when someone quoted Darwin as saying, “Well, if we’re going to talk about such-and-such, then you may as well ask about the origins of life.” Darwin seemed to be putting the origin of life into a separate category of questions he wasn’t really addressing.
PJ: Darwin was unsure about the origins of life, but he also made the initial speculation about life evolving in a warm little pond. The whole Darwinist method was immediately extended to include the origin of life. Darwinism is the methodology of philosophical materialism. Maybe physicalism would be a better term, given that Darwin didn’t develop every last inch of the philosophy.
I got the opportunity when I was on a sabbatical in London in 1987 or 1988 to read more about Darwinism. It was immensely interesting to discover that it’s all circular reasoning, deception, and pseudo-science. I had suspected that, but I saw that it was really true. It is a pseudo-science that simply works for confirming examples of a materialist philosophical system that’s held up by a priori grids.
Was there anything you read that “made the light go on,” so to speak?
PJ: The first book I read while on sabbatical was Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker, which seemed fairly convincing on the first reading but full of holes on the second. Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis did much to alert me to the issues.
But perhaps the greatest “Aha!” moment came when I was browsing in a bookstore in London with my wife. Kathie had been a bit skeptical of my developing interest in evolution. (I sometimes get in a little over my head.) She picked up a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Science—900 pages of pretty good popular science writing—looked up evolution, and there was a brief description of the theory, plus three pages of heavy-handed ad hominem denunciation of creationists for not accepting the absolute truth of this theory that was so obvious to all thinking persons. Then there was a brief section called “Proof of Evolution,” in which the entire proof—all the proof that Asimov thought was necessary—was the peppered moth experiment. So Kathie thought about it and said to me, “I think you’re on to something.” Such experiences have been repeated many times.
The ignorance that’s involved, the indifference to the facts, is stunning. Anything that promotes the “Great Darwin” and the materialist understanding is uncritically received, unless it does something that’s politically incorrect.
In short, my discovery that the reasoning in Darwinism is unscientific, illogical, and dishonest was tremendously important to me because it validates that “In the beginning was the Word” is really the correct starting point.
I then got to know the people from the mainstream community and the creationist world who are critical of Darwinism. What I brought to the dissident movement—Nancy Pearcey has pointed this out—was a sense of strategy.
People were caught in a rationalist mentality. They were thinking, “If we present facts and evidence, Stephen J. Gould will say, ‘Oh yes, you’re right and I’m wrong,’” and then the scientists would let them in. Well, I understand a little bit better how that world works, and I thought of it like a political campaign or big case litigation.
So the question is: “How to win?” That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the “wedge” strategy: “Stick with the most important thing”—the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, “Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?” and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do. They’ll ask, “What do you think of Noah’s flood?” or something like that. Never bite on such questions because they’ll lead you into a trackless wasteland and you’ll never get out of it.
How did others become involved in the “wedge” strategy?
PJ: I met Steve Meyer, who was in England at the time. Through Steve, I got to know the others, who were developing what became the Intelligent Design movement. Michael Denton stayed in my home for three days while he was in the United States. Meyer introduced me to Paul Nelson, and so on. One by one, these people came together.
At that time there was a little funding to pay for people to come to Seattle occasionally for a conference. So they had me speak at one in 1989 to look me over. I soon became the leader of the group.
I also was introduced to Stephen Jay Gould and his scientific people and attended a seminar in the Boston area where I debated him, which gave me more confidence in our work. That was before I published Darwin on Trial. Of course, I’m much more knowledgeable now than I was then, but even then I still could hold my own with the kingpin on the other side. The debate was a draw, which was all I needed because a draw was as good as a victory.
Indeed, my philosophy is, when I do a serious debate, to play for a draw because I do not want my opponent and the audience going away saying, “That is one clever lawyer who can make you look like a fool in a debate.” I want them to go away saying, “There’s more to this than I thought. We ought to do this again.” All you have to do is get the right issues on the table and then you win. You don’t have to worry about it, because Darwinism is wrong, and it will self-destruct.
By the time Darwin on Trial was published, I had pretty well worked out the strategy I thought would, in time, win this campaign, and I’ve been able to convince most of the young-earth creationists and the old-earth creationists that this is the right way to proceed.
I had thought that I would be able to persuade the theistic evolutionists, but that was a total failure. It wasn’t until I got to know them that I learned how they think. They are guided by the principle that we’re not supposed to have any disagreements with the scientific establishment over science. Everything Richard Dawkins says is perfectly right and acceptable up to the moment he says, “And therefore there is no God.” If he just didn’t say those last words, he would be fine. I discovered that there was a total lack of interest in evidence and in asking scientific questions. When I tried to tell them it wasn’t just the “And therefore there is no God” sentence that expressed Dawkins’s atheism, but his whole scientific explanation was grounded in it, they were very resentful that I even raised the objection.
So they see a great gulf fixed between science and personal faith?
PJ: Yes. For them, the enemy is the Christian fundamentalist.
Well, aren’t you their enemy, too?
PJ: When people start bashing fundamentalists, they start out talking about extreme literalists and so on. But the definition is in fact much broader than that. Anybody who thinks God is real in the sense that evolution is real is a fundamentalist. God is a Sunday morning truth or a Bible-study group truth. That’s the way the secular world has it. They’re willing to tolerate Christian faith among the students and faculty, provided they don’t bring it into the classroom and the work world, where we talk about what really happened.
Theistic evolutionists are very content with maintaining that arrangement. They think that they could get along well with the secular world if it weren’t for those troublemaking fundamentalists—and everybody who makes trouble is a fundamentalist.
I was the biggest troublemaker of all, so I found myself bitterly resented in the Christian academic world. Theistic evolution is the same thing as atheistic evolution with a certain amount of God-talk. They don’t see any merit whatsoever in alleging that God left us some fingerprints on the evidence.
I should add that some of my close allies, colleagues, and friends are Christian college professors, so it’s not as if they’re all that way.
So theistic evolutionists aren’t open to discussing Intelligent Design?
PJ: We’ve tried many times, but I’ve found that they are even harder to reason with than the atheistic evolutionists. I’ve been able to get along with the atheistic evolutionists better. It’s disappointing.
But aside from that, I would now say that the project of developing a central position, which could unify the Christian world on this issue, has been accomplished. We’re on the verge of success in the project of legitimating this issue in the secular academic realm. I don’t know exactly when to say we’ve been successful. Maybe when we get a serious article about us in Time or the New York Times. We’re still on the margins. We have this conference at Yale, but the Yale faculty aren’t really embracing it. We had the conference at Baylor and got very eminent people from the other side to attend, so we’re close to success on that front, but we haven’t reached it. We have reached success in the unification of people who disagree about a whole lot of other things but agree that the wedge strategy is correct.
Are you happy with the broadness of the coalition in the sense of including Catholics and Orthodox?
PJ: Very happy. I think Catholic support is very important. A lot of Orthodox are friendly to it, and I also consider the Orthodox to be major players in this. I greatly cherish their support. Our movement is by its very nature ecumenical. One of the reasons why this issue has always been a loser is that it’s only been taken up by Protestant fundamentalists. That has to change.
It’s like the stereotype of the Scopes trial all over again.
PJ: That’s a large reason for my redefining the issue. The mechanism of the wedge strategy is to make it attractive to Catholics, Orthodox, non-fundamentalist Protestants, observant Jews, and so on. This will be a long fight. Every month we’re moving ahead, even when we get a little bit of a setback.
Once you absorb yourself in the issues and understand the way Darwinians think, you know that it’s wrong and it’s vulnerable, which is why they fight so desperately to maintain their monopoly on the public forum.
You have said there is no natural explanation for the rise of genetic information. How important is that question in the debate?
PJ: The Wedge of Truth is all about those issues. The scientific key is, “No natural processes create genetic information.” As soon as we get that out, there’s only one way the debate can go because Darwinists aren’t going to come up with a mechanism. They’ll start out talking about the peppered moth, and when that self-destructs, then they’ll say, “Oh, self-organizing systems, or the fourth law of thermodynamics,” and other nonsense, which is just covering up ignorance.
Genetic information is the issue, but it isn’t the final issue. After you make that breakthrough, then you see other ways in which the theory is questionable. Darwinists will say, “Oh, well, maybe the mechanism has some problems, but the “fact of evolution”—common ancestry—is not in question. We distinguish the fact of evolution from the mechanism of evolution.”
But that’s a bogus distinction because the “fact”—common ancestry—incorporates the mechanism. It’s just a matter of “now you see it, now you don’t.” They are saying the mechanism by which a father and mother give birth to children is the same mechanism by which our “bacterial ancestors” gave birth to human beings. They say it’s all a process of natural reproduction and naturally occurring variation in the offspring.
Biologists affiliated with the Intelligent Design movement nail down the distinction by showing that DNA mutations do not create evolution in any significant sense. Instead, they make birth defects, so the whole thing is false from the get-go. There is no way you can establish that a bacterium is the parent of a complex animal. There is no mechanism to make the change, no historical or fossil evidence that such a change ever occurred, and there’s no way to duplicate the process in a lab.
Once you get that in the debate, then we will be poised for a metaphysical and intellectual reversal that is every bit as profound as the one with Copernicus. People will say, “My gosh, we’ve been completely misled by this fundamental truth of the creation story of our culture. We can no longer understand the world that way.”
How do you change the way people regard the authority of science? Get them to think of it as a much more limited thing. Science is very reliable when scientists stick to the kinds of things that can be tested by refutable experiments, but much of what they tell us is outside that. When they have to fake the mechanisms, it becomes a very dubious philosophy. That raises the question of why so many very brilliant people were misled for so long and did such a good job of rationalizing these things.
When the mechanism of Darwinism becomes discredited, it’s like a train that’s been turned around. You can say, “Well, that’s interesting, but the train is still in the same place. The world, Yale, Berkeley, are still there. The New York Times is still telling us what to think. So why isn’t everything different?” Well, it is different, but you can’t see it yet. The train is turned in the opposite direction. It’s going to start out very slowly, but it’s moving on the logical tracks towards something very different, and when we get there, our great-great-grand-childre n will see how different things are.
What are some of the books and writers that were formative influences on you?
PJ: I’ve told you I had read the popular Christian classics of Lewis and Chesterton and later, Lesslie Newbigin, and admired them. Michael Denton first introduced me to the fundamentals of the skeptical case about Darwinism.
When I think about things, much of what I get comes from my amateur’s interest in history, especially military history. I’m always thinking things like, “This is like Napoleon in Moscow. He’s taken over the whole country, but he’s about to lose his army.” The sweep of historical examples, rather than the philosophers, has influenced me.
I’m a great admirer of the literary classics by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Victorian novelists, especially Austen and Trollope. These are writers who help you have a Christian mindset. I think one of the great tragedies is that the loss of Christian faith and the meaning it gives to people’s lives makes it impossible for them to really appreciate literature. With a play like Hamlet, for example, you have to inhabit the Christian metaphysical rooms to really grasp what the ghost is and understand that marvelous scene in which Hamlet decides not to kill the king while he is saying his prayers.
Those are the formative influences: history and literary classics. I also give a lot of credit to the authors I fought against.
Who are your heroes?
PJ: C. S. Lewis certainly was an intellectual hero in that Oxford common-room atmosphere of his time, to stand up for what he believed was right. The other reason I find him so overwhelmingly admirable is that when he was discouraged about philosophical issues after he debated Elisabeth Anscombe, he went off and wrote the Narnia Chronicles. How could a man like that, with no experience with children, write enduring classics of children’s literature? It’s one of the most astounding feats of virtuosity in literary history.
My wife is a collector of children’s literature—we have 25,000 volumes in our home—so I have a deep appreciation for it, and for the ability to communicate with young people. Many people are urging me to try my hand at that sort of thing but I’ve never gotten up the nerve. Maybe I will someday.
What’s next for Phil Johnson?
PJ: I’m phasing out my direct involvement in the battle over evolution because the next generation is perfectly capable of carrying the ball. Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, and the rest know more than I do and are very capable writers and debaters.
My next project is to provide excellent worldview education for high school and college students. I see this as a fantastic opportunity to send thousands of these young people properly prepared into the best universities and graduate schools, with a mission to speak the truth and change them by prophetic utterance. I love the sense of having opened a young person’s mind to truth and reality and knowing that they can do a great work. Nothing is more satisfying than that. If they have a better idea, they will be successful over time in changing the world. That’s what I want to be directly involved in.
My colleague John Mark Reynolds and I are working with donors and organizations to design educational programs. We are proud of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. The young people who are here at this conference are so eager to be intellectually empowered and capable of taking on these issues. I think we can teach them how to do that. They will be better educated than the students at secular schools.
I see my work as not just being about a scientific theory—it’s about the definitions of knowledge and reality. I see it as empowering this young generation, and I also see it as being inherently ecumenical. That’s represented by John Mark being Eastern Orthodox and me being a Presbyterian elder. Wherever I go, whether to a Southern Baptist, Catholic, or Orthodox church, I feel accepted into the Body.
The first thousand years of the Christian faith was the era of the great councils and of unity in the faith. The second millennium was the millennium of the schisms—the great East-West schism, the Reformation, and the splintering of Protestantism—and then the near destruction of the whole thing in the wake of materialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But I see that ground being recaptured. All those centuries of strife and conflict and hatred—the engine has run down. There are still people who want to keep it going—I’ve met some of them—but I think the overwhelming sense is that we’re tired of that. The third millennium has to be the millennium of reconstitution—from the bottom up. It’s about recapturing the sense of the mystical union of the Body of Christ at the grassroots level. I see that happening all the time.
I sometimes wonder
06.15.05 (6:35 pm) [edit]I am not sure I should post this since it is more like a “stream of consciousness” kind of thing….but what the hell here it is anyway.
Peace
Mitch
I sometimes wonder about the emotions that I experience and how real they really are. The reason I am saying this is because I know how easy it is for my emotions to be manipulated by movies, music, books and yes commercials. I found myself near tears by the “I want to buy the world a Coke commercial” for god’s sake; what does that mean?
I tend to be accepting of others, very seldom meet someone whom I don’t like and am drawn to intelligent thoughtful people who like to read broadly. I am put off by people who are narrow since they tend to back away from me when they see how I think and look at the world that is so very different from theirs. It is easy for me to incorporate other people’s world views and I find it painful when those I befriend can’t incorporate me into their lives. Communication is hard and the older I get the less I try to dialogue with those I know will misunderstand my position on certain topics. I am not saying this because I think I am more intelligent than others since I am a man of only average intelligence, no rocket scientist here; however average intelligence is not something to look down on since average people are capable of great things, if only the fear of change and differences can be overcome and real listening can arise. I love differences and the more different a person is from me the more I enjoy being around them and learning from them.
Perhaps it is from growing up in a large family, I am the 3rd of 11 children, all still alive, except for Michael who died at birth in 1958, never saw him. Mom told me about his death but it did not affect me in any way; though I am sure my mother carried the sorrow of his loss to her grave. Having so many brothers and sister is like getting a doctorate in psychology since I had to deal with each of them on a daily basis, fighting, laughing and just plain working with. Also being 3rd I guess it has developed some leadership abilities in me. I don’t crave leadership but I tend to be put in some kind of leadership position no matter were I work and seem to be good at it; I think one reason for this is I tend not to fear authority but have an ingrained arrogance that makes me think I know better than they do; I don’t trust those in authority but am not rebellious I just try to work around them if the need arises. Now this can be a bad trait if not dealt with in an intelligent manner since authority issues arises from the unconscious and can cause a lot of trouble. However if those in power do something that I think is unfair I will put my foot forward and demand to be heard and usually I am listened to; perhaps it is because they know I will not stop until they do listen. After I say my peace then I let them make their own decisions. Also those I speak up for have to carry on themselves in trying to fight for justice in their own lives. I have very little use for passive aggressive types who will not at least try to find a better way to deal with life in general.
Well I am good at feeling anger, empathy, compassion and caring but have trouble in allowing strong feeling of love and sorrow arise to the surface. They are so powerful I don’t know how to handle them. I know why this is true and have written about in my blog called “early times” . I take care of myself and have a very hard time in asking for help from others, another trait that is not all that helpful to me since sometimes I do need help on an emotional and spiritual level; in the past this has caused me some harm. Not all pain is conductive to growth or health.
People have told me that I have an impersonal side to my personality, what they mean by this is the fact that I treat everyone the “same” and this bothers some people. They feel that I can’t really love unless there are other that I hate; a strange notion for me but not for some of my friends. For instance I will not take sides; if two friends have a disagreement I refuse to take sides, their relationship has nothing to do with the one I have with both of them. I have lost some friends over this but I will not take sides and treat the other in a manner that is unjust and I guess unloving.
I guess one reason that I went into care giving is to slowly get in touch with the ability to not only care or have compassion or empathy but to really love. The longer I am in care giving my ability to love on a deep personal level is growing and that is what I want. Love brings a depth to life that I did not know existed when I was younger…and yes it brings pain but I am not afraid of that it only shows that I am alive; besides we are supposed to wear ourselves out in loving and serving others. I don’t want to die looking like I am 35; I want to be old and tired looking when my time from loving service to others. Of course I have a long way to go in this regard; I will always have a long way to go. I tend to grow in a very slow manner with a lot if zigzags along the way.
People are so precious and Christ is found in those with whom I have the hardest time seeing that precious quality. Christ is truly in the least and for each of us that “least” would represent something different.
Oh yes…..I find myself missing my brother Michael very much as I get older…..another mystery for me, but I am glad that I am feeling this at last.
Peace
mitch
Charles continued
06.15.05 (2:15 pm) [edit]Well Charles is holding one to life, though he is moving to the point of letting go. His breathing is shallow and respiration is about 30 breaths a minute, which is fast but in his state keeping him alive. About all we can do is try to keep him as comfortable as possible, give him Ativan when needed to keep his anxiety down and lubricate his mouth from time to time with Oragel a very good product to have on had when someone is his state. He has not eaten or taken any liquid for two and a half days which is also making him weaker.
Charles has been a resident in the personal care home that I work in for a very long time; he is 93 and entered the home in his mid-eighties so he has been here about 8 years. In those eight years we have had a lot of interaction both positive and negative. Like I said in a earlier post, he has been diagnosed with a severe personality disorder and has caused a lot of pain in peoples lives. His family for instances will not have much to do with him since he can be so demanding and cruel towards them; so they leave him alone out of despair of ever really being able to communicate with him. I to have been subjected to his ways but stuck it out with him; not being a family makes that easier I guess. I have seen Charles at his best and worst, care giving does that, it is one of the most int