The Fushigi Ball

I just received a spam-mail about something called "Fushigi - The Magic Anti-Gravity Ball."

Instead of pressing an immediate "spam" I went to the Fushigi website. Here's what I found, with some philosophical comments attached.

• "Fushigi." The very word connotes mystery.
• "Fushigi is a brand new, dynamically designed ball use in the mysterious art of contact juggling." Note this sentence. "Brand new" = which means "never before, until now." "Dynamically designed ball" = which denotes... what? "Mysterious art of contact juggling." There's that word "mystery," which connotes "unknownness," "darkness" (as in: "shrouded in mystery"). Just plain astounding inexplicable weirdness.
• "Fushigi is an incredible form of therapeutic relaxation." Incredible? Now think of this conversation. "John, you seem stressed out." John: "Yes, I am. I need to spend a few extra hours with my Fushigi ball."
• "The art of maneuvering a reflective sphere through mind and body isolation and manipulation creates the illusion that the sphere may be defying the laws of gravity." This is quite a claim, even acknowledging the word "illusion." "Reflective sphere?" The thing is just a ball! But when it comes to "mind isolation," I've seen a lot of that in my philosophy students, so that doesn't impress me. What would impress me in my logic classes would be to see a student in the middle of serious mind isolation whip out a Fushigi ball and do a "Prayer Cross" (I'm not kidding).
• "Fushigi is strictly recommended for ages 12 and up." I assume this is because, at age 12, kids enter puberty, which is clinically defined as a 10-year period of mind and body isolation. If the Fushigi ball can heal the struggles of adolescence then I'll support it.
• It is recommended to begin with the 3-inch Fushigi, and then advance to the 4-inch Fushigi. These things are dangerous!
• Store your Fushigi in its protective pouch. Like a baby kangaroo.
• "Everyone loves Fushigi." That's quite a claim. I think it's false. I don't love Fushigi; therefore everyone does not love Fushigi. As Karl Popper taught us, all it takes to falsify a univeral claim like "All crows are black" is to find one non-black crow. This is Popper's falsifiability criterion. I therefore utilize Popper's criterion to falsify the claim "Everyone loves Fushigi."
• "Fushigi is sweeping the nation." I guess so, because it just came to my laptop tonight.
• Finally, re. the BIG QUESTION, does Fushigi actually defy the laws of gravity and float? The official Fushigi-answer is: No. And a good thing too, because if it did we'd have to rewrite all the laws of physics, which would create so much stress and economic disaster that we'd all be institutionalized and in big-time Fushigi-therapy.

$19.99

Overcoming Depression & Suicide

This Friday night at Newport Beach Cafe RMS graduate Val Fowler will share about God's heart for the suicidal and depressed, and how to respond to and love persons who are struggling with these things.

Newport Beach Cafe

9 PM

The evening starts off with worship!

MP3s From the 2010 EPS Apologetics Conference

Monroe County

Audio downloads of the recent Evangelical Philosophical Society's annual conference are available here for $1.99 apiece.

Some of the titles that especially interest me are:

• "Natural Rights and the New Atheists," by Francis Beckwith. "Most people believe that human beings have certain rights by nature, that is, rights that do not depend on governments for their legitimacy. The New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, seem to believe this as well. However, unlike the American Founders as well as those thinkers in the natural law tradition, the New Atheists deny that natural rights are grounded in a natural moral law whose source is God. They believe that naturalistic evolution can account for this natural moral law. This talk responds to the New Atheists and explains why the natural moral law is best accounted for by a Divine Law Giver."
• 
  "Before the Gospels were written, How Reliable Were the Oral Traditions About Jesus?" by Craig Keener. "Careful learning and remembering characterized ancient education and especially disciples learning from teachers. Why would anyone today assume Jesus’ disciples to be different, apart from modern biases against Jesus’ teachings? This session explores ancient examples of memory and their implications for the reliability of the Gospels."
• "Jesus Under Fire: 12 Reasons We Can Trust the Canonical Gospels," by Craig Blomberg. "Today, many in our culture, and even some scholars, place little credence in the picture of Jesus that emerges from the New Testament Gospels. Some even argue that the later apocryphal, and especially the Gnostic Gospels, should be preferred. The larger percentage of historical Jesus scholarship meanwhile has been accumulating an unprecedented amount of support for the trustworthiness of the main contours of the canonical texts, especially the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. This talk surveys twelve of the most important reasons for this growing confidence in what is often called the third quest of the historical Jesus."
• "God and the Genocide of the Canaanites," by Matthew Flannagan. "How could a just and loving God command Joshua to genocide the Canaanites as is apparently taught in the Old Testament? Is God really a moral monster as Christianity’s critics use these passages to claim? Matthew will re-examine these passages in light of the context they were written in showing that the skeptics' case against God relies on a questionable reading of the Old Testament."
• "Assessing Brian McLaren's Emerging Theology," by R. Scott Smith. "Brian McLaren probably is the leading person in "emergent" Christianity. He focuses especially on how Christians should live faithfully in postmodern times, and to help address this, he has developed an "emerging" version of the gospel. By looking closely at this, we can discern his stands on many crucial issues, like: How does God’s kingdom advance? What is evil all about? What was the nature of Jesus’ work on the cross? Who will be in the kingdom, who won’t, and why? Is there a hell? Then I will assess his positions."
• "Religion & Science: Where the Conflict Really Lies," by Alvin Plantinga. "This talk argues (1) that contemporary evolutionary theory is not incompatible with theistic belief, (2) that the main antitheistic arguments involving evolution together with other premises also fail, and (3) that naturalism, the thought that there is no such thing as the God of theistic religion or anything like him, is an essential element in the naturalistic worldview (a sort of quasi-religion in the sense that it plays some of the most important roles of religion) and that the naturalistic worldview is in fact incompatible with evolution. Hence there is a science/religion (or science/quasi-religion) conflict, all right, but it is a conflict between naturalism and science, not theistic religion and science."
• "Reason Cannot be Located in a Materialist World," by Angus Menuge. "Any satisfactory account of human beings must locate human reasoning, by showing how it arises from the accounts underlying ontology (its theory of what exists). For materialism to be successful, human reasoning must be located in a world consisting of particles and undirected forces. The so-called "argument from reason" is a family of arguments designed to show that materialism cannot satisfy this demand. Most fundamentally, materialism fails because rational deliberation presupposes the existence of persistent, unified selves with libertarian free will. This requires an ontology of substantial agent causes, characterized by active power, teleology and downward causation, none of which can plausibly be located in a materialist world. Reason itself also has a number of characteristics (including intentionality, teleology, normativity and prescriptivity) that do not reduce to materialist categories. Finally, materialist attempts to explain human reasoning by appeal to Darwinian evolution imply that our reason cannot be trusted, especially in science and philosophy. Moreover, while not the only alternative to materialism, Judeo-Christian Theism is well-equipped to locate human reasoning because the ontology of human reasoning is exemplified by God, and therefore implausible materialist reductions of this ontology are not required. The argument from reason can be developed into a defense of scripture’s claim that human beings are made in the image of God."
• "How to Handle Different Arguments from Evil for God's Non-Existence," by Christopher Weaver. "Contemporary arguments from evil for God’s non-existence can be accurately divided into those which attempt to show that God's existence is somehow incompatible with the real presence of evil in the world, and those which attempt to show that evil in the world somehow shows that God's existence is highly unlikely or improbable. Arguments resembling the former description are sometimes called deductive or logical problems of evil, whereas arguments like the latter kind are often referred to as evidential or inductive arguments from evil. In my short presentation, I will explore what I think are several lines of plausible responses to arguments of the evidential or inductive sort. The first such reply leans upon the work of Thomas Crisp, and attempts to show that particular premises of evidential arguments are recondite philosophical theses and can be objected to by an appeal to what's called the "evolutionary argument against evil". The second type of response to evidential arguments suggests that several of the premises of evidential arguments from evil can be parried by an appeal to what scholars call "Skeptical Theism". The last plausible rejoinder to evidential arguments I will present involves an appropriation of an argument for the controversial thesis that "God is the good", and that as the transcendental source of good, any appeal to objective moral value in the world (including instances of radical evil) materially implies God's existence."
• "Challenging the Zeitgeist Movie: Alleged Parallels between Jesus and Ancient Pagan Religions," by Mark Foreman. "In 2007 the ZEITGEIST movie appeared on the internet and had over 50 million viewers in the first three weeks. ZEITGEIST is a two hour documentary film that attempts to argue, among other things, that Christianity is a non-historical myth based purely on teachings and ideas from earlier pagan myths. The primary evidence used to support this claim is the number of parallels between Christianity and other religions. This presentation assess both the claim and the methodology of this argument noting a number of fallacies with this kind of reasoning."

Regarding "Zeitgeist," see this post I made a few years ago.

Contemplation Is a Creative State of Being

Bangkok

Thomas Merton write: "The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created." (New Seeds of Contemplation)

"Contemplation," in Christian spirituality, is revelatory closeness with God. In contemplation one beholds the beauty of the Lord. The contemplative place is a loving union with God; a unity of love (note: not a metaphysical unity of being, even though certain Christian contemplatives come close to asserting that).

When we dwell in Christ so close that it can be described as a unitive condition, then "change" and meta-morphe (Romans 12:2) is the norm. Within one's heart the creative work of God is happening. One cannot consistently dwell in the preence of God and remain unchanged or, in Merton's language, uncreated.

Evangelism In the Early Church

We've left the 4 gospels after 5 years of preaching through them and are now preaching on The Christology of the Book of Acts; viz., those Acts-passages that especially speak of Christ.

One of the things that now stands out to me is that the early church had no "evangelism program." They didn't read books on evangelism - they didn't even have the gospels yet! They didn't pay money to attend evangelism seminars. And they didn't hold scheduled evangelism meetings. Yet the news about the Real Jesus spread like crazy. How did that happen? This way, I think.

The early Jesus-followers:

1. Stayed tight with Jesus, abiding in him as he instructed in John ch.s 14-16.
2. They were empowered with the Spirit of God, given to them, and dwelling within them. God had come to make his home in them. Now, they were "temples," "portable sanctuaries," hosting the presence of God.
3. They heard from God, either directly or indirectly (as, e.g., through angels).
4. A good part of that "hearing from God" had to do with receiving directions about where to go, what to do, and what to say.
5. They obeyed.

And... the thing exploded!

This is what the biblical book of Acts is about. These first Jesus-followers are always hearing from God. Even non-Jesus followers are hearing from God. We saw this in our church two weeks ago with Philip the evangelist, last week with Paul and Ananias, and we'll see it again this coming Sunday with Cornelius and Peter.

At Redeemer we're taking the weirdness out of hearing from God and putting this forth as part of the normal Christian life. The normal Christian life includes: hearing from God, then obeying if called to. The results include: the message of Jesus gets disseminated. And, from, my pastor-POV, no more teeth-pulling-guilt-producing-low-turnout "evangelism classes" - Yay! My task is to: 1) teach people how to abide in Jesus; and then 2) teach them how to discern whether that voice they hear is God's or not. As for obedience, I can do little about that, since it says in Hezekiah 1:1 "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink."

The past two Sundays we've had a lot of good, ordinary, powerful Jesus-followers at Redeemer share stories where they heard God call them to do something, they obeyed, and very cool things happened. So - if you're part of our Redeemer family - we're having another chance to share "hearing God + obeying" stories this coming Sunday. I look forward to these, which already have been encouraging and strengthening a lot of our people!

(If you're the academic type and want to read something about this check out U. of Southern California Prof. of Philosophy Dallas Willard's book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God.)

Muslims and Christians Are Not Both "People of the Book"

Inside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul

A year ago I met with a prominent Muslim leader who kept referring to us both as "People of the Book." He was hosting me at his mosque, and I was there to learn from him. I did learn a number of things that day, but one was not that Muslims and Christians are both "People of the Book." "We really believe the same things," he told me. I held my disagreement in. Because mostly, and essentially, we do not.

This Muslim leader would do well to read Stephen Prothero's excellent God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero writes: "While I do not believe we are witnessing a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world's two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap." (K 247-55)

My Muslim leader-friend is a champion of "interfaith dialogue," by which I think he means things like: 1) we arereally all the same; 2) we really believe the same things because we are alike in that we are "People of the Book; and 3) we therefore need not try to convert one another. But Prothero is correct, as many scholars have pointed out, that such talk with solve little since it is rooted in a basic untruth. I love to talk with Muslims about our differences, and do so with gentleness and respect.

Friendship With God As the Antidote to Loneliness

I'm spending time today reading and responding to spiritual journals sent to me from Payne Theological Seminary students in my Spiritual Formation class.

One student writes of their loneliness. I respond to them:

• As you continue to spend these times with God you will discover “friendship with God.” “Friendship with God” is the antidote to loneliness. Even people in marriage need friendship with God since many married people are lonely and feel alone.
• There's a deep aching in the human heart that causes many people to anyone or anything that will heal it. Our answer is: God made you in his image; you will fnd your completeness and ultimate companionship in him.
• So, continue to abide in Jesus. Abide now. Abide tomorrow.

Our Furiously Religious Planet

While others are watching TV tonight I have been reading. For several hours. Earlier today the Lions won. That's all the TV I need for one day.

Besides, its snowy, windy, and cold outside, and I have a cup of coffee. And some books on my Kindle.

I've read Boston U professor Stephen Prothero before (I read American Jesus), and am now reading God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter. Prothero is not making a metaphysical claim about the being of God (as, God is, in his being, "one"). Rather, he critiques the naive and unstudied-yet-popular idea that all religions are "really saying the same thing." Which is false, as anyone who has actually read the various religious scriptures can attest to.

Prothero writes: "Religion is receding in many Western European countries [I think Philip Jenkins would dispute this, or at the very least want to discuss this]. But more than nine out of every ten Americans believe in God, and, with the notable exception of Western Europe, the rest of the world is furiously religious." (K 168-76)

The world religions are mostly different. To acknowledge this is good, to DaVinci-code this is bad. Prothero writes: "As my colleague Adam Seligman has argued, the notion of religious tolerance assumes differences, since there is no need to tolerate a religion that is essentially the same as your own. We pretend these differences are trivial because it makes us feel safer, or more moral. But pretending that the world's religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate... [B]oth tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually know something about whomever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting." (Ib., K 120-36)

Ours is a furiously religious planet. In this regard the prototypical Enlightenment-apes in "Planet of the Apes" had it wrong.

To B.C. & A.D., or To B.C.E. & C.E.?

Stephen Prothero, in God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter, explains his use of B.C.E. & C.E. rather than B.C. & A.D.

"Religious Studies scholars typically date events either as C.E. (Common Era) or B.C.E. (before the Common Era), in an effort to avoid the Christian bias inherent in A.D. (Anno Domini, "in the year of our Lord") and B.C. ("before Christ"). This is sleight of hand since these dates continue to mark events in relation to the life of Jesus whether or not those events are said to have occurred in C.E. or A.D. However, since the use of A.D. and B.C. indirectly imply belief in Jesus as both "Lord" and "Christ," I use C.E. and B.C.E. here." (K, 58-65)

I have no big problem with this.

And, Merry Christmas.

I Love the Chinese; Therefore I Study Confucius

In NYC

Twenty years ago I traveled with Linda and my sons Dan and Josh to Singapore, where I taught at Asia Theological College for twenty days. I had, as students, Chinese Jesus-followers who were heading towards becoming leaders in Singapore's Christian community. I taught two courses: my Spiritual Formation class, and a class on cross-cultural evangelism. Those twenty days with my family and many new Chinese friends and students were life-changing.

I also became friends with a number of Chinese pastors who attended my doctoral classes in spiritual formation. One of them, Dr. Paul Chan, invited Linda and I to come to Vancouver to be the speaker at their annual conference. They called the conference "Being and Doing," with the idea that what one does ("doing") should come out of one's being. In this ay one's doing would then be "authentic." Lnda went with me and we spend six wonderful days in the beautiful Vancouver area. And my love for and interest in Chinese culture and Chinese Christianity was increasing.

At Palmer Seminary one of my students was Dr. John Hao who is, in my mind, one of today's great leaders in God's Kingdom. John and his wonderful wife Rosie invited me to teach at Faith Bible Seminary in Queens, and speak at their church. Over the past seven years I have been with them multiple times, and will go again to teach and speak this coming January.

I think it is a good think to continue to learn and grow, so I'm reading Paul Wasserstrom's recent China In the 21st Century. Part I explains the "Historical Legacies" of China, with a major section on Confucious and Confucianism. As I'm reading this I think of the statues of Confucius and the Confucian culture we saw in Singapore. I've got a copy of Confucius's Analects, and think I'll read some before my NYC trip. I've never deeply studied thse things, and now feel it will add to my understanding of all things Chinese.

I got a mild shock when I began reading about Chiang Kai-shek's part in a Confucian revival in China in the 20th century. I remember hearing about Chiang on tv, but knowing nothing about him. Wasserstrom writes: "Despite being a Christian, Chiang elevated [Confucius's] birthday to the status of a state holiday. He argued that the emphasis on tradition, family, social order, and clearly delineated hierarchies in Confucianism could go hand in hand with the teachings of the Bible." What? So many rabbit trails, so little time to follow them all. I want to know more about Chiang's Christianity!

"Ironically, the period of rule by the Christian Chiang Kai-shek was a time in which Confucius was revered, as, even more ironically, is the current rule by the allegedly still atheist Communist Party." (Wasserstrom, K 365-73)

October 1, 1949 - The Communist Party drives Chiang into exile in Taiwan. The birthday of Confucius immediately stops being celebrated. "The anti-Confucius campaign of the early 1970s was just the most radical and focused expression of an anti-Confucian viewpoint that predominated throughout the Mao years and that continued during the brief post-Mao period." (Ib., K 373-80)

Today, Confucius is once more venerated in China. This "fits in with a general tendency by the current regime to emphasize continuity with the past." (Ib., K 380-89)

So what did Confucius say?

• He wrote on how a "true gentleman" behaves in his daily life.
• He wrote about how a ruler should govern.
• He placed a high value on education.
• He stressed "the meritocratic aspect of the Chinese political tradition, [which] is that people are pretty much alike at birth but become differentiated via learning." (Ib., K 240-48)
• The Analects emphasize the importance of three things: "education, ritual, and relationships that re hierarchical yet provide benefits to both superior and inferior." (Ib., K 248-56)
• The study of classical texts was important "because it was by studying [them] that a person could learn about and begin to emulate the actions of the most virtuous figures of the past ages." (Ib., K 248-56)
• "Ritual was important because it was a physical acting out of the best practices of earlier ages." (Ib.)
• He emphasized four relationships in particular: ruler and minister, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, and husband and wife. All of these are reciprocal and involve combinations of benevolence coming from one party and deference from the other.
• The former parties were expected to protect the latter, and in return the latter were expected to be obedient to the former. "The social order was threatened whenever people failed to act according to their prescribed roles." (Ib., K 264-72)

When I was teaching in Singapore my students, during lunch time, began asking if I was hungry. I said "Yes." And they would take me to a restaurant and pay for my lunch. One day one of the seminary leaders told me that my students liked treating me to lunch but were expecting some reciprocity. Which I gladly did, feeling somewhat embarrassed that I did not know more about the Confucian culture I was in.