Economic Insatiability Rooted in Human Nature

Leland, Michigan

I picked up the Skidelsky's book How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life when it came out, on the recommendation of philosopher Michael Ruse (by political economist Robert and philosopher Edward Skidelsky). I'll be speaking at a conference this summer on God and Money, so tonight I picked it up again and began a re-read.

This book is so good! Listen to these quotes from the beginning.

• "This book is an argument against insatiability." (3) "Insatiability" is the desire for more and more money.
• Insatiability is a problem for this world's poor, "where the mass of the people still live in great poverty." (Ib.)
• "In rich and poor societies alike, insatiability can be seen wherever the opulence of the very rich runs wildly ahead of the means of existence of the many." (Ib.)
• What is the root of economic insatiability? What is the source of this incessant desire for more? The Skidelsky's write: "Our own view is that it is rooted in human nature— in the disposition to compare our fortune with that of our fellows and find it wanting— but has been greatly intensified by capitalism, which has made it the psychological basis of an entire civilization. What was once an aberration of the rich is now a commonplace of everyday life." (Ib.)

Forget for the moment the heretical teachings of some Christians that Jesus has come to make you wealthy (the "prosperity gospel," which is the false gospel). Think of what Jesus really said about money. It jives with the Skidelsky's ideas. Now I know why I am reading it again.

"Making money cannot be an end in itself— at least for anyone not suffering from acute mental disorder. To say that my purpose in life is to make more and more money is like saying that my aim in eating is to get fatter and fatter. And what is true of individuals is also true of societies. Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it." (5)

"Our deeper objection to endless [economic] growth is that it is senseless." (7)

"The unending pursuit of wealth is madness." (Ib.) The Skidelsky's argue for this in chapters 4 and 5.

"If the ultimate end of industry is idleness, if we labor and create merely so that our descendants can snuggle down to an eternity of daytime television, then all progress is, as Orwell put it, “a frantic struggle towards an objective which [we] hope and pray will never be reached.”" (10)

One more for now...

"We are condemned to dearth, not through want of resources, but by the extravagance of our appetites. As the economist Harry Johnson put it in 1960, “we live in a rich society, which nevertheless in many respects insists on thinking and acting as if it were a poor society.” The perspective of poverty, and with it an emphasis on efficiency at all costs, is built into modern economics." (12)

God Thirsts to Be Thirsted After (PrayerLife)

Trillium in the woods across from my house.

Every once in a while some love comes my way from my sons, and from Linda. It may come in the form of a gift, or a helpful sacrificial act, or by loving words. I love Linda and my sons. While my love for them is not for the sole purpose of being loved in return, I like it when it happens. If time were to go by without reciprocity I would long for it.

While God is, in his essence, love, God also longs to be loved in return. This is the desire of every loving parent, and in this God is no exception. Craig Keener writes: "God is self-sufficient, but Augustine rightly declared that "God thirsts to be thirsted after." His love makes him vulnerable to those he loves, if we dare use such language to describe his desire for intimacy with us." (Keener, The NIV Application Commentary: Revelation, 181) 

One way I satiate God's thirst to be loved is in my praying. I often find myself saying "I love you, Lord" to him. When I think of how God has changed my life, and how God has rescued me and blessed me, it is natural and easy to express my love to him.

An Appeal for Purity

Cape May, New Jersey - the Atlantic shoreline

(Linda and I are teaching a seminar on sexual purity and a few other things Sunday night at Redeemer, so I'm thinking a lot about these things.)

Before I was a follower of Jesus one of the things I wanted to do the most was have sex with girls. The truth is I didn't have as much sex as some of my fraternity brothers did. Some of them were screwing girls left and right, and I only could look on with envy. My understanding was that this was normal. In the Godless universe as I understood it, who really cares?

When I entered the Kingdom of God things were different. In my new life I was told that genital intercourse was reserved for marriage. This radically different viewpoint made sense to me, and still does. I do not expect this to make any sense to someone who is not a God-believer or not a Jesus-follower. In this I have no judgment against you. You are, perhaps, like I was. Like, what's the big deal about premarital and extramarital intercourse? Of course.

In my fraternity one of the brothers had a little black book. The black book contained the names of a lot of girls on campus, and had numerical ratings from '1' to '10' next to their names. A '1' meant she would in no way have sex with you on the first date; a '10' meant she would definitely have sex with you on the first date. My fraternity brother charged ten dollars to look at the black book, which was constantly being updated. Many of us, including me, thought this was so cool because we wanted to have sex, almost more than anything. Girls were for our pleasure. 

The Kingdom of God is way different from this. God's Kingdom is upside-down compared to this. Kingdom thinking operates in the light, not the twilight.

I'm writing to any of you who say you love and worship God and Jesus and The Kingdom. If you are screwing around, why? In God's Kingdom this is unrighteousness. In their book Real Relationships Les and Leslie Parrott write:

"Having genital sex before marriage is clearly not in line with God’s principles. Sexual intercourse is a “life-uniting act,” as our friend Lewis Smedes calls it. That’s why sex outside of marriage is “sex-too-soon.” It violates the intended purpose of sex. “It is wrong,” according to Smedes, “because unmarried people thereby engage in a life-uniting act without a life-uniting intent…. Intercourse signs and seals— and maybe even delivers— a life-union; and life union means marriage.””

In God's Kingdom do not mess with this. It is the road to relational failure (see the Parrott's book for the supportive scholarship). I know others are doing it, but why do you care what others think and do? That kind of thinking is what created the mess you and I were once in. I know there are people who act like I used to. I understand this. But you and I are not them any more. It's time to choose your kingdom and embrace it. You and I have left that dark kingdom with its compulsive disordered sex-obsessiveness.

Our sex-worshiping culture shows us that something has gone wrong. C.S. Lewis once wrote:

“You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?”

Look - sex was God's idea, not the enemy's. The destroyer of our soul works by taking things God made and then OCD-perverting them so that our love for the distortion destroys us from the inside. Surely the One who invented sexuality knows best how to enjoy it, right?

If you are a Jesus-lover but have blown it in this area, come back. You know about the cross. You know about forgiveness. We all need forgiveness. Me too. You know that repentance means doing a 180 and changing directions. Step up and be like the prodigal son. Do it now.

Stop rationalizing your failure. Rationalization belongs to the kingdom of darkness. Rationalization muddies things. What once was clear to you has become cloudy. Just how many translations of 1 Corinthians 6:18 do you need? Our loving God, thankfully, pursues after us and then, counter-culturally, throws a party in heaven when we come home.

Flee from sexual immorality. (NIV)

There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for “becoming one” with another. Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body. (The Message)

Run from immoral behavior. (The Voice)

Join Me In Wisconsin This Summer with Leif Hetland and Scott Thompson (Jesus Culture)

Scott Thompson of Jesus Culture

Leif Hetland

 

June 27 - July 3

Green Lake, Wisconsin

Click here for details.

Deeper Bible Study - The Book of Daniel

6/8/15

It’s Monday morning. I’m sitting in Tim Horton’s with a cup of coffee and reading Daniel chapter 1.

I’ve cut and pasted this chapter in Microsoft Word and created a file for my Daniel studies and meditation.

Today… now… I’m just reading ch. 1, and writing any thoughts or questions I have about it.

My method is:

1.   Read the chapter first.

2.   Read the chapter, making notes, writing insights and questions.

3.   Go to the commentary by Tremper Longman (The NIV Application Commentary).

4.   Add additional insights from the commentary (there will, I am certain, be many!).

5.   Decide which rabbit trails to follow to gain deeper understanding of the text.

The False, Nonhistorical Jesus of the Koran

Christianity has had to suffer many foolish ideas in the past ten years, things like: the Jesus-story is simply a reheating of pagan mythologies; there are other "gospels" that tell us about the real Jesus (Thomas, Judas, e.g.); and perhaps the most ignorant one all all, that Jesus never existed.

Just as false and ignorant is what the Muslim Koran says about Jesus. Note this: no reputable scholar looks to the Koran for any truth about the historical Jesus. The Koranic Jesus is just that; viz., Jesus according to one person's 7th century opinion.

William Kilpatrick has this correct when he writes:

"Raising questions about the Koran is a ticklish business, but some questions simply beg to be answered. For example, the Jesus of the Koran doesn't look anything like the Jesus of the Gospels. For that matter, he doesn't look anything like an actual human being...

The Jesus of the Koran is not very convincing. Like the Koran itself, it's likely he would never survive any serious critical/historical inquiry." (Kilpatrick, Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West, K 3812)

A Few Thoughts About the "Amputee Argument" Against the Existence of a God Who Answers Prayers

Warren Dunes State Park in Southeast Michigan

(I'm re-posting this from 2009)

I recently had someone add to my web-post on The Best Arguments Against God's Existence. The addition, for this person, was The Amputee Argument Against the Existence of God. Here are a few thoughts I have re. this argument, not necessarily in order.

1) I have clinical evidence where cancer has completely gone away (therefore it's not "in remission"). The order has been this: 1) Person A has cancer and is being treated for cancer. 2) Person A receives prayer. 3)Tests show that Person A no longer has cancer. Using abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation), I conclude that probably God answered prayer and healed Person A. NOTE: I've been in touch with two scholars who are writing forthcoming books on divine healing, where these kind of healings following prayers will be documented. (Candy Brown, Testing Prayer: Science and Healing; Craig Keener, Miracles)

2) Of course "cancer going away" is not a "definitive" (= deductive) answer, since all such examples are only either inductively or abductively probable. The same holds for the amputee argument. While it may seem more obvious in the amputee example, it's still only a probableistic argument, and not a deductive (logically necessary) argument.

3) I do not know that there has never been a healing of an amputee. I don't think it's true that if an amputee was healed, somewhere and sometime in the world, it would thereby be "major news." Perhaps a secular press would not report it, perhaps a religious press might. (I say "might" since there are Christians who do not think God heals people.) The fact that I don't know of an amputee being healed offers no proof that no amputee somewhere in the world, sometime in the past 2000 years, received prayer and was healed. I simply don't have epistemic access to the truth value of the statement: No amputee has ever received prayer and was healed. How could a person know that? (Here the absence of evidence does not entail the evidence of absence.) Because I do have epistemic access to a number of healings in response to prayer (as I see it) I resist affirming such a claim, much as, I think, an atheist resists saying that something super-natural happened. But that, then, has to do with noetic frameworks (see below).

4) Surely it's not true that the only instances "where the hand of God could be truly verified" are like healings of amputees. Precisely because all such "verification" will only be probable and not necessary.

5) I think the amputee argument is only convincing to those who already believe there is no God. Note that if that's true, then the argument begs the question. Probably that's why someone like myself who studies, in-depth, philosophy of religion issues such as the problem of evil, remains essentially undeterred by this argument. And, this is probably why some remain unconvinced in the face of my Person A example above. And one is able to remain unconvinced precisely because it's only probably, more or less, that Person A was healed. One's noetic framework comes into play. Mine is theism, and I still find theism more coherent than atheism.

6) Which leads to my last thought: atheism (philosophical naturalism) is fraught with more conceptual problems than theism. I find atheism contains incoherencies that surpass the amputee example such as, e.g., the issues philosopher J.P. Moreland raises re. philosophical naturalism in his Consciousness and the Existence of God. Note that my noetic framework holds even in the face of putative counter-evidence, just as a philosophical naturalist's noetic framework holds in the face of putative counter-evidence. The discussion then becomes over adjudicating between noetic frameworks, which is the kind of work Moreland does in Consciousness, and Stu Goetz does, e.g., in Naturalism. For myself, and I think for others, these are the only meaningful alternatives. (I'm not open, e.g., to Hindu pantheism or Buddhist monism.)

Prayer and Discernment (PrayerLife)

For a really good book on corporate discernment in church leadership see Ruth Haley Barton, Life Together in Christ: Experiencing Transformation in Community. 

Vacationing in Cape May, and Revelation Chapter 4

I saw these earrings in a store in Cape May.

Hello Everyone:

Linda and I are on vacation this week - be back Sun. morning to preach on Revelation chapter 4. This is the second message on this incredible chapter.

I'll be filling in details so as to better understand the text.

As you read and study Rev. 4 this week seek His presence.

PJ

Quantum Indeterminacy

Linda, in Cape May, NJ

Linda and I are taking a week of vacation in Cape May, New Jersey. We do a lot of reading in places like this. This morning I pulled up and read an essay by Princeton's Hans Halvorson on quantum intederminacy - "What Does Mechanics Suggest About Our Perceptions of Reality?" It's very good for those of us who are not physicists but want to understand big ideas. (I make posts like this as much for my own reference as for others.)

Halvorson writes:

"Quantum indeterminacy is the unavoidable fact that not all quantities can simultaneously have determinate values.  For example, if an electron has a location, then it simply has no speed – it is neither at rest, nor is it moving slowly, nor is it moving quickly.  There simply is no fact of the matter about its state of motion.  Similarly, if an electron is in a definite state of motion, then it’s not in any particular place – not here, nor there, nor anywhere."

The radicalness of this is not that if you know the position of the electron then you don't know whether or not it is moving. Quantum indeterminacy holds that if and electron has a position then it is not moving. And, conversely, if and electron is moving then it has no position. Halvorson comments: "What could this possibly mean? No one is quite sure."

Halvorson (and others) reject Heisenberg's theory of subjective idealism; viz., that "the act of “looking” caused the electron to take on a definite state of motion, or a definite position." Halvorson gives other proposed solutions to the quantum indeterminacy dilemma.