Judgmentalism as Reciprocity

Monroe County

In Matthew 7:1-2 Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” I see the truth of this in two ways.

#1 – The judgmental-person-as-faultfinder-and-accuser-of-others will receive their own unfair share of retributive judgment heaped back on them. Everyone gets misunderstood. But if you waste your time picking out the faults of others, others will waste their time picking out your faults. The big bang of your judgmental words creates an ever-expanding universe of judges, all skilled at finger-pointing. 
Not everyone who gets “judged” judges back. But when people feel judged, the fallen thought comes into their heads, “But you, also, are a failure.” One then wants to attack back. Judged people rise to their own defense. Tu quoque. 

#2 – The non-divine judges of all the earth suffer something even greater, which only gets exacerbated by the human judges who lash out at them. Most judgmental people I have met waste time being critical of their own selves. People who hate and punish others hate and punish their own selves. The skilled, cynical critic of others is just as skilled and cynical about their own self. The mouth that hurts others originates in a hurting heart. It’s the old “hurt people hurt people” thing, which I think is mostly true.

The antidote to this whole wasted mess is to find and experience the love of God for one’s own self. Be loved by God, not just in theory but in experience. The result will be greater compassion towards others.

Love God.

Receive God’s love for your own self.
Stay connected to Jesus and experience, in relationship, his love.
Love one another.

The Absurdity of Objectless Anger

Under a bridge in Monroe

Years ago I knew a couple. Let's call them X and Y. Details of this common (to me) story have been altered.

X used to be a theist, but told us she became an atheist because of hypocrisy she saw in Christians. Her reasoning was: 

1. Christian hypocrites exist.
2. Therefore, God does not exist.

This was irrational on X's part, since there is no logical claim of inference here. 

X was hurt by Christians. Her response was to leave the faith entirely. When she's hurt by some hypocritical atheist will she leave that, too? (Yes, they exist; e.g., atheists who believe some things are "wrong.")

X fell in love with the atheist Y. Y had no Christian background like X did. Y lived only for his own pleasure. Y's goal in life was to "be happy." For Y, at least as it seemed to some of us, the purpose of X was to make him happy. X was one of Y's gratification objects. Happiness, as Aristotle told us, is a horrible life goal, since people get objectified as a means to an end.

Then, tragically and suddenly, Y died. We were all saddened, and grieved with X. I prayed for X, even though she didn't believe there was any God to pray to. Nonetheless, I believe. Therefore, I prayed.

We attended the funeral. Sometimes I have been asked to do the funerals of atheists like Y. I have accepted, on the condition that I will share about my belief in and hope in God. I've experienced the losses of many loved ones, including a son. I would not have made it through that event were it not for my already-existing belief and trust in God. I'll welcome the opportunity to share that at any funeral. I've had conversations with funeral-attending atheists over the years. They want to meet with me over coffee and talk about the hope I have in Jesus.

Y, in the aftermath, self-medicated to cope. When I talked with her she was angry.

"I am angry at God for taking Y!!!" "I hate God!!!" "I want nothing to do with God!!!"

"Why?" I wondered to myself. After all, X is an atheist, so there's no God to be angry at. On atheism there's nothing to be angry at, just as, in a similar way, atheist Julian Barnes brilliantly wrote Nothing to Be Frightened Of (reify the word "Nothing").

X seemed angry at people like me who believe in God. But why? We didn't take Y's life. Just like I didn't kill my own son.

Was X angry at the world? At the universe? At the theory of evolution? I'm not making light of X's grief. I have been with many who grieve, and have been with myself in my own grieving. X's version of atheism was not allowing her to grieve well.

Let's get this much clear: If God does not exist, then there's no one and nothing to be angry at in our times of loss. Anger makes no sense if there is nothing or no one to be angry towards. 

X's anger was objectless. In the language of existentialism, her emotion of anger was "absurd." Senseless. This is not an argument for theism. It is to make the Nietzschean point that, let's not be village atheists who act like theists when the tragedies of life hit.

I like how physicist and atheist Stephen Weinberg describes the absurdity of the atheistic life. He writes:

"Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair."

How might Weinberg have counseled Y? He writes (Ib.):

"What, then, can we do? One thing that helps is humor, a quality not abundant in Emerson. Just as we laugh with sympathy but not scorn when we see a one-year-old struggling to stay erect when she takes her first steps, we can feel a sympathetic merriment at ourselves, trying to live balanced on a knife-edge. In some of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, just when the action is about to reach an unbearable climax, the tragic heroes are confronted with some "rude mechanical" offering comic observations: a gravedigger, or a doorkeeper, or a pair of gardeners, or a man with a basket of figs. The tragedy is not lessened, but the humor puts it in perspective."

As one whose job description includes being with grieving people, I'm glad I didn't suggest this to X, or tell her a joke. I'm glad the doctors didn't try to get me to smile and laugh when my baby son died.

Nihilism follows from an atheistic worldview. On atheism there's no greater meaning to life, nothing redemptive about our sufferings, and nothing to be angry at. I don't think all this is that funny, either.

The Presence-Driven Pastor Leads from a Love-Encounter

Cape May, New Jersey

It began with an experience. An encounter. That's how it happened with me, and how my life changed forever.

Looking back, I see a chain of events preparing me for it. But it wasn't something I planned, or programmed. That's how it always happens, with God. Not only do we not program God's activity in our lives, we cannot do this. The Holy Spirit is nonprogrammable. 

And unpredictable. Non-scripted. This is one indicator that it is God. 

God's presence, his nearness, manifested itself to me. That's how I began. That's how Saul became Paul. He was walking on a road, when something happened.

I know a lot of pastors. These women and men, my colleagues - most began with an encounter with God's presence. I have heard their beautiful, amazing stories. I am so inspired by them. I am more inspired by their tales of encountering God than I am by their theologies. 

We never get over our first love. Our first love was a purging baptism into the alternative kingdom. People like C.S. Lewis were brought in kicking and screaming. Others entered crying. I entered amazed. I stood amazed, in God's presence. 

The American church will squeeze the love out of a pastor, if they allow it. I remember a pastor named Joe. He was in a class I taught at a theological seminary. On the first day of class, Joe returned from the assigned hour of praying. He was crying. He confessed, "I haven't done that in twenty years." On that day, Joe came home.

Love is an unscripted encounter that cannot be captured in the steel nets of literal language. Love is an experience, not a theory. 

God is love. Every experience of God is a love-encounter. This is how many of us began. With a love-encounter. The Consumer-Driven Church will steal this out of a pastor, and their people. 

This is not only tragic, it is not good. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. (Rev. 2:4)

In the beginning I had a love-encounter. I love, because he first loved me. (1 John 4:19)

Pastors, return to this. Cultivate this. Abide in this. Lead and teach and love and preach from this.

It's Christmas Time, not "the Holidays"

My back yard, on a snowy day

"Black Friday" and "Cyber-Monday" are over. The Thanksgiving days of feasting are now days of healthy, moderate eating. I'm about to sit down for a bowl of oat meal.

I turn on the TV. "Holiday" stuff is on. I see nothing about Christmas.

Because...

#1 - Christmas has nothing to do with shopping. I’m not against shopping. I like to go to the mall with Linda and look around. I like the crowds and the lights and the music and the candy. I like eating red and green M&Ms. Yet all these things have NOTHING to do with Christmas. What, then, is Christmas about? There’s a big clue in the word itself. Christmas has to do with “Christ.” The word “Christ” means “anointed King.” Jesus is “the Christ,” the anointed King. "Christ" is the Greek word for the Hebrew word "Messiah." Christ - mass. The festival of the arrival of the anointed King.

"Christmas" = Messiah has come.

#2 - Christmas has nothing to do with gift-giving. But what about the wise men who brought gifts? They came after Jesus was born. Remove them from your manger scene and place them somewhere outside the house, perhaps down the road a ways. They did bring gifts to honor Jesus’ birth. They did not go shopping to buy gifts to give one another. Is it wrong to do that? I don’t think so. I love giving gifts to my family. I like opening gifts. But giving gifts to one another has NOTHING to do with Christmas. Except that, in Jesus, God gave a great Gift to all humanity. For that Gift, I remain eternally grateful. "

Christmas" = A Gift, from God, to us.

#3 - Christmas has nothing to do with tree-decorating. Is it wrong to have a Christmas tree? I don’t think so. I like decorating the tree every year. I like the lights, especially old-fashioned large multi-colored ones. I enjoy going to Bronner's, just 75 miles north of us. But decorated trees have NOTHING to do with Christmas. Read the original Christmas story in both Matthew and Luke and see for yourself. There were no trees or lights or tinsel. And, it didn't smell like fresh-cut pine.

"Christmas" = the birth of God's Son, who would eventually be crucified on a tree.

#4 - Christmas has nothing to do with snow. I'm looking out my window and it is snowing lightly. I like this. For me, it would be nice to have snow on Christmas Day. But when first-century Jews had dreams and visions of a promised Messiah (a “Christ”), this did not include dreaming of a white Christmas. Those ancient people were under great political oppression. They could care less if it snowed or not. "Snow" is neither an essential attribute nor a contingent attribute of "Christmas."

"Christmas" = Messiah who comes to make us, righteously, "whiter than snow." (Ps. 51:7)

#5 - Christmas has nothing to do with the economy. I have friends who are local retailers, and I hope they do well. I like a stable American economy. But Christmas has NOTHING to do with a consumer economy. The angels were not rejoicing because Christmas sales were up as a result of the Christ being born. Get this: God’s Son was born into radical poverty. Mary ended up singing about how God would now finally help the poor and the hungry and the marginalized and the oppressed.

"Christmas" = the beginning of the "Great Reversal," where the proud, mighty, and rich are brought down and the poor, hungry, and lowly are exalted. (See Luke 1:46-55, e.g.)

I like the holidays, the holy days. They remind me of times with my parents and brother when I was growing up. And times Linda and I had with our sons. They remind Linda and I of a son of ours, David, who died, which made one holiday season not so jolly. They remind me of Linda's father Del, who lived with us for 6 1/2 years, until he died on New year's Eve 2012. (Deck the halls with melancholy...)

I like the holidays and I love Real Christmas Music (like "Trio Mediaeval," which I'm listening to right now). But mostly, I love Jesus. When I became a follower of Jesus I left a life of drug and alcohol abuse forever. I doubt I’d be alive today if not for Jesus. Jesus fills my life, now more than ever as I grow older. He is my raison d'etre, my reason for being. This time of the year is another opportunity to experience and encounter and think about the Christ, my Savior, and your’s too.

"Christmas" = love, worship, and adoration of Christ the Lord, King, Savior, Redeemer, Rescuer, Bondage-Breaker, Lamb of God, Revolutionary, promised Messiah, my Lord and my God.

My Sermon on The Lord's Prayer - #1

My sermon on The Lord's Prayer: Part 1 can be heard HERE.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Facebook Atheists Are Mostly Unbelievers in Atheism

Muslim women in Jerusalem

Nietzsche is to atheism as John the Baptist is to Christianity. Nietzsche was a prophet who saw deeper than your basic village atheist. "God is dead," said Nietzsche, "and here are the implications." One of which is that a person cannot deconvert from Christianity to atheism and bring Christian morality, or any morality for that matter, with them.

This is what Nietzsche the prophet revolts against, and despises; viz., the shallow sophomorisms of people who claim atheism and moralistically mock Christians as evil and hypocritical.

Such behavior is ironical, since all along it is the Facebook atheists who are the hypocritical fools, in what for Nietzsche was the great atheistic apostasy.

Terry Eagelton got this right. Here is an extended quote, with some parenthetical comments along the way. Go slow now. Pay attention, all ye atheists.

"Nietzsche speaks scornfully of French freethinkers from Voltaire to Comte as trying to ‘out-Christian’ Christianity with a craven cult of altruism and philanthropy, virtues which are as distasteful to him as pity, compassion, benevolence and suchlike humanitarian claptrap. [Think now of Facebook atheists.] 

He can find nothing in such values but weakness cunningly tricked out as power. These, too, are ways of disavowing God's disappearance. [The Facebook atheist is truly an unbeliever, but in their professed atheistic faith.]

God is indeed dead, and it is we who are his assassins, yet our true crime is less deicide than hypocrisy. [Because humanitarian claptrap is hypocritical atheism.]

Having murdered the Creator in the most spectacular of all Oedipal revolts, we have hidden the body, repressed all memory of the traumatic event, tidied up the scene of the crime and, like Norman Bates in Psycho, behave as though we are innocent of the act. We have also dissembled our deicide with various shamefaced forms of pseudo-religion, as though in expiation of our unconscious guilt. Modern secular societies, in other words, have effectively disposed of God but find it morally and politically convenient – even imperative – to behave as though they have not. They do not actually believe in him, but it is still necessary for them to imagine that they do. [Today's atheists cannot, in word and deed, extricate themselves from the metaphysical foundation laid by Christian theism.]

God is too vital a piece of ideology to be written off, even if it is one that their own profane activities render less and less plausible. There is a performative contradiction between what such civilisations do and what they proclaim that they do. To look at the beliefs embodied in their behaviour, rather than at what they piously profess, is to recognise that they have no faith in God at all, but it is as though the fact has not yet been brought to their attention. One of Nietzsche's self-appointed tasks is to do precisely that. [Nietzsche exposes the deeds of the so-called atheists, which speak louder than their confessions.]"

- Eagleton, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, pp. 157-158

My Sermons Online

My sermons are online here.

Powerpoint slides also available.

***
My book is available here: Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

Nietzsche and the Christian Moralism of Deconverted Atheists

Detroit

Was there ever a greater atheist than Nietzsche? Not in my mind. Woe to the sophomoric Facebook atheists who have not come to grips with their new shepherd. They are the "village atheists" Nietzsche so vehemently derides.

What is their problem? It is (especially for the so-called "deconverted atheists") that they thoughtlessly retain certain core beliefs intrinsic to the Christian theistic worldview, co-opting them into their "atheism." This is, for Nietzsche, a category mistake of the first magnitude.

Consider, for example, the Facebook atheist's outrage at the supposed evils of religion. In their moralistic protesting they function as Christians in atheistic disguise, for the righteous moralism that fills their being is precisely core to Christianity.

As Nietzsche knew, real atheism abandons such moral beliefs as it launches into its nihilistic ocean. Terry Eagelton explains:

"Nietzsche sees that civilisation is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values, and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundations and expect the building still to stand. The death of God, he argues in The Joyful Wisdom, is the most momentous event of human history, yet men and women are behaving as though it were no more than a minor readjustment...

in Nietzsche's view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain intact." (Eagleton, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, p. 156)

The Limits of Science

Denis Alexander, in a dialogue with atheist scientist P.Z. Myers on whether or not Christianity and science contradict one another or conflict with one another, talks about the limits of science in a helpful way. Alexander is a molecular biologist and neurochemist, and a Christian theist. He says:

"There are many things science can't address. I don't think science is up to the Herculean task of trying to decide between different political systems or metaphysical systems. I don't think science tells us whether or a not a certain democracy is right. Science is brilliant at what it does; it's brilliant at answering certain kinds of questions. But there are whole areas of life such as one's personal experience that are not really publishable in scientific journals. Politics would be one... history... isn't that why we have different disciplines in different departments in our universities? It's a recognition that each discipline has its own way of justifying its beliefs. So I don 't quite see why we have to try and make everything conform to science. That seems to me like 'scientism'."

A good read on this would be Science and Its Limits, by Del Ratzsch.

Science Cannot Give Us Knowledge of Everything

Trees in our backyard, two winters ago

Can science give us knowledge of everything, in principle? Of course not.

Science qua science can say nothing about value. Value does not inhere in brute physical matter as something empirical to be discovered, tested, weighed, measured, dissected, and quantified. ("Let's gather some lab samples of beauty." "Truth weighs 3 ounces.")  

Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schroedinger states:

"I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity." 

The logic text I use in my MCCC Logic class affirms the same. (Lewis Vaughn, The Power of Critical Thinking, Oxford University Press.) In Vaughn's discussion of logic and morality he states that any moral argument (any argument that concludes in a moral judgment) must have at least one non-moral premise (descriptive of a certain state of affairs), and one moral premise. For example:
  1. It is morally wrong to rape children for fun. (Moral premise)
2. X raped a child for fun. (Descriptive premise)
3. Therefore, X is morally wrong. (Moral judgment)

One cannot infer a moral judgment from a non-moral descriptive premise. Vaughn writes:

"In a moral argument, we simply cannot establish the conclusion (a moral statement) without a moral premise. A moral argument with only nonmoral premises does not work. To put it another way, we cannot infer what should be or ought to be (in the conclusion) from statements about what is." (Vaughn, 445)

Famously, one cannot infer "ought" from "is."

Because science cannot weigh, measure, or quantify value, science cannot tell us everything.