Andrew Tallman Show Thought of the Day

What is brave?

2012-01-02T16:18:00.000-08:00

I recently watched for the very first time an extremely famous Western, “The Magnificent Seven.” It was excellent from beginning to end, but, as those who’ve seen the film (most of you, I expect) it is precisely the ending which both infuriates the audience and makes the film so special.

See, after they heroes talk themselves into going back into town to help the peasants and kill the bandits, Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen ride off into the sunset, leaving the town. What’s frustrating about this is that only minutes before they had both been vowing to give up their gun-slinging and settle down in the town as farmers themselves. It was this dream which seemed to motivate their odds-defying reengagement with the bad guys. So why the course reversal?

Well, one answer is that in the end, these “real men” realized they were just that, masculine archetypes who know at some level that they are unfit for the effeminate domesticity of farming and will never be fully satisfied outside a good fight. So the one temporary (and dubious) member of their posse returns to his agricultural roots and settles down, the four others die fighting, and these two ride off to further future do-goodery. “After all,” the audience is invited to wonder, “aren’t their services going to be wanted elsewhere? The world needs good cops, right?” But this interpretation misses the entire point of the movie and woefully demeans it in the process.

Who in this movie is a hero? Who is brave? Who is a man?

Although the answer seems obvious, it turns out to be exactly the opposite of what it would appear. And this isn’t idle speculation by some film critic me. Embedded within the movie is everything we need to solve the riddle, and solve it we must or risk seeing this as merely another reluctant-American-warrior-saves-the-day epic.

At one vital point in the film, the three young boys who (not coincidentally) have settled on Charles Bronson as their masculine idol come to him bemoaning their sad fate as the children of cowards. Their fathers, you see, have decided to cut a deal with the bandits in exchange for avoiding the risk of an all-out gun battle whose outcome is uncertain but will inevitably mean many peasant casualties. And so the boys want Bronson (the real man) to take them away from such a humiliating society. His response to their plea is swift and stern.

He smacks them around and adjures them to never call their fathers cowards, and then launches into a soliloquy contrasting the apparent courage of gun-fighting with the true courage of fatherhood. Their fathers, he explains, are the truly brave ones who make themselves vulnerable to the needs and the tremendous responsibilities of caring for their families. Gunslingers by contrast are cowards who neither attach themselves to anyone nor make themselves responsible for anyone. “You think I am brave because I carry a gun? Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility! For you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do this because they love you and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage! Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee [that anything] will come of it. This is bravery. That’s why I never even started anything like that. That’s why I never will.”

The clear implication is that the men who decide to lay down arms and swallow the bitter pill of looking weak or cowardly because it is the prudent thing to do are in fact the brave ones. Reinforcing this point is the earlier speech Brynner makes when Horst Buchholz tries to duel him in the bar, saying that it is the foolish pride of young men that leads them to die so frequently over matters of honor. Clearly, the pride of the Magnificent Seven isn’t much better in the end, and all the fine speechmaking about settling down in town afterwards was merely a persuasive ruse toughs use on themselves to reenter the fray. They would rather die (which most of them do) than run away and live to fight (or farm) another day. That their ego-drivenness happens to benefit the villagers in this case is mere good fortune.

So in the end, this is a film which actually inverts the standard thinking about machismo in an entirely Christian and family-values sort of way, even daring to reveal the adrenalin thrill-seeking behind the thin veil of faux heroism. In this way, the Magnificent Seven is in a far subtler precursor to something like “The Hurt Locker” than to any of the less honest modern “hero” films.

But having seen all of this, one significant question lingers for me…a question which isn’t just about which way to come down on assessing a historically important film. The question, if the film’s embedded morality is true, is whether all those men (and women) who deliberately refrain from having children, for all their sincere-and-responsible-sounding reasons, aren’t at heart just cowards unwilling to participate in the world’s oldest and most terrifying mission of courage: parenthood.

Say what?

2011-11-03T14:16:00.001-07:00

As most of you know, I’m pretty good at giving people the benefit of the doubt whenever that’s possible. It’s an essential part of approaching others with charity and humility, in addition to being an obvious implication of the Golden Rule. But sometimes, well, there just isn’t enough room to do anything other than describe a massive problem.

Yes, I’m talking about yesterday’s daily White House press conference wherein Jay Carney now infamously claimed the Bible says, “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” which it doesn’t. But Jay Carney isn’t the story. The fact that one staffer, even such a prominent one, would attribute an aphorism from Ben Franklin to Scripture is purely uninteresting, precisely the sort of blunder we are in fact called to overlook or forgive. Besides, it’s probably the most common erroneous attribution people make to the Bible, so the fact that Jay did so doesn’t bother me a bit.

What flabbergasted me was the fact that the entire White House press corps didn’t catch the error. It took Politico several hours later to notice that the White House transcript issued for the event had noted the error. That means that there wasn’t a single reporter in that room yesterday with enough exposure to Christian teaching to recognize Carney’s mistake on the spot and call him on it.

See, Evangelicals pretty regularly complain that the media or the leaders of culture don’t really get us. Sometimes that’s a fair complaint and sometimes not. But in this particular instance, I know I could go to any Evangelical church in the country and expect at least half of the attendees to correctly know this particular piece of religious urban legendry. So what I’m guessing half of all Evangelicals know, not a single major news reporter in a room of a hundred knows. And for a group of people who generally will pounce like piranha on even the most minor gaffe, their silence symbolizes a tremendous disconnect.

The good news, such as it is, is that the White House itself made the correction. They may have been prodded by outside sources, but a self-effacing government is always better than the alternative. But the White House hinting at its own errors is still quite some distance from a coalition of major news sources first admitting and then rectifying their vast ignorance of mainstream American religion.

What is mine?

2011-11-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

Due to the blessings of ridiculously generous relatives, our boys are regularly showered with gifts and money for Christmas, birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Presidents Day, Valentine’s Day, and “Third Tuesday Fest” which I don’t even think is a real thing. Ever the diligent family accountant, my wife keeps close track of each boy’s individual bank balance whenever they go out shopping for toys. Well, an interesting problem has started cropping up.

Whereas Spencer and Ethan (7 and 5, respectively) always have consumer appetites which exceed their savings, Sage (3) has the reverse problem. As the beneficiary of two older brothers’ toys (and a dubiously grown-up father with some lingering childhood artifacts), Sage luxuriates in a continuous toy surplus. Having no real needs, the result is that Dani never has anything to buy for him with his money. Since the others will always be older and passing their former toys down to him, this problem seems likely never to fade. But it raises an interesting philosophical-economic question.

If the flow of toys is all Sage’s way but the dispersal of money is equal to all three, why shouldn’t some of that money go to benefit the undersubsidized desires of Spencer and Ethan? To put the matter more politically, Sage is the undeserving beneficiary of our family’s societal infrastructure the creation of which was not due to any merit on his part. So, even though the gift money is his, it seems only fair to spread it back up the inheritance chain a bit.

Now, I understand that a country is not the same thing as a family, and I understand that confusion over this distinction is near the heart of most of the mistakes of modern liberalism. That being said, isn’t there something here to support the idea that maybe some factions of our current political landscape are slightly excessive in their demand that citizens of a long-established society unequivocally deserve to keep every last scrap of anything that comes to them?

The gold-digger in me

2011-10-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

No one likes to see his own flaws. This is what makes Christianity so fascinating. On the one hand it says your flaws don’t matter so long as you have Christ, but on the other hand it then entices you to look unabashedly at those flaws and eradicate every last one of them. The beautiful importance of this process should be obvious since even a casual survey of common human practice reveals a robust set of tactics for hiding our ugliness from ourselves.

Consider what I’ll call defense mechanism number 84, in which we soothe away the awareness of our own moral decay by finding a more extreme version of ourselves, labeling it as a special category of evil, and then castigating it as some unimaginably sub-human horror. Today’s case study: the “gold-digger.”

This woman is despised by society because she marries entirely (or even mostly) for the purpose of financial security, perhaps hoping (with enough age disparity) to become a surrogate heir to an existing male fortune. Evil, right? Sure. But for clarity’s sake, let’s rephrase. Described less pejoratively, isn’t she really marrying for the purpose of getting something from her spouse that she wants? The problem is that she wants something from him rather than wanting him.

But when you put it that way, it seems rather ordinary for the simple reason that we all marry for this reason. We marry in hopes of sexual pleasure. We marry to get entertaining companionship. We marry because our beloved is pretty, or accomplished, or appealing in some other way and thus an effective proof to others (and ourselves) that we are the sort of people who can bag off such a trophy. To put it bluntly, don’t we all marry primarily for the most selfish of reasons?

Oh, sure, we love the other person, but would we marry them if they were uglier, stupider, meaner, and more irresponsible? We may say “for poorer…in sickness…and in bad times,” but we don’t cherish those possibilities, and we strive valiantly to date around them. So unless I’m performing logic poorly, this means we’re all basically gold-diggers at heart, a conclusion our security in Christ permits us to face without the risk of psychological self-destruction. But there’s a silver lining to this precious metals analogy. None of this is a surprise to God. In fact, one might even suppose He knew it some time ago. And in response, He crafted the institution of marriage.

Now as anyone knows, marriage has a funny way of exposing your flaws and then cultivating your undeveloped virtues. You see, although she might resist it, I suspect that even the schemingest gold-digging sexpot discovers during the course of her matrimony that this man is worthy of love and that she cares for him as a man rather than as a means. That’s just what marriage does to you. And although I may have married for what I would get from my wife, over the years I have learned how to gain the most joy from being married for what I can give to her. Yes, it’s a practice I am still learning, but I learn it every day from the God whose pattern I am following and in whose marital health club for the soul I am growing.

Going down in history?

2011-10-12T12:30:00.001-07:00

It has long seemed to me that one of the great challenges of fully Christianizing ourselves is seeking out, discovering, and then removing every vestige of worldliness in our thinking. For my own part, one example of this has been learning not to care very much about fame or getting credit for the things I might do.

Although most intellectuals care very deeply that they be properly attributed, I have learned to simply be happy if the ideas I generate are adopted and perpetuated by others, regardless if my name is attached to them. My reason? The God I serve knows full well what I do, and I trust Him to give me any compensation I might need, including being “known” for such things. I don’t need history to remember me if God forgets nothing.

But this morning I had a different sort of question arise. Some coworkers were discussing the roots of World War II and naturally Neville Chamberlain came up, being famous for his policy of appeasement toward the expansionism of Hitler. And that’s when it hit me. Everyone knows who Neville Chamberlain was precisely because he made such a fabulous blunder in not grasping Hitler’s true intentions. And to this day, he serves as the iconic example of how not to respond to a tyrant. In that way, he is a tremendously useful example from history, and his knownness to students of history is extremely high.

Now, naturally it’s better to avoid blunders and the horrific consequences which can flow from them, such as in this case. That being said, I started wondering whether I would feel satisfied if my own life could be as historically useful a source of guidance as Neville Chamberlain’s was. And in the end, I realized that if I’m really dedicated to teaching people to be wise, there are many far less vivid ways to fulfill that goal than the one which befell him.

So would I choose to be historically significant in the manner of Chamberlain? It’s certainly not my first choice, but if God sees fit to guide people even through my ignominy, shouldn’t I be satisfied with that? If He is pleased with me being hated by history but remembered usefully by her, well, isn’t the sacrifice of infamy even greater than the sacrifice of anonymity?

The real cost of "good deals"

2011-10-06T13:25:00.000-07:00

As someone who just unloaded two moving trucks worth of accumulated living paraphernalia, I would say I’m freshly open to the advice of motivational author Brian Tracy: “Pay twice as much for your clothes, and buy half as many. Expensive clothes are cheaper because you wear them more often.”

Although this proverb seems superficially counterintuitive, the underlying idea is brilliantly vital. Because we must wear something every day, the correct way to approach buying a shirt, for instance, isn’t by thinking primarily about purchase price, but about the number of “wears” you will get out of it. As anyone who has bought both expensive and cheap clothes knows, you wind up wearing the costly ones far more frequently for the simple reason that you like them much better. Although well-made clothes may also last longer, this isn’t the real issue he’s getting at.

In my closet, I have numerous shirts which I paid little for but almost never wear. In addition to taking up space and time, they represent an investment which was easy to make because each outlay was small. But since I rarely wear them and since I’ve over time bought so many of them, they represent an aggregate waste of money, plus the time and effort of storing, ignoring, and moving them.

The real measure of the cost of a shirt is thus the price divided by the number of times you’ll wear it. And since we tend to wear clothes we like many times more often than the others, Brian Tracy’s advice doesn’t even go far enough. In reality, I think that clothes which cost twice as much bring you perhaps twenty or more times as much value because of how much better you feel in them and how much more often you don them.

Now, for someone like me who almost exclusively buys clothes secondhand, all my clothes cost very little. But the principle still applies. I should only buy ones I like well enough to pay more for and know for sure I will wear a lot instead of the ones I like just enough to pay such a low price for.

As a friend of mine used to say, “Some things are so cheap they aren’t worth buying.” I would add that some things cost you the most only after you buy them.

And just to be sure it isn’t missed for not being said overtly, this way of thinking surely applies to any other personal possession as well.

What is a sin of omission?

2011-09-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

Some examples of things you will probably never hear people say:

“One of these days, I think I’d like to be an alcoholic.”
“I’m going to do whatever it takes to become part of an embarrassing sex scandal.”
“You know, I’ve finally decided to take up chain smoking.”
“What I’d really like to do is put on another 30-40 pounds.”
“Hopefully, if everything works out, I can have a terrible marriage.”
“Eventually my goal is to be so deep in debt that bankruptcy seems like a good idea.”

At least, I know I’ve never heard anyone say any of these things, and I suspect none of you have either. But if we can agree that no one ever says any of these things (presumably because no one ever sets out to achieve any of these results), then what are we to make of the relatively obvious fact that lots and lots of people do in fact wind up at precisely these destinations?

The answer, I think, is relatively obvious. These and a myriad of other highly undesirable conditions are never arrived at suddenly or even deliberately. Instead, they are gradually chosen over the course of numerous minor decisions to behave the same way a person who actually held such absurd goals would. And not to put the matter too finely, but many of these minor transitions are not even choices at all. Rather, they are merely failures to behave deliberately in the opposite direction.

One might say, perhaps, that only the worst kind of art paints itself.

What atheists get right.

2011-09-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

Who is closer to having good theology, legalists or atheists?

Although this sounds like an absurd question, consider what they both have in common. Both legalists and atheists (generally) have almost the exact same false view of God, in which He is a petty, vindictive, self-aggrandizing, and judgmental brat, condemning anyone and everyone who does not precisely conform to His peculiar and exacting standards. The legalists, of course, celebrate this heretically one-dimensional view of God whereas atheists reject it.

But why do atheists reject it? Because they say a God like that would not be a God worth worshipping. Their complaint is that such a God is not at all a God of love, but instead the most evil archetype of villainy. In other words, they deny the existence of this God because He is not good enough, not loving enough. The great irony, then, is that in rejecting the false theology of legalists, atheist are actually standing up in defense of the character of God. Therefore, their denial of God’s existence actually turns out to be celebration of the true God, whose loving Nature and Honor they inadvertently defend. When they say, “This God does not exist, and if He does, is not worth worshipping,” we Christians should shout, “Agreed!”

But we Christians don’t worship this false God. Our God so loved us that in spite of His Holiness and His absolute right to Divine judgment, He chose to completely humiliate Himself in order to get us who did not deserve it. He cared so little about His reputation that He went so far as to let it be tarnished on the Cross and continuously slandered by both legalists masquerading as Christians and atheists alike throughout subsequent history. He is a God which no self-respecting man would ever emulate, for precisely the reason that other-love rather than self-respect are at the very core of His character. And it is this utter lack of self-centeredness that the atheist holds aright in rejecting the false God of legalism.

And so when atheists say they would never be willing to believe in a God who would send people to hell for their petty indiscretions, ask them whether they would believe in a God who would sacrifice His dignity, His reputation, and even His very life in order to rescue people from such a horrific fate. Perhaps they will then reject God because He is too loving, but only someone who has never understood the Gospel would ever reject God because He’s too self-centered and tyrannical.

On foolishness?

2011-09-21T15:00:00.001-07:00

Imagine a man enjoying what he thinks is a relatively prosperous marriage. He treats his wife well, provides for her needs, and is a good father to their children. Every day, he goes off to work, excited most about returning home to spend time with them.

Then one day, he starts to sense that something has changed. As his fears grow, he eventually overhears his wife having a barely guarded conversation with another man, clearly indicating she has been unfaithful to him. He confronts her and she admits it, but refuses to stop. In fact, over the next few days, she becomes even more bold, telling anyone that she is cheating on her husband and even deliberately announcing her rendezvous at home. He is ashamed and frustrated and furious, but he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Finally, at a large party they throw every year at their house, with dozens of their friends and neighbors attending, she has the audacity to invite her lover, and he shows up. The crowd is stunned and buzzes about the outrage of it all. In response, the husband leaves the party for a little while, only to return an hour later, a mysterious development which has everyone eager and also a bit nervous to see what will happen next.

Then, after what seems like an unbearably long time, the husband turns down the music and calls for everyone’s attention. To the utter amazement of everyone present, he walks over to his wife, who is standing with her lover. But just as the crowd is expecting the worst, he bends down on one knee, pulls out a stunningly extravagant diamond necklace, and offers it to her, saying, “I still love you, darling. Won’t you please return to me so we can continue the life we promised to build together?”

What diversity shows

2011-09-20T14:50:00.001-07:00

I have a theory. And I’m serious that at the moment this is only a theory, but nevertheless, here goes.

If you’ve ever noticed, when people become ardent fans of something, that fandom causes them to conform toward a standard set by whatever they love. For instance, musical fans don’t merely often dress alike, speak alike, and even have similar hair styles. This is why it’s relatively easy to tell Grateful Dead fans from Bieber fans from Metallica fans. To put it in more theological language, idolizing something like a musical group reshapes the idolater in the image of the idol, causing a kind of external (and perhaps internal) convergence toward that thing.

So, even though people may feel they are being very independent or “expressing themselves” in their choice of worship, the end reality is that they actually sacrifice their own individuality in conforming to the thing they follow. This makes sense because any human idol in this sense only has the power to reproduce itself, a single unvaried thing, in others. To put the matter in a different, very uncharitable way, cults always eliminate diversity among their members.

In contrast, when people conform to God, what I’ve discovered is that rather than becoming highly similar to each other, they actually seem to grow ever more divergent, at least in external things. It’s almost as if the inherent variety in God (which we see manifested for instance in the creation all around us) is just as potent in having created each of us individually unique from all others. And when we press ever closer to Him, rather than turning us into second-rate versions of each other, we become first-rate versions of ourselves.

Now I’ll admit that it is not always so. When you visit many religious groups, for instance, you may quickly get the sense that they are not as I have described. In fact, their appearance may much more closely resemble the fans of a particular musical idol than the sort of wild but harmonious variety I’m describing. Some may actually even pride themselves on this sort of sub-cultural homogeneity.

And if that’s often the case, I’m beginning to wonder whether that may itself be a rough indicator of whether the group in question truly has hold of the God of infinite wonder described in the Bible or merely has hold of a god of limitation which they have inadvertently settled for or, worse yet, substituted for Him.

Natural harmony requires similarity, and hence natural human association will both preselect for and reinforce this. In contrast, supernatural harmony reveals itself perhaps nowhere more potently than in its ability to exist despite…and because of…vast diversity.

What isn't a sermon?

2011-09-19T14:20:00.001-07:00

Let me begin this observation with a caveat. I am not a pastor.

Although I have preached a handful of sermons, I believe firmly in the idea that one should be cautious when offering a criticism of anyone who does for a long time what I have only done a few times.

That being said, I have a bother which has developed into a frustration and has now grown into a full-fledged lament.

I’ve heard a lot of sermons in my life, beginning with my own father’s Sunday discourses. I’ve heard sermons by fiery preachers and soft preachers, eloquent preachers and stumbling preachers. I’ve heard Southern accents, British accents, Nigerian accents, and even some sermons in standard American dialect (Midwestern in case you didn’t know). Some preachers are arrogant, others are tender. Some are self-deprecating, others seem to not even have a sense of humor. Some sermons are topical, others are exegetical, and a handful are what one might generously call improvisational, perhaps meant as a way of inducing the Holy Spirit to show up. In short, I’ve heard a lot of sermons.

Putting aside sermons from so-called “liberal” churches, all the preachers I’ve heard would describe their sermons as being Biblically based. These are men who really love Christianity and deeply believe what they are doing is bringing the Bible more fully into people’s lives. I don’t for a moment doubt their sincerity, nor do I doubt they are trying to preach the Bible the best they know how.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough. And the sense in which it’s not enough winds up becoming the sense in which it’s not even really the Bible, either.

In my experience, you see, the most common way to preach is take a Bible passage (or Bible topic), and use it to disclose or distill a helpful bit of instruction about how the congregation should live. In other words, preaching is a matter of giving people good advice. “Go forth and sin no more,” might be the concluding line of any American sermon. And lest you beat a hasty retreat from taking me seriously, let me say that this is not a problem “those other” churches have. It’s been true in virtually every non-denominational, Evangelical, or Bible church I’ve ever visited. Even the ones I would otherwise describe as fairly solid.

The problem is that Christian preaching is not about giving advice, even if it’s sound advice. Christianity is about proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it is concealed in Scripture to be revealed by the preacher for the spiritual nourishment of the disciple. Every sermon, yes every sermon, is thus meant to be the culminating act of worship pressing people ever more fully into the Presence of Christ by stoking the embers of awe we all as believers supernaturally feel at the Gospel of our Savior. This (and only this) will truly transform people and bring God the glory He so richly deserves.

Failing to grasp this as the central purpose of a sermon (and the central point of every part of the Bible), many sermons never even really address the Gospel or It’s uniquely life-changing power. Sometimes, something called “the Gospel” is added on “after” the sermon, like a misplaced appendage. Sometimes it’s not there at all. But when preaching is properly understood (and practiced), the entire agenda of the thing is to bring us into Christ’s embrace by showing how He and He alone is the solution to all our problems and the resolution to every Biblical plotline. And although small drops of God’s Grace can seep out through anyone who presents anything related to God regardless of how ineptly it’s done, full-fledged preaching of this sort opens wide the floodgates of God’s transformative Grace. And it saddens me every time I see it not happen. Every time. Again and again. And it is this supreme sadness that motivates me to write today.

To put the matter in the bluntest of terms, there is preaching the Gospel, preaching Christ, and preaching the Bible. If you aren’t doing all three, then you aren’t really doing any of them at all. You may be lecturing, moralizing, or even giving useful advice. But you aren’t preaching, even if you’re basically doing what everyone else is doing…especially if that is so.

And again, speaking as someone who has tried to do this tremendous task only a few times, I can say from experience that it is magnificently hard to do right and remarkably easy to do wrong. May God grant all of us who at least sometimes communicate the Gospel the grace to do it better more often. And may we all be earnestly praying the same for all preachers everywhere. For this and many other things, our pastors deeply need our prayerful support and encouragement.

What motivates me?

2011-09-16T16:19:00.001-07:00

I like looking at attractive women.

A lot.

Despite what the culture would have me believe, I do not consider this a virtue.

I spent all my younger years hunting hot women with my eyes, a sport my culture, my friends, my television, and my subscription to Playboy all strongly encouraged me in and trained me at.

Upon becoming a Christian, I learned that the lust behind such eye-hunting is wrong for a variety of reasons, and I have been trying ever since to unlearn the skill. Sometimes I do pretty well at not looking. Sometimes I even enjoy a few brief hours of being uninterested in looking. Most times I am a spectacular failure.

But the other day, I had an insight that ever since has been useful for me, and I thought I’d share it in the hopes it might be so for you as well.

I was walking through a parking lot, and I caught myself looking at a pretty woman. Well, actually, I caught myself looking away from her just at the moment I thought she might turn and see me ogling her from a distance. Such finely-tuned reflexes are common for eye-hunters. We don’t want the quarry to notice us hunting them, you see.

But why not?

Because I would feel very ashamed and embarrassed to let a sexy woman actually see me looking at her this way. She would almost certainly dislike it, an understandable reaction to someone visually assaulting you. And as a result of not wanting to actually be discovered in my lusting, I have just enough cowardice to try to hide it from her.

That’s when it struck me.

If the passing opinion of a complete stranger is enough to motivate me to behave properly with my eyes, why isn’t the eternal opinion of my most dearly Beloved Companion sufficient as well? Shouldn’t the sadness of my Father be more meaningful to me than the unspoken contempt of an objectified woman daring to look back at me?

All I know is that since that moment, I have found it relatively easy to not look as I should not. This current triumph may not last, as past experience shows. But at least for the moment, there’s something effective about knowing that God is on my side, wanting my holiness and helping me remember that He alone is the one I should be cognizant of in everything I do.

When more means less.

2011-09-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

We hear an awful lot these days about the duties the rich have toward the poor or society or “to pay their fair share.” The funny thing about this expression is that their “fair share” always seems to actually mean “quite a lot more than anyone else.” If they only paid the same percentage as everyone else (a flat tax), they would still be paying a lot more. But since we have a “progressive” tax system, they actually pay a higher percentage, meaning they pay exponentially more than others. At least that’s the idea.

Now, the reality is that high income earners often are in a position to manipulate their earnings in such a way as to wind up paying a much lower percentage than the simple system would indicate. This is a very legitimate practical part of any meaningful tax discussion and is essentially what Warren Buffett recently wrote about in the New York Times.

Nevertheless, people seem completely satisfied with the underlying notion that in a perfectly just world, we would first solve such practical defects and then proceed to impose not just a higher tax bill, but an exponentially higher tax bill, on the rich. And the exact value of that exponent should always be either slightly or substantially higher than whatever it currently is, at least if you consult the average person. In defense of this view, they will often say something to the effect of, “The rich owe more to society because they have so much.”

But this proceeds from a fundamental error about the nature of money.

Money, you see, is nothing but a measure of how much good you have done for other people. Oh, to be sure, a great many good things we do for others don’t receive any payment, and there are also nefarious ways to acquire money, the bulk of which we make illegal. But the basic idea of money is that I give it to you when you give me something I value more than that money’s capacity to buy something else. In other words, at that moment, you’re offering me what I consider to be the best value for my currency available in my society. Thus the reason you acquire it is the same reason I held it before you: you benefitted me after I benefitted another.

So when a man has a higher income than someone else, the money he earns is evidence he has done more for society. And when he earns a lot, it means he has done a lot for people who voluntarily proved the evaluation by paying you for whatever he did. Thus, a high income is the most basic evidence of a high social contribution. Again, other forms of contribution may go uncompensated and some compensation comes from not truly contributing, but the basic idea of money is as I’ve described.

That’s why the principle of taxing the high income earners is so self-contradictory. On the one hand, high incomes prove a much higher-than-average social contribution. But on the other hand, they prove a lower-than-expected social contribution. Advocates of progressive taxation thus seem to think a high income simultaneously proves you’ve done much more than most for others and yet also not nearly enough for them.

Now, I’m very much in favor of the well-off using their resources charitably. But to say to them that the proof of their social failure is the very evidence of their social success completely baffles me.

The sin of guilt.

2011-09-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

If you feel guilty, I have some really terrible news for you: guilt is a terrible, horrible sin.

I don’t mean that guilt is what you feel after you’ve committed some terrible, horrible sin, although that’s certainly the case. I mean that feeling guilt is itself a sin. This doesn’t feel like help, does it? But hang on, the good news (really) is coming.

Ask yourself, “Why does God tell us which things are contrary to our nature and His purpose for our lives?” Well, naturally, so that we will recognize them, right?

Okay. But what are we supposed to do once we recognize that we have done wrong? The guilty man answers this question by justifying his burdenedness. “I have sinned, and therefore I feel guilty.” This seems simple enough, but is in fact a truly hellish heresy.

To put matters bluntly, the problem is that guilt is not mere sin-awareness. Guilt is sin-cherishing.

Think about it. When you feel guilty, do you go on feeling guilty? Of course. But when you are in right relationship with God, do you go on feeling this way or does God relieve you of the burden of condemnation through faith in the sacrifice of His Son? So doesn’t it make sense that an ongoing sense of worthlessness would be specifically contrary to God’s Will? That’s because guilt perverts the gift of sin-awareness by turning it into a poisonous trap of remaining alienated from God based on the blasphemous notion that God wants you to be guilty rather than repentant and faithful, that He is a God of wrath and not mercy who has revealed a moral code in order to crush you rather than to drive you back into His loving arms.

Guilt presumes God is the elder brother in the Prodigal Sons story, bitterly looking for any reason to heap shame upon you, when in fact God is obviously the father in the parable, eagerly running out to grasp us in His love.

So why does God give us the gift of sin-awareness? First, so that we will realize we are already in a fractured relationship with him. But the next step is the vital one. If God more than anything wants us restored to Him, then the proper response is to take this sin-awareness right back to Him, seeking for and trusting in His mercy and grace in joy.

But if God is a punitive and vindictive overlord, then we quite naturally internalize sin-awareness as the embedded worthlessness which reminds us we are wretched beings. That’s guilt, and that is why it is a sin; because of what it says about God’s Nature and what it says about His purpose in revealing our sins to us.

And if you’re grasping this, then you may be on the verge of another tremendously important conceptual realization. There is another, opposite reaction to sin-awareness which is nevertheless just as insidious as guilt: false repentance…which most people simply call repentance.

If there is one most common idea people have about repentance it is to turn yourself around and stop sinning. Then you will know you are back on the right path with God. But can’t you see that this only leads to pride and (of course) future failures which then lead either to guilt (when you fail) or self-reliant pride when you think you’ve succeeded?

This “change-your-behavior-ist” misunderstanding of repentance has perhaps done even more damage to Christian thinking than even guilt itself because it lays the responsibility for fixing our lives in our laps rather than at the foot of the Cross. True repentance is recognizing sin and then turning toward God in faith that Christ’s righteousness already is your identity and both seeking to grow in the knowledge of this salvation and praising God for how much of it He has already accomplished in you.

Thus, guilt and Change-your-behaviorism both start from the same basic paradigm error that our relationship with God is defined primarily by our works. If we do wrong, we are separated from him through guilt. If we do right, we are united with him through the false repentance of self-justifying works.

Repentance and faith, in contrast are beginning, middle, and end a matter of turning to God and trusting in Him to work His righteousness out in you. And when you respond to sin this way, you neither feel guilty nor proud. You simply rejoice in the ongoing fulfillment of Christ’s prayer that the Father would see us just as He saw Him for all of eternity.

And if you’re really getting this, then you will suddenly see that having me tell you that your guilt is actually even more sinful than the sin which inspired it is not even worse news. It’s incredibly good news…because it is of the essence of what the Good News really says.

This tastes rotten.

2011-09-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

Note: Pardon my verbosity today. Sometimes it’s fun to use too much paint.

When even the New York Times is lamenting relativism, you know things must not be going very well.

David Brooks laments that we’ve so ingrained to-each-his-own-ism in our children that they don’t even have the capacity to think morally anymore. They know how to seek their internal sense of happiness (and perhaps to express their own personal discomfort with some real abomination such as unrecycled newspaper), but even these blushes are below remedial. And as Brooks notes, this isn’t really their fault. They have been led over this intellectual cliff by educators with a particularly viral form of hostility to reason. The result is a society which lacks both the counterbalancing reference points of the group or the doctrine to balance unadulterated individualism and also the reflective capacity to ask whether this anthropological anomaly might be a problem.

But this is to be expected. When morality, religion, and politics are routinely taught as matters of aesthetics and then aesthetics is routinely pronounced solely a matter of private and immediate gratification, is it any wonder that no one studies anything anymore? Study presumes some relevant measure of progress. But when the unaided (and untainted) individual reaction is gilded, raised aloft, and prayed to on a daily basis, what perverse individual would waste his effort doing otherwise?

In a culture populated with truth-seekers, even matters of taste are treated as such lush opportunities for discovery that we train people to discern varieties of flavor, texture, and tone with courses in wine-tasting, art history, and music theory. But in one bursting with younglings numbed into neural incompetence by the repeated reminder that goodness is in the tongue of the taster, not even the most significant matters merit enough attention to learn the most rudimentary melodies of critical evaluation

Abnd what if I succeed?

2011-09-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

My goal is to be the very best parent I can be.

I want to show my children a healthy marriage so they don’t grow up emotionally scarred or hostile to the very idea of marriage.

I want to impart to them a strong sense of identity and their worth as human beings so they don’t crave meaning in gangs, drugs, cults, or the body of a lover.

I want to give them all the principles of wisdom I have learned and also teach them to solve novel problems on their own.

I want to prepare them for the world around them, teaching them social, intellectual, financial, and relational skills that will make the world their playplace rather than their battlefield.

I want to be such a quality companion that they want to live near me with their own families because they wouldn’t want their grandkids to grow up apart from me.

I want to give them everything a father can possibly give them. And I hope if I have done this that they will recognize it, thinking highly of me, feel grateful, and perhaps even have thoughts like, “I hope I can live up to being half the man my father was.”

In other words, my goal as a parent is to be the very best idol I can be….so good that they never have any of the problems which would make God necessary in their lives and drive them to their knees in prayer.

Am I earnestly leading my children to their true Father, or am I satisfied pretending to be His replacement?

Beware my pyrite!

2011-09-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

What’s the purpose of evangelism?

Go ahead and give an answer…I’ll wait.

Okay. So I figure most people would say something like, “Evangelism is to spread the Gospel.”

But what’s the point of that?

“To get people saved.”

Alright. That’s not a terrible start. But why do you want people to be saved?

“Come again? Obviously so they don’t go to hell.”

See, that’s the problem. I mean sure that’s part of the deal, but that’s not the real point.

The purpose of everything is to make God look as good as He really is, the term for which is to “glorify” Him. But the particular way evangelism makes God look good is by transforming people into what He originally intended them to be: beautiful lights in a dark world, so beautiful that they bring honor to the Artist who painted them. And the only way this happens is by them first hearing the Gospel, then embracing It, and gradually being renewed by It into that lustrous work of art. That goes well beyond merely saving them from eternal torture.

So why do we evangelize? Because we want to see other people enjoy becoming what they were meant to be so that the One who made them can enjoy them and receive the credit He deserves for the restoration. In short, when people come to God, it makes them happy, it makes Him happy, and it makes the whole world a better place.

Then why don’t we evangelize? Because all of that wonderful stuff hasn’t really happened in us yet, and at some level we know we can’t go share what we don’t really have. See, if we were truly already living that transformation, sharing it with others wouldn’t be an issue. The Gospel poured into us fully enough to really change us couldn’t be restrained from spilling out all over other people.

So in the end, there’s really only one reason we don’t spread the Gospel more zealously (myself included). It’s because we don’t really have It yet. And so the constant scream of our barely-scratched hearts should be to God that He would break us wide open and rain down His Grace on us to the point where we want nothing more passionately than to help other people experience that very same thing.

When that happens, evangelism stops being a command or a task or an option and instead becomes a lifestyle we are joyfully powerless to not live. After all, when was the last time you felt like you "were supposed to" tell other people about a movie you truly loved? And when was the last time you truly loved a movie and didn't naturally tell people about it?

Will the real humanists please stand up?

2011-09-06T21:40:00.001-07:00

One of the most commonly heard arguments against religion is the observation that there are so darned many different varieties, each of which claims its own proclamations are right and the others mistaken. Atheists, of course, just can’t stand this ubiquity of religion. “Why, oh why, are men everywhere so foolish? If only they could get past their folklore, all these deluded supernaturalists would see the true nature of things.”

Now, it’s true that the incompatibility of competing religious claims should give all theists pause. But pausing over faith isn’t the same as jettisoning it altogether. In fact, by pausing we see there’s another fairly obvious lesson one could learn from the observational premise that men everywhere have religion, namely that men everywhere have religion! The atheist lamenting man’s universal impulse to religionize begins by granting the impulse is universal.

But to jump from the fact that all men everywhere pursue religion to the conclusion that instead men ought nowhere to pursue it at all is truly bizarre. If everywhere you find one thing springing forth from another thing, you reasonably infer that such sprouting is normal, not aberrant. But denying all religions requires denying any validity to the deep religious impulse in virtually all men. Yet if all men everywhere do a thing, doesn’t such denial like anti-humanism rather than the name most often taken by such advocates?

Who, then, is the true humanist: the man who does as all other men have always done (affirming their mutual humanity in the process) or the man who looks at all other men with contempt and thinks himself triumphantly superior to them precisely insofar as he becomes unlike them? For all their talk of loving humanity, atheists have actually relabeled sub-humanity as the ideal. Animals, you see, are forgivably incapable of being so awed by the universe as to seek transcendent explanations for it. Atheists, on the other hand, are unwilling, and they then dare recast their repression as a virtue.

Fear no art?

2011-09-02T17:48:00.000-07:00

The other day, I saw a bumper sticker which said, “Fear no art.” Now, since I’m just the sort of guy who’s great at jumping to premises, I immediately inferred the backstory: “Don’t be afraid of art, and therefore don’t censor art.” Seems pretty bland, as far as it goes.

But why, exactly might this person feel the need to reassure those inclined toward art censorship that they needn’t be concerned? Well, the ostensive reason would be that art needn’t be feared because art isn’t dangerous, and the reason it isn’t dangerous is because it doesn’t really have any power. Unfortunately, it makes no sense that someone putting a message like this on his car would say art doesn’t have power.

Quite the contrary. In his mind, art is terribly important and hence must be protected against those villains who favor censorship. If it weren’t, why bother defending it with a pithy adhesive slogan?

So why is art so important? Well, it’s power to express, influence, affect, and shape people and culture, presumably. In other words, art is a terribly important form of social power. Agreed. But this raises a fairly obvious question. Which story are you telling? Is art the sort of impotent thing no one should ever fear, or is art just the sort of powerful thing which society has at least some reason to care about precisely because of its ability to affect people?

Despite the vast array of useless art, neither artists nor those inclined to censor it are foolish enough to believe this means art hasn’t enough power to take seriously. So now we have an interesting confluence of beliefs. The one thing artists and censors both strongly agree upon is the power of art. Naturally, all power entails the potential for both benefit and harm. Following the logic, then, the real question to ask is how to decide when art (in whatever form) might constitute a serious danger either to individuals or to society. From there, the second layer question is how best to contain or minimize the threat, if at all.

It’s true we live in a society which goes to extremes to protect freedom of expression, surely a core value of our culture, so essential that we don’t even censor those who advocate censorship. Yet the reason we protect art, literature, and music so vigorously isn’t because they have no power, but rather precisely because of their power. And even though we believe in such robust protection, anyone who discusses art, expression, and censorship should at least be honest enough to admit that the thing in question is terribly powerful and hence at least sometimes well worth fearing. Pretending otherwise is naïve and usually self-contradictory, even for a three-word bumper sticker.

Programming Note

2011-08-26T04:59:00.000-07:00

I know I haven’t written in over a week, and I’m sorry for the abrupt interruption in service. However, I think there’s a pretty good reason. I’ve been overwhelmingly busy preparing to move to Medford, Oregon for a new job at Talk Radio Network as an Executive Producer. We are selling our St. Louis house, clearing out of our Phoenix house, and somehow or other trying to triangulate all that stuff and “to do” into a place to live in the great northwest. The short version of this amazing thing God has done in our lives is that I’ve been hired to do a job I’ve never done in a place I’ve never been to, working for people I’ve never met who are paying me better than they usually would. And this job starts 7 weeks to the day after my show was cancelled, the exact extent of my severance package from the radio station. ! Oh, and did I mention we accepted the job on our 14^th wedding anniversary? Best anniversary gift ever, Lord!

Sooooo…for the moment, I haven’t been writing for obvious reasons and I probably won’t be for a little while either just because of all the logistics and starting a new job. But I do intend to continue opining, presumably on a regular basis. (Tom Brown nearly forced me to promise I would do so at lunch the other day.) And when I do, I’ll still send these out to all of you either in this format or in some other one.

In the meantime, please be praying for us as we start a new adventure, one that is so obviously God’s doing that I just can’t wait to see how it unfolds. I know this is a terribly unfair thing to mention since I’m not actually giving you the details of it all, but when I recently told some good friends the entire story of all the threads that wove together for this process, it took about 45 minutes of just me talking to tell it all. So, trust me when I say God loves His kids (all of them!), and you can trust Him to do whatever He says He’s going to do. When He works a plan, it’s astounding to behold.

Happy anniversary.

2011-08-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

Today is the fourteenth birthday of our marriage. I bought nothing special for my wife. She bought nothing special for me. I didn’t give her a card. She didn’t give me a card. In fact, most of the day, we both worked on things that needed to be done. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, we ran a few errands together with the children and ended up at our favorite burger bar. We ordered and ate in the company of children, alcoholics, and televised sports, and then we played a little corn hole with the kids. After this extravaganza of excitement, we drove home and split up to home-school our respective kids. After that we put them to bed and watched some TV before going to bed ourselves. Sound special? The sort of thing you read about in those ridiculously long British and Russian novels in literature classes? Perhaps not.

Then again, considering that neither my wife nor I care much about gifts, cards, or spending lots of money on anything, it was actually quite nice. We were full, happy, and grateful to God for a decent life with each other. And that’s pretty much the most important thing you have to know about your own marriage: what works for you.

See, a lot of relationship books and experts will give you a whole long list of “the right things” to do to make a marriage work. And many of them are quite useful. But the problem with reading such books is that it can make you think you’ve done what you’re “supposed” to do, hence you’re good. But it doesn’t matter if you do all the things you’re “supposed” to do in a hundred books if your own spouse doesn’t care about any of that stuff or needs something different (whether more or less) from you personally.

Today made me happy. Today made my wife happy. And just the fact that after fourteen years, we know each other well enough to know exactly this about us both is one of the greatest thrills of being married for a little while. Perhaps it sounds far less glamorous than the ads encourage you to imagine, but let me assure you that glamour isn’t nearly everything it’s cracked up to be. Especially when you compare it with the simplicity of sharing a life with someone you love, a rather mundanely exotic thing that I worry far too many people think somehow inadequate because it fails to live up to all their ludicrously epic expectations.

Don’t underestimate the value of a good sedan. There’s a reason it’s the kind of car most people wind up buying…and being satisfied with.

God's view

2011-08-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

Whom does God love more: me or Tom Brown? God allowed my show to get cancelled and my only real source of income to go away. But God also allowed Tom to move away from doing a task he doesn’t excel at into doing something he really loves as a talk show host. So when I lost my show, was God blessing His children?

Whom does God love more: me or Chris X? God allowed me to purchase two All-Star Game tickets for $1000 in the hopes of reselling them for a profit. In the end, I sold them for a loss of about $500 the week before the game. The stranger who bought them from me, Chris, used them as a surprise for his wife. They went to the game and the Home Run Derby, sitting in the much better seats than I even enjoyed with my other personal ticket. They were happy to buy them before hand and thrilled to have used them after the fact. So when I lost $500 on a dumb investment to make this possible for them, was God blessing His children?

Whom does God love more: us or the Blanks? All these years, my wife and I have held onto the house we dearly love in St. Louis, believing we would eventually return there as we both desire. In particular, this was always our back-up plan if I ever lost my radio show, which happens unexpectedly in my industry. Just three months ago, He told us to sell it, and it looks like we have a buyer. Now that I have lost the show, we’re suddenly semi-marooned in Phoenix, having no real idea what the future holds or where it lies. So we’re probably selling a house we love near Dani’s mom that was always our safety valve and in which we started our family. But we’re selling it to people who seem to love it, too, perhaps even more than we do. The husband and his friend have already been planning how to finish the lower level which we never did in 13 years. So when we sell it to them (assuming it goes through), was God blessing His children?

When we say that God does things to bless His children, why do we tend to think that means they need to bless us more than others? Doesn’t it make at least as much sense that He might be interested in blessing them rather than us? Isn’t the real question whether I can be as happy to see others blessed (even at my own expense or misfortune) as I am to see myself prosper? Because until I am, can I really yet say I’m seeing things through God’s eyes? And shouldn’t I find the great honor of being such a nifty part of God’s grand plan worth so much more than any of the small things I seem to have lost in the process?

Just to be clear, there is only one correct answer to these questions. And it’s an inexpressibly wonderful joy to be in a position to give it.

How do I get to hell?

2011-08-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

If I speak properly, then I am a good person, which is why it is ever so important to show people who do not speak properly their grammatical flaws, because I love them and want them to be better people…like me. Failing this, I must at least be certain others know the difference so they can recognize my goodness for what it is. Thus, I will be sure to publicly criticize those who speak poorly.

If I drive correctly, then I am a good person, which is why it is so vital that bad drivers visibly receive my love-filled gestures of indignation. How else will they know they have driven badly and learn from their mistakes, eventually becoming good drivers and therefore good people…like me. Regardless, I should at least tell my friends about the bad drivers I encountered today so they can honor my skill for what it is. This way we can all be good people together, unlike those other sorts.

If I obey the Bible properly, then I am a good person, which is why it is so essential that immoral people be taught the error of their ways. Besides, God tells me to love them, and what better way to do so than to actively facilitate their moral education? Unable to virtuefy them, I will of course need to exclude them from my closely guarded circle of self-congratulation. After all, if I and people like me to not regularly practice our God-given gift of condemnation, how will we reinforce our holiness and maintain our moral prestige with others?

What's off the menu?

2011-08-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

Among theological conservatives, it is common to hear complaints about innovative approaches to evangelism and non-traditional methods of enticing people toward Christianity. The general criticism is that people using these newer styles of Christian outreach are resorting to worldly forms of persuasion and rhetoric instead of relying upon God and God’s message to draw people. This is certainly a concern worth taking seriously.

But the difficulty is that when someone employing one style of presentation looks at someone employing another style, it is easy to mistake different for inferior. And when such rhetorical xenophobia starts wrapping itself in the sanctimonious garb of tradition, we should pause to consider some possible categories for differentiating otherspeak:

1. Rhetoric which is truly incompetent or unclear.

2. Rhetoric which only appears competent because I am familiar with its particular form of incompetence.

3. Rhetoric which is far more persuasive than my own and of which I am therefore suspicious in part because it threatens to reclassify my own as inferior by comparison.

4. Rhetoric which is very innovative and different from my own and therefore tastes a bit strange to me, but which expect from the embodied diversity of God’s creative nature.

5. Rhetoric which is innovative and different in a way which really deviates from the core idea that people come to God because of God rather than coming merely to the projection of their own desires found in enticement predicated upon such an idolatrous appeal.

It's ever so easy to find a pretext for rejecting any approach which is different from my own (or that of my tradition) and then mislabel that rejection of style as doctrinal superiority. But just as we must not remake God in our own image, we must also not try to remake His other children according to the pattern birthed in us. Just because God has truly given me my flavor of Christian outreach, that does not mean every other combination of speech spices is an unsavory defilement of God’s cuisine.

Life in eastern Africa

2011-08-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

Dadaab is a city in eastern Kenya that is home to the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is built to handle 90,000 people, and it currently holds over 450,000. As you might imagine, the conditions are atrocious. Overcrowding, food shortages, no amenities to speak of. To call this a hopeless place is really an understatement, and it is one of four similar refugee camps in this impoverished African country.

The amazing thing to consider, however, is that as bad as the conditions in the camps are, the Kenyan government has been forced to close its border to refugees from neighboring countries like Sudan and Ethiopia as a result of the sheer numbers of people fleeing those areas.

In neighboring Somalia, the drought is a famine beyond imagining. Tens of thousands of Somalis have died of starvation in the past month. It’s a situation not likely to get better anytime soon due to the ruthless oppression from the Islamist militants of al-Shabab, who won’t let aid workers come in or their own people flee. Despite the risk of being killed or raped along the way, however, starving Somalis have been attempting the hundred mile journey from their own country into Kenya across a closed border just for a chance of getting into one of the overcrowded and miserable Kenyan refugee camps such as Dadaab.

It sort of puts the irritation from having a slow computer in perspective, right?

For me to win, we all must win.

2011-08-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest hidden pathologies in our thinking is the “zero-sum game” paradigm. For the Cardinals to win, the Cubs had to lose. For Ruben Studdard to win, Clay Aiken had to lose. For Obama to win, McCain had to lose. And for “The King’s Speech” to win, “True Grit” had to lose. Clearly, the ”one-up and one-down” paradigm is sometimes a reality. But the taint which comes from expecting that pattern to hold everywhere easily blinds us to the true character of situations where it simply isn’t so.

Consider romantic relationships. At their worst, they are lose-lose, and at their almost worst they are win-lose. But when romance works properly, both parties gain tremendously from their interactions. On a good date, both people come out happier at the end. Who lost for such winning to occur? No one lost. Both are ahead. What a perversion it would be if all relationships were doomed by structure to produce no net advance for the combined participants!

Consider art. If I invent a new way to perform a dance movement (unlikely) or a new style of brushstroke (more unlikely) or a novel and poignant enwordment of ideas (possible, at least), people will be blessed by it. Others may even copy and duplicate my invention. Who is worse off in this situation? I have gained by knowing I gave the gift. Others have gained by receiving it. And still other givers and receivers will be blessed through the spreading ripples of artistic emulation. What a horror art would be if society gained no net enrichment through its production!

But significantly, consider commerce. Although it is common to think of money as a zero-sum game (since someone always gains the money from someone else paying it), nothing could be further from the truth. When I go to the store and purchase a product, I am happy to buy it, and the merchant is happy to have sold it to me. Who is worse off? The counterimpulsive answer is, “No one.” In fact, we’re both better off. This is the magic of free transactions. The shirt is worth more to me than the money I spend, and the money is worth more to the retailer than the shirt he sells me. We’re both better off. Consider an alternate universe where the simple ownership of money were the only value in the world. No one would ever spend theirs. But of course, they do, most of the time quite willingly. Why? To get something worth more to them than the money from someone to whom the money is worth more than the something.

The tremendous “positive-sum gameness” of these extremely significant domains of human experience should serve as a warning. Since it is possible to misunderstand them as win-or-lose environments if we have spent too long in such arenas, we must constantly beware such paradigmatic bleed-over. Otherwise, we will mistake win-and-win environments for the other kind and practice them accordingly, ruining by perverse expectation what God intended as another way to reveal His own ever-flourishing nature.

Anything in which there must be winners and losers should make us suspect that it may not be God-given. And anything which clearly is God-given should inspire us to look diligently for ways to conduct ourselves so that all players benefit from the endeavor.

National low-paying job day?

2011-08-04T20:01:00.001-07:00

When you go to a fast food restaurant, do you appreciate being able to get such a tasty meal so quickly so cheap?

Me, too.

When you go to the clothing store at the mall, do you appreciate being able to immediately purchase precisely your size and the color of clothing you want from an available inventory?

Me, too.

Do you like pens? DVD players? Toothpicks?

Me, too.

The reason I ask is because in our society, we tend to value things largely based on their price tag, if only for the very understandable reason that the whole point of a price tag is to tell you something’s value. But one problem that comes from this is that people who work in a wide variety of retail, customer service, manufacturing, or other relatively low-paying jobs don’t feel valued for what they do and often wind up not valuing what they do themselves.

In part this is because they may feel the work itself isn’t very stimulating. However, I suspect that if helping people buy groceries paid $100,000, very few checkout clerks would complain about the meaninglessness of their work. It’s funny how much more satisfying something can seem when it pays well, a byproduct of both the enhanced lifestyle it enables and also the significance-signal carried by the pay grade. But back in this real world where many jobs pay quite little and don’t fulfill every desire reality TV and self-help gurus have sold our culture, it’s easy to forget that we all enjoy being able to do the things such jobs make possible.

So if it’s your low-paying, under-stimulating task to sell us food, clothes or anything else, ignore the pay and take a moment to consider the blessing of being able to help satisfy people as much as you do. And if you have a “better” job, perhaps the next time you do any of these things, you can convey to that person how glad you are they make it possible. Their sacrifices, so to speak, are perhaps not on par with those of military personnel or teachers, but we do tend to take them just as much for granted even while we cherish what they make possible. And the cool thing about expressing gratitude for people who don’t get paid very well is that it costs absolutely nothing but can still purchase quite a lot.

Denial is not fulfillment

2011-08-03T18:31:00.001-07:00

“I want chicken tacos!” “No, make macaroni and cheese!”

“Give me that car!” “No, I was playing with it first!”

Every parent knows that the greatest source of evil in the world is conflicting desires. “Why can’t you just get along?” It’s a problem that obviously does not depart just because those children eventually blow out more birthday candles. Just look around, right? What, then, is the solution to such incompatibility of desire?

Well, some religious traditions have tried to solve this problem by reclassifying desire itself as an evil which should be eliminated altogether. After all, if no one wants anything, then everyone can get along. And the problem with that is certainly not that it reduces conflict. That’s a virtue of sorts. The problem is that it lacks love, which is a relatively serious defect.

See, the kind of low grade harmony achieved by mass-produced indifference is really just the illusion of society. Such people may be in proximity, but they are not knit together. How can you be knit to someone when neither of you want anything, including each other?

Without desire, it is impossible to sacrifice anything, since sacrifice presupposes the suffering of loss. And if sacrifice is the most clear expression of love, then until we are attached, we cannot let go. And if we cannot let go of one thing (like peace and quiet) for the purpose of gaining another (like having children), then how can we know that we love anything at all, let alone identify which things we love most? Similarly, when I desire nothing, what joy is there in others giving me gifts or satisfying my wants? How can I know I am loved by them, and how can I experience that love except in such ways?

So a society which merely stifles desire may have a sort of peace, but it’s the same peace anyone can have all by himself if no other humans existed. But didn’t God declare it was not good for man to be alone? And why so? Because until others and our love for them show up, desire and the guiding of it for their sake cannot produce the true harmony which alone is capable of revealing His nature. So we should be dubious about any moral agenda which says man should be as if alone, safe from the trouble of desires and others, but never producing any art with them either.

And this is why one of the most vital parts of raising children (and an opportunity inherently missing from households with only one child) is not so much teaching children to have fewer desires, but teaching them how to weave their desires into the tapestry of love.

Free beer!

2011-08-02T21:38:00.000-07:00

If you accept Jesus, you’ll be financially prosperous very quickly.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll be physically healthy and not get sick.
If you accept Jesus, people will like you.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll have a great marriage.
If you accept Jesus, your kids will start behaving and do well in school.
If you accept Jesus, life will be easy.
If you accept Jesus, everything will always make sense to you.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll never suffer again.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll never have trouble with people again.
If you accept Jesus, you will become physically attractive.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll never struggle with sin again.
If you accept Jesus, your American Idol pick will win.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll be able to lose weight.
If you accept Jesus, you’ll always get good parking spaces.
If you accept Jesus, lots of people will like you on facebook.
If you accept Jesus, your favorite television shows will never get cancelled.
If you accept Jesus, your team of choice will be champions.
If you accept Jesus, your computer will never freeze up or be slow.

See, some people complain that selling Jesus like this is a dangerous form of evangelism because it sets people up for disappointment when the promises don’t come true. Others see it as terrible theology because it treats the things we want in this life as more important than God by making him the means to them rather than the end purpose of having them. But I think our real problem in selling Jesus is we just aren’t being clever enough in the offers we print on our theological coupons.

What is anxiety?

2011-08-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

When you believe you have everything you need, you are not anxious. But when you believe you’re missing or in danger of losing anything you think you need, you experience anxiety. Thus, anxiety comes from the gap between what you believe you need and what you believe you have.

But this immediately exposes a major problem with the presence (or lack) of anxiety: human ignorance. Consider the man driving down the road to the hardware store. He has no anxiety despite the fact that he is three seconds from a life-changing collision. Similarly, consider the woman trying to pay her bills with inadequate funds. She is anxious despite the fact that she is about to receive a surprise promotion at work the next day.

Naturally, the most common anxieties come from what we believe about the present and the future, as do the most common calms. But the future is a remarkably elusive quarry. And even when we think for sure we know how it will unfold, mere moments can prove otherwise.

That’s why at some point, thinking people must decide whether they believe God is a loving Father or not. If, on the basis of good Biblical theology, we conclude that God is everything He says He is, then we realize that calm when things are going well and anxiety when they don’t are both equally silly.

But trusting God and deriving calm from that assurance is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, as is the case with almost everything in the Christian life, it is beyond our capacity to do. That’s why those of us who choose to believe the truth about God still often find ourselves at war with insubordinate anxieties. It’s also why those who do enjoy faith-based-calm do a terrible disservice to others when they pretend they somehow earned it by adhering to good doctrine.

The reality is that the ability to derive our mood from God rather than from either good or bad circumstances is itself a gift from Him. And thus pretending we can merely choose it hopelessly condemns those who don’t have it and ridiculously insults the Giver from Whom everyone else received it.

The day before my show was cancelled, I had peace on the basis of the false expectation that no real danger existed on the horizon. The day after my show went away, I had peace in the face of turmoil purely on the basis of God’s grace. And having held the two in such close chronological proximity, I can only say that I would always rather have the peace of knowing God in uncertain times than the peace of knowing circumstances in more encouraging ones. And I wish I could give you a simple formula for having it, too. But then it would be the calm of Andrew’s system for alleviating anxiety rather than the calm of receiving God’s gift. And who am I to presume to synthesize what only God can grow?

On Christian Ethics

2011-07-29T17:38:00.001-07:00

If ethics is the study of the life we should live (the good life), then religious ethics is the study of the life God wants us to live. For Christians, gaining clarity on this subject is fraught with difficulty.

One problem is what you might call the “rule-orientation” problem. Ethical systems commonly offer a set of rules for how to live the good life. But Christianity is not a set of rules. In fact, for those who love rules, the New Testament is infuriatingly unhelpful. And even if someone comes to the Bible with the idea of trying to find a compendium of rules, Jesus Himself seems to violate them as often as He upholds them. After all, the rule-oriented leaders of His day were the ones who found Him the most intolerable. His art was far too innovative for their fastidious conventionality.

Another problem is what you might call the “objective ethics” problem. As is natural to think, if God defines the good life and God is fair, then we might expect the good life to be the same for everyone. Although there are certainly some areas of what would ordinarily pass for objective principles, the New Testament again clearly denounces this error under the general principle of Christian liberty. Things that are wrong for one man are good for another and vice versa. And even the thing which might be generally right for one can become wrong in a situation where it alienates people from him or impedes evangelizing or fellowshipping with them. So even when general rules seem to appear, they must always be footnoted by the context and conscience of the individual believer. This again showed itself in the life of Christ and His followers.

But if there is yet a third and truly massive problem plaguing the study of the Christian good life historically, it must surely be the “good enough” problem. This beguiling error tends to think of all possible actions as being either prohibited, permissible, or virtuous. People often think, for instance, that stealing is prohibited, spending money after you have tithed any way you like is permitted, and giving more or all of your money away to charity is virtuous. Unfortunately, the New Testament never gives us ground to hold onto this error. Instead, it says we are to “be perfect.” What this means is that the Christian life is not a matter of avoiding being bad. Instead, virtue, valor, and moral excellence are obligatory. Another way to say this is that there really are no moral options in Christianity. Doing precisely what God wants at any moment is what it means to be good, and everything else is sin. The only life worth living is the perfect one. This is obvious if we merely consider that loving God fully is our basic obligation, which should inspire perfect obedience all the time. Jesus was sinless not because He did “enough,” but because He literally did every single thing precisely right. But considering the first two errors, the perfect life is going to differ greatly from person to person and context to context.

Add to all these difficulties the basic Christian idea that none of us on our own ability can ever actually accomplish God’s perfect will, even if we were insightful enough to see what it was supposed to be in any situation. This means that not only do we need the Holy Spirit moment by moment for guidance, but we need Him to empower us as well.

What, then is Christian ethics? At its simplest, it is the study of knowing the will of the Father at every moment and obeying it by the power of the Holy Spirit enabled in us by the love and sacrifice of our lord Jesus Christ. And once you add all those other wrinkles, it should become clear that Christian ethics is much more like a kind of artistic performance in which something may look quite wrong and be quite right whereas other things may look quite right but be thoroughly wrong. And if we accomplish this, we have merely done what we should.

If this seems to have muddied the waters for you but in a way you don’t really mind too much, then you’re starting to shed some of your pre-Christian ethical misconceptions. And if it also seems to have made things simultaneously far more clear to you, that’s probably because I’m only putting words to the experience of God you’ve already begun to have in your life.

Candy friends

2011-07-28T20:07:00.001-07:00

At church recently, my children discovered the joy of being lucky. Ethan had managed to win the grand prize in some drawing, which turned out to be a light-up foam rocket launcher, a toy all the children coveted deeply. Well, we brought it home, but there was a problem. For whatever reason, daddy was the only one who could figure out how to pump it up and launch it properly and his adeptness was non-transferable to mommy or the boys. So, mommy decided to take Ethan with her to Target the next day and return it for something he would enjoy more and could actually use.

His purchase of choice? As much junk food as possible. Kit-Kats, cinnamon swirl buns, chocolate snack donuts, single-serve packets of instant pink lemonade, glo-sticks, and of course cinnamon chapstick. It was quite a haul. What I found just as fascinating as the selection, however, was the method of enjoyment. It was all gone within the day. He would eat some, and he would share some with his brothers. Then he would eat some more, and share some more with his brothers. In fact, he seemed to enjoy being the big man around the house with goodies to dole out just as much as he enjoyed eating them himself.

I must admit, my first reactions to all this were sort of negative. I was a bit irked that he had liquidated a physical and ongoing asset (a toy) into food rather than another tangible entertainment. Then I was a bit more irked when he just consumed it all in such a short period of time rather than parceling out the pleasure at least over a few days. And finally, I thought it was weird the way he seemed to be almost purchasing affection from the other boys with his favors, as perhaps the insecure second-born is prone to do. The prudent and self-sufficient adult in me was suffering a kind of embodied repudiation of my economic identity.

But in an instant, I reframed my entire outlook. Ethan was throwing a party, and he was just enjoying the chance to be a rich man inviting his best friends to his banquet of unhealthy delicacies. And it reminded me instantly of a Bible verse which I misunderstood for years. Jesus tells his disciples to “make friends with unrighteous money,” which does not mean to become money’s friend, but to use money to make friends, a decided upgrade in value. And when you are a child living in a world where you trust your daddy to always takes care of the important stuff so implicitly that you don’t even have to think about planning for tomorrow, this is precisely the way you misspend a surplus…in love on people.

On loneliness.

2011-07-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

Being separated from my family for six weeks while they were in St. Louis was extremely unpleasant for me. There were obviously some lifestyle benefits, such as time flexibility, significantly reduced responsibility, and a total lack of the aggravations which other humans (especially the partially grown ones) bring with them. But just as obviously, these advantages don’t even remotely outweigh the pain of being separated from the ones I love. One way I learned to deal with the separation was simply to not think about them too much, avoiding looking at pictures for the simple reason that it just hurt too much.

But as I endured this unpleasant experience, it also taught me something I wouldn’t otherwise have understood. Obviously, it made me consider those others who suffer much more prolonged separations under much harsher circumstances, such as members of the military and their families. But the not-so-obvious part for me was what it taught me about single people. Young singles tend to have lots of friends and live with roommates or their parents, so they tend to not be alone very much. But for so many older singles, loneliness is a way of life.

See, in my case, it was painful because I missed my family, but at least I knew it was only temporary. There was a wife and sons who were going to return soon, and then it would all be over. But for adults who live alone, no one is coming home…or at least no one is coming home anytime soon. The house may be quiet and no one will bother them, but this also means there’s no one to cry with, get hugs from, run an idea past, or just share a joke with on a moment-by-moment basis. And although I know I have already returned to the family life in which its easy to fantasize about being alone, I hope I will also keep a place in my awareness for the gift of companionship which all of our families have to offer the alone who surround us.

What's the goal?

2011-07-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

Last night, while the rest of us watched TV together, Ethan (age five) had gone into the playroom and was occupying himself. Now, as any parent knows, the most distressing noise in a house full of children is quiet. So, having heard no sound from the other room for quite awhile, I went to check on him.

But when I opened the door, I was completely stunned by his response. Looking up from the picture he was coloring, Ethan gave me a murderous look, gritted his teeth, and ordered me to, “Get out!” in the strongest tone he could muster. Baffled, I asked him what was wrong several times, but I kept getting the same basic reaction: fury. Now, normally such behavior isn’t tolerated, but there seemed to be something extra weird going on here, which made me pause before jumping into discipline-and-correct mode.

And in that moment of pause, I considered how God deals with me when I’m angry. Despite often making jokes about being struck by God’s wrathful lightning for some smart-aleck remark or minor indiscretion, the reality is that God is extraordinarily gentle with me. In fact, His normal response to my anger is to wait until I calm down and then talk to me softly. So, instead of pushing for a confrontation with my son, I decided to yield to him for the moment, and I left.

When I returned a bit later, the door was locked, a specifically prohibited action. So I knocked and told him to open the door. When he did so, his anger was still obvious, so I told him in the most gentle voice possible that he must never lock the door and that if he needed a few more minutes to finish, he should ask for it instead of demanding. He did so, and I acquiesced.

A few minutes later, his mood had totally changed. I asked him if he had just needed some extra time to finish, and he said yes. I even honored his project by asking him if he wanted me to put it somewhere special overnight so it wouldn’t be damaged by the other boys in the morning, which he appreciated. And in the course of a few brief, gentle interactions, I watched him become not only unmad at me, but tenderly affectionate and smiling in his eagerness to express his love for me.

It’s not hard to imagine an extremely different outcome if I had gone instead for instant obedience and correction at the first sign of trouble. But instead, I went with God’s own example in Fathering me. It’s odd, but I had never before realized that, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” would apply to my own children in addition to enemies and oppressors. (Proverbs 15:1)

What is Americanism?

2011-07-25T16:41:00.001-07:00

Note: I apologize in advance for the length, but I hope you’ll agree it couldn’t have been done more briefly and the ideas justified it in this case.

Most people don’t really understand the nature of Americanism, America’s unique political philosophy. They might think America is mostly about giving people the vote or perhaps (historically) not having a king or even having a Constitution. But those are just byproducts of the underlying essence of Americanism: the suspicion of power. Americans (in any country) don’t necessarily believe that freedom on its own is always good, but they do believe that accumulations of power always lead to the loss of freedom and that is always bad. So Americans actively work to prevent concentrations of any form of power.

In government, this means parceling out political power very carefully through checks and balances and enumerated powers. It also means vesting such limited powers temporarily in the hands of representatives who can be unelected periodically by the voters who cast their ballots privately for the sake of preserving them against coercion. So, when it comes to lawmaking, power is carved up, deliberately partitioned, and spread across the most hands possible, ultimately the hands of every citizen. But this same concern about accumulated power is found elsewhere as well.

Freedom of the press is a bulwark against propaganda by the government, and it serves as a means of decentralizing information so that we can cast informed votes. But it also creates its own good in terms of keeping the power over ideas in as many hands as possible, as opposed to authoritarian systems where ideological power is amassed in one or a few places. And when information power starts to be concentrated too much in anyone’s hands (even if not a governmental entity), this starts to violate the anti-power-concentration impulse at the core of Americanism. Americanism requires a free press. But this means a lot of presses, not merely a handful of non-governmental ones.

Freedom of religion is another example, as is the right to keep and bear arms, both of which preserve the ability of individuals to protect themselves against forms of coercion: the theological and the physically violent. Any form of power is viewed with suspicion as a danger by Americans, and these are historically major forms of it.

But what about property rights and economic freedom? See, monarchy and feudalism went hand in hand because if the king made the laws and held all the political power, it only mad sense that (as a sort of demigod) he would also control all the land and wealth. Yet in America, it was no fluke at all that capitalism arose and flourished along with Constitutional republicanism precisely because capitalism is a truly radical pattern for decentralizing another major form of power: money. The ability of anyone to make transactions, own property, and engage in work for himself or for another means that no central agency can control this vital form of social power.

And yet, if the point is to keep power from being accumulated anywhere so as to preserve freedom for the individual everywhere, then we should very much be concerned about vast or at least disproportionate accumulations of wealth. Not because they show something nefarious was done to earn them (although this may well be so), but because we believe that the most likely thing people will do with such wealth is use it to distort the rest of the society (including political power) to their own benefit.

This is why, when it comes to money, Americans currently find themselves in a very dicey position. On the one hand, it is abundantly obvious that certain groups have amassed truly disparate wealth. They in turn have used this wealth to buy political influence in order to amplify their own economic and cultural position. This is true of the banking and finance industry, and it’s true of media moguls (who also obviously have information power as well). But it’s also true of corporations, labor unions, and senior citizens.

So when redistribution of wealth or financial regulation are proposed or the rich-poor gap lamented, freedom-lovers often mistakenly respond angrily as if government is being sought to deprive economic freedom. But people who truly understand Americanism don’t respond this way. Instead, they realize that economic redistribution (or at least some serious limits on the upper end of the income and wealth scale) aren’t instruments for remedying economic unfairness so much as means of preserving the freedom which vast accumulations of economic power necessarily jeopardize.

Thus, those who praise extreme deregulation as a purer form of freedom actually wind up enabling precisely the sort of economic tyranny which Americanism despises. The danger of a banking executive making $300 million a year when a bank teller makes only $30,000 isn’t just the absurdity of maintaining he is 10,000 times more valuable to society. It’s the real threat to the American doctrine that too much power in anyone’s hands is always a bad thing.

Socialism as an economic system of centralized planning is entirely contrary to Americanism. But financial regulation so as to prevent such accumulation isn’t socialism. It’s America’s truest ideals being played out against the very dangerous and historically obvious tyranny of the wealthy.

The enemyship of certain friends.

2011-07-22T17:23:00.001-07:00

As much as I love doing talk radio, I must be honest and say that my industry is riddled with evil masquerading as entertainment. I don’t mean the evil of having wrong beliefs or espousing falsehood or even indulging in vulgar discussions. That goes without saying. Instead, I mean the much larger evil of misanthropy.

You see, a misanthrope is someone who hates humanity, but most people don’t notice misanthropy because they don’t recognize the symptoms. Surely a person who kills or hurts people for sport would be seen as misanthropic, but what of someone who berates and mocks them for money…or a political cause?

You see, acerbic political (or theological) discourse is almost always the byproduct of believing that other people are mere means to a (more valuable) ideological end. Those who agree are useful objects in pursuit of the cause, and those who disagree are mere obstacles to be ridiculed or destroyed. Though it may appear to an untrained eye that the misanthrope only hates his opponents, the fact that a supporter can so easily earn his contempt by merely changing opinions (and vice versa) means that he doesn’t truly love those who agree, only the reflection of his own idolatry recognized in them.

This mindstyle of contempt awaiting anyone who fails to measure up is the infallible mark of a misanthrope. But unskilled in the diagnosis, those who happen to agree with his views merely think him a valiant warrior on the field of public discourse. Yet only a narcissist makes agreement the price tag of fellowship, and only a misanthrope mistakes contempt for a virtue.

Nobility is making your enemies so precious that your love of them leads you to suffer on their behalf. But finding your own ideas so precious that devotion to them leads you to verbally maul your enemies (and enjoy others who do the same) is just a cowardly form of fantasizing murder.

Ahh, the invisible hand of culture...

2011-07-21T18:25:00.001-07:00

One of the basic problems with cultural evolution is that, unless it is heavily guided by some sort of central governing agency or a common standard like a religious text, it will inevitably produce practices which look absurd when displayed next to each other. This is possible because those practices evolve along separate pathways which don’t normally invite comparison to one other. Thus, suddenly juxtaposing them reveals not only the goofiness of those particular features of the culture but also the utter silliness of the broader neglectful habit of letting culture shape itself this way in the first place.

Allow me to exemplify.

For the average American, divorce is a simple legal remedy to a major personal problem: the unhappy marriage. Despite making a promise before God and all your friends to permanently bind yourself to this other person regardless of the future, very few people these days will think much less of you for breaking precisely this unconditional vow. So many people have done so, in fact, that being anti-divorce is beginning to seem a bit like being opposed to antibiotics. There is simply no notion in the broader culture that there is anything fundamentally wrong with this practice. Bad marriages are a kind of illness that happens to befall some unlucky folks and divorce is simply the remedy. Even Christians who might oppose it generally wouldn’t actually break fellowship with a friend for getting one, despite the fact that divorce is meant to symbolize the union of God in the Trinity and glorify Him and His permanent vows to us as His people. So that’s the current American cultural status of divorce.

Now consider the strategic foreclosure. For most Americans, the idea of deliberately choosing to abandon a house because it is worth far less than is owed on it seems profoundly immoral, a major breach of your word. “You promised to pay, after all, and pay you should.” This despite the fact that the contract was deliberately crafted with dozens of provisos in a merely legal setting without any reference to God, family, or community at all. Moreover, this particular contract specifies a precise penalty for infidelity: loss of the asset. That is all. And there are no promises of forever or sickness and health, not to mention richer and poorer. That’s because the contract is extraordinarily conditional. And yet, somehow, the idea of radically unforeseen circumstances justifying the fracture of this merely manmade and not-even-remotely-God-instituted deal presents a crushing moral obstacle to many decent people, precisely because they are decent.

Now, clearly, one can have a vigorous discussion about both the individual merits of divorce and of strategic foreclosure. I mean only to show the surpassing absurdity of a society whose members would be so calmly accepting of divorce and so morally vexed over strategic foreclosure. It either means they worship money and not God (a possibility not to be dismissed too quickly) or else they are the victims of a culture which is in serious need of some principled reform.

On the private and the official

2011-07-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney recently said that asking a candidate to explain his church’s distinctive theology “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” And Governor Romney is certainly not alone in making the equivocation between the Constitution prohibiting a religious test oath and it being somehow un-American for citizen voters to ask such questions. But the only way to make sense of this line of reasoning is to assert that whatever the Constitution prevents Congress from doing must also therefore be unacceptable for individuals to do.

But such a view is supremely confused about the very nature of the Constitution. The entire point of preventing the federal government (or other governments) from making certain requirements is to preserve and protect that same power somewhere else. If people want to vote against Romney because he’s a Mormon or against Rick Perry because he’s an Evangelical, that is their unassailable right as a voter. And if they use those standards to urge other voters in the same direction, that is part of their unalienable right to free political speech. That’s because there is a vast difference between an official religious requirement for office and private religious judgment by a voter. In fact, one say that using a Constitutional limitation to try to marginalize people for expressing their religious convictions regarding candidates is itself un-American, or at least more so than them holding those convictions in the first place.

Consider similar cases. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. Does that mean it is un-American to support building a church? The First Amendment prohibits Congress from censoring the press. Does that mean it is un-American for a privately owned newspaper to reject essays it considers unworthy or unfitting for its periodical? And the First Amendment prohibits Congress from interfering with the right of people to assemble. But does this mean it is un-American for people to exclude anyone from their group?

For my own part, I’m not sure how much I care that Romeny is a Mormon. I might even try to persuade someone else who is adamantly against him for that reason to care less about it if the particular electoral circumstances were right. But I would never dare mangle the Constitution so badly as to imply that him persisting in his rejection on those grounds is somehow un-American. If anything, the fact that he made that argument might put me off of Romney more than his religious loyalties ever could.

It's not easy being a kid.

2011-07-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

Having been apart from my children for six weeks, I had almost forgotten all the ways in which the life of a child is really quite difficult. Two examples attracted my attention today.

First, they have almost no power over their own lives because they are either too small, too inept, or simply not allowed to do what they desire. If I want to have a piece of French bread with my spaghetti, I simply cut off a slice, butter up, and enjoy. But if one of my sons wants the same thing, he has to ask me or mom to get it for him. If I want ice cream after a meal, I just take it. But they know they have to ask permission and then probably get help from one of us get it. Such dependence on their parents isn’t quite total, but it’s pretty easy to see how so little ability to control your reality would so regularly lead to crying and screaming.

Second, their sense of what is significant is highly distorted, and it’s distorted in such a way as to make their lives much more miserable than necessary. It’s almost like Tallman’s First Law of Toddlers dictates that the magnitude of a squabble is proportional to the inverse square of the disputed object’s real significance. Hence, a single piece of candy or a dropped nickel can lead to fistfights. Apparently they don’t realize that their daddy has at least enough wealth that clawing each other over such baubles is really quite insane. But since they don’t know the difference between what really matters and what only seems to matter in their own possession, it’s pretty easy to understand how such inequities cause such conflict.

It sure is nice that once we grow up and become mature, we never suffer anything like these sorts of problems in our adult lives at all.

There are two sides to every slope.

2011-07-18T17:44:00.001-07:00

The Supreme Court recently struck down California’s law prohibiting the sale of extremely violent video games to minors, saying the law improperly violated the free speech rights of merchants and children. A common sentiment about this ruling is, “Well, that’s what free speech means. Besides, if you start limiting this form of expression, who knows what will be the next thing to be censored?”

This pattern of reasoning is called a “slippery slope” argument, and it compares the political restriction of vulgarity to a hill on which government (and our freedoms) rest precariously. If we allow even one inch of movement in the wrong direction, our freedoms will slip away into tyranny, or so the argument goes.

The first sign of danger in this argument pattern is that it specifically avoids discussing the merits of the particular issue in question. It seems no one actually defends the sale of such games to minors (aside from those who seek to make a buck from it). Instead, the argument only looks down the road for eventual danger rather than considering current danger. Thus, people worry that limiting commercial expression in this way will jeopardize all the rest of our precious free speech. Of course, it’s fair to be concerned about both this step and the others which might come later. But it’s also fair to be concerned about the danger of things sliding too far in the other direction as well. The slope, you might say, slips both ways.

In protecting these games, the Court is affirming a culture which ruins children in a thousand different ways. And if these games had been proposed to the America of, say, 1930, the idea that this is an important freedom would have been scoffed out of the arena. In other words, that side of the slope has come true, whereas the “tyranny of censorship” which people fear from allowing the California law isn’t even a remote danger.

Economists say there is no such thing as a free lunch because somebody has to pay. The same holds in politics. That’s why we must be on guard lest while defending against slipping down one gorge of ruined values we haven’t already fallen into another one. At this particular point in American history, which do you think is a more pressing cultural hazard: the potential for future loss of free speech or the actual absence of parental authority and corruption of children’s moral development?

On missing the right thing.

2011-07-15T18:34:00.001-07:00

In the process of going through my emails (some of which dated back to the beginning of the program in 2005), I was both gratified and saddened. Gratified by all the notes of appreciation people had sent over the years, but of course saddened by precisely the same thing. Every email only made me consider all the other emails that would now not be coming.

And part of me obviously was missing the unique ego-stoking that comes from appreciative praise. But that wasn’t the main thing bothering me. After all, if that’s what I really loved about receiving those notes (and thus also what I will most miss about not receiving them) then I really am quite a self-centered person. But that’s not really the point at all.

You see, every time someone took the time to share their happiness about some aspect of the show, it always meant that somehow they had experienced something so positive that it literally overflowed back out of them into an email. The emails, you might say, were just the signs of the real events which had already taken place. And since one should never cherish the sign more than that which it signifies, it is the loss of such impact on the hearts and minds of listeners which I find most difficult to contemplate.

Be careful what you enjoy...

2011-07-14T18:28:00.001-07:00

America loves the principled vigilante who slices through all the legal-bureaucratic red tape of the justice system and metes out fair punishment only to those who deserve it. And the most satisfying vigilante stories of all involve evildoers who escape on a technicality or who deliberately took advantage of the system somehow, only to be caught and punished by a take-no-guff type who doesn’t have the time to jaw with those candy-suited wussies from Division with all their paperwork and regulations.

We all enjoy such stories and wish things could be so simple. But with such fantasies in mind, I’d like to pause a moment and tell you what you’re really wishing for: Sharia Law. You see, the tribal code concept that underlies Sharia Law strives to settle matters quickly based on the best judgment of the wise ruling religious judge. Casey Anthony would have long ago been dead if she had wandered into a Sharia court.

Jack Bauer is wonderful when it works out, but we call it a lynch mob when things aren’t so clean and nice. So, as much as unjust verdicts and slow judicial systems may drive you crazy, keep in mind that there is a real, existing alternative not all that far away.

In closing....

2011-07-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

Well, as most of you know by now, the Andrew Tallman Show has experienced a brief interruption in service. After 6½ years on air (to the day), KPXQ decided to eliminate the local programming position after the broadcast on Friday, July 8th. This was not in any way a result of management’s dissatisfaction with me or my show, and we are parting on very good terms. I know this came as a big surprise, and for many of you this has already caused sadness, frustration, disappointment, and maybe even anger. I understand. But I don’t want you to think of it this way.

Instead, I hope you’ll join me in being grateful that we had this amazing opportunity for so long together. Seriously, for those of you who have been around long enough, you remember the early days of the show when we actually counted the days of “The Great Experiment.” Part of the reason for that was that I was never really sure this thing would work, let alone work anywhere near as well as it did. It was abundantly obvious from the start that God brought me here to give me this opportunity, and it has been equally obvious since Friday that God has seen fit to take it away for the moment.

I am absolutely grateful to Him for letting me do something I loved so much with such fantastic people and such an amazing audience for so long. And I’m completely grateful to Salem Communications for cooperating with Him in making this possible, and John Timm for having been my mentor and benefactor for most of that time. Moreover, I got to do it with you, the most amazing and intelligent talk radio audience in the world!

I do not know what the future holds for me, or even where it will take place. But for years now God has been telling me that the next thing He has planned for me is even better than I can imagine. “I dunno, Lord. I can imagine quite a lot.” But I’m the kind of person who will never leave a good thing (or even a mediocre thing) unless I have to. And this job was a very good thing. So the only way God could get me into something else was to force me out of this situation.

That’s why I’m very much looking at this as if it’s Christmas morning, and I’m going downstairs to open the big present from my Daddy. I have no idea what it’ll be, but I can’t wait to find out and start playing with it. He’s really good at giving gifts, I’ve learned. So, in the meantime, I’m going to continue writing and posting materials on the websites. I may try to figure out how to do some Internet radio or podcasting also. And I will try to send out the email as frequently as I can, hopefully every day still. But aside from thanking you for your loyalty and asking for your prayers, I have an idea for how to end this portion of story in a neat way.

One of the show topics we never quite got around to doing was on the question, “How has the Andrew Tallman Show impacted you?” or “What have you learned from the Andrew Tallman Show?” So, as a way of celebrating (eulogizing?) this fun and fascinating thing we did together, I’d really love it if each of you would post something on the blog or facebook (or email it to me, and I will do so for you) in answer to that question. That would not only be very encouraging to me to read, but it would also (I hope) give all of you a chance to say your goodbyes (at least for now) to the show.

And trust me when I say that as sad as this is, I’ve actually never been happier in my life because of how amazing God has been prior to and during the last few days. On top of it all, I haven’t seen my family in 6 weeks (they come back tonight!). If you know anything about me, you can only imagine how tough that was all by itself, and then to have to deal with this development while deprived of them, too…. Nevertheless, God has been more than enough source of comfort and joy for me, which has already been a gift I can barely comprehend. He truly is far more amazing than any of us ever realizes!

So post your farewell thoughts. Keep in touch. And may God richly bless you all even more than He has me.

PS My new email address is tallmanuniversity (at) yahoo.com.

PPS I know some of you will feel like contacting KPXQ about all of this (Jim Ryan is the General Manager: jryan (at) salemphx.com or (602) 955-9600 x1202). But if you do, I hope you’ll express to him your sincere gratitude for having the show as long as we did. Please don’t be angry. God is in charge of this situation, and that would mean you’re angry at Him. Be as grateful as I am, okay? And keep in mind that Jim Ryan is God’s servant, too. Remember, we show by how we handle unpleasant events whether our trust is really in Christ or only in favorable circumstances. Always strive to bring Glory to Him in everything, including how you respond to this.

An object lesson from Al Gore.

2011-07-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

Al Gore has become famous for making extravagant claims, particularly in his film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” The most infamous part of that film was the graph of a sudden spike in carbon dioxide levels predicting an equally sudden and dire spike in global temperatures.

Well, despite the high carbon dioxide, the temperatures have been flat or lower for several years now. As a result of this and other alarmist exaggerations, many people consider Al Gore to be an unreliable joke. Moreover, since Al Gore has been the main spokesman for global warming, they transfer his discredit back to that issue, concluding that it, too, must be exaggerated or false.

However, it’s very important to remember that Al Gore’s discredibility does not disprove the cause he represents. Despite his outrageousness, global warming might be real. I don’t happen to think so, but I know that one buffoon doesn’t disprove a viewpoint. But it does make it much easier for the opponents of that cause to reject it.

And in this way, Al Gore can remind Christians of a very important lesson. When we yell or exaggerate, we make it easier for non-Christians to dismiss our Lord. But when we simply tell the truth in humility, we at least don’t make it any harder for them to accept Him.

Will there always be...?

2011-07-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

There will always be enough doctors for all the sick people.

There will be enough clean water to drink.

When I go to the gas station, there will be as much gas as I’m willing to buy, and I will not have to wait for it.

The roads I drive on will not collapse, and they will be in good condition.

There will always be enough teachers for all the children.

If I don’t like what is on this radio station, there will always be others broadcasting for me.

There will always be enough paper.

I will always need bookshelves because there will always be books.

If I plan badly and run out of something like eggs or toothpaste, I can always buy it within an hour.

Television may not always be good, but it will always be available.

Our government will always be elected by the people and will transition across elections peacefully.

As you can see from this ridiculously short list, America works pretty well. But there is no magical guarantee that any of these things will be true in the future except that somebody, many bodies, continue to make it so.

You are not alone

2011-07-04T19:32:00.002-07:00

I have a lot of wild and weird thoughts. For those of you who know me, this comes as absolutely no surprise, and it fits perfectly with my belief (taken from Pasteur) that the way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. But I’ve discovered in my life that pursuing some odd little hunch or intuition can be extremely fruitful if only I force myself to press it a bit.

This is one of the reasons I love doing these daily thoughts, because they are a chance to share such produce with you without the need to find things substantial enough to make an entire hour of discussion or a full-length column out of.

But here’s something I’ve noticed when I do write on some odd little topic. People routinely respond to me with something along these lines. “I’m so glad you wrote that. I’ve been thinking the same thing but I worried that no one else saw it that way.”

The joy of showing people they aren’t alone and thus encouraging them to trust their own ideas a little bit more by simply saying out loud what they silently suspect is truly a wonderful reward.

What divides us, really?

2011-07-04T19:32:00.001-07:00

One of the most fascinating observations made so far by Lawrence Wright in his book “The Looming Tower” is that Islamists seek power, but never seem to have any interest in actually governing. This is why they are so short on political ideas, if they have any at all. The best example of this was the utter failure of the Taliban to do anything other than destroy things and bring practices to an end, decimating their society.

Instead of governance, the real objective for the Islamists is purity. And “when purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.” The reasoning is simple. If your status with God depends on not only your own personal purity but also the purity of everyone around you (since otherwise you have tolerated their evil and become an accomplice to it), you will gladly kill them since religious purity is more essential than life. In fact, killing them becomes a key way to achieve purity.

On this Fourth of July, this reminds us that Americans deeply believe other people should be essentially free to live their lives as they see fit. This may not be the only thing dividing us from the Islamists, but it’s certainly sufficient to do so.

The grief before the grief.

2011-06-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

I hate being separated from my children. There’s really no other way to say it. Not only do I miss everything about them and also my normal ability to be with them at a moment’s notice, but I especially despise the way the vividness of who they are tends to fade away a bit each day the separation prolongs.

But whenever we must separate for any significant period of time, the days just prior to that separation are especially unpleasant because I experience such mixed emotions every time I see them. On the one hand, I love seeing their smiles and receiving their hugs and watching their antics. But the very things I find most dear about them remind me that I will soon be missing precisely such moments. And so the stimulus to joy is equally a prompt for sorrow.

The realization that this is happening, of course, only makes matters worse because the whole point of those final few days is to stock up on the happiness and not have it ruined by thinking too much of the coming deprivation. But alas, understanding a thing is not the same as conquering it.

Good interpretation must begin with accuracy.

2011-06-29T19:37:00.001-07:00

As someone who grew up reading and loving all sorts of fantasy stories and fiction, I still have a special fondness for the Greek myths. But one of the things I’ve begun to notice over the years is how dramatically misinterpreted they often are.

Consider Narcissus, the youth who was so beautiful that everyone fell in love with him just by seeing him. Then one day he was led to see his own reflection in the water and he was enthralled to death, literally. So narcissists are people who are self-absorbed and sexually exploitative. But in the story, Narcissus rejected all suitors, and he only fell in love with the image because he didn’t realize it was his own. So it was the truly dangerous beauty of Narcissus, not his self-obsession, that proved so ruinous. A true narcissist, then, isn’t someone who is in love with himself, but someone who is hopelessly love-engendering in other people and yet avoids romance with them.

Or take Oedipus, the abandoned child who returns to his homeland as an adult and then blinds himself after discovering he has slain his father the king and married his own mother the queen. Freud famously used this to illustrate how all boys have latent sexual desire for their mother. But the whole point of the myth is that Oedipus only desired his mother when he didn’t know that’s who she was. His self-mutilation upon the discovery proves the naturalness of incest taboos, not the latent desire to violate them. Freud got it exactly backwards.

Perhaps I’m just a stickler for the details, but it seems to me that the first part of properly interpreting any story is at least knowing the facts and keeping them straight.

What are we preparing them to love?

2011-06-28T19:53:00.001-07:00

Eating is one of the great bodily pleasures of life. It involves four of the five senses (all five if you’re eating fajitas) in a highly intense orchestra of sensuality…at least when it’s done right. And yet, as someone who loves to eat, I learned a vital food lesson when I was a waiter.

No matter how good a food is, when you see it, serve it, and eat it every single day over and over again, the desire vanishes. One of the most regular gripes by people in the food service industry is that working for a restaurant you love ruins it for you because of semi-forced overexposure. There’s just something about turning a luxury into work that ruins it, even despite the fact that our bodies continuously renew our desire to eat in the strongest possible terms. How much worse, then, is this effect when no such bodily appetite exists?

You see, I have always loved books as much as food, but even my great passion was challenged by being compelled to consume so many of them in high school and college. A book should be savored, not force-fed. But when toil is all some people have known of reading, is it any wonder they never discover its joys at all? Moreover, how does such laborization of reading stunt those who later discover Christ and find themselves facing the Text of God?

The joy of talent scouts

2011-06-27T20:48:00.001-07:00

One of my friends is far more into baseball even than I am. And one of his favorite things to do is watch college players and follow them as they progress through the draft and the minor leagues into the big show. The thrill of having found and monitored them when they finally make it is great fun for him, even though he really had nothing to do with it.

Although I don’t do this with baseball players, I do sort of do it with television actors whom I feel are underrated and deserve “bigger” careers. Since a lot of the shows I love get cancelled, I particularly enjoy seeing those actors show up elsewhere, especially in totally different parts. I always feel like maybe someday someone will really give them an opportunity to match their talents. And if they do, it feels as if “Team Tallman’s Picks” scored a victory in some imaginary “Fantasy Actors League.”

If this sort of speculative investing is so much fun for my friend and me, how much more of an interest must God take in the human careers of that unsung team of minor leaguers whom He not only loves but actually drafted and equipped?

PS—If you’re interested, my list includes Garret Dillahunt (Life, Terminator, and now Raising Hope), Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia and now House), Damian Lewis (Life), Adam Arkin (Life and now Chicago Code), Jonathan Slavin (Better Off Ted), Loretta Devine (Boston Public, Eli Stone, and Dexter), and Jonny Lee Miller (Eli Stone and Dexter).

The science of man?

2011-06-24T19:04:00.000-07:00

Whenever we say that people are irrational, we usually mean it as a kind of criticism, as if to say, “If only they could be more easily reduced to a formula, well then they’d be more human.” But what if the irrationality of people (and of course particular persons) isn’t a disorder but rather a key element of their basic nature?

Why does the man raised well do some horrible thing? Why does the person in desperate straits behave nobly? Why is my wife unhappy although I did what she requested? Isn’t the sum total of every person’s experience with others and himself the overwhelming certainty that people are just impossible to explain and predict? And what if this isn’t because of a deficiency in our knowledge, but of a virtue in their essence?

Science, you see, wants us to believe (or at least assume) that people’s choices are nothing more than the complex result of a formula derived from their genes, chemistry, and environment. But what if (contrary to the assumption) we truly can’t be reduced to a theory like any other merely natural phenomenon, regardless of how much data we acquire? Could this perhaps explain why “social science” does so poorly what “natural science” does so well? What if people are truly irrational, which is of course just an unkind way of calling them miraculous?

If so, then what can science really tell us about people? Very little, it turns out. According to science, you see, miracles don’t exist.

On why versus what.

2011-06-23T20:18:00.001-07:00

In an article I was reading recently, the author remarked that one thing he regretted about his life and felt somewhat guilty about was “not going to church as often as he should have.”

For whatever reason, although I think this is an extremely common sentiment and expression, it suddenly struck me as odd. And I suppose it’s because someone who says this might mean one of two very different things.

On the one hand, he might be feeling bad because he didn’t do enough of the sort of religious performances one needs in order to be in good standing with God or with his peers. This would be a tragic misunderstanding of Christianity.

But on the other hand, he might be feeling bad because he didn’t receive the transformative benefits that come from worshipping God and hearing edifying preaching on a more regular basis, which would have made him a more effective instrument of God in his life. And this of course would be a magnificently appropriate understanding of Christianity.

Although it is Christian to regularly attend church, both the reason you go and the reason you feel bad when you don’t are better indicators of your faith than the behavior itself.

Should I stay, or should I go?

2011-06-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

The other night, we had a great discussion about all the things that bother us in Christianity. Honest Christians will admit this list is quite long. The hypocrisy of our brothers. Our own failure to behave as we know we should. The existence of evil in a world made by a perfect God. The non-return of Jesus after almost 2000 years despite the Bible telling us it will be sudden and soon. Unanswered prayer. The prosperity of false teachers. There’s no shortage of things to frustrate a thoughtful Christian.

But what should we do, given these tensions and the intellectual suffering they cause? Those who reject Christianity sometimes seem to think that only they have realized such problems. But all the Christians I know acknowledge them, too. So why do we stay? Because we love Him too much to leave.

In this way, our faith is like marriage. The difference between a person who divorces and a person who does not is rarely a matter of the problems in the relationship. It’s just that those who stay choose to honor love and commitment. Marriages that survive don’t do so because the conflicts and frustrations are smaller. They survive because the love and commitment of the spouses is greater.

If only it were more clear...

2011-06-21T19:31:00.000-07:00

Jeff: I wish the Bible were more clear about certain issues, such as abortion and drug use and polygamy.
Charles: Well, that’s understandable, but what do you think that would accomplish?
Jeff: It would make it a lot easier to persuade people that certain things are incompatible with Christian faith.
Charles: This is an interesting complaint. Tell me, do you think the Bible is clear that sex outside of marriage is wrong?
Jeff: Of course.
Charles: And do you think the Bible is clear that divorce is almost always wrong?
Jeff: Of course.
Charles: And do you think the Bible is clear that homosexuality is unacceptable?
Jeff: Yes! Now if only the Bible could be that clear about everything!
Charles: But, Jeff, haven’t you noticed that many people, including Christians, ignore or deny that the Bible is so clear on those subjects?
Jeff: Of course. It’s very frustrating.
Charles: And have you also begun to notice that other Christians seem to ignore other, equally obvious elements in Scripture?
Jeff: What do you mean?
Charles: Well, is the Bible clear that we are to help the poor?
Jeff: Abundantly clear.
Charles: And is it clear that we should be humble and kind in dealing with people who sin rather than angry at them?
Jeff: Sure.
Charles: And does the Bible teach us to avoid greed and violence?
Jeff: Yes. Jesus is pretty clear about all of that.
Charles: So your original complaint was that the Bible isn’t as clear as you would like on issues that people disagree with you about. But it seems that even when the Bible is abundantly clear, many Christians still seem to find a way to ignore it.
Jeff: I guess you’re right about that.
Charles: So, it doesn’t seem like the real problem here is lack of Biblical clarity after all.

What a reputation!

2011-06-20T19:03:00.000-07:00

On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found brutally murdered in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. In the trial which followed, Lizzie Andrew Borden was charged with the murders, and she became immediately infamous as the 32-year-old spinster who killed her parents with a hatchet. To this day, almost 120 years later, almost every American knows her name for this horrific crime.

But did you know that on June 20, 1893, Lizzie Borden was found not guilty of both murders after deliberations that only took an hour and a half? There was neither blood evidence nor a murder weapon found tying her to the crime, which Lizzie herself announced to the maid only minutes after it happened.

No one knows who murdered Lizzie Borden’s parents, but we all believe it was her so unquestioningly that finding out she was acquitted probably comes as a great shock. How would you like to be known a hundred years from now for a murder you were acquitted of? The presumption of innocence protects us from abuse by the government. But what protects us from abuse by the press?

“Oh, rats!”

2011-06-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

The other day, I had my Civic into the shop for an oil change. When I looked under the hood, I happened to notice that one bundle of wires looked a little frayed, so I asked the tech about it. He said, “Rats.” Finding this a strangely anachronistic form of profanity, I asked for more information.

He said, “It’s probably rats. They climb up into the engine block and chew on the wires. It happens pretty often if you park your car outside regularly. I had a lady in here last month who had $800 of repairs to the wiring, and the very next day after she took the car home it happened again.”

“Seriously?” I asked. What can you do about it?

“Well,” he said, “it’s hard to solve because the rats are after the oil in the joint. See, the companies that make the wire harnesses have gone to using peanut oil instead of a more expensive oil, and the rats are attracted to the smell.”

“So some guy in some manufacturing facility decided to save a tenth of a cent on oil that routinely leads to damage costing the end consumer hundreds of dollars to repair?”

“Pretty much.”

I’m not sure which rats are worse, the ones that eat the wires who can’t help themselves or the ones who make such decisions.

Sometimes bad is more than bad.

2011-06-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I have loved movies for my entire life, and as a result, I watch a lot of them. This obviously means that I wind up watching more than my fair share of mediocre or awful ones, despite my not-quite-best efforts to avoid this happening. But bad movies really come in two very different varieties.

The first sort of bad movie is the movie that merely fails. It doesn’t have a great concept. It has weak writing. The acting is poor. Production is off. Whatever. Movies that simply fail are extremely common. And I can usually tell within about twenty minutes whether a movie will end up being just plain bad. But this kind of movie doesn’t bother me so much.

The sort of movie that really upsets me is the one that has a great concept which is then somehow subsequently squandered in its execution. These are the movies that break my heart because they raise my hopes only to dash them in disappointment. This is the sort of movie I wish had never been made, if only so that the concept could be preserved undefiled until a competent artist could render it to its potential.

Ordinary bad movies that were never going to be good merely waste my time. But great ideas that are ruined, like opportunities missed, make the world itself seem more bleak precisely because they give me a grief-inducing glimpse of how much more beautiful it should have been.

When is skepticism a Christian virtue?

2011-06-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

A very good friend recently forwarded me an email lamenting the fact that President Obama this year cancelled the National Day of Prayer, choosing instead to attend Muslim prayers at the White House, an activity which the email shows a photograph of him doing. The only problem with the email is that it’s totally false.

As he has done every year in office, Obama again this year did issue a proclamation for the National Day of Prayer. Moreover, the picture in the email was taken during the President’s visit to Turkey…in 2009…and not at the White House, a fact easily verified by the visible Islamic arches in the background of the photo, architecture difficult to find in the White House.

But my friend’s very first line was quite telling. He introduced the email by asking, “Have you seen or read this before? Hard to believe, isn’t it.” In my reply to him, I answered that when something is this hard to believe, you probably just shouldn’t believe it. But such email hoaxes serve at least two purposes.

First, they remind us that we must always verify what we hear through gossip, especially the 21^st Century’s favorite form of gossip: the forwarded email. Luckily, this is easy enough to do at Snopes.com.

Second, we must always be on guard lest our biases render us gullible to attacks on people we dislike. Part of loving our enemies is giving critiques of them the same level of scrutiny as we would for our friends and “loved ones.” Eagerness to believe the worst about our enemies is a tendency far too carnal for any Christian to indulge.

Are you a who or a what?

2011-06-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

I recently finished “Endgame,” a fascinating biography of the famously eccentric, world champion chess legend Bobby Fischer. It’s a remarkably fair and even-handed account of Fischer’s bizarre and volatile life.

What I found most fascinating about the whole thing was precisely how irrational so much of Bobby’s behavior was, particularly for someone so incomparably brilliant at the supremely rational game of chess. His anti-semitism. His anti-Americanism. His paranoia. And his predilection for conspiracy-theories. In addition to all of this, the man was a consummately selfish jerk. “Troubled soul” is simply far too weak a label.

I kept yearning for something to congeal and organize all the madness. But nothing did. He is a man who simply did not fit. And yet, I suspect that Bobby Fischer seemed just right to Bobby Fischer, which is a good reminder that maybe consistency and predictability aren’t the highest human virtues.

What REALLY frustrated me about his story? That he wasn’t human enough? Or that he was far too entirely human after all? At the very least, I have to admit that Bobby Fischer was no machine, and perhaps that’s a very high form of praise for any human.

Who am I looking at?

2011-06-13T19:26:00.000-07:00

When I look at my children, I have an honest awareness of their flaws and failures. But I also have an overwhelming sense of their beauty, value, and significance. I am absolutely committed to them in a way that only seems fitting for a perfect child, and yet I know they are not this. And even in full awareness of their defects, I am able to enjoy them with reckless abandon as if they didn’t have any, even because of them in some sense.

If I’m not mistaken, this is how God views each of us in Christ. He loves us so fully and magnificently as if we were perfect because by His sacrifice we are made so. And yet He is also far more aware of every single imperfection in us than we are. And He revels in our every move and rejoices to behold us. Teaching us this disposition, I believe, is a big part of why He gives us our own children.

But if all of this is true, the next real challenge is whether we can learn to see other Christians through this same basic paradigm. Can we learn to see them through Christ as God Himself does? Can we learn to find their flaws and foibles as endearing as those of our own children? Every day, I hope I grow a little bit closer to being able to say, “Yes,” to that question.

Whence ridiculousness?

2011-06-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

I have a theory about the variety and amplitude of outrageous behavior we see in our media these days and the general perception that everything is much more bizarre than it used to be. I think it’s misleading.

See, if you watch or read enough news, you’ll encounter what seems to be an unending parade of ever-sillier events and statements. “Aren’t people becoming stupider?” It’s a fair question, but it’s asking about the average, whereas news always has and always will focus on the unique or rare. Perhaps there are other reasons why things seem so especially strange these days.

First, media generally has shifted from feeling an obligation to lead and educate to pandering to whatever will make ratings. Alone, this alone wouldn’t mean much, but how the shift interacts with the other factors makes a big difference.

Second, the advent of fame as a desirable and all-too-easily attainable commodity means that many people relish becoming instantly finding it any way possible. People used to avoid bad behavior because it was costly. But now bad behavior pays, and it pays in one of the most coveted modern currencies.

Third, modern technology makes any story anywhere available to anyone almost immediately, and visually to boot. Whereas in the past, some loopy behavior in Tuscaloosa might have made the local paper and nothing else, it now gets captured on some passerby’s cell phone and airs ten minutes later on Fox News in Sacramento. Thus, average media bizarreness is raised by the fact that a story can come from anywhere, vastly expanding the pool of circus applicants.

Fourth, there are simply more of us. And more people by definition means more dancers at the fringe of the behavioral bell curve. So, on any given day, you are fed stories by people trying to grab your attention with the most bizarre thing they can find anywhere in the country from a much larger population composed of more eager-or-at-least-wiling-to-be-famous dolts.

Yes, it’s true that we may, in fact, be stupider on average. But it’s also possible that we are just the unwitting victims of science and math.

What is corruption?

2011-06-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

There is an extremely large, well-financed organization with unparalleled political clout which has been engaging in atrocious behavior for decades. Although many of its members are wonderful, talented people, there are others who do terrible things to children.

But despite this outrageous conduct by its members, the leaders have turned a blind eye, simply relocating the worst offenders in an effort to hide them. And when the abuses have been raised publicly, they have defended the violators, saying it would be wrong to remove them despite this meaning that children would continue to suffer. Furthermore, the organization’s leaders have adamantly maintained that they are the only true representatives of their field of expertise, officially denouncing competing institutions and movements as misguided and dangerous.

And the worst part of all is that this organization receives almost all of its funding directly from the government, meaning that the institutional negligence of the public school teachers unions is in some ways even more troubling than that of the Catholic Church.

On consistency

2011-06-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

A hypothetical conversation with a feminist professor:

Me: Do you think the high price of college is justified by the financial return people get from it these days?
Femprof: What a ridiculous question. People shouldn’t go to college just to make money. They should go to become enlightened, to enrich their lives. If they can make more money, that’s just a nice bonus.
Me: That seems like an awful lot to charge people for a result they could arguably get just as well for free by going to church for free or at least for much less at a good used book store.
Femprof: Your notion that enlightenment can be had at church is adorable. And I think we both know people don’t have the training or diligence to read effectively on their own.
Me: Well, you’re probably right about the laziness problem. But are you really saying that education is about self-development and not earning potential?
Femprof: Of course.
Me: So you can’t measure its value in economic terms alone?
Femprof: Quite right.
Me: But don’t you also say that women who get a degree and then become mere homemakers are squandering their educations because they don’t use them to make money? It seems like they’re doing exactly what you advocate, becoming better humans and therefore better wives and mothers.
Femprof: But what sort of a fool would pay so much to gain enlightenment from us and then choose to not earn money with it, instead doing the one thing we consistently say is beneath her dignity as a person?
Me: That’s a pretty good question.

Drive unto others...

2011-06-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

Although I’m sure some of my musings on the subject of driving would indicate otherwise, I do in fact make mistakes behind the wheel. Just yesterday, in fact, I merged right on the highway in heading for the off ramp and suddenly realized I had cut someone off. Despite looking over my shoulder first, still somehow I managed to almost cause a real problem. So what did I do?

Well, when we both pulled up the off-ramp, I deliberately went slowly enough so he could pull beside me, at which point I waved at him apologetically. His response? He flashed me a peace sign. It felt really good to not only take blame for my mistake but to be forgiven. And this is always my practice.

Even in situations when I didn’t do much or anything wrong, I always try to wave or signal my apology somehow. Why? Because it costs me nothing, and it can only do good. If the other person thinks I was wrong, then I have made an effort to appease him. And if the other person didn’t think I did anything wrong, well, it makes other drivers seem just that much more friendly and cooperative to him. See how easy it is to have a civilization?

Which do you hope is true?

2011-06-06T20:29:00.001-07:00

As you may know by now, Representative Anthony Weiner gave a sweeping admission of his guilt and apologized for the misuse of Twitter and several inappropriate Internet relationships yesterday. When I talked about this last week, I said he was probably innocent (although I couldn’t be sure), and I also said it was particularly wrong to presume him guilty as the media had done. This means I was mistaken in my judgment about him.

But I must be honest. I’m proud of my mistake.

Oh, sure, in some sense I’d prefer to have been more savvy at discerning the matter. But when I didn’t know the truth for sure, I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope for his innocence. And isn’t this exactly what Christians are supposed to do, especially for those with whom we disagree politically or culturally? And isn’t it a bit disturbing that so many of his critics seem so gleeful to have had their pessimism validated?

See, for my part, if I ever meet Anthony Weiner, I like that I could tell him that I believed him and hoped it wasn’t true. How much more likely is it that we might become friends that way?

The measure of civilization.

2011-06-06T17:13:00.001-07:00

After I’ve loaded the groceries from the cart into my car, I often face the irritating realization that I have once again parked near the entrance rather than near the cart return, as I should have done.

But for whatever reason, as soon as I’m done with the cart, I suddenly have this weird sense of feeling entitled to simply discard it like litter, even sometimes wanting to blame the store for my own miscalculation. “They should have convenienced me better with more returns! Who do they think they are forcing me to walk an extra forty feet?” This despite having just walked over a hundred time this far with no complaint at all while shopping.

It’s at this moment that I decide to be civilized rather than selfish. Sure, I’d rather just leave the cart in the middle of the parking lot or hang it over a landscaped curb. But am I really so sniveling and lazy that I can’t walk a few yards to put something back where it belongs?

It is precisely the absurdity of this question that confronts me every time I see a parking lot littered with the carts of my fellow citizens who apparently couldn’t pass even so basic a moral test. In all honesty, if there’s a more reliable indicator of the moral development of a community than the ratio of carts returned properly to those not, I’m unable to imagine what it would be.

Stop fighting the wrong battle.

2011-06-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

The Theory of Evolution claims that everything about humans can be explained by slow steady natural developments over time from other forms of life. And Christians (myself included) have expended countless hours and pages refuting the archaeological and geological evidence. But in the process of denying that man physically descended from other animals, we have missed the point entirely.

It is not man’s physical make-up that make us unique. In these things, we are very much in the animal kingdom, even according to the Bible. What makes us unique from animals are things like music, art, reasoning, games, religion, morality, tools, monogamy, and generosity.

And whether you believe Evolution gives a dubious or a credible account of our physical heritage, it gives no account or evidence whatsoever of how these things might have gradually developed from animal ancestors. For all the similarities we share with beasts in our bodies, we are incomparably different in every other area. And it is this radical distinctness which demonstrates us to be that mixture of the natural and the Divine on which the Biblical story really depends.

It's bigger than anyone realizes.

2011-06-01T20:38:00.001-07:00

Everybody underestimates the Gospel. Non-Christians do so because they don’t yet accept its reality or grasp its importance. But Christians do so precisely because we think we already have. If the Gospel is God’s plan for putting right everything that’s wrong with the world, well everything is a lot.

For instance. We know that sin alienates us from God, poisons our relationships with others, leads us to harm ourselves, and even ruins our bodies. So we believe the Gospel reunites us with God, transforms us with others, reforms our own behavior, and even promises to give us new bodies eventually.

But don’t we also know that sin has wrecked this world and the lives of plants and animals who are suffering the ruination we caused? So we should expect (and rightly so based on Genesis 9:10-17) that God’s Gospel is a plan for restoring even these deformities as well. Everything sin destroys, the Gospel restores. And until we see the Gospel at least that large, we see too little of it.

On unnecessary pain and difficulty

2011-06-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

I recently had a chance to play some beach volleyball, which I haven’t done much since I played in college. In telling a friend about it, he said, “I bet your arms hurt.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of how it always hurts my wrists from the ball hitting on the bone.”

“Ahh. You were never taught how to pass or bump properly. This is a common problem. See, you need to rotate your wrists outward until they lie flat next to each other. Then you contact the ball with the flesh of your forearm rather than with the bones. Not only does that way hurt a lot less, but it also makes it possible to pass the ball accurately.”

“Oh, really? Why is that?” he asked.

“Because when you do it your way, it’s like trying to carom a ball perfectly off two hard rails. Every millimeter can make a tremendous difference in the result. But if you do it my way, you’re working with a flat surface that cushions the ball and controls it far more easily.”

“That does seem easier. I’ll have to try it sometime,” he answered.

It’s fascinating how life is full of things that are both far harder and far more painful only because no one ever taught us how to do them the right way.

On safety and success.

2011-05-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

There are two fundamental dispositions: security and expansion. You can either be aimed toward not making mistakes or toward not missing opportunities. This is true in regards to money. This is true in regards to relationships. It’s even true of food, music, art and most everything in life, including ideas.

When it comes to truth and expression, some people rarely say anything new because they want to avoid making errors. Others are willing to explore untested ideas or formulations because they want to discover new insights. However, the avoid-error types like to pretend they have a corner on safety because they make fewer mistakes. But it’s just as unsafe to miss truth as it is to commit error.

In this way, baseball serves as a wonderful metaphor. See, an overly eager batter can strike out by swinging at bad pitches. But it’s also true that an overly cautious batter can strike out by looking at good ones. And suffice it to say that never swinging means never getting a hit at all. So the key is to swing wisely, since, as in life, there is no way to “bat safely.”

On immature arousal.

2011-05-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

When I met my wife, I was aroused by her luscious hair, shapely legs, and amazing eyes. When I dated her, I was aroused by her sense of humor, brilliant mind, and solid character. But the truth is that many women have all of these things, perhaps even better versions of them. And if my interest in my wife depended on that stuff, it would be a fragile thing indeed. So after 13 years of marriage, they aren’t really why my wife arouses me anymore.

My wife arouses me now because she gave life to my sons, because she made my family debt free, because she held me as I cried when my mother died, because she threw me a surprise party for my 40^th birthday, because she watched Tron Legacy with me, because she made me visit my grandmother regularly, and ten thousand other, similar things.

In short, many women can offer me what attracted me to my wife in the beginning, but there isn’t any woman who can offer me everything my wife has meant to me since then. And only a fool would find such insignificant things as legs and laughter more arousing than that.

Headline: Famous person arrested for horrible thing.

2011-05-17T21:13:00.001-07:00

The editorial you’ve never read:

“A well-known and influential person was recently arrested for doing something atrocious. At this point, the charges have yet to be confirmed by a jury verdict and so we have decided to wait before publicly tarnishing this person’s name. Some of our competitors have opted to publish the details even while attempting to shield themselves legally by using the phrase ‘alleged crimes.

“However, since we understand how the human mind actually works, we know this will do nothing to impede anyone from associating such acts with this person permanently. We also know that if it turns out to not be true, subsequent repudiations (imagining they are even published more than once) will only make the connection stronger not weaker. The person who becomes known as ‘that guy who didn’t do the evil thing’ is still indelibly connected to what was not done.

“Since this stain can never be fully expunged, we think it best to never spill the ink on him in the first place, thus honoring the legal principle of innocence until guilt is proven. We know you can get the information from others, but we sincerely hope you will support us in resisting the temptation to murder this person’s character without a trial.”

Sincerely,

Editors of “The Daily Virtue”

Random observations

2011-05-17T16:17:00.001-07:00

Three totally random thoughts:

For fourteen hundred years after the Resurrection, there was no such thing as a printing press. This means that, statistically speaking, almost no Christian ever saw, let alone read a Bible during that period. And yet, the Gospel spread anyhow.

Christianity has been present and thriving in China at least three different times, with an almost total eradication in the interims: From the early 7^th to the 9^th Century, from the early 13^th to the middle 14^th Century, and from the middle 16^th Century to today, with a failed effort to wipe it out in the middle 20^th Century.

If Henry VIII hadn’t wanted an illegitimate divorce from Catherine of Aragon, England might never have become Protestant and may have retained the strict investment liability rules of Catholicism. Only when these rules were loosened could individual investors avoid personal liability for corporate losses, and the Joint Stock Company was formed, without which it’s hard to tell when, if ever, America would have been settled, or whether we would have “corporations.”

Imago Dei

2011-05-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Why do Christians believe that people being made in the Image of God requires us to treat them so carefully?

First, God made humans to be the unique carriers of the Divine creative stamp or identity. We must therefore handle them very carefully because they point to and reflect Him. They are His IMAGE.

Second, God has expressed His infinite love and care for these works of art He has made. We must therefore treat them lovingly as the prized possessions of Someone who has temporarily entrusted them to us. They are HIS image.

But both of these perspectives focus on the other person and thus overlook something vital. God has also created ME in His image, and He has cherished me enough to save me and conform me to the Image of His Son. In so doing, I acquire a special obligation to look like as much like Him as possible. And the way I look most like God is by treating well precisely those who don’t deserve to be treated well. Honoring this Image of God in me is at least as important as is honoring it in them.

On violence and redemption.

2011-05-13T14:23:00.001-07:00

The dominant American fictional narrative of action movies it the idea that we can make the world a beautiful place by killing bad guys. This, as some have rightly termed it, is the myth of redemptive violence. To put the point rather bluntly, Jesus came to die for us, not to kill for us. That means that killing bad guys is never the ideal for the obvious reason that it is always better to redeem (restore, rebuild, refashion, reclaim, recover) something than to destroy it. Precisely because killing prevents the Christian ideal of redemption (from which God would get the maximum glory), it must never be celebrated. But can Christians ever use or endorse it at all? It’s a serious question with a long history, but it also has a simple answer.

Yes.

Sometimes.

As rarely as possible.

Which means more rarely than you are inclined to think.

The key here is to realize that the Gospel reshapes us sometimes by prohibition and other times by telling us we must do something in a very different way. Our money and our sexuality are two big examples, cases where the Gospel prohibits some things and alters everything that remains. Similarly, violence is the sort of thing that, if we Christians do or endorse it at all, we must do so far less often, for better reasons, and in a different way than the secular world around us or our own natural impulses would.

To make things clearer, it’s useful to see that there are at least four kinds of violence. The first kind of violence is capricious, justifying itself by merely appealing to its ability. This is the violence of the strong, and all decent people recognize it as fundamentally evil.

The second sort of violence is vengeance, the sort which invites us to satisfy our bloodlust for revenge under the notion that justice will be done. This is the sort which action movies appeal to and which Christians are told repeatedly in the Bible not to pursue, leaving the prerogative to God.

The third sort of violence is the absolutely necessary. We know this kind of violence exists since in the Bible God kills, instructs people to kill on His behalf, and also endows government with the power to kill under certain circumstances. Therefore, we have to make room in our thinking for some sort of violence which is Divine, even if it is not redemptive.

And the fourth kind of violence is that which seems necessary only because we haven’t been creative enough in finding an alternative or diligent enough in pursuing it. This is actually violence of the first or second sort masquerading as the third sort, hence caprice or vengeance masquerading as necessity.

Yes, some rare violence is necessary. But precisely because violence always fails to redeem, Christians must be extremely cautious about endorsing or using it. This is why every Christian citizen, lawman, soldier, or politician must be constantly and self-critically vigilant lest we go beyond that bare minimum necessity.

What is envy?

2011-05-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, pop quiz to see how well you understand children.

Imagine you have three young boys and somehow you come into possession of four objects of considered value (muffins, golf balls, paper clips, whatever). How should you dole them out?

Thinking like a foolish adult, you might say, “Give one to each of them and then give the extra to someone randomly.”

In theory this sounds great. But here is how this will play out in reality. Three otherwise fairly happy children will suddenly all become miserable. The two who got “only” one item will be resentful and furious to not have gotten two. And the one who got two will now be plagued with all the security concerns of the wealthy and the torment of his jealous brothers.

Even when doled out equally, squabbling often ensues. But when doled out unequally, full-scale civil war is guaranteed. This is because, according to the principles of toddler math, some is not better than none. Some is always worse than none because it is less than more.

So here’s what you do. You give each child his own golf ball (preferably all the same color) and you then throw out the extra one. See, sin always requires a sacrifice.

Was killing bin Laden Biblical?

2011-05-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound, many people have been asking whether killing him is morally justifiable from a Christian perspective. Even though the answer here seems obvious, actually articulating it is still a useful exercise and may clarify some confusions.

First, it is true that only God has the authority to take a life. This is why killing is by default a prohibited action. But as with many kinds of authority, this one may be delegated to others by God. And in the Bible, we see this authority very clearly delegated to government. In the Old Testament, this is shown by the various capital crimes itemized under Israel’s penal code. In the New Testament, this is shown by the statement in Romans 13:4 that government bears the sword against evildoers as a “minister of God.”

If I hire a babysitter to feed my children in my absence or a stock broker to buy some investment on my behalf, they have the authority to do so because I gave it to them. Not because they had it originally, but because I gave it to them temporarily.

So in the case of bin Laden, a duly constituted government (ours) killed a man who had boasted of evil against our citizens and threatened more of it in the future. Killing him wasn’t just a Biblically acceptable act, it was a Biblically endorsed one. This was government doing precisely what God established it to do.

As to the question of him being unarmed in the moment of his death, the first thing to remember is that it was already justifiable to kill him, regardless. Second, ascertaining the certainty of him being unarmed under those circumstances would have been very challenging in the heat of the moment. This means that plausible issues of self-defense add onto the already justifiable killing to eliminate any real question about moral propriety. Had it been certain he was unarmed and not a threat (perhaps because he was asleep), there may have been more to be discussed. But the difference then would have been his value as a captive rather than as a corpse. Killing him in his sleep would still have been an improvement over the option of bombing the entire compound and the entailed risks to non-combatants, a choice which itself would have almost certainly been permissible to begin with.