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Posted by Anthony on November 20, 2007
This morning my wife woke me and I was having a terrible dream. In the dream, I lost most of my family… wife, children, siblings… Now, usually I am able to ‘control’ my dreams or otherwise inform myself in the dream that it is in fact only a dream. It was odd that this dream would be different. When I woke up I was on my way to the funerals, grieving. Not cool.
The only thing I can think is that my blog last night on the problem of suffering and the solution of the incarnation primed me to have such things on my mind. I don’t know. I’ve written about such things before without such effects.
Perhaps the dream came that I might have it on my mind as something experienced… for I woke up and continued to grieve for a few minutes while I recovered from the dream. And perhaps it came that I might write about it. I don’t know.
Some other random thoughts…
As I emerged from my shower I had thoughts of NBC’s Journeyman on my mind. In last night’s episode, the main character, Dan Vassar, saves a girl and has her murderer caught even though he is told that is not his mission. He fells compelled by justice to try to save her anyway. When he returns back to his own time, things have changed. For one thing, the murderer has now been released from prison and is hunting Dan and his family…
On last night’s Heroes, a very interesting distinction was made between God and gods. The character with time traveling abilities, Hiro, has returned to his own time to discover that his father was dead. Naturally not content with that news, he goes through time to his father’s pre-moment to death but his father convinces him that Hiro needs to let him be killed. His father says something like… “Just because we have the power of gods does not mean that we can play God.”
This is a distinction that hasn’t really been dwelled on in the series that I am aware of. One of the running themes of my blog has been to show how modern atheism has become much more comfortable with the ideas of ‘miracles’ provided that you give them a naturalistic explanation (I know, I know, that’s like a contradiction in terms). I have used NBC’s Heroes as an example.
So now the question is posed… in Heroes there are people with the power to fly, travel through time, read minds, etc, any number of things that we would have attributed to supernatural cause in most scenarios. These are the powers of the ‘gods.’ Will Heroes tell us how one distinguishes between the gods and God? If the writers of Heroes have read their Pullman and Dawkins, they could just say that God is the first effect of evolution, and the most advanced. What is the difference?
If you’re going to explain everything in naturalistic terms, how on earth could you possibly recognize a supernatural event even if it happened before your very eyes?
Perhaps Journeyman gives one idea: omniscience and wisdom. Dan Vassar saves a girl and catches the bad guy, but he should have let her die and the man get away. In doing so, he would have preserved the safety of his own family. Who can make such a calculation? We all die eventually… if the Author chooses to allow some to die at this moment and not this one in order that some other good might be achieved that would not have otherwise does that mean he is indifferent to the death?
If God delays his return in order to achieve some good, even if we ourselves cannot perceive it, does that change the fact that he did at one time arrive?
Just some thoughts on Tuesday morning.
Posted by Anthony on November 11, 2007
I posted a long time ago on this and I was thinking of it again while watching the show tonight. I came in late, so I didn’t get the full context. It seemed as though there was a single father, a Christian, taking care of his sons on his own. As usual, his house was a dump, but ABC came in and gave him something awesome. Here is my problem: why are Christians doing this dozens of times a day all over the place?
I am not so naive to think that ABC or Sears or the contractors here are not making a lot of money in their efforts, nor do I doubt that it cost them quite a bit, either. But the Christian church in America is extraordinarily wealthy. If you put corporations like ABC or Sears up against the Roman Catholic church alone I bet they wouldn’t stand higher than the RCC’s big toes. Now add the Protestants back into the mix.
Why there is a single poor Christian out there astounds me. I know a fair number of church workers and though they aren’t poor, especially compared to people in other countries, they’re straining just to get by. This is nonsense. You take care of your family. You certainly don’t limit yourself to the ‘family’ but that is an obvious place to start, and it is commanded in Galatians 6:9-10.
I think there is something to be said for the less flashy efforts like Habitat for Humanity which manage to plug away without making money… Extreme Makeover has done 100 or so houses, and Habitat for Humanity some 225,000 according to their site. But I bet they could build even more if they were better funded.
I guess what I’m getting at is that we’re (I am speaking to Christians) putting much of our money in areas that have little eternal benefit. You drop a million dollars on a new worship center… that worship center ain’t going to follow us when we die. But if we can use our resources to help people, the people we help and the people watching us help will be moved and affected. How many people can you help with a million dollars?
A passage to ponder: “The master commended the dishonest manager becahse he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” Luke 16:8-9
Our money and our buildings do not follow us into eternity, but the people we minister to can.
Posted by Anthony on November 7, 2007
The full response is pasted below, but you may want to download and print it off, or attach it in an email. If so, here it is for download:
If you would like to discuss this issue, please use my discussion forum, where this thread has been set up for that purpose.
Since this has been made available, my response has been featured on the ChristianPost.com.
Some people prefer a shorter treatment. I have produced a one page “parent’s guide”/bulletin insert. 
More information is available here and you can just download it, too, here:
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The “His Dark Materials” Series is Pullman’s direct answer to CS Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” Lewis intended to inoculate a Christian worldview using his series and it is clear that Pullman had the same idea in mind. Except in case you didn’t know, Pullman is a hardcore atheist.
Many Christians will focus on the apparent paganism, the hostility to Christianity and more precisely the Church, and some of the less than subtle sexual allusions. These would be the wrong place to put our emphasis. What Pullman aims to do is to offer a naturalistic explanation for anything and everything, including that which might be true in Christianity or in paganism.
He uses a mainstream interpretation within quantum science that posits that there are an unlimited amount of universes that exist and evolution working out in unlimited ways in each of them, so that one could allow yourself to consider almost anything as possible- without ever invoking a God.
It is this that makes Pullman’s series the threat that it is. Young people all over the place are going to school and university and are actually being taught in dogmatic terms that evolution is the real explanation for how we got here and it is only a matter of time before these students learn about the ‘multiverse’ as well as comprehend that scientists really take it seriously.
Thus, young people are primed to receive the atheistic worldview… they read it in high school as fiction only to have the main premises of the series shoved at them as straight science in college. Though the overt hostility to the Church, the pagan elements, and the sexuality are enough to make many a Christian’s blood boil, these are just symptoms, and we Christians should remember that.
For the full examination click the ‘read the rest of the entry’ link below. Or, to Print it off, download it in PDF here: Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on September 16, 2007
Mrs. Henneman (not her real name) was my first grade teacher. She was awesome. Naturally, my memories faded a long time ago. My best source these days is my mother who assures me that I thought the world of Mrs. Henneman and the reason for this appears to be that Mrs. Henneman thought the world of me.
It is interesting what things we remember. I had some vague recollection as I coursed through elementary and middle school that Mrs. Henneman no longer worked at the school, but it wasn’t actually until high school that I made the connection that she had left just one year after I had her to fight cancer. This was a fight that she lost. I am not sure when it dawned on me that this fabulous teacher that cared so much about me had actually died but I do remember the loss. That’s silly if you think about it. She died young and I’m sure the loss was much more potent to others then it was to me, merely one of her young students who couldn’t even remember what she looked like after a couple of years.
But it is funny the things we remember and don’t remember, the things we think about and the things we don’t. Another crazy memory I have is of going with a friend to a college campus as a High School senior to check it out. The friend had been annoying me quite a bit as it was. I don’t know what it was but he couldn’t stand my younger siblings. He was an only child himself but I have trouble thinking that was the issue. Anyway, he was a general pessimist but he had been my friend for a few years up to that point, and it was he and I checking out this college.
I remember being less then impressed by the college. The grounds were dirty and muddy and the place seemed to be completely vacant. Like, there weren’t any students at all. Initially, we had both talked about going to this place but then the coup d’grace was our sitting with the chief financial advisor. My friend had been making scoffing noises for hours by that point and after the financial counselor informed us both that he couldn’t offer us any kind of grants based on the information he had, my friend turned it up. He turned it up right there in the office with this guy. The thing is, I didn’t really stop him. I sort of smiled and egged it on.
Finally, it was time to go. He gave us each a card and as I looked at the card I saw… “David Henneman.”
My eyes found the picture of a happy couple. Yes, somebody had felt the loss of Mrs. Henneman more than I did. As we walked out my friend began even to attack the man’s appearance and I gave him a not so subtle ‘shutthehellup’ and he gave me a ‘whatthehellisyourproblem’ rejoinder. I would have been more then willing just a short time earlier to share in the derision we were heaping on the man but now something seemed different. How could I think such things about a man whom Mrs. Henneman had thought the world of? Knowing that the man had been the object of affection of a woman of impeccable character, I realized with sudden certainty that I owed him more than the benefit of the doubt.
I did end up going to a different college. I discovered that there were perfectly good reasons for the campus at this college to have been sparse and unkempt. We had visited over spring break, right after the winter thaw. Students were gone. Dirt, when wet, turns to mud. And of course Mr. Henneman couldn’t offer us any financial aid yet- we both had yet to turn in our financial aid forms. How quickly I had seen the worst in a situation without having knowledge… and perhaps in large part because of whom I was associating with.
How many people have I snapped at in the last 20 years were loved ones of people I myself cared about? What if the person I’m debating with online turns out to be the nice guy who delivers my mail? You can drive yourself mad thinking about such things. It was 15 years after having Mrs. Henneman as my teacher and meeting her husband in a college financial aid office. Who knows what interactions will come back to haunt me, or bless me, in the decades to follow? And just because I’ve forgotten them that doesn’t mean they’ll have forgotten me. Because it’s funny what we remember.
Posted by Anthony on September 11, 2007
I had some interesting experiences in college. I went to college intending to become a pastor and practically became an atheist after just a few months. I emerged from this much stronger. I remember well how deeply I threw myself into studying all sorts of things. Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism, Christianity, science, quantum physics, evolution, philosophy, and more. Most of what I learned I learned apart from the classroom. I became very knowledgeable about the Bible and I thought I was doing a good job living by its precepts. I considered myself pretty patient and selfless. And spiritual. Let’s not forget spiritual.
More than ten years later I have a different view of myself. I no longer believe I am a patient person. I thought I was selfless, but this version of myself was destroyed within the first year of marriage. Now that I have four kids I can safely say that I am the most impatient and selfish person I have ever met. What I failed to recognize while in college was that I was operating in a setting that made it pretty easy to be a Christian. How you are in that kind of setting is not indicative of how you will be in another setting.
I will sometimes have people come by my Christian discussion forum who will then email me and say that I was not nice to someone. I used to take those comments more personally until I realized that I have a community consisting of members who have been around for years and years, discoursing and debating with each other. When you live with someone it is hard to always be ‘nice’ (even harder, I’ve discovered, if you’re tired). Some of these people I have ‘lived’ with day in and day out for a long time. This person complaining to me… is he speaking from a context of insulated safety or are they the same saint when banging around people 24/7?
Unfortunately for me, of course, the snippy exchange that I had with my wife this morning will soon be forgotten between us and there won’t be a record of it left anywhere except in the Mind of God. My forum posts, however, will last so long as Google lasts, and will appear- out of the context of the years in which the postings occurred- as a mere snapshot.
The older I get the more I see that we are quick to give ourselves a pass and quicker still to stick it to the other guy. The older I get, the more I see that the reasons for my doing the right thing often had to do with the fact that I was not tired, I was not hungry, I did not have four children screaming in my ear, I didn’t have bills to pay, I didn’t just lose a loved one, and so on and so forth. It has also showed me the importance of doing what I can to create a setting around myself that will be more conducive to carrying out the behaviors I approve of.
And with this humility of age, I can look back in history and see that even though some deeds were inexcusable, one cannot simply assert- “If I was there, I would have done other.” Those people were often hungry, or oppressed, or afraid, or exhausted, or tired. I hope that I will do better if I am ever in such circumstances, but I realize now that if I do, it will only be because I have been working on it now. It is no credit to me that I am patient with the stranger in the store whom I will never see again. If I am kind to my wife after we’ve both had a hard day’s work, that is a different story. It is easy to be kind to the person I will never see again. It is much more difficult when you have no hope for escape from your circumstances.
Let us treat the ones we love better then we treat the strangers and so prepare us for the day (if it comes) when our circumstances are so radically shaken, we will have trained ourselves to still behave honorably no matter what life throws at us.
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