Thanksgiving
An atheist colleague of mine discovered my blog by walking into my office while I was working on it; as a fellow blogger it took him two seconds to read my url. He's a good guy, a friend, and he's welcome here. We've been doing some emailing back and forth about theism in the few minutes either of us calls spare time right now. He's well read, it seems, in anthro and I assume the modern skeptical lectionary. Fair enough. But this blog is also about my feelings, and those are coming up right now in one of those hard days.
I've been open about how hard this semester has been. I have all new courses, the only possible exception being my composition classes online. I've taught comp. a hundred times, but never online. Trying to build those classes and teach them at the same time has, frankly, been impossible to do well, not while staying caught up in Am. Lit. and honors. It's been a sucky term and I want it to end; soon, it will.
One of those online comps has self-destructed, or nearly. I'm very sad and even pissed. I've had attrition like I've never had f2f or online. I suppose, considering my workload, this is a good thing! But why do I get papers for a research essay with no works cited page, no in-text citations, no research at all! What the hell do these students think is going on? So few of them took the last paper seriously, at least the research component; it's disheartening.
Let the D's fly. Bite me.
I hope the other class does better.
***
Today is one of those long days home alone, still getting over my cold and with a solid headache (I never get headaches) to top it all. I feel stranded. The collegue I mentioned above, what will I call him? How about Richard, as in Dawkins? Richard and I have been talking about how too much time online, including teaching online, can foster depression. If I was in a cubicle doing this, getting ready to go to lunch with the people from across the carpeted aisle, it would be different. But time alone, online and alone, it's a tough combo. I notice I only have a two day a week schedule next semester and the semester after. I tried for 3 days down but couldn't get it. Of course, I could always drive the hour to work just to work from my office. Hopefully I'll find other creative solutions.
All I know is right now my feelings are very intense. Intense and not positive.
***
On belief: I'm convinced that two people can look at the same intellectual evidence and one choose theism, the other atheism. This is in part because the evidence is incomplete; there must also be other, deeper influences. I know modern skeptics generally believe reason is on their side and this is superior to faith; oddly enough, many theists beleive their position is based on evidence and will point to the faith involved in skepticism. But truthfully, we are talking about either non-quantifiable, often unobservable, very personal phenomena; or the 'outside' evidence for God, the classical arguments, which involve data as complex as the universe itself and rely on the reasoning capacity of mankind, who remains very much locked in the material as he reaches toward the transcenent.
Two things I will say: one, is that just because aliens aren't real, or out of body meditation, or the fact that walking under a ladder has nothing to do with my car wreck later in the day...humans can be credulous beings...this does not preclude religious truth. Maybe, credulous and desperate as we are, we are still somehow found by God. Just because some things humans believe about the non-material are false doesn't mean everything humans believe about the non-material is false. Naturally, since we're talking about a mortal, material beings postulating on the transcendent world, there will be lots of error.
Without that Transcendent somehow reaching out to us it's hard to imagine we could find anything concrete. Christians believe Jesus was just that portal; reading the Gospels (the most apologetic, as in persuasive, of all documents) it's hard to believe the 'historical' Jesus didn't believe himself to be unique in just this way.
Two (yes, one was way back there) Christians can't write off rational reflection of the facts we can see: our world appears materially perfect, biologically imperfect. By this I mean natural laws seem to proceed without much error, chemical and physical reactions are predicable. But in biological Nature, even though the complexity of Life is astounding, to say nothing of Mind, things die, sometimes without chance. It would be nice, as one columnnist noted in this month's Scientific American if penguin egg shells were thicker so that some penguins didn't fall off the parent's feet and crack and freeze (I didn't see the movie, so excuse any error). Perhaps then we'd have too many penguins? Okay, how about a process which allows them to reproduce less effectively but have better viability in the shell? Things suffer and die. Animals eat each other. We eat animals. Humans suffer and die.
It is quite possible we evolved via natural selection without any overt divine intervention. Our existence remains an astounding, shocking fact. In one real sense, the laws of our universe are no less miraculous when they aren't circumvented by conventional miracle. But terrestial biology is not what we'd build if we were divine minds, is it? We'd allow for no suffering, or minor suffering, every creature gettings its fair chance.
God isn't human. If a Creator made the universe as we currently perceive it he is quite a Being indeed, for the universe from a human point of view is very large, very energetic, very complex. Yet atheists as well as theists make a similar error if we assume the cosmos is made just for humans. The size of the universe used to cause me to doubt God. Why make millions of galaxies just so that human beings could evolve on one pitiful planet? But I was assuming that the universe was made just for us. We can't know God's mind regarding his creation. According to Jesus, though, we can know God's mind regarding us.
We're fucked up. Whether apparently accidental suffering in the human and animal world is a product of some primeval human transgression or just the way the world has developed...pain does have some self-preservative results after all...the empirical fact is humans hurt one another unecessarily with expert regularity. Some of those hurts are little, some big. Some unconscious, some quite intentional. Many of us also long for something bigger than ourselves to tell us how to stop wounding, how to live and act correctly. And, for some of us anyway, we long for forgiveness, catharsis in the true sense. Jesus promises both and eternal life as well.
Is my faith in this mere wish fulfillment? Only if it's false. Simply wanting something, even a very big or improbable thing, doesn't mean that thing doesn't exist. And for me, it comes back to the gospel record. My scholarship isn't what it needs to be on the gospels though I'm trying. When I read any of the four now I hear the Voice. A Voice which promises some of what I really need and some of what I don't want at all; a Voice which self-exults on every page; a Voice which claims supernatural authority to heal the blind, the lame, raise the dead; a Voice which claims it came back from the grave, driven by Love and obedience to the Father, for me.
Do I always believe that? No. Do I ever utterly not believe it? No; it has not been disproven to me since my (re)conversion in 2000. But while actually beginning with Jesus is one approach to Christianity, it seems the right one. Skeptics often attack theists with such impact because we aren't willing or able to really let go of our faith for anxious days to look at things from their point of view. I do that against my will, or so it seems to me. The result is that I believe it is possible to be both Christian and skeptic. To accept what science can tell me about the universe (and what it tells me keeps changing as it explores) and to evaluate the Voice in my inner person can happen concurrently. I agree no set of rational arguments will convert someone to Christianity; our faith touches a deeper part of the mind, but our faith is also born, many times, alongside reason. They are not mutually exclusive. If I ever come to believe they are, I'll have a very large problem.
***
Stupid to say it, but this is all I have time for now. That's the great thing about blog: Everything's a Draft! That would make a nice title for this blog, actually, better than the one I have and don't much like.
Love to all and Happy Thanksgiving
I've been open about how hard this semester has been. I have all new courses, the only possible exception being my composition classes online. I've taught comp. a hundred times, but never online. Trying to build those classes and teach them at the same time has, frankly, been impossible to do well, not while staying caught up in Am. Lit. and honors. It's been a sucky term and I want it to end; soon, it will.
One of those online comps has self-destructed, or nearly. I'm very sad and even pissed. I've had attrition like I've never had f2f or online. I suppose, considering my workload, this is a good thing! But why do I get papers for a research essay with no works cited page, no in-text citations, no research at all! What the hell do these students think is going on? So few of them took the last paper seriously, at least the research component; it's disheartening.
Let the D's fly. Bite me.
I hope the other class does better.
***
Today is one of those long days home alone, still getting over my cold and with a solid headache (I never get headaches) to top it all. I feel stranded. The collegue I mentioned above, what will I call him? How about Richard, as in Dawkins? Richard and I have been talking about how too much time online, including teaching online, can foster depression. If I was in a cubicle doing this, getting ready to go to lunch with the people from across the carpeted aisle, it would be different. But time alone, online and alone, it's a tough combo. I notice I only have a two day a week schedule next semester and the semester after. I tried for 3 days down but couldn't get it. Of course, I could always drive the hour to work just to work from my office. Hopefully I'll find other creative solutions.
All I know is right now my feelings are very intense. Intense and not positive.
***
On belief: I'm convinced that two people can look at the same intellectual evidence and one choose theism, the other atheism. This is in part because the evidence is incomplete; there must also be other, deeper influences. I know modern skeptics generally believe reason is on their side and this is superior to faith; oddly enough, many theists beleive their position is based on evidence and will point to the faith involved in skepticism. But truthfully, we are talking about either non-quantifiable, often unobservable, very personal phenomena; or the 'outside' evidence for God, the classical arguments, which involve data as complex as the universe itself and rely on the reasoning capacity of mankind, who remains very much locked in the material as he reaches toward the transcenent.
Two things I will say: one, is that just because aliens aren't real, or out of body meditation, or the fact that walking under a ladder has nothing to do with my car wreck later in the day...humans can be credulous beings...this does not preclude religious truth. Maybe, credulous and desperate as we are, we are still somehow found by God. Just because some things humans believe about the non-material are false doesn't mean everything humans believe about the non-material is false. Naturally, since we're talking about a mortal, material beings postulating on the transcendent world, there will be lots of error.
Without that Transcendent somehow reaching out to us it's hard to imagine we could find anything concrete. Christians believe Jesus was just that portal; reading the Gospels (the most apologetic, as in persuasive, of all documents) it's hard to believe the 'historical' Jesus didn't believe himself to be unique in just this way.
Two (yes, one was way back there) Christians can't write off rational reflection of the facts we can see: our world appears materially perfect, biologically imperfect. By this I mean natural laws seem to proceed without much error, chemical and physical reactions are predicable. But in biological Nature, even though the complexity of Life is astounding, to say nothing of Mind, things die, sometimes without chance. It would be nice, as one columnnist noted in this month's Scientific American if penguin egg shells were thicker so that some penguins didn't fall off the parent's feet and crack and freeze (I didn't see the movie, so excuse any error). Perhaps then we'd have too many penguins? Okay, how about a process which allows them to reproduce less effectively but have better viability in the shell? Things suffer and die. Animals eat each other. We eat animals. Humans suffer and die.
It is quite possible we evolved via natural selection without any overt divine intervention. Our existence remains an astounding, shocking fact. In one real sense, the laws of our universe are no less miraculous when they aren't circumvented by conventional miracle. But terrestial biology is not what we'd build if we were divine minds, is it? We'd allow for no suffering, or minor suffering, every creature gettings its fair chance.
God isn't human. If a Creator made the universe as we currently perceive it he is quite a Being indeed, for the universe from a human point of view is very large, very energetic, very complex. Yet atheists as well as theists make a similar error if we assume the cosmos is made just for humans. The size of the universe used to cause me to doubt God. Why make millions of galaxies just so that human beings could evolve on one pitiful planet? But I was assuming that the universe was made just for us. We can't know God's mind regarding his creation. According to Jesus, though, we can know God's mind regarding us.
We're fucked up. Whether apparently accidental suffering in the human and animal world is a product of some primeval human transgression or just the way the world has developed...pain does have some self-preservative results after all...the empirical fact is humans hurt one another unecessarily with expert regularity. Some of those hurts are little, some big. Some unconscious, some quite intentional. Many of us also long for something bigger than ourselves to tell us how to stop wounding, how to live and act correctly. And, for some of us anyway, we long for forgiveness, catharsis in the true sense. Jesus promises both and eternal life as well.
Is my faith in this mere wish fulfillment? Only if it's false. Simply wanting something, even a very big or improbable thing, doesn't mean that thing doesn't exist. And for me, it comes back to the gospel record. My scholarship isn't what it needs to be on the gospels though I'm trying. When I read any of the four now I hear the Voice. A Voice which promises some of what I really need and some of what I don't want at all; a Voice which self-exults on every page; a Voice which claims supernatural authority to heal the blind, the lame, raise the dead; a Voice which claims it came back from the grave, driven by Love and obedience to the Father, for me.
Do I always believe that? No. Do I ever utterly not believe it? No; it has not been disproven to me since my (re)conversion in 2000. But while actually beginning with Jesus is one approach to Christianity, it seems the right one. Skeptics often attack theists with such impact because we aren't willing or able to really let go of our faith for anxious days to look at things from their point of view. I do that against my will, or so it seems to me. The result is that I believe it is possible to be both Christian and skeptic. To accept what science can tell me about the universe (and what it tells me keeps changing as it explores) and to evaluate the Voice in my inner person can happen concurrently. I agree no set of rational arguments will convert someone to Christianity; our faith touches a deeper part of the mind, but our faith is also born, many times, alongside reason. They are not mutually exclusive. If I ever come to believe they are, I'll have a very large problem.
***
Stupid to say it, but this is all I have time for now. That's the great thing about blog: Everything's a Draft! That would make a nice title for this blog, actually, better than the one I have and don't much like.
Love to all and Happy Thanksgiving
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