1. N.T. Wright on the Afterlife and the After Afterlife
A bit obvious but still needs to be said. As David Wayne notes, "What Wright is doing, in his typical erudite and winsome way, is affirming what all Christians have always believed about the eternal state - it is a new heavens and a new earth." (HT: ThinkChristian)
2. How to Think -- Managing brain resources in an age of complexity
3. Ross Douthat: What's The Big Deal About Sex?
If you think that sex, by virtue of being bound up not only culturally but biologically with emotional attachment on the one hand and reproduction on the other, is a unique kind of physical act, one that's intimate by its very nature in a way that, say, preparing dinner isn't, then it makes sense to assign a hierarchy of moral value (and moral stigma) to different kinds of sexual activity - most likely with monogamy at the top, serial monogamy somewhat lower, promiscuity lower still, and activities that treat sex as a commodity to be bought and sold somewhere near the bottom. I don't think, however, that accepting this sort of hierarchy, and believing that some of the acts at the bottom deserves to be banned as well as stigmatized, requires you to shun any girl with multiple notches on her bedpost as a slut, any more than believing in a moral hierarchy that runs from true generosity to miserliness requires you to show the mildly stingy the same disdain you would bestow Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Potter.
4. 12 Spiritual Lessons from 'Prince Caspian'
5. Harvey Mansfield on "Hook-Up or Shut Up":
However high-minded their courses may sound - "Mirror of Princes," say, or "The Political Philosophy of Aristotle" - college students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom. In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after. And it's free. The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women - as long as the man is a fellow student and minimally artful about his approach. If he is thwarted in one overture, he may try another with a reasonable prospect of success.
No doubt lurid anecdote and popular myth cause us to exaggerate the actual frequency of campus hook-ups: Most college students do not share in these delights. But most students also believe that "everyone does it," even if the individual student, for some reason, cannot locate a partner. Thus an active minority sets the tone and makes hooking up a "culture." When there are no sexual boundaries, either official or informal, the standard becomes the extreme, and all students feel the pressure to appear more promiscuous than they are. The traditional double standard of sexual conduct - more restrictive for women than for men - has been replaced by the single standard of the predatory male.
6. Quote of the Week: "The perception of us being political has been by default. It's like, 'They don't curse that much, and they're not misogynistic, and they don't do gunplay and drugs, so ... they're political.' But really, that just makes us considerate." -- Ahmir ?uestlove Thompson on his hip-hop band The Roots
7. Matt Jenson: On Viewing a Body
The thing about a viewing is that one's loved one is semi-available. This is disturbing for two reasons. On the one hand, she is not fully available in the way she has always been for us. The last time we saw her, she had been speaking and moving. She had been another subject with whom we could relate, a 'Thou' to our 'I'. Now she hovers somewhere between a 'Thou' and an 'It'. Maybe she is a 'She', one to whom (still whom, though) we refer in the third person. But she can no longer serve in the second person capacity. She can no longer be addressed properly, and she no longer addresses us.
Still, we do address her. She is available to us. This may be a partial availability, but it is an availability nonetheless.
8. U.S. among most Bible-literate nations
Americans are among the world's most 'Bible-literate' people and Spaniards, French and Italians are among the most ignorant about what the "good book" says, according to a new study released on Monday.
A poll carried out in nine countries - the United States, Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, Spain and Poland - also showed Americans were most willing to donate money to spread the message of the Bible.
9. For the two weeks around Mother's Day, the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) is holding its Thanks Mom awareness and donor recruitment campaign. The program is a way to say "Thanks, Mom" for giving you life by sharing that gift with another person. During the campaign, costs to join the Registry are covered for first 46,000 who join by NMDP's partners and contributors.
10. The Skeptic on the media's obsession with the "pedophiles run amok!" story line:
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time -- and just 3 percent of the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true "predators" so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America's 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: "Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers." That's a diplomatic way of phrasing the uncomfortable but factually supported truth: that if your child is not molested in your own home -- by you, your significant other, or someone else you invited in -- chances are your child will never be molested anywhere. Media coverage has precisely inverted both the reality and the risk of child sexual assault. Along the way, it has also inverted the gender of the most tragic victims: Despite the unending parade of young female faces on TV, boys are more likely than girls to be killed in the course of such abuse.
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The old model of publishing non-fiction, borrowed largely from academia, promised a straightforward result. You picked up an academic journal to find the latest word on French tax farming in the 18th century. You knew that what you were getting was tried, tested, vetted, and replicated, at least as much as was humanly possible. You thought of the author as laying small bricks for subsequent scientific advances. But this model of knowledge accretion never had the accuracy it pretended to. If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia. This comparison should give us pause....
The sad truth is that "non-fiction" has been unreliable from the beginning, no matter how finely grained a section of human knowledge we wish to consider. For instance, in my own field, critics have tried to replicate the findings in academic journal articles by economists using the initial data sets. Usually, it is impossible to replicate the results of the article even half of the time. Note that the journals publishing these articles often use two or three referees--experts in the area--and typically they might accept only 10 percent of submitted papers. By the way, economics is often considered the most rigorous and the most demanding of the social sciences.
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Though the most Deistic of the Founding Fathers, even Jefferson was not a full-fledged Deist if we accept that philosophy as having had two fundamental tenets: a rejection of biblical revelation and a conviction that God, having created the laws of the universe, had receded from day-to-day control and intervention. Jefferson clearly did agree with the first part of Deism. But he did not agree with the second.
Jefferson seemed to believe in a God who was still present in, and intervened in, the lives of men and nations. After having read Jefferson attack so many of the legs of religion, it might seem jarring to now read his regular invocations of God as a personal force in life--sometimes in terms so direct and literal, they surpass those of today's politicians.
Michio Kaku's latest book, "Physics of the Impossible", aims to explain exactly why some visions of the future may eventually be realized while others are likely to remain beyond the bounds of possibility. It concludes that there is little in science fiction that could not, in principle, be realized....
Mr Kaku, a California-born theoretical physicist, divides his "impossibilities" into three classes. The first includes telekinesis, teleportation and invisibility, which Mr Kaku thinks may be fully realised within a century. The second class contains concepts that do not violate the laws of physics but which are not well understood. Hyperspace travel using hidden dimensions that have yet to be sensed would fall into this category. Mr Kaku reckons these are thousands to millions of years away. The third class is for ideas that are impossible because they violate the laws of physics. It is surprisingly empty. Mr Kaku identifies just perpetual-motion machines and clairvoyance as being truly beyond the realm of possibility.
UK Consumer group Which? conducted the test that showed keyboards may actually be dirtier than a toilet seat:
Out of 33 keyboards swabbed, four were regarded as a potential health hazard and one harboured five times more germs than one of the office's toilet seats.
Microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson said a keyboard was often "a reflection of what is in your nose and in your gut".
During the Which? tests in January this year, a microbiologist deemed one of the office's keyboards to be so dirty he ordered it to be removed, quarantined and cleaned. It had 150 times the recommended limit for bacteria - five times as filthy as a lavatory seat tested at the same time, the research found.
That invaluable rule of our Lord's, "To do to others as we would have them do to us," will serve to explain, when rightly understood, the true character of moral instruction. If you were to understand that precept as designed to convey to us the first notions of right and wrong, and to be your sole guide as to what you ought to do and to avoid in your dealings with your neighbor, you would be greatly perplexed. For you would find that a literal compliance with the precept would be some times absurd, sometimes wrong., and sometimes impossible. And probably it is through making this mistake that men in general apply the rule so much seldomer than they ought. For the real occasions for its use occur to all of us every day.Brandon Watson of Siris adds, "Whately goes on to note that application of the Golden Rule presupposes both that you have a conscience and are reasonable and suggests that the 'real design of it is to put us on our guard against the danger of being blinded by self-interest.'"
It would very much prevent our being misled by this self-partiality, to reduce, that practical rule of our Saviour, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, even so do unto them," to our judgment and way of thinking. This rule, you see, consists of two parts. One is, to substitute another for yourself, when you take a survey of any part of your behaviour, or consider what is proper and fit and reasonable for you to do upon any occasion: the other part is, that you substitute yourself in the room of another; consider yourself as the person affected by such a behaviour, or towards whom such an action is done; and then you would not only see, but likewise feel, the reasonableness, or unreasonableness of such an action or behaviour. But, alas! the rule itself may be dishonestly applied: there are persons who have not impartiality enough with respect to themselves, nor regard enough for others, to be able to make a just application of it. This just application, if men would honestly make it, is, in effect, all that I have been recommending: it is the whole thing, the direct contrary to that inward dishonesty as respecting our intercourse with our fellow-creatures. And even the bearing this rule in their thoughts may be of some service: the attempt thus to apply it, is an attempt towards being fair and impartial, and may chance unawares to show them to themselves, to show them the truth of the case they are considering.(HT: Siris)
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein - The book is much mischaracterized by certain people as a polemic for fascism. It's quite the opposite, of course, as it suggests that the right to vote and hold office might imply as certain responsibility to society. The idea that some kind of national service (which doesn't just mean in the military) should be a prerequisite for voting and holding office is a provocative one. There are other themes, such as the nature of war, that are also fascinating.I agree. Starship Troopers is a fascinating and thought-provoking book. I first discovered it because is was listed on the The Marine Corps Professional Reading Program List.
Hispanics, the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority group, now account for about one in four children younger than 5 in the United States, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released today.
The increase from almost one in five in 2000 has broad implications for governments, communities and schools nationwide, suggesting that the meteoric rise in the Hispanic population that demographers forecast for mid-century will occur even sooner among younger generations.
The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market.... There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies...(HT: Marginal Revolution)
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.
see more crazy cat pics
Conversational writing doesn't mean indifference to grammar; learn the difference between a comma and semicolon. On the other hand, forget what Sister Clair said in 3rd grade about sentences ALWAYS needing a subject and verb. Not so. But know how to break the rules the right way.
What's good for life is good for the writing life: Write "anything that would be helpful" (Acts 20:20). Also, you have heard that it was said, "The writer makes his own luck" -- meaning that he should go out and live an exciting life. But the Lord says, "Defend the cause of the weak" (Psalms 82:3) -- and you will have material aplenty.
A short film by Lucas Crandles. If you couldn't get caught, would you kill a stranger for $10 million? (HT: Locusts and Honey)
Only got to number 1 before I found something I wanted to comment on :). I think it's a vitally important message that N.T Wright is getting out there - and to say that it is "what all christians have always believed" is to cut a massive chunk of Christians out. But loved the video - thanks!
To say that "all Christians have always believed" any one thing is to betray an ignorance of church history. On every doctrine, including eschatology, Christians have spun a bewildering variety of doctrines all claiming to be based on the Bible. Of course, the Bible itself contains a huge variety of mutually contradictory ideas about what happens in the future. I do find myself agreeing with Wright's final emphasis on bringing about justice in the here and now and not saving souls for the joys of the sweet by and by.
Understanding the concept of a "living thing" is a late developmental achievement. Early research by Jean Piaget, showed that kids attribute "life status" to things that move on their own (e.g. clouds or bikes) and even 10-year-olds have difficulty understanding the scope of a living thing.
Thus the ubiquity of religion. What else is the religious impulse but an attribution of personal status to impersonal things?
Jefferson seemed to believe in a God who was still present in, and intervened in, the lives of men and nations. After having read Jefferson attack so many of the legs of religion, it might seem jarring to now read his regular invocations of God as a personal force in life--sometimes in terms so direct and literal, they surpass those of today's politicians.
But he still belongs in Hell, right?
I don't think, however, that accepting this sort of [sexual] hierarchy, and believing that some of the acts at the bottom deserves to be banned as well as stigmatized, requires you to shun any girl with multiple notches on her bedpost as a slut
Christians are amusing when they pretend to be tolerant.
The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market
Except that hunger in regions where it exists is not the product of lack of available food supplies, or global underproduction. Globally, there is a massive food glut, and there would be an even worse one if most of the US's arable land was not devoted to corn for cattle feed and processed-foods production, intended to create even higher prices. The "global food crisis" is a distribution crisis: Western nations subsidize their own agriculture and undermine food prices in Third-World countries, shifting local production to cash crops for export and draining food out of the most needy regions to the richest ones. Excess food stocks in rich nations could be used for famine relief, but those nations refuse to release them in order to maintain prices in their own markets. And all of this is the result of the rise of corporate agriculture, supported by government subsidies, forcing artificially high yields with artificial fertilizer in monoculture plantations of a tiny number of crops, most of all corn, to produce cheap animal feed, and low-priced fats and starches which can by synthesized into high-priced processed foods. (All this not to mention the dangers of monoculture farming, the energy cost and environmental damage of fertilizer use, and the toxicity of fertilizer runoff, animal manure and urine lagoons on factory farms, and antibiotic use in factory farming.)
There is no shortage. We're drowning in cheap food products. The problem is to stop starving people in the name of profit, and, over the long term, to improve the overall economies of Third-World nations to the point that they can afford reasonably-priced food of local production. Destroying local economies, putting farmers out of work, addicting poor nations to oil for fertilizer and energy-intensive farming like the US now is, and imposing monoculture farming and higher food costs for the benefit of (inevitably, First-World-owned) agro-opolists is just a prescription for continued disaster.
See Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma for a detailed discussion of the factory-farming disaster in the US; contra Collier, he argues for a return of family-owned farms, multi-crop plantings with rotation, less fertilizer, a return to New Deal commodity banking for price stability rather than Nixon-imposed direct subsidies favoring overproduction of non-edible processed-foods precursors, grass pasturage rather than corn-based feed and antibiotics for cattle, and in general a return to the production of food that isn't actually fatal to the people who eat it. The one good thing for the Third World is that, while in some cases their food distribution systems are inadequate, they haven't destroyed food production as an industry in the way the US has done; they still have time to both increase production and build a livable food-supply system by avoiding the disastrous policies Collier recommends.
Hmmmm...Wright is absolutely right that modern Christians tend to undervalue the resurrection life in the New Heavens and the New Earth, but I think there is a false dichotomy going on with "Left Behind" theology. I don't subscribe to it myself, but those who do, do not deny that there will be an eternal "New Heavens and New Earth," they see the process by which it will come about as somewhat different from the way he does. Nor do they believe that they will "leave space, time, and matter forever." That is to say, that is not their official theology, though I suspect that because of the undervaluing of the cardinal Christian doctrine of the resurrection in these times, many of them do misunderstand the doctrine and do have that gap in their beliefs. But that is not equivalent to what "Left Behind theology" actually holds.
I'm also suspicious of how quickly the interview cut away when Wright was asked "So you don't believe in the rapture?" and he answered "no." Every theologian or teacher I've ever encountered who denies the popular version of the "rapture doctrine" would have followed that "no" with, "not as portrayed in the Left Behind movies" or something to that effect, and then gone on to affirm that there is a legitimate sense in which Christ returning for the church is to be understood. I suspect there was a "but" that came right after that "no" that was cut off -- the cutaway was so very abrupt.
All Christians have always believed in the orthodox doctrine of the resurrection -- that's one of the things that makes you a Christian, as opposed to a heretic, so it's tautological. And none of the people identified in this piece as supposedly not believing it, would actually deny it if the question was put in the right context.
#33 was an episode of The Twilight Zone.
(Disclaimer: I haven't actually watched the embedded youtube yet.)
I watched #33 now. The Twilight Zone was more clever.
Anyway, that video is a horrible and devoid of any Gospel.
The key to salvation as a choice not to do evil. The test is tailored to each individual to their greatest temptation. Who could stand? This is the stark truth of trying to get to heaven. "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
Who then can be saved?
I think most Anglicans (and most High Church Protestants: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Reformed Dutch, etc.) are amillennial or postmillennial in their eschatology.
While Pentecostals, Jehovah Witnesses, Apostolics, Holiness, and free-wheeling Evangelicals (non-denominational charismatics, Neo-Orthodoxy, Engaged Orthodoxy, or whatever you guys are claiming as solid traditional theology this week) are pre-millennial.
Postmillennial/amillennial/premillennial are irrelevant to Wright's point. Those are all about things that happen BEFORE resurrection and the renewed Heavens and Earth. No Christians of any eschatology have ever had any interpretation of Revelation 21 that denies the reality of a New Heavens and a New Earth, nor an interpretation of I Corinthians 15 that denies a bodily resurrection. Those are among the very few things that have always been held in common.
So Wright's right on the mark for saying that while this is the accurate Christian understanding, we've downplayed it to the point of making everything about "Heaven after you die" in actual practice. The interview piece is wrong for opposing the orthodox understanding of resurrection and the renewed earth to any particular existing eschatology.
I'm also suspicious of how quickly the interview cut away when Wright was asked "So you don't believe in the rapture?" and he answered "no." Every theologian or teacher I've ever encountered who denies the popular version of the "rapture doctrine" would have followed that "no" with, "not as portrayed in the Left Behind movies" or something to that effect, and then gone on to affirm that there is a legitimate sense in which Christ returning for the church is to be understood. I suspect there was a "but" that came right after that "no" that was cut off -- the cutaway was so very abrupt.
The Left Behind Series is pushing a pre-tribulation Pre-Millennial eschatological view, so that school of thought (a heresy, if you want to get technical) would view Rapture much more differently than he would.
What is the place of the Rapture for Post-Millennialists and Amillennialists?
The returning Christ for Post-Millennialists and Amillennialists, seems to look a lot different than the returning Christ for Pre-Millennials. The act of the Cross and resurrection and the triumphant church are treated very different in the separate eschatological camps.
Well, I was going to try and comment insightfully on the N.T. Wright video, but I find that Pentamom has done the job for me. Wright's book is probably worth reading. Most of his are and I think he is addressing a misconception that some have. But that has less to do with Christian doctrine and more to do with the laziness and people, Christian and not.
Christians are amusing when they pretend to be tolerant.
And the village atheist is always funny when he makes ignorant statements like this.