If the medium is the message, then what is this message?

The BC premier's office was trashed yesterday by a bunch of rowdies opposed to... um, something (I guess) related to homeless people in Vancouver being kicked to the curb by Olympic athletes, millionaire hockey players, or... you know... other "Bread not circuses" type stuff or whatever.

Have these people given any thought to how much money they are costing? With all the security expenses needed to keep these professional troublemakers at bay, you could feed and house a few dozen families, I'm sure. I have no doubt that Habitat for Humanity could surely benefit from all the extra energy and passion these people seem to have.

Things are not in my hands

Nothing is in my hands
That you have not put there.
There is no gift I bring
You did not give me first.

What I will be, what I become,
These are the choices you have put before me;
What I need to be as a  branch grafted to your vine,
All this you have given me.
What I do with it,
You leave up to me.

As you ascended, Lord
So let me ascend
From the many graves I have dug for myself.
Give me the grace so that someday I might follow
Where I may not follow;
To the place of your Father's many rooms.

Nothing is in my hands, Lord
Except this one thing:

Your hand in mine.

In the Kitchen at Midnight

That's the name of a little music piece I've been working on tonight. I've been composing little ditties like this randomly a lot lately. I like this one, because the violin does a round at the end.

Jerry Fallwell has passed away

The Rev. Jerry Falwell passed away in his office today. He was 73 years old.

A minister who once eschewed mixing of faith and politics, he became perhaps one of the first and best known examples of it. Falwell founded a lobby organization called the Moral Majority in the seventies, which set the template for all faith lobbies that followed. He was at times influential, and at times controversial. One of the most memorable incidents was his altercation with the Teletubbies television show.

Want to lose weight instantly? Go to Hudson's Bay

Canada was once covered with giant ice sheets so large that when they melted, sea levels went up 60 metres. And they were so large that when they melted, they left a large portion of Canada with a gravitational anomaly. If you were to get on a scale in Moose Factory, Ontario, you would weigh less than you do somewhere else.

Nerds with guitars

Fundamentalists need fundamentalists

An interesting comment discussion I've been having with Lane (who I think is my only surviving reader) has brought me back to the premise behind the new 'evangelical atheism' movement, pitched not just by Christopher Hitchens in "God is not Great," but also by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Bobby Henderson (via his Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

These folks will occasionally take on the more serious and profound theologians (although I haven't read it, Hitchens reportedly takes on Aquinas during the course of "God is not Great.") But usually they don't.

Take Dawkins; I am always astounded this man has a following. He is to atheism what Chomsky is to liberal politics; where Chomsky is a linguist who is mistaken for an expert on politics, Dawkins is an ethologist and biologist who is mistaken for an expert on religion, anthropology, and cosmology.

One of his noted quotes:

"Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to 'speak in tongues' - the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive --- are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability."

This is a typical line of thought for Dawkins. As a biologist, he sees religion not through real understanding, but through the eyes of a behaviourist. He is all about the exhibited symptoms, the patterns: Christians who raise Christian children, Jews who stay Jews through the generations, and the continuity of practice from generation to generation. It was Dawkins who coined the term 'meme' to deal with what he calls cultural transmission (which a cynic might dismiss as simply an update of social darwinism.)

Nowhere in Dawkins work does he ever examine the import of these behaviours - what the experience of it actually is. Dawkins is likely quite familiar with the practice of Catholics fingering rosary beads. He would have no problem of following the formula, I'm sure... ten Haily Marys, one Our Father for each decade.

But could he understand contemplative prayer itself? The speaking of the ninety nine names of God by a Sufi? I doubt it, personally. All he is able to see in that is the release of seratonin, memes, trained behaviour. Experiential religion is alien, and the thing not understood, the thing feared, must become the thing abolished.

Someone like Dawkins needs fundamentalists - in his documentary, "The Root of All Evil", who does he take on? Not the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Aga Khan or any religious intellectual and peer. He takes on Ted Haggard. Haggard he can understand because, in many respects, he is a kindred soul.

Fundamentalism - be it religious fundamentalism or areligious fundamentalism - is not open to the transcendant.

A 'fundamentalist' Christianity can accept language that includes a transfigured Christ, because the word 'transfigured' can be found in Matthew 17. But a fundamentalist Christianity cannot really embrace the Cosmic Christ implied by Matthew 17, or John 1:1... the word of God through which creation is spoken into existence, and sustained (as Augustine says.) The words hint at it, but they don't come out and say it - they tease, "Who do you say that I am?"

The fundamentalist and aggressively evangelical form of atheism proposed by Dawkins needs that kind of Christianity: that kind of Christianity is contained entirely and completely in the texts of the bible. It is easy to take apart a text, point out its apparent logical inconsistencies. A transcendant, mystical Christianity is an ephemeral and difficult target to hit. But the kind of faith contained entirely in a book in the Hotel room dresser? That makes a much better target.

I've often thought - fundamentalists are all a lot more like one another than they are like any of the rest of us. "What is truth?" Pilate asked.

We weren't meant to find the answer to that question easy.... (unless the answer is 42.)

Ponderings on a Faith Journey: Faith Without Understanding

Pastor Bob at Ponderings on a Faith Journey writes about an odd paradox - Faith Without Understanding. We here on this side of the water (I count Canada as well) have faith, but often not enough knowledge about our faith. In Europe, people may have knowledge about faith (from religion classes in school), but no faith!

It isn't a particularly new phenomenon, either. Just think of the days before the printing press - everyone was dutifully religious, but nobody had a bible; and the bible was usually only written in Latin.

But if the truth will set us free, it is incumbent for us to ask, as Pilate did (but not rhetorically like Pilate did):

What is truth?

Look Beyond

In his latest screed, God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes about religion that, "it is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs. Today, the least educated of my children knows much much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion."

Leaving aside the infantile and petulant language, he's just plain wrong about our ancestors abilities, relative to our childrens'. The hunter gatherers of the early age of our species may not have known anything about Special Relativity. But they undoubtedly forgot, in their lifetimes, more than Hitchens himself will ever know about the rhythms of the seasons, the behaviours of every animal and plant they encountered, and the cycles of the weather. It is these people people who first gave us religion; people so much closer to the Earth as it really is than we in our abstracted world are.

What arrogance we have today to believe we know so much. Sure many of us can say, "electron", and have some vague idea that this abstract thing we will never see circles, in a Quantum-mechanical way, the nucleus of an atom.

But how many of us know how to flake an axehead out of stone? How many of us know how to get antibiotics from a plant, and what growth state that plant has to be in for it to be effective?

Similarly, when those of us today in our smug knowingness assert "there is no God" (without a shred of evidence more for the assertion today than was the case 30,000 years ago) , we do it out of abstract ignorance. We read in some rabies-drenched Richard Dawkins essay that there was no God, right? So it must be true, right?

My grandfather had a saying, which my Dad often repeated to me, whenever I began to pontificate about some topic I knew only in the abstract. He'd say, "Wuz you there, Charlie?"

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding." (Job 38:4)

Though I have faith, I'm not so arrogant as to tell an atheist that the strong anthropic principle ensures us through science that there is a God, because ultimately, I wasn't there to witness the moment of creation, when a scalar field kicked off the Big Bang. And I'll thank them to remember that neither were they.

Science is about the natural world, and though it tells us about much, is competent to tell us only of the natural world. If I look to the tongues of angels to tell me about the reality beyond, I need a guide that takes me beyond nature. I do not apologize for seeking out the transcendant, for it is there. I've seen it with my other sight, after all.

Fourth annual flight suit day!

It was four years ago today that President Bush arrived on the USS Abraham Lincoln, decked out in a Navy flight suit, to announce that "major combat operations" had ended.

As much as my post may be titled sarcastically and facetiously, I actually do wish he had been right about that. Tempting as it might be to indulge in schadenfreude over the political misfortunes of the man who vaingloriously made this pronouncement, too many people have suffered to take even a dark delight in how wrong that statement was.

Today, the world is a much more dangerous place. The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, Iraq may soon have to be abandoned to a Somalia-like fate, and Iran has used the influence and power it has gained from this conflict, along with the weakened international position of the United States, to commence its sinister ascendence.

The one hope that remains - the one hope that always remains - is that life does go on mostly in little vignettes... the small stories matter more than the big ones. Somewhere, someplace, someone has decided to forgive someone else. Someone somewhere has decided that Muslims/Jews/Christians/Atheists/Hindus/Kurds/Sunnis/Shiites/Falun Gongers aren't so bad after all. Someone has given someone else a second chance. Someone has quit drinking, has given up selfishness and anger, and somebody else has let them.

The world beyond us could be cause for despair. Hopefully the world around us is not.