Sin

It's a funny thing about sin. It always has a rationalization.
That statement being so anecdotal can stand alone by itself as some sagacious facebook status. Expect this to continue.
Sin has this way of bothering its owner, that it is usually too difficult to face. The usual turn is, "This is a much more complicated situation". And it is true in a fleshly sense. The problem is that is not quite an acceptable excuse. Sin is sin is bad. God's original command to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, (as if there were no original concept of the difference between good and evil or the individual existence of either) was simple. The serpent, in questioning God's rationale behind the command, successfully introduced the idea that complexity, being the reasonable result of contemplation, and moderation, was reason for sin. Although to state it so crudely would not be the ways of the the serpent. In other words, it has always been part of the fabric of sin that the decision to commit it was based on something that could be rationalized as being good. (Ironically, this is not possible without the looming presence of evil. For what are we to call good if we do not know what to call bad?) The indivisible truth of humanness is that the human only ever does that which he or she thinks is beneficial at least to him or her. Therefore the best strategy the devil might have is to somehow convince the human that a given action is what's best at least for him or her. The devil essentially manipulates the human's desire for physical pleasure, beauty, and significance, a.k.a. lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. These innate desires being God-given are not evil in and of themselves, but can be used for evil which can be simply defined as "that which is disobedience or human malice".
I say all this to say this. When you're living in sin, it's always complicated. But if sin is simply disobedience, it's not complicated. Because when you're in sin, you're in sin, you have not the advantage of the objectivity of this post, and so the exit from this state is akin to an enlightenment or perhaps a rescue. (If they are different?)The only pragmatic benefit of this blog post is for counselors or mentors, who in trying to help someone, can benefit from realizing that the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem, and that its really all that simple. I am not being facetious. You can't work with a person who's self-deceived.

Conservatism

Conservatism is a funny thing. Liberalism is a funny term, not quite descriptive. Conservatism is just a funny thing I think. The word conservative implies a hesitation; an action towards the impeding of progress. This has to be a bad idea every once in while right? Is it good to be conservative about shoes, underwear, marriage? Certainly progress is required in certain areas of life. (I appreciate redundancy). As Christians, should we be conservative about sanctification? If all I have done up to this point is point out the need for clarification of what one means when he/she says she is conservative, then I can live with that. Generally though I find myself wanting to talk about most things issue by issue seeing the subjective nature of calling oneself conservative, or labeling oneself in any case. Besides when it comes to authority of Scripture, God Himself seems to be very conservative, which is why we can take Him for a liberal when it comes to answering prayers for wisdom? Not to mention that Paul took the liberal position in Romans when He suggested that rebellion was the cause of homosexual relations. At this point homosexuality had been a normal Mediterranean practice for years.

Yankees Vindicated

I am not fan of the New York Yankees. But I am less of a fan of haters. There's a harmless element to sports fandom when it comes to rivalries. I am a Cleveland Indians fan, and for whatever reason I have found myself not liking the Yankees, mostly because of George Steinbrenner. But this is not personal. If I saw George on the street, I would say... "Holy Crap! That's George Steinbrenner!" I would say this out loud and that would be it. A Red Sox fan might punch him in the throat, or sick his brainwashed ravenous son or daughter on his ankles, but this is taking a game way too seriously. But within the realm of sports, I think George is kind of shady and have a difficult time respecting his organization.
Here are bad but common reasons to dislike a sports franchise.
Reason # 1: They win all the time
This is pathetic. Get over it. Tell your owner to get
some players.
Reason # 2: (And this is the one of concern to this
particular blog post) The Yankees take all
of the good players because they have all the
money. Small market teams have no chance. It's
not fair.
There are several problems with this line of thinking. Let us name off last decades World Series winner and losers since they were pretty good teams too. Yankees, Mets, D-backs, Angels, Giants, Marlins, Red Sox, Cardinals, Tigers, White Sox, Rockies, Phillies, Rays. 4 out of 13 of those clubs are "big markets". Albeit that the Red Sox and Yankees won twice, that the Yankees went to the world series three times, and that the Phillies went twice. Perhaps the Big markets have an advantage, but this does not mean they are worthy of hatred. It is after all a business. It's just plain communism to think that it ought to be fair. If the Yankees have millions of fans, are compelling, and can afford to pay these guys, have their own television program, why shouldn't they? Your team would. Maybe if they were killing everybody every year, and there were struggling teams without ever the chance, but...? Really last year's lineup was the first all star lineup that the Yankees ever won with. When they won their four out of five around the turn of the millenium, they did it with all homegrown guys who were just good ball players. The 2004 Red Sox are names now because they won the World Series. So baseball rewards excellence, and the 2007 world champions were stacked. If you payed your dues like the Red Sox did and won a championship, people will start to like your team and they will pay to watch your team, which increases your team's revenue. The Yankees started getting these high profile free agents in 2000 with the acquisition of Roger Clemens, and won one World Series before last year's championship. And if you think about it, how many new high profile free agents did the Yankees have last year? Sabathia and Texeira. The rest of the team was old guys. Arod, Jeter, Jorge, Rivera, Petitte, Damon, Matsui. If you ask me I say it was veteran leadership, and pitching that won last year's title.
Stop whining haters! The Yankees are helping you buy a championship too. Baseball has this thing called revenue sharing, and the Yankees are the biggest contributor to small market charities. Guess who the richest owners are. They are the owner of the Twins, the Nationals, and the Pirates. The Steinbrenners are actually down there, and the reason I suspect is that they want a winning product. So what would you rather have? A money grubbling owner who can afford to spend money and put a team on the field but doesn't. Or I guy who spends the money and gives you a winning product. As much of a weasel as ole' George is. He genuinely wants the Yankees to win as much as you do, and tries to make this happen. Who can blame him for that?
The one legitimate reason to dislike the Yankees: You grew up in Northern Ohio, but now live in Scranton, PA, and you never stop hearing about them Yanks.

Art and Objectivity

What is good art? I found out today that I don't know. My friend, an art major is going to school essentially to find out what exactly good art is. Apparently, things like composition, lighting, technique, etc..., there are rules to art. Imagine. Art has rules! I shouldn't be surprised. Music has rules. (something I am lot more familiar with)I use the term art in reference to the works you would find in any art museum, so I am not including any type of writing or music in my use of the word art, although everything I am saying probably applies to the loose usage of the word art.
My friend claimed that professional art critics know what constitutes as good art in the same way that your mechanic knows how your car works. I had several questions.
1)Who made the rules? The car works how the car works? What is the standard of good art?
2)How does everyone enjoy art if only the experts know if its good or not? If it is true that only experts know, how much do they have to study before they're experts? Who decides that the experts are experts? If it is true that only the experts know then what the novice calls good, is different then what the expert calls good. They mean different things.
Conclusion: Art is inherently subjective.
Facts are facts and opinions are opinions. Opinions can be wrong. Facts cannot. This is obvious but at least it' stated. So to put this on simple terms. My friend's hypothesis is that there such a thing as good and bad art as an objective fact. This means that if a person who knows nothing about art likes a piece and shows it to another person who is an art expert who discredits the piece that the former person likes a bad piece of art. But this cannot be.
The earlier questions apply. Who said it was good art? Why should we believe them even if we know who they are? How does an expert become an expert? Any value we assign, or reason we come up with will not be based on anything absolute, and therefore will fall short of "fact".
You ask, "what is based on anything absolute".
Let me say this. All reason is based on possibility and probability. The best way to arrive at the probability of something is through experience and repeated experimentation. But probability is not absolute. It is not by definition. To say that something is probable is to say that something is possibly improbable. If probable is as good as reason can come up with, then absolute is yet elusive. In other words, what we mean when we say that a piece of artwork is good, is that there is good reason to for us to assume that trained artists know what they are talking about. Of course this can be disputed and no doubt has been, but the point of what I'm saying is in the case of artwork, good is based on pure ideas, and ideas however improbable that they be wrong, can still possibly be wrong, which must mean that ideas however improbable to be right can still possibly be right.
So the next question is: Is there any link between ideas and fact? There is a relationship, but not a link. If a fact is only arrived at by reason, then it cannot be arrived at by reason because reason can only go so far as probability will allow it and probable opens the door for "possibility of not being". But perhaps there is another kind of thinking that gives us access to the absolute. It is this kind of thinking that ought to be of interest to us. Reason tells us the function. "This kind of thinking" tells us the form. Let's call it faith. But faith is a confusing word. Shall we call it derb?
So we have learned that when you make judgment value about anything, be it art, or anything else, that the words you use are used within a system based on probability. And if someone corrects you, they are not correcting the correctness of your opinion, but your ability to use reason. If someone says that death is an illusion, that no one has ever died. Our experience tells us that this is such a poor use of reason that this person ought to be locked up, but it does not mean that they are wrong. It just means that they probably are.

More Thoughts on the Concept of Virtue and the States Role in Promoting It

I'm back. Sorry.
So the dominating virtue of American society is not work ethic, but independence. If we can have independence without working for it we will take it. Our government is on the the way to providing this for us. However, as our entitlements increase so does our dependence on the providers, so in effect we are becoming less dependent. We're being dooped. They are using our virtue against us. Conservatives in this country recognize this and are disturbed by this because they understand the scheme, and see how its undermining the real American Dream, which is of course the age old tale of "rags to riches", which no longer necessarily requires a strong work ethic. The fear in secular terms is legitimate.
But how does the Christian faith fit into all of this? Some would argue that our heritage is Christian, that it is the hand and the American Constitution, as well as our overall heritage is the perfectly sized glove. Of course, for Protestants (which I am) this would require some inductive Bible Study. The pertinent question is: Does the Bible agree with the Constitution or with what our Father's declared? If it does not, are we not required to disagree with the Constitution, or the assertion that our heritage is Christian if it does not also agree with the Bible? Just because our conservative pastors, and FOX News political pundits tell us that we are a Christian nation doesn't mean that we are. We're a Christian nation in as much as we're biblically based as an entire nation, not in part, but in whole.

Let me supply several reasons why the United States of America is not a Christian nation, and never was, and then we'll pick up the discussion again at a different time.

1) Given 1 Peter 2, and Romans 13, and the overall mood of the Bible towards government, which is: complete submission unless it means denying Christ. What were we fighting for, and killing people for in the American Revolution? Is the sermon on the mount worth setting aside in our fight for "certain inalienable rights"? was the Gospel at stake in the American Revolution, or was it independence from Great Britain? Even if the Gospel were at stake, is it Christ-like to kill people in its defense? Should we even be a nation at all?

2) The whole flow of the New Testament suggests that the Christian community is a representative of the Kingdom of God, not any kingdom of man and it is therefore questionable that there is any such thing as a "Christian Nation", unless of course that nation is perfect, is the kingdom of God, which of course America, even its ideal form is not.

3) The early Fathers, drawers of the constitution, highly favored freedom of religion, and were of various persuasions themselves. The forefather crew, if you will, ranged in beliefs from atheism to deism, to true-blue Protestant. Unless we can somehow fit atheism, which denies the existence of God, and deism, which denies the deity of Christ, into the the category of Christianity, we cannot say that this is a Christian Nation, unless we try to argue that it's Christian in mood, which becomes so ethereal that an argument for a return to our "Christian" days would be too vague to be substantial.

I could be wrong. I welcome your input, perspectives, questions, and beliefs. My thesis is very nuanced, and inconclusive, so please be patient and wary of quickly jumping categories. I will praise America, when I think America deserves it, but I think people must understand that fighting for the Gospel is primary, time consuming, and different from fighting for all politically conservative values. To be a Christian is de facto, distinct from being American, not mutually exclusive, but different.

I'm not done. I'm just slowing down for responses.