Cars

Is society the collective refusal to examine philosophical presuppositions?


Okay. I am only a little serious. But I thought about this upon thinking about cars. Only capitalism could justify the automobile's popularity. First of all when you are driving a car, you are encased in thousands of pounds of metal moving at speeds up to 100 mph. Your options of communication with fellow motorists are few and the possibility of malfunction at some point is moderate to high.
And they cost money. And they depreciate in value. And if you work anywhere other than the three to five major metropolitan areas, you need this metal case of speed and death. It's nuts. And people drive 50 miles an hour. (I said 50 miles and hour! That's 73.3 feet per second!)To appreciate the force of this, run into a wall as fast as you can from ehh... 20 yards away. You will be traveling, probably, 10mph. Ridiculous. And why do we perform this daredevil stunt with a regularity that results in 1000 miles of driving every month? We have to get to our job. Wow. The need for capital has caused us to believe that we are safe at speeds up to 100 mph encased in a metal shell, depending on, essentially, electricity, and combustion, as if these things just work on their own and never break down, as if elderly people aren't licensed, as if we never make mistakes, and as if every one on the road has lasek surgery and has perfect vision. The well known fact that it is much safer to be suspended thousands of feet above the earth for hours, in a motorized flying machine made of metal may shed more light upon our lunacy. Long live the mighty dollar.

*Disclaimer* This post is meant mainly for humor, but is also intended to be truthful. As it stands, I own a car, and am okay with it. I am also okay with capitalism, but am also anticipating the perfect economy of Christ's kingdom.

Coffee

I am not addicted to coffee. I have evidence. I fasted from coffee for lent last year, and had basically no problems. I am however on the verge of obsession with coffee. I cannot work without it. It's a mental thing however, not really physical. I cannot stand to work without a liquid to drink, especially coffee, particularly when my work involves reading, which most of the time it does. And there's something about that taste in my mouth. It's wonderful the way that coffee lingers. This is my coffee comment of the day.

The True Christian

I find that the true Christian is unconventional. I do not mean that he is often unconventional, or that that his most distinguishing characteristic is unconventionality. I mean that he is a person void of convention. He is not even conventional in his conventionality. Now I must qualify what I mean by "true". For I do not think that either the mark or the mode of a "true" Christian is unconventionality, but that the sincere, genuine, fully functioning, completely sanctified Christian is unconventional. And by "conventional", I mean that he is himself in each and every situation that he finds himself in. He has no clique, albeit a community, which is entirely different. He has no clique because he is not afraid of being disliked, and has no desire to conform, and yet is consistently aware that "non-conformity" is a form of conformity, and that conformity itself is not the virtue in question: neither is non-conformity, but to the extent that conformity and nonconformity can be considered virtues, they are virtues if they conform to truth, and no person conformed to truth can succumb to the pressure of fitting into social norms. The conformist to truth is also a conformist to unity, and thus promotes it within himself and within society. He is a soul-undivided, utterly authentic, and contagious to all other authenticity seekers. Because he is okay with himself, others sense that he is okay with them, or they want to rid themselves of him because they have no power over him, and since they are not okay with themselves, they need this power.
I must finish with two qualifications of separate points just made. One, I promote neither acquiescence nor anarchy. The conformist to truth, a.k.a. the true Christian, stands up for what is right and against what is wrong, but he lives within the order he has known and understands since childhood. He must in conscience stop something that happens within the order is bad, not primarily because it creates disorder within the order, but because it was bad before the order existed, and will be bad upon the order's dissolution, and if the order prevent him from promoting something good which he must promote, he must promote it within the order and accept the order's consequence. So he is a non-conformist to the order but a conformist to truth, which compels him to conform to the order unless the order becomes non-conformed to truth, and still there is a way to refuse, without rebelling. For instance, say eating peas is wrong. Your mother, your authority, thus your order requires you to eat peas. The wrong reaction is to simply eat the peas, well as to deny your mother's right to authority. You refuse to eat the peas, receive your spanking, and go to bed a member of the order and a non-eater of peas. Or say you must eat peas, but your mother never makes them, and forbids them in your household. Likewise, you go buy peas, cook them, eat them, and take a spanking a pea eater.
The second qualification is more of a clarification and it deals with the question "What is truth?" How do I know in the first place that I mustn't eat peas (or must). And it is clear that I am assuming truth to have a thesis/antithesis quality. All I can say for now is that this is not a metaphysical or epistemological enterprise and that the first statement of the current post should be pretty revelatory of my basic assumptions about truth. To put it more bluntly. I am a Christian. I am assuming that the Nicene Creed is true, and I am assuming a classical Christian view of the necessity of antithesis. In as much as this enterprise concerns conformity as it relates to the Christian,(of which there is entirely to much confusion over lately)I want to call Christians out of conformity to the world all together, especially if it is pious because conformity to piety is the most deceptive of all. And lastly I am not suggesting that the true Christian can not be pegged. Anyone can be pegged. Pegging is the advantage of the subject, and he can be mistaken, but he cannot be prevented from opining, and thus pegging. If anything, the true Christian has no doubts about his pegging. He believes he is what God says he is, and lives joyfully in that. It is the church that will be difficult for the world to peg. Because the church is not a clique, it is a community. And as a community, it includes everybody, and everyone relates to everyone, exactly as they are. The former rule of subjective pegging applies. A church can be pegged as well as any individual, but not in truth. Because once one knows that the truth is that there is one body and many members of which Christ is the head, then one knows that any other peg is a mistake, and one can live in a distinct, truly non-conformist community; non-conformist in the sense of the main difference being a conformity to the truth instead of the world. In that sense, the church really is only more difficult to peg by reason that it is more complex than the individual, so we are back to where we started. The way out of this "paradoxicism" is a matter of the will. It is to truly not care what others think, only to take God at His Word and do what He says. This is a great mystery; non-conformity that cannot display non-conformity, but surely it can be practiced.

The Pluralistic Christian in a Pluralistic Society

What do you do when you find yourself in the following cultural situation? You live in a modern western, nation in which the great majority of its citizens claim to be Christians, yet the basics of Christianity is mostly misunderstood, or the pervading attitude towards the challenging Christian teachings is a form of apathy, or complacence? What do you do when you find yourself trying to follow the teachings of Jesus by reading the Bible, and most of your peers application of the Bible is to change nothing, except don't drink, get divorced, hang out with bad people, watch unbiblical movies, or say dirty words, but by all means support war, be rude to liberals, listen to Toby Keith curse and womanize, and make fun of sinners.
(I realize that many of my readers are sensitive to my implications. I am not talking about you. And I realize that I am misrepresenting a whole lot of individuals who are socially conservative, but also very cordial, polite and loving. Please realize that I am being slightly facetious, and that I in no way intend to ostracize my conservative brothers or sisters or make them look ridiculous. I am expressing however a common sentiment among more liberally minded Christians, and this is going somewhere. I don't wish to upset anyone.)
As Christians, we're called to be different; not different for the sake of different, but different in a way that is redemptive. But what does "different" look like in a pluralistic/secular/christian culture. It sure doesn't look like being a homophobic, pragmatist, elitist who doesn't drink or watch bad movies or a drinking, porn-watching, populist, who volunteers at soup kitchens, and pays more for gas effective cars. Why can't someone be a Christian who dislikes capitalism, because they believe it's about marginalizing people, more than helping them? Or be green, or a vegetarian, or vote yes for socialized health care? (Or not?) But who also hates pornography, abortion, and alcoholism? Why can't all of these qualities exist in one human without it being contradictory? What if its exactly what the Bible intends a Christian to look like within a pluralistic culture? What if "Biblical" in a pluralistic culture looks like each subculture appearing pluralistic? What I mean is that the culture is pluralistic in that many worldviews are accepted by the culture at large, but once people find others who agree with them, they form subcultures that are not at all pluralistic. This explains how subcultures become the authority of Christians' lives, instead of the Bible. This explains how the Bible gets re-interpreted in light of the subculture instead of the Bible shaping the opinions of the one individual. But I am convinced that if we interpreted the Bible before filtering it through our culture, that we would produce a truly pluralistic subculture, and that this subculture would be truly counter-cultural, and being that it would be biblically based, redemptive.

Ronald Reagan

The other day I heard someone say that that Obama is a communist. I think this is ridiculous, and a shameless piece of fear mongering. I heard another person say that Ronald Reagan was a fascist. This is just as ridiculous. I urge anyone reading this to look up both "fascism" and "communism".
Anyway, I was born in 1982. That means that I was born in the second year of President Reagan's first term and spent the first six years of my life under his presidency. Needless to say, I don't remember much about him. I remember that my father didn't like him. He (my father) said that Reagan was cocky, suspicious, and a warmonger. So that has been my general impression. But when I figured out that I was a Republican in high school, (as if you even have a choice in rural Ohio), I liked Reagan, but only because I was a Republican, and in my mind Republicans were the "moral" party that didn't make me pay taxes. Even so, the impression that he was a little shady, and arrogant stuck.
Recently, I found myself stumbling upon some old Reagan speeches and debates in the eighties, and I decided that my Dad's assessment was maybe a little off. President Reagan seemed to be very charming, eloquent, informed, and authentic. In fact, having grew up under the Clinton and Bush administration and now Obama, listening to Reagan made me feel like he was the last truly "presidential" Commander in Chief. People talk about how eloquent Obama is. He's a first year communications major compared to Reagan. Compared to Reagan's sincerity, Bush is a downright liar. And as far as charming in concerned, Clinton may have had a way with interns, but even liberals seemed to like Ronald Reagan. I found myself really appreciating President Reagan. If he's not sincere, he's the best politician, but I really think he's the last president I can listen to and believe that he really believes what he's saying, and that it has nothing to do with votes, but with the integrity of the office. I don't know. That's just my impression.