Quote: C.S. Lewis

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

– C.S. Lewis

-Grace and Peace

International Herald Tribune on Mars Hill Church

Interesting article on Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill from an outsider perspective.

-Grace and Peace

Quote: Spurgeon

“There shall be more wonder at the going to heaven of the weak believers than at the stronger ones. Mr. Greatheart, when he comes there, will owe his victories to his Master and lay his laurels at his feet; but fainting Feeblemind and limping Ready-to-Halt with his crutches, and trembling Little-Faith—when they enter into rest, will make heaven ring with notes of even greater admiration that such poor creeping worms of the earth should win the day by mighty grace.

Suppose that one of them should be missing at the last? Stop the harps! Silence the songs! No beginning to be merry while one child is shut out! I am quite certain if, as a family, we were going to sing our evening hymn of joy and thankfulness, if mother said, ‘Where is the little mite? Where is the last one of the family?’ there would be a pause. If we had to say, ‘She is lost,’ there would be no singing and no resting till she was found.

It is the glory of Jesus that as a shepherd he has lost none of His flock, as the Captain of salvation, he has brought many sons to glory and has lost none.”

—Charles Spurgeon

-Grace and Peace

Black Belt Patriotism

You can’t make this stuff up…

There’s only one man that can save us from “leftist judges” and “the liberal establishment.”  His name is Chuck Norris.

-Grace and Peace

Breaking News: Romantic Comedies Dangerous

No surprise here…

Ok, they’re not intrinsically evil or anything, but they do impress unrealistic relationship expectations on us, whether we realize it or not.  The danger comes in not actively examining our own actions and emotions, taking care to keep from letting these expectations become normal in our minds.  

Another person can’t complete you, and he or she can not read your mind (all the time).  Expect a lot, sure.  Just talk about what you expect first.  Then show a ridiculous amount of grace, and stop thinking about yourself.  We were designed to take care of others first, not ourselves.  

Happily ever after.

-Grace and Peace

Quote: Keller

Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. Our future is not an ethereal, impersonal form of consciousness. We will not float through the air, but rather will eat, embrace, sing, laugh, and dance in the kingdom of God, in degrees of power, glory, and joy that we can’t at present imagine.

Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living ‘east of Eden,’ always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be bought into the feast.

-Tim Keller

-Grace and Peace

Quote: Mathis

The apostle Peter writes,

Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life,so that your prayers may not be hindered. (1 Peter 3:7)

This is strange at first glance. How does caring for your wife connect to having unhindered prayers?

Here’s Wayne Grudem’s challenging commentary:

So concerned is God that Christian husbands live in an understanding and loving way with their wives, that he “interrupts” his relationship with them when they are not doing so. No Christian husband should presume to think that any spiritual good will be accomplished by his life without an effective ministry of prayer. And no husband may expect an effective prayer life unless he lives with his wife “in an understanding way, bestowing honour” on her. To take the time to develop and maintain a good marriage is God’s will; it is serving God; it is a spiritual activity pleasing in his sight.” (1 Peter, 146)

Christian husbands shouldn’t feel that time given to their wives is “time away from the real ministry.” Time invested with our wives is time well spent. It’s God’s will—“a spiritual activity pleasing in his sight.”

     -David Mathis, via Desiring God

Happy World Philosophy Day

Today’s World Philosophy Day (or is it?), and in that spirit, the BBC published this article.  It’s written by David Bain, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.  He poses four tough philosophical questions, then briefly walks through the logical process of answering each.  It’s a fun little exercise, good brain training.

So, with World Philosophy Day upon us, here are some pesky arguments to apply your minds to:

 

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

 

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you’re an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement – this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush’s brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it’s actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn’t implant your brain in Bush’s skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush’s pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush’s and Gordon Brown’s? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There’s nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

 

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there’s a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.

Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not

But this, you might reply, doesn’t show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it’s about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it’s readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they’re generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you.”

 

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one’s denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn’t really exist, so he didn’t really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred’s predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly.”

 

IN CONCLUSION

Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it’s a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

“…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time.”

David Bain is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow 

-Grace and Peace

GOOD Magazine – UPDATE

Something I’ve seen in Starbucks outside Texas (or at least Houston) are Good Sheets.  They are short leaflets that are focused on a particular current subject, and present a set of objective facts and information to shed some light on the given subject.  

The latest one is summarized in the following video.  Focusing on the First 100 Days, it lists the major decisions/accomplishments of each President from FDR to GWB.  Seeing each man’s list side by side is enlightening, and really fascinating.

Beyond the Good Sheets, Good Magazine is a huge resource.  I’ve really enjoyed looking through their articles and videos.  They combine very well researched data, clear presentation, innovative graphs and diagrams, beautiful aesthetic design, and a lot of dry humor thrown in to boot (for instance, in the 100 days video, the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen reads a list of Things to fear besides fear itself).

Check out the site.  It’s thought provoking, informative, and funny.  That spells G-O-L-D to me.

-Grace and Peace

UPDATE – Need more reason to check them out?  If you sign up for a membership at GOOD, 100% of your subscription fee is donated to a charity that you get to choose.  Come on, this thing is fantastic!

Quote: Allender

The cost for the recipient of God’s grace is nothing – and no price could be higher for arrogant people to pay.

– Dan Allender

-Grace and Peace