Captain America
is dead,
is dead.
Welcome to Gnu's blog ! This is an online posting of my musings which concern things related to topics like Christian faith, theology, philosophy, and my hobby, Fantasy Role-playing Games.
'What did you expect to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically?!' -Basil Fawlty
Friday, March 23, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Norman Malcolm and Religious Doctrine
Norman Malcolm has a paper offering an analysis of the way we ordinarily use the phrase "I know". Malcolm observes from cases that we often use the phrase "I know" and "I believe" to refer to the same belief/knowledge situation when all of the objective factors are the same. For example if I say that I know that there are cookies in the cookie jar (because I just got back from the cookie jar and saw that there were plenty of cookies there) and you go and look and see the cookies, I would say that I knew it. But if you went and looked and saw that the jar was empty you would say, "No, you only believed it".
Accordingly, our use of the phrase "I know" is inconsistent with any traditional account of epistemology. According to Plato, when a boy understands the proof for a theorem in geometry, such as that given any square another square whose side is the length of the diagonal of the original square will be twice area of the original square, he not only knows it, he knows that he knows it -- that is he can introspectively inspect the proof in his own mind and see that the conclusion must be true. This opposed to the person who excepts the same claim on the authority of Euclid. Such a person might be willing to say that he knows that the claim is true but also be willing to consider it false if he discovered that many other geometricians disagreed. But the person who actually possesses in their mind the proof would think that such rival geometers must somehow be mistaken.
In other words, we say "I know" in different ways. Specifically, there is a strong use and a weak use of "I know". If I say "I know" in the strong way, what I mean is that I am not open to any counter evidence to what I am claiming. If I say "I know" in the weak way, what I mean is that I am open to any counter evidence to what I am claiming. The two uses are logically exclusive of each other. In other words, my use of "I know" tracks with what I am prepared to do.
Malcolm observes that this distinction between the strong and the weak use of "i know" cuts across the traditional distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Their are certain mathematical claims that we would not hesitate to say we know (like 2 + 2 = 4) and think that anyone who doubted it was dysfunctional. But many others (like e^--(pi x i) = 1) which we would be willing to admit a need to recheck our work to be sure we are right). Also while "the sun is 9 x 10^7 miles away" and even "there is a heart in my chest" are things that I could imagine some measure of countering evidence for, according to Malcolm, I could not imagine any possible evidence that would refute "here is a computer" for me. He further argues that for me I could not have an infinite chain of weakly used knowledge claims for any a posteriori claim, so that there must be a posteriori strong knowledge claims somewhere for me.
So traditional epistemology is completely orthogonal the way I use the claim to know and its logical characteristics. Further, even though its true that for some subject S and some proposition p, if S knows that p, then it is true that p, it does not follow that if I claim I know that p that I either know that p or that p is true, for either the strong or the weak use of knowing. So the description of how we use "I know" teaches us nothing about epistemology and whatever is true about epistemology does not effect our use of "I know". Consequently, traditional epistemology is otiose to ordinary language.
But even if Plato is wrong and there is no way of distinguishing knowledge from mere belief by introspection, introspection does distinguish between my use of "I know" strongly or weakly. Once I am aware of the distinction, I can discern and choose which use to make of "I know" and so such uses are conspicuous to me because I control them.
I think such an account has interesting consequences for faith and reason. One of them is on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Consider the case of doubting Thomas. He continues to doubt even the authority of his friends' testimony until he sees Jesus alive for himself. We could imagine Thomas saying "I know that no one ever comes back from the dead" but his consideration of criterion for a genuine appearance of Jesus (feeling the nail and spear prints) suggests that this was "I know" in the weak sense. However, seeing Jesus face to face would have been a paradigm case of what Malcolm calls the strong a posteriori use of "I know" -- "I know Jesus is here". In other words, for Thomas:
(1) I knew (in the weak use) that no one comes back from the dead.
(2) I now know (in the strong use) that Jesus is alive.
are consistent. Whatever might be odd about the claim that someone rose from the dead, there is nothing logically odd about it.
Another use for this discussion is in determining the import of doctrinal subscription. Basil Mitchell uses the example of the French Resistance Leader to illustrate how faith is rational without being specific about what would make it false. He argues that we can meaningfully talk of falsification without specifying before hand what counts as a falsifying instance. Suppose you are in the French Resistance in WWII. In a foxhole you meet a charismatic figure that inspires trust and confidence who claims to be the secret leader of the Resistance. But later you see him leading the Nazis in squashing Resistance fighters. Others may give up on him but your original encounter with encourages you to think that perhaps he is tricking the Nazis to let down their guard. There may be some situation that would really compel you to lose faith in the leader but for now you cannot think of what it would be like. It does not mean that you believe in the Leader no matter what. We can imagine the resistance fighter even saying in this situation that he knows (in a weak use of knowledge) the Leader is fighting for us.
According to CS Lewis, though, there are situations in which we would be reasonable to say that we could not seriously entertain any possibility of doubt in someone. If we are on a ledge on the 100th story of a burning building and the fireman on the rope in front of us is telling us to step off the ledge, even though his direction seems to us to be the height of absurdity, we must not regard that absurdity seriously. In such a situation we could imagine steeling ourselves to action be saying "I know (in the strong use) that I can safely step off the ledge". According to Lewis before we can reasonably say this we must have some evidence for it independently of the situation, but in certain situations obstinacy of belief is appropriate.
Consider these claims:
(3) I know that what God tells me is true.
(4) I know that God is speaking to me here in the Bible.
(5) I know that infralapsarianism is true.
It seems that (3) is an example of a strong a priori use of "I know". Once we know what "God" and "speaks" mean, we can see that its true and in a way that makes it impossible to expect counter evidence. Further, it seems that (4) is an example of a strong a posteriori use of "I know". You might not think so but it seems to me that one could either have an immediate impression of God speaking in the Scriptures (say) in the sense that Malcolm speaks of a strong knowledge claim like "here is a computer", or start by having an encounter with the text that is similar to Mitchell's account of the Resistance Leader but which existential urgency may lead you to strengthen along the lines of CS Lewis' account of belief. In such cases, it seems that (4) is appropriate. But in the case of (5), (note: infralapsarianism is the doctrine that God's decree that there would be a fall of all mankind is logically prior to His decree that some should be elected to salvation) the state of affairs that is the basis of (3) and (4) together leads (if it indeed does) to the acceptance of (5) but it seems that one should only affirm (5) in the weak way rather than the strong way because we may admit the possibility that we may have incorrectly read the text or made a false inference from the textual data. However, Malcolm's account helps us make sense of how it is that we can speak so confidently even in differing conditions of belief formation. I say "I know" in both cases and the logic of saying I know allows this. Further, I could even be aware that saying "I know" in (3) - (5) does not imply that I know or that what I claim to know is true, and yet this would not prevent me from saying (3) - (5) nor would it keep me from being in my rights to say (3) - (5).
Now one way to characterize doctrinal assent is that such an assent is determined by what I am prepared to do and what I am prepared to do can help specify whether I am giving my assent in the intended way or not. Many humanists say that there is no greater bane to thought than holding to doctrines. However, if my holding to a doctrine that p means that I am prepared to say "I know that p" as Malcolm has discussed this, it is difficult to see how that could be a bane to thought. I know (strongly) that doctrine is not a bane to thought.
Further, if someone wants to know if I subscribe to a doctrine and I say "Yes, I know that the doctrine is true", that person can ask whether I am using "I know" strongly or weakly. I say that I can only say that I know that doctrine is true in a weak use, not a strong use. To which the reply might be, "Sorry, but we can only grant membership to those who would say that they know that doctrine is true in a strong way". The difference between the strong and the weak use distinguishes different requirements for assent in the same list of doctrines. Another possibility is that it may not matter which, one must at least claim knowledge in a weak sense.
So when we ask what is intended by the requirement a necessary condition for being a pastor in a Presbyterian denomination is that one subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith, we can ask if that means that pastor candidates must be able and willing to say that they know in a strong way that the contents are true. If we allow the caveat that if at any time the pastor changes their mind about any doctrine, they will notify the denominational authorities for evaluation and possible administrative dismissal, then if that means we are asking the candidate to take seriously the possibility he might be wrong, then we are requiring that the doctrinal acceptance implies a weak use of knowledge, but if we take the caveat to be essentially trivial then we are requiring that the doctrinal acceptance implies a strong use of knowledge. Either way, not all candidates who do hold to the doctrine would be acceptable. Of course, this is a false dilemma because it may be that the caveat takes it to be a possible situation even for those who do hold to the doctrine and claim knowledge of it in the strong way and this because the caveat is aware that even knowledge in the strong sense does not imply truth so that even the one who cannot imagine counter evidence my find the unimaginable thrust upon him. The caveat implies that not all doctrinal departures are within the scope of moral irresponsibility, sometimes a responsible person may have to disagree so its not clear that every doctrinal departure is a failure of character even though that is certainly possible and likely. Also, allowing weak uses of knowledge allows that some of doctrines to be accepted just on the authority of a credible tradition which means that one may accept the standards even if one has not personally worked out every article of them. Finally, since if Malcolm is right that there must be some cases of the strong use of "I know" if there are to be any cases of a weak use of "I know" and since some of those cases may turn out to be doctrines as well like (3) and (4), then the best sense of the caveat seems to be that while one must be prepared to say of any doctrine in the set that "I know", the caveat is indifferent about whether that "I know" is strong or weak.
All that to say that some interpretations of subscription, such as that all the doctrine must all be accepted as known in a strong way and never in a weak way, may be abuses of subscription requirements. On the other hand, to say that what one really is required to accept the system of doctrine in the confessions and not every jot and tittle of it suggests that some of the doctrines are different from the rest and whether or not this difference consists in what certain doctrines must be held strongly whether the rest are held strongly or weakly. But since the system of doctrine whatever it is is distinguished from the evangelical essentials there is a further question about the differences among the privileged system of doctrine. However, this may be a case not of distinguishing between what is strongly held from what is weakly held but between what must be strongly held in order to be accepted as a church member and what must be strongly held in order to be a pastor which would include the former. It also seem that another abuse of subscription would be if the real doctrinal requirements for pastors differed exclusively from those required of members including in the respect of whether they were held strongly or weakly.
Finally, Malcolm's approach sheds some light on how such communities that define themselves doctrinally can be legitimately exclusive. If doctrinal subscription is in part about what we are prepared to say it seems that prima facie it may be related to what we are prepared to do and in the existential sense what we are prepared to be. If a community is devoted to a certain vocation, it may require the right attitude to the presuppositions of that vocation and that attitude may require being prepared to say certain things. And in perpetuation, we may be required to teach what we say we know so anyone who is not in sync with this is an impedance to it. There is a doctrinal aspect to asking a person to either lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Accordingly, our use of the phrase "I know" is inconsistent with any traditional account of epistemology. According to Plato, when a boy understands the proof for a theorem in geometry, such as that given any square another square whose side is the length of the diagonal of the original square will be twice area of the original square, he not only knows it, he knows that he knows it -- that is he can introspectively inspect the proof in his own mind and see that the conclusion must be true. This opposed to the person who excepts the same claim on the authority of Euclid. Such a person might be willing to say that he knows that the claim is true but also be willing to consider it false if he discovered that many other geometricians disagreed. But the person who actually possesses in their mind the proof would think that such rival geometers must somehow be mistaken.
In other words, we say "I know" in different ways. Specifically, there is a strong use and a weak use of "I know". If I say "I know" in the strong way, what I mean is that I am not open to any counter evidence to what I am claiming. If I say "I know" in the weak way, what I mean is that I am open to any counter evidence to what I am claiming. The two uses are logically exclusive of each other. In other words, my use of "I know" tracks with what I am prepared to do.
Malcolm observes that this distinction between the strong and the weak use of "i know" cuts across the traditional distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Their are certain mathematical claims that we would not hesitate to say we know (like 2 + 2 = 4) and think that anyone who doubted it was dysfunctional. But many others (like e^--(pi x i) = 1) which we would be willing to admit a need to recheck our work to be sure we are right). Also while "the sun is 9 x 10^7 miles away" and even "there is a heart in my chest" are things that I could imagine some measure of countering evidence for, according to Malcolm, I could not imagine any possible evidence that would refute "here is a computer" for me. He further argues that for me I could not have an infinite chain of weakly used knowledge claims for any a posteriori claim, so that there must be a posteriori strong knowledge claims somewhere for me.
So traditional epistemology is completely orthogonal the way I use the claim to know and its logical characteristics. Further, even though its true that for some subject S and some proposition p, if S knows that p, then it is true that p, it does not follow that if I claim I know that p that I either know that p or that p is true, for either the strong or the weak use of knowing. So the description of how we use "I know" teaches us nothing about epistemology and whatever is true about epistemology does not effect our use of "I know". Consequently, traditional epistemology is otiose to ordinary language.
But even if Plato is wrong and there is no way of distinguishing knowledge from mere belief by introspection, introspection does distinguish between my use of "I know" strongly or weakly. Once I am aware of the distinction, I can discern and choose which use to make of "I know" and so such uses are conspicuous to me because I control them.
I think such an account has interesting consequences for faith and reason. One of them is on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Consider the case of doubting Thomas. He continues to doubt even the authority of his friends' testimony until he sees Jesus alive for himself. We could imagine Thomas saying "I know that no one ever comes back from the dead" but his consideration of criterion for a genuine appearance of Jesus (feeling the nail and spear prints) suggests that this was "I know" in the weak sense. However, seeing Jesus face to face would have been a paradigm case of what Malcolm calls the strong a posteriori use of "I know" -- "I know Jesus is here". In other words, for Thomas:
(1) I knew (in the weak use) that no one comes back from the dead.
(2) I now know (in the strong use) that Jesus is alive.
are consistent. Whatever might be odd about the claim that someone rose from the dead, there is nothing logically odd about it.
Another use for this discussion is in determining the import of doctrinal subscription. Basil Mitchell uses the example of the French Resistance Leader to illustrate how faith is rational without being specific about what would make it false. He argues that we can meaningfully talk of falsification without specifying before hand what counts as a falsifying instance. Suppose you are in the French Resistance in WWII. In a foxhole you meet a charismatic figure that inspires trust and confidence who claims to be the secret leader of the Resistance. But later you see him leading the Nazis in squashing Resistance fighters. Others may give up on him but your original encounter with encourages you to think that perhaps he is tricking the Nazis to let down their guard. There may be some situation that would really compel you to lose faith in the leader but for now you cannot think of what it would be like. It does not mean that you believe in the Leader no matter what. We can imagine the resistance fighter even saying in this situation that he knows (in a weak use of knowledge) the Leader is fighting for us.
According to CS Lewis, though, there are situations in which we would be reasonable to say that we could not seriously entertain any possibility of doubt in someone. If we are on a ledge on the 100th story of a burning building and the fireman on the rope in front of us is telling us to step off the ledge, even though his direction seems to us to be the height of absurdity, we must not regard that absurdity seriously. In such a situation we could imagine steeling ourselves to action be saying "I know (in the strong use) that I can safely step off the ledge". According to Lewis before we can reasonably say this we must have some evidence for it independently of the situation, but in certain situations obstinacy of belief is appropriate.
Consider these claims:
(3) I know that what God tells me is true.
(4) I know that God is speaking to me here in the Bible.
(5) I know that infralapsarianism is true.
It seems that (3) is an example of a strong a priori use of "I know". Once we know what "God" and "speaks" mean, we can see that its true and in a way that makes it impossible to expect counter evidence. Further, it seems that (4) is an example of a strong a posteriori use of "I know". You might not think so but it seems to me that one could either have an immediate impression of God speaking in the Scriptures (say) in the sense that Malcolm speaks of a strong knowledge claim like "here is a computer", or start by having an encounter with the text that is similar to Mitchell's account of the Resistance Leader but which existential urgency may lead you to strengthen along the lines of CS Lewis' account of belief. In such cases, it seems that (4) is appropriate. But in the case of (5), (note: infralapsarianism is the doctrine that God's decree that there would be a fall of all mankind is logically prior to His decree that some should be elected to salvation) the state of affairs that is the basis of (3) and (4) together leads (if it indeed does) to the acceptance of (5) but it seems that one should only affirm (5) in the weak way rather than the strong way because we may admit the possibility that we may have incorrectly read the text or made a false inference from the textual data. However, Malcolm's account helps us make sense of how it is that we can speak so confidently even in differing conditions of belief formation. I say "I know" in both cases and the logic of saying I know allows this. Further, I could even be aware that saying "I know" in (3) - (5) does not imply that I know or that what I claim to know is true, and yet this would not prevent me from saying (3) - (5) nor would it keep me from being in my rights to say (3) - (5).
Now one way to characterize doctrinal assent is that such an assent is determined by what I am prepared to do and what I am prepared to do can help specify whether I am giving my assent in the intended way or not. Many humanists say that there is no greater bane to thought than holding to doctrines. However, if my holding to a doctrine that p means that I am prepared to say "I know that p" as Malcolm has discussed this, it is difficult to see how that could be a bane to thought. I know (strongly) that doctrine is not a bane to thought.
Further, if someone wants to know if I subscribe to a doctrine and I say "Yes, I know that the doctrine is true", that person can ask whether I am using "I know" strongly or weakly. I say that I can only say that I know that doctrine is true in a weak use, not a strong use. To which the reply might be, "Sorry, but we can only grant membership to those who would say that they know that doctrine is true in a strong way". The difference between the strong and the weak use distinguishes different requirements for assent in the same list of doctrines. Another possibility is that it may not matter which, one must at least claim knowledge in a weak sense.
So when we ask what is intended by the requirement a necessary condition for being a pastor in a Presbyterian denomination is that one subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith, we can ask if that means that pastor candidates must be able and willing to say that they know in a strong way that the contents are true. If we allow the caveat that if at any time the pastor changes their mind about any doctrine, they will notify the denominational authorities for evaluation and possible administrative dismissal, then if that means we are asking the candidate to take seriously the possibility he might be wrong, then we are requiring that the doctrinal acceptance implies a weak use of knowledge, but if we take the caveat to be essentially trivial then we are requiring that the doctrinal acceptance implies a strong use of knowledge. Either way, not all candidates who do hold to the doctrine would be acceptable. Of course, this is a false dilemma because it may be that the caveat takes it to be a possible situation even for those who do hold to the doctrine and claim knowledge of it in the strong way and this because the caveat is aware that even knowledge in the strong sense does not imply truth so that even the one who cannot imagine counter evidence my find the unimaginable thrust upon him. The caveat implies that not all doctrinal departures are within the scope of moral irresponsibility, sometimes a responsible person may have to disagree so its not clear that every doctrinal departure is a failure of character even though that is certainly possible and likely. Also, allowing weak uses of knowledge allows that some of doctrines to be accepted just on the authority of a credible tradition which means that one may accept the standards even if one has not personally worked out every article of them. Finally, since if Malcolm is right that there must be some cases of the strong use of "I know" if there are to be any cases of a weak use of "I know" and since some of those cases may turn out to be doctrines as well like (3) and (4), then the best sense of the caveat seems to be that while one must be prepared to say of any doctrine in the set that "I know", the caveat is indifferent about whether that "I know" is strong or weak.
All that to say that some interpretations of subscription, such as that all the doctrine must all be accepted as known in a strong way and never in a weak way, may be abuses of subscription requirements. On the other hand, to say that what one really is required to accept the system of doctrine in the confessions and not every jot and tittle of it suggests that some of the doctrines are different from the rest and whether or not this difference consists in what certain doctrines must be held strongly whether the rest are held strongly or weakly. But since the system of doctrine whatever it is is distinguished from the evangelical essentials there is a further question about the differences among the privileged system of doctrine. However, this may be a case not of distinguishing between what is strongly held from what is weakly held but between what must be strongly held in order to be accepted as a church member and what must be strongly held in order to be a pastor which would include the former. It also seem that another abuse of subscription would be if the real doctrinal requirements for pastors differed exclusively from those required of members including in the respect of whether they were held strongly or weakly.
Finally, Malcolm's approach sheds some light on how such communities that define themselves doctrinally can be legitimately exclusive. If doctrinal subscription is in part about what we are prepared to say it seems that prima facie it may be related to what we are prepared to do and in the existential sense what we are prepared to be. If a community is devoted to a certain vocation, it may require the right attitude to the presuppositions of that vocation and that attitude may require being prepared to say certain things. And in perpetuation, we may be required to teach what we say we know so anyone who is not in sync with this is an impedance to it. There is a doctrinal aspect to asking a person to either lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Philosophy and Canon
My study on the relation between Scripture and practical wisdom has turned to the threefold division of the OT canon according to Jer. 18.18 into the torah of the priest, the counsel of the wise, and the word of the prophet. The Torah is the five books of Moses, the Prophets are Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah-Lamentations, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, and the Writings are everything else in the OT, particularly the Ezra books, the Psalms, and the wisdom literature. I am especially indebted to Walter Brueggeman's book, "The Creative Word" from Fortress Press.
It is clear that while all scripture is inerrant, there are relations of authority in between these sections of the canon. The Torah is absolutely authoritative,the authority of the prophets is subject to the Torah, and the writings are subject to both of the others. This is seen in the different degrees of care taken in the transmission of the text. Scribes that were nattingly meticulous in copying the Torah took more liberties with the wisdom literature.
The wisdom literature in fact seems to have had to have been "canonified" before they could be canonized. A good example is Ecclesiastes which purports to have been written for the most part by Solomon, identifying himself as the Preacher, at a time when his spiritual status was very much in question -- that is, sometime after his corruption by his wives and the abuses that led into the divided kingdom. He expresses a view that seems at odds with biblical faith which made its canonization difficult. But the book begins with a reference to the Preacher in the third person, and ends with a third person reference to the Preacher along with a general statement about the preacher's speeches as well as a general statement about wisdom. What seems to have happened is that an editor added the more constructive parts -- especially the claim that the sum of the matter is to fear God and obey His commandments -- and this is what makes the book as a whole acceptable in the canon (hence I say that it was canonified in order to be canonizable).
We only need to add that, while the New Testament has not been traditionally classified into such sections the three functions can be seen to be performed in various ways in the New Testament as well.
The wisdom literature is neither the Law of God nor the word of the Lord but rather based on ordinary life experience of the authors in service to the Torah. The purpose of the wisdom lit is to show us how to live life by God's law. Consequently, it is the most humanistic part of the canon. It represents a sanctified humanism and provides a model for our own progress into an adult faith. In the wisdom lit God normifies human understanding within limits and discourages it from becoming either autonomously self-sufficient or despairingly useless.
This is includes speculative matters as well as practical. Consider these three claims about what the Old Testament affirms, along with my verdict on whether such a claim is confirmed or unconfirmed by the OT evidence.
(1) The OT affirms authentic divine predestination. (Confirmed.)
(2) The OT affirms authentic moral responsibility. (Confirmed.)
(3) The OT affirms that authentic divine predestination is compatible with authentic moral responsibility. (Unconfirmed.)
Seeing the careful way God's divine hand is manifest in all parts of the OT canon, the OT clearly affirms divine predestination. Also, it is clear that the OT law holds men authentically responsible. At a first glance, this leads us to expect that it would hold a compatibilist view of the relation between sovereignty and responsibility. But in fact we find no evidence of that and in fact we find a kind of balking at the question in its various forms, especially in the Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes. For starters, a compatibilist argument would be quite an elaborate undertaking for the authors of Scripture other than we would expect but it would still not do enough to account for the incompatibilist intuitions people typically have. Rather than deal with the issue, the OT resorts to throwing the whole point back against the Divine voice out of the whirlwind, appealing to the throne rights of God, and/or confronting man with God's incomprehensible mystery. There is a demand for an answer which is never satisfied per se but rather condemned to be inappropriate. And God is choosing to approach the problem this way rather than give us a theory about the relationship between the two.
If we pushed the logic of (1) and (2) with an explicit contradiction of (3), then the Bible would be guilty of asserting an outright contradiction. So the biblical response hovers between fully embracing contradiction and fully satisfying demands for explanation. I think it is relevant that the OT absorbs this hit principally in the wisdom literature, the writings part of the canon. It is clear that the revealed things belong to us, but the secret things belong only to God. It is not forbidden to us to learn what we may about them but we cannot demand that everything make sense before believing. Not everything and a profound lot of things will never make sense to us.
It strikes me then that what the Bible thinks about wisdom comes very close if not exactly getting right the experience of philosophical reflection for the most part. When the philosophy considers the big questions, they invariably run against aporia which never seems to become satisfyingly resolved but which grow deeper ever deeper in undestanding. One can never rise to the level of pure dogmatism about these questions and can never be sure that there is not a further consideration that will refute his best account. Philosophy is a mixture of joy and sorrow, of wisdom gained and lost.
Now the interesting thing is that the Bible frustrates any insistent demand to have all this worked out by God so that this is often used as an objection to its authority. But taking the philosophical experience as a whole, it is clear that not only does the Bible not resist that, but rather it accepts it to the extent it internalizes the whole process into its canon when that process concerns God. And all philosophically interesting questions eventually concern God. This also includes the question of how God could possibly exist (or not exist). This is fitting with the doctrine that God is not a darkness, in which there is no light at all, but rather God is an inapproachable light, to dazzling to be ever taken in all the way but in which we may discern some things at the edges.
Or to quote John Cleese in "Clockwise", "It's not the despair. I can deal with that. It's the hope!"
In Plato's dialogues, Socrates is often described in various metaphors that bring out his mission to show those who think they know that they really don't know as they think and thus realizing their ignorance, they finally have the chance to really seek to understand. In the Apology, Socrates refers to himself as the Gadfly of Athens, irritating the city as if it were a sluggish horse. In the Meno, Socrates is described as a Stingray (or Torpedo Fish) stinging his prey and making them numb, that is making them more unsure of what they dogmatically thought they were sure. In this ministry of awaking people from their dogmatic slumbers, we have the characteristic ideal of western education and enlightenment.
One section of society, that is thought to be in especial need of Socratic therapy are Bible believers who seem to be locked into a dogmatism into which nothing can pry. The limits of this perception can be clearly seen in the function of the OT canon itself.
(A) In the Torah, God is the gadfly of the worldly powers. The Torah is the story of how a God alien to the worldly power and settled establishments of Pharaoh breaks in with greater power in behalf of those voiceless ones who have been unjustly enslaved and who will become a nation that stands in the middle of the crossroads of the world to reveal a different way of life to those passing by.
(B) In the Prophets, God is the gadfly to Israel. The institution of the role of prophet is set up in the Torah itself, in its priestly functions. Out of this the prophets are raised up from the poor in Israel to oppose the Torah experts with the Torah and to recall the kings to justice, speaking in ways that evoke conscientiousness. This function can be seen in Jesus rebuttal to the Pharisees.
(C) In the Writings, God is the stingray to the wise raising difficulties and then leaving them to answer them but not allowing their answers to be established hastily in pride nor allowing wisdom to ultimately despair.
So those scriptures provide the very resources that overcome the ossification of opinion. Fundamentalism is biblical ineptitude. A child-like settled faith in the promises of scripture is compatible an adult struggle with reasoning about nature, so that the Biblical God is more like a Socrates who is killed unjustly rather than a Buddha that we are exhorted to kill.
It is clear that while all scripture is inerrant, there are relations of authority in between these sections of the canon. The Torah is absolutely authoritative,the authority of the prophets is subject to the Torah, and the writings are subject to both of the others. This is seen in the different degrees of care taken in the transmission of the text. Scribes that were nattingly meticulous in copying the Torah took more liberties with the wisdom literature.
The wisdom literature in fact seems to have had to have been "canonified" before they could be canonized. A good example is Ecclesiastes which purports to have been written for the most part by Solomon, identifying himself as the Preacher, at a time when his spiritual status was very much in question -- that is, sometime after his corruption by his wives and the abuses that led into the divided kingdom. He expresses a view that seems at odds with biblical faith which made its canonization difficult. But the book begins with a reference to the Preacher in the third person, and ends with a third person reference to the Preacher along with a general statement about the preacher's speeches as well as a general statement about wisdom. What seems to have happened is that an editor added the more constructive parts -- especially the claim that the sum of the matter is to fear God and obey His commandments -- and this is what makes the book as a whole acceptable in the canon (hence I say that it was canonified in order to be canonizable).
We only need to add that, while the New Testament has not been traditionally classified into such sections the three functions can be seen to be performed in various ways in the New Testament as well.
The wisdom literature is neither the Law of God nor the word of the Lord but rather based on ordinary life experience of the authors in service to the Torah. The purpose of the wisdom lit is to show us how to live life by God's law. Consequently, it is the most humanistic part of the canon. It represents a sanctified humanism and provides a model for our own progress into an adult faith. In the wisdom lit God normifies human understanding within limits and discourages it from becoming either autonomously self-sufficient or despairingly useless.
This is includes speculative matters as well as practical. Consider these three claims about what the Old Testament affirms, along with my verdict on whether such a claim is confirmed or unconfirmed by the OT evidence.
(1) The OT affirms authentic divine predestination. (Confirmed.)
(2) The OT affirms authentic moral responsibility. (Confirmed.)
(3) The OT affirms that authentic divine predestination is compatible with authentic moral responsibility. (Unconfirmed.)
Seeing the careful way God's divine hand is manifest in all parts of the OT canon, the OT clearly affirms divine predestination. Also, it is clear that the OT law holds men authentically responsible. At a first glance, this leads us to expect that it would hold a compatibilist view of the relation between sovereignty and responsibility. But in fact we find no evidence of that and in fact we find a kind of balking at the question in its various forms, especially in the Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes. For starters, a compatibilist argument would be quite an elaborate undertaking for the authors of Scripture other than we would expect but it would still not do enough to account for the incompatibilist intuitions people typically have. Rather than deal with the issue, the OT resorts to throwing the whole point back against the Divine voice out of the whirlwind, appealing to the throne rights of God, and/or confronting man with God's incomprehensible mystery. There is a demand for an answer which is never satisfied per se but rather condemned to be inappropriate. And God is choosing to approach the problem this way rather than give us a theory about the relationship between the two.
If we pushed the logic of (1) and (2) with an explicit contradiction of (3), then the Bible would be guilty of asserting an outright contradiction. So the biblical response hovers between fully embracing contradiction and fully satisfying demands for explanation. I think it is relevant that the OT absorbs this hit principally in the wisdom literature, the writings part of the canon. It is clear that the revealed things belong to us, but the secret things belong only to God. It is not forbidden to us to learn what we may about them but we cannot demand that everything make sense before believing. Not everything and a profound lot of things will never make sense to us.
It strikes me then that what the Bible thinks about wisdom comes very close if not exactly getting right the experience of philosophical reflection for the most part. When the philosophy considers the big questions, they invariably run against aporia which never seems to become satisfyingly resolved but which grow deeper ever deeper in undestanding. One can never rise to the level of pure dogmatism about these questions and can never be sure that there is not a further consideration that will refute his best account. Philosophy is a mixture of joy and sorrow, of wisdom gained and lost.
Now the interesting thing is that the Bible frustrates any insistent demand to have all this worked out by God so that this is often used as an objection to its authority. But taking the philosophical experience as a whole, it is clear that not only does the Bible not resist that, but rather it accepts it to the extent it internalizes the whole process into its canon when that process concerns God. And all philosophically interesting questions eventually concern God. This also includes the question of how God could possibly exist (or not exist). This is fitting with the doctrine that God is not a darkness, in which there is no light at all, but rather God is an inapproachable light, to dazzling to be ever taken in all the way but in which we may discern some things at the edges.
Or to quote John Cleese in "Clockwise", "It's not the despair. I can deal with that. It's the hope!"
In Plato's dialogues, Socrates is often described in various metaphors that bring out his mission to show those who think they know that they really don't know as they think and thus realizing their ignorance, they finally have the chance to really seek to understand. In the Apology, Socrates refers to himself as the Gadfly of Athens, irritating the city as if it were a sluggish horse. In the Meno, Socrates is described as a Stingray (or Torpedo Fish) stinging his prey and making them numb, that is making them more unsure of what they dogmatically thought they were sure. In this ministry of awaking people from their dogmatic slumbers, we have the characteristic ideal of western education and enlightenment.
One section of society, that is thought to be in especial need of Socratic therapy are Bible believers who seem to be locked into a dogmatism into which nothing can pry. The limits of this perception can be clearly seen in the function of the OT canon itself.
(A) In the Torah, God is the gadfly of the worldly powers. The Torah is the story of how a God alien to the worldly power and settled establishments of Pharaoh breaks in with greater power in behalf of those voiceless ones who have been unjustly enslaved and who will become a nation that stands in the middle of the crossroads of the world to reveal a different way of life to those passing by.
(B) In the Prophets, God is the gadfly to Israel. The institution of the role of prophet is set up in the Torah itself, in its priestly functions. Out of this the prophets are raised up from the poor in Israel to oppose the Torah experts with the Torah and to recall the kings to justice, speaking in ways that evoke conscientiousness. This function can be seen in Jesus rebuttal to the Pharisees.
(C) In the Writings, God is the stingray to the wise raising difficulties and then leaving them to answer them but not allowing their answers to be established hastily in pride nor allowing wisdom to ultimately despair.
So those scriptures provide the very resources that overcome the ossification of opinion. Fundamentalism is biblical ineptitude. A child-like settled faith in the promises of scripture is compatible an adult struggle with reasoning about nature, so that the Biblical God is more like a Socrates who is killed unjustly rather than a Buddha that we are exhorted to kill.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
"Glad to be here!"
A Dialogue
Scene: The edge of the Lake of Fire after the passing of sentence on a lost soul, named Jake.
Characters: JAKE, a lost soul, and ERNIE an enforcement angel
ERNIE speaks first.
"Go on. Off to Hell with you."
"Wait! That looks a lot more unpleasant than I expected!"
"Of course. Hop in."
"Wait! Wait! Don't you think that this is terribly unfair?"
"Here we go again."
"I mean, don't you think that this goes against free will?"
"Go ahead."
"I mean, if God is sovergn over the human will, then there is no way I could have willed otherwise than I did in the course of my life."
"God is only holding you responsible for the deeds you did because you wanted to, so you are not being condemned for anything you didn't want to do."
"True but my wanting to sin was not something up to me. If I had wanted to be a saint and not a sinner, I couldn't have any control over that. Only God could."
"It was either God or blind luck. Since you could only do what you want, it's not like if God 'withheld His power' that you would thus be in control of your destiny."
"So you are a 'compatibilist' about free will then?"
"Of course. We are all good Reformed theologians up here. If free will means anything, it means being able to choose between actions. But actions are not mere states of affairs or events. They have an end or purpose which is essential to their character. Consequently, while choice is necessarily a condition of action, mere choice is not sufficient to account for directed or purpose determined feature of action since choice is simply the power to actualize or bring about one state of affairs rather than another. To account for the directed feature of action, will must also include inclination as well as choice. So free will must be about action, choice. and inclination. So one acts freely when they can choose the action they want. These are the necessary and sufficient conditions for free will. To choose to act apart from inclination is impossible, since what would result could not be an action. Further, a choice-making is a paradigm case of an unmoved mover, a something that cannot act unless first inacted. As such, it either is unexplained, a brute choice, or explained by a prior choice-making, or explained by a prior inclination. A brute choice would result in no action, as explained before, and this not be a meaningful expression of the human will. If you, per impossible, could have an infinite regress of choice-makings, it still would not be sufficient to account for the the thing to be explained, which is the human action, just like in the Aristotle's metaphysics. (You'll be passing Limbo on your way down so you can check with him personally.) So the explanation must terminate on something in motion and in the will which naturally is inclination. Just like in Aristotle's argument, the causal series terminates in a final cause. So a free act is an act that chooses according to the soul's inclination. In short, you are free if you can do what you want. That being the case, free will is comapatible with divine sovergnty since God can manage our freedom without interfereing with it by managing what we want. Now dive in!"
"Wait! Don't you see? Let's suppose that there is a sheriff of a small town full of good people who is very able and clever. The town is a very good town with good people so the sheriff doesn't have a lot to do. He wants to be remembered as a worthwhile sheriff but if something bad doesn't happen the town will never see his skills at putting away crime. He finally gets a great idea. He checks the local hospital to find out about all the new births of children that month. Then he begins a longterm program of cultivating evil in the hearts of the children so that most of them grow up to be criminals and he can demonstrate his concern for justice. He does this, not by coercing them by force, but rather by brilliantly managing their circumstances so that they cater to all their weakness and most base desires. He is very careful not to make them do anything they do not want to do but only managing according to what they want to do. He thus succeeds in his plan and the town realizies what a valuable sheriff he is. But do we really think that those kids are freely being criminals? Isn't this what God is doing according to you?"
"So you think that it's the apostle Paul who's the real monster in Romans 9 do you?"
"That's just a matter of an uncharitable interpretation. You see . . . ."
"Stop! We don't need to play that game. It's time for me to show you this. Here."
"What is it? It looks like an album for a certificate."
"Look inside it."
"It looks like a photo of a bunch of guys at a crawfish boil party all dressed in neon clothing."
"And who does that guy look like -- the one with the huge stogie between his teeth."
"Why that looks like the one who was on the throne in the room we just left!"
"That's right! And who does that guy off to the side look like?"
"Why it's . . . it's ME!"
"We all had a pretty good time then."
"I don't remember this. When was this taken?"
"At the Covenant of Redemption ratification party 'before' the creation of Heaven and Earth."
"I thought it was just the members of the Trinity. You mean all of us were pre-existent souls that were part of the consultation? I didn't see that anywhere in the Bible."
"Something like that. Only you were a lot less utilitarian then. You thought that justice was objective and intrinsic and worth pursuing for its own sake back then. The Bible only has stuff on a need to know basis and you really didn't need to know this. There was a 'time' when all souls existed in a state of perfect rectitude and with a perfectly clear frame of mind. The plan of God to create was presented before all of you while you were all competant to be ideal observers not blind to any relevant fact nor biased askew toward any judgement. It was shown that there was no coherent world plan possible that did not include lost sinners and that the one proposed was the best on the balance of considerations based on aspects of the character of God with respect to His justice, His love, His mercy, and so on. Everyone considered the various possible ways the world might go and the various roles they would play in each scheme, until one was selected that was the best solution. No one minded and everyone was excited about the best way of acheiving the highest aim. Once the decision was made to uninanimous acceptance, creation proceeded apace with each soul waiting to fuflfil its role during its turn on stage. Each soul was the advocate for its appearance on the earth. Of course, I'm not getting it exactly right but you get the idea."
"Funny, I don't remember this."
"Now that you have the album in your hands, something like recollection should be happening to you now."
"Yes . . . yes . . . I see what you mean. In one sense, I have existed from all eternity but not so in another sense."
"There you go."
"So you're saying that at a time when I was a competent observer of all the possible worlds that God might make, I concurred in choosing this one knowing that in it, I would be eternally lost among other things?"
"That was your original position. See for yourself. Turn the page there."
"It's a will and testiment! It says, 'Whereas I am in a condition of exceptionally sound and competent judgement and whereas I have been fully informed of the relevent facts and whereas I concur with the judgement that this world is among the best world for bringing about the glory of God to whom such glory properly belongs and to whom I conscientiously intend to glorify, I hereby freely volunteer to play the part assigned to me by the said chosen plan, even though such a plan includes my ultimate damnation. Kudos on all the good work and congratulations.' And that is my signature by my hand on the bottom!"
"Even so."
"So what you're really saying is that in the case of God rather than the sheriff, its possible to see the particular course of life as a kind of rational contracting under ideal conditons with God even if I can't actually control the circumstances of my life and their impact on my desires."
"That would be a bingo. Anything else?"
"Let me think. Nope. I got nothing."
"Fine. Now skip along. You're scheduled to magmafy the leathery hide of the demons of lust so that it melts off their bones and exposes their screaming little nerve endings."
"I thought it was supposed to be the other way around."
"Boy, you're 0 for 3, aren't you?"
Scene: The edge of the Lake of Fire after the passing of sentence on a lost soul, named Jake.
Characters: JAKE, a lost soul, and ERNIE an enforcement angel
ERNIE speaks first.
"Go on. Off to Hell with you."
"Wait! That looks a lot more unpleasant than I expected!"
"Of course. Hop in."
"Wait! Wait! Don't you think that this is terribly unfair?"
"Here we go again."
"I mean, don't you think that this goes against free will?"
"Go ahead."
"I mean, if God is sovergn over the human will, then there is no way I could have willed otherwise than I did in the course of my life."
"God is only holding you responsible for the deeds you did because you wanted to, so you are not being condemned for anything you didn't want to do."
"True but my wanting to sin was not something up to me. If I had wanted to be a saint and not a sinner, I couldn't have any control over that. Only God could."
"It was either God or blind luck. Since you could only do what you want, it's not like if God 'withheld His power' that you would thus be in control of your destiny."
"So you are a 'compatibilist' about free will then?"
"Of course. We are all good Reformed theologians up here. If free will means anything, it means being able to choose between actions. But actions are not mere states of affairs or events. They have an end or purpose which is essential to their character. Consequently, while choice is necessarily a condition of action, mere choice is not sufficient to account for directed or purpose determined feature of action since choice is simply the power to actualize or bring about one state of affairs rather than another. To account for the directed feature of action, will must also include inclination as well as choice. So free will must be about action, choice. and inclination. So one acts freely when they can choose the action they want. These are the necessary and sufficient conditions for free will. To choose to act apart from inclination is impossible, since what would result could not be an action. Further, a choice-making is a paradigm case of an unmoved mover, a something that cannot act unless first inacted. As such, it either is unexplained, a brute choice, or explained by a prior choice-making, or explained by a prior inclination. A brute choice would result in no action, as explained before, and this not be a meaningful expression of the human will. If you, per impossible, could have an infinite regress of choice-makings, it still would not be sufficient to account for the the thing to be explained, which is the human action, just like in the Aristotle's metaphysics. (You'll be passing Limbo on your way down so you can check with him personally.) So the explanation must terminate on something in motion and in the will which naturally is inclination. Just like in Aristotle's argument, the causal series terminates in a final cause. So a free act is an act that chooses according to the soul's inclination. In short, you are free if you can do what you want. That being the case, free will is comapatible with divine sovergnty since God can manage our freedom without interfereing with it by managing what we want. Now dive in!"
"Wait! Don't you see? Let's suppose that there is a sheriff of a small town full of good people who is very able and clever. The town is a very good town with good people so the sheriff doesn't have a lot to do. He wants to be remembered as a worthwhile sheriff but if something bad doesn't happen the town will never see his skills at putting away crime. He finally gets a great idea. He checks the local hospital to find out about all the new births of children that month. Then he begins a longterm program of cultivating evil in the hearts of the children so that most of them grow up to be criminals and he can demonstrate his concern for justice. He does this, not by coercing them by force, but rather by brilliantly managing their circumstances so that they cater to all their weakness and most base desires. He is very careful not to make them do anything they do not want to do but only managing according to what they want to do. He thus succeeds in his plan and the town realizies what a valuable sheriff he is. But do we really think that those kids are freely being criminals? Isn't this what God is doing according to you?"
"So you think that it's the apostle Paul who's the real monster in Romans 9 do you?"
"That's just a matter of an uncharitable interpretation. You see . . . ."
"Stop! We don't need to play that game. It's time for me to show you this. Here."
"What is it? It looks like an album for a certificate."
"Look inside it."
"It looks like a photo of a bunch of guys at a crawfish boil party all dressed in neon clothing."
"And who does that guy look like -- the one with the huge stogie between his teeth."
"Why that looks like the one who was on the throne in the room we just left!"
"That's right! And who does that guy off to the side look like?"
"Why it's . . . it's ME!"
"We all had a pretty good time then."
"I don't remember this. When was this taken?"
"At the Covenant of Redemption ratification party 'before' the creation of Heaven and Earth."
"I thought it was just the members of the Trinity. You mean all of us were pre-existent souls that were part of the consultation? I didn't see that anywhere in the Bible."
"Something like that. Only you were a lot less utilitarian then. You thought that justice was objective and intrinsic and worth pursuing for its own sake back then. The Bible only has stuff on a need to know basis and you really didn't need to know this. There was a 'time' when all souls existed in a state of perfect rectitude and with a perfectly clear frame of mind. The plan of God to create was presented before all of you while you were all competant to be ideal observers not blind to any relevant fact nor biased askew toward any judgement. It was shown that there was no coherent world plan possible that did not include lost sinners and that the one proposed was the best on the balance of considerations based on aspects of the character of God with respect to His justice, His love, His mercy, and so on. Everyone considered the various possible ways the world might go and the various roles they would play in each scheme, until one was selected that was the best solution. No one minded and everyone was excited about the best way of acheiving the highest aim. Once the decision was made to uninanimous acceptance, creation proceeded apace with each soul waiting to fuflfil its role during its turn on stage. Each soul was the advocate for its appearance on the earth. Of course, I'm not getting it exactly right but you get the idea."
"Funny, I don't remember this."
"Now that you have the album in your hands, something like recollection should be happening to you now."
"Yes . . . yes . . . I see what you mean. In one sense, I have existed from all eternity but not so in another sense."
"There you go."
"So you're saying that at a time when I was a competent observer of all the possible worlds that God might make, I concurred in choosing this one knowing that in it, I would be eternally lost among other things?"
"That was your original position. See for yourself. Turn the page there."
"It's a will and testiment! It says, 'Whereas I am in a condition of exceptionally sound and competent judgement and whereas I have been fully informed of the relevent facts and whereas I concur with the judgement that this world is among the best world for bringing about the glory of God to whom such glory properly belongs and to whom I conscientiously intend to glorify, I hereby freely volunteer to play the part assigned to me by the said chosen plan, even though such a plan includes my ultimate damnation. Kudos on all the good work and congratulations.' And that is my signature by my hand on the bottom!"
"Even so."
"So what you're really saying is that in the case of God rather than the sheriff, its possible to see the particular course of life as a kind of rational contracting under ideal conditons with God even if I can't actually control the circumstances of my life and their impact on my desires."
"That would be a bingo. Anything else?"
"Let me think. Nope. I got nothing."
"Fine. Now skip along. You're scheduled to magmafy the leathery hide of the demons of lust so that it melts off their bones and exposes their screaming little nerve endings."
"I thought it was supposed to be the other way around."
"Boy, you're 0 for 3, aren't you?"
Friday, October 20, 2006
Notes on Dilemmas of Faith
I was reading an article on line about the Bhagavad Gita which clearly saw the Gita as teaching nothing that could not be independently worked out by reason apart from it. That the doctrine is worked out for Arjuna by an avatar is only based on the fact that at the time, life was pretty messed up and that it is only in such times that God takes on human form. Revelation is merely hygenic not novel in the Gita. So basicly tha Gita is another classical statement of the perreniel philosophy. The article in commenting on this contrasted it with "orthodox Christianity" which teaches that beliefs are to be accepted because absurd and just because the Church teaches it.
This struck me as another example of the same false dilemma many atheists (and non-believers in the perrenial philosophy) often use to object to Christianity; either something is wholey established by reason or it is purely postivistic, having no rational bearing. As anyone who has looked at the judeo-christian tradition can attest, the judeo-christian tradition is neither. The contents of the judeo-christian tradition are not wholey derived from reason, but neither have the no rational bearing. The tradition has logical consistancy and some explanatory value with respect to the facts and is this open to criticism in the light or reason and learning. For some critics, granting the point makes little difference, however one would have thought the real bite of the dilemma. If the judeo-christian traditon is accessible to intellectual investigation and appreciation, in what sense is it necessarily arbitrary and anti-intellectual?
One might think that it must be because it unavoidably turns on accepting something on the basis of faith and testimony and that we could never reasonably accept anything as true on such a basis. Now it seems clear that accepting something on the basis of testimony and because one has decided to put one's faith in a witness could never produce belifs with the authority of pure or scientific reasoning. But the rationality of accepting faith is not theoretical rationality, is it? In fact, the decision to accept a belief based on the authority of a witness is a case like a moral dilemma. In a moral dilemma, one confronts at least a prima facie conflict of duites (or rights, or virtues, or values, or contracts etc.) such that it seems impossible to satisfy one obligation without violating another. In the case of moral dilemmas, the presumption is that the duties, where they apply, apply categorically. In a dilemma of faith, one is confronted with hypothetical duites (or . . . etc.) that do not actually conflict because which one applies depnds on whether the witness is speaking truly or not. However since we don't know whether to believe the witness of not we do not know if we would be actually upholding on duty or violating another one by believing in the witness and acting on that belief. But like a moral dilemma, a faith dilemma may only be apparent and there may be an option which is possible moral but not necessarily immoral if things turn out to be otherwise that attested to.
In the judeo-christian tradition, revelation is not merely hygenic in conserving forgotten truth but is intrusive and announces new states of affairs that would not have been known otherwise. Revelation is heraldic and kyregmatic and prophetic, not conservative. The question is whether to trust the prophets. They often come with insignia that testifies to their authority but these insignia presuppose priorly accepted prophecy and so on. Sometimes the prophets command us to do things that are prima facie morally wrong such as sacrifice our first born son, or wipe out an entire race, or stone homosexuals and adulterers, or tolerate slavery, or hold truths that are prima facie impossible to prove as true or coherent. Of course, if God the ideal observer truly requires these things then he sees the rational and moral grounds for doing so even if we don't but if the prophet is channeling a half-digested falafel, it would be rash to act on it.
Still as some hard cases of moral dilemmas prove to work out upon further clarification of concepts, further information, and/or creative alternatives, it seems possible that a faith dilemma could also be worked through and that a kind of certainty can be reached about the practical satisfactoriness of the decision either to believe and trust or not in alleged revelation. In the case of the judeo-christian tradition, or any particular expression of it, the fact that the claims it makes are open to further intellectual criticism is one of the factors that makes possible the rational assessment of a decision of trust. Further, just as there may be no straight forward calculus for settling moral dilemmas and thus a need for character and discernment to see through them, a similar demand on judgement is called for in the case of faith dilemmas. This also suggests a need for community social interaction in such decision making.
Reason can at least rebut scepticism about any of the foundations of the possibility of successful decision making in the case of faith dilemmas, even if it cannot always or ever refute such scepticism, whether that be scepticism about a theistic metaphysic that makes revelation possible, or scepticism about the possibility of a value judgement that is not fully explicable. Reason can play a role as we have noted in assessing the various candidates for being such a revelation. The decision to believe is something that speaks to the end of human flourishing or worth, scepticism about which may be rebuted by reason. And so it seems that rational decisions to trust are possible and that we even have the rational right to make them if they are and that this right is part of the body of rights that ought to be preserved in modern society by the state. So given the fresh spate of works by certain distinguished professors about belief in God as a delusion, the end of faith, and so on, we couldn't really imagine the force of such arguments as delegitimizing the full citizenship of religious believers qua being such.
I think that this is where the judeo-christian argument for a secular public sphere meets the dictum for statecraft as soulcraft. The public square refuses on the one hand to promote any one religion over another but on the other hand it promotes and elevates the right to religious belief in a criticizable faith as a necessary feature of a modern rational democracy. Because its in the painful reflection that goes on in making such decisions that contributes to the development of virtue in citizens. The spread of this right concommittedly with the spread of democratic principles and institutions points to the prosperity of the impact of the judeo-christian tradition throughout the world, since only the judeo-christian tradition among all the religions (including Islam) makes the claim for the possibility of a more than hygenic but still non-superstitious revelation and thus formulates the right to religious belief in this specific sense. That is about as theocratic as we need to get.
This struck me as another example of the same false dilemma many atheists (and non-believers in the perrenial philosophy) often use to object to Christianity; either something is wholey established by reason or it is purely postivistic, having no rational bearing. As anyone who has looked at the judeo-christian tradition can attest, the judeo-christian tradition is neither. The contents of the judeo-christian tradition are not wholey derived from reason, but neither have the no rational bearing. The tradition has logical consistancy and some explanatory value with respect to the facts and is this open to criticism in the light or reason and learning. For some critics, granting the point makes little difference, however one would have thought the real bite of the dilemma. If the judeo-christian traditon is accessible to intellectual investigation and appreciation, in what sense is it necessarily arbitrary and anti-intellectual?
One might think that it must be because it unavoidably turns on accepting something on the basis of faith and testimony and that we could never reasonably accept anything as true on such a basis. Now it seems clear that accepting something on the basis of testimony and because one has decided to put one's faith in a witness could never produce belifs with the authority of pure or scientific reasoning. But the rationality of accepting faith is not theoretical rationality, is it? In fact, the decision to accept a belief based on the authority of a witness is a case like a moral dilemma. In a moral dilemma, one confronts at least a prima facie conflict of duites (or rights, or virtues, or values, or contracts etc.) such that it seems impossible to satisfy one obligation without violating another. In the case of moral dilemmas, the presumption is that the duties, where they apply, apply categorically. In a dilemma of faith, one is confronted with hypothetical duites (or . . . etc.) that do not actually conflict because which one applies depnds on whether the witness is speaking truly or not. However since we don't know whether to believe the witness of not we do not know if we would be actually upholding on duty or violating another one by believing in the witness and acting on that belief. But like a moral dilemma, a faith dilemma may only be apparent and there may be an option which is possible moral but not necessarily immoral if things turn out to be otherwise that attested to.
In the judeo-christian tradition, revelation is not merely hygenic in conserving forgotten truth but is intrusive and announces new states of affairs that would not have been known otherwise. Revelation is heraldic and kyregmatic and prophetic, not conservative. The question is whether to trust the prophets. They often come with insignia that testifies to their authority but these insignia presuppose priorly accepted prophecy and so on. Sometimes the prophets command us to do things that are prima facie morally wrong such as sacrifice our first born son, or wipe out an entire race, or stone homosexuals and adulterers, or tolerate slavery, or hold truths that are prima facie impossible to prove as true or coherent. Of course, if God the ideal observer truly requires these things then he sees the rational and moral grounds for doing so even if we don't but if the prophet is channeling a half-digested falafel, it would be rash to act on it.
Still as some hard cases of moral dilemmas prove to work out upon further clarification of concepts, further information, and/or creative alternatives, it seems possible that a faith dilemma could also be worked through and that a kind of certainty can be reached about the practical satisfactoriness of the decision either to believe and trust or not in alleged revelation. In the case of the judeo-christian tradition, or any particular expression of it, the fact that the claims it makes are open to further intellectual criticism is one of the factors that makes possible the rational assessment of a decision of trust. Further, just as there may be no straight forward calculus for settling moral dilemmas and thus a need for character and discernment to see through them, a similar demand on judgement is called for in the case of faith dilemmas. This also suggests a need for community social interaction in such decision making.
Reason can at least rebut scepticism about any of the foundations of the possibility of successful decision making in the case of faith dilemmas, even if it cannot always or ever refute such scepticism, whether that be scepticism about a theistic metaphysic that makes revelation possible, or scepticism about the possibility of a value judgement that is not fully explicable. Reason can play a role as we have noted in assessing the various candidates for being such a revelation. The decision to believe is something that speaks to the end of human flourishing or worth, scepticism about which may be rebuted by reason. And so it seems that rational decisions to trust are possible and that we even have the rational right to make them if they are and that this right is part of the body of rights that ought to be preserved in modern society by the state. So given the fresh spate of works by certain distinguished professors about belief in God as a delusion, the end of faith, and so on, we couldn't really imagine the force of such arguments as delegitimizing the full citizenship of religious believers qua being such.
I think that this is where the judeo-christian argument for a secular public sphere meets the dictum for statecraft as soulcraft. The public square refuses on the one hand to promote any one religion over another but on the other hand it promotes and elevates the right to religious belief in a criticizable faith as a necessary feature of a modern rational democracy. Because its in the painful reflection that goes on in making such decisions that contributes to the development of virtue in citizens. The spread of this right concommittedly with the spread of democratic principles and institutions points to the prosperity of the impact of the judeo-christian tradition throughout the world, since only the judeo-christian tradition among all the religions (including Islam) makes the claim for the possibility of a more than hygenic but still non-superstitious revelation and thus formulates the right to religious belief in this specific sense. That is about as theocratic as we need to get.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Fairyland Diner RPG Character Helps
If anyone needs help in deciding how to design their character for either the Fairyland Diner Game (see title link) or any other of my AOB based games, I have the following supplemental helps. Sometimes you need a kickstart to think of what to do. The following basically generates some data points for your character which can be used to solve a narrative problem given the data. None of the information here alters the actual game mechanics but you can use it to decide how to interact in the game. The important value is to maintain a realistic consistency even though you're in Fairyland.
Characters have a temperament profile, native endowments, and background experience. In each of the following sets of four categories, distribute 10 points between the four so that none has less than 0 or more than 5. The higher the number, the greater the amount of that particular temperment, endowment, or experience in your background. The tables below suggest some reasonable expectations for someone with a high score (4 or 5) in each category.
5 - Amazingly High
4 - Substantially high
3 - Slightly High
2 - Average
1 - Low
0 - Very Low
You can select the exact amount for each category if there are certain conditions that you already have in mind or determine the results randomly. One way to do it randomly is to roll 10 dice, re-rolling those that come up as '5' or '6' and then assign 1 point for each dice that comes up the number that is the same as the number of each category. You can re-roll those that exceed 5 in one category also.
TEMPERAMENT: Distribute 10 points among the following.
(___) 1. Choleric - a high may be a natural organizer
(___) 2. Sanguine - a high may be a natural salesperson
(___) 3. Melancholic - a high may be a natural artist
(___) 4. Phlegmatic - a high may be a natural diplomat
ENDOWMENTS: Distribute 10 points among the following.
(___) 1. Athletic - a high may have elite physical skills
(___) 2. Intelligent - a high may have a natural aptitude for Magic
(___) 3. Charismatic - a high may be a natural leader
(___) 4. Family Nobility - a high may be well connected
EXPERIENCE: Distribute 10 points among the following.
(___) 1. Education - a high may have several magic spells or devices
(___) 2. Military - a high may have combat skills and equipment
(___) 3. Vocational - a high may have special skills and tools
(___) 4. Business - a high may have mangement or financial skills
Once you have generated your Character data, try to answer the following question in a way consistent with the information. Try to reconcile all the data with the answer as much as possible.
Question: Given all the background data on your character, how did he or she come to be working in a diner anyway?
There you have your background story and the essential identity of your character.
Characters have a temperament profile, native endowments, and background experience. In each of the following sets of four categories, distribute 10 points between the four so that none has less than 0 or more than 5. The higher the number, the greater the amount of that particular temperment, endowment, or experience in your background. The tables below suggest some reasonable expectations for someone with a high score (4 or 5) in each category.
5 - Amazingly High
4 - Substantially high
3 - Slightly High
2 - Average
1 - Low
0 - Very Low
You can select the exact amount for each category if there are certain conditions that you already have in mind or determine the results randomly. One way to do it randomly is to roll 10 dice, re-rolling those that come up as '5' or '6' and then assign 1 point for each dice that comes up the number that is the same as the number of each category. You can re-roll those that exceed 5 in one category also.
TEMPERAMENT: Distribute 10 points among the following.
(___) 1. Choleric - a high may be a natural organizer
(___) 2. Sanguine - a high may be a natural salesperson
(___) 3. Melancholic - a high may be a natural artist
(___) 4. Phlegmatic - a high may be a natural diplomat
ENDOWMENTS: Distribute 10 points among the following.
(___) 1. Athletic - a high may have elite physical skills
(___) 2. Intelligent - a high may have a natural aptitude for Magic
(___) 3. Charismatic - a high may be a natural leader
(___) 4. Family Nobility - a high may be well connected
EXPERIENCE: Distribute 10 points among the following.
(___) 1. Education - a high may have several magic spells or devices
(___) 2. Military - a high may have combat skills and equipment
(___) 3. Vocational - a high may have special skills and tools
(___) 4. Business - a high may have mangement or financial skills
Once you have generated your Character data, try to answer the following question in a way consistent with the information. Try to reconcile all the data with the answer as much as possible.
Question: Given all the background data on your character, how did he or she come to be working in a diner anyway?
There you have your background story and the essential identity of your character.
Peity as a Point of Contact
Here's a famous quote from CS Lewis (more or less) from the Screwtape Letters:
"There are two mistakes one can make regarding the Devil; one is to deny that He exists and the other is to have an unhealthy fascination with him."
It has struck me lately that this is a common feature in various aspects of religion according to the Scriptures. It is clear that the Bible does not deny the realm of the demonic but equally clear that it does not indulge in any speculation about it. A similar example is the biblical attitude toward prophecy and eschatology (as I understand it). The Bible does not deny the reality of historical prophecy but it also does not indulge in runaway apocalyticism. (For example it does not really support the kind of dispensational and millenial accounts like Dade, Scofield, or the Millerites.) Yet another example is miracles. The Bible refuses to indulge the demand for no miracles such as found among the Sadducees and the Greeks but also refuses to indulge all demands for miracles such those of the Pharisees and the "Jews". Something similar could be said about the charismatic gifts as well.
I also notice that this pattern is characteristic of the classical and Aristotelian account of virtue as the mean relative to a context and between two extremes. For example, courage is a virtue between the vices of cowardice and rashness. One extreme involves a deficiency of courage and the other an excess of it. In the present case, call the virtue in question "peity", that is the fear of the Lord. It looks like an apt word for the defect of peity is "impeity" or obstinate irreligiosity, and an apt word for the excess of peity is "fanaticism". To be clear we have to distinguish. How could it be possible that one could fear the Lord too much? The answer lies in the distinction between posessing the virtue of peity as a virtue as opposed to having the vice of an excess of peity. To say that you cannot fear the Lord enough is to say that you cannot possess the virtue of peity too much. This is the difference between fearing the Lord and being so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good.
Further I note that this understanding of peity is not unique to the Biblical tradition but is similarly found in the religious traditions outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The appeal to Greek thought here already illustrates this but it is also commonly found among Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, and Zorasterians. (Islam is a special case since it obviously depends on the J-C tradition.) The sources of those religions exhibit a similar tendency to support the middle way between extremes in religious observance. They also provide their own examples of cases of healthy religion (such as the formulations of theistic scholasticism in Hinduism and the social ethical teachings of Confucius) versus cases of degenerating cultified expressions of the religion on the one hand (soccery among Taoists and the Kali cult of the thuggi in Hinduism) and jaded secular movements on the other hand (the elite intellectualist philosophes found in all religious traditions and the Theravada school in Buddhism).
It thus seems that the virtue of peity is of a piece with the nature of man as homo religious and that the phenomena points to a natural law of appropriate belief formation in all humanity which is part of the divine law written on the human heart, the universal religious a priori. This finds a ready explanation in the Christian perspective as the phenomenalogically palpable effect of general revelation and common grace restraining human sinfulness. Given the inescapable vagueness of the tension between common grace and depravity in any particular person, this may give us a sufficiently precise way of formulating the point of contact between the gospel and the heart of non-believers, viz., that we have a point of contact with the gospel to the extent of the manifestation of peity in the hearts or the culture of non-believers.
This allows for a differentiation between various non-believers that allows us to give a differentiated answer to the question of what the Christian attitude should be to non-Christians and their faiths. To the extent that the religion manifested among non-Christians is the vice of excessive peity, we hold that it is the work of Satan and that the gods thus identified and worshipped are demons in disguise. To the extent that a religion manifests a defect of peity, it is a case of the fool who says in his heart that there is no God and is satanic in virtue of being subject to Satan's deceptions. But in so far as it is an expression of the virtue of peity, then we can see it as a work of the Holy Spirit in his ministry of providing for all a general testimony of the truth of God, as a preparitia evangelica, and that it may even teach something about the truth of God to those who already trust in Christ.
An important aspect of this account is that we do not just conveniently define what is and what is not true peity by the degree of identity with the Christian message. The account assumes that the religion is already internally differentiated by its own lights into these three catagories and that we can recognize what is good in a religion as convivial with true peity in our religion independently. This also means that those aspects that Christianity would find to be satanic would also encounter a prior criticism from their own religion and thus that the starting point for the prior plausibility of Christian faith is in each religion's own self-criticism.
One important feature of this relation between religion at its best and Christain faith is that it is potentially recognizable that aspects of that religion and Christianity have some features similar to the relation of Biblical Judaism and Christianity, such as the relationship of substitution where something better has come along, as in the case of the replacement of passover for communion. A possible example of this is ancestor worship. Many eastern faiths for example Japan hold strongly to the veneration of ancestors. In this they express the belief in an afterlife in survival after death and that the state of the dead is one of personal consciousness and interaction. The practice fosters an attitude of continued respect and devotion for the dead and the past and is in many ways similar to the veneration of saints in Catholicism. But this is put aside for the superior promise of immediate recourse to God in evangelical faith, but this is a case of the good being eclipsed by the better. The substitution is reasonable and appreciable and is intelligble to the one considering making the substitution. In the absence of a theology of unque mediatorship which could only come by way of the recognition and acceptance of a special revelation, ancestor worship is a respectable good and can be an expression of true peity.
Finally, the virtue of peity has its mirror virtue. An example of a mirror virtue is the relation between magniminity and humility. Aristotle famously considered humility to be a vice and spoke of the virtue of being a great man. This at first seems to put Christianity which makes humility a supreme virtue out in the cold. But when we do an Aristotelian analysis of humility as a virtue and compare it with a similar analysis of magniminity we discover something interesting. If magniminity is a virtue it has a vice of excess and a vice of defect. The vice of defect of magniminity is something like self-depreciation while its vice of excess would certainly be pride, egotism, or hubris. If humility is a virtue, it also has a vice of excess and a vice of defect. Not enough would certainly be pride but what would too much be? Certainly it would be self-depreciation. In other words, humility as a virtue mirrors magniminity as a virtue, to have a defect in one is to have an excess in the other, just as in a mirror the reflection of my right hand is my reflection's left hand. So there is compatibility between them but also a tension between them. This illustrates the yin-yang character that exists in the unity of virtues.
In the case of peity then I think the mirror virtue is human excellence or the virtue of being pro-human. And in general I think that religious virtues (Love, Faith, Hope) mirror the humanistic virtues (Courage, Wisdom, Temperance). This means that the point of contact may be expressed in apparently humanistic ways. For example, we may express Neitzcheanism as too humanistic amd fundamentalism as not humanistic enough, while fundamentalism might also be characterized as too pious and Neitzcheanism as not pious enough. There is a Christian humanism as well as a Christian theism. In fact the argument need go no further than the great success Christian theology has had already in accommodating to Greek humanism. And so genuine Christian peity is "naturally" compatible with genuinely humanistic science.
"There are two mistakes one can make regarding the Devil; one is to deny that He exists and the other is to have an unhealthy fascination with him."
It has struck me lately that this is a common feature in various aspects of religion according to the Scriptures. It is clear that the Bible does not deny the realm of the demonic but equally clear that it does not indulge in any speculation about it. A similar example is the biblical attitude toward prophecy and eschatology (as I understand it). The Bible does not deny the reality of historical prophecy but it also does not indulge in runaway apocalyticism. (For example it does not really support the kind of dispensational and millenial accounts like Dade, Scofield, or the Millerites.) Yet another example is miracles. The Bible refuses to indulge the demand for no miracles such as found among the Sadducees and the Greeks but also refuses to indulge all demands for miracles such those of the Pharisees and the "Jews". Something similar could be said about the charismatic gifts as well.
I also notice that this pattern is characteristic of the classical and Aristotelian account of virtue as the mean relative to a context and between two extremes. For example, courage is a virtue between the vices of cowardice and rashness. One extreme involves a deficiency of courage and the other an excess of it. In the present case, call the virtue in question "peity", that is the fear of the Lord. It looks like an apt word for the defect of peity is "impeity" or obstinate irreligiosity, and an apt word for the excess of peity is "fanaticism". To be clear we have to distinguish. How could it be possible that one could fear the Lord too much? The answer lies in the distinction between posessing the virtue of peity as a virtue as opposed to having the vice of an excess of peity. To say that you cannot fear the Lord enough is to say that you cannot possess the virtue of peity too much. This is the difference between fearing the Lord and being so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good.
Further I note that this understanding of peity is not unique to the Biblical tradition but is similarly found in the religious traditions outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The appeal to Greek thought here already illustrates this but it is also commonly found among Hindus, Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, and Zorasterians. (Islam is a special case since it obviously depends on the J-C tradition.) The sources of those religions exhibit a similar tendency to support the middle way between extremes in religious observance. They also provide their own examples of cases of healthy religion (such as the formulations of theistic scholasticism in Hinduism and the social ethical teachings of Confucius) versus cases of degenerating cultified expressions of the religion on the one hand (soccery among Taoists and the Kali cult of the thuggi in Hinduism) and jaded secular movements on the other hand (the elite intellectualist philosophes found in all religious traditions and the Theravada school in Buddhism).
It thus seems that the virtue of peity is of a piece with the nature of man as homo religious and that the phenomena points to a natural law of appropriate belief formation in all humanity which is part of the divine law written on the human heart, the universal religious a priori. This finds a ready explanation in the Christian perspective as the phenomenalogically palpable effect of general revelation and common grace restraining human sinfulness. Given the inescapable vagueness of the tension between common grace and depravity in any particular person, this may give us a sufficiently precise way of formulating the point of contact between the gospel and the heart of non-believers, viz., that we have a point of contact with the gospel to the extent of the manifestation of peity in the hearts or the culture of non-believers.
This allows for a differentiation between various non-believers that allows us to give a differentiated answer to the question of what the Christian attitude should be to non-Christians and their faiths. To the extent that the religion manifested among non-Christians is the vice of excessive peity, we hold that it is the work of Satan and that the gods thus identified and worshipped are demons in disguise. To the extent that a religion manifests a defect of peity, it is a case of the fool who says in his heart that there is no God and is satanic in virtue of being subject to Satan's deceptions. But in so far as it is an expression of the virtue of peity, then we can see it as a work of the Holy Spirit in his ministry of providing for all a general testimony of the truth of God, as a preparitia evangelica, and that it may even teach something about the truth of God to those who already trust in Christ.
An important aspect of this account is that we do not just conveniently define what is and what is not true peity by the degree of identity with the Christian message. The account assumes that the religion is already internally differentiated by its own lights into these three catagories and that we can recognize what is good in a religion as convivial with true peity in our religion independently. This also means that those aspects that Christianity would find to be satanic would also encounter a prior criticism from their own religion and thus that the starting point for the prior plausibility of Christian faith is in each religion's own self-criticism.
One important feature of this relation between religion at its best and Christain faith is that it is potentially recognizable that aspects of that religion and Christianity have some features similar to the relation of Biblical Judaism and Christianity, such as the relationship of substitution where something better has come along, as in the case of the replacement of passover for communion. A possible example of this is ancestor worship. Many eastern faiths for example Japan hold strongly to the veneration of ancestors. In this they express the belief in an afterlife in survival after death and that the state of the dead is one of personal consciousness and interaction. The practice fosters an attitude of continued respect and devotion for the dead and the past and is in many ways similar to the veneration of saints in Catholicism. But this is put aside for the superior promise of immediate recourse to God in evangelical faith, but this is a case of the good being eclipsed by the better. The substitution is reasonable and appreciable and is intelligble to the one considering making the substitution. In the absence of a theology of unque mediatorship which could only come by way of the recognition and acceptance of a special revelation, ancestor worship is a respectable good and can be an expression of true peity.
Finally, the virtue of peity has its mirror virtue. An example of a mirror virtue is the relation between magniminity and humility. Aristotle famously considered humility to be a vice and spoke of the virtue of being a great man. This at first seems to put Christianity which makes humility a supreme virtue out in the cold. But when we do an Aristotelian analysis of humility as a virtue and compare it with a similar analysis of magniminity we discover something interesting. If magniminity is a virtue it has a vice of excess and a vice of defect. The vice of defect of magniminity is something like self-depreciation while its vice of excess would certainly be pride, egotism, or hubris. If humility is a virtue, it also has a vice of excess and a vice of defect. Not enough would certainly be pride but what would too much be? Certainly it would be self-depreciation. In other words, humility as a virtue mirrors magniminity as a virtue, to have a defect in one is to have an excess in the other, just as in a mirror the reflection of my right hand is my reflection's left hand. So there is compatibility between them but also a tension between them. This illustrates the yin-yang character that exists in the unity of virtues.
In the case of peity then I think the mirror virtue is human excellence or the virtue of being pro-human. And in general I think that religious virtues (Love, Faith, Hope) mirror the humanistic virtues (Courage, Wisdom, Temperance). This means that the point of contact may be expressed in apparently humanistic ways. For example, we may express Neitzcheanism as too humanistic amd fundamentalism as not humanistic enough, while fundamentalism might also be characterized as too pious and Neitzcheanism as not pious enough. There is a Christian humanism as well as a Christian theism. In fact the argument need go no further than the great success Christian theology has had already in accommodating to Greek humanism. And so genuine Christian peity is "naturally" compatible with genuinely humanistic science.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Stephen C. Meyer Article added.
I discovered that the nefarious Dr. Meyer journal article, the one that caused such a dust up because the author argues for a specific thesis of Intelligent Design in it and another more nuetral scientist, Dr. Richard von Sternberg, published it in a Smithsonian hosted journal, which lead to reprisals against Dr. Sternberg. He has been vindicated for his role in this by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent federal agency.
You can now read the paper for yourself at the link. For a discussion on recent developments on the case, see here.
You can now read the paper for yourself at the link. For a discussion on recent developments on the case, see here.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Christian Study Center List
I nostalgically added a list of Christian Study centers, found on several campuses all over the country including some Ivy League schools. They represent the evangelical ideal of the wedding of thought and faith and the intergration of Christianity with academic fields into an intergrated worldview.
I say nostalgic because it represents a shattered dream of mine to be part of such a thing but which now seems remote. I have not been able to really survive in academia. It is interesting to me that my adjunct work has brought me closer to other professors who show a like minded compatibility with me who are not christians and yet with whom I can have excellent conversations to all of our satisfaction. If there is anything left of scholarly work its what I do with these colleagues.
It also seems to me that I am in a stronger position being an MA holder with some doctoral work at a school like Syracuse University, than a Ph.D. holder with that degree from many a state university, even though I won't get the "big" money adjunctng with just an MA.
It reminds me of the Ph.D. holder I once met working in a bookshop whose career was essentially housepainting because he never got tenure. I have to admit that part of the issue was wanting to live. During so much of the time I was in doctoral work, I was also suicidal. It didn't seem worthwhile to risk my life for an advanced degree. At least that still haunts me.
I say nostalgic because it represents a shattered dream of mine to be part of such a thing but which now seems remote. I have not been able to really survive in academia. It is interesting to me that my adjunct work has brought me closer to other professors who show a like minded compatibility with me who are not christians and yet with whom I can have excellent conversations to all of our satisfaction. If there is anything left of scholarly work its what I do with these colleagues.
It also seems to me that I am in a stronger position being an MA holder with some doctoral work at a school like Syracuse University, than a Ph.D. holder with that degree from many a state university, even though I won't get the "big" money adjunctng with just an MA.
It reminds me of the Ph.D. holder I once met working in a bookshop whose career was essentially housepainting because he never got tenure. I have to admit that part of the issue was wanting to live. During so much of the time I was in doctoral work, I was also suicidal. It didn't seem worthwhile to risk my life for an advanced degree. At least that still haunts me.
Thank you "Tall Skinny Kiwi"
. . . who commented on my emergent church post and who has an interesting blog (now added to the role). Check it out.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
A Comercial Quality Armitage RPG
With extreme humility and great mortification, I discovered that there is already available on line, an adaptation of the BESM game for the Armitage III setting. From the linked website:
"In 2001, Dan Grendell was contracted by Guardians of Orders to write a sourcebook about the Armitage III animes. Like many publishing projects, the book ended up not being printed. However, all is not lost, as fans of Armitage and the BESM game will be able to enjoy much of what would have been in the book here on the web."
The work at this site is substantially complete for the setting. There are character sheets for the main characters in both the OVA series and the Dual-Matrix movie. Also, the distinctive features and powers of the world are represented in the game additions. It would have been a professional package (it still is very professional) but is available on line.
The website also contains more detailed background to the original setting that you can use for the AOBG engine adapted setting that I posted here.
"In 2001, Dan Grendell was contracted by Guardians of Orders to write a sourcebook about the Armitage III animes. Like many publishing projects, the book ended up not being printed. However, all is not lost, as fans of Armitage and the BESM game will be able to enjoy much of what would have been in the book here on the web."
The work at this site is substantially complete for the setting. There are character sheets for the main characters in both the OVA series and the Dual-Matrix movie. Also, the distinctive features and powers of the world are represented in the game additions. It would have been a professional package (it still is very professional) but is available on line.
The website also contains more detailed background to the original setting that you can use for the AOBG engine adapted setting that I posted here.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Fairyland Diner, an RPG
"Fairyland Diner", a Shoujo Manga RPG
Sort of a cross between "Phantastes" and "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", this RPG is a game setting for the "All Outta Bubblegum" engine. Thanks and apologies to Michael Sullivan and Jeffrey Grant again. Apologies also to Gary Gygax for borrowing an idea from his Aerth campaign setting in his "Dangerous Journeys" game (I'm not worthy!).
Setting:
Parallel to the mundane world of ordinary experience is the land of the Fae. Imagine a world that looks like the inverse of the Earth's surface, with land there being where the oceans are here and vica versa. In the area of the continent that corresponds to the Atlantic Ocean, in the place counterpart to where ancient Atlantis was, is the great Seelie court where all the noble Faerie races meet with the King and Queen of the Fae. The Glorious City is almost too magnificient for human eyes, but it does have its suburban parts that are more remote from the Castle. The City is efficiently defended and policed to keep the awful Fae of the unseelie races out.
In one of these suburbs is "Twinkle's Cafe", a comfortable, happy greasy spoon joint that mainly serves the neighborhood locals as well as distinguished fae that have business at the Castle and need a quick lunch. Most of the fare includes things like "Moonbeam Loaf" and "Morning Dew Tea", but you can also find your biscuits and gravy and philly cheese steak sandwich as well. It's a place where everybody knows you name and the name of your clan.
Things are normally quiet and pleasant at Twinkle's but the word has come down that there is a need for new stewards and servants to serve and dwell in courts of the King's officers. The need is so great that they are even looking in the humblest places of the City. The royal messenger has declared that one of the wait staff, floor managers, or cooks at Twinkle's will be included in this great promotion, but only one. The diner is allowed its own means of determining who the lucky individual will be. The winner will not only receive the job but will also be made fit for court service be recovering all of its lost Glamour.
Characters:
All characters are employees of the diner as well as being a member of one of the fae races welcome in the great city. Essentially, all fae are the same. There differing characteristics are a result of different amounts of Glamour in each individual. Among the Seelie races at the diner are:
Faeries Proper: True faeries are of high demeanor and noble character. They are prismatic in appearance and seem to be outlined with a rainbow. A typical attitude of a high faerie would be to pick out another player character and work hard to assure that he or she is the one picked to go to the Castle. Faeries have 7-8 points of Glamour.
Pixies: Pixies are basicly good natured and social but they are addicted to fun and mischief (as well as to glitter). They will use almost anything as an excuse to tease and trick. Pixies seem childlike in appearance and have a pastel glow like the color of so many flowers. People are attracted to pixies but may come to regret it. Pixies have 5-6 points of Glamour.
Brownies: Brownies live closer to the earth than other fae and often appear in earth tones. They are easily irritated and cranky and will do anything to assure their privacy or space. Nothing matters more to a Brownie than his or her personal comfort and peace. Brownies have 3-4 points of Glamour.
Leprechauns: Leprechauns are kelly green and very homely looking. They are also extremely greedy and selfish and will do anything to get ahead. They can never be content with who or what they are. A typical Leprechaun attitude to the contest would be "Now is my big chance to blow this dump and these losers. Let's see what I can do to make sure that happens". Leprechuans have 1-2 points of Glamor.
Redcaps: Redcaps are colored blood red and are petrifying ugly. They are extremely vicious and will attack anyone just for the sake of causing misery. For this reason, Redcaps are considered an Unseelie race and are not tolerated within the City. Redcaps have 0 points of Glamour or less.
If a fae gets frustrated in anything significant to him or her, he or she loses Glamour. If a fae loses more Glamour than is allowed for his or her race, he or she transmogrifies into a fae of the race below it without losing his or her identity. If a fae receives more Glamour than is designated for his or her race, he or she transmogrifies into the next upper race. In each case the newly formed fae has all the features and motives of a member of that race.
There are also other enchanted creatures that might find their way into the diner -- Gryphons, Unicorns, Dwarves, Dyads, Satyrs, etc. They will also have some amount of Glamour that will also be reflected in their temperament or appearance (as determined by the Faereferee).
The Social Contract:
All players play faeries in the game except for one, who is the Faereferee. The Faereferee is responsible for creating and managing the the diner and its customers as well as making sure that the rules are applied fairly and that everyone is having fun. The Faereferee has read all the rules and designed all the encounters accordingly. He or she describes the setting and what happens during the story by answering players questions.
The rest of the players each manage the actions of one individual character that they design in the game setting. When they interact with the game environment the Faereferee acts as their eyes and ears. When they interact with other player characters, they talk and coordinate their actions in character.
There are also other characters in the game other than the player's characters. These are run by the Faereferee just as player character would. Non-player characters also have Glamour and Fairy Dust as designed for them by the Faereferee.
Designing a Player Character:
Each player character (the character that the player governs in the game) is a member of a faerie race according to his or her Glamour points. To design a character, a player starts with 5 Glamour points, 5 Faerie Dust points (see below), and 3 Building points. The player must spend all of his or her building points when designing the character. One building point may be spent to add 1 point to the character's total Glamour points or 2 points to the character's total Faerie Dust points. Once the points are spent and added, the results are complete. Then the player identifies his faerie's starting race according to the final amount of Glamour assigned.
After this, the player decides a name for his or her character (something with a flower, berry, or animal reference, but not necessarily confined to that), decides what job they have at the diner, (cook, wait staff, floor manager, cashier -- a person may wind up doing several jobs like in any earthly diner), and also some bit of back story about how the character wound up working in the diner or his our her upbringing to flesh the character out. Really good back stories should be rewarded with additional Fairy Dust points and/or other attributes, skills, equipment, or liabilities that are designed to effect the basic game mechanics and which also make sense according to the character's back story. It is the Faereferee's discretion but he or she should be open to the Player's input
Resolving Character Actions:
Everything that a faerie character does has a hint of magic to it, an air of something chimey and sparkly. When it comes to important actions, the player should describe his or her characters actions as something like an ordinary action with a magical twist (like pouring coffee from a levitating coffee pot or serving eggs that dance on the plate).
Actions that have some consequential outcomes for the character are resolved by rolling two regular dice and regarding sixes as zeros. (E.g. Rolling a "two" and a "three" equals five but rolling "four" and "six" just equals four. Rolling "double boxcars" is zero.) All important actions fall under two classifications; Mellowing Actions and Harshing Actions.
Basic Idea: Actions that are important enough to the game either narratively or strategicly are either the sort of thing a Californian might say "Dude! You're harshing my mellow!" about or not. Actions that meet with resistance by anyone directly involved even if the most passive-aggressive way are considered Harshing Actions for the purposes of the game. All other actions are considered Mellowing Actions as long as anyone involved is at least open to them or if no one else is directly involved.
A Mellowing Action is any act that does anybody any good, such as trying to persuade someone to do the right thing, serving a meal like home, healing an injury, etc. Roll two dice and if the result is equal to or less that the number of Glamour Points the character has, the mellowing action is successful. If the roll is greater than the number of Glamour points a character has, the result is unsuccessful and the player's character loses one point of Glamour.
A Harshing Action is any action that bothers or inhibits another character such as teasing, making mischief, insulting, tripping, or tricking, etc. Roll the two dice and if the result is equal to or less than the player character's number of Glamour Points, the attempt fails (the victem avoids the trick or is not phased by the insult). If the result is greater than the player character's Glamour points, the action is successful and the other player loses a point of Glamour.
Fairy Dust: Fairy dust is a residual and fungible form of Glamour. If a player wants to assure the odds of a successful outcome to an action, he or she can spend points of Fairy Dust before a roll. Each point of Fairy Dust spent is one point subtracted from the roll in the case of Mellowing Actions or one point added to Harshing Actions. Fairy Dust points must be spent before the roll of the dice and once used are not recovered. However Fairy Dust may be rewarded to players for good roleplaying or by finding a treasure of Fairy Dust, etc.
Winning and Losing:
Losing: If a faerie loses enough Glamour, he or she changes races accordingly. If a fae is reduced to becoming a Redcap, the city security will come for him or her and he or she will be dragged out of the city and the game.
Winning: The game ends when a player character is selected to serve in the Seelie Court. This could be either through the team effort of all the player characters or because they are the last one standing not turned into a Redcap. If there is more than one character left at the end of the game, the players must decide among themselves who won.
Sort of a cross between "Phantastes" and "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", this RPG is a game setting for the "All Outta Bubblegum" engine. Thanks and apologies to Michael Sullivan and Jeffrey Grant again. Apologies also to Gary Gygax for borrowing an idea from his Aerth campaign setting in his "Dangerous Journeys" game (I'm not worthy!).
Setting:
Parallel to the mundane world of ordinary experience is the land of the Fae. Imagine a world that looks like the inverse of the Earth's surface, with land there being where the oceans are here and vica versa. In the area of the continent that corresponds to the Atlantic Ocean, in the place counterpart to where ancient Atlantis was, is the great Seelie court where all the noble Faerie races meet with the King and Queen of the Fae. The Glorious City is almost too magnificient for human eyes, but it does have its suburban parts that are more remote from the Castle. The City is efficiently defended and policed to keep the awful Fae of the unseelie races out.
In one of these suburbs is "Twinkle's Cafe", a comfortable, happy greasy spoon joint that mainly serves the neighborhood locals as well as distinguished fae that have business at the Castle and need a quick lunch. Most of the fare includes things like "Moonbeam Loaf" and "Morning Dew Tea", but you can also find your biscuits and gravy and philly cheese steak sandwich as well. It's a place where everybody knows you name and the name of your clan.
Things are normally quiet and pleasant at Twinkle's but the word has come down that there is a need for new stewards and servants to serve and dwell in courts of the King's officers. The need is so great that they are even looking in the humblest places of the City. The royal messenger has declared that one of the wait staff, floor managers, or cooks at Twinkle's will be included in this great promotion, but only one. The diner is allowed its own means of determining who the lucky individual will be. The winner will not only receive the job but will also be made fit for court service be recovering all of its lost Glamour.
Characters:
All characters are employees of the diner as well as being a member of one of the fae races welcome in the great city. Essentially, all fae are the same. There differing characteristics are a result of different amounts of Glamour in each individual. Among the Seelie races at the diner are:
Faeries Proper: True faeries are of high demeanor and noble character. They are prismatic in appearance and seem to be outlined with a rainbow. A typical attitude of a high faerie would be to pick out another player character and work hard to assure that he or she is the one picked to go to the Castle. Faeries have 7-8 points of Glamour.
Pixies: Pixies are basicly good natured and social but they are addicted to fun and mischief (as well as to glitter). They will use almost anything as an excuse to tease and trick. Pixies seem childlike in appearance and have a pastel glow like the color of so many flowers. People are attracted to pixies but may come to regret it. Pixies have 5-6 points of Glamour.
Brownies: Brownies live closer to the earth than other fae and often appear in earth tones. They are easily irritated and cranky and will do anything to assure their privacy or space. Nothing matters more to a Brownie than his or her personal comfort and peace. Brownies have 3-4 points of Glamour.
Leprechauns: Leprechauns are kelly green and very homely looking. They are also extremely greedy and selfish and will do anything to get ahead. They can never be content with who or what they are. A typical Leprechaun attitude to the contest would be "Now is my big chance to blow this dump and these losers. Let's see what I can do to make sure that happens". Leprechuans have 1-2 points of Glamor.
Redcaps: Redcaps are colored blood red and are petrifying ugly. They are extremely vicious and will attack anyone just for the sake of causing misery. For this reason, Redcaps are considered an Unseelie race and are not tolerated within the City. Redcaps have 0 points of Glamour or less.
If a fae gets frustrated in anything significant to him or her, he or she loses Glamour. If a fae loses more Glamour than is allowed for his or her race, he or she transmogrifies into a fae of the race below it without losing his or her identity. If a fae receives more Glamour than is designated for his or her race, he or she transmogrifies into the next upper race. In each case the newly formed fae has all the features and motives of a member of that race.
There are also other enchanted creatures that might find their way into the diner -- Gryphons, Unicorns, Dwarves, Dyads, Satyrs, etc. They will also have some amount of Glamour that will also be reflected in their temperament or appearance (as determined by the Faereferee).
The Social Contract:
All players play faeries in the game except for one, who is the Faereferee. The Faereferee is responsible for creating and managing the the diner and its customers as well as making sure that the rules are applied fairly and that everyone is having fun. The Faereferee has read all the rules and designed all the encounters accordingly. He or she describes the setting and what happens during the story by answering players questions.
The rest of the players each manage the actions of one individual character that they design in the game setting. When they interact with the game environment the Faereferee acts as their eyes and ears. When they interact with other player characters, they talk and coordinate their actions in character.
There are also other characters in the game other than the player's characters. These are run by the Faereferee just as player character would. Non-player characters also have Glamour and Fairy Dust as designed for them by the Faereferee.
Designing a Player Character:
Each player character (the character that the player governs in the game) is a member of a faerie race according to his or her Glamour points. To design a character, a player starts with 5 Glamour points, 5 Faerie Dust points (see below), and 3 Building points. The player must spend all of his or her building points when designing the character. One building point may be spent to add 1 point to the character's total Glamour points or 2 points to the character's total Faerie Dust points. Once the points are spent and added, the results are complete. Then the player identifies his faerie's starting race according to the final amount of Glamour assigned.
After this, the player decides a name for his or her character (something with a flower, berry, or animal reference, but not necessarily confined to that), decides what job they have at the diner, (cook, wait staff, floor manager, cashier -- a person may wind up doing several jobs like in any earthly diner), and also some bit of back story about how the character wound up working in the diner or his our her upbringing to flesh the character out. Really good back stories should be rewarded with additional Fairy Dust points and/or other attributes, skills, equipment, or liabilities that are designed to effect the basic game mechanics and which also make sense according to the character's back story. It is the Faereferee's discretion but he or she should be open to the Player's input
Resolving Character Actions:
Everything that a faerie character does has a hint of magic to it, an air of something chimey and sparkly. When it comes to important actions, the player should describe his or her characters actions as something like an ordinary action with a magical twist (like pouring coffee from a levitating coffee pot or serving eggs that dance on the plate).
Actions that have some consequential outcomes for the character are resolved by rolling two regular dice and regarding sixes as zeros. (E.g. Rolling a "two" and a "three" equals five but rolling "four" and "six" just equals four. Rolling "double boxcars" is zero.) All important actions fall under two classifications; Mellowing Actions and Harshing Actions.
Basic Idea: Actions that are important enough to the game either narratively or strategicly are either the sort of thing a Californian might say "Dude! You're harshing my mellow!" about or not. Actions that meet with resistance by anyone directly involved even if the most passive-aggressive way are considered Harshing Actions for the purposes of the game. All other actions are considered Mellowing Actions as long as anyone involved is at least open to them or if no one else is directly involved.
A Mellowing Action is any act that does anybody any good, such as trying to persuade someone to do the right thing, serving a meal like home, healing an injury, etc. Roll two dice and if the result is equal to or less that the number of Glamour Points the character has, the mellowing action is successful. If the roll is greater than the number of Glamour points a character has, the result is unsuccessful and the player's character loses one point of Glamour.
A Harshing Action is any action that bothers or inhibits another character such as teasing, making mischief, insulting, tripping, or tricking, etc. Roll the two dice and if the result is equal to or less than the player character's number of Glamour Points, the attempt fails (the victem avoids the trick or is not phased by the insult). If the result is greater than the player character's Glamour points, the action is successful and the other player loses a point of Glamour.
Fairy Dust: Fairy dust is a residual and fungible form of Glamour. If a player wants to assure the odds of a successful outcome to an action, he or she can spend points of Fairy Dust before a roll. Each point of Fairy Dust spent is one point subtracted from the roll in the case of Mellowing Actions or one point added to Harshing Actions. Fairy Dust points must be spent before the roll of the dice and once used are not recovered. However Fairy Dust may be rewarded to players for good roleplaying or by finding a treasure of Fairy Dust, etc.
Winning and Losing:
Losing: If a faerie loses enough Glamour, he or she changes races accordingly. If a fae is reduced to becoming a Redcap, the city security will come for him or her and he or she will be dragged out of the city and the game.
Winning: The game ends when a player character is selected to serve in the Seelie Court. This could be either through the team effort of all the player characters or because they are the last one standing not turned into a Redcap. If there is more than one character left at the end of the game, the players must decide among themselves who won.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Finally: My political movement has mobilized!
It is always been dificult to admit that my sensibilities have been conservative, in religion, in philosophy, and in politics as well, especially in politics. This is very much due to the fact that I work in highly academic enviroments and politics is not a hill I care to die on. But it is also due to the fact that my prefered political persuasion has an intellectual pedigree that remains obscure and is often confused with backwardness. It would seem that a conservative view is just mere unenlightened dogmatism and this is substantiated by the fact that many people are conservative because they are unenlightened dogmatists.
But a good conservative will consider both the Socratic effort to come to terms with the ignorance that is obscured by cheap and inherited opinions and also the limits of standards of analyis, precision, and demonstration. A conservative may appear to be naive but this naivete is the result of reflection and conscientious choice, a higher order state of mind that is not mere naivete.
I would go into it further but I never had the ambition to make this much a political blog. However, I cannot ignore the fruity appeal of the new blog going on over at National Review Online, devoted to the phenomena of Granola Conservativism -- a version of politics where right wing values are combined with left wing sensibilities. (See link in title.)
I say that its appealing on a sentimental level. I prefer organic food self-reliant strategies, alternative medicine, small communities, folk and blues, and so on. I also do not accept the materialist, economis reductionist, and negative rights only posture of the core of the Republican party. And I am influenced by the culture of the sixties at my age. So its not suprising that I should like this so much.
But from what I've seen so far "Crunchy Conservatvism" is just the classic position of Aristotle, Burke, Weaver, and the Southern Agrarians, and so not really different. A possible exception with this is that apparently CCs are not so devoted to it as to become a kind of strong utopianism. They don't seem to be interested so far in adopting a rigid Distributivist model of economics which is both untenable and disasterous. This helps me to see CCs as something between traditional cultural conservatives and the neoconservatives who think that traditionalists are vapid. In that sense my own view is that there is a need for something like a mediation. Neocons have discovered something in showing how social science underscores the value of and provides a source for criticising social policy in a richer and more morally engaging sense than the mere economics of the hardcore libertarians. But even they may be too dismissive of ordinary sensibilities to appreciate the reasons for saving the appearances.
Crunchy Conservativism appears to not want to be another form of identity politics which is also attractive about it. The convergence of right and left folkways is other than expected and not something that had been aimed at. It certainly makes for an interesting discussion topic.
But a good conservative will consider both the Socratic effort to come to terms with the ignorance that is obscured by cheap and inherited opinions and also the limits of standards of analyis, precision, and demonstration. A conservative may appear to be naive but this naivete is the result of reflection and conscientious choice, a higher order state of mind that is not mere naivete.
I would go into it further but I never had the ambition to make this much a political blog. However, I cannot ignore the fruity appeal of the new blog going on over at National Review Online, devoted to the phenomena of Granola Conservativism -- a version of politics where right wing values are combined with left wing sensibilities. (See link in title.)
I say that its appealing on a sentimental level. I prefer organic food self-reliant strategies, alternative medicine, small communities, folk and blues, and so on. I also do not accept the materialist, economis reductionist, and negative rights only posture of the core of the Republican party. And I am influenced by the culture of the sixties at my age. So its not suprising that I should like this so much.
But from what I've seen so far "Crunchy Conservatvism" is just the classic position of Aristotle, Burke, Weaver, and the Southern Agrarians, and so not really different. A possible exception with this is that apparently CCs are not so devoted to it as to become a kind of strong utopianism. They don't seem to be interested so far in adopting a rigid Distributivist model of economics which is both untenable and disasterous. This helps me to see CCs as something between traditional cultural conservatives and the neoconservatives who think that traditionalists are vapid. In that sense my own view is that there is a need for something like a mediation. Neocons have discovered something in showing how social science underscores the value of and provides a source for criticising social policy in a richer and more morally engaging sense than the mere economics of the hardcore libertarians. But even they may be too dismissive of ordinary sensibilities to appreciate the reasons for saving the appearances.
Crunchy Conservativism appears to not want to be another form of identity politics which is also attractive about it. The convergence of right and left folkways is other than expected and not something that had been aimed at. It certainly makes for an interesting discussion topic.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Armitage RPG Encounter Deck
Here is a "supplement" to the Armitage RPG on this blog to help people who are stuck coming up with story ideas for the game. Typical encounters by characters in the Armitage universe are identified with indices on an ordinary deck of cards. Red suits identify situations friendly to the player characters and black suits hostile ones (unless otherwise stated). The GM simply draws a hand of cards and tries to work the offered elements into a good story line or to supplement her own storyline. She may repeat the process as necessary.
A -- Scientists/Technicians (among the few that knew or can reverse engineer technology)
2 -- Family members, co-workers, or friends.
3 -- Executive sponsers (heads of companies or agencies that want to use the Thirds)
4 -- Activists/Terrorists (Either pro-robot or anti-robot)
5 -- Police Detectives
6 -- Government Agents
7 -- Seconds, Security Robots, or other robots (neutral)
8 -- "Gadgets" (neutral)
9 -- Millitary Units (neutral)
10 -- Informants, Flunkies, or Goons
Red Picture cards -- Thirds
Black Picture Cards -- Assassin Robots
Jokers -- Cybernet Contacts
Social Contract Option: Have every player play both a character and be a GM. Each player sets up their humanity chips and describes their character according to the rules and prefered tweaks. Each player also is dealt a hand of four cards. One pre-agreed player starts by setting the stage and tries to incorporate one of the story elements in her hand by introducing that encounter to one or the other (or more than 0ne) player characters. She remains in control of telling the story until another player takes it from her by playing one of his cards and introducing that card's element into the story. One player maintains control of the story until another player takes over by playing a card from their hand and introducing that element. This can only happen in between action resolution checks. When a player runs out of cards, they draw a new hand. When the deck (or decks) are used up, reshuffle. Play may be competative (be the last Third standing) or cooperative (see how many player characters can reach their goals before becoming 'dead' or assassin robots).
A -- Scientists/Technicians (among the few that knew or can reverse engineer technology)
2 -- Family members, co-workers, or friends.
3 -- Executive sponsers (heads of companies or agencies that want to use the Thirds)
4 -- Activists/Terrorists (Either pro-robot or anti-robot)
5 -- Police Detectives
6 -- Government Agents
7 -- Seconds, Security Robots, or other robots (neutral)
8 -- "Gadgets" (neutral)
9 -- Millitary Units (neutral)
10 -- Informants, Flunkies, or Goons
Red Picture cards -- Thirds
Black Picture Cards -- Assassin Robots
Jokers -- Cybernet Contacts
Social Contract Option: Have every player play both a character and be a GM. Each player sets up their humanity chips and describes their character according to the rules and prefered tweaks. Each player also is dealt a hand of four cards. One pre-agreed player starts by setting the stage and tries to incorporate one of the story elements in her hand by introducing that encounter to one or the other (or more than 0ne) player characters. She remains in control of telling the story until another player takes it from her by playing one of his cards and introducing that card's element into the story. One player maintains control of the story until another player takes over by playing a card from their hand and introducing that element. This can only happen in between action resolution checks. When a player runs out of cards, they draw a new hand. When the deck (or decks) are used up, reshuffle. Play may be competative (be the last Third standing) or cooperative (see how many player characters can reach their goals before becoming 'dead' or assassin robots).
Thursday, January 19, 2006
E-mails from a philosopher: Conclusion
Dear Gnu,
Once again I amazed at how your words are most appropriate to my current state. You are always one step ahead of me even as I feel as if I am giving you news.
Yesterday, for example, I had to grade papers and prepare a lesson, from the time I woke up and the time I went to class at 6pm. I taught till 9. When I was walking back from class to the library where Mr. Smith was picking me up, I noticed with shame that all day long I had not once thought of God or Jesus--it was almost like a day from a month ago. I felt terrible. I felt hurt too, in a strange way. (Maybe in a similar way as you would get
I spoke with Mr. Smith; we do want to pick you up at 9:15 on Sunday and go to church with you. We will do that.
I noticed you did not say anything about my attempt to quit smoking. Maybe because you were skeptical of my over-zealous beginning. Well if that's so you were right. Soon after I wrote you my previous e-mail, in fact, I failed. My failure of course made me feel bad, but also it made me feel even more submissive; it helped me notice the limits imposed on my soul in virtue of being in this body. (I will be using the word "soul" in a Ramsified way; I don't think I must be committed to Cartesian Dualism.--Beside the point right now anyway.) So, I thought that maybe, even as my Lord attends to my soul because I trust in him and pray, there seems to be limits on how much He can attend to me, especially at this stage when I am only beginning to understand. (I don't think that this is a limitation of His powers, but rather a limitation of how much my soul can partake in Him at a given time.)
I also noticed that as I was trying to quit smoking, I was feeling a tad superior in some way, which of course was not right. How thin is the line between humility and letting go of your ego on the one hand, and succumbing into the thought that your ego is part of Him and that because of that you are privileged in some way, as if you deserve praise for it. To put simply, I seem to have fallen into the contradictory idea of being proud that my Lord may have bestowed grace upon me.
So as I was ackonwledging my guilt, I tried to take some lessons from it.
I must admit that it's very hard to feel guilty as one also acknowledges His power--that's something I need to study and try to figure out. I know it's a very old problem and I'm not in search of a philosophical solution; rather I need to figure out the right terms in which I can understand myself as a sinner while not doubting His power to help me not sin.
Maybe (just maybe--I'm not in a position to know this) the purpose of the whole not smoking episode was so that I taste the kind of emotion that comes along with trusting Jesus as my Lord and Savior, but also noticing how fallible I still would be even in that case.
So this is what I ended up thinking about my failure to stop smoking. I then also thought that there are practical reasons for why I should not try again to quit smoking just now. Accepting Christ as my Lord gives me joy of hope. I am not full of a sense of victory or anything like it. I see that this is only the beginning and that I have so much to chew on and struggle with. It may not be the best idea to have this learning period to overlap with a struggle against a physiological addiction when there are even more important (?) sinful habits I should intend to overcome.
The flip side is, addictions always come with a tendency to rationalize. So I would like to hear what you think about the thoughts I laid out above.
I can't wait for Sunday. See you at 9:15.
Love and God bless you,
Mrs. Smith
(This brought to an end to our online exchange and we have been continuing IRL ever since. Mr. and Mrs. Smith decided to visit our church and relatively shortly afterward, Mr. Smith also came to profess faith in Christ.)E-mails from a philosopher: Part IV
Dearest Gnu,
I thought I was going to remain quiet longer, but I shouldn't, I need to now tell you that your prayers, and mine of course, have been answered. I have accepted Jesus into my life. I don't know the exact and proper words to describe this, but, in essence, I now believe, and it gives me joy and such strong hope.
As I read through Matthew before, my feelings were growing stronger and it all was making sense to me. I was trying to refrain myself, afraid that in such an important matter, a quick decision would necessarily amount to a hasty decision. Like you said though, it ended up being a matter of desire-fulfillment rather than decision. I'll tell you what happened.
Mr. Smith and I were watching TV. (What a lame beginning for such a beautiful story..?). In one very brief scene, one of the characters were inside a church. As soon as I looked at the altar, I wanted to be there, right then, right there, make the sign of the cross, and let my self be watched over by God from now on. (Three times before in my life, when I was at the church, I had felt the desire to make the sign of the cross, without even quite understanding what this means. Those were the beginnings of the strange process which, finally, brought me to ask for your guidance. But last night it was much clearer to me.) To mix lots of metaphors, I wanted to join, I wanted to give myself up. My desire was similar to, for example, having walked on hot sand at the beach, the bottom of your feet burning, you are filled with the anticipation of the coolness of the sea. You can't/won't resist, you will just go put your feet in the water. Knowing how it will feel you already feel some joy of anticipation, even as your feet are burning more and more. Such was my desire to no longer be without God.
Soon afterwards, I was reading the Bible again. At one point, "Thank You God, if there is God" I said. I immediately noticed that I felt no need for the antecendent anymore. I thanked Him again, and again. I felt it again. I felt Him. I had to close my eyes. Then between my eyelids my eyes caught my Dad’s picture, on my wall, which, since his death, has always made me sad. Then, I had another experience as of conversing with God. He told me that He took my dad to be at peace with him for he was so innocent and suffering needlessly. He told me that my dad is with him and at peace. I wanted to kiss His hands.
I had to pause once to smoke a cigarette. The thought occurred to me that I could, with the help of Jesus, quit right then, before I took a second drag. But I was also weak and I thought that it could also wait. "Why trouble myself with this right now?" I thought. Then I kept on thinking about the night's events. First I remembered how I used to not understand at all why Christians worship Jesus. I used to think that if I ever became a believer, I would believe in God and honour Jesus best I can but I would never ever worship a man. But last night while reading it was clear to me (as anything in these matters can ever be, to me) that Jesus is God in human form. God had come to us Himself -as a man of course, how else? How could anyone hear God’s voice but for it to sound like a man’s voice?- As soon as I thought this the words formed in my head: "I love Jesus and I want to follow him."
Then I began to dream of the days ahead of me as I follow Him. I got carried away, excited. I then thought that I was getting ahead of myself. For surely there had to be tests I would have to pass. I had never thought of tests before. I was scared. All of a sudden I knew (as much as I can) that the thought that had occurred to me about quitting to smoke with Jesus’ help was the beginning of a test. Not a test of strong will, but a test of whether I would trust Him to stand by me and help me resist temptation. At once I put out my cigarette which was almost finished anyway. I noticed how weak I was, sinning so very easily. I had thought it would be so hard to quit. But I later I noticed that that is the test--I ought not think that such a thing is hard, for with His help it is not. I only need to trust and not fear, like He said. I at once washed my mouth and prayed that I quit with His help and prayed that I would not stop trusting His power. I know that if I have a craving it is because I stopped trusting and I hope that in all my weakness Jesus will see through that I never stop trusting Him.
Then later last night I went to bed. I told Mr. Smith about it all. Then I slept through my first night as a believer. When I woke up, I was still full of joy and hope. It is now about 6:30 pm. I have been reading Luke today. I haven't smoked.
I will read like you advised.
You said "I hate even giving the impression of putting anybody under any kind of pressure..." That's not my impression at all. In your words I see a helping hand. I know that if God didn't want me to get that help I would not see that hand at all.
"...but I would feel remiss in my duties having come so far if I had not at least brought some basic outlines to you attention. But havng done that, I won't develop this further unless you want to do so. "I had only meant that I should be quiet myself, for some time, to think things through. As it turns, it was not going to take as long as I thought. (Such a thirst, over years and years...)
I want to be baptized.
I want to decide which church to join. Can I please come with you next time you go to your church? Even if I will end up joining a Catholic church, right now I want to go with you, if you don't mind.
Thank you for your wisdom, your love, your friendship, and your prayers. Thank you for your help. I can't wait to hear from you again. I am filled with so much joy; a celebration is going in me.
With much love,
Mrs. Smith
Mrs. Smith,
>Oh Wow! You just don't know how, even as I have struggled with doubts and problems here, that I have often prayed for you and all the other grad students that I have gotten to know that perhaps you and they might come to know that particular joy that you're feeling right now. How i have struggled to give no ground of offense to Christ and how I have chastened my self- for all my inconsistencies and foolish mistakes for fear of doing anything that would put a useless block in the way between you all and him. I have been grateful for finally being allowed to slip a word to some who have left us now and have kept my eyes pealed for some appropriate opportunity to say or do something to make known that good news to at least some of you. But no one could really understand how I felt about it until they felt what you are feeling, so I struggled to curb my enthusiasm.
>Welcome to the family of God. You have become a sister as well as a friend. At this point you are enjoying what we have come to call the "honeymoon" phase, a period when it seems that God grants an overflowing sense of Himself and the joy of Christ to encourage newChristians at the beginning of there Christian lives before they are challenged by all the difficulties that Christ warned us would come to pass. You have already experienced how this has powerfully effective implications for dealing with our own sinful or sin-tending behaviors. Among the best things to do during this time is to put all that new motivation to work in establishing habits that will assure continual spiritual growth in the future.
>Let my give you some things for starters so you can get started right away.
>PRAYER: Prayer is talking to God whether verbally, mentally, or just by projecting your most profound and inarticulate feelings into his care. Prayer includes praise and adoration of God, personal confession of sin and weakness before God, gratitude and thanksgiving to and for God, and supplication for self and intercession for others offered to God (Remember "ACTS" -- Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication). Prayer also involves an act of recumbancy, of wholly rolling your self on the "shoulders" of God as were, so even when you have nothing to say you maintain an attitude of focused dependence and contemplation. The Lord's prayer in the Sermon on the Mount is meant to be a model and guide to prayer. If you can. try to establish a regular time of prayer that works for you (2x, 3x, or so a day is suggested).
> BIBLE STUDY: Try to read the Bible some everyday making sure to include something from the New Testament and a psalm as you begin your Christian life. I guess I don't have to say much about careful reading to you, but read in a devotional spirit expecting to be strengthened, enlightened, nourished and refreshed. Don't be surprised if you aren't also confronted and convicted but be willing to be receptive to that. God will not condemn anymore like a judge, but He will chasten like a father. The upside of that is that he only reserves such chastening for His children and none of his children will be plucked from His hand. If you don't know what i am talking about -- don't worry, you will. Bible study will begin more and more to rule and direct your prayer life. Lex credendi, lex orendi; "As we believe, so we worship".
>CORPORATE WORSHIP: Go to regular worship were the congregation is relatively healthy and growing to maturity and go to worship, confess your sinfulness (No we don't sit in a circle and have each one state there individual faults in public -- but we confess together our general need for forgiveness for daily transgressions), praise through music and singing in community, listen to the exposition of Scripture as God's word to us for now, give thanks in prayer and offerings, observe and receive the sacraments as means of God's grace. Basically, God has made provisions for the worship of Himself through his word (A Socratic point - "How do we avoid presumption against the gods unless the gods tell us how to worship them?")
>FELLOWSHIP: Being in fellowship with Christians is more than just spending time together, it is also bearing one another’s burdens, encouraging, teaching, laughing and crying with, exhorting, admonishing, forgiving, etc. etc. one another (just to pick a handful of typical biblical exhortations) as members of the same family and kingdom. Try to make some time for Christian fellowship beyond church attendance. (There is a Christian graduate student fellowship on campus -- "Graduate Christian Fellowship" a branch of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at SU. There is also the Albrandi Christian (Catholic) Student center on Walnut.) Under this is also the discipline of reading good Christian literature. I suggest the book "Knowing God" by James Packer and "The Pursuit of Holiness" by AW Tozer for starters, but one need not be confines to works of the last century.
>RECEIVE THE SACRAMENTS: Baptism is the uniform day of the Christian when she receives the identifying outward mark of belonging to the Community of Christ and also the sure seal of of the promises of God. It is also, in connection to the word, a means of grace and an assurance of God's faithfulness to you. The Lord's Supper is a regular remembrance of Christ’s death. We operationalize our faith in the finished work of Christ and make it visible to our sense when we take the supper in a conscious spirit of trust and repentance. By God's convention, the accomplishment of Christ on the Cross is made real to ourselves as the elements are made visible to our senses. There is a warning attached to observance of this sacrament, namely God is not indifferent to a reckless observance of it. If there be other sacraments, I'll leave that for you to decide.
>"MORTIFICATION" (putting sin to death in yourself): Begin to deal with your sin, both as expressions of sinfulness and as particular sins. This is hard but we all struggle with this. The book of Romans deals with these issues most straight forwardly. You will probably notice that what happens is that you realize the profundity of your sin more and more -- its worse than you first thought. But this shows that the Holy Spirit is at work deepening your walk in new holiness. BEARING WITNESS: Be prepared to be a signpost for others to Christ, to share what has been shared with you as God gives you appropriate opportunity.
>For more on spiritual discipline, see Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060628391/ref=ase_kamurj0b/102-8506933-5502569?v=glance&s=books
>Remember, that according to the book, you now have received the Holy Spirit of God and that God's Spirit dwells in you if in a temple. This is God's "down payment" on eternal life, and is the source of all encouragement and guidance and comfort. By His influence, you are being assured that you receive the truth in God's word correctly and effectively and by his presense you have security in your relationship with God. It is possible to grieve the Spirit through backsliding and to quench the Spirit through a lack of faith but He will not allow that for long and recall you to your first love again. You are welcome to come to my church. . . .
>My church is . . . conservative, but that does not man wearing that stately gown of yours. But my advice is that, if you can, you should defer to Mr. Smith as much as possible and encourage him to make an input and go with it. The reason is to encourage him even though he is yet not where you are that none the less he is still your helpmeet and husband. Faith can be a strong tonic and can lead to profound and severe difficulties within the family later, especially when children come along. People tend to underestimate the significance of religious differences, even between themselves. Mr. Smith should come to think that turning your heart to Christ has meant that your heart has turned to Mr. Smith even more, not less. I don't think I really need so much to tell you this but just as a reminder, surprise Mr. Smith with the amount of say he can have in your religious experience and see it as an opportunity to build new connections with each other. That may mean getting started in a Catholic Church . . . (Mr. Smith’s own family is Catholic, although at the time Mr. Smith was a skeptic. – The Gnu).
>Finally, though your joy would almost have you burst out at times, be circumspect in disclosing your new found faith to others, including to other Christians in the department. There is a terrible process that I went through when I first became a Christian and it has counterparts in the experience of others. I did not come from a Christian home and when my family found out I had excepted Christ, it was extremely hard for them to accept and it took along time. The difficulty surprised even themselves (No one expects this to happen to someone you know -- that happens to other people). They had to go through something like a Kubla-Ross series of stages (denial, anger, bargaining, grief, acceptance) and it took time. I had all kinds of awful things said to me and there was a lot of tension. Something similar happened to . . . (a) former professor of textual studies and queer theory at SU English department. She was a scholar-activist in the Syracuse Gay and Lesbian Community when in the course of doing research on the Promise Keeper movement, she came to know my then pastor and began a relationship to find out more about it. After spending a lot of quality time with our church, she gave up her lesbian lifestyle and become a Christian. This sent a shock wave through the English department who felt singularly betrayed as well as the gay community. Her department would speak of the "(professor’s name) Problem" at meetings even when she was attending. She finally found a better job and life leaving to teach at a small Christian liberal arts college.
>Your testimony will be a great encouragement to other Christians -- who will tend to want to "show you off" and make things unnecessarily more unpleasant (the Bob Dylan Effect) -- so be careful even telling them. Time is your friend here. Eventually if you go through some stress and tension it will pass into quiet blank stares eventually. I don't know how frightening it can be for a new born Christian grad student, but perhaps not as bad as an ex-queer feminist faculty member. You can talk to me if things get rough. I usually walk to church. Church starts at 9:30 on Sunday and we usually go out to eat afterwards. We're not home until about 2 or 3 o'clock but we can accomodate to your schedule. If you still would like to go (Maybe Mr. Smith will be curious enough to see how the religious nuts live and come also) you can pick me up at 9:15 at my place and I will give you directions to it. But let me know first by replying to this. Once again, your posts have been very encouraging to me and I am delighted that your are experiencing the joy of Christ. Praise the Lord! In Him, The Gnu
>The exchange concludes here.
E-mails from a philosopher: Part III
Dearest Gnu,
My paper on Russell is attached here (Note: I did not include her paper in this post – the Gnu). Throughout the paper I use abbreviations for several of Russell's writings. There is a list, at the end, before the References section, of what each abbreviation stands for. (This paper is probably the best thing I have written so far; yet it still is a draft. These days one of my projects is to read it through again, to revise it stylistically, and to shorten it. When that's done I'll turn it in as an area paper, and maybe submit it for publication at the same time.)
I think it is time for me to remain quiet for a while and keep on reading the Bible, and do the other things you advised. If you don't hear from me for a little while, I wouldn't want you to think that I am being lazy with my search. On the contary. I will write again later.
Oh, I should mention: Mr. Smith knows about my current situation, and he also knows that I have come to you for help. I don't tell him every detail of what goes on in my head or what you tell me, but I share some. I certainly don't tell him anything personal to you, and as to my personal side--I decide as I go. So, should you run into Mr. Smith in my absence, you can, if it comes up at all, comfortably speak about our correspondence (as far as I'm concerned). You probably wouldn't see the need to do it anyway, but I'm just mentioning this so you know that Mr. Smith knows that I correspond with you, that's all.
Like I said, I'll write again later. Meanwhile, peace be with you.
Love,
Mrs. Smith
> Mrs. Smith,
> Sounds real good to me. I'll just leave it in God's hands and in the hands of the Great Metaphysical Lottery. Some penultimate suggestions, you might want to read "God and the Philosophers" ed. Tom Morris and "Philosophers who Believe" ed. Kelly Clark. And also, you might want to look at some general sketches of essential Christian belief (Gospel presentations, tracts) that are aimed at the general public to see what such a thing might look like.
http://www.ccel.org/e/edwards/sermons/supernatural_light.html
http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/3392.htm
http://www.epc.org/about-epc/beliefs/essentials.html
http://www.gospelcom.net/stott/sermons/becoming.html
I hate even giving the impression of putting anybody under any kind of pressure but I would feel remiss in my duties having come so far if I had not at least brought some basic outlines to you attention. But having done that, I won't develop this further unless you want to do so. As John Calvin would say, "Good Luck!".
The Gnu
The exchange continues here
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