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Archive for the category “October 2011”

19 Oct 2011

The Price of Liberty

How do we place a value on life?  I recently saw a video of a little girl in China that was run over and left bleeding in the street.  People were walking around her like a piece of trash and then she was run over a second time before someone pulled her broken body out of the street.  It’s hard to imagine living in a society where that is possible.  We never think that we could be numb to someone else’s suffering, that we have some sense of humanity that protects us from cruelty.  The truth is history has us shown differently.  We can be influenced by society and fear of consequence and general persuasion can lead us to condition ourselves to become accustomed to all kinds of atrocity.  In Nazi Germany, by the time anyone felt the problem was serious enough to speak up, the consequences were so severe they kept any protests quiet.  Within the past century our own country has stood by and watched racial hatred as if it were normal behavior.   During the Civil War we had a country split in half over whether or not people should have the freedom to own slaves.  Many things that we now see as absolutely horrific have been viewed as normal or even majority view at some point in time.

Societies have always struggled with the emphasis of the importance of the individual versus the good of the whole.  We all can agree that a society needs structure and order to keep life from being complete chaos, but should it be as the cost of personal freedom?  The problem is the value of life will decline at either end of the spectrum.  If personal freedom prevails, then what is to stop a person from exploiting others for their own gain?  Child labor, slavery, domestic abuse, the way workers were treated during the industrial revolution are a few examples of how individual liberty can lead to declines in society.  However if the pendulum swings in the other direction we can end up with tyranny and oppression, genocide, fear and complacency, where people look aside when they see suffering.   Again if the pendulum swings to the side of personal freedom, the value of liberty can prevail against the value of human life and lead to rationalizing issues like mercy killing, euthenasia or abortion, after all, people are just exercising their personal freedom right?  Who are we to tell them they are wrong?  This is why it is sometimes difficult to see the difference between far right and far left, you usually end up in the same place.  Fascism and communism have many similarities.

So what are we left with?  Either extreme leads to relativism and a devaluing of life.  As important as freedom and democratic ideals are, they are really more of a result than something you can strive for.  Society often tries to model itself after other successful societies throughout history only to fall miserably off track.  Liberty itself can mean different things to different people, and can become a complete farce if imposed upon a society without the morality to uphold its value.  We associate democracy with ancient Greece, but as Plato said, “Democracy leads to despotism.”  His view was people’s freedom should be based on their voluntary submission to the elite representatives that composed their laws and represented their culture and ultimately defined their truth.  So a person could achieve personal freedom as long as they were able to redefine their definition of what that meant.

The liberty that we idealise today generally assumes morality is intrinsic within the individual, that given the right environment, personal conscience would prevail.  This is a logical assumption when we look back upon times in our history when personal freedom was paramount, but the conditions that led to liberty must be understood to see how it was achieved.  We take advantage of the morality we have been taught in that we don’t see how it colors our decisions and the consequences of our ideas.  Our American culture is fortunate to have a history and constitution that instills value for human life, and personal freedom in that our system of justice defers to a higher law.  The Beauty of this higher law is partly derived from the ten commandments.  In fact we have them printed on the doors of our Supreme court.  They are usually taken for granted, simplified or considered outdated.  However if we listen to the wisdom behind these ten simple laws we can unlock the key to a successful society.  The commandments have a chiastic structure that unifies the importance of all of them to a single element, the value of life.

For a society to be successful in longevity certain elements must be protected, labor and property, marriage and family, and truth.  There is a commonality in the third and ninth commandment,  Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain and Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.  Both protect truth.  If we start calling God what he is not, or using God’s name with a different meaning or intention it is the beginning of redefining truth.  This is important because if language is not protected and words begin to mean whatever we want them to mean, they become corruption and truth becomes relative.  Bearing false witness against your neighbor is an obvious example of this corruption.  The fourth and eighth also relate, Thou shall respect the sabbath and keep it holy and Thou shalt not steal.  On the sabbath not only were the Israelites supposed to rest, but their animals, their labourers and also their land.  Every component of a person’s property was to be respected and held in high regard.  Thou shall not steal is another example of how property and ownership was to be respected.  Another connection lies between the fifth and seventh commandment, Thou shalt honor thy father and mother and Thou shalt not commit adultery.  These both protected the family structure.  Family is what society is based on, they are the first small businesses as well.  They are the backbone of education and economy and when families fall apart, everything falls apart.  Finally respecting our elders leads to and ties in the ultimate commandment, Thou shalt not murder.  A respect and value for life is the cornerstone for all morality that a society should be based on.

However none of these can be possible without the second and tenth commandment,  Thou shall have no other gods before me and Thou shall not covet.  These cannot be judged or dictated by society and this is the foundation that makes liberty possible.  These are what brings forth freedom.   These are commandments of the heart.  We cannot measure them by actions and if they are not there or insincere the rest will fall apart.  Having no other gods before Him, means putting God first, ahead of yourself.  That means a lot more than most people think it means and it is that humility that allows a person to sacrifice their own gain to respect others.  Thou shall not covet means more than not wanting a house or a wife like your neighbor, or simple jealousy.  It means being content with what you are given.  Having a thankful heart for everything God sends your way.  That means every time we complain or grumble, or long for a situation to change, we are coveting.  These commandments are difficult and some would say downright impossible, and ultimately they can only come from God’s grace, but they can be the wisdom we look to when the pendulum swings.

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11 Oct 2011

That’s Logic!

   I always find it curious when a person makes an absolute statement.  How a person that is restricted by boundaries, limited in knowledge, information and reason in every possible way, can be an authority on anything!  The very idea of saying something is or is not true is essentially saying they have access to infinite knowledge.

Almost all the information we rely on daily is based on knowledge that is extracted or derived from other extracted or derived data.  It is the same with science.  There is no absolute data.  There is no provable information in our world that is not limited to human methods of collection and interpretation, and therefore limited and subject to error.  Science has not had the benefit of a true control subject because that would require an infinite scope of variability.  We may be able to use tools to measure beyond our human reach, but that does not set a basis for absolute information.  There are many factors that can change the state of matter, different environmental causes that alter both how data is measured and how it appears, and who knows what other factors we are not aware of.

Have you ever stopped to wonder if there is anything you can imagine that could not have a molecular transformation through either passing of time, extreme environmental conditions or perhaps just in how it is perceived?

Let’s say for example, “That desk is green.” is an absolute statement. We would not be taking into account what that desk may look like in thousand years or after a fire or a chainsaw changed it into something else completely.  Or maybe we should say, “That desk is green right now.” but even that doesn’t account for altered perception, lighting, or how the categories are classified.  With no perfect categories classification is largely a system of assumption.  The color green has thousands of different variations and desks come in all shapes and sizes.  Even the idea of right now could be interpreted to mean any number of things like this century, this era, or this second, all of which have entirely different implications.

So we can choose to accept this or not.  We can take the information around us and we can trust in it, believe that it has qualities that are absolute,  believe that it cannot change or that the world around us will continue as it always has.  Two plus two will always be four, right?  We know certain things transform but overall we can measure that, we can learn enough to determine constants.  Anything that doesn’t fit into the constants can simply be interpreted metaphorically, or allegorically.

Have you ever heard anyone say? ” I only believe in what I can hear, see or touch.”  Basically they are saying they only believe in themselves.  They will be the deciding authority on the information around them.

The other side to the coin is to have an authority outside of yourself.  To acknowledge we are limited in every way and that we may have the ability to ascertain certain things, they are always subject to forces outside of ourselves.  Two plus two does equal four using our form of logic and reason but we know that is variable.  We did not create ourselves or the world in which we live.  So therefore the only source of truth or absolutes that we can rely on must come from something infinite, something that cannot change, something omniscient.  That everything we see around us is temporal and could cease to exist.

Now those who choose the path of the things seen tend to rely on the natural world around them.  Ideas replicate balance, hot and cold, order and chaos, light and dark, life and death.  Good and evil are just the polarity of nature, forever present.  Nature is neutral and consistent, setting a cyclical, seasonal harmony that brings continuity.  With that comes randomness, things don’t happen for a reason, it’s all just cause and effect, action reaction.  No one knows why anything happens.  It is just chance, random, it just is.   Sometimes the authority for empirical knowledge ends up in a physical representation of a King, a common viewpoint ,democratic majority or the state.  Truth is determined by a monarchy or the will of the people. If there is a natural chain of being all things from the most insignificant to the most powerful can become one.  The hope for truth and power comes from the top of the chain, embodied in the state, king or democracy.  The consequence of this as history has shown is without a standard of transcendental authority a majority rule can be influenced in any direction, as a result we have had wars, slavery, and even genocide to show for it.  Obviously the same is true for a monarchy or state.

As a reaction to the pitfalls of fallible authority came Humanism.  Accepting all actions as a just the nature of being and determining truth relative to ones individual perspective.  This viewpoint is also random and if things don’t happen for a reason, it only follows that you can be the only one that creates purpose.  Life is what you make of it.  All aspects of reality end up in a relative state dependent on each individual situation.  Both viewpoints are inevitably essentially religious.  A faith in science, state, reason or perception.  Of course you may say you believe in god, but it is really an abstraction.  A form to fit the unknown, an abstract being that is always neutral, perhaps with a random nature for wrath and need for placation, sometimes gentil like the seasons.  It may be a force, spirit, mother nature or cosmos. It may be polytheistic.  Or often it is the God of the Bible, but reinterpreted to fit into an ideal neutral box.  A god that would not judge so therefore is likely to be either dormant and uninterested, or mostly metaphorical.

That is why so many people do not believe the Bible is inspired by God, it’s too disruptive.  It challenges everything that they believe to be true. Miracles would mean something could disrupt the physical absolute world around them.  They would be more likely to believe anything written by man because it would be much less threatening to their viewpoint.

2 Peter 3: 3 “knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” 5 For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, 6 by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. 7 But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
8 But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us,[b]not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”

Now those who choose the path of the things unseen,  trust not in the world around them but in who controls it.  They believe that the world as they know it is at the mercy of its creator.  That things have a purpose, there is a reason why things are the way they are.  Each cell, structure and molecule has an intricate design that is not random but reveals the character of its creator.  There are specific truths that eliminate any form of relative perspective.  The only absolutes are in the character of the creator.

So while we all rely on our surroundings to give us clarity on life, and we all proclaim our belief’s, the difference is in the authority.  It really boils down to two perspectives, are we going to interpret and define our existence with a human, limited viewpoint either collective or personal, or submit to an outside authority that is infinite and in control of everything we know and see.  Of course the real problem is believing in an infinite transcendental authority means being accountable to it as well.  That is why we all have the tendency to hide in the darkness of our perceived reality, it is our only protection from exposure.

So the next time you catch yourself stating something as a fact, ask yourself, “How do I know what is truth? Who makes it true? and What is the purpose?”

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07 Oct 2011

The Word was Love

I have always wondered what the most important thing is. The key to humanity or universality or everything.  What ties it all together.  Is it Love? Humility? Charity? Sacrifice? Perseverance, Forgiveness, Faith?  What makes us who we are, rests deep inside our souls.  What is the link to forever?

Mark 12:28 “One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ 29Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” 31The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ 32Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”;33and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ 34When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.”

All of the commandments have a structure that emphasize this.  Putting your heart in a position where God and others come first and you will automatically respect the commandments.  Putting God first means putting no other gods before Him, or not letting anything be more important that he is.  It means respecting His Creation, not distorting truth and misrepresenting things as He created them.  If truth is respected we will not lie, if His creation is respected we will respect everything in it, our neighbor, his property and family, we will not steal from him or envy what he has.  We will understand love and cherish our families. We will understand promises so we will stick out our troubles and honor our parents and elders.  We will respect the life God has given, we will not kill.  If we love God with all our hearts we will not be afraid, we will trust Him.  We will know that He loves us and will provide our needs so we can rest on the Sabbath, and we will not covet because we will rejoice in what He has given us.

So  you may say the most important thing is love. But there is no love without God, our version of love will always be a finite version of Gods love, so we must first trust him.  It is always humility that you must start with.  We cannot find love or charity or faith without first finding Him.  His love will cast away our fear so we are able to understand love, and that love teaches us to sacrifice, to forgive, to give, persevere, and believe.  It is humility that makes all  things work together.  We have to understand we have nothing without Him and we must first receive before we are able to give.

This is the truth that ties the Trinity together.   How three persons can also be One, that humility that unites three individual persons into one God.  It is the sacrifice that creates the perfect Harmony.

I think this is the nature of being.  This is the lost question that has always plagued philosophers.  This is how we understand the metaphysics of existence.  This is the link that unites realism and idealism, unity and singularity, the one and the many.  There are not 10 separate categories or even 12 but really just one, and it is God.

Everything that we can conceive of is an extension of that category.  Derived from Him.  Our understanding of time is a finite version of his eternality, space is His omnipresence, knowledge is His omniscience.  Light and color are emanated from the rainbow around His throne.  Language  is a system of classification.  Logic and reason are how we conceptualize it.  Both are finite versions of God’s attributes. Numbers are fragments of His plurality.  Nothing you can say or think cannot be broken down to the essence of God.  Truth is not a concept that we measure God by, it simply does not exist outside of Him.  The Trinity of God combines all these attributes into a self-contained entity that is manifested in all space and time and in our very humanity.  Mind, body and soul.  Matter has the three stages, gas, liquid and solid.  We have three dimensions in space and time has past present and future.   All of these attributes are always present, it is not as if God is part love, part mercy, part holiness and so forth.  He is pure and total love, totally merciful, completely holy, sovereign, omniscient…  They all exist together eternally.  So all are categories that make up the whole but all maintain full individuality and importance.  Maybe this is what God means to a certain extent when he refers to himself as “I am”.

Or in John 1″ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it. ”

In the Greek the word for “word” was Logos, which also means reason.

“And the Word was made flesh.”

So you may ask what does that make evil, or the opposites of these categories?  Do they also come from God?  All evil can be broken down into distortions of these categories.  Something pure that is corrupted, or rather it is apart from God or not of Him.  When something is away from God, it is outside of truth, mixing up the categories into different forms.  Darkness is the absence of light.  Evil is an attempt to take away the harmony that things are meant to have.  An emphasis of one attribute over another therefore displacing balance and unity.  Of course things outside of God can contain fragments of these qualities, these qualities after all make up all of existence, but without the balance of unity the truth is not complete and therefore untrue and a lie.

1 John 1:5 “This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.
8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.

1 John 2:3 “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 5 But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. 6 He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.
7 Brethren,[a] I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning.[b] 8 Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.
9 He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. 10 He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. 11 But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

We all fail to walk in the light every day.  We all break the commandments, get scared, lose faith.  Our pride causes us to put ourselves first.  Without humility we are lost, we cannot find truth or love or harmony because we cannot find God.  This is why the entire universe is broken.  When man first sinned, it displaced the nature of omniscience and sovereignty, and caused a ripple effect that spanned the molecular structure of the universe.  If all things come from God and all things at one time were in complete harmony, then the entire creation would be at the mercy of a single arbitrary act.   The balance of God’s character was the only thing that could save it because it was the only thing not broken.  God is outside the universe not a part of it so only he could  bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth.  That is what made it possible for a single act of complete humility to fix it.

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05 Oct 2011

Inside the Matrix

Movies like to capture the essence of self-determination in overcoming tremendous odds.  Characters surmount the impossible by finding courage and strength within themselves and with the help of their friends.  There is often a sacrifice in some way to make the achievement possible.

This is the basis that we use to find encouragement and determination to live our lives. The problem is that is not how God wants us to see things.  We can try to relate these movies and stories as analogies to the Christian perspective, using the sacrifice to compare to Christ and the value of unity and the ability for the “good” to defeat the great “evil”.  However that leaves out the most important element, it leaves out God.  We do it all ourselves and the idea of God is either pushed farther away into abstraction or brought down to a level of corruption.  The Man, or big brother, the system, the matrix, the force…  A cold, alien controller that tries to oppress the valiant spirit.  The hero has to find a way to break free of the oppression and in doing so will free everyone else.

Overall the story is a contradiction.  For example, In the Matrix, the Matrix was the reality.  The characters had to borrow from the same reality they were trying to destroy.  How can you step into a programmed reality and rewrite it without access or authority?  We do the same thing in our own lives, lets say it is God that controls the Matrix, and you cannot unplug, or find a door out, or a glitch in the system.  He writes the program for all reality and controls everything within.  There are no tools, skills, no amount of knowledge, no special training that can increase our odds.  We cannot sacrifice ourselves to free everyone else, that would be pointless, we have no real power in ourselves.  So everyone pretends that they are in control, that maybe they will find the secret that will give them the freedom from the programming that is within them and all around them.  Perhaps if we imagine a different reality, make up our own authority we can live in freedom.  We always know the truth though, when the end comes and our version of reality is about to be unplugged, we know our control is about to end and it never belonged to us to begin with.

Some people realize this is reality.  The futility of their existence.  That they have no control and real freedom is subject to the boundaries that contain them.  Then comes the question, what is the point of freedom or control anyway.  What good would it do?  How do we know who is the “good” and “evil” anyway?  It is all futility.  They realize that the individuality we have has no relevancy,  we are blowing in the wind being defined by the places we land along the way.  Some find this place in reality and lose all hope and purpose, and many just never look.  There are others that keep looking, groping in the dark trying to find a purpose.  That is when our eyes can be opened and we can see like the patterns in the code on the Matrix.  Only we see that what controls the boundaries around us is not what oppresses us, it is our struggle to be free that binds us and tangles us in our own bonds.  We have redefined reality for our own purpose and we have changed truth to fit.  We use borrowed logic to try to cheat the inevitable.  We say that we will choose the truths we want to believe,  we will pick our own morality, virtues, purposes and our own gods.  The world around us will be subject to our viewpoint and our own authority.  Then we call that free will, spirit, and determination.  It is really defiance, audacity and lies.  The ultimate deception is our own.  This is sin, this is the place our heart is in when we decide to put ourselves first.  Redefine a little truth here or there to make it OK to lie, or rationalize a bit to steal, if we change enough around, we can even justify taking someones life.  Without a universal authority who can say it isn’t?

So once we see that we have been busy deceiving ourselves into believing we our own authority, God helps us to see that he is the one is charge.  He created us, he knows everything, sees everything, controls everything.  He is always good,  he is truth.  He frees us from the chains of our own deception, he opens our eyes to the world as it was really meant to be, where we have a much greater purpose than just for ourselves, but at the same time we finally find real freedom, and we find our true selves.

To illustrate this in the movies, Neo would have to realize his futility, change his version of reality, and submit to the will of the Matrix. The Matrix would not be the great “evil” but really the great “good” that was not cold and oppressive and the Matrix would be the one to sacrifice and free everyone because it was the only one that had the capability.  Something tells me people would be less likely to watch that.  A powerless hero subject to the will of the system.  We like our own version of reality reinforced not shaken or disturbed.  Of course we want to believe that we have the power to overcome, that we can get stronger, dive deeper, beat the odds, but the truth is, we can only do what God allows us to do. If we listen to that truth, step out of the made up world around us, God promises us strength and courage and the power to overcome any odds.

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