A passage I read some time ago in Bruce Malina’s book which considers anthropological research and its implications for New Testament hermeneutics and reading has been resurfacing on occasion over the last few weeks. I haven’t got it at hand for an exact quote, but basically it goes along with TANSTAAFL and some of the trade-offs we in our culture fail to acknowledge, in fact if correct, also points out some of the denial implicit in our coverage and reporting on Middle Eastern and, well, other cultures.
Here is the statement. Honor/Shame societies, which describe the culture in which 70% of the world exists today have a number of obvious contrasts with Western liberal societies. As we have seen in the last few centuries, market driven liberal societies have enormous capacity for economic growth when compared to honor/shame societies. However, TANSFAAFL comes into play. People in general are happier in an honor/shame environment. Suicide is markedly decreased and as well murder, rape and other such crimes of personal violence are far less common.
Our reporting today highlights and focuses on incidents of child marriage and abuse, the rapes and honor killings of close clan and family members over events which in our society be not an outrage. What they miss within our society (apparently) overall levels of murder and rape and likely even incest are far lower … as well as suicide and mental illnesses.
So, should I research this further? Find the quote, check his references, and dig for backup independent statistics? Or (what is more likely) even if true it wouldn’t matter. Well?
Posted in Short Thoughts.
By Mark
– April 14, 2010
St. Augustine once coined the phrase, “Oh, happy fall” regarding the fall from Eden, or at least I believe the phrase originated with him. As the narrative relates Adam and his spouse were truly innocent having no knowledge of good and evil. St. Augustine is pointing out that yes, there were a lot of bad things which resulted in breaking God’s command, we were expelled to a life of hardship and death and so on. Yet we became, after tasting the fruit of that particular tree, truly human. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that man can be distinguished from the animal because no animal repents (or for that matter feels a need to do so). Without that fruit, no repentance is possible.
Now if God were more clever than I (yes … that’s supposed to be a joke) perhaps He would have arranged His world (or the garden) in the following way. That is to say, there is simple way to arrange it so what He wishes from his world could transpire and yet leave His creatures with free will. Tic-Tac-Toe is a simple game. No matter what choice I give a player, a sufficiently competent person or a computer can run the game to a tie. Similarly the Garden choice could have been set so that no matter what choice Adam made, take of the fruit or not, ran to a conclusion that ultimately ran to the same (or similar) conclusion. In gaming terms, He can arrive a winning solution irrespective of Adam’s (and our) choice(s). To restate the head’s I win tails you lose, it’s eat the fruit you become learn about ethics, don’t eat and you do as well. Now in the case of the Garden, if you think that an essential aspect of man qua man is that he can make ethical choices and can repent then St. Augustine was wrong. That is to say, Adam’s choice was not necessarily the better one. Perhaps, for example, failing to eat of the fruit then God might have other means of teaching man ethics.
Posted in Christian Ethics, Christian Philosophy, Christianity.
By Mark
– April 12, 2010
An interesting note from last nights reading. I had started reading American Rifle: A Biography. At the start of the book it notes that before the advent of the flintlock the American natives weren’t interested in firearms. But the flintlock change that, and the musket (later rifle) became a highly sought very expensive commodity item. Prior to that introduction, wars and conflicts between American native groups were based on enmity and for one 7 year conflict between two tribes resulted in 7 deaths. After the flintlock, conflicts were based not on enmity but on (economic) interest and became deadly. After 25 years, the number of combatants from one tribe dropped from 800 effectives to 300.
The point that enmity vs (economic) interest driving lethality is probably can be generalised and considered in the context of the popular opinion about European religious conflicts of the 15th-17th centuries.
Posted in Short Thoughts.
By Mark
– April 8, 2010
This started as a reply about hermeneutic in the context of the flood on my personal blog. Do we take the flood literally or not. My interlocutor was exasperated exclaiming that to not take the text literally implies words have no meaning. This is exactly backwords. Here is my response to him.
Yes, you are exactly right. Words have meaning. There is this word hermeneutic, which I have used on more than one occasion used in this sentence. Yet, you gaily trounce in with replies like “Why start with the Bible at all? Why not just make up your own stories if that’s what you’re going to do anyway?” or other remarks along the “making it all up” line as if every religious person just takes their preconceptions and hammers the text until it fits. That is not what any honest theologian does (and I think the majority of people atheist or faithful are as honest as they can be). That word, hermeneutic means, “the method by which one extracts meaning from a text.” See that word there. Method. It is there for a reason. 
Continued…
Posted in Christian Philosophy, Christianity.
By Mark
– April 6, 2010
From F.A Hayek The Road to Serfdom Chapter 2:
To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives — the craving for freedom — socialism began increasingly to make use of the promise of a “new freedom.” The coming of socialism was to be the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. It was to bring “economic freedom,” without which the political freedom already gained was “not worth having.” Only socialism was capable of effecting the consummation of the age-long struggle for freedom, in which the attainment of political freedom was but the first step.
The subtle change in meaning to which the word “freedom” was subjected in order that this argument should sound plausible is important. To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached. The new freedom promised, however, was to be the freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the “despotism of physical want” had to be broken, the “restraints of the economic system” relaxed.
Hmm. There is not just a little similarity with these arguments and the arguments posed for healthcare. Democrats argue that healthcare is not socialism. Pedantically speaking that may be correct. But that is, in part, just a technicality. There are parallels here.
Posted in Current Events, Politics, Short Thoughts.
By Mark
– April 6, 2010
The health care mandate is defended as Constitutional because it’s just a tax.
It gives people a choice: they can buy health insurance or they can pay a tax roughly equal to the cost of health insurance, which is used to subsidize the government’s health care program and families who wish to purchase health insurance….
Two questions.
- Can the government mandate purchasing a GM automobile now that they have a controlling interest in GM with a similar tax, i.e., buy the car or pay a tax used to subsidize the program for those families to buy the same sort of car who cannot afford it? If the first is allowed, why not the second? And don’t pull the “not GM, but any automaker” argument. GM could install a proprietary widget in their car and the law would require that quite easily.
- How about taxing people who don’t have at least one child of their own and adopt one child? Single -> tax. The tax roughly equal to the cost of supporting two children, which is used to subsidize those families which struggle to support those two children.
So, are the above two measures Constitutional? If they are not, why is the healthcare measure Constitutional while these are not?
Posted in Disengenuity, Short Thoughts, stupid questions.
By Mark
– April 1, 2010
Jim Anderson considers my turning the Theodicy question around. He suggests that this, in essence, means this is the “best of all possible worlds.” Now I suppose that could be a charge put to an omnipotent Good God, that is if this is not a Panglossian utopia … why not? But my claim in flipping theodicy was weaker than that. Let me try to isolate more abstractly (or succinctly) the question I had posed.
- God wishes the love of his creatures. Love cannot be coerced his creatures must be free willed.
- Following Kass’ arguments in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis from Genesis 1, creation is (and should therefore be) reasonable, that its workings comprehensible to rational creatures.
So, we have a rationally understandable universe in which creatures within it can do evil things if they choose. The ‘trap’ here for your omnipotent God wanting to prevent evil is the brute force approach is unworkable. That is if somehow an evil person, say SW (Snidely Whiplash), is prevented by deus ex machina or Rube Goldbergian coincidence every time he attempts acts of gratuitous violence they fail that this will make it impossible for a rational person to reject God.
Mr Anderson brings 6 points to bear.
- His first point is one of imagination. He cannot imagine a rational universe with free willed actors without evil. He asks if his failure of imagination “imagine a world you can’t imagine” is a problem.
- A “rigorously logical attempt will be confounded by the Butterfly Effect” … is an objection I don’t understand.
- Point three (that there might be too much gratuitous evil in the world) argues that this is likely not the “best of all possible words”, a point I am not defending.
- Point four reflects on point 3.
- His fifth point is incomplete, considering that an “inversion of the Ontological Argument” might be necessary when considering the inversion of the Theodicy problem.
- Is a self-directed ad hominem. That is, the evil in the world reflects really really poorly on us men and if it is indeed necessary it is callous to think that men have been, perhaps, constructed so that we were more naturally nice fellows.
This last point offers perhaps a clue as to where we might find a better universe, that is one populated by men less inclined to do evil?
The comments in his post trend toward mathematical thinking and I’ll offer one mathematical comparison. A school of mathematics is not happy with the method of proof by contradiction. A proof by contradiction demonstrates a fact not by construction but by demonstrating that a thing is impossible without really pointing to exactly why, i.e., by demonstrating that implications of a thing lead to a contradiction.
This “turnaround” of theodicy is perhaps similar, in that it suggests that assuming the opposite that is that a better universe is possible leads to a problem, that is our constructions of better universes have inherent contradictions, i.e., SW is magically ineffective.
Posted in Christian Ethics, Christian Philosophy, Christianity.
By Mark
– April 1, 2010
Theodicy is basically the question of how might a omnipotent good God permit bad things to happen to good or innocent people. This brings me to a question to which I have no good answer. Is there a better way of doing things than the sort of world in which we live? Qualities we consider the Trinitarian God posses include a notion that free loving relationships are of primary importance. God therefore loves us and desires us to love him. Love cannot be coerced but must be freely given. On the apologetics boundary, in discussions between those who believe and those who don’t, theodicy is pointed at as a discussion about whether or not God can exist or not given the existence of evil. But, this question can be turned another way. That is to ask given a God with certain properties does our world fit the expectations of the sort of world that God might create?
So, what properties do we think that a loving God who desires the free-willed love of his creation might possess? One might suggest that the following two qualities be present; that one might rationally choose to love Him and to rationally choose to not do so and that the creatures in that world be free to act against what He might wish. Furthermore observing that those creatures (us) that he has created are (nominally) rational, following Genesis 1 (and the Kass reading of the same) that it is good that the world in which we dwell be rational.
When one considers rape or murder of an innocent and natural disasters, those are typically the problems to which questions of theodicy are more clearly in evidence. These things occur in our world with regrettable regularity. So here’s the flip side theodicy question; that is, if you think theodicy inconsistent with the existence of a omnipotent loving Good God, how would creation differ if that was the case? Does a world in which natural disasters only strike the wicked allow for a person to rationally turn away from God? Does a world in which a rapist is halted by invisible forces allow that?
The claim is that theodicy is an intractable problem for the believer given the evil in the world. I think that this is not necessarily the case, but that those who object to the current state of affairs have failed to provide examples of a reasonable alternative world. Failing to do that means their theodicy objections lack force, that is they object to a state of affairs which may actually be exactly what is prescribed.
Posted in Christian Philosophy, Christianity.
By Mark
– March 30, 2010
Dan Brown is just the famous and perhaps the least competent academically qualified person to link Gnosticism with Early Christian theology. The popular notion is that gnosticism is a Christian heresy, that was suppressed and/or attacked an ultimately eliminated in conflict, irenic and not so much, during the early church. In my recent class on the New Testament, we were taught about the ideas of one of the leading authorities on Gnosticism, Birger Pearson who argues something different. Gnosticism was not a Christian heresy. It was a completely separate religion which in fact predated Christianity.
Gnosticisms primary beliefs include:
- Belief in an overarching monadic God.
- Creation was not performed by the overarching deity but by a demiurge, a lesser (demonic) deity. Material creation, being ruled and controlled by mostly demonic entities is not good.
- The goal for the eternal mortal essences is to escape and transcend the material creation. The secret teaching and knowledge (gnosis) is how this is the method by which this is accomplished.
This is a different religion. Gnosticism was very syncretic. It brought in different and other religious traditions into their mythologies for their purposes.
Some striking differences between Christian stories. The archon (demiurge) creating and in charge of Earth was known as the “Child of Chaos”, the Fool, and/or the Blind God. Similarities between this and either the Hebrew unnamed God or the Christian Trinity are not slight. In the Garden of Eden story, in gnostic tradition, the villain of the piece was the God of the garden and the hero? Satan, the serpent.
Early Christian theologians contended against gnosticism, but not as a Christian heresy but as a competing but different religion.
Posted in Christianity.
By Mark
– March 29, 2010
Enter the Seraglio
Saturday night my wife and I went to the symphony. One of the pieces we heard was Symphony no. 4 by Sergei Prokofiev. In the program notes, one of the things we were informed about this symphony was that it borrowed heavily from an earlier work a ballet entitled The Prodigal Son. Furthermore we were informed that the third movement borrowed from a section of the ballet which introduced (for sex appeal) a seductive dance by a female dancer/love interest, added to the story to increase popularity apparently. So when the the third movement came around, I was expecting seductive or melodic patterns that would fit a seductive dance. Yet I got a surprise. The third movement, to my ears, was quirky humorous and, well, goofy. To my minds eye, the exotic dance would feature a grinning minx with strident makeup, mismatched pigtails, a flouncy dress, and a puckish grin and attitude.
Here’s my point. While this is on occasion what I might find captivating and perhaps seductive … I think of myself unusual in this regard. I’ll freely admit, for example, in the Magic Flute, I’m more interested in the Popageno/Popagena love story than Tamino/Pamina story. What do you think of humor and puckish elements as part of seduction?
Posted in Cultural Commentary, Short Thoughts.
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By Mark – March 31, 2010