The loneliness at the heart

I have become convinced of late that there is one major driver for social media and many other uses of the Internet: Loneliness.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. When I am old, perhaps physically infirm, and many of my nearest and dearest have passed away or moved away, I earnestly hope that I have Internet access, because it will leave me less isolated than I otherwise would be. If my children are married and living far away, perhaps I can see my grandchildren's pictures electronically, or talk to them on Skype or whatever equivalent has sprung into being by then. I've actually tried to do a little research to see if nursing homes are getting with the program and getting Internet for their residents. (Answer: Not very widely yet, but some are. Hopefully the practice will spread.)

There is nothing wrong with using the Internet to keep in touch with family and friends who are far away, to read up on what is happening in the world, to participate in discussions with people you would otherwise never meet. This can actually be a healthy thing.

But it isn't enough. Since man left the Garden, he has essentially been a lonely creature. Those of us blessed enough to be happily married have communion with our best beloved, but that only mitigates the essential human loneliness. It does not entirely take it away. This may well be the phenomenon that Augustine describes when he says, to God, "Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee." But what it feels like is something more ordinary and human, less mystical.

The Internet simultaneously (partially) relieves human loneliness and exacerbates it. If one spends a lot of time on blogs or on Facebook, one gets used to an extremely high level of interaction. At any time one can get on-line and agree or disagree with someone, somewhere in the world. One doesn't have to stop and face a sense of loss or of lack, a sense that nothing else will fill. One doesn't have to listen to the clock tick. If one never stops to listen, if one always turns to the Internet so as not to hear the silence, then that is a bad thing. That is an addiction. And it is well known that addictions do not satisfy; they only produce more craving. In this case, the craving is for communication, especially with people who agree and are kind, for happiness and a sense of friendliness and community, even if only a virtual community. Therein lies part of the problem. A virtual community neither makes the demands nor offers the satisfactions of hands-on friendship. And, while it may seem that virtual friendships are easier to lose (because we get so many more opportunities to annoy one another and to disagree on the Internet), there are other ways in which virtual friendships are easier to keep. We can put our best foot forward, not be annoyed by each others' in-person habits, and nobody moves away from Facebook. Thus we think (at least for a moment) that we are being satisfied by something that is, at best, a shadow of the incarnate, in-person presence of those we love.

Loss--by death, by moving, or by a falling out--forces us to realize that nothing and no one can take the place of those who are gone. Loss is a fact of reality. The Internet encourages us to forget or ignore that reality.

In the end, in this life, we each go on alone. At some level, despite the dearness of our dear ones, despite friendship, despite the fellowship of Christian love, despite the Communion of the Saints, and, God knows, despite Facebook, we live alone. Even more: We die alone. There is only One, whom we love without having seen, who is with us always, even unto the ends of the earth. That promise, however, gives less comfort for human loss than one might think.

People talk as if grief were just a feeling--as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it's not the sort of comfort they supply there. (Letters of C.S. Lewis, 3 December, 1959)

We await a day when there will be no more loneliness and no more loss, when we will be forever with Christ and with those others whom we love in heaven. We cannot have it now, and to try to mimic it is almost certainly a mistake. Listen, then, to the ticking clock, listen to the silence, submit with patience and without bitterness to Time and Change, the reapers, and live in quiet hope of the day when death itself shall die, when we ourselves shall be changed, and when we will be alone no more.

John C. Wright has done it again

As regular readers know, I occasionally find that, when my own wellsprings of inspiration are at low ebb, the sci-fi writer and blogger John C. Wright has a post that is better than anything I could possibly write under the circumstances, so I link that instead. So it is this week. I am in the midst of researching a paper on God and time (a fascinating subject) and am trying not to get involved in much on-line controversy. I'm also not forcing myself to write new blog posts filled with my own material. So head on over and read this polemical gem on the leftist worldview from Wright. As always with Wright, it's long, not to say wordy, but it's really a beautiful thing. Here are a few quotes. (If you don't find that the first quotes I give "do it for you," skip to the last one. It's the best.)

By their theory, no fact and no conclusions of common sense are neutral. All are tainted by the original sin of bias and bigotry. The act of bringing up a fact is never, never an act done in the impersonal pursuit of truth. For them there is no truth, and even if there were, there is no impartiality. The act of bringing up a fact is always an act of aggression, an imposition, if not an attack.

This explains our first paradox. They are decent and honest people. Their motive for avoiding reason is compassion, because they wish not to be tempted by hate, bigotry, or thought crime. However, once reason is forbidden, facts, common sense, and evidence, likewise are as meaningless to them as to a Buddhist to whom all the world is illusion.

[snip] 

A man who claims to be a faster runner can be put to the race; a man who claims to be the greater poet can be asked to read his sonnet; but a man who claims only superiority in an invisible and imponderable spiritual realm can be put to no human test.

In short, because Leftism is the theory that truth is impossible, and reason is a hate-crime, it requires self deception. Because self deception provokes guilt and humiliation, the self esteem of the Leftist is continually uncertain. Because it is uncertain, it must be uplifted. The only emotion loud and broad enough to smother the powerful emotions of guilt and humiliation is the uplift of sanctimonious pride, pride in one’s own perfect righteousness.

[snip]

At this point, you may be wondering why, if they only judge by intentions and not by results, the Liberals are not sometimes helpful to those they wish to help? Surely raising the minimum wage sometimes produces a raise in real wages instead of producing more unemployment? At least once? Surely sometimes putting honey and water in the gas tank instead of petrol will create good gas mileage? At least once? Surely sometimes, by accident, they get it right? Even a stopped clock is right at least twice a day.

So the fact that they judge by intentions and not by results is not a satisfactory explanation. Why are they predictably, inevitably, and always wrong?

They are always wrong because their theory of morality springs out of their theory of epistemology. Their theory of epistemology is that there is no truth. Hence, their theory of morality is that there is no right and wrong.

[snip]

All rules by definition are crooked, part of a con game. Any attempt to excuse, explain or defend the rules is either misguided or malign.

The only success under crooked and malign rule is by definition a crooked and malign success. It is a successful crime. 

Hence the Leftist must punish success.

This means not just monetary success but imponderable success. The Leftist must not only take money from the rich, he must take fame from the famous and glory from the glorious. Just as he must give money to the poor out of restitution for the crooked roulette wheel of life, so too he must give fame to the infamous and glory to the shameful.

[snip]

If the rich and powerful tilting the wheel of life is the only explanation for life’s miseries and sorrows and failures, they are always to blame for everything. Everything. These days, the rich men and rich nations are blamed for warm weather.

Here is the explanation of the third paradox: If life is a game of pure chance, then the winners of life, the happy people, the rich, the famous, the saintly, all of them must have somehow rigged or twisted the institutions, laws and customs, and all the rules of life to their own advantage. Since all property is theft, all property owners are thieves.

Hence, all life’s winners, heroes and captains of industry and saints and famous artists, everyone worthy of admiration for any reason, all of them, all the winners, the theory demands they be nothing but outrageous cheats.

Also, they must be outrageous liars for denying that they are cheats. Worse, they are all con men for deceiving their victims into playing.
The logic applies to wealth as well as to power and virtue, including such things as applause and glory and dignity. Hence, combined with the pathological and neurotic smug self-sanctimony, the Leftist, as long as he be true his theory, must demean whatever is worthy, true, successful, and good, and reward and praise whatever is unworthy, untrue, unsuccessful, and bad.

Let us call this the Principle of Inversion. The Principle of Inversion says that whatever or whoever Reason calls good and decent is in fact bad and wretched, and whatever Reason calls bad is in fact good.

[snip]

The Leftist theory of economics produces poverty.

This is the precise and diametric opposite of the prediction made by the theory. A more fair and even distribution of the winning numbers of life’s spinning wheel should have produced more wealth for everyone. The super-genius five-year central economical planning of the Soviet Union should have outproduced the gross inefficiencies of unplanned capitalists America by an order of magnitude. Instead the Soviets ended up eating each others’ heads in starvation, and the Americans grew overweight. The theory not only failed, it failed in a remarkable, spectacular, astounding, astronomical way.

The same result obtains for the application of their theory wherever it is applied.

The Welfare State should not have abolished the family structure among inner city blacks and, even if it did, the loss of the family should not have malign side effects on child rearing.

Turning all the inmates of insane asylums loose on the streets for some reason not named should not have lead to an increase of the number of insane street people. Being lenient on criminals should not produce an increase in violent crime. Disarming the victims should not encourage attackers. Surrendering a war should produce victory, not defeat. Rewarding Jihadist violence by praising and funding them should decrease Jihadist violence. Socializing the student loan industry will lower costs. Socializing the medical insurance industry will not only allow you to keep your plan and your doctor, your premiums will actually go down. and more people, rather then less, will be covered by health care the moment less health care is available to them. Goods can be rationed without rationing. And so on and so on and so on. 

In each case, the theory fails in the most remarkable and jaw-droppingly spectacular fashion possible.

The Leftist has only two choices here: accept reality, in which case he is no longer a Leftist, or deny reality, in which case his loyalty to the ideals of Leftism becomes rarefied and refined, and he become of their Cathari, the Pure Ones, an arhat of enlightenment.

[snip]

And here is the best of all, a handful of sentences which could have come from Chesterton:

Anything that reminds them of innocence or truth is abhorrent to them. It makes them uneasy, lest their master raise his whip of iron and punish them. Therefore the very people and things the addicts of self righteousness hate the most are saints, women like Mother Theresa, and heroes, figures like George Washington, and captains of industry, men like Henry Ford. The things they hate most are ideals like Justice and Mercy. And they despise and hate the innocent most of all: the greatest part of their fury and destructiveness is turned against those two figures which, for all times past, were the symbols and embodiments of purity and innocence: the virgin and the child.

Wright continues,

If the reader doubts that Leftist hate virgins, let him inspect any dozen Hollywood movies taken at random, or visit any dozen college campus dorms at random after hours, or read any two dozen essays by feminists. If the reader doubt that the Left hates children, let him read the account of what goes on in an abortion mill, or read how the British Health Service disposes of the tiny corpses.

Indeed, and if anyone doubts that the leftists hate virgins, let him read perverse postmodern theory with its glorification of every sort of perversion. Or let him contemplate the cesspool of sex education in the schools, which attacks children and virginity at one and the same time, destroying the mental innocence of the young and moving them toward destroying their own physical innocence.

We wrestle against great evils. Polemics like Wrights can assure those who find themselves isolated and fighting on the side of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful that it is indeed the world that is insane, having accepted an insane philosophy. This can, in turn, hearten us not to compromise with this evil but to fight it consistently wherever we are called upon to do so.

Why might pastors preach about...this thing rather than something else?

I saw somebody griping on the Internet the other day. What's new?

But, especially since I've been neglecting this blog a bit recently, I decided to post something about it. The specific gripe was that pastors seem to preach more about p--- (I'm going to use this typography through this post so as not to attract bots, creeps, and spam) more than about adultery. I haven't run into this in my own experience, but I'll take it as read that this particular person has seen a trend in which pastors preach more against the former than the latter.

Why is this foolish, bad, or inexplicable?

Here, just off the top of my head, are reasons why a pastor might reasonably have that emphasis in his preaching:

1) The pastor might easily have more reason to believe that the members of his congregation are using p--- than are engaging in physical adulterous relationships. In fact, he might have reason to believe that a far larger number of his members are sinning in the former way than in the latter.

2) The pastor might have reason to believe that members of his congregation think that p--- isn't really so bad because it isn't "real sex." He might well think he needs to try to dispel this dangerous confusion.

3) The pastor might reasonably believe that physical adultery, being connected with a particular person, is less likely to lead to lifelong addiction. If a person involved in an adulterous affair repents and forsakes that sin with that person, he is less likely to have a lifelong, destructive habit thereafter that he cannot break than a person who repents but has developed a p--- addiction. Hence the greater need to warn against getting involved in p--- and the greater need to warn parents so that their children do not fall into this evil and greatly harm their entire lives. (Children are not going to be literally accidentally getting involved in even physical fornication, much less adultery with a married person, though of course they may be abused by an adult, which is a different matter. But children have literally accidentally viewed p--- on the Internet and then found themselves sucked in and damaged for life.)

4) Relatedly, it is often true that one can break off contact with the other member of an adulterous affair, whereas p--- is constantly available.

5) Since a person in an adulterous affair has to deal with the willingness or unwillingness of another specific person, he cannot readily move, in the course of that affair, into every possible form of abominable perversion conceived in the dark depths of the fallen human psyche, but there are no similar limits to what is available for consumption in the world of p---. Thus a person involved in (heterosexual) adultery is less likely to be adding all manner of vile perversion and unnaturalness to the sin against chastity itself, and in the process developing a taste for such darkness, thus confusing his own sexual nature possibly for life. (See #3.) (Readers, please notice my deliberately vague language at this point. Similarly vague language will be expected in comments, or they will not be published.)

6) At risk of being thought to be excusing adultery, which I emphatically am not, or of applying touchy-feely criteria, I'm willing to add that a relationship that involves a real other person is in one sense and just to that extent less spiritually and psychologically unhealthy than a non-relationship that involves the deliberate objectification of other persons. This is all the more true when the media form is deliberately and aggressively degrading of those other persons.

A counterweight to these considerations is the fact that, precisely because of the real personal bonding, a person engaged in an adulterous affair is more likely to break up his marriage as a result, because he believes that he is in love with the woman he is having an affair with. (Or, in the case of a woman, believes she is in love with the man.) That's no doubt true, and it is serious. But I think in terms of how much a pastor preaches, it is probably outweighed by considerations 1 and 2, above. Of course, we also have to ask what counts as "preaching about" something. If a pastor mentions adultery in a list, does that count? But if we are talking about preaching at some length, it seems perfectly understandable that a pastor would concentrate on those extremely serious sins which he has more reason to suspect his congregants are actually engaging in and, worse, excusing.

The sort of gripe that prompted this post is, I'm afraid, likely to come from those who feel that somehow men get a bad rap in today's Christian world. I fear that the idea is that the pastors are being "too hard" on men by preaching disproportionately about p---. To be honest, my greater concern about a pastor preaching about p--- is that I think children of all ages should be welcome in the church service, and I wouldn't want to have to explain to my little child what Pastor Smith was talking about this morning. But I'm entirely unsympathetic to the idea that pastors should preach less about p--- because that's "taking it out on" the men in the congregation. If either men or women are hurting and degrading themselves and their marriages (present marriages or future marriages) in this fashion, they need to be told not only that it is sin but that it is dark, dangerous, and harmful. There is no need for some sort of "affirmative action" in preaching topics so that no one group feels "preached at" more than any other. And if a pastor thinks his members are involved in this, he is showing right perspective if he recognizes the urgency of trying to stop it.

What is so bad about unifying your worldview and your self-selected groups?

I was recently conversing with a young woman who is now Catholic but was raised fundamentalist Baptist. It sounds like her fundamentalist Baptist upbringing was even more strict than mine, so I don't want to lean too heavily on the fact that my experience has been different than hers. What I do want to talk about a little is this: She repeatedly said, as if this were definitely a bad thing, that the church groups of her youth were "white, middle-class, and Republican" and that they made one feel that this entire worldview, including economic ideas, was bound up with their Christianity. When pressed, she came down rather heavily on the alleged badness of uniting "right-wing" economic views with Christianity.

Had I been quicker on the uptake (I was too busy trying to think about how to give some pushback while remaining tactful) I would have pointed out that bishops of her own Church repeatedly tie up economics and immigration, neither of which are actually doctrinally essential, with Christianity. Indeed, it is considered to be something of the glory of Catholicism that it has economic views and economic encyclicals, some of which are a bit of an embarrassment to any free-market economists who also happen to be Catholic. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Is it really a baaaad exclusionary tendency for "Bob Jones Baptists" to think of free-market economics, with a strong emphasis on human fallenness, human responsibility, and the dangers of centralized government as, in some sense or other, part of their Christian worldview but inclusive, loving, and not at all an overreach or "tying the gospel up with politics" for the Pope and bishops to think of anti-market economics and "immigration reform" as part of their Christian worldview?

But more: Any particular church or parish is going to be to no small extent a self-selected group, because there are always other places for people to go. It is perfectly normal human behavior to want to be able to talk about a variety of issues with one's friends at church, and it is perfectly normal human sociology for a tightly knit church to come to be to some degree homogenous across a variety of ideological issues. This is no doubt just as true of left-leaning local churches as of right-leaning local churches, especially when they are not "megachurches" and therefore actually have some sort of definite cohesion. Just how comfortable is a "white, middle-class Republican" going to feel in some of the evangelical churches presently catering to hipsters and seekers? How about at a Catholic church where the priest's sermons are often left-leaning in character?

It's important to remember too that to some degree the natural gravitation of like toward like is bound up with the idea that local churches should provide a sense of community. Perhaps one will get more diversity both of ideological and of sociological background if one's church is merely a place for the weekly meeting (e.g. the Mass) itself and is in no sense a larger community. If people scarcely know one another a church's de facto membership may be more diverse, but is that really what we want? Is it something we have a right to demand in the name of encouraging diversity?

Let me make it clear at this point that I actually do see both a tension in the church's goals, whether Protestant or Catholic, and also a distinctive way in which Catholicism is likely to be more diverse. As to the first of these, all churches are indeed trying to evangelize the lost. That evangelistic goal is going to have to mean a willingness to be friendly and welcoming towards those who come to one's church who don't fit in a purely social sense with those who are already there. It may well even mean explicit outreaches to all manner of people. Let me add here that one of the fundamentalist Baptist churches of my own upbringing has a regular outreach to the gospel mission and is by no means exclusionary of those "not like us" who show up at church. It is one of the most diverse churches I know, in economic, social, and racial terms.

As regards Catholicism, the emphasis on the Sacraments is in some ways orthogonal to the emphasis on community. Community is good, but if one is a real sacramentalist one goes to church in no small part to get the Sacraments, not to get together with other members of a club. I suspect that the "here comes everybody" character of Catholicism, of which many Catholics are rather proud, arises from the Sacraments. And that is not a bad thing.

Still, Catholics need community as well. I hear my traditionalist Catholic friends on the Internet talking about this all the time. Especially now, social conservatives are pretty lonely, and if your church (Catholic or Protestant) can be a community to encourage you rather than a place where you have to grit your teeth through left-wing platitudes in the sermon, so much the better.

So color me unimpressed with the complaint that the church of one's upbringing was too full of white, middle-class Republicans who were most comfortable with others like themselves. White, middle-class Republicans need Jesus too, and if they form church groups that look like themselves, they shouldn't be blamed any more than any other identifiable social group that forms church groups that look like themselves. Yes, as Christians we always have the tension created by the Great Commission, and we need to be aware of that. But if the upshot is still that a given church is mostly full of white, middle-class Republicans, it is not clear to me that this is per se cause for scorn or criticism. Yep, even if most of them believe in the free market.

The Drama of Divine Logic: "O What a Savior" and the Four Daughters of God

Ernie Haase's signature song is "O, What a Savior," below.

One line that bothers some theological purists is "But they searched through heaven, and they found a Savior to save a poor, lost soul like me." They searched? But the Incarnation and death of Jesus were part of God's plan from all eternity past. Whaddaya mean, they searched through heaven?

I'm glad to be able to cast a little historical light on the pedigree of the search through heaven. A trope in Medieval morality plays was a scene now known as "The Debate of the Four Daughters of God," derived from Bernard of Clairvaux. The four daughters of God are Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace. (See Psalm 85:10, "Mercy and truth are met together. Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.") After Adam and Eve sin, the four daughters have a falling out, with some saying that man should be simply punished and others saying that he should be given mercy. To reconcile the four daughters, God decrees the Incarnation and death of the Son. In a version which occurs in a mystery cycle known as the N-town plays or Coventry Cycle (circa 1450-1500), we find that "The Daughters put their unresolved problem to God the Son and he orders a search in heaven and earth for one who will die for Man. When this fails the Son accepts the role himself as [G]od and man concurrently."

An ancient pedigree indeed for the lyrics to a Southern gospel song, and one not lightly to be tossed away.

But still, it may be replied, ancient or not, it's all rubbish. Nobody had to search for the Son. God was never in any doubt about what He would do. This is all just an allegory, even if it was originally a medieval allegory.

Indeed. But an allegory for what?

God of His free choice decided to redeem man. Had it not been for that choice of God, mankind would have been lost. The search through heaven dramatizes that yawning chasm between what is and what might have been, that irrepressible drama of Divine freedom and human lostness. By stretching it out in the allegorical form of a search, we see just what it meant: The Son, willing but one will with the Father, eternally says "yes" to Incarnation, to suffering, to death. Without that...a blank. Dismay, disappointment, and death. A failed search, if you will. The eternal will of God has a strict internal logic, and bound up in that logic are all the "what ifs," all the drama of both Divine and human freedom. Enough drama to fill a few human allegorical plays, easily.

They searched through heaven, and they found a Savior, to save a poor, lost soul like me.

Testing God

We have it on high authority that we should not tempt (aka test) God. (Matthew 4:7)

It might seem that this means that we shouldn't seek evidence for the existence of God or the claims of Christianity, but any of my long-time or even short-time readers will know that that is the last use I would make of Jesus' injunction. The Bible also tells us that God has provided much evidence. Jesus emphasized his works as evidence of his being sent from the Father.

But there is a certain model of evidence that depends upon experiment and repeatability. In fact, some people have no other model for hard evidence, so when they think of "evidence for God," they immediately look around for some kind of test they can do to find out whether God is really there. The prosperity hacks and the verses they rip out of the context of the Bible as a whole and present as "divine promises" provide plenty of fodder for this. God promises, they say, to "pour down blessings" on those who give, so therefore, if you give, God will make you rich. Then, of course, we find out that plenty of such people don't get rich, so there y'go! God failed the test, the experimentum crucis has been done and has yielded a negative result. Christianity has been falsified!

This entire model of evidence for Christianity is flat wrong. God is not a physical law nor a physical process but a personal being. He gives evidence of his existence through many avenues, the most dramatic of which are miracles. Miracles are mighty acts of power that occur at a particular time and place and are thereafter available to historical inquiry. This does not make them subjective; it doesn't mean that they can be known only "by the eyes of faith." But it does mean that they are not something you can repeat in your back yard as a test.

All of this is related to some questions that I was recently asked about a couple of posts at an atheist site. The posts urged Christians to test God by praying sincerely for good things and then seeing how the alleged "promises" in the Bible of answered prayer are falsified. I'm reluctant to link the atheist site, because quite frankly, I think it's a mistake for Christians to get involved in lengthy, public, on-line debates with Internet atheists. Sincere inquirers are one thing, but even then it is better to communicate with them privately than in the form of a kind of gladiatorial contest surrounded by an often trollish and un-serious audience. At the same time, I'm afraid that, "God didn't answer my prayer" has probably led more than one soul to damnation. (I know of one case among my own acquaintances in which I later learned that the person excused his deconversion in this way.) So it is probably worth looking at some of these questions and at the verses that prompt them. I beg the reader's indulgence for some absence of organization in what follows, as it is a somewhat edited version of what was originally a personal e-mail.

Notice how [our atheist blogger] lumps things together. He lumps the fact that Jesus did miracles or that Paul was not killed when bitten by a snake together with verses that appear to promise answers to prayer and treats all of these as though they are part of some “Christians will have success” pattern of biblical promises. But this is ridiculous. Jesus was God! The apostles were showing signs and wonders as part of kicking off Christianity. It simply isn't true that the fact that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead means that all of us are supposed to be able to raise people from the dead.

Inconsistently, he also faults Christians for taking seriously all those places where the New Testament, especially, tells us to expect earthly troubles and persecution. He argues that this makes Jesus' promise never to leave us meaningless. But why so? If Jesus' promise never to leave us is a spiritual promise of His presence through our trials, a promise of spiritual strengthening, and a promise of carrying our souls through to everlasting life, how does the existence of those earthly trials make that promise meaningless? On the contrary, the expectation of trouble and persecution is far more deeply woven into the warp and woof of Christian theology than the relatively far fewer passages that appear in isolation to promise an earthly answer to prayer. That very fact should cause us to think twice (on the principle of comparing Scripture with Scripture) about taking those passages to be promises of earthly success. But the atheist wants to have it both ways. He wants to chide Christians for taking Jesus' promise of being with them spiritually through unpleasant trials as though that makes Jesus' promise meaningless, and he wants to fault some of them (Pentecostal snake handlers and prosperity preachers) for believing that Christianity promises earthly success. It's heads he wins, tales we lose. Christians are just wrong whether they look at the whole sweep of New Testament teaching and don't expect earthly success as a promise or whether they look at isolated passages and do expect earthly success as a promise.

Here follows a short digression on the long ending of Mark, in which we find Jesus predicting that Christians (or his apostles) will be able to pick up serpents and drink deadly poison without harm: This ending is considered not to have been part of the original manuscript of Mark entirely for textual reasons. The oldest manuscripts do not have this ending, and it appears that the original ending of Mark was lost. It happens to be the case that this obviates the need to deal with the “snake handling” verse, but that is not why the ending is rejected. Certainly the gospel would end very abruptly without the long ending, but that is a reason for believing that the original ending has been lost, not for insisting that the added ending is authentic. Note that this does not in any way call into question the genuineness of post-resurrection accounts in the other four gospels, even though treating the long ending of Mark as inauthentic involves cutting out the post-resurrection account in Mark itself. Whether or not Mark is in fact the oldest gospel (patristic evidence is that some version of Matthew was the oldest), we have no reason to accept the shallow, higher-critical evolutionary view that only what is in the oldest gospel is true and that everything else evolved in a legendary fashion from there. *All* of the gospels, including very strongly the *latest* gospel, John, show clear internal signs of eyewitness testimony and also of having an important degree of independence in their accounts. Nothing heavy rides on whether we have an authentic ending to Mark including a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus.

Now, back to the “promises” criticism: Any attempt to press Christians into adopting a prosperity gospel is monumentally unconvincing. One verse used for this purpose is 2 Cor. 9:6ff, in which the Apostle Paul urges the Christians to give generously to a collection he was gathering for the Christians at Jerusalem. Paul says that he who “sows generously” will also “reap generously.” These words have a strongly proverbial ring and are pretty clearly an allusion to a proverb. In fact, they sound much like Proverbs 11:24-25. Now, Proverbs are notoriously overstated, just because they are proverbs. Think of the English proverb, “What goes around comes around.” We can all think of counterexamples to this. Nobody takes it as an exceptionless truth. Nonetheless, we've seen enough examples to think it worth embodying in a proverb. A stitch in time doesn't always save nine, etc. Proverbs 11:24-25 is not giving some kind of divine promise but rather worldly wisdom. It is warning against stinginess and pointing out that sometimes being stingy causes you to end up literally poorer than you were before. (There's a whole Victorian novel in that picture right there!) Paul is citing this proverbial wisdom as part of urging the Corinthians to give, but for that very reason he should not be taken to be making a revealed promise of wealth as a result of giving. Moreover, below in the same passage, vs. 11, when Paul uses the phrase “enriched in everything...” he seems to be echoing I Corinthians 1:5 which says that the Corinthians are “enriched in everything” by God and clearly refers to spiritual gifts.

Once we clear away the fog, what we are left with is not a consistent pattern of actual divine promises of prosperity or of positive answers to prayer. What we find rather is a handful of verses that, taken in isolation, appear to be sweeping promises of answers to any prayers or at least to any serious and good prayers. There is, however, so much in Jesus' own teaching and in the apostles' teaching and practice that stands in opposition to the “promise of success” interpretation that that sweeping interpretation seems ruled out. The same Jesus who said, “Ask and ye shall receive,” “You shall do greater works than these,” and “Anything you ask, believing, you shall receive,” also said, “In this world you will have trouble,” “They will cast you out of the synagogue and kill you,” “Happy are you, when men persecute you,” and “Take up your cross and follow me.” If the “ask and receive” verses were really supposed to mean that we could ask for anything, or even anything serious and good, and receive it, then all the prophecies of persecution, all the calls to come and die with Jesus, would be meaningless. For it is in an obvious sense a serious and good thing, not a frivolous or wicked thing, to ask that God would rescue a Christian in danger of death or being persecuted for his faith or that God would heal the sick. And again, since the themes of suffering for Christ and growing through suffering are absolutely pervasive in Christianity, to the point of being of the essence of the Christian commitment, the handful of “ask and you shall receive” verses ought to be interpreted in a way that is consistent with these overwhelming and pervasive themes.

The same point applies to the book of James. It is James who says that “the prayer of faith will heal the sick,” but at the beginning of the book James says, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.” It seems clear that illness is an example of a trial that could be used by God to produce patience, which leads one to conclude that James didn't really think that all sick Christians would be healed by prayer.

Or again: The Apostle Paul did sometimes heal sick people miraculously, but in Philippians 2:27, Paul talks about the sickness of his friend and fellow-worker, Epaphroditus. He says that Epaphroditus was near to death but was healed and that God “had mercy on” Paul because of the sorrow Paul would have had if Epaphroditus had died. Paley says in the Horae Paulinae, and I agree with him, that the whole tenor of the passage implies that Epaphroditus was healed by secondary causes–that is to say, that he got better naturally. Otherwise, Paul presumably wouldn't have let him get so close to death before miraculously healing him. Apparently Paul's ability to heal by miracle was not a “sure thing,” nor does Paul say that the elders of the nearest church prayed over Epaphroditus, and, voila, he was immediately healed. His sickness was serious, it was a near thing, he almost died, but eventually got better. We can assume that Paul did pray for him, and in that sense Paul's prayers were answered, but evidently not in any dramatic or obviously miraculous fashion. Again, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that he himself had some sort of physical ailment, prayed for healing, and did not receive it.

And let us not forget that Our Lord Himself, the perfect petitioner, asked in the garden that the cup might pass from Him, but then added, “Nevertheless, thy will be done,” and of course did not receive His own petition.

So Christian teaching and practice seems to indicate that we should not expect any good prayer to be answered, nor should we expect to be able to engage willy-nilly in “faith healing.” We as Christians are responsible to take all of this Scriptural data into account, not to grab a few verses, take them at their most literal, and then insist on “holding God to” those as promises.

What, then, is the meaning of the problem passages? First, let me list what I right now (of course, I might be forgetting a couple) consider to be the remaining prima facie difficult verses.

Matthew 21:21-22, which includes “All things, whatsoever you shall ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive.” The parallel passage in Mark (11:24) says, “believe that you receive, and you shall have them.”

John 14:12-13, which includes the promise that “he that believeth on me” will do “the works” that Jesus has done–“the works” being a phrase which refers clearly to miracles in vs. 11. In vs. 13 we have, “Whatsoever you shall ask in my name, that will I do...”

Matthew 18:19 “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”

James 5:14-15, apparently promising that “the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up...”

I think a number of options are open to us, and we shouldn't be dogmatic. C.S. Lewis discusses this in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly On Prayer, on pp. 59-61. There he conjectures that the apparent promises of receiving whatever one asks in faith may be intended to apply to people who are, or at least are at that time, in a special state such that they have special insight into what God intends to do and therefore ask for it.  In the Protestant tradition we hear stories about a man named George Mueller who ran an orphanage and may have been one of these people. (Of course, we don't hear of any cases where Mueller prayed and didn't get what he asked for, so we may have a case of cherry picking.) The stories are rather striking and always show Mueller as calmly confident in the result and then some event, natural in itself but a remarkable coincidence, which brings about the result. So perhaps Lewis's conjecture is correct, in which case most of us should just keep following the “thy will be done” model, which was good enough for Jesus Christ Himself at one point in His life.

There are other options for specific passages. For example, the James passage specifically says that the sick person should confess his sins and that, if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven. Paul in I Corinthians 11 says that many were sick and some had actually died among the Corinthians because of their disrespect for the Holy Communion. Perhaps James had in mind situations where the sickness was a punishment for sin. That shouldn't be taken to mean that all sickness is a punishment for sin; far from it. Merely that this might have been the sort of situation James was thinking of when he says that the prayer of faith would save the sick person and that the Lord would heal him.

John 14, where Jesus says that those who believe in him will do “greater” works, immediately says that this is “because I go unto my Father.” He strongly emphasizes the coming of the Holy Ghost, which he said could not happen until after the Ascension (going to his Father). He may therefore be referring both to the special gifts (such as the miraculous gift of speaking in tongues) given to the disciples as a sign and special aid from the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and also to their (in one sense) miraculous success in spreading the Gospel with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 18:19, which Lewis lists in an essay in Christian Reflections as particularly problematic, comes (at least in the discourse as we have it) immediately after the promise of the power of binding and loosing committed to the disciples in vs. 18. “Whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” This verse apparently alluded to a Jewish tradition that the “right” rabbinical rulings concerning the keeping of Judaic law had special status with God, so that those rulings were ratified in heaven. Here Jesus appears to be giving that sort of power as his “council of rabbis” to make rulings to his Apostles, a power that they have to exercise later, in Acts, when questions arise about whether the Gentiles have to keep the Jewish law. Verse 19 which says that “if any two” agree it will be “done for them” by the Father may be a reiteration, specifically to the Apostles, of their special authority.

You can take or leave any of these interpretations as you find them more or less plausible. The more important take-home lesson is how few of them there are and the necessity, in the light of a much larger biblical consensus suggesting the good of suffering, of not interpreting them as a blank check from God promising earthly answers to prayer for any Christians who asks with confidence and sincerity.

Let us by all means look for the truth and follow the evidence. But let us not create “crucial tests” for Christianity where they do not exist. We have to take our evidence as it comes and give it its due weight, not manufacture an artificial set of requirements that embody the form in which we would prefer to receive evidence. If one is locked into a test-tube model of evidence, even empirical evidence, one will miss much that is genuinely and objectively evidential in nature while simultaneously thinking that Christianity has somehow "failed." That such a mistake could have eternal consequences is a good reason for being careful not to fall into it.

"Deconstruct Heterosexuality"? Say what?

This extremely poor post at First Things blog ought to require no response, just because it is so very, very wrongheaded. It ought to suffice to say that the author, one Michael Hannon, suggests (I hesitate to say "argues") that we should "deconstruct heterosexuality," that is to say, that we should cease to believe that being heterosexual, which most of us would call having normal attraction to the opposite sex, is a real part of individual human identity at all, much less that it is per se healthy and normative. His suggestions are festooned about with many silly statements about the history of mankind, apparently garnered from academic "queer theory." Shouldn't that brief synopsis (if you must read it, I think you will see that it is accurate) be enough to cause at least any Christian conservative to conclude that the article is completely confused and not worth his time? You would like to think. Unfortunately, one of my at least somewhat conservative Facebook friends linked to the piece with apparent approval while another on-line conservative friend sent the link to me by e-mail with explicit approval. Talk about "deceiving even the elect"! I would have ignored it after the first, but I was rather shocked by the second incident of approval. And hey, I wrote so much to the second person in e-mail that I figured it was a good opportunity to put up my criticisms here on my somewhat neglected personal blog. With additions. Because this article is so bad, so wrongheaded, that I keep thinking of more things to say.

Now, I've not really had a lot of respect for the First Things blog qua entity for a long time. They have a huge stable of writers who say all kinds of things and are all over the map--the good, the bad, and the ugly. They've become rather enamored lately of what is known as the "new homophile" movement, which would have been enough to lose my respect all by itself. Blogger Joshua Gonnerman is an example. The idea of that movement, speaking broadly, is that homosexual identity is somehow a good thing, a kind of gift, really, bestowing special insights and stuff on those who have it, as long as you are chaste and don't lust. And that people who so identify shouldn't be asked to give up their identity or think of it as "identifying themselves with their temptations to sin." Even though the "new homophiles" are mostly (all?) Roman Catholic, they get pretty uneasy when one uses the Catholic Church's designation of "intrinsically disordered" for their desires.

In that context, one might regard this piece by Hannon as a kind of counterweight. Hannon is explicit in rejecting homosexuality as an identity, and one of his reasons is that very reason--namely, that we shouldn't identify ourselves with our inclinations to sin. Hannon is also concerned about the fact that young people agonize (as they shouldn't have to) over what their sexual identity is, whether they might "be gay." He is bothered by the fact that homosexual identity is treated as innate and immutable and that young people are now nervous about developing close friendships with members of the same sex lest this mean that they "are gay." With all of these concerns I agree, and that's probably the last good thing you'll see me say here about Hannon's piece, because that's all that is good about it.

The concerns about exposing young people to the idea that they "might be gay" and the harm that this does to them, including to their friendships, have been explored far more eloquently by Anthony Esolen, here, for instance. Esolen has also trenchantly answered the "new homophiles" here without any trendy nonsense about deconstructing anything, and certainly not deconstructing heterosexuality, of all things!

Hannon, either because his head has been addled by reading queer theory or because he wants to be even-handed, or maybe both, is not willing to stop at saying that homosexuality should not be regarded as a part of personal identity. He must go on (as the title of his post attests) to say that neither should heterosexuality. In fact, he informs us quite seriously that the concept of heterosexuality was invented in the late 1800's. In the 1860's, to be exact. As an historical thesis, this has all the virtues that "things fall up" has as a scientific thesis. (Hannon apparently got the claim from Michel Foucault, that fount of accurate, unbiased historical information and model of intellectual rigor and clarity.) Let's not quibble about words. I make no etymological claims about when the word "heterosexuality" was invented, because I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard the word before my own adulthood, which was long after the 1860's. But the concept that it is normal and healthy for men to desire women and for women to desire men, that, indeed, these normal and healthy desires are part of the very cement of all human society, and that part of being a normal man or a normal woman is having an "orientation," a telic attraction, toward the opposite sex, making that orientation part of one's normal individual identity, is as old as mankind, as old as the day when the Lord God said, "It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him an helpmeet."

Or listen to St. Paul:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. (Romans 1:26-27)

See that part about "vile affections" and what is "against nature" as opposed to the "natural use of the woman"? That, my friends, is the "gay-straight divide" which Hannon tells us was an invention of the 1860's. The "natural use of the woman" is what a sexually healthy man desires. That which is "against nature" is what homosexuals desire. It's really very simple. And it wasn't invented in the 1860's.

St. Paul's identification of heterosexual intercourse as being natural looks like the sort of "heteronormativity" that Hannon wants us to reject. Perhaps Hannon should lecture St. Paul to the effect that such heteronormativity creates "pride" and "pathetically uncritical and unmerited self-assurance." But all such sophistical rhetoric does nothing to change the one paralyzing fact: Homosexual desires and acts are not only contrary to chastity, they are also contrary to nature. Normal heterosexual intercourse may well be (in specific instances) a sin against chastity but is not a sin against nature. No amount of talk-talk and worry about heterosexual "pride" can change the fact that there is a fundamental asymmetry between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The former is a gift, God's created engine for the perpetuation of the human race and for the generation of much love and beauty. The latter is a perverted and tragic disorder.

And what pernicious nonsense Hannon talks about pride and heterosexuality:

But heterosexuality, in its pretensions to act as the norm for assessing our sexual customs, is marked by something even worse: pride, which St. Thomas Aquinas classifies as the queen of all vices.

Please. So imagine a mother whose daughters have always, since childhood, noticed handsome and/or charming men. Imagine a father whose son has blushed over the beauty of women. Suppose that this mother and this father regard their children's inclinations as part of a beautiful, natural, God-given plan for the world. Suppose that they regard themselves as stewards whose job it is to guide these natural, powerful, God-given instincts in the right direction, their job to bestow, in fear and trembling and with God's help, wisdom and guidance upon these budding young women and young men. Is this pride? Is it pride for the children themselves to believe these things about the naturalness of their own feelings? Far from it.

Imagine that we were beset with a dirt-eating activist contingent in our society who tried to make out that eating dirt is normal. Would it be anything other than nonsense on stilts to chide those who say, "The desire to eat food is normal. The desire to eat dirt is deviant and disordered" for fostering pride by such declarations of obvious truth?

Now, someone might say, Hannon wants us to emphasize married sexuality rather than heterosexuality as the norm. What could be the problem with that? Since it is set expressly in opposition to the normalizing of heterosexual desire, lots and lots. First of all, if we ditch the very concept of heterosexuality as a natural, telic orientation in anyone who isn't married, how is anybody ever going to get married? Call me over-literalistic if you will, but it's important to remember as one reads heady talk like Hannon's about "deconstructing heterosexuality" and about how "heterosexuality blinds us to sin" that if unmarried people didn't have heterosexual desires they would never become married people! If churches and other organizations didn't regard heterosexuality as normal and natural, they would have no reason to provide, for example, opportunities for young people to get to know each other and hopefully meet mates and get married.

Girls need to be given a picture of themselves as girls and boys as boys during their whole lives, from long before they are actually married, and part of that picture is the understanding and expectation that, in due time, they will be attracted to members of the opposite sex and that this is perfectly natural. Nor is this sort of gradual heterosexual self-awareness appropriate solely in relation to the one and only one person they will actually marry. It need not be a case of lust for young women to notice men, including men they know they are never going to marry, and to recognize that they find those men attractive or unattractive, to evaluate and even analyze those instinctive attractions, to decide, for example, when they are wise or unwise. And the same mutatis mutandis for young men. To hold, as Hannon urges us to hold, that attraction to the opposite sex should not be considered an important part of one's normal and innate identity any more than same-sex attraction is is a psychologically dangerous thesis. Adopting it would be utterly disastrous for parenthood. For this reason alone it is to be hoped that Christian parents completely reject Hannon's misguided advice if they should happen to read it. The solution to the tragedy of children who agonize over their sexual identity is not the deconstruction of heterosexuality but rather a "heteronormativity" so absolute as to be beyond doubt or question, a "heteronormativity" that gives children a secure background against which to set themselves and in which to grow up.

Here is another point: In general the relations of the sexes are part of what makes the world beautiful and interesting. When a gentleman holds a door for a lady or even compliments her respectfully on her appearance or when a lady dresses nicely because there will be gentlemen present at some meeting, this is all entirely good and appropriate as far as it goes. The parties need not be married to one another at all. Certainly such recognition of the presence of members of the opposite sex and appreciation of them, even of their physical attractiveness, can descend into crudity and lust, but it need not do so. None of us should want to live in an androgynous world. Nor should we be reacting to our own pornified world by trying to turn all male-female interactions into androgynous interactions unless they are between people actually married to one another. So, no: Gender identity and even sexual identity cannot and should not be confined solely to "married identity," and heterosexual identity in these areas is normal whereas homosexual identity is not. That is one of the places where the "new homophiles" err. They want to create some space, for homosexuals, for a category such as I have just described for innocent heterosexual appreciation. There is no such space, however, precisely because homosexuality is intrinsically disordered.

A central fallacy of Hannon's post consists in the strenuous attempt to treat homosexual inclinations and heterosexual inclinations as on a par. In this Hannon actually agrees with the "new homophiles." They, like him, want to treat homosexual desires in a similar way (as much as possible) to the way one treats heterosexual desires. Their solution is to treat homosexual desires as, somehow, a positive thing, a gift, and part of one's identity. That puts them to some degree (except that they must not be acted upon) on a par with heterosexual desires. Hannon, too, wants to treat the two even-handedly, yet his solution is to say that neither is a normal part of identity and that any identification of oneself in connection with one's sexuality merely blinds one to sin. What neither group is willing to do is to recognize the absolutely fundamental asymmetry between heterosexual and homosexual desires. The reason that the former are a normal part of identity is because they are really part of nature, really part of God's design for the world. Masculinity and feminity are important aspects of reality, and our recognition and celebration of them is an important part of being human. The reason that homosexual desires are an unhealthy source of identity is because they are disordered. Identifying oneself as intrinsically "a homosexual" really is identifying oneself with one's inclinations to sin. This is not so for being heterosexual.

It may be replied to all of this that I am just out of touch with the world of 2014 and don't understand the extreme perversions of "heterosexuality" that many people are being exposed to and developing a horrible taste for--e.g., via pornography. This ain't the 1950's, so maybe we shouldn't celebrate heterosexual desire. No, dear reader, I assure you. Though I do indeed try to follow the injunction of Philippians 4:8 to think on whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and of good report, I am indeed aware that people can be inclined to genuine perversions which happen to be carried out with members of the opposite sex. Even without going into any lurid detail, one can see this merely by considering that a pedophile man may desire little girls.

What, then? Is the solution to this to reject or deny the beauty of natural attraction between the sexes and of the natural recognition of the attractiveness of the opposite sex? God forbid. If anything, we need more and more attempts to resurrect that old world and that old vision. Hence, my deliberately dated references above to relations between ladies and gentlemen in public situations.

Moreover, to go back to Hannon's post, how does the existence of sexual perversions involving males with females support Hannon's thesis that heterosexuality should be "deconstructed" and that its "deconstruction" is an "opportunity" for Christians? In short, it doesn't support it one smidgen. Since God did indeed make men and women and did indeed intend them for one another, since normal heterosexual desires are indeed natural, Hannon's denial of "heteronormativity" is just flat wrong. No amount of twisting or perversion of the sexual instinct on the part of (some of) those who are not homosexuals can possibly change the fact that he is wrong. It simply does not follow from the fact that there are unhealthy urges and acts involving members of the opposite sex that there are no healthy urges and acts. Indeed, the only healthy human sexual urges and acts are between two people who are members of opposite sexes. If Hannon thinks it is "prideful" to point that out and to recognize it in society, then he just has a war on with reality.

I would go so far as to say that for Christians, who have both general and special revelation at their disposal, to join in "deconstructing heterosexuality" as Hannon suggests is so badly confused and so wildly irresponsible as to be actually sinful. Such a "deconstruction" can only do harm, not good. Let us join in promoting "heteronormativity" in every venue where we can, and most of all in our homes.

"I need it" doesn't mean "is a basic human need"

Time for an economics post, as some slight attempted atonement for my neglect of my personal blog. (I have to some degree kept up posting during the same period at What's Wrong With the World, so be sure to check in there from time to time.)

Oh, digression before I even get started: If you love J.R.R. Tolkien and/or are skeptical of movie versions of great works of literature, or if you are interested in how to make a work of fantasy utterly stupid, do not miss John C. Wright's takedown of the most recent Peter Jackson hobbit movie. I had no intention of seeing the movie anyway, but reading Wright's review is worthwhile even if you never see the movie. In fact, it'll probably prevent you from ever wanting to, and reading it will be a better use of your time than going to the movie. Sometimes I have to admit that Wright is a little too wordy, but this time it was fine, just fine. He could go on at length with no complaint from me, because he was just so darned funny. Though "lol" has become an overused Internet pseudo-word, in this case I really did laugh out loud, repeatedly. Warning: Pictures of mostly unclad girl warriors included in the post. They are part of Wright's satiric comment on the movie's gratuitous inclusion of an inauthentic, not-in-the-book warrior elf chick. Not that John C. Wright needs much excuse, mind you, to include pictures of scantily clad girl warriors. He does it in other posts sometimes apparently just for its own sake. Anyway, tolle lege, and enjoy.

Now, moving on to my own post...

It makes sense to me to say that, if some society or country frequently faces famines in which large numbers of its citizens starve to death, there is probably something wrong with that country's economy. It doesn't absolutely have to be something morally wrong. It could be some vast failure of prudence caused by stupidity. It could be a well-intentioned ideology that actually creates shortages. We all know people whose economic sense appears to be nil but who aren't actually bad. Some country might be run by such people. On the other hand, there might be moral wrong behind the problem--graft, corruption, theft, anarchy. In general, if a country has the rule of law and a sensible economic system, especially in the 21st century, most people will be able to have the bare necessities of life in that country, either by means of working, by means of being supported by relatives, or by means of accepting charity or government aid.

But we must distinguish those extremely vague and harmless comments from the proposition that, if I need x, even if I genuinely do need x in order to survive, x should be fairly readily affordable for me. It depends entirely on what x is. If I have a rare disorder that means that I will die if I don't have weekly blood transfusions, then maybe my society isn't rich enough that I can get that without extraordinary economic help. Suppose that I need some expensive medication in order to survive. It doesn't follow from the fact that I need it that, if that medication is expensive and I may not be able to afford it, "something is wrong." I don't have a cause of grievance against society for not meeting my "basic needs" or making sure that I have what I "need to live" if there are difficulties with obtaining that medication. Someone in such a situation may have to accept charity. He may turn to government assistance. He may have to work at a job that he very much dislikes or take on extra hours.

All of this is just a concrete instance of the old TANSTAAFL--there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. But it's perhaps easy, especially for young people who don't seem to have been taught TANSTAAFL, to equate "Joe needs this" with "Joe is entitled to this" or "something must be terribly wrong if Joe might not be able to get this." In our highly technological and immensely rich Western society, we often expect a great deal of our healthcare system. Got psychological problems? There's an OCD medicine for that, and oh, by the way, insurance will pay for your therapist. Got digestive problems? "Somebody" should provide Prilosec or Nexium. At risk for blood clot? Your insurance will pay for Coumadin. And so on and so forth. Sometimes, as in the case of heart ailments or stroke risk, these really are life-saving medications. But nobody is entitled to the medicines just because they are life-saving. The fact that they are live-saving really has very little to do with the question of how much they "should" cost. Indeed, it is highly dubious that we have any good grip on the meaning of the question, "How much should this heart medication cost?" Does it even have a meaning? Is the meaning moral or economic? If economic, what reason do we have to believe that the current cost is skewed or distorted from some norm?

This last question actually does have an answer: Insurance and other third-party payments (e.g., Medicare) have a strong tendency to drive up costs and drive down competition. For decades our healthcare system has been moving to more and more third-party payers, and Obamacare is making matters even worse. Fee-for-service tends in general to keep costs down. (Ask yourself sometime why body work on your car is so expensive in contrast to mechanical work. I submit that part of the reason is that a lot of bodywork is paid for by auto insurance after accidents and that this has warped the market.) So we can guess that many medications would be cheaper if they had from the outset been paid for by people themselves (that means you and me, dear reader) out of their own pockets and if competition had been allowed to drive the price down.

But there are several problems with deriving from those facts any strong conclusions such as, "My Nexium ought to be less expensive. Someone is doing something wrong, or my society is badly messed up, if it's more expensive than I think it should be." First of all, there's the small matter of patenting. One of the few actually constitutional things our federal government does is to issue patents, a function given to it by the founding Fathers. If the first company that put in gazillions of dollars in research and development is going to recoup that huge investment, it needs to be able to have exclusive rights at least for a time to its intellectual property. After that time the generics come in like the Light Brigade, and prices generally come down. During the time that the initial company has exclusive distribution rights, there won't be any competition for the sale of that product, and the cost will be high so that the company can recoup its R & D costs. In other words, it has to be made worth the company's while to develop the medicine or the medicine just won't exist in the first place. People who look only to production costs when they make airy statements about how much medicine "should" cost neglect the research end. They neglect also the fact that the pharmaceutical companies may be helping to pay for their development of some other medication (which will save somebody else's life) by what they charge for your medication. Nor is there anything wrong with that.

Second, if we really did go to more of a fee-for-service model, there would be an extremely tough market correction, and it would take some time. Medical costs would not drop like a stone overnight, and in the meanwhile a lot more people, faced with paying out of pocket, would face a lot of difficult decisions and would have to forego a lot of things that they think they need. Many hospitals might just go out of business. Once the economy has become addicted to bad economic practices, the withdrawal can be unimaginably painful.

Third, to the extent that R & D and production costs have been covered by an inflationary economy and by third-party payments, some medications might simply go off the market altogether. It would be foolhardy to say that one knows that one's own medicine would continue to exist and would just fall to a more affordable price if "all were as it should be." The fact is that you simply don't know if the pharmaceutical company would continue to consider it worth its while to make the medicine, or what the natural, uninflated price would be if it did.

So even though we do have reason to believe that medical costs are artificially inflated, it doesn't follow that we know what the landscape would look like if those artificial price supports were removed. We should be especially cautious when it comes to predictions about specific products.

Notice in any event that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that some people need x medicine to survive. "Affordable" cost simply doesn't track necessity, especially not when the urgent demand comes from a relatively small percentage of the population. Everybody needs food to survive, so there's a booming and competitive market for food. A lot fewer people need Lovenox.

My more economically savvy readers may think that all of this is so obvious as not to need to be said, but listen around next time you hear some far less savvy young people talk about what people "should have" and what people "need" and what things "should cost." You might get a surprise. Nobody has, apparently, ever explained to these people that neither money nor pharmaceuticals nor fully-trained doctors grow on trees. It's just an astonishing thing, but the fairies don't distribute goods and services.

Be sure you discuss these things with your kids explicitly. Children are compassionate, and their compassionate natures can easily be manipulated by those who will tell them that things "should be different" without any clear idea of what that means. Moreover, children tend to be somewhat self-centered (so do human beings in general), and when a compassionate person is himself in need, if he has had no good economic training, he might well be tempted to say, "It shouldn't be so hard to get this. This is what I need. It shouldn't be so expensive. The whole world ought to be different!" Sound childish? Well, yes, I'm afraid it does sound childish, but then, economic liberalism is childish and all too easy to fall into.

Teach 'em TANSTAAFL young, and then teach them, in true bourgeois fashion, to apply it to themselves: "No, honey, we can't afford that." Even if they really do need something, it doesn't follow that it will be magically and painlessly provided, with no struggle, discomfort, or embarrassment to themselves. Indeed, it may not be provided at all. Sometimes, life's just tragic like that, and all men are mortal.

A conservative view of the world is a view that recognizes limitation. This applies, alas, even to some things that some people need.

A Ken Medema sampler

Over the years here at Extra Thoughts I have repeatedly mentioned blind pianist and singer Ken Medema. He was big in the Midwest in the 1970's. Ken has a talent for piano improvisation and for livening up or rewriting hymns. For a long time you couldn't find his older stuff anywhere on-line, and as I look over old posts that mention him, that complaint comes up frequently. That has gradually ceased to be the case on the music playing site Grooveshark, and I'd like to share several of his numbers here.

First, "Someday," which is the hymn "Saved By Grace." I wrote about its words here. The original author of the lyrics, Fanny Crosby, was also blind. Ken gives it a new tune.



Here's a fun jazzy number called "Sonshiny Day" that should pick you up if you happen to be feeling blue during this long, dark winter.



This next one turns up on Christian radio at Christmas time for some reason. I think it must be because of the line about the newborn baby. I would say the newborn baby is the narrator's own baby.



"Lead the Way" is, in my opinion, a particularly beautiful song in a 70's ballad style. Christian contemporary music has only gone downhill since this counted as "contemporary."



"Fork in the Road" shows Ken's grittier style as well as his ability to tell a story in song. It's about Judas and always makes me tremble a bit for my soul.



"Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying" gives us Medema with what sounds like a black back-up choir. Soulful.



Here is a more recent example of Ken with a "choir" backup, which actually sounds like a live audience. His energy has apparently not been sapped with age. Sure it's repetitious, but I love it when he yells, "Play the music." I know it's comparing small things with great, but the African drum rhythms make me think of something on Paul Simon's Graceland. Here is Medema's version of "Amen."



I'll finish up this sampler by returning to something more mellow from Medema in the 70's. "Jesus, Lover of My Soul."



Ken Medema is an original. There will not be anyone else quite like him in Christian popular music. I'd like to see this older music shared more widely.

Some music from the Martins

I was cooking again today (yes, you are starting to notice a pattern in these posts) and listening to a Gaither hymns CD (yep, that's another pattern). This one included the Martins singing "He Leadeth Me." They have the most amazing a capella sound.



I've seen them sing the Doxology in person at a Christmas concert a few years ago. It brought the house down. Here is that number:



And this is a great, fun song for Epiphany, which happens to be the season we are in. (Sorry that there's an ad at the beginning, but it's a good, high-quality video.)



I don't know why I don't own an entire CD and/or DVD of the Martins. I should rectify that.

"In the Garden"

Today while cooking I was listening to a hymns CD by the Booth Brothers, one of my favorite Gospel music groups. Unfortunately not nearly enough of their music is available on-line. So I can't link the version of Michael Booth singing "In the Garden." I harmonized with him while cooking. It sounded pretty, at least to me. (But I have to share a link, because it's the Booth Brothers, so here is Michael singing "Look for Me at Jesus' Feet," which is really wonderful.)

Anyway, I was thinking about "In the Garden," because it gets a certain amount of hatin' from the hymn purists. Here's how the position roughly goes: Hymns are fine provided you go way, way back. Like, to Bach. Or maybe to Wesley. But all that 19th century stuff, like Fanny Crosby and such, is more or less sentimental schlock unfit for manly singing. In such statements, inevitably "In the Garden" comes in for a whack.

Or there's an attempted tu quoque if a traditional hymn lover like yours truly makes some mention of the "Jesus is my boyfriend" tendency in all too many contemporary worship songs. "Oh, yeah! Well, what about 'In the Garden'? Huh?"

So here are the words to "In the Garden."

1.

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

(Refrain)
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

2.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

Refrain

3.

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.

Refrain


Now, as sentimental lyrics go, those beat many a Jesus is my boyfriend song hollow and then some. It's not the greatest poetry in the world, but it's perfectly respectable poetry. (How many people in 2014 even know that "discloses" can be used that way?) Moreover, the meaning is not actually romantic at all. The allusion is clearly to the book of Genesis where it is said that God walked with Adam in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. (Though here it is the early morning rather than the evening.) The impression is of a deep and close friendship but not a romantic relationship. The third verse deepens the meaning by bringing back in the voice of the world outside the garden with its worries and woes. The speaker comes to the garden to spend time with the Lord in order to be strengthened to go out and endure what must be endured. Jesus' voice, heard clearly in the quiet of the garden, will continue to sound through the voice of woe outside.

As I read the lyrics, too, I think of how many great saints of God have arisen early in the morning to pray and read the Bible. I love my own sleep, making sloth one of my besetting vices. I tried getting up early to pray for a brief time in my ardent youth but wouldn't even think of such a thing now in middle age, unless truly convinced that the eternal fate of my soul depended on it. Now I try to pray when more awake, later in the day. But many do not have that luxury.

At this point I am reminded of a scene I saw almost three years ago. My mother had passed away, and when I went to the funeral (in a different city) I stayed overnight for several days with my mother's pastor and wife. I did not sleep well with all that was on my mind, so I was up unwontedly early, sending a flurry of practical e-mails back home to my family. One morning I arose while it was still dark around 6 a.m., an hour at which I would usually be fast asleep. I saw the pastor's wife sitting quietly by a lamp with her Bible in her lap. She was a wonderful hostess and one of the sweetest, busiest, and hardest-working ladies it's been my privilege to know. (Just after her devotions, still very early, she put on her coat and went over to clean the church nursery in preparation for the next day's services.) But that time belonged to the Lord. She sat there quite still and read and prayed. I have not the slightest doubt that she was hearing His voice and gathering spiritual strength for the day ahead.

Even if we do not come to the garden literally while the dew is still on the roses, let's be sure that, at some time, we do come.

The Strange Attraction of Political Alienation: "Silent Running"

Back when I was "out there" in the office working world, twenty-some years ago, "Silent Running" by Mike and the Mechanics was playing on the radio all the time. I felt then that being forced to listen to the radio constantly while trying to concentrate on office work was a version of water torture, and I tuned out the repetitious songs as much as possible. I'm pretty certain I'd feel the same way now. So this one got a bad rap. I've become more open-minded since then. Not being forced to listen to a song over and over again helps one to be more objective about it. (But certain Billy Joel songs, like "Honesty," are eternally ruined for me.)

So when I heard "Silent Running" in the store a couple of weeks ago, I got curious: What in the world is that song about, anyway? Now we have the Interwebs (unavailable twenty-some years ago), so I was able to find out.

According to La Wik, the songwriter said that the lyric:

is about a guy who's traveled light-years away, out in space somewhere, and he's ahead in time. Therefore he knows what's going to happen to his wife and kids back home, on Earth. And he's trying to get the message to them to say what's going to happen, the kind of anarchy, the breakdown of society, to tell them to be prepared.

In 2013, the lyric has something eerily evocative about it:

Take the children and yourself
And hide out in the cellar
By now the fighting will be close at hand
Don't believe the church and state
And everything they tell you
Believe in me, I'm with the high command

Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?
Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?

There's a gun and ammunition
Just inside the doorway
Use it only in emergency
Better you should pray to God
The Father and the Spirit
Will guide you and protect from up here.

Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?
Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?

Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stood still.

I have little doubt that Mike Rutherford conceived these lyrics in terms of the Evil Republicans (or, in England, the Evil Thatcherians). There is a hint in the "swear allegiance to the flag" line. I realize I'm jumping to conclusions here--assuming that Mike Rutherford was not a Tory. But I think that's a safe guess. It was, after all, 1985, when all the artists were a-twitter (before Twitter) about the Power of the Right. Nonetheless, there's something refreshing about the gun and ammunition. It is interesting to see that the rebel spirit in 1985 did not always take the form of hating guns.  It's difficult to imagine any lefty in 2013 counseling the use of a gun even in an emergency, such as when one's home is attacked by an anarchic mob.

But what is particularly striking is how swiftly the passage of time has made these lyrics applicable on the other side of the political spectrum. Who is it now who is being asked to "swear allegiance to the flag, whatever flag they offer"? Who, now, is having to teach the children in secret? The phrase "political correctness" is really much too tame to describe the ideological totalitarianism and the lockdown on the free exchange of thought that has taken over our Western world, whether the topic be the morality of perverted sexual acts, the blatantly racial aspect of increasing thuggish violence, or, for that matter, gun ownership. Is it not now the Right that is said to be encouraging "vigilantism" by suggesting that people be prepared to defend themselves and their property, as the police in various parts of the West become ineffective at keeping the peace?

These words resonate with a home schooling right-winger in 2013. Now we find ways to keep our countenance in public, and we teach our children to do the same. Now we adults find ways to avoid saying the wrong thing, to avoid losing a job or even getting a visit from the authorities. Now we teach the children politically disallowed truths. We teach them, if not precisely in whispers, at least not very loudly.

This lyric is first and foremost about political alienation. To be sure, it's also about anarchy. In fact, one might have thought a priori that there is a tension: The lyric portrays at one and the same time a totalitarian and controlling State that makes everyone swear allegiance to the flag and, simultaneously, an impotent State that cannot prevent anarchic violence. Ah, but real-world history cannot be done a priori, can it? For anarcho-tyranny is a reality. We in the West now know better than we could have known in 1985 that it is entirely possible to have a government that makes itself impotent to carry out its real functions of keeping streets and homes safe and punishing evildoers but at the same time creates endless fear and harassment for peaceful people who simply want to go about their legitimate business. And naturally, that causes those peaceable people eventually to conclude that their government does not, to put it mildly, represent their best interests.

It goes without saying that political alienation is a dangerous and troublesome thing. But it is worth saying that, for an individual and especially for a Christian, reveling in political alienation is also a dangerous and troublesome thing. Dangerous to the soul if nothing else. I do not wish to be unclear: We need to have a clear-eyed view of the present situation and the future prospects for freedom in our country (or, for my readers abroad, countries). Being a bunch of Christian Pollyannas will only trigger blunders which could cost us dear.

At the same time, however, we need to be aware of the dangers of treachery. I do not use that word lightly. When, inspired by a series of quotations on Bill Luse's blog, I read Witness for the first time all the way through, I was much struck by the way in which treachery comes upon a man unawares. Each of us is preoccupied with his own affairs, and the more thoughtful of us are preoccupied with our own ideas and theories. When the suggestion comes that, because of those theories, a man should do something genuinely treacherous to his own country, the suggestion always comes in plausible guise--at least, a guise that is plausible to that man at that time. No one says to himself, "I am about to be a traitor, but treachery is a good thing." Rather, a man says to himself, "This country is no longer my country, so I am not being a traitor," or "By doing this I am fighting for the true essence of what my country ought to be," or "I am moving forward with the right current of history," or some other excuse.

Of course, most of us ordinary folk are in no position to commit any treachery anyway. At the most we are tempted to commit the tiniest and most trivial of infractions--running a red light or something of that kind. Nonetheless, he who is faithful in the least is faithful also in great matters, and he that is a scofflaw in the least is more likely to be treacherous in the great matters. It is a matter of daily, cultivated attitude, and it is especially an issue for those on the non-mainstream right.

I therefore say: Yes, let us be clear-eyed. Let us acknowledge that we are strangers in a strange land and are, in a real sense, much beset by an increasingly hostile government at various levels. Let us not duck the fact that government officials are not our friends. But at the same time, let us not cultivate in ourselves or in others a spirit in which we are, in essence, waiting only for the right trigger to go from being dissidents and critics to being seditious.

The strange attraction of political alienation is real and therefore calls us to walk a crucial, and all-too-fine, line. It is a line that we cannot afford to ignore, in either direction.

Lazy Sunday--John C. Wright has a Christmas story

I'm being a bit lazy this Sunday. Put it down to the large blizzard cum sub-zero temperatures we are having here. Not that that weather is actually demanding any serious action on my part, beyond sliding my car gracefully into something on the road the other day and bending my left front wheel, that is. (It'll be going into the shop tomorrow, if the mechanic isn't snowed in at his home.) Or some extra snow brushing for the purposes of store runs. Or carrying all the groceries into the house from the snowy driveway. Exhausting stuff like that. Esteemed Husband is the one doing the snow-blower and shovel shtick.

My children and I start home schooling again tomorrow after our two-week Christmas break. I'm pretty well prepared. I have just ordered live paramecia and amoebas from this science supply company, with a special live stain which is supposed to make them easier to see and slowing drops which are supposed to keep the paramecia from running away. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, I offer you a link to a Christmas story that made me cry. Mind you (backhanded compliment alert), I'm not entirely sure why it made me cry. It is a John C. Wright fantasia. Digression: John C. Wright either never sleeps or types faster than any man on the planet. I don't know how he writes things that long. End digression. Imagine a Roman Catholic mash-up of A Christmas Carol, a sci-fi short story, complete with changing the past (if I'm understanding the ending correctly), visions of the end of the world, complete with a monster that eats continents, the Book of Job, and St. Nicholas doing theodicy and performing miracles. Oh, and did I mention a little girl going to heaven and getting to hold Baby Jesus? I didn't? It's in there, too. But it kept my attention, peering short-sightedly at the screen (I hate reading fiction on the computer), and it made me cry. So if you think you will enjoy such a story, give it a whirl.

Blessed Epiphany!