How can anyone fail to see that this is a civilization in decline?  It is understood that way only if you have a direction in mind:  if you know where Memphis is, you know whether you are traveling toward it or away from it.  If you have lost track of where it is, not only can you not know how to get there, you don’t know when you are wandering away from it.

A civilizational decline is only visible if you have an idea of what “good” looks like.  For most of my life I have assumed that we are in a state of confusion about what direction to take but that we all wanted to go to the same place, as though we have several paths before us, and don’t know which one will lead us to our joint goal.  Then I began to see that we don’t agree on the goal.  We all want good, but some of us think it is in Memphis and some in Jackson, and, depending on where we are, we could go together for a while but eventually will need to part ways.  But maybe it is worse than that:  perhaps we are so confused about where we would like to go that none of us knows what to do, and we are simply wandering lost.  We may know where Memphis and Jackson are, but we are no longer convinced that a step toward either will help.  Now I think I have been optimistic in every analysis.  What I am beginning to see is that it is not just confusion, or differing goals, or even arbitrary wandering that our civilization is doing - it is a calculated and specific push we are making to go in a particular direction.  It is almost as though we have been taught that Memphis or Jackson would be good, but never, NEVER go to Louisville, and we are determined to go to Louisville.  Whatever we have been taught about right and wrong, and we are consciously choosing to oppose everything that we know to be good.  It is almost as though we are becoming little Satans that desire to vent anger and loathing at God so much that we bend all our energies to the study of His word solely in order to make a specific point of doing the opposite.

As a child, our parents thought their job was to teach us right from wrong.  Don’t we still think that?  But doing so may backfire - that is, if your desire is to oppose God, knowing right from wrong only gives you a long list of “rights” not to do.  After a while, a culture forgets that there was such a list, and forgets there was an agent that placed them on this path - a culture busy living out lives of dissipation and self-indulgence.  Imagine one day that that culture finds a copy of the list of rights and wrongs.  The Church presents this list (found in the bible), and the first argument it receives is that religion is for fools, and we shouldn’t bother to even read such a list.  But if folks can be persuaded to read it, it shows not an arbitrary list of inexplicable religious practices (like watches can only be worn on the right wrist), but gives a list of the very things they have been opposing with the enthusiasm of self-righteousness that comes from the defense of individual liberty.

They learn that marriage is not a man-made institution but rather a visual relationship referring to an invisible relation of God with His people.  All the adjustments to marriage that our culture proposes seem at the time to be liberating and reasonable but in effect serve specifically to blur or mar that relation.   In fact, it doesn’t matter what is proposed, anything that will blur or mar is satisfactory:  one could encourage no-fault divorce to make ending marriage easier to attain; or encourage pre-marital sexual practice to blur the line between single and married life; or encourage adultery while married, open-marriage, or “swinging” as it has been called to blur it another way; or encourage homosexual practice outside of marriage as a viable substitute for male/female courtship, but only for the purpose of eventually being able to convince the culture that homosexual marriage is a reasonable thing;  or, man/boy sexual relations, and eventually sex with machines and animals.  We may find we are repulsed by these thoughts, but that only means that there are still vestiges of the old morality woven into our souls.  This revulsion is no final defense against decline, as we can be conditioned to overcome it (specially if those who show revulsion are labeled homophobic, or repressed, or old-fashioned). This trajectory can only be seen as a decline if you hold to begin with that there is an image that marriage is to reflect.  But what is striking me today is the conscious intent I am beginning to see.  The naked, pointed aggression toward marriage as an institution.  It is as though a child built a little twig house, and another child, who could have walked anywhere in the garden, chose to come and stomp on it for spite.  It is too calculated, too specific, too intentional to be offered as “an alternate lifestyle.”

Do you yet think I am attributing evil intent to those who only want to be free to follow an “alternate lifestyle?”  What exactly is evil?  If we follow our own definitions, individual autonomy is good, and anything that limits it is evil.  But if we follow the biblical definition of evil, individual autonomy is actually evil.  That’s right - what some call freedom is evil.  How can that be?  What is evil is not the freedom, it is the belief that we can know good and evil on our own apart from God.  In that case, God is actually giving us a great blessing by telling us that we cannot trust our own hearts to give us the definition for good and evil...it seems that our hearts have already joined forces with the enemy and are not to be trusted.  If autonomous freedom actually leads to slavery, what kind of God would allow us to take that road without warning us?  

But there are other items in the decline.  Is it not strange the interest in vampires?  Not if you know that we are told by God that we are not to drink blood.  There are rules for Israel in the book of Leviticus that particularly say that a body’s life is in the blood, so we are to drain the blood out of our animals before we cook and eat.  It is wrong to drink blood.  What could be more specifically “taboo” than to break two laws at once, the law not to kill, and the law not to drink blood?  Why, to drink the blood of a person!  Even better, let’s combine it with a perversion of sexual pleasure, and turn the whole thing into a metaphor for taking someone’s virginity?  It is the cruelest, most consciously evil thing one could do: to empty someone of her virginity and life for momentary personal appetite.  It is the same evil that clear-cuts forests or strip mines mountains for immediate profit.  It can only be seen as a particular choice to take specific commands and go against them.  Don't murder.  Don't drink blood.  Don't allow your appetites to rule you.  Don't abuse the creation.  Don’t go to Louisville.  (I have nothing against Louisville...)  

It turns out that we live in a world that DOES know right from wrong but has carefully, calculatingly, willfully chosen the wrong, and even finds delight in searching out “rights” to oppose.  Wouldn’t it be a strange world to be taught that religion should be ignored  because it is nothing but a bunch of arbitrary rules by an arbitrary god (like requiring that we wear watches on the right wrist), and then find out that it is the ONLY trustworthy repository of clarity about good and evil?  And wouldn’t it be even stranger if we should find that the very teachers who told us that religion is arbitrary and meaningless spend their entire lives, energies, money, and even their last breaths fitting as many watches on their left arms as they could?

I wish to see all arts, principally music, in the service of him who gave and created them. Music 

is a fair and glorious gift of God. I would not for the world forgo my humble share of music. 

Singers are never sorrowful, but are merry, and smile through their troubles in song. Music

makes people kinder, gentler, more staid and reasonable. I am strongly persuaded that after 

theology there is no art that can be placed on a level with music; for besides theology, music is 

the only art capable of affording peace and joy of the heart...The devil flees before the sound of 

music almost as much as before the Word of God.

Martin Luther, from the introduction to Johann Walter’s hymnal: Wittenberg Geystliches gesang Buchleyn (1534). 

Here's the chart again -- let's see if it works this time.  And in all that long foolishness, I neglected one question about what would have happened had we not bailed out GM and Wall St.  I really don't know.  But in principle, I think the government should stay away from getting involved with private enterprise.  If it fails it fails.  The problem is that one could say the failure came about by way of government intervention to begin with, through Fannie/Freddie, so they (Bush, anyway) felt a need to fix what he had helped damage?

Politics and the Economy

Some of my friends and I have been talking about the political landscape on FB, and since my replies are getting longer and longer, I have answered here instead.  The most recent posts were:

 I'm curious. If we are to oppose a nuclear Iran, albeit with better information than we had when we went into Iraq, how can we do this without increasing spending? It's to a large degree this defense spending over the last 8 years that has put us in our current financial position. This is what troubles me about the Republican candidates; like Bush in 2000 (in the initiatives Ted notes), their claims for change have to be backed up with money, so their limited government ambitions are countered by their political aims. Paul would basically be arguing for an isolationist standpoint, so he's the only one who could back up his claims with a political ideology.

And what would have happened if Obama had not bailed out GM and Wall Street? I mean both on the short term and the long term? Do you think really think the free market would have bailed them out?

Would appreciate your thoughts.




and another: 
Ron Paul knows exactly what to do to fix our financial crisis and has no other political aims that would stop him from doing so. Our economy and the world economy are the #1 issue right now and no other candidate aside from Paul has shown me that they will make the hard decisions to correct the mistakes that has put us in the horrible position we are in now.







These are great questions - thanks for making this a real discussion, you all.  Andy, I think opposing a nuclear Iran right now will save us a lot of defense dept spending down the road as we wouldn't then have to fight another 10-year lite war as we did in Iraq.  Some of the candidates have mentioned ways to restrict Iran without spending war-levels of money.  (gasoline embargoes, et c). We can't pretend not to be a super-power (as I think it is clear Ron Paul's isolationism would have us do) but still we can listen very carefully to Paul's proposals, as well as Rick Santorum's -- each knows a great deal and has a lot of good advice, even if it is opposite in content.  They are good men.  You are right that Paul's position is consistent and clear - but it is mistaken, I believe.  I am with him on the Constitution and the economy, but not on foreign policy.  If we could have stopped Hitler in 1937, should we have done it?  


One more point about the Iraq and Afghan wars -- I don't agree that they were the cause of our financial woes today.  The combination of those two wars since 2003 doesn't come close to the spending lost through the housing crisis.  "The sum of all the deficits from 2003 through 2010 is $4.73 trillion. Subtract the entire Iraq War cost and you still have a sum of $4.02 trillion."  (that is from this write up on the issue ----   http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/iraq_the_war_that_broke_us_not.html.)  The federal budgets were in the hands of the Dems since FY 2008, and the increase in spending is head-spinning.  Bush added $4T to the deficit in 8 years, and Obama added that much in 2.  Each should have to answer to the American people for their gross mis-management of our tax dollars, I think.  But as to the war - the entire Iraq War, from 2003 to fall of 2011 cost $709B.  In the first few months of Obama's term, the Dem-controlled congress spent more than that on one stimulus package.  This is just the truth.  Here's the chart:



SO about the bailouts, I am surely not an expert in this field, so I don't know what to suggest -- I AM an expert about my own household economy (not that I handle it well, only that I know more about it than anyone else...), and I find that when I spend more than I make I get into trouble.  I would assume that the principle extends to governments as well (and I hold Greece and Spain up as examples).  I think there has been a very sincere attempt on the part of many well-meaning people to do something good for those in need, namely help more low-income people into houses and out of renting.  However, it was a little like trying to help more people get where they are going faster by getting them to flap their arms and jump off high buildings.  It may seem like a good goal, but it doesn't take reality into consideration.  So - we had a lot of people hitting the economic pavement at terminal velocity.  It didn't matter to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd - they were receiving kickbacks from Fannie and Freddie to write the laws to exempt the mortgage houses from careful scrutiny.  (If the Occupy WS folks really wanted to address corruption, all they would have to do is read the books being written on the Fannie/Freddie horrors.)  Countrywide made out well for a long time...but then Wall St bundled those bad debts and sold them to unsuspecting investors, spreading the disease around the world, and THIS is the reason we have such a terrible economy now, and that's why Bush and Obama felt the need to spend the the breathtakingly huge amounts in bailouts.  The Dems passed spending bills without the need for a single Republican vote in 2009, including the Obama health care bill (that came in at $1T all by itself, and they now say was grossly under estimated).  This is the reason why the Dems lost the House and nearly the Senate in 2010.  I think that (if the country doesn't have short-term memory loss) the House and the Senate and the WH will be in Republican hands this time next year.

Why does it need to be so difficult?  The reason that Europe is going under financially, and the USA is not far behind, is that countries have decided to care for the poor through the government rather than through the Church.  When the Church cares for the poor, the poor are given a much larger gift than simply food or money.  When the government is first told that it can have no religious affiliation, then is told it must be compassionate, it cannot help but offer only short-term material benefit, and so has no hope of getting the better of the problem.  The church offers spiritual help as well as material help, and the Church offers the possibility of membership in a community - a community of people who are dedicated to living their lives for God instead of for themselves.  This one aspect would disallow an individual to remain on welfare for very long.

Say you had a classmate who could never get his papers written on time, and regularly asked to copy yours and turn them in as his own.  What if you had actually agreed to do this several times?  Wouldn't you eventually try to explain to him that it actually would be better for him in the long run to get his own C than to get your A?  Can you imagine how you would feel if a majority of your classmates and teachers sided with him arguing that they couldn't see how a C is better than an A in any way, so you should be more compassionate and let him copy your work each week?  This is what it sounds like to those who are already paying most of the nation's taxes when politicians tell them, "you have to pay your fair share."  The amount considered "fair" is not based on how much an individual should be required to contribute to the government, rather it is based on how much the individual will have left over compared to those who are less well-off.  It is as though an equal amount of money for each citizen is a right that can be enforced by the government.  Our ancestors called this tyranny.  I don't believe that replacing the current president with another will solve this problem, but if he were replaced, it would be a sign that our country may have what it takes to survive this world-wide economic madness, and might be able to show the EU an alternative to the welfare state.  If we all agreed that we mustn't bankrupt our government, and drastically reduced our spending in nearly every area, we would all be motivated to find an alternative to provide help for those in need - an alternative that would have to take a person's entire humanity into consideration, as the Church does.

In order for a culture to accept homosexual practice as a cultural norm, people need to sever the link between enjoyment and purpose.

It is easy to see why people want to turn the question of homosexual marriage into a civil rights case.  People should be free to marry whoever is preferred - society and its government shouldn’t be able to interfere in the personal lives and loves of its people.  It is such a basic thought that to question it is to question both individual freedom and the very institution of marriage.  God, rather than being a Designer with our best interests at heart, seems to become a cosmic kill-joy, creating people with desires they cannot satisfy.  It seems we should oppose this limitation on principle, even if it doesn’t apply to us personally.

But on the contrary, God’s design of us must make us reconsider.  Even if my opponent has dismissed the possibility of God himself, he can’t ignore the very specific practical purposes of the “hardware” we have each been given.  (on a side note, it is not surprising that in a world that believes only in the physical, when the physical reflects a Designer, the first response is to ignore it, and if it cannot then be explained away, the next option is surgery...in any case, the physical MUST not be allowed to stand in the way of personal gratification.)  In order to embrace (forgive the pun) the homosexual life as culturally acceptable, we must disengage the passionate experience from the purpose.  If the sexual climax becomes the goal of the act, then who is to say that there is only one way to accomplish it?  Why not two men?  But with this reasoning, why should one stop there?  Why not 3?  Or with machines, or animals, or children?  By rejecting the idea that the male is made for the female and vice versa, and separating the experience of sex from any sense of purpose for the act beyond momentary pleasure (building relation between husband and wife for raising the children they make; literally making the children; forging links in the generations of an extended family), we have become sexual anorexics.  We like the taste of the food, but we reject (and eject) the nourishment.  Imagine a culture that spent all of its time preparing and chewing the finest of foods but never swallowing.  Wouldn’t that group eventually have to find ways to artificially ingest nourishment?  IV lines into the arms, taking vitamins... and wouldn’t they necessarily have increased illnesses, physical and emotional?  Is our culture not that way to a degree already?  If we divorce the connection between nourishment and pleasure we will misunderstand the entire eating process.  The same is true of sexuality.  If we disconnect the pleasurable experience from the function, we will misunderstand the entire plan and purpose.

And it is no good claiming this is only a problem with those who practice homosexuality, it is just as much a problem for those heterosexuals who have made this separation.  To indulge the pleasure of the moment without a knowledge of the purpose of the act is like clear-cutting forests or strip mining land.  We want the profits and don’t care about what we do to our selves, our partners, or our homes.  In each case, we need a re-grounding in the design of the Designer, and a reminder about how we are to both tend AND keep the world we have been given:  tending means to help it come to fruition, and keeping means to protect and cherish.

When two men decide to care for one another in the way of husband and wife, they are not only going against the physical evidence, they are misunderstanding the nature of marriage.  Marriage is the harmonizing of two people.  Harmony in music (at least since 1100) can only happen when there is more than one pitch:  a unison is not harmony.  Two of the same gender cannot create harmony, harmony requires difference.  And it is interesting that when two different pitches are tuned properly they generate overtones - some of which are actually new pitches, not merely octave representations of the original two.

What’s more, the greatest example of harmony is to be found within the Trinity.  There, the three Persons have been in harmonic relation throughout eternity, making one single God able to love and relate in harmony, not unison.  There are not three Fathers, or three Sons, or three Spirits -- there is one of each, and they have specific relations and roles they each play in relation to each other.  Marriage is designed to be an imitation of that relation: a harmony of one made up of two different ones, and that cannot be accomplished if the two are of the same gender.

For those who look on reality from a sentimental point of view, it may seem harsh or unkind to put limits on the definition of marriage when it means that many desires will go unsatisfied.  But surely this is a view that places individual desire above reality?  Don’t we have rules that keep peoples’ desires in check in other arenas of life?  Don’t we say that it is wrong to have sex with minors?  (there are those trying to change that too, by the way, and on the same principles)  and don’t we say that it is wrong to favor your own gender or race above others in court or business hiring?  Why should those desires, preferences, and inclinations be limited when sexual desires are allowed free reign?

Why do you suppose past generations have been so clearly against homosexual practice?  Could it be that they understood the design of the world better than we do, and, like the reasonable ban on adultery, knew that certain practices, if allowed free reign, would destroy the society?

Bill is a coal miner.  His father was a coal miner, and his grandfather was too.  Here’s a picture of him coming out of the mine one day, with his fellow workers in their hard hats, grinning, looking forward to lunch.

But last year, Bill turned 22, and began to think that the mines were not as safe as they should be for the men who worked in them.  He thought that if they were designed differently, he might be able to reduce the number of cave ins, so he began to think like an engineer, and learned quickly that he didn’t know what he needed to know about mine design, so he decided to start an engineering degree at the local vo-tech college.  He took out a few student loans, and finished his degree nights while working a few shifts to make ends meet.

Once finished, he worked in the engineering office as an apprentice for a couple of years, and eventually was able to craft some designs of his own that were indeed very helpful for the company, and as a result, he was hired as an engineer (which paid, by the way, a salary higher than the hourly he drew as a miner).  As the company implemented his designs, there were fewer problems, and the company turned a greater profit.  As a result, he was given a bonus from the owners, and even some stock in the company.  

Later, with his own salary, he purchased more stock in the company, as he wanted to invest something back into the business that had given him a livelihood.  (He could have invested in pork bellies, or aerospace, and might have made more money in the long run, but he didn’t know anything about them, and his heart was in mining).  So after awhile, he found that he owned a good portion of the company that he was working for, and as a result, as the company prospered, so did Bill.

Here’s a picture of Bill at age 62, leaving from the board room after discussing with the board the best designs for some new mines.  Mines they were able to purchase partly because Bill had made the company more efficient.  The company’s profits were spent opening these new mines, hiring more miners, and raising the hourly rates of the best miners (they wanted to keep their best producers happy).

Let’s compare the two pictures.  The first is of Bill, dirty but grinning, wearing a blue collar and helmet; a worker.  And the second was of Bill, clean, wearing a white collar, and looking for all the world like “management.” 

But it is the same person.  He was only a member of a “class” of people when you see his life in still photographs.  If you see his life as a movie, day to day, his life is quite different.

Why should we be told in our country that “The rich are getting richer” or that “the corporations are taking the profits” as though these things are bad things?  The only way the rich get richer is if the business is profitable.  The only way the business is profitable is if they have product and buyers.  The only way they have product and buyers is if the company is producing, and the only way the company can produce is if jobs are assigned and each does his job well.  The CEO all the way to the least experienced miner.  And the only way that you can hire CEOs OR miners is if you pay them a salary commensurate with their abilities.  That means that some will be paid more than others.  If some are paid more than others, it means by necessity that there will be the well-paid (rich) and the lesser-paid (poor).  There is nothing insulting, sinful, degrading, or cruel about paying one more than the other.  Bill was paid to dig coal by the hour when he started out, and was paid to design mines for coal workers to work in, and the two amounts were not the same.  The difference in pay was simply a designation of the fact that the design work was considered more valuable by the hour than the digging (rather like a pound of diamonds are worth more than a pound of mulch).  This was the result of the kind of gifts being exercised, and the rarity of those gifts.  It really is the result of supply and demand:  the supply of coal miners is larger than the supply of mine engineers, and the supply of those who have the ability to run the company are rarer still.  The greater the supply, the lower the salary one can require.  Likewise the demand:  there is a demand for coal miners, otherwise none would be hired.  It is not the kindness or cruelty of the owner of the mines that many or few jobs are offered to miners -- the demand for the coal dictates how much coal he needs to produce, and that dictates how many miners he needs to produce that amount.  If the demand for coal suddenly went down, he would make less money with the company, and there would be no need for all the workers.  On the other hand, if the demand goes up, the owner needs to hire more workers, and as the demand for workers goes up, so does the pay for a miner (meaning that the worker benefits when the company does well).  If the owner were to keep all the profits for himself, he would not be putting the money into the pay for the miners, and they would not produce the amount of coal that he needs for the demand.  This (like another still photograph of one moment in time) LOOKS possible, but it is only possible for a few moments before the company falls apart.  The way the owner makes money is not by hoarding profits, it is selling the coal that he pays the miners to collect.  If they don’t produce, he doesn’t have any profits to “keep.”  If the demand for an excellent CEO or a trained mine engineer is high, there will be competition for their services at more than one company.  The market-rate for hiring someone with that rare set of skills will go up, and the miner is a fool if he complains that those with greater or rarer skills are making more money than he is.  It is part and parcel of the same system that pays him for the work he is doing.  Destroy or interrupt the market’s influences on others and you will soon find that your own position is destroyed or interrupted as well.  It is all the same piece of cloth.

In one picture, Bill looks like “the poor” in another he looks like “the rich” -- but he is the same person.  Conservatives are accused of protecting “the rich” while abusing “the poor” - as though they are protecting Bill the coal miner from Bill the stock-purchasing mine engineer.  But they are the same person.  What conservatives are actually trying to do is to remember that life is not a still photograph but a moving, living, breathing day-to-day life where people are in flux, and because of this, they think that the best way to proceed is to protect freedom for each and every person regardless of position when the picture is taken.  This is the freedom that Bill benefitted from.

Attacking the rich to serve the poor only makes sense if you see the world in categories suggested in still photographs.  The attack takes all those in one category and forces them to help those in the other.  If you see life more as a movie, the result of this attack is only to discourage Bill from studying, improving his gifts and offerings, and contributing more to the need of the company and the community.  The result is that Bill remains a miner all his life (which is not bad in and of itself) but because of that, he doesn’t improve the mines, which in turn leads to more injuries and deaths.  It also leads to lower profits for the company in the long run which means that they are not able to buy more mines and employ more workers, and the miners that ARE working are paid less than they would have been.  How is this better in any meaningful way?

This is the reason we have a stagnant economy right now.  

ps - some would say that I am not an economist.  They would be right.  But what about my parable here is wrong?  It may be an oversimplification of more complex issues, but I would rather have you think of it as principled.  Where are the principles wrong?  I will consider any argument on that level.  Arguments that suggest simply that I have neglected the complications of economics because I am not an economist must first address how those added complications oppose or change the principles I am offering before they will carry any weight with an honest man.  

Rational activity involves both ends and means.  In a technological age we acquire an increasing grasp of the means to our goals, and a decreasing grasp of the reasons why we should pursue them.  The clarity of purpose that I observed in Homer’s Odysseus is not a clarity about means:  it is a clarity about ends, about the things that are worth doing for their own sake, like grieving and loving and honoring the gods.  The mastery of means that emancipated mankind from drudgery has brought with it a mystery of ends - an inability to answer, to one’ sown satisfaction, the question what to feel or do.  The mystery deepens with the advent of the consumer society, when all the channels of social life are devoted to consumption.  For consumption, in its everyday form, is not really and end.  It destroys the thing consumed and leaves us empty-handed:  the consumer’s goals are perpetually recurring illusions, which vanish at the very moment they loom into view, destroyed by the appetite that seeks them.  The consumer society is therefore phatasmagoric, a place in which the ghosts of satisfactions are pursued by the ghosts of real desires.

Roger Scruton, from An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, page 32

I would like to make a case for something that should need no case – faith.  Ultimately, faith itself is nothing – it is the object of faith that is significant (obviously I could have faith that my pen would save me – and a nice pen it is too – but God Himself is a bit more authoritative regarding my soul).  So I don’t mean in any way to say that it doesn’t matter who you put your faith in.  However, I would like to take a minute to consider faith itself and what part it plays in the life of a person.

I have often fallen into a way of thinking that goes sort of like this:  there is a clear choice in life.  You can either live by faith, or you can live by sight.  The Christian (and followers of other religions) live by faith, the typical atheistic scientist lives by sight.  And this dichotomy runs full through all things – you can know by faith (that is, taking the bible seriously), or you can know by sight (that is, trusting your senses, your experiences, the latest science).  Knowing itself is accomplished by 2 different routes, and the Christian is on one, and the majority of the academic world is on the other.  (Small wonder we have such dissonances at college!)

But this is a cheat – what I am finding is that it is not this way at all.  It turns out that living and knowing by faith is the default position, and that even those who claim to be living and knowing by sight are not able to do so.  In fact, no one lives without faith.  By that, I mean everyone lives trusting in things he cannot see or touch.

When you go to the dentist, a strange and mysterious thing happens – a person (and perhaps someone you don’t even know), in a mask and white coat, picks up a needle, or a sharp instrument, or sometimes something that sounds like a tiny buzz saw, and asks you to open your mouth.  Now, one might question a person’s sanity at what happens next.  Like lambs to the slaughter, we dutifully open our mouths.  It happens every day, at hundreds of points around the city, and no one thinks anything of it.  Nothing on the news… but if you want to see just how insane this act is, just change the circumstances.  Let’s say you are walking down a dark alley one night and out from the shadows jumps a guy with a needle in one hand and a sharp instrument in the other and he says “Open up!”  The mask and white coat that seemed so reassuring on the dentist would only make this guy creepier.   In each case we have to make a decision about obeying or politely refusing the command.  How do we make that decision?  Faith.  If you believe in the person making the request, you can obey.  If you don’t you can’t.  That’s the way of the world.  It is the same way with God – if you believe Him, you can obey Him, if you don’t, you can’t.  And suddenly, it makes sense to hear Him tell us that without faith it is impossible to please God.  Or that the righteous will live BY FAITH.

In fact, we do nearly everything by faith – we certainly believe when we do things like taking wedding vows, or trusting the promises in the scripture.  But these acts are not as strange as the world thinks when we point out that we also sign contracts, cross streets in front of busses, pet our dogs, and sit in chairs by faith.  We believe bus drivers won’t run us over, or that our dogs won’t bite us, and that a chair will hold our weight.  

You may rightly say that having faith in God and having faith in my chair are not the same thing, and you would be right, but not in the way people usually think.  The argument usually goes that faith in God is faith in something we can’t see while faith in the chair is in something we do see.  And furthermore, that we have experience with chairs, so we are trusting in our own experience and our senses.  This sounds very good until you think about it a little more deeply.  

We actually are unable to trust our senses and experience unless we have a world that is coherent – that is, if we pet a dog six days in a row without a bite, we probably don’t even think about his biting us on the seventh.  Or the scientist in the lab who yesterday put two chemicals together and observes the result assumes that if he today combines the same chemicals in the same situation, he will observe the same result.  But there is no reason to believe this.  Why would that be?  Why isn’t the universe actually random?  Why don’t dogs change their personalities on an irregular basis?  Where do these laws of nature come from if there is no design that they adhere to?  And how can there be a design if there is no designer?  

Fact is, there is not only no reason to trust the uniformity of the laws of nature, there is no reason why we should be able to trust our senses – why don’t we SEE differently from one day to the next?  Can’t our senses be fooled?  Have you noticed how in the last 10 years there have been a lot of movies about false realities?  Did you see the film The Matrix?  Or the 13^th Floor?  Or Dark City?  Or The Truman Show?  They are all about how our senses are fooled into thinking that we are experiencing reality when we are actually not.  We know that our eyes can be fooled by certain sensual experiences – when we see a pole in the water that looks broken by refraction, or see a mirage on the road due to heat and reflection, et c.

And one more element:  memory.  For things to make sense we have to REMEMBER what happened the last time we pet the dog or combined the chemicals.  If we don’t, we don’t have the benefit of predicting the outcome, and it is that prediction that makes it possible for our actions.  Have you noticed how many films there have been in the last 10 years about the loss of memory?  Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Paycheck, What Dreams May Come, even Dorrie in Finding Nemo.  Each of these films has at least one character who has lost his memory – and there is always something horrible about that experience – we know ourselves by our memories as well.  Who we love, who our family and friends are, where we live, work, how to work the cell phone…

My point in all this is that without faith, we cannot obey God, but neither can we obey our dentist.  Without faith we have to give up the Christian worldview, but we also have to give up the scientific worldview because we cannot trust our senses, our experiences, or our memories unless there is a God who designed everything, gave us senses to see things as they really are, and memories that are reliable.  In the end, it is NOT a question of living by faith or living by sight – it is only a question of what or who you are going to put your faith IN.  Saying that we are not going to live by faith is really a little like saying I am not going to breathe air – I can try water or chocolate pudding, or ammonia, but it won’t last long…the reason is, we were MADE to be faithful creatures.  

So it shouldn’t surprise us that God teaches us that 

1 - we can’t please Him without faith, 

2 – that our righteousness is accomplished not by our obedience, but by our faith in His obedience,

3 – that we should walk by faith not by sight, and even that

4 – we should always remember what the Lord has done for us (Deut 6)

When Moses knows he is going to be leaving the Israelites, he gathers them around to tell them one last thing:  and that is to ALWAYS REMEMBER.  Why?  Because they were to pass the faith down to the next generation, and our memory of what God has done for us tells us who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.  All things quite necessary for us to remain sane.

One last point:  this all means that revelation and reason are not two different ways to know things:  they are two sides of the same coin.  We don’t think that there are two ways to go, like faith OR science – revelation OR reason.  Both are gifts from God given to better know Him, His plans, and how we fit into them.  We know that revelation is a gift from God, but it turns out reason is a gift too – given to be able to make sense of revelation.  And revelation comes in two types:  Special and General.