iMurphy

Sometimes, I listen to so much Hugh Hewitt that I feel a comradery with Conservative America, a connection with the Red half of this country. None of them live within 500 miles of me, so it doesn’t last long! I don’t think I’m in danger of forgetting where my citizenship really lies (Philippians 3:20), but I start to have too much hope in the US of A. Then I read something online like this: a majority of people who have had eggs fertilized in the laboratory are willing to give those embryos over to stem cell research. We don’t even recognize that this whole Culture of Death which we associate with abortion, can be found even in those seeking to have children. The book keepers don’t count selective reductions as abortions or infanticide in the numbers we are read about. We’re willing to kill babies in our demand to have babies. Any society that doesn’t value life above all else will not last, so even from a secular humanist stand-point, America has already taken the step off the cliff, it just hasn’t accelerated to terminal velocity yet. Maybe we should move to Israel…

One can not believe in Science and God at the same time. Science is defined as adhering to methodological naturalism. This is the belief that all phenomenon can be (or at least ought be) explained without recourse to anything outside of the material universe. Ungodly philosophers hold that this view can coexist with ontological supernaturalism, the belief in things outside of the natural realm. Their argument is a straw man; any belief in the supernatural that concurrently denies the necessity of incorporating those entities’ effects upon observable phenomenon does not genuinely believe in the ontological standing of the supernatural. Put more simply, if one’s conception of God does not co-mingle with one’s definition of the universe, then one’s God is meaningless, and not the God of the Bible. In the first linked-to article from Wikipedia, the authors vehemently argue that theirs is not an ontology, but it is in effect. The definition of science, however, could be put differently. It would be relatively easy to demonstrate that it was so for many renowned scientists in the past. They merely believed that they were describing patterns in nature, as best as they could understand them. It is not necessary to have a philosophical certainty that recourse to the supernatural will not be the only option to explain empirical data. Do not accept Wikipedia’s definition of science.

How frustrating! I’m reading “10 Faces of Innovation” and it’s just disgutting me! Not the book, but what it reveals about some of the processes I have to interact with. In the military, there is a current buzzword “operational tempo”. It means how fast one reacts to a situation and changes one strategies. I just read how quickly TellMe can implement changes in their enormous infrastructure, and it just about made me want to cry or punch a wall! Why is no one else concerned with responding to change this quickly?! As someone who works in an ER, I really like being put under pressure and being forced to adapt quickly. It’s not just about making changes, it about making changes in how you make changes. When you’re in the water, you can stand still, but you also can’t thrash about. Being calm on the inside and yet exerting powerful force in the right direction is crucial. I hope I get to be part of team like that

Ontology is the branch of philisophy that seeks to answer “What is there?” or “What is real?” These may seem like straight-forward questions, but consider things like Mathematics or The Spirit of Christmas. Are they real? How do you determine what is really real? Most cultures, religions and philosophies can be assessed by how they answer these questions. Traditionally, the West has been labeled Dualistic, that is, considering that there are two fundamental kinds of things in the universe (matter and spirit), while the East has been called Monistic, considering there to be only one thing at heart (the Tao or Brahman). I think that they are both right, but for the wrong reasons.

In the West, we inherited the wonderful traditions of the Hebrews and then foisted upon them the Greek’s errand nonsense. Jewish tradition maintained that a person is his or her body, that the breath was given to man by God and that as long as so animated, he or she was as living soul. Words like soul, mind and heart also mean breath, kidney and wisdom in Hebrew. When someone died, they didn’t have an inner “Casper the Friendly Ghost” float off somewhere: they were simply dead. Sheol, Hebrew hell, was simply an extended metaphor for the nothingness of the grave. It’s grey, monotone description indicates that death was empty and void. The word in Genesis 2:7 where Man becomes a living “soul” is rendered “creature” twelve verses later.

Greek philosophers, who presupposed no God, saw abstract concepts as having some reality beyond the physical. If everyone knows that right triangle obey the Pythagorean theorem, yet only perfectly in the mind, then the mind must be a kind of different thing from crummy, hand measured triangles. The New Testament was written in Greek because it was the lingua franca of the day, but now we’ve taken the pagan etymologies of the word to be what first century Jews were thinking. We are merely perpetuating Greek Dualism.

In the East, the ideas that everything is an expression of the Tao or Brahman, helped people remember that they are their body, not that they have a body. Never mind that God will resurrect everyone, then judge them: we have to have our bodies to exist. God is uncreated, however, and though the word doesn’t fit, He is the only thing of a different substance than everything else. Therein lies the correct definition of Dualism.

    Normally I hate all celebrity gossip and I am trying to shy away from my usual prying into other people’s lives. However, I have long been curious about Bono from U2. I put “40″ from War on my Christian mix tapes and I have long thought that “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” must be a Christian song. But Bono’s politics and rebellion put me off over the years, and they didn’t release any new songs to confirm a Christian faith.

    This new article in World Magazine, now, has renewed my belief! Bono is not only a Christian, but is heard evangelizing to an heathen interviewers who knew nothing of the faith. His politics may be quite left-of-center, but he has always struck me as being very sincere and very concerned about humanity. I hope, however, that there might be a song or two in the future to care for the souls of people, not just their bodies.

    Why is Superman such a popular character in popular culture. I just listened to the free download from Amazon of Mudville’s “Hero of the World”, but I was also thinking of Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” and the Superman monologue from Kill Bill 2. Bill is right about Superman, he is unique in the cosmion of superheroes, and modern revisions to his character only highlight our uncomfortableness with his uniqueness.

    We all want a hero. We want someone who is like us, but not like us. We want someone who is human, like us. We want someone who is touchable so that we can no that he is real. We want someone who is hurtable, because we hurt, and then we know that he is not just condescending. But we also want him not to buckle under the pressures of life and stress and years. Not only ought he to withstand external pressures, but internal as well. We want a hero who doesn’t lose to personal demons.

    Superman is half-way between what we want and what we actually need. His alien origin is offset against his completely human appearance. His is just one man but he can save the doomed airplane and the little girl stuck in a tree. He is vastly superior to us, yet comes down to live with us as one of us. He pretends to be Clark Kent and loves Lois Lane, a mere mortal. Because he’s American, he’s not about to overthrow the government, but instead fights to truth and justice. The clearly perceptible injustices of the world are righted by him without painting him a vigilante. But he can’t save us from ourselves.

    Jesus Christ has no comic books or action movies but is the true fulfillment of our Superman inclinations. He is God and so is alien to us, but he is human to a larger extent than we are. He shows us who we ought to be by having lived in the world but never yielding to it. He is vulnerable; Jesus wept. But he didn’t overthrow governments or evil geniuses or sadistic killers. Instead, he diagnosed our unadmittable condition and provided the unattainable solution. The eradication of external evils will not make the world a better place a long as any person has hatein his heart. We need Jesus, not Superman, because we are God’s enemy by nature.

    I hear a lot of talk from Conservative, Christian people that America is a Christian nation. After I exploded “No it isn’t!”, I remembered that during the election I heard a lot of talk about how America was a Christian nation at its founding and we need to get back to our real roots. One has only to read what Thomas Jefferson thought of Christianity to know that America was not what they claim it to’ve been. But, as always, the real heart of the debate comes back to semantics and epistemology, regarding what we mean by a “Christian Nation”. What would a Biblical definition be?

    A Christian nation is nothing more than a great big church (not a church as in a building, but a group of believers). Non-believers are not part of the church and can not be a part of a Christian state. Such was the case in ancient Israel. This notion is repugnant to our modern sensibilities because tolerance has long been heralded as the highest virtue of our times and the redeeming factor in America’s make-up. But this 18th century Enlightenment concept is not to be found in the Bible, and would therefore not be found (in the same way) in a Christian nation. The church is the earthly collection of those who profess Christ and are therefore subject to the authority of church elders, or in the case of the Christian nation, the government.

    As long as we maintain that non-believers are part of our group (aka country) then we are not talking about a Christian nation. America is a country founded on freedom, not Christianity. Pennsylvania was the role-model for the rest of the country during the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As Christian subjects to this non-Christian government, we are called to submit in all things that don’t go against the Word of God. This includes things like voting. We must not be confused by Christians being elected to high positions in our secular government. This does not mean that the government has become any more or less Christian; The root of the system is firmly embedded in the ungodly soil of the Enlightenment.

    The result of these ideas is a that even ultra-conservative Christians must vote a little more “purple”. Are goal cannot be the Christianization of the federal government of America, though of course we want fellow Christians to succeed and change what can be changed. The highest possible implementation of God’s Law on earth would be an individual state that was theocratic, but it would still be part of the overall, tolerant American scene. We cannot hope to silence or outlaw those who hate Christ or wish us gone in a society that values freedom above all else. At the federal level, we must strive to elect those who will maintain our freedom at the state level to form communities where we can practice religion as we see fit. We must aim to keep the federal government as small as possible, always remembering the Civil War: we are not permitted to leave.