Confessions of a former Environmentalist prt 2

Roughly How my Conversion Took Place

The doctor adjusted his spectacles in the dimly lit room and readied his pen with a click. He spoke with an air of professional psychological disinterestedness to the burlap-clad man with the bushy unkempt beard. "Tell me now, from your earliest memory -how did you come to love the trees?"


The slumping, skinny, tofu-fed man scratched an undeodorized armpit. "Man, my earliest memory? Dude, my memory is shot, man. But okay. As near as I can tell, it all began back in...lessee...it was like, two years before woodstock...yeah, ‘92! With "Fern Gully". I mean, I was just a normal boy, right. I’d put my papers and bottles in the big blue bins like every other kid, right? But after seeing that movie, it like...blew my mind!"

"Would you describe viewing that movie as a watershed experience?"

Sitting up, the silage-smelling man spoke urgently: "Watershed? Dude, it was like Christmas on speed! Trees had feelings, and we were blind, man! We couldn’t feel what we were doing to the planet! We would torture little animals, and were totally out of touch with nature’s harmonies."
"So you felt something new that you hadn’t before?"

"Well, it was more like injecting some feelings into what I was already doing. All of a sudden, it was really really really important to recycle. I remember going to school the next day and all I could think of was the importance of telling my friends to see this movie. And it wasn’t just ‘cuz it was a good movie, but because it was important."

There was an entranced look in the hippy’s eyes as he sought to make eye contact with the psychologist. "Impoooortant, man."

Calmly raising his hand, the bespactacled professional spoke reassuringly: "Please remain seated. Excuse me for a moment." The psychologist reached over to his desk and pulled out a box of cubans. He lit one up and resumed the analysis. "Tell me more about this feeling. Why was it so important?"

The puzzled hippy scratched his head. "I guess it was guilt. And fear. And anger. I mean, all of those come out, right? Fear was probably the biggest: seeing that big smog monster was scary man, especially ‘cuz we made him, and fed him! Feeding him was the guilt part, and the fear was fear that we would destroy the world."

"I see. And was that it, the whole environmentalist thing begins and ends with a movie you saw 2 decades ago?"

"No way man, like I said, that was just the beginning of like, seeing the environment as something impooortant. After that, it just became second-nature to like, recycle and stuff. Every bottle, every piece of paper was impoooooortant. But, I found that like, no matter how much I recycled, the man wasn’t going away!"

"The man?"

"Yeah, the man!" The hippy steeled his eyes and clenched his smoke-stained fingers into noodly fists. "The corporations!"

The psychologist paused to take a liberal puff of his cigar. "Would you say that ‘the corporations’ were the primary target of your frustrations?"

"Oh, totally! And not only that, I found that other people shared my frustrations, and that I wasn’t like, all alone! I found that like, I could totally get people goin’ just by the way I could say the word. Like, I figured out that you can spit three times when you say it: ChorPoraTIon! It’s fun man, you should try it."

*puff* "No thank you. Please continue."

"So now it was like, words man, I found there was a whole string of words and ideas that fit together: corporations, colonialism, industrialisation, consumerism, inequality, exploitation, it all made sense! And you could like, string this litany together and sound smart. I mean, I was hardly passing school, but suddenly people thought I knew stuff, and I think I thought I knew stuff too. And like, my conscience was on fire! Every time I stuck a piece of paper in those blue bins, it was like, I was changing the world!"

"So it felt good to recycle?"

"Good? Oh man, it was an addiction, but like, a good one. ‘Cuz it would confirm that I was right! I was standin’ up to the man, and he was goin’ down! Him and his exploitative, colonialist, economic empire of corporate greed!"

*puff puff*

"And then I had this job at this electronics store, a few years back right? And they didn’t have any blue bins! I was confused. After all we fought for, here was the man still makin’ a mess of things. I didn’t know what to do without those blue bins...those beautiful blue bins. It made me mad, man! Every day at closing I could fill up two garbage bags with cans and bottles that were just goin’ to the landfill. The landfill, man, do you want to live in a landfill? ‘Cuz if no one stops the man, that’s where we’ll be living soon!"

*puff puff* "It sounds like you have everything figured out. What brings you in here?"

A sober mood crept over the hippy’s shoulders. "Well...I’ve got my doubts now. I mean, when you’re just a little boy, watchin’ movies about fairies and trees, and you just wanna do the right thing and save the planet, you just trust what you hear, right?"

"As it ought to be."

"But then, I took this political philosophy course right? And there I had to read abit of that bushy bearded guy...what was his name? Minx? And that Smith guy, and some economics and zero sum games..."

"You had never read these before?"

"Are you kidding man? Economics? That was the man’s stuff! You couldn’t trust it! It was tainted with exploitative free trade propaganda that keeps quiet the 99%!"

*puff puff* "Hmmm...’trust’, interesting choice of words there." The psychologist got up from his chair and slowly paced the room, listening intently as his patient continued to speak.

"Oh man, trust, that’s just it, trust man. I mean, once I started seeing things from another person’s point of view, that maybe the man isn’t who I thought he was, that maybe there’s another man out there whose out there tellin’ people lies about the trees! So who do I trust? At first I was taught that I couldn’t trust the man, but then it turns out, it was another man who was tellin’ me not to trust the man, so now I don’t know who the real man is anymore, and I think the worst of the two might be the one who chained my conscience so tightly to those little blue bins..."

*PUFF* "Well, our time’s up for today. I think we’ve made some significant progress." With that, he opened the blinds in the dimly-lit office.

Confessions of a Former Environmentalist

After a long hiatus involving a move and a new job, I think I can finally squeak some spare time out to do some more blogging. I’ve been meaning to hack out some thoughts on environmentalism for awhile now, so here goes: my eco-confessions.
Hold it! I feel the need for a lengthy preface, so let me first chat about a more general topic first: worldview.

Worldview is something of an obsession of mine. I’m regularly distracted from my immediate surroundings by mental excursions into idea-land. Therein, I’m fascinated by ponderings about "How would I look at the world differently if I thought ___ idea was true?" In fact, these mental excursions are hazardous: many thanks to those who refuse to talk to me about these things while I’m driving, as I’ve had more than a few near misses on the road.



Ideas are consummingly important, and I think rightly so. Worldview is something we all have and need as human beings. Recently I finished reading a book on the natural history of human beings, and I found this one quote from the author (Ian Tattersall) extremely informative and enlightening:

"As far as we can tell from the archaeological record, the difference in cognitive capacity between Homo Sapiens and even its closest extinct relative is a huge one. And it is not just a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind. It is probably fair to say that even such evidently complex beings as chimpanzees do not in essence do much more than react fairly directly to stimuli that they receive from the outside world...Human beings, on the other hand, are symbolic creatures. Inside their heads they break down the outside world into a mass of mental symbols, then recombine those symbols to re-create that world. What they subsequently react to is often the mental construct, rather than the primary experiences themselves."

That mass of symbols is one’s worldview. A worldview is something we as humans can’t not have, it’s how our brains function, we need one in order to interact meaningfully with the world around us. I wanted to draw attention to this, because it greatly helps me understand why changing one’s opinion about something is such a frustrating and painful process. It also explains why it’s so difficult to convince another person to change their mind. It’s actually a really tall order to ask someone to change their worldview, because, depending what you’re arguing for, you’re expecting another person to re-arrange their head full of symbols that they’re using to live by.

Moreover, the act of changing one’s symbolic system in any major way is an excruciatingly painful and confusing experience. As I experience it, my mental world is a self-consciously Christian one: these concepts are crucial in my day-to-day working world, because the world as I know it is governed by God, and every decision and thought is accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ. There are things going on around me that I can’t see, for God created both a physical realm, and a spiritual one. I interact with both those worlds, and make decisions based on the assumption that these symbols are accurate. If you were to take my symbols away, I actually could not interact with the world in a way that was meaningful to me. I am used to seeing the world through a certain lens, and if that were taken away, I really couldn’t do anything. If I were to be persuaded that a major part of my worldview was false, I would be very confused about what I ought to do, what my moral obligations are, for these all depend on the world around me being ordered and coherent. If you change one concept that is obviously inconsistent with other symbols, I could be seriously thrown into confusion.

Another example I like to use to describe this re-symbolizing of the world that we humans practice is by comparing our mental worlds to a living room full of furniture. We are like a person who owns a room, and acquires furniture and appliances that enable him to live comfortably in that room. Changing your basic beliefs is like re-arranging your room. We move around our mental furniture. Now most of the time, we’re always in the process of re-arranging things. I think most ideas come to us like handy appliances: when we come across an idea that helps us understand things, it’s like we just acquired a new blender, and happily add this new appliance (knowledge) to our mental living space.

Now, sometimes new ideas are imposed upon us. We thought we were all comfy, but suddenly someone comes in and kicks over the centerpiece of your room, or smashes a table or a major appliance like your fridge. This causes great discomfort and anxiety: the room that you were used to is no longer liveable or comfortable, and it takes a lot of work to re-arrange your room in the light of the loss of your refrigerator.

Now I write all this as a preface to a bunch of posts about the environment because the experience of "converting" away from environmentalism was very much like being violently thrown out of a favorite lazyboy chair. Not only was my room disrupted, but I could not simply set my living room upright and resume sitting in it: the chair was trashed and no good; I couldn’t sit in it even if I wanted to, but the rubble still cluttered my mental living space. I suddenly had no place to sit, and the room was almost too messy to move around in. The busted chair didn’t just disappear, it left a mess.

The importance of this worldview preface is actually to apologize. I’ve had a few years to fix up my room, and now that it’s a little cleaner, I can see in retrospect what I was going through at the time. When you can’t sit down, you get tired, frustrated, and grumpy. Changing my long-held views on the environment was positively exasperating, and I wish I had dealt with the process better than getting angry. My sincere apologies to those who had the unpleasant experience of talking (or writing) to me about the topic of the environment while I was in the business of cleaning up my headspace due to the unexpected destruction of the environmentalist chair I had sat in since childhood.

Hair Metal and the Lord

For awhile now, I have tried to put my finger on something that has been nagging at me: what is it that makes Christian music sound so different? That is, when I surf through the radio, there’s a certain something that identifies Christian music as such. Even my 3-year old notices it: while surfing, whenever I hit the Christian station, regardless if any words are being sung, my little munchkin will pipe up; “That song’s about Jesus!”

Today it occurred to me that Christian music (at least the pop Christian music played on the radio) makes a gratuitous use of reverb, echo, and delay effects that you don’t see quite as much in any other genre. There are some bands that use a lot of electronic effects; U2 is well known for the Edge’s trademarked delay sounds. But it doesn’t seem to matter which Christian band it is, they all amp up the delay. Likewise, the drums aren’t your snappy jazz kits, the Christian drum kit sounds big and powerful. Christian vocalists also seem to have more reverb and vocal effects added to their sound, and the bass frequently has a powerful boom to it, rather than the sharp pop-bass you find in a lot of contemporary rock.

There is one other genre that regularly makes use of such tones, and that is 80's hair metal. What’s with that? What’s the connection between 80's metal and Christian rock?

I think the combination of boom tone bass, echoed big drums, guitars with delay, echo and reverb maxed out and a concert-hall echo on the vocalist gives Christian music an “epic” tone. It’s a fitting style of music for the content Christians sing about: the larger-than-life God, the transcendent, the macro themes that make the finite world seem so small. In light of God, the world is just one big, empty canyon that His voice fills up with ease. Can you properly communicate the majesty and grandeur of God with a banjo? Wouldn’t the tone do a disservice to the theme?

You see a similar tone in a lot of Enya’s music, where the tones and instrumentation she uses has that “Spiritually transcendent” feel to it where the echoes and the reverb and delays take the listener to the past, and the earlier notes and words continue to echo in the background as the continues. Like Christian music, the tone fits the themes of the words.

The big joke of course, is 80's hair metal. If the above rationale about musical sound and content has a grain of truth to it, what on earth led rock stars to connect such tones to their lyrical content? Consider Def Leppard, a good example of the quintessential “epic” tone of 80's metal. Rather than using epic tones to fittingly describe epic themes, they use epic tones to describe their epic sex lives, their epic romantic flings, and their own epic rock.

While I generally find fault with the proverb “the medium is the message”, I have to concede there is a grain of truth there. If art is just the mirror of the soul, 80's hair metal might rightly be described as the purest expression of Freudian humanist philosophy: sex as that great transcendent beginning and end of all things.

Philosophically, Freud is depressing. Musically, I think he's hilarious.

Some Theological Reflections on Japan’s Earthquake part 5 of 5

My last post was largely concerned with defining and defending the sovereignty of God in the midst of evil. God is directing, working with, and using the earthquake as a means towards a good end that only He fully knows and understands. How does this answer the problem of evil? I have offered no complex argument, it is basically: “God is sovereign.” Why do I think this is a good answer? For starters, it places God where he belongs: not as the conclusion of a philosophical curiosity, but as the One who makes inquiry possible, and provides the events that cause us to seek Him:

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ (Acts 17:24-28)

Secondly, it challenges the questioner’s question, which I think is crucial. Just as all answers come from a certain worldview and motives, so all questions come from a certain worldview and motives. It gives the questioner the response God gave to Job:

“Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?
Let him who accuses God answer him!”
“Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

“Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
Do you have an arm like God’s,
and can your voice thunder like his?
Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor,
and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.”

(Job 40:2-10)

Letting God be God

This answer preserves the Godness of God. Rather than suggesting we know the why, what, how, and when of God’s own inner counsel, we freely say that God’s ways are inscrutable, and this is what we ought to expect: if our answers did away with all mysteries of the Divine, we would essentially have proven secular humanism, not Christianity. If God could be explained, He would not be Higher than us, he would be merely “man writ large”.

There is a bad need to correct many contemporary well-meaning apologists who trot out a diminished deity as a response to the problem of evil. One way or another, their response amounts to this: “What’s that Mr. Skeptic? The idea of God being Sovereign offends your human autonomy? No problem, I have just the product for your skeptical woes in my apologist’s handbag! Introducing: Christianity! Now with 25% less Deity!”

The problem of evil and suffering brings us face to face with what we are commanded to surrender: our own personal claim to Lordship. God directs all events, and He is under no obligation to anyone to justify His actions or to explain what He is doing, or how He does it, or where evil came from. He is the Holy One, the Almighty, and we are His subjects under His judgment, not the other way around. To insist that God submit to our queries reverses the order of Creator-creature, as if God was bound to justify himself to His subjects.

The Evil Practice of Justifying Evil

This answer doesn’t pretend to justify or explain away the weight we feel in the face of evil and suffering. It seems to me that if you come up with an answer that justifies the existence of evil, you have failed to understand evil. Look closely at the suffering of the Japanese, and can you, O Philosopher, come up with any possible answer that makes this right, just, or fair? If you can, you have just justified evil. You have established that evil can be right and warrantable.

Any attempt to say that “Evil happens because of ___” is really saying that evil can be tamed by reason, and that its presence in the world may be rationally justified. This does great dishonor to victims of suffering, for it in turn demands that we argue that “the ends justify the means”. As if there is any end which could justify the existence of suffering. The answer I have given, which is basically the bible’s answer, is to refuse to justify evil. The demands of the rationalist cannot be met without a gross misperception about how evil evil really is.

By contrast, the bible never pursues this route, recognizing that evil is unjustifiable: that is what makes it evil. It cannot fit into rational categories. By its very nature, evil is defined in terms of what it isn’t, but it’s impossible to conceive of what evil is. Goodness is law, order and logic. Evil is lawlessness, disorder, unreasonable. So I think that beyond God’s own inscrutable purposes, it seems that evil itself is inscrutable as a subject. To try to bring the weapon of reason to bear against evil is like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight thinking you have the upper hand. It is hopeless to try and answer evil. What is by nature irrational cannot respond to rationality.

Conclusion

Evil and suffering is altogether an inscrutable menace. It is obviously in some sense a product of freedom, but it’s clear as day that freedom does not justify the existence of evil. (See part 2 in this series of posts) God knows why He allows it, and He merely asks that we trust He will do away with it on a set day that He has appointed. He defeated it on the cross, and will bring that initial victory over death and evil to a final conclusion. Ironically, though we have no idea how, Japan’s suffering will in some way serve the good purposes of God in bringing about the destruction of evil. For now, we must be content to let God be God, and leave the foe of death, destruction, suffering, and all other evils in the hands of the only one with the power to bring it to an end. In the meantime, we are commanded to let our faith work itself out in love, compassion, hope and patience.

Lastly, we must never lose sight of Jesus Christ, the Conquering One crowned with Sovereignty. As a foreshadowing of the fullness of God’s promise, evil has been utterly defeated and humiliated at the cross. Ultimately, Jesus himself is the response to evil, for in Him, suffering has been overcome, and death has been defeated.

Some Theological Reflections on Japan’s Earthquake part 4 of 5

This series has been quite awhile in between posts, so let me just summarize what I’ve said thus far.

First off, I have discussed atheism’s self-imposed joke of criticising Christianity for “the problem of evil” meanwhile openly asserting good and evil are not objective categories.

From there I addressed 3 Christian answers that aren’t very good: the “It’s just natural law!” plea, the “free will justifies evil” response, and the hypocritical “they’re sinners!” response. I hope to wrap this up in two more posts by sketching out what I think is a better answer intellectually and practically.

Of course, by “better”, there’s probably more hubris in that phrase than I’d like to convey: I’m very much indebted to a number of other authors on this topic, and I have by no means finished studying it. I’m sure many, if not most people, will find my answer to the problem of evil to be a terrible one. The answer I give will also raise more questions for my reader than I will probably address here, and so comments and criticisms are most welcome as always.

The Sovereignty of God

When answering the problem of evil, I find the temptation to obfuscate God’s power and glory is great. Whether coming from a strict intellectual question, or a hurting person, the ominous presence of God seems to be what causes the problem of evil to be so sharp, and so many answers relieve this problem by avoiding or minimizing the sovereignty of God. By contrast, I think we must assert that God is fully sovereign and fully knows and intentionally purposes all events that occur. Deliberately drawing attention to the fullness of God’s power and glory I think is the first step that makes the difference between a good and bad answer to this difficulty.

Some Christians, (notably those in the Arminian tradition) openly disavow or silently avoid the traditional doctrine of God’s sovereignty. (Kenneth Grider’s systematic theology is a good example of Arminian silence on this.) The deep problem involved in denying the full sovereignty of God is this: if God is not in control of every unfortunate/evil event, then we introduce a large amount of meaninglessness into the universe. This is because God’s sovereignty is an either/or position. Either God is involved, or he isn’t. He is either hands-on and thoughts-on, or neither of these. There can be no “middle position” on this, because it’s a yes or no question. If our answer is “no”, we are basically saying that evil serves no purpose in God's mind. If God has no thoughts or actions towards evil events, who do we think we are to propose an answer?

Further, This also demolishes any pastoral concerns of comfort, for God himself is distant and uninvolved. To deny that God directs all things pushes a person to assert that God created a world in which meaningless and purposeless events occur regularly and often. If that is the general nature of the world God has created, there can be no basis to assert that God is ever involved in any particular occurrence of suffering. In turn, this has implications for the nearness and knowledge of God, and results in a deity that is either ignorant, or distant, or both.

Despite these problems, many Christians still reject the full sovereignty of God, claiming that rejection of God’s sovereignty avoids making God responsible for evil. Better to have a non-sovereign God they say, than a God who causes evil.

In reply, it must be asserted that God’s sovereignty is ultimately a mystery. We don’t know how He works, and so we cannot reasonably bring the accusation of malice to God just because God says he is Sovereignly directing all things for a purpose. God’s methods are inscrutable: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) Nevertheless, some things can be said about God’s sovereignty to rule out a deterministic take on God. I can’t put it better than it was put by Thomas Oden, so I’ll just cite how he put it:

“Classical Christian exegetes have thought of providence in three inter-related dimensions:
-The unceasing activity of the Creator by which in overflowing bounty and good will (Ps. 143:9; Matt 5:45ff.) God upholds creatures in time and space in an ordered existence. (Acts 17:28; Col 1:17; Heb 1:3)
-God cooperates with natural and secondary causes to employ fit means to good ends through orderly and intelligible processes of natural causes; (Prov 8:29-31; Westminster Conf. V.2 CC, p. 200); and
-God guides and governs all events and circumstances, even free, self-determining agents, overruling the regrettable consequences of freedom and directing everything toward its appropriate end for the glory of God. (Eph 1:9-12)” (Syst. Theo. Vol I, 270-71)

Upholding, guiding, cooperating are primary concepts to understanding God’s Sovereignty. But above all, in the midst of that we assert God’s goodness and love, without which all the upholding, guiding and cooperating would mean nothing.

There is meaning and purpose in suffering. God is constantly near and in control, and no amount of evil ever diminishes that. In fact, the assumption of God’s sovereignty is necessary to give a meaningful answer, because it is a necessary assumption behind the love of God. God is near, He is in control, and He cares. If He is not in control, it is impossible to assert that God cares, or that a disaster like Japan’s earthquake has any meaning or purpose in God’s free and sovereign will.

That Inevitable Evil: Superficial Politics

Allright, let’s face it, elections are that aggravating time of year where we all look down our noses at each other’s grossly incorrect opinions and lament the shallowness of the sloganeering and vacuous mud-slinging that goes on between our country’s elite. Is this what the best and brightest do? Elections time to me always has a fog of hopelessness in the air: strategic voting, angry arguments, pushy politico-evangelists, shallow mail-outs and demonizations of “the other guy”.

I’ve never liked the idea of not voting, especially the so-called conscientious objector who fancies himself too profound of a thinker to get involved in this barbaric box-ticking and shouting matches. Not that I’m without empathy: it is shallow, it is depressing.

However, it has to be. There are two sides to political opinions: the present and the future. The future is what we hope for, the country we’d like to see, the personal values we vote from believing they would make the world a better place to live in. However, we can’t stop the machine of government until that happens. We are here now, and we must govern now. So until the ideal comes, part of working for an ideal will involve a realistic assessment of the present, and working with the tools of the present.

I would like to assume that the people behind the shouting and shallow mail-outs and commercials are deeper than the mail-outs make them look. As with almost everything, political mail-outs is an industry: there are people who specialize in slogan-writing and pejorative mail-outs and commercials. It’s a business, these political businesses run on certain principles.

Very little of a campaign is directed towards rational arguing, and politicians know this. A few quotes from workers in the field taken from the book “Culture Wars” by JD Hunter: “The purpose of the (political) letter is ‘not to convince the reader of anything [but to] motivate the person to send some money.” And “The rule of thumb in the industry is to keep writing to about the sixth- to eigth grade level.” “Direct mail is a medium of passion, and the more extreme the appeal, the more successful the mail campaign will probably be. One mailing consultant simply put it: ‘You’ve got to have a devil. If you don’t have a devil, you’re in trouble.’” Another remarked: “Find...a nasty enemy. Tell people they’re threatened in some way...it’s a cheap trick, but it’s the simplest.” Another Gem from Hunter’s book; “Political scientist Larry Sabato reports that direct mailers apply the ‘magic word test’ to their letters. ‘You add up the number of words under five letters in your copy, and if you’re anywhere under 65 to 70 percent, you have problems.’” In a nutshell, politics are institutionalized superficiality, and those are the tools politicians must work with, or forfeit the chance at power.

The same laws of superficiality apply to Parliament: all that “debate” is largely for the camera. Most of the real task of governing is done behind the scenes as they make deals and manoeuvres and compromises to get what they want and hopefully keep the job of governing under way.

For similar reasons, local MP’s are largely parrots for the party line: this is why every party has a member designated as “the whip”; responsible for in-party discipline. In other words, making sure all the soldiers are following orders and towing the line. As I understand it, Canadian politics aren’t so much about personality as they are about party, and local MP’s have to get used to being a cog in the party’s machine.

In a nutshell, there’s much to complain about the system itself. That’s no secret. But complaints about the structure is no reason not to vote, because the structure of Canadian government isn’t strictly the result of shallow minds and poor design. I don’t know everything that put it together, but one of the main reasons for the current state of affairs is the development of information technology. Televised parliament, mass-mail-outs, and newspapers. Information technology has popularized the process of governing to a whole new level. Polarized politics and articles are nothing new, but the extent of the superficiality is. Politics are superficial because the primary mediums of communication in our society, Television and Newspapers aren’t capable of carrying deep argument and detailed information. Only books, essays, lengthy conversations, lectures, and well-moderated debates can do that.

I would love to see a Canada that has a better educated electorate. (Then maybe the NDP would go away.) That requires work though, and before we complain about the process of elections, we ought to take stock of how informed our own political views are. If you had to publicly defend them, would your opinions survive any informed scrutiny? I know many of mine wouldn’t.

Conclusion: Read. Read your history, your economics, your political philosophy, and know where you stand with ethics on the various issues. Form your opinions on good arguments and evidence (and learn how to evaluate good arguments and interpret evidence!) before an election comes along. Know where the parties stand philosophically and practically. Even if “being a dutiful informed citizen” doesn’t turn your crank, do it because it helps make sense of the mud-slinging, and makes election time a little more bearable for the soul.

Some Theological Reflections on Japan’s Earthquake part 3 of 5

There’s one last “Christian answer” that I almost forgot. I had hoped this answer had been sufficiently buried into the dustbin of stupidity, but I was told this answer was roughly given in a local church a week or so ago. That is; “They suffer because they’re sinners!”

Ugh. This barely deserves the dignity of a response, but because it’s so common, it seems one of those things that needs a constant reminder.

In one sense, this response is true: of course they suffer because they’re sinners, but the problem here is this whole “they”. I think it was it was well put by one Evangelical author who said “The problem with the Christian right is they think sin is everywhere but in them.” This answer’s main problem is both intellectual and moral: it reveals one’s hypocritical thinking patterns.

Perhaps this response would be better if it was rephrased to this; “Oh Lord, why weren’t we struck with an earthquake?”

Again, the book of Job deals with this answer ad nauseum, and Jesus needed to rebuke this opinion in his own circle of disciples; “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered in this way? No I tell you; but unless you repent, you will likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will likewise perish.” (Lk 13:2-5)