Last weekend I signed up for the tough mudder event, a 12-mile mountainous marathon/obstacle course that boasts to have been put together by the British Special Forces. The event is actually the brainchild of a Harvard business school grad, so how much of that is marketing gimmick I don’t know. At any rate, I signed up for this crazy course a few months ago to give myself some reason to get some exercise, and I’d like to chronicle my experience.
For starters, let me say I didn’t train enough. Having not taken regular exercise seriously in a decade, the experience of trying to get in shape with a 30 year old body and 20-year old memories of exercise proved to be quite a confusing experience. I’ll spare my readers the details, just imagine some get-in-shape attempts that fit well with the adjective “pathetic” and you’ll get a pretty good picture of what the months leading up to the Tough Mudder were for me.
Nevertheless, I was determined to push my body through this event no matter how much it whined at me, and to show my sucky knees who’s boss.
The sign-up time was uneventful, except for the sighting of a guy who planned to do the event in a full suit. Never saw him after that -I hope some pictures of him show up, ‘cuz that was the best costume idea I saw. The runner-up was a team of girls whose team name was “Ovaries of Steel”. I also saw the ninja turtles there, again a girl’s team. Come to think of it, it was mostly female teams that went for some sort of costume-party gimmick. Hmmm, didn’t see that one coming. Apparently the event typically bills at 75% male, 25% female.
“Mudders” begin the event by leaping over a wooden wall about 6 feet high. Then they wait at the start line for their time to come up. My team signed up for the 8:30 run, which meant I had to get up at 5am. Oorah!
While we wait, a Samuel Jackson look-a-like leads the crowd in a deluge of military-motif machoisms set to blaring pump-up music. I was standing right by the loudspeakers, so I got an extra dose of macho hollered at me, which I believe I assimilated through an airborne type of osmosis.
What ensued was a lot of running uphill & downhill on jagged rocks & mud, peppered by the odd obstacle, some pathetic, some awesome. The run keeps most of the obstacles ‘till the very end, where all the spectators get to sit and watch you get zapped, mudded, dunked, while you crawl up, under and through various machinations that leave your knees and elbows bloodier and muddier than when you went in.
A few of the highlights:
The first obstacle was called “the arctic enema”. This is the event that made the top of most mudder’s lists of “what event do you dread the most?” Basically you climb up a ladder into a basin of ice water, and I do mean ice water: they had a tractor dumping in bucketloads of ice into these three giant basins.
I myself wasn’t too worried about it. It’s just cold, you get in, you get wet and cold, then you get out & warm up. Woop-de-doodah, I couldn’t understand why all these babies were cringing at the thought of getting a little cold. So in I went, and it wasn’t all that bad, just cold. However, apparently my body thought it was colder than I did, because I immediately began hyperventilating. It was a very odd experience to be out of control of one’s breathing, and more of an irritant than anything else. I mean really, it’s just a stupid thing to do, because very quickly I realized I wasn’t getting adequate oxygen. Since my lungs didn’t look like they were going to smarten up and breathe properly anytime soon, I dipped under the wall (yeah, they make you fully immerse yourself -clearly this one was designed by baptists) and clambered out.
The ice water had a good amount of dye in it as well, and for the rest of the race about half the people that I ran with or passed me by or I passed had this silly-looking pink skin. Except of course brown guys, who are born with an immunity to being humiliated by red food coloring. My skin seemed fine, so my theory is that some people have more color-absorbent skin than others.
The arctic enema was actually a nice break for my left knee, which had begun giving me grief some 2 months ago when I asked it to actually do something other than sit and read. Soon it began begging me quite abit, to which I told it to suck it up and do its job and run. It gracefully complied, until my right knee took its side and began complaining too.
A few months ago I had a seen a youtube video where a guy had trained himself to get kicked in the nuts and not feel any pain. Using this as motivation, most of the time I was able to keep an internal mantra going that somewhat succeeded in shutting out the clamour of nerves that want to tell my brain that my knees are in pain. Yeah yeah, I know that. You know what you need to know knees? I don’t care! Do your job!
Well, round about the 6 mile mark, I lost a final argument with my knees. We came to an uneasy compromise: they would only agree to a forced march through the rest of the race, but acquiesce to sprinting and doing cool stuff when called for by cool obstacles. This wasn’t ideal, and it definitely put me on the more pathetic end of the spectrum of athleticism, but at least I can say I did indeed do every obstacle successfully without wimping out and walking around them like some sort of girly-puss who sucks his mother’s thumb like a sissy wimp. Oorah!
Because the course was set in the mountains near Whistler, about a quarter of the course was spend on snowy terrain. Another obstacle required the aspiring Mudder to slide down an ice hill and plunge into a mostly-frozen lake, wade for about 5 meters and clamber out on a cargo rope. Ahead of me I saw a couple of Mudders go down the ice on their butts, which appeared to give the Mudder who favored this method of descent a few violent collisions of their tailbones with protruding ice. The other option was to balance on your hands and knees and suffer through a abit of ice-shredded hands. I took that option, thinking that skin heals faster than tailbones, and it all went a-okay.
Also, this time I was ready for the effect that a plunge in ice water has on my breathing, and when focusing intensely on breathing properly, there was less frustration getting my body to do what I asked it to. However, breathing properly seemed to improve my circulation, so even though I didn’t hyperventilate, the frozen lake seemed much colder than the earlier ice basins. For a good 5 minutes after clambering out of the lake, I really couldn’t feel my nether regions, which was a new experience for me. There were a good number of popsicle jokes bouncing around the crowd that made it to the other side of the lake.
My favorite events were the ones that involved climbing of some sort. The 8-foot walls were particularly fun, and I even got a “whoa!” from a fellow Mudder as I bounced over them with ease. The 12 foot walls were another story. Thinking this would be like the 8 foot walls, I got ready to pull my Jackie-Chan moves out again, only to find out that after 8 miles, my upper body was quite loathe to give me the same stellar performance it did around mile 2 mark where they had put the shorter walls. So the 12-footers involved much more team cooperation and scrapage on the underarms. Still, scaling 12 feet walls is cool.
Another awesome event was “Everest”, the mud slicked quarter pipe. Basically you sprint up a mud-slicked quarter pipe, make a desperate leap up for the ledge, and largely rely on the host of Mudders at the top to haul you up. Once up, you take the place of the Mudders who helped you, and you get to haul others up. Lifting people around is fun. I saw one guy mess up his hamstring real bad on the sprint up the pipe though, and at least half of the Mudders who attempted to climb up slid back down, which was quite amusing to watch. Some people look funnier than others sliding down a muddy quarter-pipe. Flailing and squealing on the way down ain’t the way to do it. I was quite happy to make it on the first attempt, with many thanks to my fellow Mudders who hauled me up. Also, the blaring AC/DC music they had going at this event helped get the adrenaline going. This event shook me. Yeah, it really shook me.
And of course, no chronicle of an event named “Tough Mudder” could be complete without a comment or two on one of the longest, most beautiful obstacles there: the mud. The glorious, glorious mud.
The first “mud” event involved crawling under some barbed wire on your hands and knees. The mud for that event was like tar and sawdust, like a big muck of smelly, soggy black playdoh with grit. The first real stretch of mud we encountered was much more swamp-like, au naturelle poop-mud up to your knees, which was kinda nasty to wade through. Then, the most beautiful stretch of mud came near the end, where you had to ascend and descend for about half a mile through cascading falls of glorious, sticky, swelling, unpredictable mud that you could only march through it was so rich. One girl in front of me stepped into a sink hole and was waist-deep in mud, completely stuck and screaming. She had to get some of her buddies to haul her out. It was beautiful. After that event, I ran through every mud puddle I could find, which functioned quite well to clean my shoes off and lighten my load of caked-on mud.
At one point during the event, I stopped to stretch my hip flexors, which I didn’t realize ‘till then, looks suspiciously like a Tebow pose. Mudders stop to stretch all along the course, so I didn’t quite understand why people were giggling and muttering at me while I was doing this stretch until I overheard the word “Tebow” among their whisperings.
Okay, some stuff that sucked:
The electricity-themed events were just straight-up pathetic. I was gearing myself up to be tazed with 10,000 volts like the promos boasted, but on the “electric eel” (a giant slip and slide through live wires) I only got one little blip on my shoulder. Really? I get more of a buzz from licking 9v batteries. The Tough Mudder also concludes with a jog through a gauntlet of unavoidable electric ropes. Didn’t feel a thing. Huge disappointment.
Also disappointing was the “Boa Constrictor”, an event that is supposed to be a crawl through a shoulder-width pipe half filled with muddy water. There was no water in it at all! I just crawled through a pipe like I was in some children’s jungle gym.
A few of the other obstacles rated “meh” -they could have made the cargo net we had to climb over taller (it was barely 8 feet), and hauling a log up the hill was disappointing in how small the hill was. I wanted to say I hauled a log up a mountain. Nope. I hauled a log up a hill around a rope area. Boo! There was also no flaming hay bale course to run through, which I was looking forward to.
Every so often they had water and snack stations, which mostly consisted of bananas. One of the stations gave out packages of gummy sharks called “Sharkies” which had electrolytes in them. While I am by no means opposed to gummies, it rather killed the atmosphere to be jogging around in mud at a macho event snacking on animal-themed gummies labelled with diminutive suffixes. And electrolytes? Really, do I need to stop this hard-will driven march to have some hippy reflection on what my saline levels are? Darnit, just give me that phallic-shaped fruit and stick with the military theme!
So I made it to the end, I saw at least one person with a broken arm, and a lot of people like myself limping everywhere they went. In fact, walking around whistler the next day, you could identify Mudders quite well by their walk, even if they weren’t wearing Mudder merchandise.
The cleanup process at the end took awhile. It’s amazing how much mud you can grind into your skin and flesh wounds if you really put your heart into it. I also had never experienced bloody nipples before, which was a bit of a surprise when I took my shirt off. Nipple chaffage is macho. Don’t diss my bloody nipples. Also, the place I stayed at lacked any washcloths, but I found my beard made a handy scouring pad. My knees also squeaked a fine print clause into our earlier contract and refused to bend properly in the shower so I could clean my toes. Buncha whiners. The next day I found a big popped blister on one of my toes. As of this writing, it’s still stained black. Under all the mud, I also found my complexion made me look abit like the red skull. My finishing time was 4.5 hours, and somewhere in there my skin decided to burn under the sun.
So all in all, I can’t wait for the event to come back sometime in the near future. An excellent test of mind over mud, and a great excuse to get away for the weekend.
Oorah!
Monday, July 2, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Measuring the State of the Environment
Well, seeing how Lenin's birthday (also known as earthday) just passed us by, I thought it'd be high-time I update my blog, seeing as how I'm supposed to be in the midst of a series on the environment. So what do you think, does the planet need saving badly enough that we need something better than a Soviet Dictator to celebrate on April 23rd? This I think is the macro question of the eco-hour that I’ll try to shed some light on in this post. Of course, I may well fail in my light-shedding task, in which case, I’m just using my blog for what blogs do best: vent random misinformed opinion. In this case, I hope I can at least entertain.
Measuring the state of the environment is an incredibly pretentious activity. I find it quite sobering to note that in almost every book I’ve perused on the topic of the environment, from left to right-wing, they all lay claim to be able to help the reader navigate the morass of eco-misinformation. I was actually hoping to lay a similar claim: that I can point to some good data on this subject, but since that claim has been made so many times, I’m a little sheepish to make it myself. So I won’t. I have no formal education in environmental issues, but I do think (however naively) that I can point to some resources on a handful of issues that as near as I can tell, are good ones, and ones I would like to see eco-dialogue refer to more often.
A lot of this just comes down to trust and authority. Most of us are crowd-followers of one stripe or another. We believe something because someone (or some group) we trust said it. So if someone we trust tells us that a football field worth of rainforest is chopped down every day, and we’re going to run out of forests within a decade, resulting in global warming and all the ice melting and the continents drowning, we’ll likely believe it -especially if said trusted person can do so accompanied by harrowing apocalyptic music and hair-raising visual illustrations.
*sigh* If only I had such magical powers.
So how is the environment doing anyways? Bad? Good? Most people seem have a sense that things are ill-fated for mother earth at the moment. I don’t think environmental conversations often stop to ask exactly how such a sweeping measurement can possibly be made, or even if it’s important. Consider that any one-word evaluation of the state of the world presupposes a standard of measurement, and places the state of the earth below a certain ideal on that measurement scale. So let’s say that we were to measure the wellness of earth on a scale of 1 to 10. Anything 6 and above is “good” and anything 5 and below is “bad”. So let’s say we get excellent data and rate the earth at 8. It’s “good”. But we might ask “well, if it’s good, why didn’t it get a 10?” And suppose we find out that our data reveals that 80% of the world is doing well, but we’ve actually irrepperably polluted 20% of its continents and seas?
The argument goes both ways -let’s say earth scores a 5, and that means we’ve got 50% of the earth that is healthy, thrivin’ liveable and ecologically sustainable, with nothing worth complaining about in that area.
So judgments like “environment doin' fine” or “environment doin' bad” are statements about the aggregate state of affairs of the environment. Everything from seas to forests to skies are included in this evaluation. And this is why I think one’s opinion on the aggregate picture of the environment might well be useless information. We can’t do anything with an aggregate evaluation, what is useful is knowledge of specifics: what specifically is going wrong that we can fix? What specifically is going well that we can conserve?
I think there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from this. Ask yourself: is your degree of emotional involvement with your eco-opinions really commensurate with the a) reliability of your information and b) the usefulness of that information?
My impression of the average Joe’s eco-data (mine included) is politicised hearsay of a rightish or leftish stripe. In my books, that’s a “Reliable-information” fail. Consequently, so is the usefulness of this data.
Nevertheless, I see something useful in having good data on the aggregate state of affairs. That is, I really do feel that each individual must have in their minds an objective way past the polarized, politicised BS of the environmental movement and its opponents. What we really need to find is some ground of agreement for good discussion and education.
A gold mine of information on this topic for me has been the “Environmental Sustainability Index”
This index, put together by some smart dudes at Yale, evaluates the world by political boundaries on the basis of 5 components of Sustainability:
1. Environmental Systems: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable to the extent that its vital environmental systems are maintained at healthy levels, and to the extent to which levels are improving rather than deteriorating.
2. Reducing Environmental Stresses: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable if the levels of anthropogenic stress are low enough to engender no demonstrable harm to its environmental systems.
3. Reducing Human Vulnerability: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable to the extent that people and social systems are not vulnerable to environmental disturbances that affect basic human wellbeing; becoming less vulnerable is a sign that a society is on a track to greater sustainability.
4. Social and Institutional Capacity: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable to the extent that it has in place institutions and underlying social patterns of skills, attitudes, and networks that foster effective responses to environmental challenges.
5. Global Stewardship: A country is more likely to be environmentally sustainable if it cooperates with other countries to manage common environmental problems, and if it reduces negative transboundary environmental impacts on other countries to levels that cause no serious harm.
These are further broken down into 21 Indicators, and 76 variables. It’s a great read, check it out:
http://www.yale.edu/esi/ESI2005_Main_Report.pdf
And here’s a summary of the index in colored picture form for those of you who won’t follow the link. Basically if you’re a country that’s been industrialised for awhile, and you don’t live near the equator, you’ve probably got good marks. Let’s hear it for the Western world in temperate climates, Yay! Boo (most of) Africa, China, and the middle east! Get rid of the equator, it's clearly negatively affecting the aggregate state of affairs! We need a new equatorial Occupy movement!
Another resource I have found helpful is the “Environmental Performance Index”
They have a real pretty website where you can look at a whole host of different factors on a big colored map of the world. Got a hangup about forestry, fishing, or infant mortality rates? Just select your latest eco-hangup from the drop-down bar and see if your opinions line up with reality at the click of a button!
http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/map
Happy belated Earthday!
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
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 fing
ers 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.
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 fing
ers 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.
Monday, December 12, 2011
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 furnitur
e. 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 le
ft 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.
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 furnitur
e. 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 le
ft 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.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, May 6, 2011
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.
“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.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
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.
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.
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