P-Dunn's Musings

Occasionally, someone will send me a YouTube video and say that it is important for me to watch it and pass it on. I don't often end up watching them. Usually, I end up skipping them entirely. Does that make me a bad person?

Today was different. I received this video and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first part, quickly realizing what it was all about. Soon I found myself continuing onto the second part of it.

The video is located here:



So here I am, passing the video on. But that doesn't mean I agree. I'm writing this because I want your thoughts on it. Watch both Part 1 and 2 (total it's about 12 minutes) and then let me know what you think. But, of course, I'll tell you my point of view first.

There are certainly many things good about this video. People who call themselves Christians and go on sinning as if it's no big deal certainly need to examine themselves. People who use God's grace as an excuse to go out and sin everywhere don't understand what Jesus talked about. Christianity is not merely praying a prayer one day and obtaining a free ticket to Heaven. It's much more than that, in fact. This is a pernicious distortion of the truth, certainly, and this man is wise to call it out. It's something that we don't emphasize as much as we can.

But there's a great deal in this video that I take objection to. You may already know what I'm about to say, since I left a few comments on the video.

This man's view of salvation appears to be that even if you are saved by the so-called "grace" of God, you still are bound by the law. You still have to do a great amount of works. In fact, you have to almost completely forsake your sinfulness. The extent that he emphasizes this, and how we must forsake our desires, sounds almost like Buddhism to me, not Christianity. I thought the point of Christianity was that we can't not sin. We are totally depraved, each and every one of us, and that's why God became human and was sinless in our place. We cannot simply remove our inherent sin nature once we become Christians. I don't know of any Christian who doesn't sin, and certainly no one who is not tempted to daily.

No one can serve two masters, he says: it is either sin or God. Not both. Now, if that were Biblical, that would be one thing, but that's not what the scripture actually says. It says that we can't serve two masters, being God or money. Money, as it turns out, is never mentioned in the video, and yet the video itself looks like it was professionally put together with high-end cameras and video editing software. I wonder how much it cost to purchase those materials to put out this video.

God killed his son in a bloody and brutal way, according to this man, "with a smile." Something strikes me as incredibly barbaric about that statement. The idea that God was literally reveling in watching his son be crucified (in an act of human sacrifice) is completely foreign to me. I thought that Jesus (God in flesh, after all) was so terrified about his upcoming fate that he sweat blood, and then begged his Father to somehow "take this cup" from him. Pardon my apparent mistake, but I was under the impression that God turned his back on his son in his final moments, forsaking him because he was so covered in our sin that he could not be in his presence. Smile, indeed.

And in Part Two, we discover that God is apparently opening the door of mercy as "wide as he can." This, I happen to believe. But this seems to render this man's theology incoherent. How can he possibly say that God is being as merciful as he possibly can, when most Christians are in fact Hell-bound (of course, being literally tortured by fire for millions of years) because they happen to watch movies which happen to contain profanity? Where is God's mercy when he "stomps his enemies until their blood sprinkles all over his robes?" Where in the world is that imagery coming from? I bet you that he would condemn that sort of imagery if it were in a movie, but apparently stomping people into bloody pulps is okay if you're God.

So those are my thoughts, coming from someone who really believes that salvation is through grace alone, not by works, lest any man should boast. I know that God has forgiven me, even for sins that I have committed after I "became a Christian."

What are your thoughts?

Patrick Dunnevant

Merely looking at the list of major announcements of this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo shows that 2009 and 2010 are years that will be looked back upon as a milestone for video games.

1. Project Natal for the Xbox 360, a full-body motion sensing device that removes the need for any kind of controller at all to play a video game. Move your arms, head, legs, or any other part of your body, and the character on the screen moves in the same way.
2. Golden Sun DS, a revival of a series of fabulous role-playing games that has not produced a new title in six years, and was generally assumed to be finished.
   
3. Halo: Reach, a prequel to the best-selling Halo: Combat Evolved, likely based upon the book Halo: The Fall of Reach.
4. Metroid: The Other M, a return to a more traditional style of Metroid games in which the focus of the game is in third person. It combines two-dimensional and three-dimentional graphics, and is developed in part by Team Ninja, the masterminds behind the Ninja Gaiden series (and seems to have been heavily influenced by it).
5. New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a nostalgic, side-scrolling platformer that allows four simultaneous players for the first time in the history of the immensely popular video game series.
6. Super Mario Galaxy 2, a sequel to the fantastic platformer of a similar name, and the first time more than one full 3D Mario title has appeared on any one Nintendo console.
7. Metal Gear Solid: Rising, a title that will return the Metal Gear Solid series to the Xbox and bring back the love-him-or-hate-him protagonist, Raiden.
8. The Playstation Motion Controller, a wand-like device that will be used to create further motion capability on the Playstation 3.
   
9. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, the first traditional Castlevania title on the next generation consoles.
10. Perfect Dark, the classic first-person shooter for the N64, finds it way to the Xbox Live Arcade in its original form.
11. Final Fantasy XIV, the newest title in the epic series, is announced before Final Fantasy XIII is even released.
12. Assassin's Creed 2, a new sequel to the groundbreaking and sadly over-hyped (to its own demise) "medieval science fiction" title.
13. Wii Fit Plus adds new exercizes, the ability to further customize your workout routine, and newer features to enhance the fitness experience.

This was a great E3, certainly better than many of them in recent years. Nintendo learned from their mistakes of last year in not showcasing any new titles from any major franchises by announcing five heavy-hitting titles. And Microsoft demonstrated a potentially revolutionary device that could change the way people look at motion sensory gaming forever, with Sony throwing in their competitor to the infamous Wii Remote.

In short, I'm going to have to save up a lot of money for all of the incredible new games that will be coming out soon. I haven't been this excited about the future of gaming since the Wii came out.

Patrick Dunnevant

A recent Huffington Post editorial [1], contributed by Cenk Uygar, asks a very important question.

Should we torture the man who shot the abortion doctor George Tiller in the middle of a church service? After all, he had been arrested for the possession of bomb making materials before. This is a pretty clear indication of his terrorist intentions. And the act of slaying a man to make a statement is a nearly exact definition of what terrorism is all about. So is he a justifiable candidate to subject to, say, waterboarding?

Or perhaps more intense techniques. Perhaps drowning the man isn't enough. Maybe we should make him stand in "pressure positions" for 48 hours, not allowing him to sleep. Maybe we should burn his skin with cigarettes, or use dogs on him. Maybe we should stack him with other naked anti-abortion activists in amusing positions and take photos.

Many, even amongst the GOP, would respond that we should not torture Scott Roeder. But why not? He's a terrorist. He has more of a terrorist background than many of the Guantanamo prisoners ever did. The man even said that killing of abortion doctors is "justifiable homicide" a while before he killed Dr. Tiller. Who knows what organizations he's connected to that may be planning on many other killings. We need to extract that information out of him at all cost in order to save the lives other doctors! It doesn't matter that he hasn't even been tried yet or given a lawyer. He may be guilty, and sounds like a terrorist, and that's all that matters.

Oh, wait. We can't do that. He's an American citizen. We can't torture one of our own! That would be unethical.

And this is what we're reduced to. Torture advocates are put in the uncomfortable position of admitting that we must believe that Americans are somehow more valuable as individuals than "those brown people over in Arabia or wherever," and they don't deserve to be subjected to such treatment merely because they happen to have been born in a particular location.

Or if you're like the rest of us, who view the torture of any human being to be a cowardly act of despicable evil, you'll recognize the absurdity of the idea of torturing even a murdering scumbag like Scott Roeder is alleged to be.

Patrick Dunnevant

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/should-we-waterboard-the_b_209591.html - It's not every day I agree with a Huffington Post article.

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, African Americans are more religious than the rest of the population.

Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another. The analysis also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56% among all U.S. adults.

... A large majority of African-Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular faith (72%) say religion plays at least a somewhat important role in their lives; nearly half (45%) of unaffiliated African-Americans say religion is very important in their lives, roughly three times the percentage who says this among the religiously unaffiliated population overall (16%).

This presents an interesting dilemma for the types of atheists (who I often call "fundamentalist atheists") that say that the less intelligent you are, the more religious you are, or that religion makes you stupid. Will the atheists own up to their claim, and now have to agree with the idea that African Americans as a whole are less intelligent than the rest of the population? Or will they let go of their bigotry and finally agree that there are plenty of smart people who are religious, and religion doesn't have any significant role in someone's intelligence?

Patrick Dunnevant

Here's an interesting quote from physicist Stephen Barr for you to contemplate.

"When examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness. On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding of an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way. When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously "arranging themselves" into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeared to be haphazard actually has a great deal of order to it. . . .

"What [Richard] Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than [William] Paley's watches. Paley finds a "watch" and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?"

What do you think?

Patrick Dunnevant

It happens all the time. Atheists assert that faith is fundamentally unreasonable. Anyone who believes in God is being irrational and not using critical thinking. On the contrary, atheism is rational and atheists think through their beliefs rather than accepting them uncritically.

1. "The Reason Project," founded by prominent atheist author Sam Harris, describes itself as "a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society." It has a stated goal that it will "encourage critical thinking" and therefore "erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world."
   
   
2. Bill Maher and other non-believers fancy themselves "rationalists," with the definition of one being that their worldview is defined by facts and evidence, rather than faith and religious beliefs.
   
   
3. The "Brights" movement, with the obvious implication of being made up of smart people, is made up of people called "brights," which are "individuals whose worldview is naturalistic (free from supernatural and mystical elements)."
   
   
4. Richard Dawkins sells DVDs known as "Voices of Reason," which feature himself in dialogue with others about issues like religion from an atheistic point of view.
   

Somehow, atheists have decided that they can declare a monopoly on reason and rationality.

They also assert that Christians, and other religious people, are close-minded. Their view of the universe, they say, is a product of open-minded thinking, because they don't believe in any kind of deity. Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," remarks of people who may be convinced by the book (emphasis mine):

"But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn't 'take', or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether."

But is this not merely a rhetorical ploy? How can it possibly be anything different? They are aware that many of our modern intellectuals are religious believers, even Christians. They have to be aware that Christians function rationally like any other individuals do in their daily lives. They are aware that many of our most important scientific discoveries have been brought about by Christians like Galileo, Francis Bacon, Copernicus, and Kepler, who were very rational and reasonable individuals, yet in many cases thought they were doing God's work by performing science. They are aware of all of the arguments presented for the existence of God, which are purely rationalistic in nature, and all of the great philosophical works by Christians which have nothing to do with blind faith. So what is the issue?

Furthermore, the idea that fundamentally theism is close-minded and atheism is open-minded seems to me to be a very strange concept. "At the center of the Christian faith," pastor Rob Bell notes in Velvet Elvis, "is the assumption that this life isn't all there is." Christianity declares that there is more to life than what we can taste, touch, see, hear, and in other ways observe, whereas atheism declares that the material universe is all there is, and is built around the idea of declaring that something does not exist. Which perspective, out of these two, is more "open?"

Certainly some Christians prohibit themselves access to things that may change their mind. Certainly Christians don't always read both sides of the story before making a decision. But then again, atheists do the same thing. I know a lot of atheists who have read "The God Delusion," by Dawkins or "The End of Faith," by Harris, but not many atheists who have read "Reasonable Faith" by Craig, or "The Resurrection of the Son of God" by Wright. The basic assumption that atheists have thought through what they believe and Christians have not needs to be challenged every time it is brought up, because in many cases, it is simply not true.

Atheists trying to monopolize reason and rationality is rather like Christians trying to monopolize love, music, or happiness. Reason, just like joy, is a basic human phenomenon, not a specifically secular phenomenon. It is an insult to Christians, most of whom do critically analyze their beliefs, understand the basics of critical thinking, and use reason in their daily lives. But it is also an insult to atheists who do believe in proper debate, and understand the very basic idea of what "respect" means.

"Theology gives evidence of a high order of reason at work, and one cannot, as many atheists do, dismiss these arguments as unreasonable even if you don't agree with them." - Dinesh D'Souza, "What's So Great About Christianity?"
Patrick Dunnevant

"To compose is not to express oneself at the moment; rather it is to release oneself from the moment into a timeless limbo. To compose is to notate what one has learned over the years about the nature of things (including self expression)." - Ned Rorem, "Setting the Tone."

"Music cannot lie, though it can speak a banal truth." - Ned Rorem, "Setting the Tone."

"Musical composition, though always dealing with sound, does not primarily deal with sound but with the cohesion of ideas eventually expressed through the language of sound." - Ned Rorem, "Setting the Tone."

"Art is not the abstraction of ideas but incarnation of ideas. We talk all about it, but only the thing itself explains the thing itself. What music 'should' do is nothing next to what it does." - Ned Rorem, "The Later Diaries."

"Art is an aristocratic affair. One cannot demonstrate that the average man experiences - or can be trained to experience - those reactions which make up a work of art, or an appreciation of that work." - Ned Rorem, "The Later Diaries."

"The art of words and the art of notes answer to separate calls; for if the various arts could express each other we would only need one. Were a composer able to say what it means to compose, he would not need to compose." - Ned Rorem, "Setting the Tone."

"Like abstract painting, . . . a poem calls forth personal representations of the words it contains. Music, meanwhile, is itself the emotion (the idea): it represents nothing beyond itself. And so music cannot be intellectualized." - Ned Rorem, "Setting the Tone."

"Composing expresses the invisible singer within us all." - Ned Rorem, "The Later Diaries."

"Enveloped by music - not by its sound but by the tools. Staves entwine us with their five endless tentacles while treble clefs unwind and re-stiffen into unstable towers which crash upon the sand, sand crushed from a trillion yellow neumes." - Ned Rorem, "The Later Diaries"

Patrick Dunnevant