All sin is equal

Ever heard that one? I have; in Bible Study, Church, Sunday School (many many times), and in conversation. It's quite a pervading precept of my-kind-of Christianity. But where does it come from? Nobody knows.

Now of course, in some sense, like most prevalent false statements, it has some truth to it. All sin leads to death. All sin deserves death. All sin separates us from God. Jesus blood is for all sin. And I'm sure you can come up with many others.

So if someone is using it to demonstrate that all sin needs to be dealt with, for instance in evangelism, then perhaps it's helpful.

But there is one enormously important sense in which it is categorically untrue, unbiblical, and, frankly, stupid. And that is in thinking that God has the same feelings toward all sin.

Passages abound. Almost every page of the Bible seems to have this concept. In fact, when does God ever, in the Bible, not distinguish between sins? God waits for the sins of the Amalekites to reach it's full measure. God punishes the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Ninevah, and Babylon who he called against his own people but later punished them for it. Is it that these people did 1000 sins, but other nations only did 500? Because if all sin is the same in God's eyes, then that's the only conclusion you can come to - and it's a silly one. Of course it's not about quantity! It's about quality! The sin of Sodom was really bad sin. The sin of sacrificing one's child is a particularly bad sin.

Now my Sunday School teachers assured me that 'there is no such thing as a white lie'*. I appreciate what they were getting at. Lying is bad, and claiming that nobody really got hurt does not exonerate you. But this doesn't mean there aren't really black lies does it? For the sake of not treating some sins lightly, we seem to have simultaneously rejected the notion of treating some sins heavily.  

I think this is really dangerous.

*This is a topic for another blog post. Spoiler alert: I think there is such a thing as a white lie.

(I've ranted about this before, and it may have been on this blog. I had a quick flick through and couldn't find it though, so I think I ranted about it elsewhere)

The Absurd II

A while back I talked about a book by Albert Camus, The Outsider or The Stranger, in which the main character lives and dies by the arbitrariness (?) of the universe.

This morning I was reading about the book Bear is now asleep, which is written by the father of the girl who died when she was hit by a goal-post. Remember that? Bear is now asleep is the final line of the song she was singing just before she died.

It's a terribly sad story. I really feel for this couple.

I haven't read this book. It may well be insightful and touching and worth reading. What struck me about it was (at least the editor's idea of) the point of the book.

The first section is about the random-ness of life and death. If only she'd been walking on her mum's left side, if only they'd been a couple of seconds later, or earlier etc. The final point seems to be something like life and death are random and unpredictable, but love lives forever.

This is such a sad annihilationist view of the world. It's not his little girl's love that lives on, but their memory of her. It's her legacy. It gets her nowhere, but is some sort of solace for the parents.

I just can't buy into this sort of perspective. It's one thing to think "remember how lovely she was and how much we loved her", which is great. It's another to attach some sort of existential or even meaningful weight to this. It has none.

Maybe I'm too concerned with the girl, and too little concerned with the parents, because I can't help but think you can't take love with you. Just as people say about money or clothes or other possessions, you can't take these feelings with you, and so essentially, at the end of the day (your life), feelings, like money, are meaningless (on their own).

It's sad that when someone dies one must try to attach meaning to the waste and the sadness. But there is none. Within an annihilationistic (?) worldview, the world is random and unfeeling, and I have to agree with Camus, not this poor guy.

Really sad stuff...

Same-Sex Adoption

In the next couple of weeks, NSW parliament will vote on ammendments to the adoption act of 2000. The recommendations being put forward are to allow same-sex adoption.

Not surpsisingly, churches are discussing how to respond. My old church forwarded around some documents about it. There were 6 talking points. I'll include the first sentence of each in the vain hope that you'll get the gist of what the rest of the paragraph must say, and then my brief response. Spoiler alert: at the end of the day, I think in a secular society, I am pro-Same-Sex Adoption.

1. Best interests of the child paramount.
This is very important of course, and is perhaps accidentally neglected at times in the discussions (on the parliamentary level or otherwise). An extremely important point really. We mustn't allow our sympathy for would-be parents sway our decision.

2. Same sex relationships are not marriages.
This is either a legal technicality or a religious distinction. Besides, property law already blurs the boundary, as I believe it should.

3. Recognition of same sex adoption may lead to recognition of same sex marriage.
This is irrelevant.

4. Marriage provides the best environment for raising children - thousands of years of human history demonstrate this
This is not necessarily true: see the next point. Thousands of years of human history are completely irrelevant. Firstly we cannot account for the entirety of human history. Secondly, if Christians are taking the Bible seriously, there are cultural reasons why it is this way, which are irrelevant to a secular nation. Thirdly, from an evolutionary point of view, the particular survival of predominantly heterosexual cultures is plain, and the development of certain prevailing opinions about homosexuality, unavoidable.

5. Fitness of potential parents - Homosexual people have more emotional problems on average.
This may be true but the data is undoubtedly swayed by the effects the prevailing culture has on people who are homosexual. Therefore I don't think one can say this is intrinsically true. So then, people who are homosexual have a higher incidence of particular problems, but many will not. As adoption is treated on a case-by-case basis (as it must always be), then it is simply a matter of considering each same-sex couple individually. If they fulfill the adoption criteria, you cannot possibly make this argument cogently.

6. Precedent in other jurisdictions.
Universal suffrage would never have happened if we actually thought this were a valid point of view.


I can't get past point 5. There are plenty of abusive and unfit heterosexual couples. We must treat each case on it's own merits, and so at the end of the day we are stuck with our own opinions of the 'appropriateness' of same sex parenting, which I just don't have any data against except that God doesn't like it. That's good enough for me, but I can't enforce it on a secular community....

Any thoughts?

Emergence

I've been away on a conference and then have been organising a move. So I'm sorry for my lack of posting (not sure who I'm apologising to... the net? Anyway...)

I have lifted these excerpts directly from another blog. All the details of where it comes from are given there. But the topic is emergence. I love emergence, I think it's such a fantastic concept, it's really important in my area of physics, as well as many other fields. It's great. Anyway, it's also a bit heavy, so I hope the ideas will blow you away as much as they did me:

This account of the dynamical theory of chaos leads to a metaphysical picture of a world with an open future, in which the laws of physics are emergent-downward approximations to a more subtle and supple reality and in which there is downward causation through information input as well as upward causation through energy input. Such a metaphysical picture can accommodate both human and divine agency.

Subatomic particles are not only not “more real” than a bacterial cell, they also have no greater privileged share in determining the nature of reality.

.... If apparently open behavior is associated with underlying apparently deterministic equations, which is to be taken to have the greater ontological seriousness—the behavior or the equations? Which is the approximation and which is the reality?

....epistemology and ontology are intimately connected. One can see how natural this view is for a scientist by considering the early history of quantum theory. Heisenberg’s famous discussion of thought experiments, such as the gamma-ray microscope, dealt with what can be measured. It was an epistemological analysis. Yet for the majority of physicists it led to ontological conclusions. They interpret the uncertainty principle as not being merely a principle of ignorance (as Bohm, for example, would interpret it) but as a principle of genuine indeterminacy. In an analogous way, it seems to me to be a coherent possibility to interpret the undoubted unpredictability of so much of physical process as indicating that process to be ontologically open.....

d’Espagnat [who discussed the philosophical implications of quantum theory] does not go all the way with Kant. He insists that independent reality is veiled rather than inaccessible; it is elusive rather than absolutely unknowable.

I am driven to greater metaphysical boldness .... I believe that his cautious invocation of veiledness is, at the least, not inconsistent with the kind of openness about the nature of reality that I am trying to explore.

.... such a world of intertwined order and novelty is just that which might be expected as the creation of a God both faithful and loving, who will endow God’s world with the twin gifts of reliability and freedom....

The correct lower-level description can only provide an envelope of possibility within which top-down causation will find its scope for realization. 

..... God’s interaction with God’s own world can be expected to respect its freedom (including our own). God’s acts will be veiled within the unpredictability of complex process. They may be discernible by faith, but they will not be demonstrable by experiment.

Real Service

Every Friday morning I take a couple of my kids from school to do a breakfast club at Nowra East Public School (NEPS).  It's a great thing to do and I like that the kids from my school get to do something (be it very small and, really, of no cost to them as they miss out on class) for others.  What impresses me, though, is who I meet there each Friday morning.

There is a lady who gets there before us each day and stays after us.  She runs the breakfast club and is there every day of the week.  Not only that, she stays after breakfast club is finished and helps out around the school.  She doesn't get paid, she just thinks that it is mportant and she loves the kids at NEPS.  There are quite a few kids there who are real behaviour problems.  She takes them under her wing and makes special time for each of them every morning.  I don't think that they understand it, but this woman is probably one of the only people who really shows Jesus' love to them and is committed to doing it every day that she can.

The other person who is there when I go is a guy who I suppose is in his forties or early fiftes.  He can only make it to breakfast club a couple of times a week, but when he is there he speaks to the children with respect and (appropriate) affection, no matter the way that they speak to him.  He also comes to the school to help out with sport so that the kids have another man around who loves and serves Jesus that they can get to know.  He is planting a church in Nowra East and wants as many people as possible in the suburb to come to know Jesus as their lord and saviour as possible.

I admire these two people.  They want to serve Jesus in an area that is difficult and where few Christians are willing to go.  Any fool can go overseas to people who are grateful for what you bring.  But not many Christians are willing to serve the poor in our own country because they don't actually love them.  I am challenged by those who are willing to really serve Jesus anywhere, be it here or there.  I am challenged by those who really love others, no matter how difficult they make it.

Rationality

Ever heard this one:

Can God move and un-movable stone?

It's a silly question, don't give it any thought.

What I am wondering about though, is rationality. Jenny, this blog's best commenter, raised the issue of rationality a couple of posts ago, and it has got me thinking. Something I've always wondered about, is this:

Is God bound by rationality?

I think he is. I think rationality is a property of existence. In fact, I think it's more fundamental than even existence. I think that if God exists, then he cannot not-exist. And the reason I think that's true, is because it's irrational for both to be true.

But I'm speaking outside of my field of expertise here. Anyone got any ideas how to think about this little nugget?

Preparing for Suffering

The holocaust was a terrible time in human history.  It represents a time of immense suffering and persecution.  It also, however, is quite unique in lots of ways, and presents opportunities for us to gain insight into a world that we would otherwise (God willing) never know. 

What I mean is that even today there are people suffering as the Jews suffered during the holocaust.  In the years since WWII there have been many groups of peple who have suffered terribly and it is supposed that tens of millions have died at the hands of government regimes.  It's just that we don't hear from them.  These people that are persecuted usually have no affluence or influence before the persecution starts, and so after it is finished, those that are left alive return to their lives of no affluence and influence and they still have no voice that the world can hear. 

This is not so of Jewish people in WWII.  They were taken from all positions in society, even those of affluence and influence and suffered terribly as that was taken away.  After the Nazi regime fell apart, though, they were (mostly, not always) allowed to return to their stations in society.  This has led to us having a wealth of literature through which we can gain insight into how people have borne a time of terrible trials and suffering.

One such person who has written about her life and experiences who I very much enjoy reading is a Chrstian lady, Corrie ten Boom.  She grew up in Holland and lived in the same house all of her life until the day she was imprisoned by the Nazis and held in 2 concentration camps.  She has an amazing story and I encourage you to read it.

The person that I have been considering lately in her story, though, is her father, Casper ten Boom.  He was a man who lived a life devoted to Christ and was a pillar in his community.  He prayed with his family before and after each meal and he read the Bible each night straight after dinner no matter who was or was not there.  He tried to live a life pleasing to God and Corrie always describes him as having time to spend with his wife and family.  When the Nazis occupied Holland it was very difficult for men like him.  He resolved never to compromise God's command to love his neighbour and didn't even hesitate to use his house as a refuge to hide Jews.  From the time that Jews were being deported from Holland until the time he was imprisoned they always had Jewish people living in their house.  He never turned anyone away.  When he and his daughters were arrested for housing Jews and conspiring against the Nazis the Jews hidden in his house remained safe and he and his daughters never gave them up.  This cost Casper ten Boom his life.

I am interested, then, in what gives a man the courage to be able to withstand this kind of persecution.  Certainly, it is by God's grace that men such as Casper ten Boom were able to stand against an army.  But I think that od is a God of means and when I learn about the life that Casper lived before Nazi occupation, it seems to me that he was preparing himself for any eventuality to be able to stand firm for the gospel no matter the face of his enemy. 

So it is that I am left to ask myself: 
Does my life now look like the kind of life that is being prepared to stand for Christ no matter the adversary that comes against me?
Or, like many Christian people in WWII, does my life look like I am only prepared to stand for Christ when it is relatively easy. 

These are difficult questions to ask, and if weare honest with ourselves, should probably lead to increased discipline in our Christian walk.