Today i pondered over a new factor about the “busyness crisis” of the 21st century. I heard a sermon this morning on the importance of rest in a frenzied world and it hit me that the reason people aren’t resting is because they aren’t sure what brings meaning. It’s as if people are uncertain if it’s the most important to build an intimate family life, participate in a community to strengthen oneself, develop career that will leave one’s footprint on the world, or discover quirky hobbies that will add depth to a personality.

Basically, i think everybody is having an identity crisis, nothing new. What is new is that i want to start thinking more about how much time should be spent doing what in our lives from a Christian/biblical perspective. It seems like the Bible talks a lot about work bringing meaning (although i can’t think of any particular verses right now, does anybody have any?)

However, the Bible also condemns wealth, selfishness and non-reflectiveness. does this mean cut-throat, travelling-CEO jobs are out for the Christian population? What about kids signed up to be child actors that also profess to love Jesus? Intuitively I want to say that being “in the world” means Christians can do whatever the heck they want with their life, as long as it follows a basic moral code (fidelity, honesty, etc), but I also have this feeling that a lot of us spend our time as schizophrenic meaning seekers just like the rest of the world.

What if all of our schedules just stopped and suddenly we had to face and sustain our relationships with God and those closest to us?

I think those relationships would take on a level of depth a whole lot deeper than they are.

On the other hand, I don’t think “doing stuff” is bad. I just think we live in a “doing” centred society and have no clue how to just “be”. I know I feel a certain amount of panic anytime I have a “hole” in my schedule for a couple hours. I can’t image Jesus freaking out this much! I think I need a monastic trip for a jolt of reality sometime soon.

A week ago I finished reading Raj Patel’s new book, Stuffed and Starved, and can say without a doubt that it was a huge eye opener.

I’m not a math kinda guy, so a lot of the economic things he said were lost on me, but I definitely understood enough to see that the international food system right now is in no way a just one.

At his website, he gives a condensed list of some suggestions he has for action, one of which I want to highlight here:

2. Eat locally and seasonally.
You can find resources on eating locally and seasonally here – but the joy of it is that eating locally and seasonally happens most easily and healthily by growing the food oneself. Nothing tastes like a homegrown tomato. Why not google your local allotments and gardening centres to see what resources they can offer?

Now, I don’t have the money or the time at the moment to start growing all my own food, but I have been trying to take this point to heart. Frankly, I have no right not to, given the enormous amount of suffering the international trade of food is causing people. Eating locally is a necessary first step. Ignorance is really no excuse; with little effort I was able to find a cookbook with seasonal and local recipes for a reasonable price. It isn’t that difficult to do.

I have to say, forcing myself to drink and eat less pre-prepared food (including my much beloved coffee) has made me realize how much sub-standard food we actually consume. Patel has an interesting quote related to this on the site I just mentioned:

As Marco Flavio Marinucci says at his Cook Here and Now website,

Evolution gave us the gift of having to eat frequently: Let’s not treat it as a chore. I believe that when we devote attention to what we do, we feel more satisfied and satiated by it. Each meal gets my full and undivided attention. Choosing the best ingredients from what’s in season locally, preparing the dishes from scratch as often as time allows, and keeping in mind who’s sharing them – it’s all gastronomical foreplay that creates the emotional build-up released in a delightful meal.

Now, if Marinucci has enough awareness to realize that the joy of eating is something he has to be grateful for, even though he thinks that joy was given to him by a series of purposeless events, shouldn’t Christians be doing even better? Should we not be even more grateful, and even more focused on preparing and eating food in a way that recognizes the great many varieties of food and the gift of artistic talent that God has given to us?

Solomon once wisely wrote:

Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life and in your toil in which you have laboured under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:7-9)

I think we need to consider this more, as 21st century Christians; the greatest earthly gifts in life are the simplest: shelter, drink, love, food. Let’s not squander them, nor abuse them through negligence.

A relevant post from Triablogue on the subject.

I should mention: I’m highly sympathetic to the argument there, and in fact, given his argument from Proverbs 5, I think I might have spoken too lightly in my comments in Dan’s post. I think it’s definitely an open possibility that even the OT prohibited engaging in polygamy. In which case, I would have to say, if polygamy is permissible at all, it is only permissible in the sense I raised in my comment to Dan in his previous post: it is permissible to remain in it if you have already been polygamously married.

I’ve sort of been keeping up with the recent debate over homosexuality started by this post on CoG. Does God abhor homosexuality? And if so, what should a Christian in 2008 do about that (if anything)? I’ve been thinking about this, and the rallying cry of those activists engaged in this debated on a political level is “one man, one woman” or something to that effect. There are sometimes dark whispers that the gays are going to open the door for the polygamists. Most Christians (at least those I know) would oppose polygamy, and I would agree with them on that matter. The social consequences of polygamy tend be that girls are forced to marry young and the young men are driven out of the community so the paedophiliac old geezers can have some more 13 year-olds for themselves.

But is it unbiblical? Consider

• Genesis 2:24 says that a man will leave his parents to be united with his wife as “one flesh” but it doesn’t explicitly prohibit further unions.
• David, said to be a man after God’s own heart, was definitely a polygamist, as was his son, Solomon who built the temple. The same was true for other kings of Israel and Judah.
• Deuteronomy includes rules for handling succession in the case of multiple wives. Clearly this was a common enough occurrence that a ruling needed to be made on the matter.
• The pastoral epistles in the NT say that elders or deacons should be husbands of “but one wife” which makes monogamy a requirement for church leaders, but, more pointedly seems to implicitly admit that there were polygamists in the early church.
• Deuteronomy 17:17says not to take too many wives, but doesn’t give us a number.
• Leviticus 18:18 says not to take two sisters as wives, but thats about it.
• Mark 10 may look like a ban, but seems to focus on divorce more than marriage.

So why are we against polygamy now? I imagine that for a number social and cultural reasons it fell out of favour and became frowned upon. The meanings of Genesis 2:24 and the pastoral epistles were tweaked and/or amplified. As I say though, this is a good thing. But it is an innovation that the Bible does not record in any obvious fashion such as “No one should ever commit polygamy.”

We seem to have been capable of prohibiting something that the Bible was prepared to, at the very least, tolerate. Is this better or worse than tolerating something the Bible prohibits?

This is a fascinating bit of audio from Jacques Derrida.

Does anyone find that this is true? It reminds me about how Dostoevsky, at the end of his life, commented that his faith was not like that of a child because it had passed through the “crucible of doubt.”

Over at Poser or Prophet, Dan (not our Dan) has posted on why he thinks arguments against homosexuality based on the order of creation in Genesis 1-2 are faulty. Please take the time to read the whole post. Here’s my response:

Interesting post, but I don’t think it adds up. The argument you’ve presented is sound, but it excludes important information that would negatively affect it.

You say that the beginning, creation, was good but not perfect. Due to this there is room for creativity and innovation, such as the move from a garden to a garden city. You then say there is nothing in Genesis 1-2 to stop us from thinking that homosexuality is one of those creative innovations.

“Thus, even those (the minority) who ‘choose’ homosexuality, have not done anything wrong. They to, are simply engaging in an act of creative, and good, innovation — and are mirroring God’s actions by doing so.”

Perhaps this is true if we just look at Genesis 2 alone, but Christ interprets Genesis 2 in the gospels. He uses it to condemn (at least some forms of) divorce.

So, although creation was good but not perfect, the goodness of creation does reflect some values that God wishes to reflect throughout the whole story of Scripture (unless you think that we ought to move beyond the words of Christ on divorce to some more ‘innovation’).

Of course, this same logic doesn’t necessarily follow with homosexuality. Christ doesn’t authoritatively speak on that subject (without getting into his discussion of Sodom and Gomorrah). But, the whole canon of Scripture does. As Robert Gagnon’s work has shown, everytime homosexuality is mentioned in the Scripture, it is seen to be an act of great abhorrence to God.

I see no good reason to see men having sex with one another as an “act of creative and good innovation” In light of the pertinent texts (which should be looked at more in depth … DH’s analysis in the comments was seriously lacking, cf. his argument from silence on Jesus and homosexuality) that do speak of homosexuality, this is downright blasphemy.

-Keith Brooks

“Generally, again, I ask your permission to drop the subject,” Pyotr Alexandrovich repeated, “and instead let me tell you another anecdote, gentlemen, about Ivan Fyodorvich himself, a most typical and interesting one. No more than five days ago, at a local gathering, predominantly of ladies, he solemnly announced in the discussion that there is decidedly nothing in the whole world that would make men love their fellow men; that there exists no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that if there is and has been any love on earth up to now, it has come not from natural law but solely from people’s belief in their immortality. Ivan Fyodorvich added parenthetically that this is what all natural law consists of, so that were mankind’s belief in its immortality to be destroyed, not only love but also any living power to continue the life of the world would at once dry up in it. Not only that, but then nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted, even anthropophagy. And even that is not all: he ended with the assertion that for every separate person, like ourselves for instance, who believes neither in God nor in his own immortality, the moral law of nature ought to change immediately into the exact opposite of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to the point of evildoing, should not only be permitted to man but should be acknowledged as the necessary, the most reasonable, and all but the noblest result of his situation… .”

I should add:

• it’s not enough to simply point to self-professing atheists who also seem to love their fellow human beings, because Christianity (and Dostoevsky) also says that everyone actually knows God exists, despite what they say (cf. Rom. 1)
• it seems to me that the bible teaches that the human subject’s awareness of the moral worth of the other is the same as his/her awareness of (the likeness of) God in the other, so that knowing what is right is the same thing as knowing God (which means: just because someone, even a Christian, might think they would still have moral intuitions even if they did not believe God existed, they would not necessarily have those intuitions if they were not actually knowing God in the other when they have those intuitions; in other words, if the bible is right, if they did not in fact know/believe that God existed, they would cease to have any awareness of right and wrong)

That is, is God a deceiver if the omphalos hypothesis is right? I don’t think so, for the following reasons.

Firstly, the universe only has an “apparently old” age in the sense that, when interpreted through a grid which inductively extrapolates backwards from the present, based on current period processes, we can mathematically estimate how long the processes have been running. But it is not as if the rocks have flaming messages from God (a la Douglas Adams) written on them telling us the time and date of their creation. This means that any age they appear to have is based on our inductive reasoning being applied to the objects of nature, not because the objects of nature themselves, or God on them, “tell” us their age.

Secondly, God has never promised that our inductive reasoning will always be correct. As well, we know that our inductive reasoning can often be (and has been) incorrect.

Thirdly, a deception is a falsehood communicated by an intelligent agent. But our inductive conclusions are not propositions communicated to us by God.

Fourthly, if God actually has told us how old the universe is, it is obviously wrongheaded to say that he has deceived us.

Thus I can’t see how the objection sticks. This is not to say that the hypothesis is true: if God has actually not told us the age of the earth (i.e., if non-”literal” interpretations of Genesis are exegetically correct, or if there is no divine revelation at all, or if there is no God to reveal anything), then there is probably no reason to disagree with our inductive extrapolations from current periodic processes. The truth of the hypothesis must be established apart from rebutting the above objection.

(The other objection to the omphalos hypothesis mentioned at wikipedia, that it is unfalsifiable, also fails: if it is established based on it being divine revelation, falsifying its claim to be divinely revealed would remove any reason to believe in a young earth, unless inductive reasoning could separately tell us that the earth was young. So it is falsifiable rationally and theologically, though not through empirical induction from the very things that it says cannot tell us the age of the earth.)

There has been some recent discussion about the philosophy of science and the movie Expelled in connection with ID and the intelligent design movement. Much of this has assumed that everyone is familiar with ID is. In order to make this more complicated, ID does not mean just one thing. It means a few things.

ID is sometimes taken to refer to a family of theories about the origin of information in the universe. These family of theories all state that some information or structure in the universe was created by an intelligent being. In this sense, ID is NOT a theory. This family includes any theories of alien design, all forms of Creationism and every theory that claims that God designed the constants or laws of the universe. It would do well to note that by this definition Darwin believed in an intelligent designer. I will call this the wide family definition of ID.

Sometimes ID is taken to refer to a different family of theories. These are the theories that claim that information created by an intelligent being is empirically detectable in principle. These theories do not necessarily claim that intelligent beings actually created anything at all! I will call this the empirical family definition of ID. It would be useful to note that both criteria are sometimes combined. In that case, the family of theories could be called the narrow family. This narrow family excludes all fideistic theories (ie. some versions of creationism) and still includes some versions of “alien creation” theories.

Sometimes ID does not refer to a family of theories, but to a particular theory of design. An example, now famous, is the design of the bacterial flagellum.  Behe has claimed that this feature is designed. The structure did not originate from any mechanical process at all. The evidence is the claim that the formation of all such structures (irreducible complex ones) using any evolutionary process is highly improbable. This theory could (in principle) be disputed by other thinkers favorable to ID. It is one of many. There is no single Theory of Intelligent Design.

Sometimes ID refers to a research program or a heuristic. In that sense, one arrives at scientific theories by assuming that the object of study was designed. For example, one might suppose that so-called junk DNA has a useful function. One would then begin research to find out what that function might be. In this kind of case, ID is not a theory. It is a way of thinking that encourages scientific research.

Thus ends the list of what ID is. ID is not creationism. It lacks political agendas and faith commitments. ID is not the Intelligent Design Movement (IDM). ID is not a revision of creationism. It is both too general and continues much earlier thought. ID is three things: it is a theory about specific features of the world, a family of such theories, and a research program.

Dan,

Your question about being vegetarians is one I’ve also been thinking about for a while; as a co-carnivore, it has also been difficult for me!

But here’s my thinking so far:

When it comes to economic obligations to others, apart from not doing things that are sinful, I think we also have another obligation, stemming from our common Christian calling: to be a sign of the kingdom of God.

I don’t think we can say that, because of national/global patterns of consumption and production regarding meat, we are obligated to forswear all meat because “every bit of meat you eat means less food for other people in the world.” Frankly, if you alone became a vegetarian, it would completely insignificant in terms of cause and effect on global supply and demand… except…

insofar as you function as an example, a sign to others, you have the ability, and thus an obligation, to point towards what is right. In that sense, I think we can say, in our modern context (and given that you are correct about what you and Matthew have been debating in the comments of your post), our obligation to be a light to the world at least requires a noticably (i.e., to the outside world) different attitude towards meat consumption than the generally gluttonous (a vice not much discussed in the modern church, perhaps not ironically) attitude the West has today.

Because of this, I have (slowly) been trying to consider ways to reduce the amount of meat I eat, though so far I haven’t been very successful (unfortunately, my tastes are very limited when it comes to non-meat foods). But I think I need to try.