Unfortunately, one of the most frustrating experiences any rational person could ever have is to listen to liberals try to justify their position on any sort of political or social issue” (x).

So begins Richard Mgrdechian’s book How the Left Was Won: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order. From this point the book devolves into a wide generalization of liberal tactics that purportedly serves to alert the cautious and rational citizen to the miscreant liberal who is actively attempting to undermine the American way. While Mgrdechian has some valid insights into faulty logic and erroneous arguments that are often made in the political arena, he fails to achieve his goal of providing an “in-depth analysis” because he relies heavily upon unsupported assumptions, bases many of his analyses on a handful of anecdotal events, and generally expects his reader to agree with his interpretation of political events rather than making a sound case for his opinions. (more…)

Sitting at a decent sized intersection in suburban Los Angeles, I watch an ambulance try to get through to, presumably, take someone to the hospital in order to save his or her life.

Obstructing the ambulances way were not one or two, but five (5!!!) cars that took their left turns right in front of the emergency vehicle.

What were those drivers thinking? “If I don’t make this green left turn light, I might have to wait here another 3 minutes. It’s just an ambulance. Who cares that its job is to go save lives.”

What’s the ambulance driver thinking? Maybe he was a gracious guy. Upon seeing the cars turning left: “Please, go right ahead. Don’t mind my flashing lights and siren. You just mosey on across the intersection and I’ll wait right here with the guy having a heart attack in the back. No hurry at all!”

Wouldn’t it be a dark shade of funny if the ambulance had been traveling to get the grandma or child of one of the drivers? Ha!

I Corinthians 3:18-19

“If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God.”

Perhaps no book of the Bible speaks as relevantly and directly into our culture as does Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. The church he addresses was submitting to cultural pressures, and thus to take on the “wisdom” of this world. The church had become obsessed with peripherals such as the gift of tongues and had lost focus on the central point of the gospel, the Resurrection, and the result it ought to produce in Christians with the new life, Love.  Ah yes, Paul also addresses the abuse of sex: does that sound familiar? Our church culture suffers from many of the same vices as the Corinthian church of the first century A.D. and we would do well to heed Paul’s advice to that body of believers.

But let us take a closer look at the passage at hand. Is Paul advising Christians here to avoid wisdom? “Let us be foolish,” he proclaims in 3:18. This verse could justify the anti-intellectual sentiment so widely embraced in American evangelicalism. Maybe all that book-learnin’ is for the pagans and we should duck-and-cover in the Bible – and we shouldn’t try too hard to understand that either.

Of course, this is not what Paul is trying to get across here. Paul, here, is writing to a Corinthian church much plagued with Gnosticism. When you hear “Gnosticism,” think Da Vinci Code. The idea is that there is a secret knowledge that only the initiated, wise man can possess, and those who have the secret knowledge must carefully guard the secret because of the subversive nature of the so-called truths therein. (I’m sure there are other reasons as well.)

The Corinthian church, judging from numerous references to the state of that church in Paul’s letter, was beset with those trying to persuade the faithful that their “knowledge” was inferior. The very fact that such a problem occasioned a letter from the busy Paul leads us to believe the heresy had become serious indeed.

Paul’s strategy is to grant the Gnostic thesis that special knowledge is an important thing. It is not obtained, though, through mysteries, but by wholeheartedly accepting the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and submitting one’s mind completely to its truth.

This is the rational thing to do because “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Cor. 1:25) This provides the basis for Paul’s advice to “become a fool” in order to be wise. The idea is to adopt the precepts of God, which naturally seem foolish to the world which denies the basic premises of the Gospel.

Paul hits on this point again late in the book in his section on the Resurrection: “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor. 15:19) If Jesus’ resurrection is false, Christianity is a silly way to live life. Paul hangs everything his life had come to mean on this premise. Surely this is the source of his “great learning” and apparent madness. (Acts 26)

So how does a life of hard study correspond to “becoming a fool” in the way Paul advocates? This point is actually neither here nor there. Whether one embraces study or not, the Christian must hang all his hope on the Resurrection from the dead, Christ’s victory over the grave.

However, many of the great saints of the past also accumulated great learning – Paul is not the least example of such. What tends to happen when one learns a great deal, is that one begins to see how little one truly understands, unless one deludes oneself by means of comparison with others. When we consider the vast body of knowledge unattainable to man, we recognize the limitations of human strength and knowledge. The only logical thing to do at this point is come to the One who presides over the greatness and vastness of the universe and begin the eternal pursuit of Him in His goodness, truth and beauty.

C.S. Lewis once said that to understand grace one must try as hard as possible to be good. One will quickly find the impossibility of the task and thus recognize the blessedness of the gift of grace. Likewise, the student ought to pursue knowledge as far as he or she can, to find weakness and thus grow in the ability to embrace God’s strength.

The discussion on the rationality of a transcendent being continues unabated over at PseudoPolymath. Mark and Jim continue to wrangle over whether it is possible or necessary to determine whether God is rational. The discussion has sidelined into issues of theodicy and Romans 9, prompting Mark to provide this treatment of the difficult passage.

Work and sickness have kept me away from blogging, and the discussion has consequently moved beyond me, but I thought I would offer a few reflections. In his concise reply to my post, my brother asked this provocative question: “if transcendent thoughts are “utterly other,” how is it possible to judge them “not irrational?”” The question is beautifully framed, and difficult to answer. Mark and Keith’s replies are, I think, spot on. But, as Chesterton understood, there are thoughts that stop thought, and I think my brother has hit on one. If the transcendant thoughts are not rational, then it seems any rational basis for judging anything is lost. If the fundamental reality of the world is will, rather than reason, then all reason can be reduced to the irrational will that undergirds all. The end result is that the stopping point for any question will not be a rational stopping point, but rather an irrational power. Because there is no Answer that will make sense of the universe, there can be no answers that will make sense of our experience.
The ability to question well–to ask and hope for answers–depends upon a logos at the center of the universe. The fact that we do question indicates that we are looking for answers that make sense–that rationally explain the reality. The question itself, as with all questions, seems to point to the rational structure of the universe. The question is its own answer.

Two posts in one week!?! I know, it’s unheard of, but I couldn’t contain myself. I just read this article at JPost.com and followed it up with this news release from the Hashemite Kingdom. Jordan’s King Abdullah is opening a prep school in Jordan that is “utterly progressive, utterly idealistic, and utterly optimistic.”

Part of the concept behind the school, according to Azar, is to offer families – who otherwise might send their gifted students to the West in order to give them the finest education possible – the option to send them to a top-notch boarding school in an “Arab framework.”

“The King’s Academy offers the best an American prep school education [has to offer] in a Middle Eastern context, with Arab culture, language, tradition and history,” she said.

The school is modeled on Deerfield Academy, a rigorous New England prep school that King Abdullah himself attended as a teenager. There are certainly some questions to be raised about the good sense of modeling a school after anything American (more…)

I imagine I am somewhat putting my reputation on the line by making my reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice common and public knowledge; after all, it is not every day that one finds a military man consenting to reading such novels. However, I safely presume that those readers who know me personally will already by sufficiently acquainted with the oddities and inconsistencies of my character to take no great offense at my present behavior while the opinion of the more general and disinterested reader can have but very little effect on my overall happiness, since my writing in this forum is largely for my own pleasure and conversation with the aforementioned friends, and thus can be generally dispensed with.

When it comes to reading, I am at times quite the literature snob–not because I think very highly of my own tastes or abilities to understand good literature, but simply because, in light of the vast array of books and writing (to which, I am told, there is no end) I simply must be selective in those that I bring before my eyes, considering that time is a valuable, because limited, commodity. Unfortunately for my own pride, however, I must admit that my literary tastes could hardly account for my not reading Austen’s novel so much as my rather silly prejudice towards the book due to a lasting impression taken from the cover of the first copy I encountered. I distinctly remember the outlandish and silly looking woman on the front cover of the bright red paperback, extravagantly dressed in muslin, white lace, and a hat the size of Texas–adorned with nearly as many flowers as that great state can boast in springtime. “Sentimental nonsense,” I muttered to myself, and would have nothing to do with the story, despite the claims of some friends to the contrary. Last month, however, a few friends pressed me so hard on this issue, and had the audacity to appeal to my literary snobbery as argument for their suit, that I ultimately capitulated and borrowed a copy of their book–a book which had the good sense to be dressed in a plain cover with nothing but the simultaneously pretentious and homely seal of “the Classics Club” adorning its front. It took me less than a week to finish the novel once I got started and I found it to be a very edifying exurcision, and now that I have sufficiently boasted of both my virtues and vices and invited you to laugh at them with me, I will turn to an examination of one aspect of the novel that I found intriguing. (more…)

I missed this two days ago, but Saints Behaving Badly, a fun and engaging introduction to some of Christianity’s more…interesting saints is now available on Amazon.  I reviewed it before it’s release date, so I thought I would offer this reminder.  Go get it now!

My brother decided to take on the Pope’s recent speech by arguing–if it can be called that–that Christianity suffers (or almost suffers?) from the irrationality of Islam. Unfortunately, the ironies my brother points out seem grounded misunderstandings of the nature of Christianity. To quote Mark Olson, Jim’s interpretations seem “silly.” I certainly don’t agree with every claim of Mark’s, but his criticisms have kindly saved me the trouble.

The irony of my brother’s post, though, is this claim: “If Keith Plummer is right, and “theological convictions have undeniable practical outworkings,” then let us be glad that, at least at present, the Greeks are winning.” It is ironic because Paleiologos was presumably steeped in the particularly Platonic Christianity (broadly speaking, of course) of Orthodoxy, a tradition that particularly emphasizes the transcendence of God. While Platonism is immensely rational, it also contains mystical and mysterious elements.

It is my hunch that our theologizing should start with the doctrine of transcendence, and never leave it behind. God is wholly other, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. Transcendant thoughts, though, are not irrational thoughts.

I leave you, of course, with a fitting quote from Chesterton. He is responding to those in his day who would reject transcendence in favor of immanence:

If we want reform, we must adhere to orthodoxy: especially in this matter (so much disputed in the counsels of Mr. R. J. Campbell), the matter of insisting on the immanent or the transcendent deity. By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference — Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation — Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.

Despite what I thought earlier, the movie Facing the Giants (reviewed here) will, in fact, be released in the area for you LA/Orange county readers. In short, I recommend this satisfying and truly unique film, so see below for the theater listings.
I’m excited to share with you that FACING THE GIANTS will be released in
Orange County on September 29th in the following theatres:

AMC 30 at the Block in Orange
Edwards Irvine Spectrum
Regal Garden Grove
Regal Foothill Towne Center (Foothill Ranch)
Edwards Brea Stadium (Birch Street)
Edwards Aliso Viejo Stadium
Edwards Kaleidoscope Stadium (Mission Viejo)
AMC Ontario Mills
Edwards Ontario Palace

We at Wheatstone are retreating the next few days, so blogging will be light. In the interim, Keith Plummer at The Christian Mind, has articulated the question for “The West”: “Who is being most consistent with the inconsistent deity of Islam – peace-loving, moderate Muslims or those willing to justify all manner of atrocities in his name?”

On a totally unrelated topic, I also found this thought by Matt Harmon interesting: “In my estimation this is one of the great descriptions of gospel preaching–preaching in such a way that those who hear the message “see” Jesus Christ as the crucified one. That they see Jesus as the one crucified for their sins. For it is in this seeing of Jesus that we are transformed into his image (2 Cor 3:18). This, then, is the great task of preaching.”

Read and enjoy!

Update:  After reading Keith’s post, check out this essay by scholar Bernard Lewis on the rise of modern Islam. It is an immensely clear and concise explication of the roots of modern Islamic thought.  If you read one article today, read that one.  It’s that good.  (ht:  Hugh)

A fascinating narrative in the style of the Greek fables, written by unlikely author…

“In ancient times, when the world was just beginning that is, there was a young lonely nymph named Rose. Rose was lonely because she wasn’t as beautiful as the other nymphs of the forest. Every day she would sit and watch over the daisies, as it was her job to do so, and she would long to to feel as though she belonged with the other nymphs. More importantly, she longed to feel loved. It was indeed a very sad life for a nymph to live. (more…)

“He who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is wise.”

– Lao Tzu

With the reading of many books comes learning. With the in-depth analysis of a broad range of topics and issues comes the reputation for being intelligent, clever, smart, or at least well educated. Leaving aside the humanities, with the many-year long commitment to studying applied mathematics in areas of physics and chemistry, or the related disciplines of engineering, medicine, biology, astronomy, etc., comes an ever higher cultural elevation as one of the holders of true knowledge in the world today.

The pursuit of scientific knowledge is an unquenchable thirst for many people. (I mean “scientific” in both the narrow sense, ie, the modern empirical sciences, as well as the broad classical sense, ie, of any true learning about unchanging principles and facts of the universe, its infrastructure and workings, and the creatures within it.)

The sustained effort to quench this thirst, it seems to me, inevitably pushes the thirsty to make one of two decisions: 1. One decides that scientific knowledge, in all of its varieties and taken as a whole, is a means to self-knowledge. Or, 2. One decides that self-knowledge one of many means to scientific knowledge, in all of its varieties and taken as a whole.

There is no third alternative.

Lao Tzu has so pithily provided an assertion of his opinion. Does anyone care to assert theirs, along with a supporting argument? Or to provide poor Lao Tzu with a support for his?

The Pope’s recent essay apparently didn’t fit very well into a soundbyte. The outcry prompted an apology, leading to this fitting headline: Pope Sorry for Reaction to his Remarks. As we all are. (ht: Jim)

Update: Peter Leithart, a really smart guy, responds to the Pope’s remarks.

Update 2: Check out this excellent open letter to Pope Benedict by blogger Ed Morrissey. The Anchoress has keen thoughts as well. As for myself, I am going to hold off and think about the issue some more. I’ll simply keep directing Mere O’s traffic elsewhere until I have something constructive. (Ht: The Blogger).