the Enlightenment charge

Of trendy criticisms leveled at current (U.S. evangelical) churches, one of the more puzzling to me has been "The church's core beliefs were reinterpreted to better match the Enlightenment, and this is one of the many causes of its decreasing effectiveness". The adaptation of Christianity to the Enlightenment is supposedly characterized by an emphasis on constructing theoretical systems, reaching truth through abstract debate, and generally enshrining eternal propositions. For postmodernists of varying levels of devotion who're attempting to reconcile their philosophy to Christianity, those emphases are considered unhelpful at best and deceptive or distracting "mere social constructions" at worst.

My first issue with the Enlightenment charge is that it isn't accurate. A long time before then, the biblical concept of God had already been firmly established: a static, absolute, spiritual being whose very nature could be better comprehended through the reading of unchanging documents such as the Pentateuch. Of course, He was also a Personal God who spoke, acted, loved, disciplined, and so forth, but never in ways that contradicted those known attributes. Perfection doesn't evolve so neither does the "I AM THAT I AM". His unpredictability and ineffability are not due to "dynamic divine development" but to the straightforward logical fact that finite creatures (us) are unable to capture or summarize infinity completely. While we have faith that He is Good, it's impossible for us to reliably calculate which specific good thing He will do next. Christians used reason to broaden their picture of God before everyone else began to experience the Enlightenment, and in its function of preserving the (Roman) past, the church was at least partially responsible for the Enlightenment.

Secondly, I'm not convinced that the postmodern Christianity I've read about is any less derivative of the Enlightenment. A postmodern Christian will enthusiastically claim that God isn't a figure in a piece of literature or a precept in a doctrinal statement. Rather, He is alive and willing to participate in an intimate relationship. Anyone who seeks Him earnestly will find Him. "Intellectual hair-splitting" cannot analyze Him for He can only be known by what He does. One mustn't think about Him and instead breathe Him in, more or less.

When I ponder the methodology in the preceding paragraph, the resemblance to a particular philosophical position is uncanny: empiricism, which I could informally state as "Nothing can be known except what we directly experience or can relate to direct experience. Therefore the definition of anything can mean nothing more than a person's experiences of that thing." A postmodern God is thus an empirical God. If we can't ascertain any truths about God except through experience, then He must be defined as experience and nothing else.

Hence the postmodern Christian is an empiricist. However, empiricism's resurgence began with the reintroduction of systematic science...the Enlightenment! Before then, "empirical Christianity" would've been virtually nonexistent even as a possibility. At that time the church's hierarchy declared what God is like, what the duties of each Christian must be, how to apply the Bible, etc. The sentiment of "Stop talking to me about your faith in god and just prove it to me!" is quite foreign before the Enlightenment. One learned through the cunning arguments said by the wise, and so long as the explanation seemed plausible nobody demanded vulgar illustrations of it in the dirtiness of everyday life. The model of belief advocated by the postmodern Christian is itself symptomatic of the Enlightenment.

Still, regardless of debates about history and philosophy and "where the church first went wrong", I gladly join with the postmodern Christian in exhorting (although he or she probably would select a different word than "exhort") my fellow believers to exercise their beliefs in good deeds. We use the same Bible, which compares an inactive listener to a house built on sand. Unlike my counterpart I think that one can certainly say true things about God, but in any case the epistle of James instructs us both that an unexpressed faith is a dead faith.

a God by any other name

I recently read a curious interview online. The gist was someone claiming that the typical understanding/interpretation/explanation of salvation is out of sync with modern times and not well-supported by the Bible on close examination. To the contrary, he stipulated that salvation isn't primarily about sin or defining who is accepted by God but rather about participating in the ongoing redemption of creation at large. He also specifically mentioned that the usual way of framing the concept of salvation is too exclusionary and narrow for a pluralistic society of people whose expressions about good and evil only differ superficially; underneath, everybody who loves his or her neighbor believes the same broad ideas. In any case a God who demands human sacrifice for unholiness is too vengeful to be consistent with the suffering, victimized Christ who identified with the downtrodden.

I almost don't know where to begin dissecting the viewpoint of Christianity in the preceding paragraph.

• In point of fact it isn't as revolutionary or new as some would say. Theologically liberal and culturally-muted sects of Christianity have been around just as long as any other part of the Christian movement. Some Christians always have been hesitant to accept the details at "face value" and opted to mix and match the "general outline" (i.e. the bits they like) of the faith with a variety of external notions.
  
• I've written before about cultural accommodation through appeasement - the practice of deemphasizing or totally removing culturally-foreign ideas, like truth and sin and hell and blood, until the remainder isn't Christianity in any practical sense. In this case one of the rejected ideas appears to be God Himself, or more specifically the God who quite explicitly in the Bible is exacting in both His moral laws and the highly-serious methods by which guilt is remedied and the divine relationship restored. It may be true that too many Christians are too focused on that aspect of Him, but that's still distinct from veering to the opposite extreme of pretending it isn't there.
  
• At another time I wrote about how nonsensical it becomes when someone tries to say that nobody's spiritual beliefs are ever wrong. My point is that if the spiritual realm is real, then what we have are real disagreements about real things. If your one true god is an impersonal unity of the universe then my God cannot also be your god because we're describing contradictory beings. If you believe in multiple gods of roughly equal "rank" then how silly is it to suppose that my God consists of the same divine Presence as all of yours? (Yeah, yeah, Christianity has a Trinity, but Jesus also said "the Father and I are one".) Maybe one's motivation for reducing all religions to one unified supernatural path is the worry that when there are too many religions someone can't rationally believe in one of them. I offered some thoughts on that in the post linked in the previous sentence.
  
• At yet other times, I addressed the question of words failing to express all of God, as well as some straightforward reasons for why there's no such thing as Christianity without doctrine. It's certainly a truism that words and doctrinal statements and formal pronouncements aren't the entirety of Christianity, and right actions and motivations matter. But it's still overreaching to conclude either words are useless or your thoughts are pointless. Sure, we have contact with a resurrected God and we are called to imitate Him and cause others to imitate Him. How shall we do that without describing Him or studying His words?
• Lastly, a serious obstacle to a radical reinterpretation of salvation is the manner that Jesus lived and died. Assume not that He came to atone and assure a blissful afterlife, and instead He came solely to be an in-the-flesh example and teacher of a better human lifestyle that heals and loves not damages and hates. Why didn't He start His ministry sooner? Why didn't He do as His followers advised and "lay low" somewhere away from Jerusalem, where He could train disciples without interference? Why did He talk so literally about His blood and body at Supper?
  

drop the superciliousness

This is more of a personal preference or opinion of mine than a reasoned-out argument, but I believe that Christians of all people shouldn't be supercilious toward any object: people, things, or ideas. We shouldn't search eagerly for reasons to either denigrate or self-congratulate. For God's sake, our inclination will be to find and appreciate any goodness we encounter. Why?

• Superciliousness can accompany and perhaps partially cause overall negativity or despair. It's not beneficial long-term to the human spirit, and its short-term rewards are illusory and beggarly.
  
• I've read that the ground at the cross is "level", which is a pithy way to remind ourselves that the Bible portrays a God who isn't impressed by what we do; indeed, we're sinners steeped in evil at birth. The powerful and privileged don't have special passes to heaven. Rich folk aren't God's favorites. Fashionable and popular people might not be regarded well by Him. Christians are deceived and distracted by the sinful world's patterns whenever they expend time and effort into measuring humanity's worth by such scales. (On the other hand, some commentators go overboard on this topic of social inequity. Since the ground is level it's also incorrect to assume that all who are poor must be innocent victims and all who are prosperous must be crooks!)
• At the same time that Christians recognize the dirty-rotten-sinner in everyone, they also know that God loves them. If Christians claim to emulate His example then they'll love them too. They'll rejoice in any speck of righteousness they discover in whom they meet. Although a fallen person's despicable actions deserve no acclaim, he or she is still included in the scope of love. Christians can neither exalt nor despise their fellow man, so they can't be supercilious.
  

revisiting the Matrix

Preface

More than 10 years later, I'm well aware that mining the Matrix movies for religious illustrations isn't groundbreaking anymore. Neither has it ever been insightful, since the movies invite it by borrowing much inspiration, imagery, and symbolism from various religions and then leaving the borrowings strewn about in clear view for the audience ("Zion"? "Trinity"?). Also obvious is that despite all the iconography the movies are not uplifting or evangelistic (not for biblical Christianity anyway) in purpose or design or content; the base ingredient of philosophy combines with heavy dollops of mayhem, lasciviousness, and profanity. Lastly, many of the premises of the movies are present in other works that aren't as broadly-known.

Nevertheless, the Matrix has undoubtedly popularized an idea at its core that's shared by many supernatural belief systems: the reality of the senses isn't the entirety of existence and in one way or another can act as an illusion that hides something more important. This is literally portrayed in the Matrix as the "Matrix", a fake reality maintained by machines to subjugate humans. This is achieved by a direct electrical connection from the human bodies to the electric impulses that simulate the Matrix, so that in effect the humans' "senses" simply have never experienced anything real. The implication is that by hijacking the nervous system a person's mind is completely trapped in a convincing fantasy. In effect, to trap the brain is to trap the mind.

Disconnect

For completeness (and self-indulgence's sake) it's worth mentioning that as the storyline progresses, the movies increasingly undermine and downplay the entrapment of the nervous system as a simple explanation of the Matrix's functioning. Readers who haven't seen the movies and/or wish to avoid getting any geek splattered on them can skip ahead.

• When the Matrix simulates someone's "death", the person's real body is said to die also because "the body cannot live without the mind". Similarly, when a person's body is suddenly unplugged from the Matrix, both the body and the Matrix "virtual body" drop dead. But if the Matrix is just fakery for the body, then how could it be separating the mind from the body in either case? The most straightforward though mysterious rationale is that when a person connects to the Matrix his or her mind actually leaves the body, which is quite distinct from the concept of the Matrix as electrical signals directly relayed into the person.
• The opposition "agent" programs of the Matrix somehow occupy people's virtual bodies in the Matrix, but only those who've never been unplugged. Agent Smith, who unlike other agents can reproduce, manages to continue to inhabit an unplugged actual human body. While it's unclear why this "possession" by the agents is necessary at all when many other sentient programs exist in the Matrix without it, still more unclear is how a person's identity could be overwritten through the Matrix mechanism. What stream of sensations could accomplish this? Talk about rapid personal change! More on this at the end.
  
• As Neo develops into an advanced stage, he demonstrates the astounding capability of observing and affecting real machines without any physical connector whatsoever, and as if to underline this point he can do it after losing his vision. He can also be in a virtual reality known as "limbo", although this is involuntary. Unless the viewer assumes that the environment previously presented by the movies as "reality" is truly a Matrix within a Matrix (an inventive yet tricky story twist), Neo's later feats presume that his mind extends beyond his nervous system.
  
• In the climaxes of the first two movies, plugged-in people are revived from lethal wounds sustained by their Matrix virtual "bodies". The status of someone's virtual "body" must have a strange relationship indeed to the status of his or her body, in order for death and resuscitation to sometimes flow one way and sometimes another. There could be a couple loopholes: either being plugged-in isn't a genuine total takeover of the nervous system or the association between a person's mind and body isn't fully based in the nervous system at all.
  

Soulfulness

Coming to the point after laying aside the movies' own increasingly complicated stance toward the concept, the Matrix analogy raises a provocative question that perplexes me. If the Matrix is like the physical reality of the Christian and a mind in the Matrix is like the soul of a Christian, then how can a Christian soul distinguish physical reality from spiritual reality any more effectively than a plugged-in person in the Matrix can distinguish the (mostly) seamless Matrix from reality? Falling even farther down the rabbit hole, how can a Christian soul distinguish whether the source of his or her thoughts is natural or supernatural? How does a Christian increase soulfulness in practice so he or she lives not in human "strength" (or brainpower) but instead in divine insight as contacted by the soul?

The question isn't theoretical or academic! It should be confronted by all Christians who believe in a living and active tripartite God, for their answer will shape how they respond when they have a thought that might be from Him. Is a sudden impulse to do a specific good act a supernatural "nudge" by the Spirit or the end result of an undirected (subliminally-triggered?) series of neuron "tickles"? Is a "crazy" idea a mission from God or is it from the same peculiar part of consciousness that in children suggests jumping off tall structures?

Of course, I'm familiar with many of the usual checkpoints for atypical spiritual directives (atypical meaning it isn't one of the easily-understood universal directives like "stop acting arrogant"). Christians should examine their motivations, compare the directive to the Word, pray more about it, ask other Christians for advice, look for tangible "confirmations" of it, etc. I firmly believe that Christians should also evaluate the foolishness of the directive when deciding if it's from God, but on the other hand many people have built a convincing exegetical case that godly wisdom has a tendency to appear foolish to human minds.

While those checkpoints are excellent, anyone of a scientific bent will quickly reply that falsification is easier than proof; it's easier to say "for sure" that a spiritual "directive" that contradicts the Word isn't from God than to say "for sure" that a spiritual directive that meets the approval of three other Christians is from God. In the end, with our souls encased in the "Matrix" of physical reality, we can't reach absolute certainty about our distinctions. A leap via faith and trust is inevitable. The leap may include a discomforting mental shift from "Does this directive match the God I imagine?" to "Do I need to revise the God I imagine to match this directive from the God who is what He is and not merely whom I imagine?"

Dually Noted

However, the question of how to sift physical reality from spiritual reality (or sift the Matrix from reality in the Matrix) runs deeper than practical concerns. According to direct quotes from experienced leader Morpheus in the Matrix, the reason why the Matrix can be a perfect trap is that all human sensations arise through the internal actions of the nervous system and brain. "If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." "Do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in this place [the Matrix]? Do you think that's air you're breathing now?" "Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind."

"Fine," the audience might say. "Regardless of defining mental sensations as nothing more than raw sense data, people can still freely think for themselves. The mind or soul remains an independent piece able to react to sensations however it chooses." Unfortunately, this opinion is flawed under close examination.

Once the audience concedes that sensations are just occurrences in the nervous system, there's no theoretical obstacle to tracing the "lifecycle" of one of those sensations, especially in simplified form. The sensation starts when something outside or inside (infected appendix?) the human body changes. That original change causes a change in a neuron. (Alternatively, the plugged-in human's neurons are jiggled by the Matrix.) The neuron's change has the side effect of changing other neurons. Eventually the chain reaction reaches a part of the brain that receives that category of sensations. Then through the unimaginably dense interconnections that characterize the cortex, the sensation produces "waves" of activity across other brain areas, perhaps including the ones specialized for speech. After a period of time relatively lengthy by the rapid-fire standards of nerve conduction yet considered short by people, some of the motor-control brain areas start another chain reaction among neurons but this time toward the mouth. The mouth says, "Yeowch!" or "Narf!" or whistles "Whew!"

Doubtless some readers anticipate the question this little cartoonish sketch of a sensation's lifecycle is leading up to: in the scenario where and when is the separation between perceiver/brain and decision-maker/mind/soul? Crudely put, how does the brain "make room" for the mind inside the cramped skull? In Matrix terms, doesn't being plugged in mean that someone's very brain is a part of the Matrix, and if so why and how does someone retain the ability to make decisions?

Traditionally, the solution to this conundrums of this sort is to split reality into dual parts, the physical and the non-physical. The brain and the soul reside in opposite realities. Each soul is intimately bound to one brain, and that one brain is its only window into physical reality because souls don't literally see through another's eyes.

Finally, the earnest believer in dual realities faces a last Matrix challenge. It portrays software "agents" occupying the brains of plugged-in people, which has led some to speculate why the machines didn't originally follow Smith's clean solution of agents just replacing everybody. But according to dual realities, if a hypothetical Matrix gained total control of a person's physical-reality brain, would the person's non-physical-reality soul be free and independent regardless? Comparing and contrasting this hypothetical with the biblical accounts of demonic possession is left up to the reader.

better Christianity through foreign languages?

One of my recurring themes here is that words are no more AND no less than symbols. Since the purpose of symbols is to transport ideas, any symbol's value is dependent on: 1) significance, which is the value of the transported idea; 2) precision, which is the success of the symbol in transporting the idea. It's pointless to judge a symbol's value based on other criteria than those two.

That's why I'm flummoxed by Christians who insist on symbolizing Christian ideas with words from languages other than their own (often ancient Hebrew and Greek, and it's apparent that correct pronunciation isn't at all necessary!). I'm not offended by it, but I'm suspicious of their motives. Why do it, especially when equivalent symbols of similar convenience are available in their own languages? I dearly hope their motives aren't one or more of the following.

• Vanity. The ostentatious usage of foreign words can be a peacock-like display to impress others by one's attainment of great knowledge, spirituality, etc.
  
• Cliquishness. An excellent method for members of a clique to differentiate themselves from outsiders is to consistently make the same relatively obscure word choices, such as foreign words specially selected by members of the clique.
  
• Conjuring. The communicator carefully chooses some foreign words and/or languages based on the assumption that God will be more pleased/honored and therefore more likely to respond.

cultural norms and divine norms

In the blog charter (first post ever, back when there were more posts labeled "Mitigating the Objections" than "Christian Errors") I wrote that the online arguments I seek to confront are in fact centuries old. I believe that a similarly ancient history applies to many of the common mistakes committed by people as they seek to live as Christians.

(And to digress momentarily, a third belief of mine is that people who don't learn about the great controversies of Christian theology are destined to relive such. Recently I heard some people giving their opinions about when and how many times baptism should happen, but I strongly suspect none of them knows what "Anabaptist" means.)

Perhaps the most quintessential Christian mistake is to exalt a cultural norm into a divine norm. Examples abound, probably because Christians stumble into it through a variety of routes:

• As a culture and its norms change, Christians accustomed to the previous set of norms may not be willing to fairly evaluate the changes. "In the Christian culture of my past, we'd never ______!"
  
• Christians originally invent a particular practice or prohibition in order to aggressively pursue God or prevent wrongdoing. Then other Christians assume that the practice or prohibition is not only recommended but necessary for all "true" Christians.
  
• Within any culture, conformance to established norms (formal or informal, written or unwritten) is part of indicating one's status. Violating those norms reduces status, and low status reduces credibility, and low credibility reduces the success of evangelism. Therefore, just as Paul's letters instruct, for the purpose of evangelism Christians should adhere to cultural norms that aren't sins. But as they do so, they shouldn't confuse the cultural definition of a "good" person with the Christian definition. "'Everyone' knows that good people don't have that hair style. This is an affront against God!"
• A more contentious category is cultural norms among Christians in regard to prayer, worship, interpersonal interaction, biblical interpretation, and organizational hierarchy. I opt not to delve into it any more than I have in previous entries, except to suggest that these differences often aren't as important or God-pleasing as people assume.

the fallacy of "more mystery, more supernatural"

I've previously taken the time and effort to remind everyone that God isn't luck, God isn't weather, and God isn't (ever) absent. I'm continually flabbergasted by the striking discrepancy of Christians in attributing events to the supernatural. Some people give off the impression that God carefully orchestrates all good events, but does this mean that when horrible events occur then He must either be taking the day off or carrying out incredibly circuitous/unintuitive plans (the much-commented "mysterious ways" and "all things working together for the good")? There's a similar discrepancy in evaluating the deeds of people with free will: great acts merit no personal appreciation because God is "working through" someone but responsibility for despicable acts is solely personal. Hence, many believers' perception of the ongoing relationship between the natural and supernatural realms appears to be conceptually hazy at best and baldly self-interested at worst.

Recently I noticed another aspect of this mental assignment of natural or supernatural causes to events. The more mysterious something is, the likelier an observer will apply a supernatural interpretation. And in my opinion the strength of the correlation is undeniably devastating to the logic underlying the whole practice. In fact, its entire credibility is thrown into question.

Medicine has to be one of the best examples. Every day physicians and patients confirm that microscopic bacteria and viruses play a large role in disease, but for centuries few people had even guessed at that fact. Christians and unbelievers alike often used supernatural spirits or forces to explain the mystery of disease.

However, Christians in the present who're fully aware of the biological basis for disease continue to pray for divine prevention and healing as if a disease's cause and resolution are entirely supernatural. Really ponder the meaning of this prayer for healing: either the patient's immune system cells suddenly transform into more effective shapes or the disease-causing organisms just vanish. Would the same Christians pray that their car engines spontaneously have an additional cylinder or that a tree in the car's path blink out of existence? The only conclusion is that the difference is one of scale, and this is an instance of the general fallacy of explaining mysteries using supernatural causes. As long as an event's scale makes it more mysterious through being unobservable to the normal senses, people more readily place it into the "supernatural" column!

Further note that the same phenomenon of scale is at work in the previously covered categories of "luck" and "weather". Luck and weather occur at a huge scale involving many complex individual interactions, and it's a daunting task verging on impossible to collect and analyze enough data to accurately predict specific outcomes. Thus the scale makes luck and weather events more mysterious, and therefore likelier to be assigned supernatural causes according to the fallacy.

If a chance encounter happens at the local store between people who haven't talked in years, and as a final result they marry (or save from Hell the unbelieving person in the pair, etc.), a supernatural design/intervention certainly feels satisfying. Yet it's worthwhile once again to really ponder the detailed engineering effort this conclusion of design implies. If person "A" had to go to the store because he or she ran out of milk, then A must have bought and consumed the supply of milk in the exact quantities necessary - including buying a half-gallon instead of a gallon, not drinking milk at all one day, using a lot of it to prepare a recipe on a different day, etc. Also, for A to arrive at the store at the right time, A's usual schedule might have needed to shift, perhaps because A needed to work for an additional half-hour. Needing to work for an additional half-hour was caused by a customer making a complaint which in turn was caused by a slight manufacturing defect which in turn was caused during production by the normal wear-and-tear on the plastic-molding machine in the factory...

The list of details as well as each detail's cascading chains of causation could be continued, but the more relevant questions are simply at what point(s) in space and time the supernatural adjustments happened to "put the plan in motion", what the adjustments were, and observers' experiences of the adjustments (with the optional follow-up question of how often we personally witness similar adjustments). When person A originally opted to buy the half-gallon of milk, was that decision the result of a supernatural mental "nudge" or carrying too little cash? When the plastic-molding machine produced a defective product, was the machine's wear-and-tear a result of supernatural "tapping" on its atoms or the routine action of corrosive/frictional forces?

I believe such divine actions are possible but I still find it very curious that people happen to more eagerly apply supernatural reasoning to anything mysterious. Mystery is subjective since it depends on the observer's knowledge and understanding. Then why should mystery have any bearing on the objective question of whether the cause of an everyday event is supernatural?

My third example is the statement that prompted me to write this blog entry. Elsewhere on the Web, someone questioned if an economic downturn could be a judgment (or "discipline") from God. I think this is a strange question to ask. Fundamentally speaking an economy is a system of participants and resources. Therefore in order to cause a downturn in this system of participants and resources, God would need to somehow tweak the participants' actions or afflict the resources. That is, override a participant's decision from "buy" to "sell" or abruptly cut off the worldwide supply of a vital resource (via catastrophe?). If someone thinks it's far-fetched to blame God for a job firing, surely it's more not less far-fetched to blame God for an "economic downturn" of many job firings?