Justice Delayed

... is never justice denied. At least, that's what the Christian ethic would hold. Every now and again the Problem of Hell gets brought up. You're forced to ask, how could a just and loving God condemn anyone?

http://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-death-row-inmate-writes-letter-life-152637993--abc-news.html

And sometimes the answer just floats to you out of the blue. Bad as I feel about the idea of Hell, I'm pretty sure I'd feel worse if it weren't around. Just take a look at how the wicked prosper when the just are too soft.

Apologetics in a nutshell, revisited.

(What am I supposed to do? Leave!? They'll keep on being wrong!)

"And whoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when you depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet." (Matt. 10:4)


Let it go, kid. Let it go.

Jesus > Religion (?)

The older, wiser heads have already prevailed where this video is concerned, I think. In particular, I understand that the guy who made it already graciously acknowledged the corrections offered by Kevin DeYoung. So... tempest in a teapot, FTW.

What'd I think, tho'?

I think if anyone can tell me an outlet where I can get a jacket like that at a wholesale price, I'd be mighty grateful. Now, I'm not coveting, but...

Hidden Song Message #1

Sometimes when you dig a little, you can tease out a message that prolly ain't intended, but what the heck. Today's track is "Ten More Minutes" by Kill Hannah. I had a writing coach one time tell me that if you couldn't see the face of God in your beloved, then you had some real spiritual work to do on yourself. I think you can see it in this one.

I don't know who you are,
But now somehow
You're breaking  my heart.

And I don't know where you are,
But like a drug lift me up to the stars.

It's why I'm feeling alive,
It's the first time.

Here's hoping this day won't end.

I don't know now what to do, I don't care.
I need ten more minutes with you.

I don't know what you are,
But one look and I'm hooked from the start.

Now I'm falling apart.

That's what you get for falling in love.

Tonight I look in your eyes for the first time,
Here's hoping this pain will end.

It's what you live for.
It's what you lived for.

What you live for,
Would you die for it?

I'm alive
For ten more minutes!

Change for a Dollar

This one isn't nerd-specific, or even necessarily Christian-specific, but if you can't see the Spirit moving here, then there's just no hope for your unRomantic soul. ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DXL9vIUbWg

It really inspired me to think, not just about how much of a difference I can make, but to be utterly amazed at how much God can and does move in our lives without us ever knowing.





"A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah."


Well, there's your sign. Perhaps "Change" became a dirty word a few years ago, but there's better synonyms. Perhaps "grow" or "transform"


... or "Repent."

Batman and the Canaanites, Part Deux

So, I suppose we're all wondering what happened during that wildly successful annihilation of every single pagan Canaanite (well, almost all, but we'll talk about the red cord another time)? About what you'd expect. Violence, carnage, glorious victory, disobedience of God's direct order, greed, and softheadedness.

Oh, wait, you forgot these were the Israelites we're talking about? Yeah, turns out they didn't have the heart to make a clean sweep of the Canaanites. Especially when it came to valuable livestock, or the more beautiful Canaanite women, or the booze, or... well, you get the idea. They were seduced by the booty. Besides that, they seem to have lost a bit of their focus. They chased out the evil until it was what they, in their human estimation, thought was 'far enough', rather than going all the way.

So what happened next?

If you guessed "They had to deal with the Canaanites again later," then you win a kewpie doll. Bonus points if you added "They were corrupted by their involvement with the vestiges of Canaanite culture."

The Israelites just didn't have it in them to completely wipe out the evil. They wanted to keep a little of its riches for themselves, and they had some glimmerings of misplaced mercy.

How can a Christian say that mercy is misplaced? Aren't we supposed to forgive and love everyone? Even and especially our enemies?

This would be where the Batman analogy comes in. Obviously I don't support genocide. If God gives a direct order, then it's to be followed, but anyone else declaring a whole people group to be "evil" I'd look askance at. But take the whole thing as a morality tale, the way it should be used to teach.

How many times has Batman beaten the Joker, over the years? Or Two-Face, Scarecrow, the whole lot of them? But especially Joker. Dozens? Hundreds? And how many people get murdered, tortured, maimed, driven insane, or otherwise harmed severely when the Joker gets loose (because he always does). Thousands, according to the comics.

Batman refuses to kill. He plays catch and release with the Joker, and every time it costs someone their life. He doesn't want blood on his hands, so some mother loses her son, and the tragedy is repeated hundreds upon hundreds of times.

He'll go out and fight the evil. He lacks nothing for courage, skill, or dedication. He'll fight the evil until he draws his last breath, let nothing take away from that. But he won't kill it. He simply won't go over that threshold and take it as far as it needs to go.

It costs him in effectiveness, too. Criminals lose their fear of the bat when they know he won't take their lives. For some of them, that's the only thing they hold dear. His justice has no teeth.

Consider then, how your enemy views you, when you won't eliminate the evil from your life. And make no mistake, you have an enemy--we all have the same one. The tempter, the betrayer, the liar. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ckuXx64abc

Somewhere in your life, you give him ground. I catch myself doing it, too. I'm not okay, and neither are you, and neither is anyone else. Maybe you just can't let go of a grudge. Maybe you quietly envy another. Perhaps you have a stash of Playboys under the bed. Or "hentai doesn't count" or somesuch nonsense. You're stingy with money that you could easily afford to share with the poor. You justify it somehow or another.

You think that this sin, or that one, is "okay." You hold back a little for yourself. Somewhere in your life there is a line that you won't cross, even though God orders you to. Whatever is on the other side of that line, that's your golden idol. That's your Canaanite mistress. That's your sympathy for the devil.

I'm sure he appreciates your mercy, but there's nothing Christian about it.

Batman and the Canaanites, Part I

For some kooky reason, I thought it would be a good idea to tackle one of the most disturbing, unusual, and troubling events in the Old Testament, and compare it to a comic book. As a disclaimer, I don't do this to be irreverent, nor do I think the analogy carries completely for several reasons that I'll sidebar, but bear with me.

Most folks of reasonable Bible-literacy are familiar with the conquest of the Canaanites. If not, I'll give you the Cliff's Notes.

The Israelites had been wandering around for umpteen years (the Bible says 40, but a lot of the numbers, especially OT numbers, are symbolic--it was an extraordinarily long time, in any case). This is after the plagues in Egypt, the exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, Moses drawing water from the rock, manna from Heaven, flocks of birds being sent for meat (cuz manna just ain't manna unless you've got some fried chicken in there), the Ten Commandments, all that good Charlton Heston stuff. They tote around the Ark of the Covenant and are in the constant and palpable presence of God. It's basically the kind of stuff that would supposedly convince even the most ardent non-believer of the truth.

Except they aren't always convinced. No sooner does Moses turn his back on them, than the Israelites start worshipping idols and holding toga parties. And not the innocent John Belushi kind. The sort where Romans look up from the vomitorium and go "Wow, those heathens are degenerate."

A certain pattern emerges throughout the travels and travails of the Israelites. When they follow God's will and give proper recognition to him, things go well. When they try to go their own way, not so much. There's breakouts of plague, serpent invasions (as far as I'm concerned, that would be it for any apostasy on my part--Indiana Jones and I feel the same way towards snakes), and all other manner of punishment. Poor Moses is run into the ground trying to keep these people from killing themselves. The level of recalcitrance is astounding--God Himself is as plain as the nose on their collective face. He gave them orders, very explicitly, written on big stone tablets. It could not get any more real, or clear. And yet people still rebelled. There's something very telling about human nature here. Whenever you feel inclined to grumble that God's word is subject to interpretation, or that he isn't sufficiently visible, remember how the Israelites fared under totally different circumstances. His visibility ain't an issue, our rebellion is. Goes all the way back to the Garden. 

So, by this point in their collective lives, it's become pretty clear that God knows what he's doing, and the Israelites do not. The lunatics do not need to be running their asylum.

And that's when the Kill Order comes down.

Now, the Israelites had been doing a pretty fair amount of butt-kicking out there in the desert already. The Amalekites in particular had been a lethal nuisance, and suffice to say that they were generally having a rough go of it. They'd been around the block a few times, and definitely knew which end of the pointy stick went into the other guy.

But now God wanted them to do something that was a shade past the normal. Total warfare. None of this playing at raiding, a couple camels here, a few dead bandits there. This was big league, Sherman-through-Atlanta, professional-grade military action. Their mandate, in no uncertain terms, was to completely eliminate every one of the pagan people groups occupying what was to become Israel (and Judea). Everyone. The men, the women, the kids, the cows. If the crickets chirruped and they had a Hittite accent, you squashed 'em.

So how do we square this sort of mission with a God who is slow to anger, and quick to forgive? One who is not loving or just, but who is Love and Justice? It isn't as though, as some people joke, having a Son chilled God out. His character is eternal--in fact, most orthodox Christology states that Jesus, pre-incarnation, was already part of the Triune God along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as the Word. So there's no out here, no way to just up and say "Well, that was before Christ--it's different now."

Nope, there's a paradox here alright, but that ain't the solution.

Firstly, a little primer on Near Eastern heroic narratives, and hyperbole in general. When you read accounts from that area of the world, especially ancient ones, and very especially ones dealing with warfare or other heroic narratives, you sometimes get more heat than light out of the descriptions. If you ever saw 'Borat', you might remember him wishing "May US and A kill every single terrorist. May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child in Iraq! May you destroy their country so that for the next thousand years, not even a single lizard will survive in the desert!" 

A lot of the invective is like that. You can hear it today when the Iranian President makes doomsday pronouncements, which leads to some real tensions. He's just making noise with his mouth, but people take it seriously. 

This isn't to say that God wasn't giving a serious order, unlike the aforementioned blunderbusses, but you have to understand that when a narrative says something like "wipe them all out" what is more likely to actually have occurred is that all armed resistance was crushed, and no prisoners were taken. Which generally means mass deportation, not house to house murder. Leave your stuff, grab your kids, and get out. There would be a lot of what we nowadays euphemize as 'collateral' damage. Fires, brutality, intimidation, a lot of nastiness. One may reasonably hope that, because of Israel's divine guidance, they weren't committing rapes or other atrocities. None were recorded, at least, and the Bible frankly doesn't shy away from mentioning incest, infidelity, bestiality, rape, or much of anything else, if it happened, so I'd be hard pressed to believe it went on. That said, it was bad. A whole lot of people were killed on both sides, and the Canaanites were to be expelled, and any vestige of their culture eliminated from the area. Purification by fire, so to speak. This may not rank with Hiroshima, or the firebombing of Dresden, or My Lai, and certainly has nothing on the Soviets or Nazis, but it was not a good time to be a Canaanite.

It was also, as many have noted, probably not easy on the Israelites. More on that in a bit.

The other issue here is what exactly made the Canaanites a target in the first place. This was not arbitrary--there was a whole lot of unoccupied land in the world at the time, certainly God could have sent the Israelites anywhere he pleased without the need for further bloodshed. There was a purpose to the wandering, and a purpose to where they wound up--and how. The Israelites weren't the Chosen People because they were so virtuous. Quite the opposite, as we saw earlier they were the furthest thing from morally impeccable. Moreover, the Canaanites weren't just the unlucky losers who happened to be kicking it on a land of milk and honey.

By all accounts, the Canaanite culture was, frankly, evil. I realize that in our age of pluralism and cultural acceptance, it's definitely not a mark of enlightenment to pass judgement of that sort. However, if you'll look at recent history and current events, it's pretty easy to see evil with a cultural imprimatur upon it. Think of the practice of widow-burning, or female genital mutilation, or foot-binding (or more recently, forced abortion, infanticide, and sterilizations), think of the culture of Manifest Destiny that led Americans to force people onto reservations and hand out smallpox blankets, think of everything that went on in the Belgian Congo (Heart of Darkness, anyone?), or the Weimar Republic's sanction of dehumanization and later extermination of Jews and other 'problem people', think of the Soviet culture and all the ills that it brought. And those, to be frank, are relatively mild compared to what we'd be looking at in Canaan.

You'd be seeing temple prostitution, rampant rape, child abuse (including and especially not only pedophilia, but infant sacrifice), military atrocities, theft, murder, and sure, probably quite a lot of gambling, carousing, drunkenness, and general vice. Small fry, big fry, fish fry, they had it all going on. Every evil in the world, in one place. The brutal, the seductive, and the just plain wrong.

In the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that the town is so corrupt that you couldn't find ten good men in amongst thousands. When two visitors come to town, the whole neighborhood shows up like it's a block party--only it's meant to be a gang-rape-them (probably-to-death) party. We have no reason to suspect that the Canaanites were any different. The only hitch is that this time, the judgement isn't coming in the form of fire and brimstone. It's on the edge of Israelite swords, carried by Israelite men.

And it's always a mess when men try to carry out the justice of God. Especially when that judgement is on others. Often, it's plagued by false righteousness--we violently attack the mote in our brother's eye, and ignore the log in our own. In this case, we have the opposite danger--failing to have enough zeal to finish the task.

In 'The Boondock Saints' (which I categorically do not recommend for learning what it is to be a good Christian or Catholic, but nonetheless a good point is made when) they ask their father how far they're supposed to go in fighting the mob. He responds that the question is not how far, but whether they are ready to go as far as it takes.

Wherever you draw the line, evil will take one step past it and regroup. Then it comes back, in force.

That's where I'm going to draw the line for today, however, since I've got a real job to attend to.

Oh noes, a cliffhanger ending! Will Bennett get to the point? Are all these loose ends going to tie up? Is he ever going to get around to explaining how Batman factors into all this? Is it the analogy even necessary? Could there be a Julie Newmar cameo? For these answers and more...

Tune in tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!

So What Are We Doing Here?

Don't worry, that's not an existential question--although I very well may address it as such, one of these days.

No, right now I'm determining the purpose of my writing here. What I'm strongly considering is being more topical than most. A minister some time back told me that he learned in seminary that he was allowed to do one topical sermon a year, and then apologize. As a layperson, I feel I get some more levity. So what I'm probably going to do is put out some briefer commentaries and thoughts during the week, and probably go into depth on whatever catches my mind, when the weekend rolls around.

There's bound to be some blunders here, since this is actually the first time I've gotten into operating and maintaining a web page of *any* sort. I basically toyed around with the idea, and then put it aside for a long time before coming back to it... a familiar pattern. Someday I may put my testimony up here, too, cuz it sounds a lot like that. ;-)

Hopefully the pattern will *not* revolve around just posting a random cartoon from the comics and something half-witty about it, but this one did grab me.

I know he's trying to zing me, but I just don't quite "get" it. Is he saying that religious people deny evolution? Some do, certainly, but he's depicted the guy as the Pope, who certainly has no issues with Natural Selection theory. Maybe it's a gag about us denying salvation to prehistoric man, or 'lower' animals? That's a little sketchy on the theology, I'm not even sure that we do. Or who 'we' would be. It would seem that the 'Ego' here is more the artist's, taking a half-informed swipe at the purported ignorance of people whom he doesn't understand or care to.

This really calls attention to one of the pitfalls of being a nerd in Christ. We love to be well-informed, intellectual, and even skew towards elitist notions of our own comprehension of the world. Too often we enjoy that smirking, over-the-glasses satisfaction of looking down on the less-enlightened. In the Bible, we wouldn't be the ruthless Romans, nor the moralizing Pharisees. We're the intellectual Greeks and Sadducees, in love with our critical reasoning skillz. We scoff at those crude primitives with their outdated moral codes, or thuggish lust for power.

But the Romans and Pharisees had their upside. There is much to be said for discipline, honor, and organization. There's a lot of benefit to being charitable, good, and virtuous. And yes, there's much to be loved about wisdom, learning, and the life of the mind. But we're supposed to have all of those things. Christ wants your body, your mind, and your soul to be directed towards God.

Now, that doesn't mean turning off your brain and zombie-shuffling, or abrogating the flesh with reeds and whips, or getting so high on your own righteousness (as if we had any of our own) that you can't see the dirt under your own nails.

There's a whole bunch of things that we don't have to do, to be Christian. I'll list a few Don'ts (or at least Don't Got To's)

1) Watch Fox News
2) Believe in ID
3) Throw out your Harry Potter
4) Lose all your friends
5) Turn into someone you don't know anymore
6) Quit thinking
7) Vote for any particular politician
8) Tebow

And so on and so on.

Actually, on #5, I should clarify--you will change. But if you don't want to change, you should look deeper. Stagnation breeds death, spiritual, mental, and physical. Do you experience a constant sense of joy and hope in your life? Do you have the assurance of a meaningful purpose? Do you never feel lost, or alone? Do you think you're perfect? Do you think morals are just "Don't kill or rape and otherwise it's all just whatever"? Have you really considered what it would mean if the Bible were true? Have you really considered what it would mean if it's *not*? These are important questions, and the answers will change you one way or another.

Personally, I have grown, and evolved, but I do recognize myself. I'm still me--I didn't lose my soul. Quite the opposite, I found it. The things that you give up are things that you don't and shouldn't embrace about yourself to begin with. Pride, arrogance, vanity, anger, spite, grudges, self-destructive vices and distractions. The things you hold onto because they give pleasure, in the end are the fetters keeping you from achieving what you really could become.

In the Bible, there's a guy called Esau. He sells his inheritance for a "mess of pottage". That is, all the soup he can eat in a sitting. At the time, he's hungry, and he gets conned into it. He doesn't have the discipline or the faith to keep pushing. So he gives up all that he was promised by his father, in order to satisfy his immediate hunger. See any parallels here?

Yes, cake is delicious. Diabesity is not.

Yeah, drinking is fun. Alcoholism is not.

You might get quick pleasure out of hooking up, or watching porn, or treating women like objects, but how does it affect your prospects for relationships? For that matter, how do you like the idea of your dopamine receptors going so haywire that you can't even become aroused by a real woman anymore?

Things aren't bad because they're sinful--they're sinful because they're destructive. Much like Planck's Constant, nothing could be less arbitrary, and without the Law, we'd live in a crazy looking glass world, where you throw up to keep from starving, and run as fast as you can to stay in place.

So. That is what I'm trying to do here. I'm going to talk about how to overcome sin, not as an abstraction, but as a way of improving our lives in every way imaginable. We're going to talk about True Love, and the Battle Against Evil, and I'm going to make comparisons to Yoda, and the Princess Bride, and Batman, and all sorts of stuff that would probably get me branded a heretic if I were behind a pulpit instead of a keyboard.

Sometimes, it's good to be the laity!

Apologetics in a nutshell.

Courtesy of today's funny pages.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Those of us who grew up on Captain Planet got it soundly beaten into our impressionable little brains that we were responsible for saving this planet from the consumerist 80's greedmonster that we were growing up under. Of course, this message was slightly undermined by the nature of the medium (Captain Planet action figures, anyone? Bet those weren't biodegradable) but they sank in nonetheless. Then you grow up and some English teacher makes you read Henry David Thoreau, and you probably miss his Transcendentalist ethos altogether (that's alright in my book!) but remember the old "Simplify (x3)" adage.


And thus, I've repurposed, retitled, and rededicated this blog. It was just gathering cobwebs anyway, but I felt it would be in the spirit of its purpose (one quite unrelated to Nature-worship of any sort, have no fears) to let the old one die, and a new one spring up. Same ol' me, only not. As Green Day said, every new beginning is some other beginning's end.


So. There won't be any homework or lecture today, I'm just passing out the syllabus and taking attendance. Hopefully there won't be too many drop/adds. Have a good day, and tune in next time.