Wednesday, October 08, 2008

This year I've just gotta start eating healthy...

In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:1,2)

Fellow Diners,

I'm just not going to go there anymore. But I'm probably not going to go there any less, either.

You know where I'm talking about: The Cultural Diner, of course. My mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health would certainly be a lot better if I could give up the regular table reserved for me. I want to improve my health, so this should be sufficient motivation to do it. Going cold turkey shouldn't be so bad. I can handle it...

First, I'll just turn off "The Bob and Tom Show" in the car on the way to work. Then I'll make Bible.com my home page, instead of MSN.com. Pass by all those People magazines in the waiting room. Newspaper, in the trash. No more Thursday appointments with "Survivor". No idolizing the "Idol". TV in general, out. The movies, out. Talk radio, out. Gossip, out. Brangelina and the Golden Globe's Best Dressed list, out. (Well, maybe I can make a little room for Angelina!).

Then the healthy stuff: Prayer, Bible study, other spiritual disciplines to fill the pantry and regrigerator. Exercise, plenty of rest, more time with the family, waiting on the cupboard shelf.

Aaah! This year is gonna be so good!
______________________________________

Probably a good many people in this fair land made sweeping resolutions for the New Year. Maybe even you did. Those resolutions will no doubt cover a broad spectrum of topics: lose some weight, get in shape, find a new job, learn a new subject, spend more time with my family, and so forth.

But there’s one subject I’ll wager very few of us have included in the list of things we resolve to do in the year to come. Repentance. “I resolve to repent of my self-centeredness.” “This year I’m going to stop lying to cover my backside.” “My New Year’s resolution is to give up always trying to be the center of attention and show a little more consideration for the people around me.”

Just doesn’t happen, does it? People simply are not given to repenting. And there are some good reasons for this. The first is that sin is our natural habitat. We are born into this world sinful and self-centered. It’s part of the original factory equipment of every human being. We spend all our childhood basically perfecting the skills of selfishness that, in adulthood, start making us inconsiderate, boorish, and mean. It’s so convenient just to be myself. It feels so right. Why try to go against my very nature?

There is a second reason that repentance is not high on most people’s list of things to do: sin can be downright pleasurable. We enjoy sinning. Delight in it. Try to get away with as much of it as we can, because, doggone it, sin is fun! Who’s going to give up all the fun that comes with those little flirtations, that carefully placed gossip, those indiscretions of this or that kind, that mean spirit that makes everyone cower in our presence, those exaggerations that easily bleed into lies? What’s wrong with a little fun? No harm, no foul. We simply like to sin. Repent? What will you offer me to replace the fun I’ll be giving up?

The third reason repentance is so unpopular today is because to repent means to admit wrong. If I’m going to repent from something then I have to admit I’m doing something wrong. I’ve made a mistake. I may have done a bad thing, or, heaven help me, actually be a bad person. In our “I’m OK, you’re OK” culture, we don’t want anyone to feel bad about himself, no matter what he does. Even in our churches we don’t like to talk about repentance, because we want people to be smothered in “feel-good-about-me-ness” when they’re in our midst, so they’ll be sure to come back next week.

So how’s this for a resolution—New Year’s or any time: Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. You'll not likely practice the discipline of repentance if you're ignorant of the law of God. You'll not likely practice healthy eating if the health food store doesn't advertise and educate.

Finally, you will be greatly aided in your practice of repentance by maintaining some kind of accountability. Be willing to be confronted, rebuked, and corrected by those who love you, and you’re on your way to a fruitful life of repentance, and a healthy meal at the wedding banquet. Share your needs for repentance with those who love you; seek their prayers and support. Repentance will become more a part of your life in the kingdom of God if you have a diet buddy to help you along the way.

For reflection: How could society be different if our churches were more faithful in teaching about repentance?

Cultural Nurse-in-Training,

~Bill

As John the Baptist said, "Bear fruit in keeping with repentance." Matt.3:8.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One bite at a time.

Fellow Noshers,

As I watched the other customers' order being delivered, my appetite really revved up. Sizzling plates, delightful aromas, silverware clinking greedily on their plates...

That's why I was so disappointed when the waitress got to my table. I tore into the steak before she had a chance to walk away...and it was COLD!

"Excuse me, miss, but this steak is cold."

"That's okay, sir. Usually people like their steak hot, but it's okay if you want it to be cold. We don't mind here."

"But, it really is cold. I'm not making this up. I don't want it cold."

"If you don't want it cold, then just drink some ice water. The difference in the two will make the steak hotter. Glad I could help, let me know if you need anything else."

So there I sat, not knowing what to think. Was I really the reason the steak was cold? ________________________________________

Try a little experiment: Next time you grow weary of the vapid chatter about the price of gas, the latest guest on Oprah, Trump and Rosie, and the merits of cable versus the Dish, try this the next time you’re in a social setting: Ask, “Who believes in truth?” After the room revives from the dead skunk you’ve tossed on the carpet, continue, “No, really; who believes that truth exists and that it is knowable?”

(In my experience, whether you do this with co-workers, neighbors, or church members, the conversation will proceed something like this:)

"You’re talking about absolute truth?"

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Depends on what?

"On your viewpoint. Have you seen that sketch—the one that looks like a hag or a beautiful girl."

Yeah.

"Well, which is it—a picture of a girl or a hag?"

"Exactly! It all depends".

Can we get off this gerbil run? Depends on what?

"Okay. We’re all products of nature and nurture which causes us to see things differently. As to the sketch—I may see a hag, but that gives me no right to claim that it is a hag, or that others are wrong if they see something else. In the end, who’s to say what it is, or if it’s anything but a poor artist’s scribbling?"

The responder reflects the prevailing sentiment of the day: truth is not an objective, overarching statement about reality; it is personal perception shaped by our genetic makeup and experience. Among sophisticates and intelligentsia, such relativistic thinking is all the rage. Yet few realize that their fashionable ideas are really quite old.

Like the modern-day hag/girl drawing, a favorite illustration of yore was the parable of the wind: One person feels the wind as cold, while another feels it as warm. And since the wind can’t be both warm and cold, it’s the individual--not external reality--that determines its properties. In fact, maybe it’s the individual that determines the very existence of the wind.

Maybe.

Relativity theory and quantum theory form the backbone of modern relativism. Together, they validate the “truth” about truth that the Eastern mystics had been telling us all along: objective truth is an illusion.

Then East met West in “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” In the famous fable, six blind investigators examined different parts of a pachyderm to conclude that it is like a tree, a rope, a wall, a branch, a fan, a spear. The lesson? They were all right. The application? We, too, are blind men with no privileged position to judge the perspectives of others. The conclusion? If all we have are the experiences of our diverse fumbling in the dark, practically speaking, there is no elephant!

But if truth cannot be discovered and, in fact, does not exist, it is our creation.

Even better than creating the new "truth", are the reasons we've created for giving up on the old "truth": “We don’t know the whole truth” (So I guess we just make something up?); “It’s good to raise questions” (Maybe we should also question whether 2 plus 2 really equals 4?); “It stimulates critical thinking” (About as much as wasting thought on Holocaust denial theories). But my personal favorite, the American Bandstand answer, is: “It's a catchy, hip idea, with a cool soundtrack.” That oughta do it.

Resist the siren song of the modern-day Relativists: Truth is independent of us. Truth is true regardless of our perceptions or beliefs no matter how sincerely we hold them. Neither is it something we invent. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “We can no more create truth than we can create a new law of nature, like the law of gravity.”

Busy creating my own truth,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Infidel,

~Bill

You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose...

The old joke ends,"But Dr. we really need the eggs."

Fellow Diners,

Well, it may finally be time to send for the guys with the white coats to wrap me up and cart me off. (I know, I know...)

It had been a while. Probably a month or so since I'd last visited the Diner, and that's just wrong. Not only did it feel good to get back in here, in a way it is good, for the body and the soul. In the same way our immune system needs exposure to pathogens to generate and maintain resistance, so our value system requires the occasional irritation or poke in order to remain strong and vigilant. But this didn't strike me as right.

The service is normally superb here. They bring you anything you want, and I mean anything. Don't misunderstand; the staff here knows the meaning of suggestive selling. In fact, they invented it. This time was different, though.

I ordered the chicken. So you would expect, they bring me the chicken, right? The waitress smiles, calls me "Hon'", refills my drink, and unveils a plate full of...roast beef!? Not wanting to be rude, I say this must be a mistake, I ordered the chicken. And what do you think she tells me? Most minimum wage servers working for a big tip would be right on that one, whipping the incorrect meal back to the kitchen, returning with the right vittles and an apology for the inconvenience. So imagine my surprise.

"No, that's right sir. I know it looks like roast beef. But the chef really wanted it to be chicken. In fact, the whole time he was cooking it, he kept thinking that it was chicken. So now, it must be chicken."

Hmmm. Times they are a changin'.

___________________________

It used to be, in the old days, that the biggest decision new parents had to make was the name of their baby. The one thing they didn’t have to decide was the kid’s sex—that decision had been made for them, all they have to do is take a peek. That would be that.

Well, not any more, at least not in New York City. You see, under a proposed Board of Health rule, “people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates.” They would need only to provide “affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex.” They would also have to promise that “their proposed change would be permanent.”

The proposed rule isn’t aimed at people who have had “sex-change surgery.” They are already permitted to do this. Instead, it’s directed at people who “had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years . . . ”

Read those words carefully: adopted and especially gender, instead of sex. It is a big hint that there’s some major postmodern mischief at work here. “Sex” is what scientists call “binary”: You either have an XX (that is, female) or an XY (that is, male) chromosome.

But, if nature can’t be twisted and shaped to suit our ideological predilections, words, especially in the hands of postmodern vandals, can be. If the goal is to separate anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, then the use of the word gender is a must.

You see, transgender activists can get away with saying that gender is just “socially constructed” and more than “the sum of one’s physical parts” because gender is a word that most people don’t regularly use. Substituting an obscure word, in this case, gender, for the more common one, sex, is intended to confuse and obscure. It’s the kind of verbal tactic George Orwell would be proud of, akin to a squid squirting ink to confuse its predators.

Of course, what makes this squirting necessary is the denial of the obvious: “Living as a woman,” whatever that means, no more makes you a woman than hiding a pot of gold makes you a leprechaun.

These verbal parlor games may wow them in the faculty lounge or the counter seat at the Diner, but nature is unimpressed. They remind me of the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. He submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal filled with postmodern gibberish like “physical ‘reality’ and physics. . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

After the paper was published, he revealed the hoax, that it was all gibberish, adding that those who believe that physics really is a “social construct” should test their beliefs from his twenty-first floor window.

Christians should not be shocked at any of this. Romans 1 tells us that God’s truth is made plain in creation, and to deny this truth—in this case, “male and female created He them”—is to exchange the truth for lie, which Paul illustrates by an example of men lying with men, in other words, rejecting their God-given gender, which is a challenge to God’s created order. Well, today we have renewed that old lie—that we can create ourselves the way we want, and peeking doesn’t make any difference.

I don't know what I just ordered. Do you?

Your Friendly Neighborhood, Puzzled, Still Hungry but Willing to Give Them Another Chance, Because I'll be Hungry again, Maybe I Should Just Shut Up and Eat What They Give Me, Apatheist,

~Bill

The NY Times covered this all very well Nov. 7, 2006.

We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service...

Faithful readers,

You've seen the signs, right?

I don't mean the "No shirt, no shoes, no service" ones. Those are right at the front entrance, and are placed at the order of the Health Department. Those are for the good of everybody.

I mean those little signs, behind the counter. They read something like this: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, at anytime, for anything." Ostensibly, they mean to let you know that if you are going to act like a jerk, you run the risk of being "86-ed". (Anyone know where that term came from?). But tell me, in a multi-cultural melting pot as America claims to be, don't those signs sound slightly discriminatory?

I made a mistake the other day at the Diner. Normally, I think of this as a place I can go to get away and just be myself. After all, everything and everybody is supposed to be tolerated, accepted and loved here at the Diner. And so it may be, except for...those who criticize the menu.

When the server listed the specials of the day, I said,"Oh my gosh, no I don't want that! Don't you know that stuff will kill you?" Immediately, the management gave me the opportunity to eat somewhere else for the evening. The shame of being kicked out of the Diner! In effect, they said my money was no good there, and neither was I.

----------

Were the Nazis wrong to murder millions of Jews? Is it wrong to practice human sacrifice? These questions may seem like obvious no-brainers. But prepare yourself for a shock. Many young people today consider genocide, human sacrifice, abortion, murder, and suicide open questions. (Does anyone remember the story The Lottery?)

Lately teachers have noticed a troubling trend: Up to 20 percent of students are unwilling to say that mass murder is immoral. Oh, they usually say they disapprove of what the Nazis did—but they consider this merely their own personal taste. "Of course I dislike the Nazis," a student may say. "But who is to say they were morally wrong?"

This moral malady is not new, but let's give it a name-- "absolutophobia"--the fear of making absolute moral judgments.

How did we reach a point where young people refuse to condemn mass murder and human sacrifice? The answer is that, as children, these kids were spoon-fed moral relativism along with their Gerber and their ABCs.

In grade school, they were probably subjected to various forms of "values clarification," a idea that teaches kids that morality is merely a matter of personal preference—that no value judgments are right or wrong.

When these kids reached high school, they were doubtless taught the philosophy of multiculturalism, in which moral truths are reduced to cultural values, none of which is morally superior to any others.

And when they reached college? There they would have been exposed to postmodernism, which teaches that values are all relative to race, gender, and ethnicity, and that any statements of moral truth are merely attempts to exert power over others and oppress them.

Clearly, many of today's students have learned their lessons well: They exhibit a severe case of absolutaphobia when they can't even bring themselves to raise moral objections to genocide and human sacrifice. They reject all moral absolutes as restrictions on their freedom.

But what they don't realize is that moral absolutes are our only guarantee of freedom. Without a set of transcendent moral truths that are above individual cultures and preferences, it is impossible to protect human rights.

Christians are getting kicked out of all of the Diners these days. You're getting kicked out of the classrooms, the courtrooms, TV land, proper social and academic circles, and politics. You're even getting kicked out of prisons! It seems like you are no longer wanted, because the perception is that you believe in absolutes, that some ideas and choices and lifestyles are better than others, and that you should say so.

The Christian doctrine of general revelation tells us that we all share a common human nature. As a result, you can often agree with nonbelievers on basic principles, such as honesty, courage, and respect for others. But talk about a God behind those principles, and you're out of line, mister.

You and I ought to support efforts that teach our kids the values on which most citizens can agree. We must help our neighbors and our children understand that without moral absolutes, there is nothing to stop the culture from drifting back toward human sacrifice… or from embracing another Holocaust.

Your Hungry Apatheist,

~Bill

It's an interesting thing that Google did recently. You see the Google ads everywhere, their searchboxes are on almost every website. One can, so I've heard, even visit the porn sites, and find Google. They seem to have no problem with this. Maybe I shouldn't, either. What I find interesting is that, though Google supports porn as long as Google gets paid, they refused to allow a Google ad to be placed on talk-show host Michael Savage's website; they say he is too "controversial".