A lot of Christians will be glad to see this article: The Imagination Is Dangerous. (Don’t forward it to thousands of people. It’s the Onion. But if you want to forward it to Ken and Ingrid, that would be interesting :-)

JS: Sounds like a good idea. We could start an online support group. We could, um, I don’t know, both pick our favorite civilization, and then we could, um, show one another how we really, you know, struggle to conquer this problem.

Greg, Civ IV is like sweet, sweet crack for my soul. We should form a support group.

Mark: Thanks for the article on Sid Meier. Now I feel much better about my Civilization addiction! Though addicted, I have been a dry addict for some time now. My wife gave me a copy of Civ. IV for my birthday several months ago. For a couple of weeks, I stayed up every night till 2 or 3 AM conquering worlds (I use the “fortify and wait em out method”). After a couple of weeks of that, I realized I couldn’t function that way – so I put the game away and have only played it a couple of times since. Actually, I’m resisting the urge right now…must not place CD in disk drive…must say my prayers and go to bed…get thee behind me…

Pirate: Did he really say that? Because not only has he unchurched the Anglicans, but pretty much all of the Orthodox in North America, along with a great many of the Church Fathers. That’s whacked.

Here’s an interesting article on video game designer Sid Meier.  Part of it talks about how his faith impacts his game designs.

I need a recommendation on a good one volume Bible commentary. Non scholarly. For an older Baptist Sunday School teacher.

I remember Al Kimel saying something years ago about how because of “alternative oversight,” all Anglicans in the USA are now conscience-bound to leave the Anglican Communion, since the essence of the Church is for the geographic boundaries of dioceses to not cross.  It was truly one of the weirdest “theological” arguments I’ve ever read since I quit reading Hal Lindsey.

Clay takes on a bit of theodicy, and lands right where we all should.

Denise on Victorian lingo.

BTW—-in response to Jim’s post this morning: It’s not that one cannot extract a point from Hardaway’s rant. It’s that the moral objection to his view outweighs any minor points of agreement. It’s like me saying that the strict segregationists have a point about state’s rights.

A bunch of you guys have big posts in the “unpublished” area. Could you please look at them.

Thanks to Ted Olsen, Online Managing Editor for Christianity Today, for the heads up on the AMiA’s response to the recent action of the Anglican Primates.

First of all, they commend the primates’ action; but they add that the problems addressed are only the symptom:

We believe it should always be remembered that while much of the focus of this recent primates’ meeting has revolved around The Episcopal Church’s violations of the 1998 Lambeth Resolution I.10 concerning human sexuality, those violations have, in fact, been only a painful symptom of the much greater crisis of faith and leadership that presently exists within TEC and the many questions that TEC has raised in recent years regarding the authority of the Scriptures as our “standard and ultimate rule of faith.”

Concerning the Primates call to return to the Episcopal Church under the new pastoral scheme, they responded “thanks, but no thanks.”

“We remain thankful that the AMiA enjoys a secure home in the Province of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda and the assurances of our Archbishop that this will not change without our request and/or consent. Given our canonical standing within the Province of Rwanda, the Anglican Mission is in no way expected to be placed under the oversight or authority of either the proposed Pastoral Council or a Primatial Vicar, but we will support and pray for our brothers and sisters in the Communion who may be entering into this interim arrangement.”

Interestingly, the AMiA has positioned themselves as “a missionary movement of the Province of Rwanda.” This suits them, as this group seems intent on being an adamantly biblical, fiercely evangelistic, Holy Spirit-filled cutting edge church planting movement. More power to ‘em.

I rejoice over the news that the Anglicans have chosen to retain biblical Christianity. I’m curious how my favorite brand of Anglicans – the Anglican Mission in America - fits into the new American “church-within-a-church” plan handed down. I agree with Hylden – this decision and plan is monumental and could be viewed one day as a major turning point in Anglican Church history. I’m wondering if the AMiA will come under the authority of the “Primatial Vicar”. According to Hylden’s article in First Things, “the primates have encouraged but not required those who have already left the Episcopal Church to return under the new pastoral scheme, and they have left the door open for their inclusion in more-or-less their present form.” I’m assuming this would include the AMiA, but I don’t know what their response is. Any AMiA folks out there who know, please shoot me and email and fill me in. Thanks!

David Warren’s excellent Ash Wednesday post.

There are sobering features in the season of Lent, in the forty days and nights of Christ’s wandering in the wilderness, and in commemorating a path that can only lead from Ash Wednesday, through Gethsemane. To the Christian view, that is earthly life. The fact of our own death is before us, and the reality of the Crucifixion can never be dismissed. We offer, “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” together with the joy of salvation. Only through that portal, only in the knowledge that “we owe a death”, can we glimpse an eternity that is not false. This is written in the very words of the Lord’s Prayer, uttered daily by every Christian. In praying, “Thy will be done,” we’re inevitably praying for a good death. And not necessarily for a painless one.

Sometimes it seems even our own bishops have forgotten, that “the catholic truth” is entirely incompatible with the “happyface” of pop doctrines. Even what we mean by the words “life” and “death” is incomprehensible, without heaven and hell. Baudelaire once said, “Everyone believes in God, but nobody loves Him; nobody believes in the devil, and yet his smell is everywhere.” Except that belief in God has declined, this strikes me as a fair description of Western man in late modernity.

Greg, I’m still here (for about 5 minutes.) Consider yourself prayed for, and enjoy the warm air.

Peace

Pirate: I don’t disagree, but I think that’s the hardest part of the argument to make convincingly. It’s actually the flip side of the more-abortion-less-crime argument, and works the same way. It’s interesting, then, that the availability of abortion and reliable birth control can be said to contribute both to the spread of religion and to a reduction in crime.

If one believes the causal links, of course.

Keep it for next year: An unusual emerging Ash Wednesday service. Good combination of old and new.

An inside view of what happened at the Anglican gathering.

Jason: I hope you read this before you go, because I am going to be doing something very similiar to what you are going to be doing this weekend (except that it is sunny and 70 degrees here right now). Amazing. So I’ll certainly remember you and your friends in prayer this weekend. Please do the same for me. Hopefully we can compare notes when we get back.

I pray that we will “get real”. As C.S. Lewis said “it is religion itself – prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration – which is here in the long run, our sole avenue to the real.”

By the way, a woman is filling my pulpit this Sunday. Hopefully that’ll piss somebody off.

The Anglican Communion gives the USA 8 months to get its act together.

Visited St. Ann RCC in Manchester last night. We were the obvious visitors, and Fr. Charles was very gracious to always say “catholic Christians and other Christians of other faith traditions.” I appreciated that. He came to our seats and prayed for us during the eucharist. Nice touch. What was tough was seeing how the little congregation deals with liturgy with almost no instrumental musical resources. Made me grateful for the abundance of resources I have at OBI. His homily on how ashes were used to make soap was a good illustration, but you sure won’t find any stray versions of Luther’s gospel in the Ash Wednesday liturgy.

Frank Turk and I are going to do some Q/A blogging on the Stetzer presentation paper. We’re in basic agreement, but I doubt it will be a group hug. I’m looking forward to it.

In about two hours, I will be traveling with a small group of men “up North” for a monastic retreat. This will be a great way to get into the beginning days of Lent.

Aside from the time when we come together to pray and share a meal, we will be silent and by ourselves.

Three times a day, we will come together for liturgical prayers (based on the Anglican morning, noonday, and evening daily prayer), followed by a simple meal. On Sunday, our noonday prayer will be replaced by the Eucharist, then we will come home.

The only things we are bringing with us are our Bibles and empty notebooks.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a couple months, but I would ask for prayer from those who are willing: that we would have safe travel (we may be coming back to snow between 4 and 12 inches), that our loved ones would be safe in our absence (we know they are always in God’s hands and not ours), and that we would be faithful to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Be assured that all of you will be prayed for as well. “See” you Sunday.

Phillip, I think the argument could be oversimplified to one thing:  Birth control.  But that would be an oversimplification.  Here’s my summary of various arguments, statistics, and reflections I’ve come across, all of which I think are compelling:

Religious people tend to believe in a divinely inspired, created, or instituted purpose and goal in human existence and that divinity, whatever it is, is somehow reflected in the nature of man. Further, they tend to believe in a future higher existence beyond this one. Having children, thus, is an inherently noble and desirable thing, and sacrifice in this life carries the expectation of reward in the next. Abortion and contraceptives are either undesirable (often for being “unnatural” and therefore harmful to man’s essence, or simply being forbidden by divine law, etc) or at least to be used only minimally. Most organized religions regard motherhood as sacred and therefore the fulfillment of a woman’s existence. Although this attitude is regarded as sexist by most Americans today, it is undeniable that it does produce more babies than a single woman living on the pill, hooking up with guys she meets in bars.  Religious folks likewise tend to regard marriage as divinely instituted and therefore desirable and also frown upon divorce.  Marriage, as we know, is a better, more economically stable forum for having babies than living alone.  Anecdotally, you never read of the hardships of raising children with two parents instead of one.

Irreligious people tend to believe that man’s purpose is forged from his own will alone. In free countries, this is the self-will, and in totalitarian countries, this is the will of the state. Either way, since begetting is not an act of will, this tends to be low on the priority list. In totalitarian atheist countries, the tendency is to sacrifice on behalf of the state—for women, this means sacrificing child-bearing in order to work in the state-run economy. In free countries, the tendency is to sacrifice on behalf of attaining a more comfortable, easy life. For women, this means sacrificing child-bearing in order to have an abundance of money, plenty of free time, and spacious living quarters. I should add that totalitarian countries probably can force women to have more children by such horrible means as herding them onto breeding farms or threatening them with death if they fail to have at least two children, but that doesn’t seem to happen a whole lot.  Further, marriage, since it is instituted by will, is dissolved by will as well (or lack of will).  Lacking divine institution or blessing, it seems to practically interfere with the goals of self-willed humans, and therefore can be simply undesirable.

That argument reminds me of one put forward by a lawyer who argued that ID/Creationism would eventually win out, because the people who believe such reproduce more than those who repudiate. Hence, evolution favors ID/Creationism (though evolution is still true).

I’ll leave the philosophical parts for the philosophers (like Alex), but I guess my big question is whether the birth rate is intrinsically related to the religious philosophy. I’m not sure how you’d like them convincingly. I don’t think a survey of countries quite does it, because that’s only correlative. Where’s the causation?

Well, this came after I had looked up the birth rates for all the major secular countries.  With only two exceptions, the USA and Israel, they were below replacement, regardless of race, culture, geography, or economy (France, Ukraine, Vietnam, South Korea, and China are all below replacement).  But the USA and Israel differed precisely in that they also have large religious populations.  I looked up about 20 religious countries (Catholic, Hindu, and Muslim), and they were all above replacement with the exception of Iran.  Further, a few select examples from the secular countries showed shrinking nonreligious populations and growing religious populations.  Thus, I said, “For whatever reason…”  My guess is that birth control and abortion have something to do with it.

Pirate, our barmate Alex is far more competent to shred your argument than I am. I won’t even attempt it. I will point out, however, that you appear to be formulating an argument with no little similarity to Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). I heard him deliver this argument at a Veritas forum. There are probably versions of it floating around edu sites like here. To see how an opponent might shred it, you might want to check out the book Naturalism Defeated? which is a collection of essays both for and against EAAN and includes Plantinga’s response.

Your main wrinkle in the argument is a factual claim that populations of religious people expand while populations of nonreligious people shrink. Prima facie, this seems a controversial claim, possibly arrived at by an oversimplification fallacy, such as the fallacy of the single cause or perhaps a spurious correlation. Nevertheless, your claim that “Natural selection favors religion” might still be true for other reasons; but to be persuasive to someone nonreligious it would require strong evidence.

Another point of concern would be your use of the term ‘rational’ and its relatives. I’m not sure after my quick read-through that you are using the term univocally (for other senses, see this timely post by Macht).

But let’s see if Alex will show up to do some real analysis…

Have we reached a place where saying Hardaway “unwittingly raised serious cultural issues” is a ringing endorsement? And by the way, will all the straight men at the bar who look forward to sharing a locker room and a shower with gay men please look straight into the camera? The newspapers want a picture to go along with the story of the raid.

Could the philosophers at the bar shred this argument for me?  This is one I made, so feel free to be merciless.

Theoretically, atheists can have babies. In reality, they don’t. Some of the behavior patterns associated with atheism (egalitarianism, birth control, radical individualism), quite obviously lead to low fertility, while some of the other behaviors (materialism, statism) less so, but would appear to.

But whatever the reason (we could talk all night about why precisely this is), one thing is clear by an abundance of data: atheists do not procreate fast enough to replace themselves, while religious populations tend to expand.

Now that’s a pure, factual, scientific observance. Natural selection favors religion.

Now, the philosophical argument that I was making from the argument, stated more systematically, is this:

Premises:
1. Suppose atheism is true (i.e. the fundamental forces of the universe, are random, blind, and non-teleological).
2. Suppose also that natural selction and adaptation are true.

Observations:
1. Every non-rational population of life increases its reproductive fitness by conforming itself to the way the world actually is and thereby taking advantage of it. For example, birds fly because their bodies and motions are in harmony with the laws of physics.
2. The rational populations of life whose minds conform to the way the world actually is, i.e. coming to realize that there is no higher principle of reality, without exception decrease in their reproductive rates, regardless of other factors like economy, race, geography, culture, etc.

Conclusion:
1. True rationality, i.e. actually understanding the way the world really works, fails the Darwin test. Natural selection selects against rational atheism and for irrational religion.

But Observation 1 appears to be universal, and its lone exception, Conclusion 1, is absurd. Rationality allows the highest conformity to nature and therefore seems like it should be favored by natural selection. On its face, it seems like natural selection should favor the Enlightenment, not the Church (to choose two representatives or the rational and the irrational), since the Enlightenment is in conformity with nature and the Church is living in an irrational absurdity.

But if we reject Premise 1 and say there is indeed a Higher Principle (not necc a personal deity), then true rationality includes religious belief and practice, and thus is in harmony with Observation 1. Now this is a purely aesthetical argument—it all depends on whether or not you are comfortable with such a huge exception to Observation 1 and saying that when rationality reaches its metaphysical apex, it self-destructs. But then the big question is “why?”  I think the answers to this question are wholly unsatisfying and consider the existence of some kind of Higher Principle to be much more harmonious with rational existence.  But if you accept the existence of a Higher Principle, the big question is “What or who?”

This is an honest question…what can the SBC do?  It officially has no authority to control its members.  I suppose the convention could resolve to create a central authority.  I would think that an information-keeping clergy roster would at least be possible.  And on the other side, a strong hierarchy allows you to have situations that read like “Father so-and-so was removed from the country just before the investigation began and now resides in Vatican City.”  Rather than official policies to deal with it in a Christian manner, you could end up with policies to systematically hush everything up.  At least in the SBC, having no system to ferret these guys out also means there’s no system to protect them.

I have only been aware of the Didache for a couple of years.  I have read it a few times.  I re-read it this morning.  Once again, I was struck by the same thing as the first time I read it—its simplicity.  Seriously, as I read it I can hardly imagine any contemporary Christian group that would take something like this very seriously.  I don’t mean that they would not use if for historical study or that they would doubt its validity.  But how many people today would take something this simple as being a serious exhortation to live as a follower of Jesus?

When it comes to baptism, there is no long explanation of the “why” but just a command to do it and then detailed instructions on the “how”.  The emphasis on living a holy personal life is hard to miss.  There is not a long diatribe about what to believe but simply, “you are followers of Jesus-act like it”.  Oh, that is my paraphrase.  Seriously, who would read this today without almost mocking the simplicity?  With all the things that are not said, there is still detailed instructions about how many days an apostle, prophet or regular visitor can stay at your house.  Some of that is cultural, I know, with prophets, both false and real, being much more common then.  But still, you can see the emphasis on hospitality given over many other things.  Instructions for the Lord’s Day are straightforward and leave little room to wonder what to do when gathering.

I know that perhaps the Didache was written to complement the letters that many churches had and so maybe that is why there is this emphasis on the practical. But still my question remains—how many communities of faith could accept such a simple exhortation today without qualifying it to death or dismissing it entirely?  Any thoughts?

I remember when I wrote an IM essay saying that the sex abuse scandals would come to the SBC because we had similar issues with ministerial access to young people. I got nasty mail about being pro-Catholic and hating my own denomination. Well here’s your crow. Have a bowl. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination and it has little or no interest in admitting that a percentage of the many adults who work with its children and youth are dangerous predators. Now the victim’s groups are coming for the SBC churches and leaders who have looked the other way. It’s not an RCC thing, and the cover ups by pastors are just as bad.

Did I mention that it is currently 76 degrees and sunny in Little Rock?

Went to a wonderful Anglican Ash Wednesday service today at noon. The worship leader is a good friend of mine and former Pentecostal, Baptiscostal, IHOP, Vineyard worship leader. He led the congregation in a Kevin Prosch song. I grinned to myself. After the service, I remarked to him that that service was certainly one of the few Ash Wednesday services today to feature a song written by Kevin Prosch. He responded from his newfound Anglican perspective: “Kevin Prosch is lent! Thats why a lot of churches never wanted to sing his songs. They are too full of gut wrenching repentance and pain over sin. Lots of churches don’t have any place for that kind of stuff.” How true.

Joe Thorn connects the dots, and has great Stetzer quotes.

Here’s what I’m giving up for Lent.

MOD: Careful on that Pyromania. We love those guys.

Is the time ripe for an American evangelical Ambrose Bierce?

I submit the following as a worthy entry c/o Doug Wilson: Those who hold mindlessly to the tradition of rejecting mindless papist traditions.

Now, what is the headword for this definition?

George Takei’s response to Tim Hardaway. (HT to some good Christian in the Lansing area.)

If you’ve got a mac, this a really nice little app for reading text in a much improved format. Using voice commands, too.

Here’s what you have to feel pathetic about: This fellow has been read Ken and Ingrid, and is now hell-bent (my word) on destroying any pastor or church that is 1) related to the SBC and 2) not identical to the church in his head.

Ed Stetzer is a prophet, and this is the proof. (Sorry to say proof. How about “evidence?”) Seriously, if you didn’t listen to Stetzer’s talk, then you missed the call out: The SBC is going to kill off its missional churches because they don’t look and act Southern Baptist. Mark Driscoll is the devil.

Any SBC BHTers want a room in the St. Sadie’s bunker, call ahead. Rooms are filling up.

IM is updated with Thoughts on Weekly Communion. No, Pirate, you may not…

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