Nice Link

Redistribution of wealth


Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign the read “Vote Obama, I need the money.” I laughed.

Once in the restaurant my server had on a “Obama 08" tie, again I laughed–just imagine the coincidence.

Suddenly, it hit me. An experiment is in order.

I asked the server, did he really believe that Obama's platform was a good one? Yes, he did.

When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept.

He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need – the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10, and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn, even though the actual recipient needed the money more.

I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application - at least if it is your wealth that is being redistributed.

Part 1

On the Road with Atheism

Christopher Hitchens squares off with Douglas Wilson.
Nate Wilson | posted 10/31/2008 09:43AM

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Day 1, October 29, 2008

Last year, Christianity Today hosted a lively online debate between pastor and author Douglas Wilson (my father), and Christopher Hitchens, popular author and leading atheist. Both authors have a flair for the humorous and the literary, and the popularity of their debate led to its publication as a book (from a Christian publishing house). Is Christianity Good for the World? was released last month, and now both authors are on the road, debating and discussing the topic in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Because of the uniqueness and value of their exchanges, a documentary film crew is following them, led by MTV music video director Darren Doane.

As for me? I'm tagging along. Day one was remarkable. The two men met in the morning over coffee, debated in a town hall-style encounter at the King's College in the Empire State Building, signed copies of the book in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, and then divided for different events of different flavors in the evening. Hitchens debated Rabbi Wolpe in Temple Emanu-El — said to be the largest Jewish house of worship in the world — while my father addressed the atheist clubs of Columbia and NYU in an event called "Stump the Preacher Man."

But to be honest, the most interesting moments have all been outside the formal events — discussions over meals, in cabs and elevators. Both men share a love of poetry (over lunch, they gave an antiphonal recitation of "Jabberwocky"), a love of the English language and the well-turned phrase, and have spent a good ten minutes spouting favorite lines from the British writer P. G. Wodehouse to mutual laughter. And both men have a respect for each other — though clearly not for their conflicting opinions of God and the nature of the world.

At the King's College debate, Hitchens professed disdain for the biblical admonition to "love your enemies," calling it total nonsense. And yet, as he appears in Christian forums, wrangling with a Christian man, that is exactly what he is experiencing firsthand. The exchanges are heated. No punches have been pulled, and no one is pretending like the gulf between atheism and Christianity is anything but dark and profound. Yet underlying it all, there is an affection shown to him that is just as profound.

Hitchens said he wanted all his enemies destroyed. Wilson countered with qualified agreement, saying that God destroys all his enemies, but doesn't only destroy them in the traditional way, as understood by man, but also destroys his enemies by making them friends.

Last night, the two will debate "Beauty and the Existence of God" at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
And you will be hearing more from me.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Part 2

On the Road with Atheism II

Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson, together again.
Nate Wilson | posted 11/03/2008 10:03AM

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Day 1, October 29, 2008
Day 2, October 30, 2008

The morning began with New York City heaving its traffic in the normal way. With cameras tagging along, Hitchens and Wilson found themselves a coffee shop and settled into conversation. But before long, they were shuffled into a cab, and were off grid-locking their way to a heliport, a chopper to Philadelphia, and a debate at Westminster Theological Seminary.

The Phillies had won the World Series the day before, and it was evident everywhere in the city—even in Van Till Hall, the venue for the debate. Phillies jerseys, tees, and caps were crowded in beyond the room's capacity. Both men were given Phillies hats beforehand and Wilson produced his early on, promising the audience that he would put it on if he began to lose the debate (as a sure-fire way to win back the crowd).

After two days of travel and laughter, agreement and disagreement, meals and missed meals (in plenty and in want), the men began their debate with a stronger mutual rapport than the previous day. They both drew laughter from the audience throughout the discussion, but also regular laughter and acknowledgement from each other.

Substantively, Wilson began by claiming that if you deny the existence of God, you banish any standard of beauty or aesthetic criticism from the world. Nothing is more beautiful than anything else. In response (and ironically) Hitchens waxed eloquent about the marvels of reality. He became positively poetic as he paid tribute to stars and black holes and what he believes to be the inevitable destruction of our planet (at the hands of the Andromeda Galaxy).

But he didn't stop at poetry. When describing the Event Horizon of a black hole, he ceased to sound like a rationalist and began to sound more and more like a mystic—referring to the transcendent majesty of the thing itself (as it is imagined by some modern scientists) and reveling in the sci-fi idea of being able to simultaneously see both the past and the present, standing and ceasing to exist at that brink where space and time and light descend into darkness. It was odd, coming from the empirical rationalist, and he seemed unable to believe that in Christians, such thoughts (or visions) would stir up the desire to worship and obey the Artist behind such astonishing art.

Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson both marvel at the same creation, and they turn to the same words and poetry to describe that creation and its effect on them. The difference, and never so stark as in this debate, is that one man reacts into extreme gratitude and thankfulness for the marvels of reality, while the other struggles to prevent that reaction, but is unable to even check his use of religious language and vocabulary in doing so.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Wilson and Hitchens Courtesy of CT

To see the article in its original context, click on my title.

On the Road with Atheism III
Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson walk into a bar ...
posted 11/04/2008 11:34AM

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Day 1, October 29, 2008
Day 2, October 30, 2008
Day 3, October 31, 2008
Washington D.C.

On the final day of their frenzied tour (handing out copies of Is Christianity Good for the World? at every stop), tired of being prodded and wired and filmed and helicoptered, Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson were trundled into a train in Philadelphia and headed south for the District and their final climactic event. The organizers of this tour (and accompanying film) had not wanted to end with a formal debate. All too often, formal debates are the rhetorical equivalent of two fighters shadow-boxing in opposite corners struggling to impress the crowd with their respective bobs and weaves, but never actually meeting anywhere in the middle—anywhere where noses might end up bleeding. While this had not been true of the tour up to this point a different tone was needed for the finale.

Martin's Tavern in Georgetown was selected for the venue. This would not be an event involving blue blazers standing behind podiums beneath spastic fluorescent lighting. Nor would there be a moderator. The two men sat on stools at one end of the restaurant, the bar at their backs, and they faced off in front of a packed (and eating and drinking) house.

The guest list was necessarily tight, and the room was a blend of theologians and journalists, skeptics and believers, students and authors, as well as friends of both men and roaming cameramen.

The discussion was meant to focus on morality and (this being the final event), it was clear that Wilson would not be content unless Hitchens left with the truth wrapped around his neck. For his part, Hitchens attempted to maintain that morality is innate in humans, an evolved feature in a higher primate.

Wilson challenged the authority of any such morality, saying that it could evolve along and morph along with any other biological feature, simultaneously pushing Hitchens on his admission that the desires to rape, pillage, and murder was equally "innate" in the species. He insisted that Hitchens explain how he (or any man) could determine the difference between a moral and immoral act if both were simply byproducts of evolution.

Hitchens slipped and shifted and evaded, but he was never let off the hook, and he could never successfully answer the question. The atheists in the audience grew antsy, chomping for their own shots at Wilson, and soon enough the floor was opened for questions. One after one, they attempted to do what Hitchens could not—show an authority for their morality, or show that they did not need no such authority—and one by one they failed.

The collegiality between the men continued, though both exchanged barbs more pointed and meaningful than humorous.
Hitchens is an intelligent man. But an intelligent man without the truth is no better than, well … a higher primate.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Evangellyfish

The entire book, epilogue et al, is now up. Very worth reading, in an O'Connoresque way. It is a satire of the modern Christian church in America, and is painfully and gloriously accurate.

Just Hilariously Amazing

This is a teaser trailer for the documentary of Hitchens Verse Wilson: A Collision of Lives, which is coming out in March of 2009. The music is amazing.

More Wilson verse Hitchens

Click on the title.

History Summary

J. Broussard
History Summary
10/31/08

Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great


Premise 1: In creating the phalanx, lengthening the sarissa (so that the hoplites as far back as five rows could still reach their enemies) and simultaneously increasing the armor and mobility of the hoplites, Philip of Macedon made his army a far more effective force.
Premise 2: In uniting most of Greece beneath him, Philip bequeathed to Alexander the resources of an empire to draw upon.
Premise 3: In placing Alexander under the tutelage of Aristotle (among others), Philip gave him the advantage of a brilliantly honed logical mind.
Premise 4: In his Imperialistic mentality and ruthless dealings with his enemies, Philip set the example for Alexander to follow.
Conclusion: Were it not for Philip of Macedon?s influence and the changes that he implemented, Alexander could not have swept the known world in the way that he did.

Wilson vs. Hitchens: Apologetics

Just click on my title.

Adams as Priests

Something that has been on my mind over the last few weeks: the parallel between Adam and Christ as Priests.


INTRODUCTION

The priestly office, it is generally agreed, involves guarding the relationship between God and His people from external enemies and internal pollution. A priest must first keep himself and his own pure, then must protect the temple so that there is no hindrance to God's people meeting with God. As such, it is an office that is concerned with guarding the life of the people of God (John 17:3).


PART ONE

Now, look at the way, particularly the order in which Adam (who was placed in the garden as a priest, to guard and tend it) failed:

1. He failed to protect the garden from external enemies--he allowed the dragon to enter;
2. He failed to protect his own--he allowed Eve to be deceived by the dragon;
3. He failed to protect himself--he was not deceived, but simply, high-handedly rebelled by obeying the dragon.

A brief aside: it was not until his ultimate rebellion that he was expelled from his position as priest and given the task of attaining the position that he had just rejected. We can see then, that God is not a legalistic God--He allowed Adam to fail two times without judging or condemning him for them.

PART TWO

Now we can look at Christ, Who fulfills Adam chiastically:

3'. He protected Himself through His threefold temptation by the dragon (part of which included refusing to take food for Himself);
2'. He protected His own--He ministered to Israel for three years, casting out the dragon (demons) and correcting the deceptions that Israel was under;
3'. He took the garden back from the dragon by replacing the fruit that was taken off of the tree (He was the fruit that was placed on the tree, fulfilling the principle of "eye for an eye"), and by doing so, expelled the dragon from the garden forever, restoring in Himself and then in us the temple that we had failed to protect.

A parallel aside: it was not until His death on the cross, His refusal to refuse the position given Him as priest that Christ succeeded in regaining what we had given away.

PART THREE

A few miscellaneous notes:

Adam was not simply assigned to protect and guard the garden, but to extend its boundaries to the four corners of the earth. Our assignment from the Second Adam mirrors this: we are to disciple the nations and populate the earth by declaring the victory of Christ.

There are three offices given to men, and in hierarchical order they are Priest, King and Prophet. In the new covenant, all Christians are Priests by definition (1 Peter 2:9), all are Kings in Christ, and all are Prophets in Christ. These latter two I will explore as the urge takes me, but to very briefly and inadequately define: Kings have the same assignment that priests do, but it is extended, and includes many more grey areas. If you have a family, you are a Priest and a King in that family, either well or poorly. The Prophet is one who has access to the very counsel of God Himself, and is called to rebuke Kings that are out of line. Draw your own conclusions; I leave you here.

CONCLUSION

The theme of Priest, King, Prophet is continued through Genesis, culminating in Joseph, who was the best picture of Christ that Genesis offers us. Look for it. It also extends to the people of Christ corporately, though it has not yet been fulfilled there.

Blessings,
Jesse Broussard

The Gauntlet is Accepted

Each year, the house that won the pumpkin rugby game challenges the house that lost the pumpkin rugby game to a game of, not surprisingly, pumpkin rugby. This is done, I am afraid to confess, in a public setting, and this was this years response to the challenge, read by Ryan Handermann and Nate Douglas.



Ryan: Woe! Woe! Woe! Weeping and wailing arises from Blaine Street and all Israel can hear her lamentations. How Anna Street stomped upon our faces and beat our precious pumpkins into the ground! How they have sneered at our rucks and pranced about in our Trizone! They have strewn our mutilated bodies over the whole earth, vultures have come and eaten our flesh. They buried the remains deep in the earth, where no light could penetrate. And there was nothing to mark our death-graves only seven small pieces of broken pumpkin. Death be not proud! Oh Israel! The night is darkest, just before the dawn.

Nate: Dawn. She shone with her rose-red fingers, slowly creeping across the sky, like blood spilt over the floor. The sky was red. Today, blood would be spilt at the hands of Blaine St.
But then, the earth began to shake, lightning ripped through the sky, as the headstones of the graves split like the temple veil. Hades rejected the men of Blaine, who then arose from the coffins, battered, bruised, and muddied. The sun sprang up, leaving the brilliant waters in its wake, climbing the bronze sky to shower light on the on the men now clad in white. The men approached, clad in white, and the names that set on them were death, and hell followed with them.

Ryan: Then hell broke loose upon a third of the field which views the mountain. Horses flew forward urged on by their shining riders. And then, just before the clash of battle sounded, all looked up and upon the cliff overseeing the battle stood a man. Frozen in time, they waited. Then the prophet of old who had been lying on his side, right hand lifted up before the sunrise, spoke these words: “Behold, I have looked with my eyes, and I have seen a vision from the pumpkin colored-heavens.

Nate: A man, like Hector, burst through in glory, his face dark as the sudden rushing night, but he blazed on in white and terrible fire broke from the bright garments that wrapped his body, two pumpkins clutched in his fists. No one could fight him, no one could stop him, none but the gods as the man rushed through their masses and his eyes flashed fire. And whirling around he cried to his brave men of white, shouting through the ruck, “The line! Storm the line!”

Look, Breath, Both: We, on behalf of blaine st and all men it doth represent, do accept this challenge.

N: For redemption.

R: McCain.

N: For freedom.

R: For a random faculty or student.

N: For Plato

R: And Aristotle

N: For women’s suffrage

R: For the Gourd Goddess

Both: Don’t ruck until you see the whites of their thighs.

More N. D. Wilson

I know I’m not capable of ladling out silver-bullet profundity that will automatically anoint the furrowed brows of hopeful writers with the warm shininess of success. [Sidenote: I apologize for the previous sentence. But it still make me smile.]

Click on title

N. D. Wilson

Sidenote: Stealing ideas from contemporaries is rude and tasteless. Stealing from the long dead is considered literary and admirable. The same is true of grave-robbing. Loot your local cemetery and find yourself mired in social awkwardness. But unearth the tomb of an ancient king and you can feel free to pop off his toe rings. You’ll probably end up on a book tour, or bagging an honorary degree or two.

http://ndwilson.com/blog

Bavink

"People take their hearts with them when they enter a monastery, and from the heart arise all sorts of sins and iniquities."

Bavink, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 3, 54.

Bavink on Hegel

"However much he (Hegel) regarded nature as a product of reason, he could not deny that it was powerless to fully realize the Idea; he therefore stated that the Idea, in giving existence to such a world, had become unfaithful to itself, had in fact apostatized from itself. Thus he paved the way for the pessimism that, in the manner of Buddhism, considers existence itself the greatest sin, a sin committed by the blind irrational will, which is the ultimate guilty party."

Bavink, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, 53.

Evangellyfish

Doug Wilson's Evangellyfish is now all up, save the epilogue (which is up on Monday). It is 16 chapters that are brutally honest and very entertaining, in a stick your hand in a meat grinder sort of way. Not that graphic or anything, just, well, read it and tell me.

Ton of the Chester

"Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undisputed first principles."
~G. K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross

Bible Tool

Just a great site; very useful.

http://www.blueletterbible.org/

Trovato: Aquinas on Zombies

Whether there are such thing as zombies?

Objection 1: That’s weird and dumb.
Objection 2: You’re an idiot.
Objection 3: To assert that zombies are nomologically possible would be to assert that in some world that shares all of its laws with the actual world there is a being identical to some actual or genuinely possible human being who is utterly lacking in consciousness. Of course, the existence of a real zombie would entail that zombies are nomologically as well as logically possible, but the reverse entailments do not hold. The idea of qualia and related phenomenal notions of the mind are not coherent concepts, and the zombie scenario is therefore incoherent.

On the contrary: The Bible.


2 Kings 19:35: And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they [were] all dead corpses.

I answer that: Um…well, nomologically speaking the related phenomenal notions inherent in the generic state of consciousness in the human mind and to certain qualia related platitudes…um, the Bible?

Reply to objections 1 & 2: Don’t you feel stupid now?
Reply to objection 3: Psh. Science. They don’t even know.

Declamation: Aquinas on Beards

The assignment was to write in a structure imitative of Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, so here is mine; others are forthcoming.

Blessings.

J. Broussard
Declamation:
Aquinas Summa imitation (in form)
10/22/08

1. Whether it can be demonstrated that facial hair is good?

Objection 1. It seems that the benefit of facial hair cannot be demonstrated, as it would be a matter of preference—a benefit to some, but a detriment to others.

Objection 2. Further, facial hair is not available to all manner of men, so if it is beneficial, it is a benefit that slanders the justice of God: that He would give it to some and not to others.


On the contrary: It is written that God made all things that are, and that He declared everything that He had made to be “all very good.”

I answer that: Demonstration can be made in two ways: through the state of man at creation, and through the state of man following the resurrection. Hence the benefit of facial hair, which cannot be easily ascertained from our current fallen state, can be made plain through the eternal counsel of God.


Reply to Objection 1: The Gospel clearly states that the beard of Christ was plucked out, and that this was done to shame Him. How is it then merely a matter of preference for us to daily imitate the vile heathen that crucified our Lord by severing with dull razors the beard from the Imago Dei in us (be you a man with one blade or a coward with five)? This is indeed our shame.

Reply to Objection 2: It is true that all men cannot grow facial hair; indeed, it is also true that most women cannot either. But this does not appear to have always been the case, for it is written in Leviticus, the thirteenth chapter and the twenty ninth verse, that “if a man or woman have a plague upon the head or the beard…”
Now it may be easily assumed, that if women used to be able to grow beards, so too could all manner of men, and if we are asked why this is not the case today, we may easily respond, “why do men not live past their hundredth year today?” God has changed things for His own pleasure, and it is our delight that some men, and (indeed, our great delight) that most women cannot grow beards, and this does not impute partiality to God.
However, we may all look forward to the day when there shall be neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek, American nor Dutch, bearded nor side-burned.