Dallas Willard on “What Is Skepticism For?”

Skepticism is for:

1. To undermine illegitimate forms of authority.

2. To stimulate inquiry.

Dallas Willard on Joy

Via Facebook

So This is Water, The Water Is Joy

Wow, very impressive. I would like to deconstruct it a bit though.

The thesis is that education affords one the choice to consider a more generous outlook on the banalities of modern urban existence. This is true and helpful. What’s interesting to me is that he undercuts his own nihilism when he makes the opening assertion “this is water”. The asserting of nihilism ironically undercuts the nihilism as well because of course you need something in order to base an assertion upon. You can’t both have nihilism AND an assertion with bite.

A true nihilist would of course assert that the choice to be generous, the choice to love, the choice to assert fellowship is arbitrary. You could as easily assert violence to indulge the felt frustration and in nihilism there is no morality to critique that violence. He says there is no religion or morality but the beauty of the vision he is suggesting is of course, like unseeing water, also dependent upon an idea of what beauty and goodness and good community are. The psychopath, the terrorist and the serial killer find beauty and goodness in mayhem and slaughter, but this we condemn and rightly so.

You cannot will an aesthetic destination like beauty and goodness without either some water-like construct of the goodness of that destination and you can share it and have the experience of fellowship (note how much Christian language he borrows) without a communal assumption of the goodness and beauty of that construct.

The piece is multilayered because he begins with water like banality of contemporary urban living, cuts to a level of nihilism and free choice, but the water like level beneath THAT level that he must appeal to is actually the cultural remainder of Western Christendom. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard would be all over this one.

Of course a true post-modern can assert any narrative he/she wishes with their post-modern credibility in tact as long as they wink at what they are doing, knowing that all such assertions are freely done because none of this really exists, but then I say “this is water”.

As a Christian I say the the water you are appealing to where you seek shalom, goodness, generosity that isn’t just the imaginary construct of your choice is actually the fabric of a good creation woven by a good Creator who joyously calls you to choose to love now simply because it makes you feel moral or offers some consolation from the banalities of urban existence, but because woven into the creation is a joy that will fundamentally not be denied.

Education helped teach me how to listen carefully to his video and deconstruct it for that I can be grateful. Education can lead to other good and joyful places, as CS Lewis once noted, an atheist need be very careful in their reading.

David Foster Wallace who made this speech of course killed himself.  Here is a video of Dallas Willard dying of cancer. He speaks of joy. His life is being taken from him, but he is choosing something in a far more despairing circumstance than a long line at a check-out counter and he finds joy unto joy.

The Double Life of the Boston Marathon Bomber

NY Times. 

James Davidson Hunter on the Culture War

From Patheos ”The Culture Wars Reflect the Polarization of Society”

Really just passing on the quote (isn’t cut and paste nifty!:) )

The question of the tactics of power politics imposing its vision on all others is not an idle one–for the simple reason that cultural conflict is inherently antidemocratic. It is antidemocratic first because the weapons of such warfare are reality definitions that presuppose from the outset the illegitimacy of the opposition and its claims. Sometimes the antidemocratic impulse is conscious and deliberate; this is seen when claims are posited as fundamental rights that transcend democratic process. More often than not, though, the antidemocratic impulse in cultural conflict is implicit in the way in which activists frame their positions on issues…a position so “obviously superior,” so “obviously correct,” and its opposite is so “obviously out of bounds” that they are beyond serious discussion and debate. Indeed, to hold the “wrong” opinion, one must be either mentally imbalanced (phobic–as in homophobic–irrational, codependent, or similarly afflicted) or, more likely, evil. Needless to say, in a culture war, one finds different and opposing understandings of the politically correct few of the world.

Forming Children, Forming Young Adults

From Jesus Creed

Childhood Messages 

1.You are loved.

2. You are unique.

3. You have gifts

4. You are safe.

5. You are valuable.

Adolescent Messages

1. Life is difficult.

2. You are not in control.

3. You are not that important.

4. You are going to die.

5. Your life is not about you.

The Nuclear Family is not Traditional Family

Peter Leithart on marriage and family. 

In a recent talk at the Wheaton Theology Conference, the Kenyan Anglican Archbishop David Gitari told of a Christian ministry that hired an ambulance to assist employees at a factory where injuries were being reported regularly. Eventually, someone had the bright idea of finding out why so many accidents were happening in the first place. Inside the building, investigators discovered a hall of hazards. What most needed fixing was the factory, not the workers.

For the past half-century, cultural conservatives have been running an ambulance service. Alarmed by the collapse of sexual morals, rising rates of divorce and illegitimacy, and legalized abortion, we’ve devoted energy and resources to shoring up the “traditional family,” conceived of as father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker, and their common children. But the nuclear family is as much problem as solution. An exclusive focus on defending the nuclear family reinforces the social dislocations that created the crisis.