This is the kind of thing that's funny only when you live in a seminary town.
But I do, so it is.
A calvinist arrives at Heaven's gates and sees that there are two queues going in. One is marked "predestined," and the other is marked "free will." Being a good calvinist he wanders over to the predestined line. After a few minutes an angel asks him, "why are you in this line?" He replies, "I chose it." The angel looks surprised, "well then, you should be in the free will line." So our calvinist, now slightly miffed, obediently wanders over to the free will line. Again, after a few minutes another angel asks him, "why are you in this line?" He sullenly replies, "Someone made me come here."
Life's a bit hectic right now, so instead of posting my own brilliant (or, more accurately, "brilliant") thoughts, I'll just link to some better-articulated thoughts from more articulate people.
First, a quick shout-out to my friend Dan's new startup, Wylio.com. Wylio is a tool for bloggers who need good (free) artwork. Enter your search terms and it finds creative-commons material that you're free to use in your blog. Choose your size and orientation (twss) and get your embed code. It's dead simple, and I've used it for every image in this post.
My friend Jim Zartman not only plays a pretty mean guitar, he's also a pretty good thinker. I REALLY liked his post on Gollum, but for sheer quotability you can't beat this post on doubt.
I was watching this movie where the main character was talking about the philosophies she lived by and one of them was, “Never take advice from someone you wouldn’t trade places with.” I like that, not as a general rule, but as specific to situations. For example, I wouldn’t ask advice on being a father from someone who I thought had bratty kids. When I look at the lives and read parts of books from guys like N.T. Wright or C.S. Lewis, I know I would rather be like them than like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.
What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
Not to get too heavy on you, but truth itself has a kind of fractal component – you can be right at one scale, but then zoom in and discover you had it all wrong. I stopped trusting people with absolute opinions the day I understood the answer to the question “How long is the coast of Britain?” is “It depends.” Not coincidentally that was the same day I discovered Mandelbrot. That was the question that led him to invent a new branch of mathematics by creating a way to quantify and discuss this kind of weirdness, and it changed the way we think about all sorts of things.
I don’t know for sure, but I think that maybe God is trying to tell me that I’ve got to stop reacting so much, that I can’t allow the little ups and downs in my day to affect me to the core. Gentleness begins with strength, quietness with security. A great tree is both moved and unmoved—it changes with the seasons, but its roots keep it anchored in the ground.
This suggests a more general point—is the existence of a public school system consistent with a serious commitment to the separation of church and state?
I think the answer is that it is not. While teaching a fundamentalist version of the origin of life is indeed taking a side in a religious dispute, teaching a conventional account of biology and geology is is also taking a side in that dispute, just the opposite side. I do not see how I can honestly tell a fundamentalist that it is a violation of the separation of church and state to teach children that his religious beliefs are true but not a violation to teach children that they are false.
I've had several normally thoughtful people tell me recently that this election campaign was the least civil ever, and that our country is trending away from civility. It's possible, I guess. I certainly wouldn't know, since I don't own a TV or watch election coverage (actually, election coverage in 2008 is what convinced me to finally cut the wire completely). But my general suspiciousness of "it's getting worse all the time" thinking received a boost from this brilliant piece:
Well, this blog post is long enough for now. If you're interested in seeing what I'm reading, follow me on Reader or subscribe to my Shared Items RSS feed (top right, "What I'm Reading).
