Solid Stuff: Reason Over Revelation In The Public Square

If you have not read Ryan T. Anderson's "Huckabee And Social Conservatives" first published at First Things (and then reprinted in the Wall Street Journal's online Federation), then you should.

Of course, I know "should" is a strong word these days. Perhaps I should -- there I go again -- say that "If you feel inclined, then you might want to perhaps possibly consider the possibility of reading it for yourself."

Seriously, it is a very provocative piece.

Blessings.

BG

God, Bootlegged

On Saturday morning, just before Barack Hussein Obama stepped out from behind the temple veil to reveal his plan to make each of us happier people, MSNBC's Chris Matthews ejaculated that Abraham Lincoln, the great statesman who once governed in Obama's home state, would be dancing for joy at the familiar site of Springfield, Illinois' capitol building; and how it now served as the backdrop to an "African American" announcing his candidacy for the President of the United States. Remember, Matthews gushed, this is where Lincoln said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Moments later, deep into his own emancipation proclamation -- calling for an end to poverty, promising resolution in Iraq, and freeing us of our fearful dependence on foreign oil and its attendant destruction of the atmosphere -- Mr. Obama said (in bold) this in a list of wondrous deeds Americans have performed as ONE:

"In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened railroads to the west, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King's call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream." [emphasis added]

Of course, the "King" referred to is Martin Luther King, the fallen and iconic civil rights leader.

Perhaps in this age where some do not respect the fences erected around us by the scribes of copyright laws, by the good manners of attribution and the love of one's neighbors' own genius, it is easy to honor the wrong men, the wrong women, even the wrong gods; or to steal for oneself the giftedness of others. Lakes steal from springs and rivers, and rivers abscond with lakes' blue riches, only to find poverty in the sea that robs from the sky as the sky steals back. So great leaders, apparently existing unto themselves where all greatness is apparently shared, are remembered for the great things they have said, even though they did not say them.

Abraham Lincoln may have said, "The house divided against itself cannot stand." And I may have said the same thing in a speech as vice-president of my high school senior class. But I was not quoting Lincoln, and Lincoln was not quoting himself: we were both quoting Jesus Christ the Plagiarized.

And then dear Mr. King, who surely gave the right attribution in his original speech, acknowledging his mentors' gifts to him and their own genius, never did say a thing about "justice rolling down." The Jewish prophet Amos did, a fact Mr. King learned as a Christian in Sunday School.

Clearly Mr. Obama and Chris Matthews have both missed out on these apparent trivialities. Who cares if religious language is stolen for political purposes; who cares if the fullness of genius was found in the prophets who uttered what the world most likely had never before heard? What matters is that it takes a certain amount of genius to plagiarize for political gain; to forget that true justice is rooted in the heart and language of God, and to take His honor for oneself.

(It matters not the source, but the outcome, if you but believe in "destiny.")

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Bow Your Heads

(I've been away for a few days. 'Tis good to be back.)

George W. Bush, you'll recall, has often been chided for his associations with the "religious right". He has been mocked for admitting during the 2000 presidential campaign that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. He has been ridiculed for revealing that he prays every day that God would guide him to do the right thing; militant Bush critics even believe this revelation is tantamount to the Commander-in-Chief waging a holy war against Islam, all proof that Mr. Bush holds theocratic ambitions.

But darkness descends on the minds of too many men and women, blinded to the overwhelming fact that there is religion aplenty driving those who adhere to liberalism, or who work to transform the world into the image of the Democratic Party. Without question certain "believers" accept the grandiloquent damnations hurled at religious right activism; and without question they shut their minds to religious leftism and other forms of theocratic emanations.

Who is going to stand up to the great and swaggering behemoth which is the Democratic Party as it bowed its head in prayer the other day? Who is going to demand redress of great religious and ideological grievances brought upon Democrats for their unthinking connivance to appear tolerant, devout, and ever so peaceful?

If you have not already done so, please watch this video clip provided for us by HotAir.com of a Muslim imam invoking "god" at the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) Winter Meeting. It is enough to make one's prayer shawl crawl. It is enough to make one daven in disbelief; to genuflect in semi-conscious bewilderment.

Here is a transcript (thanks to Frontpagemag.com) of the whole prayer (the HotAir excerpt is too abridged):

In the name of God the most merciful, the most compassionate. We thank you, God, to bless us among your creations. We thank you, God, to make us as a great nation. We thank you God, to send us your messages through our father Abraham and Moses and Jesus and Muhammad. Through you, God, we unite. So guide us to the right path. The path of the people you bless, not the path of the people you doom. Help us God to liberate and fill this earth with justice and peace and love and equality. And help us to stop the war and violence, and oppression and occupation. Ameen. [Emphasis added]

I am sure we all would agree that it would be wrong for a President of the United States, the Chief Executive of a nation devoted to separation of powers, particularly the separation of Church and State; it would be wrong of that leader to invoke God's "perfect will" in declaring war against a neighbor, all in the name of Christ. Americans recoil at such religious vigor; they expect there to be a "wall of separation" between the State and its many churches.

But I am equally sure that we all must agree -- along with the deconstructionists among us -- that nowhere in the history of America has any founding document called for the erection of a wall between Mosque and State. For it appears, or so it seems, our friends in attendance at the DNC's meeting have no problem sharing the same podium with an imam invoking Allah to guide national affairs; the Mosque is our political friend. All facetiousness aside, we must (must we not?) be perplexed by the sudden Islamophilism of the DNC.

How interesting it is -- or am I wrong about this? -- that the DNC would be of nearly one mind that it is wrong for any leader to seek God's guidance in starting war, and yet it is somehow right for leaders to seek God's guidance in ending war. How interesting it is that the DNC would countenance a prayer by a man asking for exclusive privileges for a certain set of special people, the good people, and that there would be no such privileges on those God has kindly chosen to "doom." And how interesting it is that God should -- with the Democrats' help and Islam's fervent plea -- bring an end to "occupation" and procure "equality" for all.

Ahh, men.



PEACE.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

Preservation And Defense

Not long ago, two old farmers - a brother and sister - moved out of their family farmhouse: the last two surviving members of the Welch family had stayed at home as long as they could. They were each nearly a century old when they died a few miles down the road, beneath the flourescent light buzzing over a nursing home deathbed. But before they left this life, they bequeathed their farmhouse, and all of the surrounding land, to a conservation group: the old siblings did not want their legacy to fall into enemy hands.

Adjacent to the Welch's homestead, just east of the old rooming house, stood a clutch of barns. Inside one barn could be found the initials, carved into pine or painted in stove black, of every farmhand that passed through the farm dating back to 1865. It was clear that not a few workers took jobs at the farm several years in a row; others would be off to fight in some great war, never to return. There were chains and old scythes hanging in rusted silence; there were old tins on the wall; a set of old oars stood in a corner, crossed. It was a hall for the silent past, but a past that was not so silent if one but listened.

After the old couple died, I would walk the forsaken farm, taking pictures here and there. The photo above was taken along the northern wall of the old house, just off the ell. I could not help but take the photograph -- with the old lamp and bulb, the paper-wasps' nest tucked beneath the shade, the flecked paint, a lonely window and the ghostly imprint of old shutters -- all calling me to remember. But what seems silent is not at all; and what seems old is still rather new: the tap of hands on a window flung open, the smell of fresh paint on a horsehair brush, the piquant air of harvest. I hear children nearby, the shouts of farmhands heading to town with a wagon-load of milk; or the muted thud of boots beneath a dim lamp during heavy snows.

The conservation group which inherited the land, in response to fears and anxieties and sundry other modern maladies, decided that the best thing for the preservation of the old regime was for the new to vanguish the past. So the fire department was called. The volunteer fire corps practiced in the light of burning barns. They rescued smoke and soot. They aimed their hoses only after all memories had disappeared in the heat of a spark fanned bright by legal arson. Later, a bulldozer would level the old farmhouse. Soil was pushed here and there beneath the row of singed catalpa trees; a little monument was erected to remind stray visitors of the monuments that were burned and buried.

Occasionally I return to the old Welch farm. Nothing much remains, of course, but a few flecks of paint, a shard of glass, an ember pressed into soot. And the wasps nearby.

Peace.

Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

In Whom Do We Trust?

Some of us are afraid to leave the barn. We fear we may be led astray, or that some fox will rend us to pieces. Beware, of course, of the wolf dressed in shepherd's clothing. Beware, of course, of the fox and coyote just outside the fence, sniffing for a way in. There is indeed a warm barn; but don't forget that you have a warm coat. And there is a fence, a sheepdog keeping watch, and a real shepherd but one prayer away.

You may be a sheep, but you are never a sheep alone.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Interceding On Our Behalf, With Groanings Too Deep To Be Uttered

There is a horse-and-buggy, and strange folks with black cloth and black hats, and some with beards, and a child running with flowers toward a deep blue dream. From some cold grey pasture (it was green this morning), with dirt on his boots and mud-caked cheeks, a man steps forward and, taking off his hat, bows before a weeping mother and father. He stands erect, though a little bent, and looks into their eyes, eyes filled with flowers and children and blue and dirt and the teary flash of a gun. He says, “We will forgive your son.”

A dog passes by, sniffing for a little girl whose last words of the schoolday were, “Please, shoot me first.” Mothers and fathers -- and several small girls -- collapse at such lessons.

But these strange images all look the same to us: black-and-white on a horse-and-buggy, a triangle flashing warnings. We barely slow down, unless we have friends visiting from faraway. That movie with Harrison Ford was as real as this: we are witnesses to the futility of innocence. And we drive home, thinking we got the picture.

The full moon falls from the sky with nary a word. But the internet and TV are all a-chatter. The world would do well to drape itself in black for a while, seeing in the dark fabric the brilliant tearing flash of forgiveness that cuts its way through an Amish field not far from Paradise. Forgiveness bearing glad tidings, once twitching with doubt on the tip of a trigger. The big, sad bang which started it all.

"Pray for me," he said†. We pray, irrespective of the time, or whether it's too late. And now Amish families gather coins and cans, raising funds, not for the victims, but for the murderer's own family, left shattered beyond imagination. The rest of us are just confounded by such grace.

Peace everywhere, if for just one minute.

[†"He asked the children to pray for him, and that's kind of interesting because he said he hated God," Rhoads said. "He must have recognized the faith in them, God in them." -- ABC News]

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

amish, murder, forgiveness, grace

The Existence Of God: A Letter To Christopher Hitchens

Dear Mr. Hitchens,

You are a man of tremendous talent. I am always amazed not only by your erudite prose (so precise and elegant), but also your wits. You remind me a bit of William F. Buckley Jr.; though he is loathed by many, he is surely not loathed for being dull-witted. You may not like the comparison with a man so thoroughly conservative. But surely you must agree that both of you possess mastery over language; surely you agree that such mastery is desirable in all thinking men and women and secretly envied by most. My envy is not one whit secret: your offhand comments are more substantive than my highest order cogitations. Most men struggle to express what you simply toss off parenthetically. Minds like yours assemble in one sentence what others destroy in whole paragraphs. I thank you for the inspiration.

But I am not always convinced you are as critical as you should be. While I respect that you might describe yourself as a self-interested libertine in a fight against Islamofascists intent on, at best, revoking your license; while I agree with the thrust of this fight and that much of Islam threatens our freedoms; I am not sure I agree with your suggestion that religion in general is a threat to human life and dignity. Your recent comments on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" -- indicative of your thoughts on religion in general -- strike me as passionately spoken and yet intellectually stunted. Permit me to refresh your memory. The reason (partly) for Mr. Matthews' interview with you and Jerry Brown, as you might recall, was the recent lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI in which the Holy Father made the unfortunate decision -- or so you averred -- to quote a crusading emperor's feelings regarding Islam's contributions to the world. You said:

"The fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel, who had said the Koran was wicked because it preached spreading faith by the sword. And I can‘t imagine who advised the pope to do this. The Muslim world is always saying, falsely, that it‘s being attacked by a Crusade, a Zionist conspiracy and all this nonsense. And now you have somebody invoking and reviving the idea of the Crusader period and talking as if only Islam has ever spread its faith by violence.…

"It shows secularism is our only friend. And what we‘re fighting for is the secular enlightenment against all forms of unreason and theocracy…"

What's quite clear in (all) your comments is that you admit Islam and Roman Catholicism are both claiming revelation; such revelations have led to bloodshed and tyrannous coercion: both faiths wield a weapon -- one a sword, another a scimitar. This, I would gather, simply expresses your belief. Am I wrong?

Even if I am fallible here, I am not fallible in describing your belief that secularism is the friend of all thinking humans. Of course, by secularism you must mean those systems of thought and order which are solely derived from unencumbered reason: you await a complete "enlightenment against all forms of unreason." If you're are at all credal, this, I bet, would be your creed.

Now it would not necessarily win me a single polemical point if I mentioned that the secular state of the Soviet Union, a state committed solely to reason and the mechanization of society according to reason's laws, was itself prone to wielding something like a sword. The Soviet sword, however, was a bit more like a hammer and a sickle, where thinking humans were either pounded into submission or sickled down like so many weeds. Furthermore, this reasonable state was heaped in philosophical idealism, in a religious historical determinism which believed such enlightenment was an inevitable fact of temporal forces: the proletariat would and must seize control of their fate. In short, even Soviet reasonableness was clouded by unreason. For it might be the case that to believe solely in the inevitable force of reason is to be as unreasonable as any religious clod in the street. And it might be the case that those, like you, who hold reason rather high, might be forgetting something.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

I hope, Mr. Hitchens, that you will not mind if I share with you an argument that came together in my mind during my sophomore year in college. You see, while I was studying The History of Philosophy, Part II, under the tutelage of my professor, Malcolm Reid, something Dr. Reid said about Immanuel Kant transformed my very soul. It was really a remark made in passing that was then shaped into a question by a classmate, Nathan Stoltzfus. The remark was about Kant's idea of a transcendental ego; the question was whether Kant had unwittingly proven God's existence. I will skip the part about the proof. But I can't skip what fascinated me to no end: the part about the very nature of knowing oneself.

I wonder if you will permit me the following. I wonder if you will accept these simple subject/object propositions: I see a tree; I observe a lemon; I touch this keyboard. For surely these simple propositions are as basic to empiricism and reason as one can find. You and I can even agree to criteria that will give us some reasonable certainty that I am in fact seeing, observing and touching these very things; that such things are indeed there to be seen and touched. But I wonder if you will permit me this proposition: I see I. Or, perhaps I can state it this way: I observe myself. What do you think? Is there a problem with this?

Forgive the didactic nature of my comments here; forgive that I should presume to teach you a thing about basic philosophy, about simple epistemology. But there is a gnawing problem here, one that gnaws at one's guts. And since you believe that religious faith is unreasonable in contrast to secularism, I am left believing that you cannot have possibly chewed on this problem long enough.

Let me pose the problem this way. Can you observe yourself? Of course, we hear people all the time say that they can and do observe themselves. They do not mean they observe themselves in a mirror or portrait; they mean that they observe their own minds with their own minds. They mean a type of mental mirror, a sort of self-reflection. But I ask you, if you can observe yourself, who is doing the observing? If you can examine yourself, who, or what, is doing the examining? Or are you a self observing yourself observing yourself? Can you even do that without reflecting, like so many parallel facing mirrors, ad infinitum?

Surely you see the conundrum. Though we can have things outside of ourselves be objects of our own consciousness, we are not able to make our own consciousness an object of itself. It is not possible for the subject to be its own object; it's not possible for the knower to simultaneously know himself. It is a bit like Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty: one can't measure the position or velocity of a particle without affecting either (and hence one can't be certain of either). Thus, we cannot prove to ourselves that we even have selves: it is not possible to make one's mind an object of scrutiny. How then does each of us even know we have a self?

We know this by extrapolation made in faith. It is faith, not certainty, that is at the bottom of our 'certainty.' I cannot prove to you I exist, because I cannot prove my own existence even to myself. I have to make a leap of faith that I exist, or that my existence and mind and thoughts correspond at all to the reality outside my very being. There is no one who is not faith-full. Faith is the very basis of human epistemology. You can be certain of it.

This, at least to me, is what I got out of Dr. Reid's simple remark about Kant's transcendental ego. And I believe this all proves that no one is free of being religious, or, in your words, unreasoned.

IS THIS FAIR?

I do not know if you really ever forgot, as I implied above, this fact of human consciousness forced on us by reality. I do not know if you have not thought all this through before and have some proper and compelling answer. But I will state that I cannot imagine anyone would not agree that faith inheres in all people; that even the possibility of having souls that can believe or doubt is akin to revelation. I recognize the concomitant anxiety this all portends, for if we all share this fact of faith, we are left a bit at sea: what revelation, if any, is the most truthful? After all, if we cannot prove our own selves to our selves, how can we prove -- or, more interestingly -- disprove, the existence of God?

The battle afoot, Mr. Hitchens, is not really a battle between civilizations or for civilization. Such a battle is superficial and a true distraction. To limit this battle to mere clashes of peoples is to descend into quagmire. What this battle is, is nothing more than the very battle of wisdom, of what is real, true, and actual; about the nature of knowledge and the very cosmos; about the essence of humanity and the nature of God. This is a battle between lies and truth, between heresy and orthodoxy, between Satan and God. It is a battle that has been raging since Eden. And it is all contained in God's first question to Adam and Eve after they fled that lost paradise: Where are you?

Where, oh, where are we indeed. The answer, obviously, cannot come from ourselves.

Peace to you, dear sir.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Christopher Hitchens, Clash of civilizations, God, Faith, Philosophy, Epistemology, Chris Matthews, Hardball, William F. Buckley

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part IV

[Part I of this series begins here.]

I've never known a person not touched by evil, pain, suffering. But I have known many people who have never known joy.

The other day, while I was sitting in a park photographing cedar waxwings (not my photo), an old salt-of-the-earth New Englander asked me a question. He had recently seen a bird, a black bird with red patches on its wings. "I have never seen one before. Do you know what it was?" I cheerfully told him that it was one of my favorites, the red-winged blackbird (not my photo either). I told him all I knew of the bird, and the old man continued on his way. But it was clear that the man, who surely seemed to have his wits about him, had never seen what is utterly a common bird in New England. Since the beginning of this essay (this morning) I have had several visit my feeders just outside the window, and they are always busy flitting about wetlands everywhere. They are remarkably obvious birds, extremely chatty, very active. It is hard to imagine that there are people around who have not seen one of them.

But then again, there are all kinds of things that surprise us, not least of which is that there are people who have never even been loved. This may be too hard for us to entertain even in the most detached, academic way. We do not know how such a fact could ever be possible. But reality is often too much for us, especially when that reality so thoroughly contradicts our experience: There are people who have not been loved for one second of their lives. How could this happen?

Perhaps there is some solace, and a small answer, in the pronouncement that God loves those who are unloved, or even unlovable. But it is not a very convincing sort of solace; we are not convinced that this is enough to restore someone who has never been loved to any sense of self worth. After an encounter with a very sad man on a city street (I was working as a photojournalist at the time), and after a very brief argument with an editor at the newspaper where I worked, I wrote the following poem:

In human interest

I submit the photoshopped images to the news queue
a disfigured head, gigantesque in its distortion
twisted grin his normal straight

brow like the elephant man’s

I pull them up to show you and you
give a face that has sales written all over it

I remember meeting this news feature
before you either saw him as news or
even as a feature:

He was sitting on a bench, where else?
on Main Street near Railroad Ave.
his head twice the size of most
fairground balloons

I wondered whether he had ever been touched

What’s your name? I asked.

Johhhhhnnnyyyy! he replied, Ya gaht aaany mmmonnney?

I emptied my pockets, a few bucks and I handed it to him.
At that instant a cab pulled up to the curb, and Johnny
jumped in. I laughed, but knew I’d be back for more.

I say, I wonder if anyone ever loved him.

You say, you’re too philosophical to be a
journalist.

I say, thank you. Really.

You walk away muttering about your circulation.

***

It seems like a loveless world. Darwin tells us, when we really think about it, that it is all about competition: there is no equality in Darwin's mean streets, there is no rest or peace or promise of uninterrupted comfort anywhere on the face of the earth. We balk at this, or we kick at the portents of atheism in so much Darwin-inspired, dread-saturated, post-modern emptiness. We wonder how a people who demand so much meaning out of life, who expect justice and love and joy, could have evolved from a primordial ooze that is utterly without meaning. How does the desire for purpose evolve from purposelessness; how does the want for love evolve from lovelessness?

Life does not seem fair: the child born with no face (as shown recently on TV); the newborn boy discarded in a garbage pail, now pushed from orphanage to orphanage; those families crammed into railroad cars heading toward gas chambers. I ask how it is that, if we've evolved from nothing, we then don't blame nothing for evil, or how we even see anything as evil at all. Why, if the radical evolutionists are right, why do we even care about suffering, or why would we blame God, if, indeed, there is no God at all? How did we get here, when our starting point was the void? It's as if we fundamentally defy as creatures the very physics of the universe, where it is a law that you can't get more energy out of a thing than what's in it. How is it that humans can demand, inspire or expect more meaning and love than the meaningless, loveless universe from whence they came can ever offer?

***

Did God create death camps? Did God create cigarettes, guns, nuclear bombs, chainsaws, alcohol, crystal meth? Is God responsible for polluted rivers, polluted air? Did He make us fly jets across the Atlantic, scarring the atmosphere; did He make us fly planes into skycrapers, skyscrapers that He built on fill in Lower Manhattan?

If there is a proof for the existence of God I might think it resides here, that humans blame Him for the things they created. One might also find an argument for the existence of God in His apparent absence: if I were God I might hide from humanity too. But there really is nothing hidden about God, as He is evident in every wingbeat of the red-winged blackbird. Heidegger's haunting question might even help us see God even where Heidegger could not: How is that there is anything here at all? What keeps everything from slipping into the abyss of non-being?

For some of us, the question might get us to begging, begging for a miracle. We want intervention (and we want it NOW!) not realizing that the very squirrels and birds and grasses and winds are divine signs. God is at work. Jesus may have impressed His disciples by walking on water. But the miracle is not in the walking, it is in the water; that there is any water at all. Raising the dead is miraculous, no doubt, but not anymore miraculous than that there was any person who lived in the first place. Sadly, we are too dulled, or too fearful, to live in the miraculous. We comfort ourselves in the presence of natural laws, oblivious, mostly, that the predictability of nature is often illusory and, more importantly, that the very laws themselves are miraculous. Breathing is really more of a miracle than Christ's resurrection. In fact, I believe He rose from the dead to prove that very thing, granting us life eternal so that we might breathe forevermore. But we hardly notice the miraculous in the commonplace until the wind is knocked out of us, or when we sense our last inhale will indeed be our very last.

***

We can ask where God is in the midst of suffering, as long as we are asking where we are in the midst of it, too. As we have seen, God has taken the blame for creation, for suffering, for evil; and He has taken the blame for things He did not even create. There should be joy in this news; we should receive this news with dancing and laughter and merriment. But we have even grown used to joy, I am afraid, even when it comes so rarely; good news is old news, and even joy seems tired, boring, predictable. We are too worldly to laugh, to dance in the freedom of forgiveness, to drink deep draughts of holy, redeemed merriment. Holiness, joy, redemption, forgiveness -- these are greeted with a big yawn by the all-knowing sophisticates we think we are. We snicker at the idea of a banquet with a Holy Family, because we know families, and they are all broken and disappointing. Laugh for a while, we say, but before long you'll be at each others' throats, just like so many holidays with our own too-often unholy families. Heaven? bliss? No thanks. That's for those who need such assurances.

***

The Christian message is simple regarding suffering, and it is painful. God loves both the murderer and the murdered, and He knows what it is to be both. He cannot stop being all-knowing, all-present, and thus is always both victim and victimizer. To intervene in world affairs in terms familiar to us, action figures that we think we are, would be for God to have to choose sides. But God is, until time has run out, on all sides: He is a Yankees and Red Sox fan; He roots for Manchester United as fervently as He roots for Arsenal. In short, He cheers on people, not ideologies, except the Gospel itself. He did not root for Hitlerism, but surely He adored Hitler. He did not root for Arafat's hatred, but surely He loved Arafat. He did not love the blood on King David's hands, but surely He loved the hands that were David's. The red-winged blackbird killed by a goshawk in my yard recently, killed right before my eyes, was no less loved by God than the goshawk that carried the dead bird away. After all, had God stopped the hawk from smashing that helpless blackbird into the side of my house, right next to me, would He not have had to bring the whole cosmos to a halt?

The Gospel of Christ declares this: That God loves you more than He loves His own life, and even His own joy. Better to be with you in hell than in heaven without you. Better to crucify the Creator than to stop Creation. Better to bring God to a screeching halt than the hawk in its deadly flight. Better to bring God to the grave than Hitler to annihilation.

Strange, though, how few people point out that Hitler was indeed stopped. No one seems to thank God for that, do they? Perhaps God did intervene -- perfectly, the only way Omniscience can. He KNOWS what He is doing, right? Otherwise, He can't be God. And if He is not God, we are indeed pitiable, and lost.

"Come unto me, all you who labor, and I will give you rest." It is always a good thing to remember that the very first miracle that Jesus performed was to make more wine. Sounds exactly like the sort of message one would expect of a God who cares, who pays attention.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil, The New Yorker

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part III: To Hell With Jesus

[I post this essay with trepidation. It is a long entry in this series on good and evil. But it is a necessary one. That is not where my fear lies. I am afraid that I have gone too far. (Part I of this series begins here.)]

This series began with Pope Benedict XVI praying at Auschwitz. It won't end there, not because I am interested in following the Holy Father to another scene, but because the issue of good and evil has no earthly terminus. We will be asking questions until answers are finally given.

In the February 6, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, in an article called "Forgiveness", author Timothy W. Ryback discusses the Pope's difficult past –– of growing up in Nazi Germany and serving in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi military. But in Ryback's piece one reads the following about then-professor Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) teaching at the University of Tübingen as a young man:

In 1966, when Ratzinger arrived in Tübingen, the university was a center of theological dispute. Students disrupted lectures with cries of "Verflucht sei Jesus!" ("To hell with Jesus!"). Protestant faculty members endorsed flyers denouncing the crucifix as "an expression of sadomasochistic glorification of suffering."

We have already spoken of both human indifference and human culpability regarding suffering and evil. I have argued that humanity is remarkably silent about horrors, except when it comes to horrors and God, and then humanity is quite boisterous about God's alleged weakness, moral turpitude, indifference, or even His non-existence. If there is a God, God is to blame; He's the one who must give account, He is the one who must be judged. God is the source of horrors.

***

I cannot think of a more complex religious image: the Vicar of Christ, the Pope of the Holy Catholic Church, a former Hitler youth and soldier in the Nazi cult, standing at Auschwitz. It is a stillpoint; it is the crux of the matter. Can a sinner be a saint? Are redemption and sanctification possible? Does God love the indifferent and brutal as much as He loves the compassionate and merciful? Does God love the abuser as much as he loves the abused? Are Hitler and Elie Wiesel (a famous Holocaust survivor) loved equally by God?

There is something essentially Christian about Benedict XVI standing within the gates of death. There is something essentially Christian about the very idea of redemption: St. Paul, the outstanding Jew who was a murderer, is the quintessence of the Christian message: all are saved who would be saved. God, as St. Paul says, takes the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; He is a God of gracious irony, proving that grace, love and mercy always trump the rules. My own earthly father taught me this: he taught me that he loved me more than he loved his rules, his reputation, his honor. I was more important than a statute, a commandment. The sheep is more important than the sheepfold; a hole in the fence did not mean that the fence was broken but that a sheep was lost, and in jeopardy. God cares for the lost, He pursues them; and He finds them in order to make them whole. This is what my father taught me, and it is essentially Christ's message to the world.

And yet there is a whole world of people who believe that rules are God; that a lost sheep deserves his or her plight; that the fence should just be fixed to keep only the good sheep in, and the bad sheep out.

Perhaps I am rambling, but I ramble over brambles and thorns to get to one important point, a point that might indeed save one sheep from a disasterous decision, and that point is this: To hell with Jesus indeed!

***

I have said it before and I will say it again: The Christian gospel has it all exactly right. Christianity is separated from all other religions by having, not the valley climb to the summit, but the summit tumble down to the valley. There is no Moses climbing to receive a Word from God in the Gospel story; there is no Muhammad receiving the very words of a radically transcendent God whose message is all about making men better men. The message of Christianity is about a God tumbling to Hell in order to make God a better God. I border on blasphemy, I know, but hear me out.

***

Years ago I was painting a school gymnasium with a college friend when a horse fly, a large nasty bloodthirsty fly with stinging jaws, landed on my friend's leg. My friend was quick to snatch it, and, in the course of looking at it, my friend asked me if the pest was "one of the nasty biting flies". I told him that it was indeed, and that it was cousin to the smaller though no less nasty deer fly. To my horror, my friend pulled the wings off the fly and tossed it to the ground. "Suffer!" he shouted. I quickly walked over and crushed the wingless fly beneath my foot.

Odd that such a moment should have become a defining moment in my life. Earlier that year I had a young man in my dorm (I was an RA for three years) whose father, an atheist, threw out a stiff challenge to the idea of original sin or original culpability. "Why should God be upset with me if I cannot help but be a sinner? I did not ask to be born. How then am I accountable?" It is a great challenge, and I was stumped for months. But when I crushed the fly beneath my foot, I knew I had an answer. And that answer begins with the character of God. Was my friend, the wing-ripping, sardonic and merciless man before me, anything like the God of the universe? Did God delight in abusing that which itself was abusive; did God aim to punish a fly that was just being itself? Would a just God punish a being that had no choice but to be unpleasant?

The clarity with which I divined my way through the problem took the following course. I imagined that I, an outsider to the fly's world yet a being full of love for all flies, descended to the mere existence of a fly. I was, to a perfect match, a horsefly. And to the other flies I spoke:

I know that you do not know exactly what it is you do. But if I were to tell you that you were an awful, nasty creature, what would you say? If I told you that the things you bite, the things from which you draw your life, are injured viciously by you, and that they loathe you, would you care? Trust me when I say this: I am not blaming you. In fact, let me state that you were even made this way. I made you this way. But now I ask you this. What if I were to tell you that you could become something new, wonderful, lovely? What if I told you I could transform you, I could liberate you from this plight? Would you follow? Would you choose to be new, different, lovely, though still in essence who you were created to be? Would you choose to be more lovely than the butterflies if I promised you such wonder? Or would you reject me?

My question to you, dear reader, is this: If I really could transform the flies, if I really could deliver them from their plight and I showed them incontrovertibly that I could, who would be responsible if they refused? If the flies could be completely transformed and yet essentially remained their fully undifferentiated selves, and they refused so great a blessing, who is to blame if they chose to remain nasty biting bugs? Surely not their creator, even if He, indeed, had created them to bite. For now He was offering them a singular gift, a chance to participate in their creation; they were to be co-creators in their new lives. But, and here is a critical point, if they refused their new lives, they would be endorsing their viciousness as wonderful and desirable. In short, if they chose to be nasty and untransformed, they would become the sole creators of who and what they were.

For those who have an understanding of the problem of predestination and free will, we come to another crux, another crossroad. For here we see something amazing. Even if the creator of the flies made them to be vicious, should they refuse his offer, they have become their own creators, setting the creator free. The flies can no longer complain that they were made to be mean by someone else: they have freely made their decision, and they have continued in their evil ways. The flies have chosen, and their NO to the creator is the one thing that is truly their own: It is a wondrous act of free will.

However, should any fly choose to be transformed, should any fly choose to be a co-creator in his (or her) re-creation, that fly would make a startling pronouncement: I had nothing to do with it at all! For the fly, now more glorious than a butterfly, would announce that his choice was not of his making, as the wondrous world in which he lived was not his doing: "You see, I am indeed new, but I had nothing to do with either the option or the choosing. I did not present the choice to myself, it came to me; I did not create the idea of a butterfly, it came from above. My assent is hardly a choice. It is more that I have been chosen, for my creator came to me at a point in time with a wonderful bit of news; I did not come to HIM with the news, but He came to me." In other words, the transformed fly would say that his YES to the creator was not really his; he was predestined to be transformed. For he did not come up with the whole idea in the first place. And, as a result, both the creator and created were set free.

So in short, free will means saying NO; but it has nothing to do with saying YES.

Where does this fit in with the problem of evil? It fits right here: that Christ became a fly, was confronted by the vicious who could not be, on their own, otherwise; they submitted Him to capital punishment for making the cosmos in the first place; He died and descended to Hell, and returned as a transcendent butterfly with POWER. And then He said, "You've killed me. I've suffered. I've taken the blame for starting it all; I have taken your sins upon me and called them my own. And now the whole of sin is buried, hidden away, tossed into the abyss. I am the murderer, and the murdered; I am the rapist and the raped; I am the Nazi and the Jew. I have been all things in all ways in all times; you have punished me and I have succumbed. And now that you are no longer to blame, now what? Will you come to me now? For there is no one left to blame."

***

"Verflucht sei Jesus! To Hell with Jesus!" To Hell indeed. For it is the God that was believed to be vindictive and petty, mean and cold, that we discover in Christ is a different God: He is the God who SUFFERS, who succumbs to the death inherent in even the smallest sin. He would rather be in hell with us than in heaven without us. He has come, He has shown us that He is a different God. "Come unto me, and I will give you rest," He offers to Jew, Gentile, and Nazi alike. And yet, and yet …

There are those who refuse, who resist transformation, healing. And in so doing their NO to God becomes a YES to sorrow, sin, death, and suffering. They freely choose to be sole creators in their sorrow; and they resist the gentle Hand that reaches forward. God does not pull off wings; He does not say "Suffer!" We say it in every moment of resistance to transformation; and in keeping our pitiable sorrows we refuse to have our sins transformed to gems. We, those who protest against such grace, true protestants as we are, are the sadomasochists: it's not the God on the Cross who is sadist, masochist. It's the obdurate who view Him that way who are mired in sadomasochism.

Pope Benedict XVI, formerly a little boy in Nazi Germany who helped the Hitler cult perform even one heinous deed, is that perfect emblem of Christianity: The wise are confounded by the grace of a God who saves -- and transforms -- not only that which is lost, but that which is revolting. Grace abounds in Christianity, from sea to sea, star to sun, earth to hearth, Heart to heart. There is no peace without forgiveness, the forgiveness of God toward man, and man toward God; and, most importantly, man to man, woman to woman, brother to sister and Palestinian to Jew. There will be no end to woe without forgiveness. Mark my words.

Forgiveness always requires that something dies, is buried. And then comes the freedom. It is the gospel, the glad tidings. Glad indeed!

Peace to you.

(Concluding thoughts tomorrow, which begin here.)

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved. (Dedicated to James Saunders.)

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil,
The New Yorker

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part II

In Part I of this series, I spoke of suffering, of evil and death; of the Holocaust. I discussed the problem of evil, that the existence of evil proves that God is weak, mean, or both; and that for many people the best conclusion drawn from the harsh realities of suffering is that there is no God at all.

I added my own thoughts on the problem of evil as classically defined, arguing that the problem ignores the obvious assumption in our definition of God, that God is omniscient. As an omniscient Being, God might know that the only way to eradicate evil and suffering from the cosmos is exactly the way we see events unfolding in our lives: omniscience IS at work in every tragedy and in every joy. In other words, God IS doing something, the very thing an all-wise God can only do; and it looks like Life. And it might very well be the case that God was not silent at all during the Holocaust. His voice may indeed have been quite strong. In fact, I have even heard it suggested that had Hitler not been distracted by the Jews in Germany, Poland, France; had Hitler instead ignored them and turned the German machinery of death, destruction and warfare on his enemies, he would have won World War II and far more than 6,000,000 Jews would have been killed. The suggestion posits a heroic idea, that the Jews were something of a glorious sacrifice that saved us all from Nazi tyranny: the Jews were freedom fighters even in their alleged weakness. It was the Jews who destroyed Hitler. Churchill and Roosevelt had nothing to do with it.

This is not an attempt on my part to palliate the evils of the Holocaust, nor am I trying to cheer up the surviving victims of Germany's death camps. I am making a point that God may have indeed been very much at work in profoundly effective and yet strange ways, which is what one would expect of an omniscient God. Omniscience, in fact, may behave in utterly bizarre and contradictory ways; and it may act in obscurity.

A couple of years ago, I had a bit of a spat with a local shop owner about suffering, God, justice. He followed me out to the sidewalk and, in the heat of debate said, "I've done more for the suffering of starving Africans than God ever has." I must say that I understand the sentiment behind this conceit, but I do not understand the conceit. God appears not to be doing anything most of the time; He does not seem to even care. But one of the real problems associated with evil is not that God doesn't care, it's that there is sweepingly broad empirical evidence that most humans don't care either.

About 15 years ago I received a phone call from an old friend grieving about the sad death of a young mother we both knew. My friend was angry at God, for God had let not only Penny (the dead woman) down, He let lots of others down, too. My friend wondered how God could choose not to heed the prayers of Penny and her son, or the prayers of countless people surrounding that tragedy. Even Penny believed that she would be healed! How could God not honor that? How could He be content with yet another motherless child?

After awhile I shared with my friend something that hit my conscience hard. I said that in all of the time that Penny was living, all 26 years of her life, not once had anyone called me to proclaim how glad they were that Penny existed. No one called to praise Penny's smile, her laughter, her sweet goodness. No one called me to praise God for His wonderful creation which was Penny in all her simple glory. No one called to complain that there was not MORE of Penny everywhere; and no one ever said that God was too kind to us all to have created such a wonderful woman in the first place. And yet, in spite of all this silence, people were now mad that God had taken Penny away. Before, there was no gladness around Penny, but after her death there was nothing but madness. No one praised God yesterday, and yet now people were poised to curse Him today.

My friend agreed, and I believe we were both changed during that phone call.

***

I am reminded of something G. K. Chesterton once said. He imagined a rather randy man complaining to God about women and matrimony. "Explain to me God why I can't be with all women?" the man might have asked. To which God replied, "If it comes to that, explain to me why you can be with even one woman?" Chesterton went further, suggesting that Adam and Eve, given the entire cosmos and yet prevented from having just one thing -- an apple -- might have asked God something similar: "Explain to us why we can keep everything we have if we don't have just one thing? Explain why we can't have the apple, too?" God's reply? "Well, if it comes to that, explain the apple."

I am reminded of all this because we often expect an explanation for something taken from us without ever asking ourselves how we were given the thing to begin with. A man may be mad at God when his son is killed in a car wreck; but was he ever grateful to God that he even had a son who would, eventually, die?

What has come to surprise me about many reactions to death and suffering is that people respond with such surprise. When a child dies of a brain tumor or a woman is raped and murdered, one would think that such a thing had never before happened, judging by many survivors' reactions, particularly their reactions toward God. God is to blame, it seems, even though few people take the responsibility for suffering themselves. Like the shopkeeper who thinks he does more to alleviate sorrow than even God, many forget that they are perhaps the reason there is suffering at all. For surely each of us who has had a child knew about rape, murder, disease, fire, pestilence, earthquake, pedophilia, and car crashes BEFORE we had children; surely there is NO ONE on this planet choosing to have children who did not know about these things. And yet, AND YET, knowing this, knowing that death occurs every day; knowing that there are murderers and rapists and wars and droughts and suicides and divorce and cannibals and cancers, and that we nonetheless still choose to have children; all of this should lead us to one question, and one question only: When it comes to suffering and evil, who among us is NOT to blame?

Please note: I am responsible for every bit of suffering my child experiences in life, every bit. Why? Because I knew beforehand that dreadful things MAY happen; I might even have known that they WILL happen, and yet I (not anyone else) CHOSE to bring a child into this world. I am the source of suffering. If there was at least ONE thing I knew before reproducing a child, it was the simple fact that that child will someday DIE.

Interestingly, as I may be responsible for my child's sorrow, I cannot say that I am responsible for my child's joys. And this for the simple reason that before having a child I had no certainty that joy would come his or her way; but I was indeed certain that death MUST come. Life does not guarantee joy, and there is no proof that it ever did, or ever could, or ever will. But every graveyard is proof that even if there is joy, joy, eventually, falls into the ground. With family planning the only guarantee one has is death.

But since sorrow is one of life's guarantees, we can be glad that joy, should it come, is one of life's infinitely wonderful privileges. After all, there is no joy if one is entitled to it; there is no bliss if bliss is one's guaranteed right. Joy can only come in the form of a surprise or it is not joy. Hence, we take a gamble with every breath and in every birth. We hope, we pray; we throw our chance into the hand of omniscience. Surely we cannot blame God when things go wrong, particularly when we don't "blame" Him when things go remarkably right. But when things do go right, surely we are out there thanking God for the privilege of simple existence.

Well, one can only hope.

More tomorrow. [Part III begins here.]

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil

The Problem Of Knowing Good And Evil, Part I

Perhaps this will not help at all.

Pope Benedict XVI stood at Auschwitz this past weekend. He entered death chambers. He knelt before the gates of death, and he prayed. And then there was a rainbow.

It is not that the several elements, the prayers and presence of a Pope and a rainbow, are causally connected. It is that we hope they are.

Auschwitz is that geographic point that exists like an oracular black hole. Oracles, as you know, were where pilgrims traveled to hear news from the divine, hopefully good news, though usually not. Auschwitz is like an oracle in reverse: there is nothing proclaimed there, only asked. But no answer comes in that crushing dark, the oppressive silence. Auschwitz is the place of questions, the abyss with no answers. We plead for God, and God hides behind veils of smoke, the smoke of burning bodies. Atop gas chambers, birds sing. God says nothing.

The problem of evil, at least in theology, is framed something like this: If God is all-powerful and all-good, He could or would stop evil. Since there is evil, God is either not all-powerful or all-good. Many philosophers have chosen to dismiss God as not all-powerful, needing God to be at least all-benevolent. Many have rejected the idea of God altogether in light of the facts of evil and suffering. And a few malcontents have chosen to see God as so much badness, a real sadist in the sky.

Those theologians and philosophers who believe that God must be both omnipotent and benevolent often defend Him by noting God's free choice to give humanity free will; as such, He permitted us to make a mess of things. And so we have. Of course, really shrewd thinkers note that if God did in fact design humanity and the cosmos this way He is still responsible for starting the whole thing in the first place. Free will arguments don't really absolve God of apparent culpability.

Pope Benedict XVI, like countless other people before him, stood at Auschwitz and asked, “Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" Of course, I recognize that the Holy Father is asking the question rhetorically; that he is revealing his humanity, his compassion, and his ability to identify with doubt, sorrow, pain. He is like the Psalmist, or like the prophets before him: How long, O, Lord, will you let our enemies prevail? Even the Christian Savior asked in His darkest hours, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Women huddled in a gas chamber asked the question with perfect lucidity.

If readers will permit, I would like to confront the problem of evil (theodicy) in a few posts here at Contratimes. And the first place I would like to start is with the problem itself. For it strikes me as self-evident that the classic problem, that God can't be either omnipotent or benevolent before the facts of evil, is thoroughly wrong-headed.

Not long ago I called a radio talk program to join in on a conversation about this very problem. The guest was a former professor of mine, Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, and I asked if anyone had considered whether perhaps an omniscient God, one knowing everything in a state of all-wisdom, would KNOW that the only way to overcome evil in the world is to overcome evil exactly the way we see things working out every day. For all any one of us knows, an all-wise God would say to us, "You know, I am destroying evil, I am alleviating suffering; and this is the ONLY way for me to do so. This is omniscience intervening." In other words, omniscience would know exactly how to destroy the evil and suffering that besets all creatures, and that destruction might be what we are witnessing in every breath and in every sunset. There can be no other way. Should God just step in and stop, for instance, Hitler from killing Jews, then a far greater evil may follow. Oddly, the talk show host would have none of this: She wanted to blame God for being weak or malevolent. She could not buy the idea of omniscience. And I believe that she could not buy it because she had never thought of it before.

Peter Kreeft, as would be expected of a philosopher, ran with the question. He added that some have speculated that if Hitler had not committed suicide, for example, and that he was instead arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, we might find ourselves living under the dreaded Nazi flag today. For a person cannot tell how one thing ultimately influences another; one cannot tell what is materially the less evil path in the long run. One can only hope; one can only stand on principles when confronting injustice and evil. But one cannot know, unless one is God, whether one's actions will have an ill or healthy effect on the world. Kreeft's words were engaging, and correct.

Hopefully Dr. Kreeft won't mind if I put his words differently. If it were up to us, our battle with evil might be a bit like administering antibiotics: they appear to work as a victorious solution to infections, but in the long run, antibiotics may in fact have weakened humanity's innate abilities to self-immunize. The infections we beat short-term may have been overcome long-term by themselves had we just waited long enough for the human immune system to evolve. One simply does not know. Nor does doltish humanity know what God's sudden "dramatic" intervention might look like, or what effect it might have.

But the assumption in all theological discussions is that God does indeed know. God is either omniscient or He is not. If He is not, it is awfully hard to call Him God. And if He is omniscient, then one can only conclude that the very reality we are in is the best reality for overcoming sin, evil and suffering. To return to the antibiotic image for a second, it would be wrong for a sceptic to conclude that because there is a battle between cells in a person's body the antibiotics are not working, for the battle is proof that they are. If anyone concludes that an antibiotic that does not work "fast enough" (for whom?) or "well enough" is neither potent nor good, that person should be reminded that there are plenty of measures one can take to instantly and completely eradicate an infection. Killing the patient is one such measure. But good doctors are a bit like God. They are wise to the idea that killing the bad often takes time so as not to kill the good. God could perhaps instantly wipe the earth clean of all evil, but what would be left, and where is the wisdom in that?

And yet there is one more thing that complicates matters, and it is a hard pill to swallow: God is that antibody that loves everyone. In other words, God, who is love as well as justice, and who exists as the only all-wise being, loves the very persons many of us consider evil. This is alarming for many of us, but it is Christianity's truest, boldest and most controversial assertion: God loved the Jews in the gas chambers as much as he loved Hitler outside them; God loves the victimizer as much as any victim. It is almost too difficult to even write, let alone admit into one's reflections on these matters. But it must be true. God cannot HATE what we might hate; His wisdom must not be void of love or justice, nor can His love and justice be void of wisdom. God loved Hitler, and all other disgusting tyrants, as much as He loves any of us. And we know Christ the Shepherd leaves the beloved flock to find the one beloved stray, even if that stray is a rebel. That is the most difficult problem in the eradication of evil: How does God eradicate it without destroying everybody, and everything? How does God purge humanity of evil without destroying the entire body?

Only an omniscient Being has the knowledge, and power, to do that. Or there is no such Being at all.

More tomorrow, I hope. (Part II begins here.)

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
[Related post at WI Catholic can be read here.]

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Hitler, Theodicy, Problem of Evil

The Most Important Question: Epilogue

In parts I and II of this series, I mentioned a belief in inevitability that runs through Islam; a theological concept of predestination. This article of belief is known as al-Qadar. Marxist- Communist doctrine is similar, claiming that the proletariat struggle against the bourgeoisie (with the proletariat's eventual overthrow of that bourgeoisie and the socializing of the means of production) is an inevitable process of history. Of course, this Marxist idea is a religious idea, as there are no logical or scientific proofs to Marxist idealism.

I was a bit heavy-handed, I think, in attributing by innuendo to all Muslims that all Muslims are quiet about terrorism, or are supportive of or comfortable with al-Qadar. There are problems in Islamic theological discourse between Muslim clerics, with sundry divisions, in ways familiar to those of us attuned to divisions in Christian theology. No one group is ever completely homogeneous.

Let me direct you to this interesting condemnation of Islam's old infatuation with suicide bombings. It is delivered by a Muslim cleric. Please take the time to read this speech reprinted at MEMRI. It is revealing (though there are problems with it). [Thanks to Frontpagemag.com for citing it.]

I will end my comments with this curious syllogism found at Answering Islam.org:

• (1) If A, then B. If Allah endorses Islam, then it should expand endlessly.
• (2) Not-B. But it is not expanding endlessly (see this analysis).
• (3) Therefore, not-A. Therefore, Allah does not endorse Islam.

In a technical sense, this is a valid syllogism, a modus tollens, though I find such syllogisms faulty. For this could be an equally valid modus tollens:

1. If my dog is home, the front door will be locked.
2. The front door is not locked.
3. Therefore my dog is not home.

But the syllogism about Islam raises an interesting point. If there is a God, and that God has established a religion, one would think that that religion would expand and not contract. Of course, Christianity's earliest writings predict a great apostasy in "the last days" from its own folds, but I do not believe Islam makes similar claims of itself. Islam is much more concerned about earthly terrority and holy sites than is Christendom: Visitation to such sites is one of the Five Pillars of Islam (Hajj). Much of Islam is fixed on earthly dominance and expansion, and thus is much more vulnerable to the problem raised in the syllogism printed above.

IRAQ CONSTITUTION

As you know by now, the deadline has passed in Iraq, and the Iraqis have not agreed upon a constitution. This news is only disappointing in the most superficial analysis. To me, the news is heartening and exciting. That one Iraqi lawmaker said that the constitution thus far drafted has been drafted "by the powerful people, and not by the people," is beautiful, for it reveals the depth of understanding some if not all Iraqis possess about the drafting of a constitution. Even some lawmakers have recommended that parts of the constitution be sent to the Iraqi people in a referendum. In that way, perhaps, the seminal elements of democracy will be fertilized even more. But what is heartening is that the process is taking time; even lots of time. Which proves, at the very least, that people are taking this process seriously, and are not rushing off pell-mell to take control of an ancient and vulnerable culture.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

The Most Important Question: On Inevitability And The War On Terror, Part II

In Part I of this series (which is a prerequisite for understanding what follows), I argued that the Islamic article of belief – al-Qadar – the sixth of six such articles, must lead us who reside in the West to this important question: Has Allah willed the destruction – or the submission – of the West?

As I have shown, al-Qadar is the will of Allah; that all that comes to pass has been willed by him. Thus, as the towers imploded at Ground Zero, Muslims submitted to Allah's will – the towers were willed down by Allah's fiat. There is therefore no real condemnation of the act of terror: Since it happened, it was meant to happen. There is no denying Allah's hand.

Of course, this teaching is fraught with difficulty, as many Muslim scholars admit. Where is human free will in Allah's sovereignty? Does Allah will evil and sinfulness? How does a Muslim understand devastating personal or military defeat? (For some analysis of the problems such questions raise, follow the links in Part 1.)

Irrespective of the difficulty of al-Qadar, the fact remains that most if not all practicing Muslims are reluctant to either condemn or reject this article of belief. Why? Because it is fundamental to that faith, and to the very essence of Islam, a word which means "to submit" or "surrender". Allah must be sovereign. He can not be surprised; he cannot have other wills competing against his own; he cannot NOT know everything. Otherwise, he would not be all-powerful or all-knowing. In short, he would not be Allah.

THE WAR ON TERROR AND AL-QADAR

In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, an Israeli army major reservist wrote about his role in removing his fellow citizens from Gaza, a painful and harrowing ordeal. Michael B. Oren writes about how he felt prior to that dreadful eviction:

"My feelings were, at best, ambivalent. I wanted to end Israel's occupation of Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians and preserve Israel's Jewish majority, but feared abetting the terrorists' claim that Israel had fled under fire." [emphasis added]

(see Page A10, August 23, 2005)

What is important to see in Oren's comments is what I've highlighted in bold: He feared that Israel's withdrawal would fuel the terrorists' belief that Israel was routed by superior force. Why is that important? Because it supports the Islamic belief that, if a thing happens, Allah wanted it to happen. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza proves the supremacy of Allah's will, and the supremacy of his Lordship over even other gods. After all, there is no other God but Allah. The Jewish God is no match at all.

Remember Osama bin Laden's celebration over the surprising (to him) collapse of the World Trade Center towers? The collapses proved his faith in Allah; Allah was on his side. Similarly, when the mujahideen pushed back the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, this success was proof that Allah was against the greatest Western super-power in Europe and Asia. And the retreat of American troops in Somalia proved more of the same.

So Israel's "retreat" is seen as a defeat, and a sign that Allah is on the move.

WHAT ARE OUR OPTIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

For a moment, let us countenance the foreign policy of someone like Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother of a fallen soldier camped out at "Camp Casey" in Crawford, TX. Let us agree that America should begin an immediate and systematic withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and even Afghanistan. What would those actions do to Islamic religious beliefs about its holy war against Western infidels?

Answer: It would fuel confidence that Allah was in fact supreme, and supremely interested in defeating the infidel West. It would vindicate the insurgents' attacks along countless roadsides. It would be cause for celebration. What will be was MEANT to be. Meant by Allah.

Thus, retreat and withdrawal from the Middle East is an act of concession on a religious scale, and not a military one.

In Part 1, I asserted that the West, particularly the United States, might want to rethink its military strategy in Iraq or withdraw. Clearly, withdrawal is not an option. But its current military strategy may in fact be as ineffective and dangerous as withdrawal. Why?

If in fact al-Qadar infuses all of Islam, or most of it, then perhaps the only military strategy effective in dealing with Islamic militants is profound military superiority. And I mean profound. (Please note: I am not advocating this, only analyzing what is before us.) If, for instance, the West were to destroy all Islamic holy sites, making them in fact uninhabitable and unrecognizable; if the West obliterated every alleged Allah-backed stronghold, the Islamic faith in Allah would be sorely shaken, and may perhaps never recover. In fact, Islam might even be destroyed, or reformed into something hardly recognizable to its current form.

Again, I am not advocating this, nor am I wishing this. I am merely suggesting what may be the only viable military option to confront those Muslims committed to Allah's victory over alleged Western infidelity.

There is, of course, another way. We could do what I said yesterday: We could let the theologians fight the battle.

"CONVERT THEM TO CHRISTIANITY"

Recall what Ann Coulter said shortly after 9/11: The West should, among other things, invade Islamic countries and "convert them to Christianity". In a way, her remarks were brilliantly on point. For what we need to do is win the propaganda war with radical Islam: We need to show the most aggressive corners of Islam that the religious idea of Allah's sovereignty is not intellectually viable. In other words, we should not be launching sorties of bombs on Muslim strongholds, but sorties of brochures pointing out the weakness of a deity that wills everything. (Of course, this would violate Church/State or Mosque/State separation requirements. But what must America do if indeed the war on terror consists of a religion battling a secular state. Should that secular state ignore religion altogether? Should it be mute about it? Or should it engage its opponents in a battle of wits?)

What? Have I lost my mind? No. What I am saying is this: Any deity deemed to be all-powerful is not a deity if he (or she) WILLS everything. Willing EVERYTHING is a sign of weakness, not strength. Really, who is stronger, that Being which MAKES everything turn out his way, or that Being which permits things to happen randomly and yet nonetheless conform to his will?

Think of it this way (I'll try not to be too theological here). Imagine two men in an adventurer's race from New York City to Katamandu. One racer maps out every step; makes plans to the final minute; mapping out every runway and highway and airport escalator. The other racer plans nothing other than a willful first step. And with that first step he is carried in a whirlwind of events: he is hit by a car, taken to hospital, blown out a window by a tornado, lands in a ship, shipwrecks at sea, swims to shore, is offered a bicycle ride by a one-legged man. The racer with the plan and the map is making great headway, and yet, at the finish line, is amazed to find that his opponent is buying fabric in a Katamandu market. Which of these racers is really the more adventurous, and even the more powerful? Is the man who plans and controls every step powerful, or the one who finds his way through chaos?

But we are not talking about men here, we are talking of gods. And if there is a God, it would seem to me that He must be so all-powerful that His will would still cosmically prevail without His needing to decree every single instant. (As theologian Karl Barth said of the Christian Incarnation, God is so omnipotent He can be impotent and still be God. God has the power to be powerless.) Moreover, His Will is not some sort of preconceived outcome, like decreeing that Jerusalem is the seat of Utopia. His Will is not a quantity but a quality: It is not that the end of all things is defined by the walls of a perfected state. The end is defined by whether the end of all things is LOVING. Hence, God's will is more about His heart than His head. He does not have a PLAN. The creation is enfused with His nature, and thus, no matter how creation unfolds, through myriad accidents and trials and seemingly random events, it will end up according to God's nature. The paths to the end may be infinite; but the end will always be the same: God's will crosses the finish line first, and the prize is love and gentleness and prodigal generosity. The prize is not a better government or a better nation-state or caliphate.

It is this sort of argument that needs to be dropped on the "fatalists" at war with us. What is needed is the sowing of healthy doubt. What is needed is to make people, no matter who they are, doubt themselves enough to wonder if they in fact "might be wrong." What we need ultimately is the destruction of certainty; religious certainty.

Who are the most gentle, easy people with whom to debate religion? Is it that person who KNOWS they are right about God? Is it that person who is certain you are wrong for believing in Christ? Is it that arrogant agnostic certain of his doubt? Or is it that person who is health-fully doubtful, recognizing the role of faith in all knowledge; recognizing that our certainties are often the worse thing about us? In short, are not the best dialogues on religion between those who are genuinely (not feignedly) humble about their beliefs, admitting their vulnerabilities and doubts?

There are only a few ways to fight the War on Terror: As an all out flexing of muscularity and blustering of machismo; a turning heel and running scared; a half-hearted display of strength; a reasoned, calculated blend of force and diplomacy. America may in fact be involved in the shrewdest type of warfare ever seen: superior firepower blended with conviviality and fraternity and patient restraint. But unless the War on Terror includes a better bomb for the mind and heart – the religious mind and heart – the war will continue on its perennial, 4000-year-old course.

This is a religious battle over the nature of God. I am, I think, certain of it. But I could be wrong.

Peace to you.

(Here is Part III, the epilogue.)

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved

The Most Important Question: On Inevitability And The War On Terror

What I am attempting here today might be overly ambitious. But I want to get at the most important thing you need to know about the so-called War on Terror. I am not suggesting that the War on Terror is false or foolhardy. There is undoubtedly the Islam-fueled machinery of terrorism aimed at the West. But what I am suggesting is that the War on Terror is not really aptly named. It would be like calling the practice of medicine a "War on Pain". Pain is only a symptom. Of course, sometimes medicine can only treat symptoms; the common cold is so treated. But a medical War on Pain is about etiology, about causes and origins. It is not about pain per se, but what the pain signifies. Hence, medicine is about treating causes; about eradicating threats to health. But even that is not the ultimate aim of medicine. Medicine is not ultimately about a War on Pain or Causes. It is ultimately about a War on Death.

Similarly, the War on Terror, playing out as a war on symptoms, should be a war against causes. But the causes are not failed foreign policy or trade imbalances or territory occupations. Those themselves are symptomatic. What the war is ultimately about is something far scarier, and far more elusive. The War on Terror is really a war about the nature of God. My aim is for this essay to be the most important thing you've ever read about radical Islam, and its aggressions toward the West. And it is to suggest two things: The West either needs to completely redefine its use of military force in this war, or it needs to stop such force altogether. In short, the War on Terror might be better fought by theologians than soldiers.

I begin with the National Geographic documentary "Inside 9/11". This well-done though imperfect and incomplete 4-hour film defines the key "causes" of 9/11, though it reaches only back into the deep history of 1980. That this is a tremendous shortfall is obvious, though the reason for this mistake is likewise obvious: Islam and the West have been at 0dds for over 1000 years, so a line must be drawn somewhere. What happened in 1980? The former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, an invasion which was nothing but struggle for the Soviets for 8 years. Eventually, Muslim fighters – the mujahideen – backed with weapons supplied by the US' CIA, forced the great socialist state to retreat in defeat.

This defeat set the tone for men like Osama bin Laden (OBL): They were on the right side of God, as Allah decreed. This religious confidence would expand, finding itself expressed in the "defeat" of American forces in Mogadishu (backed by OBL) made infamous in the film, "Black Hawk Down" (I have read that Somalia celebrates an annual holiday in honor of its victory over America); through September 11, as Muslim crowds cheered the demolition of the World Trade Center; and even on through to today, as Israel completes its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Where does this confidence come from? Why do Muslims cheer as thousands die? And why have no major Islamic leaders – political or religious – denounced those horrific acts?

The confidence of Islam and its glee over and seeming indifference to death comes from one of the most important teachings of Islam. It is to this teaching that I will now turn.

al-Qadar

If you are at all familiar with the Calvinistic idea of predestination, then you are on the road to understanding the Islamic teaching of al-Qadar. It is, in simplest possible terms, the idea that an all-powerful, all-knowing Allah wills and decrees and foreknows every thing that comes to pass. That this teaching is fraught with difficulty is admitted by Muslim scholars the world over, as many struggle to maintain a concept of human free will in the presence of an omnipotent Allah. Of course, this same problem exists for Christian theologians, particularly those in the Calvinist tradition.

Granted, I have perhaps over-simplified the doctrine, but I have stated its essence accurately. One online definition and description is to be found here; a more thorough one can be read here or at this link.

Let me share three things I've learned over the years as I've studied this. First, this doctrine is not peripheral or tangential to Islam, it is essential. In fact, it is the sixth of the Six Articles of Belief. "Islam", let us remember, means "to submit or surrender"; the surrender of the Muslim (one who surrenders) to the will of Allah. Second, to deny or challenge this foundational doctrine is to risk divine judgment. And third, this teaching has led many to believe that Islam is essentially fatalistic: That there is nothing in life but inevitabililty; there is no personal control over destiny. In fact, G.K. Chesterton nearly 100 years ago repeatedly referred to Islam as the religion of fatalism. Muslims have actually addressed this charge (for an example, go here). For a discussion about such fate, study this link.

I want to highlight two statements regarding al-Qadar from sources already cited:

"Al-Qadar is a matter of Allah's Knowledge. No one can uncover his own Qadar but after it happens. One's intention to perform a deed precedes the action itself. He does not know what Al-Qadar holds for him."

"Allah created everything and nothing happens without His permission. He said that all actions taken by His slave happen by His Will, (If Allah had willed, succeeding generations would not have fought against each other, after clear Versus of Allah had come to them, but they differed, some of them believed and others disbelieved. If Allah had willed, they would not have fought against one another, but Allah does what He likes.) [2:253] and, (And if We had willed, surely! We would have given every person his guidance, but the Word from Me took effect (about evil-doers), that I will fill Hell with Jinn and mankind together.) [32:13].

"As for the mind, the universe is Allah's Kingdom and mankind are a part of this Kingdom. Therefore, all mankind are owned by Allah. The slave cannot do anything in this Kingdom unless its Lord, Allah, gives him permission."

THE PROBLEM

I hope the reader can guess where I am going here. I am suggesting something entirely simple, and it is this: When something occurs, whether it be the defeat of the Soviet army, the withdrawal of American troops from Somalia, a bombing in London or Madrid, or the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, Muslims MUST view those events as Allah's will, his Qadar. There is no other choice. And if you've read the articles to which I've linked, then you know that al-Qadar is not an easy teaching for Muslims: It is nearly impossible for them to separate a person's freedom from Allah's decree. In fact, if I were a Muslim, I would always choose, largely because of the difficulty of the teaching, to assign all actions to a sovereign deity in order not to offend that deity's omnipotent honor.

Osama bin Laden himself submits to this teaching, as proven by his comments released in December 2001. Surely we all remember the videotape, with OBL sitting in a cave speaking about 9/11 to a Saudi sheik? What did they say about the World Trade Center? They said this, translated of course [UBL is Usama bin Laden, a variant spelling]:

UBL: (... Inaudible...) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (... Inaudible...) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.

Shaykh: Allah be praised.

UBL: We were at (... inaudible...) when the event took place. We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day. We had finished our work that day and had the radio on. It was 5: 30 p. m. our time. I was sitting with Dr. Ahmad Abu-al-(( Khair)). Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We turned the radio station to the news from Washington. The news continued and no mention of the attack until the end. At the end of the newscast, they reported that a plane just hit the World Trade Center.

Shaykh: Allah be praised.

UBL: After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it.

Shaykh: I listened to the news and I was sitting. We didn't... we were not thinking about anything, and all of a sudden, Allah willing, we were talking about how come we didn't have anything, and all of a sudden the news came and everyone was overjoyed and everyone until the next day, in the morning, was talking about what was happening and we stayed until four o'clock, listening to the news every time a little bit different, everyone was very joyous and saying "Allah is great," "Allah is great," "We are thankful to Allah," "Praise Allah." And I was happy for the happiness of my brothers. That day the congratulations were coming on the phone non-stop. The mother was receiving phone calls continuously. Thank Allah. Allah is great, praise be to Allah.

(Quoting the verse from the Quran) Shaykh: "Fight them, Allah will torture them, with your hands, he will torture them. He will deceive them and he will give you victory. Allah will forgive the believers, he is knowledgeable about everything."

Shaykh: No doubt it is a clear victory. Allah has bestowed on us... honor on us... and he will give us blessing and more victory during this holy month of Ramadan. And this is what everyone is hoping for. Thank Allah America came out of its caves. We hit her the first hit and the next one will hit her with the hands of the believers, the good believers, the strong believers. By Allah it is a great work. Allah prepares for you a great reward for this work.

(Read the complete transcript here)

What is the response to OBL's having learned that the towers have collapsed? "Allah be praised". It is more than anyone hoped for.

Hence, that the towers collapsed PROVES to (most?) Muslims that they were MEANT to collapse, by divine decree. In fact each terrorism attack that succeeds vindicates militant Islam's belief in its superiority to the religions of other nations. Moreover, Muslims can't really denounce something if it has already occurred: Allah willed it!

Where does that then leave us? It leaves us in the heart of a theological debate, even if each of us in the West living under Osama bin Laden's fatwa is an atheist. There is no way around this religious issue. It is the heart of the struggle, and that struggle begs this most important question: Is the deity of Islam WILLING the West's destruction or not?

It is food for thought.

(CLICK HERE for Part II)

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All rights reserved.