Art and Vomit

I recently responded to someone expressing dismay about the fantastic display of art seen in the Lady Gaga set last week at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, in which Gaga had someone vomit on her multiple times (not that once is less scandalous) apparently as an expression of art. 

(In my response, I didn't think to raise the question of whether the offense is mitigated by the fact that the one who vomited is a genuine vomit artist?) 

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The popularity of people like Lady Gaga, Chelsea Handler, Pink, and others in the moral and intellectual vacuum in which they live, is one of the clearest demonstrations of the moral vertigo that inevitably results when people jettison the fact of God. The extremely pervasive view on ethical standards in western culture today is that of autonomy; the standard that determines right and wrong is only within one's self. What's right for you may not be for me, etc. It's a subjective rather than objective view of morality, with one exception for the rule of consent, which says the only thing that makes any behavior wrong is that it imposes something on someone who is unwilling. So, whatever the behavior is, as long as it takes place among "consenting adults," it's acceptable. 

This may sound appealing to those who are ignorant of the reality revealed in the Bible. But even if someone is ignorant of the message of Scripture, this approach to morality ends up with bestial, absurd behavior--behavior that ultimately violates the basic traits that make us human--as so clearly demonstrated by Lady Gaga. Almost always, when people are not guided by a reverence for God, they will not then be guided by reason, but by raw visceral appetite. 

Lady Gaga is also an outspoken advocate for gay rights, and a self-proclaimed "bi-sexual" (though I realize that's a nonsensical term). But, if the general thinking behind the gay rights movement--that consent is the only moral standard, and that being born with a desire automatically validates it--is correct, then how can there be anything wrong with vomiting on a singer as an expression of art? All those involved freely chose to be. And, of course, what they were doing they naturally wanted to do. In fact, what would make anything wrong as long as those doing it did so willingly? Assisted suicide, prostitution, open marriages, all take place among "consenting adults." By what standard should these things be judged if our moral compass is of our own making?

The irony in all this is that even the most debased and morally depraved people still find reasons to fight for justice (funny how they can't get rid of that concept). But if each person decides what's right and wrong independently from an objective, Divine authority, what meaning could justice have? From where do people like Lady Gaga get their idea of justice and the conviction that all people are to be treated with respect and equality? If, like the rest of of her moral convictions (or lack thereof), they come only from her own feelings, then how can she demand that other people heed her call for justice? Maybe her idea of fairness and equality for those that were "born that way" isn't right for someone else? 

MM

2 Good Articles on This Week's Supreme Court Decisions

I came across two very good articles on the Supreme Court decisions on DOMA this past week and wanted to pass them along.

Click here and here

MM

Heroic Perversity

If you’ve watched any news this week, you probably heard about the courage and heroism of NBA player, Jason Collins. In a recent SI article Collins made it publicly known that he would like to claim his perverse sexual desires as a central aspect of his identity. In other words, he announced he is gay.

In Collins’ interview with sports writer, Bill Simmons, Simmons commented that he suspected someone in the professional sports world would “come out” this year, but he wasn’t sure who, and that Collins was a great person to do so because he’s well spoken and has a reputation as a hard worker and a good team mate. He even said Collins is a “good guy for the locker room.” (I guess there’s no need to comment on the irony in that statement.)

So apparently Simmons’ point here can be paraphrased by saying it’s good when a responsible, hard-working, well-spoken person announces he’s gay. That way people learn that the way one chooses to handle his sexual desires has no moral significance, and that as long as he is a courteous, responsible citizen, how he chooses to respond to his sexual urges with other willing people is no indicator of his character. All those who have struggled with urges toward adultery, promiscuity, and incest will be relieved to hear this.

Collins even got a call from President Obama who applauded him for the courage he’d shown. I have a hard time seeing what part courage plays in a celebrity making an announcement that will make him an instant hero in the eyes of the major media outlets and the mainstream culture, but this is likely because I’m yet to reach that point of moral enlightenment which recognizes the great virtue in following through with one’s inner urges wherever they might lead.

But if Collins really is an example of heroism, I’ll bet it won’t be long before we see some superheroes coming out, next to whom he would look like Robin to Batman. Not long ago those on the vanguard of moral liberation were working tirelessly for the cause of justice, to set free those who had been ostracized and discriminated against simply for wanting to live out their unorthodox sexuality. Today their work has been done, and yesterday’s victims are today’s heroes.

But the project is not complete. There are some today who are demonized and criminalized simply for trying to live out their natural-born orientation. They are those of a “cross-generational orientation” (known in a more insensitive and less enlightened time as pedophiles). One day, perhaps in the near future, a hero will muster the courage to come out from the stagnant, stifling, closet of traditional morality and pedophiliac prejudice. Maybe Bill Simmons is hoping it will be a courteous and well-spoken athlete to break the stereotype. And maybe that hero will get a call from the President too.  

The Clash of Hope and History

Most of us are incorrigible optimists. And I don’t just mean the happy, bubbly people who could see the bright side of a sewer trench. Most of us, no matter our temperament, have a sense that the world will ultimately be good. We may not have all our future plans clearly mapped out, and we may be in the midst of struggles right now, but the majority of us have an inarticulate but certain sense that in the future the world is somehow going to be made right. In a word, we hope.

But hope is a curious thing in this world so filled with seemingly hopeless tragedies. We suffer directly as we or our family members grapple with pain and terminal disease. We witness the immense suffering of others in seeing them lose children to deranged school shooters or (for tens of millions in the third world) to poverty and starvation. Even if it were possible to prevent every crime and provide all with food and medical care, we would still eventually grow feeble and die, and that doesn’t meet anyone’s definition of all right. And yet we still have it in the back our minds that everything will be all right? So where does hope come from?

It’s as if we live amidst the constant clash of two worlds: The world of hopeful desire on the inside of us and the world of hopeless facts on the outside. The question is, which of these two worlds is the real world? Thoroughly cynical people, who, interestingly, usually still try to live as if there’s a future to hope for, accuse Christians of being childish and willfully ignorant. They say we live in a dream--that there’s no real difference between our belief in Heaven and a child’s belief in the Easter Bunny. Neither are grounded in objective facts. We’re said to be “escapists” who retreat to our inner fantasies about God and Heaven because we don’t have the good sense and fortitude to face the world as it truly is.

And it’s at just this point that confetti explodes over Christians. The resurrection of Jesus was precisely the moment when the world of hope entered into the world of history: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-15)

At Easter, and all through the year, we want to proclaim to all the stiff-lipped “sensible” people who base everything they believe on the hard facts of history that Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead is one of those hard facts! We thank God that Jesus physically rose from the dead, and in doing so he has "destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel" (2 Timothy 1:10). In the words of John Mark Mcmillan, he “laid Death in his grave.”

It really happened. Hope and history are one!

More Than Many Know About St. Patrick

My Good friend Dick Cleary has a most excellent blog site called Viewpoints (click here). A couple of years ago he posted a very insightful piece on St. Patricks Day, which I wanted to repost on Kalon Christian today. I'll bet there are few people who know the real significance of Patrick's impact on the world. 

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrated their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own. Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter. From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Atheists Are Not Honest

A few minutes ago a friend emailed me a link to a horrific news story about a murder-suicide. A 43-year-old college professor murdered his 39-year-old wife, called 911 to report it, and while the dispatcher was still on the line, the man went into his basement and fatally shot himself in the chest. The couple had two school-aged children:

The news of this tragedy was all the more disturbing to me because it all happened on the same road I lived on for three years prior to last summer. Nine months ago, my family and I lived only a couple of miles from where this heinous event has taken place. 

This kind of news (which is so disgustingly frequent) always calls attention to one blazingly conspicuous fact: atheists are not honest. The idea that God does not exist has waxed and waned in popularity over the past three hundred years or so. And through the last decade, there has been a wave of prolific writers whose consistent complaint against belief in God and the willful naivety that makes belief possible have put new wheels on the atheist bandwagon. They’ve come to be called the “New Atheists,” though there’s not much new in what they have to say. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, among several others, have gained quite a following writing and speaking about the absurdity of religious belief. They deride anyone who believes in God and his moral authority as asinine, superstitious, and willfully ignorant. As Dawkins laments, religious believers in the modern, scientifically enlightened world must be either stupid or wicked. 

But the problem with such luminaries is that they cannot stomach the conclusions of their own ideas. As C.S. Lewis says, they don’t remember their philosophy outside school. As bad as I believe most atheists to be, I don’t believe they are fully bad, at least not yet. I would bet that the vast majority of those who identify as atheists would read about this tragedy and respond by saying something like, “What a shame” or “How tragic” or “That’s just wrong.” And like the noonday sun on a shard of mirror, their wretched inconsistency comes to light.  

If there is no God and no moral accountability beyond the grave, if we truly cease to exist after our last breath, and if all of reality is made up only of physical elements, then morality itself is an illusion. We don't watch mixed chemicals react in a vat and say, “That’s just wrong!” And yet, if the New Atheists are right, all of life is simply the product of a series of extremely complex, though mindless, chemical reactions. If this is so, words like shame and tragedy, wrong and right, good and evil, have no meaning. Morality is, at best, a social convention like shaking hands or wearing neck ties. It’s taught and expected but has no real meaning in and of itself. There are many who are working hard to convince themselves and others of this, but they still instinctively realize (despite their philosophy) that tragedies really are tragic. Thus atheists are not honest. But as long as their are atheists we should hope they remain dishonest; we would not call an honest atheist honest. We would call him a sociopath. 

Doubting Diversity

As most Americans in the early 21st century know, diversity is all the rage. It's the one quality that seems to give moral legitimacy to almost anything in secular culture. I once worked at a secular school which even had a faculty member whose title was "Diversity Coordinator." 

I understand where the concern for diversity comes from. To safeguard against the bigotry of civil rights abuse in the old South and other forms of stupidity, many have thought it best to pose diversity as the greatest good. But, all things considered, diversity doesn't deliver. 

On one hand it's true that people should never frown on others simply out of a sense of unfamiliarity. And all sane people realize it's wrong to exclude someone from basic human rights or violate a person's dignity simply because the other holds a unique belief or is part of a minority culture. We should all be willing to listen to and thoroughly discern the beliefs and cultures of others--but not as an end in itself. We should be open to learn about the beliefs and behaviors of diverse cultures, to determine which elements in diverse cultures bring us closer to truth!

But acknowledging such a "hegemonic," bigoted idea as truth is blasphemous in the modern church of diversity. As soon as we make a judgment as to what's true, we automatically label all that's inconsistent with it as not true--and that's mean.

I once heard a Hopi Native American woman give a talk to a group of students on the Hopi religion. She said the sun was a god, and some other interesting things. Her ideas were definitely diverse from most others in the room, but what I most wanted to know was, "Is it true?" Of course if I were to suggest it was not--that the sun is really a ball of gas and not a diety--I would have been accused of being "exclusionary."  

But what could be the value of diversity for the sake of diversity? I would love to be able to ask an administrator or CEO of some institution who's made great efforts to create cultural diversity, "OK. Your institution is diverse. Now what? Diversity is great, but what is true? What is real?" 

But again, all this makes sense when one realizes that truth is not typically a concern for those who place diversity as the greatest good. Diversity means harmony, and if one doesn't accept the idea of ultimate truth, I guess the next best thing to shoot for would be harmony. 

Christians, however, don't have the luxury of putting harmony first. When we're tempted to take a dip in the warm-fuzzy, anesthetizing pool of philosophical and religious diversity, we should remember Jesus' words in Luke 12:51-53

"Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother–in–law against her daughter–in–law and daughter–in–law against mother–in–law."

MM