Perhaps Sagan's most famous observation was that we humans are essentially stardust. Sagan said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” How beautiful is this observation? To imagine that this bright, powerful object we rely on every day of our lives, the sun, is actually the very type of being from which every molecule in our body has been sourced - it's absolutely mind-blowing and beautiful. We are all made of star-stuff. Every human you have ever met was once a piece of a burning, shining star.
Created with Microsoft Bing Image Creator AI One of the most famous scientists in the last century was astronomer Carl Sagan. While Sagan was a brilliant scientist in his own right, a large part of his popularity comes from his profound ability to disseminate scientific thinking and scientific concepts to the non-scientific masses. His willingness to step down out of his ivory tower and tend to the well-being of the general population has made him a staple resource in many lives outside of the scientific community. Sagan's condescension to the lay people may have a variety of explanations, but I personally think that one of the biggest reasons Sagan cared for the masses was because he was more than a scientist. He was an artist. A poet, to be more precise. Sagan could see beauty in the universe and in the story of humanity. His fascination and love for science and for beauty allowed him to communicate convincingly large scientific concepts to the general population.
Perhaps Sagan's most famous observation was that we humans are essentially stardust. Sagan said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” How beautiful is this observation? To imagine that this bright, powerful object we rely on every day of our lives, the sun, is actually the very type of being from which every molecule in our body has been sourced - it's absolutely mind-blowing and beautiful. We are all made of star-stuff. Every human you have ever met was once a piece of a burning, shining star.
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Photo by Erkan Arda Abaci on Scop.io I have a bunch of ideas that have been circulating in my head for a while now, and I have been trying to find some time to write them all down. However, I've been so busy, I just haven't had the time to write about it all. Then my cousin recently told me about this voice to text app that can make things a whole lot easier to get my ideas down on paper, so I've decided to give it a try for the near future. That means that for the foreseeable future, my blog articles are probably going to have a different sort of tone to them, since I'm actually talking them out instead of writing them out. But hopefully that allows me to get more blogs out there since I have taken a hiatus due to our busyness. The multiverse is something which has fascinated me for a long time. I love all of those movies about multiverses and time travel and all of the the cerebral sorts of things that go on in these stories. I feel like a lot of times the multiverse is extremely speculative, and speculation often allows ample room for creativity. In the real world, though, I often times feel like the multiverse is a cheap cop out to avoid some of the implications of the Divine. Nevertheless, it's absolutely fascinating. So I was thinking about the multiverse the other day, and I had this realization, which I don't know if it's a new realization in the realm of thinking about the multiverse or if it's probably some really obvious thing that that all the nerds out there know, but it was a revelation for me. There have been a lot of times where I'll be thinking like, man, if there's a multiverse, then there is a me who has lived the exact same life up to this point. But instead of having their hands at 90 degrees right now, they have their hand at 90.01 degrees. And then there's another multiverse where all of the exact same things have happened, but the other me has their hand at 90.0101 degrees, right and you can go on for infinity in regard to all of the variations just of like how my hand is placed, but then you can get into fingers and eyes and and then you can have all of my past was different and I mean, there are an infinity of infinities in regard to possibilities for a multiverse. But then I had this revelation. I recognize that if all of these infinite possibilities existed, then there were actually worlds in which all lots of possibilities have actually happened.
Photo by Avril Wu via Scop.io I have a bunch of ideas that have been circulating in my head for a while now, and I have been trying to find some time to write them all down. However, I've been so busy, I just haven't had the time to write about it all. Then my cousin recently told me about this voice to text app that can make things a whole lot easier to get my ideas down on paper, so I've decided to give it a try for the near future. That means that for the foreseeable future, my blog articles are probably going to have a different sort of tone to them, since I'm actually talking them out instead of writing them out. But hopefully that allows me to get more blogs out there since I have taken a hiatus due to our busyness. I recently took a seminary class in which we discussed the idea of concupiscence. Concupiscence isn't a term that I had really heard of before, but the concept was something that had come up quite a bit in both thought and conversation. It's basically this question of whether or not the desire to sin constitutes a sin or not. And those who hold to concupiscence would say "yes, if you desire something that is contrary to God's will, or to God's creation order, then you are in sin and on some level." This makes quite a lot of sense, right? If it's against God it must be sin.
I’m probably one of the only Americans who despised being a homeowner. There were a few reasons I liked apartment living better, but the major source of my disdain stemmed from a homeowner's marriage to incessant yard work. If there was one thing that reminded me of the curse, it was the entropy to which my yard would succumb in a single week. Yard work just seems like a monotonous task that one does solely for looks, with little to no return, and being left only with the promise that you’ll have to rinse and repeat in about a week. It just seems like a vacuous endeavor. It's utterly monotonous. While our move to Romania has significantly diminished the size of the yard for which I’m responsible, this yardwork has come with its own set of challenges. I now have to lug heavy machinery up steep embankments. I have to take care no to run over the electric mower’s cord (I didn't even know electric mowers existed before moving to Romania). I hate it. Yard work is a small thing, I know (unless you are one of our neighbors who wishes it would be a bigger thing for us), but it’s something I despise.
*This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. There is a famous Orwellian movie I hear referenced every once in awhile - Minority Report. The movie is basically about a future world in which technology enables leaders to know who will commit which crimes before they actually happen. They are able to essentially rid the world of crime (except the crimes of the aristocrats, of course) by locking up "criminals" before they actually commit their crimes.
The movie is similar to another common ethical dilemma in which you are a time traveler who has the opportunity to kill Hitler while he's a child. Would it be moral to kill him before he actually committed his crime, even if you were as certain as you could be of what his future held? Can the ends justify the means? Can one be guilty and justly judged before they've committed a crime? Minority Report and time traveling assassins are all far-fetched sci-fi concepts, but the idea of preemptive justice is not far-fetched at all. As Americans, we've preemptively judged many nations through our military and many criminals through disproportionate sentencing. We drop bombs and we raise sentences based on what we know of our enemies. While we certainly preemptively judge on a national scale, we Americans often promote Minority Report justice on an individual scale. I mean, isn't that what self-defense usually is? If someone invades your home and you choose to confront them with a gun rather than lock your room and call the police, aren't you preparing to kill an aggressor based on the assumption that they're seeking your harm rather than your material goods? Even if one thinks the death penalty is a legitimate punishment for murder, how many cases of "self-defense" are cases in which one's life would have been taken? How many times is self-defense taking the life of someone who would have stolen or assaulted rather than killed? I have to ask two questions, then. First, why are we so critical of Minority Report as being Orwellian when we do something similar in our promotion of self-defense on both a national and individual scale? Second, why do we hide our inhumanity behind self-defense? Many would be appalled at state execution for theft, assault, or rape, as many are even appalled at state execution for murder. Yet self-defense goes even further in that it is execution for a presumed crime. Self-Defense is passing the death sentence for a crime not yet committed. *This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. Did Jesus only speak inerrantly? Was there anything about which he was mistaken? Was a perfect eyewitness for every event or could his perception ever be skewed? Did he ever get any of his math homework wrong? Did he know Bible verses perfectly the first time trying to recite them from memory, or did he have to work and try over and over again until he knew it? What does it mean to grow in wisdom and understanding if not that there is a point where we are less informed? Isn't being ill-informed sometimes/often the same thing as being errant?
When we speak of inerrancy of the Bible, we assume that it has to be so because God's words are inerrant. How is it that the written word of God must be inerrant while it seems the living word of God was certainly errant? Is it because Jesus's errant part was the human part (if you think we can dissect him like this)? Is Jesus's human nature any more prone to errancy than the non-divine human agents God inspired to write the Bible? How is it that the God-man indwelt by God's Spirit could speak errantly while the God-inspired, human authors of the Bible could write perfectly? Did God empower the human authors more than his own Son? Or does God only ensure that he speaks inerrantly for certain events - like the writing of scripture - and not for other events, like the incarnation of the redeemer? Proverbs 26:4-5 Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes. The Bible is a complex document which can be confusing on a multitude of levels. But perhaps one of the ways in which it is most often confusing is in its bipolarity. Did Jesus come to bring judge the world (Jn. 9) or not judge it (Jn. 3)? Is Jesus the prince of peace (Is. 9) or did he come to bring not peace, but division (Lk. 12)? Or, as Proverbs 26 writes, are we or are we not supposed to answer a fool according to their folly?
Most would call me an idealist, but not in the nice way. I'm not the loveable idealist - some pie in the sky dreamer who holds lofty aspirations that will never come to fruition. I'm the despicable idealist - the kind who refuses to advocate getting our hands dirty in order to accomplish the greater good. I advocate that one should never kill another and that one should never lie, no matter what. And that type of moral idealism just doesn't fly in the real world. I mean, look where it got Jesus?
Of course I understand the aversion to pharisaical moralism. Nobody, including me, wants a system that offers sacrifices and works up to God which are secretly built on foundations of injustice. I don't want my neighbor's ox to fall in a ditch on the Sabbath and refuse to help him out, or condemn a healer for healing someone on the day of rest. I don't want to pray for your hunger while doing nothing tangible to resolve it. Yet, as a moral idealist, many often think this is the type of vain offering I'm advocating, and I get it. Hopefully I can resolve that misperception of idealism and give you a new vision for the world which causes you to become an idealist too. *Please note that this article is not critiquing inerrancy as a whole, but rather a specific form of it - we'll call it hyper-inerrancy. Hyper-inerrancy is often found in fundamentalism and in many with a lay understanding of what inerrancy means, and who aren't aware of its implications. This is an inerrancy of tokens rather than of types. For a more detailed discussion of that, you can check out this article from Stand to Reason. I think identifying and eliminating that type of understanding of inerrancy is vital for Christian intellectual integrity and apologetics. The idea of inerrancy has honestly been a struggle for me over the past few years. Ironically, that struggle started as I delved more into apologetics. There are two key points of struggle for me in regard to inerrancy: the autographs and the circumscription.
*This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. Most people advocate the idea that life and morality are best exemplified by the avoidance of extremes. If you err in one direction, you end up being licentious, and if you go in the other direction, you end up being uptight and legalistic. The letter of the law or no law at all. Both are problems.
But when you try to apply this concept of avoiding the extreme, you end up with a life that doesn't depict radical Christianity at all. Let's just take economics as an example. If you were to tell the early church in Acts to avoid extremes, you'd tell them not to horde their money, but also not to give their money away "unwisely." They should live modestly, but they also should make sure to save enough to put their immediate family first, to put their kids through college, and to have a safe, comfortable retirement fund to provide for their future. You certainly wouldn't tell them to share all their possessions and to give to those in need to a point that it hurts them and their families. Yet that's exactly what the early church did. The thing is, God's commands are extreme. So hording for self and spending in excess for self both fail to demonstrate love, just in different directions. They're both egoistic. But selling possessions, giving to the poor at cost to yourself, and sharing in common are extreme measures, but they are beautiful goods. I think we have to nuance the term "extreme" or else we equivocate on it. When we say don't go to extremes, what we should mean is that we shouldn't err to either side, either extremity, or either direction. What we shouldn't mean is that we live a life devoid of actions which are extreme and powerful. Think of it like driving on the road. When you stay in the middle - in your lane - you go at high speeds and have purpose and direction. But when you go into either ditch, you hit ruts, signs, fences, guardrails, and you slow down or crash. Extreme speed can only be maintained when avoiding the extremity of the road. Chesterton has a wonderful discussion on this in his book "Orthodoxy." Chesterton argues that Christian virtue is not the avoidance of extremes, but rather the furious joining of two extremes. Courage, for example, comes when one counts his life as lost while simultaneously desiring to preserve his life. To only count one's life as lost is to be a suicide, while to only care about the preservation of one's life is to be a coward. Courage, like most/all Christian virtues, can only be held if one holds both extremes in the middle. The Christian life is an extreme life and we ought not to use this idea of "avoiding the extreme" to water down how we are called to live. |
*The views and ideas on this site are in no way affiliated with any organization, business, or individuals we are a part of or work with. They're also not theological certainties. They're simply thinking out loud, on issues and difficulties as I process things.
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