We Should See Other Blogs

• You should ask the question, “Why do we have denominations? Why can’t we all just be Christians?” Then wait until someone asks, “What does ‘just be Christians’ look like?” As soon as you’ve started describing that, BOOM, you’ve started your own denomination. Then you should ask yourself the question, “Is it even possible to not have denominations?” That’s a much better question, and much harder to answer.

Last night I watched the Emmys. So sue me. Or judge me from afar.

One thing I noticed is that Claire Danes doesn’t much look like Claire Danes. That is to say, Claire Danes (the woman trying to revive her career) doesn’t much remind me of Claire Danes (the girl from My So Called Life). Possibilities of plastic surgery aside, I’ve met people that don’t really resemble themselves throughout much of their lives. But I’ve also met people who look similar from cradle to coffin.

I wonder how our brains handle this. It’s easy enough to slot a certain person into a category (this is “Dan” because he looks like “Dan”), but how does a brain handle someone in the category of “Dan” who doesn’t really look like “Dan”? If someone’s looks change through their life, or they have plastic surgery, or they have facial reconstructive surgery, how do we really see that person?

I don’t know if maybe this changes with how close to you are to that person. It might be that I’m not overly familiar with Claire Danes, but whenever anyone said “Claire Danes” my brain said, “That’s not Claire Danes!”

So I wonder: If Laura (my wife, and a very attractive woman) were somehow damaged and had to have reconstructive surgery that made her only vaguely resemble herself, how would my brain react? And if I reacted the same way to Laura, how long would it take for my brain to put her back in her category?

Here’s a quick question. Why are we biased in favour of new music in worship?

I get this a lot when talking about worship, and I see it in myself too. I lean towards new music. I like to sing songs that reflect my comfort zones, songs that exist in my vernacular.

There’s something disconnected about that, I think. Something off. I mean, we don’t exist apart from the rest of church history. Why would we sing only our own songs? Why not the songs (and Psalms, too; remember that Israel is as much a part of church history as the early church) of our forefathers? We have their faith, after all. We use their theological terms. We rest our faith at least partly on the tradition passed down through history. So why do we so quickly jettison one of the great traditions of the church, namely the songs?

Giving the saints of yesteryear a voice in the goings-on of the modern church is a good exercise in continuity that we’re missing out on. Hymns and psalms aren’t just for the grumpy old people ossifying in their seats. They’re for everyone; they’re a way of saying that we place ourselves firmly in the flow of church history, that we’re not modernist snobs who think we’ve got the best music ever invented.

There’s another question, about why we assume that people jumping around and showing energy and “getting into” the music is always a good thing, or why we assume the Holy Spirit is synonymous with adrenaline, but I’ll leave that for another time.

I want to plug a DVD player directly into a monitor. Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing, any product recommendations?

Bryce makes a good point in his latest post about Inkscape (and FOSS in general, as he points out). It is better to spend time hacking on something yourself than to offer someone $100 to do it for you. I think this is right and true for many reasons, one being that $100 is not very much money at all to pay someone for what usually ends up being quite a few hours of work.

But then there are people like me. I don’t have any coding skills at all. I don’t have enough time to pick them up. I really enjoy Ubuntu, I really like the concept of Open Source Software, and I want to help both of those things succeed. You tell me how I’m going to invest my time in a project like Inkscape. Or, even better, something simple like gTwitter, which could use some improvement. I’d love to figure out a way to help them along. I’d love pay a bounty in time to make a program I use all the time work like it should work, but I don’t have any usable skills that would help them along.

So paying your bounty in time is fine, as long as you have some sort of skill. But for the rest of us? The Joe Blows of the world who use open source software but don’t give much back? What about us?

If you want to be a scriptural Christian, do you read the Bible like it’s a systematic theology, or some other way? What do the scriptures ask regarding their own interpretation? How does the Bible say “read me”?

Or is that a question with a stupidly easy answer I’ve managed to miss?

Interpreting the Bible is hard thing. If you do it wrong, you can literally make the Bible support almost anything.

I find it difficult to extract myself from the reading. There’s a cultural context to everything I do — if I’m honest with myself — and that cultural context is often in conflict with what the Bible says.

Is it just popular culture, though? Every group of people has a particular slant, a way of looking at things. Could it be possible that Christians read certain sub-cultural things into the scriptures?

This seems to be a real problem. In the hands of the Greeks, the Bible became a philosophy textbook. In the clutches of the Enlightenment, the Bible turned into something rational, something factual. In slippery fingers of the modern western world, it’s been transformed into a manual for a better, more fulfilling life.

I don’t pretend to know what God was thinking when he inspired the scriptures. I don’t even know — neither do you, admit it — what that process looks like or what it means. I don’t know what the original authors thought of truth, whether they were what we think of as modernist or post-modernist, what their approach to facts was.

All this highlight how difficult it becomes to understand some things. Certainly most things are clear, but modern life brings up issues people in Biblical times couldn’t have dreamed about. Obviously you can’t write a blank cheque and say, “Well, if the Bible doesn’t mention it, it’s okay!” There are principles for almost everything.

Which is, of course, when things become tricky. When things start creeping into the interpretation that just might not really be there.

The question becomes how much you let your viewpoint inform the scriptures and vice versa. What does the Bible have to say about that? For example, the idea of verbal plenary inspiration is a very rationalist doctrine: is it actually in the Bible, or is it something a bunch of rationalistic theologians came up with because they were so fixated to a certain mindset that the Bible must obviously have been inspired that way?

I’m not saying this is what happened: I’m just asking the question.

Still, at the end of the day, how far can imperfect humans with biases and an imperfect perception of reality really read between the lines?

At work, there are certain things we do all the time. We do these certain things every day. Most people here have developed a method of doing these things, a way of (for instance), writing descriptions for tools of different sorts. After a while there’s a sort of community lexicon for these things.

There are, however, a few people who resist change. Though I should say they resist changing by constantly changing. Or, they cannot seem to do the same thing the same way twice. They’re immune to the community lexicon no matter how long they work here.

I alternately find this annoying and fascinating (I have a deep ambivalence to caring about such things) and sometimes wonder: why do some people settle into patterns and adopt informal standardisations while other people seem to resist them at the atomic level?

Where is my book of Paul Aster’s poems? I search for it angrily but can’t find it. If you happen to come across this book, I will give you a large cash reward. (Please note that your idea of large and my idea of large may very well be orthogonal.)

Maybe you should stop asking questions and instead seek some answers. There’s no point in constantly walking around pointing at things and asking what’s up with them if you never want to know what deal actually is.

I have become convinced that incessantly asking questions is a defence mechanism. At least a certain kind of questioning. After all, what better way to ward off the truth than by constantly prolonging your journey toward it?