We Should See Other Blogs

Here’s a question for Richard Stallman: why can’t the FSF do for patents what it did for copyright?

At work we sell scrap pieces of a material called Tungsten Carbide to various people who take it and do what they will with it (one application, for instance, is the blades on the front of snowploughs). We collect it from customers, but also from our day-to-day operations. It’s fairly expensive stuff at this point, thanks to the Chinese, and because we’ve advertised on our website that we do indeed pay for scrap carbide and resell it, we quite often get people wanting to buy our collection in bulk.

So yesterday this guy calls up, and somehow ends up talking to me. He starts barraging me with questions, asking where we were, and, strangely, how far we were from the American/Canadian border.

But it’s not that he asked, it’s how. He said “you’s”, like I would say “use”. As in, “Are you’s far from the border?” (Answer: “Yes, we’s are.”)

I’ve honestly never heard anyone use that contraction before outside of, like, radio dramas and stuff. Maybe some American will happen along and clue me in; is this some sort of regional dialect or something?

Programs like SQLite are available for anyone to use in the backend of their program, like for instance Mozilla Thunderbird. Why, then, are we not able to store our data in a sane format like an SQL database? Why must we have these legacy things still clinging to the undersides of our applications?

On my Ubuntu box (which, for home use, is pretty much all I use) Amarok runs an SQLite database. I’ve never had a problem with the database. Never. I’m sure it’s possible, but contrast that with my constantly-disappearing and -corrupting iTunes library.

Why, in this age of awesome computer firepower, are we not making things sanely?

I know a guy who does things that I just don’t get. Crazy things. Stuff you hear about and have one of those surreal moments where you feel like you’ve stepped into Fraggle Rock or something. This guy does it all in the name of spirituality, in the name of orthodoxy, in the name of Christ, and yet his balance is so far off he’s walking sideways.

How do you get there?

How do you become a crazy person?

I mean, I understand mental problems, but how does a person go from being a rational and fairly normal guy with regular opinions and regular questions to taking this wild tangent and heading off to who knows where?

Most of you who know me will tell me I’m a pretty odd guy most of the time (and those of you who don’t get my humour, doubly so), but I don’t believe the sky is pink or that aliens are farming us for meat by gradually reducing our numbers or that George Bush somehow masterminded 9/11. I’m not a nutbar.

But I think I could be.

I mean, I think I could one day wake up and find myself the champion of something that doesn’t really make any sense, some stupid crusade in the name of something good, some Quixotic quest to rid the world of windmills. That’s the best case scenario. But what if I were so enraptured by this thing that I was doing or so deeply wrapped in it that I couldn’t or wouldn’t want to wake up? If I were the idiot, the circus freak so freaky that the other freaks freak out? If I were on the train to wherever everyone else is going, with everyone wondering, “When is this crazy guy going to get off?”

How would you take me back from this place?

I’ll tell you how I’d get me out of there. Or how I’d try: I’d try to convince myself that community is important and get me involved in a community full of good, level thinkers, the type of people that keep the boat from veering too wildly. I would try to get me into a community, and watch my opinions change over time, watch me come back from the brink.

Or else I would kick me out. Declare myself persona non grata. I wouldn’t be afraid to do this, either. The last thing the world, the church, your family, your friends, and you need are more morons making the whole thing look like a zoo.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that people go batty when you leave them alone. Because being alone is like being in the dark.

Fungus grows in the dark, and mushrooms.

And the people you find jousting lamp standards are often that exact thing: closed off from the real world, and left to redefine their world into whatever they choose, and finally unable to tell fantasy from reality or opinion from fact or a windmill from a giant. You can slap them upside the head with scripture but it won’t help; there’s a fog in there.

I remember reading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis and being struck–though I hated the book; oh, was it awful–by the metaphor of dwarves sitting in a dark stable, unable to see what was around them. Finally, presented with a great feast, they react like it’s manure and cattle feed.

Is that what it’s like to be one of the crazies? To be in all points sane but at the same time at all points twisted and backwards? To be a loony? To be one of those people whose opinions might as well be mental problems for all the good they’re doing?

Have you ever wondered why Christians are so concerned with morality? What is it about Christians that makes them care so much about doing things a certain way?

By this point you might be expecting me to go off on some sort of liberal screed; instead I’d like to surprise you by saying that it’s obvious why we’re concerned with morality, and even more than that, it’s a good thing we’re concerned with morality.

But I think morality isn’t quite the right word for it; or if it is the right word, it feels much colder than it should. It’s problematic that there aren’t many other good words to describe morality, isn’t it? When I hear the word, I think of a certain moral code, a certain way of doing things, a certain subset of things defined as right, and a certain narrowness of opinion.

Morality doesn’t speak to motivation, though, does it? It’s like describing a piece of music without understanding the intentions of its author or talking about an Olympic event without considering why the competition’s happening in the first place.

We should invent a new word for that or seek to redeem the word or something, because Christian morality, it seems to me, isn’t something that takes place in a vacuum; it’s something that is part of a larger picture or something that needs to be viewed within a certain context.

Imagine God ripped out of the world: imagine being an atheist. If there’s no point to the universe, if there’s no context in which the universe takes place, it’s a pretty mean place. Animals dying and killing and being broken down by even smaller animals until their atoms are part of something entirely different, maybe a plant or an airplane or your baby brother, until the animal is forgotten and all trace of it removed from the earth; then you find out the animal is in fact you, and this is what’s going to happen to you, and you don’t much like it at all so you build a giant statue in what will one day become a desert, and one day Percy Bysse Shelley comes along and writes a poem about you, only it turns out that he’s just telling you how you’ve been forgotten despite your statue (which is also gradually being destroyed by erosion), not to mention that he’s gotten your name entirely wrong and you’re completely and utterly dead. That’s a pretty mean world, wouldn’t you say? Mean, pointless, and spirit-crushing. That’s what the world becomes if you divorce it from eternity, and from God, and from redemption, and from re-creation, and from Jesus.

Morality, as it turns out, seems the same way. It can be divorced from the context in which it was created, but it becomes this method of keeping people in check, like a straight-jacket or a jail cell. Imagine someone coming along a reading Psalm 119 and hearing David be all like, “I love this law, and I read it all the time, and I’ve started memorizing this passage here”, and on and on and on; David is clearly off his nut, as laws aren’t thing you delight in, or that you memorize (can you imagine memorizing Ontario’s traffic code?). They’re things you try to circumvent and try to push as far as you can, because you’re looking at it outside of its framework.

Imagine morality inside your friendships for a minute. Do you steal from your friends? No, unless you’re like the worst friend ever. Do you routinely beat them up? One would hope not. But by don’t you do those things? Not because you subscribe to a set of rules that you’ve agreed on and signed, but because you love your friends. You don’t do certain things to your neighbors because you love your neighbor.

All of that–and I can’t see an exception, really–is in the context of loving God. Jesus came, he did something wonderful, and your response is not only faith, but the things that naturally flow out of faith, those things scripture calls good works.

Sure, you can divorce these concepts from Jesus, and in some place at the back of most people’s minds there’s this place that defined a certain moral code, but why would you want to? Maybe it’ll restrain some evil in the world or something, but at what cost?

I personally feel that a lot of our Christan brothers have got things backwards. Sure, a country that doesn’t marry gays is in a better place than one that does, but what does that mean to the unchurched and nonchristians? Nothing. Why should it? Try forcing that view on them, and outside of the context of Jesus, you have a mean system of morality that denigrates people and calls all sorts of things “bad” without providing the very redemption from those things that Jesus offers.

Maybe I’m just talking to myself here–after all, I don’t enough fingers to count the times I’ve stolen from Jesus, or beat him up, or whatever–and maybe I’m not making much sense. But it looks like it works, doesn’t it? Can you imagine a world blanketed in Christians? Can you imagine an America as a nation of Christians instead of a so-called Christian nation? Can you imagine a Canada that says, “We do this because we love Jesus.”?

Tonight I browsed through some pictures taken at last year’s Camp Tamarack. And it’s weird seeing those places again, to be honest. It’s been what feels like a long time since I was there, though I’ve left some great memories in various spots around the camp.

Strange to say I’ll probably never go back. Stranger even to admit that’s a good thing. Maybe I’m just too old for it, but I can’t say I’d enjoy it in the same way now as I did then. I don’t even have anywhere close to the same group of friends, or the same way of looking at the world.

Though even that’s not really true. I remember once me and some guys put some coloured stuff in our hair — Ice Spiker if I recall correctly — and were told in no uncertain terms that coloured hair is something that people on Yonge Street do, but not us. I might think a bright-blue hairdo is a bit juvenile now, but I certainly don’t think it’s wrong. Slightly different reasons now, but still.

That’s the thing. You get thrown in camp with 139 other people who feel pretty much exactly the same way about everything except minutiae, and it leads to a certain way of thinking about the world. Not in a bad way. It reminds you what the world could be like. It’s maybe a small picture of the Kingdom come, a little look at the lion lying down with the lamb.

But then you get back and remember that the world is a bigger place than all that. Not necessarily a better place, but certainly bigger. And while camp is great for a week, the other fifty-one weeks are filled with something else altogether, and things that can’t be faced with a simplistic attitude about appearances. Things that would be shocking to see in such an idyllic setting become almost normal outside Tamarack’s walls.

It makes me wonder. I’ve heard it said that in order to properly identify and correct evil, you must be shocked by it. But how can you be shocked by behaviours and attitudes you see on a daily basis? How can you be shocked by pagans outside the walls acting like pagans outside the walls? Work knee-deep in grime for a while, and grime becomes the norm. But does anyone give up washing simply because they become dirty every day?

It makes me wonder if the people who are so truly shocked by depravity have actually gone knee-deep in the grime of the real world out there. Not swimming in it, but as if sticking an arm in to rescue someone drowning. It makes me wonder if the desire to be shocked by sin also has its price, and if that price isn’t simply too high to pay.

Another thought: if freedom must be forced upon the world, if the goal of universal liberty is such an overriding ideal that some evil must be done in its name, how is it then different from the very tyranny that it seeks to displace?

Can peace come from war?

Can an evil tree bear good fruit?

We agree that abortion is murder. We agree that life is sacred and good. We agree that death is evil and unnatural.

We also agree with Jesus that though it has been said, An eye for an eye, we should rather Return good for evil.

How than can you be pro-life so often and yet be pro-death in war? How can you claim that a foetus is a person with a soul and yet act like an enemy combatant or a terrorist is a monster with no heart?

Maybe you’ve never thought of it in those terms. Maybe you’ve never pictured war as people fighting people. Maybe in war you view the enemy as a faceless evil.

But then maybe your pro-choice neighbour has never though about it in those terms either. Maybe he’s never pictured a foetus as a human. Maybe she views abortion as junking unneeded tissue.

Maybe you’ve asked yourself, How can these people devalue life this way?. Have you ever imagined someone asking the same question about you?

I am unabashedly for sola scriptura.

That is, scripture is my only plumbline, my only yardstick. Not to say I’m good at it. Not to say I ever will be. But when push comes to shove, that’s where I’ll stand. When Jesus says, for instance, that the kingdom of God is at hand, meaning that it’s here, it’s now, it’s on this earth, I take that at face value. When Paul says that the kingdom of God is after the resurrection, I take that at face value, too.

But I am not ashamed to say people are imperfect. The “but” beginning that sentence may not make sense now; let me explain. Scripture only goes as far as it goes. It lays down hard and fast rules sometimes, but most often it lays down principles to follow, or guidelines to observe.

Our depravity as people enters here, that we are asked by holy scripture to figure it out for ourselves. (Incidentally, this is why the way of Jesus is so transferable, from culture to culture; there’s no one way to dress, for instance. There’s just decency and modesty.) The writers of the canonical books didn’t have a clue about optical information transfer and the hive mind of the internet, or internal combustion engines. They probably didn’t even understand the vast immensity of the universe that the Hubble telescope has unfurled for us in such vivid photography. Yet they had the seeds of it all there. Why is the free transfer of information good? Why is unlocking the secrets of the universe good? How should we do it? What should be our aim? And even when our goals and methods aren’t very good at all, what should be our response?

That God gave us brains to do this stuff is amazing. It draws glory to him above all. The fact that I can talk to some guy in Indonesia, the fact that I can send money to Come Over and Help to feed and clothe the young people of Eastern Europe, the fact that I can understand how I can’t grasp the vastness of the universe – these things all glorify God in their own way.

Yet, our brains, our beings, these things are all incredibly tainted. The vestiges of perfection are there, yes, but think of the ways humanity, created in God’s image, has mis-applied the gift. War. Weapons. Cruelty. Racism. Poverty. Sexism. Materialism.

These are things that even Christians have perpetuated on other Christians. Let’s not even mention what non-Christians have done to eachother in this and the last century alone! Even with our continuing personal reformation there is still a big chunk of absolute shit in each of our hearts. Think of what you, if you’re a Christian, have done to your brother or sister. To your fellow kingdom member. To your family. To your neighbor. I know: I’ve done my fair share and a bit more.

But focus merely on the application of scripture. Imagine the Roman Empire with its abundant slavery, and imagine Paul giving slaves the same dignity in Christ as their masters. Imagine how this will, eventually, snuff out slavery altogether. Now imagine Africans being sold by their fellow Africans to slavers, then sold again to the nominally Christian American southerners. How does that fit with the message of the Bible that slave, free, man, woman, black man, and white man are all equal under Christ? It doesn’t. Slavery is evil. Period. And those that promoted slavery while claiming to be Christians were committing a heinous crime against the ethos of scripture, and of Jesus’ and Paul’s message.

Imagine the battalions of Roman soldiers stationed over the known world, the emperors of which empire exercised every manner of cruelty against their enemies. Imagine Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God is not perpetuated with a sword, or with a spear, or Isaiah’s message of weapons being melted down and made into plowshares. Now imagine a nominally Christian president of a nominally Christian nation waging an unjust war against an equally unjust dictator, all while under a flag of a nation that mentions God in every pledge of allegiance. Imagine the thunderous trampling feet of nominally Christian armies lifting sword and shield to free a holy land. Imagine heretics being burned alive. War is evil. Unjust war is even more evil. And those that promote war in the face of scripture’s repudiation of it, and who promoted “redemptive violence” in the name of the Prince of Peace are committing and have committed a heinous crime in and against the name of Jesus.

All this to say, “We’re not perfect.” The sins of Christianity in the 2,000 years after Christ are many and complex. They are more numerous and more complicated that the sins of the Jews in the 2,000 years after Moses. I’ve mentioned some overt sins. But there are more, and they are personal. They are in the hearts of Christians who embrace a Hellenistic version of Christianity, or a rationalistic version of Christianity, or a Judaic version of Christianity, or a post-modern version of Christianity, or a materialistic version of Christianity, or a Pharisaical version of Christianity, and on, and on, and on.

We’re not perfect. This is the reason we stand on scripture as final authority. It is perfect. You can laugh at that from your modernist standpoint if you wish. I am convinced of it, like Paul was convinced.

But I am not convinced we Christians always get its spirit right. I am not certain I do, either. This is why I am unable to simply accept human tradition as an augment to the word. Isn’t that what the reformers fought against? This is why I am unwilling to simply submit to a certain cultural interpretation of scripture. This is why I am unable to say that things lacking clarity in scripture must go only one way. This is why I am suspicious of people who say that such and such is a necessary result of following scripture.

This is why I feel compelled to re-examine practice in the light of scripture over and over again, and to ask questions, and be convinced in my imperfection by that which is in itself perfect in every way. Have you done these things? I think they’re necessary. Essential, even. Simply because my evil runs deeper than even I know (and some of you will of course point out with a wink and a nudge a few places I haven’t noticed yet), and because, like the church, I am my own greatest enemy, and like the church, need Jesus, and only Jesus.

This morning has been a movement backward through the history of music: we started with post-modern minimalism and have since gotten to Russian modernists and a few Russian romantics. Selections have included Steve Reich, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Glazunov.

In taking this journey, I’ve stumbled across a fascinating question, one that I’ve asked myself many times, and one that I’d like you to ask yourself as well.

What makes music?

Think about it for a minute: it’s huge! Why is a Sonic Youth song music but an aircraft engine not music? Why is a Philip Glass composition music but wind chimes not music? Or, are these thing simply music waiting to be made?