What is conversion?

Let's illustrate Christian conversion with some comparisons:

i) Suppose I was born blind. I have an older brother. We're about 2 years apart. We're very close. He's always protected me. I know him by sound, scent, and touch–but not by sight. 

Suppose, due a medical breakthrough I received an eye transplant using cloned eyes. After surgery, when I open my eyes, I see my brother looking down at me. I see my brother for the first time.

Of course, my brother always had a visual dimension. It's just that up until then, I didn't have the capacity to sense that dimension. 

ii) Suppose my teenage brother has a poster of a pinup girl in our bedroom. I'm still prepubescent, so I don't see what he sees in her. When I hit puberty, the poster suddenly has the same effect on me it has on my older brother. 

The poster hasn't changed. Same face, figure, eyes, and hair. But I have a new capacity to appreciate something that was there all along.

iii) To take a more subtle example: suppose my dad is crazy about opera divas. He loves the timbre of a classically trained female vocalist. 

I don't get it–until I hit puberty. Then I suddenly find the sound of an opera diva seductively appealing. Nothing changed in the voice. Rather, something changed in me. I heard the same voice, but I didn't perceive it the same way before and after I hit puberty. 

These examples have a male bias, but I could illustrate the same principle using the reaction of a teenybopper to a boy band. 

Conversion creates–or restores–a capacity to perceive something that was always the case, but we suffered from a psychological impediment that blocked recognition and appreciation. 

Does Purgatory make sense?

1. A common rationale for Purgatory is that are sanctification is incomplete at the moment of death, but sinners can't enter heaven, so we require an interim postmortem state to complete our sanctification before we are ready for heaven. I've argued that I think that relies on a dubious, unexamined assumption:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/04/purgatorial-presuppositions.html

2. However, it relies on another assumption: sanctification is necessarily a process. It can't be accelerated. There can't be instantaneous sanctification. 

This raises the question of what sanctification is. There are, of course, standard definitions, but let's explore the concept from a different angle. Suppose we view sanctification, or moral character, as a kind of moral perception. Take some examples:

i) I read that someone committed a heinous crime. As a result, I form a negative view of the accused. I later read that he was falsely accused. That changes my view of the accused. And the change is immediate.

ii) Let's take (i) a step further. It turns out that he was covering for an innocent friend. The accused was prepared to face prosecution on a false charge to protect his friend. Not only was the accused innocent, but his action was morally heroic.  

In this case, I don't just change my view of the accused. Rather, I go from having a negative view to a positive view. I now see him as admirable. And, once again, the change is immediate.

iii) Decent people perceive that it's wrong to gratuitously harm a child, physically or psychologically. 

And it's not that they have an inclination to harm children, but that's overridden by their moral perception. Rather, they value children. That, too, is part of their moral perception. They view children in a way that makes the idea of harming them emotionally repellent. They don't need to suppress or resist the impulse to harm children–because they have no such impulse to begin with. 

iv) Another example is the criminally insane. Their insanity generates intellectual misperceptions which, in turn, generate moral misperceptions. If their sanity can be restored, their evil impulses disappear. 

3. If sanctification is a kind of moral perception, which is, in turn, a moral type of intellectual perception, then instantaneous sanctification seems possible if God is able to correct the intellectual misperceptions that twist moral character. 

Are naturalistic explanations the default assumption?

1. Some Christian philosophers take the position that naturalistic explanations are the default assumption, so that extra evidence is required to acknowledge a miracle. Hume and his followers take that a step further to say the presumption of a naturalistic explanation is so strong that there will never be enough evidence to overcome that presumption. But let's go back to the weaker claim. Certainly it's easy to come up with examples where Christians regard a naturalistic explanation as the first explanation to reach for. So does that concede that there is, indeed, a standing presumption against recognition of a miracle? 

2. I'll make the preliminary point that drawing a firm line between naturalistic and supernatural explanations is more important to atheists that Christians. Atheists require that dichotomy to eliminate the supernatural side of the dichotomy while Christians don't require the same distinction since they don't eliminate the natural side. So these are asymmetrical concerns. 

3. Let's take a comparison. Suppose I'm walking on a trail, and up ahead I see a fallen tree. In principle, there are basically two possible causes for the fallen tree. 

i) A natural cause made it fall. Perhaps it was blown over in a wind storm because it had a shallow root system; or rain eroded the topsoil–exposing the root system; or it was hollowed out by Ambrosia beetles or heart rot.  

ii) It was cut down. Felled by logger with a chainsaw.

In the debate over miracles, (i) illustrates a naturalistic explanation while (ii) is a nonnatural explanation–akin to a supernatural explanation. The result of intervention by an agent outside the normal lifecycle of trees using "artificial" means.  

Now, viewing the tree at a distance, where all I see is the effect, before I'm in a position to see the tree up close, is there a default explanation? Is it antecedently more likely that it was felled by natural processes rather than a logger? At that stage, we don't have enough information to justify a default explanation. Whether it was felled by natural or artificial means is a contextual question whose answer crucially relies on specific evidence one way or the other. There is no explanatory presumption in a vacuum. 

Faith and science

Here's a sobering excerpt from an email I received from @BioLogosOrg. I have seen this firsthand: skeptics are made by bad hermeneutics and bad theology. pic.twitter.com/hsEKmL0GD5

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) September 28, 2019

What Rauser really means is that we should just admit that the Bible is full of scientific mistakes. When we defend inerrancy, that creates "unnecessary stumbling blocks". 

i) Churchgoing teenagers should be taught the limitations of science. 

ii) While their questions shouldn't go unanswered, teenagers should acquire the sophistication to look for answers in the right places. The fact that most Christians in church can't answer their questions doesn't cast doubt on Christianity. It's not their area of specialization.

iii) According to Rauser's "progressive" theology, whenever there's a conflict between Christianity and "science", we should always defer to "science". Think about that for a moment:

• Science says there is no world to come. Planet earth will become uninhabitable, and that's the end of life on earth. 

• Science says humans have no immortal soul. When you die your mind and memories are lost forever.

• Science says people who've been dead for days never come back to life. 

Is Noah's flood a legend?

Some people view Noah's flood as sheer fiction. Others view Noah's flood as a reflection of a dim historical memory that's undergone legendary embellishment. 

One of the striking things about the flood account is how it presents the flood as a natural event. The account as a supernatural framework. It gives God's motivation for sending the flood. God repeatedly speaks to Noah. And God "shuts" them in. Those are the most explicitly supernatural elements. 

It also says the animals "came" to Noah, which might suggest God sent them. And there's a reference to God sending a "wind" (which may be a Hebrew pun). 

But the flood itself is depicted as an event caused by natural mechanisms. In that respect it's not different in kind from other floods. If you were an outside observer, you wouldn't notice anything about this particular deluge to distinguish it from other floods in terms of what caused it.  

Put another way, the flood account has far fewer supernatural elements than the Exodus. In that regard, the flood account is conspicuously unembellished. 

If you think any supernaturalism is a mark of mythology or legendary embellishment, so that we must strip away all the supernatural elements to arrive at the historical core, then the flood account reflects legendary embellishment. But that says everything about secular prejudice and nothing about the realism of the account. Reported miracles are only ipso facto evidence of pious fiction or legendary embellishment on the assumption that naturalism is true. 

The Dems reject America's premise . . .

The left has rejected America's premise: you win some, you lose some.

This premise has helped make America the land of the free. Not many countries in human history can claim this premise.

So what has changed is that the wingnuts have taken over the Democratic party. There are—can't—be any moderates in that party.

Since the Democratic party has rejected America's premise, their recourse has been to use Soviet tactics: make up criminal allegations of treason against your political opponents.

They reject prosperity, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, and freedom of religion. Sound familiar? 

Their inner Leninism is coming out, which means all of this will not end well.

Window or mural?

A quick follow-up to my previous post:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/09/flood-topography.html

This illustrates a limitation or weakness of many OT scholars. Most of them are trained in the literature and languages of the ancient Near East. As a result, they interpret passages like Gen 2-3 or 6-9 in abstraction from the physical would outside the text, which the narrator and his audience inhabited. This can lead to overly literary and generic interpretations that are cut off from the concrete world to which the text refers. They view the text as a mural rather than a window.

Despite his secular outlook, Montgomery has a realistic eye for the world of Gen 6-9 that's ironically missing in many commentaries on Genesis. That's clearly a problem for liberal scholars, but it can also be a problem for conservative scholars. 

We're scolded by scholars (e.g. Peter Enns, Paul Seeley, John Walton) on how we ought to construe Genesis in light of its ancient Near Eastern setting. That's an undeniably valid principle, yet they themselves suffer from a blinkered view of what it means, due to the tunnel vision of their training and interests. They fail to take their own principle as seriously as they should. 

Flood topography

Around the 19-20 min. mark, secular geologist David Montgomery has an interesting discussion regarding the topography of river deltas and flood patterns. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY

In big river deltas you'll find that the high ground is right along the river and the levees of the river, and the land slopes off to the side, [which is] why, when it floods, the coarse sand settles out right by the river and builds the high ground.

The far area though, when the river overtops its banks, as big rivers eventually do in a big enough rain somewhere upstream, basically the surrounding terrain fills up like a bathtub. Well, the delta of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers were very similar…flooding the valley wall-to-wall at a depth that you couldn't stand in and survive [might] have been the origin of the story of Noah's flood.

That's a model of a catastrophic regional flood. Standing water needn't be terribly deep to make an area uninhabitable.

Social Media Oppression

I posted this earlier on my Facebook, but figure the results should be known wider.

So, about that search engine manipulation that YouTube swears they don't do. I confirmed if you search on YouTube for "Steven Crowder" a video from his verified channel doesn't even show up until the 19th on the list (irrespective of if I'm signed in to YouTube or signed out, but most of this was done in incognito mode). Not only that, but only 6 videos from his verified channel even appeared in the top 100 results.

If you search for "StevenCrowder" (without the space, literally matching his verified channel name of "StevenCrowder") it gives 3 videos from his verified channel in the top 25 results.
Searching for "Steven Crowder Change My Mind"...no results from his verified channel until the 23rd video.

Only in searching "Louder With Crowder" do you get all but 2 results in the top 25 actually from Steven Crowder's verified channel! Remember, the verified name of his channel, again, is "StevenCrowder", not "Louder with Crowder."

Why do I point out so repeatedly that StevenCrowder (the channel) is a verified channel? Because YouTube swears in it's last update that it tweaked the algorithm to promote verified channels as opposed to non-verified channels, so you would know you're getting the content you're searching for. And it's almost true! If you search for "The Young Turks" for example, the first 11 videos are all from their verified channel. The next two aren't, and from that point on through the top 50 results, about half are from their verified channel.

If you search for Vox, 10 of the first 11 results are from their verified channel.

Even if you search for "Joe Rogan" (a center-left leaning individual), only one video out of the first 50 was NOT from his verified channel of PowerfulJRE!

But search for Red Elephants, a right-leaning channel (official verified name: The Red Elephants Vincent James), and you get 3 results out of the top 10. Search "Vincent James" and you get 0 results in the top 30, even though you get several results for James Vincent McMorrow (yes, "Vincent James" gives you multiple results for a "James Vincent" and NOT for a guy with the name "Vincent James" literally in the verified name of the channel.

Look up "Paul Joseph Watson" and you'll get lots of videos *about* him, but absolutely none *from* him in the top 50, even though his verified channel name is exactly "Paul Joseph Watson".
It's not like YouTube doesn't know who you're actually looking for. They will still give you a link to the *channel* as the first result for "Red Elephants", "Paul Joseph Watson", and even "Steven Crowder"--all right at the top of the list! But they will not return any results for video searches.
Hence why in his last show Steven Crowder mentioned he's begun certain proceedings he's not going into detail over yet. It's not an issue about what *we* want YouTube to be; it's about YouTube lying about what *they* claim they are. False advertising is false advertising. And if you're clearly a publisher refusing to publish a specific worldview you disagree with, you are not a platform. And you deserve to be sued like a publisher can be. Period.

"Assault rifles" and self-defense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9AfhdKLNDA

What Brexit and impeachment have in common

We have a parliament that is frightened of the electorate.

We have a politicised judiciary.

We have a government with no majority.

We have a population who fear that democracy is at risk.

The next general election will be fascinating, if we’re ever allowed to have one.

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) September 25, 2019

There's a striking parallel between our situation and Brexit. The electorate voted in favor of Brexit, but the Parliamentary and judicial elites want to vacate their vote. They despise popular sovereignty. Likewise, Executive agencies under Obama tried to throw the election to Hillary. When that failed, they tried to have Trump removed on a 25th Amendment pretext. When that failed, they moved to impeachment, even though the next election is just 13 months out. Once again, they despise popular sovereignty.

The card you draw

Debates over Calvinism and freewill theism often revolve around the allegation that Calvinism is committed to "causal determinism". In my experience, freewill theists rarely if ever define either term. 

It's interesting to compare determinism to causation. What does it mean to cause something? Suppose I'm in a poker game. If the deck is randomly shuffled one way, I'll draw a particular card, and if it's randomly shuffled another way, I'll draw a different card. If we keep all the other variables the same, there's a sense in which changing that one variable makes the difference. Depending on the card I draw, I will bet, bluff, call, raise, or fold. 

But in a larger sense, that's not the only thing that causes me to play my hand a particular way. Depends on the other cards in my hand. Depends on how I read the other players, which in turn depends on the composition of the players. Depends on whether I'm in a good mood because I'm savoring a nice bourbon, or whether I'm in a bad mood because I just broke up with my girlfriends. Depends on how much money I can afford to lose. 

We might say they don't make the difference in the sense that if we just change one variable, then that's what makes the difference. But we could change one of those variables, instead.

So there's no one variable that causes the outcome, but the combination. They all make a difference to the outcome.

Men in tights

One of the quirks of human nature is that humans will do weird or unseemly things that feel natural or wonderful so long as everyone around you is doing the same thing. Take eucharistic adoration. For many devout Catholics, that's a central feature of their piety.

But take a step back and consider the spectacle of a grown man who thinks sitting in front of an ornate storage box containing wafers, for hours at a time, is a way to experience Jesus, commune with Jesus, feel the presence of Jesus beaming from the box. That may seem like the most natural thing in the world if you're in a social setting where there's group reinforcement, but if you think about it, isn't that a very artificial act of devotion?

To take a comparison, a few years ago a PCA church had three male ballet dancers perform on stage in the worship service:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNG4s4DMac

To the ballet dancers, that seemed like a perfectly normal, reverent thing to do. In the social context of urban elites and the ballet subculture, there was nothing jarring about that.

But to a disinterested outside observer, the performance was a giggle fest. A normal man can't watch it with a straight face.

What's striking is the contrast between the self-image of the dancers and the image they're actually projecting. It never occurred to them that this performance would go viral. They couldn't foresee how this would make their church a laughingstock. 

Consider kings and noblemen who used to dress up in slippers, silk stockings, and powered wigs. When we see those paintings we think how foppish and decadent they are, but that wasn't the impression they had. If everyone's a fop then nobody's a fop. 

Catholicism provides many other examples. The Sistine choir used to have castrati. Popes sincerely thought that was better than having–heaven forbid!–women in the choir. Within the bubble of old-fashioned Catholicism, that seemed to be reverent. Here's one of the Sistine choir castrati:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjvfqnD0ws

To a disinterested outside observer, that's an utterly cringey performance. Unintended comic relief. 

By the same token, the traditional wardrobe of popes would be a drag queen's dream come true. Yet until recently, Catholics reveled in that. It doesn't go over as well in the television age, which is why a media savvy pontiff like Pope Francis has mothballed that tradition. 

The upshot is that almost nothing is too ludicrous which may not seem natural or praiseworthy so long as everyone in your peer group is doing it. 

From Samuel Clemens to Mark Twain

Some men get depressed because they failed to reach their goal. Success and failure can be deceptive and paradoxical. Because we can't go through both doors at once, we don't know how things would have turned out had we succeeded.

Mark Twain is a failed Samuel Clemens. The original ambition of Samuel Clemens was to be a riverboat captain. That's what he trained for and had some rookie experience, but the Civil War destroyed that goal, so he had to settle for "second-best" by becoming a fiction writer under the pen name Mark Twain. Had he succeeded in achieving his dream, he might have have had a fulfilling career as a riverboat captain. Been happy with his choice in life. But he'd disappear from history without a trace. No one remembers Samuel Clemens–they remember Mark Twain. 

Because he failed, that forced him to tap into an unsuspected talent. Think of all the successful people who never develop their full potential because they succeeded at something beneath their ability. Conversely, think of all the "failures" who achieve distinction at something they didn't plan on doing, and fell back on as a last-ditch compromise. Samuel Clements' bad luck was Mark Twain's good luck.

Animal cunning

An interesting fact that's emerged about Trump, from his campaign up until now, is that he never quite steps into the trap. He walks right up to a trap, then walks around it. He comes so close, but doesn't take the final fateful step. Others are ensnared, but he walks away. Apparently, there were some shady meetings at Trump Tower during the campaign, but they didn't cross the line. The Mueller report cleared him of collusion even though it was written by Mueller's hyperpartisan aides, using a backwards burden of proof. Likewise, the transcript of Trump's conversation is fatally ambiguous regarding a quid pro quo. It's like animal traps that are put out  every evening; in the morning they are tripped, but empty. 

This pattern is hugely frustrating and infuriating to those hellbent on taking him down. What they get from Trump are teasers. Maybe he's just lucky, or maybe he has the animal cunning not to take that extra step. 

“My Kind of Hero”

I have a chance to write for Reformation21. Here is my first piece for them.
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2019/09/my-kind-of-hero.php

Pray to Mary

Marian prayer is central to Catholic piety. If it's God's will that Christians pray to Mary, why didn't God simply tell us to pray to Mary? Why not a single verse in Scripture commanding Christians to pray to Mary? 

Since we don't have that, Catholic apologists cobble together a Jack-that-house-built argument for Marian prayer. A chain of inferences like:

i) Jesus is God

ii) Mary is his mother

iii) That makes Mary the Mother of God

iv) Jesus is the king

v) That makes Mary the Queen Mother

vi) Honor your father and mother

vii) King Solomon genuflected to Bathsheba

viii) Therefore, Mary has Jesus on a leash. He comes running whenever she yanks the leash.

That argument is full of holes, but more to the point, it would make things so much simpler if there was at least one verse in Scripture which said: "Pray to Mary!" 

Fishing expedition for impeachment

https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1176878427942424578

Theological speculation

Is there a place for speculation in theology? On the one hand, some people are more entranced by theological speculation than knowing or caring about what biblical revelation actually teaches. Indeed, that might preclude things they want to believe in. 

On the other hand, Christian theism opens up vistas of possibilities that are foreclosed in atheism. God is infinitely greater than we can imagine, so it's hard to exaggerate what might be the case. Our imagination will always fall incomparably short of God's imagination. So long as our speculation has a foothold in Scripture, and we don't confuse speculation with revelation, there's value in stretching our horizons. The opposite danger is to make our humdrum experience the yardstick. 

Catholic camouflage

Recently I saw some interior shots of a modern Presbyterian church. It was studiously Spartan. Imagine the impact on someone used to that who goes inside a Gothic cathedral or Byzantine basilica for the first time. The contrast is overwhelming. 

They may feel cheated. This is what they've been missing all those years. That's one reason it's a mistake for evangelicals to be gratuitously Spartan when it comes to worship. That defiantly invites defection.

I myself basically have a high-church aesthetic along with a low-church ecclesiology and sacramentology. Mind you, I'm selective about high-church aesthetics. I don't care for ostentation. That's not even good art but bad taste masquerading as piety. 

But here's a different point: impressive art is a great way to camouflage vacuity. If you have nothing, you make it look like something through externals. If the wine is just wine, that's offset by using a fancy chalice. If the wafer is just a dry piece of bread, you conceal that by putting it inside a fancy tabernacle, on a fancy altar, with lots of other glittery trappings. If the priest doesn't actually have transformative powers, but is just a bloke like you and me, you mask that by swathing him with fancy vestments. The less you have, the more you compensate. 

The externals, the sensory overload, deflect attention away from the fact that there's nothing there. Layers upon layers to hide the vacuity at the core. Overpowering the senses is a savvy tactic to disarm the critical faculties. 

Or to put this in reverse, if there really was something there, something manifestly supernatural, then all the showy art, architecture, music, gilt and brocade, would be unnecessary. Indeed, if there really was something to it, all the wrappings would obscure it.