Relativism and Objectivity

     The essence of Relativism is that one person's opinion is just as good as another's even though the two are mutually exclusive.  Lately, some Liberal clergymen, joining other liberals in their bonding with Islam, have been opining that 'all religions are basically the same and they all have the same purpose'.  This remarkable idea is symptomatic of a dreadful moral and intellectual poison --- that of Relativism, which denies all objective truth on the claim of "tolerance", perhaps the most misunderstood word in the English language.  It is easily provable that the various religions of the world are incompatible with one another, though they may coincide at certain points.   If Judaism is true then Christianity is not true, or not entirely true, and if Islam emobodies the ultimate truth then  Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Budhism does not.  Any two or more of these may contain similar concepts on certain points but they are inconsistent in their final conclusions.  In other words, any one of them could theoretically be true but no two of them could.  If you seek the truth you must pick one to exclusion of the others or opt for some other choice, such as agnosticism or atheism.  Furthermore,  to deny objective truth, to claim that any viewpoint is as good as another --- in religion, baseball or anything else --- requires the conclusion that that claim itself is not objectively true.  If any opinion is as good as any other, why should we be influenced by anyone else's opinion on anything?  And if the response is "well of course I wouldn't go that far" the respondent in all honesty should be able to explain when he would and when he would not "go that far".  In the end he will be backed into a corner because he will either affirm the existence of objective truth, including the "truth" which tells him that everything is relative, of which he should now start to see the absurdity, or he will admit that even that claim is relative and his argument has defeated itself.  In other words, a relativist destroys the basis on which his relativism rests.  At that point anyone should logically lose the slightest interest in anything he says unless it is a mere personal preference, such as a preference for one flavor of ice cream over another.  The only way out of this conundrum for the relativist is the assertion that his truth is entitled to a privileged position in the hiercarchy of opinion.  Someone else may wish to continue the discussion after that but I opt out.

    

Jesus and the Woman at Jacob's Well

      Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman, recorded at John 4, is interesting for a number of reasons and is one among several instances in which He shows His disapproval of racial, religious and gender discrimination. The Samaritan woman is the first person to whom Jesus expressly reveals who He is. He comes close to revealing his status as the Son of God to Nicodemus in John 3, but he refers to Himself in the third person.  He does not expressly say to Nicodemus, as He does to the Samaritan woman, "I am he, the one who is speaking with you."  This is also the longest conversation that Jesus is recorded to have had with any individual in the New Testament. Jesus and his disciples did not have to go through Samaria, Jews normally bypassed that region because the Samaritans had their own religious outlook and did not practice Judeaeism.  In other words He intended to go there. He was not just passing through.  And we encounter Him talking to a woman, for one thing, and a Samaritan, for another. A Jewish man would never drink water proffered to him by a Samaritan because they were considered by the Jews of that time to be unclean. The woman was at the well at noon time. Most people gathered water in the morning or evening, when it is not as hot. This woman went at noon in order to avoid people, perhaps from shame. The fact that she had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband, indicates a shameful personal history.  So Jesus is revealing His divine sonship to a woman, a foreigner, a half-Jew, a sinner, and to her people who are outside the pale of Judaism. It shows the breadth and scope of His kindness and tolerance as distinguished from the narrowness and intolerance of the times.
     There are a number of instances in which the same principle is shown --- the story of the Good Samaritan, His willingness to go to the home of a Roman Centurion to heal the man's servant, His encounter with the gentile woman, a Scyrophonecian gentile, whose daughter was desperately ill and whom Jesus healed --- these among others.  And all of this when tolerance was not generally the order of the day.

What About Hell?

     When someone expresses doubt about the existence of Hell as a real place where 'non-believers' reside in eternal torment, he may be referred to one or more of many places in the Bible which seem to apply to such a place.  See, for example, Rev. 14:11, Mark 9:43, Luke 3:17, ll Pet. 2:1, Matt. 5:27-30 or Mark 9:48-49.  And there are others.  Christians are urged to take all these references literally. 
      Nothwithstanding insistance otherwise, however, Hell may be a metaphor for the source of the evil which is sweeping the world. Is it only that which matters?  Are bread and wine literally body and blood?  Even those who answer yes --- Roman Catholics, for example --- will admit that these elements are wine and bread to a chemist but they contend that they are converted to something else in some mystical or metaphorical sense which no one but Catholics, and perhaps a few others, even claim to understand.  The Catholic doctrine is called 'Transubstantiation'.  The Lutherans have a variation called 'Consubstantiation'.  Does it really matter?  Jesus asked for an act, not understanding (this do, not this understand).  He did not care about actual physical facts but only their meaning.  Or is that entirely true?  Without going too far into that, there is a good deal of support for those who believe that the physical facts and the literal reality of events reported in the Bible does matter a great deal.  Was there a real Abraham, a real Moses?  I go from one side to the other on such questions.  I tend to believe along with C. S. Lewis that the earlier events may have a mythical aspect to them but that there is no doubt about the reality of Jesus, the Virgin birth, miracles, crucifixion and Ressurection.  Where the mythical blends into the literal, while even then retaining something of the character and flavor of myth, I don't know.  But the Christian story is true.  Everything depends on its being true and there is sufficient support for it to state categorically that it is true.
      Is Hell real?  Yes, you can see it in the eyes of lunatics, of those who are slaves to alcohol, of sociopaths, of people so burdened with guilt that they cannot get through the day without breaking down.  Are there demons, those denizens of Hell who are said to torment the damned eternally?  There are certainly human demons --- Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and conspicuously those lovely Jihadists of the Middle East who think they are vindicating God's will by torturing and decapitating people, blowing up buildings, passenger jets, trains, night clubs and theatres, and oppressing women.  Yet I have to admit that there is more to it than that, joining to a degree those who advocate belief in Hell as an actual place.  There is an evil force making its way across the world with frightening effect.  We see it in "spontaneous" protests and riots, in crazed Jihadism, roaring and seeping into societies everywhere and threatening civilization.  We see it in the horrific crimes which are committed with the insistence that they are  in compliance with God's will.  Though I am not convinced that Hell is literally a place, it is very likely something more than just a state of mind, though it is certainly at least that, and that is bad enough.  Beyond that the notion of a literal Hell in a specific place seems far-fetched.  The Earth itself is constantly changing locales within the Solar system, and the Solar system within the Galaxy, and no doubt the Galaxy with reference to the Universe itself.  The similarity to a physical Hell, however, lies in the fact that it would be impossible for all of the hellish events going on around the world to be the result of some master plan, coordinated efforts,, a grand conspiracy promoted by people gathered in a room somewhere plotting.  There are plots going on here and there; in Washington, Tehran, Wall Street, union meetings, Moscow, Caracas and elsewhere;  no doubt about that, but not one grand plot.  At least not one grand human plot. There is simply too much hell in the world for that.  Hitler did not sit around hatching wicked schemes with George Soros.  They didn't even know each other.  Yet we see it as if everything had in fact been orchestrated at some central venue much like, if not actually, a real hell by a real devil.  Which makes me tend to believe that such a grand ongoing conspiracy exists in reality but not in some human board room or meeting hall.  What's the point of these evasive and presumably immaterial conspirators?  Whay bother with plots and conspiracies designed to injure humanity without any apparent benefit to themselves? Do they never quit?  Why don't they get bored?  I find street riots, wherein teenage boys throw rocks at tanks, and that sort of thing, just plain boring.  It's all the same.  It may take place in Paris, or Seoul or Cairo but if you've seen one you've seen them all.  And evil dictators who all seem to wear some sort of bizarre or garish costume with a strange hat, or a hat that's too big.  They want power.  But what will they do when they get it?  Do they even know?  Yet it never stops and this to me suggests something very evil going on the origin of which is not apparent.  Where does it originate?  Who originiates it?  And why?
      

 

The Danger of Fundamentalism in a Nut Shell

     The shocking excesses of the fundamentalist church in Kansas which has been sending people out to disrupt funerals, etc. points out the danger of fundamentalism if it turns in the wrong direction and then goes unchecked.  The fundamentalist represents every opinion he has as an "interpretation" of scripture, allowing him to excuse any number of reckless or violent acts with his all-purpose excuse, "so it is written, so it shall be done, thus sayeth the Lord" meaning that some Holy Writ has shut off all further revelation, inspiration or use of the mind and intelligence which are themselves gifts of God and intended by Him for use.  All further discussion and the thought process itself is shut off.  While many or even most fundamentalists may not go that far I submit that this explains jihadism and Islamist extremism to a large extent because it indicates the dangerous direction in which fundamentalism can go.  

What Can Man Know About God?

      Even as a committed Christian I have problems with organized religion and church services, not Christian theology.  So much of what so many ministers or priests say about God, His mind and purposes, presented as absolute truth, must be specualation or interpretation.  I am convinced that they claim to know, and doubtless believe that they know, much more than they do and that God is considerably more mysterious and inexplicable than they think He is.  Given the difficulty of understanding how television works, let alone Einstein's theory of relativity, it seems very unlikely that any human being, smart as the species is, can really know very much about God  on his own initiative.

     When a sailor in the mid-Pacific or the wayfarer in the Sahara or a tenement-dweller in New York, looks up at the sky and exclaims 'how great is God' he probably has come close to stating about all he can really know on his own, except for a few ideas originated by philosophers, about God being omnipotent, omnipresent, and all  that.  "Oh God, How great is thy sea and how small is my boat", the sailor's prayer, just about does it though we can embellish it a bit with the child's prayer;  "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so", which is a simple affirmation of all that may really matter in the end.  How He reacts with someone else is something I probably can never know, or know completely, and may be something I couldn't understand anyway. 

      We can know some things about Jesus because He was here and was written about by persons in a position to know.  But I submit that God the Father, the Great Spirit, the Emperor over the Sea, the ineffable Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, is beyond our intellectual capacity to know or ferret out.  Didn't Jesus Himself suggest as much to Nicodemas?  Speculation is all right I suppose (anyway, we will continue to do it) but it is very adviseable to recognize its limited value.  Yet we can know a fair amout about Jesus Christ, His life and work, His promises and expectations.  And the belief that God chose to limit Himself temporarily in order to take the form of  that same Jesus, in part so that He could cause mankind to understand some things he needs to know is both reasonable and supportable by a very high level of evidence.  Added to the 'leap  of Faith, we begin to see the way to Salvation. 
        

    

The Danger of Love

     This is about being 'in love' and is addressed specifically to heterosexual males, of which I am one, though the principles apply to females as well.  The subject is important and practical, because most people have had or will have the experience, or think they have.  All but an infinitesimal fraction of the population can do anything to settle matters between Israel and the jihadists but a great many people will experience the circumstances discussed here.  So the Middle East is important but this subject is important and practical as well and one fraught with deadly consequences literally and figuratively.

     When a man falls in love with a girl (and all women are 'girls' when you're in love with them) what is it like and how is it distinguished from lust?  It is like this; a consuming obsession with the object.  You think about her all the time.  You can't think very long about anything else.  You want her so much you can hardly stand it and you think "I would rather be miserable with her than happy without her".  And you really mean it.  It is an experience which I believe some men never have, though they may think they have.  It is not lust.  In fact, it excludes lust, and that is one very odd thing about it.  At your peak powers of male performance you lust after every attractive girl who walks by, particularly in a bikini.  If you are wise you control the emotion but the emotion pressures you at every turn.  For that matter, you can lust at any age, though your ability to do anything about it may abate.  Your motto is something like this:  "If I'm not near the girl I love I love the girl I'm near". 

     The test is this; ironically, if you are 'in love' you think very little if at all about sex.  That's not what you want.  You want the girl, not something she can give you or withhold from you.  You want her on any terms you can get her. 

     And here's the danger.  If the object of your affection is married to someone else, or if you are, you are likely to think that there's something almost spiritual about falling in love with her.  That's when you hear such nonsense as "We didn't want it to happen.  We didn't plan it.  We were just 'good friends' and just wanted to have lunch together and reminisce about old times" --- and all that garbage, for that's what it is.  'It' is not something that happens to someone.  You cannot separate 'it' from 'you' and thus absolve yourself from  blame.  Even if the situation never evolves into a physical affair --- thought the danger that it will is ever-present --- a mental affair is likely to be just as bad and almost as damaging. 
     There is only one possible answer, or solution, to this if the temptation arrives, an eventuality which is hardly unlikely, as it probably besets more people at one time or another than it leaves alone.  Only one course is decent and civilized, rational and moral.  Drop the matter.  Leave it alone. Do not fall for any of that just-good-friends nonsense.  Don't make the date for lunch, for it would in fact be a "date" whatever you think it is and whatever you call it.  If you have already made the date, cancel it.  Extra-marital affairs ruin lives, families, careers and friendships.  They corrupt character and cause a wide swathe of misery and despair which probably can never be repaired.  Don't think it's innocent because it seems so civilised when it starts.  It is not innocent and you are to blame if you encourage it or do not stop it --- at once and completely.  And if you see the girl in the supermarket, go the other way.
     Of course, if you are both single and unattached pursue your dreams.  If you encounter problems write to Dear Abby.

Fire in a Crowded Theatre

     The left does not have much imagination.  Once they latch on to some belabored phrase or slogan they won't let go of it until they realize that no one is impressed by it anymore or they find a new toy.  A current liberal mantra is 'fire in a crowded theatre'.  Whenever a lefty wants to squelch free speech he reminds us that a Supreme Court justice once opined that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech does not protect a man who falsely yells 'fire' in a crowded theatre.  He will seek to squelch free speech through the 'fairness doctrine' or its equivalent by another name, and through campus speech codes which ban all expressions of politically incorrect views as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on, whether or not such expressions have anything at all to do with those subjects.  If you argue the First Amendment to them they will remind you that it does not protect the yelling of 'fire' in a crowded theatre when there is no fire. They keep going until everything becomes the equivalent of fire in a crowded theatre.  If they could have their way even the Declaration of Independence would approximate 'fire' in a crowded theatre.  (After all, they might remind us, wasn't it a rather alarmist document)?
     One of their goals currently is to use the Fairness Doctrine to silence conservative talk show hosts.  This would occur, or so the left hopes, by causing local stations and advertisers  eventually to cancel current-events daytime talk shows by claiming that they aren't being "fair" with their conservative  broadcasting.  The idea is that stations and advertisers would decide that the game is not worth the candle and go exclusively to sports, music and local issues. It hardly matters to the left that the reason that conservatism predominates on daytime radio and Fox News is that conservatism gets the ratings and the ratings and public preferences are what they are in a free market.  The liberals retain massive quantities of liberal media outlets, but they want it all.  If you tell them that they ought to respect freedom of speech across the board and be consistent they may respond that the First Amendment is all well and good but it doesn't protect someone yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre and, of course, anyone who goes around saying things they do not like is equivalent to a man who yells 'fire' in a crowded theatre.