Friday Music Post - FFHAWDWM

The weather in Chicago has been awesome the last couple of days, but I still miss the west coast. 

Acting with Certainty in our Uncertainty

Kyle Cupp:  I cannot dismiss the possibility that my faith isn’t something otherwise than a response to a revealing God. It’s possible that what I call my faith experiences are the result of digestion, bodily chemistry, neurosis, the fear of death, or the desire for meaning. Because I do not know myself with certainty, I cannot know my faith with certainty. I cannot say for sure what it is.

I’m not in the least bothered by my uncertainty. It’s not as though certainty is one of the virtues, theological or otherwise.  I seem to get along, faith-wise, just fine without it.

Can you live a life of conviction, advocacy, and passion without certainty?  If I am not certain of the things my faith calls me to have faith in, can I speak regarding my faith without a sense of feeling disingenuous?  Cupp's short blog post on the matter includes this quote from Philosopher John Caputo:

The acting subject is something acted upon even in its very acting, for the acting subject is itself a function of the anonymous, presubjective forces by which it is traversed—by language, the unconscious, by the weight and momentum of its own past, of the collective past to which it belongs, by the biochemistry and neurophysiology of which it is constituted, and by numberless (because anonymous) other forces. When the subject acts, we cannot be sure what acts, i.e., what is happening, because the individual subject is an irreducible complex of other events.

In my interpretation, this is a wordy way of saying, whenever you do anything, there are an infinite number of things that have influenced you to act that way, and there is no real way of saying what it is that is doing the acting.  

However, perhaps we can agree (and maybe not) that the sum total of all the influences, be they historical, biological, etc., add up to this thing we call personhood, and therefore, while it may be impossible for us to point at the person and say you are doing this because of x,y, and x, we can say that it is you that is doing it.  Whether or not such a claim is rationally consistent with an "irreducible complex of other events" is inconsequential in my opinion.  That we act with any sense of certainty, in the face of uncertainty, means we have to act with a sense of responsibility for the I that is taking action.

-Tim

The Obama Blame Game

A longer-than-normal post, but an oh so important topic no?

In the Red Corner! (Color not chosen for any symbolic reasons...though it may seem that way)
Drew Westen: When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.  
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze.

In the Blue Corner!
Jonathan Chiat: Westen's op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen's telling, every known impediment to legislative progress -- special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion -- are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama's failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
Westen locates Obama's inexplicable failure to properly use his storytelling power in some deep-rooted aversion to conflict. He fails to explain why every president of the postwar era has compromised, reversed, or endured the total failure of his domestic agenda. 

If you look at progressive circles, Westen's argument seems to be the one people want to believe.  I have seen at least one prominent progressive Christian organization publicizing Westen's article, and have heard a similar line of thought from many I have talked to.  Its an argument that comes from the heart.  But if you read Chiat's rebuttle, its hard not to conclude that sometimes the heart is profoundly mistaken.  

Every "victory" for the progressive agenda thus far has been dampened hugely by the fact that concessions had to be made (the public option in the healthcare debate comes to mind first for me).  But that is the reality of the political system we inherited.  To think that if Obama gave the best speech ever written in the history of mankind about the public option (which he did do a pretty good job of arguing for), we'd have it right now, is a delusion beyond delusions.  Rather, maybe if the White House didn't decide to waste so much time waiting for the Senate's gang of six, we might have a different outcome (I know this stuff was a long time ago but it still stings damnit!)  As Chiat points out, the primary issue to be taken up with Obama is a tactical one. 

I also want to add that the economic crisis we face now is an entirely different animal than the national security crisis Bush was dealt.  With an economic crisis, people are prone to all sorts of ideas about how the economy works because despite what some economists might think, the tangible answers are not as clear as "go and shoot the bad guy."  When we feel like our lives are in danger, we are willing to applaud the president as he lets the rockets fly.  When our jobs our in danger, we become partisan ideologues.  If 9/11 never happened, would Bush have been able to convince the nation to go to war on rhetoric alone?

-Tim

The New Atheists as Evangelical Fundamentalists

Reza Aslan: It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism--an atheist fundamentalism. The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.  This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).  Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer. This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.

I have tried to argue this case time and time again, that when I listen to someone like Christopher Hitchens speak, I get the same odd sense of angry arrogance that someone like Jerry Falwell is famous for.

But I will affirm something good about Dawkins and the rest, their poor theology does a great job of attacking Christians with equally poor theology.  Like this guy (video embedded below).  For that I am grateful.



The devil must have made pineapples.

Edit: I seriously cannot stop watching this video in awe.  The background, the accent, the insanity, the dude from Growing Pains.