5/1/2012 Links

I have three links for today, focusing primarily on social skills and coping:

1.  Aspergers Girl has an excellent post on 20 things NOT to say to people with Asperger’s, and 15 beneficial approaches.  A lot of what she says can probably apply to how we approach people with other problems as well.  People who say some of the 20 things NOT to say are most likely trying to be helpful—-to offer the person with Asperger’s hope, to motivate the person with Asperger’s, or to demonstrate that they understand what the person with Asperger’s is going through.  But what they say can easily be construed as offensive.  If you want to be supportive, it’s better, as Aspergers Girl notes, to be willing to listen and to convey that you are there for the person with Asperger’s and will provide help that the person wants.

2.  Literary agent (for Rachel Held Evans and others) Rachelle Gardner talks about how you can be supportive to the writers in your family.  What I liked about her post was that it presented writing as (in a number of cases) a thankless job, which makes me feel better, since there are times when I wish that my writing were more appreciated!

3.  Yesterday, I linked to an interview with Temple Grandin.  Temple made two points that I found helpful.  First, she said that we should be willing to try new things, for how do we know if we’ll like them or not if we don’t try?  Second, Temple said that people get fired for getting mad on the job, but not for crying, and so there are times when she goes to a solitary place and just cries.

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships 9

A couple of things stood out to me in my latest reading of The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, by Temple Grandin and Sean Barron.

1.  On the issue of emotion, Temple and Sean are different in how they manifest their autism.  Temple is logical and believes that emotion distorts reality.  Sean, on the other hand, was angry as a child and as a teen because people were not accepting him and living up to his expectations.

I’ve come across both kinds of Aspergian people.  The first kind strike me as Mr. Spock-like, and they do not seem to have a great deal of compassion for people who struggle.  Rather, they believe that the people who struggle socially are at fault somehow and need to change (as if the people struggling even know what they need to do to change); as for their own social struggles, these Aspergians casually dismiss others as emotional rather than logical.  The second kind whine and complain because of their struggles—-because they don’t have a significant other, for example.  I’m not saying that Temple is totally like people in the first category, or that Sean is completely like those in the second category.  I’m just giving my impression of different kinds of Aspergian people whom I have met.  And, while I identify more with the second category, I have difficulty being around both kinds of Aspergian people.

2.  The book goes into social skills, as it talks about the importance of recognizing other people as individuals with their own interests, personal histories, and desires, and of expressing an interest in those things.  In my opinion, that’s a key aspect of socializing: honoring and expressing interest in other people.  There may be a right way and a wrong way to do this.  Deb Fine wrote a book on small talk, and she said that we should not come across like an FBI agent, shooting people one question after another.  Moreover, one thing that I fear is that I’ll ask a person a question, and that person will give me a long lecture in response on something that does not particularly interest me.  It’s happened before!  But a key part of socializing is expressing interest in others.  And, if a friendship develops and it ends up being one-sided, as one is sharing with you but has no interest in what you have to share, then perhaps you can tell him or her that you would like a relationship that is more mutual.

Writing and Naturalistic Bees

My church’s Bible study group was good last night.  We’re going through Margaret Feinberg’s Scouting the Divine: My Search for God in Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey.  Two things stood out to me.

1.  We watched the DVD in which Margaret speaks.  Margaret was talking about different kinds of bees and the distinct roles that they play in making honey.  She then went on say that Christians in the body of Christ perform necessary roles, whether or not they feel that their work is important.  She said that there are times when she doubts the importance of her own work.  How can that be, when she is an author, speaker, and Bible teacher?  Margaret responded to that question by saying that she doesn’t see many of the people whom she impacts, and that she spends a lot of her time in research or in front of her computer screen, with no other company than God.  In those lonely times, she wonders if she is making any impact at all.

I appreciated Margaret’s honest comments about what it’s like to be a writer.  Personally, I like writing because of the solitude.  I wonder what kind of difference I am making, and I assume that this feeling will go away were I to become published and more well-known.  Not necessarily!

2.  Margaret quotes the beekeeper she interviews in the book as saying that an atheist who sees a hive would believe in God, presumably on account of the hive’s order.  My pastor agreed with that comment, for he noted that each bee somehow knows its distinct role in making honey.  He wonders how that could be the case, had God not programmed the bees to do so.

I wouldn’t be surprised if an atheist could come up with an explanation.  I don’t fully know what it would be, but I wouldn’t be surprised.  I’ve heard evolutionists say that animals learn that something works, and then they pass on what they learn to their offspring, such that it becomes instinct.  Animals that don’t do this are the ones that don’t survive.  In this model, I speculate, bees found a way to support themselves by making honey, which happens to be delicious for humans, and so they were survivors who passed down that know-how to their offspring.

Feel free to comment, only don’t put me or anyone else down as stupid.  I admit that I don’t know much about bees.

Believing without Proof

Respectful Atheist has a thought-provoking post entitled Do Atheists Need Faith?  I have some rambling thoughts.

The definition of “faith” that Respectful Atheist is assuming in his post is essentially believing in something without proof.  As he notes, many Christians consider that to be a virtue.  I myself have heard Christians treat it as such.  “God does not prove his existence to us because, if he did, our belief wouldn’t be faith”, they have said to me.  But what’s so great about believing in something without proof?  I’m with Respectful Atheist on this.  I don’t get it.

Respectful Atheist does not believe that it’s good to believe in things without proof.  But Respectful Atheist does acknowledge that there are things that he believes without absolute certitude.  He states:

“My current belief is that it’s perfectly alright to have varying degrees of certainty about pretty well anything and everything.  For example, I feel around 99% certain that I will wake up tomorrow morning.  I am a relatively young man, without any significant health problems (that I am aware of), and it is pretty rare for people like me to die suddenly in the middle of the night.  I am about 75% sure that I won’t have to replace either one of my aging cars within the next year.  I feel roundabout 60% sure that it will rain tomorrow.”

But do those things constitute believing in something without proof?  My hunch is that Respectful Atheist would say “no”, for, although there is not absolute proof for any of these things, they do have some basis in reality.  He looks at reality, and young men without significant health problems usually wake up the next morning, and so he concludes that there is a decent chance that he, too, will wake up the next morning.  For him, that’s different from a belief in God or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy because it is based on observable reality.

But what about those who believe that they’ve experienced God or the supernatural, in some way?  Many atheists dismiss that as anecdotal evidence, or they say that those experiences can be interpreted in a non-supernatural fashion, or they say that they should not have to believe in God on the basis of experiences that they themselves did not have, but that others allegedly had.  I sympathize with the last one.  At the same time, I don’t think that those who believe in God on the basis of what they believe to be experiences with the supernatural are believing without any proof or basis at all.

Yet, I do get tired of Christians getting in my face with their Christianity, telling me and the rest of the world that we should do this and not that, when there doesn’t appear to be any proof for their worldview.  Sure, people can experience the supernatural, and that can even occur within the context of Christianity, but does that prove that conservative Christianity in its entirety is true?

Yet, would God leave us in the dark without giving us a revelation, such as the Bible?  But do we have to accept all of the Bible to be recipients of that revelation?  Even conservative Christians downplay or explain away parts of the Bible that contradict our notion of justice.  Moreover, there are many who do not believe that the Bible is fully consistent and clear, and the existence of many denominations and forced interpretations of the Bible shows (in my mind) that there’s something to that view, so why would the Bible be the revelation that we receive?

Some then say that God reveals himself through other things, such as life and nature.  I’m not sure, though, if life and nature communicate unequivocal messages.  Does nature teach us to be kind?  What about animals not being kind to each other?  I think that those who claim to be receiving God’s revelation through life and nature are projecting their own views onto those things, as do I.

2/13/2012 Links

Here are some links for today:

1.  Whitney Houston talks with Diane Sawyer about her struggle with drug addiction (see here).  I don’t know if this is the same video that I watched yesterday, but, in the one that I watched yesterday, Whitney was telling Diane about her faith that Jesus loves her.  She was also saying that her greatest problem is herself.  Recovery, living out a positive and an affirming faith, and battling one’s inner demons can be for many a struggle that needs to be affirmed and re-affirmed each day.

2.  According to this article, Osama Bin Laden did not want for his children to follow his path of jihad, but rather to get a good education and live in peace with the West.  That makes me wonder why he was even conducting jihad, if he did not believe that it was a suitable path for his children.  Was it because he was angry that the U.S. set up a base in Saudi Arabia, which he considered to be holy soil, and so he felt that he was fighting things like that rather than the West in general?  Did he believe that it was too late for him to follow a righteous path, even as he was seeing that the path of jihad that he was on was futile?  Did he feel that Westernization was inevitable and so his children had best make peace with it, while maintaining some devotion to Islam?

3.  A theme that comes up on my blog, and which will come up again this coming April (which is National Autism Month), is social skills.  In books that try to teach social skills, we are told that we should be interested in other people’s lives and ask them questions about themselves.  But there are right and wrong ways to do this.  In this post and this post, the topic is whether or not it’s appropriate to ask parents with children adopted from other countries about their children.

4.  Something that turned me off to evangelicalism was how people around me appeared to be hearing from God, whereas God didn’t seem to know my address.  Not only did this influence me to beat up on myself, but I also tended to look down on others who did not hear from God.  I’ve been wanting to get away from beating myself up and spiritual elitism.  Carson T. Clark has a post on this issue.  Both the post and the comments are good.

Completing Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man

I finished David Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man.  I read the Appendix, which tackled the Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, and witch-hunts.  I won’t go into great detail about Marshall’s arguments in this section.  I wrote this post in response to similar arguments that he made in The Truth Behind the New Atheism.  There were some things in the Appendix to Jesus and the Religions of Man which were different, and they certainly deserve consideration: that the Salem witch hysteria was starting by girls who were flirting with black magic, that the trials did not follow biblical procedure, that an imperial mindset played a role in the Crusades, etc.

On the whole imperial mindset issue, I wish that Marshall had applied that to the topic of anti-Semitism, or (more accurately, perhaps) anti-Judaism.  Unlike Marshall, I’m very hesitant to say that the New Testament had nothing to do with anti-Judaism within Christianity, for, in my opinion, the division between Christianity and most of Judaism played a role in the church’s stigmatization of Jews.  This may very well have started out as a debate between Jews, as Marshall and other have argued.  After all, even the Old Testament continually criticizes the children of Israel.  But criticism of Israel became more of a stigmatization of the “other” as more and more Gentiles entered the church, and the portrayal of the Jews as hard-hearted and as corrupt in both the Old and also the New Testament played a significant role in how Gentile Christians conceptualized the Jews.  I don’t believe that was the only factor.  The New Testament certainly does not command Christians to humiliate or slaughter the Jews, for it tells people to love their enemies, to be humble, etc.  While I maintain that the Bible played a role in how Gentile Christians viewed the Jews, I think that the notion that Jews should be subjugated and treated as a defeated people comes from other things, such as triumphalism, an attitude that is consistent with an imperialist mindset, but not with New Testament principles.

I have two other thoughts, which take some of Marshall’s arguments as their starting-point, even though they do not entirely relate to Marshall.

First, on page 309, Marshall refers to a critic who told him: “You’ll say they’re not real Christians.  But you have to take the bad with the good.  Christianity has changed many lives for the better, but it has also done a lot of harm.”  Does Marshall argue that those who were responsible for the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the pogroms, and the witch hunts were not real Christians?  At one point, Marshall refers to those responsible for one of those atrocities as alleged Christians.  But he also acknowledges in this Appendix that there were true Christians who participated in those examples of gross wrong-doing.

I’ve always hated the evangelical argument that those who were involved in atrocities were not real Christians.  I was once talking with a Christian conservative fanatic who was continually bashing President Obama and Muslims.  When she was expressing outrage that American Muslims are allowed to practice their religion in the U.S. military and referred to Muslim atrocities throughout history and in the present, I told her about atrocities that Christians have done.  She responded that those who do not love other people are not true Christians.  I thought what she said was ridiculous.  I mean, what right did she have to be so smug and judgmental?  Is she showing love when she stigmatizes an entire group of people?  Is she saying that true Christians cannot make mistakes?  What makes her think that she’s so perfect?  I admire Christians who are willing to admit that they and others can err in judgment, not Christians who act like they’re the “true Christians” while those who fall short (sometimes dramatically) are merely “professing Christians”.

Second, Marshall talks a lot in this book about the good that Christians have done.  Before reading Marshall, I thought that was a rather trite argument.  I mean, I used it often against atheists and non-believers back in the days when I was a conservative evangelical!  But what I have concluded after reading Marshall is this: it can easily become a trite argument because I and others have used it as such—-as a mere debating point.  It’s one thing to use a predictable conservative Christian debating point in an attempt to score, to make myself look good, and to make my opponent look bad.  It’s quite another thing altogether to step back and to admire those who put their necks on the line so that the oppressed, the marginalized, and the disadvantaged can have a chance, and (even more) to realize that I may have an obligation to help, too.  I’m not criticizing Marshall here, for he has done humanitarian work, such as combating the sex trade.  When reading his polemics, I often wish he would show more humility, but I know that I am not always humble in the battlefield of online and print debates.

The next book that I will read will be Marshall’s very first book: True Son of Man: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture.

David Marshall: “Miracles”

For my write-up today on David Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man, I’ll blog about Chapter 10, “Miracles”.  I’ll use as my starting-point something that Marshall says on page 226:

“Christians are often asked, ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world?  Why do some starve when the rains cease to fall?’  Christianity arose not through an effort on the part of philosophers to find a solution to such problems, as did Buddhism.  The Bible never pretends to provide an all-embracing theory, class warfare, racial oppression or karma, by which to explain all suffering.  I think it suggests, on the contrary, that only those who need an answer and look for an answer, will find one, and that for their own suffering, not the suffering of others.”

This chapter is about miracles.  I appreciated Marshall’s discussion of his past skepticism regarding miracles, as well as his encounter with Christians who claim to have experienced them, and who usually are humble, low-key, and reticent when talking about them, showing that they’re not making stuff up to draw attention to themselves.  I also enjoyed Marshall’s story about how he was a struggling missionary in Taiwan, and God provided him with meals when his money was running out. I myself believe that there are miracles in the world, and that God can and sometimes does answer prayers for help.

But a discussion of the problem of suffering naturally accompanies a discussion about miracles, for people wonder: If God is intervening in the affairs of the world and is healing and providing for people, then why are there so many people who suffer and die as a result of disease, starvation, and malnutrition?

One of my favorite blogs is that of Respectful Atheist.  I like his blog because, well, he’s a respectful atheist, unlike a lot of prominent atheists I know, who are far from being respectful towards others.  Respectful Atheist just lays out his case, and, as far as I can tell, he does not put people down or demonstrate a smug sense of superiority.  But back to my topic.  Respectful Atheist had a post a while back entitled “His Eye Is On the Sparrow”.  In that post, Respectful Atheist talks about a question that deeply perplexed him: Why doesn’t God just send rain to places that are plagued by drought, drought that is taking the lives of so many people, including children?  This problem really hit him like a ton of bricks when he got an e-mail from his church that said, “Thank you for your prayers and praise God for holding off the rain, yesterday, during the church’s annual ‘outreach BBQ’!”  So God is willing to intervene and to control the weather so that a church in the prosperous United States can have its outreach barbeque, but he’s not willing to intervene and to provide rain to save people’s lives in an area that is plagued by drought?  For this, and for other reasons, the person who became Respectful Atheist doubted that there even was a God.

Marshall would address this problem in a variety of ways.  He says that we don’t really know why God allows other people to suffer.  In another place of his book, he says that we should channel our energies into helping the suffering (as Jesus did) rather than fretting over why God allows people to suffer.  I think that there’s something to that (the part about helping the suffering, that is).  Rather than fretting over why God permits drought in areas (as good of a question as that is), why not support the efforts of Christians and other humanitarians to bring clean water to those regions?  I’m saying this to myself, too, for there are seasons in which I give to charity, and seasons in which I do not. 

I’m going to shift now to Marshall’s point that the Bible does not pretend to provide an all-encompassing answer to the problem of suffering, as Buddhism does.  If Marshall’s point is that we can know that the Bible is divinely-inspired because it does not try to answer certain questions that people have (i.e., suffering), whereas obviously human-made religions do, then I would take issue with that claim.  I think that a number of biblical authors actually do seek to explain why people suffer.  The story of the Fall may be one such attempt.  The view in Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History, Psalms, and Proverbs that God rewards or saves the righteous and punishes the wicked is another attempt.  And then there is the view that we find in the writings of Paul and Peter (or “Peter”, for liberal New Testament scholars) that suffering produces character in Christians.  But there are some biblical authors who are not satisfied with such solutions, for they feel that these solutions collapse against the brick wall of reality, in which the innocent suffer for no apparent good reason.  Thus, we have the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes.  It does not take divine-inspiration to realize that certain attempted solutions are inadequate, or that there are many things that we simply do not know.

Moreover, I will note that even some religions that Marshall would consider human-made express agnosticism on certain issues.  Marshall probably knows more about Buddhism than I do, from his experience and also his reading.  But, in a class on Eastern religion that I took a while back, and also in my reading, I have learned that the Buddha himself said that he did not know how the universe came to exist.  A Buddhist tale says that such a question is not even relevant to the human predicament.  It’s like speculating when one has a poison arrow in one’s chest, when one should be trying to remove the arrow!  I remember my professor in my class saying that, and a smug evangelical was snickering, as if Buddhism were inferior to Christianity for saying “I don’t know”, even though Christians are huge fans of the “We don’t know why God works this way” spiel when it suits them.  I guess my point is that all religions are attempts to answer questions (i.e., why people suffer), and yet some of their practitioners and thinkers may recognize that there are adequate and inadequate solutions, and that there are things that we do not know.

More About Hitchens (and Death, and Hell)

I’d like to share a couple of quotes about Christopher Hitchens and hell:

1.  Bruce Gerenscer on his blog discusses the smug comments of Al Mohler and others implying that Christopher Hitchens now knows the truth about Christianity and is in hell.  Infidel 753 comments under Bruce’s post:

“It’s very odd that a change of heart at any point right up to the moment of death ‘counts’, but after death, when (according to the doctrine) you would have better information on which to base a decision, you can’t change your mind. It seems more like the rules of a game show than ‘divine’ justice.”

2.  I was talking with a Catholic friend of mine, and his observation was that a lot of Christian conservatives are actually not gloating about Christopher Hitchens being in hell, and he wonders if that could be due to Hitchens’ strong and vocal support for George W. Bush’s foreign policy, particularly the Iraq War.  That’s an intriguing question.  But I especially liked what my Catholic friend said about how many Catholics address death, heaven, and hell:

” Most Catholic bloggers, etc., have been very kind—-even affectionate—-and not only the right-wingers. Probably its because the CC teaches that no one on earth can ever know the state of another’s soul for certain. It’s not just the idea that there are tares among the wheat, mind you, but that most of what really happens between a soul and its God happens very deeply inside and may not even be truly annuciated by a very vocal person like Mr. Hitchens. There’s also a very old Catholic tradition that God may save a great many souls—-even all souls—-at the very instant of death (but not after). The idea is that death itself is such a cleansing ordeal that each person may be granted an immediate vision of the truth at the last moment—-and could possibly cry out for mercy and be saved, no matter what their past opinions. Not dogma, of course…but a germ of hope. Which is what I would allow on the subject of Mr. Hitchen’s current state.”

That gives me comfort.  I myself rant quite a bit against religion, and there are plenty of times when I don’t know what I believe.  But I do feel a need for God’s love and mercy.

My friend sent me some links.  I have not read all of them yet, but they’re here for me and for you.  The first one actually says that Hitchens challenged the Bush Administration on the Iraq War, so I’m not sure how to characterize him.  “Contrarian” is probably the best I can do!  (UPDATE: See John Hobbins’ post here about the reasons for some of Hitchens’ beliefs about Iraq.)

http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/Christopher-Hitchens–R-I-P–6694
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/2011/05/10/hitchens-singular-voice/
http://witness2christ.blogspot.com/2011/12/final-days-of-christopher-hitchens.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-rip.html

David Marshall: “How Has Jesus Changed the World?”

For my write-up today on David Marshall’s Jesus and the Religions of Man, I’ll blog about Chapter 7, “How Has Jesus Changed the World?”  I have two items:

1.  On page 137, Marshall quotes Valieriu Gafencu, who narrates:

“My father was deported from Bessarabia by the Russians.  We never had enough to eat.  I was beaten in school, then put in jail for running away and joining the Iron Guard.  I’d never met a single good, truthful, loving person.  I said to myself, ‘It’s just a legend about Christ.  There isn’t anyone in the world like that today and I don’t believe there ever was.’  But when I’d been in prison a few months I had to say that I was wrong.  I met sick men who gave away their last crust.  I shared a cell with a bishop who had such goodness that you felt the touch of his robe would heal.”

This is a powerful quote.  I think that non-Christians, too, can do good deeds, as Marshall acknowledges.  A lot of that may be rooted in empathy.  If I know what it’s like to struggle financially, then I can empathize with others who struggle financially.  If I can envision how awful it would be for me not to have food to eat, then I can sympathize with those who are hungry and give them food or money so that they can eat.  But suppose I was in a Gulag, where it’s every man for himself?  In that case, I’d have a difficult time being generous, except perhaps to those I truly love (not people Christianity tells me to love).  Christian beliefs such as God’s love for me and an afterlife would play a significant role in whatever generosity I could muster.  To be honest, I don’t know if I have that kind of faith right now.

Overall, I have to admire the Christians Marshall discusses in this chapter, who sincerely care about others and make a firm stand for justice.  In my opinion, that’s basic Christianity, and it should be basic humanity.  That’s something that I’d like to recapture, wherever my faith is right now.

2.  On page 146, Marshall quotes a Signapore Chinese person who wrote the following to Newsweek Magazine:

“Your article emphasized the historical aspect of Christianity.  Living in an Asian culture, I would like to add another perspective.  Imagine a society where man is not made in the image of God and the dignity of the individual depends on his power and wealth.  Imagine truth belongs only to powerful and influential people.  Imagine a society where forgiveness is a weakness.  These are still the conditions in many countries.  What the United States and Europe have become are results of living out the basic doctrines of Christianity.  Don’t shrug up Christianity and elope with secularism.  It is your religion’s greatness that has been slowly influencing the world for better.”

I remember hearing Joseph Campbell praise Japan as a country that is not weighed down by the Christian doctrine of original sin.  Whether the impact of the doctrine of original sin is positive or negative, that is debated.  Many say that it’s been negative, for people should not have to see themselves as rotten.  Marshall, however, holds that it encourages us to see all people (ourselves included) as human beings of weakness rather than elevating ourselves above other people, as well as was a significant factor behind the American system of checks and balances, which is based on a distrust of human nature and a desire to prevent the corruption and concentration of power.  Joseph Campbell believed that a society that was not influenced by original sin was a good society, and I have read atheists appeal to Japan as an example of a country in which people can be good apart from Christianity.  I believe that their points deserve a fair hearing.  But the Signapore Chinese person raises another important consideration: Are there ways that Christianity is better than Asian culture?

I hope that I don’t offend anyone, here, and I apologize if I did.

Christopher Hitchens

I listened to a couple of Christopher Hitchens debates today.  One was Hitchens’ debate with William Lane Craig (see here), and the other was Hitchens’ debate with Dinesh D’Souza (see here).  I enjoyed Hitchens’ thoughtful meanderings about science and religion as well as his soothing British accent.  It would have been awesome had Hitchens debated N.T. Wright before his death!  Christopher Hitchens will definitely be missed.

Here are some good thoughts on the late Christopher Hitchens:

Douglas Wilson’s obituary for Hitchens in Christianity Today

Christian Peter Hitchens’ memorial to his brother

Blogger Carson Clark’s musings

The New York Times’ Obituary

James McGrath’s reflections and links