dangerous liberty

I’d be nerdier if I hadn’t somehow developed social skills as a teenager.

Hat tip:Black Lace Mittens

Check John Ray’s A scripture blog, where he (an avowed athiest) discusses certain doctrines and dogmas and applies his reason and knowledge.

Right now, he’s discussing trinitarism, or the doctrine of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Ray maintains this is a pagan doctrine developed some years after the first church. He has some very thought provoking things to say, if one who believes in the Trinity dares. I’ve never really questioned this doctrine for myself and it is nice to have a critic with no obvious axe to grind.

I was raised to believe the trinitarian doctrine, but I have no particular allegiance to it and am open to, ah, strict originalism, if you will!

Ray’s posts on the nature of God and his relationship to the son of God and the apparent logical contradictions in the text have brought a few things to mind upon which I’d like his take.

First, I’m no scholar - I’ve read this and that and can think pretty clearly and there has been much I’ve read in the bible that contradicts what I’ve been taught by other christians. (for instance, the rapture and predestination).

If we posit God’s eternal nature, then we know all we need to know about predestination. Eternity, I believe, means ‘without time’. Not a long time, not forever, but NO TIME. For creatures whose entire existence is framed by time - by birth and death along its progression, in our language tenses, in and out of everything we experience - time. From an eternal perspective we can only surmise, there is no future, no past, no present.

CS Lewis put it best in The Screwtape Letters, (I cannot imagine Ray is unfamiliar with his works) “the present is full of eternal rays” and it is the present moment that we choose charity and grace toward others (among other virtues) or selfishness, etc (vices). There is then John the Baptist “The kingdom of God is at hand”. See also Mark 12:34 and Jesus said “the Kingdom of God is within you”, speaking to the Pharisees (luke 17.20).

But I digress.

My point above is that we must be cognizant of our limited perspective, if indeed we are dealing with an eternal God, especially so when attempting to dissect that presented by the prophets and apostles of old.

Regarding trinitarianism, what shall I make of the passages in Genesis where God refers “us”?

Gen 1.26: NKJV
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all[b] the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

What is meant by ‘our’ in this passage? I checked Biblegateway.com and looked at the other english version (RSV wasn’t there) - all said ‘our’.

This passage is immediately followed by references to God in the singular. What’s up with that?

I also wonder about the logical implications of our being made in God’s image and our awareness of three ‘parts’ of our being: spirit, flesh and soul. Or superego, id and ego, if you will. Here we have corrupted man (according to doctrine) with three ‘parts’ in being. We all know people who are dominated by the sensual, the intellectual or the spiritual. Indeed, we are a mix of the three as our intellects attempt to manage animal urges against spiritual mores.

So what of that? Would an uncorrupted man in the image of God detect these distinctions, or would they be balanced more seamlessly? Are we tripartite beings or is that idea untenable? It seems to be true according to my own inner life.

When I consider the implications of an eternal reality, it seems to me that it could be possible to have a Godhead which is God, but from our lowly perspectives can be seen as 3 different persons, while still being one person, one being, one entity.

Jesus was called ‘emmanuel’ which I’ve been led to believe means ‘God with us’ (if this is wrong I welcome correction), what of that?

For me, if I posit a being outside of time, it opens the door to understanding how scriptural references could not really mean what they appear to say, because of the time-perspective bias of the human writers of scripture.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. It’s coming to a public high school or middle school near you and it has been coming here for a couple of years now. What is “it”? It’s “Challenge Day” and if you feel your child’s school experience hasn’t been emotional enough to date, you’re going to be one very happy parent because the tears and snot quotient is about to rise precipitously. On the other hand, those of you who are privy to enough emotional trauma with your teenager had best gird your loins and, perhaps more importantly, hide your wallets. Challenge Day, in a nutshell, is meant to heal the wounds suffered by young adolescents who are victims of bullying in school, and ostensibly, to heal the bullies themselves who, after all, are just misunderstood. It does this by dividing kids up into groups and encouraging them to feel sorry for themselves.

Let’s talk a little bit about what “Challenge Day”, the organization, is. A cursory look at this program’s “Global Leadership Council” reveals some interesting characters. The site itself doesn’t tell you anything about them, but the Google search engine does. I’d love to tell you about all of them, but that would take up too much space, so I’ve selected just three. We have, for instance, Brenda Blasingame who is, among other things, an activist for bi-sexuals and bisexuality and whose book on the subject is entitled: “Power and Privilege Beyond the Invisible Fence” Debbie Ford’s ‘best-selling’ book is entitled: “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers“. Her mission is described as being “…to empower people to become the conscious designers of their lives and create the external circumstances that most clearly reflect their heart’s desires.” Good grief! Another member of the Global Leadership Council is Alanis Morrisett who, I trust, needs no introduction.

Here’s how Challenge Day describes its raison d’etre: “For millions of young people every day,” it intones, “violence and alienation has become deeply ingrained in his or her school experience.” I feel an almost unholy need to correct this poorly written sentence. It should read more like this: “For millions of young people every day, violence and alienation HAVE become deeply ingrained in THEIR school experienceS”. I’m not trying to be petty. I’m pointing out what sure as heck looks to me like an irony (although Alanis might disagree with me): that irony being that in the very first sentence on its homepage, the sentence that is meant to hit us between the eyes, we find such a poor example of grammar and syntax. You’d think they’d want to be very careful not to draw attention to what it looks like when people don’t write well…since, you know, they’re taking kids out of their classrooms to participate in this stuff. And just to make the irony (or whatever it is) a little bit more pronounced, hasn’t there been a good deal of hand-wringing around here regarding whether teachers can be expected to prepare our kids for the FCAT after all the unscheduled “hurricane days”? This program usually takes two full days. One for Challenge Day and another for Challenger Day. Have we got the time to spend on what amounts to sensitivity training from an organization that can’t manage to formulate a decent opening sentence on its own homepage?

And there are more problems with this business than just that it is time-consuming or that its message may be badly written or politically skewed. While Challenge Day, itself, is a not-for-profit organization, it has been run jointly, apparently, with a for-profit organization which calls itself “Resource Realizations”. RR is connected to what Michelle Malkin (April 19, 2002 “See Dick and Jane Weep”) refers to as “kiddie rehab” programs. She tells us that it has also been a defendant in several law-suits alleging claims of emotional abuse at its facilities. What seems to be the drill is that following Challenge Day and the emotional upheaval foisted on students, it is suggested that more (rather expensive) work may need to be done. At which point, Resource Realizations enters the picture.

As reported in the Seattle Times of April 10, 2002: “A letter from Resource Realizations founder David Gilcrease to the parents of Challenge Day participants said “the next step for your teen” is the company’s three-day, $295 Teen Discovery seminar. Brochures were provided for a May 3-5 seminar at the Ramada Inn on Northgate Way.”

“While Challenge Day is a critical first step, a one-day learning experience only goes so far,” Gilcrease wrote. “To create truly lasting transformation in their lives, most teens need more.”

I can’t tell you if the two organizations are still connected in any way, but I can tell you to keep an eagle eye out for people trying to get your kid into some pricey programs as a follow-up to Challenge Day. I can also tell you that our district has seen fit to support this program without a “by your leave”, or any attempt at all to inform parents as to its contents, or its rather sketchy past. Thus far, a few parents who’ve tried to inquire about it have met with a blank wall. Nobody, not the school principals, nobody at the school board, nor the teachers seems to be able (or willing) to give inquiring minds any sort of definitive idea what a child attending this program might expect to find.

All of this has been organized and paid for locally by a group called “Circle of Change”. I am assuming that there are “Circles of Change” being set up locally around the country in order to help promote this program in their districts. This would be worth looking into more deeply, as well. Although about half of the workshops will be held off-campus (at The Martin Luther King Center), the rest are being held on school campuses. The program wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t being set up via the public school system and endorsed by it. I get a very creepy feeling about this. It feels to me like a form of emotional blackmail being perpetrated on kids in the name of political correctness, and I don’t like it a bit. Worse than that, it seems to me to encourage a sense of victimhood. I’m put in mind of something I saw on the Simpsons not too long ago. Bart asks Homer: “Am I the only one who’s in terrible pain?” and Homer answers, “No, but you’re the only one who won’t shut up about it.” Kids having undergone this sort of program are likely never going to shut up about how they’ve “suffered” at the hands of bullies. I don’t know what bullied kids did before there was a Challenge Day…I guess they did as I did, sucked it up, and steered clear of the little thugs.

Look, I hate to seem like a Scrooge, especially as we approach the holiday season, but why is it that I don’t see anyone on the list of responsible people at Challenge Day who is likely to be promoting the values that *I* hold dear? What business has our school system got…a system designed to accommodate people with values of all sorts…trucking in an organization of this ilk to spend school time on what amounts to an encounter session? I’m sorry folks but that ain’t representative of what I consider to be important and I pay my taxes, too. Doesn’t what I want count? Since when is it a function of public education to indulge in sensitivity training or, as one student referered to it, “..a psycho cry-fest” ?

I highly recommend that parents investigate this further before allowing their children to become involved. I highly recommend, further, that the school district stick to academics and making sure that kids can pass the FCAT. I think our school board is skating on thin ice with this one, and needs to reign in the “good-for-you” social programming in favor of some “better-for-you” old-fashioned scholarship. And they’d best do it before their support for this kind of thing blows up in their faces.

Johann Hari - The strange, unexplored overlap between homosexuality and fascism

Just read it.