Home alone?

Is the universe teeming with life or are human beings home alone? There are solid scientific reasons that the latter may be the case. Two astronomers explain why in "Home Alone in the Universe." Science writer Fred Hereen used the same title later for his longer treatment.

Interview with a former atheist

In my sermon for Sept. 13, the introductory message of my science and religion series, I explained why an educated, reasonable and scientifically-literate man or woman can believe both the scientific explanations of the beginning of the universe and the teaching of Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." In it I mentioned the story of Antony Flew.

Probably few people here are familiar with the name of Antony Flew. A British philosopher, he is a retired Oxford professor, and was a leading academic champion of atheism for more than fifty years. (He was also the son of a Methodist minister!) In 2004, at age 81, he renounced his atheism and gave an interview to Christian scholar Gary Habermas, entitled, with Flew's approval, "Atheist Becomes Theist - Exclusive Interview with Former Atheist Antony Flew." In it he stated,

... that "the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries" and that "the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it".

Flew also affirmed that the "decisive" forms of argument in favor of God's existence "are the scientific" ones. Flew, however, professes no Christian faith, saying his idea of God is much like Aristotle's - a god who caused the universe but since then has had pretty much had nothing to do with it. Flew's type of belief in a deity is called theism.

Here is the text of the interview by Habermas of Flew. Flew was one of the most respected and leading voices of intellectual-academic atheism until 2004, so his explanation of his turn to belief in deity can't be readily dismissed.

Crash test clarity

This car crash test by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety hits (heh) a little close to home for me. The IIHS offset crashed a 2009 Chevy Malibu into a 1959 Chevy Bel Air. As the video shows, despite being made of heavy gage steel, the Bel Air folded up like tin foil. The impact would have killed its driver instantly, while the Malibu's driver would have suffered a slight knee injury.



Why does this hit close to home? Because I survived with practically no injury a 70 mph, one-car crash of my 2004 Malibu in Interstate 40 in December 2007.

Hard rain, a shallow left turn, I-40 West at Tenn. mile marker 171, near Dickson, 1:30 Saturday afternoon. I pretty quickly figured out that my control inputs were not doing any good. Looking through the windshield at other westbound traffic behind me was one clue. (Fortunately, the nearest traffic was 200 yards or so away.)

In one gestalt moment, I realize that I am wrecking at interstate speed and surely will not survive.

"Jesus, it's your automobile."

There were two or three high-speed revolutions on the road surface. All I heard was whizzing of the tires skidding across first the pavement and then the grass. The windshield went opaque from water and thrown mud. I hear two loud bangs and the car suddenly stops. I am surrounded by pine trees. I smell and see smoke. The car's on fire! Seat belt off, pull the door handle. Nothing happens. The door's jammed. I see shattered glass all over me and feel cold air against my face. The driver's side window is shattered. Even if the door worked, it wouldn't open more than two inches because of the trees. Great: I lived through the crash to burn to death.

But the smoke smells different than smoke from burning petroleum or rubber. It smells explosive. Then I see the deflated air bags and realize they are the smoke's source. Relax. I feel no pain. The front of the car is buckled upward. Nothing penetrated the passenger compartment, which did not deform.

I drive a 2005 Volvo S-60T now, a make whose safety is legendary. I tried to find another used Malibu but the prices were out of reach. It's a popular car for excellent reasons.

Doctor shortages and health-care price controls

Last September, Paul Howard reported in in City Journal of "a 2006 survey finding that as many as half of all physicians have either stopped accepting new Medicaid patients or limited the number they’ll see because reimbursements are so low."

And today Investor's Business Daily reports the results of a new survey of physicians: "45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul."

The reason for both these phenomena - one actual, one potential - is the direct result of price control.

The fundamental rule of economics is that someone is able to buy only if someone else is both able and willing to well. This is true no matter what kind of economic system is at work, from command-economy totalitarianism such as the old Soviet Union's or to a full free-market economy such as America's used to be.

However one might describe the economic system of American health care, "full free market" ain't it. Probably the best description of how we get medical care is that it is brokered to us: "Health care does not equal health insurance."

The costliness of health care rests largely on the fact that its provision became brokered long ago by insurance companies. We buy "coverage" from insurance companies instead of medical care from providers. The insurance company is intermediate between the consumer and the provider. Unlike say, stock brokerages, which have to compete with each other for consumers and so lower both costs and price, health insurance companies operate in monopolistic fashion. The competition between health-insurance companies is so low that there are no competitive pressures to reduce price, only internal costs. The result? Lower reimbursements to providers and higher premiums to consumers.

We have almost a doubling effect of price controls in play here. First, the government, command rations medical care by controlling the prices its insurance programs will pay, especially Medicaid but also Medicare. Then we have health-insurance companies effectively price controlling medical care because they often, if not usually, tell doctors that they won't pay more (or much more) than the Medicare rate. As Healthsymphony.com puts it, Medicare is such an important part of the health-care economy "because of the precedence set by its claims payment practices."

The inevitable result of price controls, no matter by what mechanism implemented, is shortage of the price-controlled good or service. That doesn't mean that the service is scarcer, that is, physically rarer. Medicaid's low payments schedules have not reduced the total number of doctors. It has produced a shortage of medical care available to patients by halving the number of doctors who will accept Medicaid payments.

The distinction between scarcity and shortage is crucial to think through reforming health care. Presently, we have shortages of care (not uniform shortages across the country or across all medical disciplines) because of:

• price controls by Medicare and Medicaid and
• second-level price controls by health-insurance companies that follows the precedence set by Medicare.

Shortages are phenomena of prices. When prices paid by consumers (and insurance programs are the actual consumers in America, not you and me) are not synchronized with costs of providers, then you get things like a shortage of Medicaid-providing doctors even though there is no scarcity of doctors.

Well, there may be no supply-scarcity doctors who could treat Medicaid patients but that doesn't mean that there's not an overall scarcity of doctors. The NYT's John Tierney reports,

The A.M.A. may be one of the most trusted voices by the public in the health-care debate, but some economists argue that it helps perpetuates one of the largest problems with the American system: a cartel that limits the number of doctors. Mark J. Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, argues that “we would probably go a long way to solving our ‘health care crisis’” if the “medical cartel” hadn’t prevented medical schools from expanding to meet students’ demands for more places. ... whereas medical schools shrunk instead. As a result, their rejection rates rose, frustrating students who wanted to be doctors. The result was fewer doctors to care for the growing population... .

Ms. [Shikha] Dalmia, a senior analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation, says “that the net effect of A.M.A.-type restrictions hasn’t been to make better quality doctors available to more people, but to reduce existing options, especially in rural and other under-served areas.” She concludes: 

Obama and his fellow Democrats blame the current health care mess on the free market. But a free market can’t exist when a cartel with the ear of the government is allowed to control a key input for its own self-aggrandizement. If the president is serious about lowering health care costs instead of advancing an ideologically driven government takeover of the industry, he should be doing everything in his power to disband it–not cozy up to it.

The link to Ms. Dalmi's article is here.

So on the one hand we have price controls mandated by the government. Price controls always create shortages even if there is no actual scarcity of supply. But on the other hand we have an actual supply scarcity of medical-care providers (see Ms. Dalmia's article for more). 

What is the effect? MSNBC tells it straight:

As Massachusetts' experience shows, extending health care to 50 million uninsured Americans will only further stress the system and could force many of those newly insured back into costly emergency rooms for routine care if they can't find a primary care doctor, health care observers said.

Massachusetts, home of the nation's most ambitious health care law, has seen the need for primary care doctors shoot up with the addition of 428,000 people to the ranks of the insured under a 2006 law that mandates health care for nearly all residents.

To keep up with the demand for primary care doctors, the country will need to add another 40,000 to the existing 100,000 doctors over the next decade or face a soaring backlog, according to Dr. Ted Epperly, president of the Kansas-based American Academy of Family Physicians.

"It's like giving everyone free bus passes, but there are only two buses," he said.

The need for more primary care doctors comes as the country's shortage of all doctors is expected to worsen, according to a study by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which found the rate of first-year enrollees in U.S. medical schools has declined steadily since 1980.

If current patterns persist, the study shows the country will have about 159,000 fewer doctors than it needs by 2025.

That last prediction should have read, "the country will have about 159,000 fewer doctors than it needs by 2025 unless adjustments are made to the way that doctors are paid." The presumed supply scarcity of physicians does not have to occur. It is not inevitable.

But that's not all - we also have a supply scarcity of private health-insurance companies, even though there are more than 1,000 such companies operating in the country today. The reason is that health-insurance companies are restricted from operating across state lines. So there is a supply scarcity of insurance put into effect by law. 

The upshot of this hodgepodge is:

• patients are not the real medical-care consumers, insurance companies are.
• market corrections relative to supply, demand, price and costs simply do not occur. Instead, we have rationing by government price mandates, amplified by private insurors.
• Non-competition by insurance companies for premium-paying patients means that patients are basically  caught in monopoly markets and have no recourse to rising premiums except to pay them or reduce coverage.
• Supply scarcity means that doctors don't compete, either. Instead patients have reduced choices of doctors except in a small number of locations. The number one question patients have to ask before selecting a doctor is neither how good the doctor is nor what are his prices, but whether s/he accepts the patient's insurance plan.
• Supply scarcity also means that patients pay non-financial prices for medical care. Stories are legion of lengthy waiting times in doctors' offices for scheduled appointments and long waiting time to get an appointment in the first place. (For some reason, though, I rarely have waited more than 15 minutes past my appointment time to see my own doctor. Seems to be a very competently-run office.)

So, a thought experiment - suppose these things all happened reasonably close together (ain't gonna happen, that's why it's a thought experiment rather than a proposal):

1. Insurance companies could compete across state lines. Remember what Karl Marx (no friend of free-market capitalism he) said, that when greater competition becomes possible, it quickly becomes necessary.
2. Medicare lifted payment limits to doctors, but with these provisions: First, doctors must post in their offices their price schedules for the medical services they provide. Second, patient co-pays cannot be waived by the doctors.

I am not an economist, but my understanding of the dismal science makes me conclude that the first option would result in greater coverage choices of insurance by consumers at lower costs. The second would buttress patients, not insurance companies, as consumers and result in a leveling of price, demand and costs. Doctors would have to answer first to patients for prices rather than simply accept whatever payment schedule the insurance companies laid down. This would be even stronger if medical savings accounts programs were expanded so that all Americans could take advantage of them.

As for the supply of medical-care providers (who might not necessarily be actual M.D.s) I think that these two influences would cause the supply to be increased.

Update: See also, "Understanding the Causes of Health care Inflation."

Why God must exist

Many years ago I was on an online religion forum (so long ago that the Internet really wasn't yet there) where a self-described atheist said that he would believe in God if only some evidence existed.

I replied, "Since the universe already exists, you either have to accept the universe itself as evidence or admit you are asking for evidence greater than the universe."

Yesterday during my message at worship service, my topic was whether science has relegated God to the status of an unnecessary hypothesis in matters of cosmology - the study of the universe and how it came to be. You can listen to a two-part podcast of the message by clicking here.

The question was this: Can an educated, scientifically-literate person agree with the Bible's proposition that, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth?"

In classical terms, my conclusion is based on the "cosmological theory" of God's existence - that the universe, having come into being (having been created, in other words) must have had a cause. And it is entirely rational to call that cause the creator of the universe, for which a very good name is God.

Christians and Jews were not the only ones to come to this conclusion. Aristotle argued at length for the very same reasons. He called the universe's originator the "Unmoved Mover." Aristotle's reasoning was picked up by Aquinas and by Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period. Maimonides offered several arguments for God's existence, all of them some variation of a cosmological argument.

This argument is very powerfully buttressed by the discoveries and conclusions of modern-day astrophysics, as I explained in my message of Sunday.

Another argument in favor of God's existence is called the ontological argument. This argument attempts to prove God's reality basically by arguing that the term, "God," is nonsensical unless it has an existing referent rather than an imaginary one. Probably the most famous proponent of the ontological argument is Anselm of Canterbury, 1033-1109. Ontological arguments

proceed from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world — e.g., from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments from nothing but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion that God exists. In his Proslogion, St. Anselm claims to derive the existence of God from the concept of a being than which no greater can be conceived. St. Anselm reasoned that, if such a being fails to exist, then a greater being — namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists — can be conceived. But this would be absurd: nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. So a being than which no greater can be conceived — i.e., God — exists.

(Anselm's contemprary, Guanilo, argued in reply that Anselm's argument was absurd. As Anselm had cited the Psalm 14, "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God," Guanilo snarkily titled his essay, "Reply on Behalf of the Fool," but though it was clever, it did not actually address Anselm's argument since Guanilo apparently misunderstood what Anselm was getting at.)

In the twentieth century, Charles Hartshorne presented the ontological argument this way:

1) God can be analytically conceived without contradiction.

2) Therefore God is not impossible.

3) By definition God cannot be contingent.

4) Therefore God is either necessary or impossible.

5) God is not impossible (from 2) therefore, God is necessary.

Now, in this argument, "necessary" does not mean "required." A necessary entity's's existence does not depend on something else. "Contingent" means that the entity's existence depends on the prior existence of something else. In the ontological argument, God's existence is not dependent on any other thing. As Anselm pointed out, if there is an entity, however powerful, whose existence is contingent on something else, we would definitionally say that entity is not God. It would fail to be that "than which no greater can be conceived."

Non-contingency is one of the key points in the very idea of God. Over the centuries, many philosophers have tried to knock down the ontological argument, but, as atheist Bertrand Russell observed, it is much easier to say that ontological arguments are not valid than it is to explain why.

We reason that a non-contingent entity is possible. But we observe that contingent entities actually exist. The contingency of the things we encounter in everyday life is empirically self evident. In my undergraduate days, one of my philosophy professors observed that the cosmological argument and the ontological argument together made an extremely powerful case for the existence of God.

William Lane Craig recently put the cosmological argument this way, which I am paraphrasing. Suppose you are walking through the woods and come upon a perfectly spherical, transparent ball a couple of feet in diameter. You would not decide the ball was a necessary entity - that it existed without dependence on any other entity. You would immediately think it is a contingent entity, that its existence and location did indeed depend upon something else. "Who made it? How did it get here?" are entirely reasonable questions because it would be impossible to declare, with any sort of intelligence, that the ball simply popped into being in and of its own. No one would or could claim that the ball created itself. And, says Craig, if you expand the ball so that it is the size of the universe, the problem does not change.

So why are we so willing to assume that the universe itself simply "big banged" itself into existence when we deny that anything else does so? And if the universe simply appeared, just popped into being, why do other such appearances not happen routinely? Why, for example, don't spherical balls (or whatever) just pop up in my front yard or yours from time to time? But they don't.

In fact, the entire universe itself consists only of contingent events that bring forth only contingent entities. But somehow, we are nonetheless willing to say that the universe is necessary, that it exists independently of other another entity. I believe that it is neither intellectually coherent not congruent with empirical science to think that the universe, which consists solely of contingent entities and contingent events, is even so somehow itself necessary rather than contingent. No, the universe itself and entire must be seen as empirically contingent; its existence depends on another entity.

Since it is possible for God to exist as a necessary being, as explained above, the existence of the contingent universe means that God is also required. Therefore, God exists. However, I must side with Maimonides that arriving at this conclusion shows only that a creator exists, which we call God, but it tells us nothing about the nature of that God. For that more is required, which will be later.

A podcast of William Lane Craig's presentation, followed by two attempted rebuttals, is here, recorded at a formal philosophy conference.

Can we really believe in Hell?

Hell is such a grim topic that an icebreaker is called for. So let’s loosen up a little before we do a swan dive into the lake of eternal fire.

What is the difference between heaven and hell?

In heaven, the lovers are Italian, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the police are English, the administrators are Swiss. In hell, the lovers are Swiss, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the police are German, and the administrators are Italian.

Because of the resurrection of Jesus, Christians know that death is not the end of their existence. At some point, God will bring creation to its final fulfillment and, just as Christ was raised from the dead, human beings will be resurrected into eternity. Heaven is used to describe eternal life in the actual presence of God, while hell is used to describe eternal life apart from God’s presence. Hell was described by Jesus as the final destiny of Satan and his cohort after the final triumph of Christ over evil, as well as the place where unsaved souls spend an eternal sentence of punishment for their sin.

By asking, “Can we really believe in hell?” I mean this: There are numerous explicit references to Hell in the Scriptures. Should we take them seriously? If so, how may we understand them? What does the Bible mean by Hell, anyway? Should we include hell within the umbrella of our Christian faith?

For some persons this is a non-issue. Some persons consider the whole question cut and dried: those who believe in Christ enjoy eternal life with God, and those who don’t believe are adjudged into Hell. But many others of true Christian faith have real difficulty with Hell, myself included.

The problem is this: God is supremely good and supremely powerful. According to First Timothy 2:3-4, God wants everyone to be saved. And God alone is savior. Through Isaiah God said, “. . . for I am God, and there is no other. I . . . am the Lord, and apart from me there is no savior” (Is. 45.22; 43.11).

These things being true, there would appear to be nothing to prevent God from simply exercising his divine power to bring everyone into heaven whether they are already “saved” or not. So the paradox is this: how can we reconcile an eternal hell with God’s power and God’s desire that all be saved?

A usual answer has been to point out that God is totally good, totally pure and totally just. Thus, God’s inherent goodness and purity do not allow unredeemed sinners in his presence, and God’s justice requires that a penalty be paid for sin. However, Jesus’ ministered to the worst sinners of his day, proving that divine goodness does quite well in their presence. Jesus’ teachings reflect that God’s justice is not the tit-for-tat human kind, but a supremely forgiving justice in which we actually do not get what we deserve. Furthermore, an eternal sentence of punishment for a mere seventy to eighty years or so of sin is not justice, it is mindless torture.

We know that God is always at work in the affairs of human beings to bring us into fellowship with God to the greatest degree possible. God’s grace is the only source of salvation.  Grace is a gift. We cannot earn it, nor does God coerce us. We have to accept it. Randy Maddox, past president of the Wesley Theological Society, put it this way: “Without God’s grace, we cannot be saved; unless we respond, we won’t be saved.” Sadly, experience shows that some persons resist this gift of grace and either defy God or deny that God even exists, right up to the day they die. What becomes of them, then?

God does not stop being God simply because we die. If God loves us in this life, God certainly loves us in the next. If God wills to save in this life, he certainly wills it in the next. The hard question is not whether God’s will to save disappears after we die. The hard questions are:

• Why would anyone be more “savable” after death than now?

• Why would God’s grace be more likely to penetrate our resistance to it after we die than now?

• Why would someone be more receptive to God after death than before?

The case for universal salvation presupposes that either human nature or God's nature, or both, are radically different on the other side of human mortality. Persons either become so enlightened in the afterlife that no matter how corrupted by sin they were in life, they nonetheless accept the full grace of God that they had always rejected before – or God is for some reason able to act more powerfully upon us after we depart this life than while we are still living. I can find no biblical basis for either position. In fact, we would have to ask a couple more questions: Why would dying makes us smarter? Why would dying give us better judgement? It can’t. The Bible clearly teaches that death is destructive, not creative.

The Bible treats physical death as a gateway event. The book of Hebrews teaches that we don’t get a “do-over” in life. We get one life, one death, and after that, the judgment, followed by eternity.

Is it possible that dying has a “fixing” effect on our eternal destiny? Here’s an analogy. I once learned how to develop photographic negatives and make prints therefrom. It’s not difficult, although with today's digital cameras it's a vanishing art. Once the negatives have been developed, you make a print by placing a negative frame in a vertical projector. You focus the image on the bottom plate and turn off the lights. Then you place a sheet of photo paper on the bottom plate and expose the paper for a calculated time. Then you immerse the paper a chemical solution that brings the image forth. Finally, you place the paper in another chemical solution known as the “fixer.” The fixer sets the image permanently.

I wonder whether while we live we are “developing,” but death “fixes” us where we are, as far as salvation goes. Even if God’s will to save continues after we die, perhaps it is more difficult, not less, for us to be saved then than now – not because God is less powerful, but because we are less responsive. Freshly poured concrete can be molded, but hardened concrete cannot. It may be that death “hardens” us so that we cannot respond to God’s saving grace.

If God’s salvation is coercive, then this wouldn’t matter. But the Scriptures tell us that God saves from love. Love’s nature is invitation, not compulsion. Jesus called people to follow him, but forced no one. So I am brought to confront Hell as a real possibility. What, then, is Hell?

At one level, we can understand hell as a useful idea. The concept of hell helps us to understand that there is a moral order to creation. The ideas of hell and heaven reinforce human understanding of justice, for if evil is finally destroyed, or at least separated from God’s presence, we can see that what we do in this life has ultimate meaning. Human actions have cosmic significance, and our struggles for justice, mercy and righteousness have divine sanction. Asbury Seminary professor Jerry Walls wrote,

The doctrines of heaven and hell are the supreme articulation of the claim that we can neither evade responsibility for our actions nor the motives behind them. They represent the epitome of the notion that we never serve our ultimate self-interest by doing what is immoral, just as we always serve our ultimate self-interest by our steadfast commitment to do what is right.

When the Bible speaks of hell (or heaven), it uses highly symbolic speech. The theologically conservative Nelson’s Bible Dictionary says,

Because of the symbolic nature of the language, some people question whether hell consists of actual fire. The reality is greater than the symbol. The Bible exhausts human language in describing heaven and hell. The former is more glorious, and the latter more terrible, than language can express. 

So while the Bible does describe hell as a place of fire and burning, we need not take it literally to take it seriously. The New Testament word translated as hell is “Gehenna,” which was a real place outside Jerusalem where pagan Canaanites had once burned their children in sacrifice to their god Molech.

In Jesus’ day Gehenna was the depository of all the filth and garbage of Jerusalem, “including the dead bodies of animals and executed criminals. To dispose of all this, fires burned constantly. Maggots worked in the filth. When the wind blew from that direction over the city, its awfulness was quite evident. At night wild dogs howled and gnashed their teeth as they fought over the garbage.

“Jesus used this awful scene as a symbol of hell. In effect he said, ‘Do you want to know what hell is like? Look at the valley of Gehenna’” (Nelson’s). So hell may be thought of a “cosmic garbage dump,” the exact antithesis of heaven.

I have come to understand hell not as a place, but as a state of ongoing rejection of God. C. S. Lewis described hell as the “skid row” of creation, where souls have become so intoxicated by sin that they no longer even try to break the chains that bind them there. Their dilemma is that they are captive there because they choose to be. They would rather have a delusion of freedom than salvation. Their delusion, wrote Lewis, is that if they glorified God, they would lose their personal identity, but their choice has really ruined their human greatness. Hell, Lewis said, is “the greatest monument to human freedom.”

The apostle Paul wrote of the self-imposition of godlessness in the first chapter of Romans:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 ... So they are without excuse; 21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools; ... they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator (1.18-22 excerpted). 

Hence, Pope John Paul II stood of solid Scriptural ground when he wrote that hell “is not a punishment imposed externally by God but a development of premises already set by people in this life. The very dimension of unhappiness which this obscure condition brings can in a certain way be sensed in the light of some of the terrible experiences we have suffered which, as is commonly said, make life ‘hell.’” Hell “is the ultimate consequence of sin itself, which turns against the person who committed it. It is the state of those who definitively reject” God’s mercy.

The closest analogy to hell I can think of is that of addiction. There was a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Latisha Lewis in the news who confessed that she murdered ninety-year-old Ella Gilbert, whom she did not know, to steal money to buy drugs. Addiction can become so powerful that it overwhelms the faculty of reason and distorts our will beyond self-control. Latisha Lewis’s tragedy is that she became an addict by her own free will. The first hit of narcotics she ever took was her choice.

So I think of hell as a sinner’s crack house, a state of being that is hopelessly beyond self help. It is a perversion of the will so strong that God is not even hoped for, much less sought. Salvation may be technically possible because God’s grace is still offered, but effectively impossible, because it is not even recognized. "The gates of hell," wrote C. S. Lewis, "are locked only on the inside."

This kind of hell is a photographic negative of heaven – isolation rather than fellowship, apathy rather than love, loneliness rather than caring, conflict rather than community, desolation rather than richness. The torment of hell is not chiefly that these things are unbearable (even though they are); the worst torment is that even if hell’s addicts want to escape, they will not or cannot accept God’s grace to do so. Their torment springs from their own self-centered incapability to let God in, and all that results from it.

Hell is thus not a sentence of God imposed on sinner, because God desires all to be saved. Hell is God’s recognition that he has been rejected. Even though God’s grace continues to be offered without ceasing, its acceptance becomes evermore unlikely as the addiction to godlessness becomes evermore concrete.

If this theology of hell works for you as it does for me, then there are still steps to take. One is that the prospect of eternal punishment need not figure prominently in the Gospel of love. The center of the Gospel is not that God wrathfully seeks to condemn all who fail to meet narrowly defined criteria. God is love and desires with great liberality all to be saved, even to the extent that in all eternity, God never gives up seeking out his children. But it avoids what Methodist Professor David Watson admitted is the pitfall of universal salvation, that evangelism is really a pointless exercise if everyone winds up in heaven, anyway. On the contrary, the reality of hell makes a decision for Christ in this life vitally important. “Who is Christ?” becomes not merely one important question among others, it becomes the central question of human affairs. Evangelism is the crucial mission of the church.

This understanding also places a great burden upon us if we are to love God in return for the love God has given us. David Watson wrote,

When even a cursory thought is given to the countless millions in the world who are hungry, who are suffering, who languish under injustice, or are ravaged by war, the prospect of anyone celebrating personal salvation . . . borders on the obscene. There are still too many of Christ’s little ones who are hungry, too many who lack clothes, too many who are sick or in prison. There are too many empty places [at God’s banquet table]. The appropriate attitude for guests who have already arrived is to nibble on the appetizers and anticipate the feast which is to come. To sit down and begin to eat would be unpardonable . . . especially since the host is out looking for the missing guests, and could certainly use some help. 

Jerry Walls wrote that God has both the ability and the desire to preserve and perfect his relationship with human beings. God created in us aspirations for divine fellowship. Being good, God does not leave those aspirations unsatisfied.

The doctrine of heaven is the claim that our deepest aspirations can be satisfied in a perfected relationship with God and other persons. However, a loving God does not force this relationship upon us; indeed, he cannot do so if we are truly free. So we can, if we prefer, destroy our own happiness by rejecting the only true means to that happiness.

“And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done.”

Is America a Christian nation?

Jeremy D. Boreing at Big Hollywood says yes.

Life after death - or life again after death?

"What happens when we die?" is the central question of most religions. Certainly it is the central focus of the New Testament, for it is on the answer to this question that everything else about Christian religion depends - ethics and morals, for example, the question of our duties and obligations in this life.

The reason for this is summarized by a verse from the book of Hebrews: "And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that comes judgment ..." (v. 9.7). Which is to say that each of us survives the death of our bodies in a personal sense and that we are the judged by a wholly righteous God for how we lived this physical life and what we did. The passages emphasizing this point are so numerous that I hardly feel compelled to point them out. Start with Matthew 25, for example.

It would be pretty hard to find a church man or woman - or child, for that matter - who does not know that the church teaches that death is not the end of existence for human beings. Do what we teach and what we believe accord with what the Bible teaches?

Death is an enemy of God, so powerful an enemy that Paul wrote death is "the last enemy [of God] to be destroyed." And this will not happen, says Paul, until after "every rule and every authority and power" that is an enemy of God has already been destroyed.

For about 2,000 years Christians have been waiting for Christ to "put all things under his feet" and vanquish injustice, conflict, estrangement and death. In the meantime, we are born and live and die. Because the first Christians expected Jesus to return very soon, they became distressed when some of them died before Jesus had done so. Apparently, these believers thought that they would be saved by Christ only if they were still alive when Jesus returned.

In response to this fear, Paul wrote (1 Thessalonians 4:13-17),

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. 15 For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, [1] that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

This is one of the passages some Christians use to support the idea of the Rapture, popularized by the recent "Left Behind" novels, but that topic is outside the scope of this post. On topic, here are some key things this passage points out:

1. Note the future tense of the passage: Paul is prophesying what will happen, not something that had happened or is already going on. Hence, the salvation of the dead is a future event.

2. Because Jesus died and was raised from the dead, we are enabled to look forward to the same grace, including persons who have died.

3. Those left alive at the eschaton (the return of Christ) have no advantage in salvation over those who have died. In fact, "the dead in Christ will rise first," noting again the future tense.

Clearly, we should take to heart that we should not worry whether those who die in Christian faith will be saved. Death of the physical body is no impediment to the saving grace of Christ. So, on the basis of this passage and its correlates in the New Testament, we are able to say with certainty that, as Paul later wrote, "For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8).

This really is the fundamental teaching upon which everything else is commentary.

And yet, the early Christians' question has not gone away. We do await the return of Christ, but in the meantime - and we've had a lot of meantime since Jesus' day - what is the status of the dead?

The earliest Christians were Jews in Judea and pagans outside Judea, plus some diaspora Jews living in Gentile cities such as Corinth, Greece. (The concerns about the status of the dead seems to have arisen from the converted Gentiles rather than the Jews.) Because Jesus was a Jew and the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus still considered themselves Jews, they would have instructed the Gentile converts of Jewish thought about the fate of the dead.

In that way, the Jewish Scriptures are not comforting about the grave. Here are some relevant passages.

Psalm 115:17 - The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence. (Hence, according to my close friend, Rabbi Daniel Jackson, we should avail ourselves of every opportunity to praise God in this life - while we still can! See for example Psalm 34.)

Ecclesiastes 9:5 - For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.

Psalm 39:13 - Look away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more!

Job 7:21 - Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.

Isaiah 40:7 - The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass.

Ecclesiastes 7:2 - It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.

There are many other examples. The main thrust of the Jewish Scriptures on this subject is that death is the dissolution of the body and the end of the joys and meaning of this life. From the earliest days, the souls of the dead were thought to be consigned to Sheol, "the pit," an abode of the dead in which they are the merest shadows of their former selves. Sheol was thought literally to be in the depths of the earth and was specifically a punishment place for the wicked: "The wicked shall return to Sheol, all the nations that forget God" (Psalm 9:17), even though there is a thread in the Old Testament that it was the destiny of all who die. However Sheol as envisioned was never presented as a place to look forward to. The Psalmist, for example, repetitively prayed for deliverance from Sheol, which is to say deliverance from death.

Though the Jewish Scriptures view death entirely negatively, they are also are enormously encouraging that being dead is not the final destiny of human beings. A consistent thread throughout the Old Testament is that the righteous will be exempted from death - more precisely, the permanence of death. In the same way that the psalmist prayed for deliverance from Sheol, he praised God for (prospectively) doing so.

Psalm 86:13 - For great is your steadfast love toward me; you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.

Psalm 16:10 - For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.

Again, there are many other passages in the Jewish Bible - which was the only Bible the first Christians had - that echo this hope of deliverance from permanent death. The Jews professed great hope that the grave was not their final fate (at least not of the righteous), though death itself was viewed with abhorrence. At some time in the future, God will deliver the righteous from the corruption of death and restore them to life even more filled with God's presence than ever before.

Over time, this belief developed into a doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Concurrently, a popular Jewish belief developed that the souls of the righteous dead awaited the day of resurrection in the "bosom of Abraham" while the souls of the unrighteous were consigned to a hot, dry place where they suffered from thirst and loneliness.

Jesus may have even believed this himself. In his parable of the wretched Lazarus and an unnamed rich man (Luke 16:19-31) the soul of Lazarus is located next to Abraham while the rich man's soul suffers from thirst and "agony in these flames." The Bosom of Abraham is not heaven, but a sort of halfway house for the righteous awaiting the resurrection.

By Jesus' day this was the majority, but not universal, belief among Jews. The Sadducees rejected this belief because it did not appear in the Books of Moses (Genesis through Deuteronomy). It was, however, firmly affirmed by the Pharisees, who were extremely influential among the Jews because of their studiousness of the Torah and devotion to faithful living as Jews under foreign occupation. Jesus, being sympathetic to the Pharisees even though often at odds with their practices, also affirmed the doctrine of resurrection (being its first practitioner, this is hardly surprising!).

Now we are ready to tackle the question, "What is the status of the dead until Christ returns?" On this question, the Church has responded in three major ways.

First: those who have died in Christ endure a Sheol-like place, without the punishment, until the eschaton, when Christ will raise them to new life. This is reflected in the Revelation of John, where the evangelist writes (6:9-11),

9 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; 10they cried out with a loud voice, ‘Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?’ 11They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow-servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed.

Revelation is, of course, an apocalyptic book, written in highly visionary language. It would be a stretch to claim that its visions and beliefs were typical across all Christians of the day. Even so, there is a a good indication of belief here that the dead are basically "warehoused" until the fulfillment of the eschaton.

This belief did not survive in the Western wing of the church long. When Emperor Constantine gained control of the entire Roman Empire in the early 300s,he made Christianity the empire's official religion. The number of church people rocketed, leading to the formation of what know now as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. (These churches already existed, of course, but not in the full bureaucratic splendor they had to adopt to deal with explosions of numbers in the fourth century.) And this notion of "warehoused" souls of the dead did not survive in the Roman Catholic Church after its transformation into a bureaucratic church.

However, in the Eastern church the doctrine did survive and continues to this day. In their thought, the souls of the dead simply await the day of resurrection. The souls of the saved await in a pleasant abode of light and the souls of the unsaved suffer in darkness. But salvation is not finally accomplished until the resurrection and judgment.

Second - the souls of the dead pass immediately into heaven, purgatory or hell.

The church before Constantine was necessarily concerned foremost with literal survival. The two worst persecutions it suffered were in the 250s and very early 300s. These were quite severe. While important doctrinal issues did arise and were dealt with before Constantine, the explosion of converts after 300 more firmly established the institutionalization of doctrine and practice.

In this light, the 4th-century church was faced with two predominant tasks. One, how shall the life of Christians be ordered according to Christian principles? Two, what shall be the authority of priests and bishops in doing so?

At the 4th century's inception, about 10 percent of the empire was Christian. At century's end, about 10 percent was not Christian. To deal with this explosion of adherents, and to teach them the basics of Christian faith, the church developed its systems of catechism and sacraments, not from scratch, though, since both already existed. But they became deeply entrenched as a way of ordering the lives of the legions of new converts. They enabled the church not to have to "reinvent the wheel" over and over to cope with the influx.

The sacramental system also established the church (meaning the Pope and the priesthood) as the gateway to salvation after death. Two sacraments in particular were key to that purpose, baptism and penance.

From the earliest days, and continuing until now, the Catholic Church has held that baptism remits the guilt of original sin. And baptism also remits the guilt of volitional sins committed up until the moment of baptism. But sins committed after baptism had to be remitted another way. That is done through the sacrament of penance.

Penance consists of confession to a priest and the faithful carrying out of deeds he prescribes to remit the sins confessed. The nature of these deeds is not the issue here; suffice it is to say that baptism followed by faithful practice of confession and penitential submission were seen to guarantee that one could die with all, or almost all, sins remitted.

Long, long before the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s, Catholics were taught that for those who died within the grace of Christ, mediated through the Church, there were one of two immediate destinies. First, if someone died with no sins left unremitted then that person's soul would fly directly to heaven. But heaven was exclusively for the sin free. The souls of those dying with some sins still unremitted went directly to purgatory where penance continued until all sins were worked off. (The only exit from purgatory led to heaven.) Not all sins can be worked off in purgatory. Based on 1 John 5.16-17, the souls of those who died either unbaptized or with unremitted "mortal" sins went directly to Hell, from which there is no exit or escape.

Protestants who adhere to this belief discard the notion of purgatory but affirm the ideas of immediate reward in heaven or punishment in Hell (although a large number of Protestants don't really believe anyone goes to Hell).

This teaching did not actually become official dogma of the Roman Catholic Church until the Catholic Counter-Reformation that began in the mid 1500s. Its pronouncement as dogma seems to have been impelled, at least in part, by Martin Luther's doctrine of "soul sleep."

Third - "Soul sleep." In the Eastern church's doctrine of a sort of afterlife waiting room, the souls of the dead are aware and in either pleasant or suffering circumstances, depending on their state of grace at death. And they know it.

In the doctrine of soul sleep, promulgated by Martin Luther and a feature of some Protestant denominations, the soul survives the death of the body but with no awareness. Think of its state as a sort of deep unconsciousness. It endures neither reward nor punishment, but simply awaits resurrection at the eschaton.

One step further than this is the idea that the human person consists of a fully integrated being of body and soul and that the soul dies along with the body. In this idea the person concerned is re-created at the resurrection by God.

"How are the dead raised up, and in what body do they come?"

Its seems clear to me from the New Testament that the apostles Paul and John did not even consider, much less affirm, the second of the above doctrines, that the souls of the dead go right away either to heaven (even with detour) or Hell. Both apostles were Jews and their apostolic calling did not change that identity as far as they were concerned. Although the concept of the soul going to heaven exists among Jews today (at least some), it's not clear that this was so 2,000 years ago or before. Heaven was seen as the place of God and his heavenly beings, not of mortals. John echoed this idea thus, "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13). In this understanding (and I am reluctant to argue with John!), mortals do not go to heaven. Instead, heaven comes to us. Hence, Revelation 21:1,

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

There were some exceptions. Paul, for example, wrote,

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)

And the prophet Elijah was taken directly to heaven.

And as they still went on and talked, behold, chariots of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them. And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven (2 Kings 2:11).

For both Paul and John, the destiny of the dead is to be raised up in the general resurrection, after which comes eternal life with God.

Paul observes in 1 Corinthians 15 that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." In the resurrection, we are not raised as the bodies we enjoy in this life. "The dead," Paul writes, "will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality."

So, "If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ... Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Paul is referring to Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [the risen Christ]." And so in Philippians Paul wrote that Christ "will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body."

While neither Paul nor another apostle actually denounce the idea that at death our souls go either to heaven, neither do they promote or affirm it. They do emphasize resurrection into eternal life, but this is always presented as a future event.

Since that is the actual hope of Christian faith, the status of the dead awaiting the resurrection seems seemed to be of no concern to the apostles. After all, "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's."

Good enough.

Postscript: What about Jesus' words to the thief on the cross, Luke 23:43? Here is the verse in its context:

39 One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." 42 Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." 43 He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (NRSV)

There are a couple of points here. First, the term, "Paradise" is extremely rare in the New Testament, appearing only here and two other places. One is the Pauline passage I quoted above and in Rev. 2.7, where Jesus gives permission to the faithful "to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God."

"Paradise" is used in other Greek literature, referring to a cultured park or on occasion an orchard. The word was probably borrowed from the Persians where it had the same meaning.

"Paradise" does not mean heaven. In its use of Jesus' day, Paradise would have meant something close to the Bosom of Abraham in the spiritual sense, a pleasant place where one awaited the final redemption of God. The Essenes, who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, described Paradise as a land across the sea where breezes were gentle and weather mild. (Think of Hawaii without the high costs or crowding.)

In any event, whatever Paradise meant 2,000 years ago, it did not mean the resurrection or the final fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. And we are clued into that by the thief's plea and Jesus' response.

The thief's supplication is not oriented on that same day, but to the future. He pleads to Jesus, "Remember me when you come in your kingdom." (Some translations say "into" rather than "in," but I think "in" is correct.) On the face of it, this plea makes no sense at all. Jesus is dying on the cross right next to the thief. If Jesus is merely a man, then the thief has lost his mind!

But if the thief understands that Jesus will survive crucifixion in some sense and return to establish his divine kingdom, then the question does make sense. And so the thief begs Jesus to remember him when that day comes. But clearly, the thief expects nothing on crucifixion day except death. In his plea, he is looking forward to the end of the age, the eschaton, when Jesus as Lord brings all unholy things into submission and the righteous are brought into eternal life.

And it is in this sense that Jesus answers him: "Truly I tell you today you will be with me in Paradise." In the Greek manuscript, there are no commas or any other punctuation. But English syntax demands them. So where to put the comma?

Consider: "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

Now compare to, "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise."

There is a difference in meaning, is there not? On the basis of what "Paradise" probably meant in that day, Jesus would have meant the former. An expanded way to phrase the answer would be, "Truly, I tell you: today we will both die and I will take you to Paradise where I will remember to redeem you when I come in my Kingdom's power." This also would be consonant with the meaning of Paradise in Rev. 2, where Paradise is the state of being from where the redeemed enjoy the fruit of the tree of life and then enter into eternity, this being highly poetic language, of course.

Paradise cannot have meant heaven because Jesus was clear in his own prophecies about his passion that he would "be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40) which is certainly not heaven. And on the first Easter Jesus told Mary Magdalene, "I have not yet returned to the Father."

However, the meaning of Paradise is, at bottom, deeply ambiguous and without exactitude. Jesus' answer to the thief simply assures him that he will be redeemed when Jesus comes in his Kingdom. (If Jesus had simply replied, "Okay," we would not be wondering what he meant.)

Like the thief, we still await that day.

Joining the Crackberry Legion

I broke down late last week and retired my Palm Treo 755P in favor of a Blackberry Tour, left. (I use Verizon.) It is an improvement over the long-in-the-tooth Palm, but for my purposes not really a huge improvement. A data plan is required with the Blackberry, of course, while it was not with the Palm. I did not have one before nor did I wish for one. Besides, the Tour is a 3G phone while the Palm was not. So the Palm was slow using the Internet during the very rare times I logged on.

I played with the touchscreen Blackberry Storm for some time in the store, but it seemed clunky to me, slow to respond to commands. The larger screen would have been nice (the Tour's is a little smaller than the Palm's) but the Tour seemed more usable.

I was much concerned about getting my data moved from the Palm to the Tour. The Verizon guy told me he could transfer my contacts using their SIM-card data transfer gizmo, but not the calendar, tasks or memos. However, according to the Blackberry web site, the desktop software included with the Tour had a "device switching" function that would transfer all of that, either from a Palm OS or a Windows Mobile OS (or, needless to say, from another Blackberry).

Blackberry lied. When got the phone I discovered that yes, there is such a selection on the Blackberry desktop menu, but there are two show stoppers.

First, it's in a foreign language (click image for larger view). I discovered that Blackberry's site has no number for tech support, referring you instead to your service provider. So I called Verizon, where the collective response from the several different persons I was bounced to was, "Huh?"

Second, a Google search of the problem (not translating, but the data transfer) did result in useful info that finally solved the problem. I learned that the device switcher won't work with Palm desktops newer than version 4.X while mine was v. 6.7. So, said the Blackberry forum I was reading, sync the Palm with the existing desktop, uninstall the desktop and install v. 4.X. Then re-sync the Palm device with the older version of the desktop, then run Blackberry's device switch.

Well, not quite. The last step did not work since the Blackberry device switch function was still (of course) in Sanskrit or whatever and besides, it still wouldn't import when I guessed which buttons to click.

There was, however, salvation of the transfer. The Blackberry desktop's sync function will sync with Yahoo's calendar, contacts and tasks. And Yahoo will sync with Palm 4.X (though not with later versions). So I synced between the Palm desktop and Yahoo, then between the Tour and Yahoo. Voilá, my Tour had all my data.

Well, not quite. The Palm's contacts, calendar and tasks came through cleanly, but not the memos. It seems Yahoo has no memo function. It does have a notepad function, but the Tour has no equivalent and nothing on the Yahoo notepad will sync over to the Blackberry. I have a lot of memos on the Palm and so far have been stymied as to how to transfer them over.

The other concern was my password safe. On the Palm I used a free, and excellent, Palm program called YAPS (Yet Another Password Safe). This little jewel will export all its data into a Palm memo and will import from the same. You can copy and paste this memo from the Palm desktop into Windows notepad and with a little manual tweaking convert it into a CSV file.

Alas, this does you no good in importing it into Blackberry's Password Safe. It won't import a CSV or any other file. I had to enter all my password information manually into the Tour. I'm not complaining; I understand the imperative for security here, and limiting ways to access the data is a big part of that. 'Twas a pain, that's all.

The Tour is still too new to write a review. I haven't used it long enough. Overall it is certainly more capable than the Palm. The Palm is a touchscreen phone, although best touched with its included stylus rather than a finger, and the Tour uses the (in)famous Blackberry trackball centered at screen's bottom. This means I can operate the Tour one-handed (well, I have to) which does work better than one-handed operation of the Palm, which is possible but clunkier than on the Blackberry.

I considered selling my Palm on eBay but the 755P's listed there are not selling for much. So I am keeping it as a backup phone just in case. Since I can always re-sync it with Yahoo, should I require its use again I'll have all my data at hand.

What I really wanted, of course, was the Palm Pre, but it's available only on Sprint. Checking Sprint's coverage map for my area and my business-related travel areas showed that once you get off the interstate, you're pretty much out of Sprint's calling area. Verizon is supposed to get a Pre or a Palm device like it some time next year, so I'll take a look at it then.

How low can we go?

David Warren writes that Western civilization can't get any lower:

The many symptoms of civilizational decay that lay partly concealed beneath the surface of society only recently came into full view, in the open pornography, the open nihilism, the despairing flippancy, visible throughout our contemporary public life. But the pond was long draining, and it is only now we see fish flopping in the mud.

Euthanasia is the final "life issue," the clincher for what the last pope called "the culture of death." Even when legalizing abortion, we agreed only to the slaughter of human beings we could not see. It was still possible to look away, to pretend we were not killing "real people," only "potential people." But when we embrace so-called "mercy killing," we embrace slaughter not only for the sick and old, but ultimately, the "option" of easy suicide for ourselves. It will be hard to go lower.

While I am entirely in agreement with David's position on euthanasia, I am not sure I agree that, "It will be hard to go lower." Euthanasia is not merely a symptom of hopelessness, as David shows earlier in his column. It is also the greatest act of societal narcissism. As others have written about the rise of narcissism in Western life, I'll not belabor it here.

But is euthanasia the lowest depravity? It is, to use David's metaphor, a big, flopping fish indeed, but not the biggest.

For, despite the moral emptiness of a euthanasia-accepting society, the society itself is still focused on life. Now, it is life only under "normal" conditions, not a life stricken by illness or dementia. And, dangerously, not a life that requires expensive medical care to maintain. It is a society that rejects less than optimum life (which is what it means to talk about "quality of life") and wishes simply to shove aside those not enjoying it (whatever it is, which no one define).

Nonetheless, it is not a society that has actually embraced death and glorifies death. Such societies have existed. Rome was one, a very harsh culture in which mercy was a vice, not a virtue, and in which the gruesome deaths of men and women were public spectacles and sports. Not only gladiator combats, of course, but plain execution by means intended to inflict suffering before death. They included burning alive, being attacked by ravenous beasts and cruelest death of all, crucifixion, which was always a public spectacle precisely because it was (and is) the worst way to die devised by man.

David Warren points out the inverse relationship between religion and suicide rates. He cites the work of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. "He was the 20th-century Czech thinker and statesman whose 1881 book, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization, laid the foundation for much later social thought."

It was Masaryk's thesis that suicide rates, already at historical highs, and climbing, in the more industrially advanced parts of Europe by the 1880s, would continue to rise through the decades ahead, with decreasing religiosity and increasing modernization. He predicted that this trend would spread to regions yet untouched, as the symptoms of modernity reached them.

This was not so much a question of religious denomination, as of religious practice. There would be a rough, inverse correlation between church attendance and the suicide rate. Later statistical studies have borne this out, and Masaryk thus stands among the few sociologists whose work retains any empirical value.

Let it be noted that Masaryk was embedded in Christian Europe. As Christian devotion has declined, the "the real self-killer [which] is the absence of hope for the future" has risen, followed by a rise in suicide rates.

There is a specificity to Christian faith - and we must include Christianity's parent, Judaism - that assigns transcendent value to this life even while it remains deeply hopeful in the promise of life to come. God, said Jesus in Matthew's Gospel, is not God of the dead, but of the living. So while Christian faith is no guarantee of immunity from depression, it does immunize against despair and hopelessness (as David briefly discusses).

Is there today another culture that glorifies death and hence enhances enhances hopelessness? Alas, there is, and the fish flopping therefrom are bigger than the ones of the West. It is the lands of the Islamic ummah.



Islam formally infuses little to no value in this life and in this world. Allah is remote and unconnected to this world. Allah has given the Quran to humankind through Mohammed (so goes the story) but Allah is himself not present in human life in any way. There is no chance in Islamic thought that Allah could possibly be embodied among us - this Christian idea is very specifically rejected in the Quran - and there is no concept whatever of the Holy Spirit, or, as the Jewish Scriptures put it, the Presence of the Lord.

Hence, from Islam's formative days, Muslims have affirmed that they love death rather than life:

Another chapter from early Islamic history — serving as a lesson for today's Muslims at war against the West — is the concept of the love of death. This originated at the Battle of Qadisiyya in the year 636, when the commander of the Muslim forces, Khalid ibn Al-Walid, sent an emissary with a message from Caliph Abu Bakr to the Persian commander, Khosru. The message stated: "You [Khosru and his people] should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don't, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life." This account is recited in today's Muslim sermons, newspapers, and textbooks. ...

Leading Muslim clerics often refer to the love of death. Chief Palestinian Authority cleric Mufti Sheikh Ikrimeh Sabri stated, "We tell them, in as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom." Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qassem in Al-Madina added: "The Jews preached permissiveness and corruption, as they hid behind false slogans like freedom and equality, humanism and brotherhood... They are cowards in battle... they flee from death and fear fighting... They love life."

Former head of the Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee Sheikh Atiyyah Saqr was asked the following question in an online chat room on March 22, 2004: "What, according to the Koran, are the Jews' main characteristics and qualities?" He explained one of their worst traits: "Cowardice and love for this worldly life are undisputable traits [of the Jews]." Hezbollah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah revealed in an interview after the recent prisoner swap between Israel and his group: "We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death."

An Islamist terrorist taking the nom de guerre of Marwan Abu Ubeida al-Jarrah was quoted by Time magazine thus:

"It doesn't matter whether people know what I did," he says. "The only person who matters is Allah and the only question he will ask me is 'How many infidels did you kill?'"

Is it any wonder then, that al Qaeda and other Islamists embrace suicidism and "martydom" as glorifications? The depravity of Islamism would take more than a single book could document. (Contrast this terrorist's idea of what Allah will ask him with this Christian teaching.)

Apollo 11 took Communion to the moon

Who knew?

Buzz Aldrin had with him the Reserved Sacrament. He radioed: “Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, whoever or wherever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way.”

Later he wrote: “In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.’ I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute Deke Slayton had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly…Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”

OK- this is strange

Reuters: "Turkish TV gameshow looks to convert atheists."

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - What happens when you put a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk in a room with 10 atheists?

Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.

The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion -- Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

Turkish religious authorities are not enthusiastic. Although Turkey's government is formally secular, the vast majority of Turks are Muslims. The TV program may have trouble finding an imam to appear. But its producers are undeterred.

"We are giving the biggest prize in the world, the gift of belief in God," Kanal T chief executive Seyhan Soylu told Reuters.

"We don't approve of anyone being an atheist. God is great and it doesn't matter which religion you believe in. The important thing is to believe," Soylu said.

Now let's take a harder look at that last statement. I've heard it a lot, even here in America.

"It doesn't matter which religion you believe in, as long as you believe."

Really?

Imagine a parent saying to a child, "It doesn't matter what you eat for supper, as long as you eat something."

Child: "Okay, I'll take pizza and chocolate ice cream - forever."

But that wouldn't matter, would it, as long as the child is eating something?

Math teacher: "It doesn't matter what your answers are on the exam, as long as you write something."

Employer: "It doesn't how you spend your time on the job, as long as you show up."

Why are we so willing to dismiss religion with a wave of the hand - "anything I believe is okay" - but won't accept such a non-standard in any other arena of life?

I'm going to give an answer I know in advance will make some readers hackles rise. It's because to the vast majority of Americans today, their religion is a hobby rather than the ordering principle of their lives. Consider that this statement actually is acceptable: "It doesn't matter what your hobby is as long as you have one."

One man's hobby is golf, another's woodworking. One woman's hobby is gardening, another's crafts. No one thinks his/her hobby is better than another's, and they're right. Hobbies, in the long run, don't really matter. That's why we call them hobbies.

But rare indeed is the religion whose doctrines don't insist it doesn't matter in the long run - the very long run of eternity. So if someone treats one's religion no more importantly than a hobby, then he simply isn't taking his religion seriously.

To say that what we believe, religiously, doesn't matter as long as we believe something betrays, I think, a covert belief that death is the end of existence. If there is no life after death, then not only is one religion as good as another, so is atheism. Or, as the apostle Paul put it, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die'" (1 Cor. 15:32).

However, if one does take seriously the possibility that we survive the death of our bodies in some meaningful sense, then the choice of religion becomes centrally important. For the three great monotheistic religions all teach that right beliefs in this life are of eternal importance for the next. Consider the orienting claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:

Judaism: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), some translations thus: "... the Lord is our God, the Lord alone."

Christianity: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (Gospel of John 3:16).

Islam: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."

Now, one could, I suppose, maintain that all three are wrong and that eternal life, if it is to be gained at all, is achieved another way than taught by them. Yet the alternatives of world religions are not encouraging in that regard.

Buddhism, for example, teaches that when one dies one is immediately reborn as someone or something else until, eventually, final liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth is the attained by entering a state of Nirvana, the literal meaning of which is "to extinguish." Buddha himself made no claims about Nirvana other than that it was "indescribable" and "unutterable." Not much there to stake a hope on, I'd say.

As for Hinduism, its teachings on eternal life don't differ much from Buddhism's, they simply describe it differently and Hinduism does affirm the existence of deity - deities, in fact, since Hindus are generally willing to acknowledge the existence of any god you care to name because specific beliefs about God or gods is not considered essential. Like Buddhism, Hinduism seeks release from birth/rebirth until the Self is ultimately subsumed into universal identity "as a drop of rain merges with the sea."

Frankly, that doesn't float my boat, either. I want to be me in the afterlife - a better, perfected me, oh please, but still me. And I want you to be you, too.

Only Judaism, Christianity and Islam can hold out any hope for me in that regard. But they do not agree on how eternal life with God is to be achieved. Though Christianity is the child of Judaism, there are obviously some starkly defining differences, mainly the affirmation of the divine identity of Christ, but not only that. As for Islam, it formally claims that both Judaism and Christianity are corrupted religions resulting from revelations from Allah, but which were adulterated and changed by human sinfulness.

Each has, through history, excluded the others from validity as a way to life eternal. And yet, in that more than any other thing of life, it is most important to be right.

So how to choose, and on what basis? Well, this post is long enough, so I'll take that topic up another day.