The Questioning Christian

The GOP Pledge to America: Abolishing "traffic laws"?

Give the GOP credit:  In offering the 2010 version of their 1994 Contract with America, dubbed the "Pledge to America," at least they're being clear about what they'd do if they regained control of Congress.  (I found a draft of the Pledge at Scribd and am working through its 21 pages.)   Some of the GOP proposals make sense; others, I'm not at all so sure about. 

The Pledge talks about cutting through job-killing government red tape. But if there's one thing we know about people of all stripes, it's that they can focus single-mindedly on the pursuit of what they want; they'd much prefer not to have to think about the possible side effects of their actions. (Economists call these side effects externalities.) That goes for two-year-olds, for tycoons, and for everyone in between.

Rodney Clapp put it well a couple of years ago in The Christian Century: "The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ..." (Emphasis added.)

It'd be wonderful if we didn't need traffic laws, and every driver could relentlessly put the pedal to the metal to get to her destination, oblivious to everything around her. But that would have been a bad idea even in the days of Model Ts and two-lane gravel roads; it'd be disastrous in this day of SUVs and high-speed interstate freeways (not to mention giant tractor-trailer truck rigs).

The "road" we share is both more crowded and more complex. It seems pretty silly to insist that the simple "traffic laws" of yesteryear are all we need.

Related posts:

• Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect
• Financial regulations can be like fire safety rules

Israeli ‘settlers’ torch Palestinian property in retaliation for being evicted by Israeli troops

When you and your friends and family are implacably convinced that you know God’s will beyond question, you can do some evil things:

On a hilltop, blankets, pots and broken chairs are strewn where the Israeli army tried to demolish an illegal Jewish settlement outpost. In the fields opposite, 70 olive trees are scorched and blackened after the settlers took revenge — not on the army, but on the local Palestinians.

It is a new and effective settler tactic known as the “price tag”: if the Government sends police or soldiers to dismantle an outpost that is being built, the settlers make the Palestinian population pay the price.

“It’s quite simple and smart but evil,” said Michael Sfard, a lawyer with the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “They attack Palestinian property, people, and blockade roads every time the Israeli security forces do something they don’t like” — such as demolish outposts.

Many settlers in the West Bank are religious hardliners who believe that they are fulfilling a biblical prophecy by taking over the land that they call Judaea and Samaria.

* * *

“It’s not a war, it’s our right,” he said, brushing aside the issue of what might happen to the Palestinians if his movement succeeds in settling the land.

“It’s not my problem, it’s not something I have to solve. This is a land that was promised by God, that’s all I know,” he added.

Mr Sfard said that there were anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred settlers using the violent tactic, which was proving to be effective.

“It’s slowing down the security forces and demanding much larger and heavier forces,” he said. “It’s such a big headache that many of the relevant authorities give up without trying.” The outposts are rebuilt quickly by determined settlers once the army leaves.

From James Hider, West Bank settlers use ‘price tag’ tactic to punish Palestinians, The Times [UK], Oct. 15, 2009 (bold-faced emphasis added.)

Tunnel vision is the source of so many of our troubles

David Broder writes that President Obama’s quest for rational, evidence-based public policies is likely to be derailed by the tunnel vision of people acting like heat-seeking missiles, pushing and shoving in their single-minded struggles to get what they want:

… [This highly rational, comprehensive approach fits uncomfortably with the Constitution, which apportions power among so many different players, most of whom are far more concerned with the particulars of policy than its overall coherence.

The energy bill that went into the House was a reasonably coherent set of trade-offs that would reduce carbon emissions and help the atmosphere. When it came out, it was a grab bag of subsidies and payoffs to various industries and groups. Now it is stymied by similar forces in the Senate.

Schambra's essay anticipated exactly what is happening on health care. Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient.

But now it is in the hands of legislators and lobbyists who care much less about the rationality of the system than they do about the way the bill will affect their particular part of it.

Everyone has a parochial agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, wants to be sure a new cancer treatment center in Nevada has favored status.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Of course, at an individual level this tunnel vision makes perfect sense. Harry Reid knows full well that his chances of reelection hinge more on his being able bring home the bacon than on whether he enacts policies good for the country as a whole.  (On a related note, see also this post about a mother whose tunnel vision enabled her to rescue her child from a polar bear.)

The proper response to sin is not excessive sorrow or self-loathing, but an effort to learn and do better

"My religion rains obligations, but it is notably free, except in some of its more stringent and sectarian versions, of the worst terrors of sin. The compassion is even in the etymology: in Hebrew, the arrow that misses its target 'sins' against it.[1] The proper response to imperfection is not despair. It is another arrow."

-–Leon Wieseltier, Washington Diarist: My Secret Life, The New Republic, June 3, 2009, p. 48 (emphasis and footnote added).

[1] DCT note:  The Hebrew word for ‘sin’ is het, to err or miss the mark; ditto the Greek hamartia [link]. Likewise, the Greek word usually translated as ‘repentance’ is metanoia, a change of mind and heart.

Muslim extremists’ narrative of grievance may be an evolutionary side effect of altruistic punishment

Islamic extremism is just one of countless movements that “create[] a collective identity by appealing to a set of common grievances and create[] a master narrative of suffering and oppression.” [1]   It’s possible that this tendency to frame the world in terms of a narrative of grievance is something of an evolutionary side effect of an otherwise-useful trait.

The trait:  Natural selection appears to have hard-wired us to seek to punish unfairness, even at a cost to ourselves, because doing so tends to promote group fitness.  This is often called altruistic punishment. 

The side-effect:  Consciously or not, movements that cast their sales pitches in terms of ‘the unfairness of it all’ are making a smart move, because it so often works.

(It’s not unlike sugary cereal manufacturers who discovered that they could increase sales by positioning their wares on the lower shelves, that is, at eye level for kids riding in their parents’ shopping carts.)

Our willingness to punish unfairness may partially explain why we can be so quick to buy into narratives in which —

1. the members of our group (whatever that might be) are entitled to certain things;
2. when we don’t get those supposed entitlements, it’s not merely the luck of the draw, a poor choice of parents, a consequence of past decisions, etc.  No — it’s unfair, a distortion of the cosmic fabric, a case of Life Not Being The Way It’s Supposed To Be;
3. our hard-wired response to any perceived unfairness is to identify those at fault and punish them.

Putting it another way: if a hammer is one of your primary tools, an awful lot of things can start to look like nails. 

This might also help to explain why anger at Those At Fault often seems more emotionally satisfying than the hard work of facing the facts about the things we don’t like and trying to do something constructive about them.

Related post:

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

---

[1] Reza Aslan in an interview in the Houston Chronicle (emphasis added).  Aslan is author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005) and the just-published How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.  It’s not hard to think of other examples of group identities that are built on, or reinforced by, a narrative of grievance; think of extremists in, for example, North Korea; Serbia; the political parties of various countries; the Episcopal Church; etc., etc.  (And I’m not even going to mention some other obvious examples from history.)

Today's collect seems clearly wrong: We do indeed have power in ourselves to help ourselves - just not enough

The collect for today (third Sunday in Lent) reads: 

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves
to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and
inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all
adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil
thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.  (Book of Common Prayer at p. 218, emphasis added)

Huh?  This is a pretty strongly Reformed statement (HT: Ross); I'm guessing it's a leftover from the 1928 BCP.  The bold-faced portion, about our having "no power in ourselves to help ourselves," seems grossly mistaken in a literal sense, flying in the face of millennia of human experience.

For the sake of argument, we should probably assume that the collect authors intended to say that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves achieve 'salvation.'  Even with that limitation, I don't see how exactly the authors of the collect can claim to know that the statement is true.

For this assertion in today's collect to make any sense, it would have to be rewritten to indicate that we have the power to help ourselves, and that our own power is necessary but not sufficient for salvation. 

I like the way Ross TenEyck put it in a similar discussion thread at TitusOneNine:

... as the article you link to quotes (and vehemently disagrees with):  “If God takes a thousand steps to reach out to you for your redemption, still in the final analysis, you must take the decisive step to be saved.”

Call it semi-Pelagian if you like, but I think that if you throw out the necessity for that one step on our part, you render Christianity pointless.

Poor, bewildered Paul blames Canada, er, sin, for his shortcomings

Sadly, the church pretends to know why people do the bad things they do, fixating on Paul's "blame sin!" trope in today's Epistle reading from Romans 7.  Paul manifests a certain bewilderment about his own failings, and seizes on 'sin' as the explanation:

¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ... ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.^[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.

¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God's law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am!  (Emphasis added.)

Paul's inclination to blame sin for his shortcomings is neither shameful nor surprising. Even today we know little enough today about the human mind and its motivations. In Paul's day, Jesus' own disciples blamed sin as the cause of a man's blindness from birth (Jn 9.1-3); their contemporaries and Jesus himself assumed that demons and spirits were the causes of mental illness (Mt 8.28-29) and epilepsy (Mk 9.14-32).

Hey, that was the best they could do back then with the limited information they had. Sure, we moderns know a bit more about brain chemistry and psychology; as a result, we've had some limited successes in treating disorders of the kind referred to in the Gospel accounts. But it's not as if we've progressed all that much further ourselves.

What is unfortunate is that the church refuses to admit that Paul didn't know what he was talking about. Contrast that with Jesus, whose (reported) attitude seems to have been, face the facts, and acknowledge the limits of your information (e.g., Mt 11.2-5; Mt 16.1-2; Mk 13.28-35).

Instead, the church continues to canonize Paul's uninformed guesswork about 'sin' — commendable though his efforts were — as Holy Writ.

Somehow, I doubt that's what Jesus would have done.

---

Related posts: 

• Sin: We've Got a Long Way to Go in Understanding It, Let Alone in 'Treating' It

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

• The Sin Model's Weakness

• Sin as Failure to Live in Relationship with God: How Can We Know?

• See also the Sin category of postings.

Original sin: Self-interest motivating self-deception

"The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ...

— Rodney Clapp, "American Soundings," The Christian Century, Nov. 18, 2008, p. 45.

Related posts:

• Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect
• Financial regulations can be like fire safety rules
• Sin = Failure to "Get It"?

It's we, not God, who need an atoning sacrifice - MadPriest

The Mad Priest has an intriguing take on the Atonement:  He thinks that it's we, not God, who need a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins — without such a sacrifice, he says, we don't truly accept that we're forgiven (and thus, one could extrapolate, we're not truly liberated from sin):

In my understanding of the Atonement I emphasise the sacrifice that Jesus made, which is an orthodox doctrine and has been throughout the whole history of our faith. For me, the scapegoat is the most important character in the Jewish Bible.

However, where I plunge into heresy is that I do not believe God needs the sacrifice, because he is God and not subject to any action and because we are told many times in scripture that he does not require bodily sacrifice.

Therefore, my conclusion is simple. Jesus willingly becomes the payment for our sins because we need the payment to be made (not God).

Although we know intellectually that God forgives we don't truly believe it unless we are punished. We are unable to bear the required punishment but God is, so Jesus, who is God, takes the rap for us so we, in our human weakness, can truly believe we are forgiven by God.

It is the same psychology at work in the story of Lamb as in the story of the scapegoat.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

Sin: We've Got a Long Way to Go in Understanding It, Let Alone in 'Treating' It

This morning I got into a discussion about sin with a commenter at TitusOneNine.  Here's an edited version of what I said.

As to 'sin,' certainly we're all sinners in that we all make 'bad choices.'  But we understand very little about why and how we make any choices at all, bad or good.  

Traditional Christian models of 'sin' don't offer us much insight here.  And when it comes to the acid test, that of combating sin (let alone all but wiping it out as we have, say, polio), traditionalist sin models have an uneven track record, to put it politely.

Combating sin with prescriptions derived from traditionalist models is analogous to the way doctors used to treat peptic ulcers with diet changes and stress reduction. In the case of peptic ulcers, sometimes the treatment worked, sometimes it didn't.  The trouble was, doctors could never reliably predict which it would be for a given patient.  When the treatment did work, they didn't understand why, because they didn't understand how and why people got peptic ulcers in the first place. 

It's much the same with the traditionalist 'treatment' for sin.  By this I mean the usual prescription of accepting Jesus into your heart, believing that he was God incarnate who died for our sins, and so on.  Sometimes the treatment works, but very often it doesn't.  We can't reliably predict which it will be for a given sinner.  And when the treatment does work, we don't understand why, because we don't understand how and why people make the choices they do.

In the case of peptic ulcers, doctors eventually figured out that most common peptic ulcers are caused by a particular type of bacteria, Helicobacter pylori.  The standard treatment is now an inexpensive course of antibiotics. 

In the analogous case of sin, we've got a lot of work to do to reach that level of understanding.   I would venture that many nonbelievers and doubters instinctively understand this, and for that reason (among others), exclusivist claims about Jesus strike them as foolish nonsense.  This certainly doesn't help our efforts to bring such people to God.