Archive for September, 2010

For many years I have heard countless quips, ideas, suppositions, and biases concerning Luther. It was only until I actually sat down and read a bit about him that I feel I can finally make some kind of opinion about him. As I typically do, I neither fully commend nor fully despise a man’s work.

On the one hand, Luther made great reformations upon a dire church scene. Though Germany is not Spain, St John of the Cross and St. Teresa d’Avila made many comments of how poorly the regulations of the Catholic church were. Nunneries were essentially brothels with no restrictions on who came in and who went out. Indulgences were created to collect money for a corrupt system of monasteries and nunneries. Teresa herself tried to make reformations on this corrupted institution (and she did with great success). In Germany,  Luther saw how confession was spreading the towns gossip and church events could easily be drunken parties. As a result, he swung in the opposite direction. Though it is good to flee from the very presence of evil, there is a way that one can swing too far and become a Pharisee.

Luther ran, but like any individual at times he ran too little, too far, and just right. Concerning marriage he ran far too little. Adultery and “secret marriages” were alright to him if a party was not sexual pleased. Concerning flippancy, he ran too far. One does not have to be drunk or stern to have an appropriate attitude towards God. There is a balance to be reached. Concerning Aristotle, I have said before that I have a distaste for the mixing of Greek philosophy and Eastern religion, so I may be biased. However, I think it is appropriate to say Aristotle’s works do not belong in the canon. For that matter, I think some of his viewpoints are down right un-Christian (which is fine for philosophy but problematic when people can no longer distinguish Aristotle’s words from Jesus’,Paul’s, or Moses’ words). Finally, concerning free will, I must disagree with Luther without crediting this disagreement to how he approached the situation. We simply disagree on a point that (at least to me) doesn’t seem very important in how I live my life. It seems to be a good scholarly question to wrestle with, but the wrestling is more important than being right. I have so much to learn and “be” in simply being a good follower of Jesus that I am not going to loose sleep over free will vs predestination.

Overall, I feel mixed about this Luther. I’m glad he stood up against corrupt churches (and it takes a strong personality to do that kind of thing), but was his solution better? In the end, I am glad that people could read their Bibles in their own language and thus reconsider their viewpoints about faith and God. This was a good time to wrestle with what you really believed in.

Infectious Ideas

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Dom Cobb – Inception

I am a little behind the times.  I saw the movie, Inception, this weekend.  Besides being a brilliant story, the above quote struck me as extremely compelling, particularly in regard to some of the thinkers from the Renaissance and Reformation eras.  These men were infected with ideas that changed their lives (and ultimately ours).  One early thinker, Galileo, specifically, changed the universe we live in (at least figuratively).  Galileo once said “UI do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”  Those contagious ideas.

What would possess a religious man (Galileo at one time wanted to be a monk) to denounce the church’s teachings?  Those pesky ideas again.  Initially, Galileo wanted to prove that objects fell at the same rate regardless of their weight.  He noticed that hail hit the ground at the same time regardless of its size (another of those parasitic ideas).  Aristotelian’s believed that the heavier hail just started higher up in the clouds so that was why they appeared to hit the ground at the same time.

After improving on the existing telescope, Galileo’s brain was infected by the preposterousness of Aristotle’s claims that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything in the universe was perfectly spherical and rotated around the earth in perfect circles.  Galileo saw mountains and craters on the moon, he saw spots on the sun, he saw changes in Venus that indicated to him that Venus rotated around the sun.  More parasitic ideas.

It is hard to imagine not living in a world that KNOWS that the earth revolves around the sun!  But this was almost literally an earth shattering idea for people of Galileo’s time.  People did not want to be infected by this idea.  Their previous notions of world order had already contaminated and taken hold of their brains and minds.  Fortunately, Galileo persisted in this propagation of ideas.  I want to be open to new ideas, but be able to separate the truth from nonsense.  I do not want to be stuck in a world where the sun revolves around the earth—but only in my head.

The following is a link to an Indigo Girls (Amy and Emily) song that gives tribute to Galileo.  The main theme of the song is about reincarnation and righting past lives wrongs which is more Platonic that Galileo-ian, but it is a good song anyway.

Galileo – Indigo Girls

I certainly find it to be true that once ideas get stuck in the “craw” of your brain, it is hard to eradicate them.  Who hasn’t had trouble falling to sleep because their brain will not turn off?  Some idea keeps bouncing off the walls of your mind.  I know that since I started contemplating writing on Galileo for the blog, I could not get the Indigo Girls song out of my head (which I haven’t heard for years)! Then I found a book on Galileo at the dollar store.  Some of this, I think, is our subconscious searching out “confirmation” for our ideas.  But Galileo was so possessed with his ideas and so wanted other people to hear and see his ideas that he got in trouble for them.

Inception was a movie that completely blew my bind. It was incredibly deep and something I thought about for days after the ending credits. I mean literally a day or two later I was thinking, “Is the top still spinning?!” The concept of inception was unique to anything I had ever considered before. After reading about Descartes and his belief in innate ideas, I started thinking about the movie Inception again and the correlation in those concepts.

Descartes believed that if he had a “perfect” idea, then it was not his original idea because he was imperfect. He concluded that the ideas of perfection could be considered true. I began thinking about “perfect ideas” and the whole concept Descartes discusses about how they originated from “a nature that was really more perfect” (p. 119). The whole idea of inception is to take an idea that was created by someone else and plant it so deep within the subconscious of another human being that they believe the idea originated from them. This concept made me begin to question the originality of ideas. I feel that Descartes’ theory on innate ideas provided me with similar questions. He too believed in a concept that some ideas are innate or come from something bigger than ourselves. It made me start thinking which ideas and beliefs I could 100% call my own. I went even deeper and began wondering where exactly my thoughts or ideas actually came from. I am sure most people who read this are thinking that I am way over-analyzing this concept in which case I would agree with you. I do believe that we have ideas that come from others, but I also believe that we are all different. Even if we have the same overall beliefs, we will still have a little bit unique idea on such beliefs because we are so different. I also believe that there are innate ideas especially in realm of Christianity. I believe that because we are created in the perfect image of God that there are instinctual concepts that he places inside us like the need to be loved. Anyways, that was just something I had thought about and I hope I have not been too over-analytical with this whole concept.

\”Tabula Rasa\” LOST

This summer I had the opportunity to watch all six seasons of LOST and while it was entertaining, it was thoroughly confusing. It is interesting to look at the characters from LOST and how they compare and contrast to the philosophers they are named after. I thought it was just Locke who was named after someone, but after looking into it I realized that the writers had a purpose behind the names of their characters.

John Locke the empiricist rejected innate ideas and believed that everything was learned from experience. He believed in tabula rasa, the idea that the mind is a blank slate to be written on. Tabula Rasa is the title of the third episode of the first season. The theme of the episode is that everyone is starting new on the island and therefore is a blank slate; they can be who they want to be. The youtube clip shows the end of this episode where Jack tells Kate that they can start over and forget about the past. Locke the character is not a believer in the ideas of tabula rasa because he believes in destiny and that he was put on the island for a reason.  One similarity the writers added was the character of Anthony Cooper. On the show, Cooper was John’s father and John saved his life by giving him a kidney transplant. In history, Cooper was John’s patron and John saved his life when he persuaded him to have surgery.

Desmond Hume reflects the ideas and characteristics of David Hume in a few ways. David Hume believed that emotions and passions caused their behavior. In the show, Desmond’s behavior is greatly influenced by his emotions. For example, his love for Penny causes him to sail around the world and end up on the island, and his fear of blowing up causes him to push the button in the hatch repeatedly for 2 years. Furthermore, both David and Desmond are Scottish.

After realizing that Locke was named after someone, I wanted to learn what other references were made. It intrigued me to research the characters and ideas behind them. Other characters that are named after philosophers include Jeremy Bentham, Mikhail Bakunin, Danielle Rousseau (Jean-Jacque Rousseau), and Charlotte Staples Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis). I appreciate when writers and artists tie in history and important figures into pop culture. I think it helps keep the past alive and in our minds.

Different philosophical questions also arise from LOST. For example, do people really have a destiny or is there free will? Is there life after death? Does good triumph over evil? Is there redemption? These are just a few tough questions that LOST has made me think about.

Around 1961, two Skinnerian behaviorists named Keller and Marian Breland stumbled across a discovery that actually worked to weaken the prevalent radical behaviorist view of the time. The Brelands operated a business called Animal Behavior Enterprises, where they basically used operant conditioning principles to teach animals to do tricks for commercial purposes. As time passed though, the Brelands reluctantly began to notice that the animals they conditioned were gradually beginning to revert back to their original instinctual behavior. This “instinctual drift” as they termed it, called serious attention to the innate aspects of behavior that the radical behaviorists of the time so strongly opposed.

As I read this story in the text, I began to see a parallel emerge. Is it also in man’s nature to spiritually drift back to instinctive behavior? I guess I asked myself the age old question once again; is man inherently good or evil? I personally believe that as Creatures made in God’s image, we must be inherently good, and only until we are originally exposed to sin, do we fall into it ourselves. In regards to the Breland’s idea of instinctual drift, I like to think that we experience the same sort of thing and drift back to our original “blank slate” of innocence. Throughout our lives we are conditioned by our society, our government, our culture, our family, our friends, and numerous other institutions of control. But God calls us to be the salt of the world; in the world, but not of it, and it is this blogger’s belief that he supplies us with an innate spiritual drift that leads straight back to Him.

It seems today especially from Christians both from catholics and protestant back grounds, that skeptics are given a bad name. In fact it was said this week in chapel that it is much harder to find the truth in something than it is to find the fault and the point was to tear down skepticism, I take offense being a skeptic myself. The renaissance shows the true greatness of being a skeptic as well as how hard it is to be a skeptic and get criticized for it. Yes, that’s right i said its harder to be a skeptic, often you become attack and in many cases are unlike especially by those you disprove, yikes. One of my heroes in particular is Galileo as his ideas of what can be considered science have driven my logical arguments for years. His ideas on Primary qualities and Secondary qualities has shaped how i look at a rational argument and what i consider to be reason or logic. Basically the idea is that only things that can be perceived or measured mathematically or can not be perceived differently by different people can be considered a primary quality or scientific. But, there was one thing that we disagreed on. I believe that psychology can be considered a science. It is not an exact science but the psychological test that show the same result time and time again such as the Milgram experiment in which the participants were ask by what was general understood to be an authority figure to shock the another participant. It is questionable what each person precieves as an authority figure and whether they felt the other participant was in any real danger. Although it showed that people are easily manipulated time and time again by an authority figure. Is it science or not? You have to be a skeptic of either psychology or galileo’s ideas about psychology, have fun!

Reviewing the notes on Descartes, I am conflicted with his ideas on reason.  His belief that we should only accept as truth things that present themselves “so clearly and distinctly” to the mind, works great concerning knowledge and everyday life, but not with religion.  I recently heard a speech by Randy Harris in which he referenced the Tillich Paradigm, a model that uses reason to prove that it is in everyones best interest to believe in God.  Tillich starts with the premise that you can either believe in God or you cannot, then identifies that either God exists or he does not.  If you believe that God exists and he does not, then when you die you have not lost anything.  If you believe that God exists and he does, then when you die you hit the jackpot.  If you believe that God does not exist and he does not, then when you die nothing happens.  If you believe that God does not exist and he does, then you lose big time.  So, according to Tillich, logically it is the best decision to believe in God because you have the chance to win big and you can’t really lose. My problem with this theory is that if you follow this theory, then you are not following Christianity for the right reasons.  I do not believe that one should primarily use faith or reason concerning religion, but a duality of the two.

The Bible, the Koran, the Vedas and all the texts revered by the world’s various religions are sources of endless debate. Their origins are hotly contested and the influence of man on their contents can never be understood to the degree that we all wish it could. Thus, the relationships between people and these texts are extremely complicated and the discussions about them are nearly always contained within frayed edges. How fully can one embrace a religious text?

The handout we received in class about The Renaissance says this about Luther: “For him, a true Christian is not allowed to adopt a skeptical method and argue both sides of an issue.” To many this seems unbearable and anti-intellectual, and to part of me it does too, but I am also deeply drawn to such a position. I have deeply conflicted emotions about religion and that phrase is where it all comes from. As a person the setting that I thrive in is one of consistency and routine. I was also raised in a very Christian home and these two things are in constant struggle. In the context I was raised in religiosity and consistency are helplessly opposed to one another. There are countless examples of scriptures that we don’t follow. A recent example: I was talking with some friends and one of them mentioned that another one of our friend’s moms got botox. From there they talked about how ironic that was considering what a big deal she makes about her faith. This baffled me and I asked them why Christianity and botox were intrinsically incompatible and their response was that getting botox was the height of vanity. I was absolutely unable to make sense of it because nearly everything we do when we get ready in the morning comes from varying degrees of vanity. To me, the logical extent of their embargo on botox should include make-up and jewelry. I can’t condemn one without the other because I can’t live with how inconsistent that feels.

If I were to fully embrace Christianity I would have to condemn the actions of those who helped harbor slaves in the underground railroad because the Bible says that slaves should submit to their masters. I don’t want to sound like I think the Bible advocates slavery, I think Christianity wants a world without it but I also think it only wants it if the slave owners become benevolent and free the slaves of their own volition. Similarly, if I were to fully embrace Christianity I see no way around the subjugation of women. If I held those beliefs I would be unable to live with myself. People have ways of explaining away or reinterpreting those scriptures that sound so foolproof, but it presents another problem for me: if you can explain away those scriptures and admit that a religious text is untrustworhy is those areas then how in the world do you have it within you to trust that text in so many other areas? I cannot accept the Bible without those passages, but I can’t live with myself if I do and further still if I reject the Bible, which I have to if I want to avoid being a misogynist, I have an immense guilt complex. As a result my relationship with Christianity is a tentative side hug, not knowing where it will go.

It was brought up in class (and believed by several philosophers in the Age of Reason) that man is perceived as a machine.  This view can range from flat-out criticism, to that of a “complex” machine (as did Descartes), all the way to Julien de la Mettrie on the opposite extreme, that man at every level behaves in a mechanistic manner.  But just how true or how extensive is the idea?

Behaviorialists most certainly would agree to varying extremes. The fact (as has been demonstrated in repeated experiments and therapies) that people can be “programmed” by pairing stimuli and responses over time doesn’t seem to contest this idea, and in fact supports it fairly heavily. The overwhelming effectiveness of behavioralist therapies for a majority of psychological disorders is another harrowing indication of some truth to the notion. There was even a study conducted (Benjamin Libet) that claimed the neural signal to “act” was actually sent before participants announced their intent to act (as they were asked) challenging the very concept of free will.

Are we just machines programmed from birth, and further engineered by the environment dictating how we develop and how we will respond? Is choice an illusion, with reasoning applied only after our actions as some sort of meek justification that provides us with some sense of autonomy? I find it kind of funny that these thoughts that we may have considered absurd during such earlier times turn out to be real quandaries even today.

I suppose that is what the field of psychology is all about. Asking the questions to which the answers are hardest to provide. What I find the most curious of all that is how universally everyone seems to revolt at the idea, how quickly we are to retaliate against the mere mention that our choices might not be our own, that we might not be in control of something so fundamental as our very thoughts and actions. I guess the most harrowing question of all is how would we ever know?

The definition of happiness by  

Epicurus: "Happiness is man's greatest aim in life. Tranquility and rationality are the cornerstones of happiness."

 Are we all looking to find happiness? We all like to be happy.  We like when others make us feel happy and I would like to assume that we too like to makes others happy.  Helen Keller describe happiness: "True happiness is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." Bette Davis  states: "You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation."  Musicians are by no means the "scholars" of modern time nor do the speak for everyone but I believe many if not all songs speak truth about life.  Happiness is a common reoccurring theme in all genres of music.  Sometimes the pursuit of happiness is seen as a bad thing that makes us do selfish things but others see it as the reason to do good. Some of the songs that first come to mind are:

Saves The Day- Obsolete
"Who says what happy really means?

Because in that state of mind there is no state of self"

The Weepies- Happiness