A short history lesson by David Frum is my gift to you on this Christ-tide morning. Christ-tide? Read the piece:
December, 2006:
Choice, Belief, and the Necessity of Hell
As far as believing in hell, whether you believe it is a literal, physical place of torment or a state of absolute alienation from God, it seems to me to be a necessity of logic. I feel as CS Lewis did in that if there was one idea, one doctrine I could delete from Christianity, hell would be the one.
But for there not to be some ultimate destination for our journeys would fill me with despair. And it’s not a matter of Jesus laughing at you or gloating saying “Haha, for no reason at all you have to believe in me or I’ll send you to hell”. The way to not face what is after this life with fear is also the way that will bring us most joy and true satisfaction on earth… back to the ideas Thomas Merton and our true selves.
Free choice is necessary for true love. Love cannot exist without the possibility of failure. Is this the reason God placed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden? Probably. It wasn’t to tempt us; it was because he loved us enough to give us functioning brains and to lay choices before us.
We could not love God if it was impossible to not love him, but then we’d be robots right? He could have created a world with padded walls where we could never hurt him but we’d be dumb beings who could not choose because we would have no choices.
Beliefs do have a lot to do with where a person is from, but everyone is FROM somewhere. I hear some parents say “I’m not going to bias my kids with my beliefs. I’m going to let them figure that out for themselves.” What a gross mismanagement of parenting responsibility. They WILL be influenced one way or another and all one is conveying with this “non-influence” strategy that all the searching in life has not led to anything they want to pass on.
Yes, I understand some are in transition and many learned things as children that they don’t want to pass on, but what’s the point of having kids if you’re going to send them out into the world unprepared?
I agree that children raised under a certain belief system having all other systems withheld will be ill prepared to face the world. My children will be exposed to many viewpoints but I will certainly be passing on to them what I’ve learned along the way. As a responsible parent can I really just abandon them in their intellectually formative years to make an unaided decision?
That idea of an unaided decision is a fallacy anyway because children don’t make any unaided decisions (ok, so they decide to go pee when they need to but you know what I’m talking about here) – you will either primarily aid them or they will be aided by someone who is not you, and at that point what was the point of your parenting, or your lifetime of learning for that matter?
I understand our parents’ fear of allowing us to explore the ragged landscape of faith and reason, there are risks, but we were shortchanged because of it. What should have happened, and this is far more common today in my experience, is that they should have explored those landscapes with us, pointing out the hazard areas and explaining to us how they discovered the hazards.
Instead there was far more “don’t go there and don’t ask why” going on which led many of us to discover these hazards in secret or under questionable influence.
I Dream in Movies
I have a habit of envisioning my life from a bird’s eye view. I catch myself viewing my life in third person, as if in a dream – watching myself, simultaneously in control and predestined. After all, if its predestined then someone must already know, like the scriptwriter or director, even if they’ve kept the actors in the dark for dramatic effect. In real life I tend to box situations into probable movie scenes and attempt through this process to predict what might happen next. When I dream, more often than not my source material is stunningly unoriginal, usually dictated by the most remarkable event of the day. And since we usually end the evening catching up on 5 seasons of “24″, more than once in my dreams I have been Jack Bauer, saving a life or the whole world through actions and decisions that walk the fine line between too far and way over the edge.
In the post wrap of most situations, I think about things I could have said differently, or things I might say next time in the same situation, as if I could rewind my last moments and make an edit. But things rarely happen the same way twice – you miss that opportunity for a killer one-liner and its gone, baby, “Hasta la vista”, unlike in a movie where you can do another take and freeze that classic moment for eternity.
Is there a problem here? I think in movie scenes. I dream in movie scenes. I definitely talk in movie scenes. How many times have I uttered “Whoa! Do NOT go in there!” or “He’ll flip you… he’ll flip you for real” or “Freeeeeeeeee-dooooom!” or “Yeah, I can pretty much milk anything with nipples” or one of my all-time faves “How about I give you the finger… and you give me my phone call?” How about “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one yesterday” or “Keyser Soze…. KEYSER SOZE!!!” or “You make me want to be a better man” or (same movie) just after Greg Kinnear lets his lost little dog lick his face, the maintenance man who found him unceremoniously and in front of his arty friends who are at his place for a party informs him: “Yeah, I found him in the basement eating diaper sh–.”
Movies are the most pervasive medium of our existence. Most of us have seen so many movies that it’s hard to pick something we haven’t seen that’s not on the new release shelf, and even then, try picking a non-new release movie with a friend or two. It gets exponentially more difficult the more friends you’re with. The older I get the less this happens. There just isn’t time to go to the movies anymore and when I do go we see “Cars” or “Over The Hedge” or “Open Season.” Good movies to be sure but not ones that offer up lines I can use in my daily life.
I’m not sure how useful they actually are but at least they help me to determine who’s on my wavelength… my very odd, distorted wavelength. What I mean is this: can you tell me which movies 50-70% of those classic (in my mind) movie lines I mentioned in the above paragraph come from? If you can we’ll probably get along just fine. If not, well, we might be entirely different people who probably won’t end up spending my time together. Or maybe you just need to catch up on some movies. Name those movies, or in other words: “Go ahead, make my day.”
1. “Whoa! Do NOT go in there!”
2. “He’ll flip you… he’ll flip you for real”
3. “Freeeeeeeeee-dooooom!”
4. “Yeah, I can pretty much milk anything with nipples”
5. “How about I give you the finger… and you give me my phone call?”
6. “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one yesterday”
7. “Keyser Soze…. KEYSER SOZE!!!”
8. “You make me want to be a better man”
9. “Yeah, I found him in the basement eating diaper sh–.”
10. “Go sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
Mornings at Our House
It is 6:30am and I am about to go to work. I wait at the door for a moment and hope Olivia comes running down. Sometimes she peeks around the corner slowly and inquisitively and if she sees me there she comes running full tilt. I get the excited hug at the end of my workday too, but these morning ones are a bit rare and I cherish them a little more. Sometimes she’s up before I am and I try to put here back to bed, but she’s a tough little nut and this usually doesn’t result in her staying there very long. Her sister will sleep until 7:30, maybe 8:00am and sometimes beyond.
They are so different. Madeleine is obsessively detail oriented and Olivia is equally obsessively free-spirited. Madeleine can create entire worlds and has an attention span to die for. She’ll set up her farm and animals for hours at a time some days, while Olivia gets bored a bit quicker. She can’t sit through entire movies and doesn’t care to create worlds – destroying them is much more fun. I took her to the Sunday morning kids singing for the first time last week and she was the wildest one there, dancing without regard for those around her, crowding the leader at the front. Madeleine has been going for a year already and still hesitates to go every week. Her bravery appears in increments while Olivia’s, being the extrovert, is ever-present. She has no fear.
I see benefits and dangers for each of them. Olivia will be ambitious, accomplishing much probably by erring much, but succeeding much because she’s not afraid to fail. Madeleine will succeed too, if we nurture her ability to think long and hard and solve problems. Hopefully we can convey our satisfaction with each of them as they grow. With her beautiful orange hair and extrovert personality, Olivia will always be the attention getter and we’ll have to counter-balance that by giving Madeleine and bit more attention at home.
And girl #3, Sophia? I’m not sure yet, she’s only 6 months old. She’s a decent sleeper and a “good baby” by anyone’s standards. Having now observed 3 children up close and hanging out with a lot of other people who have kids, I believe less and less that some kids are just born to misbehave – well, girls anyway. I probably won’t ever have the experience of raising a boy but speaking from vicarious experience I’d say it’s a completely different task.
Who are YOU to decide?
It seems sometimes in our democracy addicted society that we believe absolutely that a group of like-minded individuals will always come up with a more comprehensive, well-tempered solution to a problem than any one individual within that group.
I have recently seen the opposite in action. During a desert survival simulation in a leadership training seminar, there was in fact a group who had a single member that performed much better on his individual score than the group did as a whole. Why? He had special knowledge but was overruled by the majority. In this situation, the tyranny of the majority caused the entire group to die (vicariously of course) in the desert.
Could this happen in the church as well? Could one person know better than everyone else but be sacrificed on the altar of democracy? Unlike the desert simulation, there is no immediate and conclusive answer. If one person might be smarter than the group, who is that person and how do we figure that out without dying first?
The idea that the head of an organization makes many executive decisions is a myth. The Pope. The President. People who think these men make all decisions at their whim without first consulting a large number of trusted advisers seem to me to be a little out of touch with reality. Those decisions are rarely come upon through a solitary time with no outside influence. Sure they must occasionally be decisive and decide something with little consultation, but most often the leader is the one who announces a decision.
One of the most often leveled accusation against these leaders: “How can one man decide what is good for the Church/country?” And even though the perception of a leader the level of the president or the Pope always making individual, unilateral decisions is inaccurate, they do still usually exert more influence over the process than others involved.
Catholics might answer: maybe the one man is gifted with a special grace to do so. And citizens of a democracy: we chose him to lead us. No institution can last long on executive decisions alone, and while the presidency is more easily observed as a collaborative governing I can say with some certainty that the governing of the Catholic Church works in much the same way. “How can one man decide what is good for the Church?” is an unfair, strawman argument that we Protestants often use to create a distance and avoid examining, then opposing or confirming Catholic theology.
The alternative to this type of spiritual pecking order, whether it is actual or merely perceived to be so, should not be reckless individual interpretation, but that fact is difficult to see in an era of prosperity preachers and fake faith healers. The pendulum often swings toward irony. You can find Christians somewhere saying and believing things that are not even tangentially connected to Christianity – at no risk and no cost and – here’s the irony – without consultation.
After all, God “told” them, so how could they be wrong? In fact, they often benefit from their distinct, “unique” interpretation of Jesus’ life. We tolerate all this in a misguided attempt to avoid quarrels amongst ourselves, but heresy needs to be called out whenever and wherever it’s found and we often do more harm than good by being tolerant of this behaviour. But there’s that authority problem again: by whose standard shall we judge what is heresy?
But isn’t one proven fake faith healing enough? How about a $10 million “parsonage”? Routine $1500-a-night hotel rooms? Any takers? Are our standards really so low that we can’t even call 
each other on these abuses? Must we leave it to the “Fifth Estate” and “60 Minutes” investigative crews to expose? Although much criticized for their expose of Mike Warnke , I believe Cornerstone Magazine showed us how investigative journalism and biblical confrontation could work together for the edification of the church at large.
If this is all quite confusing for me, someone blessed with faith, a lifetime of belief, and generations before me with the same, how difficult must it be for someone interested in belief but standing at the gate wondering which splinter of the road is the right one.
How does a seeker decide? Answer me if you know because I have never been a seeker in the sense of being a non-Christian adult attempting to choose a religion. I have done plenty of reverse engineering and tried to simulate this decision but that is all theoretical for me.
