Category: Christianity

God Made the Mountains

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized3 Comments

I was talking with a friend about the subject of Christian Esotericism after watching a video in which Jonathan Pageau talked with a few others about the subject and he mentioned the old esoteric idea that King Solomon used the power of God to force demons to build the Temple. I found this a very strange idea not merely for the obvious reasons, but also because it just doesn’t make sense. If God wanted to delegate the construction of the temple to some creatures and it wasn’t to men, why would he give this privilege to demons? Why wouldn’t he give this privilege to angels?

God certainly doesn’t need to delegate the construction of the temple to anyone. Aside from it being the obvious consequence of God’s omnipotence, it’s also quite visible in the way that God was often worshiped on mountains, and God made the mountains. God had no qualms about making places to worship Him, he just refrained from making all of them, giving it as a privilege to some creatures to imitate, in a small way, the mighty places of worship that God made.

Why on earth would God force this privilege of imitating Him onto angels who rejected Him, rather than give it to angels who would want it?

This, ultimately, seems to be the problem with Christian esotericism—it’s just esotericism, with Christian trappings. At the end of the day, there’s no good reason to make a deal with a devil, even if you think you can cheat the devil. (Yes, the magicians thought that they were merely forcing the devil to do their bidding rather than making a deal with it, but really that’s just a deal in which the devil doesn’t get anything. If God were actually guaranteeing the devil’s good behavior, then you’re actually forcing God to do your bidding and the demon is just a puppet. It’s an even worse idea to try to control God than it is to try to make a deal with a devil.)

Contingency and Space

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The natural theology argument for the existence of God from contingency and necessity rests on the existence of something contingent. This is remarkably easy to supply, since any telling of this argument is, itself, contingent, and supplies the necessary contingent thing. However, explaining why it is contingent sometimes confuses people, because the non-existence of the contingent thing at some point in time is most typically used.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but it can accidentally mislead people into thinking that the causal chain that must be finite (since there cannot be an actual infinity) is a temporal chain of causation. E.g. I’m here because of my parents, who are here because of their parents, and so on back to the Big Bang, which is here because of God. This can be helpful to illustrate the concept of a causal chain, but it’s not the kind that’s actually used in the argument, since it’s not the sort referenced by “actual infinity”. What’s discussed is why the contingent thing is here, now, as in, what is giving it the power to exist this moment. It cannot be something that doesn’t exist, because things which don’t exist have no power. So it must be something that also exists right now. That thing which exists right now can either be contingent or necessary, and if contingent, it too must be dependent for its existence on something else which also exists right now. And so on; this is what must terminate in something necessary because there cannot be an actual infinity.

Something that my attention was drawn to by a commentor asking me a question in one of my videos is that one can use the existence of a thing in one part of space but not another as a demonstration of contingency. If a thing were necessary and not contingent, it would exist at every point in space, since a particular location cannot cause a necessary thing to not exist. Thus anything which is someplace but not another must be contingent. The advantage to demonstrating contingency in this fashion is that space is simultaneous, and a temporal sequence will not be suggested. It is possible, then, that a person will not be accidentally led astray into thinking of a temporal sequence of events where the argument about how an actual infinity cannot exist is less clear, since the moments of time don’t exist side-by-side. (From our perspective; all moments are present to God in His eternity, of course.)

Thoughts on the Soul, While Hunting

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Missing the Mark, YouTube Channel1 Comment

A quick video I made while bow hunting while the deer weren’t coming. I share some thoughts on the soul, and how some people go wrong by thinking of the soul like a ghost in a machine, or like some sort of physical pure-energy matter that operates the body in a purely physical way, except not physical. I also talk about how everyone actually believes in the soul, because being a strict materialist would be absurd, and give examples.

It’s never Too Late at Amatopia

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Interesting FindsLeave a comment

Over at Amatopia Alexander Hellene has an interesting post about repentance with the fascinating (if long) story of Saint Mary. It’s worth a read.

I must confess that the intellectual problem of repentance has never really bothered me; I can’t conceive of a sin being stronger than God’s ability to fix it. But, for that reason, I do really like stories of repentance, because they demonstrate the mighty power of God.

Faith is Sometimes a Practical Virtue

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Back in the fall, as the weather was getting cold and plants were dying off I bought some flower bulbs and planted them in a newly open spot by my house. This spring, they’ve bloomed, justifying the effort involved. (Already done are some crocus, in the foreground, and not yet done is some weeding.)

I also planted some tulips next to some rhododendron bushes.

Back when I planted them things were cold and there was not much green to be seen. The bulbs I planted were brown and gave no visual hint of the flowers that would come forth from them. In order to get the tulips in spring, I needed to trust that the brown balls I was planting in the cold dirt were alive, and would stay alive, and would in fact put forth beautiful flowers come spring-time.

It is often under-appreciated how practical a virtue faith is. For some reason people talk as if the practical virtue of faith and the theological virtue of faith were somehow utterly unlike each other. In both cases they amount to trust in previously known evidence during the immediate absence of that evidence. We trust that God’s purposes are good because we know that His purposes are good because He is good, even though we can’t see that in the moment because all we can see is suffering or pain, such as weeds growing among the flowers or deer eating the leaves on one’s recently planted apple trees. This is not really different in kind from knowing that a brown ball is alive despite looking dead and when planted in the cold dirt will take root and put forth beautiful flowers when—despite the world growing colder and darker—it will one day be warm enough for flowers to bloom.

Chemical Composition, or, Substance and Accidents

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation means that in the Eucharist, when the priest speaks Christ’s words of consecration (“this is my body”, “this is my blood”) over the bread and wine on the alter, the power of Christ is invoked, by the authority he gave to his apostles and they delegated to their successors and they delegated to the priests whom they consecrate, and it changes the bread and wine on the alter to become the body and blood of Christ. (This is sometimes called the “real presence.”) Much difficulty arises over exactly what is meant because the bread doesn’t turn into muscle tissue and the wine doesn’t develop red blood cells.

The Eastern Orthodox basically just say “it’s a mystery” and leave it at that. (I liked the styling I saw someplace, “eeeet’sss aaaaa myyyysssterrrryyyyy”.) The Catholic Church says that it’s a mystery, but it gives a few helpful details. You can actually see this in the word “transubstantiation.”

“Transubstantiation” is derived from two words: “trans” and “substance”. “Trans” meaning “change” and “substance” being that part of being which is not the accidents. Accidents, in this case, not meaning “something unintended” but rather the properties a thing has which, if they were changed or removed, would not make the thing something else. A chair might be made out of wood, but if you made it out of plastic it would still be a chair. The ability to hold up someone sitting is the substance of a chair, the material it is made out of is an accident (again, not in the colloquial sense of accident but in a technical sense). You can also do the reverse. You can take the wood a chair is made out of and rearrange it into a collection of splintery spikes protruding up. It has the same accidents (the wood), but the substance has changed. “Transubstantiation” just means that the accidents (the gluten, starch, etc. in the bread and the water, sugar, alcohol, etc. in the wine) remain the same but the substance—what it is—is what has changed.

Or, to put this more simply: in the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ has the same chemical composition as bread and wine. Something to consider, when trying to understand this, is that a living human being has exactly the same chemical composition as a human corpse.

The Problem of Evil: Depression

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Missing the Mark, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

This video is a response to a question. Gadowscar asked, “[M]y question regarding the problem of evil would be triggered by my own personal experience and be fairly narrow, and be an inquiry into how God can allow for such rampant depression among society. I wholeheartedly believe God exists with my intellect, there’s no doubt in my mind that He exists. However, because I suffer with depression(to the point of being suicidal at times), I have difficulty on an emotional and spiritual level believing that God loves me. How would you answer this?”

Here’s my answer.

Why Christianity is Not a Cuckold Religion

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Missing the Mark, Uncategorized, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

This video is a response to Jonathan Pageau’s very interesting video in which he looked at the question of whether Christianity is a Cuckold religion. If you want to watch it first, that video is here:

His video is very interesting, but somewhat surprisingly he doesn’t look at the symbolism of what cuckolding is. So in my video I look at the cuckoo, then at human cuckolding, and then show how these are unlike Christianity.

Johah And the Belly of the Whale

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

On his YouTube channel, Jonathan Pageau gave an interesting talk on the symbolism in the story of Jonah.

There’s something very interesting about the story of Jonah which Jonathan didn’t touch on. It was pointed out to me by Brant Pitre in his book The Case for Jesus (which I highly recommend, btw). Here’s the thing: Jonah didn’t survive in the belly of the fish (ancient Hebrew did not distinguish whales from fish, so it can be translated whale, too).

Jonah died.

I know all of the kids books always show Jonah camping out in the belly of a whale with a big air pocket and a lantern and a canteen with fresh water and whatnot. But if you look at the text, not at children’s books, it’s very much written as if he died. The fish didn’t swallow him with a huge pocket of air, and not digest him, and so on. It ate his corpse.

The prayer of Jonah is, I believe, a mosaic of psalms, but it states fairly clearly that he is calling out to God from the land of the dead. It also describes him dying in the ocean. That he spent three days in the belly of the fish shows that he was good and dead. Absent a miracle, no one survives in the belly of a fish for one day, let alone three.

Then Yahweh made the fish vomit Jonah up onto dry land. And what does God say to Jonah? “Up!” This sure reads like a command to a corpse to get up and stop being dead (with echoes of Christ’s words to the daughter of Jairus, “little girl, arise”).

Granted, the text doesn’t explicitly say “Jonah died, he did not survive in the belly of the fish”, but absent someone starting a tradition of interpreting the text that way, it’s not ordinarily the sort of thing you’d need to be that explicit about; the man dying and praying in the land of the dead would, ordinarily, suffice.

The whole book of Job is a very interesting book, for a great many reasons. But I do very much like that when it comes to a prophet, not even dying is enough to get out of the job.

Lepers And Social Distancing

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A curious thought occurred to me recently with regard to how we talk about lepers in the bible, and especially in the new testament. It’s fairly common to hear about how lepers were feared, had to stay outside of society, etc. and this is often connected to people in modern times who are on the outskirts of our society. Jesus was not afraid of lepers, and so we should not be afraid of those on the outskirts of society, either. (That this means that, among others, we should love neo-nazis and KKK members and the like is rarely mentioned, though, nor is the fact that love does not always look like acceptance, as it would not in those cases.)

What this modern approach seems to miss is that ancient people avoided lepers because lepers had a communicable disease. They weren’t outcasts because they looked different, or had a different culture, or pronounced words in a strange way; they were outcasts because being too close to them might cause one to catch a serious disease. That is, people practiced social distancing from lepers.

In these modern times of COVID-19, we have an exceedingly similar practice with people who have COVID-19, though with our modern understanding of diseases and the conditions of transmissibility, we do admit some exceptions who are wearing a great deal of anti-germ-armor (“PPE”). Medical personal in body suits with respirators aside, people with COVID-19 are outcasts, except we phrase it, “they should self-quarantine”. If someone with COVID-19 comes to a hospital, we expect them to call ahead to warn the staff, and to come through a different entrance, which is a slightly more technologically advanced version of clapping a bowl and calling out “unclean!”

If Christ were conducting his earthly ministry today, there would undoubtedly be COVID-19 patients who came within six feet of him hoping to be cured, and instead of lecturing them to maintain social distancing, he would, undoubtedly, cure them. But he would not come within six feet of someone with COVID-19 because he doesn’t recognize human prejudices and is not afraid of human superstitions—disease is not a human superstition and people with a communicable disease can actually spread it. He would come within six feet of people with COVID-19 because, as Lord of the world, he is Lord of diseases, too. As the one through whom all things were made and nothing was made apart from him, COVID-19 could not hurt him. The one who can make the blind see and the lame walk and clense lepers cannot be harmed by disease, unless he were to choose to permit it.

In short, Jesus did not care about social distancing with lepers because his miraculous power made him immune to communicable diseases. The closest parallel I can think of was when he angered a crowd who brought him to the top of a cliff to throw him off, but it was not his time, so he just walked away from them. This was a demonstration of Christ’s power, not an instruction that Christians should treat angry mobs as if they aren’t dangerous. In like way, Christ was not afraid of lepers because he could cure them, not because communicable diseases are, to use another modern phrase, fake news.

Christianity is Not a Cuckold Religion

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In a very interesting video, Jonathan Pageau (of The Symbolic World) discussed the question of whether Christianity is a Cuckold religion:

He did an excellent job discussing cuckolding in human society and patterns related to it one sees in human society (such as war rape and sexual taxes to a chief/lord). He also did a good job talking about how Christianity got rid of those patterns.

What’s really weird is that he didn’t talk about the symbolic structure, either of cuckolding, or of Christianity. That sort of thing is usually his bread and butter.

So let’s do that.

In order to see the structure of cuckolding and why Christianity is not a cuckold religion, it will be helpful to start with etymology. The word “cuckold” comes from the Cuckoo bird.

The common Cuckoo

The Cuckoo is a nest parasite. It looks for the nests of certain other species of birds and when it is unguarded, it throws an egg from the nest out and lays one of its own in its place. When the baby Cuckoo hatches, it generally throws the rest of the eggs, or if it didn’t hatch first, the other baby birds, out of the nest, too. The parents of the nest then feed the baby Cuckoo until it is old enough to care for itself.

The much larger bird, sitting on the nest, is the baby Cuckoo.

(Both images are from the Wikipedia page on Cuckoos.)

The symbolic structure of the Cuckoo’s nest parasitism is replacement. The Cuckoo replaces the offspring of another bird with its own offspring; its line continues at the expense of the line of the other birds. They do the work of raising it and get nothing out of it.

In humans, by analogy, cuckolding is when a woman is unfaithful to her husband, and another man fathers a child with her that her husband raises as if it were his. Here, too, we see replacement, but in humans it is an incomplete replacement. Human beings, when we raise children, do a heck of a lot more than just feed them. We raise our young; we teach them and shape them. An extremely large fraction of who they are as an adult is given to them not by genetics, but by their upbringing. An adopted son is not a biological son, but he is still a son. When his adopted father and his biological father are old, he will care for his adopted father, not his biological father. This does not make cuckolding OK, but it is important to note that the replacement is incomplete. This will be relevant later.

So now we come to the part of Christianity which some describe as Cuckolding: the virgin birth, and Joseph raising the child as his own.

In order to see whether the virgin birth of Jesus was cuckolding, we need to look at the structure of what happened. Recall, cuckolding is replacement. Was there replacement? The answer is: no.

In a normal birth, God creates a new human being, giving a portion of the creation of his body to a father and a mother who come together to make it. The technical term for what the parents do is secondary causation. God could create a new human being entirely on his own, but instead he gives it to human beings to be part of his act of creation. In the case of Jesus, only one human being was given the privilege of secondary causation—Mary, his mother. What’s important to notice is that this does not change God’s role in the creation of the Jesus’ human nature. God is not more active, as if he somehow normally depends on a human father and without his help he had to do more work.

A useful analogy to consider is an author writing a story. If the author normally has two characters have sex and this gets the woman pregnant, the author does not do any less work than if he writes the woman getting pregnant without a man. (If anything, he does slightly more work, in that it would take more words to set up and describe, but this may just be the analogy breaking down.)

So in the conception of Jesus, there is no replacement of Joseph, he simply is not given a part in it. There is no other creature who has taken his part. There is just no father at all. Importantly, God did not take the part of the human father, he took the part he always takes in giving existence to all of creation at every moment of time. He simply didn’t give a portion of that work to a creature to be part of.

So the conception of Jesus was not cuckolding, because there was no replacement. What of the other aspect—of raising a child as one’s own?

This Joseph does with Jesus. However, this is the same raising of a child as one’s own that happens in any case of adoption. And, indeed, Joseph raising Jesus is clearly a case of adoption:

This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being an upright man and wanting to spare her disgrace, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when suddenly the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.” Now all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Look! the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son whom they will call Immanuel,” a name which means “God-is-with-us”. When Joseph woke up he did what the angel of the Lord had told him to do: he took is wife to his home; he had not had intercourse with her when she gave birth to a son; and he named him Jesus.

God clearly asks Joseph to be a father to Jesus, and Joseph accepts. And this is the key: in so doing, Jesus becomes a son of Joseph. Joseph gives Jesus his name. Not only his first name, but his family name—Jesus is in the line of David through Joseph.

So if you want to say that Christianity is a religion of adoption, you won’t be wrong. In fact, adoption is one of the main themes of Christianity. You might almost say that God was adopted by man so that man might be adopted by God.

This is why—among other reasons—Christianity had the effects which Jonathan described. God is not merely the highest, but unlike human beings. As Bishop Barron might say, God cannot cuckold a human being because God is not in competition with human beings. The milkman can cuckold a human being. Ghengis Khan did. Zeus could have, if he was real. God simply can’t. All things have their limits, even omnipotence. In particular, omnipotence can’t be limited.

Well, except for the incarnation. But when he could compete with people, Christ didn’t.

Jesus never cuckolded anyone.

And a servant is not greater than his master.

On The Seventh Day God Rested

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized, WritingLeave a comment

On the seventh day, God rested.

This is an interesting thing to contemplate since as a American Northerner, I don’t really understand the concept of rest.

Granted, every now and again I take breaks, and every night I sleep. The thing is, I can’t help but think of these as weaknesses, as concessions to a fallen world. Chesterton described this attitude toward work and rest very well in Utoptia of Userers, though he was talking about employers and not individuals:

The special emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who is the worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of holidays. I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to work until they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as well as wicked. I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to grant what he would call “decent hours of labour.” He may treat men like dirt; but if you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let it lie fallow by some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but unless he is a lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs lie.

But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to do with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of ten hours day and eight-hours day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to the space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low.

Again, Chesterton is talking about employers, but this also encompasses an American attitude toward the self which need have nothing to do with money. Chesterton goes on:

Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body and soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury (though he seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for those to whom a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday, like the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege. But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion of the man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye, the word “recreation” would be like the word “resurrection,” the blast of a trumpet.

And here we come back to where I started—that on the seventh day, God rested. We are not to suppose, of course, that God was tired. Nor are we even to suppose that God stopped creating creation—for if he were to do that, there would not be another moment, and creation would be at an end. Creation has no independent existence that could go on without God.

So what are we to make of God’s resting on the seventh day, for it must be very unlike human rest?

One thing I’ve heard is that the ancient Jewish idea of rest is a much more active one than our modern concept of falling down in exhaustion. It involves, so I’ve heard, the contemplation of what was done. Contemplation involves the enjoyment of what is done. What we seem to have is a more extended version of “and God looked on all that he had made and saw that it was good”.

There is another aspect, I think, too, which is that God’s creative action can be characterized into two types, according to our human ability to understand it—change and maintenance. In the first six days we have change, as human beings easily understand it. There are arising new forms of being different enough that we can have words to describe them. We can, in general, so reliably tell the difference between a fish and a bush that we give them different names. But we cannot so reliably tell the difference between a fish at noon and that same fish ten minutes later, even though it has changed; we just call them both “fish” and let that suffice because we cannot do better. Thus God’s rest can also been as the completion of the large changes, which we easily notice, and the transition to the smaller changes, which we have a harder time noticing or describing.

I’m thinking about this because I recently sent the manuscript of Wedding Flowers Will Do for a Funeral off to the publisher. It’s not done, because there will be edits from the editor, but for the moment there is nothing for me to do on it. I finally have time—if still very limited time owing to having three young children—to do other projects, but I’m having a hard time turning to them.

My suspicion is that I need to spend some time resting, which is what put me in mind of this.

Meek is an Interesting Word

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Somebody asked me to do a video on the beatitude about meekness, so I’ve been doing some research on the word “meek”. Even though I don’t speak from a place of authority, talking about the beatitudes still carries a lot of responsibility.

The first problem that we have with the word “meek” is that it is not really a modern English word. It’s very rarely used as a character description in novels, and outside of that, pretty much never. So we have to delve back into history and etymology.

The OED defines meek as “Gentle. Courteous. Kind.” It comes from a Scandinavian root. Various Scandinavian languages have an extremely similar word which means, generally, “soft” or “supple”.

Next, we turn to the original Greek:

μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν

To transliterate, for those who don’t read the Greek alphabet:

makarioi hoi praeis, hoti autoi kleronomesousin ten gen.

Much clearer, I’m sure. Bear with me, though, because I will explain. (I’m going to refer to the words in the English transliteration to make it easier to follow.)

The beatitudes generally have two halves. The first half says that someone is blessed, while the second half gives some explanation as to why. This beatitude has this form. Who is blessed is the first three words, “makarioi hoi praeis”. In the original the verb is left understood, but this is usually translated as “blessed are the meek”. The second half, “hoti autoi kleronomesousin ten gen” is commonly translated “for they shall inherit the earth”.

Let’s break the first half down a little more, because both major words in it are very interesting (“hoi” is just an article; basically it’s just “the”). The first word, “makarioi”, can actually be translated in English either as “blessed” or as “happy”, though it should be noted happy in a more full sense than just the pleasant sensation of having recently eaten on a sunny day with no work to do at the moment.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people, or at least a lot of my fellow Americans, want to take “blessed”, not as an adjective, but as a future conditional verb. Basically, they want to take Christ, not as describing what presently is, but as giving rules with rewards that are attached. This doesn’t work even in English, but it’s even more obvious in Greek where makarioi is declined to agree with the subject, “hoi praeis”. Christ it’s telling us what to do and offering rewards. He’s telling us that we’re looking at the world all wrong, and why.

The other part, “hoi praeis”, is what gets translated as “the meek”, though I’ve also seen “the gentle”. It is the noun form of an adjective, “praios” (“πρᾷος”), which (not surprisingly) tends to mean mild or gentle.

Now, to avoid a connotation which modern English has accrued over hundreds of years of character descriptions in novels, it does not mean week, timid, or mousy. The wiktionary entry for praios has some usage examples. If one peruses through them, they are things like asking a god to be gentle, or saying that a king is gentle with his people.

So translating the first half very loosely, we might render the beatitude:

Those who restrain their force have been blessed, for they will inherit the earth.

This expanded version of the beatitude puts it in the group of the beatitudes which refer to something under the control of the people described as “makarios” (blessed, happy). Consider the other groups of people, which are roughly half of beatitudes: “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn”, “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”, “those who are persecuted in the cause of righteousness,” and “you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you falsely on my account”.

I think that this really makes it clear that what is being described is a gift, though a hard-to-understand one. So what do we make of the other beatitudes, the ones under people’s control?

Just as a quick refresher, they are: “the meek”, “the merciful”, “the pure in heart”, and “the peacemakers”. They each have the superficial form of there being a reward for those who do well, but if we look closer, the reward is an intrinsic reward. That is, it is the natural outcome of the action.

So if we look closely at the second half of the meek beatitude, we see that indeed it is connected to the first half: “for they will inherit the earth”. This is often literally the case: those who fight when they don’t have to die when they don’t have to, and leave the world to those who survive them.

Now, I think too much can be made of “the original context”—our Lord was incarnate in a particular time and spoke to particular people, but they were human beings and he was also speaking to all of us. Still, I think it is worth looking at that original context, and how in the ancient world one of the surest paths to glory was conquest. Heroes were, generally, warriors. They were not, as a rule, gentle. Even in more modern contexts where war is mechanized and so individuals get less glory, there are still analogs where fortune favors the bold. We laud sports figures and political figures who crush their enemies in metaphorical, rather than literal, senses.

Even on a more simple level, we can only appreciate the power than a man has when he demonstrates it by using it.

And here Christ is saying that those are happy who do not use their power when they don’t have to. And why? Because they inherit the earth. Glory is fleeting, and in the end one can’t actually do very much with it. Those who attain glory by the display of power do not, in putting that power on display, use it to do anything useful. They waste their power for show, rather than using it to build. And having built nothing, they will end up with nothing.

You can see this demonstrated in microcosm in a sport I happen to like: power lifting. It is impressive to see people pick up enormous weights. But what do they do with them once they’ve picked them up? They just put them back down again.

Now, the fact that this is in microcosm means that there can be good justifications for it; building up strength by lifting useless weights can give one the strength to lift useful weights, such as children, furniture, someone else who has fallen down, etc. And weightlifting competitions do serve the useful role of inspiring people to develop their strength; a powerlifting meet is not the same thing as conquering a country. But there is, none the less, a great metaphor for it, if one were to extend the powerlifting competition to being all of life. Happy are those who do not.

Bishop Barron on Giving and Receiving

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Interesting FindsLeave a comment

In an interesting review of a book/movie called The Gold Finch, Bishop Barron talks about the subject of giving and receiving:

It’s a good video and I recommend watching it.

I’d like to add that people (not Bishop Barron) tend to view giving as if it is somehow the enemy of having, but it is, in reality, the receipt of something else. People too often take the idea that we are made in the image of God to be exclusively about how we are rational. It is, certainly, about that, but I think people too often neglect that, in the words of Saint James, God is love. Love being the willing of the good of the other for his own sake, this can also be translated that God is gift.

To be made in the image of God means not only that we can rationally understand the nature of creation, and not only that we have the intellect and will to choose good or evil, but that we partake in this divine nature of giving. In us, who are contingent creatures, we must first receive in order to give. But in giving away what we’ve been given, we are receiving the gift of taking part in the divine life of generosity.

Too often, people think of giving things away as reducing the self. As a noble self-sacrifice, it is true, but none the less as a form of self sacrifice. As if it is good to diminish ourselves. But this is not right; it is not good that we become less. The key is that in giving away, we become more, because giving is participation in the divine. It is a privilege to be able to give.

For us finite human beings it is complicated, of course, by the fact that we are surrounded by more recipients than we have ability to give to. This is probably magnified a thousand fold in modern life where we are surrounded by strangers and only a phone call away from a few billion people. Figuring out what it is given to us to give and what it is not given to us to give is an enormous challenge. In fact, much sin has at its root grasping at something we were not given to give.

Looking at life from the right perspective does not make it easy to get right, but it does at least make it possible to get right.

The Best Laid Schemes O’ Mice an’ Men Gang Aft Agley

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

This weekmonthsummer has really not been going the way I hoped it would. I’m going to talk about why that’s OK, but first I want to quote the stanza from which the title comes, because the original poem, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785, is not quoted often enough:

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!

So, the reason for the strike-through up above is that I began this post in, if my memory serves me, July, and I am now finishing it in August. Between various things, mostly family related, as well as an annual trip to visit my parents, and most things have gotten pushed to the side. About the only thing I’ve managed to do which is creative is work on the second chronicle of Brother Thomas, Wedding Flowers Will Do For a Funeral.

On the plus side, I’ve finished the first draft and, as of the time of this writing, have edited the first 100 pages (actually, 99¼, but the word processor is on page 100). It’s going slower than I would like, of course, but that’s something of a theme, lately.

And just to make life more crowded, I’m finally going back to the gym to lift weights 3 times a week. In the long run, it’s very good that I’m doing it, but it means even less time.

And that’s OK.

I’d really like to be a lot more productive on this blog and on my YouTube channel. I’ve got a notepad of videos to do which is up to about 10 items now. It’s a backlog. And I’ve got tons of blog posts to write. I want to finish reviewing the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, I want to review all of the Cadfael novels, and after that, probably the Poirot novels. I want to talk more about mystery writing, I’ve got lots of things to write about theology and philosophy, too.

And, God willing, some day I will.

But it’s that first part that’s really important to keep in mind. It’s our job to do our best; it’s God’s job to figure out whether—and how—we should succeed. Running the world is a big and complex task, and God doesn’t ask of us that we do it. All He asks of us is that we do our best to do what he’s given us to do in the moment.

So, the world frequently doesn’t turn out like we expect. But we can trust that it does turn out for the best.

That’s really all we can ever do: do our best and trust God.

The Case For Jesus is a Good Book

On By Christopher LansdownIn ChristianityLeave a comment

On the recommendation of a friend, I recently picked up a copy of The Case For Jesus by Brant Pitre. I’m glad I got it on hardcover, because it’s the sort of book I’m going to make sure my children read when they’re older.

The main subject of the book is the historical evidence for the gospels and within them, Jesus’ claim to be divine. It is very easy to read, and covers a good amount of both modern nonsense and straightforward questions which even a non-modern might reasonably ask.

On the modernist front, it addresses subjects such as the gospels being anonymous compilations, assembled long after the witnesses were dead, which were folktales rather than history. It rips each of these to shreds, with copious endnotes.

On the more reasonable front, it asks and answers questions such as, who wrote the gospels? Did Jesus really claim to be divine in the synoptic gospels? Why did people think that Jesus was the Messiah? It answers these questions in a very satisfying way.

It’s the answers to the more reasonable questions which are what make the book great. Pitre’s main thesis is at looking at Jesus and early Christianity through first century Jewish eyes, and one of the more intriguing things he notes is that what really impressed the first Christians were not the modern arguments common today but the degree to which Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of scripture. This prompts an absolutely fascinating discussion of the prophecies in the book of Daniel, as well as drawing attention to what the sign of Jonah actually was.

So, in short, this book is absolutely worth it and I highly recommend it.

Carrying One’s Cross

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

In the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, it says:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. What, then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world and forfeiting his life? Or what can anyone offer in exchange for his life?”

Carrying one’s cross is a common expression, though it’s often treated as an atypical thing. People talk about something troublesome as “a cross they must bear”. But I think that there are two things to note about the above passage in this regard.

The first is that carrying one’s cross is a prerequisite of discipleship. That is, carrying one’s cross is normal. Or, in other words, suffering, in this fallen world, is normal.

There was a Twitter conversation I was in, recently, where an aquaintance who goes by the nom-de-plume of Brometheus was pointing out that a lot of people are afraid of having children because they’ve been taught that “having children is a miserable experience, a thankless martyrdom of bleak misery and self-denial.”

There is much that can be said about this arising from misguided attempts to get people to avoid fornication, such as by having to “care” for robot babies whose programming is to be a periodic nuisance, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Instead, I just want to point out that having child is actually a miserable experience, an occasionally-thanked martyrdom of joyful misery and self-denial. Or in other words, it’s good work.

All good work involves suffering and self-denial; it involves this because we are imperfect. We do the wrong thing, at the wrong time; quite often for the wrong reasons. And being a parent quite often involves having to do the right thing at the right time, and if at all possible, for the right reasons. To a creature with unhelpful inclinations, that involves suffering.

And that’s OK. Everything worthwhile involves suffering, because worthwhile things make the world better, and that hurts in a world that’s flawed. Or in other words, if you want to be Jesus’ disciple, you have to renounce yourself, take up your cross, and follow him.

The problem is not that people think that having children involves suffering and self denial. It’s that they think it’s bad that it involves suffering and self-denial. The problem is that they want to put down their cross and follow the path of least resistance.

The other thing to note about the passage above is that people often talk about it like life gets more comfortable when it’s finally time to put down your cross. Perhaps it’s because execution by crucifixion is no longer practiced in the western world.

Something to remember is that if it’s your cross that you’re carrying, when you finally get to put it down the next thing that happens is that the Romans nail you to it, then hoist you up to die.

It’s not the full story, but there’s a lot of wisdom to those lines, from the Dread Pirate Roberts to Princess Buttercup, in The Princess Bride:

Life is suffering, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

Thoughts From an Aging Sex Symbol

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Interesting Finds, PhilosophyLeave a comment

One of my better videos, now two years old, is Satanic Banality:

In it, I mention that celebrities can only sell the image of the bad life turning out well for a while, and when they wise up they lose their relevance. Which reminded me of this article by Raquel Welch, back in 2010. As the kids would say, here’s the nut graf:

Seriously, folks, if an aging sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it’s gotta be pretty bad. In fact, it’s precisely because of the sexy image I’ve had that it’s important for me to speak up and say: Come on girls! Time to pull up our socks! We’re capable of so much better.

But in 2010, so far as I can tell, Raquel Welch no longer had any influence, so it didn’t matter. That’s the resilience of an engine which feeds on ignorance and spits out wiser people as spent fuel. When they were ignorant, the machine gave them their power. Once spit out, their knowledge is powerless.

(Except in individual cases; saving souls tends to be a personal business, not done over television screens.)

When Atheists Pray

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

In a video in which a former MMA fighter accepts a challenge from a self-defense coach to fight, the comment section was, as you might imagine, lapping up the drama like a man who just walked through the desert a lemonade stand. One comment stood out to me, though:

I’m an atheist, but please God, make this happen.

In his excellent video on prayer, Bishop Barron said that studies show that everyone prays—even atheists. And indeed, they do. But it’s curious to consider when they pray, since they’re not exactly known for regularly saying their bedtime prayers. (What follows is, of course, guesswork and painting with a broad brush.)

The second biggest time, I suspect, is in cases of danger. And of course there is the prayers asking to be spared from danger. But more interesting is a reason given by the blogger Richard Fernandez, who went by the pen name Wretchard the Cat at the time. He was explaining why there are no atheists in foxholes. It’s not because people are scared. It’s because they need forgiveness.

And indeed, forgiveness is one of the two great problems that atheists face which they cannot possibly solve. As a creature in time, they cannot change the past; this means that things done wrong cannot be put right. God, being outside of time, can apply a balancing payment at the very instant of a misdeed; people can only try to make amends and try to forget. But amends do not fix the original problem, since it remains what it ever was. Only God can change the problem in the moment of its existence, since only he was there and not causing the problem.

The other great unsolvable problem which atheists have relates to what is probably the more common type of atheist prayer: hope. An atheist has precisely no reason to hope. The only way to live life, other than in despair, is in hope. We are too finite—too weak and short-sighted—to live in any way other than despair and hope. But to live in despair will probably just end in suicide; though to quote Chesterton it might be suicide using the tools of pleasure, rather than the tools of pain.

The type of prayer that hope produces is generally that of asking for life to work out according to an intelligible rational plan, or as it is more commonly known, asking for stuff.

Which brings us back to the quote with which this started. Everyone knows, on some level, that for the world to be good it must be ordered according to a rational will. It’s curious how much of the time, in a rich society, one can not think about that fact.

Gaudy Night

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Mystery, Uncategorized, WritingLeave a comment

I recently finished re-reading Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers. It is the second to last of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels and, in fiction at any rate, may reasonably be considered her magnum opus. (As a warning, this is not a review but just the jotting down of some thoughts. It is meant for those who have read the book or who don’t mind spoilers. If you’re neither person, you would be best advised to put his post down and go read Gaudy Night. As the standard joke runs: go do it now. I’ll wait.)

Reading Gaudy Night is always a mixed experience for me. On the one hand, it’s a a triumph of a book. It’s got some of the most vivid, living characters I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s got an excellent plot which is excellent both as a mystery and as a story of the characters who are caught up in the mystery. It has an excellent setting. It is very well told. It has fascinating and important themes. It handles the long-running romance between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane with great skill and brings it to a very satisfying conclusion.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is related to why the atheistic children of atheists can’t tell good stories. This might sound strange to the people who know that Dorothy L. Sayers was a very well educated and intelligent Christian woman. There are better examples of it, but her book The Mind of the Maker, for example, is none the less a good example of the fact.

The problem is that there are limits to how good a story even a Christian can tell with atheistic characters. The atheistic child of atheists is far more limited because he simply has no good stories to tell. Atheism is the supposition that life is not, in fact, a narrative, but merely a meaningless set of coincidences. Such a person can suspend his disbelief, but he will simply have nothing to suspend it for. His parents will not have told him any really human stories, and being an atheist himself he will not have encountered them, either.

A different, but related, problem faces the Christian who is writing a story entirely about atheists. It is that all good stories must flow out of the characters in them. Characters who do not generate the story but to whom the story simply happens are not characters but mere props, possibly of the seen characters and possibly of unseen characters. And the most you can get out of atheistic characters is seeing the problems of life.

Atheists cannot have answers to any of the problems of life for the very simple reason that atheism does not allow for the possibility of meaning in life. (They will whine to you about “the meaning they give their life”. It is nothing but awkward when an adult tells you about the games of pretend they like to play. I mean that literally, by the way. The meaning an atheist chooses to give to life exists only in his mind and goes away as soon as he stops creating it. This is no different than pretending to ride a giant seagull named Harry.)

All themes raised in a book with only atheistic characters—or where the only non-atheists are fools—can thus never say anything about the themes it brings up except to point out that some false answer or other is not true. This can be valuable but it cannot be satisfying. It’s going to dinner and being told that the ham is poisoned. It’s good to know. One leaves just as hungry as one came, though.

One of the great themes of Gaudy Night is that principles hurt people. But it leaves unexplored—or only implicitly explored—that a lack of principles hurt people even more. And, more to the point, that it is only principles that make living worthwhile in the first place.

For example, when Annie was complaining that the lie her historian husband had told never hurt anyone, no one pointed out to her that the only reason he had even had his job in the first place was because he was trusted to tell the truth. If they were to abandon the principle that the truth mattered, he’d have lost his job, instead of by being the wrong man for the job, but by there being no job at all.

Instead they talked of how the truth is more important than personal attachments. And so it is; anyone who loves father and mother more than Christ is not worthy of him. But this is a Christian idea—as is, really, the university. I don’t mean that students coming to wise men to learn is Christian—one obviously finds that throughout time and place. Rather, the idea that all of the truth is sacred is a uniquely Christian attitude. You simply don’t find it outside of Christianity; everyone else takes the far more reasonable position that there are big truths and little truths and the latter are inconsequential compared to the former. Most people hold that here’s one truth of overriding importance and everything else should give way beside it. It is not the love of some truth that Christianity elevated. To love some truth is simply to be human. It is the elevation of little truths that is uniquely Christian. Christianity is unique among the religions and philosophies of the world for raising up the lowly. All sane men agree that life is a hierarchy; the unique contribution of Christianity is not the obvious fact that the lower should serve the higher, but rather that the higher should stoop down to serve the lower. The very strange thing about Christianity is that the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

And this is what is uniquely Christian about a university. It is the attitude that facts which don’t matter, do matter. Which is why in our own time the universities are disintegrating before our eyes. Some take refuge in engineering; others take refuge in pretending that their incredibly minor disciplines are central to life. Most are simply taking advantage of the shade while the building is still standing. But anyone with eyes can see that the thing won’t be standing for many more decades.

In Dorothy L. Sayers’ time the conclusion was not yet so obvious, but the problem was certainly visible. The thing which prevents Gaudy Night from being a complete triumph is that, in the end, no one answered Annie. They didn’t answer Annie because no one had an answer. They didn’t have an answer for her because they didn’t have an answer for anyone. Atheists have no answers. It’s why they always feel so daring when they ask questions. They know, on some level, that merely asking questions will take a sledgehammer to the foundations and it will be discovered that the whole edifice is painted cardboard.

In the end, I think it’s very symbolic that the problem was dealt with “medically”. They had no arguments, they had only force. But they didn’t even have the courage of their convictions to use the force; they had to pay someone else who would soothingly pretend that they weren’t using force.

In a sense this conclusion was merely true to life. The events of the story take place in its year of publication: 1935. World War II was four short years off, but you could hear it coming in Gaudy Night. The project of living a Christian life without being Christian was coming to a close. Which ultimately makes Gaudy Night a book about failure. It’s a very good book, and a very important book. But this limits it. Failure is, in this world, only a prelude. The true story of life is, ultimately, about victory.

If you like Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, consider checking out my own murder mystery, The Dean Died Over Winter Break.

No, Not All Are Welcome

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was recently reminded of a rather bad hymn that seems to be standard in american Catholic hymnals: All Are Welcome.

Let us build a house where love can dwell
and all can safely live,
a place where saints and children tell
how hearts learn to forgive.
Built of hopes and dreams and visions,
rock of faith and vault of grace;
here the love of Christ shall end divisions.
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.

Granted it suffers from the problem that many hymns written in the post-war period suffer from: it’s really about man, not about God. However, that’s not why I despise it. I despise it because it’s a lie.

All are most certainly not welcome in the place that hymn is sung. The only place in the world of which that’s true is prison. Everywhere else has membership requirements. Whatever they sang, the hippy-dippy hippies who sang this with all of the enthusiasm they could muster would ask the chainsaw-wielding man covered in filth and screaming obscenity-laced death threats to come back some other time.

Some will object that they mean that the man is welcome once he puts away his chainsaw, takes a bath, and speaks politely. So what? It’s not a meaningful sort of inclusiveness to say that one will accept anyone who conforms to the group’s demands. What’s special about that? Everyone will accept those who make themselves acceptable.

Of course, the example I gave, while sufficient to prove the theoretical point, is not realistic. And it’s precisely the realistic extreme example which sheds a lot of light on the theme of that time and the very contrasting theme of our time.

The realistic example is the man in the sweater vest who is openly fornicating and openly saying blasphemies in a normal speaking voice. And the hippy-dippy hippies who sang All Are Welcome did, in fact, let him stay.

There is, of course, a parallel in secular culture. The flagrantly fornicating man who “flirted” with all of the women at the office was welcome too. Modern mythology holds that this was the norm throughout history until fifteen minutes ago but even a cursory familiarity with movies and television from the 1950s and before would tell one that a man who talked openly of sex in the workplace, not just in front of women, but to them, would never have been tolerated.

This is, after all, the repression which the 1970s loved to criticize. Today we call it sexual harassment rather than impropriety but apart from the language a man being fired for “being too free with the ladies” differs only in terminology. But in the 1970s all were welcome, even the sexual harassers.

Our society prefers to call “polite society” by the name “safe spaces” but the thing to which the name refers is the same. There are places and times when people must restrain their impulses and behave in a way that makes everyone comfortable. The idea that everyone should become comfortable with everything simply doesn’t work.

At the same time we see secular culture clawing its way back to propriety in public places we see religious culture clawing its way back to the idea of sacred spaces. Sacred means “set apart” and a thing is set apart not by having walls and doors but by what is and is not done in them. That first part is as important as the second; when it comes to the sacred sins of omission are the equals of sins of commission.

I do not yet know what it was that animated the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s—what it was that made the hippies so dippy that they thought that if they broke down all barriers everyone would somehow get along. (The obvious guess is the devastation of the first two world wars, especially in Europe, and those combined with the trauma of racism in the United States.)

It had the very curious property that it sounded Godly but was actually diabolic—I mean in the original sense of the Greek “diabolein”: to scatter. The diabolic scatters man from man and prevents unity. So surely getting everyone together should be the opposite?

But this is a fallen world and men will not all get along. If you try to force them to all that will happen is that you will break down true friendship and camaraderie. Those need safe spaces in which to grow.

If you let the heretics into church they will not worship God with you. They will only keep you from worshiping God. It is no accident that Christ said:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

An even more apt quotation would be what the angels said at the birth of Christ. Curiously, the version most people are familiar with, which comes from the King James translation of the bible, is very badly translated:

Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Bu when it is translated more accurately, you get something like (this one is from the Revised Standard Version):

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.

Just so you can see the main idea in the variety, here’s an alternative translation which is also faithful to the original text (The New Jerusalem Bible):

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace for those He favours.

Peace is the ordering of the world to the good. That is, it is a rational ordering of the world according to its nature. But a rational ordering must be in a mind and for it to be a property of the world and not merely imposed on the world it must be in the mind of the world’s maker.

Peace is the ordering of the world according to God’s will. Peace is only possible, therefore, among those who do his will. Those who do only their own will can never be at peace with God or each other. 

Which is why people must set themselves apart so that they can get along.

The age of universal peace is finally over. We can now get back to the business of getting along with each other.

The Frank Friar on Regrets

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In a video which I highly recommend, The Frank Friar talks about regrets:

I really like how he distinguishes a proper resolve to make amends where making amends is possible and an inordinate attachment to the past where action in the present isn’t possible.

Much of life is reducible to: do what you can and trust God for the rest. But it can be very beneficial to see the specifics of that in each circumstance because that sort of fundamental orientation is hard, in this fallen world, to achieve.

Natural Theology and God’s Essence

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I received an email with an interesting question:

The classical theistic tradition makes it well known that any knowledge of God’s essence is impossible, and even advances several argument as to why this is the case. However, if this is correct, I can’t really understand how the arguments from natural theology can give us any knowledge of his existence: isn’t the point of those arguments to show that God just is his existence itself, that is, that in God essence and existence are one and the same? Wouldn’t this mean that knowledge of his existence is also knowledge of his essence? And the latter being impossible, aren’t we left with a contradiction?

There are two answers to this. They depend on how one answers the question of whether we can predicate anything of God by analogy or whether we can only negatively predicate things of God.

I fall into the former camp and hold that one can predicate things of God by analogy. Thus when we say that God exists, we mean something which is analogous to our own existence but not something which is known in its entirety to us. To make a poor analogy but one that points in the right direction, when we say that a flower is white, we are describing an aspect of its color but we’re not saying anything about what it looks like in spectra that we can’t see. (It is the case that most white flowers look different in the UV spectrum which some insects can see.)

To say what God is, completely, is beyond our ability. But it is not accurate to say that we can’t know anything about God.

Part of why I fall into this camp is that it doesn’t make sense for creation to not even be like its creator; if we do not reflect any of God, then from where do we draw our qualities?

However, it is possible to go the other way and to say that we can only negatively predicate things of God. (These are not, in general, the people who do natural philosophy.) In which case, you get this result:

it is wrong to say that God exists

(“It is wrong to say that God exists. It is wrong to say that God does not exist. But it is more wrong to say that God does not exist. –Saint Dionysius the Areopagite)