Category: Christianity

Frustrations Can Be Very Frustrating

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve been trying to work out a way to use a teleprompter to be able to read scripts for my YouTube channel without having to do any editing. (My traditional scripted videos, which use an audio track with pictures meant for illustration is extremely time-consuming and I just don’t have the time right now.) I’m trying the teleprompter because I’ve found that if you can see a human being speaking, it’s not a big deal if they occasionally correct themselves, but it feels really weird for that if it’s a disembodied voice.

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to read a script off of a teleprompter, there’s no substitute for actually trying the thing and seeing how it goes. Which means I’ve had various takes of five to twenty minutes that were no good and had to be thrown out. In several cases these got junked by having the teleprompter settings off (too slow/wrong font size) or the AI teleprompter which uses speech recognition to advance the words losing track and giving up. In some cases, it was finding all of the settings on my laptop to have it stop going to sleep automatically. And in one case I had a complete take where I accidentally left something in frame which ruined the take.

All of this was very, deeply frustrating. I lost hours to this stuff at a time in my life when minutes are precious.

But that’s just how life goes, sometimes.

If you spend enough time doing creative work to do anything worthwhile, you’re going to encounter frustrations and wastes of time. For this reason, a man’s ability to make worthwhile creative things is only partially determined by his skill. That’s necessary, of course, but it’s not enough on its own. Equally necessary is the ability to not give up in the face of great frustration.

This is, of course, the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. If life is thought of as a race, it is won, not by whoever happens to be fastest at the moment, but by those who do not give up.

This is also why forgiveness is such a critical skill, particularly being able to forgive oneself. It does matter greatly how often one stumbles and falls so long as one gets up every time. Indeed, the man who gives up the first time he falls will fall only once—and will not finish the race.

It’s also the same idea as Woody Allen’s quip that “80 percent of success is showing up.” It’s not so much showing up the first time that’s hard, but showing up all the time.

What Should Christians Make of AI?

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

In this video, I answer a viewer’s question about what Christians should make of AI. (It’s really the same thing that everyone should make of AI.

Basically, there are two senses of AI:

  1. Like us
  2. Something that does what we would do by intelligence.

All AI that exists is AI in sense 2, not in sense 1, though sense 1 wouldn’t be a massive problem if it did exist.

How to Balance Gratitude With Ambition

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was watching a Chris Williamson Q&A video recently and a question he was asked was how to balance gratitude with ambition (or aspiration for improvement, if you dislike the term ambition). The exact phrasing of the question was:

How do I manage the dichotomy between being grateful for how far I’ve come and wanting to become more? The dichotomy between working for my future and being present in the moment.

There are several answer to this, and the thing is, they’re all primarily religious. It’s actually kind of interesting how often hard-won, top-level secular wisdom is beginning religious education. The Jewish sabbath is exactly this. God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and on the seventh day God rested, so human beings will work for six days and rest on the seventh. (Bear in mind that rest implies contemplation, not merely sleeping.) There you go, there’s your management of the dichotomy between working and gratitude. (The Christian moving of the day of rest to Sunday is an interesting and rich topic, but all of that rich symbolism doesn’t materially affect the current subject.) To put this in secular terms, a regular 6-to-1 balance of time dedicated to work with time dedicated to contemplation will keep your balance. If you keep it regular (that is, according to a rule), it will ensure that the effects of contemplation do not wear off. And guess what: you need to impose rules on yourself to make yourself do it because human beings don’t perfectly auto-regulate. (Just don’t make the rules so rigid you can’t live; the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.)

Another answer, here, is to keep God always in mind. This will make you strive to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect and also make you grateful for all that He’s already given you.

Here’s where Jordan Peterson’s language of “God is the highest good” falls a bit short, since keeping the highest good in mind will stimulate ambition, but it doesn’t tend nearly so much to gratitude. For gratitude you need to keep in mind the nothingness from which you came and which you could, apart from the positive action of The Good, become again. This requires a leap of faith that the world is not evil, though. If you can do this, you’re not going to be secular for long, and the whole exercise of trying to put this into secular language will be unnecessary. If you can’t take this leap of faith that the world exists because of good, then you’ll never actually be grateful anyway. People try to use “grateful” as an intransitive verb, but it’s not. It’s a transitive verb. You don’t have to conceive of God as a person to be grateful to Him, though it helps. But if the world is just a cruel joke with no punchline which no one told, gratitude is nonsensical. But here’s the thing: if you aren’t sure whether life is a cruel joke with no punchline that no one has told, that is equally paralyzing.

To see why, consider this thought experiment: you receive a text message from a friend which says something complementary about you, but there are enough odd word choices that you think it might just be his phone unlocked in his pocket interacting with auto-correct. Try to feel grateful for this message which you think might be a real compliment and might just be random noise that accidentally looks like a message. You will find that you can’t do it.

Nevertheless, it can still be interesting to say what is true, even if it will do no one any good: the way you keep perspective is by comparing, not to one thing, but to two things. If you want to keep perspective on your achievements, you must compare them both to the fullness of what you can achieve as well as to the nothing which is the least you could have achieved. Comparing to only one will not give you a proper perspective, because neither, on its own, is the full picture. Only by looking at the full picture will you have a correct perspective on where your achievements are within it. This is as true of metaphorical photographs as it is of literal photographs.

Tzvi Reading The Lantern Bearers

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Interesting Finds, UncategorizedLeave a comment

My friend Tzvi put up a video in which he gave a reading of the Robert Louis Stevenson essay, The Lantern Bearers. You can watch it on his substack.

It’s an interesting essay and Tzvi reads it well. I especially like the part where Stevenson discusses the interior life of the miser, though it’s only next to the main point of the essay. The main point, or at least what I take to be the main point, is that the makers of art are too apt to think themselves full, because they know themselves, and to think other men empty because they do not know them. (Admittedly, Part 1 of the essay is a little slow, though it was appropriate to the style of the day, which was necessary to make the point it made in the time in which it was written. It very much rewards bearing with it.)

This is a bit of a tangent, but the essay calls to mind this section out of G.K. Chesterton’s book The Well and the Shallows:

It is not an idle contradiction to say that Mr. Shaw is flippant because he is serious.  A man like Mr. Shaw has the deliberate intention of getting people to listen to what he has to say; and therefore he must be amusing.  A man who is only amusing himself need not be amusing.  Generally, when he is a perfect and polished stylist, he is not.  And there is a good deal of misunderstanding about the relative moral attitude of the two types; especially in connection with the old morality of modesty.  Most persons, listening to these loud flippancies would say that Mr. Bernard Shaw is egotistical.  Mr. Bernard Shaw himself would emphatically and violently assert that he is egotistical; and I should emphatically and violently assert that he is not.  It is not the first time we have somewhat tartly disagreed.  And perhaps I could not more effectively perform the just and necessary public duty of annoying Mr. Shaw than by saying (as I do say) that in this matter he really inherits an unconscious tradition of Christian humility.  The preaching friar puts his sermon into popular language, the missionary fills his sermon with anecdotes and even jokes, because he is thinking of his mission and not of himself It does not matter that Mr. Shaw’s sentences so often begin with the pronoun “I.” The Apostles Creed begins with the pronoun “I”; but it goes on to rather more important nouns and names.

Father Ronald Knox, in his satire on Modernism, has described the courteous vagueness of the Oxford manner which

….  tempering pious zeal
Corrected, “I believe” to “One does feel.”

And though I have much of such courtesy to be thankful for, both in conversation and criticism, I must do justice to the more dogmatic type, where I feel it to be right.  And I will say firmly that it is the author who says, “One does feel,” who is really an egoist; and the author who says, “I believe,” who is not an egoist.  We all know what is meant by a truly beautiful essay; and how it is generally written in the light or delicate tone of, “One does feel.” I am perfectly well aware that all my articles are articles, and that none of my articles are essays.  An essay is often written in a really graceful and exquisitely balanced style, which I doubt if I could imitate, though I might try.  Anyhow, it generally deals with experiences of a certain unprovocative sort in a certain unattached fashion; it begins with something like.  .  .  .

“The pond in my garden shows, under the change of morning, an apprehension of the moving air, hardly to be called a wave; and so little clouding its lucidity as to seem rather vacuity in motion.  Here at least is nothing to stain the bright negation of water; none of those suburban gold-fish that look like carrots and do but nose after their tails in a circle of frustration, to give some sulky gardener cause to cry ‘stinking fish’.  The mind is altogether carried away upon the faint curve of wind over water; the movement is something less solid than anything that we can call liquid; the smoke of my light Virginian cigarette does not mount more unsubstantially towards the sky.  Nor indeed inaptly:  it needs some such haven of patriarchal mildness to accent sharply the tang of mild tobacco; alone perhaps, of all the attributes of Raleigh’s red-haired mistress, rightly to be called virginal.”

I think I might learn to do it some day; though not by a commercial correspondence course; but the truth is that I am very much occupied.  I confess to thinking that the things which occupy me are more important; but I am disposed to deny that the thing I think important is myself.  And in justice not only to myself but to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Belloc and Mr. Mencken and many another man in the same line of business, I am moved to protest that the other literary method, the method of, “One does feel,” is much more really arrogant than ours.  The man in Mr. Shaw’s play remarks that who says artist says duellist.  Perhaps, nevertheless, Mr. Shaw is too much of a duellist to be quite an artist.  But anyhow, I will affirm, on the same model, that who says essayist says egoist.  I am sorry if it is an alliteration, almost a rhyme and something approaching to a pun.  Like a great many such things, it is also a fact.

Even in the fancy example I have given, and in a hundred far better and more beautiful extracts from the real essayists, the point could be shown.  If I go out of my way to tell the reader that I smoke Virginian cigarettes, it can only be because I assume the reader to be interested in me.  Nobody can be interested in Virginian cigarettes.  But if I shout at the reader that I believe in the Virginian cause in the American Civil War, as does the author of The American Heresy, if I thunder as he does that all America is now a ruin and an anarchy because in that great battle the good cause went down — then I am not an egoist.  I am only a dogmatist; which seems to be much more generally disliked.  The fact that I believe in God may be, in all modesty, of some human interest; because any man believing in God may affect any other man believing in God.  But the fact that I do not believe in gold-fish, as ornaments in a garden pond, cannot be of the slightest interest to anybody on earth, unless I assume that some people are interested in anything whatever that is connected with me.  And that is exactly what the true elegant essayist does assume.  I do not say he is wrong; I do not deny that he also in another way represents humanity and uses a sort of artistic fiction or symbol in order to do so.  I only say that, if it comes to a quarrel about being conceited, he is far the more conceited of the two.  The one sort of man deals with big things noisily and the other with small things quietly.  But there is much more of the note of superiority in the man who always treats of things smaller than himself than the man who always treats of things greater than himself.

Dogmatists, being fallen creatures, have faults. But I think it worth saying that among their faults, one does not find that they assume other men’s interior lives to be empty merely because they do not know them. Dogmatists are the great democrats of life, in the Chestertonian sense of the word “democrat”—they believe all men equal before the Law. Quite annoyingly to their neighbors, they also have a tendency to believe that all men are equally interested in the law. This may annoy their neighbors, but at least it does not insult them.

Science vs. Religion Show Why Heresy Matters

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, Uncategorized1 Comment

The “war between science and religion” does not really exist according to those English words in that order, and was a terrible name for what it actually did refer to. What it really should have been called was “the war between science and a particular widespread-in-the-english-speaking-world Christian heresy.” Because that’s what it actually was. I’m going to explain, briefly, before I get to the main point, which is that heresy matters.

The Book of Beginnings (more commonly known as the Book of Genesis since it frequently gets left untranslated) is obviously not meant to be anything like a science textbook, for the very obvious reason that it contains, back-to-back, two creation stories which disagree with each other about the sorts of things that a science textbook primarily concerns itself with. Whether Human Beings are the pinnacle of material creation as the end of a triumphant process or whether they are the pinnacle of creation as being given the right to name everything does not much matter to the central point of Human Beings being the pinnacle of material creation, but it matters very much to the question of which came first: the human or the chicken? It does not take a genius to figure out that the book can’t have been written primarily to answer questions it treats as irrelevant.

It doesn’t take a genius, but it does take someone who has thought about this a bit and can understand things like literary purpose. That’s not everyone. And here we come to the heresy of Sola Scriptura.

Sola Scriptura, which is the doctrine that scripture is the only authority, requires a somewhat lengthy treatment to be dealt with in full. This lengthy treatment can be found in many places so I’m not going to present it here. The relevant part to the moment is that Sola Scriptura means, as a necessary consequent, that any person (of good will/faith) who reads the bible must understand it fully and completely. (Martin Luther tried to get around this problem, in On the Bondage of the Will, by claiming that the parts of scripture that are hard to understand say the same thing as other parts, just less clearly, and so it’s not necessary to understand any part that’s hard to understand. Setting aside the astonishing hubris of claiming to fully and completely understand scripture, that doesn’t actually help anyway.)

This means that people who don’t get the concept of literary purpose, metaphor, etc. must be able to entirely understand scripture. Worse, this must be without any learning, because there are plenty of uneducated people in the world and even if there weren’t the educators would then have some of the authority since they would be teaching how to properly interpret.

The unintended consequence of this is that people who believe Sola Scriptura and who know any uneducated people or people who otherwise don’t understand things like literary intent and metaphor are forced to hold that the Book of Genesis is in fact meant as a science textbook. This puts them at war with actual science, because actual science disagreeing with the parts of Genesis which were never meant to be a science textbook will show that Sola Scriptura is false. This is “the war between science and religion.”

And this is where we come to the part where ideas have consequences: “the war between science and religion” has hurt a lot of people. Sola Fide has hurt even more people, since Sola Scriptura is just a consequence of Sola Fide. Sola Fide wouldn’t even be so bad except for Martin Luther having redefined faith from meaning, roughly, “acting according to truths we know but for which the evidence is no longer apparent” to “the will creating reality.” More colloquially, “trusting someone trustworthy” to “generating an interior feeling of certainty.” Moving faith from an act of the intellect and will in harmony to an act of the will against the intellect is, in essence, rejecting truth. And here’s the thing: Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. What Martin Luther tried to do, with Sola Fide, was to have Christianity without Christ. But you can’t do that. Which is why Martin Luther’s protestantism is proto-atheism. At some point you can’t keep up the pretense of having Christianity without Christ. Or to put it more simply: the fact that, within Christianity, there is nothing more important than the truth will eventually reassert itself. The bible cannot be the only authority because it cannot be any kind of authority. It’s a book. It is the thing authored, it is not an author itself. If the bible is the only authority, then there is no authority, and that this is logically necessary can only be evaded by an act of the will for so long. Historically, that turned out to not be very long.

It is not pleasant to call a heresy a heresy. When Saint Thomas More called William Roper, who had just asked for the hand of Sir Thomas’s daughter, a heretic, Roper replied, with great feeling, “Now that’s a word I don’t like.” To which Sir Thomas replied, “It’s not a likable word. It’s not a likable thing.” That gets to the heart of it: it’s not a likable word because it’s not a likable thing. It’s natural that people don’t like things which are not likable, but it remains important none the less.

Ideas have consequences. It is not pleasant to fight over ideas, but if we don’t fight over ideas we will still end up fighting. We will just fight over the consequences.

Requiescat In Pace, Michael F. Flynn

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized1 Comment

I recently learned from a post on his blog by his daughter that Michael F. Flynn, perhaps better known in the blogosphere as TOF, has passed away. Her post includes a tribute to him which is worth reading if you ever encountered him or his writing.

I must confess that when it comes to his fiction I only read a few of his short stories, which were extremely well written. The thing he wrote which I think everyone should read, though, is his fantastic history of the Copernican revolution called The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown. It is absolutely excellent history, very well written, engaging, and enlightening about the scientific revolution of going from the Ptolemaic model to the Copernican model of the solar system. It’s not a short read but it is absolutely, unquestionably worth the time.

Having said that, join me, if you would, in praying for Michael Flynn, with this prayer I remember from many funerals I attended in my youth:

Lord God, have mercy on your servant Michael. Forgive him his sins and grant him eternal life. This we ask through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

A Weird Take on the Thief on the Cross

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity7 Comments

Somehow Instagram (a social media site for looking at pictures of reptiles, though I believe some people look at it for photos of other things) recommended a video to me of a guy who was talking about the thief on the cross. Specifically, the one that upbraided the one who was abusing Jesus, and who asked Jesus to remember him when He came into His kingdom, and Jesus said, “this night you will be with me in paradise.” The guy asked, “how does this square with your theology? He wasn’t baptised, didn’t receive communion or confirmation, didn’t give anything to the poor, Jesus didn’t take away his suffering, he didn’t speak in tongues, etc.”

It’s a fairly obvious point, though one worth making from time to time that the ordinary ways that God gives to us to live are not the only ways he gives to people, and while he works through his sacraments he is not bound by them, etc. etc. etc. This is certainly a doctrine of orthodox theology, and you can see it in things like the baptism of blood, the baptism of desire, and so forth. But this guy is making a really big deal of it like he’s the first one to think of it, and also like it’s revolutionary. Somehow he doesn’t seem to take into account that the good thief was nailed to a cross. People tend to focus on the death in excruciating agony part of dying on a cross—reasonably enough—but it’s also a feature of the cross that a person nailed to it can’t do anything. The good thief didn’t do anything for the poor, but he also couldn’t. You can’t extrapolate from that to people who can do things for the poor. It’s just possible that Jesus’ words about the importance of caring for the poor might have some applicability. In short, just because it’s possible to be saved while nailed to a cross doesn’t mean that no one should bother with anything other than what a person nailed to a cross can do.

Then he went full-heretic (never go full-heretic). He said that the only thing that the thief had to offer Jesus was his belief.

This is dead wrong.

It is true that people can’t buy salvation with their good works. It is equally true that people can’t buy salvation with their belief. People simply can’t buy salvation.

Salvation is a gift from God freely given to us. The thing is, we have to accept it. And this is where we come to the part where Jesus said, “It is not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ who enters the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my Father.” Good works are the content of faith. It is possible for one to have faith without works where those works are prevented, but for most of us this is academic. Most of us are not nailed to a cross. Most of us have the opportunity to live according to the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection.

I find it really weird that there are people who are still trying to peddle the idea that salvation is a matter of pledging allegiance to Team God or having some sort of emotional experience of “belief”. I get why Martin Luther tried to redefine faith so as try to get rid of the need to trust God without having to get out of having the word; it made sense in the context in which he found himself. These days, there are much easier ways of not being Christian.

Lord, Have Mercy on Me, A Sinner

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

In which I discuss that referring to myself as a sinner is simply true and not rhetorical, as well as draw some lessons to when others (such as Bishop Barron) refer to themselves as sinners and how that should be taken seriously (but without speculating as to the specifics).

The title of the video is a reference to one of my favorite prayers, the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” (This prayer is, itself, a reference to the publican in the story of the pharisee and the publican.)

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.