Twitter Updates for 2010-04-24

Posted on April 24, 2010 by PaulVK

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Twitter Updates for 2010-04-23

Posted on April 23, 2010 by PaulVK

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Twitter Updates for 2010-04-22

Posted on April 22, 2010 by PaulVK

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Twitter Updates for 2010-04-21

Posted on April 21, 2010 by PaulVK
  • BBC: Iranian cleric says God cause earthquake because women wearing revealing clothing lead young men astray http://bit.ly/9iRJNe #
  • I love it when Tweetdeck says "don't panic" when Twitter goes down. What kind of panic do they imagine is tempting me? #
  • Handy timeline of the life of John Calvin http://bit.ly/91WANI #

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Twitter Updates for 2010-04-20

Posted on April 20, 2010 by PaulVK

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The tyranny of a good idea

Posted on April 19, 2010 by PaulVK

The zealots among us are passionate believers in something. We imagine that if only the infidels and hold-outs among us would conceded then there would be freedom and happiness. The downfall of most of us who are zealots is that we don’t understand culture and that we are all operating within systems that contain within themselves economies of checks and balances. Life is a complex of interweavings that defy our clumsy tinkerings. Innumerable revolutions and good doings in human history bear tales of supposed liberation and subsequent disaster.

Union troops freed the slaves. At first there was obviously jubilation. Not long after slaves would begin to wonder if they were freed to starve. Jim Crow and share cropping took its place after a dozen years of reconstruction. Slavery is never as easily undone as letting go of a chain. We are slaves to many masters, the worst of which are seldom the most obvious.

US troops liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Let freedom ring. You’re now free to enter into your own cycles of bloody reprisals.

Missionaries (religious, technological and otherwise) bound like Tigger into the lives of those “less fortunate” lovingly wanting to do good. Good is seldom that easily done. Tinkering with cultural systems nearly always leads to unintended consequences.

None of this is to say that any given intervention was not important, good or helpful in the long run. What I am saying is that we seldom fully understand exactly what we’re doing, even with the best intentions, and that should hopefully motivate us to add wisdom to our zeal. pvk

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Twitter Updates for 2010-04-17

Posted on April 17, 2010 by PaulVK

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Twitter Updates for 2010-04-16

Posted on April 16, 2010 by PaulVK

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CS Lewis clarifies Christian Morality in terms of immortality

Posted on April 15, 2010 by PaulVK

Again, from Mere Christianity. The chapter on Morality and Psychoanalysis

And that leads on to my second point. People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, if you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with. God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers; they seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of thought as if they were immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure or enjoy—for ever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.

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Lewis on the consequences of human immortality

Posted on April 15, 2010 by PaulVK

From Mere Christianity from the chapter on Three Parts of Morality

Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

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