Right now somewhere on the internet someone is seriously assuring you that if your church does not change its ideas to fit the fashion of the day, it will die. They will have diagrams, charts, and the advantage of youth. . . even if the writer is old. . . for advocating the spirit of the age is much cheaper than botox for church leaders who feel their youth fading.

Of course, ideas can be put in new packages. Liturgy in even the most traditional of churches evolves over time, but a certain sort of person, whether through fuzzy thinking or wickedness, bundles a change of message with a change of form. While the medium can be part of the message, it is not all of it. One can be a trinitarian who believes in sound doctrine in a great many different styles of worship. . . just as I have known heretics who get doctrine by divination of the cultural trends who were as traditional with their liturgy as any nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic.

So let me point out, for the doubter, the utter folly of those who advocate change in content for the sake of change of staying contemporary.

My favorite example at present is May Sinclair, a novelist and feminist, who did her best work in the early twentieth century. Her books are barely readable. . .they are in hack Victorian prose of the sort Trollope or Dickens would have written if they had started imitating Trollope or Dickens, but she has been pulled out of her total and blessed literary obscurity into the ungentle hands of Women’s Studies groups desperate for female authors to read who do not betray the ideology of the Department. The sad truth is that Austen and those Bronte girls are just not very feminist and are very Christian. The fact they wrote some of the best English prose of all time and were women is off set by the disturbingly romantic and traditional ideas in the book.

May Sinclair presents no such problems and requires no strained ideological reads. (”The balls in Austen are coded attacks on social repression.”) Sinclair may not write very well, but she is one of the team. She had some straight forward words for the Church and she pulled no punches.

As a fan of R.A. Torrey, who wrote about the same time, it is instructive to compare the two and what happened to the movements that followed their respective advice. Sinclair’s program for the church can be summed up as: “Make women priests and secularize fast!” Too much religious enthusiasm could lead to madness.

My favorite Sinclair quote has one of her favored characters say:

“I feel very strongly that taking over what you call the secular side is the Church’s one chance for survival. The people will be reconciled to the Church only if they see that the Church is identified with the common life and the common interests. We churchmen can only justify our existence through direct, personal service. Personal service and the increasing secularization of the Church’s outlook. Those are the great things.”

And another (sounding weirdly like Lewis’ Un-man of Perelandra) says:

“If God hasn’t created us, we must create God. . . . Out of ourselves. He is hidden in us as the germ is hidden in the womb. The world’s pain is the pain of labor, of bringing forth God. You see, we’ve got to change the Christian idea of God-made man to the idea of man-made God. God is not the great I AM. He is the great I SHALL BE.”

(A Cure of Souls, 1924)

All that sounds absurd enough now, even to secular ears, but people took it seriously then. Traditional Christians hated the thought, but moderates in their midst believed they had to change or die. At the same time , and I hope Fred Sanders can find some Torrey from 1924, R.A. Torrey was fighting back. He told the church to stick to the old ideas, but he was happy to use modern means of communication to do so.

Torrey preached Paul’s gospel using twentieth century techniques and fought Sinclair’s agenda with all his might. . . helping found the traditionalist reaction to secularism in the church.

What happened? Churches who listened to Torrey are thriving. Churches who listened to Sinclair are dead or dying. Now Sinclairism, the belief that the Church must adopt the ideas of the Academy of the time or die, is back in full cry. One of Sinclair’s favorite tactics was to claim that the real Jesus had gotten lost in a crust of old ideas that had nothing to do with the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We had to strip away those bad old ideas to get to the real Gospel which always amounted to something that (surprise!) was much more acceptable to smart folk of that age!

Sound familiar? I will leave it to the reader to supply his own examples from our own present May Sinclairs. Of course, they will claim to be different. . . and they are different, since intellectual fashion has changed in some areas (though not the obsession with women priests) and they are always highly attuned to fashion.

Amazing fact: one can safely ignore the wisdom of the Sinclairs and survive. In fact, it is the only way to thrive. My goal is to emulate R.A Torrey and preach the Old Time Religion by every means possible.

God is totally other than we are, so remote in His Divine Essence from anything human that merely thinking about Him is a kind of blasphemy. Aristotle was right to think that if He exists that He would be so great that no reasonable man could presume He was even aware of our insignificant existence. I cannot press the shift key often enough to express His greatness. God is so holy, has such a piercing beauty, that no man could see Him and live. We would be overwhelmed by Virtue.

And yet, we know one thing of God. God is One and in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity is revealed to us in three persons.

How do we know even this most precious fact?

I hardly dare to speak of it, but this same great God, in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, became human. Think of it! The Word, the divine Reason, took on a body and lived in our midst. We saw Him. We could touch Him. We beheld His Glory! Though we cannot know God in His Essence we can approach the Incarnate God . . . a Savior who let little children come to Him when the disciples would have kept them away. Rationally He should not have paid attention to our very existence except to condemn our foolish rebellion, but loving us He became one of us to save us from our evil.

In an act of unimaginable elevation, this God-Man called His disciples His friends. He is willing to be my Friend . . . a Friend to a sinner. I don’t deserve, cannot earn it, almost feel like rebuking God for His Divine temerity in loving me, but can only accept it.

And glory in it! Jesus Christ is willing to be my Friend.

When Christians have worshipped this God, they have traditionally brought their best. Like the woman in the New Testament who poured precious oil on the feet of Jesus, we give our best gifts to honor Our Lord. He gave up so much in becoming man that nothing we do could ever express what it means to humanity.

Our Friend is never just our Friend, but also our God, King, Creator, and Lord and yet it is equally wrong to forget that He wept. He was willing to weep for His friend Lazarus and for the women of Jerusalem. He does love us and sentiment is not misplaced. It is a false pride that is unwilling to accept His splendid condescension to us.

It is a cynical age. We are an age that has reduced everything to a marketable commodity. Even the last few paragraphs did not thrill us, but merely cause some to roll their eyes and others to think of how to make a profit on it. Love itself is something to toss aside. If the Victorians were overly sentimental, we have no sentiment left after having Barney and too many cartoons milk it out of us for Happy Meal sales. Christianity has too often followed suit with cheap icons sold for high prices, bobble head Mary for the back of the car, and “Foot Prints in the Sand” bathroom wall hangings.

Prophets must rage against this reduction of the Divine, but in my small minded way I am tempted to mere “sniffery.” Sniffery is the fastidious reaction of the middlebrow against things that offend good taste as defined by our age. It gets its title from the frequent nasal eruptions that occur when we notice some breach of manners. I am so tempted to sniff at everything and in fact, in some circles, learning to sniff at the proper moments is a reasonable substitute for a good education. Having come up from the “lower classes,” the middlebrow man is afraid not to sniff lest his “betters” think he does not know that the Precious Moments Bible is in bad taste.

It is fine to rage against the prophets of mammon who derive profit from the Sacred. It is good to condemn the powerful who give the poor a second rate education that does not educate them to the nature of true Beauty. But it is unworthy and mean hearted to sniff at those left poor by the powerful, in finances and in spirit, when they reach out sentimentally to One who is always Friend to the poor.

It is true that America is overrun with religious sentimentality and Europe is not. It is true that the empty and barren Churches of England rarely witness a thing about which a sensitive soul is tempted to sniff. It is also true that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there will always be bad taste. We cannot react to the Divine well whatever we do. The words of Cranmer’s liturgy, the most beautiful ever written in English, are a fools nonsensical babbling, an ugly blasphemy compared to the worship of High Heaven.

What must the Courts of the Highest think of our clownish marketing? But then one realizes that if all our works our clownish, that Heaven does not think much of the distinction at all. We must bring our best. If for me, it is one thing I must expect that for others it will be something else, but realize that we are all falling short of the glory of God. That is no excuse to bring God “strange fire” or things we know fall short, but it does recognize that all of us will do so whether we mean to do so or not. We all have unclean hands, but we all have been invited to the Great Feast.

I glory in the fact that my own church has sacred spaces. We would never use the altar as a salad bar! (Heaven knows we hardly approved of electric lighting for the nave!) And yet David took the Holy Bread from the altar space and ate it. The priests sniffed, but David was a God’s friend, a man after God’s own heart. I must never condemn the best of someone else, lest his heart, covered by his Christian t-shirt with the tactless religious slogan, beat more purely than my own.

If I must ever pick sides, then put me on the side of the tastless man who with true sentiment loves God, has a heart that burns with evangelical zeal for souls, and desires to love His Divine Friend, rather than on the side of sniffery and empty churches with perfect altars and well run liturgies.

Of course, we need not choose, but sniffery tempts me to such language when I see it in myself. For I am of all men most given to sniffery!

I must not become so drunk in the knowledge of God’s holiness, so keen with the insight of the philosophers into His greatness, that I refuse His offer of Friendship out of a vain attempt to defend His honor.

He comes to every man with this offer of Friendship, even men who take it for granted! He reaches out with His nail scarred hands and wants to love Moses, who disobeyed Him and destroyed an image of His nature; Rahab, the prostitute; Amos, the shepherd from small town Judea; Matthew, the tax collector; Mary, the young girl from Galilee who became the Mother of God; and me. I am not even worthy to be listed amongst the humans, but God still wants to make me His Friend.

I must admit that I am tempted by sniffery again. My nose erupts at this Divine presumption at choosing me. How dare He! How dare He choose me! Doesn’t He know my sins! Doesn’t He know my self-loathing! Doesn’t He know my temptation to mere sentimentality! Isn’t He afraid I will take His Friendship and do something clownish, self-indulgent, and stupid with it?

Yes. He knows. I must bend the knee and accept it. The God-Man who was not afraid to call His Father, Abba (Daddy), is not afraid to risk calling me Friend.

Jesus Christ, son of God, Word, Second Person of the Trinity loves me! Blessed thought, unworthy thought if it were not made true by His Own words, life, and death. Sniff if you must, but I shudder with the joy of it.

Torrey Honors, a great books program, we all work for is running the second GodBlog convention in August.

We are hoping to impact the new media for the Cause of Christ and bring some serious reflection to the business of Christian blogging.

Now a fine fellow Dr. S.M. Hutchens has written a post accusing the name “Godblog” of being blasphemous.

Seriously. Our great books program is turned into a sort of California hippie hang out with a Jesus-is-my-best-friend approach . . . despite the fact that our web site (easily available) attacks the very things Hutchens fears.

Hutchens has confused appropriation of terms and aggressive cultural engagment with blasphemy.

That seems a bit hard and suggests more a tea-and-biscuits conservative approach than I am used to from Touchstone, my favorite magazine bar none. (”Really,” she sniffed, “all those loud and scruffy young people are disturbing the splendid quiet of our Eucharist.”) Godblog is a term coined by critics and friends of religious blogging. For all I know the motivation may have been the very disrespect and crudeness feared by Hutchens.

However, the term “Christian” itself was just this sort of pop pagan shorthand for the followers of the Nazarene. Christians did what the Godbloggers hope to do and took over the term for themselves. They sanctified the impiety of secular language making the sneer “little Christ” a term of honor. Surely we can do the same with the phrase Godblog with a little help from our normal friends, if they are not too delicate for the task? Of course, there is always the danger of crudity in cultural engagement, but the Fathers took that risk and we are willing to do so too.

It is amusing that this post charging blasphemy to those of us involved in GodBlog and attributing lots of other social attitudes having nothing to do with our actual beliefs came out on the day my breviary said was the traditional Western feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius. . . who in their own day were sniffed at for using the language of the people to try to communicate the Divine.

Does Hutchens find the term “Christian” blasphemous? How far will he let his own magazine go in getting the Word to the people?

I have written for Touchstone and serve on an advisory board for a fine new project of that ministry, Salvo. Salvo uses the Holy Cross on which our Lord suffered in a cunning graphic that looks, well, not unlike a target. It is full of clever marketing to make its traditional Christian message understandable. Does Hutchens find this blasphemous?

I attend a church that uses the Prayer Book essentially unchanged. I love noble language (even if I cannot write it), but today’s crudity and insult can be transformed to better work. Ask Shakespeare.

I would have hoped Hutchens would have checked us out more closely before sniffing. However, the danger of blogs, giving immediate writing power before time for reflection, is one of the very dangers that will be discussed (Socratically!) at Godblog. Hutchens is a great guy and I bet wrote before reading too deeply. . . Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me a sinner!

I would like to offer Huchens a free registration to check us out. He can give a lecture for Torrey and let us know if he finds us the sort of place that would take target practice at the Mona Lisa (which a group of forty of us visited this year without harming). I will even serve him tea and sniff with him at the decay of all things dignified.

And why should we care?

She is the best demonstration for the way our culture exploits young people and then mocks them. I remember when Britney was presented as cutting edge and daring. Now she has become a white trash joke and the process was predictable. Just as it was with Elvis so is it now with Britney only Spears faces the dark night of her career without actual talent on which to fall back. New moms who love Britney know they have been set up for appropriate mockery from their children.

The four stages of a pop culture career contain two key turning points:

I. You are Discovered. (There is nothing much to be done here. The industry always needs new blood to drive money making. Talent is not needed. Looks are not needed. Both can help.)
II. You are a Star.
III. You need a Second Act. (Here is where talent helps. The talented can choose to develop as artists and become of actual interest. This is why a wise young adult listens to groups that have been making music for over a decade before wasting valuable itunes clicks doing what major media says to do. If you are lightly talented you can go the Funicello Route and keep your dignity. People your age will remember you fondly. Or you can stay on time by following the Spears Route of becoming ever more “shocking” until you have consumed all dignity and you become a joke.)
IV. You Become an Institutionalized. (Either you become a joke, insert latter day Elvis here, are mostly, mercifully forgotten by people not in your age group, or keep maturing. U2 is at this crossroads. Bono is now officially too old to be cool. Will he become a thoughtful artist or become ever more a political parody? It is hard, very hard to recover from joke status if you made the wrong choice at III. . . though Elvis was so overwhelmingly talented and influential that he can keep some sensible fans. )

If you consume pop culture, or let your children consume it, remind yourself that you are only setting them up for the shame of the mockery that will come when pop culture moves on. Read and listen to the timeless and you can avoid the whole consumerist, materialist trap that must find a new nice best thing.

Without any argument, Linda Hirshman asserts in an article in the American Prospect:

Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family — with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks — is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government.

Hirshman never argues for this offensive conclusion. In fact, like most “women’s studies” types, she hardly ever argues for anything. Now if this was a mere blog post, that would be fair enough, but this is an article in a journal and she intends to be taken seriously.

She asserts that well educated women are morally wrong to stay at home. This choice is associated with such joy filled tasks as vacuuming the floor. Evidently (shockingly) this kind of intellectual boorishness provoked an overwhelming storm of criticism, but of late Hirshman has comforted herself by noting that her critics were mostly religious and that working women (the moral ones on her account) were too busy doing the important work of the nation to send her missives of praise. (She claims to know this because a friend reports that working women were emailing each other article links. Evidently working women have time to praise the article to each other, but not to copy her on the email. Following the level of her analysis, perhaps this is because they have chosen public over private so don’t have the time to comfort a sister under fire. After all, they are engaged in the important work of running government agencies and earning big checks.)

Here is my counter-assertion:

We need good mothers more than we need more lawyers and a great deal more than we need more politicians of either gender.

Which seems more plausible to you?

In fact, it is hard to see the social value of the job of writing articles for the American Prospect. Without motherhood the nation would perish, but without the American Prospect nothing much would happen, some of us even think the nation would improve greatly.

Being a mother is difficult because it is more mentally and physically challenging than almost any job one can name. Evidently if one becomes a teacher in the “public sphere” it is valuable work, but if one teaches her own children at home, then one is not doing demanding work. Cooking a gourmet meal for big money is creative, doing it for love is demeaning. Running a government is important to gain power, running a household to create a home is not. By this reasoning selling one’s body for money is good while making love to one’s spouse is less.

Hirshman is a gift that keeps giving to a blogger. She cannot see why women rather than men might stay home with their young children… evidently never having had the natural function of the breast explained to her or having objectified them as sexual objects divorced from love and marriage.

However, her most difficult assertion to defend is the one I highlighted: staying at home is a kind of mental death. Now as any college graduate can report, the transition from the mentally rich world of college to any job, home or not, is difficult. It is hard to keep reading, thinking, and discussing big ideas. In my brief time working in financial planning, I did not notice profound mental discourse breaking out around me. On the other hand, I know many mothers engaged in Socratic discourse and reading programs to provide the intellectual framework for the management of their private estates. One has to choose to stay mentally alive or any role can kill the life of the mind. The first years of any role, public or private, are the hardest in which to do this as the person just starting out has to do the most difficult ground clearing work. This is as true of mothers as it is of anyone else. Critics of motherhood often look at the first experiences and assume it all stays the same as if the first year stock broker who must do a great deal of demeaning work never has her role change. My experience suggests (as did Socrates!) that working for money or the government is the hardest place to stay mentally alert.

Why does staying at home have to include physical labor? Has Hirshman read Proverbs 31? Why is motherhood anything less than managing the private estate of the family? If the family can afford it and wished to do so, then physical labor could be hired out. Managing the home can include private industry. . though Hirshman seems to think managing a quilt making factory for money is more fulfilling mentally that designing and making a quilt by hand for love.

Homemaking can include, for example, home education. Hope can find her role taxing and demeaning, especially when women like Hirshman says that as an honors graduate of a fine college she has acted immorally. She also found being a teacher sometimes taxing and demeaning.

A wise stay at home mother can, especially after the early childhood years (which are the most difficult and from which Hirshman seems to have drawn all her conclusions) find herself with the most freedom and ability to shake loose of the commercial rat race and create the private social networks that used to be the very definition of civilization. Many a mother looks forward to reaping the results of her early loving labor in the years following early childhood.

On the other hand, when did physical labor become more demeaning than mental labor? Perhaps this is due to my religious worldview (which evidently makes everything I say suspect to Hirshman), but there is dignity and can be glory in any job. The dehumanizing snobbery of Hirshman’s post would be breath taking if it were not so common in today’s good colleges. Evidently, people who go to “good colleges” should never be plumbers either. . . since only government and non-physical work has value. Union members involved in physical labor should note the reality that if you are in a union, liberal leadership secretly despises you. There is a reason that Christians led the union movement. We believe all jobs should and can have dignity and great worth.

The greatest jobs are not those for which a man receives money. The old American ideal, the family farmer, was to escape from this dependent semi-serfdom of the wage earner and become self-sufficient. The millions of stay at home mothers and their home centered husbands are recreating that reality. They are becoming less dependent on the state through avoiding government schools. They grow or at least prepare their own food. . . rather than giving their child a generic cookie made for money and purchased with money, they create their own unique food. In fact, they refuse to measure a job’s worth by money, but instead are intent on the formation of the private and social relationships that create a nation.

Of course, traditionally Americans have believed that persons who never do physical labor may be missing out on something. Groups like the Boy and Girl Scouts were created, in part, to teach this value. This is one reason my children are the some of the few in a fifty block region to cut their own grass and why I try to become part of gardening or other projects in the house. My stay at home wife manages these projects and countless others. She engages in discourse with friends and with young women on any number of topics. In fact, when it is all said and done I often feel that I exist to provide the money (sordid stuff) necessary for Hope to create civilization.

Some women must work. Other women choose to work and do not feel called to have children. Others are in complex situations where the best way for their family is for both mom and dad to become part-time homemakers and part-time wage earners. However, there is, as the late Sheldon Vanauken once wrote, an iron law of home: there is no home without a homemaker. . . making a home is a full time job for someone or a combination of someones. The ideal is for both husband and wife to be able to be homemakers. Technology is now allowing many of us to return to the family not just by farming but new jobs. Many more of us realize that wages, power, and “big jobs” are futile snares and spend as little time working for money as possible and as much time working for love and with our families.

Many of us believe, based on best reason and evidence, that home is the most important of all social institutions. We need more homemakers. If you are a homemaker, then you are the bed rock of society whether you are a man or a woman. Don’t let the Hirshman’s get you down. She has chosen the public over the private, the paycheck over the personal, and somehow believes cutting herself off from the physical is good. We shall see whose worldview works best in time, but thousands of years of human history suggest that Hirshman is part of an effete, decaying elite cut off from the way the real world works. Go on creating civilization and the children who will form it, but remember that folk like Hirshman are out there hoping to borrow both for her causes.

Or How Statism Leads to Obsession with Meaningless Local Control

Some places disappoint when you actually get to them . . . 221B Baker Street was Sherlock Holmes fictional address and all the Victorian charm you believe you will find there is equally mythic. There is no Baker Street if by that you mean the place where the game is afoot and Mrs. Hudson waits to serve you tea. Doyle’s illusionary Baker Street is better than the real place.

Scotland is not one of those illusions of the heart, being a staggeringly beautiful place that has been accurately described by some of the world’s greatest writers. You know it when you see it, but because it is real, it is always surprising. It reminds the visitor that God’s reality combined with the authentic development of any group of humans created in His image is better than any human words. Scotland is more beautiful than her literature . . . the chapel of Saint Margaret of Scotland, the Isle of Skye which in the summer is the most stunning place I have ever been, or Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh rising up green and grey on a rainy day cannot be reduced to a description even if one has the gifts of Robert Burns.

Perhaps the Scots are naturally modest, but they do not exaggerate one bit when they describe their land. What Robert Burns wrote is real, better than what even his massive talents could describe, and you can find no place more authentic to a man’s work than Sir Walter Scott’s actual home. Anyone can walk the long grassy yard down to the River Tweed from Scott’s house and know it, because it is the place he has always known from his heart’s image of Scotland.

The Kings of Scotland well understand one vital truth: a good government connects humans to their past, their native land, and the best epic calling of that folk. You can feel the weight of Scot pride and glory when you go to Stirling.

We build buildings that say something about who we are and to create a connection to our best dreams. Historic dreams of Saint Andrew and Wallace create brave hearts indeed and not just on film, but in stone.

A visit to Edinburgh confirms all of this. The city has aged well and if it was ever the Auld Reekie of the stories from the stink of pollution . . . the best of the city has long ago won out. It has a stunning castle, interesting streets, and is alive. Work is done in Edinburgh and the British experiment which fused the English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots into one nation did wonders for Auld Reekie. The best of the past was preserved and the English majority to the South blended in some notable contributions to making the city great.

However, the long shadow of secularism sits over Scotland. The passion of John Knox and the sanctity of Saint Mungo are not politically correct in a Scotland where more and more decisions are not made by Scots or by the government of the Queen in a United Kingdom sanctified by hundreds of years of Scot contributions and blood to a great Britain, but an unelected, unresponsive European Union.

When the European Union can destroy the historic fishing fleets of Scotland and allow land locked Southern European states fishing rights it denies an island nation, then something must be done to distract a proud people from the tyranny of the spread sheet tyrants. There is nothing authentic about the EU . . . there is no European people . . . no European poetry, music, or language. There is an English language and a Gaelic tongue. There is Robert Burns and James of Scotland. There is the legend of the King over the Water and Bonnie Prince Charlie his son, but there is no passion, blood, or glory in the generic structures of a European Union which would replace the Union Jack and the cross of Saint Andrew with a flag designed to offend nobody and which can defend nothing.

What one does have is a growing class of people without any attachment to customs, culture, religion, or history of their own who are attempting to create out of nothing more than their own pop culture wisdom a place where they can rule. These men without homelands recognize that they are unloved and essentially unwanted. They can only distract folk from their grabs for power by pretending to devolve it.

And so one finds in the last fifty years a growing exploitation of legitimate Scot pride in their past and in their nationhood to rend the Union and break up the United Kingdom. Some small power is devolved to local people groups and they are given the right to elect local bureaucrats who can move and second and regulate within narrow confines. By breaking up the nation states and returning the British to a kind of tribalism the European Unionists and their allies can destroy the chief obstacle to their growing sterilization of Europe.

So the Scots have been given a “parliament.” It has little power, but is allowed to talk a great deal. Whenever possible it is encouraged to do the regulating and stifling of non-secular, politically incorrect Scotland so that the shadow of Brussels cannot be blamed. Set up a committee and the type of man who likes to sit on committees will show up . . . and Scotland is no exception.

Nothing demonstrates the futile, ugly nature of this game more than the new parliament building itself.
Read the description of the building as drawn from the governments own web site:

Scotland’s new Parliament sits at the foot of Edinburgh’s famous Royal Mile in front of the spectacular Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags. Constructed from a mixture of steel, oak, and granite, the complex building has been hailed as one of the most innovative designs in Britain today.

Drawing inspiration from the surrounding landscape, the flower paintings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the upturned boats on the seashore, Enric Miralles, one of the world’s premier architects, developed a design that he said was a building “growing out of the land”.

The building is certainly complex, growing out of the land as a tumor grows out of a sick man’s chest, disfiguring it.

When you walk down the rule mile it sits between a Castle and a palace. . . looking like a refugee from Southern California.

It is so complex that no tour guide in my experience has a clue what it means, how it relates to the surroundings, or where to take a group to see it in all of its complex glory. The building is complex the way every mess is complex . . . and the use of the term is always a sure tip off that nobody understands a thing that they are too intimidated to simply despise. It is also innovative in the sense that the moment it was done it looked dated.

“Yes,” you can hear a future Scot sigh, “in the nineteenth century Scottish innovation was ship building and engineering that was the wonder of the world. In the late twentieth century, our innovation was reduced to melding flower paintings with upturned boats in complex buildings that looked not unlike American housing projects since the EU would not let us build or use real boats anymore.”

Secularism combined with Statism produces sterile, inauthentic tyranny. It exploits regional differences to disunify peoples so that the nationless can govern . . . giving the form of liberty without the substance. Certain Basques are falling for it in Spain just as now there are rumblings of “local government” in York!

Of course none of this means less government control over lives with more local control . . . just more government! Patriots and sensible folk who favor local control of their own lives fall for this at times. It is, after all, historically delicious and glorious that the Stone of Destiny is back in Scotland, but it would be better if political power were returned to a United Kingdom capable (as it has shown for hundreds of years) of protecting tiny Scotland (just five millions in this great world) from European tyrants.

Americans should beware the secular left beginning in our own nation to exploit regional differences in a manner that sounds like “federalism” but is actually disguising a hatred of our national government and a desire to turn over power to a global entity. Leftists in the United States more and more decry patriotism and describe it in our schools only by evil abuses (which are real) of this virtue, but one can be sure given what anyone can see for themselves in Scotland, that the fall of the nation state here will not lead to liberty, but a global state. They will disguise the movement of all power to this central government (a European Union writ large) with parliaments for Native Americans, rights for groups of all sorts to meet and make motions, more and more levels of government all of which owe their creation to the new entity and governing class.

This has not happened yet, but the European warning is before us. Americans should beware regionalism, a group or identity politics that would divide our nation with the false promise of freedom.

Or Can a Nation Remain Great that Cannot Master Flush Toilets and Electricity?

Britain is such a wonderful place to visit that it seems a pity to begin with a complaint, but it always strikes me just how absurdly terrible flush toilets and electricity are in Britain. Both seem to be treated as new developments jury rigged into buildings so that they can be removed if the whole fad of indoor plumbing and Edison fizzles. It is common to see a jaw droppingly beautiful building from the glory days of Empire with electric cords tacked to the outside, snaking their way from floor to floor as if just run at the last moment when the hotel discovered that Colonials were coming who might not know every civilized man’s skill in trimming a lamp. British rooms that contain exactly no available electric outlets remind a man that some low end American hostels have wireless internet.

One need only think for a moment of the shining, pristine yards of white tile at any In-And-Out while standing in a miniature stall last cleaned during the Roman occupation of the Island in order to shed a tear for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Apparently this island nation with scads of rain (really!) is saving the planet by allowing only a table spoon of water in each toilet. Added to what appears to be a fond wish that perhaps the public will simply clean public toilets in self-defense . . . since nobody else seems to do so. . . and the senses can become quite overwhelmed. . . leading me to wonder if the EU has decided that smell is a vital part of every free man’s toilet experience. To then label this toilet size space a water closet simply adds insult to claustrophobia as no American 1951 row house has a closet so small and there is less than no water (even when there is working flushing mechanism).

On this trip I do believe I have discovered where all the workers who are supposed to clean public restrooms have hidden themselves. They are all engaged in not cleaning the bathrooms at Heathrow. Openly. Aggresively putting up door blocking signs with little people mopping. . . which image is the only sign of a mop that one will see.

The bathrooms at Heathrow Airport, a decent medium size US port allowed to decay through over use (imagine Minneapolis with too much traffic), do have full size bathrooms that do have water and occasionally can be flushed, but appear to always be in the process of being about to be cleaned. Mind you, I have never seen one clean, but there are always surly workers in them setting up signs that look preparatory to an actual cleaning. Most of the time, speaking in a variety of Eastern European tongues, but no English, they are offended that you would try to use the bathroom and gesticulate their displeasure as they go on preparing to clean a bathroom now roped off from the public.

First it strikes you that the Mother Country and America are two nations divided by the languages of the workers both exploit to clean their potties. Your carefully cultivated excuses in Spanish about needing to go will do no good here. You then realize your gross cultural insensitivity as you are about to dirty the only public bathroom in Britain that stands a chance of being clean. Even if that hypothetical moment will never come, it is rude, the act of an Ugly American, to even think of adding your New World filth to a room that has in it a man who might, at any moment, become a worker. In the Land of Hope and Glory one must never destroy all hope for a clean, working, public restroom.

Our television, press, and culture may all be shallower than that of the Brits and often depend on them for greatness, but by the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress our toilets and electric outlets are as far above their British rivals as Shakespeare is beyond Dan Brown.

In Europe the news is blissfully unaware of any nuance to American politics . . . the general level of analysis seems to be that Bush is a moron because he has a Southern accent, or that one cannot find anyone of the right sort of American who like him (so he must be bad), or (I kid you not) that the War in Iraq is the greatest disaster to Western diplomacy, ever, but that it could have been avoided if one only had listened to the retired leaders who created the world that made 9/11 possible.

One got to enjoy the last colonial governor of Hong Kong nattering on the BBC about this as he searched for greater and greater nuances and complexities while seeing only horror and not much progress in Iraq. . . which was evidently in a civil war that the Iraqis were simply refusing to recognize or get going really well. He would keep talking it up however so as to appear to have an opinion that might still be relevant in a world that left him behind when the last viceroy took off the last pith helmet.

Europeans think the War in Iraq is the West’s worst blunder. Ever. Worse than Munich. Worse than Vietnam. Worse than Yalta. What will they do when we win and democratic Iraq is functioning?

They will simply splutter, splutter, with rage. Fortunately, since this is also their essential reaction to terrorism, it will harm us and our victorious allies as much as it has harmed the terrorists: not at all.

Coming home allowed me the space to see the same symptoms in the Democrat Party. They have become the party that splutters hard against evil (”Terrorism is bad,” Pelosi spluttered.), Bush (”Bush is ineffectual,” Byrd spluttered.), and Republicans (”Karl Rove is bad,” that Senator from Nevada whose very name fades from your mind the moment he stops spluttering, spluttered.)

Assuming their patriotism, they have become so intellectually convinced in the wrongness of the War that the new government of Iraq, democratically elected, and the fact that some US troops will soon be coming home as the new (did I mention democratically elected?) government of Iraq defends itself, makes no impression on them at all. They cannot see US victory, because they must see a Bush failure . . . a neo-con Vietnam because the alternative is unthinkable: Bush’s plan is working.

They are counting on the spluttering ending in November. They just know they are going to win, but I will stick to my January prediction and say that they will gain control of neither house of Congress. They may make gains, but they may not. However, they think they are going to win and they are not going to win. Bush (has anyone noticed) is creeping back up in the polls . . . staying in the low forties which means he has his base. None of their presidential candidates can break fifty percent in the polls . . . which means without governing and despite war weariness. . . Democrats do not look able to win a two-way race for President. The likeable Clinton never did and the shrill one will not.

The failure of any name Democrat to catch fire for two years from now is a good indication that there is no building fire for the Democrat Party this year. . . the country may be tired of Bush (at least a big chunk of it), but it dislikes Dems just as much. Most folk will vote for their local guys, because they don’t dislike their own Senator or Congressman. . . the Dems not having noticed that Bush is not in Congress. . . and that in big chunks of the country Bush is still pretty popular. Bush is not at 40% in the whole country. . . in some states he is higher and in others very low indeed. It will not take much effort to discover that Bush is well liked in areas of the country already containing many Republican members of Congress. . . and that in such areas the President is more a help than harmful.

First Amazing Fact: as the minority party, Dems must knock off Republicans to regain power. To do that, they will have to win races in regions where the war still commands majority support.

Second Amazing Fact for Dems: Bush is not running for office again. Ever. You need people to dislike Republicans, not have grown tired of Mr. Bush and the challenges of our time. Anybody can tell a pollster they are unhappy. It costs nothing. It does cost something to go to the polls and vote for folk who have no plan for American victory only American failure.

What will they do? One can only assume that they will splutter . . . splutter so hard in impotent rage that perhaps at long last, for the good of the nation, the William Jennings Bryan/Joe Lieberman wing of the party will be revived and send the fanatics back to rage and battle in academic conferences without end.

The heart of Paris beats, but it is irregular like an aging man with arrhythmia and too much caffeine.

Most of the children one sees appear to be of immigrants. The most excitement I saw on the streets came from side walk merchants. The city seems tired . . . as if it is going through the motions of being Paris, merely undead rather than alive . . . more like the museum that is Venice than like a living city. And yet I watched the faithful in devotion in the divine Church of Sacre Coeur . . . whose prayers lift to heaven in a steady stream and acts as a heavenly pacemaker to the aging heart of harlot France.

The British heart seems much stronger with fewer of the generic Ikea-inspired Euro-flags and more vibrant religious life. It may be the lowest form of patriotism, but the World Cup is filling small towns, cities, and even jaded London with English flags. British media was filled with images of her Britannic majesty in her eightieth year somehow more substantial, and certainly more fecund, than the entire media image of the present French government.

Who can be inspired by the second rate hacks, too small to carry DeGaul’s handkerchief, who now lead France? Does the European Union even have leaders or have such figures been banned by a working group “studying the nature of leadership in the twenty-first century?”

Still in Britain too there is the foolish secularist class which assumes they can govern with the ideas stolen from Cranmer, Shakespeare, Burke, Wesley, and Gladstone without their God. They know the tune to “God Save the Queen” perhaps, but they don’t know the God of the Queen. Unless the heart of the British public recalls the Christian worldview they are in danger of losing through forgetfulness rather than overt rejection, they will leave the defense of their freedoms, which depend on that worldview, to secularists who cannot defend themselves let alone Britain. Secularists do not have the blood for it and they don’t even believe in their own souls let alone the soul of their nation.

I am just returning from a three week trip to Great Britain and France where I led forty honors students (Torrey at Biola University) on a tour. I did extensive reading before going and on my return. I read everything I could while I was there . . . tried to speak to whoever would talk with me . . . and I have returned to report my observations to anyone who might care about them (hello Mom!). They are not scientific, but they are human. Think of them as one man’s thoughts on the two nations that did as much as any others philosophically to birth our nation: Great Britain and France.

The yester-media is starting their predictable pattern of painting the troops in Iraq as a group of burned out killers. Whatever their age, films - - combined with illiberal education in our secularized colleges- - have painted a picture in the minds of most people of troops at war as burned out, drug using, half-wits: the lying stereotype of the Vietnam warrior.

War is a kind of hell and there is no doubt that in the days to come the media will find some troops who fit their stereotype. Anybody can find a person to fit their prejudice if they try.

To counteract this, let me tell you about Colin Anderson. He is a classically educated graduate of Torrey Honors at Biola University. He volunteered to serve out of a deep sense of duty and a love of country. He serves as a medic; he reads, reflects, and tries to image his Christian values.

Earlier this year, he faced the ultimate test of his courage when his unit drove over an IED. Colin was badly burned, but returned to save the lives of his men. He has mercy for the people of Iraq he is liberating from decades of slavery and a justice for the evil men who would keep them in bondage.

Colin has been awarded the Purple Heart and several other service awards for his work for freedom. When asked about it he shrugs and comments that he is doing his duty. He is a gentleman who reflects deeply on the value of liberty and the good his unit is doing for the nation of Iraq, our own country, and the world.

Remember Colin the next time the media begins to celebrate the token losers amongst our brave troops. He is the real face of our fighting men and women.

Yesterday at Torrey graduation, the entire audience rose to their feet to cheer the service of man who is fighting for us. Of course, we know there are bad American fighting men and they should be punished. We can be confident that such men will be punished, which is a first for the nation of Iraq: rogue soldiers cannot get away with misdeeds.

When some in the old media focus obsessively on the few bad souls in our armed forces and their misdeeds, they do not reflect reality, but, one sometimes fears, only an image of their own twisted view of reality. I hope you join me on this weekend of Memory to celebrate the life of all the Colin Andersons out there instead.

God bless all our troops. God bless the President of the United States and may God bless America.

Final Day: Physics, Metaphysics, and God

Where is the Unmoved Mover? He is not “outside,” but I don’t think He is “far away” (as a total answer either.) Looking up, He is further away than anything, but He is also the foundation of every substance and permeates (without division) everything. He is both the closest and the furthest away thing.

“At” does not work in our relationship of God, but our movement is “towards” Him. The stars are within Him (in a sense) and (in the circular motion they use) always falling toward Him in circular motion.

God has a great deal to do with stars moving in circular motion, but is not the only cause. I think it is the incarnate nature of the stars, souls with fire bodies, that also causes them to need to move.

Where is the “that” or “there” of the Beautific Vision? It is not a place (as where-ever), but more what-ever. God is, after all, incorporeal and has no magnitude and no parts.

Aristotle: God in not “outside” as Plato puts them.

I had to go to a debate at a local church where I got to side with the divine Paul Nelson against two fine scholars from Cal State Fullerton about whether Intelligent Design is religion or science. All of us ignored the question. My main goal was to open the dialogue to the possibility of Mind as an explanatory category. There seems little willingness to allow for this second type of cause on the part of opponents of intelligent design.

I returned to class (10:30) to discover students carefully working through Aristotle on this and other topics dealing with contemplation and the divine mind. The questions were far more pointed and difficult from the students than in the debate. I love my students and I love the chance to be in a program where everything is on the table and so much can be imagined without limit.

Nicomachean Ethics 1177b 30 is key again to our discussion. Where does the impulse for contemplation come from? How do we know that we should live a divine life? It seems in Metaphysics XII, Aristotle suggests that for a short duration (hence different from God in this way) man can experience the Noetic moment of contemplation that is like God’s. We can be like God . . . though limited in duration and in essence of the person experience this contemplative moment. This is a pious impiety or better an impiety that leads to piety as we recognize our utter deficiency even in our most divine moment. When we are most like God, we are the least aware of self and most aware of Him (or the good things).

Even if there is no creation in time, God has priority over the cosmos, because the cosmos is dependent on God for its order, but God is not at all dependent on the cosmos. Foolish atheists who believe that one must believe in creation in time to believe in creation (in terms of the “first” position of God) are just wrong.

The order of the cosmos does not come (for Aristotle) from a general who gives orders, but for a general with a total lack of awareness that the cosmos even exists. It is God’s utter disregard (or lack of awareness?) of the cosmos that makes Him able to the general without being Lord.

Poetics

I missed some of the morning session on Poetics. The life of the city rightly came in front of the life contemplative! Here are some initial thoughts or questions . . .

As for the discussion, it centers on the nature of tragedy. Is there a difference between Greek tragedy and Christian? The obvious answer is hope. Is there in fact hope in some of the later tragedies?

Why is a tragedy more interesting to this group of students than comedy? I would give much for a copy of Aristotle’s work on comedy. His few (very few!) initial thoughts are so cryptic, but enough to irk me that the full picture has been (so far) lost.

Is part of the problem of Oedipus that he refused to contemplate his actions?

Did Oedipus see that will was ineffective and his escape impossible? Is Oedipus a man of action?

We have lost Aristotle’s treatise on Comedy, but still what he says is fascinating. First, he points out that it was not (until recently) taken as seriously as tragedy!

Categories, Posterior Analytics

“x is y”

A primary substance is not fit for predication. (I assume we are leaving out predication in the case of identity statements: “This man is George Bush.”

This makes the following passage puzzling, “Of species themselves, except in the case of such as are genera, no one is more truly substance than the other.”
.
I perceive a primary substance (a particular). This particular carries with it the content of the universal, but this universal is only made real in the soul.

The hard work of thinking well is stimulating, almost like a drug. If Plato is like a romantic work, then Aristotle is high and pure like a single French horn sounding in a winter morning in Upstate.

The World

Contra Plato, Aristotle argues in Metaphysics VII vi that a man is identical to his essence. Our individuality is not what gives us substance, it is nothing. What gives us substance is our essence which is the same for every human being. What we are as primary substances is identical to what we are as secondary substances. Point to any human being and you will say that this is a “man” and not this is a “short man” or this is a “plumber.”

Our essence is indentical to the secondary property that is our species. It is (technical sense) insubstantial.

At Metaphysics VII xvii (1041a) Aristotle does not use the term “ousia”, but simply says “what it is to be.” Why? Essence seems a wholly inadequate term here.

Matter? Stuff? What is it in Aristotle?

The most radical thing that occurs to me in this text is that Aristotle has presented us his thoughts in progression. The early Metaphysics need not be made “consistent” with the later parts, but viewed as the seed from which the latter parts have come. We are following the thinking of one the world’s great geniuses. . . Aristotle’s thoughts out loud. Terms develop (primary substance to informed matter), arguments force Aristotle to modify his thoughts.

What followed was a long discussion of the nature of things. Hypothesis of the group:

Form=essence=species=art or nature=shape

What is the soul in this? I am intrigued also by the relationship of circular motion to all motions and also to rest. Is there a possible rest in the Universe?

The notions of place that seems to arise from the text has this interesting result: we are in a place, exactly where we are, which is real and defined by our existence as a primary substance with the only other true place being the cosmos itself. This would make it sensible to say that I am in my own place and in being in my place with everything else am also in the cosmos and no place else.

Aristotle: A Weekend with the Master of Those Who Would Know (with Apologies to Dante!)

I now begin the academic high point of any semester. Al Geier, professor at the University of Rochester, has come to lead a series of sessions this weekend. With the exception of a debate I will have to attend this weekend, I will spend the next three days, almost every waking hour, with a group of students attacking the text of Aristotle. Why? Sustained discussion over a short period of time enables a kind of progress not possible in a class separated by many days.

Plato lover that I am . . .I am eager to gain a greater insight into the thoughts of Aristotle. I respect him and especially the fine Aristotle scholars with whom I have studied in the past, but I want to gain the insight that will enable love.

Why does Aristotle not appeal to me? First, he seems too dogmatic. Second, the style of the Aristotle that we have is so unliterary (not fair of course to the actual Aristotle) that he is hard to love. Yet. Yet there is a sublime severity to his prose and an attempt at clarity that is missing from Plato. There is much in that.

Nicomachean Ethics:

What is Aristotle thinking when he says “human good turns out be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete?”

Love is not a feeling, but an activity. What is that activity? Why an activity? What kind of activity? If it is a flourishing of humanity, then how can this be? If it is done by reason, as I suspect, what does Aristotle mean by reason? What does it contain? It contains at least analytic thinking which does seem to be (in animals) a uniquely human task.

(God help me to flourish as man. May I never give up on the analytic thought. May I never claim to know You in Your Divine Unknowable Essence. May I always rationally pursue the Truth whatever the cost to self.)

I find it difficult to accept from Aristotle the confidence he expresses. The important point here might be that he believes happiness to be possible. If possible, then perhaps we can proceed in life with hope. It might be that this hope is what enables the dialectic to proceed.

There is a two-fold irrationality in the soul, but in a sense the desiring element at times listens and obeys reason. Why do we listen to our parents? Is it because they are wise? Is there a sort of irrational instinct to wisdom?

And contrary to my own prior thought . . . it made not just be a willingness to follow best Reason, but also to become habituated to virtue. What does it mean to contemplate? How does this tie into the Vision at the end of the Comedy? How does it relate to the simple virtue of such souls as Saint Lucy?

I must be careful not to commit the mistake of worrying about the wickedness of the many when should begin with contemplation and action on my own wickedness. I also cannot begin by despairing (so Aristotle would say) about the masses when I can help the one.

All of this (thoughts about Dante and Aristotle) turn us toward the nation of contemplation. There is a divine thing . . . the life of contemplation that may finish the fully happy, fully human life. (By gum, Aristotle’s habit of just announcing a thing true is irritating.) When we contemplate, we imitate God (and this seems true) whose very act of creation is an act of contemplation.

At 1177b, Aristotle seems to find the best life (contemplative) as too high for man. To the extent that something divine is present in him that he will do this thing. Habituation may the human thing while contemplation is the divine thing. Is this a dim image of the “image of God” theology in Aristotle? Contemplation may make us immortal.

This is a critical passage and perhaps the peak of the entire book.

He says, “. . . reason more than anything else is man.” The full contemplative life is too high for man and yet he concludes by saying that reason is to be man as man. He is not just saying “do the best you can,” but that to the greatest extent possible make ourselves deathless.

What can this mean? Can contemplation make us immortal? How can the end of man be the divine? Is this theosis? Is man the rational being capable of theosis? Or is just that thinking on great things makes us great so that thinking on divine things makes us like God?

An Outline of this Passage:

Such a contemplative life is too high for man:
a. not possible for man
b. possible on account something divine in him.
Contemplation superior to the composite nature as divine activity is the rest of virtue.

However, if reason is divine (compared to human things), then the living reasonably is divine compared to living humanly.
In this we will make ourselves immortal. (Al believes this to be the key phrase in the passage.)
We will be completely happy without being divine.

(Contemplation is not a sort of passive thinking, but reasoning about the divine or true things. It is a mental activity, not a mental passivity.) Can anything other pure intellectual activity (something like martyrdom) be equivalent to the life of the mind? I do not contemplate for the sake of helping others or doing something else . . . instead I contemplate for the sake of seeing first the good things and then the God who possesses them.

Take a trivial example of law breaking: downloading music off the Internet. Before Itunes, if you wanted obscure music by your favorite group and did not live in a major metro area, the easiest, and often the only way, to get that music was with swapping software. It was illegal, but hard to feel guilty about downloading a blue grass version of “Amazing Grace” from a group that stopped singing in the forties. I am not arguing that this was good thinking, but it was easy for otherwise good people to do. The odds of getting caught were small, the social sanction for doing it tiny, and the alternatives (relatively) costly. The other group of down loaders wanted to steal for whatever reason. They hated recording companies and were never going to pay a dime for music under any circumstance. By allowing for cheap and easy downloads, the music industry split the otherwise decent, but sorely tempted types, from the hard core music thieves. It did not solve the problem of the hard core thief, who continues to steal music, but it helped a good bit.

If the industry had just gone after theives, making no difference in the two groups, the public would not have supported what it would have taken to make a difference, no money would have been made, otherwise decent people would have been hurt, and the problem would only be larger.

That is the problem with a “law and order” approach to immigration that does not include a guest worker program. If you are not in this position, imagine living in Mexico a poor country that borders on chaotic. You have a family and you want to give that family a better life. You also love your country and your culture, but are not sure you can give your family that good life if you stay. The temptation to cross the border is very great. Of course, raising the cost and risk of making that crossing will deter some, but unlike the simple desire for music the need to help your family is overwhelming. You are not a “law breaking type” but you are faced with an overwhelming temptation to break man’s law, the artificial borders of a nation, to do what is right for your family.

On top of that, we have American industries who want and need the workers since our culture of death crowd has cut off population growth from most native born Americans.

We must find some way to make this sort of illegal immigrant legal, because he is going to come no matter what we do until Mexico improves as a society.

It is impossible to imagine a deterrent that will stop this sort of good man that can be ethically practiced. The nation will not support shooting families at the border, thank God. There is a limit to how high we are willing to raise the price and there are millions of people who will pay almost any price to get here. It is impossible not to sympathize with this plight even if we wished it was not so.

That is why with increased enforcement we need, really need, something like a guest worker program proposed by the President. We can split off those hard working souls who want to save their families, make them legal, treat them as humans, and accept the reality that they will come regardless. The music industry had to face this and so do conservatives. Most Mexicans would stay in their nation if they could, so a guest worker program allows for visits. We should also make legal immigration easier for those workers we need so that those good persons are not tempted by an easier illegal route.

Of course all of this must come with increased enforcement of our border laws for the hard core criminals who will defy the law and whom, even though a small minority, give immigration (legal or illegal) a bad name. Some fencing, yes. More border police, of course. But we also need a way to split the otherwise good Mexican immigrant from the illegals who no nation wants. One hopes the Senate can stop listening to radicals on both sides of the debate and adopt a mix of carrot (more legal workers we need and are going to get anyway) and stick.

We should also pray for peace, justice, and prosperity in Mexico. This is the only real solution to the problem of the border.

CortaSlim Religion: the Dan Brown Scam

You know it is too good to be true, but you want it to be real. Remember when you could not turn on the radio without hearing an ad for CortaSlim? It promised to strip off the pounds and as someone who struggles with weight, and hates his daily trip to the gym, it was very appealing.

It sounded so good that I knew it had to be a scam. Keeping my weight down requires treadmill work, lifting, and saying “enough” to my favorite foods. Surely if someone had found a way to avoid all of this, there would be no need to advertise on talk-radio. We would all be lined up to buy. A little Google research and I discovered that the whole thing was useless, backed by folk with questionable credentials, and under fire by many reputable groups with no ax to grind.

Yet millions bought CortaSlim for the simple reason that it promised to solve a big problem for money. It also blamed somebody other than self (the need to block a mysterious thing making us fat with a pill) while offering superficial tough talk. Everybody is busy and if you could trade cash for solution to a big problem most of us, who value our time over money, would go for it.

Let’s call that the CortaSlim deception, where a shyster convinces us a big need can be met by a little investment.

The Da Vinci Code is a spiritual variation of this scheme. Most of us know we need some soul work, don’t feel we have the time for the demands of organized religion with all, and would rather have something that pats us on the back than points out our spiritual flabbiness. We are sinners, but don’t want to hear it anymore than the junk food junkie wants to be told that he has to cut out the fat to get rid of his fat.

The problem with Christianity is that it keeps telling us that we are in spiritual trouble, because we are bad. Instead of this hard news, we want some new revelation to show that our religious problems were caused by the trained religious telling us we are bad, just as many diet scams depend on arguing that nutritionists are making us fat!

What do I say to a person who wants to believe in the Code? I sympathize. I get it, since I too want something for almost nothing, but feel the need to warn the person that Revelation is unlikely to come in a cheap paperback that cannot stand the light of even a few years of critical scrutiny. Brown and the Gospel of John both claim to have the truth about Jesus. Read both and make your own judgment about which sounds like it is more likely to be true. Would you have died, as the apostles did die, for Dan Brown’s Jesus?

It goes all the way back to the Gnostics in Biblical times. Everybody wants something big for just a little bit of effort. Give the Gnostic guru some coin and he will pull back the curtain and show you how everything works. The Bible is on the Internet for anyone to read and you can join the Church and participate in its service without ever giving a dime. Try it. You will find that the Church does not demand money before letting you in on its secrets.

Christianity, like any candidate for truth any non-CortaSlim religion, does the hard work of history. It finds eye witnesses for its biggest claims. It conducts its arguments in public and allows critics to see its intellectual struggles. Do you doubt this? Go get a copy of the Bible from even the most conservative of churches and you will find footnotes all through it showing the textual and translation struggles of the scholars who produced your English Bible. Variant readings will be given, whole passages, even beloved ones like the story of the Woman caught in Adultery will be challenged, and the disagreements between source texts will be in full view. Now notice how little it impacts the basic message. The Bible stands up to scholarship.

Does Dan Brown do this? He does not. Don’t trust a book that claims to be the truth that does not.

I am told the CortaSlim people have made a mint on their too-good-to-be true claims and I know Dan Brown has made a bundle by writing a book that he says is fiction when he cannot support the lies, but coyly claims is fact when not being challenged. CortaSlim plays on our self-loathing, our laziness, and our dreams of something for almost nothing. The Da Vinci Code plays on our knowledge that spirituality matters, but our desire to avoid the rigors of real religion.

Just as physical health is too important to trust to the quacks who made CortaSlim, so our spiritual health is too important to trust to someone so badly educated he gets almost none of his history right. Organized religion gets some just criticism in our culture, but two thousand years of survival in the market place of ideas has its advantages. It is simply more likely to be true than whatever New Age nostrums that we could cook up in the tiny amount of time most of us give to our spiritual health.

If it is just about the money, then I get it. The Code is a decent airport paperback . . . the mental equivalent of watching a Gilligan’s Island rerun . . . allowing for a mental nap when trapped on a plane. However, I keep meeting people who take the thing seriously, who wonder if Christianity really has been hiding Gnostic gospels that they could have checked out of their public library. It is astonishing to me, as if they were pleading with me to do something to get the government to rescue Gilligan and the Castaways or find Fox and Mulder to uncover the UFO conspiracy or finally allow Buffy and Angel to wipe out the vampires of California. . . and then I remember the temptation of the CortaSlim devils who hear the heart cry of such folk, men and women whose public education has been stripped of any sensible discussion of religion, but who have God shaped holes in their hearts. The hole needs filling and CortaSlim religion promises to fill it with no uncomfortable demands, no need to change, and no God who refuses to change with to fit the agenda of our times.

I remember that you cannot cheat an honest man. He knows that CortaSlim is too good to be true, too cheap to be real, too easy to be worthwhile. He also knows that the gods of Dan Brown are too small to be worthy of worship, too facile to save, and too glib to stand footnotes. God help us all, but the road to Hell for most of us is surely chosen with good intentions mixed with spiritual laziness.

My favorite sources of information:

1. One should actually read the Gospels to see if they are what Brown claims. Is Jesus of the Gospels the misogynist Brown paints? Try the [ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=50&chapter=1&version=47 ]Gospel of John first.
2. Read an early Church Father like [ http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/justin.html ]Justin Martyr who had to deal with shysters like Brown in his own time.
3. Are the Gnostic gospels hidden? Do they say what Brown claims? Read [ http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas.html ]one here. Note its view of women while you are at it!
4. If what you want is the truth on the Code, I like Mark Roberts of this very blog best with the [ http://www.go.family.org/davinci/ ]Focus on the Family response a close second.