Not Enough Options, You Insensitive Clod

Just got forwarded an email chain letter urging me to vote in an MSNBC live-poll…

	Should the motto “In God We Trust” be removed from U.S. currency?
		Yes. It’s a violation of the principle of separation of church and state.
		No. The motto has historical and patriotic significance and does nothing to establish a state religion.

Here’s my problem – I may have a “yes” or “no” opinion on the question, but I absolutely do not agree with either of the elaborations.

Regarding the first, the “principle of separation of church and state” is not a proper Constitutional legal doctrine… the only constitutional principles are “free exercise” and “no state establishment”.  So if “In God We Trust” should be removed, it would have to be on the basis of it either inhibiting the free exercise of religion (which it clearly does not) or because it somehow establishes a state church (which it also does not, although strident secularists would argue otherwise).

Regarding the second, the phrase does have historical and patriotic significance, but these cannot be decoupled from its theological significance.  While it clearly does not establish a state church (as I have claimed above), it does have religious significance, pointing to the fundamentally theistic philosophical foundations for our system of law and governance.

Of course, speaking as a Christian I find it deeply ironic that we print “in God we trust” on the instruments of Mammon, in whom we actually trust.  Were God actually an object of trust in any practical sense for America as a nation or its people, perhaps I would see more virtue than parody in the slogan.

Detectable Design

The hot debate between Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates is whether “design” is a detectable property of a system.  The ID hypothesis votes yes, its opponents vote no.

So the other day I was random-link-cruising and happened upon some articles and discussions about Yucca Mountain, and particularly about the “warning label” problem: how do we mark the Yucca Mountain facility in such a way that all comers will recognize it as “dangerous” even if those comers are not English-speakers (10’s of years), familiar with Post-enlightenment Western culture (100’s of years), users of “language” as we understand it (1,000’s of years), or even recognizably “human” (10,000’s or 100,000’s of years).

It struck me that this is simply another face of the “design” question: the DOE wants to make it unambiguously clear to an observer with whom they have nothing (practically speaking) in common and to whom they will communicate nothing except a single physical artifice that (1) the artifice was deliberately designed by an intelligent agent, and (2) the intent of the designer was to warn the curious away from the site.  So success rests upon the existence of some empirical means of detecting not only design, but intent.  If the site can be misunderstood as a potentially natural phenomenon (e.g., genetically-modified blue cacti) or its purpose is misunderstood by a civilization with a different cultural lexicon (as, e.g., a “place of honor”), the project will have failed.

Then I had an almost comical daydream about Richard Dawkins’ great⁶⁰ grandson (60-some-odd generations from now) standing before an apparently sealed-up wall, Geraldo Rivera style, lambasting his critics’ quaint but preposterous notions that the triple-triangular megaliths surrounding him are anything except aethetically fortuitous freaks of geology which our psychological evolution happens to have predisposed us to be both fascinated and horrified by, and that he intends to prove first-hand that there is nothing interesting about the site.  Bring in the robot-piloted hyper-backhoes and start digging!

A Stroke of Genius

Here’s an idea that will revolutionize church finance:

Pre-paid tithe and offering cards.

Someone needs to jump on this and make it happen.

You’re welcome.

Never Let Go of the Gospel

This is a rant.  Consider yourself warned.

We live in what may be the most opulent, gluttonous, self-aggrandizing, selfish, arrogant civilization on the face of the earth.  We bear children not as the natural fruit of loving covenant and an expression of God’s providence, but because we decide we’re “ready” and we “want” them.  We have unfettered access to stores of knowledge beyond our remotest sense of comprehension.  We set aside a decade for “adolescence” in which we grant almost-unfettered economic freedom with near-total liberty from legal, moral, and cultural responsibility, and consider it destructive to impede the total moral free-agency of these formless and void wanderers. All but a sliver of the severely destitute live with conveniences and luxuries beyond the imaginations of millennia of the world’s wealthiest men, and many of the world’s people even today.

Living in that kind of world, I can’t see how anyone can open their Bible, stand up in front of hundreds (or thousands) of gathered believers on a Sunday morning, keep a straight face, and tell them how to have an even more comfortable, fulfilling future.  I don’t see how someone can look at himself in the mirror after telling an eager flock of God’s people that the Apostle Paul, writing to them from a prison cell, clothed in rags, and nearing the end of his life at the hands of a pagan government, wants them to be “winners” according to the exact same measure of “success” used by that pagan government (money, influence, popularity, power).  I am dumbfounded at the rush to remove from Christian believing every burden which might actually mark us as “Christian”, and their replacement with burdens of trend-chasing, status hoarding, and cultural conformity.

I say all of these things as a guy who loves churches that “understand the times”, that engage with culture in their forms and language and structure and outreach, that minister to practical needs, that produce well-balanced intelligible influential Christians to the glory of God.  I’m just getting quite fed up with the ease with which the unnegotiable first things are “swept under the rug” or treated as of “secondary importance” to those things which, frankly, are passing away.

Never, ever, ever let go of the gospel.  Never, ever, ever stop preaching the goodness of God, the awfulness of our sin, the awesomness of God’s judgement, the sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion, the power of Christ’s resurrection, or the responsibility we bear as His representatives and body here on the earth.  Never, ever, ever think there’s anything more important than that to put in front of your people.

Okay, end of rant.  I feel better.  Don’t you?