My affair with Catholicism: A short book report on Matthew 23

Matthew 23 seems to be a popular stone to throw at Catholics (or Anglicans for that matter). Here's the salient part (a very big part) of it:

1: Then said Jesus to the crowds and to his disciples,
2: "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat;
3: so practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice.
4: They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.
5: They do all their deeds to be seen by men; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long,
6: and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues,
7: and salutations in the market places, and being called rabbi by men.
8: But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brethren.
9: And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.
10: Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ.
11: He who is greatest among you shall be your servant;
12: whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
13: "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in.
15: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.
16: "Woe to you, blind guides, who say, `If any one swears by the temple, it is nothing; but if any one swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.'
17: You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred?
18: And you say, `If any one swears by the altar, it is nothing; but if any one swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.'
19: You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?
20: So he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by everything on it;
21: and he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by him who dwells in it;
22: and he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.
23: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.
24: You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!
25: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity.
26: You blind Pharisee! first cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate, that the outside also may be clean.
27: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
28: So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
29: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous,
30: saying, `If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'

---

Have I told this story already?

Not to many of you, think.

When I was in high school, in Jim Plante's church group, to be specific, I prayed for experience as an unsaved soul. Since I had been raised from birth as a Christian, accepted Christ myself in a personal (but entirely inevitable) decision after the age of accountability, as befits a good Brethren boy, and never had any experience outside of a church, I didn't know how I could possibly convince someone of the life-changing power of Christianity. I hadn't seen any lives changed.

Of course, I could have just gotten my hands dirty, met people who hadn't shared my easy life, and so on, but that wouldn't have been properly dramatic and appropriate for a teenager.

As ironic as it seems, I've never received a more direct response to a prayer.

Over the next few years, I felt like God kicked me out of the church. There were circumstances (my pastor-friend left and cut off ties to his former life, including our friendship (albeit for logical reasons); another pastor-friend convinced me that predestination was the only biblically-tenable position, and as a serious Protestant, the Bible was the one and only Word, but as a thinking person, predestination was unacceptable) and there were ... "stirrings". I couldn't have had any clearer indications without a burning bush or temporary blindness whilst in route to Lebanon.

That was ten years ago. I've been out of the church - any church, really - since then, and I don't think I'm going back. Somewhere in the back of my mind there's always been the nagging voice that if God kicked me out of the Church, he'd probably bring me back in. But maybe not. Maybe the place for everyone is not in a Church.

---

For reasons I can't put together, most of the friends, acquaintances, etc. with whom I discuss theology have been Catholic, or Anglican, or some reasonably orthodox variation. And they're very persuasive. They should be - they have thousands of years of apologists who have chewed over most every serious problem already. I am not a Christian in a sense the me of 10 years have go would have respected. I think of myself as a follower of Christ, but not the church. I'm a Christian like the early Christians, I like to imagine. Well, with a little bit of Buddhism, Humanism, Urantianism, and God knows what else thrown in. But if I were a Christian, I might be a Catholic. Or, a pre-backslidden Catholic, as I was telling my friend Craig.

See, the Bible is very unreliable as a sole source of direction. It is confusing, even contradictory. It was certainly not divinely inspired for clarity. What is more, a study of biblical history shows indisputably that no significant part of the New Testament was written within 20 years of Jesus' death. Much of it was written more than a generation later. A significant part was not even written as part of the original text, but was incorporated later. The point is that the gospels, the epistles - the entire New Testament, rely upon the tradition of the apostles (what I thought was Apostolic Succession, but apparently this is something different). So by relying on the Bible, you are relying even more fundamentally on the tradition of the apostles and the first batch of Christians. If we accept tradition, at what point do we abandon it? Just like Timothy, the Catholic tradition makes an internal claim to its own validity. Why accept one claim but not another?

So if I were a Christian, I would be a Catholic. But while I concur with the Catholic claim to authority, I simply can't accept on that authority that sex between any consenting adults is sinful. Unlawful or unwise, perhaps. But not sinful. I won't accept the roles of women as currently defined. Most importantly, I won't accept the absolute spiritual authority of another man.

Scroll all the way back up to the top, read, and come back here. I'll wait.

This "Call no man father" passage has often been thrown as a very casual and shallow "bomb" (e.g. "You call your priests 'Father', so you're sinning") - while I have been mulling this post in my mind for some time, it was prompted tonight by a comment on this post at Ales Rarus, in which the verse was tossed - but I think it has a more crucial significance. As any beginning Catholic apologist should respond, people are called "father" throughout the bible, and Jesus didn't mean you shouldn't call your own dad "father". Clearly we're not supposed to take it literally, any more than we are to literally pluck out our own eyes.

But in the context of the passage, and in the context of the rest of Jesus' ministry, we are called to be sons of God, not sons of Paul (despite "Paul's" later claim to the contrary!), not sons of Augustine, not sons of the Pope. God is our father, and there is no intercessor between us save the Christ. I don't see any clearer reading than this.

I've attempted to avail myself of the gobs of Catholic apology on the subject. I'd originally planned this post to be a discussion of the following links (link link link). But it can be distilled to this: I have not seen any Catholic interpretation of this passage which does not boil all meaning away. I'm still hopeful someone will be able to provide a better alternative - I'm not closed to the idea.

Though I know that within the Catholic tradition to knowingly err is mortal sin, were I a Christian, and thus a Catholic, I would immediately be in opposition to the Pope and papal tradition. I would need wake each day and pray to God, "Forgive me Father, for today I will sin - my contrition is sincere, though I will repeat the sin today and tomorrow."

So perhaps it is best I'm not a Christian. At least not by the old me's definition.

I need a personal manager

When I'm at work, I'm an exceptionally productive person. I trust my own judgement in that, but I have a feeling that all of my managers after Barnes & Noble would agree (I was not a productive salesman!). Around the house, when it comes to chores, I'm reasonably reliable. The trash will go out, if not immediately. The dishes do get cleaned, if not that night. The lawn will get mowed (so I keep telling myself).

When it comes to my own personal projects, though - writing, drawing, etc., staying in shape, maintaining a sense of style, and even the more developmental home jobs (like the landscaping), I'm just not great at getting things done. It's not really through a lack of effort or attention - I'm great at starting projects, at working around their edges, at planning them and laying them out, but not at methodically driving through them. I think to myself that I work while its fun, and abandon what becomes dull, but that's not really a problem with work or chores. And it's not a problem when my personal projects are being overseen by someone other than me.

For example, I have a handful of Coera-related drawings languishing in the "Current" folder, but I push myself to wring out a SWAG drawing for each monthly challenge. I peck around the corner of several stories I'm writing now, but in my novel writing classes, I could turn out 60 solid pages in two months, breaking right through the dull spots and the writer's block and the incessent short breaks to get a glass of water or check what Kim's doing.

So, I think the thing is, I need a personal manager. I don't need to be graded on my work, or paid for it. It's not the fear of losing a paycheck or even, really, the motivation of getting a raise or a promotion that makes me want to do a good job. It's the recognition from my manager and my co-workers that make it worthwhile. I'd never be happy with building a very clever database that tracked what I was struggling to manage with paper receipts, unless I showed it to someone else and got some kind of praise for it. The utility of my work and the self-satisfaction are there as factors, but they are completely outweighed by the external response.

So I need someone who is invested in the silly things I do, in my health, in my writing, in my drawing, in my home repairs, who will give me meaningful deadlines, who will give me a bar to surpass, who will give me someone to impress so I'll strive for excellence.

Maybe that is a role husbands and wives are meant to play for each other. Perhaps the back and forth "nagging" which has become a comic charicature of traditional marriages is an adaptive form of co-management that fills this need for everyone who feels it (which is everyone)? But "traditional" family cohesion is popularly supplanted by unions of co-individuals, partners whose interests are a sort of Venn Diagram - they are cuffed at the wrists with some common interests, but are largely facing different directions. Maybe thats a better picture of the "traditional" family structure, too, once you get to know June and Ward Cleaver as people instead of as Beaver's Parents.

But maybe what I really need is to figure out how to make self-satisfaction meaningful. How can I do this without becoming narcissistic or anti-social? Is it even possible - is it a personality trait, or a feature I can cultivate in myself, like courtesy or generosity?

Today

...I started my new job with Mori Luggage!

Unlike nearly every other job I can remember, my first day wasn't filled with jitters and trepidation. I think this is going to be great!

Conditioned Reflexes

When you study a martial art, a sport, or a musical instrument, the majority of your study is repetitive practice. Sure, you may learn a new kata or a new kick, but then you practice it over and over and over, and you keep practicing the old one. You may learn a new play or strategy, but you don't continue to spend hours on the layups and free throws. You may learn a new sonata, but you still run your scales.

The point of the repetition isn't that you need to keep trying until you get it right, but that you need to keep doing it right until it doesn't take effort. After you've correctly assumed defense stance 7 a few thousand times, there's no pause when your opponent's saber takes a quick cut for your helmet. When you've run that same play for the last two months, you see the gap in the defensive pattern before either team has had a chance to think about it - you get the ball to the open man. A master musician doesn't have to play the piece from memory - they play it by feel, since memory is too slow.

The point is that through conditioning, we learn to respond automatically and correctly, without thought or conscious assessment. Of course, people have natural reflexes, too - some more than others. A real talent is someone who seems to have this conditioning already inborn - their reflexes and reactions are naturally reliable.

I think morality is along the same lines. Our family and parents model behaviour for us when we are young; when we are older, we learn to make snap judgements about situations - to know what is right or wrong. We value the moral athletes - our elders - who know the good and the bad of a situation without even having to know all of the details. They've learned to "feel" a situation without having to think about it.

Some of us train and refine our moral judgement, either by studying a school of morality until it is engrained into our person, or by throwing ourselves into all kinds of situations and finding our way through them.

So.... I'd like to decondition my reflexes, you know? I don't want to have a reflexive response to a moral quandry - I want it to be based on reason. I don't want to worry about how my initial reactions are coloring my decisions. I don't find myself in too many situations where I need a reliable snap judgement. So how do I unpractice?

Is that what zen is?

Random Saturday thougts

Today I thought, I suppose a mall-based custom bra retail chain could be rather profitable. People pay plenty for custom coffee, and women (generally) are more quality conscious in their clothing than men - they will pay $200 for shoes or purse, if they're good enough. Why not a bra? With Oprah et al. telling women that the vast majority of them don't wear the correct size bra, getting even the occasional free bra fitting from Angie's (that's what this shop is called in my head) would be beneficial, and while they're already in the shop for the fitting, they might see a style they really like... Hmm. If only I had capitol. I'd have started at least 6 or 7 (failed) businesses by now.

Today I thought, people often talk to their dogs like they were babies or toddlers. People talk to their cats like they were adults. How strange.

Today I thought, what if people looked at businesses like they did their bodies? Rather than admiring glut and a big belly, they admired lean, agile beautiful businesses that were more concerned about their health 40 years down the road than they were today's big bowl of stock dividends? (Okay, everybody loves a bowl of stock dividends, but at least some people exercise later and make sure to keep their whole body happy, and not just their tongue/head.) I guess we just haven't sufficiently evolved to the point where we want to turn Forbes sideways to loll over the fold-out of that month's 10-Q.

Misquoting Jesus

Todd and Cindy gave me Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman for my birthday.

It was high on my list of desirable books, and I was very excited to get it, and continued to be excited to read it.

In brief, the author (who is a highly-respected scholar among academic biblical historians - he's come recommended from a variety of sources in the past, including The Teaching Company (who produces those lectures on CD I listen to)) explores the field of Biblical authenticity, guiding the reader through a handful of examples of the reasons why most Biblical scholars would argue that the Bible as we have it today is not the original Bible, as it was written. Though we don't have any texts that we would be able to say with certainty are authentic to the original, the older and arguably more reliable texts do not, in fact, say the same things as the modern versions of our Bible. Whether through accidental mistakes in copying, deliberate changes intended to thwart heresies, or additions to the texts (such as the very famous example of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery), it's not just our translations that are misled, but the Greek and Latin texts from which they were translated. The King James version, which many people rely as itself divinely inspired, was in fact based on a fabricated Greek version known at the time of production to contain errors!

The sometimes technical expedition through the history of biblical translation is framed with the author's own story and reasons for Biblical study, starting with his graduation from the Moody Bible institute and his plans to champion the fundamentalist Protestant inerrant view of the Bible, and ending with his secular but deeply enthusiastic love for textual archaelogy.

It's a reasonably short book and easy to follow - I'd recommend it to anyone. There's nothing terribly new or shocking within, but it's very well presented and explained.

Pet Peeves

I tend to believe that pet peeves are indicative of a superiority complex. That's why I try to limit myself to 20 or 30 of them. :)

I've been spending a lot of time...

...here.

I don't know why I frequently end up at Catholic-themed blogs - perhaps because the heavy Platonic influences in Catholicism instill a propensity for theological and moral inquiry?

Dunno. But I like it. I've been commenting quite a bit in the discussion thread following the morality of homosexual marriage, but the majority of his posts are worth a read. The author promotes healthy, open debate around areas of his interest, but does not seem to fall back on Catholic dogma as a stance of last defense, as several other sites I have visited do.

Philosophy: Frameworks

Hypothesis:

Valid, non-trivial theories that seem to depend on highly-technical arguments can be expressed in simpler, broader strokes from within the proper framework.

This is a hypothesis instead of a theory, because I can't offer any kind of proof, only examples.

Ex. 1: The Monty Hall Paradox (Perhaps some people think the argument for this is not very technical - I would argue that this is because the framework for proper understanding has become popularized in the course of explaining the initial paradox.)

Ex. 2: Non-Euclidian Geometry Along with modern relativistic physics, these provide a relatively accessible theory for explaining real-world phenomena that are not cleanly understandable in previous paradigms.

Ex. 3: (This is a good one) Kepler/Galileo/Newton's model of planetary motion versus Epicycles

The above examples are all mathematical or scientific, because those are easily documented and explained, but the principle applies to less exact sciences as well. Consider technology from the vantage of a pre-industrial tribesman. Explaining how even a lightbulb works would take the most complicated explanation until he had the vocabulary to understand electricity.

Corollary: Theses which have been declared valid but rely on very complicated and technical explanations are likely gateways to new fields of understanding.

"Now...

...witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!"

Err... if by "battle station" I meant the new and improved Coerablog, and by "fully armed" I meant, umm, that all the posts and images are moved over there and it's all set up and ready for traffic.

Let me know what you think. I hope it's more useable.

Coerablog is moving!

Coerablog is being relocated to http://coera.wordpress.com/.

Wordpress offers free blogging with "categories", which eliminate the need for the clumsy dating system I've devised for blogger, and the interface seems much more manageable and useable, but I can't customize the template, so my fancy UI on blogspot is for nought. Alas.

I won't be tearing down the old site until I'm sure I like the new format.

(For those of you considering the move from blogspot (which I certainly have nothing against!), wordpress offers a blogspot/blogger migration tool that will move your posts. I didn't try it, so I don't know how well it works for images, etc.)

Happy Birthday to Me, continued!

No, this isn't another post bragging about my computer.

On Friday I got a call from John Mori of Mori's Luggage (one of the several places I'd applied after learning my days at Netifice were numbered.) This was the job I was terrifically excited about - I thought I was very well suited for it, it was right in the direction I'd been hoping to go from Vans, and it was slightly less of a drive than Netifice. He had an offer for me - slightly more than I'd originally asked for the position (though there had been some serious negotiation after the first interview, he had come up past where I'd started), and he seemed even more excited about me joining the company than I was.

Huzzah!