Out of the Woods

... and back toward home.

The retreat weekend was good, as usual,

with lots of time spend tromping around out in the woods.

This act of simply being alone in the midst of God's creation, seems to naturally prompt conversations between He and me.  Which is a large part of the point of these retreats, after all.

The room I stayed in was tucked away under an earth berm, and pretty quiet. Accommodations were both comfortable and simple, as you'd want.

The rest of the buildings were scattered around tucked up against the same woods, so each one seemed private, except maybe the cabin units connected to the dining hall by a raised wood deck.

The library/lounge, the sun room, and the chapel building were all sun catchers, and really lovely, as Catholic retreat centers tend to be.

Somehow it seems easier to bring concerns to God in places like these... and to be grateful for His presence in your life.

Again... part of the point, yes? :)

It's that time of year again

... where I take a long weekend away, usually at a retreat center (which is also usually Catholic; they are so much more contemplative than Protestants and design these facilities accordingly), and think about the year just past, as well as about the year ahead.  I try to pick the weekend closest to my birthday, so that I can do this in the context of another year of my life going into the books - was it a good year?  Can next year be better?

So this time, I am heading SouthWest instead of my more usual NorthEast.  Creighton University, a good Jesuit school, has a retreat center about 2 hours away, and supposedly some nice wooded grounds.  It's kinda remote, apparently, too; the nearest McDonald's is 30 miles away.  I wonder if I'll get cell phone signal???  (Now in theory that question shouldn't matter a lick.  But... of course it sort of does.)

But anyway, I have my reading stack selected, my mental/ emotional/ spiritual health checklist ready, and my trusty ukulele for chord fingering practice.  So Friday morning it's back to nature, to find some solitude and practice some contemplation, along with a little self-evaluation.  I hope to be able to assign myself a passing grade.  :)

Out in the tails of the Bell Curve

Dear reader, you are surely aquainted with the Standard Normal distribution (otherwise known as the "Bell Curve").  It is useful in many statistical applications, including some of the social sciences.

When applied to things like the political landscape (where for instance the political left and political right can be represented by the part of the x-axis on either side of the center, that 50% mark at the peak of the curve), it explains why there are so few true "undecided voters" (the further from the middle, the less likely you are to switch sides), and why the "undecideds" decide so many elections (they are the closest to the middle and have the least distance to move).  But it also explains why they are so very difficult to motivate and keep engaged in the political process.

The 2/3 or so in the middle (shown in red as +/- one standard deviation) are the agreeable uninvolved who simply go along, whether blissfully or grumbling as they go; they may have an opinion, but either way they are able to live with whatever the majority decides.

The next quarter (in green, split roughly 13% on either side) are the disagreeable activists, those who "do not go gentle into that good night", but rant and rave and try actively to change things (usually falling short, since this is a social "system", a process, after all, and lone individuals can rarely change a larger social process).

The remaining 5% (the 2+% percent of people on each end of the curve), are the true outliers, the fringe, the pathological disrupters, creative geniuses, anarchists, crusaders, megalomaniacs & visionaries who actually DO change the world - for good or for ill.

Change the definition of the x-axis, and the same principle applies.  Make one half of the bell curve stand for the degree of collectivism / statism, and the other side the degree of libertarianism / individualism, that a person desires; the same descriptions hold true.  The Ayn Rands have their followers out there in the "tail" on one end, and the Mao & Lenin types have theirs in the other "tail".  Most are in the middle wishing the government wasn't so intrusive in their lives, but also wanting the government to fix more of their problems, etc.  The 2/3 in the middle mostly just go along, the 5% in the tails are the lightning rods, fanatics and magnets that draw the discontented (in the green) away from the middle and toward their wild ideas.

Which are you closer to... the agreeable middle?  Or the fringe?

Political Statement of Principles

Here's a set I endorse, at least when it comes to government:

Campaign For Liberty 

Statement of Principles

Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression.  Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

But many Americans today are frustrated.  The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all.  For all their talk of “change,” neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way.  Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt.  Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy.  Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands.  Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world.  Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years.  Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document.  Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers.  Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy.  Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda.  Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments.  Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns.  And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred.  For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress.  We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives.  Such compromises of our country’s independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control.  Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example?  The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

Our country is ailing.  That is the bad news.  The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us.  Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

One Dollar, One Vote (more or less)

When Mitt Romney made his candid remarks awhile back about the "47%" of voters who pay no taxes, he was partly right and partly wrong.  Not all of "those people" are wards of the state, lack ambition, see themselves as victims, and refuse to take responsibility for themselves.  Some fit that description, sure.  But not all 47%.  However, what they all definitely do NOT do is... pay taxes.  It seems to me that there does need to be some recognition that those who provide the funding for government services should have a greater say in the management and disposition of those government services than those who provide no funding for them whatsoever. 

I propose a system of popular voting for political office in this country that rewards tax-paying as much as it rewards citizenship.  To lay the groundwork for this system, here are a few pertinent statistics:

       296,000,000 total population of US in 2005
       135,000,000 filed an income tax return in 2005  
                            (46% of total US population)
       100,000,000 paid (a tax obligation) in 2005
                            (34% of total US, 74% of filers)
935,000,000,000 federal income tax paid in 2005     
                            ($9,350 average paid tax obligation)

       299,000,000 total population of US in 2006      
                            (1% annual growth)
       225,000,000 voting age population in 2006       
                            (75% of total)
       208,000,000 eligible voters in 2006                   
                            (92% of voting age, 70% of total)
         86,000,000 actual turnout in 2006
                            (41% of eligible, 29% of total pop.)

Oh, and in case you doubt that 47% of voters pay no taxes, just compare the 100M above who did, vs the 208M of eligible voters, and you get... 48%.  Adjusting for a year's worth of population growth between '05 and 06, and it's 47%.  So there you go.

In finding this collection of statistics, I found it staggering that less than 30% of the people in this country actually determine who runs the place.  My proposal would increase that participation, especially among tax-PAYers... who often seem to be at the heart of complaints about the system.  The idea would be to give tax-PAYers some kind of additional voting shares based on how much they actually pay in taxes.  Eligible voters would still get their normal vote to use whether they paid any taxes or not, so no change there.  But zero taxes paid = zero additional voting shares.  And lots of taxes paid = lots of additional voting shares. 

Looking at the Federal system only for the time being, from the data above, the average tax paid amounts to roughly $9,350 per tax-PAYer (someone who really paid income taxes, not who simply filed to get a refund/credit).  For easier math, let's call it $10,000 for an average tax payment.  Since that's an average, there are definitely some people above and some below that average, so let's divide that amount in fourths to get a baseline "tax voting share" figure of about $2,500.  That way we can distinguish a bit among those folks who do pay less than the average. 

In this scheme, then, anyone who pays even a dollar in net taxes after deductions and credits gets one "tax voting share" (TVS).  Then once you reach $2,501 in paid taxes, you get two "TVS's".  Between $5,001 - $7,500 tax paid, you get three; at $7,501 you get 4, etc.  Since $935B was paid in total, if you divide that into these equal "tax voting shares", you would get $935Bn / $2,500 = 374,000,000 tax voting shares to distribute among the 100,000,000 people who paid a tax obligation.  That is roughly 3.7 TVS's per tax-PAYer.  To make the math a little easier, let's round that to 4 shares on average; of course some tax-PAYers will only get one TVS, others will get many. 

To be sure that tax-PAYers do not have an advantage over normal eligible voters, we then have to dilute the overall value of those TVS's to match the level of eligible voters.  In this rough example, it would be approximately 400M voting shares compared to a little over 200M eligible voters, or a dilution to about 50% of the value of a "regular vote".  So a TVS would be worth only 1/2 of an eligible voter's normal vote, but there will be two times more of them allocated out to the tax-PAYers, so that their overall weight is equal.  Thus, a tax-PAYer who pays $5,000 in federal income taxes (net of all deductions, etc.) would get 5,000 / 2,500 = 2 TVS's, which in total would be worth 2 x 0.5 = 1 vote. 

Think of TVS's as a Common Stock issue vs the regular eligible voter having the Preferred Stock series.  Over time, the value of a TVS will fluctuate with the level of Federal Income Taxes paid and the number of people who pay it.  But the regular eligible "citizen voter's" vote value will always be 1.  And, the total value of TVS's issued will never exceed the total value of regular votes that are made available to eligible voters, so that the "tax share" voters could never outvote the regular eligible voter population, assuming their turnout is the same.  Note, I say votes "made available", not "votes cast".  Some of those regular votes will go unused, in the same way that some TVS's will not be redeemed, either.  In either case if an eligible voter, or a holder of TVS's, chooses not to go to the polls... that's their decision.  But the votes and shares available won't change based on turnout - only the usage of them will.  You don't use 'em... you lose 'em.

FAQs

Q.  Doesn't this mean that an eligible voter who is also a tax-PAYer will get their vote(s) counted twice? 

A.  Yup.  Well... not exactly twice.  Twice if the tax-PAYer sent $5,000 to the federal government in income taxes.  Only 1.5 times if you paid in $1 - $2,500.  Potentially a lot more than twice if you paid in a lot more in taxes.

Q.  So what happened to the "one man, one vote" principle?

A.  Well, at one time, that really did mean man.  Not woman.  And for that matter, white man.  Not any other kind.  And before that it really meant landowner (and still does in the House of Lords in jolly old England).  So, "one man, one vote" has meant different things at different times.  I'm suggesting it's time for another revision.

Q.  And just what would you call this principle?

A.  I'd call it the principle of Proportional Progressive Accountability.  The people who fund the government get more of a say in it than those who don't.  And those who fund it more get more say than those who fund it less.

Q.  How is this fair, again?

A.  In a corporation, a large stockholder has more influence than a small one.  At some point, he/she can even demand a seat on the board, or can band together with other large stockholders and wage a proxy battle to remove the board altogether and replace it with a new slate.  Why can they do this?  Because the consequences of the decisions made by that board and that corporation flow straight to their wallets.  There is more impact from bad decisions on the value of shareholders' equity than on directors and officers' compensation.

Directors and officers (read: elected politicians and political appointees), should serve at the pleasure of the shareholders (read: tax-PAYers).  After all, they are the ones who provide the corporation (read: government) with capital (read: tax income), and put their own finances at risk to do so (think: government debt).  The more capital at risk, the more say they should have in how the business runs, and who runs it on their behalf.

Q. So how much say would Warren Buffet get in this arrangement? How many votes?

A. Only one vote, silly. Same as the rest of us. TVS's, though... that's another matter. Let's see... last time I looked, he paid about $7M in taxes. That translates into 7,000,000 / 2,500 = 2,800 TVSs, which are equivalent to 1,400 regular votes. Let's call these Tax Equivalent Votes (TEVs). So old Warren would have the voting power of 1,401 non-tax-paying but otherwise eligible voters. Would that sway the presidential election? Hardly. 1,401 voters is only 0.000016 of those who actually cast ballots in 2006.  Mitt Romney would wind up with 600ish TEVs.  Obama would have 360 TEVs to cast. The financial elite would NOT rule the world, if that worries you.  But the tax-PAYers might feel like they are getting a fairer shake for their financial contibution to this business of government.

Q.  How would this work on a state and local level?

A.  It would be same principle, but based on the amount of state income taxes paid (for state elections), or local property taxes paid (for city/county elections), adjusted for the number of people paying those taxes and the number of eligible voters in that state or county.  All of this tax paying information is public record and could easily be fed to voter rolls at polling places so that poll workers know how many ballots to give to Julie Brown vs to John Smith when they walk into their local precinct on election day. 

Q.  Could a Warren Buffet sway a local election?

A.  Perhaps.  Depends on his share of those local taxes.  But you would expect that one influential person could have more effect on a local race than a national one, right?

Q.  What about corporations and corporate taxes?

A.  Corporations are not voters.  They're out.  Period.

Politically Polarizing Polemics

The rhetoric of the major party campaigns this year (both national and local) has been getting to me.  So when I saw this article on the NPR website today, I figured that I had waited to write this post long enough.  Other people are seeing things the same way as I have for a while, and are writing about them, so... why hold off?

Party politics (at least of the two major parties) has devolved into little more than showing your team allegiances (like wearing the colors of your school or the jersey of a pro player) at best, and at worst the total scandalous vilification of an opponent to gain a temporary positional advantage, using completely fabricated "facts".  In this kind of an environment, where defeating your opponent is the most important thing (regardless of the validity of their viewpoint or the consequences of your opposition), party loyalty has become the most important currency you can trade in, so that you can have the weight of the party machinery opening the way for you, like an offensive line does for a running back.  And when the chosen method of defeating your opponent is personal, ad hominem attacks, the political dialogue gets ugly fast.

What makes it all the more emotion-laden is the sharp ideological divide that seems to be driving the partisanship.  It's typically framed as left vs right or liberal vs conservative, but I think that's really inadequate, a convenient media-packaged distortion of the core conflict: Individualism vs Collectivism. One views the world through the lens of "the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many", and the other sees it as "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one".  It's Star Trek 2 all over again.   You could also call it the difference between Populists and Progressives, but that gets confusing because there are liberal populists as well as conservative populists, and progressive statists as well as progressive anarchists, so...  let's stick to framing the divide the way it makes the most sense.  The Republicrats (both presidential slates and their backers) have said that this election is about what kind of country we want to be, what kind of people we are.  The major parties each put forth their worldview as the one that should resonate with the voters.  But what they really resonate with is the hard-core ideologues at the far ends of the worldview spectrum.  So what gets forced on us as voters is a false choice between two extremes.

Must we choose, this election season, between

Individualism or Collectivism, 

private sector solutions or public sector ones, 

freely accumulating wealth or equitably sharing it, 

flawed private excesses or flawed social structures,
spending on defense or spending on healthcare,

legislating private morality or legislating public morality,
advancing personal liberty or advancing the common good?

Is there really only black or white (red or blue) to be had?

The thing about Collectivism that makes me most uneasy is that possessing a sincere and compassionate humanitarianism doesn't exempt one from wanting to force that same compassion on the rest of society, via the power structures embedded in that society, as this article from 1943 points out.  Tax policy often determines just who gets helped by society... and just who is required to do the helping.  Unfortunately taxation is always, ALWAYS, backed by the threat of force (force sanctioned by society, of course, but force nonetheless).  Help others, in the way we tell you to help them... or go to jail as a tax protester.  Charity, on the other hand, is never mandated; there may be peer pressure to give, sure (like your boss checking to see if you gave your fair share to United Way), but there's never IRS agents in a black SUV with bulletproof vests slapping on the handcuffs hauling you off.  I don't fear peer pressure anywhere near as much as I fear legislation of public morality via tax policy.  And don't even get me started on privacy concerns... as security and traffic cameras proliferate, and drones start to flood the sky, living in the basement is looking more and more attractive.

The thing about Individualism that makes me most uneasy is the depths of depravity of which the human heart is capable.  As Saint Paul wrote: "...if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for nothing! They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer."  There is a legitimate purpose for government regulation: the restraint of wrongdoing.  Now, of course, what the definition is of wrongdoing matters here a great deal, and we could (and should) wrangle over that. But that aside, one only has to look at the Enron scandal or the Madoff fraud to see what unchecked greed can do.  Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" occasionally needs a slap on its wrist, when it decides use fraud as a means to gain.  Human trafficking, child abuse, robbery, violent crime of all sorts, make it clear what unchecked appetites can do.  For every southern plantation owner who voluntarily chose to free his slaves, there were many more who could have freely chosen to do the right thing... but did not.  It took massive force and bloodshed to make them change their practices (at least... change within a short span of years, rather than waiting decades or generations for it to happen naturally).

Is this really the choice I face?  Isn't there an alternative to this schema?  Some other way of organizing the discussion?  I don't want one or the other.  I want some of each!  Who will offer me a reasoned and passionate blend of these two?  What I'd love to see is candidates who can somehow synthesize Libertarianism and Catholic Social Teaching.  Then you'd really have something: protections of individual freedom and structures of collective caring.

On another NPR program earlier this week I heard the author of this book interviewed about how we can recover from the Politically Polarizing Polemics to which we have become subject whenever we listen to the proceedings of Congress.  I've thought for some time that we really need a Parliamentary style of government, so that multiple parties with varying viewpoints can negotiate for common ground (and thereby gain more influence as a bloc than separately).  Yes, it's more tribal than what we have now - but what we have now is what we had 150 years ago: a country sharply divided by ideology ready to take up arms against each other.  We're nearly there again.

Cupcakes and Cocktails

Ok, this is a strange one: a bakery with a bar.

But, it's not like Ernie's Fresh-Daily Donuts & Liquor Mart - it's classy. Check out this light and crispy Lemon Creme Fruit Tart in a Lavender Meringue. It tasted even better than it looked. :)  The meringue was perfect; light, crispy, and melted in your mouth, with an ever-so-delicate hint of lavender that did not at all contend with the filling.

Actually, the menu was designed around pairings: an exotic dessert with an exotic cocktail (fine wines also available for the discerning. Me, I paired my dessert above with a fume' blanc. Good call.)

Yes, by day, it's a Cupcake place, suitable for children. But by night, it gets all swank and grown-up.

Best College Fight Songs, 2.0

It's football season again, when one looks forward to crisp Fall air, letter sweaters, pep band, and the good old u! rah! rah! cheer. Except right now the air is nothing even remotely crisp (100+ as I write this), bikini dance teams are more the rage than sweatered cheerleaders, and halftime shows with pyrotechnics and vocal acrobatics have replaced the marching band.

But still...

I've been nostalgically listening to my favorite CD of marches, which embeds the top tier of fight songs from a prior post. Coincidentally, I stumbled upon this old article on ESPN which purports to rank the top 50 fight songs. Like many of the commenters at the bottom of the article, I disagreed with the analysis, and it put me in mind of a more objective scoring model for ranking these things. So I am updating my prior analysis with a new 10-point scale.

To be a truly unassailably great fight song, I believe that first these three key features need to be present to even get it in the running: 

Memorable, catchy main melody

Use of relative minor & diminished chords

Showcases trombones in some clear way

If these are fully present, it's a "good" fight song.  Then, if it also has these two, it gets bonus points, and becomes top-tier:

  

Has a clear place to shout out (u-rah-rah, hail, fight, etc.)

Additional melodic section of 6+ bars

With these in mind, I developed a 9 point scale; two points for each item in the first section, and 1.5 points for the next two.  Finally, I have a category for extra points.  To help with a tiebreak, to separate the songs at the top, I would consider these features, which are more subjective:

Good use of off-time, rag or swing rhythm

Especially rousing (driving cadence, big drums, etc.)
Run-up flourishes in beginning or middle (~2 bars)

Slam-Bang ending (....."hey!")

Key change!

Each of these could get .2 of a point, and if all were present an additional point could be awarded.

So in my rankings, each category gets full credit for clear use of that feature, half credit for slight use, and 0 points for absent. 10.0 would be an ideal fight song (which doesn't exist... yet). Oh, and ... it has to be written AS a fight song, and not be a wholesale lift of some other tune (sorry, Clemson, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma, South Carolina, A&M, etc...).  Finally, whatever I use to judge the song will take no more than 1:45 to play.  At a decent pace you can get 48 measures in that time; a fight song should be crisp.

After reviewing 60+ college fight songs (and one from the NFL!), using the above websites and others like this YouTube channel, only 13 have scored 8 or more points, and make the "good" category.  The great ones score 9 or better.

And, the winners are:

1 Columbia 9.60
2 Wisconsin 9.50
3 Michigan 9.40
4 Indiana 9.05
5 LSU 8.80
6 Notre Dame 8.75
7 Navy 8.65
T-8 Ohio St. 8.50
T-8 Illinois 8.50
10 Michigan St. 8.40
T-11 Nebraska 8.10
T-11 Northwestern 8.10
13 Syracuse 8.00

The Big 10 makes out well here (especially now that Nebraska has joined) with over half the list.  Not making the minimum of 8 points but still in the top 25 schools, deserving of honorable mention are:

14 West Virginia 7.55
15 Penn State 7.45
T-16 Princeton 6.90
T-16 Rice  6.90

T-16 Washington  6.90

19 Texas 6.70

20 Alabama  6.35 

T-21 Iowa 6.10 

T-21 AZ State  6.10 

23 USC 5.75 

24 Oregon 5.55 

T-25 Minnesota 5.40
T-25 Florida 5.40

Ole Miss also got 5.30 points, the only other school to finish 5.0 or better. (Sorry, Iowa State, Purdue, Auburn, Arkansas, Virginia, etc.)

As a side note, if NFL fight songs were eligible, the Minnesota Vikings' "Skol, Vikings, Let's Go!" would have come in 16th alone.  Not only is it a quality fight song, but it's sung in a hilarious Norwegian accent and preceded by the blowing of the Viking Horn by Ragnar, the Viking mascot.  If you ever catch a game in Minneapolis, it's not to be missed.

Alright, then.  Got my Fantasy Football team selected, rosters filled, my app downloaded... I'm ready for tailgating and TV.   Let's kick this thing off!

Hot, Fast & Loud

How else to describe attending my first NASCAR race?  It was just a Friday night "pup" race on the NASCAR feeder circuit. The big-boy race (or big-girl if you're Danica Patrick - see her bus center left) was later on the weekend. But they still went 130+ mph, so their movement was faster than I had ever seen in person.

We were guests of a company for which my wife's employer (a large contracting firm) does work.  I was the accompanying spouse - a role I am warming up to nicely.  :)  They gave us access to their suite at the track, complete with comprehensive refreshments.

The pre-race warmups were about the only time you could be outside without ear protection, and I didn't really want to be outside at all due to the searing heat. Give me an air conditioned box with a TV monitor, food and drink, and relative quiet anytime. :)

But when you did step outside, it was soooo loud.

And just a tad fast...

Worldviews, Part 7

Jumping off from my prior post, I'll now explore what Judaism & Christianity postulate about God in regards to my presuppositions about what God would be like, from my observations of and intuitive conclusions about nature.  There's no reason at this stage to consider things that are off-topic, not part of my presuppositional list, such as what the religions say about "the problem of evil", or "social justice", or structures of economics or government.  I don't care about those topics until I'm convinced that the religion in question has the nature of God correct.

Since Judaism and Christianity share some common holy writings, and a common theological heritage (up to a point), I'll treat them as combined at first and parse them later on.

In these religions, is God seen as:

• Creator (and thus Universal)?
• Personal (having preferences)?
• Consistent (over time, reliable)?
• Orderly (precise, complex)?
• A Lover of Beauty?
• A Source of Vitality?
• Allowing for Free Will choices?
• Relational in nature?

The answer to all these is a clear and unequivocal yes.  So far, so good, then.  I can establish that my presuppositions are all satisfied by the core Judeo-Christian religious tradition.  So, what else might these religions say regarding some other questions I raised in prior posts, like:  is God approachable by human beings?  is God actively involved with the created order?

The answer to these would also be yes, although here is where the two faiths might differ in the degree.  Judaism tends to see God as less personally approachable than does Christianity.  Accessible, yes, but not quite as easily.  Like Christianity, Judaism encourages kindness to others, holy living, personal prayer to God (as in thanksgiving and petitioning for aid), but there is little discussion in Judaism about the Spirit of God indwelling the participant and enabling these behaviors to happen.  That's a Christian distinctive.

Similarly, we could ask what kind of record of divine-human interactions do these religions claim to have?  Judaism sees God as historically involved with the created order, but more in the sense of intervention at critical points in history, and perhaps in the ongoing sustaining of nature.  Christianity (for the most part) is much more expectant about Divine Intervention (or Providence) happening frequently, even continuously at a personal level, and in some infrequent cases even seeing the intervention take the form of the miraculous (supernatural).

Christianity also emphasizes to a greater degree than Judaism the relational nature of God, particularly God's desire to have relationships with humans, both individually and corporately (in a faith community, be it global or local).  From Christianity, you get the sense that God is active in pursuit of people, doggedly working circumstances around so that people will respond and commit to relationship with God. 

The ultimate example of that pursuit is contained in the record of the life of Jesus Christ seen in Gospels and a few passages elsewhere in the New Testament.  On this point, the two religions diverge sharply.  A question to be asked, then, is: The picture of God painted in the New Testament, of a God who is freely accessible, desirous of intimate personal relations with us, and actively involved with the created order to the point of regular intervention (especially with the regular affairs of humans) - is this both intuitively pleasing and resonable given the evidence?

More on that after this break for some hot summer fun...

Worldviews, Part 6

Now we are at the point in this string of posts where I start evaluating various world religions to see which of them (if any) match my intuitive conception of God, drawn from observations of the natural order of things. Which religions, then, posit a creator Deity (or deities) who is/are:

• Personal (self-aware, choosing, valuing)
• Volitional, Emotional, Rational, Spiritual 
• Relational (and probably benevolent?)
• Orderly, reliable, internally consistent
• Lover of beauty
• Source of vitality

There are a lot of ways to go about this, I suppose.  But I'll take the approach that Matt Willis does on ESPN when he analyzes golf or NASCAR events.  He calls it "The Eliminator", and knocks out one contender after another until he picks a winner.

We've already eliminated Materialism (no God) and its variations, Pantheism (God as impersonal force) and its variations, and we should probably eliminate the traditional Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian and Norse pantheons as well, since they do not seem to satisfy the criteria of being orderly, reliable and consistent.  Rather, those gods are notoriously warring, petulant, and capricious.  The animistic, aboriginal religions that posit "regional" or "topical" gods, with limited scope of influence, responsibility or expertise, hardly seem to qualify either, since a creator-God is specified. 

So, only those religions that claim to have a God (or Gods) that is (are) personal, universal, and consistent, need be explored.  This leaves us with Monotheistic religions (at least the ones that worship a personal creator-God; some don't), and some Polytheistic ones that focus on a smaller number of harmoniously inter-relating Gods. 

The short list, then, seems to be:

• Hinduism (the various Brahman sects, anyway)
• Judaism (Hasidism, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform)
• Christianity (except sects whose God is impersonal)
• Islam (Shia, Sunni)
• Deism
• Baha'i
• Miscellaneous others with relatively few adherents; it's probably safe for me to assume that if my presuppositions are shared by a lot of others (which may or may not be true!) that many people like me would be drawn to a religion that is consistent with those.  For the time being, then, I'll research the bigger religions and see which can be eliminated.

Some of these have strains (like Shia Islam vs Sunni Islam) that have different views as to whether or not God is approachable, capable of relations with humanity, and some (Deism, Ba'hai) see God as personal but unapproachable (non-relational).  We'll dig into each as we go along.

But, to expedite my drill-down, let's make one additional intuitive leap:  if God IS approachable, as well as relational, then interactions with God(s) and humans would very likely have been noteworthy experiences, so much so that they would have entered humanity's historical record in some way (whether written or oral).  Deism, Baha'i, Sunni Islam, Christian Science and the like, by their very beliefs, exclude that possibility.  I can check them off the list for the time being, and revisit them if none of the remaining religious work out.  And so we reach the taxonomy shown in Part 5. 

Which of the remaining list of religions DO make claims for such interactions between God and humans?  (keeping in mind, of course, that many religions make such claims, but may have already been eliminated by other points on my list of presuppositions).  Judaism and Christianity lay claim to historical interactions between God and human beings, although the frequency and degree of those differ greatly.  Islam does as well, at least in the case of the Prophet Mohammed.  I can't comment on Islam beyond that, and know little or nothing about the Brahman sects of Hinduism.  That will no doubt come with teaching REL 120 later this year.  :)

*****

At this point I will press on with what I know about Judaism and Christianity on this topic.  That's up ahead in Part 7.

Worldviews, Part 5

Continuing with this series on worldview presuppositions and what impact they have on my choices for religious practices, I'm now at the point where some religions can be screened to see what lines up with my presuppositions.  I've established to my own satisfaction that there is more to this world than simply matter & energy, that there is a Supreme Being who exercised preference and creativity in inaugurating and maintaining the world we inhabit and its natural processes.  This Supreme Being is relational, precise yet tolerant of variation, has an affinity for beauty, a penchant for order and complexity, and embues nature with a robust vitality. 

It appears that this Supreme Being is benevolent, although I can't at this stage be totally sure of that.  Potentially, IT (sorry, I don't know about gender at this stage, or if it's even appropriate as a category) could be approachable by humans.  IT also could be actively involved with nature and the created order, but I'm not yet sure at this point in the process.  I'm even assuming by my language that this Supreme Being is singular, working solo, rather than with a team of other Supreme (more or less) Beings.  If there is more than one Supreme Being, though, the consistency I observe in the created order tells me that they are pretty much on the same page with how things are supposed to be.  Still, I need more information to be definitive.

So one of the things I might ask is: do we (humans) have any evidence in our historical record of interactions with a Supreme Being? (let's just use God from here on; less typing.)  What accounts do we have of this?  Do any of the existing religions line up with my presuppositions here, and if so, what record might they have of God interacting with the created order?

Well, I first have to lop off the atheist and materialist and humanist belief worldviews (they wouldn't call themselves religions even if I might).  I also have to abandon the religions that view God as an impersonal force, unapproachable, not possessing what we know as personality or personhood (in the sense of having preferences, making choices and forming relationships).  Naturally, someone else coming with different presuppositions would perhaps be drawn toward those religions, but... my particular set tells me "no - these don't work with how I see the world".

What, then does that leave me to explore?  A taxonomy diagram like this one that I developed last week is sort of helpful in that regard:

(all rights reserved by blog owner, 2012)

Worldviews, Part 4

Now that my intuition (see previous posts on this topic) has established, and evidence has not refuted, my presupposition that there is a creative Being of some sort out there that is vastly greater than me but shares some of my same affinities, I move on in this section to what more can be learned about that Being and how.

*****

As I look around me, I notice a number of things that tell me something about this Being:

•      an affinity for beauty, order, and vitality, since this characterizes the created order (nature)
•      sweating the details.  Things fit precisely, systems are complex, in little things as well as big things; rather like a NASA engineer - nothing is too small to do well.
•      a tolerance (at minimum, if not a preference) for variation. Order does not mean sameness to this Being; variation within a system or a species is normal, expected.
•      creaturely independence seems to be woven into the fabric of the animal kingdom.  Even if their actions are driven by instinct, animals (and even insects) are free to go where they like, eat what they wish, mate with whomever they want, and interact peacefully or violently with other species.  The larger the animal's brain, the more point-by-point decision making they seem to do; but at all levels they do not act uniformly.  This creative Being seems not to want to force anything.
•      there is a reliability (albeit laced with unpredictability) about the cycles woven into nature.  Summers yield to winters and days to nights without exception.. but with variation.  Each day, each season, each year of life, is different from the rest, but they still come 'round with a comforting regularity. 
•      not only is there variety in nature's cycles, but with that a staggering variety of life forms on this planet, many of which seem to have little or no utility (i.e. mosquitos), or are simply good for human amusement (like housecats - see internet videos).  This creative Being apparently is a fan of diversity.
•      social organization is integral to most species, with individual social relations particularly noticable in the higher order mammals.  The more intelligent the species, the greater the degree of complex personal relationships are formed.  You might expect that this creative Being, then, would both expect and value relationships, even ones across species, in these higher-order creatures.  From this you might infer that this Being would be a relational Being, since relationality is built into nature in this way.

So to sum up, it appeared intuitively clear to me that whatever Being was responsible for nature's existence and function is a Being who:

•      could be considered as having preferences - in other words, personality (vs impersonal)

•      is likely a relational Being, and as a result probably approachable

•      shares an affinity with humanity's common preferences for beauty, order and vitality

•      is comfortable with variation, and individual free choice (including the results that flow after)

•      is reliable, dependable and consistent, but not machine-like; likely exercises own free choice as well

•      could be (but not sure yet about this) engaged with nature on an ongoing basis

The implications of these findings will be explored next.

Worldviews, Part 3

Continuing from my prior post on what presuppositions brought me to my chosen religious practices, I had determined intuitively (and further evidence did not disprove my instinct) that something put the world as I knew it into motion and was keeping it functioning.  But what was that something?

*****

As I observed nature, from little on, three things have consistently struck me as characteristic of it: Beauty, Order and Vitality.  Each seemed essential to what I was sensing around me.  There is a stunning and marvelous loveliness to the world: shapes, colors, sounds, patterns, juxtapositions.  Why?  There is also a sequence to things, a cyclicality, an interworking, a system of systems.  Why?  There is a robust liveliness all around us, a fertility, a recuperative ability, a repetitiveness, a replenishing, an exuberance built in to the world.  Why?

Now, you can have each of these things without the others, beauty or order or vitality; you can even have them in pairs.  But the three of them together seemed to me to be the defining characteristics of the world around us.  But why these?  Why not ugliness, disorder and death, for instance?  Maybe the creative something that I intuited was responsible, had something to do with these characteristics.

It occurred to me as well that animals don't pause to contemplate these things.  They react to stimuli like people, have emotions and can learn & make choices, but they don't wonder why.  Humans do.  We can understand order, appreciate beauty, measure vitality.  But... who did those things before humanity was on this planet, before Cro-Magnon Homo Sapiens with a large frontal lobe and contemplative ability displaced the Neanderthals who showed little concern for art?  Who understood order, appreciated beauty, and measured vitality before humans? 

My intuition said - SOMEone had to!  Otherwise things wouldn't be like this, unless someone made it so, someone who actually wanted it this way.  So, POP!, in my intuition the creative and sustaining something had just become someone - a being, not a force.  What's more, this creative and sustaining Being apparently liked the same things I did, and worked them into nature: beauty, order, vitality.  How about that?  Made me wonder if I could learn more about that Being, either from deduction by using my senses and reason, or... by some other means I didn't quite know how to articulate (but, again, sort of knew intuitively might be available to me).  Was that Being approachable somehow?  Surely, that Being with whom I shared some appreciation of the world would be extraordinary in every sense of the word, and... if it were possible... worth knowing (or at least worth knowing more about).  And that's the next step.

*****

More in Part 4

Worldviews, Part 2

In my prior post on this topic, I described how I plan to approach an upcoming World Religions class I'll teach this coming year at a local college.  Part of the approach is to ask students to identify the presuppositions to their existing worldview, and explain how those impact their choices regarding religious practices.  Before I ask them to do that, however, I should attempt it myself.  So here goes.

*****

Every time I've taken the Myers-Briggs Temperament Inventory (MBTI), I have come out as an INTJ, which stands for Introverted iNtuitive Thinking with Judging.   That means I am by nature an intuitive person - I just "know" what is so, and go on to defend it by reasoned, informed judgment.  I don't sift through the data first to figure out what's what.  I look around me, see what's there, make an intuitive leap to a conclusion about it, and then sift through the data, either confirming my instinct or correcting it. 

As a boy, I loved being out in the woods in the Fall, or the fields in the Spring, just poking around by myself, hoping for a cool breeze, looking at things around me and thinking about them.  Lakeviews and mountains had a special appeal, as did the beauty of artwork and music (they still do).  I'm not so much of a hands-on guy as a visual one, although really one who enjoys evaluating with all the senses.  Sensory inputs (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches) go straight in to my mind and heart without a lot of processing.  I experience what's around me, take it in, and before you know it, POP! there's an insight, a conclusion (about what I've been immediately experiencing or the larger world around me).  Then I go back over the sensory input with my reason and see if the facts line up with my insight, to see if reason matches that intuitive leap I just made.  I apply this basic process not only to nature, but to people's behavior, to statistics, to philosophy, whatever. It feels hard-wired.

In these early thoughtful forays into nature, it was intuitively obvious to me that nature did not simply appear of its own accord in the form I was perceiving it.  What I was seeing and experiencing had been (and was being) created.  I just knew it to be so.  Yes, there were natural processes operating in and on nature continuously.  But something had started them up, and at the very least gave them enough of a push (and very likely has kept on pushing) to keep them operating just so.  It was as if I had gotten on a bike, pushed hard on the pedals to get up to speed, and now was gently pedaling just enough to keep it steadily moving on a flat road.

Later reading about evolution did not contradict my intuition about a creator.  The natural processes Darwin talked about were put in place (and kept moving) by something.  Nature shifted around (adapted?) as these processes worked.  But it kept going, fairly steadily, like a bike on a flat road, with only the occasional bump, like an ice age or an extinct species.  My intuition told me that the philosophy of materialism was simply the wrong explanation for what I was seeing around me.  There was more to life as I knew it than just matter and energy - there was MORE.  But what was that MORE?

*****

I'll look at that question in part 3.

Worldviews, Part 1

Well, it's a pretty nice deal when you finish grad school (in my case, seminary) and right off the bat get an offer to ply your new trade.  :) Just last week I found out I have a teaching gig in Spring, teaching REL 120 at a local college (as an adjunct instructor, of course; no plans to quit my day job yet). So I've been thinking about how to approach the class (it's a survey of world religions).

My current thought is to begin with presuppositions - what we bring to any study of religion before we even crack a book. There are things we each know (or at least presume) to be true about life, the world, and ourselves, regardless of what religions may say. We come to the table with a set of beliefs, whether we have spent any time thinking about them or not. And whatever lens we're looking through will determine how we view a religion or philosophy. So we really should start there, with the assumptions, spoken or unspoken, that precede and help determine our world view.

Some can be pretty simple and basic, like...

• I think, therefore I am (i.e. I am self-aware, a sentient being) 
• Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so 

or more philosophical and thought out, like...

• What we see is all there is; all is matter & energy 
• What we see is an illusion; reality is in your head
• What we see was made by someone; someone greater than us 

So maybe I'll open the class with a discussion of presuppositions and assign some supplementary reading on worldviews, like "Naming the Elephant" by James Sire, before moving on to a categorization of religions.  Which brings up another matter: how to categorize them? What is the taxonomy to be applied to religions (or worldviews for that matter)?

I can sort of envision a decision tree, made up in part of some presuppositional questions, like:

• Is materiality everything (nothing exists but matter & energy)?
• Is materiality real or illusory (can we trust our perceptions)?
• Should God be understood as a being or a force?
• Is God one, or are there many gods?
• Is(are) the God(s) personal or impersonal?
• Does God interact with the world?  With humanity?

It seems to me that the religions of the world could be grouped according to some scheme like this.  I haven't found one like it yet, but then again... I haven't seen the textbook either.  :)  Maybe it's way ahead of me.

Regardless, I'll keep looking.  No doubt I will require of the students a research paper describing their presuppositions and how they have influenced their "choice" of religious practice.  What's more, I have a feeling that at the end of such a class, I will owe the students a working example... my own.  Part two of this post will deal with that, assuming I can articulate it.  We'll see.

*********updates for taxonomy links*********

http://www.interfaithcalendar.org/Familiesofreligions.htm

http://firstthings.com/blogs/evangel/2010/08/multiple-constituencies-in-the-science-and-religion-debate/

http://www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/burgess-jackson/A%20Taxonomy%20of%20Religions.pdf

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/497215/classification-of-religions