Runaway Planet

James' Testimony and Baptism

Baptism from James Piper on Vimeo.

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1.02.28

CONVERSION

Columnist Tapu Misa recently announced that she had become a Christian and has since written a couple of very interesting pieces about conversion: here and here.

SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN

The first thing that struck me about last weekend's Live Earth event was how closely it resembled a typical contemporary Christian evangelistic festival. Lots of music and entertainment to bring in the people, who then get preached to between (and often during) the sets. Setting aside for the moment whether or not this is an effective conversion strategy, and even whether or not the claims of global warming activists are specious or not, the fact that a this wing of environmentalism has become a religious movement is becoming quite clear.

For example, Amanda Carpenter notes:

If Al Gore wore a high-collared black suit instead of a polo shirt and jeans to the Washington,D.C.Live Earth concert, he might have been mistaken for a preacher.

He gave a brief sermon Saturday, July 7 on global warming with a solemn opening. “Today we are gathered on all seven continents and eight giant concerts and in 10,000 other gatherings, many as large as this one, two billion people, we are gathered, with one message.”

He then asked those congregated on the National Mall to commit themselves to his cause.

“I hope that all of you will join me in taking my seven-point Live Earth pledge, and here are the words,” he said before enumerating his commandments.

As though taking a biblical oath and swearing himself to truth, Gore raised his right hand and vowed: “I pledge to demand that my country join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth!”

Jonah Goldberg also saw the connection:

Some argue that environmentalism has become a secular religion. Buying carbon offsets, they say, is the modern equivalent of purchasing indulgences for your sins from the Catholic Church. Live Earth certainly fit into that vision. The concerts seemed like Baptist hoedowns of yore, except now Gore is the Billy Sunday for the baby boomer booboisie.

But why the need for a new religion? Aren't we supposed to be past all that? Why do we need "global warmism?" OpinionJournal.com reader Richard Bennet offers an interesting answer in the context of discussing Al Gore's NY Times editorial.

[Al Gore said]

But there's something even more precious to be gained if we do the right thing. The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few     generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational    mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being   forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics     and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge. 

Mr. Gore clearly lays out his driving force and what he offers to the world:   "a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and . . . a genuine   moral and spiritual challenge." The entire man-caused climate change racket   is a new secular religion that is used to help a drifting generation feel better about itself. Feeling guilty about their prosperity, confused by a world that   seems to resent them, and perplexingly empty after having jettisoned the religion of their parents, the Climatists search for something to make them feel better.  

But here is the irony: nearly 500 years after Copernicus took man out of the center of the universe and placed the sun firmly at the center of our little planetary system, the new secular religionists are trying to put man back at the center as the cause of everything. In order to feel good about themselves, they need to feel that man is causing all negative change and only Enlightened Man (Homo goriens) can make it right. Only by listening     to, and following, our modern Moses in form of Al Gore can we reach the Promised     Land. Welcome to the new Middle Ages, all you have to do is believe!

Whether or not you agree with all of Mr. Bennet's thesis, he is right to question Al Gore's reasoning. After all, does Gore really think that global warming is one of the few causes in history that offers a "moral purpose" and "spiritual challenge" that unites people across sociological dividing lines? Every generation of Christians for the past two thousand years has experienced exactly that. The only cultural context in which Gore's claim could be accepted without a smirk would be one in which people are ignorant of history and ignorant of the Christian message. Such a culture would be adrift, longing for something, perhaps not realizing what they are missing and ready to accept any old thing that came down the line. Now that I think about it, this whole global warmism thing is starting to make a whole lot more sense...

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

From a column in the LA Times this week:

In a new book, "Stumbling on Happiness," Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert suggests that happiness is largely an anticipatory experience. Human beings, he explains, are the only animals that have the ability to think about the future. As a result, we spend much of our time not so much experiencing pleasure as thinking about future pleasure and taking steps to ensure its attainment.

In other words, most of us spend our time chasing after happiness rather than actually experiencing it. No matter what we achieve, it is never enough. Mr Gilbert is not the only one to have noticed this.

As Ilya Shapiro explains in an article on the Tech Central Station , he and many of his fellow Gen-xers have achieved a great deal of what the world considers success, but, in the words of U2, they still haven’t found what they are looking for.

[We have made it to the top of our professions] and although it makes us sound like spoiled brats (and me narcissistic for writing about it) -- we're not happy. Or, rather, after a (relatively short) lifetime of playing by the rules, eating our greens, graduating from high school, then college, then grad school or whatever other apprenticeship takes up our early-to-mid-20s, and finally starting work in the real world we’ve come to realize that there's more to life than taking an anointed spot in the meritocracy.

We were told by our parents (and Billy Joel) that if we worked hard, if we behaved, we would achieve the good life. Well, we've achieved! Achieved!! ACHIEVED!!! and now… what?

David Brooks take note: Generation X has arrived, made its presence felt, looked around, and is wondering, "Is that all there is?"

It is a conversation I keep having, or talking around, with my friends and peers -- the type of folks who 20 years ago would have been called yuppies (which label I at least am happy to wear now, if in a descriptive rather than ascriptive way). They -- we -- have everything we could ever want in this stage of life, but still we search for meaning.

Young adults are not the only ones living unhappy, meaningless lives. Baby boomers are in exactly the same boat. In his book The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook notes that while our current standard of living far surpasses any of our ancestors, our level of happiness has not increased at all.

Suppose your great-great grandparents, who lived four generations ago, materialized in the United States of the present day.Surely they would first be struck by the scale and clamour of present-day life, and might not like these things; neither do we, necessarily….

Yet as your [they] learned more of contemporary life, they would be dazzled. Unlimited food at affordable prices, never the slightest worry about shortages, unlimited variety – strawberries in March! – so much to eat that in the Western nations, overindulgence now plagues not just the well-off but the poor, the poor being more prone to obesity than the population as a whole. …

Many other aspect of contemporary life, taken for granted by those who live it, would dazzle our recent ancestors. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average American lifespan was forty-one years; now it is seventy-seven years, equating to almost twice as much time on Earth for the typical person. History’s plagues – polio, smallpox, measles, rickets – have been defeated, along with a stunning reduction of the infectious diseases that for pre-antibiotics generations instilled terror. …

Easterbrook goes on to point out other aspects of contemporary life that “would strike our recent ancestors as nearly miraculous” such as the end of backbreaking physical toil for most wage earners, instantaneous global communication and same day travel to distant cities, the end of formal discrimination, mass homeownership and incredible advances of freedom.

Today we live a long time, in fairly comfortable circumstances; enjoy goods and services in almost unlimited supply; travel where we wish quickly and relatively cheaply; talk to anyone in the world; know everything there is to know; think and say what we please; marry for love, and have sex with whom ever will agree; and wail in sorrow when anyone dies young, for this once-routine event has become a wrenching rarity. All told, except for the clamor and speed of society, and for the trends in popular music, your great-great-grandparents might say the contemporary United States is the realization of Utopia.

But it isn’t Utopia. Easterbrook concludes by saying that although everything is better, we are not happy.

Yet how many of us feel positive about our moment, or even believe that life is getting better? Today Americans tell pollsters that the country is going downhill; that their parents had it better; that they feel unbearably stressed out; that their children face a declining future. …The percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “happy” has not budged since the 1950s, though the typical persons real income has more than doubled through that period. Happiness has not increased in Japan or Western Europe in the past half-century, either, though daily life in both those places has grown fantastically better, incorporating all the advances noted above plus the end of dictatorships and recovery from war…[Even in a era of abundance and social progress] the citizens of the United States and the European Union, almost all of whom live better than almost all of the men and women in history, entertain considerable discontent.

We are like Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes. He achieved everything he could think of to achieve and got for himself everything he could think of to acquire, yet he was still unhappy.

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11) 

He concludes

So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. (2:17)

Here is the answer to our dilemma: The reason nothing on earth satisfies our innermost longings is that we do not actually long for anything on this earth. As C.S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity,

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

That other world is Heaven. That is what we are missing. Our deepest problem on earth is that we do not belong here. We were created to live in the presence of God and living anywhere else will leave us unfulfilled. We are homesick. In the words of Randy Alcorn,

Nothing is more often misdiagnosed than our homesickness for Heaven. We think that what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, a large-screen television, a new car, a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii. What we really want is the person we were made for, Jesus, and the place we were made for, Heaven. Nothing less can satisfy us.

According to the Bible, humans were created to live with God and were put in a place where they could do that, the Garden of Eden. However, because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, our first parents were expelled from their natural home and exiled from God. They found themselves living on a planet gone awry. So do we.

This actually should present a certain sense of relief to all those who have been struggling to find happiness. G.K. Chesterton writes how glad he was to learn this fact:

[A]ccording to Christianity, we [are] the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world….

I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.

ENTERTAINMENT EVANGELISM?

As an addendum to the previous post, (read that first if you haven't yet), I submit this for your consideration:

If people use entertainment primarily as a means to dull the pain and drudgery of their meaningless, empty lives, - to forget about how ultimately futile their existence is for an hour or two or ten - why do church leaders remain convinced that the way to get people to see the true meaning of their lives is by using entertainment? Does that not send a mixed message?

For example, here is how the L.A. Times reported last weekend's big evangelistic events in Southern California:

Sumo wrestling for Jesus, religious motocross stunts and a dose of Christian testosterone.

That's a sampling of the lineup this weekend as a trio of large-scale Christian events descends upon Anaheim and Los Angeles. ...

At Saturday's Latino-oriented Festival Bajo el Sol, teens and young adults can enter break-dancing contests, fling themselves against a Velcro wall, wrestle with friends wearing inflatable sumo costumes and respond to an altar call profession of faith led by a minister named T-Bone. ...

Meanwhile, in Orange County, the 16th annual Harvest Crusade kicks off with Christian concerts and motorcycle daredevils as the lead-in to Riverside Pastor Greg Laurie's 25-minute sermons and altar calls.

The reporter notes that

The gatherings ... highlight a gnawing problem for modern evangelists: how to keep things fresh and relevant in the face of shrinking attention spans and competition from secular entertainment. ...

John Collins, director of planning for the Harvest Crusade, said his team is constantly tinkering with formats, technology and staging to keep the crusades from getting stale.

"It's a challenge," he said. "We attempt to mix it up every year."

First of all, if the proclaiming the truth of the gospel is "stale", you aren't preaching the right gospel. And secondly, secular entertainment is not the "competition" for the gospel; its widespread use is a symptom of the void in  people's lives that the gospel is intended to fill.

If people understood the true meaning of their lives, they wouldn't bother with wasting so much of their time on entertainment. They would be out striving to be good soldiers and athletes for Christ (1 Cor. 9, Phil. 3, 2 Tim 4).  If a revival broke out and everyone truly accepted the gospel and became followers of Christ, the entertainment industry would cease to exist as we know it. (Authentic Christians have fun in their lives, but they don't waste precious time and money on the frivolity (and often immorality) that is the norm for entertainment these days.)

By using "entertainment" as a calling card for evangelism, these ministers are unwittingly endorsing the very worldview that is, in fact, the competition for the gospel.

 

SUICIDE BOMBERS AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

Tim Lott offers a devastatingly accurate picture of what drives Muslim suicide bombers and the difference between them and their typical Western contemporaries: The Muslims have lives with meaning.

The meaning said this: my life is not futile and my death is not final. This carnage has a higher purpose than anything the barren ceremonies of the West can offer me with its expensive gewgaws, watered-down religions, trips to the leisure centre and celebrities.

This is a terrifying reality - that these bombers want nothing in return for their lives other than what they perceive to be the virtue of martyrdom. But as usual in incidents where it is suspected that al-Qaeda is involved, no demands were made. The point was to kill non-believers and thus gain not only a place in heaven but also a paradoxical assertion at the exact point of detonation of the absolute reality and significance of their own lives.

This is not specifically a criticism of Islam, or even fundamentalist Islam. In fact, there is something weirdly admirable in the fundamentalist Islamist, however maniacal, compared, say, with his wishy-washy, half-baked Anglican counterpart. Because the real difference between a fundamentalist Muslim and a moderate Christian (or a moderate Muslim for that matter) is surely that they really, really do believe.

They don't use their religious custom as social glue, or conventional ritual, or a way of fitting in. They talk the deadly talk and they walk the deadly walk.

The difference between a fundamentalist and a moderate is that the fundamentalist is not playing games, at least not games that he is conscious of. In fact, "I'm not playing games" is one of the meanings that the bombings expressed. This is another way of saying: "I am the hero of my own life. I have the courage of my terrible convictions. I will not flinch in fulfilling my bloody destiny." Again, this is not suggesting that Islam is "mad".

It is no madder than Christianity, where we have a whole raft of leaders and politicians who seem quite happy to believe that 2000 years ago a man performed miracles and then died to rise again. The only difference being that, I suspect, most Christians in the UK do not really, really believe it. They just say they do, even to themselves, whistling in what they secretly recognize to be the dark.

Christian faith is dying in the West, and in Britain it is nearly dead (deduct all the people who are trying to get their kids into the local school and it looks even more moribund).

In the meantime, man's desperate thirst for meaning and heroism continues.

What can we offer? A few drinks down the pub, some nice glittering objects, sex, entertainment, a safe refuge for family and friends, a reasonably rich and stable society. Surely that is enough? Sometimes, but not for anyone with a spiritual imagination (and that may be most of us).

Many of us get by, happy enough to await our eventual extinction through old age or disease, distracting ourselves with toys and work, bringing up our kids till they push us aside and into the grave. Others find a gigantic and growing void in the place where meaning should be, a place they fill with endless millions of prescriptions of Prozac, binge-drinking, self-harm, crack cocaine and reality TV.

The bombers are lying to themselves, just as we are, but they are doing it in a more committed, one might even say, more honest way. This is their way of saying life is not a joke and death is not a rumor. This, the life we are living, is real and deadly, beautiful and terrifying. We must burn away the illusion, they say. In their case, it is simply, tragically, to reveal another illusion.

But is there anything but illusion, any truth about the world that could give the atomized, lost century a meaning powerful enough to act as a buffer and a prophylactic against suicide bombers? Are there truths worth living for beyond family, finance and fun? Because if there aren't, make no mistake, more bombers will come, and will succeed.

Lott is exactly right up to this point. The empty, nihilistic, hedonistic void created by the West’s materialistic worldview has left the culture starved for something more. And radical Islam does a much better job of filling that void than anything the West is offering. Just read the testimonials of the young Muslim radicals profiled in an excellent Christian Science Monitor report from Britain:

On 7/7, the jihad came. The suicide bombers were aged 18 to 30 - the same age as Abu Osama's cohorts. By portraying militancy as the ultimate expression of piety, Abu Osama and preachers like him are leading young Muslims down the path toward violence.

"Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you'll want to convert," says Dublin-born convert Khalid Kelly, who soaks up Abu Osama's sidewalk sermon. "But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle."

Armed struggle was the last thing on Mr. Kelly's mind until his conversion several years ago. "I was your average Irish drunkard, partying and so on," he says. Arrested in Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a nurse, for brewing his own alcohol, Kelly found Islam in prison - an increasingly common arena for Muslim conversion and radicalization … Like many, his dedication to Islam arose from a messy flirtation with a Western lifestyle … "When reality hits you, you come back to Islam," he says. "If you read the Koran, you see that Allah gave us the right to terrorize the enemy."

The report goes on to say that hard core Islam is reaching many like Khalid Kelly:

Hard-line mosques are an intoxicating arena for disillusioned young Muslims, Britain's fastest-growing, poorest, and worst-educated minority.

The pull to Islam in general is not bad," says [LondonAbdul-Rehman Malik, contributing editor at the Muslim magazine Q-News, based.] "It gives [young people] a sense of identity and spirituality that is important to their lives."

Unfortunately, as Tim Lott wrote, these Muslims are believing a lie. There is no Allah who is going to reward them for blowing up buildings and murdering people. They may firmly believe that they are living and dying for a noble eternal cause, but they are wrong. As Lott also points out, the great mass of Westerners who spend their lives keeping themselves drunk and distracted from the meaningless of it all are also wrong. There must be more to it than that. But what? This is where Lott also goes wrong.

To his question of  “Is there anything but illusion, any truth about the world that could give the atomized, lost century a meaning powerful enough to act as a buffer and a prophylactic against suicide bombers? Are there truths worth living for beyond family, finance and fun?” he answers “I believe that meaning is there - in the sacredness of life itself, in the deep mysteries of science, in the magic of collective storytelling, in the cage of time and space we all have to share.” He suggests that we get “mystical” and turn to the “religions of non-religion” like “world humanist philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism. These schemes of thought have also been hijacked by the religious, but at their root they do not talk about God, but man.” He goes on to explain that the only hope for mankind is to rid itself of the “religion virus” and find the meaning in our lives by focusing on its “mysterious” and “magical” qualities, whatever that means. 

What hogwash. There is no more reason to believe this “mystical” worldview is true than there is to believe the terrorists or the materialists. There is meaning in life but it is not revealed to us by looking inward or by straining to see something ambiguous and mystical. It is found by following the evidence where it leads: to Jesus Christ. His life, death and resurrection (along with the rest of the revelation of scripture) show us that we were indeed made for more than sex, drugs and sitting like a blob in front of the TV our whole lives. But it does not tell us that we are to establish a Muslim political kingdom on earth, either. The testimony of the Bible is that we are in the middle of a supernatural war for our very souls and that our eternal destiny hinges on what we do with the time we have on this planet. What could be more meaningful than that? 

As I wrote in my last post, people are feeling lost and empty. The solution is not to try to fill the void with false religion, (as the Muslims do and Mr. Lott suggests, even though he uses a different label) or entertain yourself so you don’t have to think about it (as most Americans do), but to seek the Truth. Then, when you find Him, (He is not far), follow.

GIVEN UP

Quote of the day:

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."

- Vaclav Havel

MEANINGLESS, MEANINGLESS

It's the classic story: you get everything you desire and everything the world has told you is going to make you happy and you find you are not happy and that you still desire something more. Your life is meaningless.

That is how Ilya Shapiro explains his (and other Gen-xer's) situation in this piece at Tech Central Station.

And -- though it makes us sound like spoiled brats (and me narcissistic for writing about it) -- we're not happy. Or, rather, after a (relatively short) lifetime of playing by the rules, eating our greens, graduating from high school, then college, then grad school or whatever other apprenticeship takes up our early-to-mid-20s, and finally starting work in the real world, we've come to realize that there's more to life than taking an anointed spot in the meritocracy.

We were told by our parents (and Billy Joel) that if we worked hard, if we behaved, we would achieve the good life. Well, we've achieved! Achieved!! ACHIEVED!!! and now… what?

David Brooks take note: Generation X has arrived, made its presence felt, looked around, and is wondering, "Is that all there is?"

It is a conversation I keep having, or talking around, with my friends and peers -- the type of folks who 20 years ago would have been called yuppies (which label I at least am happy to wear now, if in a descriptive rather than ascriptive way). They -- we -- have everything we could ever want in this stage of life, but still we search for meaning.

Unfortunately, Shapiro has found no answers for his dilemma. I suggest he look to two of my favorite guys: Solomon and C.S. Lewis.

Solomon (in Ecclesiastes) realized that without God and eternity, life is objectively meaningless and without hope. However, because there is a God and He does offer eternal life, meaning and hope are ours for the taking, so take it we should.

Lewis (in Mere Christianity) realized that if nothing in this world satisfies our deepest desires, it is a good indication that we were not made for this world.

What Shapiro (and everyone else who is still searching) is missing is their true calling: relationship with their Creator. Everyone who remains alienated from God has, in the words of Augustine (in Confessions), a God sized hole in their being that can only be filled One Way: "You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." 

VAST INTERNAL DESERTS

Pope Benedict started his tenure with a strong sermon in which he nailed the source of the world's major problems: the great void in people's spirit:

"There are so many kinds of desert," he said, taking up the main theme of his powerful homily. "There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love.

"There is the desert of God's darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast."

ETERNITY IN THEIR HEARTS

Peggy Noonan on why so many people ran to St. Peter's Square (and to their television sets) when the new pope was announced:

The faith is dead in Europe, everyone knows that. So why did they come?

You say, "They just wanted to be there. It's history. People are experience junkies. They wanted to take pictures with their cell phones."

That would be true of some. But why did so many weep as the new pope came out? Why did they chant "Benedict, Benedict" as he stood at the balcony? Why were they jubilant?

Why were so many non-Catholics similarly moved? And why in America, where the church is torn in divisions, did people run to the TV and the radio when word spread?

People are complicated. You can hit distracted people with all the propaganda in the world, you can give it to them every day in all your media, and sometimes they'll even tell pollsters they agree with you. But something is always going on in their chests. Some truth is known there; some yearning lives there. It's like they have a compass in their hearts and turn as they will, this way and that, it continues to point to true north.

We want a spiritual father. We want someone who stands for what is difficult and right, what is impossible but true. Being human we don't always or necessarily want to live by the truth or be governed by it. But we are grateful when someone stands for it. We want him to be standing up there on the balcony. We want to aspire to it, reach to it, point to it and know that it is there.

Because we can actually tell what's true.

We can just somehow tell.