Brains & Stomachs Part Three

I think it was Steve Turner, a secular British journalist writing for a secular British newspaper who captured the dilemma of being just brains and stomachs when he penned his article "The Creed for the Modern Thinker." He writes in a rather sarcastic tone, and this is the consequence of what happens when man lives on bread alone.

We today believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin.
We believe that everything is ok, as long as you don't knowingly hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your definition of knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe adultery is fun.
We believe sodomy is ok.
We believe taboos are taboo.
We believe everything is getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated and you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe that there is something in horoscopes, UFOs and bent spoons. Jesus was a good man, like Buddha, Mohammed and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher although we think his good moral teachings are really bad.
We believe that all religions are the same at least the ones that we read were. They all believe in love and goodness, and only differ on creation, sin, heaven, hell, god and salvation.
We believe that after death comes nothing. Because when you ask the dead what happens, they say nothing. If death is not the end and the dead have lied then its compulsory heaven for all; except possibly Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan.
We believe that what's selected is average, what's average is normal, and what's normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed.
We believe that the Americans should beat their guns into tractors and the Russians would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good, its only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society, society is the fault of conditions, and conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find what truth is right for himself and reality will adapt accordingly. The universe will readjust, and history will alter.
We believe that there is no truth except the truth that there is no absolute truth.
We believe in the rejection of creeds and the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be the father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky. And when you hear: state of emergency, sniper kills ten, troops on rampage, youths go looting, bomb blasts school - it is but the sound of man worshipping his maker.

Man does not live on bread alone, as Jesus says. But rather on every word that comes from God. That is why, when he was conversing with the Samaritan woman, Jesus tells his disciples that he has food to eat that they know nothing about - food of purpose and meaning in life because without God, there is no goodness, no purpose, no meaning, no hope and no recovery and no living a life that is not fraught with endless contradiction as Steve Turner so elegantly put it in his article. The only option we are left with is the dead God of Nietzche, who went on to say that because god had died as a philosophical entity, the following years would be the bloodiest yet because of the consequences of that singular idea - as just previously stated - and the twentieth century has been the bloodiest century yet. Not only that, but the violence he declared for the world also took place in his own body; he eventually contracted venereal disease and spent the last fifteen years of his life, or so, insane.

Food cannot change a person's heart. Knowledge cannot change a person's heart. That is why Jesus offers not a religion, but a personal relationship, and through that relationship with our heavenly father we can be transformed on the inside. Neither food nor knowledge can change us the way Jesus changes us on the inside because he changes not only what you do, but also why you want to do it. That is what he called being born again.

Brains & Stomachs - Part Two

What happens, then, when we attempt to meet people's minds at the expense of all else? History also has much to tell us here. You will have to bear with me, some of this has already been stated.

What we tend to forget is that, during World War II, the most intelligent nation in the world at that time spent their evenings enthralled by the music of Wagner while, at the same time, that nation also marched six million Jews off to concentration camps. If you go to Auschwitz, you will see a plaque on the wall with the words of Hitler himself, that reads: "I want to raise a generation devoid of a conscience; imperious, relentless and cruel." And you see the cruelty that Hitler's doctors, most notably Mengela, had performed on children and the mentally handicapped; their little shoes and suitcases, the pictures of them having been castrated, and so on.

But here is the point through which I tie in this post and the last one: when life is diminished to a random mass or collocation of molecules, there is no way to ascribe essential human dignity to that mere mass of elements and atoms. And when this idea reaches its full run, the idea of us being nothing but matter and we having only minds and stomachs, without heart and soul, it eliminates the shame that someone like Mengela ought to have felt as he went about his awful work. When we remove the soul, and God from our lives, we are left only with the body (mind and stomach) and when we do that, we eliminate the legitimate shame from our lives that also can speak to us truthfully about reality.

That is why, as Newsweek carried the story, a Californian doctor could choke the baby that was meant to have been aborted but emerged alive from the mother, in the sink and claim the whole time that the baby had been born dead despite the testimony of two other hospital workers in the room with him at the time. The doctor could obviously lie and walk into the courtroom with his head held high, because there is no such thing as shamefulness, it is only in the glands.

Evidently, both Mengela and this doctor had been good boys and read their Green Book.

But isn't it fascinating that psychologists are still grappling with this sense of shame in a culture that has jettisoned moral absolutes, denies the soul and God and worships the body, but is still unable to jettison a very real sense of shame from the populace.

The mind can be a good thing. I am not for an instant decrying technology or education. But as someone once told me, "nothing good can come if the will is wrong." Or to popularize that saying, I quote Malcom from Jurassic Park who said, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Victor Frankl said this concerning the Holocaust, "The gas chambers of Auschwitz were not born in some General's mind, but in the classrooms and lecture halls of nihilistic doctors and philosophers."

The possibility of abuse of the mind is not something that can be regulated by the mind. That is why nearly sixty years after the Holocaust, the band King Crimson sings, "Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules."

If our problems could be met with simple intellectualizing, than once everyone had enough doctorate degrees then humanity would be all set. But as I said in my last post, it those who have the fullest stomachs, and by that I mean either through education, wealth or sheer resources, that are ever the cause of the most horrendous evils.

Brains and Stomachs - Part One

"They live that they may eat, but he himself (Sophocles) eats that he may live."
- Matthew Arnold

One of C.S. Lewis' less famous books is called "The Abolition of Man," and in it he takes the opportunity to respond to a book that had been published. C.S. Lewis called this book the Green Book, and renamed the authors Gaius and Titius so that he would not be on a frontal assault with them but rather could deal with the issues that Gaius and Titius had raised.

The Green Book tells the story of two young boys that happen across a waterfall. And one of them exclaims that the waterfall is beautiful. The other states that the waterfall is sublime, because it evokes a sense of awe within him. Gaius and Titius go on to say that the boy who said that the waterfall was wrong-headed, and needed to be retrained because there was no sense of sublimity out there, in the world. His feelings were glandular, the product of some enzyme secretion and certain feelings which engender prettiness and beauty, which he attributed to sublimity. Thus, this wrong-headed boy, according to the authors, needed to be retrained because his prior instruction had taken him in a wrong-headed direction.

C.S. Lewis' criticsm is thus; he says that if he were to take Gaius and Titius at their word, he would have to believe that mathematics is real, therefore his brain is real. Food s real, therefore his stomach is real; but sublimity is not real because there is no heart, no emotion, with which to also experience reality. Gaius and Titius, Lewis goes on to say, would then produce a generation of children of just brains and stomachs; no heart, that was also in keeping with the truth of reality.

It is a good thing that those who were kidnapped on an airplane on September 11th, and who realized that the terrorists intended to use the plane and its passengers as a mobile missle and therefore decided to take on the terrorists - it is a good thing that they did not read the Green Book. Otherwise, their feelings of courage and selflessness would not have been properly motivated; they too would have needed retraining because there is no such thing as courage, it is only in the glands, nor is there any such thing as self-sacrifice, it is only in the glands. Or just as well, they all might have helped the terrorists achieve their goals despite any feelings of guilt or shamefulness because in the world there are no such things and they needed simple retraining to correctly deal with their glandular secretions.

My dear readers, humanity is more than thoughts and hungers. And those of us in acadamia in particular tend to forget that. Indeed, that ivory tower becomes a very easy escape from the troubles of friends, family, humanity, and even one's own inner turmoil as we theorize and rationalize all of our problems away. But we have to remember that all of our proofs, and all of our theories, philosophy, and number games mean nothing to someone that has just crossed paths with a funeral procession. G.K. Chesterton says this concerning the topic in his book Orthodoxy, "Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world."

Very often we make this mistake. We assume that by meeting people's thoughts and hungers alone we can change people for the better. History, however, tells us otherwise and Jesus himself was given a similiar temptation by Satan in the desert. After Jesus has been fasting, Satan comes to him and tells him to turn the stones into bread.

But what is the significance of that?

Marx and Engles wanted to dedicate their work to Darwin because Darwin had given them their essential definition of man but Darwin, purportedly, declined. Atheistic economic theory saw some of its essential underpinnings in the idea of humans being merely the products of blind naturalistic processes, and the ramifications of such an idea have been with us ever since.

What we must remember is that if humanity is nothing but minds and stomachs, is that we eliminate soulishness as a real possibility. And when the soul is effectively non-existant, we must take the body to be the soul - that is, the thing toward which we protect, nourish and guard. And when soulishness is gone, and body is all that is left, the body eclipses the soul in importance and we lose all sight of the spiritual side of reality. History tells us what happens next, when we remove the soul we remove the concept of God.

Josef Stalin was, at one time, a seminary student who lost his faith in God. Later on, Lenin singularly selected Stalin because of his hatred of things religious and Malcom Muggeridge documents the last moments of Stalin's life, as he lay in bed, clenching his fists towards the heavens, and then died. Here was a man whose wife and son had killed themselves, and who himself was responsible for the deaths of over fifteen million people. What we must not forget was this: Stalin was an avowed atheist.

The Nazi regime was also atheistic; bowing to no God other than Hitler, and Hitler attempting to bring about the perfection of body in the superman, an idea he took from Nietche and summarily militarized. Hitler personally presented copies of Nietchze's work to Bonito Moussilini.

The slaughters in China and Cambodia were both the result of atheistic regimes coming to power, Mao Tse Dong (spelling?) and Pol Pot respectively, and that saw no reason to grant essential dignity to a life that can only be described as a random collection of molecules.

Let me clarify the point: when the soul is gone, and body is all that is left; it is the body that becomes God. And this idea will not remain in the abstract; it will not be simply man becoming the god of himself as Nietchze effectively claimed, "...some actual men will become God; either the erotomaniac or the megalomaniac; Hitler or Hugh Heffner, (Ravi Zacharias)." The worst crimes in history are ever brought about not by men and women whose stomachs are empty, but men and women whose stomachs are full.

"Turn these stones into bread," Satan tempts Jesus, attempting to lure Christ into the false belief that humanity is nothing but brains and stomachs. And Jesus replies in the fourth chapter of the gospel of Luke, "It is written: man does not live on bread alone."

The Tests of Truth

Before I head any further into Jesus' claims about reality, I ought to spell out the direction I intend to take.

First and foremost, I will not be surprised if the thoughts you see here are not already familiar to you because you have heard someone else say them. There are many good Christian minds out there, and I'm not offering any new ground-breaking insight that minds such as Ravi Zacharias, J.P. Moreland, or William Lane Craig have not already offered. I do not want to stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were; the vast minority of thoughts to be expressed herein are my own. I must credit Mr. Zacharias especially with most of what I intend to bring to this forum.

Now, for any worldview, there are three areas in which a worldview can be measured: logical consistancy, empirical adequacy, and experiential relevance. That is to say that any system must logically cohere together; it will not do for a worldview to give a solid answer for the origin of humanity, and then give a contradictory statement concerning the nature of reality. Secondly, the claims that any worldview makes must correspond with how we can know and test reality. And thirdly, do the claims of any particular worldview ring true with how we experience reality.

For this first study, I intend to talk about the Christian worldview and how it relates to us as a worldview by breaking down what the Bible claims about the nature of humanity, suffering, history and destiny. And from there, to move into studies of Biblical passages and topical ideas.