Category: Lessons Learned

Pray

As I mentioned, this week I’m starting a short series on Islam. I’m doing this to clarify my thoughts, I’m doing this because you won’t, and I’m doing this because H- (and her friends) deserve my best. Pray for me.

Random Updates

I texted my Muslim acquaintance. He hasn’t got back to me. So I’m back to square one regarding knowing a Muslim (radical or not). But I have, in fact, let all the talk about “radical Islam” be a catalyst to finally reading the Qur’an myself. Believe me when I tell you that there will be many posts to come about that little book. Suffice it to say, it is only 350 pages (the English copy I have) and I recommend it to you. I recommend it to everyone. I especially recommend it to any wayward, post-modern, grew-up-in-the-church-then-left-because-obviously (fill in the blank with anything from “there is no god” to “I love the Da Vinci Code”) Christians. The Qur’an is a must read. Let’s make it a NY Times best-seller. Seriously.

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This is probably too soon, and likely inappropriate on several levels, but I want to share an idea that I couldn’t stop regarding an Onion-style post. My idea is to have Trump insist that the President call the alligator an “alligator” but the President refuses. Instead the President favors the label “a native Floridan swimmer of the swamps and walker of the woods and tall grass”. And while those two argue about names, all the male toddlers across the country use the episode to push their long-standing agenda to “skip the bath”. The post would have concluded with a scene back in Orlando showing the first of several alligator eggs hatching to witness its parents and aunts and uncles rounded up and killed by uniformed professionals.

What do you think? Would’ve been funny, right? Or no?

My Response to President Obama’s Speech About Radical Islam

This one again is mostly for me as a time capsule. But enjoy! 

Here are my responses to a few key points President Obama self-righteously thundered home.

“That’s the key they [Trump] tell us. ‘We can’t beat ISIL unless we call them Radical Islamists.’ What exactly would using this label accomplish?”

Are you asking me? Or is this just a rhetorical question? Calling them “Radical Islamists” would demonstrate to me that you live in the same time-space universe as me, Mr. President. That’s all.

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“Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”

Here’s where I’m losing you, Mr. President. Supposedly we’re at war with terrorism, which is an abstract idea. Terrorism is an idea, not a thing. Ideas might be able to be stopped with bullets and violence like you’re trying to do, but they definitely cannot be stopped if they aren’t accurately identified. My question to you is are we fighting an idea or people? Please inform me.

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“As president I have repeatedly called on our Muslim friends and allies at home and around the world to work with us to reject this twisted interpretation of one of the world’s great religions.”

Bold move, sir. I love that you are so willing to flippantly and negligently treat religion as if it is a hobby.

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“Not once has an adviser of mine said ‘Man, if we really use that phrase, we’re gonna turn this whole thing around.'”

I doubt you have an adviser who has ever told you anything you don’t want to hear. Moreover, you’re the President. You’re the leader. You don’t need advisers to advise you that a duck is a duck.

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“They [The DoD] know full well who the enemy is.”

Can you arrange a meeting where they tell us who the enemy is? Someone please tell me. Who is the enemy again? People or terrorism?

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“The reason that I am careful about how I describe this threat has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with actually defeating extremism.”

Everything you do is about political correctness. That aside, you cannot deny that extremism (the Radical in Radical Islam) is the cause of extremism (an ideology, not a people) and expect to defeat it. Do you see?

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Paraphrasing: “If we use Radical Islam then we do the terrorists work for them.”

See earlier this week.

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“It could not have been more inspiring [to be at the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony two week ago]. To see these young people stepping up, dedicated to serve and protect this country.”

This is really just a pet peeve of mine, but the officers of the U.S. Military swear to protect and defend the constitution of the United States of America–not the country. Again, words matter, Mr. President. When I went through officer training school, the Air Force was sure to point out that Germans in WWII era swore allegiance to Hitler, Russians to the Russia, and America swears to the constitution. Do you see the difference? We’re nobler and have a greater understanding of the human condition.

Does Anyone Think We Can Defeat The Enemy?

Here’s President Obama’s self-absorbed response  to Mr. Trump’s self-absorbed bombas-ticary.

Assuming you don’t have 25 minutes to spend on the above video, I’ve done my best to clarify the arguments below.

Mr. Trump is arguing that

A – American leaders need to use the label “Radical Islam” in order to stop terrorism.

B – Implicit to Mr. Trump’s argument is the argument if we don’t label the enemy accurately (know who/what the enemy is) then we cannot possibly defeat the enemy.

C – If we don’t elect Mr. Trump as president, then no one will say “Radical Islam.”

A + B + C =

D – Without using the label “Radical Islam,” we cannot defeat the enemy (whatever the enemy is).

Since B and D are the same, then Mr. Trump is using circular reasoning. All Mr. Trump has actually argued is, “Without me, we cannot defeat the enemy.”

In response, President Obama is arguing that

A – If we use the label “Radical Islam,” we don’t really mean the adjective “radical”. In other words, if we say “Radical Islam,” people only hear “Islam.”

B – Extremists successfully recruit new extremists by telling the lie to young Muslim men that the West believes Islam is the enemy.

C – If the number of extremists grows, we cannot defeat the enemy.

D – If he were to say, “Radical Islam is the enemy,” then he’d be doing the recruiting for the extremists (ISIL/ISIS).

A + B + C + D =

E – If we use the label “Radical Islam,” we cannot defeat the enemy (whatever the enemy is).

Since C and E are the same, then President Obama is likewise using circular reasoning. All President Obama has actually argued is, “Without me, we cannot defeat the enemy.”

In sum, Mr. Trump believes we must use the label “Radical Islam” to defeat the enemy and President Obama believes we must NOT use the label “Radical Islam” to defeat the enemy. But each man clearly believes that without him, the enemy cannot be defeated. Can we agree that besides being self-absorbed and redundant, their argument is depressing?

For a different, encouraging argument, try mine.

I am arguing that,

A – I wanted to fight or I did fight terrorism (Wait. Terrorism? Who are we kidding? We’re at war with Allah) with violence from Sept. 11, 2001 until March 1, 2012.

B – It’s now 2016. 4 years after stepping off the violent path, it is apparent that terrorism (Allah) is still a growing threat.

C – Terrorism (Allah) cannot be defeated by violence because it is an idea.

D – Only ideas can defeat ideas.

E – Due to internal inconsistencies not much different than President Obama and Mr. Trump’s circular reasoning, neither naturalism, nor deism, nor Buddhism, nor scientism, nor atheism, nor Mormonism, nor Tom Cruise-ism, nor patriotism, nor nationalism, nor globalism can defeat terrorism (Allah).

A + B + C + D + E =

F – Christianity’s Triune God, in all of His mystery (tell me again, how was Jesus fully human and fully divine at the same time?), in all of His reality (the concrete resurrection of Jesus as proclaimed by the New Testament writers and its subsequent 2000 year witness of manifest grace) is the only idea that can defeat terrorism (Allah).

In other words, A + B + C + D + E = 

F – We can defeat terrorism (Allah). And we can defeat terrorism (Allah) without me! We just need to submit ourselves to the will of Christianity’s Triune God.

In sum, my argument (Christianity’s argument), unlike Mr. Trump and President Obama, is, “Without me, the enemy can be defeated”–emphasis on “the enemy can be defeated” and “without me.” There is hope people. His name is Jesus.

Do you see?

Three Random Ramblings

“I know the Bible is God’s word because it says so.”

It’s a silly notion, no? It also rightfully causes a certain anger to develop, assuming you haven’t hardened your heart against God so much that you can’t feel anymore. Well, know that I’m with you. It’s illogical. The particular fallacy is named “Begging the Question,” if you care.

Now for the fun part. I need you to take all your willpower and see that I get to be just as righteously angry when you say, “God (or anything supernatural) doesn’t exist because science says so.” That’s also begging the question. We’re talking about the almighty triune God. Measurable? For your sake and mine, appreciate that He isn’t and wouldn’t be.

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Speaking of books that contain prophecy, check this out. At work the other day a 17 year old man asks me, “Isn’t Sam Smith (the singer) dating some hot chick?” I said, “I don’t think Sam Smith is heterosexual.” He said, “What’s a heterosexual?” I said, “I’m not telling you that one. Google it if you care.” He googled it, then said, “So, they like multiple people?” I said, “What?” He read, “A person who is attracted to persons of the opposite sex.” Luckily, his online highschooling surfaced and he realized that persons wasn’t indicative of many before I lost my mind.

This little scene led to me randomly considering that George Orwell got it wrong when predicted the message “Big Brother is watching” would accompany the future all-encompassing government surveillance. The metaphor no longer works. American kids don’t even know what that means. Big brothers aren’t overseers anymore. Like everyone else, they don’t have a clue or a care about anyone but themselves, if big brothers even exist. (I indict myself as a parent of an only child here too.) All you parents/grandparents who made the book a “classic” have failed. How does that feel? You’ve ignored your children in favor of yourself, in favor of work, in favor of the dollar so much that all brothers and sisters care about is themselves, let alone you, me, or God. Taken with the fact that kids think government is their lord and savior–the righter of all wrongs–the only choice this arrogant, selfish godlessness leaves us is Trump or Clinton. No thank you. If you want to find me, I’m taking my Bible–the very revelation of the one true God to humanity–to the streets. There is only one Hope, there is only one Lord, and there is only one Savior. Pray that He has mercy on us.

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As I was delivering pizza tonight, I looked out of my window to see a partly cloudy blue sky. Against a setting sun, it was particularly striking. I was moved to think, “Of course there is a God. Why else would that look so beautiful?” Then I reprimanded myself and said, “That’s so stupid, Pete. It’s just clouds and the appearance of the color blue caused by the light of one star out of billions.”

Remember I wrote that a professor said Christianity is just glasses? Glasses with which to view the world? Well, let me use my hero-ness to twist that metaphor a bit. I offer that Christianity is night vision goggles.

Night vision goggles have to be focused by pilots before every flight. The best they can guarantee a pilot is 20/40. Obviously this isn’t the 20/20 of daytime, but we’re talking about seeing at night. Well, one part of NVG focusing is that they have to be focused upon either a fixed distance or an indeterminate distance. The way we flew with them, we’d focus them on an indeterminate distance in order to see outside, and then we’d look under them to see the flight instruments with our naked eye.

Well, as the NVG-focusing lore goes, back in the day there was a pilot who thought he’d be real smart and focus one tube of the NVGs to see the dimly lit flight instruments, and the other tube to see the outside world. Suffice it to say that the next day he wore sunglasses to work because he jacked his eyes up so much that he didn’t want anyone to see them.

The point is, just like pilots adjusting their NVGs before a night flight, all of us are adjusting our vision every day. This activity is inescapable. Yet if we get it wrong one day from the next, God spares us and we live on.

Christianity is the only adjustment that gives 20/20. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do to prevent you from zooming in closer than 20/20 (Buddhism/Quantum-ness) or not close enough (atheism/agnosticism/the belief that I am merely an observer, not a participant). Reality is no different than how there was nothing that poor pilot’s friends could do to get him to not experiment with the NVGs. The beauty of Christianity is that it never disputes the experienced reality that I do not possess the ability to focus your NVGs for you.

In other words, I concluded that the partly cloudy sunset was beautiful because God created it to be so. And so are you. Believe it.

Brief Note On My Church

Want to know why I love my church? I’ll tell you. On Sunday, as the pastor was wrapping up and about to head to the door in order to greet everyone on their way out, an old lady with a walker–same one as every week–began to be assisted by a younger gentlemen in an effort to get her out of the building before the rest of the congregation was formally dismissed. Nothing special has happened yet. But as she’s heading down the aisle, she, in full conversational volume, starts saying good-bye to all of her friends and offering them “blessings” as it were. So the pastor is talking into the microphone and at the same time this faithful parishioner is distractingly talking out loud to her friends. With me?

I still have an instinct to initially judge the woman and find the behavior inappropriate, but this week for some reason a better angel overtook me. In observing the entire scene from a removed vantage point, I actually gained more respect for the old church and its congregation. The woman’s willingness to talk and the pastor’s steady march to the end signaled that the church isn’t afraid of dying. It’s been there for 150 years, and is going to last at least 150 more. There is no need to act like the woman sinned because she said “good-bye” as she left. Should the Lord tarry, we’re all going to see each other again next Sunday. No big thing.

Maybe this seems insignificant to you, but to me it was yet again a refreshing take on an old, old story.

Friday Funny and Election Assesment and Public School Rant

Good Morning. I don’t mean to always be so somber in my posts these days, it’s just that I’ve had a lot of school work and so blogging takes the back seat. I’m excited to share that I had a theological epiphany today, and a big one at that. Or at least I think I did. We’ll see how my grade turns out. On to the funny.

First, I was reminded today how many times my honesty with women is unappreciated. Two specific cases stand out. First, back over a decade ago, I was a personal trainer/gopher at a gym. Two twenty-somethings were complaining that their diets and routines weren’t producing results. As I felt that I had wasted time on other gym members who never put to use my diet/fitness plans, I asked the pair if they really would do what I told them to do. They said yes. What I said next was said with the intent to return to ground zero, so to speak. Like the way basic training breaks everyone down only to build them back up. But in my case, I just came across mean. I said, “I’m only asking if you’re serious because it takes some time and effort for me to develop this plan. But I will, because what we know for sure is that what you’re doing right now isn’t working.”

(WARNING: Dad, this one has a curse word, but it’s okay because it’s just a record of the past). The second hilarious honesty blunder was when this crotchety old military veteran flight scheduler asked me, “Pete. Why do you think I’m so mean?” I took a breath to demonstrate that I was really going to consider my response before speaking and said, “Well, I’d say it’s because you’re surrounded by a bunch of us asshole pilots all day.” OMG. Only after I saw her reaction and realize that she wanted to know why I thought she was mean, not that she accepted her mean-ness as a conclusion and was curious how she ended up that way. So funny.

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If it wasn’t for long road trips in passenger vans, I don’t think I would have ever had a friend as a kid.

Because I only made friends as a kid during long road trips in passenger vans, I don’t know how to make one as an adult.

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God has to laugh a great big belly laugh when we simultaneously have a runny nose and have to drop a stinky deuce.

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When a certain category of maintenance issue (usually safety of flight related) occurs within a specific make/model of aircraft, the flying community’s response is to ground (no longer fly) all aircraft of that make/model until a solution is discovered.

Viewed through this lens, Super Tuesday’s results can only require all Americans to ground themselves. Evangelicals/Christians-as-a-whole especially need to be grounded. And the only fix is to TURN OFF THE FUCKING TELEVISION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I guess this one isn’t funny except in a depressing way. My daughter’s kindergarten teacher sent an email to all parents asking if anyone had a copy of the movie “The Lorax” based on the Dr. Seuss book she could borrow. She wanted to save a buck during the Dr. Seuss section. Even giving her the benefit of the doubt that she had the children read the books first, the point of Dr. Seuss’ books was to increase literacy, not entertainment as an end. She should be ashamed, then fired, then ashamed again.

I feel like this rant proves my humility focus is going astray, but I don’t conclude so. This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I don’t know how much more I will take before H- is outta there. Dr. Seuss movies during kindergarten? That’s actively contributing to the detriment of children.

Oh, and while I’m ranting, did you know that the school let’s my daughter buy food during lunch on credit? A five year old. She was so proud to tell me that she did in fact eat her sandwich on the day I didn’t give her the pretzels and cookie that she had been eating instead. She continued to tell me how she then bought a cookie because she remembered her number.

Okay. The rage is building. Time to quit. Happy Friday. (Oh, and for the record, I’m joining the group that predicts Clinton wins.)

Sin

A fellow student in my theology class told me that in his 69 years of existence he’d never encountered hamartiology. My own 34 year old pink body hadn’t either until two weeks ago. Hamartiology is the field of Christian theology which studies sin. Fascinating stuff. How many people even believe in sin anymore? Here in Denver the concept has very little support. I have had several older folks tell me bluntly, “Well, I don’t believe in sin.” Like I said, it’s fascinating. Then this past week we read about atonement and all the different reasons Christian thinkers over the years have deduced the reason for Jesus’ death to be.

As I hope the savvy reader can imagine, there are no clear cut answers. Christians have been doing their best and generally fall into only a handful of categories, but there is no universal agreement. (No surprise here). What was intriguing to me, however, was how integral a person’s concept of sin is to their concept of atonement and why Jesus had to die.

Obviously, I have nothing new to add to the study of sin, but I do have one observation that brings me some hope. One of the books mentioned that sin is both our condition and the result of our condition. We sin because we’re sinners and we’re sinners because we sin. That’s easy enough, nothing new. But then it went on to remind readers that we (humanity) commit sins not just because we’re sinners, but because we’re the recipient of others’ sins as well. For example, I have been living a fairly spartan life these last couple weeks. Early to rise, been memorizing scripture, reading voluminously, no movie/TV-watching etc. Yet I have still been sinning in some very easy to acknowledge acts. Before I read the aforementioned section about being on the receiving end of fellow humans’ sin, I was a bit perplexed. But now I feel like I’ve gained some understanding, or perhaps one more example, of the reality that I cannot ever do it on my own. Theoretically, if I could erase my memory and become a hermit on Mars with no more contact from humans, maybe I could avoid sins of commission. But even then sins of omission would be occurring because I’d be avoiding my purpose.

The point of all this is that hamartiology and the Christian doctrine of sin is the most accurate description of reality/evil I have discovered as of today. Consequently, I believe, like most Christians do, that I am a sinner in need of repentance and that God sent Jesus to die to take my place in order to restore the broken relationship that the first man caused by his sin. Those of you who know the story know that the ironic piece, of course, is that the biblical writers suggest that in my act of recognizing both my status and that there has been a substitution of characters; instead of being punished, I am forgiven. That’s a relief, a veritable un-burdening–especially compared to the sensation that accompanied me while I distorted the reality of sin’s effect on my life.

Oh. What is sin, you ask? What is the root of all sin? It’s the displacement of God from his rightful place.

Conversation Over

Last week wasn’t one of my favorites.

Remember my character formation class that I have been touting? Well, the character trait that I have decided to specifically get working on this semester is humility. That really has nothing to do with this post except to share that one of the spiritual disciplines that a book suggests is journaling. All of us bloggers do this without thinking and so while I have been blogging for a few years now, I am specifically going to dedicate one blog a week to my walk with God, if you will. I share this because sometimes I get the feeling that Christians do read these posts every once in a while and maybe they’d be interested to see just what goes on at a seminary. Anyhow, back to last week.

I had lunch with a friend and there was discussion about the nature of God and scripture etc. A couple years ago when we met, we both were in the agnostic category, but obviously I don’t believe I can ignore what I’ve been feeling and learning, nor do I want to. Suffice it to say that he hasn’t changed. He’s old, so it’s not like I expected him to during the course of one conversation. I even said this in the conversation. But I love the conversation and he’s kind of been a mentor of sorts so I wanted to pick his brain a bit about why he believes what he does. Long story short, I sent him a follow up email (old habits–post-flight debriefs–die hard). At the end of the email he wrote that he does not want to continue talking about the subject.

I don’t know what to do next. “The subject” is kind of my life right now. I wouldn’t know what else to talk about. As I have gotten older I have begun to recognize the subtleties of my body’s physiological reactions to life. The physical reaction happens before the words develop to describe how I feel. In this instance, as I read his “conversation over” assertion, I felt a sadness in my gut that demanded a long nap with the hope that upon waking I would discover that it was just a bad dream. Then I labeled all that rejection.

Am I that unbearable?