August 2005 Archives

Yet another internet article that makes me boil.

Anti-Gay Church Protests at GI Funerals

The article starts out with this:

Members of a church say God is punishing American soldiers for defending a country that harbors gays, and they brought their anti-gay message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq.

And what were they doing?

The Rev. Fred Phelps, founder of Westboro Baptist in Kansas, contends that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq as vengeance from God for protecting a country that harbors gays. The church, which is not affiliated with a larger denomination, is made up mostly of Phelps’ children, grandchildren and in-laws… The church members carried signs and shouted things such as “God hates fags” and “God hates you.”

I thought maybe they were blowing this out of proportion, but evidently not. An article on Wikipedia for the “reverend” made me all the more upset.

I hate that this sort of thing gets press. I really do. There is more to God’s Word than that homosexuality is a result of our exchanging God’s glory for His creation. When I stand before God on judgment day, I won’t be pleading, “But Lord, I was a heterosexual!” My sexual chastity (and lack thereof) will not be the thing on my lips on that day. “I plead what Jesus has done in my place.”

Phelps & Co. need to go read what Piper wrote two years ago: Taking the Swagger out of Christian Cultural Influence

I was reading from John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God this morning, and found a quote from C.S. Lewis on man’s failure to see the physical and transpose it into the spiritual. This reminded me of yesterday’s talk about the foolishness of treating man as just another primate.

The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love… physiology never can find anything in thought except twitchings of the gray matter…. [The materialist] is therefore, as regards the matter in hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor: the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all…. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below… will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.¹

…and humans only animals. I thought Lewis put it well.

I always wonder about those who view humans as nothing more than animals consciously think that when they hold their first child in their arms, when they receive very good news, when they reach a sexual climax, when they receive news that their dearest friend has cancer. Is that what really enters into their minds first? “This is only a chemical reaction of my brain to certain stimuli”? I suppose over the years continual exposure to this leads to a sort of hopelessness that Charles Darwin lamented near the end of his life.

Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds… gave me great pleasure… Formerly pictures gave me considerable (pleasure) and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry… I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight it formerly did… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.²

I can’t speak for you, but I don’t want my life to end with such a tragic loss of the wonder of the glory of God in creation by exchanging the truth about God and His glory for a lie in order to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. I don’t want to hear my three year old nephew giggle and respond, “That’s just a bio-electric signal.” I don’t want to hear Rosanna tell me, “I love you, Rob,” and think, “That’s only because of your innate desire to survive by way of reproduction.”

Not only do I want to avoid those things, but I want to be given to something greater than a general awareness that these aren’t just chemicals. I want to know that this is God’s glory expressed to me in the laugh of a child and the tender affection of a beautiful and kind-hearted woman. I want to thank Him and let the work of His hands come back to Him full-circle in my delight and enjoyment of what He has made. I want to find the food pointed to me by the finger instead of sniffing at the finger like an animal. Like Derek Webb wrote in The Emptiest Day…

The words I find impossible to mention
Are written on a star.
They say that I can find you in a flower,
But I need you in the car.

The optimism of my youth is dead and gone
But I save these speculations for another time and song.

Life, is only perceived through chemicals and emotion
But love, love is the island that overgrows the ocean.

And I am looking for the well that won’t run dry
The rest that weary thoughts cannot deny
When you wrap your arms around me I can walk away
Or face the emptiest day.

And, for that matter, Piper has a fitting ending to this entry.

All of God’s creation becomes a beam to be “looked along” or a sound to be “heard along” or a fragrance to be “smelled along” or a flavor to be “tasted along” or a touch to be “felt along.” All our senses become partners with the eyes of the heart in perceiving the glory of God through the physical world.³

Footnotes

1. Quoted in John Piper, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 181 ↩
2. Quoted in John Piper, Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism ↩
3. Piper, When I Don’t Desire God, 185 ↩

Humans Are Ones on Display at London Zoo

Read this today. At the London Zoo, eight human beings made in the image of God were on display in an old bear habitat. For what purpose?

“Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals … teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate,” [London Zoo Spokeswoman Polly] Wills said.

Earlier in the article, we have children trumping the “wisdom” of adults:

Visitors stopped to point and laugh, and several children could be heard asking, “Why are there people in there?”

These children were indeed asking the right question, but for different reasons than this exhibit hopes to propagate. If I were standing there and a child asked me that, I’d say, “That’s because people don’t belong there, Child. We are made in God’s image unlike all other animals in the world.”

If we really are just like other primates, why should it be surprising when we act like them, too? Because we are not like them, thus we are horrified when man fails to act according to the dignity with which he has been made, the very image-bearer of Almighty God. We have marred that image through valuing other things than Jesus Christ, by trading His glory for things like ourselves. And so Jesus Christ is in a reclamation project of redeeming these marred and corrupted images and making them, more and more, like Himself again, in fact, better than new.

But regarding this “exhibit,” what’s being exhibited is man’s bondage to suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. My bondage that I must be set free from if I am to not waste my life.

Off to work with other image-bearers.

Are there any news organizations that report on, y’know, positive things? Is the only thing worth reporting events that are about death and suffering and loss?

It just seems like all the news sources I go to are hopelessly pessimistic both in the reporting itself and what they choose to report on. I don’t care if it’s conservative or liberal. I don’t like watching the evening news for that reason alone. Seems like the mass weight of what’s on is deaths, rapes, fires, kidnappings, etc.

It’s not that I want to shelter myself from these sorts of things. It’s just that it seems so slanted I’ve forgotten what it’s like to hear good things reported accurately. Life is serious and I don’t want to be trivial. But life is also hopeful and not all is doom and gloom.

I’m bothered by that, I guess. Is there any good news in the world worth reporting?

Of Temptation

I’m reading this in Volume Six of Owen’s works, which also includes Mortification and Indwelling Sin.

When I Don’t Desire God

Reading for the second time with Rosanna. This is a good book to read and re-read.

John Paton: MIssionary to the New Hebrides

Thoughts to follow. Or not.

I’m wondering whether I really need to put as much effort into each entry as I typically do. I’ve been enjoying reading random updates on various friend’s blogs, some short and some long, and I must say I love each update.

Maybe I don’t need such long updates before I actually post. Yeah.

Not sure how this works out when a human being has become more or less your preferred blogging audience. I keep my own personal journal and my own personal heart I write on (and such a lovely heart hers is!) that I feel like I’m leaking all over like some sort of colander if I invest in a website.

But it’ll all be worth it someday. Suuuure. :o)

I was leaving Target yesterday, having purchased a watch because my beloved old Timex wristband broke, and I lost it while on the way to see my most beloved Wonder Woman. I’ll bet it’s still going, I had that thing since 1998, I think. Tragedy. So I got this chintzy little watch for the time being (hardy har har) so I don’t lose track of time at work. Did I mention I’m in charge of the photo lab now?

I had my iPod with me and was jamming along to some new music that Chris Farmer turned me onto. I walked outside the blue doors¹ and into the pouring rain during a quick storm. Walking out to my car, I felt the need to dance along with the song I was listening to. I immediately thought about the people around who might be watching and thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I had a big open space where I could just dance without worrying about other people’s thoughts?”

On the way home, I mused that a solution wouldn’t be to have the big open space but rather a lack of worry about other people’s thoughts. I can be so concerned about what other people think of me it paralyzes me from doing what I want, less what I ought. I’ve grown a lot in this regard, but times like wanting to dance in a Target parking lot… that fear comes back.

After all, Rule #1 of the Dancing Book I’ve Yet to Publish (or Write) is: dancing requires that you do not care about how you look to anyone. I know I’m not the only person who struggles with this, and there are many people who don’t struggle with this in the same way I do. I just thought it’d be nice if I didn’t worry about looking stupid and would just be stupid. In fact, they’re probably not watching (or caring) anyway.

Another related thought: there are always going to be people I don’t know (and some I care deeply about) who are going to be against me anyway. I’m coming to see that. I don’t know what these people want from me, really. Some people will always hate me no matter what I do and will try to stomp on any real joy in my life.

Hmm. I hate leaving a thought in the middle of it, but I’m going to hit the sack for a Sunday afternoon nap. I don’t keep this updated enough to keep any readers, so here’s hoping I’ll update more. Haven’t I been saying that forever? Even this post is influenced by what people think of me. How ironic.

1. For the unitiated (which means most of you), Super Targets have two sides: green side (the side with groceries, health & beauty, pharmacy, etc.), and blue side (everything else normally found in a Target store) ↩

I’ve never been terribly happy with any photo gallery software I’ve used. The thing is, I spend a lot of time organizing my photos in iPhoto and I’d like to export the titles, comments, and such to my site without having to go through the rigamarole of uploading and naming each individual file.

So I’m trying out Photon, a plugin for iPhoto that allows me to upload my pictures to MovableType (or other blog systems). I’ve created a new sub-blog and will see if this is something that will meet my needs. I’ve just put up new photos from my recent trip to visit my wonderful girlfriend. I still need to tweak it a bit to get it to work as I want, but I’m pleased with my progress so far, enough to present my first rough draft of it to the world.

Presenting: Rob Hulson’s Photos!

Lemme know how it works. There’s an XML feed that I’ve configured to show the thumbnail and comment, even. Pretty darn nifty if I do say so myself.