I just had a truckload of beauty dumped in my lap as I took part in ‘Mixi Club’ at my church.  Mixi Club provides community and food to the most interesting and wonderful range of people from the community around.

I lunched with *C* (name withheld to respect privacy), who told me (not for the first . . . → Read More: beautiful]]> Is beauty completely subjective?

I just had a truckload of beauty dumped in my lap as I took part in ‘Mixi Club’ at my church.  Mixi Club provides community and food to the most interesting and wonderful range of people from the community around.

I lunched with *C* (name withheld to respect privacy), who told me (not for the first time!) his life story of being abused sexually as a child, getting into ‘drugs rock and roll and women, ya-know?’ and how coming to church has helped ‘everything start makin’ sense – know-wadda-mean?’.  He could write a book, he tells me, about the things he’s seen.  He has 50 pages at home that the world would be richer for reading, if you ask me.

Grace, who has less than half her sight, stooped down very close to me to get a good look at me, so she could put a face to the voice she knew from my preaching.

Ken, whose post-stroke condition made it frustrating for him to match words with what he was trying to say, was passionately concerned (‘…but maybe I’m wrong’ he said) about my casual attire being someone who worked for a church.  We had quite a nice chat and his utmost concern throughout was that I understood him and was not offended.  Peter who had shared his thoughts during my talk and remained mostly quiet during lunch, raced up to me as I was leaving to tell me that my outfit was perfectly fine and looked quite nice.

It is enough to make one cry

I could give a ‘what we got up to’ report of the work our team did (some still over – some still yet to go) on the new Freeset T-shirts building.  But we didn’t only go as labourers – we went to observe as well.  Kerry took us on . . . → Read More: india: different]]> So I should probably post about my recent trip to India.

I could give a ‘what we got up to’ report of the work our team did (some still over – some still yet to go) on the new Freeset T-shirts building.  But we didn’t only go as labourers – we went to observe as well.  Kerry took us on a couple of ‘walks’ to see the areas around Freeset, and also we saw other bits of Kolkata as well.  I suppose I’m more inclined to reflect on what I observed and the thoughts it brought to mind – many of which will still tick over in my head for some time to come.

Kolkata is dirty (except for the clean bits) and smelly (except for the non-smelly bits).  They’ve got the latest technology (laptops, cellphones, etc.) but also way more poverty/beggars than many places (certainly developed/western places!).

I used to argue that people were happier in the 2/3 world (as opposed to ‘third’ world – 2/3 better reflects the balance of population and land mass).  To some extent, this may well be true.  But this doesn’t mean that many people wouldn’t choose a “1/3 world” lifestyle if they could.  I sometimes assumed they would just want to carry on as they are, but that’s not true.

Take drinking water, for example.  The water most of them drink carries disease.  They would drink clean water if they could (and thankfully, the community around Freeset will soon have access to safe drinking water – though the issue of how to ensure it doesn’t contribute to inequality – the powerful taking all the clean water, etc. – is an ongoing issue).

Or take the controversial (or not, or in different ways, depending on where you’re from, influences, cultural assumptions, etc.) example of prostitution.  The women are nearly universally pressured/forced/bullied/threatened/coerced into the trade by pimps, boyfriends or even husbands or family.  Their bodies are turned (by others) into a commodity to support needs of all kinds (and all levels of legitimacy).  These women would do something else if they could.  Matter of fact, show me any any 12 year old girl anywhere in the world who would choose (apart from manipulation or coercion) to sell her body to strangers.  Apparently, you can spot the new girls to the trade by observing the ones who aren’t smiling.

It is true that we cannot simply cut/paste our cultural sense of what is appropriate or not onto another culture.  But I’m convinced that there are real and true modes of existence for the world that are better or worse than others.  Some things are indeed merely cultural differences.  But other things we just ‘know’ are better or worse than others.  A lot of morality may well be grey, but not all of it.

On one of our walks, we stopped to play a game with some children – like 3-4.  In minutes, the whole street population (it seemed) had gathered to watch – including (I’d barely noticed) an older drunk man.  As we eventually moved on, a young man commenced giving the older man a hearty beating – young, angry fists connecting with elderly, weak skin/bone.  Kerry (who later told us that it would have been due to their seeing the drunk man as an ‘embarrassment’ to the community – esp. with foreigners present – time to make an example of him) quickly broke it up and gently-yet-firmly – with fluent Bangla – rebuked the younger man.

Was Kerry imposing his Western values onto them?  I think not.  I think some things aren’t as complicated as others may be.  I think they understood – and even respected – his actions.

The Hindu caste system was behind this and other inequalities we saw (and seeing the inequalities in India made me more aware of inequalities in so-called ‘egalitarian’ NZ…).  Widows in India lose their entire identity and worth (in the past, a practice called ‘sati’ was common – but is now outlawed apparently – where widows would throw themselves onto the burning graves of their dead husbands).  Again, I don’t oppose this simply because it’s not American or Kiwi, but because I genuinely don’t believe it is right that a widow need be stripped of honour and dignity.  One truly amazing and inspiring woman, Mina, had just lost her husband, and even though she has turned to Christian faith, she is still struggling massively with feelings of un-worth and uselessness.

That’s probably as good a place to stop as any for this rambling, unstructured post.  I may post again on other things, and I apologise (sort of) for the philosophical/ethical bent to this so-called ‘report’ on my trip to India, but it’s just what came out as I typed.  Cheers.

It’s worth noting (as I have before) that one cannot speak of anything . . . → Read More: teleology & ethics]]> The word ‘teleology’ (from Greek τελος ‘telos’ – meaning ‘goal’, ‘end’, ‘purpose’ or ‘that toward which things tend’) is not a street-level term.  However, the concept of a purpose, goal, function or ‘end’ to things most certainly is.  It’s a common as anything.  Teleology is blindingly relevant.

It’s worth noting (as I have before) that one cannot speak of anything being truly good or bad, well or poorly functioning without some kind of teleological concept.  From complaints (or amazement) about how poorly (or well) ‘designed’ the universe is (if designed at all – see this rebuttal), to the largest complaint of all – the ‘problem of evil’ (which has an often forgotten twin, the ‘problem’ of good); every kind of value-judgment we make assumes some kind of teleological concept.

Teleology, then, underlies the whole prospect of moral and ethical enquiry.  If things merely ‘function’, but do not function toward a certain end, goal or purpose, then there can be no such thing as a truly or ultimately immoral action.  Nothing can be said to ultimately or truly right or wrong with either the universe or human behaviour.

One can give an account of the ‘functioning’ of an event/thing in purely numerical, metrical or otherwise descriptive terms: human ‘a’ swings their right arm with tightly-closed digits in such a way that the digits impact the face of human ‘b’ with ‘x’ amount of force, resulting in human ‘b’ losing the state of balance and falling to the ground… etc.  This is a statistical, and purely ‘objective’ account of an event.  No ethical comment here.

The moment someone begins to say that one person should not have hit someone (or should have in the case, for example, of self-defense or protecting a helpless person being raped or otherwise harmed), they are imposing a teleological assumption onto the set of events.  They are no longer giving a merely descriptive account of the event, they are giving a prescriptive account.

As a Christian, my ethical thought (and hopefully my action too!) is shaped by my belief that creation has a telos.  Things are being brought from a state of chaos (Genesis 1 creation poem says ‘tohu vo vohu’ – wild and waste – formless and void) to a state of more and more orderedness.  Things are going somewhere – toward an ‘end’.  Things are meant to behave in a certain way and not another way.  This, in a basic sense, is what the notion of God’s “will” (desire) means.

The most tightly compacted summary of the desire of God is one word – Love.  Jesus summarised the entire ‘Law’ and ‘Prophets’ in two commands: Love God. Love Others as Self.

A summary that I’ve found helpful is the desire of God for humans to be in right relationship 1) with God, 2) with other humans, 3) with ourselves, and 4) with creation.

Christianity views humans as having a unique status (and therefore responsibility) within Creation.  This anthropocentricism is not, however, to devalue the rest of creation.  All of creation is seen to ‘reflect’ God’s beauty and creativity.  But humans as the ‘crown’ of creation, the ones with the capacity to bear God’s ‘image’ in a unique way, have a special role.  Humans are put ‘in charge’ of creation, commissioned to take care of it, and use it wisely – working to bring it to the fullest expression according to God’s will/desire.

Interestingly, no matter what one believes about God or whether or not humans reflect a God, it is manifestly obvious that humans have the greatest power to either utterly wreck things or to behave in a way which helps creation, humanity included, to flourish.  (And we note, again, in passing, that things being ‘wrecked’ or things ‘flourishing’ are meaningless concepts with no teleology.)

Christian ethics, then, are based on a Christian understanding of God’s purposes for His creation; namely to bring it to full and rich orderedness.  An orderedness characterised by not control but freedom to be all that it was made for.  And an orderedness characterised by Love.

Here are a few (quite random) examples of my out-working of this:

• Education: Knowledge is to serve relationships.  Humans are to celebrate any/all kinds of knowledge which enrich their relationship to/with creation, each other and the creator (i.e. medical knowledge, social knowledge, scientific knowledge, relational knowledge, etc.), while not letting knowledge –or the pursuit of it– become an idol or an enslaving thing.
• Sexuality: Sex is to be used in such a way as to bring an orderedness characterised by freedom, and not slavery.  Many forms/expressions of sexuality are characterised by human slavery to sexual desire.  Sex is for humans, not humans for sex.  Also, sex is to bring relational fullness, not relational pain.  Sex should thus be respected as the powerful thing it is, and used in ways that reflect freedom and full relationships.
• Poultry production (one of my favourite examples): God’s desire is not for chickens to live the life of a chicken in a cage covered with it’s own feces, and to be injected with steroids and killed in a mechanical and abusive fashion, etc.  God’s desire is also not for chickens to be deified to the point where they are forbidden to be eaten.  Chickens are a part of God’s good creation, and are to be farmed, ‘egged’ (hens) and processed/eaten in a way that is characterised by order and freedom (the ‘free range’ movement is brilliant here).
• Eating (while on the topic!): Humans (like other animals) need to eat to survive, but eating should not be treated as a merely biologically sustaining thing, but rather in a way that brings dignity to both what is eaten and who eats it.  One of the most degrading and undignified forms of eating is (we all do it) fast food.  Where speed and efficiency of production is the telos of eating.  The food is mass-produced, the food preparers have little/no relationship to the eaters, and the eating experience is rushed and shabby.  Contrast this with a community that grows and harvests their own crops, and where the cooks sit at the same table with everyone, serving each other and sharing in the creativity of food preparation and the joy of sharing the eating experiene (the culmination fo the whole process) together.
• Work: Work is to bring freedom not slavery and enable us to bless, rather than participate in being a curse.  Laziness and greed are equally destructive things.  Slacking on the job or working 60+ hour work weeks are ways of cheating and enslaving (or being enslaved).  Industry and production should serve to bring about the flourishing of creation – including humans.  Work in fields such as education, social-work, government, police-work, food industry, transport/travel, clothing, entertainment, etc. can all be done in either a dehumanising way or a humanising way.
• Music/Art: Art (including poetry) is a deeply human thing, and should reflect the creativity of the creator.  Art can deeply reflect reality in a way that other things cannot.  Art can be characterised by chaos and confusion with no hint of redemption or freedom, or it can speak of healing, order, justice and transformation (even while acknowleding brokenness and pain).  Sadly, much ‘Christian’ art is often cheap copies of what has been done before, and has no staying power (it is quickly forgotten).
• Technology: All technology (from eating utensils to wireless broadband) should serve to bring order, freedom and to deepen relationships.  Sadly, we often end up being enslaved to our conveniences.  Technology allows us to have higher frequency and quantity of contact with other people – bringing the sad reality of ever-increasing numbers of ‘contacts’ and ever-shallowing depth of relationship with family and friends.  Transportation technology takes us further and faster away from home than ever before, giving us more options than we know what to do with.  Add to this, the constant reminders that our basic normal life is boring, and that we ‘deserve’ another trip to this or that resort place to ‘escape’, and we find ourselves often on a treadmill-ish pursuit of ‘happiness’, being less and less satisfied with ‘normal life’ and seeking more and more after the elusive reality we see in the advertisements.
• Medical Activity: Medical knowledge and activity should serve to bring order to the chaos of disease and injury and freedom from blindness and pain.  It should always be used in the service of rich human life, not to destroy it.  Surgery should be about healing (even if it temporarily makes you bleeed), not about making a womans breasts look like this or that super-model or about doing away with an inconvenient developing pre-born child.
• Violence: Violence is only justified when in the service of bringing freedom and preserving relationships – for example protecting those who cannot protect themselves from rapists, thiefs, abusers, torturers and (actual) terrorists.  The power to inflict violence (and control people by doing so) comes with great responsibility.
• Community: Obviously, community is a place where relationships are central.  True community is characterised by freedom and whole and holistic relationships.  Community that leaves people enslaved to things, experiences or addictions, etc. is not a community characterised by love.  Also, community that controls and micro-manages people is to treat people as cogs in a system and is therefore dehumanising rather than humanising and thus not characterised by freedom.  True human-ness if found not in isolation from all others, nor in being forced into conformity with them, but in a community which values true genuine human flourishing and which is characterised by loving, patient and consistent transformation to it.
• Money/Possessions: All possessions are to be held with gratitude, and to be not merely ‘used’ or ‘consumed’ with our comfort/survival/convenience as the telos, but rather to be shared with and passed on to others.  Life’s telos is not acquisition or status, but transformation and wholeness; and our handling of money and possessions should reflect this.
• Clothing: Clothing is a wonderfully rich and creative human thing.  It can be used (both by wearers and producers) to enrich our freedom and relationship to others, or to enslave us.  Fashion, for example, can often serve to alienate and degrade those who are not able (for either financial or body-style reasons) to keep up with things.  This divides and dehumanises, and is not God’s desire.  Although modest dress will look differently from place to place and time to time, for each culture/place, there will be uses of clothing that either serve to enhance a person’s personality and humanness or which will serve to rob them of their person-hood, and make them into an object.  Clothing design and production can and should be a creative and body-honouring thing which encourages human relationships.

Science measures certain kinds of ‘values’ that can be measured, because it is by nature a metrical enterprise.  It (among other things) makes measurements.

It recently occurred to me that all of our units of measure are derived . . . → Read More: measuring value]]> There are at least two kinds of ‘value’ – a) the kind science can measure, and b) the kind that science cannot.

Science measures certain kinds of ‘values’ that can be measured, because it is by nature a metrical enterprise.  It (among other things) makes measurements.

It recently occurred to me that all of our units of measure are derived by a relation to something else.  Here are a few:

• distance: units of measure related to things like a human ‘foot’, or ‘hand’ (horses are often measured by ‘hands’), ‘meter’, ‘yard’, ‘mile’, etc.  My favourite example is a ‘light-year’, which is saying ‘this’ star is as far away as ‘these’ waves/particles of light can travel while ‘this’ particular planet orbits ‘this’ particular star.  Try to tell someone how long/tall/wide/thick/far away something is without using a unit of measure.
• area: like distance, but add a dimension…
• size: a more general term that is very fun to think about
• weight: units of measure related to whatever thing was originally a ‘pound’ or ‘kilogram’.  I could just as accurately say that my son weighs 150 ‘this’-sized rocks, as I could any other unit of measure.  Try to tell someone how heavy/light something is without using any units of measure.
• volume: units of measure related to some amount of liquid, whether an ‘ounce’, a ‘gallon’, a ‘cup’, a ‘tea/table spoon’, etc.  How many barrels of milk do you take in your coffee?
• heat: units of measure related to however we got a ‘degree’.  BTU’s (british thermal units) are the amount of heat required to raise ‘x’ (liter?) amount of water one of ‘these’ (degrees).  Who would have ever thought that we’d measure the heat of the sun with a unit of measure we got on this planet?
• brightness: unit of measure I don’t know the name of…
• voltage: how much is a volt?  why not a little bigger/smaller?
• time: a ‘year’ (how long it takes ‘this’ planet to make one circle around ‘that’ star); a ‘month’ (let’s not go there here); a ‘day’ (how long it takes this planet to spin ’round once); an ‘hour’ (why not 24 of them?  good number as any…); a ‘minute’ (why not 60?); a ‘second’ (it worked with minutes, why stop a good thing?).  I’m 30 earth-trips ’round the sun old at the moment, and my son is a bit over three ‘moon cycles’ old.  We’re so sophisticated.
• speed: you’ll need an arbitrary standard of distance and an arbitrary standard of time for this one.  How many light years per minute will get me a ticket driving on SH1 in Auckland?

And – there are other kinds of value.  Like ‘goodness’ and ‘honour’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘dignity’.

“Ahh… but these are totally subjective values…”, you might say?

Compared to which ‘objective’ value?  ‘Distance’?

As subjective as things like ‘beauty’ and ‘dignity’ may seem – they’re just as real as anything, I reckon.  The value of life and the dignity of human beings, for example, is immediate and obvious – you don’t need a unit of measure to know that slavery (the “humans = property/objects” kind of slavery) represents a failure to respect human dignity.

Ben Witherington III posted this story with this photo (warning – surgical photo – thoughI think . . . → Read More: surgery to save or end a life]]> Anyone who knows me knows I’m aware of the sensitivities associated with abortion.  Although in one sense (something like the sense reflected in the post title) I think it can fairly be seen as a simple issue, I also affirm that it has complexities.

Ben Witherington III posted this story with this photo (warning – surgical photo – thoughI think it’s a very ‘un-offensive’ one!).  Here’s the story behind the photo.

The baby was diagnosed with spina bifida and would not survive if removed from his mother’s womb. Little Samuel’s mother, Julie Armas, is an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta . She knew of Dr. Bruner’s remarkable surgical procedure. Practicing at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville , he performs these special operations while the baby is still in the womb.

During the procedure, the doctor removes the uterus via C-section and makes a small incision to operate on the baby. As Dr.Bruner completed the surgery on Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon’s finger. DrBruner was reported as saying that when his finger was grasped, it was the most emotional moment of his life, and that for an instant during the procedure he was just frozen, totally immobile.

The photograph captures this amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, ‘Hand of Hope.’ The text explaining the picture begins, ‘The tiny hand of 21-week- old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother’s uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.’

Little Samuel’s mother said they ‘wept for days’ when they saw the picture. She said, ‘The photo reminds us pregnancy isn’t about disability or an illness, it’s about a little person.’Samuel was born in perfect health, the operation 100 percent successful.

For me, there is an utterly stark difference between the surgical procedure described above, and the various surgical procedures involved with the so-called ‘termination’ of a ‘foetus’ (not to mention the social life conditions, and big and tiny decisions leading up to both!!!).  The starkness is all the more striking between this one, where the surgeon does restorative surgery on a foetus still in the womb, and one particular procedure that I know of, where the surgeon ‘dismembers’ the foetus while (obviously) still inside the womb.  And of course, there are nice, sanitised terms for this procedure, so that would-be mothers do not have to be told that the foetus (or developing baby) inside them is going to be ‘dismembered’ (and please note that descriptions, such as ‘butchered’ or ‘chopped up’ are not ones I’d ever use as they are utterly inflammatory – even though they are perhaps more honest terms than vauge/misleading [even dishonest!?] jargon such as ‘dilation and evacuation‘, which says absolutely nothing about cutting the foetus into pieces before the ‘evacuation’).

Among many other reflections this brings to mind, one is the inability of scientific knowledge  (in general; of which ‘foetal developmental knowledge’ or ‘surgical knowledge’ are specific examples) to guide or direct us in any direct way whatsoever as to (shall we say) which way the knife should be wielded.

I feel truly loved.

We can imagine a spectrum of least sentient to most sentient.  The nearest animals to humans, in this case, would (obviously!) have the closest kind of sentience to humans.  But (however this ‘emerged’ or came to be) humans are ultra-sentient.  We have more than sensation (sentience); we also have a perceiving, yearning . . . → Read More: sentience and consciousness]]> Consciousness is at least sentience, but not less.

We can imagine a spectrum of least sentient to most sentient.  The nearest animals to humans, in this case, would (obviously!) have the closest kind of sentience to humans.  But (however this ‘emerged’ or came to be) humans are ultra-sentient.  We have more than sensation (sentience); we also have a perceiving, yearning kind of consciousness.  We are self aware of our own self awareness.

Just as consciousness is at least sentience, but not less; I think we can say that humans are at least animals, but not less.

Aristotle called humans the ‘rational animal’.  This makes me think about times where we allow ourselves to be less-than rational.  Have you ever just zoned out for a while and then ‘came back to yourself’, so to speak?  Philosophers sometimes use the idea of a zombie when talking about this stuff.  The point is often made that we could be zombie-like in our perception of reality (including our perception of things like pain, which we not only feel, but lament…).  Doing what we need to survive and pass on our genes, but not reflecting on our lives/actions (transcending, as it were, our living/acting).  Not having what is often called ‘rational insight’ (or ‘critical intelligence’).  Not caring about meditation, music, meaning or mathematics.

Again, the question of how humans became so rationally insightful or critically intelligent or non-zombie-like is a side question.  The simple fact that we are is significant.  We should not let our fear of anthropocentricism (human centredness) scare us away from appreciating the wonder of being human.

caption competition on...