(Vanity) Musical Thoughts: Metaphysical Musings From A Christian Music Video

Recently I was watching a YouTube video of Phil Keaggy. For those of you who do not know -- (which is to say, almost everybody) he is a Christian songwriter and guitarist who is a legend among guitarists; there are rumours floating around that Jimi Hendrix once called him "the best guitarist in the world."¹ What is interesting is the comment threads which show up on YouTube under many of his videos. Generally one or two Christians will show up, with comments like "This is what Heaven must sound like" or "Praise GOD for Phil Keaggy's gift." Then usually, one of two things will happen: either other guitarists will show up, and say "Shut up and let us listen to the music" or "Yngwie Malmsteen / Van Halen / Leo Kottke / name your own" is better. Or, the atheists will show up and start ragging on the Christians.

And so it was here. A couple of days ago, one of the posters led off with the following gem:

"see above fairy tales" .... No thanks, enjoy being indoctrinated by a cult based on the ramblings of drunk arab sheep herders from a time when selling your daughter seemed like a great idea. I don't have a problem with you so please don't take offense. I would honestly be happy for you if you realised that you are wasting your entire existence."

Nope Stop trying to shove religion down our throats and just listen to some music with out bringing up god or jeebus.

Do a Youtube name determines my Intellect? the fact that you believe In a magical man In the sky who hates gays,Nonbelievers and pretty much anything, Kind of says It all.You're the kind of people who are slowing down the human race.

Do I detect a trend here? "fairy tales" and "magical man in the sky" tend to be stock insults, and used by atheists. The words are pejorative, to be sure, but more tellingly, what are the values communicated by the words? As Christian Blogger and SuperIntelligence Vox Day reminds us, we reveal our values in attacking others. So it's fairly obvious, that to the mind of the atheists, religion is a crutch, a holdover, which has been rightly supplanted by science, and it's about time. And it is this thought that I take as the jumping-off point for my essay.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke

He replied, "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." -- Jesus, in Matthew 17:20

Note the following points: Arthur C. Clarke is bragging, not only that technology works, but that, boy does it *ever* work. Jesus, on the other hand, is promising that one CAN move mountains -- but only under certain conditions.

And this is an important ingredient. Recall that C.S. Lewis, noted Christian author, was a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Oxford, then Cambridge. He wrote in his book The Abolition of Man:

I have described as a `magician's bargain' that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe's Faustus, the similarity is striking. You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from the devils, but gold and guns and girls. `All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his command' and `a sound magician is a mighty god'.3 In the same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit.4

Now this is quite a lot to take in at one go, but the essential elements are these:

1) People wanted power: both magic and technology strove for a time to deliver that power, but technology worked, and magic didn't.

2) In the centuries since that time, by accident or by on purpose, the impression has been left on people that everything but naturalistic science is "superstition" and that people used to believe in it before science set them free; and that the proof that science is better is that it works; in fact, religion is only for the losers, for those without any way to help themselves, it is a last gasp, a final (futile) resort.

People tend to lump prayer in with magic because the results seem to be inconsistent. But the reality goes deeper than that.

Bear with me for a change of pace while I use an analogy from the world of sports. If you went back in time and stood on the baseball diamond next to Brooks Robinson in his prime and tried to vacuum up line drives down the third base line; or if you tried to pitch like Nolan Ryan; or if you tried to run for long yardage like Adrian Peterson two things would happen. First, you'd get hurt. Second, you'd fail.

Does this mean that sports are magical, or that legendary sports achievements are mythological? After all, you tried to reproduce the results yourselves, and you failed.

No, it means that you weren't paying attention closely enough. Science is not reproducible -- except if you follow the instructions carefully. This is why we have experiments with controlled conditions, and why scientists are careful when reporting results in a journal to specify the methods, materials, and experimental apparatus, setup, and conditions. And since (as far as we can tell), science is "mechanical" and operates without respect to the individual, one person running the experiment is just as good as another.

Athletics, however, is only somewhat reproducible: it is mechanical, to be sure, but one of the conditions involved (if not pre-conditions) is skill. As Danny Glover said in the movie Angels in the Outfield, "There's this thing called talent. You guys don't have it." In order to reproduce athletic results, you need to have talent. And discipline, and practice. And then more practice. And even then, the results are not perfect. An all-pro batter only gets on base one-third of the time. Reggie Jackson pointed out that his 2,000 career strikeouts meant that he spent the equivalent of four full seasons doing nothing but "swing and a miss."

"And because of their unbelief, he couldn't do any miracles among them except to place his hands on a few sick people and heal them." Mark 6:5

And even *with* faith, God may say, "No," because He happens to have other plans: remember the Garden of Gethsemane:

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." (Matthew 26:39)

Therefore, one of the differences between technology and faith, is that since faith is personal, and not merely mechanistic, you can't guarantee results. Whereas technology relies upon observable, discovered, repeatable regularities in the behaviour of the natural universe; and taking advantage of them.

But the other difference is more subtle. Since technology *is* impersonal, as the large corporations have discovered while offshoring jobs, the physics and the engineering of a manufacturing process work whether the factory is in Toledo or in Harbin. Furthermore, once the formula has been discovered, the blueprints built, all of the accumulated knowlege of how to leverage nature's workings can be applied immediately: and the machines and factories and cars, and the knowledge imbued in their workings, endure even after the original discoverers have died. It is not as though each person born has to *rediscover* fire, and gravity, and calculus, and classical mechanics (or the horse collar or the cotton gin) in order to enjoy the immediate benefits of past discoveries.

But with faith, since it is a personal discipline (think of Brooks Robinson!), each person *must* start at the beginning, from the ground up. I can pray for you: but I cannot "Vulcan mind meld" my faith over *to* you.

Which means that there is an accumulation of applicability, of efficacy, of technology, over time, which is widely diffused among individuals, which is not necessarily seen in prayer.

Since prayer is a petition to God, and God can work miracles (whether by interfering with nature without our knowledge, or by truly *breaking* or *suspending* the laws of nature) -- when prayer works, it is not limited to the discovered laws. It truly can "move mountains" -- or change entire kingdoms, or the course of history.

And the other difference, is that prayer is not designed, we are explicitly told it was never meant, for personal power. That way lies Faust and the Occult. Think of the difference between the Three Rings of Power forged by the Elves (power to retain all things unstained; this they have gained, with sorrow) vs. the express purpose of the One Ring -- to capture and ensnare all.

Technology, though it can be used for good, always contains the possibility of being used for evil, to control other people. Witness the trench warfare and poison gas of World War I up to the atomic bomb; or even the ability of the government to spy on you using sophisticated telecommunications and electronics.

Returning to The Abolition of Man C.S. Lewis pointed out that "what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. "

Whereas, by definition, the power of prayer *is* that of self-denial, as witnessed by Gethsemane. "Yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt." This is the very opposite of the "will to power" which countenances or demands abominations such as digging up the dead: and it is opposite in its effects as well, for Gethsemane did not result in an exhumation, but in Resurrection.

¹ I tracked that rumour down as far as (IIRC) the Feb. 1975 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, in an article on "Jesus music" or somesuch. The rumor has been squelched by a number of sources. But he *is* off-scale versatile -- speed, melody, techniques from using an E-bow on an album all the way back in 1978, to volume swells with his little finger on the volume knob, to jaw-dropping looping, and intricate finger-picking. He does it all, with superlative technique.

LOL, not so fast.

You have no problem that the infants needed to be allowed to be conceived, by a supposed god which wanted them destroyed, not by its own efforts (which it could have avoided having to do so, by preventing their conception), but by the hand of a man, ordered to stomp, chop and slice babies as if they were scrub vegetation? I don’t believe you. Mind you, their short lives would also imply that they didn’t have any free will to exercise their options, as to whether they truly deserved “Hell” or not. If this god could foresee their eventual behaviour beforehand, then what was the point of their conception in the first place, and their premature destruction before they actually committed evil? If you don’t see a problem with the entire arrangement, I don’t have much to say other than that I assume you are lying (to yourself, and to me) about your level of comfort with it.

You would have to endure massive levels of cognitive dissonance almost to the level of what would classify as a psychological disorder, in order to “zone out” of the internal contradictions you are forced to deal with, here. On top of that, accepting such a god for its “recorded” behaviour would make it impossible for you to make a moral case against someone’s belief in, say, Allah. Since your version of god can do anything it wants (even contradict itself) then where is the limit? Nowhere.

The point about the spontaneous abortions was to highlight the callousness of existence, of suffering which has no meaning, no purpose. There is little that can be done to save them because their destruction was induced by the mother’s body due to mechanisms evolved which prevent her body from bringing these embryos to term - because of the risk they would eventually pose to the mother’s survival. Artificial intervention to force a body to continue a pregnancy to term which would have naturally been ended would involve causing more damage than good. Not to mention privacy violations because devices would have to be put in place in the mother’s body to detect such a fertilisation, as the mother herself is not aware most of the time.

Work your way through all this and let me know your thoughts.

I love how you jump with calls of "strawman!" and other labels every time you find yourself unable to answer. I miss the "nice try" comments though, because they happen every time you know that I have you cornered. Regardless...

The laws of thermodynamics... ahem, if I may interrupt, there is no proof or theory available to us that tells anything conclusively about the ultimate fate of the Universe. The latest findings based on Dark Matter and Dark Energy lean towards supporting a Cyclic Model. All life (in the present cycle) may indeed be extinguished, not only by the laws of thermodynamics, but even by something as lowly as a meteor strike. Life can rise again, and fall again, with each cycle. Not quite as "geo-centric" or "narrow" as you might be wont to conclude, if the Universe does operate in cycles.

And if all you have is probabilities, then you have no morality from which to declare "killing is wrong."

Re-read my previous comment. I explained this, Ref: societal obligations. Self-preservation is survival. If an individual entity benefits in terms of survival from its physiology and its environment, the individual's self-preservation will correspond with the preservation of the aforementioned variables. For man, society forms a core part of his success as a species. Anything that breaks society down, harms man's survival in turn. Murder would be one of those things (coincidentally recognised more or less universally by disparate cultures as, ahem, immoral). Likewise, other things.

What you are doing is taking an emotional view, using it to try to bootstrap socially shaming arguments, and trying to bludgeon me into agreeing that Christianity is unaware of evil.

All I did was show you a self-contradiction in your adopted dogma. Too bad you feel you were being bludgeoned; that was not the intent. When you said you didn't experience any difficulty in accepting a divinity figure ordering a man to slaughter infants, I recognised you were lying. My mention of the same earlier was not questioning your acceptance of your god's plans that lead to the slaughter - that is a given, akin to how a believing Muslim sees no lapse in morality when his faith compels him to eradicate non-Muslims by the means sanctioned in the Quran - I was asking if you were comfortable with the slaughter itself. Are you admitting that you would have wanted those infants to be cut up, even if you had the choice/power to edit things, you being granted in advance the property that your edits wouldn't change the ultimate conclusion of the narrative? You implied you would, but the only people I know who are comfortable with slaughtering infants are psychopaths.

Which is absurd even on the social level, since the worldwide symbol of Christianity is that of a religious minority, an itinerant manual laborer under military occupation, who was betrayed by His friends, convicted by a kangaroo court of His culture, and executed under torture by the occupying authority, by a method so painful that its very name has become a synonym for "painful torture".

LOL, now you are resorting to the same thing you accused me of adopting: appealing to emotions. As if no human died a more painful death than crucifixion.

Bone cancer is excruciatingly painful, and lasts for years as the disease takes its course, and the ones suffering don't have the luxury of knowing for a fact that they can transcend death (because they know they aren't divinity). And even more absurd on a Theological level, for Christianity's tenet is that this Man is God Himself, come to partake in our suffering and death ("he has tasted death for every man") and in doing so, to destroy the ultimate power of death.

Just to remind, that 'Man' isn't the same 'man' as you are. Blurring the distinction does no one any good. The 'Man' knew he could transcend death, but 'man' doesn't. Important difference.

Life can rise again, and fall again, with each cycle. Not quite as "geo-centric" or "narrow" as you might be wont to conclude, if the Universe does operate in cycles.

It's cute. It thinks it knows science.

Have you noticed that thermo has been experimentally confirmed; but not only that, it gives its results even without relying upon the atomic model?

Whereas we have no experimental evidence to confirm cycles; it's still vaporware.

Re-read my previous comment. I explained this, Ref: societal obligations.

I read it. But it's pointless. Not as a pejorative, but a description of its relation to science. Science states that individuals and species go extinct all the time; whether localized short term changes in the environment such as a flood or famine, changes in the ecological niche (receding of Ice Age glaciers kind of helped do in the Saber Tooth Viking Kitty), or the Earth being struck by a whipped cream pie (Hugo-award winning Science Made Stupid, now unfortunately out of print), or yet again, the Sun following its evolution to Red Giant, or, longer still, the Heat Death of the Universe.

Life dies out.

So whence comes your insistence that "survival good, death bad" ?

You implied you would, but the only people I know who are comfortable with slaughtering infants are psychopaths.

Naah. You're failing to realize moral development over time. People did that kind of thing all the time back then: you can even find one of the Jewish prophets speaking to a messenger from a foreign king, "I'm looking at you odd because the Lord is showing me the devastation you will cause in Israel. Killing infants and ripping open women with child."

And the dude replies, "Who is your servant, that he should do this great thing?"

The prophet answers, "The Lord has shown me you will be the next King over Syria."

So the guy goes home, smothers the King of Syria in his sleep, and assumes the throne.

Or you have the quote in Psalms, "Woe to you, Babylon you devastator! Happy is he who does to you what was done to us! Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against a rock!"

But, you know, this kind of thing still happens quite often in the modern, civilized, enlightened 20th century: as the diary of Japanase troops who invaded (IIRC) the Philippines talk about "we came across a pregnant woman today. We stuck our bayonets her huge belly and skewered her like a piece of meat." (Try the Time-Life series on WWII for that quote.)

Or, for that matter, the infamous Rape of Nanking by Imperial Japan, which was so bad, that John Rabe, the official representative of Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan, became horrified to the extent that he wrote a personal letter to Adolph Hitler appealing for clemency on humanitarian grounds.

Or the Holmodor, where official testimony before the US Congress of survivors related people eating their own children -- which was also prophesied, and happened, in the Old Testament.

Or the practice of under Mao's terror of decapitating a family member then forcing the survivors to sleep in a bed with the remains.

Or the Palestinian terrorist who attacked a family and hacked them to death including infants; or the other one who came across a dad and his four-year-old daughter, shot the dad to death first, and then picked up the girl and bashed her head in against a rock, so the last thing she remembered was the death of her father before her eyes.

If I really thought death bothered you, you'd be complaining about these more recent examples, rather than the GNUatheist approach of "OOH, look, I found this bloodthirsty God on an atheist site and I'll cut and paste and humiliate this Christianist because I know his Bible better than him."

The problem with this, is the same as with the other supposed gotcha of "why doesn't God heal amputees?"

They are both reduced cases of theodicy, relying on novelty for emotional impact.

It's not working.

LOL, now you are resorting to the same thing you accused me of adopting: appealing to emotions. As if no human died a more painful death than crucifixion.

No, it's easier than that. You thought you were going to wow me with suffering, because to you, Christianity is just SWPL, so I would be horrified if I knew what the world was "really like."

I just showed how your central contention was based on a chronic *mis*understanding of Christianity. You tried to pretend that if you came up to me and made a big scary face "BWUHAHAHAHAHA" I'd shit my pants and run. Which is funny, because a generation or so ago, the big fad among atheists was attacking Christianity as merely being a crutch for those who were hopeless in this life -- opiate of the masses and all that; the exact opposite of the current fad of accusing Christians of being spoiled and indifferent.

I guess the KGB-type controllers behind all your organizations figured out that it wasn't working, and also figured nobody would notice if they suddenly did a 180 on their accusations.

You atheists are too stupid to notice; as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, it begins to look as if no stick is too weak or absurd with which to try to attach Christianity.

If death bothers you, great. It's supposed to...but there is nothing in scientism which justifies this belief; whereas Christ came down and was resurrected to defeat death. You're barking up the wrong tree.

Incidentally -- as far as killing children, it's the atheist Peter Singer who advocates killing unwanted healthy children after birth at the mother's whim.

Suck on that.

Jews *used* to kill, but only within strict geographical boundaries; Christians killed, to counter hundreds of years of forcible conversion and invasions from Islam, then began pissing matches with each other (note, for the nonce, the Christians outgrew it from within, whereas the Muslims haven't even had anything corrsponding to the Reformation); Atheists began killing with the French revolution, then the Russian revolution and have left everyone else in the dirt in terms of body count: and if you read the exhortations of the Socialist and Communist leaders, you will find that they openly and continuously speak, almost in terms of sexual lust, for torture and death. And their deed follow them.

Similarly with the Muslims.

But that's not allowed to get mentioned, because shut up, because you're only supposed to prove your open mindedness by attacking Christianists.

You remind me of the Film Actors Guild from Team America:

Nice try.

Have you noticed that thermo has been experimentally confirmed; but not only that, it gives its results even without relying upon the atomic model?

Whereas we have no experimental evidence to confirm cycles; it's still vaporware.

Your point being? Relativity took approx. 50+ years to confirm experimentally. The Dark Energy / Dark Matter findings are barely half a decade old, and their ramifications on the older models are not so easy to brush off under the carpet, so much so even the famed Cosmological Constant is under consideration for revision. So... no sale. And by the way, the Cyclic Model does not conflict with Heat Death necessarily (Baum-Frampton Model, 2007).

I read it. But it's pointless. Not as a pejorative, but a description of its relation to science. Science states that individuals and species go extinct all the time; whether localized short term changes in the environment such as a flood or famine, changes in the ecological niche (receding of Ice Age glaciers kind of helped do in the Saber Tooth Viking Kitty), or the Earth being struck by a whipped cream pie (Hugo-award winning Science Made Stupid, now unfortunately out of print), or yet again, the Sun following its evolution to Red Giant, or, longer still, the Heat Death of the Universe. Life dies out. So whence comes your insistence that "survival good, death bad"?

Quite simple, really. Survival implies the preservation of the mechanisms promoting life. Survival has necessitated evolutionary mechanisms that force pain to be felt when survival is threatened - a hard-wired encoding relegating survival as "good" and death as "bad". The models that didn't hard-code this way, failed for obvious reasons, validating the importance of survival to life. You ought to try harder than this.

And the dude replies, "Who is your servant, that he should do this great thing?"

The prophet answers, "The Lord has shown me you will be the next King over Syria."

So the guy goes home, smothers the King of Syria in his sleep, and assumes the throne.

Or you have the quote in Psalms, "Woe to you, Babylon you devastator! Happy is he who does to you what was done to us! Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against a rock!"

Or, for that matter, the infamous Rape of Nanking by Imperial Japan, which was so bad, that John Rabe, the official representative of Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan, became horrified to the extent that he wrote a personal letter to Adolph Hitler appealing for clemency on humanitarian grounds.

Or the Holmodor, where official testimony before the US Congress of survivors related people eating their own children -- which was also prophesied, and happened, in the Old Testament.

Or the practice of under Mao's terror of decapitating a family member then forcing the survivors to sleep in a bed with the remains.

The problem with this, is the same as with the other supposed gotcha of "why doesn't God heal amputees?"

They are both reduced cases of theodicy, relying on novelty for emotional impact.

It's not working.

LOL @ "moral development over time." Suddenly, an "absolute, universal" standard of the "divine" becomes as flaccidly impotent as the vagueries of human consensus-based morality. Divinity tells Saul to slaughter the infants, the natural repulsion to such acts (because they don't promote social cohesiveness, ref: social evolution) sees slaughter as wrong, and the likes of you scream, "Oh, that's the effect of moral development over time!"

Please.

It becomes hard to tell one from the other, ultimately - because both are the products of the human mind, contradicting the qualities of absoluteness.

You've cleverly avoided answering me, though, about your choice if you had the power to edit without distorting the overall theme of the narrative. That was the crux; all else is fluff to avoid addressing that.

No, it's easier than that. You thought you were going to wow me with suffering, because to you, Christianity is just SWPL, so I would be horrified if I knew what the world was "really like."

I guess the KGB-type controllers behind all your organizations figured out that it wasn't working, and also figured nobody would notice if they suddenly did a 180 on their accusations.

You atheists are too stupid to notice; as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, it begins to look as if no stick is too weak or absurd with which to try to attach Christianity.

Incidentally -- as far as killing children, it's the atheist Peter Singer who advocates killing unwanted healthy children after birth at the mother's whim.

Suck on that.

Similarly with the Muslims.

But that's not allowed to get mentioned, because shut up, because you're only supposed to prove your open mindedness by attacking Christianists.

Lose the hyperventilation. You've lost yourself in irrelevant tangents. Even the Japanese became a docile, lamb-like society from what they were famous for, during WW2 - disproving the exclusivity of the "civilization over time" effect you tried to play out above. As for those "attacks", they've swept the length of the spectrum through the ages, precisely because the arguments are valid.

Two centuries ago:

"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion's Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years?"

- John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814.

You remind me of the Film Actors Guild from Team America.

And you, a card-carrying member of the same?

:^)

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