harmonicminer

The previous post in this series is here.

In an earlier post in this series, I said that, “If an idea or perspective can be shown on historical grounds to have arisen from sources which are anti-Christian (something more than merely non-Christian), we are correct to look with great suspicion on its current manifestations, regardless of how much God-talk we surround it with.”   It is not necessary to claim that all of what is normally called “humanistic psychology” is “anti-Christian” in order to demonstrate that a great many of the philosophers and thinkers whose work provided its foundations were certainly anti-Christian.  Further, the value-neutral orientation of humanistic psychology (including extreme non-judgment as a therapeutic tool) is an implicit denial that there is such a thing as right and wrong, other than socially constructed norms.  All too often, the biographies and writings of innovators in the field of humanistic psychology make it clear that they were explicitly reacting against Christianity, along with its moral expectations.

Here is Carl Rogers:

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.

In humanistic psychology, it really is all about you.  In the Christian tradition, it isn’t.  There are certainly a great many Christian therapists who borrow this or that modality from secular humanist therapeutic approaches, but one might wish they exhibited a bit more fear and trembling as they did it.   It is playing with fire to attempt an integration of therapeutic approaches, devised by people hostile to Christian values, with true Christian counseling. It’s not impossible to do, but it’s safe to say that just because your therapist is “a Christian” and has a degree in psychology, it doesn’t follow that you’re getting “Christian counseling.”

Here is a particularly grim presentation that details the deliberate use of psychological therapeutic techniques to destroy faith, and religious institutions built on it. The “therapists” didn’t hide much, didn’t pretend too carefully.  All anyone had to do was simply read what they said in print, read the philosophical underpinnings of their work, and their intent should have been crystal clear.  The ability of the leaders of these Christian institutions to delude themselves was remarkable.  (Then, they sometimes said that they were “deceived.”  But it takes two people to tell a lie, one to tell it, and one to want to believe it.)

One mother pulled her daughter out of a failing Catholic school for girls before it closed, saying, “Listen, she can lose her faith for free at the state college.”  The school was failing specifically because it had turned therapeutic Rogerian wolves loose on the sheep.  Sadly, something similar might be said of some of the Biblical and theological training on offer at some Christian institutions.

It is very common at Christian universities for a course in the “social sciences” to be required of all students.  Often, it can be chosen from a list that includes an introductory course in either Psychology or Sociology.   Is this a value-neutral enterprise, merely revealing a commitment to the liberal arts?  Or are other dynamics also at work?

The leftist slant of the entire discipline of sociology has been well documented.  Do you doubt it?  Start knocking on doors at Christian university sociology departments, and see if you can find anyone who voted for the Republican slate for the last few elections, or is a constitutional originalist, or is a biblical inerrantist, or thinks Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be reversed, or thinks global warming fears are overblown, or believes that government is far less trustworthy than the free market, taxes are too high, and redistributionist programs create more problems than they solve.   If you find one sociologist who shows any leanings to the Right, can you find two?  Better bring your cell phone…  because you’ll soon be calling for driving directions to the next Christian college down the road, somewhat like Diogenes with a GPS lantern. Don’t even bother looking at secular schools.  The GPS satellites’ orbits will decay before you find a right-leaning sociologist.  Unless you know one of these guys, maybe.

Are all approaches to psychology specifically anti-Christian?  Of course not.  But it is a huge mistake to think that all therapeutic approaches are “value neutral” by definition, or that Christian therapists can just pick and choose from the smorgasbord of techniques taught in secular graduate schools.  Psychological therapeutic techniques can’t fix the damage done by sin.  Only Jesus can.  Approaches that direct patients away from understanding that their own sin may be part of their problem can’t be mainstays in the arsenals of Christian therapists.  That way may lie the acclaim of the world, and easy acceptance by professional organizations.  But it is, by definition, based on a lie that Christians, therapists or not, must not tell.

Psychology is a baby science.  It is very, very young and undeveloped.  It is just too new.   In particular, aspects of it that involve theories of personality seem to change about every other decade…  or more often.    Bluntly, we know as much about the psychology of human beings as scientists knew about physics before Isaac Newton.  There were some good observations, scattered examples of brilliance, and a beginning had been made, but none of it made much sense yet, because there was little in the way of a unifying theory that pulled together all the various observations and allowed the making of successful predictions.  (Unless, of course, you take the New Testament approach that the human problem is sin, and those who don’t acknowledge that and deal with it in Jesus’ name are going to have more problems….  always a successful prediction.  And yes, I hear some of the shrinks sneering in the background.  Imagine, sin causing personal adjustment problems….  how quaint and unsophisticated!)

A therapist friend tells me that too much that passes for “therapy” these days is the moral equivalent of fastening a leech on the patient and hoping for the best, but doing so with a sympathetic expression and non-directive attitude.  In fact, he tells me that some Christian therapists seem to believe it is an ethical breach to make any kind of moral judgment or statement to a patient, even to let it be known that the therapist is a Christian.

Is there any evidence that taking a course in Psychology or Sociology, as an undergraduate, results in a happier life, a better adjusted life, a more moral life, a less conflicted life?  Well…  no.  I asked several psychology faculty who had a vested interest in making the case, but they admitted there is none.  Such an admission “against interest” carries great weight.  Of course, there are those who claim that their particular way of teaching is just so spectacular that their students DO become better adjusted because of the course.  I remain skeptical.  But I have actually heard this claim made as justification for requiring all undergrads to take a psychology course.  The therapeutic model of education seems to be in full flower.

Can we be reasonably sure that the content of a course in “Introductory Psychology” will be about the same in 30 years?  That would be the sign of a stable discipline with a solid foundation…  like physics, or chemistry, or calculus, or English, or music theory, or whatever.  Advanced courses will show advances in the discipline, but intro courses won’t change so much in terms of actual content, though pedagogical approaches may change.  If the last 30 years are a guide, I have my doubts that psychology is there yet.

None of this means that psychology isn’t a valid discipline, that people should not enter the field, etc.   It does mean that a little humility is in order.  It means that the value of a single introductory course is probably somewhat less than an intro course in a more stable area of study.   And given the apparent ideological proclivities of too many in the fields of  psychology/sociology, administrators of Christian universities will be well advised to start by reading the articles linked above, and assessing their own institutions.

There are some great therapists out there.  I know a few, and know of a few more.

But denying moral truth cannot be a successful therapeutic technique in the long run, and it is damaging in the short run and long run.

And it is simply a lie that Christians cannot tell, even by implication.

The next post in this series is here.

Two popular notions among certain Christian academics these days are open theism and theistic evolution.

What’s interesting to me is that there is a group of theologians and a few theistic scientists who subscribe to both.  They seem not to be too concerned about the contradiction between:

1) theistic evolution, which basically posits a God who just about never changes his mind in the process of creation, and pretty much never intervenes in a significant way in the working out of the laws of nature as their interplay leads to the universe we see, and almost requires some form of reasonably strong determinism in order to allow its adherents to say “God created the human race,” and

2)  open theism, which posits a God who changes his mind sometimes, can be surprised at how things turn out, doesn’t know the future exhaustively in every fine detail, but only those future events He has predestined in a specific way, and so on.  (Openists would say that God knows all possible futures, including how He will work out His will and foreordained events in each one.)

These sound like two different Gods to me.  And I’m not too sure that either one of them is the God that I worship, though I suppose I’m willing to be convinced by compelling evidence and logic.

A very prominent Christian biologist, Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, essentially admits that some form of relatively exhaustive predestination is required in order for God to have used evolution to bring about humanity.  Collins doesn’t like the phrase “theistic evolution,” preferring his own term, “biologos,” but as far as I can see, they are the same general idea.   Collins’ distaste for the phrase “theistic evolution” seems to have more to do with the difficulty of selling it to the public than with the inaccuracy of it.  Collins specifically rejects the notion that God did anything directly to bring about humanity via evolution, other than set the conditions of the big bang in the first place.  Presumably he does this to avoid being placed in the company of those foolish, benighted believers in Intelligent Design.  That wouldn’t be respectable, y’know.  So his acquiescence to some form of “pre-creation” determinism makes sense.  How else to say God created humanity, rather than merely a universe in which a planet like Earth might come about, on which life might arise, which might evolve into intelligent beings who might happen to have a spiritual nature as well?

From the Biologos website (the organization founded by Francis Collins, but from which he withdrew to accept an appointment from President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health):

Because evolution involves seemingly “random” mutations, it seems that the Earth could have been the home of a different assortment of creatures.  But belief in a supernatural creator leaves the possibility that human beings were fully intended.  An omniscient creator could also have created the Universe’s natural laws so as to inevitably result in human beings. (emphasis mine)

As in Collins’ book, this seems a clear admission that some form of determinism is required for theistic evolution, as understood by one of its chief scientific proponents.

Open theist Greg Boyd, in his book God of the Possible, presents a view of God’s created order in which the future is not pre-determined, so much so that God does not know it exhaustively.  To quote from the Amazon description of his book,

Boyd sidesteps the more abstruse theological debates surrounding this issue in favor of a patient, but not pedantic, exposition of a “motif of future openness” in biblical narrative and prophecy. These biblical texts repeatedly portray God as changing plans in response to human decisions, viewing future events as contingent and even being disappointed at how events turn out. Boyd clearly believes the debate over open theism has gotten off to an unfortunate start, as disagreements about the “settledness” of the future have unnecessarily been interpreted as challenges to God’s omniscience or sovereignty.

In other words, in contrast to process theology, in which God is seen to change, develop and “learn,” open theism is presented by Boyd as merely “the open view of the future,” i.e., it’s more a statement about the kind of universe God chose to create than about God Himself.

Understandably, historic Christian understandings are often seen to be threatened by either of these perspectives.  My point here is not to challenge them directly, but to point out that they challenge each other.  That makes it very interesting that there are so many academics who appear to believe both.

Consider:  if God brings about his fore-ordained will in an “open future” universe, He is a God who clearly is constantly interacting with it, adjusting circumstances to reflect events that were NOT fore-ordained, and which God did not directly choose.  When the first bacterium turned left instead of right, God moved its food source where it would find it anyway.   (Hey you, the orphan germ, can’t you see where the kitchen is?)   And surely there would be many such events all along the developmental path of life on earth.

The point?  It seems to me that the Intelligent Design view of the development of life is more suited  to the “open future” view (of the open theists) than “theistic evolution” is.   Yet the open theists love to keep company with the theistic evolutionists, to the extent that they appear on the same academic programs at universities, apparently because the programmers of these conferences believe that theistic evolution and open theism somehow support each other.

I guess they buy the notion of a God who doesn’t know how it all turns out, but predetermined it anyway to make sure it turned out like He wanted.

I suppose it’s also possible that God cheats at solitaire.

This is a repost of something I put up last September, before Obama was elected, of course.  I think it’s very appropriate for what has happened under Obama’s watch already, and what’s perhaps about to happen with healthcare.

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Being a politician, and especially being President, has aspects in common with being a parent, and with being a physician.

Good parents, first and foremost, need to avoid damaging their children. Maybe I have low standards for parenting. But if you can raise a child to the age of 18 or so, and have helped them avoid doing damage to themselves (they aren’t substance abusers, high school dropouts, criminals, etc.), and if they know you love them, and they love you, you’ve probably won. Sure, there are tons of nice things to try to do, but they depend at least as much on the nature of the child as on parenting magic. The point: you are to raise the child, help where you can, not go against the fundamental nature of the child by trying to get things from them they can never do or simply hate (and you’ll have to be somewhat sensitive while discovering the child’s nature), and avoid messing the child up. Everything else is gravy, and we all know how bad that is for your health, in excess.

There is a similar principle in medicine, sometimes attributed to Hippocrates, “First, do no harm.” It means, generally, that if you can’t fix it, at least don’t make it worse, or create a new problem. Medical doctors used to attach leeches to “bleed” patients to remove “ill humors” that were making them ill. Of course, they were simply weakening their patients, in most cases. Thalidomide babies of 1950s helped lead to the creation of the modern FDA drug approval process (which has created its own problems), another example of doctors causing harm while trying to do good.

What has this to do with politics? It’s pretty simple: some problems are very complex, and are rooted in human nature and individual choice. The attempt to use governmental power to “fix” them is likely to create new problems, frequently without making a serious dent in the old ones, and sometimes making the old ones worse.

So: beware of the politician who promises things that have never been, that sound too good to be true, that depend on very complex systems managed by governmental power and oversight, and that create incentives for individuals and organizations to behave in ways counter to the intent of the new program or policy. Raise taxes on the rich, and they’ll change their behavior in ways that don’t lead to economic growth, and you’ll actually reduce tax receipts to the government. Offer benefits to unwed mothers, and you’ll have more unwed mothers. Fix prices at some “fair” level, and you’ll have shortages. Provide “free” or “cost controlled” healthcare, and you’ll soon run out of healthcare services…. a special case of price fixing, in essence. And so it goes.

I think it’s very likely that Obama plans huge, radical changes which will have unpredictable effects, not solve the problems he claims the changes are aimed at (or make them worse), and create new ones. The article at the previous link makes it clear that the danger of Obama’s election is not that he won’t keep his promises; it’s that he will. What else can you expect from someone whose ideological hero’s manifesto is titled Rules for Radicals? And he is likely to appoint judges who have similar intentions, to make sure his radical changes are declared to be “constitutional”.

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Unfortunately, it seems that the predictions I made here are coming true.  Obama has made huge changes to the relationship between government, business, and individuals, and seems to plan even larger ones.  FDR used an economic downturn to change the course of America, and we struggle under the programs he set in motion up to this day.   Obama, who only thinks he’s FDR, seems to be going down the same road….  only instead of driving a 1930 Packard, he’s driving a 2009 Corvette….  which he probably “got free” from GM (of course, you actually helped pay for it), and he’s driving us all, pedal to the metal, towards a utopia that never existed, and never will.

Better fasten your seat belt.  Put on a helmet if you have one.  The crash is going to be spectacular.

Is this the end for human space flight?

SO WE won’t be going to Mars, not in my lifetime anyway. And not back to the moon either, not for decades. Buzz Lightyear fantasies are dashed. Don’t believe the spin – the dream is over.

OK, the Augustine panel’s review of NASA’s human space-flight plans outlines several options. Mars may be out, but the moon is still in with a shout, and plans to go to the Lagrange points and even the asteroids are mooted. Technically, all this is probably doable. But it won’t happen, and here’s why.

The problem is not money: the US can afford an extra $3 billion a year. It is psychological. NASA, the only game in town, has no idea what space is for, and no audacity.

Sooner or later, we’ll go. We’ll have to. The earth, large and varied as it is, is finite, and we will need the resources of space, just to sustain life on earth.  And we’ll need to protect civilzation from space-borne catastrophe, sooner or later.

But the people who go, who first reap the benefit, who first control the high frontier (since we seem to be relinquishing it) will probably speak Chinese.   Our great-great-grandchildren may vacation on a Chinese owned space platform, and get there on Chinese vehicles.

Someone is going to do it.  It should be US.

Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

In the meantime, Obama and the Left want to saddle us with onerous carbon cap and steal legislation.

This is not a good time to be poor, because the developed world doesn’t want you to get electricity into your village.

From Memri

Following are excerpts from a sermon delivered by Egyptian cleric Mahmoud Al-Masri, which aired on Al-Nas TV on August 10, 2009.

Mahmoud Al-Masri: My dear brothers, we want to repent, and we want to take by the hand those people who have not yet repented. We should feel pity for them. By Allah, we should not be tough with them. These people are sick. They are sinners. We should feel pity for them, we should care for them. We should act like doctors who care for the sick. You should care for them and feel great pity for them, and seek any ingenious way to make a person repent.

I’d like to tell you a very nice story. Once there was a Muslim who lived next to a Jew. The Muslim saw in the Jew a measure of goodheartedness, however small, and he wanted to find any way to make him convert to Islam. So he went to him and asked: “Don’t you feel the need for Islam? Why don’t you become a Muslim?” The Jew said: “The only thing preventing me from becoming a Muslim is that I love drinking alcohol. I would have become a Muslim ages ago, but the only thing stopping me is that I am an alcoholic.”

The Muslim devised a plan. He said: “No problem, become a Muslim, and continue to drink.” The Muslim didn’t meant this, of course, but he said to him: “Become a Muslim, and continue to drink.” The Jews said: “Fine.” He said: “I proclaim that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” The Muslim said to him: “Now you have become a Muslim. If you drink alcohol, we will carry out the punishment for drinking alcohol on you, and if you renounce Islam, we will kill you.” So the man remained a Muslim and never drank alcohol again. This was a nice trick by this good Muslim.

Now, THAT’s evangelism.

In a review of Christopher Caldwell’s new book on Europe and Islamic immigration, Jacob Laksin discusses The Crescent and the Continent

….mass immigration in Europe was predicated on several assumptions, nearly all of them false. Needing cheap labor to fuel their expiring postwar industrial economies, Europeans assumed that the immigrants they turned to would be temporary; that they would not qualify for welfare; and that those who remained would assimilate and shed the cultural mores and habits of their home countries. The Europeans were wrong on all counts. When its textile mills and factories closed in the sixties and seventies, Europe was left with a vast, imported underclass with one tenuous link to its adopted countries: the welfare payments on which it had come to rely.

The demographic transformation was profound. Europe has always had immigration, but the scale of its midcentury influx was without precedent. And one group led the way. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were practically no Muslims in Europe; today, it is estimated, there are about 20 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Equally dramatic was the change in immigrants’ economic fortunes. In the sixties and seventies, Germany’s Turkish migrant workers actually boasted higher labor-force participation than native Germans did. Today, unemployment in Germany’s Turkish community tops 40 percent—three times the national unemployment rate. Nor is Germany an outlier. Some 40 percent of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands are on welfare, Caldwell reports, as are two-thirds of French imams.

Will the USA learn before it’s too late that importing low skill workers is not the solution to American economic woes? It’s not looking promising, from where I sit….  And that’s at least partly because too many politicians think importing low skill workers IS the solution to their political woes.

A friend of mine has been asking me to explain why free market friends insist that the economy is not a “zero sum” game.  To him, it seems as if anyone who makes money must be getting it from someone else, who then doesn’t have it.  On his understanding of the situation, there are winners and losers, and people who wind up with more money are the winners.

We live in a remote area at 4500 feet elevation.  It can get quite cold, and there is no natural gas service underground.  If you want to heat by burning gas, you have to buy propane.  In our area, almost everyone has a large propane tank on their property, and has propane delivered once each month.   It’s expensive, compared to natural gas, and with a large house in cold weather you can spend a lot of money heating the place.

We have a wood stove in my home.  We put it in last year, because the propane bills were killing us.  Last year, instead of spending up to $500 per month on propane bills during the coldest weather, we heated our home for the entire winter on about $600 worth of wood, which we had delivered.  (It looks like the wood stove will pay for itself by the end of this winter.)  Basically, it costs about $150 for a really big pickup truck full of wood.  Four of those did it for the season.  The guys who delivered it are mostly tree-cutters themselves.  They are hired to cut down trees, and they simply cut them up and take them to their lots.  They let the wood sit there for several months or a year to “season” it, then they cut it up into wood-stove size pieces with chainsaws and power-splitters, and they sell it.

So, this year, I thought I’d really save some money, and instead of having the wood delivered, I’d go get it in the national forest, where the forest service very kindly sells low cost permits for people to pick up wood that the forest service people have cut down already, and (with some help from a kindly brother-in-law with a trailer and a chainsaw) I’d cut it up myself.  So far, I’d say I’ve spent about 10-12 hours of time messing with it (my brother-in-law has spent even more).  My back hurts, and my legs are sore.  And I’ve only got, so far, about as much wood as 1 and 1/2 pickup truck deliveries.  So there’s plenty more work to be done.

For a really entertaining time, come and watch as I try to hit a splitting wedge with a six pound sledge hammer.  I have one eye that works, and have never had any depth perception…  so it’s really dumb luck if I manage to make solid contact with the wedge.   My 11yr-old daughter comes out and watches sometimes….  she’s not very good at pretending not to laugh.

If you are forming the impression that, on an hourly basis, this attempt at economizing isn’t paying for itself, you’ve got the right idea.  You may sing the glories of self-reliance, you may tell me I needed the exercise anyway, but the fact is that my brother-in-law and I are making not much more than minimum wage for doing this, in terms of the money we’ve “saved.”  Since I can make money plying my trade, at a considerably higher rate, and work is generally available when I want it, I’m losing money trying to save money.  And that doesn’t even count the money my brother-in-law spent buying a professional grade chainsaw.   He’s a lawyer, which means he’s used to making enough money in a couple of hours to buy my whole season’s worth of wood.  But luckily for me, he considers the whole thing something of an adventure.

So, what’s the point of all this?

I pay for wood to be delivered, and it comes relatively cheaply and with minimal work remaining for me to do.  The people who sell it to me make money, so they get value from the transaction.  I get value, because I can spend my time doing something more economically productive than chopping wood, at which I am singularly unskilled.  Or I can just kick back.  Or some of both.

The “zero sum” way of thinking doesn’t explain this transaction.  The choice is not between one person collecting and chopping wood for himself (me) or someone else doing it the same way I would do it, but whom I have to pay.    The choice is between an unskilled and ill-equipped person doing it (me) or a skilled and well-equipped person doing it (the people I pay).  I MAKE money by paying them to do it, if I can use that time to do something else of benefit to me.  They make money because of their skills and investment in equipment, which allows them to do efficiently what I would have to do very slowly and inefficiently.  So they make more money, and so do I, and value is created in the economy that wouldn’t be there if I just chopped my own wood.

Even if we take money out of the equation, it’s clear that everyone isn’t equally skilled and well-equipped to do everything, and so even in a barter economy there is not a “zero sum” of net economic value in the society.  Every time someone becomes more productive, the entire society gets richer, because there is more value available.  When a lot of people become more productive, by a combination of capital investment, skill acquisition and greater efficiency, value is created, which in a money-based economy means that there is simply more money to go around in the system.

This basic fact of economics was best explained by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations.”  You don’t want to read the original, unless you have insomnia.  But here is a very entertaining introduction to it.

In a more or less free market, and even in a mixed economy like what we have now (somewhat free, somewhat regulated), “zero sum” thinking just doesn’t reflect reality.

It never has, or we’d still be living in log cabins and riding around in horse drawn wagons.

Recently, on another comment thread, I had some comments to make about the origin of the verb “to diss”

That’s because it comes from the ancient Hebrew word “dissohnia” which means, roughly (go with me here, some words don’t translate well between languages), “without ownership.” Most scholars believe it is the root word for the modern verb, “to disown.” But I digress. Or maybe disgress.

The main point is that in modern socialist thought, no one really owns anything except the government (which occasionally deigns to give something back to us, and calls it a “refund,” as if someone is getting some fun back). So the suffix of the word “dissohnia” has been dropped in contemporary usage. That’s how the word got shortened to “diss” (the second “s” being retained to aid proper pronunciation), which simply means “without.”

That’s what makes “diss” (meaning “without”) the perfect word for conversation about socialism, since indeed, in socialist economies, most people eventually ARE without… without opportunity, without redress, without options, without hope, and without lunch, let alone cancer treatment or a heart transplant.

The common phrase “I’m gonna disownya, baby,” can now be understood as a transliteration into colloquial English that retains both the original meaning and original pronunciation of “dissohnia.”

So if you’re feeling dissed by the feds, don’t sweat it. So do the rest of us. And if some sectors of society continue in their current trends, and the government continues to encourage them to do so, we’ll soon be without a next generation, too….

Call it the ultimate DISS.

Congress, of course, is about to DISS us, bigtime.  Today they’re going to try to take over our healthcare, and through the new federal bureaucracy they will create to do that, they plan to regulate about a million other things that you don’t normally think of as relating to “healthcare.”  You think the nanny state is overactive now?

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

There is a slight chance it can be defeated.  Call your congresscritter, today, before 6 PM Eastern Time, when the vote is scheduled to happen.