Do you know what the Electoral College does?

An editorial by Ed Feulner appeared on TownHall.com today highlighting the fact that most Americans just don't really know how government works.  You can find the article here.

According to the article, "The ISI [Intercollegiate Studies Institute] gave more than 2,500 people a 33-question quiz about basic historical and constitutional principles. The average score: 49 percent."

Here are some other results of the test:

* Fewer than half can name all three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial).

* Only 53 percent realize Congress has the power to declare war (even though lawmakers have voted twice in the last eight years to approve foreign wars).

* Just 55 percent know that Congress shares authority over foreign policy with the president. Roughly 25 percent mistakenly believe that Congress shares its foreign policy authority with the United Nations.

This is perhaps the most disturbing part:

In ISI’s sample, 164 of the 2,508 respondents said they had been elected to government office at least once. There’s no way of knowing if this meant federal, state or local government. But it’s sobering to note that those who say they’ve held office earned an average score of 44 percent on the civic literacy test -- lower than the public they were elected to serve.

And get this:

Among these officeholders, almost half (43 percent) don’t know what the Electoral College does. One in five guessed it “trains those aspiring for higher political office” or “was established to supervise the first televised presidential debates” instead of identifying its actual role: selecting the president of the United States.

So not only are voters tragically uninformed, but the people we're voting for are, as well.

I have a recommendation to anyone who wishes to change this state of affairs. Read the US Constitution. It's actually not long at all. My pocket-sized version is only 37 pages, including all the amendments. Compare this to the European Union Constitution, where the "reader friendly" version has 219 pages.

And if you're not good with big words, they even have a version of the US Constitution for kids!

My brother should appreciate this

A few days ago my brother posted a note with the same title on his blog.  Now I get to return the favor.

The Reason for Good

I have very much enjoyed Tim Keller's The Reason for God, so the following complaint ought not to leave anyone with the impression that I disagree fundamentally with anything the book says.  Still, I don't think I'm just being nit-picky when I make this complaint.

In Chapter 11, entitled, "Religion and the Gospel," Keller lays out the classic evangelical reasoning for doing good works, as opposed to the supposedly Pharisaic view:

In the gospel, the motivation is one of gratitude for the blessing we already received because of Christ.  While the moralist is forced into obedience, motivated by fear of rejection, a Christian rushes into obedience, motivated by a desire to please and resemble the one who gave his life for us.

This is great and everything, but I have two problems with it.  One is simply a common sense problem.  I tend to sympathize with my atheist friends who point out, "Why can't one do good simply because it is good?"  Indeed, it sometimes feels just as trite to try to please God out of gratitude as it does to try to earn God's favor with good works.  Gratitude is wonderful, but it really is only one the many emotions that drives us in our Christian life.

The second reason is that I honestly don't see the Bible itself put such a great emphasis on this gratitude bit.  Honestly, most of the time you see that good works are motivated by reward.  See, for instance, the words of Jesus countless times in the Sermon on the Mount.  But even in Paul, who for some evangelicals is thought to teach nothing ever except justification by faith, you see how good works are done in order to gain a reward:

I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.  Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize?  Run in such a way that you may win it. (1 Corinthians 9:23-24)

For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming?  Is it not you?  Yes, you are our glory and joy! (1 Thessalonians 2:19-20)

For he will repay according to each one's deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life... (Romans 2:6-7)

The way some people talk about Paul, you would have thought the answer to Paul's rhetorical question in 1 Thessalonians 2:19 was going to be, "Nothing but the blood of Jesus!"  While that is a great song, and true as far as it goes, Paul doesn't say that, and in fact he really seems convinced that his good works (namely bringing the Thessalonians to Christ) will be cause for boasting when the Lord Jesus comes.

Well, I suppose one could take all of this biblical data a little too far if one is not careful.  But it does suggest that gratitude as a motivation for good works might not be sufficient.

The way I have come to see it is more in terms of Jesus as a true political leader (after all, we do call him "King," do we not?) and as such, he brings a certain vision to his reign over the world.  Think of our own political system.  Some people really think Barack Obama is the Messiah or something.  Why?  Is it not because they think he's promised them the right direction for America?  Is it not because he's going to bring us "Change"?  The hope is that by following his plan, all will now be right with the world.

Only God is the real thing.  Jesus Christ is the true Messiah, the one whose vision of the world actually is all it's cracked up to be.  His notions of power, goodness, love, justice, and truth are all exactly what we need them to be.  His rule will be as described in all those amazing prophecies like Isaiah 9:2-7 and 11:1-9.

So why do we do good works?  I think it is honestly for reasons similar to the reasons people went out and volunteered for the Obama campaign.  Change is coming.  A new vision of the world is here.  This is what human beings are made for, and this really is what drives us.  When Paul talks about boasting before Jesus Christ, I think the sentiment being expressed is, "Yeah, the King is now here, and I had a part in his campaign!"

Jesus Christ's campaign isn't a campaign for votes.  It is more of a military campaign, in which all evil will be vanquished.  To be part of that is exactly what we were made for, and when you start to think about it in these terms, there's no reason to really ask anymore, "Why do good works?"  This is simply what we were made for; there's no denying the attractiveness of it.

Change is coming.  God is here.  We, through our actions, can be part of His campaign to take over the world.  Or we can continue to be those rebels who get overthrown.  The core message of the Bible seems to be, take your pick--either way, God is going to win.

Forgiveness

So, I finished reading Tim Keller's The Reason for God, which I last blogged about here.  There is much to praise about the book, and I especially enjoy the last three chapters of the book.  Keller has a very good explanation of why Jesus had to die, and his chapter on "The (True) Story of the Cross" is almost a sermon on what it truly means to forgive.

Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself.  Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears.

There really is something about being wronged that makes a person physically ill.  I mean, you can literally feel the hurt flowing through your body.  That's what you have to absorb in order to truly forgive someone.  And yet, in parables that appear in passages such as Matthew 18:23-35, we read that the sins we have to forgive others are petty and worthless compared to the sins God must forgive us for.  Forgiveness, then, really is a requirement that Jesus makes of us (see Matthew 5:14-15).  I suppose it's true what Christians say: the more you realize God has forgiven you, the more you realize how right it is to forgive others.

I know there are many who object to this idea, and I've had some objections, myself.  I mean, does everyone in the world really owe God that much?  What about people who are just plain awesome--always giving to the poor, doing great things for the community, and generally being nice, wonderful people?

I think it helps to look at things in terms of the grand narrative that Christianity presents.  In the beginning, God created us with power over the perfect world that He had created.  Our rebellion consisted not in breaking this or that petty commandment, but really in destroying this perfect created order.  The message of the Old Testament is that the human race, corporately, in cooperation with one another (a cooperation that disintegrated precisely because of our sin) destroyed the perfect order God gave us.

I don't think we owe God more than we can ever pay simply because God the lawyer can cite points A, B, and C where we have failed to live up to His standard.  I think we owe Him more than we can ever pay because we, the creatures He designed to be leaders over a perfect world, used our power to achieve our own greedy ends.  We, the vice-regents, set ourselves up as kings.  Even the most kind, nice, and moral people among us have taken part in this rebellion, in which the One True King of all creation has been rejected by His people.  So it's not really a question of how "nice" we are.  It's simply a question of who we serve.

God is clearly not the tyrant in this image.  Although rebellion is the thing He condemns us for, it is not because He can't stand to be out of control.  Clearly, God has been happy to let us make our own decisions, i.e. our own mess of things for thousands of years.  Yet God has always been there in the midst of our faulty, divided kingdom.  He is uncompromising and unyielding in His methods.  His method has always been love, even when it means the kingdoms have literally destroyed themselves by their own evil.

In a way, God's love is oppressive.  His forgiveness is offensive, as forgiveness so often is.  You know--someone forgives you, and you begin to resent them for being the kind of person who can forgive you for what you did.  You begin to say in your heart, "Oh, I bet they think they're better than I am."  It really is hard to be forgiven, to realize that yes, you actually did damage to someone else that had to be absorbed, not merely forgotten.

But in thinking about all of this, I have begun to realize that God forgives not simply because it is good for us, but surely because it is good for Him.  As Hebrews 12:2 rather mysteriously says about Jesus, he "for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame...."  It is a nice sentimental (and true) thing to say that God didn't have to forgive us, but He did for our sake.  Yet it is also true, and powerfully so, that God forgave us for His sake.

That means there is something fundamentally good about forgiving.  We don't simply owe that much to God that we must forgive everyone.  It is also good for us.  In a truly Christian worldview, to forgive is to show or perhaps gain strength.  Just as you can imagine a warrior becoming stronger by defeating more and more enemies, so does a person become stronger by defeating evil right where it strikes the hardest--in the heart.  Forgiveness is indeed a powerful weapon.

That is why to me, Christ's death on the cross really was an incredible victory, not just for us but for him.  It is something we should emulate (indeed, he commands us to--see Luke 14:27).  Of course without the resurrection, the victory of the cross would be no victory at all.  Still, the crucifixion stands in my mind as Christ's true weapon against evil.  In fact, I will venture so far as to say it is still a weapon being used against evil today, whereby God still absorbs the evil that is being committed against Him even now.

All of this helps me to realize the value of forgiveness in my own life.  I look back on all of those times I let things get to me, instead of absorbing them, and I realize I missed a chance to become stronger.  I missed out on something desirable not only for others, but even for myself.  Just think how empowered someone must feel when they actually don't feel the need to retaliate against someone who does them wrong.

You will have to forgive me, dear reader, whoever you are, for going on and on with this.  I just think it's so wonderful when these truths come together, not just sentimentally, but logically.  God is a God we can actually think about, and He makes sense.  Hallelujah.

Robot solves a Rubik's cube

So, my brother put this video up on his blog, saying I should appreciate this.  Indeed, I did.

I'm sorry, I don't care what you think of math and science.  That's just cool.

TeachersUnionFacts.com

My mother is a public school special education teacher, so I've been hearing about teachers' union politics roughly all my life.  Unions never sounded to me like a good idea, mostly because I have a strong philosophical bent toward merit pay.  Even if unions have a place in the workforce, particularly in education, one has to look at the facts about teachers' unions today and see that they are rather ineffective in ensuring quality education for students.

Check out this video:

The Truth about Teachers Unions from Union Facts on Vimeo.

I happened to find this web site, www.teachersunionfacts.com, and I was really impressed by how well it is put together, exposing the flaws in the current system.  I think education is probably my #2 political issue, right after right to life issues.  Good education is the only way to maintain a free society, and right now, according to the web site, our education is the worst in the world per dollar spent.

Something has to be done, and I think that includes reforms to give power back in the hands of the students and parents of students, and out of the hands of teachers' unions.  I'll definitely be keeping a close watch on this issue.

The Problem of Suffering

I've been thinking a lot lately about justice. One of the biggest (and most logically cogent) complaints people have about Christianity is that it has tremendous difficulty explaining evil and suffering in this world. Atheism offers a chillingly logical explanation: there is suffering because the universe does not care whether or not we suffer, and we happen not to be invincible in the universe as it exists. So, do the best you can, and try to appreciate all that is good in life. In the end, there's not going to be any cosmic justice. The universe does not care that you're here now, and it won't care when you leave. So forget about the big picture and focus on living a good life now.

There are no apparent logical contradictions here, except that it makes the whole pursuit of justice an absurdity. I think this idea is well-developed in lots of authors from C. S. Lewis to present day apologists like Timothy Keller. Oh, and speaking of Keller, I'm reading his book, The Reason for God, which also happens to be why I'm writing this post right now. It's a nice read, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in answers to hard questions about Christianity.

Keller develops the point about why the pursuit of justice is absurd in an atheistic universe in the ninth chapter of his book, entitled, "The Knowledge of God." He makes the case that each of us already knows there is a God, and we think and act on that knowledge every time we make an assertion like, "This is wrong."

I've heard this kind of thing before, and it's the kind of thing that gets people on both sides of religious debates going in circles. Atheists will be floored by the idea that you have to have some big God telling you what to do in order to have a sense of right and wrong. And then Christians will wonder why atheists can't see how if it's all up to us, then really right and wrong are just relative and therefore meaningless. It's so simple, each side thinks, wondering how the other side could allow themselves to be trapped in such a web of nonsense.

Fortunately, Keller has been talking with people who have genuinely well-thought doubts about Christianity long enough to know better. That's why for all of his typical evangelical arguments he also makes some appeal to what I think is the more potent side of Christian thought.

Here's what he writes in his second chapter, on suffering:

The Biblical view of things is resurrection--not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired by will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.

Having recently read N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope, I am lately rediscovering the incredible power of the truly orthodox Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead. It is not a belief that gives hope to the mere individual. The resurrection of the dead will bring with it healing and restoration to the cosmos, a perfection of all creation.

It seems to me that once you brush aside all the meaningless semantics, the fundamental difference between Christianity and other worldviews is the view of what the world is going to become, and how it is going to become that way. Atheism especially predicts no happy ending for humans, no real goal toward which we as a race are moving. But Christianity predicts a future made for human beings to flourish--yet not just humans, but all creation. This gives objectivity to the concept of justice. We know certain things are right and certain things are wrong because we know that one day, things will be like this, and not like that.

We will live forever; we will not die. It is bad when people die, and it is wrong when people kill each other. We will lack nothing, and we will be perfectly content. It is bad when people don't have enough, and it is wrong when people steal from one another. There is a whole logic to justice founded on the objective reality that we anticipate as Christians. All justice can be seen as a glimpse of the future we long for, the future we know will come with the resurrection of the dead.

How will this be accomplished? Through suffering, Christianity says. Not just our suffering, but even the suffering of God, who suffered on the cross. And not only that, but even the suffering of the whole creation--see Romans 8:19-23.

We have the what, the how, but there still is this elusive, "why?" Why should we suffer? Why does God allow us to suffer? Why does God subject his creation to suffering? Even if He's justified in doing so, why? Even if the fact that He suffered for us justifies the fact that He allows our suffering, well, why did He suffer? Could He not have chosen some other path?

I think that Christians must all admit that in some sense, this "why" will always be elusive. Just read the book of Job; in the end, God didn't really see the need to answer Job's question, nor did Job persist in demanding one. Yet I've always found this question fruitful. It always causes me to remember amazing things. I always remember how the greatest memories of my life are those which involved the most hardships. I remember how every time I've found something worth pursuring, there always seemed to be a degree of pain involved. I remember how often conquering pain can be a far greater pleasure than any pleasure that comes in the absence of pain.

Most of all, I remember that Jesus is the great conquerer. He does not merely deflect pain and suffering. He absorbs it, takes it into himself, and destroys it. That is a true conqueror.

With that kind of conquering spirit, who knows what the body of Christ could do today? Save the world, maybe? At the very least, we could give a glimpse of what we know must one day come. The sooner the better, I say.