But when I read this post by Richard Beck at Experimental Theology, I knew I had to break my silence – even if only for a moment.

Dr. Beck is 100% correct in his claim that contemporary Christianity has become less about being a good person and more about doing certain kinds of things. (His list includes some explicitly religious things like attending church, reading the Bible, and praying, as well as some more political items such as “Voting Republican”, “Arguing with evolutionists”, and “Not reading Harry Potter.”) His claim has support in how Christians act regularly – I commented that the phenomenon of Christians leaving tracts in lieu of money for tips at restaurants is one example of how some Christians (certainly not all – I don’t think that most Christians do this) replace a moral action (providing a tip to someone who served you, especially given that servers in most restaurants are paid less than minimum wage and only make up that income in tips) with a supposedly “Christian” action (evangelizing – although as I noted, leaving a tract is about the most impersonal form of evangelism I can think of, maybe besides a billboard or a flyer in the mail).

Maybe there’s a presumption in churches that people who come to church are good people by virtue of desiring (or at least consenting) to come, but I think that this presumption would only show the naiveté of contemporary Christianity. Being religious doesn’t make you good, that much is clear. What churches ought to do is to tell our congregations, “Listen, we want you to be good people because that’s what God calls us to do, and that’s the example Jesus Christ set for us while he was here on earth – not reading the Bible, not attending church, not even necessarily praying or fasting or baptism or taking Communion. We think all those other things are important, but if you want to be a Christian, you need to work on becoming a good person first. We absolutely do not want you to think that spending time in prayer, in church, or in any other religious activity is a substitute for loving your neighbor and for living a good, moral life that shows respect for all humans.”

But then again, piety is often easier than living the moral life.

It’s been interesting, though, in how I’ve been reminded: they have been people who have tried to use the things I’ve written here to form a snapshot of my beliefs and ideals. While that might be generally pretty useful, I’m also noticing that it’s not sufficient.

For me, this space has always been tentative – or at least, I have always thought so. Too often do we expect publication – and yes, even a blog is publication in this day and age – to solidify an idea in writing, frozen at the moment that it stopped being a private thought and instead became public words. Generally, the prevalence of what is sometimes referred to as “the rhetoric of assertion” (cf. this essay by Gary Olsen) makes this idea that much more pervasive. But blogging for me has never been simply about the publication of thoughts; it is the perfect place to explore ideas in a way that is interactive (if I just wanted to put out my own ideas with no interaction, I’d disable comments – and believe me, there are times in the history of this blog that I have wished I didn’t have the convictions that I do about free and open discourse) and in some ways collaborative.

I have been doing that here since August of 2006. (I’ve actually been blogging since around January of 2005, partly here – and wow, how my writing has improved since then! – and for a year on the long-defunct thechristiancynic.com.) It is impossible for me to verbalize all the ways in which my life has changed: I now have two sons (my first wasn’t even born when I started blogging, although he would have been an infant when I started up here), am finishing up a degree that I wouldn’t have even considered at the beginning and which (other than relating to writing itself) has very little to do with the interests that led me to blog initially, and have a different outlook on life altogether because of all the experiences that I’ve encountered along the way, most of which have never been reflected on this blog.

I suppose what I’m doing here is an extended disclaimer: feel free to read anything that I’ve written here. I am (for the most part) unapologetic about what I have said, and I wouldn’t take any of it back even though there is much that I would no longer assent to if you asked me about it. You can disagree, and that’s perfectly fine. If you’re looking to characterize me by what I’ve said, especially the further back that these musings go, then you will be battling rather unsuccessfully with an image of me that does not exist in reality.

Time changes most things, and when progress occurs, that is undoubtedly a good thing. I like to think that I have made progress, and that is enough for me.

I won’t go into great lengths as to how the topic of evolution came up, but suffice it to say, I wasn’t impressed with the way it was presented. Part of the message was on the human tendency to resist change, and whereas I can’t remember how evolution fit into that precisely, it was very clear that evolution was not a scientific theory that accurately describes and accounts for the diversity of life on earth but instead a theory that had been made up, presumably (from the implications) from thin air. It was all I could do to keep from walking out (I might have if I weren’t responsible for a major part of the worship service).

It made me think more about the way that I came to integrate evolution. Yes, my initial acceptance of evolution was primarily based on a cognitive shortcut (I had read enough on the matter and its defense to discern that its proponents were educated, articulate, and honest, while its opponents were at best educated, somewhat articulate, and dishonest), but there was certainly a way in which I came to move that belief into the theistic worldview I now hold.

In educational philosophy, there is a view that I favor known as constructivism; essentially, it is the idea that learning occurs in a generative manner, forming new conclusions based on the interaction of old knowledge and concepts with new data and sensory information. This philosophy of learning is incredibly versatile and applicable to virtually any learning that I can think of, not the least of which is my own area of specialty in education, English/language arts. (Think back to how you initially acquired language, for instance.)

This process of learning, as far as I am concerned, consists of three main stages: 1) stasis (when all of the information has been assimilated into one view; I suspect that this stage is the least frequent), 2) data acquisition, and 3) integration. Most of our conscious time is spent in the second stage, and it is only (edit: well, most generally) through reflective thinking that we engage in the third stage. In the integration stage, several things can happen:

1. Affirmation – The new data aligns with the old views, reinforcing existing knowledge.
2. Negation – The new data outright contradicts the old views, requiring the discarding of the previous knowledge for a new conceptualization. (Counterexamples in logic are an example of this sort of negation, like Popper’s swan analogy.)
3. Reconstruction – The new data challenges the old views, requiring a re-examination of existing knowledge.

In my opinion, reconstruction is much more common or probable given any new data than pure negation; evolution fits into this third category for me. Before I came to accept evolution, my conception of God was as a powerful being who simply poofed life into existence, mostly as it is now (with some clear exceptions like dinosaurs); after, my view morphed into a view of God that is much more subtle, more willing to rely on physical laws to guide a plan out to its end. This is certainly not the view that everyone takes on evolution, but I think this approach comports well with the way that Christianity itself was born: Jesus was our new data, and lots of things changed when He came, but certainly the whole system was not abandoned entirely.

Again, this is somewhat subjective – what kind of data is needed in order to contradict something rather than simply challenging it? where is the threshold for abandoning previous knowledge with somewhat ambiguous data (which could either contradict or merely challenge knowledge, depending on the person)? – but that makes this approach no less accurate a way to go about learning things.

What happens with many Christians, however, is not learning at all; it is denial. I cannot find any good reason to deny evolution as an accurate way to see the world, and I am much more satisfied with my view on God as a result of accepting this truth.

In my interim as a student teacher – which is coming to a close in the next few weeks – I have tried to stay apprised of what is happening with the blogs that I have been following for quite some time (many of which are on this site’s blogroll). One of those which I have come to enjoy greatly is Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars, which I find interesting and enlightening on a number of topics (despite disagreeing personally with Brayton on a number of matters).

Recently, Brayton wrote about Chris Mooney ripping George Will apart for his uninformed and flawed piece on global warming in the Washington Post (both pieces were printed in the Post, actually), and in discussing the issue, he brought up the idea of cognitive shortcuts:

Cognitive shortcuts are leapfrogs over study and analysis to reach a conclusion without going through those intermediary steps. The most common type of shortcut is group identification. If you place yourself within a group – political, religious, ideological, etc – and you are confronted by an issue you do not understand, the default response is to accept whatever the position of that group is and to presume that it must be correct even though you have not taken the time to do any study that would justify that conclusion.

If you’re a conservative, you will blindly accept the standard conservative position on global warming. The leaders of the group you place yourself in have assured you that global warming is a myth, perhaps even a cover for evil intentions, and that is all you think you need to know. If you’re a liberal, you will blindly accept that global warming is a serious problem for the same reason, because the people you respect and follow have told you so.

But in reality, a vanishingly small number of people in either group has ever looked at the actual data and an even smaller number is capable of understanding it, analyzing it and reaching rational conclusions about it.

I was thinking about this as I read some critical reasoning application essays, which was my culminating assignment for a small week-long unit I did on critical thinking and logic with my seniors. One student (who I know is Catholic from personal interactions) wrote about his own reasoning for his Christian faith, and it was interesting to me that he made a point to include science in his reasoning (not that it contributed to his faith but instead that he did address its role in his faith). He took a similar position as I and many other Christians do regarding evolution, that God used it in the creation of the diversity of species on earth. (Well, I assume that his position is something like that; his statement was much more cursory and general.)

It really occurred to me that this student probably uses cognitive shortcuts in his approach to the integration of his Catholic faith and the science he believes to be true as well. From what I can tell, he has grown up Catholic, and so his group participation in that faith dictates some of what he believes regarding God and the apologetic he puts forth for the truth of his beliefs. But clearly at some point he was introduced to the idea of evolution; it might have been from his church, his parents, or some other important figure in his life, but I would venture that it was his formal education in science that in fact influenced this belief. (Indeed, I know the science teachers that he would have had at the high school level – coincidentally, all of whom are Christians, from what I can tell from talking with them – do in fact teach evolution in fair depth, certainly more than I got in my own high school experience.)

This experience in some ways mimics my own, except that my education in evolution has been largely self-discovered through a long history: My initial ideas on the origins of the universe and man were ones rooted in Genesis (although I would have probably never called myself a creationist; my parents never pushed the stranger aspects of flood geology or anything like that on me, and even as a precocious kindergartner/1st grader, I would have known that man most certainly never co-existed with dinosaurs); my interest in Christian apologetics ultimately led me to the Intelligent Design movement, which I followed seriously for some time until I became very much disillusioned by the antics of its proponents; finally, I became much more aware of the evolution side of the creation/evolution (or ID/evolution) debate, and that tended to solidify my own position in thinking evolution to be evident in nature and thus true.

So here I was, an inquisitive and generally philosophically individual in his early twenties who maintained a belief in God (after all, evolution doesn’t preclude a deity; it merely falsifies any sort of strict creationism) and a belief that evolution explains the diversity of life on Earth. How did I comport these views, ones which could be in conflict depending on how either were construed?

To be 100% honest, I still don’t entirely know. Part of my own integration is to acknowledge that I am in some cases taking cognitive shortcuts; I have a fair amount of knowledge on how speciation works, of the evidence for common descent, and so forth, but I certainly have not studied it in enough depth to defend it fully. On the other hand, I have some good reasons to think the universe (although not necessarily life itself) to be the product of some non-natural force, and I do not find sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the Christian Bible and the theistic proofs that I have formerly read and considered. (I say ‘formerly’ only because it’s not a matter of deep interest to me these days; my study of apologetics has really fallen by the wayside for other things.)

I’m not sure exactly what to do about this, though. I do think about these matters sometimes (like now), and I do continue to think about what I believe in the most critical terms I can, but there is a certain extent to which I cannot simply discard the shortcuts upon which I base my core beliefs. Maybe I will jettison them at some point, but not now, and I don’t consider it dishonest to do so for the time being.

There is, after all, only so much I can know, and I must in a sense stand on the shoulders of giants to make decisions about what I believe based on the evidence available in reality. When the limits of man’s knowledge can become something approaching infinity (which will likely never happen), then perhaps cognitive shortcuts can go by the wayside, but for now, they’ll have to do.

I really do have good reason for the gap, I suppose: I just finished an 18-hour semester, and I’m preparing for student teaching, which starts in just a few days for me. I simply haven’t had the time to post anything substantial, and to be honest, I haven’t had anything to say on the typical issues that this blog covers.

So here’s the official word: I will not blog as The Christian Cynic for at least four months. This timeframe coincides with my student teaching, and I will be using all of my energies to fulfill my New Year’s resolution to blog through my student teaching.

It’s possible that I might come back to this blog – it’s equally possible that I might be done with The Christian Cynic. (Maybe I can let this guy have the name back.) Time will tell. If this hiatus is permanent, I thank those of you who have read and those who have commented as well – I have enjoyed your feedback and learned a great deal in the process.

If any of you are still interested in reading what I will be writing on teaching, learning, education, and English language arts, hop on over to Docere Est Discere. I hope to see you around.

As a writer, I appreciate comments that I can get on the content of my entries, which is why I enjoy the current format immensely. However, even though commenters are limited and my blog not well travelled (I presume), I will not tolerate comments made for the sole purpose of promoting other blogs or sites. I would prefer only comments that are directly relevant to the material being covered or at least directly related to the point of this blog itself, so I am henceforth adopting a policy of disapproval for shameless promotion. I won’t moderate all comments that include links to other sites – and in fact, I appreciate the inclusion of such in blog profiles and such as a way of subtle promotion – but if you choose to comment only to link somewhere else without responding to my entry itself, however tangential the content might be to what I am saying, your comment will be taken off. I hate to be authoritarian about it, but this site is mostly writing for myself, even though I hope other people appreciate what I have to say, and as such, I do have some standards.

First, let me say that I disagree with Pruss that “There is good reason to think lying is always wrong.” Well, I disagree with the caveat that he and I may be talking about two different things (that is, he may be construing the term more narrowly than I). For the purposes here, I will use lying to refer to the act of expressing (generally verbally but perhaps even through non-verbal means) a statement or sentiment that the speaker either knows is false or knows she does not have reason to assert as true. (I am incorporating non-verbal communication here because they very often have semantic content that is translated by the other party; a shrug in response to “Do you know what time it is?” would be a lie if the non-verbal party had in fact just glanced at a timepiece he knew to be accurate.) This is to be contrasted slightly with deceit, which is a lie told with a specific goal in mind. These seem like linguistically appropriate terms, although I freely admit that they may have weaknesses in usage.

One reason I wish to separate these two concepts is that, pace Pruss, lying does not seem to be entirely unjustified on Kantian grounds, although I would argue that deceit is. Indeed, I think there are counterexamples where lying can be useful (in a sense that does not treat the individual as a means to an end) or even a consensual act between individuals.

The most obvious example of a consensual lie for me is fiction. When I pick up a Faulker novel (say, The Sound and the Fury), I am distinctly aware of the fact that Yoknapatawpha County is not a real place, and neither are the characters in the novel. Moreover, I am reasonably certain that Faulkner knew that the Compsons are not real people and that the events described in the novel did not actually occur. By all rights, this ought to be called a lie, but one normally does not see fiction condemned as immoral.

A few points seem to bring out the distinction here: first, we cannot say that Faulkner intended the readers of The Sound and the Fury (or any of his books set in the fictional county) to think that Yoknapatawpha County is a real place (although of course Mississippi, the state it is purportedly in, does exist) or that any of the events are true. There is an expectation that the work as a whole is not true, and the reader’s consent justifies this. But consent is not sufficient to ward off the criticism of using the reader as a means to an end; this is clearly not true of fiction, which generally has other purposes that are of benefit to the reader (entertainment, self-awareness, positive emotional instigation, etc.).

My main thesis here is that deceit has an element of subversion: that is, lying is bad when it undercuts or subverts something generally accepted as positive. Fiction has a positive end in itself, and we do not generally consider “reading only things that are true” to be something worthwhile to subvert. On the other hand, seemingly harmless lies (like telling someone you’re doing fine when in fact you are distressed) can subvert ordinary conversation, and this subversion usually violates the Kantian considerations Pruss mentions. In general, the cliché that honesty is the best policy may hold, but it does not appear to be universally so.

So, were [sic] having a discussion about the applicability of a book written by middle-eastern [sic] goat herders (who were also genocides), added to by bipolar preachers and opportunists, edited and translated by politicians, and interpreted by more politicians, scam-artists and cult leaders.

Yeah, I can [sic] were [sic] all going to learn something valuable and useful from this. (emphasis mine)

I was very puzzled by this usage, since genocide is so very rarely used to describe people – it is almost solely used to describe events or even extended campaigns (like the Holocaust, which is the backdrop for the word’s coining by Raphael Lemkin, a Pole, in 1944). What is still stranger is that this usage is meant to describe the perpetrators of genocide as opposed to the victims.

I am somewhat comforted in observing that this usage is not widely recognized; the OED only mentions it in the context of a thing or event.

One appropriate Google hit came up in the first few tries:

• Besides, would anybody blame the US troops of genocide for bringing this disease to Europe, then why are there people saying Spanish conquistadores were genocides when it is proved that most of the indians who died after the Spanish arrival in the new world were because of illnesses that did not exist in America? (source)

Strangely, suicide – a word with a similar structure – does in fact have this sort of usage:

One who dies by his own hand; one who commits self-murder. Also, one who attempts or has a tendency to commit suicide.

1732 Lond. Mag. I. 252 The Suicide owns himself..unequal to the Troubles of Life.
1769 BLACKSTONE Comm. IV. xiv. 189 The suicide is guilty of a double offence: one spiritual, in invading the prerogative of the Almighty..: the other temporal, against the king.
1838 W. BELL Dict. Law Scot. 953 The wounds inflicted by a suicide upon himself are usually in the front, and in an oblique direction.
1861 F. NIGHTINGALE Nursing (ed. 2) 77 A fourth [patient], who is a depressed suicide, requires a little cheering.
1870 R. C. JEBB Sophocles’ Electra (ed. 2) 47/1 Suicides used to be interred with a stake through the body, ‘to lay the ghost’.

So I suppose it’s not unthinkable that the perpetrator of genocide might be called a genocide, but the usage is still rather odd.

Has anyone else noticed this usage? I find it curious and would like to see if it is more common than my search has indicated.

His reason is one that I have sometimes struggled with: a lack of desire to blog, and John adds that “blogging has felt more like a chore than an enjoyable hobby.” I’ve been there, and it’s hard to muster through with other things happening.

I’ve been blogging off and on (although probably more off than on) for about 3 years now, and the only reason I still feel like doing it is because I still have things that pop into my head, some (relatively) original thoughts and some reflections on various mental stimuli (like reading the blogs of others), that I want to put down (in a metaphorical sense) in writing. It used to be that I felt like my voice needed to be heard because I had important things to say that other people needed to hear, but now my reasons are more selfish (and paradoxically less egotistical): I’ve realized that blogging is more about catharsis for me than relaying important facts or personal wisdom. I also deeply value the use of blogging for reflection, something that drives me (for reasons sometimes unknown to me) to keep two blogs, one specifically to reflect on my teaching/learning experiences.

For any bloggers reading this that might be suffering from similar troubles with blogging, I would make the following suggestions:

1. Reassess your reasons for blogging. Unless you have a relatively large readership and are a proficient writer, you’re probably not going to write to appease others who want to read what you wrote. The best thing I think the average blogger can hope for is to have some small regular traffic and other sporadic hits that indicate that someone cares about what you’ve written. Comments are even better, but blogging in the hopes of receiving feedback is probably a futile effort as well unless you choose to write on only the most controversial topics (abortion and evolution are ones that have driven feedback for me).
2. Keep your mind thinking about things you might want to write about. I started using Google Notebook to track ideas, some of which have been sitting around for months now, and it has been very useful to provide content (when I don’t spontaneously blog with my ScribeFire interface – another useful tool). Jeremy Pierce of Parableman has stated that he keeps a text file of ideas for blogging that he searches every so often for things to write about. It might even be useful at times to review past writings and follow up or amend previous statements on different topics – maybe even to find holes in them.
3. Read, read, read – and then read some more. The best way to keep ideas moving is to take them in – ingest whatever you’re interested in to keep your mind sharp. It doesn’t even matter if you blog about what someone else has written; you may simply be inspired to investigate a certain topic or to find analogous arguments elsewhere, among other things. When you stop consuming writing – something that seems to be a common thread among writers of all types – then you will probably see your own writing flow diminishing as well.

I wish John all the best and thank him for his great site, and I hope that other bloggers will see this as an opportunity to reflect on their own habits and struggles as writers.

So I’m especially irritated to see Graham Kendrick, a well-known Christian worship songwriter, make a statement like this:

Orthodoxy sounds like a dusty old word, but actually it means right glory, in other words representing God as he actually is.

There may be a nugget of truth in here: the Greek doxa, from which the word is derived (along with ortho, “correct”), is sometimes translated as “glory” or “praise” (c.f. Matthew 4:8). And in a sense, I think I can give Kendrick a little bit of poetic license, since orthodoxy may have at its roots a desire to glorify God by accurately representing Him. That’s fine, but the word “orthodox” doesn’t mean that – it means “correct belief.”

The OED says this regarding etymology:

[< post-classical Latin orthodoxus, ortodoxus, adjective and noun (4th cent.; freq. in Jerome) and its etymon Hellenistic or Byzantine Greek òρθóδοξος right in opinion (see note), person holding a right opinion < ancient Greek òοθο- ORTHO- comb. form + δóξα opinion, glory (see DOXOLOGY n.). In English perhaps partly via Middle French, French orthodoxe (1431 as adjective, a1565 as noun). Compare Italian ortodosso (1478 as adjective).
Ancient Greek òρθοδοξεîν ‘to have a right opinion’ appears first in Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, but remains rare. The cognate noun òρθοδοξíα appears first in Origen; the adjective óρθóδοξος does not appear until the late 3rd, or early 4th cent. With the exception of uses in commentaries on Nicomachean Ethics the group of words is restricted almost entirely to Christian writers.] [Ed. Greek characters should now display correctly]

So the usage existed prior to the Greek writings of the NT, and certainly one cannot say that orthodoxy does not today refer to belief, not to glory of praise.

Finally, a note: words, like books, don’t get dusty if they are used, and orthodox has been in great use for centuries now, thanks in large part to the insistence of religious organizations’ desire to see correct belief (i.e. adherence to their doctrines) among those who associate themselves with the organization. What Kendrick seems to be doing here is setting up orthodox as an elitist word, high and lofty and out of the comprehension of the common man. This is of course untrue; orthodoxy is easily understood by anyone who has been introduced to the idea of believing in the right things.