Monday, December 05, 2005

Good and Bad

I bought a book again over the weekend. I was in this book store, passing time when I came across the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It wasn't very expensive so I bought it.

I found the first 40 pages very interesting. It sort of reminded me of something remotely relevant my friend Jonathan had to say about this. But there is more to it.

What is it about the "Law of Nature", as Lewis puts it. There seems to be a law within us that we all live by. If someone takes your seat on the bus while your back is turned, you will complain that you were there first. You are appealing to his sense of morality, some unwritten rule that dictates that it is bad manners to inconvenience others for your own gain. Sometimes such a person will simply flip out the bird, but more often such a person will think of a good excuse as to why he should be allowed to do what he is doing, in a sense explaining why he is NOT breaking any rules.

What is more, it is impossible to define right and wrong away. You may say that morality is subject to the culture of a people and might be very different, yet you will find it almost impossible to imagine a people where leaving your brother to drown or deserting your fellow soldier in a time of war is something you can be proud of.

You can also try the Duality approach, which says that there is a light and a dark side, and they are balanced out. But for this to work, evil has to be able to exist for the sake of evil only, but that is not the case. Evil is almost always used to procure something "good", that is, something you define as being good. It is a bit like trying to claim that there is a hot side and a cold side, and that they are balanced out. In reality there is only heat and coldness is simply the lack of heat. Making something cold only transfers the heat to another location.

For some reason we also feel uneasy about our inability to keep to the law of nature. Why else would we try to excuse ourselves when we do break this law? Even if we argue that this is simply something we learned from generations before us, I wonder why people who grow up in an "alternate reality" are often scarred for life. For example, if a young child is sexually mollested by her parents. He/she has no way to know that what is happening to her is wrong. She is presented with an alternate reality where it is ok for a parent to do this to a child. Yet these people turn out to be unbelievably damaged, for life.

We are therefore presented with a problem: We have some inbuilt knowledge about how we are supposed to act, yet we're unable to act that way. Perhaps the idea that something is seriously wrong with this world -- and with ourselves -- is not that far off. Perhaps there really is something wrong with us, something we cannot save ourselves from.

But I have to insist that you rather read the book. I'm not done with it yet, I just think he makes a very good argument.

Do you own your own house?

Late night TV accounts for a LOT of random thoughts for me. Flipping through the channels again, eventually settling on TBN just as a program called "Called to Conquer" is starting. I make a quick bet with myself: How long before this guy launches straight into prosperity gospel.

THIRTY SECONDS!

Thirty seconds is all it took. He asks the crowd who don't own their own house, and the majority of people put their hands up. He says, no problem, before the end of the evening we will pray for you and get rid of that bad spirit.

So I'm thinking, perhaps he should try that message just south from here in a little place called Lwandle. Perhaps tell that to the thousands who are without a house because it burned down. Tell that to women who gets raped, children born with aids.

Seriously, these American pastors needs a wakeup call. Come to Africa. Stay here for more than a couple of weeks. You will learn to look beyond yourself very soon. It is not about you. It is about the glory of God. There is no glory in it if you worship a god who makes you insanely rich. Heck, you'd be crazy not to worship him. The real glory is in worshiping God despite all that. That is in the Bible too you know, check out Habakuk 3:17-18.

What is more, I am very concerned about how this guy quotes the Bible. I am by no means an expert, but within the first 20 minutes he says two things:
  1. Jesus is the wheel inside the wheel (no doubt referencing Ezekiel 1:16). This is a very imaginative jump and I don't even know what it is supposed to proof.
  2. Before the foundations of the earth, Christ died for you. I quickly fired up bibletime and did a search: Closest seems to be 1 Peter 1:20, which if I cross compare with the Afrikaans and German bible seems to be taken completely out of context here.
And to think the rest of the world judge Christians by the actions of these people.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Shooting yourself in the foot

Been watching DWTV again this morning. More innocent people taken hostage. The price for their release: Get out of our country.

But you have no choice but to question the motives of these people (lets refrain from calling them terrorists for the moment). If we specifically consider the german woman who was taken hostage: she has been helping the people in Iraq for such a long time, even while America was fighting its controversial war there.

Essentially you have a good person -- who really CARE about Iraq and it's people -- on death row simply because she is german.

I think these "people" are shooting themselves in the foot. The vehicle they use to force their "opressors" out of their country also makes the country pourer. If they get their way, they will be without both. Which is why I say you have to question their motives. Do they really have Iraq's best interests at heart?