what ordinary people can do

The first question we may ask is, Why do massacres and other atrocities...occur? On one level this is the easiest question to answer.

I don't mean to be glib in stating this so simply, but I believe the reason these offenses occur is because people choose to indulge their selfish and brutal urges to dominate the defenseless. They have chosen to live in rebellion against the God of love and goodness who made them, and now they are left with nothing but their own sinful nature, or whatever you want to call it - the unrestrained will to power, the unmediated libido, the nausea of existence, misogynistic male aggression. Scripture graphically describes such people:

Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit...
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Romans 3:13-18)

If people have no respect for God, no love for their Maker, I would ask the question another way: Why not pillage, rape, persecute and murder? If it feels good, and they can get away with it, why not? If God is dead or does not exist, as these people believe, why aren't all things permitted? Why should they restrain themselves? Because it's just wrong? Because it's not the way civilized people behave? Because what goes around comes around? Because they'll end up feeling terrible inside?

Within tidy circles of properly socialized and reasonable people, such appeals can seem like they actually have the power to restrain people from doing what they otherwise feel like doing. But in the real world outside the philosophy seminar room, oppressors frankly don't care that you think it's just wrong. Who are you, they ask, to foist your random moral intuition on them? Who are you to tell them or the lords of the Third Reich what civilized people should and should not do? If what goes around tends to come around, then there's no moral problem, only a practical problem of making sure it doesn't come around to you. They think, Fine, if being brutal makes you feel terrible inside, then don't do it. But it makes me feel powerful, alive, exhilarated and masterful, so quit whining - unless you want to try to stop me.

This description of a dark Nietzschean world of self-will - a vacuum devoid of moral authority or spiritual resources for good - used to seem excessively melodramatic to me. But then I got out more. The world is truly full of brutal oppression because humans have rejected their Maker, the source of all goodness, mercy, compassion, truth, justice and love.

Personally, I do not have a difficult time understanding that without God I am as lost as the oppressor. When I don't depend on the Holy Spirit moment by moment every day, I see the ugliness in me come out: selfishness, pride, insensitivity, anger, gossip, ingratitude, self-righteousness, self-deception, jealousy and covetousness, to name a few.

For most of us these latent forces of great sin are kept in check by various social and cultural restraints, but we should be under no illusions about what exists at the human core. Perfectly ordinary human beings are actually capable of being mass murderers. In Rwanda...When all restraints are released, farmers, clerks, school principals, mothers, doctors, mayors and carpenters pick up machetes and hack to death defenseless women and children. And this happened in a nation where 80 percent of the citizens identified themselves as Christian...the person without God (or perhaps worse, the person without God but claiming "God", "Jesus", "Muhammad", whatever) is a very scary creature.

Good News About Injustice (1999)
Gary Haugen

God and academia

As Christians, we of course want our worldview to be fundamentally derived from God's Word, not the climate of opinion that happens to prevail in the world in which we live. Still, since "all truth is God's truth," as Augustine taught us, we should assume that whatever is true about the views of our culture, including the views of science, will be consistent with God's Word (assuming we are interpreting it correctly). 

Locating this element of truth in the culture and aligning it with our theology based on the Word can be advantageous to communicating credibly the truth of the Word to our culture. It can also help us more effectively think through and apply our theology for our culture and for ourselves. This is why our theology should be developed in dialogue with every other branch of learning. Whatever truth is to be found in physics, biology, anthropology, and so on is God's truth and can only help us credibly proclaim the truth of God's Word to the world.

God of the Possible (2008)
Greg Boyd

Read-thinking

"Imagine this scenario: Parents from around the world send their children to a rustic camp set in the midst of Kentucky's Bluegrass Region for the summer. All one hundred children became infected with a deadly virus during the first week of the camp and have but one month to live. Fortunately, a specialist who has seen a similar outbreak in New Mexico knows of a treatment: the Yucca cactus, when ground to a pulp, blended with vinegar and ingested over a period of three weeks, will completely counteract the virus and return the children to full health. 

Unfortunately, every single child finds the smell of the concoction so utterly repulsive that no amount of coaxing by even the best of counselors succeeds in getting anyone to eat any of it. To make matters worse, the virus somehow drives the children mad, prompting them to lash out in foul language at those trying to help them and to accuse their counselors of gross misconduct. Luckily, yet another specialist develops a serum that, when injected hypodermically, creates within the child an insatiable passion for eating the Yucca mash.
Now imagine that new of the virus reaches the alarmed parents. The camp director immediately sends a letter reassuring them that he loves all their children, that he is offering to all their children the life-saving Yucca mash in liberal quantities, that he will supply this expensive preparation without charge and that all children will be brought to the cafeteria three times a day and strongly urged to eat. 

Three months later, the parents arrive in the Bluegrass to retrieve their children. But at the campsite, they are stunned to discover that seventy-five children have died from the virus. Interrogating the director, they discover that the life-saving food could not work its wonders unless the child was injected with the appetite stimulant. On further questioning they discover that the director had chosen to inject only twenty-five children with the serum, though he had an unlimited supply at his disposal. To say nothing about their anger and grief, the parents are utterly perplexed! 

In chorus they immediately challenge the claim made by the camp director in the letter they had received, asking, "How can you claim to have loved the seventy-five dead children if you could have saved them but didn't?" We can imagine just how unconvincing some of the director's answers might be: "But I offered the Yucca mash liberally, freely and passionately." Yes, but all this talk about the merits of the mixture misses the issue of the serum! "But the children are to blame, since they ate exactly what they wanted and violently rejected my help!" Yes, but you fully controlled exactly what each child wanted! "But note how much attention I lavished on these children in the last weeks of their lives." And you call this love - to provide the most exciting camp activities to a child as she dies, while you withhold the very serum of life? 

The director's claim to love all children rings hollow at best, deceptive at worst. If love will not employ all available means to rescue someone from ultimate loss, it is hard to hear the announcement of universal love as good news. Indeed, it is hard to hear it as love at all. In our judgment, it becomes meaningless to claim that God wishes to save all while also insisting that God refrains from making the salvation of all possible [footnote]. What are we to make of a God whose walk does not match his talk?
...[In the Calvinist interpretation,] the true intentions of God cannot be discerned from his words."

 Why I Am Not A Calvinist (2004)

Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell

On another note, I have about two to three books I've borrowed from friends here that I want to finish reading within this month, so I can return them before I leave Tucson. On top of school books and writing papers. Speedy eyes and spongy brain!!!

Christian America

Greg Boyd's Don't Weep for the Demise of American Christianity, Christus Victor Ministries

Jon Meacham's The End of Christian America and Faith isn't Under Fire, Newsweek

Judith Warner's This I Believe, New York Times

Still thinking about it, but it seems to corroborate with what I've seen and encountered with Christian America and many American Christians.

Keeping a tab on:
De Civitate Deo, Augustine
The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church (2006), Greg Boyd
The Cross and the Sword Sermon Series (2004), Greg Boyd

My Paunchy Ragbag

If I were to ever make something to represent my current state, I'd make something like this.
(I googled 'swollen head' and I got this picture titled 'toothache', but never mind.)

So I shall unload some of my grey matter here:

In His Time, and the Beauty of Free Will
Sometimes our hearts get so ached from mourning for the sin of the world, backslid or lukewarm Christians, proud hearts that refuse the Gospel, and we ask, 'God, why wouldn't You show them that You are the Sovereign God whom all are to fear and to repent to?'. From here, we may have an inclination to go and help solve these problems, forgetting that we are but tools for God's use, who furthers His Will in His own time. As the Teacher says, 'God will bring to judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time for every deed' (Ecclesiastes 3:17). In God's time, He will save those whom He has chosen to be His sons. In His time too, will He revive the tepid love of His children, leading them back with the ties of love (Hosea 11:4), which He has been holding onto all along. In rushing God's Will, we pride in our own judgment and we become too arrogant to have faith that God will does His Will best in His own time. And so, amidst the urgency for resolution for the things and people we mourn over, we need to pray for wisdom - to know how to respond and how to interact with these people - and humility, that we might not put our own judgment higher than God's. Our God is Sovereign, surely He can bring this people back to Him instantaneously. But He loves us so much He wants us to return to Him willingly, convinced of our Father's love and the sin of our going astray from the narrow gate to Heaven. How beautiful is that!

Abstract Art can be used for God's sake too.
I just finished reading this book called 'Art For God's Sake' by Philip Graham Ryken, which offers a brief introduction to the biblical theology on arts. (I'm reminded of something I wrote in January this year, Greek Masterpieces from the Louvre Museum.) It helped clear some doubts I had about abstract art, which especially bugs me because I am involved in a choir who experiments greatly with aleatory and structure and sings aleatoric music annually in a church. Abstract art glorifies God too, because (1) God blesses all art forms just as He blessed Bezalel with the 'skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts' to make His tabernacle in Exodus 31, (2) it is capable of expressing Christian truths (not to say that all God-glorifying art have to be directly linked to Christianity in content). Such realisation has brought me to appreciate my conductor, Mrs Valarie Wilson, even more. The juxtaposition of singing On suuri sun rantas autius in aleatory with God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen interposed in unison shows structure among chaos, that Christ coming to earth brings 'tidings of comfort and joy' to the desolate, dystopian world modern and postmodern art portray. And also, that art is to be beautiful, good and true, just like how the dissonance in John Rutter's Hymn to the Creator of Light opens up to a meditative, quiet singing of the German hymn Deck Thyself, My Soul, With Gladness. Dante Alighieri sees abstract art is the highest level of excellence that an artist can attain, and these examples lead me to see that often, abstract art is a way for especially these artists, especially Christian ones, to glorify God, giving Him their best.

Every One is Equally Ugly, and thus Equally Justified before God

This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Romans 3:22-24

What do we do with the ugly histories we discovered about others? And even, the present ugly things that they are doing? There are two ways to go from here, one of which is to pray for them in love and mourning, the other is to gossip and share more information in groups of people, making this distinction of the Other. Looking at what Christ did in His earthy ministry, we know what the 'model answer' is. Internalising this 'model answer', not just knowing, would be a proof of the Holy Spirit giving life to our mortal bodies which are dead in sin (Romans 8:11). When responding to things that suddenly disfigure my impression of people around me, I need to be careful to not slant myself towards judging, only concentrating on criticising the speck of sawdust in the eye of that person, paying no attention to the plank in my own eye. We are all sinners. The wonderful thing is that it doesn't stop there: we have been justified by grace through faith in our Redeemer, and we are all Christians who are exposed to the temptation of sin, who can stumble.