Passing The Plate:Why Christians Don't Give Away More Money by Christian Smith & Michael O Emerson

Christians in the United States who are actually members of churches earned a total collective 2005 income of more than $2 trillion. Christians in the United States who actually attend church twice a month or more often or who consider themselves strong or very strong Christians earned a total collective 2005 income of also more than $2 trillion. Needless to say, more than $2 trillion earned every year is a huge amount of money. It is more than the total Gross Domestic Products of every nation in the world except, at most, the six wealthiest, United States, Japan, Germany, China, United Kingdom and France. pg 12

This is not the most amazing statistic in this book. in fact, having just learnt the immense wealth of American Christians, one of the most amazing, if not shocking stats is:

At least one out of every five American Christians – 20 percent of all U.S. Christians – gives literally nothing to church, para-church or nonreligious charities. 

The mean % given by Christians is 2.9% of income. 2.9%!!!!

This book is filled with such stats and results of surveys taken regarding the giving habits of US Americans and it is an eye opener. Of course the book builds towards the big question - WHY!

Everything involved in the matter of voluntary Christian financial giving takes place within the larger context of a massive economy, powerful culture and ubiquitous advertising and media industries that are driven by and dedicated to the promotion of mass consumption…. Therefore every Christian impulse to generously give money away inevitably runs up against potent counter-impulses driven by mass consumerism to instead perpetually spend, borrow, acquire, consume, discard and then spend more on oneself and family.  Such forces are not merely matters of personal values but are structured into deep rooted institutions of employment, transportation, media, home ownership, entertainment and material luxuries…..

In other words, Christians are caught up, hook line and sinker, in the world and how the world thinks. We have bought houses we can barely afford, cars which we can barely afford, High Definition T.V’s which we can barely afford. 

What challenged me from reading this book is (and this is my take on it) - Christians need to begin getting lower mortgages, to buy less expensive houses (i.e. we can afford this much but lets buy a  house $100,000 / $50,000 less so we can give more to the kingdom) - buy cheaper cars, buy cheaper T.V’s, buy cheaper phones, buy cheaper clothes so that we do have extra money in our budget to give to the kingdom. We may be ABLE to afford the $500,000 house, but lets make a choice to buy the $300,000, or even $200,000 house BECAUSE WE WANT TO GIVE TO THE LORD -  let THAT be the reason and driving force of our spending decisions - We may be able to afford the new SUV at $30,000, but lets buy the $14,000 used car so that there is room in our budget to give money away.

In other words, a radical transformation from Christians on the issue of money could literally change the world.

One thing is for sure - more of the $2 trillion income of christians needs to get out of Christians hands and into the world.

Touched by an angel #5

I thought I could make a dash to the next chapter but alas no. Just a few lines down from John Cornwell’s jibe about King Lear and Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”1 (see: Touched by an angel #4) sparkles a real gem.

Fifth in a series responding to John Cornwell’s Darwin’s angel: an angelic riposte to The God Delusion.2

See also: Touched by an angel #1; #2; #3; & #4

Gospel truth

Richard Dawkins

Remember Cornwell is an angel, addressing Richard Dawkins his wayward protégé:

[Y]our separation of fact and fiction, true and false, reality and imagination, science and everything else, could not be more plain. The only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the gospels,” you pronounce in your God Delusion, “is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.” That settles the hash of the Four Evangelists, you maintain. The Da Vinci Code, which is not factual, is fiction; the Gospels are not factual (because they have all those factual inconsistencies, as you note), therefore the Gospels are fiction. So are you inviting your readers to infer that poets, dramatists, novelists are not concerned with truth-telling either? It’s one thing, I suppose, to suggest that Christ’s Sermon on the Mount contains no truths, but do you really wish your readers to accept that writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoyevsky … the entire canon of world literature … is just so much untruth? Fiction?

Does anyone understand the point Cornwell is making? I think I understand the point I think he thinks he is making. He seems to be painting Dawkins as a philistine, with no appreciation of art, creativity and aesthetic truth - and therefore not a writer worth taking seriously?

Let us look at what Dawkins actually says, and in context. He is going through a set of different Arguments for God’s existence which have been used over the centuries. One is The argument from scripture:

There are still some people who are persuaded by scriptural evidence to believe in God…3

A version of this argument is that God exists because Jesus said he was the Son of God. Five pages of reasons follow why, in Dawkins’ opinion, this argument falls down, on the basis that the gospel accounts cannot be taken as factual because collectively they contain so many inaccuracies and contradictions.

For the moment we are not discussing the merits of the case, just the structural logic. The ‘argument from scripture’ presupposes that the gospels are to be taken as factual accounts. If they are not factual accounts they cannot serve as evidence for any substantive reality which they might refer to. They could of course serve as evidence for something else, for example something about themselves as texts. Word usage or, perhaps more specifically, atrocity count in the text of Titus Andronicus could count as evidence for or against Shakespeare’s authorship of the play. But nothing in the text of Titus Andronicus has any bearing on the historical Titus Andronicus because there was no historical Titus Andronicus. It is pure fiction, adapted from a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Either the gospels are factual accounts or not. If they are, then they could support the argument from scripture; if not, not. Dawkins gives reasons why they cannot possibly be taken as reliable factual accounts and concludes they are fiction. Because they are fiction they cannot support the argument from scripture, which is what this section of The God delusion is about.

Dan Brown

The section ends:

Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, and the film made from it, are arousing huge controversy in church circles. Christians are encouraged to boycott the film and picket cinemas that show it. It is indeed fabricated from start to finish: invented, made-up fiction. In that respect, it is exactly like the gospels. The only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.4

I have no idea what Dawkins thinks of The Da Vinci Code5, or whether he has even read it. It is irrelevant. Dawkins’ reason for using The Da Vinci Code as the example here rather than The Canterbury Tales, Titus Andronicus or Oliver Twist is that although it is a work of fiction it had a significant recent impact among certain religious communities. The point of the example is to show that a work of fiction can have an impact on religious believers. There is nothing in the example to suggest anything Dawkins may or may not think about imagination, literary creativity, or the aesthetic truth or value of any novel, legend, poem, play or opera libretto, be it The Da Vinci Code or anything else from ‘the entire canon of world literature.’ Or indeed anything else anyone might get from the gospels. It is purely about the factual status of the gospels and whether anything they say can support a truth claim about the existence of God.

Perhaps this is an example of the ‘sharper logic’ and ‘closer insight’ our generous angel promised us? (See Touched by an angel #1.)

The chapter ends in a lament for (and a quote from) the Richard Dawkins of The selfish gene, with its redemptive appeal to what Cornwell has to call ‘imagination’ to make his point, but which is actually (and very clearly) moral consciousness:

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no space in nature, something that has never existed before… We… have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.6

See how Cornwell bends it:

Such an affirmation would accord with the intellectual and imaginative freedom of poetry, literary fiction, art; would be in accordance, too, with a measure of human liberty and moral agency. [Emphasis added.]

Dawkins’ paragraph was about human liberty and moral agency. It is consistent with intellectual and imaginative freedom. Not the other way round. But because Cornwell has decided Dawkins was talking about imagination, he now feels free to unpack what imagination means to an angel:

Imagination enables human beings to contemplate and model their past and their future, their origins and their destiny, their meaning and their nature: to make choices; to think scientifically and religiously too.

See how religion sneaks in? The author of The selfish gene and the author of The god delusion would doubtless agree that human beings have the power to think religiously. But that is not what Dawkins is saying here. If he had been he might have added something about what happens when religious imagination results in metaphysical conviction about the inhabitants of a supernatural realm.

Scientific and religious imagination are different, says Cornwell, but both have

the capacity… to make metaphors. But you appear… to have retreated from a trust in the dynamic, protean power of imagination when it comes to religion. Have you retreated because you no longer believe in the power of the imagination to impart literary, poetic, religious, and moral truth either?

The rhetoric is so preposterous it is hard not to labour the point. Dawkins defined his target: see Touched by an angel #3. His target is not religion in general. It is not religious metaphor or religious imagination. It is quite specifically the god of the ‘God Hypothesis’, the hypothesis that

there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.7

A superhuman, supernatural, super-intelligent creator does not need to be sneaked in through a list of creatures of human imagination. Anything less is not the target of The God delusion.

The rhetoric continues:

Or because trust in the imagination threatens your militant atheism? Even a guardian angel cannot enter into the soul of a protégé’s conscience.

Some rhetoric is so preposterous it really can stun you into silence.

References

 John Cornwell, Darwin’s angel: an angelic riposte to The God Delusion, Profile Books, London, 2007.

John Cornwell, 2007: 1 above.

 Richard Dawkins, The god delusion, Bantam, 2006.

Richard Dawkins, 2006: 3 above.

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday, 2003.

 Richard Dawkins, The selfish gene, OUP, 1976.

Richard Dawkins, 2006: 3 above.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Book review: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

As mentioned before, occasionally I write reviews for the website www.goodreads.com. I’m in the middle of reading a few books at the moment, so I don’t have anything piping hot and fresh, but I would like to share some of my favorite reviews I’ve written. This one is of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

——————————————————————————————

A preface: If you haven’t yet read Infinite Jest, this review won’t serve to persuade you to make the commitment. Other reviews will tell you how long and complex this book is, or how some of the vocabulary comes straight out of the Oxford English Dictionary’s left field, or tell you how brilliant or pretentious or overwritten or other Red Flag words the book and author are tagged with. Et cetera, et cetera.

A review: In his book Howard’s End, E.M. Forster wrote, “Only connect!”

That short little diddy has long been one of my favorite literary quotes; and although I have no tangible evidence to prove either way, I think a variation of this ran through David Foster Wallace’s mind constantly.

I had the misfortune of having started this just a few weeks before DFW committed suicide, so naturally, my perspective on the book changed mid-read. For those of you have read Infinite Jest, recall how Hal starts perceiving the world horizontally instead of vertically. Yeah, it’s kinda like that. Adding to the emotional baggage of this read was an uncle of mine who also committed suicide a year prior, not to mention a few good friends who have been to rehab and recovery houses. Then, on top of that, is the capitalized Personal Identification I discovered having with DFW too, which quite possibly transcends ways in which I am able to coherently express.

Suffice to say, circling back to the quotation above, you know how some have said words and language are the only real way we connect as human beings, right? Well, to me, Infinite Jest is Wallace’s personal own Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), his way of sending out a transmission signal that said, “I’m here. We’re here. We’re alive and suffering, trying to be happy, living the only way we can. Please respond. Please Identify. Please commit.”

Last night after I closed Infinite Jest for the final time, I had an image in my mind of DFW presiding over a dying plant and slitting his own wrists to water it with blood. I think it will stick with me for some time.

Concluding thoughts: this review is probably too somber and narrow, and I find it difficult to say what really matters without going on and on and on and on, so it’s time to cinch up the tourniquet and spare the limb. It’s worth noting how compulsively laugh-out-loud hilarious this book can be, and how the philosophical digressions will get you nodding affirmative, the observations of persons, places, and things so spot-on and vivid some won’t want to leave your head, a literary entertainment so gentle and brash and enlightening and real, and yes, entertaining too, that I will truly miss reading it.

What more can you say about a book than that?

How Long Will the Recession Last?

Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Fed, voiced his opinion this morning that the current recession should ease up within the next 12 months and give way to some solid growth. Does this mean we’re out of the woods?

Well, maybe and maybe not. I certainly don’t have Bernanke’s background and resume, but if there’s one thing I do know about economics, it’s that it’s an uncertain science. In other words, spending and confidence might be back to normal tomorrow, but they also might not. What’s more, I know that it’s his job to help instill that confidence, so I’m going to take his statement with a grain of salt.

I mention all of this today because there are lots of salespeople out there who are taking a ‘wait it out’ approach to the recession. Hold on long enough, they figure, and things will get better. In the long run,  of course, they’re absolutely right. But burying our heads in the sand, or waiting for better economic weather, entirely misses the point: a recession is a great time to grow your business!

So while the rest of the world is hanging on every word that the big name economists utter, take a more proactive approach and get busy selling. There are a lot of small buyers, bargain hunters, and underserved clients out there. Now is the perfect time to add them all into your client list. Certainly, the recession will end, sooner or later, but the question you should be asking yourself isn’t what month or year it will be over – but how much money are you going to make in the meantime, and how many new customers you’ll have when it is.

Book Review: Tactics by Greg Koukl

Tactics, by Gregory Koukl,  is a Christian apologetics book with a difference. It does not focus on issues in Christian apologetics (like, for example, Lee Strobel’s excellent The Case for Christ books). Instead it focuses on strategies for having productive conversations with people about these apologetic issues.

If you have ever walked away from a conversation, thinking about all the things you wish you had said but did not think of at the time, this book is for you. Koukl gives you the tools to say the things you would want to say at the time when you need them, not half an hour later. This is why the book is called Tactics. He is giving you tactics for having productive conversations about your faith.

Christians are often confronted with broad statements that are meant to discount the Christian faith in one sentence. Here are a few examples: “The Bible is full of errors”, or “All religions are basically the same”, or “It is arrogant to think that your view is the right one.”  Koukl notes that most Christians stumble over their words to try and refute these broad claims, instead of asking the person to provide evidence for such broad statements. His approach reminded me of Tim Keller’s challenge to skeptics, to doubt their own doubts (see Keller’s book The Reason for God. I reviewed it here).

Koukl’s basic tactic is called ‘the Columbo’ (named after the famous TV detective), where he asks the question “What do you mean by that?” His purpose in asking this question is to clarify what the person is saying, making sure he understands it, and making sure they themselves understand it, since many people are just repeating statements to which they have not given much deep thought. It also gives you time to think.

His second part of the Columbo has to do with the burden of proof. Here he asks the person to support the opinion they have expressed. As Koukl puts it, “It’s not your duty to prove him wrong. It’s his duty to prove his view.” The question that Koukl uses is “How did you come to that conclusion?”

Koukl’s two Columbo questions, “What do you mean by that?” and “How did you come to that conclusion?” are simple but powerful. Instead of having to squirm and feel bad because you are not an expert on every area of apologetics (thinking to yourself, ‘If only Ravi Zacharias were here to help me!’), you make the other person squirm by asking them to explain and justify their statement. You don’t really have to know much about the apologetics issue they have raised, since you are just asking them to elaborate and support their opinion. (Koukl would still certainly encourage readers to learn more about apologetics, but his point is that you don’t have to know everything about an issue to be able to challenge a person’s statement.)

Koukl notes that many people can’t answer these two basic questions and it quickly becomes evident that they are uninformed and cannot support the statement they have made. His goal when interacting with people is to metaphorically ‘put a rock in their shoe’, causing them to walk away thinking about the conversation in a way that challenges them to reconsider their view of Christianity, and that draws them them one step closer to the Lord.

Koukl’s explanation of “The Columbo” takes up about half of the book. The second half deals with how to handle various forms of self-refuting statements. Koukl does a great job helping you to identify this type of statement (for example: “You can’t know anything for sure”, Koukl’s response: “Are you sure about that?” )

I really enjoyed this book. It is an easy read and I gobbled it up in just over a day. The tactics are practical and the examples are helpful in illustrating his points. He provides a summary at the end of each chapter, and the book’s main points are easy to remember.

I would strongly recommend this book to any Christian who is interested in being ready to share their faith in an intelligent and effective way, by learning tactics to respond to challenges to their faith that will inevitably come.

Koukl, Gregory, Tactics, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2009, 207 pages.

You can purchase Tactics here from chapters.ca

Crochet book: Tea Time of Yarn

Tea Time of Yarn   毛糸のティータイム—藤田智子のニットルーム

  

 

Book:  Tea Time of Yarn by Tomoko Fujita 藤田智子 2006, 72 pages, ISBN: 4861912016.

A couple of days ago I got post from Amazon, Japan:-))  5 great crochet books, which were delivered pretty fast: Only 9 days from Asia to Europe.

Amongst them is this little gem by Tomoko Fujita: Tea Time of yarn.  It contains 16 crochet projects, 14 of them are food related:

A funny tea cozy (see front cover), strawberry-, pineapple-, watermelon-, pear-, egg- and apple pouches, doughnut brooches, a chocolate cake tissue box and more. The patterns are made with care for details and can easily be remodeled to coasters, dishcloths or embellishments for clothes. The layout is also made in a simple but tasteful style.

 I haven’t started any of the projects yet, but the instructions look very clear, so Japanese skills will hopefully not be necessary. Every project is accompanied with a stitch diagram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Japanese Fishermen's Coats from Awaji Island

Japanese Fishermen’s Coats from Awaji Island (Fowler Museum Textile Series 5) arrived on my doorstep this morning, just in time for a leisurely read over tea and breakfast. And what an enjoyable read it was!

This slim volume starts off with an historical essay by Luke Roberts, Fishing Villages in Northern Awaji, about the life and times of Awaji Island fishermen. Accompanied by modern photos and Edo era illustrations, this essay presents a taste of the culture and economy of Awaji Island at the time when these garments were the height of local fashion. I’ll admit that as I purchased this book more for the photographs than the essays, I’ve mostly skimmed this essay but will definitely read it later. 

The second half of the book, Waves and Folds, the Life of Fishermen’s Coats is chock full of gorgeous photos of indigo dyed sashiko garments worn by Awaji fishermen and sewn by the industrious wives and mothers of these men. Also included are firemen’s jackets and examples of kogin (similar to sashiko but more ornamental and complex). Tsutsusode and makisode, two variations of kimono sleeve design often seen in Japanese mingei are also explained, which I found very helpful. 

I highly suggest this volume if you are interested in historical uses of shashiko and design ideas. It is not a how-to book, but certainly worth reading if you are looking for more advanced techniques to replicate or expand on.