Cheap Shots Holiday Edition

Most of these will have absolutely nothing to do with "the holidays."

• Y'all know about Canada? That country north of here we all pretend to like, but as soon as they're out of earshot we immediately go back to assessing how fantastically irrelevent they are? Yeah, well, their Prime Minister is awesome--the lone voice of sanity in a sea of diplomatic posturing. See why here. Soundbite: Stephen. Harper. Is. My. Hero.
• Youth Specialties gets noticed by CBS. Last time a packed Christian event was in the mainstream media news (reference GodMen in the previous Cheap Shots), it wasn't so pretty, and it looks like another comment war arose at CBS. The chase: To my fellow Christians: will the real apologist please stand up; the rest of you, just shut up--it's kinda embarrassing.
• ThinkChristian has an interesting letter from God about the "War on Christmas." Fascinatingly, the author apparently wasn't quite as inspired as St. Paul. Otherwise, he may have known that putting Christmas in place of a pagan holiday is one of many theories about the date's origin. For next time: Wikipedia is your friend.
• The bookstore at which I am employed sold a book to Anne Rice. Yes, that Anne Rice. But, in case you don't know, she is now this Anne Rice. For the gossip page of People: she ordered a 1908 edition of the classic Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
• It is now 2:30 AM on Friday, December 22nd which means the Uganda mission team is on their way home. So far as I've heard, there have been no deaths, Tanner (unfortunately) is not returning with tribal tattoos and extended ears and 'Dra did not get to adopt her foreign child.

This concludes this edition of Cheap Shots. Tune in next time (whenever that is) to find out about the things you already learned from the local news channel.

Miscommunication in Tips

I was at Starbucks today and left a $0.96 tip for the baristas. I had ordered a grande white chocolate mocha, totalling a bill of $4.04 and thus the $0.96 was my change. Therefore, when you consider that you tack gratuity before tax, I had tipped nearly 25%. No. I had tipped more than that. This is a ridiculous percentage, especially for those drink monkeys at Starbucks who aren't waiters at Black Angus.

Ah, and here is the point of this whole thought process: tipping is not gratuity. There is a grave misconception in the service sector that a person who does not leave a tip is a dick. But, frankly, why should he leave a tip? He has paid for his order and has every reason in the world to believe that his server (barista, waiter or whatever) is being reimbursed for services rendered by the establishment. That is to say, the server is an employee and therefore paid for the work they are doing by the employer.

The word "gratuity" is derived from the Latin word gratia, which is literally translated as "grace." Any hack can define grace as "unmerited approval." Nothing merits "gratia." You don't earn grace. You do not earn a tip. A tip is something given out of the genuine compassion of an individual.

Why, then, do we have a "customary" tip level? Because somehow grace became a social institution. For some bizarre reason a person is expected to be kind with his money even if he can bark at a waitress for getting his order wrong. Getting an order wrong earns no tip, but getting an order right--something the waitress is already paid to do--earns her extra cash. There is something wrong here.

And I think I know what's wrong. The whole idea of customary tipping is based on a--wait for it--Christian view of society. For 1500 years in Europe, Christianity was the unquestioned supreme religion. Islamic imperialism knocked on the doors a few times, even overran a good deal of Christendom (it's Istanbul, not Constantinople), but Christianity remained at the heart--both physically and metaphorically--of Europe and therefore the Western world.

Central to the worldview cultivated by this society was that a person, Christian or not, lived in a state of perpetual grace. They were given life that they did not deserve, got a day of life-giving rain they did not deserve, and a day of sunshine to dry the wet land that they did not deserve. The response to such divine benevolence was to respond in kind by imitating that grace and bestowing on others that which they did not deserve, such as a tip for services rendered.

And then came this strange age in which the whole of Christian philosophy is swept aside, but the social institutions it left behind are gobbled up by the secularists.

I am not sure what this all means, but it is thoughts I have on "tipping." I never calculate a tip because I think it's an insult to the concept of gratia.

Advent Song of the Week

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

O come, o come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear

Rejoice, rejoice
Emmanuel
Shall come to thee
O, Israel

O come, Thou dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight

Rejoice, rejoice
Emmanuel
Shall come to thee
O, Israel

O come, Thou wisdom from on high
And order all things far and nigh
To us the path of knowledge show
And teach us in her ways to grow

Rejoice, rejoice
Emmanuel
Shall come to thee
O, Israel

O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind
Bid our sad divisions cease
And crown Thyself our King of Peace

Rejoice, rejoice
Emmanuel
Shall come to thee
O, Israel

"Biblical" Dating

Mere Comments has a post concerning the concept of dating in the Bible. It links to and quotes from a series of articles in the Boundless webzine (published by James Dobson's Focus on the Family) by Scott Croft which posit that the modern concept of dating is foreign to the Bible and we should return to the implied option of "courtship," though Croft himself never uses this term, instead falling back on the euphemism of "biblical dating."

Far be it from me to disagree with Croft's premise. The modern concept of dating is foreign to the Bible, but I disagree with his conclusions. For one thing, the Bible encourages us "to do what is right, not only in the eyes of the Lord but also in the eyes of men" (2 Corinthians 8:21, emphasis added). We should therefore recognize that many of the habits of the classic Church were instituted to keep them above the reproach of the Roman populace, so that by being like them in practice, they might win some to Christ. This doesn't mean that the Church didn't think classic courtship rituals were wrong--if they did, they wouldn't practice them--but that it was chiefly a cultural concern and not an ecclesiastical one. Maybe if the Church were founded today, in order to remain above the reproach of the populace, they would practice our dating methods without the sex. Who knows?

I, for one, don't like the Catholic categorization of sin--venial, mortal, et cetera--but it does carry some weight to it. Namely, it aids adherents in recognizing specifically what the sin concerns. Does it concern a sin against ourselves and our bodies, which are temples of God? Does it concern a spiritual practice and direct refutation of God's commandments that do not concern physical acts? This taxonomy may indicate what dating is concerned with. It is not concerned with God's admonition of man as a Spiritual creature, but about how man interacts with the fairer sex (and ladies with the more gruesome one, who, in a perfect world, they wouldn't have anything to do with because we're a bunch of idiots) and how that reflects on Christian morals. Dating outside of the courtship concept (e.g. through the family and supervised by the church) does not indicate any sinful transgression, for there is no commandment regarding it. We simply know how we should act in a relationship, not how we ought to pursue that relationship in a romantic fashion (see 1 Corinthians 7 on marriage and sexually charged relationships).

All that said, do I think the modern dating scene is proper? As a single male, I have no vested interest in saying that it is. (It obviously isn't working out for me.) On the other hand, I have no real interest in saying that it isn't--as a male, single or otherwise, the sexual norms of modern dating attract me. I think my view of dating is best summarized by a comment on the original post:

I recommend that we return to the courtship regime that reigned during the Victorian era in America, and put women back in charge of asking men out. (For those unfamiliar with the history I recommend Beth Bailey's wonderful book From Front Porch to Back Seat.)

It was merely through the blind force of economics that young men moved into control of courtship in the first place: once entertainment moved out of the home and into public spaces like concert halls and restaurants, money was suddenly necessary to courtship, and men, as the partner with income, found themselves in a position from which to issue the invitation. Some writers at the time noted that the new regime of "dating" resembled prostitution, since only young men with money could now afford the company of young women; and, of course, it put the young woman in the vulnerable position of feeling at the end of the night that she now owed the young man something — he had, after all, just spent money on her.

I beg of you all to remember that the sex which we designate as the active agent, who gets to issue the invitation for a date, is put in a position of immense power — for each member of the passive sex must then become, in essence, billboard, an advertisement, an attempt to draw the attention of one of the askers. Please take a moment to glance at what a typical forteen-year-old girl wears — and what she reveals — today, and you will see what happens when the standards of young men are allowed for decades to pressure the standards of young women and what they must do to earn attention.

We should end this madness! Put the young woman back in charge, and make the young man jump through her hoops, earn her attention, just as his great-great-great grandfather did in the nineteenth century. Little girls being of fallen nature too, of course, the result will not be perfect; but by letting the naturally far more predatory young male take charge of courtship, we have put the fox in charge of the henhouse.

Why I am a Lutheran Part I: Abstract Deities

In order to lay a foundation for being Lutheran, we must start at the bottom. Without Christ, there can be no Christian denomination, Lutheran or otherwise. Without Judaism, there can be no Christ, for there is no promised Messiah. Without monotheism, there can be no Judaism. Without theism, there cannot be monotheism. Therefore, the first reason I am a Lutheran has to be that there is in the great beyond some abstract deific force. I do not at the point mean to say that there is one god or that there is any god at all in the conventional sense of an active personality.

But why god at all? There are a myriad of differing views, among them atheism which completely denies the existence of a deific force. And among the myriad of differing views, there are even more arguments to support those views. But for the sake of thinking of an abstract deific force, I only care about one: the argument of beginnings.

Let us say that this universe had a beginning point. Some scientists say it was the big bang, others say that the universe has always existed. Theists, however, claim that a god of sorts willfully crafted the universe into form. I am partial to this view, and not just because I am Lutheran--it is one of the reasons that I am Lutheran, not vis versa. How do I mean?

Let us accept the Big Bang Theory for the moment. At the very beginning, all matter in this universe was concentrated into a minute singularity with a density of infinite value. That is to say its practical volume was zero. Due to the amount of stress from gravitic and electromagnetic forces, this condensed matter exploded in a "big bang," scattering its make up across the vast ocean of empty space. Over billions of years, this matter concentrated in certain areas and began to condense into planets and stars and all other sorts of heavenly bodies.

This is an interesting series of events, and given the trillions of stars among the thousands of galaxies, even the low probability of one planet being capable of sustaining life is bound to be fulfilled. If the odds were 1 in 1000000 (and the odds are even less than this), after 1000000 tries, we have reason to expect that at least one of those trials would result in a planet capable of sustaining life. Repeating the trial 1000000 times may not alter the odds of the individual trials (that is to say that if I flip a coin twice, even if it landed heads the first time, it is still 1:1 odds that it will land heads, rather than 2:1 in favor of tails), but multiple trials will carry out the probability.

Thus we have come to this simple conclusion, namely that a planet capable of sustaining life is expected to a rise despite the ridiculous odds simply because there is the given of so many trials. Now that one planet (and there may well be more) is capable of sustaining life, but then we have to say that life arose against all odds (which, given the number of trials that occurred, is still possible) and then that this rudimentary life became, eventually, you and me.

I do not intend here to deny macroevolution--though I do--but I want to go back to the first issue: the inital "bang" that started it all. There is a very simple argument to be made against this, and it is one that we can all appreciate. The classical philosopher Aristotle introduced the concept of the prima causa or "First Cause" (also "Prime Mover") to the world and science through the ages has borne out this concept as an observable and verifiable "law." Newton explained that every action has an equal an opposite reaction, which assumes, of course, that there is an initial action, which will of course cause the reaction. That is to say every action is caused by some other action. (A reaction is an action that will start something else.)

So, we come back to this issue: what is the prime mover of the singularity? What thing caused the matter? One school of cosmology suggests a cyclical universe, which is constantly expanding and the contracting again into a singularity regularly and then re-exploding to create a whole new universe. So for all we know, the universe is a googol years old instead of the customary few trillion. But this begs the question: there must be matter to initiate the cycle. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Evolutionary answer: duh, the egg; the chicken was the uniquely adapted life form that emerged from the egg of a long lineage of ancestors.) Okay, so there was a singularity before there was a universe. Or was there a universe that condensed to cause the first singularity?

And even given the matter, as if it appeared out of thin air (a bad analogy, as matter is what makes up the air), from whence did the laws of gravitic forces and electromagnetics come? Gravity and electromagnetism are caused by matter, but why is it following this strict pattern, any alteration of which--to the 1/1000000000th of a unit--would cause the universe to collapse from this order into chaos?

The universe is fine-tuned beyond human comprehension. It has not been explained by science. Richard Dawkins, debating Francis Collins in the most recent issue of Time hints at the fabled "unifying theory" that ties all these things together, but there's a catch: this unifying theory is built on the back of the theories under it. In other words, all these laws may be subject to submolecular units called strings (the predominant "unifying theory" candidate today) but these calculations are only possible given that science sees the theories under it. It's a bottom-up function. Take away science's understanding of gravity, and there is no way to unify that physical reality with electromagnetics. And even the unifying theory came first (strictly speaking impossible, given that there would be nothing to unify), where does this universal law come from?

It comes back to a prima causa: there must have been something before the Universe that determined how it would function among the infinite number of ways possible. But you say "wait, wait, then who created this prima causa?" And there is a very simple answer to that: since the prima causa initiated the Universe, it does not necessarily exist within it. And therefore, it is not necessarily bound by physical laws such as the Prime Mover principle.

Wait, that's not fair; it's a cop-out. Why can't the Universe simply be? Again, a simple answer: the universe can simply be, save for the fact that we know there are laws upon which the universe rests. And the universe cannot create its creator. The laws themselves may simply be, but that is more of a cop-out than the abstract deity. Why? Because it does not conform to the rules of science, materialist science, upon which they are observed. Scientists who say "just because" are no scientists. They just stop with no further scientific inquiry because maybe, just maybe, the evidence leads to a place they don't want to go.

Why I am a Lutheran: "Bibi wo soro"--there is something in the Heavens.