Month: May 2005

Amazing New Work Of Art! The Toothpick Fighterplane Sculpture!

Suppose that you’re a little child and that you’re abducted by the public school system.

Every day a large yellow metal machine that makes a humming noise appears before your house, and you are expected to cooperate with your abduction under the threat that the truant officer will make things hard on you and your family if you don’t.

During the times that you have been abducted by the public school system, aliensteachers bent on undermining American society mess with your brain and implant the idea that "self-expression" has such a high value that it trumps everything else in life.

They further implant the idea that "You can be anything you want to be."

One day in art therapy class, you build a tiny model of a figherplane out of toothpicks and glue.

The commandantteacher of the art class holds it up for all the other children to see and praises it highly as an outstanding example of your self-expression.

You are awash with emotion. This is the first time that an alien overlordteacher has ever praised anything that you have ever done.

You imprint on the moment.

The making of toothpick fighterplanes becomes for you, forever, the defining mode of your self-expression. It is you mission in life.

But soon the novelty of making tiny toothpick fighterplanes wears off. Soon you must move on to bigger and better toothpick fighterplanes in order to recapture the feeling of satisfaction and approval that the praise of your art class commandantteacher gave you.

So focused are you on your mission in life that you think only about making bigger and better toothpick fighterplanes. You completely ignore your other studies. You never pick up any skills besides those needed to make toothpick fighterplanes.

By the time you graduate from the local state college (where you major in art), you are producing full-scale, incredibly realistic fighterplanes made entirely out of toothpicks and glue.

But then college is over.

Your abduction by the public educational system is over.

It’s now time to . . . "Find a job." (Dum! Dum! Dum!)

Of course, there are no employers willing to pay you to make toothpick fighterplanes for them full time, so you become an independent artist.

You’re an entrepeneur!

You start approaching art museums and the governments of towns where aviation and the military are big local industries and start trying to sell them your toothpick fighterplane sculptures.

You make some sales!

It’s a real fad for a while for people to buy your works!

But then the fad ends.

Suddenly people aren’t buying your toothpick fighterplanes any more.

Several towns tell you that they’d like one, except the town right next door already has one, so it’s not really a novelty that will add anything to their community.

You’re stunned!

You complain!

You argue all the advantages your toothpick fighterplanes have to offer a community!

You point out that Catholic social doctrine says that a worker deserves a just wage allowing him to make a decent living for himself and his family.

But the towns still aren’t buying.

You just can’t sell enough of your magnificent toothpick fighterplane sculptures to make a living.

Unfortunately, with all the emphasis with which the public school system has been placing on self-expression and its message that "You can be anything you want," the public school system failed to communicate to you other messages like "You need to develop a marketable skill" or "You need to develop a form of art that there’s a sizeable market for."

What does this teach us?

That the public school system does not prepare children to face real life?

Yes, that’s exactly what it teaches us!

But what else?

That public school teachers are all evil aliens?

That self-expression is worthless and everyone needs to just conform?

That art is a worthless encumbrance of society that is not worth our time?

No, it teaches us none of those things (despite a superficial plausibility to the first).

What it does teach us is that we have to have the skills to do marketable work–that is, work for which there is a market. We do not have a right to decide that we want to do a particular thing and that the rest of the world has to conform itself to what we want to do.

It also teaches us that when we start upon a particular line of work, we must be aware that we are taking a risk. Risk is part of the job. There may be a market for our work one day but not the next. If we take a risk and it doesn’t pan out, or stops panning out, we cannot blame the world for that. We simply misestimated the market for what we wanted to do.

It finally teaches us that we must seek to exercise the virtue of prudence exercise foresight and adaptability in determining what skills we cultivate and what jobs we pursue.

Otherwise we may find ourselves trying to sell toothpick fighterplanes in a market that’s already saturated with those.

Religion & Star Trek

Some folks have been questioning the status of religion in Star Trek.

This is a complex subject.

The fact is, religion is not given a consistent treatment in Star Trek. Sometimes it’s treated positively, sometimes neutrally, sometimes negatively. One can’t draw simplistic conclusions about how Star Trek regards religion. Star Trek has produced over 700 hours of material, and in reality how religion is treated has do to with who was writing those individual hours.

This is true from The Original Series onward.

In The Original Series we had some episodes, that spoke respectfully of religion. For example, there was "Bread and Circuses," in which the crew visited a parallel planet where the Roman Empire never fell and there were televised gladitorial matches and such. During the episode they learned of an underground group of sun worshippers and were perplexed by this as ancient Rome <false claim>didnt’ have a lot of sun worshippers</false claim>. At the end of the episode, Uhura informs them that she’s been listening to the planet’s broadcasts and that the sun worshippers don’t worship the sun in the sky, they worship the Son of God, and the show closes with a direct allusion to Christianity and the possibility God is incarnating on other planets.

(It also, apparently, indicates a problem where the Universal Translator gets confused with homophones. Where’s Hoshi when you need her?)

OTOH, there were episodes of TOS that were very disrespectful of religion. The worst was "Return of the Archons" where a parody of the Christian religion is at the center of the episode. In this one, they visit a planet controlled by a being known as Landru, who is in total mental domination of the inhabitants, whose are "absorbed" by lawgivers (priests) into Landru’s "Body" and become smiling, 19th century zombies totally given over to "the will of Landru" in a stultified society that never makes any progress and that represses the violent and sexual urges of the people to the point that they have to have a bacchanalia evey year to blow off steam.

"Landru" is lader found out to be a 6,000 supercomputer programmed by a(n ostensibly) altruistic guy who, in Kirk’s words, nevertheless could not give the computer "his wisdom" and so the society he created to save his planet from the ravages of war ended up being not such a paradise after all.

This nice-talk about the historical Landru is a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys meant to deflect charges that the episode is anti-Christian, because the truth is that Landru is a cipher for Jesus, the lawgivers are ciphers for priests, and the "Body" is a cipher for the Church, which Roddenberry (who wrote this episode) mocks by presenting us with a repressed, totalitarian, society of smiling fuddy-duddy zombies.

This was not the only time Roddenberry let his anti-Christian streak show. Multiple episodes (and the first Star Trek movie) are all based on the idea of going into space and symbolically finding God and finding out that he’s a fraud, or an alien, or a child, or a computer, or insane, or some combination of these. The two twin themes Roddenberry felt drawn to were "God is unworthy of worship" (for one reason or another) and "There ain’t no paradise except the Federation" (all other paradaisical societies having some horrible hidden flaw).

Paramount didn’t let Roddenberry go whole hog on these themes, so he had to mask them (with things like Landru), but they’re there. In other episodes (even ones Roddenberry co-wrote, like "Bread and Circuses") religion is treated more respectfully.

When it was time to make Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Roddenberry’s original treatment included the idea that the V’Ger machine was really behind Jesus Christ (another God as childish supercomputer theme)–a fact that would have been made explicit to the audience by the V’Ger (briefly) projecting an image of itself as Jesus Christ.

Paramount totally nixed that idea.

Roddenberry was thus suitably enraged when Bill Shatner got to incorporate an explicitly God-oriented (and braindead) plot in Star Trek V: The Search for God (or whatever it was called).

Things got worse when Roddenberry got to do Next Gen, in which he had far fewer shackles on his secular humanism compared to what he was allowed to put on television in the 1960s. Not only were the episodes in which Picard gleefully proclaimed that humans are merely electro-chemical machines, there was also the awful "Who Watches The Watchers" episode in which the ship finds a planet of primitive proto-Vulcans and accidentally starts a religion among them, leading to a prime-directive violation in order to stamp it out. Secular humanism is in full force in this episode, and religion is treated very disrespectfully.

Roddenberry’s secular humanism was one of several dumb things he imposed on the series. The idea that the Federation was a paradise and didn’t have money were others.

But this wasn’t the end of the story.

Roddenberry died, and afterward the franchise passed into other hands. These folks, whatever their flaws, tried to undo some of the conceptual damage that Roddenberry had done and loosened the ideological straightjacket into which he had put certain elements of the show.

The franchise then got more friendly toward religion. In fact, the next two series–Deep Space 9 and Voyager–both contain episodes that are extensively devoted to and positive about religious themes.

Deep Space 9 has three major religions in focus: Bajoran religion, Dominion religion, and Klingon religion. It never proclaims any of them true (and in fact, it’s quite clear that the Dominion religion is false), but it offers the show extensive changes to discuss things like the value of faith, the role of evidence for faith, what the prerogatives of God are, how one may need to sacrifice personal power and prestige in order to embrace true spirituality, how seeminly unconnected events can be part of a divine plan, how the loss of faith and the betrayal of faith are bad things.

There’s one moment in a DS9 episode in which the Kai (the main Bajoran religious leader) discovers that someone close to her has embraced the Bajoran equivalent of Satanism and, stunned, her instant reaction si to slap him very hard and cry "Heretic!"–and the thing is, you agree with her! He is a heretic! He needs to be slapped! The Kai (for once) did the right thing.

Sure, the moment is masked with the trappings of an alien religion, but how often do you find a moment on television that affectively conveys to the audience the horror of what heresy is.

This is something that simply could not be achieved without the sci-fi setting. If you had the pope slapping a Satanist here on Earth and yelling "Heretic!" at him, the audience would be pulled into all kinds of analysis and introspection about Christian history and "oppression" and violence and love and compassion and such and the emotional horror of heresy would be muddied.

But in the sci-fi setting, even secular members of the audience are on the Kai’s side, cheering her on, making the moment a protoevangelium for them.

Unfortunately, the Kai’s resolution is fleeting and she subsequently succumbs to the same heresy herself, only to find redemption (another religious theme) later on.

Even when we know the religion we’re being shown is false the series still manages to pull out interesting insights. For example, there is one episode in which the Dominion character Weyoun, who has been genetically programmed to worship the Founders of the Dominion, is discussing the matter with someone who points out that the Founders have controlled the development of his species so that he worships them.

Weyoun replies: "Of course! That’s what gods do!"

(Think: Genesis.)

In another episode, Weyoun is chuckling to himself about how silly and superstitious the Bajorans’ worship of the Prophets as gods is and another character points out that Weyoun himself worships the Founders as gods.

Weyoun instantly becomes very serious and says: "That’s different."

"How so?"

"The Founders are gods."

We, the viewers, know that Weyoun’s religion is false, but they still admire Weyoun for sticking by his beliefs. He may be immoral in other ways, but he’s going to stick by the priciples of his faith even if others don’t, and you respect him for that.

There is even a very touching moment when Weyoun dies (one of the times he dies) in which he knows he may have sinned and is extremely anxious to receive his god’s "blessing" (read: "absolution") before he passes into the next world. Weyoun is genuinely fearful of what may happen to him if he isn’t absolved before he dies, and it is a moving moment.

Star Trek Voyager also has significant exploration of religious themes. In this show we finally get a human character who is overtly religious (Chakotay, who follows a religion based on the beliefs of Native Americans), and there are episodes that directly imply (in a variety of different contexts) that matter is not everything and that there is a spiritual dimension to the world that we need to pay attention to and that we may need to rely upon for help.

There is even an episode ("Barge of the Dead") that warns that we need to take the possibility of going to hell seriously. In this episode, the half-Klingon B’Elanna Torres experiences has a near death experience in which she is made to understand that, if she says on her current path, she will go to hell (albeit a Klingon-themed hell).

The current series–Star Trek Enterprise–has also touched on religion in non-dismissive ways.

In a first season episode the alien Dr. Phlox comments positively about his study of Earth religions, mentioning in particular his visit to India to learn about Hinduism and his attending Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

This season we got to see the Vulcan equivalent of the Reformation take place (though the differences are enough that there is no Catholic-bashing message here; it’s just a Reformation-like event on another planet), and afterwards the Vulcan first officer T’Pol is shown spending a lot of time reading a book that is explicitly referred to on screen as a "Vulcan ‘Bible.’"

Who’da thought we’d see a character doing the sci-fi equivalent of Bible study on Star Trek?

So, while Star Trek has many flaws, and while Gene Roddenberry was an anti-Christian secular humanist, it is not accurate to portray the series as if it was uniformly hostile to religion. While there are anti-religious episodes, there are an increasing number of positive and even interesting treatments of religion on the show.

Religion & Star Trek

Some folks have been questioning the status of religion in Star Trek.

This is a complex subject.

The fact is, religion is not given a consistent treatment in Star Trek. Sometimes it’s treated positively, sometimes neutrally, sometimes negatively. One can’t draw simplistic conclusions about how Star Trek regards religion. Star Trek has produced over 700 hours of material, and in reality how religion is treated has do to with who was writing those individual hours.

This is true from The Original Series onward.

In The Original Series we had some episodes, that spoke respectfully of religion. For example, there was "Bread and Circuses," in which the crew visited a parallel planet where the Roman Empire never fell and there were televised gladitorial matches and such. During the episode they learned of an underground group of sun worshippers and were perplexed by this as ancient Rome <false claim>didnt’ have a lot of sun worshippers</false claim>. At the end of the episode, Uhura informs them that she’s been listening to the planet’s broadcasts and that the sun worshippers don’t worship the sun in the sky, they worship the Son of God, and the show closes with a direct allusion to Christianity and the possibility God is incarnating on other planets.

(It also, apparently, indicates a problem where the Universal Translator gets confused with homophones. Where’s Hoshi when you need her?)

OTOH, there were episodes of TOS that were very disrespectful of religion. The worst was "Return of the Archons" where a parody of the Christian religion is at the center of the episode. In this one, they visit a planet controlled by a being known as Landru, who is in total mental domination of the inhabitants, whose are "absorbed" by lawgivers (priests) into Landru’s "Body" and become smiling, 19th century zombies totally given over to "the will of Landru" in a stultified society that never makes any progress and that represses the violent and sexual urges of the people to the point that they have to have a bacchanalia evey year to blow off steam.

"Landru" is lader found out to be a 6,000 supercomputer programmed by a(n ostensibly) altruistic guy who, in Kirk’s words, nevertheless could not give the computer "his wisdom" and so the society he created to save his planet from the ravages of war ended up being not such a paradise after all.

This nice-talk about the historical Landru is a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys meant to deflect charges that the episode is anti-Christian, because the truth is that Landru is a cipher for Jesus, the lawgivers are ciphers for priests, and the "Body" is a cipher for the Church, which Roddenberry (who wrote this episode) mocks by presenting us with a repressed, totalitarian, society of smiling fuddy-duddy zombies.

This was not the only time Roddenberry let his anti-Christian streak show. Multiple episodes (and the first Star Trek movie) are all based on the idea of going into space and symbolically finding God and finding out that he’s a fraud, or an alien, or a child, or a computer, or insane, or some combination of these. The two twin themes Roddenberry felt drawn to were "God is unworthy of worship" (for one reason or another) and "There ain’t no paradise except the Federation" (all other paradaisical societies having some horrible hidden flaw).

Paramount didn’t let Roddenberry go whole hog on these themes, so he had to mask them (with things like Landru), but they’re there. In other episodes (even ones Roddenberry co-wrote, like "Bread and Circuses") religion is treated more respectfully.

When it was time to make Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Roddenberry’s original treatment included the idea that the V’Ger machine was really behind Jesus Christ (another God as childish supercomputer theme)–a fact that would have been made explicit to the audience by the V’Ger (briefly) projecting an image of itself as Jesus Christ.

Paramount totally nixed that idea.

Roddenberry was thus suitably enraged when Bill Shatner got to incorporate an explicitly God-oriented (and braindead) plot in Star Trek V: The Search for God (or whatever it was called).

Things got worse when Roddenberry got to do Next Gen, in which he had far fewer shackles on his secular humanism compared to what he was allowed to put on television in the 1960s. Not only were the episodes in which Picard gleefully proclaimed that humans are merely electro-chemical machines, there was also the awful "Who Watches The Watchers" episode in which the ship finds a planet of primitive proto-Vulcans and accidentally starts a religion among them, leading to a prime-directive violation in order to stamp it out. Secular humanism is in full force in this episode, and religion is treated very disrespectfully.

Roddenberry’s secular humanism was one of several dumb things he imposed on the series. The idea that the Federation was a paradise and didn’t have money were others.

But this wasn’t the end of the story.

Roddenberry died, and afterward the franchise passed into other hands. These folks, whatever their flaws, tried to undo some of the conceptual damage that Roddenberry had done and loosened the ideological straightjacket into which he had put certain elements of the show.

The franchise then got more friendly toward religion. In fact, the next two series–Deep Space 9 and Voyager–both contain episodes that are extensively devoted to and positive about religious themes.

Deep Space 9 has three major religions in focus: Bajoran religion, Dominion religion, and Klingon religion. It never proclaims any of them true (and in fact, it’s quite clear that the Dominion religion is false), but it offers the show extensive changes to discuss things like the value of faith, the role of evidence for faith, what the prerogatives of God are, how one may need to sacrifice personal power and prestige in order to embrace true spirituality, how seeminly unconnected events can be part of a divine plan, how the loss of faith and the betrayal of faith are bad things.

There’s one moment in a DS9 episode in which the Kai (the main Bajoran religious leader) discovers that someone close to her has embraced the Bajoran equivalent of Satanism and, stunned, her instant reaction si to slap him very hard and cry "Heretic!"–and the thing is, you agree with her! He is a heretic! He needs to be slapped! The Kai (for once) did the right thing.

Sure, the moment is masked with the trappings of an alien religion, but how often do you find a moment on television that affectively conveys to the audience the horror of what heresy is.

This is something that simply could not be achieved without the sci-fi setting. If you had the pope slapping a Satanist here on Earth and yelling "Heretic!" at him, the audience would be pulled into all kinds of analysis and introspection about Christian history and "oppression" and violence and love and compassion and such and the emotional horror of heresy would be muddied.

But in the sci-fi setting, even secular members of the audience are on the Kai’s side, cheering her on, making the moment a protoevangelium for them.

Unfortunately, the Kai’s resolution is fleeting and she subsequently succumbs to the same heresy herself, only to find redemption (another religious theme) later on.

Even when we know the religion we’re being shown is false the series still manages to pull out interesting insights. For example, there is one episode in which the Dominion character Weyoun, who has been genetically programmed to worship the Founders of the Dominion, is discussing the matter with someone who points out that the Founders have controlled the development of his species so that he worships them.

Weyoun replies: "Of course! That’s what gods do!"

(Think: Genesis.)

In another episode, Weyoun is chuckling to himself about how silly and superstitious the Bajorans’ worship of the Prophets as gods is and another character points out that Weyoun himself worships the Founders as gods.

Weyoun instantly becomes very serious and says: "That’s different."

"How so?"

"The Founders are gods."

We, the viewers, know that Weyoun’s religion is false, but they still admire Weyoun for sticking by his beliefs. He may be immoral in other ways, but he’s going to stick by the priciples of his faith even if others don’t, and you respect him for that.

There is even a very touching moment when Weyoun dies (one of the times he dies) in which he knows he may have sinned and is extremely anxious to receive his god’s "blessing" (read: "absolution") before he passes into the next world. Weyoun is genuinely fearful of what may happen to him if he isn’t absolved before he dies, and it is a moving moment.

Star Trek Voyager also has significant exploration of religious themes. In this show we finally get a human character who is overtly religious (Chakotay, who follows a religion based on the beliefs of Native Americans), and there are episodes that directly imply (in a variety of different contexts) that matter is not everything and that there is a spiritual dimension to the world that we need to pay attention to and that we may need to rely upon for help.

There is even an episode ("Barge of the Dead") that warns that we need to take the possibility of going to hell seriously. In this episode, the half-Klingon B’Elanna Torres experiences has a near death experience in which she is made to understand that, if she says on her current path, she will go to hell (albeit a Klingon-themed hell).

The current series–Star Trek Enterprise–has also touched on religion in non-dismissive ways.

In a first season episode the alien Dr. Phlox comments positively about his study of Earth religions, mentioning in particular his visit to India to learn about Hinduism and his attending Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

This season we got to see the Vulcan equivalent of the Reformation take place (though the differences are enough that there is no Catholic-bashing message here; it’s just a Reformation-like event on another planet), and afterwards the Vulcan first officer T’Pol is shown spending a lot of time reading a book that is explicitly referred to on screen as a "Vulcan ‘Bible.’"

Who’da thought we’d see a character doing the sci-fi equivalent of Bible study on Star Trek?

So, while Star Trek has many flaws, and while Gene Roddenberry was an anti-Christian secular humanist, it is not accurate to portray the series as if it was uniformly hostile to religion. While there are anti-religious episodes, there are an increasing number of positive and even interesting treatments of religion on the show.

Touto Esti

A reader writes:

I’m trying to counter the common anti-Catholic argument that Jesus’ words "touto esti" (at the Last Supper) actually mean "this stands for" or "this represents" my body. I tried searching on the Internet without a lot of luck and I don’t know the Greek language at all.

Could you tell me the real meaning of the phrase or point me to a website that might have more info?

Touto esti means "This (touto) is (esti)." Period.

The verb eimi (here in its third person singular form esti) does not mean "stands for" or "represents." Nobody with adequate training would translate it that way.

This is not to say that eimi cannot be used symbolically. Just as in English we can say of a king who is also a great warrior, "The king is a lion" (meaning that the king has the qualities in battle of a lion), so one could say "This is my body" (meaning that "this" represents one’s body).

The language thus means one thing but may be taken in one of two ways.

The debate thus graduates from the level of language to the level of meaning. The broader context, both of Scripture and the Church Fathers, shows that Jesus meant what he said literally, not symbolically.

Touto Esti

A reader writes:

I’m trying to counter the common anti-Catholic argument that Jesus’ words "touto esti" (at the Last Supper) actually mean "this stands for" or "this represents" my body. I tried searching on the Internet without a lot of luck and I don’t know the Greek language at all.

Could you tell me the real meaning of the phrase or point me to a website that might have more info?

Touto esti means "This (touto) is (esti)." Period.

The verb eimi (here in its third person singular form esti) does not mean "stands for" or "represents." Nobody with adequate training would translate it that way.

This is not to say that eimi cannot be used symbolically. Just as in English we can say of a king who is also a great warrior, "The king is a lion" (meaning that the king has the qualities in battle of a lion), so one could say "This is my body" (meaning that "this" represents one’s body).

The language thus means one thing but may be taken in one of two ways.

The debate thus graduates from the level of language to the level of meaning. The broader context, both of Scripture and the Church Fathers, shows that Jesus meant what he said literally, not symbolically.

Metasearch=Preterism

A reader writes:

Hey, I have a couple of questions about preterism. I’ve been trying to figure out what preterism is, but I’m having a hard time finding any good resources on the web. Most of the websites are terribly unorganized. But what exactly is preterism, why do preterists beleive what they do, and why do they claim that if Jesus didn’t come back in 70ad that we are indeed still under the law?

I normally have an easy time becoming abreast of issues like this, but none of my books mention it, and I hear you’re a supercomputer that can do an internal metasearch for things like this.

I’ll do the best I can.

First, as to what preterism is, it is the position that the great majority of the prophecies in the Bible have already been fulfilled. Some individuals seeking to call themselves preterists, however, maintain that all the prophecies in the Bible (including the Second Coming) have been fulfilled.

Because this leads to a confusion of terms, it is better to refer to this second group by a second term. The second term that is coming to be used for them is pantelists, meaning "those who believe that all (pan) prophecies are at an end (telos)."

The distinction is important, for the question of whether or not the Second Coming has happened is the difference between orthodoxy and heresy. Pantelists are heretics. Other preterists are not heretics (unless they are heretical for other reasons, e.g., by denying the Real Presence).

As to why preterists believe what they do, a very strong case can be made that many of the prophetic texts of the Bible have already been fulfilled. I write about this in some articles that are available online. For example, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

The problem with pantelists is that they take this and push it too far, claiming that all the prophecies of Scripture have been fulfilled when the Second Coming clearly has not been. The fact that the Second Coming took place in A.D. 70 is infallibly excluded by the Nicene Creed [A.D. 325, 381], which states that Christ "will return [future tense] to judge the living and the dead."

As to preterists saying that Jesus returned in A.D. 70, it is not clear to me which kind you are talking about. Pantelists would claim that the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, and the inauguration of the ternal order all occurred in this year, which is all contrary to the faith for reasons that we have seen and that requires a radical reinterpretation of each of these concepts.

Many (though not all) ordinary preterists, by contrast, would say that a coming of Christ occurred in A.D. 70, but not the Second Coming, which still remains in the future.

These preterists commonly argue that the book of Revelation deals with the destruction of Jerusalem, which happend in A.D. 70. According to the theory of these (not all) preterists, Revelation depicts Jerusalem as the "Great Whore" or the "city where their Lord was crucified" (Rev. 11:8), whose fall is depicted in chapter 18 of the book. Chapter 19 presents a coming of Christ, and chapter 20 speaks of a very long period (symbolically represented as a "thousand years") in which we are presumably living.

Since the fall of the Whore, the coming of Christ, and the advent of the thousand years seem causally connected and piled on top of each other, it is plausible to suggest–given this interpretation–that the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was due to a coming of Christ and that it inaugurated the present age in which Christianity–now separated from Judaism–has spread dramatically.

We know that, in his earthly ministry, Jesus placed significant stress on A.D. 70, when the Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed. This destruction is mentioned in all four of the gospels, so it seems to have quite a bit of significance in God’s mind.

The question is: If this interpretation of Revelation is correct, what kind of coming of Jesus occurred in A.D. 70? Pantelists claim (contrary to the faith and with massive reinterpretation of the Second Coming) that it was the Second Coming itself. Ordinary preterists, though, are more modest and claim that it was a lesser coming, of the kind that the Old Testament frequently speaks of God having, symbolically "visiting" his people with either blessings or cursings in tow, based on whether they are keeping or violating his Law.

On this hypothesis, Christ (as God) symbolically "visited" Jerusalem in judgment for its sins (notably, his own crucifixion; cf. Rev. 11:8) through the Jewish War of the late A.D. 60s that culminated in the sacking of Jerusalem and the burning of its Temple in A.D. 70, just as Jesus has prophesied. There may have been apparitional or other phenomena associated with this event, though it did not amount to the Second Coming that is still in our future. It was a coming of Jesus, but not the Second Coming that he elsewhere prophesied.

As to why the individuals that you have encoutnered link this coming in A.D. 70 and the end of the Law, I can conjecture. I haven’t encountered this claim myself, but since Jesus said

Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished [Matt 5:17-18].

one might conclude that the Law of Moses (the Law that Jesus is talking about here) would still be binding until "all is accomplished," which these folks would then interpret (pantelistically) as "all biblical prophecies are fulfilled."

There are several problems with this:

  1. The Law of Moses was only ever binding on Jewish people to whom it was given. It was not binding on the gentiles. Thus unless "we" are ethnically Jewish, "we" are not bound by the Law of Moses because we were never bound by the Law of Moses.
  2. The assumption that "all is accomplished" means "all biblical prophecies are fulfilled" is by no means certain. Jesus came to clarify the Law, and so it may mean "until I have finished clarifying what God truly wants." Jesus also came in obedience to the Law, and so it may mean "until I have completely fulfilled the Law through my life, death, and resurrection." Jesus also may have only the events of his First Coming in view, in which case he may mean "until my First Coming–my life, death, and resurrection–are accomplished."
  3. Whichever way one interprets these matters, St. Paul (who died before A.D. 70) seems to clearly regard the Law of Moses as already fulfilled and thus something that has passed away by his day, for he writes:

And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ [Col. 2:13-17].

Hope this helps!

An Emily By Any Other Name

Attention, expectant parents: Do your child a favor and don’t name him or her Jacob or Emily.

"A lot of kids must look up when teachers call out ‘Emily’ or ‘Jacob’ these days. Those were the most popular babies’ names last year — and have been every year since the 1990s.

"Emma and Madison were second and third for girls, just like the year before. Michael and Joshua for boys, like the year before.

"The biblical name Jacob, the most popular choice for boys for the sixth straight year, also was at the top in the first count of names given to twins. Parents like to pair it with Joshua."

GET THE STORY.

Trust me. I know whereof I speak. I was born in the early-1970s, apparently during the heyday of naming baby girls Michelle. (The heyday was likely spawned by that teeth-grittingly awful Beatles’ song of the same name. I bless my parents everyday that they simply liked the name Michelle and did not name me after that song.)

Anyway, growing up, there was almost always someone else in my class named Michelle. When I graduated in 1990, I lost count of how many times the master of ceremonies said the name Michelle as a first or middle name, but I do know that there were four other girls named Michelle Lynn because I counted.

Now, I’m not telling you to go out and give your child some weird name. Just please, please, please give your child a name that hasn’t appeared on the Top Ten Baby Names List for at least the last five years. Your child will thank you.

Trust me.

Miracle Apologetics

A reader writes:

I have an issue that comes up in my classroom often enough. Throughout the year I present and flesh out a list of different reasons to my students why Catholicism is the one, true religion. Included among those reasons are (a) trusting the biblical testimony about Jesus and His miracles, and (b) the collective testimony of 2 billion people today professing belief in Christ and His teachings.

Some students will typically respond that the same two things could be said for Islam–people believe the Qur’an’s testimony about Muhammad and his alleged miracles, and there are alot of Muslims in the world today, too. There question ultimately is: Why should we accept these two reasons when they support Christianity but reject them when they support Islam? I do have a response to this question, but I would be curious to know how you would deal with it.

I would be careful about using the two billion people argument. One might suppose that God has a desire to reach the greatest number of humans and thus would work to see that the true religion is the largest, this argument is subject to a number of significant objections:

  • The fact that Christianity is the largest at the moment doesn’t mean that it always was or always will be (indeed, Jesus seems to indicate that it will end up small). Why should we prefer this time period?
  • During much of world history, the number of worshippers of the true God has been very, very small. This seems to cast doubt on the supposition used to support the argument.
  • To the extent the argument provides evidence for Christianity, it seems to provide half as much evidence for Islam, there being half the number of Muslims in the world that there are Christians.

It thus seems to me that I’d stay away from this argument, at least as here articulated and interpreted. It may have some evidential value, but that seems to be only very limited.

It is possible to argue for the Church as a moral miracle that points to God, but the argument that will need to be made will involve much more than what is presented here.

As to how to defend the first claim, here we are on much firmer ground.

If you read the Qur’an, one of the recurrent themes that comes up with tiresome frequency is the question of why Muhammad can’t perform a miracle. In contrast to Jesus, who performed many miracles in his career, Muhammad seems unable to cough up any. Apparently people were regularly asking Muhammad to perform a miracle so that they might believe what he says (or to prove that he was no prophet at all by his failure to perform them) and he dictated suras explaining why he can’t do so. These suras tend to say the following things (or variations on them) each time the question is raised:

  1. Muhammad is only a prophet and so can only do what God lets him.
  2. Just look at creation! That’s a miracle!
  3. At the end of the world there will be the resurrection of the dead, and that’s a miracle.
  4. You’ll get yours for disbelieving God’s prophet!

Not a very convincing set of replies.

The few miracles that are attributed to Muhammad are problematic in various ways: (a) they are not clearly miraculous (e.g., "Hey! We won this battle against our enemies instead of losing it!"), (b) they are based on doubtful interpretations of verses in the Qur’an, or (c) they are based on late sources that do not appear to go back to the time of Muhammad.

By contrast, the evidence for Christianity’s miraculous origin is abundant.

This is not to say that every individual miracle Jesus performed can be verified. In fact, the great majority cannot be at this late date, when all of the eyewitnesses have been dead for so many centuries.

But the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, taken together, are the subject of a very powerful apologetic. Numerous alternatives for these can be tried (the Lord, liar, lunatic trilemma, the testimony of the apostles under pain of death, the failure of alternative explanations), but in the end the evidence supports the fact that Jesus both rose from the dead and then rose from the earth.

Other religions may have reports of miracles, but no other religion has miracles that can withstand the type of cross-examination (no pun intended) that the Resurrection and Ascension can. Therefore, no other religion has the kind of miraculous evidence for its veracity that Christianity does. This gives us a reason to believe in Christianity.

Amazing Defense Innovation! The Toothpick Fighterplane!

Suppose that you are a defense contractor and that one night you are abducted by aliens who are bent on undermining Earth’s planetary defenses.

The aliens tamper with your brain and implant the idea that, instead of building your current defense project (a new kind of jet fighter that is just the thing to knock down pesky flying saucers) out of metal, you should build it out of toothpicks instead as this will make it really extra strong and light and good at knocking down flying saucers.

They also also abduct all of your employees, so they all think this is a great idea, too.

Thus you set to work building the great toothpick fighterplane.

You order large quantities of toothpicks and glue and your workers eagerly set about building the toothpick fighters. MillionsBillions of dollars are spent on acquiring enough toothpicks and glue to make numerous planes entirely out of toothpicks.

Your brain-poisoned employees labor happily and energetically and put in long hours, for which you happily pay them their salaries plus overtime, they are such effective and enthusiastic workers.

You also pay for their medical insurance, which is needed to cover the innumerable and unavoidable splinters in workers’ fingers, the resulting infections, and the constant faintings and work-related accidents from inhaling too much of the everpresent glue fumes.

Finally, the fighters are ready to deliver to the Pentagon (which for some reason has been remarkably lax when it comes to inspecting how the project is going). You and your workers couldn’t be prouder of the wobbly, creaky fleet of toothpick fighters that you have produced, and you are very much looking forward to the Pentagon taking delivery of them and giving you the multi-billion dollar check you need to replenish your company’s now badly-depleted bank accounts.

It therefore comes as a total shock to you when the Pentagon says that it won’t pay!

You’re devastated!

You complain!

You try to argue them into paying!

You point out all the "advantages" that the aliens made you believe toothpick fighters would have!

You point out that vast sums of money went into the raw materials for the planes!

You have your human resources department trot out documentation showing all of the countless hours of regular time and overtime that your workers worked.

You point out that Catholic social doctrine holds that workers need to be paid a just wage allowing them to support themselves and their families with human dignity.

Yet for all this the Pentagon remains completely unmoved.

It believes the planes are, in its word, "Useless."

And, again in it’s words, it’s "Not paying."

What does this teach us?

That we all need to sleep with a can of Grey-Away next to our beds?

That we need to constantly monitor ourselves for traces of alien mind manipulation?

That an invasion is imminent?

No.

It does, however, teach us a very fundamental lesson about economics.

Many people, thinking from the viewpoint of a product producer, suppose that the value of an item is determined by the raw materials or the labor that went into making it.

This is false.

The real value of an item is not determined by raw materials or labor but utility. A fleet of toothpick fighter planes is useless for making war against aliens since they will shake apart before they even lift off the runway. They thus have no value to the Pentagon.

This shows something about where value is established: It isn’t fundamentally determined on the side of the seller but on the part of the buyer (at least in the sense of the word that I’m discussing). Buyers who place more value on a product will pay more for it.

Of course, the seller can try to generate value in the buyer’s mind by advertising to him all of the ways in which the thing could be useful to him (even if that’s just making the buyer look more "cool" and "hip" to others). He can even refuse to sell the item if his price isn’t met and thus try convincing the seller up in what price he’s willing to pay, but that is just a way of sharpening for the buyer a choice between having the item and the value he perceives in it and not having it.

Ultimately, it is how useful a buyer perceives an item to be, or how much he values it, that determines what price he is willing to pay for it.

Now that the Pentagon has passed on your fleet of toothpick fighter planes, your best bet is to sell them as works of art (at vastly reduced prices that will at best only recoup part of your costs in making them).

You and your employees also probably want to let the Pentagon study your brains to figure out what the aliens did to them and how to protect other defense contactors from the same treatment.

An alien invasion may be imminent.