An article today on FiveThirtyEight says it’s possible that the simple awarding of badges to those who follow certain procedures (openness of data, revealing methodology, etc), may have sparked an increase in these good practices. Or not, of course. The correlation is pretty clear. The causation is somewhat less so. It could be that all the publicity regarding replication has been more conscientious scientists choose more rigorous and open approaches.
What’s interesting to me is some of the popular fallout and commentary that I’ve heard on this. Completely unscientific quacks and nuts use the errors made by scientists as a cover for their own ridiculous claims, while ordinary people decide they can ignore scientific evidence because it might be wrong. If it might be wrong, why should I bother?
Projects such as the one awarding badges for certain practices can help with the public perception as well as the actual practice of science, and that will be a good thing.
What bothers me about the frequent response is that people who are actually much less careful and accountable than the scientific community use the misbehavior as some to both denigrate science as an enterprise and to open the door to completely untested ideas and theories.
Even though the scientific community has its problems—and I strongly commend those organizations working for greater transparency—your odds are still better working with material produced by a community that at least aims for sound methodology. Sure, some science may be wrong, but I’m willing to bet my life on my doctor’s views over those of someone who guesses and goes by their feelings.
Recent political discourse reminds me of the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector:
9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Lk 18:9–14). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
It has been interesting to read articles by partisans of one party or the other explaining how unelectable the candidate of the other party is, and how that party is truly in trouble and going down in flames. “They’re so bad that we’re good,” seems to be the subtext.
I’m not primarily interested in the politics, however, but in some things in shows about human nature. These articles and conversations point to a dangerous, perhaps even fatal way of measuring ourselves. We do it in church just like we do it in the broader society. If I can point out enough negatives about a church or a group, I will surely have demonstrated the value of my preferred group or position.
Thus comes the Pharisee. Now I think we should be careful about how we talk about the Pharisees. In many ways they would make excellent Christians. They were good people trying to fulfill God’s law. Nonetheless they suffered from one of the many failures of the righteous—self-righteousness. It’s interesting that when we look down on the Pharisees for their flaws, we generally are participating in the same ones. We’re not Pharisees. Aren’t we special?
Jesus is here bringing in a character who will be considered righteous by his audience and putting him up against one who will be considered wicked. Note the prayer. “I thank you that I am not like other people.” Face it! We thank God that we are not like other people on a regular basis. We may pretend to be the tax collector who went home justified. But more often we’re looking for the position of the Pharisee. However much contempt we may put into saying the word “Pharisee,” it’s his position we long for. It’s just that we want to thank God that we “are not like other people … or even like this Pharisee.”
I believe the root, however, is our bad approach to measurement. We want to be “better than.” We want a church that is less unfriendly, more mission minded, more biblical, better structured. If we can say with any justification, even just enough to convince ourselves, that we are better than the church down the street, then we can be happy. As a Methodist, I can give thanks to God that I’m not the frozen chosen as are the Presbyterians or self-righteous like the Baptists.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this, as someone points out to me the flaws of the United Methodist Church, which are doubtless legion. How can I be a member of a United Methodist congregation? Surely all of these flaws mean that I should instead be a [Baptist, Presbyterian, Reformed (some variety), charismatic, pentecostal, house church, high church, etc.].
Here’s what experience has taught me: Don’t look at the church down the street. Ask this question: Am I doing God’s will by being where I am? Where can I best do God’s will?
Every church I have been in has had flaws. If it didn’t have them before I got there, it definitely did after! One of the most dangerous things we can do is determine our value before God by comparing ourselves to other churches. This works in many ways. The church down the street can provide us with an excuse for continuing to behave badly. My Methodist congregation may be comforting itself by noting that it’s better than the Baptists while the Baptists are comforting themselves that they are doing better than we are. We can follow that spiral right to perdition as our errors give others an excuse for theirs.
On the other hand, we can become extremely discouraged by comparing our performance to others. If the church down the road is growing by 10% per year, what’s our problem? If they have money to build a new Family Life Center why can’t we?
We need instead to take the parable to heart. What is God’s will for us? Let’s seek God’s will and God’s mercy as we work that out.
Here’s a video of a sermon I preached many years ago. I wonder if it’s still relevant.
I will not be presenting my study on eschatology via Google Hangouts on Air this evening. I will continue on May 12 and May 19 which will conclude this study. I still haven’t decided what my next topic will be. I’m open to suggestions.
… have to vote for one of the major party candidates come November.
I’m going to take a break from not posting anything political. I haven’t stayed away from political posting because I think politics is bad and Christians shouldn’t be involved. I welcome the involvement of everyone in politics. For me, it is a matter of priorities. I choose to post about the gospel and about dialogue, especially but not exclusively among Christians. I’m still not going to tell you how I will vote, but rather about how I make the decision.
I have been registered as independent, not a member of either major party, for about 28 years. I honestly can’t remember (and have no records), whether it was 1986, 1988, or 1990 when I changed my registration from Republican to Independent, but it was one of those. The reason was that I could not accept being counted as a supporter of either of the major parties. I could say that my hope was to get the two parties removed from their privileged legal position. I do wish that, but “hope” is too strong a word. I have been told that I have given up much of my ability to influence the course of politics by this decision.
I have been told that I have given up much of my ability to influence the course of politics by this decision. I’m told by the same people that my one “vote” in changing my party affiliation is no sufficient to be meaningful. I find that oddly contradictory.
Each presidential election I have been told that I need to vote for one or the other of the major candidates, because one of them would become president (or holder of some other office), and indeed this is right. In all the elections in which I have voted, one of the major party candidates has won. In most cases, I voted for one or the other of them, though I have voted for other candidates on occasion.
And you know what? One of the major candidates won, no matter what I did. That was expected. I probably had an impact on that by taking away my vote from whichever major party candidate I would have voted for had I not voted third party or independent. In each case, I fully accepted that result.
The reason for all this is that I don’t belong to any of the political tribes into which we seem to be divided. I would never pledge to support the nominee, whoever that is, in either major party. I cannot call myself a conservative, a liberal, or even a libertarian, though I have some affinities for positions held by each.
Let me illustrate.
I am strongly opposed to foreign military intervention in almost all circumstances. I think that trying to occupy other countries and do “nation building” is especially unproductive—no, make that destructive—because for some reason other countries are not as enthusiastic about being made into the nation we think they should be as we are about “building” their nation. There simply aren’t enough troops out there to occupy all the countries where terrorists might hide and be overlooked by the local government.
At the same time, I favor a strong national defense, with the emphasis on intelligence, special operations, and technology, especially developing new technology to detect and deal with 21st-century threats.
I am fundamentally a capitalist, not pro-business, but capitalist. That means I oppose subsidies, corporate bailouts, protectionism, and governmental barriers to entry, such as most licensing laws.
At the same time, I believe in a safety net. The problem with our existing welfare system is not that it gives too much money to people who need it, but rather that it is so complex and unwieldy that it requires a good lawyer to sort out the requirements and an army of bureaucrats to manage it. And I do mean by this that we should not have children starving, we should not have people depending on the emergency room for their medical care, and we shouldn’t have people involuntarily in the street. Of course, there will always be some that we cannot reach, but those that can, should be helped.
I am very conservative in my lifestyle and in my personal ethics and morals.
I am libertarian about what choices others should be allowed to make.
I could go on and on and doubtless bore you to death. Every candidate will, if elected, do things that I consider wrong. When I vote, it’s not a matter of finding a candidate that agrees with me, but of choosing which wrong things I think should take place.
I don’t find this very surprising. That’s politics. I often have the same problem in church. That’s how living as a community, even a fractured community, works. What I refuse to do is tie myself to any party, and I wish more people would do so as well.
Don’t become disengaged, but at the same time don’t feel that you have to support everything because you support something, or nothing, because you can’t support everything. (I put that sentence in there to test your parsing ability!)
I will vote. After I vote, things will happen that I don’t like. That’s also part of living in community.
But I may vote for someone that has no chance of winning. Friends will tell me I threw away my vote. Some of them will think I hurt one major candidate, some the other. Then during the term of office to follow they’ll explain to me that one shouldn’t support any of the minor parties because they didn’t get enough votes.
I sometimes tend to overthink things. I know this will shock my family and friends. I just experienced the downside of this.
Our yard is full of trees. I have nowhere to park my car that doesn’t result in it being covered with tree sap. Now doubtless friends by the dozens will know how to wash this off. I, on the other hand, had to go complicated. I have tried different car washes. Then I tried a pressure washer, which started to damage the paint.
Today I decided (finally) to just get the water hose I use for the garden and a rag. I intended to have some soap, but forgot to buy it. In 15 minutes with the rag and the hose, the car looks just fine.
Overthinking … I could have done this last year and saved time and money on car washes. It hardly takes as long as running through the machine!
Tonight I’ll be bridging the gap between these two very commonly associated books and doing a look-ahead to my several week study of Revelation. This study will conclude my series on Eschatology.
Amongst the small but diligent group that watches these, are there suggestions for continuation? I will doubtless keep talking, even if the audience is small!
I’m going to try to wrap up my discussion of Daniel. I must remember that my purpose here was not to do an extended study of Daniel, but rather to look at ways of interpreting the book and how they fit into and/or underlie one’s eschatological views.
Chapters 10 & 11 would take quite a number of studies just because of the detail and the fact that it matches history with which very few people are acquainted. So I will recommend some reading regarding this section but will generally summarize and then tie in the ways one might read Daniel with the ways one might read other apocalyptic literature and other statements on eschatology. I will discuss some specific points of the chapters, just not the entire outline.
The Supreme Court did this by declining to hear the case, thus leaving the Appeals Court ruling in place. Article here. HT: FastCompany.
As both a publisher and an author, I approve of this decision, especially because I publish many relatively unknown authors. Sometimes it’s hard for me to convince authors that letting people see portions of their books doesn’t persuade people not to buy them. Without seeing some of the contents, very few people will by a book by an unknown.
I remember telling one author who was obsessive about the idea that someone might pirate his manuscript that he should be hoping for the good luck that someone wanted to pirate his manuscript. His problem, and that of many unknowns, was not that people were reading his book without paying him money, but that people didn’t even know his book existed.
Yesterday I read a few chapters (4 actually) of Hebrews with Stephen’s Textus Receptus (1550) beside my NA27, both from Logos Bible Software. It was an interesting exercise. I noticed a few things I hadn’t noticed before and was reminded of some things I know, but can easily neglect.
I started into biblical languages to get past the gatekeepers. I wanted to read the original text for myself and discover what was there without depending on others. In that goal I failed. It’s amazing the number of little things you can notice when you look at different edited texts. And that is what our Greek New Testaments these days are. (I’ll stick with discussing the Greek, though I could make similar, but not identical, points about Hebrew.) Someone studies the manuscripts available, or existing editions, or starts with an edition and just looks at particular variants, and produces a text which I then read. I can take the Nestle-Aland 27th edition text and read it from their edition, or from the UBSIV Bible I also have which uses the same text. They list different variants. Why? Because the editors determine that for the purposes of this edition, those are the variants you need to see.
Now it happens I’m fairly happy with most of their choices, though one reason I have various editions is so that I can check on other details. In my reading yesterday, for example, I noticed quite a number of differences in word order. It would be quite a daunting task to cover all those differences in a textual apparatus, but they might actually be meaningful. I’m very careful doing so, but I have been known to argue emphasis based on word order. Do I have the right word order?
My point is not to make one feel helpless. Rather, I think we should be thankful to those who have gone to the work to provide us with these tools. I’m thankful that I can read my Greek New Testament in an edition that combines information from thousands of sources and then gives me notes on a selected set of the most important variants. Hebrews 12:1 has its crowd of witnesses. Whenever I study the Bible, I am standing on a substantial pyramid of other peoples’ shoulders.
At the same time I have to remember that there is a time to get out of the rut of the ordinary and to look at things that are substantially different. I’m now interested in studying variations in word order, though I doubt I will ever have the time. Nonetheless, it looks like a field that could be fascinating to research and study.
Lessons? 1) Always go for the source, even if you won’t really get there. 2) Be thankful to those who have gone before!
I’m going to try to wrap up my discussion of Daniel. I must remember that my purpose here was not to do an extended study of Daniel, but rather to look at ways of interpreting the book and how they fit into and/or underlie one’s eschatological views.