Virtually Augmented Vision, Violence vs. Self-Loathing & the View from Underground
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, February 11–17, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
Vision Con by L.M. Sacasas in The Convivial Society:
There are two ways to augment reality: virtually or by your attention—in the mode of the machine or in the mode of a creature.
Is the Trinity Biblical? The Trinity Doctrine in Three Points by John Peckham in Adventist Review:
[The] teaching that there is no one like God rules out the possibility that someone is partially God. Scripture sets forth an absolute distinction between God—the Creator—and everyone else. Even as one cannot be a little bit pregnant, one cannot be a little bit divine.
When the Olympics Gave Out Medals for Art by Joseph Stromberg in Smithsonian Magazine:
“[The Baron Pierre de Coubertin] was raised and educated classically, and he was particularly impressed with the idea of what it meant to be a true Olympian—someone who was not only athletic, but skilled in music and literature.”
Texas Neighbors Said They Tried to Sound the Alarm About Houston Church Shooter for Months by Suzanne Gamboa at NBC News
Years before a shooter opened fire at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, residents in the small neighborhood said they had run-ins with the suspect, who frightened them.
The women who spoke said things got so bad in the neighborhood that five of them spent a day about five months ago talking to local elected officials, police, the sheriff’s office and the city’s legal department.
You Can’t Reclaim the Culture by Having More Kids by Matthew Loftus in Mere Orthodoxy:
If your basic outlook on life still functionally treats financial security and physical comfort as your primary life goals, then homeschooling and family discipleship can easily be perceived as different wallpaper on the same house.
A family that is otherwise indistinguishable from their unbelieving middle-to-upper-class neighbors in terms of where they choose to live and how they spend their money is probably not different enough to make a difference. If your basic outlook on life still functionally treats financial security and physical comfort as your primary life goals, then homeschooling and family discipleship can easily be perceived as different wallpaper on the same house. We can easily recognize the cultural forces in arenas like sexuality that are encouraging apostasy and even push back against the encroachment of sports leagues, but if there’s no similar effort against Mammon, we run the risk of guarding the front door while the back gate remains open.
Hatred Alone Is Immortal by Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:
It may end in violence, but I think not, at least not a return to the brutality of the Seventies, much less that of the age of “anarchist” bombings. What we are moving toward instead is an ever-blooming festival of contempt and blame that will—inevitably: caveat lector—culminate in all the varieties of self-loathing.
Why Was Turkish Delight C.S. Lewis’s Guilty Pleasure? by Cara Strickland in JSTOR Daily:
For Edmund, Turkish delight represented a way to taste happier times, when his family was all together and the future was unmarred by world conflict.
The Data-Backed Case for Marriage by Joseph Holmes in Christianity Today:
The book follows a consistent pattern: Each chapter introduces a popular negative idea about marriage, then presents a mountain of mainstream research (much of it conducted by Wilcox himself) and anecdotes debunking the claim.
The Future Requires a Usable Past: And Nostalgia Is Not the Right Way to Find One by Noah Millman in Gideon’s Substack:
You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, anymore than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent authority that they make it so. To make the future, you have to actually learn about the past.
Without that element of connection to and building on the past, futurism comes to be dominated by a a kind of loathing for the present and the actual lives we are leading. This is the same emotion that animates and is animated by nostalgia—both are ways of fleeing life rather than exploring it. The preservationist and the iconoclast are, in many ways, mirror images of each other. A big motivation for preservationism’s stultifying dead hand is the simple belief that we are incapable of creating anything as beautiful as people made in the past. But the iconoclast’s envious hammer is impelled by a very similar spirit, because if the old icons had no inherent power, if they could be shamed into obsolescence, then they would not need smashing. Neither orientation enables us to make use of the past. The same is true of our social reactionaries and revolutionaries; to my ears, they both sound like people determined not to live life, but who are instead determined to demonstrate the impossibility of living. Should we go “back” to a world of fixed gender roles, where women were women and men were men and nobody could possibly confuse them, or “forward” to a world where an infinitely proliferating panoply of genders are a matter of pure personal expression? Both sound awful to me, but a big reason why they sound awful is that they both feel rooted in a loathing for actual being, and actual connection, in preference for the clean and tidy fatality of the absolute.
A Small Parable by Alan Jacobs in The Homebound Symphony:
When people say that academics “have their heads in the clouds.” Or that we humanists are always taking “the view from 50,000 feet.” That’s when I want to say: No. We’re not taking the view from 50,000 feet, we’re taking the view from ten feet underground, and from long long ago.
Music
Praise unto the Son of God for he has saved me and breathed me and breathed new life in me.
Well, peace, it don't come easy
Love, it don't come free
Martin Luther King said
“Lord, I have a dream
Boys and girls of every color
Walking side by side.”
Fragment
Psalm 82:6 is an example of how, in the ordinary Hebrew of the Old Testament, “elohim” can mean a lot of different things including God, (false) gods, other beings from the divine realm (angels, demons), and human beings with quasi-divine status (kings, judges). Perhaps this is one reason why the Old Testament required repeated affirmations that there is only one creator God and that there is none other like him.
In John 10:34, Jesus is making an argument from a trivial case to the case under dispute (a form of argument called the qal vahomer, in Hebrew, and a forteriori, in Latin). The Jews with whom Jesus was arguing in John 10 thought it was a problem for Jesus to use the word “God”/”god” in reference to himself as the “Son of God” (see also Heb 1:5, 5:5 where Jesus is called God's son based on the anointed king being called God's son in Ps 2:7 and 2 Sam 7:14; 1 Chr 17:13). Jesus argues that because it is trivial that the OT permits the use of the word to refer to beings who are not the one creator God, how much less is it blasphemy for him to call himself the “Son of God.”