When Lies Lash Out

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They say, Where goods don’t cross borders, guns do. I’d like to propose a corollary: When words aren't exchanged, bullets are. Bullets may be exchanged anyway, but the absence of dialogue makes it more likely. Now, a hardened hater might not respond to reason, but what about before he got into that condition? Maybe. Who knows what an extra ounce of prevention might have done?

Things build. Merely annoying misunderstandings can get quite ugly, especially should the conflict serve the interests of others, like identity politicians. So, I'm losing patience. I'm losing it with those who don’t appreciate the practice of commending and defending their most important ideas and values. And I am growing in appreciation of reasoned conversation unto truth, or dialectic. That simple childlike wonder could do so much good in the world (with grown-up acumen), that amazes me.

Merely inconvenient anti-intellectualism is one thing. One time, I politely made a theoretical comment at a new bible study, and the pastor's wife dismissed it (and me) as being “all head and no heart” (Lady, you just met me. How much heart is that? 🙂 ) But things seem more than personally inconvenient now, and the antipathy enrages me today. Why? The propaganda that fosters all the heinous violence on the news is so very thin! What happened to thinking for ourselves? People have lost interest I guess, and with it, skill. Also, they don’t see anyone caring, so why should they? It’s not a thing, to them.

Public school doesn’t help. “Think for yourself, oh, but not anything that's not on this card of acceptable secular-liberal belief.” Also of no help: the whole pseudo-polite aversion to ever talking politics and religion. It just makes us bad at such talk, which reinforces the aversion. (The state of that art is abysmal.)

So, the young are vulnerable to lies, and the lies foster violence… and all that is fostered by the neglect of those responsible for them. Now, I don’t mean to excuse the violent. It’s more that, as with transitioned kids, many passive parents are culpably not helping.

There's nothing new under the sun. Lies lash out, or people lash out with them. It happened to Socrates, Jesus, Solzhenitsyn, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and on 9/11. It's all over the news, and it's happened to many of us. It just seems like a good time to remember that the pen is mightier than the plane. The planes haven't stopped. Neither should the pens.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Subjective Professory

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This is a bit of my episode with The Subjective Professor in which we talk subjective professory and agreeable discourse. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

The Subjective Professor: And my guiding principle was avoiding hypocrisy because Jesus didn't like it so much. So.

Penjammin: [laughs] I've heard that. I've heard he wasn't a fan. You know, maybe.

The Subjective Professor: Yeah. As soon as I saw something was hypocritical, I just said, okay, moving on. Just sort of examining people's presuppositions or their assumptions and then seeing what they wanted to do with it then allowed me to say Oh okay, well, that's one way of doing it. But then, at the same time, being open minded with what might be better. So that's pretty much where the whole subjective professor thing came from.

Penjammin: Maybe this is an exercise in subjective philosophy, or professory. The hypocritical. People will say “that's hypocritical,” but often there's different intentions with the word. There's double standard, there's fakeness. There's a combination of both.

The Subjective Professor: Right, right.

Penjammin: Probably, just off the top of my head, I think I'm missing one. But, how do you intend it when we're talking about like –

The Subjective Professor: Right. So I looked up hypocrisy in the dictionary, and the definition that's there says pretending to have moral values that they don't actually have.

Penjammin: Right.

The Subjective Professor: And I thought that was describing something, but it really wasn't getting to the heart of the matter. And to me, I made the conclusion that it was simply…

Hear more:

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Silence and Starsong

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This is a bit of my episode with Joseph Knowles in which we talk his efforts to inspire wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

Penjammin: So what we're really talking about is Silence and Starsong. Most people aren't going to hear that and know exactly what I'm talking about. Would you please fix that for us? What is Science Starsong, and what's distinctive about it, too?

Joseph: Sure. Silence and Starsong is a fiction magazine of which I am the editor. Our tagline is inspiring wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness. And even that itself might not mean a lot to a lot of people, but it's kind of latching on to something that C.S. Lewis talked about. It's a little bit inspired by his space trilogy books.

This April will be the two-year anniversary of our first print magazine issue, and we publish short stories in a variety of genres. So we have a lot of science fiction and fantasy, a healthy dose of stories you probably just have to call horror stories, one or two that might fall under the broad label of fairy tales. We have a couple of Westerns and a number that you just have to call “That's just kind of weird. That's just a weird story.”

Penjammin: Well, there's the high strangeness part, bringing that to bear. They're doing the heavy lifting on that one, I guess.

Silence and Starsong, what's that from?

Joseph: Well, the idea for doing a magazine to begin with came up in a group chat of online friends. And every now and then we would joke back and forth “There's another idea for my novel” or “There's another idea for my story collection.” And one day somebody said why don't we just actually do thi? Amongst amongst a few of us, we could we could put together a little anthology.

And from there it kind of grew to: Well, why don't we just throw the idea out there and see if anybody else is interested? So we had to come up with a name, and . . .

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Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Neighboring Faiths

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This is a bit of my episode with Dr. Win Corduan in which we talk the latest edition of his book Neighboring Faiths. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

Penjammin: Oh, I have a list of things I wanted to ask you, but mostly I want to talk about your book, which is not about elves or dwarves or anything like that. Some people probably still believe in them, so maybe in a future edition. Right? [laughter] It's Neighboring faiths. Why this book, and how is it distinct from others?

Win: In the 90s, if you were looking for a book in world religions to use as a textbook in your class at a Christian college, your choice was between books that were motivated by various agendas (all religions are the same or maybe the original religion of humankind was the worship of Mother God and so forth). And having been placed in the situation by the Lord that I needed to teach world religions . . . I started to study for that to make my teaching worth while more and more and more. Then finally, I got to the point where some students were encouraging me to write that book, and I thought about it, and I approached InterVarsity press with the idea of writing a book from a Christian perspective, and they went along with that. And so I wrote the first edition, and thankfully, the Lord has blessed that. So now up to the third edition, and I don't know if there will be any more.

Win: You know, I think that as a Christian who makes no pretense of being anything else, who even prefaces his book with reflections on Christianity and world religions, I can give a fairer and more objective picture of what others believe than those who think it's all the same pudding just in different cups.

Penjammin: Yeah, yeah.

Win: I distance myself from, say, Buddhism and Hinduism. It's not my religion. I can give an objective description of both rather than looking for a nonexistent common core.

Penjammin: That's interesting because it also points out that the perspective that the religions all have this common core, that they all melt down to pretty much the same thing, that is just as much of an assumption or a presumption or a slanting bias, potentially, as anything else would be. And it seems like that's assumed to be the objective point, when really it's one other view, right?

Win: Right. It becomes almost a religion in itself. When you say that we really don't worship Jesus, but we all worship “The Real”; we just don't know it, as a Christian, I feel like I'm being shortchanged. I think most people would think the same.

Penjammin: Right. That's interesting when the “neutral” person says something like that, and then every other adherent of a religion says, “No, you got us wrong!”

Win: Yeah.

Penjammin: Like, Wait a minute. Everyone disagrees with your [analysis]? Maybe it's you.

Win: From the first edition on, from the very start, I had for each religion, the section . . .

Here more below.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Systematic Philosophical Theology

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This is a bit of my episode with Alex from The Protestant Libertarian Podcast in which we talk William Lane Craig's new book Systematic Philosophical Theology Vol. 1. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

Penjammin: So what'd you think about this book in general? We're talking about, by the way, William Lane Craig's book just coming out with a multi-volume series of a systematic theology, and it's called Systematic Philosophical Theology. So for those listening in, there's a little courtesy heads up for you. What did you think about it?

Alex: I'm familiar with William Lane Craig's work. I have a lot of respect for him. I think he's a brilliant intellectual. There are some issues of course [that] I haven't agreed with him on in the past, but that's okay because I respect his output. And I think that in general he's on the right track. And I'm also not really a systematic theology guy. My background is in biblical studies, which, as William Lane Craig talks about in the book – I know he has a section where he quotes Ben Witherington and I think Brevard Childs, when he talks about how there's a difference between I guess, the theology that emerges out of biblical studies and then trying to systematize that theology into this, this kind of orderly structure, which is what he's trying to do with his book. So I obviously I do read a little bit of systematic theology for the podcast, and I have an interest in certain issues, and I'll read what the systematics think, but I'm not an expert on that by any stretch of the imagination. But it seems, at least with the Prolegomenon the introductory section of the book, he is laying out this kind of grand picture for a way of rationally systemizing theology based on kind of strict philosophical reasoning. And one of the things that I really appreciate about what he incorporates in the Prolegomena is the idea that this has to conform to what we find in the Scripture.

Alex: And he actually has this really great passage, which maybe we'll talk about in a little bit, where he discusses how actually our reading of the Bible has to be the starting point for any systematic theology. And this has always been one of my problems with systematic theology is that, as I've read some of this, it almost seems like the systematic theologians, they're born into a particular tradition, whether it's the Lutheran tradition or the reformed tradition or whatever tradition, the Catholic tradition. And instead of using the Bible to critique their tradition, you know, the kind of reading their tradition through the lens of the Bible, what they do is they read the Bible through the lens of their tradition. So you wind up having a Lutheran reading of the Bible or a reformed reading of the Bible. And I just think that as a Protestant who believes in the ultimate authority of Scripture, that should be our balance for us. Our starting point should be the Scripture, and we should work forward from there. And that's exactly what William Lane Craig argues in this book. And so I think that this might give him a huge advantage as a systematic theologian in this series. And so it'll be really interesting to see where he takes it in the long run. But knowing his work, I think he's going to do a great job with it.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.