catapult magazine

Anybody remember those heated debates we had here before, during, and after the American invasion of Iraq? An article I read today reminded me about the argument we had about WMD, the UN, weapons inspections, and preemtive war.

http://www.slate.com/id/2137953/?nav=tap3

So I’m wondering if people still generally have the same ideas about this thing as then, or has anybody changed their mind.

Here’s one of the treads from those bad-ol days:
http://www.cultureisnotoptional.com/discuss/viewtopic.php?t=315&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

or maybe he meant that whatever either of them did would have been imperfect…though perhaps some more imperfect then others.

or maybe he meant that as long as human actions are rooted in the wrong spirit or people put too much trust in their own power, they will fall short. and how could people not put trust in themselves? it’s only natural.

Just because Bush believes he is doing God’s Will doesn’t mean he is. It also doesn’t mean he isn’t. The Old Testament clearly suggests that God uses non-Jewish nations to do "His Will". That could mean that Hitler might have been used by God, Iran might be God’s tool and Bush could be yet another pawn in God’s grand scheme.

And what might God want to teach us with all this turmoil?—-what He has continually said, that all kingdoms will fall at the feet of the one Kingdom that endures. As long as the U.S. is not the kingdom of God, it will fall. This is not defeatist. This is putting my hope elsewhere than in the power of the United States. The strange truth about Calvinist communities is that the predestining God doctrine often seems to operate more as a comfort for anxieties and a powerful catalyst for working to make things better.

I must admit, however, that at the moment I find my Calvinist work ethic in conflict with the monastic mysticism of Thomas Merton. My own tiredness the last several years has led me to be attracted to Merton’s ideas of rest from the Modern world. I’m trying to find a harmonious balance between the urgency of Calvinism to bring the Kingdom home and the restful "apathy" (apatheos) of Merton’s Catholocism. I find myself drawn to the wisdom of the teacher in Ecclesiastes who says everything is meaningless if human beings have no control over the fruit of their labor.

Your take on Ecclesiastes almost sounds Marxist, grant. I like it! Let’s rise up and take control of the fruit of our labour. Oh oops, there I go again thinking that mere humans can do good stuff.

It is my belief that God granted humans one very potent and important thing….free will. Free will that extends to every aspect of our lives. Whether we take action and fight for our beliefs or whether we sit idley by, saying it won’t be good enough so i’m not even going to try….it’s all our own choice. Whether we say "Let’s see what I can do" or say " one person can’t change anything", it is all on us. God created the Earth and everything on it and handed it to us. And it is up to us not just to ask God to help but to take to the task at hand and rise up and fight, kick and scream, do whatever is in our power to live up to the responsiblities God has given us. Even if we lose, we know and God knows that we did our best and we didn’t give up. We’ve been mentioning a lot of quotes, adages, and cliche’s…and the reason being that most are ingrained with some kind of truth, no matter how often it’s used. And the one I think is appropriate now is "God helps those who help themselves"…with a little added tailend…."and others". We’re not going to win every fight we take on, but we can say we fought. We can’t save every child, but we can look back on the ones we did, we’re not always going to be recongnized for the good we’ve done…but we’ll know we’ve done it. Every small action brings a reaction, and sometimes those reactions change lives and even save the world in some small way.

Ask any sinner who has found his way to Jesus by the words of a minister….he’ll tell you that minister changed the world…his world. Ask any scared forgotten child who lost his parents and is given a second chance with a foster family….he’ll tell you that family changed the world, his world. Ask any illiterate man who is taught to read by his tutor…he’ll tell you that tutor changed the world, his world. Ask any lost and lonely elderly person, any sad housewife, any unemployed man, what it would take to change te world? A smile, a hug, a job? Those things change the world everyday. Ask any soldier sitting in Iraq today what a letter, a package, a handdrawn picture means to them? It changes the world. Their worlds. All these things and more bring hope. Without hope their is no point. So if you carry a little bit of hope with you everyday, you to can change the world…one smile at a time.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the soldiers sitting in Iraq today instead of home with their families, serving their country. Whether you agree with the war, or whether you don’t….these soldiers need your prayers today and everyday.

Thank You,
Heidi

Wow, Dan, Marx is an excellent example for this discussion! Excellent! I can’t think of a better one. The difference between me and Marx is precisely on this point that, for me, God’s power works outside and sometimes against us whereas Marx dissolves God into an all-too-human equation. Because Marx follows Hegel’s synthesis of God and man which essentially turns man into a god (or equates God with man’s Reason, to be more precise), Marx’s interpretation of Ecclesiastes will be very different than mine. I know it sounds like I’m trying to make a theological point, but this is really very relevant to the whole discussion of why we should work for a better world. It may even lead to better digestion! Read on…

Marx thinks the problem is that we have made for ourselves an irrational world, no? where man does not enjoy the fruits of his labor. But this has been the state of human existence ever since The Fall and continues to be the case after Marx. The curse of the Fall is death, which means our work is in vain if we’re just going to die in the end. We may be able to enjoy the fruit of our labor every once in awhile, but what good does it do us if we only shit it back to the dust from which it came? Does fruit help us live forever? You could eat 100 bushels of fruit a day—you’re still going to die (of dehydration due to the diarrhetical episodes that would result).

When Christians read Ecclesiastes, however, they take the wise teacher’s point and add onto it the hope of Christ—that death is not the end. Only work that is done in Christ’s name is meaningful (comes to a good end) because it finds its end in an endless Kingdom. The fruit of Christ the King is fruit that lasts. Long and happy live the bowels of the believer!

I know the Christian message sounds silly, but it doesn’t make any more sense to continue tilling the earth in the hope that human beings will somehow "magically" get better than they are now. When has that ever happened? In all of history, have humans ever made themselves better than they once were? Human beings continue to do bad things, even when they try to do good things! The only way this pattern of bad behavior could be disrupted is if somehow a new kind of human were born who doesn’t sin and who gives birth to other new kinds of human beings—a new race of people who are made up of many different races and who can finally be content to work for their fruit because they know they’re never going to die. Working toward a better world would really make sense if people lived in a Kingdom that endured forever. But something like that is too silly to be true. Something like that could never happen.

grant, you have a very negative view of shit. :) You know, shit makes great fertilizer which helps trees grow big, juicy fruits. Death, decay and shit are essential to life, but this is slightly off the point.

I don’t think that we can actually make ourselves better (as you say, we have a terrible track record), but I believe we have to believe that we can. If you don’t believe that, then we’re going to do nothing. Or, we’re going to actively participate in making things worse. If we believe that what we do matters, it does. And if we don’t believe it, it matters anyway.

On the other hand you’re right. I can’t imagine a world where people are people yet they don’t age and don’t shit and don’t die. i also can’t imagine a kingdom that lasts forever (because everything I have ever known is always in flux). I simply don’t get forever because I’m a temporal being. But you’re a temporal being too, so perhaps all of this comes down to a lack of imagination on my part.

But wouldn’t you agree what we have to believe that what were doing matters?

The fact that we’re temporal beings should make you want to work, fight, and play harder. Everything we have and everything we are will go away someday, so you need to enjoy it. And fight so that others can enjoy it. The world will never be perfect but as long as there are people out there willing to try to make this world a better place, there’s hope.

~Heidi

In other words, shit is the meaning of the world. Because the world is a constantly changing process of turning to shit—it will only lead to more shit, which then leads to other beings who will benefit from that shit, and then shit some more. All we need to do is enjoy the eating of what comes from shit and the shitting of what will once again go to shit. If shit is the beginning and end of life, then life is shit! I don’t believe in a world that begins and ends with shit.

Ayayay, such radical antipathy toward shit! Before the days of chemical fertilizers people really valued the stuff. These days we just flush it down the toilet and never see it again. I’d like to suggest an essay by Friedensreich Hundertwasser called "ScheissKultur: Die Heilige Scheisse" (ShitCulture: Holy Shit) which is a bit hard to find in North America, especially translated into English, but here’s a turd to chew on:

Vegetation has taken millions of years to cover the sludge with a layer of humus, a layer of vegetation and a layer of oxygen, so that man can live on earth. We have a false notion of our waste. It is with shit that life first begins.

Shit is much more important than food, food only nourishes mankind, which reproduces on a massive scale, diminishes in quality and has become a deadly threat to the earth. In the name of false hygienic laws, we lose our cosmic substance, we lose our rebirth.

Dirt is life. Sterile cleanliness is death. Our waste is washed far away whereby we pollute rivers, lakes and oceans, or we transport it to costly sewage works. Every time we flush the toilet,thinking it a hygienic action, we violate cosmic laws.

Why is eating positive? Why is shit negative? What comes out of us is not waste, but the material of which the world is made, our gold, our blood. Humus has a good smell. Anyone who walks in the woods after the rain knows its smell. The smell of humus is the smell of God, the smell of resur rection, the smell of immortality.

I wholeheartedly agree with the quote. Since my stomach problems, I have a much more positive view of the stuff actually. In fact, I wait patiently every day for it. But my point is that it matters what we believe about the beginning and end of the world and that our view of the end and how to get there will affect the way we view this Iraq thing. It seems that your view of the end of man is that everything can be fixed with good politics or the removal of capitalism or some such thing. Actually, I’m not entirely clear on what you think the solution is. It seems like you’re thinking that it has to be a political one—is that right?