Month: April 2007

I often do plumbing for an organization which promotes, among other things, “peace and justice.”  One of their slogans (you see it on buttons, bumper stickers, etc.) is “Stop the Violence.” Someone there asked me once why I wear a sidearm. I told him “It’s sort of a fundamentalist version of ‘Stop the Violence.’  If somebody starts some violence, I intend to stop it if I can.”

This past Saturday night I discussed carrying with a friend and mentioned that, once you get used to it, you feel somewhat vulnerable whenever you happen not to be armed.  Philosophically, I oppose the existence of places where only criminals are armed, and I mentioned schools as an example.  It is not legal for me to be armed on school property. He and I both agreed that shooters would gravitate to such places, knowing that they have a free hand against their prey.

And so thirty-six hours later we hear that a shooter went to Virginia Tech and blew away over thirty kids.  I am literally horrified when I think of what the students endured while this evil murderer casually snuffed out one life after another.

If a trained handgunner had been present and armed, the murderer would have been summarily stopped and most of those kids would be alive today.

Several articles about Don Imus have appeared recently. No two agree in details, but all agree that he is worse than Hitler, Bloody Mary, and James Dobson all rolled into one. That is a tipoff that something is askew in the analyses, but don’t expect many to notice.

I did. I’ve never listened to Imus. I’d heard that he was ugly and I happen to think that the world already provides enough ugliness to last me for a day, so I haven’t sought him out. Then I heard that he’d said something ugly about the Rutgers basketball girls. “So what else is new,” I thought. “Isn’t that what he’s paid to do?” I mean, does anyone pay Don Imus to restrict his speech to acceptable levels of depravity? No, they pay him to be ugly.

Imus was just using the degrading jargon of the black underclass to elaborate on the appearance of the black girls whom he and his partner had observed to be tough and tattoed. He was saying that they looked like the people who typify the culture where such language is used.

I didn’t see the girls. I don’t know what they looked like. I can say, generally speaking, that no one should look like the underclass and expect to be treated as upperclass. But I have no opinion of the girls’ appearances, since I didn’t see them.

The airwaves would be better off without filthy talkers, but I don’t think that’s what the sharks have been after for the past week. I hear them on Air America. They want to silence anyone who refuses to conform to their dictates. Running Imus through the disposal is just a strategy to try to get to Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck.

I like to give God credit for things, but the word “miracle” is overused. If everthing is a miracle, then nothing is. If one says “I believe in miracles: I saw the sun rise this morning,” then he and the atheist both agree, for the atheist saw the sun rise as well.

It is difficult to define “miracle” because it involves certain presuppositions about God’s relationship to the universe. The Bible says that he upholds all things by the word of his power and that all things “hold together” by, or through, him. Yet a miracle goes beyond that, and I think a miracle is when God intervenes and does something that could not occur naturally.

If a sick person gets well, that’s not a miracle. But if he gets well in an instant, that’s a miracle. God usually answers prayer through providence rather than through miracles. If one is dying of cancer and God’s people pray seriously and the cancer goes into remission, that’s only a miracle if it conflicts with the large record of cases where other cancers have gone into remission. I’m not saying God didn’t do it, I’m saying that he did it through providence and not through miracle.

Why quibble? As I said at the beginning, if everything is a miracle, then nothing is. Unbelievers have a long history of laughing at believers because the believer experiences nothing unusual, but still calls it “God.” The believer is thanking God for a medical recovery and the doctor gets ignored along with the scientists who developed the effective medicines. The unbeliever thinks that there is nothing compelling in the believer’s worldview because he sees plainly that the believer is looking at nature and calling it supernatural.

If there is such a thing as nature, (and I think that there is), then those things which are within that realm need to be labeled as such, and “miracle” needs to be reserved to those phenomena which conflict with the natural order of things. Examples would be a storm ceasing suddenly when commanded to do so, a structural deformity in a human body being remedied instantly, or an uncanny coincidence in response to prayer such as an exact dollar amount arriving in the mail precisely in response to a specific need. Such timing and specificity may rise to the level of “miracle.”