Don't Judge Me

"Don't Judge Me", together with "I'm not Judging" is a phrase I am hearing more and more often, both in Christian and in secular circles. Now I think I get what people are trying to communicate and I suspect (please correct me if I am wrong in your case) that mostly "don't judge me" means "don't think badly of me". Which is a perfectly legitimate sentiment though it does seem to suggest that the speaker already thinks poorly of his own actions or opinions. What worries me is the fact that the two statements are being used interchangeably and I can't think of many reasons why that should be.

There may be an assumption that all judgement is negative. Which is odd, but no more so than many of the unreflected ideas we carry around most of the time. Of course some judgement can positive; even in popular culture we see judges giving encouraging reviews in all sorts of competition. On this interpretation, the phrase would seem to mean something more like :"don't think badly of me for doing the thing that makes me think badly of myself". And that is an old if largely indefensible sentiment. If I think that I am a very bad person, that does not mean that I want anyone else to think of me as a very bad person but it does mean that I have no good reason to ask anyone to think of me as better than I believe myself to be.

 
Alternately, I suppose someone could use "don't judge me" in a more precise way, they may really and impossibly, asking the world not to come to any conclusions about their actions. Maybe I used "impossibly" in haste, there may be some of you out there who can see a friend or acquaintance doing or saying the sort of thing for which they say "don't judge me" and not come to any conclusions about whether or not their actions are good or bad.

 I can't.

Fair warning to everyone I know: I judge you. I judge you all the time. Granted, I have judged most of you as being pretty cool folks but nonetheless, I am judging you all the time and I'm not likely to stop.
 
And if that weren't enough, I happen to think that my proclivity for judging is a good thing. As a matter of fact I have a lot of trouble even imagining a world in which stuff just happened and people just did things and I didn't have any opinion as to whether it was all good or bad. And I think that I'm in pretty good (and bad) company here.

 
Regardless of it's quality, my company is certainly numerous. Sartre and Nietzsche, even Hume all assumed that we are forever judging things, although they disagree with each other - and certainly with my own view - as to what judgments we ought to reach. Heck Nietzsche, who called for a re-imagining of all values, still seemed to believe (one is never on firm ground trying to insist that Nietzsche definitely believed any particular thing) that the strong should judge (albeit according to their own systems of value); while Sartre lamented that we are doomed to invent standards of judgement for ourselves and then live our lives knowing that they were essentially arbitrary. On the other side of things, C.S. Lewis (you didn't think I could write my first post in months without mentioning him did you) certainly believed that we are naturally prone to judge thoughts actions and speech. He believed that we judge the world by the Tao, the basic way of all existence, that the Natural Law was real and that good and wise people judge their environments as either conforming to or diverging from it.

 
And I think this draws out the important distinction between "don't judge me" and "don't think badly of me". Ignoring the possibility of positive judgement and granting for a second that the judgement in question would be negative, the disastrous assumption people seem to be making is that judging someone's actions or words to be bad means loving them or valuing them less. But that does not follow at all. I am fully convinced that I think, say and do bad things all the time. Go ahead and judge me, it's fine, just don't love me any less, don't value me any less for it. No matter what you think, you probably won't think that I am half as bad a person as I know myself to be, and I still value myself a lot.
 
You see, I think we have forgotten (both Christians and seculars) that there is no contradiction in saying that people have infinite value and terrible moral character. The two are not interdependent. The problem is that when we conflate judgement and love we end up losing either the ability to acknowledge reality (it was very bad for Bob to gossip to me about Henry), or we end up hating and devaluing beings of infinite worth.

 
So when people ask me not to judge them I have a bit of trouble. I guess you could say I'm judging you for asking me not to judge you. I just love you, that's all.

That's Me in the Mushy Moral Middle

In case there is someone out there who hasn't actually figured it out yet, I'm a Libertarian. As such, I was perusing reason.com (the big online libertarian magazine) the other day and I found an article which has helped me to understand some of the ambiguity I am still feeling towards the occupy movement (yes I know the movement seems to be practically dead thanks to all the reporters ignoring it to focus on the Republican primaries - and for crying out loud how wishy-washy can I possibly be to have not worked out my own position on it yet anyway). As a person of faith and sometimes teacher of ethics classes, I was struck by the ethical model this fellow, Jonathan Haidt, uses to analyze the moral appeals of various political cultures and find myself wondering how a holistic, pre-modern, philosophical Christian ought to think about these things.


For those of you who don't want to go read the article, Dr. Heidt's model sets up "six clusters of moral concerns": care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. In the article, he uses a representative sampling of protest signage from Zucatti Park to determine which clusters are more valued by the occupy crowd (and presumably by those who are sympathetic to said crowd). He finds that the occupy movement - and I think it is important to distinguish the apparent values of a collective movement from the real values individuals within that movement might hold - seems to value fairness/cheating above all other clusters with care/harm coming in a strong second. After that, liberty/oppression came in a very distant third and the remaining three clusters were hardly evident at all (a few signs could be stretched to say something about a few of them but it was quite a stretch.

I found this interesting enough that I followed a couple of links over to Dr. Heidt's research website where I took an online survey and discovered that, so far as his research is concerned, I value harm/care the most, followed by loyalty then fairness, sanctity and authority which, as it turns out, I don't care very much for (apparently liberty/oppression is a new category which has not yet been added to the online-questionnaire but I am reasonably sure that I would have ranked high in that category). So my question for this post is: Is this scheme a healthy one? I certainly think that it goes a way towards explaining my ambivalence towards the occupy folks since we heavily share one value but then go on to differ as regards others; but are either of us right? Am I mistaken in valuing authority the way I do? According to Dr. Heidt, Republicans would say that I value it to little and Democrats would say I like it too much. In fact I am between the two major political persuasions in everything except fairness which I value less than anyone and loyalty which I value more than anyone.

Or would you say that it is a mistake to even rank these values (I wouldn't say it but try to convince me, it could be fun!). Is it valid to say "I'm the kind of person who values authority more than anything else and am therefore more basically moral than anyone else"? I tend to think that my ranking is a pretty good one, but then I would wouldn't I?

Well there you have it. More questions than answers or opinions in this post but I would really like to get some thoughts from y'all (even if you are reading this eight months after it goes up).

Confession of a Luddite Sympathist

 
It seems to me that if you are going to tell the world that modern technology and specifically social media type technology makes you uneasy, and you are going to say it on your blog, then you had better frame the statement as a confession. So here it is:

I confess - technological development makes me uneasy and I have a constant sort of background nervousness about what social media is doing to our ability to relate to one another in healthy ways.

And now for disclaimers: I do not actually disapprove of technology, I try hard to stay on top of technological development and I think that it offers great opportunities for good. My confession is one of inclination not of decision so while there is a little worried knot in my stomach every time some new device of website catches on, I go ahead and try to learn the tech and see what can be made of it.

Technology is essentially power. In fact it is an expression of power which is almost unique to humans (I think I remember that there are certain monkeys which do stuff with sticks and I heard somewhere that sea otters will hold on to especially useful "shellfish cracking" rocks). It is the manifestation of the power of thought, imagination and innovation and as such it really sort of deserves to be celebrated - all things are indeed glorious for being themselves.

I believe C.S. Lewis J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton each pointed out that the desire to develop technology is a manifestation of the same desire which leads people to try magic (Lewis has some really great things to say about this in The Abolition of Man). The technologist and the alchemist are the right and left hands of the same impetus. In fact when you get right down to brass tacks definitions it becomes surprisingly difficult to differentiate between the two. The major difference is that technology has worked while magic hasn't.

The problem is that technology is power - and exponentially increasing power at that - in the hands of a species with questionable moral character. Power only increases an individual's ability to do what they want to do, to "enacting their will on the world" as the philosopher would say. It is a good thing for a good person to enact their will on the world, but conversely it is a bad thing for a bad person to enact their will. And technology itself does not discriminate between good and bad, it simply amplifies. Technology makes bad people more able to do worse things and good people more able to do good things.

I think that Facebook gives a useful example. Facebook (together with other social media) has enable people to organize and topple repressive regimes. I take this to be a good thing, although I have not always been pleased with the "new boss", but that is another post. At the same time, I believe that Facebook (again together with other social media) has enabled people to create illusory relationships which save them from the difficulty and ultimate satisfaction of forging real relationships. It allows for someone to become increasingly antisocial without feeling as many of the negative effects of actually being alone.

All of this is because technology essentially amoral. It is not immoral, for then it could not serve and especially not amplify the good that it is so often used for. Neither is it moral, for then it could not be used in the service of harming people as it has so often been. Technology is a catalyst, an amplifier, to stake out yet another "mushy middle" position, it is what you make of it.

But maybe things are not quite so simple as that. As Spiderman is wont to remind us, "With great power comes great responsibility". We need to ask ourselves whether we are able to handle that sort of responsibility. After all, there was a time when the worst mankind could do with its power was to kill itself off. This would have been a bad enough thing and we managed to be responsible enough not to do it. But now, with much greater power, we carry much greater responsibilities. We now have the power to reduce our entire planet to a glowing slag heap, ending nearly all life; and we are responsible for how that power is going to be used.

So the question "is technological development a good thing?" turns out to be the question "is it a good idea for beings like us to be more powerful?" and our answer will have to depend on whether or not we think that human beings ought to be trusted with this much power. And this is a hard question to answer because in reality we all clearly observe that humans, both collectively and individually, are both incredibly evil and shockingly good. We are beings of unimaginable glory and holiness who have become corrupted and evil. We are just about as paradoxical a set of beings as can be imagines, veritable gods who have become demons and still aspire to godhood what the Greek Orthodox call Theosis. We are the only species that could have produced bothe Mother Teresa and Hitler and that species tension is at work in each of us. Indeed, to go back to C.S. Lewis, one of those two must be our ultimate destiny:

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations." - The Weight of Glory

But then maybe a growth in human technological power is unavoidable, maybe whatever the answer to that question, we will still be faced with an inevitable increase in human power. So we might want to jump strait to another question: "how can we ensure that power is used responsibly? How can we keep from blowing up the world or turning the vast majority of the population into unthinking, consuming zombies?" After all, there are certainly people out there who project exponential and unavoidable technological growth over the next few years.

To my mind, the answer to these latter questions (I don't think that technological progress is something which can be effectively fought) is twofold: First we have to find a way to make people better - in spiritual terms we have to really focus on bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, we have to begin to really care about things like sanctification, maybe we need to go back and read James and Hebrews again. And secondly we need to never cease in doing good to the best of our own ability - and this must include the acquisition of the technological expertise which will enable us to become more effective peacemakers, more efficiently generous, more aware of the suffering that we are to be forever healing. After all, Spiderman works backwards as well: "With great responsibility comes the providence of great power" at least it must God was serious when He promised to provide everything necessary for the doing of His will.

The Third Love...

I was recently asked whether or not I have a “safe person” in my life. I do. In fact I have several – my wife, my siblings and parents, and quite a few of my friends.  As the conversation went on though I caught on to a couple of things: that “safe person” meant something more specific than “someone you feel safe around”, and that friend doesn’t mean much anymore.  As it turns out, “safe person” in this context meant what I mean when I deliberately use the word friend. Those of you who talk to me on a regular basis may have noticed that I prefer to use semi-synonymous titles like “buddy”, “acquaintance” or the rather awkward “a guy/woman I know” when talking about someone I like and have a relationship with but with whom I am not friends.

Let me say at the outset (granted the outset of my second paragraph) that this post will not get into the question of Facebook friending, it’s a fascinating topic but “beyond the scope of this paper”. I will also not be concerning myself with talking about whether men and women can be simply friends (though that may make a worthwhile topic for another post). What I do want to talk about it what friendship is supposed to be and what it isn’t, I probably won’t be able to restrain myself from a few thoughts on how things have gotten this way as well.

The Turkish word for “friend” is “arkadash” which essentially means “someone who has your back” or more literally “supports from behind”. In contrast, our word, according to my online etymology source, comes from a Proto-Germanic word “to love”.  And then the famous four loves of the Greeks included “phileo” which was essentially non-sexual love. If I have been at all correct in my previous posts in claiming that we are essentially social creatures, then friendship has to be something more profound than a long-term playmate.

 
And that begins to get at what I am looking for with friendships. When I think, talk or write about friendship I am looking for something that gets beyond “acquaintance whom I really enjoy being around”; I am looking for something to which words like “honor”, “loyalty”, “commitment” and “love” come naturally and for which words like “like”, “enjoy”, “pal” and “nice” feel too weak.

  Friendship is supposed to be a relationship you can rely on. Bill Cosby tells the story of a friend of his whom he could call at 2 am on a rainy night who would drive 70 miles to pick him up if he had a break down because that man is his friend. In college I had a professor who defined a friend as “that guy who would give you $500.00 just because you told him you need it.” C.S. Lewis suggests in The Four Loves that friendship grows out of a discovery that you share a fundamental passion with someone. Friendship happens when you have a connection with someone that first reminds you that you are not alone in the cosmos and then lets you know that someone else is on your side.  It is not an accident that soldiers form some of the deepest friendships we know of, theirs is an experience which demands and proves interdependence.

To my mind the archetypal friend would be Sam Gamgee, though there are others though out history and literature. David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, heck Bert and Ernie are all encouraging, moving friendships. There isn't much bad that can be said about Sam, but if there is any one trait he is most famous for it would have to be his loyalty. Sam had Frodo's back. End of story. To quote Shakespeare, Sam's love "carries it out, even to the edge of doom" Mt. Doom in Sam's case.

In fact hardship works this way. One of the great things about hardship (it has many bad aspects as well) is that it brings people together. I have written about interdependence in the past; hardship creates interdependence which, itself, creates one of the best opportunities for friendship. I would be fascinated to find out if there is a correlation between the experience of hardship and the occurrence of real friendship. I expect that there is a strong one and if there is, that would suggest one more reason for the depression and apathy which is so prevalent in our materialist society.  I certainly know that the last several years of financial difficulty have created and strengthened several of my friendships.

 
I want to end by clarifying something: I am not saying that there is anything wrong with being an acquaintance. As a matter of fact I think that at least part of the problem is that we have begun to take it as an insult to hear that someone we like is not a friend. It shouldn’t be. There is nothing wrong with being a buddy or an acquaintance. It is simply a different thing, not a worse thing.

 
So what do y’all think? Do you have friends? If not, have you felt the lack? If so, what is the benefit?

If you Can't Play Nicely Then None of you Get the Toy

 Big warning, I think that this is the most political and potentially divisive post I have written. Or maybe not. It's certainly on a topic for which I have little to no awareness of public opinion. To wrap up the waffling and prevaricating, I have no idea what you will think of this.
 
While I was growing up I was in the habit of getting into fights with my siblings, especially my younger brother. Many of those fights were over who would get to play with some much coveted toy. I am reasonably certain that at least once, my parents resolved the situation by confiscating the toy and informing us that if we couldn't play nicely with it then we wouldn't get to play with it at all. If that didn't actually happen to me then it did happen to so many friends and TV characters that I have adopted it into my own experience. Before anyone throws my parents (or some now-nameless TV parents) under the bus for this atrocity, let me suggest that it worked pretty well. I have very clear memories of making efforts to resolve fights over various toys before they escalated to the point that my parents would take a hand.

Yeah this was pretty much
me

I want to suggest that we take the same approach with marriage in this country. For quite a few years now, we have been fighting over who has the right to get married. The conservative crowd wants the government to define the word in such a way as to exclude certain times of lifetime monogamous commitment and the liberal crowd wants the government to step in and guarantee everyone the right to call their relationship marriage (and thereby receive the important social and legal benefits that married couples enjoy). So as a starting point I want to suggest that the kids have been fighting over this too long and it is time for us to take marriage away from the conservative and liberal politicians.
 
But that is really just a starting point. As I reflected on it, I realized that I don't think the politicians have any real right to claim power over the term in the first place. Historically it looks as though marriage first became an important legal term to the government (state governments I believe) when they decided to write bigamy laws. After that the federal government got involved with the income tax. Various child welfare and adoption laws joined the mix at some point as well. But all of this, with the interesting exception of bigamy which I am not going to touch, worked without any technical definition. A marriage was what everyone knew a marriage to be. No point in defining it.
 
Now we have various political interest groups trying to get their representatives to define a word in one way or another. Which is really silly. Can you imagine a campaign to define a chair as a "tool for sitting involving no more or less than four legs and a back"? The stool lobby would be up in arms. Why should the government have the right to define a marriage? The only answer I can come up with is that it is an important term in several tax and legal codes. But surely those codes would work just as well with the phrase "committed-cohabiting couple" substituted for marriage.

I like this document

And on further reflection, doesn't the idea that the government has the right to define marriage violate the free exercise clause of the first amendment? Historically, marriage is a religious concept. At least in western civilization, we hold that God makes or at least recognizes a marriage between two people (possibly more if you are an old school Muslim but again - not going there). And if that's the case then aren't my fellow religious people out there a little offended that our government has even thought about giving itself the power to define one of the sacraments - even if they want to define it in a way you like? After all, if they get to claim that power today what assurance do you have that they will use it well tomorrow. Today they define marriage as only between a man and a woman, tomorrow they define the Eucharist as the ceremonial partaking of cotton candy and soda pop.


Now it certainly is the government's job to protect contracts (see my earlier two posts on capitalism) and if Uncle Sam wants to give tax breaks and extend insurance benefits to people who commit to act as one unit for the rest of their lives, I say let him (I am generally in favor of tax breaks and insurance benefits for people who care about each other and are willing to make life-long commitments to one another, in addition to visitation rights and other basic rights of attorney and so forth). So my "solution" is to replace the legal concept of marriage with a number of standard domestic partnership agreements. Then those people who are legal domestic partners can go to the religious (or non-religious) institution of their choice and take part in whatever ceremony they think will create a spiritual union between them, and call their union whatever it is that they want to call it - probably marriage.

Update: Same sex marriage is now legal throughout the United States, a situation I thoroughly support (though I would not be sad to see the implementation of my recommendations above). You can read my series in support of LGB folks within the church starting HERE.

And Here Comes Capitalism - Take Two.

  For those of you who are keeping score or who are possibly trying to make a convert out of me (love and appreciate the attempt by the way, if you think you are right about something, the nicest thing you can do is try to show me the truth you have found), the mission is not yet a success. I am still a pretty hard-core free market capitalist. A big part of that is probably the fact that I haven't yet heard (or read) a response to my "it is immoral to force people to spend their own money in a particular way" objection. Still waiting on one -really- so that I can at least be in dialogue with someone about it.
  In the mean time I though it might be worth recording some of musings on the strengths of free market capitalism in a modern liberal society and why it is that I think more and more good people find themselves against capitalism these days. I have been re reading The Abolition of Man recently and it occurred to me that we (the western world in a terrible over-generalization) used to combat the major flaws of capitalism in a way that is, at best, only minimally effective in modern culture. It used to be that the average westerner held two particular views in regards to the use of their financial (and material) resources: A) that their stuff was their stuff; only they have a right to decide how to spend it so that if anyone else tried to force them to use it in a certain way they would be justified in being offended, outraged etc... B) that they ought to be generous with their resources, help those less fortunate than themselves (especially their friends, family and neighbors) so that generosity and concern for people in need was a basic part of being a decent person.
  The result was a worldview which protected societies (in theory and at least sometimes in practice) from the worst impacts of a purely free market system. If people view charity (in the middle-old sense, "giving resources to the poor") as each persons duty, then the poor will generally be kept from starving.
  But we can't teach that any more. Back in the day, this moral obligation to help the poor was taught as just that, a moral obligation - usually a religious moral obligation. Today we don't teach children that they have any moral obligations other than tolerance (and something akin to but not quite the same as non-violence). We tell them that everyone has a right to their opinion and then we tell them that all statements of ought or moral sentiment are statements of opinion. And once we have taught them this moral subjectivism, a lesson they pick up with alarming speed, they are almost perfectly defended against any appeals we make to some duty of charity. We have already told them that they have a right to define their own moral code, thus we lose all right (in their minds) to tell them what that moral code ought to look like. So charity becomes a matter, not of moral obligation, but of pragmatic utilitarianism.
  This, by the way, is why I think so many older movies are popular as left-leaning films simply because they contain the message that the rich ought to be generous with their wealth. But that is not a socialist message, that is a capitalist message. It is the capitalist who says "the rich have a right to their riches and a responsibility to do the right thing with them. The truly evil man is the miser who has great wealth and does not use it for the good of his neighbors". The socialist thinks of the rich man as un-deserving of his treasure and insists that it be stolen from him and used to make the middle class feel better about the suffering of the poor.

  Now, the average schoolchild's reaction to poverty is not "I had better do something about that" but "that makes me feel bad so some thing ought to be done about it". Do you see the difference? In the first case, the problem demands concrete action (generosity) on the part of the individual. In the second it demands action on the part of "society".
  That is why I see it as only natural that good people, people who happen to care about the poor, the mistreated, the abused, are trending more and more towards socialism (not all have gotten there and I see no great shame in being a socialist - though I think that it is a very bad economic and political system). These are the people who want the problem fixed and have noticed that nobody is standing up to fix it. In short, socialism is on the rise because the free market capitalists have forgotten their moral duty.

  I believe that being truly moral (something I would still like to be) means not breaking either of two principles. I must not let other people suffer if I can do anything about it and I must not steal, even from those who can afford it, to alleviate the suffering I see around me. Being a free market capitalist means taking responsibility for my fellow man, not because the government forces me to but because it is the right thing to do. A socialist society is a society which does not provide it's citizens with as much of an opportunity to learn to be good; because it is a society with less freedom, it is a society for rule breakers (in Blue Ocean terms - socialism is a good system for a stage 1 society which needs rules and the threat of violence to make it be good). A capitalist society is an audacious experiment in free will. A wager that given the necessity, the rich will voluntarily give of themselves to feed the poor. Let us pray that the experiment does not fail.

Variations on a Theme by Shakespeare, Lewis and Kreeft

2019 Update: I am still wrestling with the core concepts I explored in this piece. If you want to read more about my thoughts on post modernism, modernism, and pre modernism you can find some of that HERE.

I was playing with different topics today and it occurred to me that I have not yet explained this blog's title. I have hinted at it and I think I may have even used it somewhere (though I can't find the post off hand) but I haven't ever posted on why I call it "Heaven and Earth Questions". In Hamlet when Horatio sees the ghost he is confounded more because ghosts don't fit into his understanding of the world, than because of any normal fear of ghosts. Hamlet responds with : "There are more things in heaven and earth. Horatio, than are dreamt of in  your philosophies." I read Hamlet quite a few times with out ever noticing that line. In fact, the line was pointed out to me by Dr. Kreeft in one of his lectures (he uses the line quite a bit and at this point I have no idea which lecture I heard it in first so let me just give him general credit).

Dr. Kreeft's point, building off of C.S. Lewis' work on the character and weaknesses of modernism as well as his own work, is that there are really only three possible relationships between an individuals epistemology (the study of what is know and how it can be know) and ontology (the study of being or of what is). Either there are more things in heaven and earth (in reality) than are dreamt of in their philosophy (their epistemology), there are the same number of things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy, or there are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. Crudely speaking - and I am already anticipating a few grumpy notes from post-modernists out there- the post-modernist holds that there are fewer things; the modernist, that there are the same number of things; and the pre-modernist, that there are more things in heaven and earth. 

For the post-modern, reality is a really tricky concept (and possibly an entirely meaningless word) to begin with. The post-modern approach tends to downplay reality as unknowable and therefore unreal. For many, many reasons, they have abandoned anything like a correspondence theory of truth (truth is when a proposition corresponds to reality) and then operate out of a desire to establish ones own "working" reality which they seem to simultaneously think must also be a fundamental illusion. However it plays out it will work out to a belief that reality, to the extent that it is a meaningful word, is smaller than the conceptions of each individual.


The modernist holds on to that initially exciting yet ultimately deadening idea that human achievement will one day be able to explain absolutely every aspect of reality and offer something like a scientific proof to verify those explanations. You hear lines like "if science can't prove it then it doesn't exist" from them. Here in America we have a very common religious form of this modernism which claims instead "if the Bible doesn't prove or affirm it then it isn't real". Both are modernist by this model. The claim boils down to the belief that human reason is capable of explaining or describing every aspect of being; that there are exactly as many things in heaven and earth as are dreamed of in philosophy. Thus prior to meeting the ghost, Horatio is a sort of proto-modernist.


But the pre-modern believes that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy; that reason works but isn't comprehensive. The pre-modern believes there is more to the world than what we can figure our. This does not mean (as I find many athiest apologists have construed it) that the pre-modernist gives up on trying to understand or that they believe that reality can't be known. "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; but the honour of kings is to search out a matter." (KJV) Instead, the pre-modernist believes that there is always going to be more to know, that reality is fuller, more complex, more meaningful, more beautiful than we can comprehend - there will always be more to discover.

That is why I named the blog "More things in Heaven and on Earth". By now you must know that I am, or at least am trying to become, a pre-modern. Thus the title reflects my belief in infinite depth and breadth of the universe, of reality, of the cosmos, of the question and of the answers. There is bottomless joy in the search for truth because the truth is always being found and will never be exhausted.