The Story of Stuff

The things we buy come from the store, and the trash we discard goes to the curb, right? Well, that is a small part of the story. But things are grown, raised, harvested, slaughtered, mined, manufactured, transported, stocked, incinerated, dumped, landfilled; and all along the process people are employed, exploited, unemployed, displaced, served, and disserved – all over the world. We neither see nor consider these effects of our consumption – but we need to; we need to take a look at what we’re causing. It shouldn’t be weird to ask who sewed your shirt, or how your meat was treated. It should be weird to not ask, and not see, and not care. This should be especially weird for Christians, who so explicitly profess ideals of loving our neighbors, and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. We’d better consider what it is we’re doing unto others, unto our neighbors.

One good introduction to your economic impact is a relatively short, charmingly pedantic video called “The Story of Stuff” (1). Here is an outline of what that video shows:

First, natural resources are being used up at an increasing rate. But these resources are finite; our planet is finite. So we simply cannot keep increasing the pace at which we use resources indefinitely. Consider the Amazon rainforest for example: 2,000 trees per minute are cut down, so the finite rainforest is shrinking, and we’re running out of trees.

What’s more, the way we use these global resources is nowhere near equitable. The United States makes up 5% of the world’s population, but uses an obscene 30% of the world’s resources, and produces 30% of the world’s waste (2). If everyone in the world lived like we do, it would take between three and five planets to support us! This obviously means that many of the world’s people are forced to live on less than their fair share. Moreover, their resources are used and their land is polluted to make goods for wealthy consumers like us, and many of them are put to work making our goods. In large part because of this, 200,000 people per day move from the environments that had sustained their ancestors, into cities filled with factories, sweat shops, and slums.

One notable fact about the production of our goods is that in total, it involves 100,000 synthetic chemicals, most of which aren’t tested for possible effects on human health. So not only are tons of untested chemical in consumer goods, but these chemicals are handled daily by factory workers all over the world, most of whom lack the regulations and protections which we Westerners enjoy as workers and as consumers. In addition to this, U.S. industry alone releases over 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year into the environment – and much more is released around the world, often with less regulation.

Goods then move from production to distribution in places like Wal-Mart, where the CEO is paid 871 times what the average U.S. worker is paid, and 50,000 times what the average Chinese worker is paid. Another key source of this corporate profit, and this cheap consumption, is the externalization of costs: corporations cause harm to their employees and to society at large which they do not pay for (3). So essentially, many people who help make our goods are underpaid, and many are not paid at all.

This economic system operates on such a scale, and at such a velocity, that there has developed a tremendous emphasis on shopping. Shopping is seen not as a practical chore, but as a leisure activity, or even a civic duty. After World War 2, retailing analyst Victor Lebow said, “Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate” – and this demand seems to have been met. The average American today consumes twice what the average American consumed 50 years ago. And the average American house today is twice as large as the average American house was in the 1970s.

Advertising plays a huge role in our overconsumption. The average American is targeted with more than 3,000 advertisements a day. That translates to seeing more ads each year than a person living 50 years ago would have seen in his or her entire life. These advertisements tell us that the ways we are and the things we own aren't good enough – and we need to buy stuff to fix that. So a cycle develops between advertisements, shopping, and work (4). To quote the “Story of Stuff” video directly,

“We’re in this ridiculous situation where we go to work, maybe two jobs even, and we come home and we’re exhausted, so we plop down on our new couch and watch TV, and the commercials tell us ‘you suck!’ so you’ve got to go to the mall to buy something to feel better. Then you’ve got to go to work more to pay for the stuff you just bought, so you come home, and you’re more tired, so you sit down and you watch more T.V., and it tells you to go to the mall again, and we’re on this crazy work-watch-spend treadmill – and we could just stop.”

Another significant factor in this consumption is the fact that many products are designed to wear out, and many other products get discarded well before they wear out when there arises a newer version, or a different fashion. So many things are discarded quickly, and so much is expended in production, that six months after the sale of goods in North America, only 1% of the material which flowed into this production system is still in use.

This obviously translates into an incredible amount of waste. The average American directly produces 4.5 pounds of garbage a day – but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because for every garbage can you put out on the curb, 70 garbage cans worth of waste were made in upstream production (5). All of this garbage either gets dumped in landfills, or burned in incinerators and then dumped in landfills. Either way, it pollutes air, land, and water.

The “Story of Stuff” video closes by naming many of the things being done to improve this economic system, and the website gives a lot more information about how to take action yourself. I encourage you to check it out, and I’ll repeat just one of their tips: buy green, buy fair, buy local, buy used, and most importantly, buy less!

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1) You can watch the video here, and also find citations for all the information given below. I know the general thrust to be correct, so I have not read a ton of critiques, and I am not double-checking specific information – but if you do so, please leave a comment here about what you find.
2) That’s absurd! We don’t use 6%, which would be more than our fair share. We don’t use 10%, which would be twice our share. We don’t use 15% or 20% – we use 30% of all the resources that get used!
3) This harm either might be compensated from some other source, such as tax dollars, or might be suffered without any compensation at all. For example, think of a worker without health insurance who gets sick, and either gets no medical treatment, or goes to the emergency room on the tax-payer’s dollar; or think of pollution which we and our children face without any compensation from the polluters.
4) Tellingly, the top two American leisure activities are watching television, and shopping.
5) This fact should temper our enthusiasm about recycling. Recycling is no ultimate solution, and it does not exactly avoid waste, or cancel out environmental costs. But of course, do keep recycling, as it is much better than not recycling!

Easter Meditation

Jesus lived sinlessly, suffered, died, rose again, and ascended to heaven. In this He triumphed over sin, death, and hell; He overcame the world; He abolished death. So let us see these things with new eyes. We can face the evils of this world as defeated enemies, which already stand condemned. And we can see them at the same time as instruments in the hands of a sovereign God, who uses them for our reshaping in the image of Christ. For “we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.” Christ has suffered and has been glorified, and as surely as we follow Christ in suffering, we will follow Him in glory. So let us “know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that [we] may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

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John 16:33, 2 Timothy 1:10, Romans 8:29, Romans 8:17, 2 Timothy 2:12, Philippians 3:10-11

Exit Closed

“He also, with the evident intention of gently and courteously showing me my delusion, asked how I explained my strange principle of non-resistance to evil by violence, and as usual he brought forward the argument, which seems to everyone irrefutable, of a brigand who kills or violates a child. I told him that I recognize non-resistance to evil by violence because, having lived seventy-five years, I have never, except in discussions, encountered that fantastic brigand who before my eyes desired to kill or violate a child, but that I perpetually did and do see not one but millions of brigands using violence toward children and women and men and old people and all the labourers, in the name of a recognized right to do violence to their fellows. … No one has seen that fantastic brigand, but the world groaning under violence lies before everyone’s eyes.”

– Leo Tolstoy, in his introduction to A Short Biography of William Lloyd Garrison

The Way International

My parents were very involved with a religious organization called The Way International. They left this organization as it splintered after the 1985 death of its founder Victor Paul Wierwille, or “Dr. Wierwille.” But a great number of those who left The Way International still held to most of the things they’d learned there – and that’s what both of my parents have done to this day.

Many of the people who left the Way’s organization while keeping its beliefs formed groups of their own, ranging in scope from international, to lone congregations. I grew up in one such lone congregation, or house church – or “fellowship,” as we called it.

One thing I was taught there, in a perfect echo of the Way, was that Jesus Christ is not God. In high school I became aware that all my Christian acquaintances believed otherwise, and I decided to study the matter – so that I would be able to persuade all those clueless acquaintances. That’s not the way my studies shaped up, though, and after my junior year of high school I concluded that the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ is God, and I left the fellowship I’d grown up in. I continued to study that issue, and a year and a half later, I finished a paper defending the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, and emailed it to every Way-influenced believer I knew.

Then recently, an old friend who was among those I emailed got in touch with me. She wrote that she had looked over that Trinity paper back when I first sent it out, but was now wanting to study the issue in more depth, and so she asked me to resend the paper to her. I replied:

I haven't looked back over it in quite a while, but I know that there are certain arguments and interpretations that I wouldn't make today, fyi. On the whole, though, it should definitely be a good resource for your studies.

Really, the paper boils down to this: the Bible teaches that the Father is God (1), Jesus Christ is God, and became a man (2), the Holy Spirit is God (3), and there is one God (4). Those few points, held together, form the doctrine of the Trinity.

Or one place you could start from is the question of when Jesus Christ first existed. I was taught that He came into existence when He was conceived in Mary. But all these scriptures seem to say otherwise (some more strongly or directly than others): Isaiah 9:6, Micah 5:2, Matthew 23:37, Luke 1:78-79, 13:34, John 1:1-3, 10, 14-15, 30, 3:13, 31, 6:33-35, 38, 41, 51, 62, 8:23, 42, 58, 11:27, 12:41, 13:3, 16:27-30, 17:5, 8, 24, Acts 2:25, 1 Corinthians 10:4, 2 Corinthians 8:9, Philippians 2:5-7, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 1:2, 8-10, 2:14-17, 10:5-10, 11:26, 1 Peter 1:10-11, 1 John 1:1-2, Jude 25, Revelation 1:8, 17, 2:8, 3:14, 21:5-7, and 22:13.

So thank you very much for getting in contact with me, and please keep in touch as you continue to study the Trinity. I'd be happy to email or talk about anything. And I definitely do mean anything, because I've come to disagree with what I was taught on a lot of things in addition to the Trinity.

She wanted to hear about what else I had come to disagree with, so I wrote her an overview of my journey from roots in the Way, through evangelicalism, to where I am now:

As for the beliefs I've come to disagree with... there is actually quite a bit to tell. While the identity of Jesus Christ was the decisive issue which drove me from the fellowship, it wasn't the first thing I had questions about. For instance, growing up I had noticed scriptures about love, and service, and giving, and people in need - and concluded that a little volunteering was a good, biblical thing. But I never heard anything at all about that at fellowship, and my first volunteer outings in high school were actually frowned upon as an effort to earn salvation, or as just generally "religious." Then there was water baptism. It didn't seem like a huge issue, and I'm still not sure I understand it very well - but there in the Bible is water baptism, and Jesus commanding His followers to baptize the disciples they make (5), and no later command of "Ok, now stop!" Also, I had questions about the way we talked about spiritual gifts. I learned very specific things about the nine manifestations, and the five gift ministries (6). But in addition to the two lists which gave rise to that taxonomy, there are other lists in the Bible, made up of some of those gifts or manifestations, and some other ones (7) - and no single list is set off in scripture as preeminent, or exhaustive. So it seemed like we were being more specific than God's word was.

There was also a very gradual evolution in the way I approached the Bible in general. I was taught some guidelines that were good in principle, such as looking at context and asking who a given passage applies to. But good things were misapplied, and baseless things were brought in, and in the end we were hacking and twisting the Bible in so many ways. There were all these supposed tensions in scripture that would occasion statements of how the word had to fit together, followed by the bludgeoning of the part of the word which didn't seem to fit. In this bludgeoning, sometimes the Seven Church Epistles were the only parts of the Bible that counted for anything; sometimes a passage would mean the opposite of what it seemed to say because it was arbitrarily deemed to involve some figure of speech (6).

But by God's grace I moved away from that approach. I would broadly characterize this as a move from making the word fit together, to letting the word fit together - that is, just recognizing that it already does fit together, and submitting to that. I reached the point where when a passage of scripture conflicted with my thinking, I wouldn't just glaze over it or forget it; and I wouldn't change the scripture - I would change my thinking. God perfectly inspired His word, so we need first and foremost to respect it, and believe it, and obey it - not to chop it up, or treat it like a puzzle, or even, in a certain sense, to "research" it.

There were also more specific things along these lines, like noticing what 1 Timothy 6:3-5 says about the words of Jesus, and noticing that in Matthew 28:20 Jesus commanded the Apostles to make disciples and teach them to observe all that Jesus had commanded. So while Jesus' Lordship somehow hadn't been enough to make me take His words seriously - how blind and stubborn I've been! - this finally changed that, and I stopped writing off the words of Christ as pertaining to "a different administration" (8).

So with these issues rattling around in my head, and having concluded that the Bible says Jesus Christ is God, I left the fellowship after my junior year of high school. I soon joined a big evangelical church, got baptized, heard it preached and sung that Jesus is indeed God, His words indeed matter, and we should indeed love and serve our neighbors, including the poor ones - and I felt at home.

This feeling lasted into my freshman year at OSU, when some experiences, some hard thinking, and a couple of books shook things up for me once again. One of those books was The Cost of Discipleship by a guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and it talked about God's grace being costly, and demanding, and leading to a radically changed life. Then I went back to the Bible - and saw that Bonhoeffer was right. Jesus says: "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me" (9). So I began to see the Christian life - being a believer, being a Christian, following Christ, being His disciple - as a radical, committed, holistic endeavor. And along with this, or under this banner, came some other big realizations.

Growing up, I'd learned that salvation was exceedingly simple: one need only say that Jesus is Lord, and think that God raised Him from the dead - and in that instant one is certainly and securely guaranteed heaven. (What I later heard from evangelicalism was a little bit deeper and more biblical - but not much.) The problem with this is that approximating or quoting a single scripture is not enough. The Bible is an entire book for a reason. So in addition to Romans 10:9-10, there are other scriptures which need to be known and believed in their own right, and also need to inform our understanding of Romans 10:9-10. That's the right application of rhetoric about God's word fitting together: it does fit together, and is one cohesive whole, so we must understand each part in a way which fits with all the other parts - that is the correct way to understand the part; that is what God means by it. So Romans 10:9-10 is huge and true; and so are Matthew 7:13-29, and Ephesians 2:8-10, and James 2:14-26, and 1 John 2:3-6. The resulting picture is complex and deep, and I don't have it figured out. I suspect that there are even limits to how precisely we can figure it out. But this picture which the whole of scripture gives, however mysterious or difficult, is what God says, and is the truth.

Also during my freshman year, I started becoming much more aware of the social and economic sides of the gospel. The Old Testament speaks continually about God's concern for orphans, widows, and immigrants. Jesus calls the poor blessed; and says that the way we treat the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned is the way we treat Him, and He will judge us by it (10). So in a world where so many people live in abject poverty, and we in America - even people like you and me - have such wealth, this becomes a very, very pressing matter. It seems to me that this should affect the way we spend every dollar.

In addition to those considerations, I've learned that there's another whole side to what the Bible says about money. Besides what money lets me do for others, there is also the question of what money does to me. And on this count, Jesus says to store up treasure in heaven and not on earth, and that we cannot serve both God and wealth, and He warns: "Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed." Paul writes to Timothy that "we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content. But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs" (11).

Eventually even the "food and covering" part of that last passage hit me: I had always taken for granted so much of the typical American standard of living, but God sets a very different standard of just food and clothing. It is food and clothing of which Matthew 6:33 says "all these things shall be added unto you" - this is not said of all the luxuries and "blessings" which I’ve heard it applied to. But I did indeed hear Matthew 6:33 grossly misapplied, and I likewise heard all kinds of biblical promises about supplying needs, and passages about material blessings in the Old Testament, used to guarantee things which God does not actually promise to us - some of which He even warns against! And the biblical truth that God can and does heal was wildly twisted to say that God will always heal.

Overall, it seems that as I was growing up, God was presented much like a genie to grant wishes; or like a doting grandparent - rather than a Father who cares about what is truly best for us, and not just what we might want or request at the moment. So I was taught that God would give me what I wanted, and God was paramountly concerned with my present happiness, and God would always heal me, and God wanted to bless me with money and material comfort. Any experience different than this traced to my unbelief, or to the devil - and was totally opposed to God's will. But eventually these beliefs were overwhelmed by the many contrary things which the Bible says: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. ... But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep," "to you it has been granted for Christ's sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake," "we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him," "Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps," "those also who suffer according to the will of God shall entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right" (12).

Together, all this paints a picture of Christianity which is very different from the picture I grew up with. It is not centered on a sort of belief that just means thinking the right things, and thinking them vigorously. Because as I've come to understand from scriptures in James, 1 John, the gospels, and all over the place: real belief isn't just an abstract mental thing - it bears fruit; it leads to actions. And I've realized that this makes perfect sense: if you really believe that God says something, you won't just think it harder and harder - you'll act in light of it, without twisting or ignoring any of it. And so it happens that real belief connects with all the things I've talked about, from commitment, to ideas about salvation, to giving and serving, to money, to suffering. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 is an incredible summary of most of this, as well as tons of other biblical truth.

So... I've said an awful lot. What are your thoughts on all of this?

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1) John 6:27, Galatians 1:1, Ephesians 6:23, 1 Peter 1:2
2) John 1:1-18, John 20:28-29, Acts 20:28, Philippians 2:5-7, Colossians 2:9, Hebrews 1:8, 1 John 4:2-3
3) Genesis 1:1-3 with Isaiah 44:24, Psalm 95:6-11 with Hebrews 3:7-11, Isaiah 6:8-10 with Acts 28:25-27, Jeremiah 31:33-34 with Hebrews 10:15-17, Romans 8:2-16, 1 Corinthians 2:10-11
4) Deuteronomy 6:4, Isaiah 43:10-11, Isaiah 44:6-8, Mark 12:29-30, Romans 3:30
5) Matthew 28:19
6) I’m not going to explain much Way or ex-Way terminology here, as it doesn’t seem necessary for the points I'm making. But feel free to ask me, or to google for yourself.
7) Romans 12:6-8, 1 Corinthians 12:28-30
8) The Way and its heirs use the term “administration” for what most others call “dispensations.” But they are often more rigid and exacting than the dispensationalists I’m familiar with.
9) Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23
10) Luke 6:20, Matthew 25:31-46
11) Matthew 6:19-24, Luke 12:15, 1 Timothy 6:7-10
12) Luke 6:20-25, Philippians 1:29, Romans 8:17, 1 Peter 2:21, 1 Peter 4:19

Goads

Ceasing to trust in wealth but still having it seems like ceasing to be addicted to a drug but still using it.

The line of reasoning which allows a Christian to serve as a soldier would also allow a Christian to serve as a prostitute.

Don’t throw away food – there are hungry people in the world, and instead of using money to buy food you’ll throw away, you can use that money to buy food they’ll eat. And don’t throw away meat or dairy – then you’re buying things to waste which some of us won’t buy to eat.

If I say I believe a truck is coming toward me, and I talk, argue, write, and sing about the truck, but don’t move out of the way – then I don’t believe in the truck.

Going Out to Not Eat

I often want to spend time with friends who want to eat out. What is one to do in that situation, if he or she doesn’t want to blow $7 at Panda Express? One can stay home in stoic resignation, and sometimes that might be best. But one can also go along to the restaurant and simply not buy anything – one can go out to not eat.

I used to feel awkward about doing this, but it has really grown on me. You are not leeching off of the restaurant; your seat is simply part of the package the restaurant must offer to your group of friends in order to receive their business. I’m sure that if push came to shove, the restaurant would much rather welcome you than lose your whole group.

And what are you left to do during the meal? Enjoy the company of your friends! And as for food, you can eat some rice and beans before heading to the restaurant; or fast; or bring a sandwich bag of dry oatmeal and a bottle of water – just pour the oatmeal in your mouth, pour the water in your mouth, and enjoy.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Below are some excerpts from a book which I thoroughly enjoyed and high recommend: Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is Tracy Kidder’s insightful narration of The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. Kidder has said of Farmer in an interview that “I was drawn to the man himself. He worked extraordinary hours. In fact, I don’t think he sleeps more than an hour or two most nights. Here was a person who seemed to be practicing more than he preached, who seemed to be living, as nearly as any human being can, without hypocrisy. A challenging person, the kind of person whose example can irritate you by making you feel you’ve never done anything as important, and yet, in his presence, those kinds of feelings tended to vanish. In the past, when I’d imagined a person with credentials like his, I’d imagined someone dour and self-righteous, but he was very friendly and irreverent, and quite funny. He seemed like someone I’d like to know, and I thought that if I did my job well, a reader would feel that way, too.”

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I had dozens of questions about Haiti, including one about the assistant mayor’s murder. The soldiers thought that Voodoo beliefs conferred a special, weird terror on decapitation. “Does cutting off the victim’s head have some basis in the history of Voodoo?” I asked.

“It has some basis in the history of brutality,” Farmer answered. He frowned, and then he touched my arm, as if to say that we all ask stupid questions sometimes.

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He worked in Boston four months of the year, living in a church rectory in a poor neighborhood. The rest of the year he worked without pay in Haiti.

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I felt as though, in Farmer, I’d been offered another way of thinking about a place like Haiti. But his way would be hard to share, because it implied such an extreme definition of a term like “doing one’s best.”

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Farmer was on service at the Brigham on Christmas. He spent part of the day visiting patients outside the hospital. He brought them all presents, including [a thirty-five-year-old, HIV-positive, alcoholic, cocaine-using man named] Joe [who Farmer had helped place in a shelter] – who got a six-pack of beer, disguised in wrapping paper.

Joe seemed glad to see him, as well as the present. As Farmer was leaving the shelter, he heard Joe say to another resident, just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant for him to overhear, “That guy’s a fuckin’ saint.”

It wasn’t the first time Farmer had heard himself called that. When I asked him his reaction, he said that he felt like the thief in Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Fawn, who steals something from a Catholic church and, before making his escape, dips his hand in holy water. “I don’t care how often people say, ‘You’re a saint.’ It’s not that I mind it. It’s that it’s inaccurate.”

That was seemly, I thought, resisting beatification. But then he told me, “People call me a saint and I think, I have to work harder. Because a saint would be a great thing to be.”

I felt a small inner disturbance. It wasn’t that the words seemed immodest. I felt I was in the presence of a different person from the one I’d been chatting with a moment ago, someone whose ambitions I hadn’t yet begun to fathom.

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He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn’t bristle, but his tone had an edge: “I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma.”

This was for me one of the first of many encounters with Farmer’s use of the word comma, placed at the end of a sentence. It stood for the word that would follow the comma, which was asshole. I understood he wasn’t calling me one – he would never do that; he was almost invariably courteous. Comma was always directed at third parties, at those who felt comfortable with the current distribution of money and medicine in the world. And the implication, of course, was that you weren’t one of those. Were you?

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After a few days in Cange with Farmer, I came to expect such interpretive discourses. Farmer called them “narrating Haiti.” I don’t want to exaggerate this tendency of his. He was capable of maintaining companionable silences, indeed, often seemed to prefer them to talk, and he made light conversation at least as often as he proselytized. Besides, I was trying to get the hang of his cosmology, so I egged him on, sometimes even badgering him into narrating Haiti. When he got going, though, everything around us became the occasion for drawing a moral about the suffering of the Haitian poor, which often also served as a lesson about the suffering of the world’s poor. Sometimes he’d pause to ask for a reaction: “You feelin’ me?”

And for me the problem often was that I couldn’t muster a sufficient response internally. I’d feel sorry that so many Haitian children still died of measles – though not in Zanmi Lasante’s catchment area – but I’d also feel that I could never be sorry enough to satisfy him. I’d end up annoyed at Farmer for a time, in the way one gets annoyed at others when one has done them a disservice.

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Farmer got hold of a pamphlet about how to equip labs in third world places published by the World Health Organization. It made modest recommendations. You could make do with only one sink. If it wasn’t easy to arrange for electricity, you could rely on solar power. A homemade solar-powered microscope would serve for most purposes. He threw the booklet away. The first microscope in Cange was a real one, which he stole from Harvard Medical School. “Redistributive justice,” he’d later say. “We were just helping them not go to hell.”

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At the end of one of those weekends, they were driving down Delmas Street on their way out of Port-au-Prince, and Ophelia was thinking of the long, hot walks ahead of her in Cange, and of how wonderful it was to return from them and drink a Diet Coke. “I’d love to get some Diet Coke,” she said.

Paul said, “We don’t have time. We can’t do it.”

She understood that he wanted to get back to Cange and that making the stop would mean not just a twenty-minute delay but also walking past the beggars into a supermarket that served the Haitian elite. But at the moment, his words nettled her. He seemed to be saying that if he and the peasantry could get along without things like Diet Coke, so could she.

Why I Dumpster Dive, Pt. Two

Hi Phil,
You must explain the dumpster diving thing to me. Please! :)

I would be glad to explain! Last year I started hearing here and there about “dumpster diving,” that is, about people choosing to sift through the trash for things that they could afford to buy. This immediately piqued my interest for a few reasons. I’m naturally thrifty, and not too squeamish, so I’m sure that contributed – but it definitely goes deeper than that. The past few years I’ve been more and more struck by the greed and waste of our consumptive lifestyles. Compared to crushing global poverty, or to a scriptural standard of “food and clothing,” the American standard of living is absurd. Those realities, and the rest of what the scriptures say about money, and covetousness, and the poor – they’ve really been sinking in. And dumpster diving began looking like one way to begin addressing those kinds of things. It is a way to rescue some waste, and to save money, which can be given to the poor. And it’s also turned out to be an incredible conversation starter, which can get people thinking and talking about these really important issues.

So yeah, last spring break, Stephanie and I tried dumpster diving out, and visited a bunch of dumpsters around our campus. We went on a few more forays during the spring quarter, and then over the summer when we were away from the campus cafeterias, we both did a lot of dumpster diving. It’s worked well, because there really is a ton of good food just thrown away, and it’s often packaged or otherwise protected from the real garbage. And I’ve gotten a good feel for what kinds of stores to visit and when, so it’s pretty easy and smooth to do.

Other people obviously do things differently, according to their needs, tastes, squeamishness, etc., and they may dumpster dive for alternative reasons – but this is dumpster diving in a nutshell for me. What do you think?

The God Delusion

I read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion about a year and a half ago, and never got around to writing any kind of review or response. But as a gesture in that direction, I offer a revision of something I wrote on Bertrand Russell’s much earlier book Why I Am Not a Christian when I read it three years ago. The two books have a great deal in common, and most of what I wrote about Why I Am Not a Christian can be directly applied to The God Delusion.

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In my edition of Why I Am Not a Christian, the editor's introduction calls “the essays included in this book perhaps the most moving and the most graceful presentation of the freethinker’s position since the days of Hume and Voltaire.” If the editor is correct, and if he did not mean his vague praise to specifically exclude logical soundness, then it is fair to see this book as representative of the case against Christianity. If this is so, then I have given the opponents of Christianity too much credit; I was expecting more.

First, I would like to say that I agree with many parts of this book. When Russell criticizes Christian hypocrisy or the modern desertion of orthodox faith, he is right. True Christians should be saying the same things, and more forcefully. I can honestly say, though, that in this book there is not one attack on the Christian faith itself which is not easily answered. (So if you think you’ve run into one, let’s talk.)

Russell is indeed a gifted writer, but his strength in writing sometimes masks weaknesses in thought. These weaknesses are, of course, quite curious given Russell's overall brilliance. Might they be due not to any intellectual factors, but rather to moral or spiritual considerations like willfulness, or pride?

But moving on, let us consider an example of Russell's skillful writing. He offers the most poetic and tragically beautiful picture of an absurd world which I have ever read: “The life of a man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death.” He goes on to extrapolate a call to love and life from this, but unfortunately for Russell, a good tragedy is still a tragedy, and a poetic hopelessness is still hopeless. It offers no substance, so while it may be beautiful writing, it is bad philosophy.

Elsewhere, Russell flies through an argument with even less care. Consider his handling of the first cause argument for God’s existence:

I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made God?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God … There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed.

The waiting answer from the pages of the Bible and from any theologian worth his weight is that God is eternal. God does not have a beginning in time; He created time, and beginnings. We know only time, so we can think beyond it about as well as a goldfish can think about climbing a mountain – and yet we can reason out reason’s limits. If God created time, He is not subject to it. If God instituted causation, then He has no cause. Time and causation are the rules of this universe, but God is not part of this universe. Russell did not tackle this answer: apparently it was too daunting. As for his proposed answers, the idea of the world coming into being without a cause is madness, and the idea of the world always exiting is a mockery of scientific data. If modern cosmology about the Big Bang is right, then the universe had a very definite beginning about 13 billion years ago when God banged it into existence. Also, the second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy - which is basically disorder - in a closed system increases over time - so this smashes even the abstract possibility of our universe having always existed. If it had, we would not have a sun and stars and life, but all matter would be a warm, dead sea. So the argument of the First Cause is indeed sound, and points us straight toward God.

Another common practice of Russell's is the rending of doctrine from doctrine, and then the attacking of the more vulnerable ones. Russell sets up straw men that are only half of the Christian truth. For example, he will take enough Christianity to say that God is omnipotent and therefore responsible for the station of a person’s birth, but then leave out the rest of Christianity which says that God is also responsible for the person’s very makeup (which we cannot see and compare like we might compare outward circumstances), and that He will judge all this justly and graciously. Does this then truly imply that since the Christian God makes some men rich and some poor at birth that He is unfair and unworthy of worship? No, it simply means that Russell’s God might be so, for he is less than half the Christian God.

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As I said, this all applies pretty well to The God Delusion. Especially notable is Dawkins' failure to even address the claim that God is eternal - just as Russell had failed to do. This plays into Dawkins' "Ultimate Boeing 747" argument, which essentially contends that God could not have evolved. Bravo, Professor Dawkins... Here, as elsewhere, Dawkins goes beyond misrepresenting or straw-manning religious belief, and simply fails to address it.

This brings us to the last thing I'll touch on: Dawkins' approach to the "God Hypothesis." While Russell addressed himself to Christianity, Dawkins looks at the God Hypothesis. This makes perfect sense inasmuch as it casts a larger net for all of what Dawkins wants to attack, and doesn't privilege one perceived delusion over another: it tries to address the broad spectrum of religious belief. But the approach has its downsides. It encompasses only part of any given religious belief system, and not the whole - and this is a fact which Dawkins repeatedly exploits. He takes enough of religious belief to sketch a God hypothesis, and to set up all the questions he wants to pose - but he leaves out the answers of any actual religion. This makes it obvious how the distillation of a God hypothesis can go astray in practice, but it's also flawed even in principle. For the vast majority of believers in God do not believe as a hypothesis. For example, I have not surveyed all available data on everything, and formulated my belief in God as a hypothesis to explain it; I have met Christianity as a supposed divine revelation, and upon considerations including, but not limited to, my data on everything, accepted it as such. The vast majority of believers in God are believing via something that may roughly be described as a perceived divine revelation, be it focused on a tradition, a scripture, or a teacher; they are not believing as a scientific hypothesis. And when a religious belief system is presented as something like a revelation, this obviously makes it a cohesive whole, which cannot be hacked to bits, and then examined in hacked part, without reference to its whole. The fact that so many religious belief systems agree on the subject matter of Dawkins' God Hypothesis may be significant in many ways, but it does not license the epistemological and methodological leap to the God Hypothesis which Dawkins targets.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter Miller’s classic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz is divided into three books, the first of which is set centuries after global nuclear war; the second of which comes centuries later as knowledge, technology, and civilization are being restored, but war also looms; and the third of which follows centuries later still, as a re-industrialized world teeters on the edge of another nuclear war – and falls.

I’d heard of this novel first on a high school summer reading list, and last through a Thrice song entitled “The Flame Deluge,” and eventually I decided to read it. There were a few passages which struck me as especially insightful:

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“How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?”

“Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.”

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And yet, Dom Paulo’s own Faith told him that the burden was there, had been there since Adam’s time – and the burden imposed by a fiend crying in mockery, “Man!” at man. “Man!” – calling each to account for the deeds of all since the beginning; a burden impressed upon every generation before the opening of the womb, the burden of the guilt of original sin. Let the fool dispute it. The same fool with great delight accepted the other inheritance – the inheritance of ancestral glory, virtue, triumph, and dignity which rendered him “courageous and noble by reason of birthright,” without protesting that he personally had done nothing to earn that inheritance beyond being born of the race of Man. The protest was reserved for the inherited burden which rendered him “guilty and outcast by reason of birthright,” and against that verdict he strained to close his ears.

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Benjamin smirked. “I have no sympathy for you. The books you stored away may be hoary with age, but they were written by children of the world, and they’ll be taken from you by children of the world, and you had no business meddling with them in the first place.”

“Ah, now you care to prophesy!”

“Not at all. ‘Soon the sun will set’ – is that prophecy? No, it’s merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events. The children of the world are consistent too – so I say they will soak up everything you can offer, take your job away from you, and then denounce you as a decrepit wreck. Finally, they’ll ignore you entirely. It’s your own fault. The Book [my people] gave you should have been enough for you. Now you’ll just have to take the consequences of your meddling.”

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“In addition to these studies, Thon Maho Mahh is heading a project which seeks further information about the origin of the human species. Since this is primarily an archaeological task, he asked me to search your library for any suggestive material on the subject, after I complete my own study here. However, perhaps I’d better not dwell on this at any length, since it’s tending to cause controversy with the theologians. But if there are any questions–”

A young monk who was studying for the priesthood stood up and was recognized by the thon.

“Sir, I was wondering if you were acquainted with the suggestions of Saint Augustine on the subject?”

“I am not.”

“A fourth century bishop and philosopher. He suggested that in the beginning, God created all things in their germinal causes, including the physiology of man, and that the germinal causes inseminate, as it were, the formless matter – which then gradually evolved into the more complex shapes, and eventually Man. Has this hypothesis been considered?”

The thon’s smile was condescending, although he did not openly brand the proposal as childish. “I’m afraid it has not, but I shall look it up,” he said, in a tone that indicated he would not.

“Thank you,” said the monk, and sat down meekly.

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“Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think – as long as they don’t seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste.”

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“Brothers, let us not assume that there is going to be war. Let us remind ourselves that Lucifer has been with us – this time – for nearly two centuries. And was dropped only twice, in sizes smaller than megaton. We all know what could happen, if there’s war. The genetic festering is still with us from the last time Man tried to eradicate himself. Back then, in the Saint Leibowitz’ time, maybe they didn’t know what would happen. Or perhaps they did know, but could not quite believe it until they tried it – like a child who knows what a loaded pistol is supposed to do, but who never pulled a trigger before. They had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the still-born, the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it.

Now – now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums, now they know – with dead certainty. They can know it by the children they beget and send to asylums for the deformed. They know it, and they’ve kept the peace. Not Christ’s peace, certainly, but peace, until lately – with only two warlike incidents in as many centuries. Now they have the bitter certainty. My sons, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again–”

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He fingered the mound of faggots where the wooden martyr [“the old woodcarving of Saint Leibowitz”] stood. That’s where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam’s, Herod’s, Judas’s, Hannegan’s, mine. Everybody’s. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by wrath of Heaven. Why? We shouted it loudly enough – God’s to be obeyed by nations as by men. Caesar’s to be God’s policeman, not His plenipotentiary successor, nor His heir. … But when Caesar got the means to destroy the world, wasn’t he already divinized? Only by the consent of the people – same rabble that shouted: “Nom habemus regem nisi caesarem,” when confronted by Him – God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon. Same rabble that martyred Leibowitz.

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The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they – this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.

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Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it’s not decades away; it’s right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.