FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury

read."

 "Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go." Faber turned the pages. "Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I'm one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the `guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the, firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it's too late." Faber closed the Bible. "Well--suppose you tell me why you

came here?"

"Nobody listens any more. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me. I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I

read." 

Faber examined Montag's thin, blue-jowled face. "How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?" "I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help." 

"You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the `parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph record0s, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts. Three things are missing. 

"Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This

book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet

of paper, the more `literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. 

Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn't something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane. Well, there we have the first thing I said we needed. Quality, texture of

information." 

"And the second?"

"Leisure."

"Oh, but we've plenty of off-hours." 

"Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the four wall televisor. Why? The televisor is 'real. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, '

What nonsense!'"

Jesus is the end of Ethnocentrism - John Piper

 

 Jesus is the End of ethnocentrism, now by ethnocentrism I mean, the thought, the conviction or feeling that my ethnic group should be treated as superiors or privileged. 

https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/jesus-is-the-end-of-ethnocentrism

God in the Wasteland - Wells, David

We have thus become pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God in which God’s creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world.

Image and appearance assume the function that character and morality once had.

We have ended up with more, but we ourselves have ended up being much less.

We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives — including the soil in which our Christian faith grows — is constantly shifting.

The protestant liberalism represented by these churches unabashedly sought a synthesis between Christian faith and modern culture. The liberals held that culture was flawed but that it was not estranged from the life of God. because God is to be found immanently within all human beings, they said, the meaning a morality by which America should live is to be found in religious consciousness.

The more modern they felt themselves compelled to be, the less Christian they were able to remain. It was a predicament from which they could find no way to extricated themselves.

Without God’s truth, without his Word as its center, a civil religion also forfeits his grace and his judgment — and without these, it has not means to survive in the modern world.

If a convergence ha sin fact taken place between modernity and evangelicalism, it is not because modernity has become more theological but because evangelicalism has become modern.

Modernity has be hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of Gods Truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume , perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension to noticeably or noisely on others or into the public square.…… Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe — so long as keep those believes from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy.

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests to inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is to distant, His grace too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.

Why do people choose the substitute over God himself? Probably the most important reason is that it obviates accountability to God. We can meet idols on our own terms because they are our own creations. They are safe, predictable, and controllable; they are, in Jeremiah’s colorful language, the “scarecrows in a cucumber field” (10.5).

There was a time when individualists lived by the internal gyroscope of character. They thought for themselves, did what they believed to be right even if they received no approbation from others, judging that it was better, as David Heisman put it, to be right than to be president.

We now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity, oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of worldliness into the church. It was once one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but now it is attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the pronouncements of the pollster.

It is true that the self has lost its capacity for connectedness in the world outside of itself, but it is also the case that it nevertheless seeks to adapt itself to the multiple shifting worlds of meaning through which it must pass each day and that this has a powerful effect on personal identity.…

Personal identity now is being shaped on the basis of a vision of freedom that amounts to little more than complete randomness.

Families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down.

modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialism is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price

Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost

Personal identity became increasingly associated not with the narrative of one’s inner life but with the projection of one’s public image .…In this world self is not something that is; it is something that is constructed.…In the modern world,…we are required to construct multiple selves because we live in so many different “worlds,” play so many different audiences, encounter so many different experiences, and juggle so many different values.

There is a hunger for religious experience bu an aversion to theological definition of that experience. There is a hunger for God but a disenchantment with dogma or doctrine.

When the consumer is sovereign the product (in this case God himself)must be subservient.

Neitzche…He declared that God had died, or more precisely, that he had been murdered.… He was speaking of the passing of a world in which meaning and values had been rooted in the transcendent. Hi saw a world in which human beings were wresting sovereignty for themselves, and hencea world in which there were no longer ultimate values but only present possibilities — possibilities that were fluid, open, and unstructured by the divine or by an absolute moral order.

What may start out as an additional authority alongside the word of God will eventually supplant its authority altogether.

In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well, and so we have transformed the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy

We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquility of their lives.

The New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumers satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. The faithfully Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed.

[In dealing with the worship of the “virgin” Mary] It was assumed that when Mary approached Christ, her Son, she could expect a far more gracious reception than common sinners, and Christ, in turn, could approach the yet more distant father on their behalf.

The people of Our Time are strongly inclined to trace all internal confusion, pain, disappointment or lost advantage back to someone else’s door.

Our experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provide to it.

There is no way, he said, that we can extrapolate from the world’s pain and disorder, or even from what is good in the world, to what the designs of God might be. We cannot have any hope of success if we begin below… Those who begin with the human perspective inevitably end with the human perspective. We must begin with God, for only in this way will we end with the divine perspective.

Modernity has gone a long way toward robbing us of our faith convictions. While we may believe in God’s existence and his goodness, we find ourselves psychologically disabled in our attempts to bring this belief into incisive relation with the stuff of daily experience, unable to frame effectively our daily routine within the context of ultimatum.

There is some artificiality involved in slicing the work of God too finely, for his purposes were conceived in eternity and are worked out in history as an interconnected whole. What God did in bringing the world into being cannot be separated from his ongoing work of sustaining it, nor can his purposes in creating human life be separated from his purposes of redemption and judgement(John 17.24: 1Peter1:17-20). The beginning must be read in the light of the end, because the end was present in the mind of God in the beginning and hence all that comes to pass has been in the mind of God from the beginning(Isaiah 14.24,27; 22.11; 40.10)

Efforts to build character have been replaced by efforts to manage the impression we make on others. behind this constant game of charades, this shifting of cultural guises, is a personality that is typically shallow, self-absorbed, elusive, leery of commitments, unattached to people or place, dedicated to keeping all options open, and frequently incapable of either loyalty or gratitude.… On the other hand, this kind of person often proves unwilling to accept the limitations of life and hence is inclined to believe in what is deeply irrational. Thus primitive myths and superstitions are now making their appearance side by side with computer wizardry and rampant secularization.

in the post-literate and post-rational world we are entering, the truth of Christian faith may no longer travel on the wings of logical argument as it has in the past, but it will be compelling nonetheless as churches reform their inner lives to embody a fitting counter cultural spirituality centered in a serious, worshipful recognition of the presence of God, an obedient submission to his Word, and a compassionate outworking of His grace in loving service of the stricken of this world.

God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in A World of Fading Dreams

Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids , USA and Intervarsity Press, Leicester, UK

On aliens, rasial abuse and space CS lewis

This is a warning to what we may expect if we ever do discover animal life (vegetable does not matter) on another planet. Each new discovery, even every new theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching theological and philosophical consequences. It is seized by unbelievers as the basis for a new attack on Christianity; it is often, and more embarrassingly, seized by injudicious believers as the basis for a new defense.

But usually, when the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before. So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism, with Biblical Criticism, with the new psychology. So, I cannot help expecting, it will be with the discovery of 'life on other planets' if that discovery is ever made.

The supposed threat is clearly directed against the doctrine of the Incarnation, the belief that God of God "for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was . . . made man." Why for us men more than for others? If we find ourselves to be but one among a million races, scattered through a million spheres, how can we, without absurd arrogance, believe ourselves to have been uniquely favored? I admit that the question could become formidable. In fact, it will become formidable when, if ever, we know the answer to five other questions.

1. Are there animals anywhere except on earth? We do not know. We do not know whether we ever shall know.

2. Supposing there were, have any of these animals what we call "rational souls"? By this I include not merely the faculty to abstract and calculate, but the apprehension of values, the power to mean by "good" something more than "good for me" or even "good for my species'. If instead of asking, "Have they rational souls?" you prefer to ask, "Are they spiritual animals?" I think we shall both mean pretty much the same. If the answer to either question should be No, then of course it would not be at all strange that our species should be treated differently from theirs.
There would be no sense in offering to a creature, however clever or amiable, a gift which that creature was by its nature incapable either of desiring or of receiving. We teach our sons to read but not our dogs. The dogs prefer bones. And of course, since we do not yet know whether there are extra-terrestrial animals at all, we are a long way from knowing that they are rational (or "spiritual").

Even if we met them we might not find it so easy to decide. It seems to me possible to suppose creatures so clever that they could talk, though they were, from the theological point of view, really only animals, capable of pursuing or enjoying only natural ends. One meets humans the machine-minded and materialistic urban type who look as if they were just that. As Christians we must believe the appearance to be false; somewhere under that glib surface there lurks, however atrophied, a human soul. But in other worlds there might be things that really are what these seem to be. Conversely, there might be creatures genuinely spiritual, whose powers of manufacture and abstract thought were so humble that we should mistake them for mere animals. God shield them from us!

3. If there are species, and rational species, other than man, are any or all of them, like us, fallen? This is the point non-Christians always seem to forget. They seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it. Notice what waves of utterly unwarranted hypothesis these critics of Christianity want us to swim through. We are now supposing the fall of hypothetically rational creatures whose mere existence is hypothetical.

4. If all of them (and surely all is a long shot) or any of them have fallen have they been denied Redemption by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ? For of course it is no very new idea that the eternal Son may, for all we know, have been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours. As Alice Meynell wrote in "Christ in the Universe":
. . . in the eternities
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

I wouldn't go as far as "doubtless" myself. Perhaps of all races we only fell. Perhaps Man is the only lost sheep; the one, therefore, whom the Shepherd came to seek. Or perhaps but this brings us to the next wave of assumption. It is the biggest yet and will knock us head over heels, but I am fond of a tumble in the surf.

5. If we knew (which we don't) the answers to 1, 2, and 3 and, further, if we knew that Redemption by an Incarnation and Passion had been denied to creatures in need of it is it certain that this is the only mode of Redemption that is possible? Here of course we ask for what is not merely unknown but, unless God should reveal it, wholly unknowable. It may be that the further we were permitted to see into His councils, the more clearly we should understand that thus and not otherwise by the birth at Bethlehem, the cross on Calvary and the empty tomb a fallen race could be rescued. There may be a necessity for this, insurmountable, rooted in the very nature of God and the very nature of sin. But we don't know. At any rate, I don't know. Spiritual as well as physical conditions might differ widely in different worlds. There might be different sorts and different degrees of fallenness. We must surely believe that the divine charity is as fertile in resource as it is measureless in condescension. To different diseases, or even to different patients sick with the same disease, the great Physician may have applied different remedies; remedies which we should probably not recognize as such even if we ever heard of them.

It might turn out that the redemption of other species differed from ours by working through ours. There is a hint of something like this in St. Paul (Romans 8:19-23) when he says that the whole creation is longing and waiting to be delivered from some kind of slavery, and that the deliverance will occur only when we, we Christians, fully enter upon our sonship to God and exercise our 'glorious liberty'.

On the conscious level I believe that he was thinking only of our own Earth: of animal, and probably vegetable, life on Earth being "renewed" or glorified at the glorification of man in Christ. But it is perhaps possible it is not necessary to give his words a cosmic meaning. It may be that Redemption, starting with us, is to work from us and through us.

This would no doubt give man a pivotal position. But such a position need not imply any superiority in us or any favouritism in God. The general, deciding where to begin his attack, does not select the prettiest landscape or the most fertile field or the most attractive village. Christ was not born in a stable because a stable is, in itself, the most convenient or distinguished place for a maternity.

Only if we had some such function would a contact between us and such unknown races be other than a calamity. If indeed we were unfallen, it would be another matter.
It sets one dreaming to interchange thoughts with beings whose thinking had an organic background wholly different from ours (other senses, other appetites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly superior to our own yet able for that very reason to descend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we met innocent and childlike creatures who could never be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the inhabitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are fallen.

We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don't. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed.

It is interesting to wonder how things would go if they met an unfallen race. At first, to be sure, they'd have a grand time jeering at, duping, and exploiting its innocence; but I doubt if our half-animal cunning would long be a match for godlike wisdom, selfless valour, and perfect unanimity.

I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.

Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries be trusted? "Gun and gospel" have been horribly combined in the past. The missionary's holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire, the busybody's itch, to (as he calls it) "civilize" the (as he calls
them) "natives." Would all our missionaries recognize an unfallen race if they met it? Could they? Would they continue to press upon creatures that did not need to be saved that plan of Salvation which God has appointed for Man? Would they denounce as sins mere differences of behaviour which the spiritual and biological history of these strange creatures fully justified and which God Himself had blessed? Would they try to teach those from whom they had better learn? I do not know. What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting, you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts. 

But let us thank God that we are still very far from travel to other worlds.

I have wondered before now whether the vast astronomical distances may not be God's quarantine precautions. They prevent the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading. And of course we are also very far from the supposed theological problem which contact with other rational species might raise. Such species may not exist. There is not at present a shred of empirical evidence that they do. There is nothing but what the logicians would call arguments from "a priori probability" arguments that begin "It is only natural to suppose," or "All analogy suggests," or "Is it not the height of arrogance to rule out ?" They make very good reading. But who except a born gambler ever risks five dollars on such grounds in ordinary life? And, as we have seen, the mere existence of these creatures would not raise a problem. After that, we still need to know that they are fallen; then, that they have not been, or will not be, redeemed in the mode we know; and then, that no other mode is possible. I think a Christian is sitting pretty if his faith never encounters more formidable difficulties than these conjectural phantoms.

If I remember rightly, St. Augustine raised a question about the theological position of satyrs, monopods, and other semi-human creatures. He decided it could wait till we knew there were any. So can this.

"But supposing" you say. "Supposing all these embarrassing suppositions turned out to be true?" I can only record a conviction that they won't; a conviction which has for me become in the course of years irresistible. Christians and their opponents again and again expect that some new discovery will either turn matters of faith into matters of knowledge or else reduce them to patent absurdities. But it has never happened.

What we believe always remains intellectually possible; it never becomes intellectually compulsive. I have an idea that when this ceases to be so, the world will be ending. We have been warned that all but conclusive evidence against Christianity, evidence that would deceive (if it were possible) the very elect, will appear with the Antichrist.

And after that there will be wholly conclusive evidence on the other side.

But not, I fancy, till then on either side.

"Religion and Rocketry" from The Worlds Last Night by C.S. Lewis.