The Questioning Christian

Author: D. C. Toedt III

  • Revisiting Rawls: Time to raise the veil of ignorance

    I used to think that a successful life was available to anyone in this country who was willing to work hard, and if someone didn't succeed, it was his- or her own fault for making bad choices. But over the years I've seen how not everyone gets dealt as good a hand as I was, starting with one's "choices" of parents and upbringing. I've also seen how sometimes basically-good people can experience disappointments and even disasters that seemed hardly their fault, if at all. "Suck it up and accept your fate" is not an especially-satisfying response — particularly since evolution has programmed all of us higher-order animals to want what we see that others have (arguably, such programming is largely responsible for all human progress).

    I've come to appreciate the wisdom of John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" in his book A Theory of Justice: We should try to set up our basic societal arrangements as though we didn't know what "ticket" we'd be handed in life's lottery. One simple example is the kids' technique for sharing a big cookie: You cut, but then I choose (which goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis, as it turns out).  To quote the Wikipedia article: "For example, in the imaginary society, one might or might not be intelligent, rich, or born into a preferred class. Since one may occupy any position in the society once the veil is lifted, the device forces the parties to consider society from the perspective of all members, including the worst-off and best-off members." The same article notes that "if [slave-owners] were forced through the veil of ignorance to imagine that they themselves may be slaves, then suddenly slavery may no longer seem justifiable."

  • Original sin? How about unfinished natural selection?

    Crispin Sartwell has a piece in the NY Times:  What's So Good About Original Sin?   He says, "I would like to entertain the notion that a secularized conception of original sin is plausible, and that believing it might have good effects. In short, perhaps it’s time for a new Puritanism, though with fewer witch trials this time around."

    I wonder if this philosophy professor has any familiarity with evolutionary psychology. Yes, as Paul said in Romans, we do things we hate and we don't do things we want. But original sin seems a less plausible explanation than natural selection of variations.  To borrow from Jesse Jackson: In "his" continuing creation, God simply isn't finished with us yet.

     

  • “Am I a Christian?” Cardinal Tobin responds

    Well said, Your Eminence:

    [NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof:] "In previous Q. & A.’s, I asked [Presbyterian] Rev. Tim Keller and [Baptist] President Jimmy Carter whether a skeptic like myself, who admires Jesus’ moral teachings but doubts the virgin birth and any physical resurrection, counts as a Christian. Basically, Keller said 'no,' and Carter 'yes,' so you’re the tiebreaker. Am I a Christian?"

    [Joseph Cardinal Tobin:] "I would think that if you haven’t completely closed the door on the possibility that God has more to say to you, then I think you’re in the tent.

  • Why income earning power isn’t an acceptable measure of “fairness”

    (From a Facebook discussion about income inequality:)  As I get older I get less and less enamored with using income as any kind of proxy measure of net human contribution, and by extension, of “fairness.” Income is determined by the vicissitudes of whatever the marketplace happens to value at the moment, and markets are notoriously prone to short-term thinking and to encouraging participants to burden others with their “externalities,” that is, with their side-effect costs such as emission of air- and water pollution. (Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.)

    EXAMPLE: For several years I’ve volunteered a few hours a year in the Real Men Read program, reading “chapter books” to underprivileged elementary-school kids (I was recruited by a close family friend who’s a teacher).  I can easily argue the case that in the long term, no one is more important to society than school teachers. Yet we pay even the best teacher a tiny fraction of, say, the income that Martin Shkreli has managed to capture.  The marketplace has highly valued his skills and has rewarded him accordingly. But his income is in no way a valid measure of his long-term contribution as a human being and thus of what’s “fair” for him to get.
     
    (In fairness to Skreli, I think he might well be mentally ill — or at least he’s putting on a good show of it for his criminal trial — but my point remains.)

  • We just don’t know enough about human motivation

    In a Facebook thread, a conservative friend writes: "And yet, those economies where it was 'sink or swim' have thrived throughout history (in contradiction to those that were socialist)." I moved my response here.

    That's an oversimplification. Sink or swim does provide a certain motivation, but humans generally aren't willing to just let others sink, even when the others' problems are their own "fault."

    That's why we have laws requiring hospitals to treat emergency cases, even when the patients should have bought health insurance. That's why we have food stamps.

    For that matter, that's why first responders and volunteers risk their lives to rescue people from their Harvey-flooded homes and streets, even though those people had [fouled] up by ignoring earlier warnings to evacuate.

    We simply don't understand human psychology as well as we need to. In particular, we haven't developed a broadly-accepted, tested, general theory about what it takes to promote socially-desirable behavior.

    Sure, we have various notions along those lines. A lot of those notions, though, are no more evidence-based than, say, bleeding a feverish patient to (supposedly) reduce the fever, as physicians used to do centuries ago.

    In that vein, I thought this Kristof piece from a couple of months ago was quite thought-provoking:

    … Consider baseball: Some teams pay players much more disparately than others do, and one might think that pay inequality creates incentives for better performance and more wins.

    In fact, economists have crunched the data and found the opposite is true. Teams with greater equality did much better, perhaps because they were more cohesive.

    What’s more, it turned out that even the stars did better when they were on teams with flatter pay. "Higher inequality seemed to undercut the superstar players it was meant to incentivize, which is what you would expect if you believed that the chief effect of pay inequality was to reduce cooperation and team cohesion," Payne notes.

    Nicholas Kristof, What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness (NYTimes.com June 3, 2017) (emphasis added).

    This lack of a true understanding of human motivation, and how to apply that understanding to motivate "useful" behavior, is the basis of a lot of political disagreement. For example:

    • Today's GOP leadership thinks that tax cuts for the wealthy are a panacea for the economy; they think that such cuts will supposedly incentivize the wealthy to create jobs. Sure, the Laffer curve ~sounded~ good back in the 1970s. But from what I've read, most non-right-wing economists have concluded that, at the very least, the Laffer curve has been taken too far. ("If a little is good, then more would be even better — right?")
    • On the other side of the aisle, some leftists seem to think that we could solve all our social ills by imposing punitive taxes on the rich and giving everyone a universal basic income (UBI) and free health care. That strikes me as likely to be a fantasy, for several reasons I won't take the time to discuss.

    In sum: We just don't know where the sweet spot is for getting people to do useful things. Hell, we don't even agree that much on what we mean by "useful." And in any case, the sweet spot is likely to move around over time, just as weather patterns do.

    The best we can do, I submit, is to stay focused on seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves, and to face the facts as they are revealed to us.

  • An interesting speculation about the Resurrection

    Here's a comment from a reader, who prefers to remain anonymous but who has approved my posting this.  Boldfaced emphasis is mine, and I've added some extra paragraphing.

    I came across your Blog this weekend and find it very refreshing and informative. You have addressed many of my doubts and concerns about the mainstream Church's doctrine that I have been either too afraid, or insufficiently knowledgeable to answer on my own. For this I am indebted to you.

    Today I was reading through your essays on the Resurrection – an event which I have never been able to accept as being literally true, based solely on my gut feeling that 'if it doesn't make sense, it probably didn't happen'.

    Your alternate explanations have resonated with what I was unable to clearly formulate on my own, the feeling that it just didn't fly. (Sidebar: I'm not an attorney but I have spent most of the past 40 years in the field of video surveillance and intelligence gathering. One develops a sort of Jedi ability to separate fact from fiction)

    I wonder if you have considered a third possible explanation of the Resurrection story? That is, that when Jesus was removed from the cross he was actually still alive. Barely, of course, and in critical condition, but to all outward appearances (and given the level of medical knowledge available at the time) he was thought to be deceased.

    Figuring this option into your description of Joseph of Arimathea removing Jesus from the tomb, perhaps he, Joseph, discovered Jesus to be still alive and took him to a secret location where he could receive some healing and be safe from discovery. Maybe through God's intervention he recovered – and this would account for subsequent 'appearances' to his followers after a period of time. Obviously he would know that it would be unwise to stick around, and would have made his escape into obscurity.

    Am I right in thinking he remained on the Cross for only a few hours, due mainly to the approaching Sabbath, and could conceivable have survived? And the fact that Joseph whisked him away so quickly may also have been because he felt there was a chance Jesus wasn't dead? 

    My response, slightly edited:

    Thanks for reaching out, [NAME].  Nearly all of your conjecture about Jesus' being taken off the cross barely alive and then "escaping into obscurity," as you put it, is certainly more plausible than either (i) the conventional orthodox narrative, or (ii) Hugh Schonfield's The Passover Plot, which always struck me as far-fetched. 
     
    I'm intrigued by your idea that a recovered Jesus, after the scare of his near-death experience, might well have changed his mind about trying to overthrow Israel's oppressors and usher in God's reign.  In that scenario, though, we'd still have to account for Jesus' brother James' being part of the early church; this would presuppose that Jesus didn't simply go back to his old life in Nazareth, but instead abandoned his family and effectively disappeared.  That makes me lean more toward the notion that Jesus simply died and was secretly buried.
     
    Sadly, we're not likely ever to know the truth (unless Benjamin Franklin was correct).

  • Kristof’s good-news column

    The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof reminds us that life is a movie, not a snapshot. EXCERPT:
     
    "Every day, another 250,000 people graduate from extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. About 300,000 get electricity for the first time. Some 285,000 get their first access to clean drinking water. When I was a boy, a majority of adults had always been illiterate, but now more than 85 percent can read.
     
    "Family planning leads parents to have fewer babies and invest more in each. The number of global war deaths is far below what it was in the 1950s through the 1990s, let alone the murderous 1930s and ’40s."
     
     

  • Success: How much is due to effort, and how much to luck?

    This is an interesting discussion thread about how success depends not just on our own efforts, but on luck, too — especially in our choices of parents and of upbringing — and so we ought to have plenty of sympathy for those who come up short in the luck category. Excerpt: "When once asked for the secret of financial success, he [the Duke of Westminster] replied it was to have an ancestor who had been a close friend of William the Conqueror."
     
     

  • Inequality can be good for society — until it isn’t

    I'd always accepted the assumption that a certain level of inequality was good for society because it helps to motivate less-well-off individuals to get busy and up their game. But studies seem to suggest that the "machinery" of a sports team, a company, a community, etc., can be thrown out of whack by too much inequality. It sounds like the way that the machinery of the human body can be thrown out of whack by too much salt, too much vitamin D, etc.

    Here's an excerpt from a June 5 piece on this subject in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof, What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness:

    … Consider baseball: Some teams pay players much more disparately than others do, and one might think that pay inequality creates incentives for better performance and more wins.

    In fact, economists have crunched the data and found the opposite is true. Teams with greater equality did much better, perhaps because they were more cohesive.

    What’s more, it turned out that even the stars did better when they were on teams with flatter pay. "Higher inequality seemed to undercut the superstar players it was meant to incentivize, which is what you would expect if you believed that the chief effect of pay inequality was to reduce cooperation and team cohesion," Payne notes.

    This might well raise doubts whether laissez-faire, libertarian, free-market economics is really the best way to promote human progress.

  • Breathing, Photosynthesis, and the Continuing Creation

    Think about what happened the last time you took a breath, and consider the cosmic machinery that made it possible:

    • Within your body, the oxygen that you inhaled got combined with the energy-storing molecules in your food to release energy. That energy was used by your brain, your muscles, etc., to leave the cosmos just a tiny bit different than the way it was before.
    • The energy you used to make that cosmic change had to be packed into your food somehow.  As we know from high-school biology, plants stored that energy in the food's constituent molecules, using CO2 from the air and sunlight as "feedstocks" for photosynthesis.
    • One of the byproducts of your changing the cosmos was your release of a certain amount of carbon dioxide back into the air when you exhaled.
    • Your exhaled CO2 will eventually be recycled by other plants — again using solar-powered photosynthesis — into still more molecules that will show up in foods, building materials, etc.
    • Oh, and this:  All those molecules we've been talking about?  Every single molecule on the planet (apart from hydrogen and maybe some of the helium) is composed of atoms from the ashes of one or more exploded stars.
    • And those dead stars? They came about as a result of a titanic process that's been in progress for billions of years, starting with the unimaginably-huge release of energy at (what we call) the Big Bang.

    So let's sum up:  We humans are part of a very-long-term process by which the energy from the Big Bang is being busily transformed into an ever-evolving universe.  

    If we wanted to speculate, we might even call this process a project — a continuing creation — in which we get to participate.

    (Inspired by an NPR commentary yesterday by astrophysicist Dr. Adam Frank reminding us of the wonder of photosynthesis.)