No, I haven’t died physically yet. Though I sure feel my age, of late, as my body parts fragment earlier than expected.
Rather, this article deals with the crisis I’ve experienced mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. The substance-- lines and examples came to me a couple hours ago as I swam laps at the health club pool, and I wrestled with the modern torrential waves of theological and Atheistic determinism.
Or viewed alternately, what occurred was a crisis meeting, somber party of Albert Camus and George Fox;-) and others, laying a game plan to defy the wiles and brilliant horrors of determinists of all sorts.
And then, suddenly, the breakthrough answer came to me…
But let me back up, and provide a bit of perspective before shouting out my Will and Testament.
It’s been a tough spring and summer. The evangelical minister and theologian John Piper started it off by claiming that 90 tornadoes that wreaked havoc and killed at least 40 people in the American Midwest in early March 2012 were actually God raking his fingers across the landscape. And that Jesus ruled these winds, the tornadoes were his.
Really comforting to the grieving families! who lost loved ones including a baby infant throw hundreds of yard into a corn field, left to suffer in agony until it finally died after being rescued. How wonderful of Jesus. (sarcasm a few hundred millions miles long)
I would still like to punch Piper in the nose for his words. (emotional hyperbole, not literal for those who wonder if I’ve given up my dedication to nonviolence).
Then nearly at the same time out came Sam Harris’ shocking essay that humans have no free will, that we are only an effect of previous natural causes, that we can’t reflect and make creative decisions but are only acted upon by causes within our unconscious and previous forces of past existence.
I still can’t believe he wrote such an essay and a book of the same name, Free Will, which came out mid-March. Several years ago, when I read a couple of his books for Atheism, I thought he was a voice of moderation compared to the other New Atheists. Guess not.
Anyway, let’s cut the words. What came to me as I swam--in the midst of a mental, spiritual, and emotional crisis--was a defiant insight!
I remembered reading Atheist Albert Camus’ tragic existential novel The Plague years ago. In the powerful book an individual fights against a decimating disease killing thousands (it could be millions); he has no hope of possible victory but defiantly fights against the plague and for individual humans anyway. And Camus, emphasizes that even though, according to his understanding, there is no meaning or purpose to Existence, no hope—yet he still acts to fight against destruction, and for the good as he understands the good to be.
And a world away, 300 years earlier, of an opposite life view, George Fox, a spiritual seeker, totally disillusioned with the Christian churches of his time and the materialists too, feeling drowned in an ocean of darkness, finally experienced an ocean of light. And said, “When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’; and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.
Well, I can’t say I am leaping for joy…
But by the time I finished swimming I did realize I don’t care, ultimately, whether Sam Harris and his kind can show materialistic determinism is true or Christian theologian John Piper (or Thomas Aquinas or Sunni Muslims or Spinoza, etc., fill in the blank with your favorite fatalist)
can show theological determinism is true…
Ultimately, even if it were proven we humans are incapable of decisions (of free will), I choose (like Camus and Fox) to defy “the stars.”
Even if there are no ethical truths, there should be.
Even if humans matter not at all, they should matter.
Even if there is no free choice, there should be.
So maybe we will go our ordained way as chained galley slaves of the indifferent cosmos or some sadistic sovereign god. Maybe our lives are condemned by fate.
But let us go defiantly contrary, refusing, opposing, against that destiny.
Let us choose the Light no matter what.
Let us follow Jesus all the way to death. Let us rescue the perishing no matter what.
In the Light,
Daniel
