Couldn't Help Noticing

The woeful ones

(From Andrew Lansdown, one of our Briefing readers in Dianella, Perth, Western Australia):

Despite my family's interest, Australian Idol is not a television program I much care for. However, I have to admit that I did enjoy watching the audition process. I liked seeing how the judges (Mark Holden, Kyle Sandilands and Marcia Hines) dealt with the vastly different contestants who came before them.

I also liked the feeling of anticipation before each contestant began to sing: would he or she be wonderful or mediocre or woeful? And to tell the truth, I especially liked the woeful ones. Indeed, I found myself simultaneously enthralled and appalled by the sheer brass and badness of the worst contestants.

Were there a ‘Most Woeful’ category in Australian Idol, it would be hard to pick the winner. But let me suggest two contestants who would be among the finalists (NB: all names have been changed):

First there was Helen. She chose to sing ‘You Raise Me Up’. She screeched her way through the song, missing every note as she went. Her performance was little short of hideous.

When she finished, Mark asked her, “How do you think you went?”

She replied, her voice strained with emotion and defiance, “I think I gave it my best and that's all that matters. And if that's not good enough, then fair enough.”

“Only people that aren't any good use that as an excuse”, Kyle replied.

Then there was Jane, a nice-looking and seemingly nice-natured young woman who chose to sing ‘Misty Blue’. She did not screech like Helen, but she did sing off-key. Her voice lacked any remarkable quality and her earnestness was off-putting. Sometimes she clenched her teeth, and she somehow forced the notes to resound harshly in and from the back of her throat. And to top it off, when she held a note, she would hit it with an irritating and exaggerated vibrato. It made your eyes misty and your mood blue just thinking about how bad she was.

In the silence at the end of the song, Kyle blew a raspberry—a long one.

“Have you taped yourself and listened back to it?” he asked.

“No I haven't”, Jane replied defiantly. “I don't think I really need to, to tell you the truth.”

“Well you do”, Kyle said.

“I believed in myself”, she said. “That's the main thing.”

“Well too bad”, Kyle said. “You're kidding yourself. You're fooling yourself.”

“I don't mean to be rude, but that's your opinion”, she said. “Marcia and Mark are here, too. I'd like to hear their opinions.”

Sadly, Marcia and Mark agreed with Kyle. Kyle's judgement was not merely a personal, subjective opinion, it was also an impersonal, objective judgement. In all forms of music—as in all matters of life—there is such a thing as excellence, and its qualities can be objectively known, pursued and applied. Kyle was comparing Jane's performance against basic objective criteria, such as being able to hit a note and keep a tune, and by all objective standards, Jane's performance was a cringe affair.

How did this atrocious situation come about? How could seemingly sensible people front up to audition for something for which they had absolutely no talent? How could they so easily and earnestly make utter fools of themselves before the whole nation? The answer is that they deceived themselves. They viewed themselves and their talents differently from what they really were. They did not judge themselves truly.

They may have misjudged themselves because their friends and relatives, hoping to be kind, had pretended that they had talent. They may have done it because they were blinded by the chance of quick fortune and fame. They may have done it because they were in the habit of being precious with themselves and of making excuses for themselves. Whatever the reason, they did not judge themselves truly, and so they exposed themselves up to the judgement of the whole nation. They fooled themselves, so others came to see them as fools.

The self-deception and consequent humiliation of those woeful wannabe idols vividly portrays a universal spiritual principle. The Bible warns us to consider ourselves carefully so that we can arrive at an accurate assessment of ourselves, and thus avoid doing wrong and reaping harm. “Let a person examine himself”, the Bible says. Then it adds, “if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged” (1 Corinthians 11:28, 31). In context, these words are addressed to Christians and they refer to a particular aspect of Christian worship (the Lord's Supper). But they form a maxim that applies far beyond their original context: in every matter in life, we ought to examine ourselves, because if we judge ourselves truly, we will not be judged.

We tend to deceive ourselves in many matters, but the most serious self-deception usually involves the matter of our own moral nature. We generally want to think of ourselves as good. On the rare occasions when we concede that we have done or said something wrong, we quickly exonerate ourselves with all sorts of excuses.

However, the Bible claims that we all have failed to meet God's standards of goodness: there is no one who is righteous and without sin (Rom 3:23). We have all done and said and thought things that are wrong. Worse yet, our desires seem to be perverted towards what is wrong. We actually enjoy selfishness, covetousness, gossip, impure thoughts and the like. We are not only sinners in word, thought and deed, we are also sinners by nature and inclination. Consequently, our sinfulness and our sins have separated us from God, and have opened us to his judgement.

However, if we judge ourselves truly in this matter—if we judge ourselves to be sinners in need of forgiveness from God—and if, on the basis of that sober judgement, we turn in repentance and faith to the Lord Jesus Christ whom God sent to make amends for our sins by his death in our place on the cross—if we do all of that, we will not be judged and condemned as sinners on the Judgement Day.

It will carry no weight with Almighty God to say on the Day of Judgement, “I believed in myself and that's the main thing.” It will be futile to say, “I gave it my best and that's all that matters.” And it will be pointless to say, “That's just your opinion.”

Woeful is a word with two meanings—‘bad; awful’, and ‘sad; sorrowful’. It is better to own up to being woeful in the first sense today than to finish up being woeful in both senses tomorrow.

Prophetic coinage

As many of you would know, the fine people of the United States acknowledge their Christian heritage with the words “In God we trust” on their coins.

But a recent development in things monetary is that folk at the US Mint have developed this marvellous new technology which allows them to put inscriptions on the edge of the coins. So “In God we trust” is now much less obvious, if indeed it is legible at all after a few days of wear and tear.

And the latest confession from the US Mint—that, oopsy, they managed to just produce an “unspecified” proportion of 300 million new $1 coins without any edge inscription at all—seems oddly helpful to the cause of those who have been fighting in the courts for years to have “In God we trust” removed, so far unsuccessfully.

So “In God we trust” has gone from up-front, to the periphery, to dropping off altogether. It all seems strangely symbolic.

Better ministry to men

I got permission from Lieutenant Colonel Mick Mumford of 3RAR and from Tim Booker to post this nine-minute version of Col Mumford's speech at Tim Booker's commencement for ministry at Guildford Anglican.

If you have broadband, it is well worth a look (with apologies for the first 45 seconds of random shots of the back of people's heads, and the general hand-held quality). It is an extraordinary testimony to the work Tim did as chaplain to 3RAR.

On the subject of how to attract men to church, there are some really good things said. Col Mumford's view was that Tim commanded attention to the message of the Bible essentially because he spoke with conviction from Scripture, and acted with integrity.

I don't think there is much more of a trick to men's ministry—or ministry to anyone really—than imitating Tim's approach.

Be careful whom you insult

I guess there is a certain bravery (or at least bravado) in telling a very large number of people, many of whom are very smart, that they are all idiots.

That's what Richard Dawkins has done in his runaway bestseller The God Delusion, and, strangely enough, some of the very smart people are starting to respond. Unfortunately, it turns out that the bravado and vehemence of Dawkins's attack on Christianity (and all manner of God-belief) is not quite matched by the quality of his argument.

Mega-brain philosopher Alvin Plantinga, writing in Books and Culture, has this to say:

Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.

Plantinga goes on to show that Dawkins uses arguments that you could drive the Queen Mary through, and just for good measure concludes with a stinging return of serve on the inconsistency of Dawkins's own philosophical position (naturalism and Darwinism).

Dawkins isn't the only militant atheist who's been banging his drum lately, nor the only one to be taken to the woodshed by a Christian reviewer. David B. Hart's review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is one of the most devastating book shreddings I have ever read. After quoting a speech by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll's ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, Hart says:

The entire passage is a splendid specimen of Carroll's nonpareil gift for capturing the voice of authority—or, rather, the authoritative tone of voice, which is, as often as not, entirely unrelated to any actual authority on the speaker’s part—in all its special cadences, inflections, and modulations. And what makes these particular verses so delightful is the way in which they mimic a certain style of exhaustive empirical exactitude while producing a conceptual result of utter vacuity.

Perhaps that is what makes them seem so exquisitely germane to Daniel Dennett’s most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. This, I hasten to add, is neither a frivolous nor a malicious remark. The Bellman-like almost all of Carroll’s characters is a rigorously, even remorselessly rational person and is moreover a figure cast in a decidedly heroic mould. But, if one sets out in pursuit of beasts as fantastic, elusive, and protean as either Snarks or religion, one can proceed from only the vaguest idea of what one is looking for. So it is no great wonder that, in the special precision with which they define their respective quarries, in the quantity of farraginous detail they amass, in their insensibility to the incoherence of the portraits they have produced—in fact, in all things but felicity of expression—the Bellman and Dennett sound much alike.

Hart goes on to flay Dennett's attempt to construct an evolutionary account of religion based on “the infinitely elastic and largely worthless concept of memes”, and then to show that the very subject of Dennett's argument—‘religion‘—is a hopelessly broad and inadequate category.

Both reviews are in equal measuring illuminating and devastating, and both are academic in tone and content (keep your dictionary close by with Hart!). Stay tuned for a more popular level review of The God Delusion in a forthcoming Briefing.

Should we fast?

I wouldn't want to stop people from fasting, but I think there are wrong reasons for doing it.

I wrote an opinion piece called ‘Give up giving up’ for The Daily Telegraph, a local Sydney newspaper.