The Problem of Suffering...

...runs like this: God is omnipotent (can do anything) and omniscient (knows everything). He is also perfectly good. But there is suffering in the world. Either God cannot do anything about this suffering (not omnipotent and/or omniscient) or he chooses not to, in which case he is not perfectly good.

In summary, for suffering to exist in the world God must either be powerless over it, or be a real big jerk.

This question of whether suffering is compatible with belief in God (I mean the God of Abraham and Paul, the great unchangeable I AM) perplexes and discourages many Christians. It is often a stumbling block for those seeking God. And it has been a powerful argument for atheism for thousands of years.

I am a Christian, so I will approach the problem from a Christian point of view. I will be making certain assumptions that I feel no need to defend. I do not have to defend all of my faith every time I defend part of my faith.


What's the problem? 
The problem of suffering is even bigger than you think. Every terrible thing that happens on this planet happens, in one sense, because God does not prevent it. Every death. Every rape. Every mugging, mutilation, assault, arson, war crime, and act of littering happens because he does not prevent it. I believe he does not cause these things to happen, he does not actively will them, but nonetheless he certainly allows them to happen.

But let me restate the question of "what is the problem?" in a slightly different way. How do you identify this problem? When you say that the world should not be this way, should not contain suffering, against what are you comparing it? No human has ever experienced a world without suffering. Yet suffering is not only not hardwired into our expectations of the world, we actually expect or hope for a world without suffering.

This could be called imagination. I call it an awareness of what we are supposed to be and have. What we all silently expect is a perfect world. Most people try to create it for themselves while knowing it is impossible, but that is their desire: a perfect world. I believe perfection is not just a concept.

Perfection exists, and its name is God.

Perfection exists, and the state of humanity experiencing perfection is called perfect relationship with God. Heaven. The new creation.

So the problem, phrased differently, is: why am I not in heaven already?


Why not straight to heaven? 
If God is so good and loves us so much, why didn't he create the world and put us all straight into heaven?

Well, he sort of did that.

God created humanity and put them in a garden. He told them to take care of the garden. He visited regularly. The only negative instruction he gave them was don't eat from that tree there, because if you do you will die. Humanity was created to obey God and reflect his glory, to see and revel in his total amazing perfection. Adam and Eve (yes, both of them) chose to disobey God's instructions and make their own rules. They wanted to run their own lives.

God doesn't kill them. He could have wiped away the world and started again. Instead, he boots them out of the garden and they have to work for a living. But he promises them that one day Eve's descendants will triumph over the serpent - that is, the creature that tempted them into disobeying God.

What does all this have to do with you? Well, if you were put in Adam or Eve's place you would make the same decision. That's what makes you a human - all humans are disobedient now. You can't overcome what you are. Ever since the first two humans disobeyed God we have all been unable to obey God. We are all sinners.

It is this sin which messed the world up. God created the world as good, harmonious, fruitful. Human sin made it chaotic, painful, riddled with suffering.

It is humanity that is responsible for suffering. I don't mean that you yourself directly cause your own suffering, but the choices of Adam and Eve - the same choices you yourself would make - have broken the world. We choose to disobey God every day. Can we really get pissed at him when we suffer as a result of past disobedience?


Can't God fix it? 

Yes he can. He's omnipotent.

But consider this. Your sin is mixed up with the suffering in the world. Your sinful desires don't cause the suffering, but they come from the same source: the original sin of humanity. God can sweep in and take away the suffering. In fact, he is going to.

But when he does he will deal with the problem at the source. He will judge sin, and everything that is not perfect will be swept away by his anger. This includes people. Have you ever sinned? Have you ever done one thing that would not make God proud of you as his child? Then you're going to be swept away by his wrath as well.

God has provided a way out of this problem. He sent his son Jesus to pay for everyone's sins. Everyone who trusts in Jesus is shielded from wrath because God sees Jesus' perfection instead of human sin (Jesus being God, and therefore perfect).

The only reason God holds back the end to suffering, the re-creation of the world, the terrible flood of his righteous and judging anger, is so that as many people as possible will be saved by trusting in Jesus. Suffering will end. Judgement will come. 

Electronic Economics

I was given a $30 gift card for JB Hi-Fi for my birthday, and since I now have a computer that might be able to run Starcraft 2 and was pretty sure I'd seen the game at JB for $34, off I went to purchase it. Maybe that $34 pricetag was only there for the Christmas sales, or maybe I only imagined it. Either way - I wasn't getting SC2 from JB without forking over sixty bucks. Sorry, $59.95. 

Now that is fine. Sometimes prices are oddly high or low at stores for reasons I can't guess at. But by this point I had been imagining finally getting this game and playing online games with my friend Big Josh. I hopped on to the Blizzard website to buy SC2 digitally. 

$39.99. I assume that is US dollars, so probably a little less in AUD at the moment. Wait, no, after logging in with my Battle.net account I see it is $49.95 AUD.

Leaving aside the fact that from the splash screen Blizzard actually requires you to enter a Battle.net account to see the price (click buy from this screen) this is a ridiculous price. First of all, this is a game that came out three years ago. Computer games usually experience a fairly swift fall in prices after the first 6-12 months. For example, Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out in 2011 and is $25 online through Steam (without taking sales into account). I'm sure it was around sixty dollars on release. This might seem like a steep drop-off but big-budget games aren't so different to big-budget movies: first the expensive release price for those want to have it now (at the movies). Then the lower price for those not prepared to pay so much, or only vaguely interested in the experience (buying or renting DVDs; also streaming video or Pirate Bay). 

But there is another reason why this price is ridiculous: it is only ten dollars less than the in-store price. This seems like a funny thing to say. It is very convenient to buy a game over the Internet; why should the publisher knock down the price for such a superior delivery method? 

In fact digital purchase is vastly less convenient than a physical disc. You have to download all the files for install rather than having them to hand, you have to re-download them if you get a new computer or have to re-format, and you cannot do any of this if the publisher's servers are down or you lack Internet access. That might be fine now, but in three years that publisher may not even exist. Companies merge, split, dissolve or are dissolved all the time. And who will be supporting the publisher's guarantee of access to the data you paid for? Probably no one. 

Not to mention that a digital copy is not "yours" in any physical sense. You can't sell it secondhand, or give it to a friend, or trade it in for something new. Digital purchase is a purchase of access to data and services, not of any clearly defined "thing". This is why it is cheaper for the publisher. They do have to pay for server space and so on, but this is much less than burning and shipping DVDs (packaging, quality control, security, so on and so forth). 

We also have to look at the competition. Blizzard's big enough to distribute its own games, but many companies aren't. In the world of digital distribution of games, there is Steam and Origin (we don't talk about Microsoft's efforts). I haven't really used Origin but I do use Steam. What is my experience of Steam? Games often cost the same on Steam as physically, but because of the frequent sales this is a fiction. Because of Steam, my attempt to buy SC2 was my first attempt to physically buy a computer game in years. Games are cheap and Steam's cloud backs up my progress in case of a hard drive failure. Yes, the same fears about access to what I paid for continue to exist. But the marketplace is cheap, slick and  most importantly Valve have been in the business for a while and to a degree have earned my trust. 

The final reason $50 is an outrageous price? This year Heart of the Swarm, the next standalone expansion pack (don't ask) for Starcraft 2, will come out. Multiplayer is the main reason I wanted to buy this game and Heart of the Swarm will have a separate multiplayer ladder (no crossover with basic SC2 players). Most dedicated SC2 players will upgrade. Essentially, base SC2 will be obsolete. And yet the price is still $50. 

I've put thirty-nine very enjoyable hours into Mark of the Ninja. I bought it on sale on Steam for five bucks. 

What kind of world are you living in, Blizzard?

Failing

You may have noticed that there are rather less posts in the Calvintaries series than you might expect, since I declared a M-W-F timetable for them. The truth is I have totally failed to do what I hoped and planned to do. Let's talk about why.

The first reason was a blow to my morale. When I struggled with the posts about Romans (more on why below) and missed several deadlines, I wasn't really sure how to deal with it. I had lost my momentum. I was going to break my self-imposed schedule, which would make me feel bad. The only way to avoid that feeling was to ignore the project and pretend it didn't exist. This has been a pattern in my behaviour for years.

The best way to fix this response to failure is to, upon missing that deadline, commit to getting the next thing done without reference to time. I think that this will help restore momentum (upon which I emotionally thrive) and get me over the shame of failure. Yes, even for a little blog project which like five people will ever see, I experience shame when I fail.

I struggled (struggle) with summarising Romans not because I can't understand what Calvin is saying but because I found it difficult not to simply transcribe the commentary. What I really want to do is look at what Calvin is saying about the passage, and how it relates to that passage, and why he might expound it in that particular way. Really I want to analyse Calvin's hermeneutic. This takes more time and brain power than I anticipated.

So that's why the blog has been dead. Hopefully it will regain some life in the near future. 

No Ending For You

I have been thinking about videogame endings since I finished Mark of the Ninja. I usually don't finish games. For example, I've put around a hundred hours into Deus Ex (the first one) but never played it all the way through. I thought I'd quickly list some reasons why I stop playing games before the game tells me I'm done.

First of all is difficulty. Games often ramp up the difficulty near the end, usually to increase tension. Sometimes this works. But it works best when the game feels more difficult without actually becoming so. If the game gets substantially harder I move through it at a different speed; I have to reload saved games more often; I get so familiar with the level that my every move is known to me minutes in advance. I stop trying to defeat my enemies (who or what ever they are) and start trying to beat the game itself, which is no way to play.

Secondly, new mechanics stop being introduced. Well, that's not true - that happens earlier. When a game moves into its ending it not only stops giving you new tools/environments/opponents but it stops combining them in new ways. For the ending has come! And you must draw upon all your hard-earned skills!
...
Except that I'm an exploratory player and I've now run out of things to explore. If this gameplay is going to be the same as before, but harder and put together a little differently, then what benefit do I get from continuing? Now, I do get the end of the story. But I am not reading a book, I am playing a game. If the gameplay is not drawing me onwards, if the things I am doing to advance are not important to the progression of the story, then I am no longer playing a game - I am watching a badly made movie.

Thirdly, sometimes I just don't give a damn about the things I am supposed to. Let's use Deus Ex as an example. That game is full of vast, impersonal conspiracies tugging the strings of the world and of the player character (JC Denton). But that's too large and vague to hold in my head. I didn't give a damn about M-12 or the Illuminati or what UNATCO was really created to do. I cared about the people I had met - Gunther Hermann, Anna Navarre, my brother Paul. Once their story arcs were resolved I had no emotional connection to draw me further into the game when I stopped exploring the gameplay (as discussed above).

I can only think of three points right now, so this post will end now.

Terrorism and Playing the Game

What is terrorism?

In the dictionary sense, perhaps "the use of violence and threats to intimidate and coerce, usually for political purposes." Another definition might be the use of violence to create an atmosphere of fear to further political goals. The argument over a precise definition continues. But in this post I don't want to talk about what kind of act can be labelled terrorism, but about what other labels can given to acts which have been labelled terrorism.

Please now imagine a historical act which you believe to be an act of terrorism.

What you saw in your mind was probably the consequences of terrorism, the scene after the act was complete, painted with emotional reactions as well as visual: pain, loss, anguish, fear, anger. Perhaps there was dust, or smoke, or fire, or only a human being now dead when previously they were alive. What is important is the emotional response.

It is quite possible you were imagining the September Eleven attacks upon the United States, which I will be using as my chief example. What I wish to argue from this example is that one of the main reasons why you find terrorism objectionable is not the death or destruction but the fact that the terrorist does not play by the rules. I mean by this the rules of safety: if you join the armed forces you may die in warfare, but ordinary citizens do not die in war. The fact that this has been true of only a handful of conflicts very recently in history in very specific circumstances does not diminish the fact that it is the rule in which people believe. And it is a very pleasant belief.

One reason for the strong emotional response which terrorists elicit is that they do not play by the rules. Acts of terrorism show that the accepted rules are not rules at all. They are temporary conventions which are sometimes accepted and sometimes rejected. Ordinary citizens often die in war. And what is more, they often die in wars which have not been declared by their own side, or even by the other side - there may not even be a readily identifiable 'other side' at all. The conflict which causes death may be entirely incomprehensible, even to a careful observer.

This is not because terrorists are playing a different game to armies. In fact, they are playing the same game. They are pursuing political goals through violence. What they are doing is examining the state of the game and doing what seems most effective to them. They simply reject the fleeting convention which you embrace. You are the scrub: the player - or component of a player - whose ability to play the game is limited before you ever consider what your opening move should be.

Terrorists, in other words, acknowledge no automatic or inherent restraints on what constitutes legitimate violence. Terrorism makes you tremble - in fear, anger, grief, confusion - because it reminds you that even the moral restraints which seem obvious and mandatory to you are in fact personal to you. The natural tendency of humanity is not towards good but towards evil. Nowhere is this more clearly shown to you than in the willingness of people - of brothers and sisters and parents and lovers and poets and students - to kill other people they have never met and cannot possibly hate in any individual or comprehensible sense. All of this in pursuit of an atmosphere of trauma and fear in order that certain political goals might, possibly, maybe, be furthered.

All this is not monstrous. It is as human as any act of love. And the reminder of this, the upsetting of the rules for not only warfare but your understanding of humanity, is what disquiets you so about terrorism.

Injustice and Suffering

H L Mencken, whom I respect in the same way that a woodcutter respects the tallest eucalypt in the land, once said that "injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice." And this is very true. I don't mean in the physical sense. A year in jail is not any shorter if you are innocent or longer if you are guilty. A slap does not hurt more if you really made that offensive joke, or less if some other person made the joke but slipped off before the target turned around.

What I am talking about is the ability to endure the suffering: to fix your attention on something beyond it. This is straightforward (though certainly not easy) in the case of injustice. The person suffering injustice, if they know that it is unjust, can see that it should not affect their view of themselves. The authority which dispenses unjust suffering has proven itself no authority at all and its opinion of you can be safely ignored. Almost all suffering is considered by Australian society to be unjust and therefore uninformative - it shows you nothing about the world or yourself.

If you take this point of view then you learn very little from looking at the world. Consider what is humorously called the justice system. Even the energy of a great many dedicated people can do no more than make this system less unjust than the usual chaos of the world. Any decision of a court will contain injustice because it will not be perfectly just. In the case of murder, what would be perfectly just would be to restore the dead to life, perhaps by using some portion of the killer's life force. This is quite impossible.

Instead the usual decision is for the killer to be deprived not of some of their time alive, or some of their capacity to enjoy life, but of their ability to dwell with society while living. How curious. If you want someone to realise that killing is wrong, depriving them of liberty and joy is an odd way to go about it. Many people have preferred death to captivity, and a murderer sent to prison might easily decide that they did their victim a favour in booting them off such a constrained and twisted mortal coil. I am not saying that I know a better decision for the court to make, or that there is one (though I hope there is). I am saying that the manifest injustice of the world should cause a thirst for true justice. But because this injustice is seen as uninformative it is not really processed by society or by the individual.

And because it is not processed by the individual, it is more difficult to endure. It is more difficult to fix your eyes on something beyond the present suffering when there is no reason for the suffering to ever end, because there was no reason for it to begin. Unjust suffering is a trumpet played (badly) at random in the night: you do not know why it began, and you do not know when it will end, so you do not know whether you should simply plug your ears for a few moments or find and admonish the trumpeter.

A Christian, if they are aware of their own sin, has no such trouble. A Christian knows that they are a sinner and that they deserve suffering - an eternity of suffering. I am not saying that there is a causal connection between an individual's sin in this world and their suffering. It is transparently obvious that that is not a general principle. But a Christian knows that sin in general is what caused and continues to cause suffering in general, and that the one cannot be abolished unless the other is as well.

And since a Christian knows that through faith in Jesus, the perfect sacrifice, their sin has been taken away, they can fix their eyes on the day when Jesus will return and abolish further sin and further suffering. Being a Christian does not shield you from suffering. But it gives you the knowledge that suffering in this world is justice, nor injustice; and being justice, it is purposeful; and being purposeful, it will end when its usefulness is at an end. When Jesus returns the usefulness of suffering will come to an end. I can fix my eyes on that while I suffer.

A Candle Is Not A Conflagration

Should Christians oppose the legalisation of same sex marriage?

The answer to this question is inextricably linked to another, equally complicated question: what should be the relationship between church and public life? My own answer is that the church should actively inject Christian values into public life, but should not project Christian expectations. Values such as compassion, mercy, justice, truth and integrity can do nothing to harm society; they are invariably positive for society, and for the gospel. Injecting these values into society through involvement in public life - specifically in the political process - is one means by which the church can be a light to the world. These are our values, both because they are good and because Jesus commanded them, and we should not hide them. We should inject them into all that we can: not hiding the lamp that is Jesus' church, but putting it on a lamp-stand. 

Truth is one of our values, and we must always preach the truth about the gospel and God's commands. It is clear from Paul's writings that homosexual lust and-or romance is inappropriate for a Christian. We must not hide or soften that. 

But we must be wary of projecting Christian expectations alongside our values. By this I mean the expectations we have of fellow Christians. Homosexual romance is outside God's plan for humanity, and so it is a form of disobedience, of the rebellion which is endemic in all humans. The church should expect Christians to turn away from their sins. But we should not expect or require society to do the same before they have put their faith in Jesus. It is important to consider what spiritual effect actually results from opposing same sex marriage in the political process.

It is more godly to abstain from homosexual romance. But the question of godliness means nothing for a life if it does not follow on from faith in Jesus. It is particularly hollow when godly behaviour, or avoidance of ungodly behaviour, is required by law rather than caused by deliberate choice. Without Jesus, an individual has neither the motivation nor the ability to live for God rather than in rebellion against God. Requiring that they act as if they were living for God will have no effect on their inward attitude, and likely negligible effect on their behaviour. The church should be a light to the world, but it should not set the world on fire to provide better illumination.

I should also raise the point that if the church wishes to legislate against ungodly behaviour, opposing same sex marriage is only the beginning of its pushing for legislation. The majority of heterosexual romance will also have to be banned, as well as most divorces and almost every aspect of the Australian economy. Perhaps this does not seem unappealing. But I find it relevant that Paul instructs the Corinthian church to resist the social norms of ungodly behaviour and speak against them, but not to stamp out those norms. Sin is a part of living in this world. Earthly laws are for maintaining order, not for building up each individual's faith and love for God. And I would argue that projecting Christian expectations into legislation is in fact a subtle form of rebellion against appointed rulers and authorities: rather than trying to build the kingdom of God within petty mortal kingdoms and democracies, the church sometimes tries to create the kingdom of God top-down through mortal legislation. This will never work.

The principal task of the church is to spread the gospel. A significant part of this is, in gentleness and love, making people aware of sin; of their rebellion against God. Ideally they then put their faith in Jesus and live for him, which necessarily involves some changes in their lives. But when the church tries to skip to the end, to push non-Christians towards Christian living (in this case by opposing same sex marriage) it is confusing at best and appears bigoted at worst. 

I do not think the church is bigoted. Most Christians who oppose same sex marriage do so because homosexual romance is a form of rebellion against God. But it is impossible for people who do not trust in Jesus to understand that motive, or to differentiate it from hatred and prejudice. This is particularly the case for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) couples and individuals, who continue to experience significant discrimination in Australia. Non-Christian LGBT individuals do not understand where the church is coming from and so they quite reasonably associate the church with the general stream of hatred. So the church, as it tries to project Christian expectations into society, ends up associated with hate rather than love. 

This is a real issue for spreading the gospel. It presents the worst possible view of Jesus' church to not only the LGBT community, but to all of society - particularly youth. Young Australians react badly to what they see as blatantly unfair laws. No defence can be made for the church's position without first delivering the gospel, which can never be done effectively in a political context. I believe the church should not oppose same sex marriage. It should continue to make it clear that it does not believe homosexual romance is appropriate. But it must do this in the context of the gospel, not in the context of divisive politics. This will make the difference between the church and society clear, and allow a non-Christian hearing the gospel to subsequently consider same sex marriage in light of the gospel. 

The church can and should help care for society through involvement in public life. But it cannot reduce or prevent sin through such involvement; dealing with sin is God's domain. And the church must do nothing to inhibit the proclamation of Jesus' glorious work on the cross to wipe away human sin.

Response to Stimulus: Phillip and the Ethiopian

That is, Acts 8:26-40, which contains a road trip and the miracle of quantum tunneling.

• God has a plan for his followers. Phillip is directed to the chariot of an official reading the prophet Isaiah, which contains prophecies about Jesus. The official has a context for the good news which Phillip delivers.
• God's plan is not always explicable (it is often ineffable). Phillip "found himself at Azotus" rather than asked God to go there; his subsequent preaching in the towns between Azotus and Caesarea was not his idea but God's.
• Phillip's sudden displacement was not only for the purpose of getting him to Azotus, but seems to have also been for the benefit of the newly baptised Ethiopian.
• The Old Testament is not separate from or alien to Christianity, but is vital to how we understand Christ and his relationship to us and to the Father.