Tomorrow evening the family is going to see Tomb Raider 2: The Cradle of Life. I am way excited. I actually rather enjoyed the first one (and not just because I could identify almost all of the guns on sight, thanks to my Modern Phoenix Earth research), and I think that the sequel actually looks quite good. I'm not expecting it to be Pirates of the Caribbean - now there's a movie that will put a light in your eye - but I am expecting to enjoy the fight scenes (even though they're probably going to be missing that little something which makes me giggle in my seat).

And of course I am expecting to enjoy Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Lara Croft is the only woman character I can think of who is cooler than Trinity (no, I haven't played any of the Tomb Raiders). I am sure that many a pundit out there in the wide wide world has, is, or will criticize Lara as nothing more than the incarnation of "sex sells" - and I will not deny that I find Jolie rather sexy in that wetsuit, or whatever it is she's wearing on the posters and billboards - but there's more to it than that.

I don't mean that there's more to it than that she's sexy. That is precisely the point, and you need look no further than that - although you should recognize that being smart, self-possessed, and skillful is part of Lara's sex appeal. And of course it is the sex appeal that is the point, not the body - the body is merely a means to an end, and Lara is particularly potent because she includes the aforementioned three S's along with the body (I say body deliberately because there is more that is attractive about Lara - and Jolie - than just the breasts). But the end result of all that is sex appeal.

And is there really anything wrong with that? Of course there is many a movie that uses sex appeal irresponsibly, and a great many individuals among the movie-going public are so hopelessly immature and untutored that they really shouldn't be availing themselves of this at all. But surely we will admit that sex appeal has its legitimate uses. For instance, I should fault very much the spouse who cannot be bothered to be sexy for his or her partner. Sexiness is fundamentally a skill. Everyone has to learn it (although some admittedly have inborn talent in this area), and refusing to learn to be sexy in the eyes of your spouse is not only reprehensible behavior in a married person; it is an insult to the partner and the marriage bond itself. It says, "I have more important things to do than learn how to live in your world" - for of course our ideas of sex appeal are very close to the center of our personal worlds. Learning to be sexy is not only a pleasurable gift. It is one of the supreme compliments - a growing-closer which values and assimilates part of the beloved's core identity. It is, I would venture to say, one of the ways in which we submit ourselves to the reality of a married couple being a single organism (though not a single personality, of course - let us not confuse the two). And therefore I would call it a great obedience, and a great good.

Now I am personally inclined to believe that married people are going to have a very hard time with this if they do not give it a good deal of thought beforehand, for learning how to be sexy (much less learning how to be romantic, of which this is a sub-skill) is neither an easy nor an intuitive skill. And so I would say that it does young men (at least - young women I suspect benefit from this as well) to watch movies and read books and sing songs that deal with both the fundamental and individual nature of sex appeal. But even without that, I find that when I watch movies designed to "sell sex" I have one or two responses - and the two are not very often mixed at all. In the case of movies which are actually about sex, in whole or in significant part, I do find myself thinking thoughts which are perfectly natural but most unfitting. But in the case of movies where the sex appeal is present but not the point (e.g., Pirates of the Caribbean, Charlie's Angels 2) I find myself appreciating the beauty\\sex appeal of the women on screen - but I am not thinking about that. I am thinking of how good it is that mankind has sex and beauty, how pleasing it is that these things are neither physical nor mental nor emotional but all three, and possibly more - I am thinking of how wonderful it will be to share this goodness with an appropriate woman, when I am (and for whom I will be) an appropriate man. I am thinking, I daresay, of something much higher than how hot Kiera Knightly is.

I do not want to sound like I am trying to excuse boorish and ungentlemanly lust for movie stars. Such behavior is reprehensible and no apology can be made for it. But I do not want to sound like I am being mystical about the effect of beauty in art, either. I find that this general pattern of behavior is consistent to other things as well. When a person watches Black Hawk Down or Gettysburg, for instance, his thoughts are not drawn to the horror of infantry combat even though that is the subject of such films. His thoughts are fixed on the higher thing which that horror reveals - namely the nobility of love, for one's comrades or (in a few rare cases) one's home; the nobility of love so strong for those things that one is willing to die in the most horrible way for them. When a person watches a romantic movie (name any you like; my personal favorite is Beauty and the Beast) he is not particularly thinking of the joy found between the couple on screen, even though that is the subject of such films. He is rather thinking of the nobility of love for another person, and the excellence of being romantic for their sake - and it is this which the on-screen romance is designed to point to. And so too, I think, it is possible to watch a movie about how sexy Charlie's Angels are, and not be thinking about how sexy Charlie's Angels are - to find one's thoughts instead drawn above the subject of the film (yet by the subject of the film) to the nobility of love, and the excellence of expressing it through sex appeal.

So I am looking to seeing Tomb Raider very much.

People continue to comment on the July 10 post, but I don't know how many folks in the reading public (which, for all I know, consists solely of the people commenting - but probably there's at least one other person) check that comment box which persists in reading [0]. So here's a transcript of the ongoing dialogue, which can continue here:

#1
Well said. Interesting to read this so soon after I had a long conversation about religion with a friend yesterday.

Juka


#2
I agree with your statement that "the nature of God is not an idea to be built; it's a truth to be discovered." But then how do you go about discovering that truth among the sheer proliferation of religions and people's "obvious" freedom of choice in this area? If it were something we could figure out as easily as we perform physics experiments, I think there would be a lot more religious agreement in the world, and less of a difference between "agreeing" and "believing." But since this doesn't seem to be the case, we have to have some other way of evaluating the choices. With a lack of definitive proof, it seems reasonable that people would turn to their gut feelings as all they have to fall back on. Sure gut feelings are unreliable, but so is listening to other people and their various ideas about God. There are so many ideas out there -- who's right? When it comes right down to it, I'd rather be true to myself and risk being wrong, than be true to someone else and risk being wrong. Obviously, being true to God would be best, but it's not generally clear how to do that when your beliefs are still in the process of getting sorted out.

I'm a little curious about your last sentence, where people should just ask what their beliefs imply. You seem to be saying that they should just take what they already believe and work from there. I suppose that's good, assuming they already have definite beliefs of some kind. But what about the people who aren't sure what they believe, or are wavering in their beliefs?

Anyway, this is all the sort of stuff that tends to be on my mind these days, so it's interesting to hear your thoughts on it.

Graham


#3
Definitely well said. It made me happy to read this on Friday. Your wordcraft never ceases to amaze me. I'm looking forward to catching up with you soon! :)

Blue Rose


#4
As to my last statement, I didn't necessarily mean to imply that they should just take what they already believe and run with it - though unless you're actively putting your current beliefs on hiatus for the purpose of re-evaluation I think that's a good rule of thumb. If your beliefs have no implications for your life, I would question in what practical sense you actually "believe" them. On the other hand, if you're one of those people who thinks that Islam is true but just can't "believe" the words of the Prophet, I'd suggest that you're fooling yourself: what you're really feeling, I'd wager, is a belief in Islam coupled with a self-deceiving reluctance to acknowledge that a belief in Islam necessitates living your life like a Muslim - and if you don't know what living like a Muslim is, then it behooves you to find out or else your belief in Islam is fundamentally useless to you and you might as well not believe it at all. What I meant to imply in my last sentence was that if you're waiting for religion to whack you upside the feelings, you've got a long wait ahead of you. Once you acknowledge the truth of a religion you owe it to your self-honesty to knuckle down and figure out what life as a follower of that creed is like, whatever your feelings.

As for evaluating other religions, it seems to me that you've got essentially three possible tacks to take. You could just despair of ever evaluating all the religions on the market and just give up. If you're evaluating other religions at all obviously you've decided not to take this route, so we can pass it by. Or you could decide to withhold judgment until you've evaluated all the religions you're aware of - an impractical task in my opinion; you'll be dead and moldering in the grave before you finish getting a handle on humanity's multiplicity of religions.

So the third option is to evaluate starting at some religion that seems plausible or attractive in some subjective way, and then stop once you've decided that that one is true. Unsatisfyingly ad hoc (of course, so is quantum mechanics, and so what?), but it seems like the only practical possibility - and chances are the choice you settle on will necessarily exclude all others. For example, you simply cannot believe Christianity and consider other religions to be true where they differ from the Christian creed; to do so denies one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity - and I think that will turn out to be true for most religions if you're serious about the claims they make.

As for my personal evaluations, which is really all I can comment on since I've really only seriously evaluated Christianity ... I'd say they come twofold. My own religious experience is a nice personal touch, but I consider feelings to be an inadequate rubric for this sort of thing and all religions have genuine religious experiences - nor does my creed necessitate that I consider those other experiences fraudulent. What it really comes down to for me is the history of the Jews and the resurrection of Jesus. Given those two facts, and what they imply about Jesus' words, I go with Christianity. I'd much rather evaluate a creed by historical events than its philosophy. In the first place, I find history much more concrete in its verdicts than philosophy and therefore much more amenable to actual evaluation. In the second, while nothing is free of interactor bias, I trust my ability to evaluate history objectively much more than my ability to evaluate philosophy objectively ... perhaps others better trained in philosophy can evaluate religious creeds on something more universal than whether or not they like it, but "whether or not I like it" is about the size of my ability to evaluate philosophy unless you allow me some basic axioms. And if we're evaluating religious philosophy, basic axioms seem unfair to allow; there's no set of axioms that no significant portion of the population will disagree with. Historical axioms may be up for debate, but I find that they vary less than philosophical ones do ... and they're up for debate less often.

Natalie


#5
Hi, Eric, this is Ryan Mitchell.
It's been a long time, hasn't it? I suppose it's a bit odd to be hearing from me, but I stumbled back upon your blog by accident, and I felt compelled to comment.

Since we last saw each other I've had a wealth of important experiences, and having read this last post of yours, I would have felt irresponsible had I not taken the time to voice my agreement. In the fairly recent past I have become a very firm devotee of a Buddhist practice called Falun Gong, and I have also been studying Jungian psychology. Exposure to these complementary perspectives has changed a lot about the way I look at the world, by far for the better.

As I have come to restructure my life around the Law, I have also come to appreciate genuine religious sentiment of the kind you describe. In my view both Christianity and Buddhism are equally reliable paths to the end goal of subsuming one's imperfect ego to the intrinsic wholeness of all things existing.
You might be extremely interested by Jung's work - he is what I would call a great defender of faith, refusing to hide beneath the dogmas proclaimed by so many psychologists in their efforts to deny the inexplicability of so much of human experience.
That which is inexplicable to cause-and-effect formulations,

oops, got cut off - suffice it to say that that which cannot be explained by cause-and-effect formulations or by the highest reasoning of the human mind must, thus, since we live in an ordered universe, be a sign of higher formulations and reasoning beyond our understanding.
The inexplicable actions of human minds themselves, the structures of our societies, even our capacity for thinking at all; these do indeed defy what we know of the universe.

Religion is the invaluable framework we have been given for enlightening to the connecting principles which supersede causality and acknowledge that, as human beings, we are equally creatures of matter and of spirit: our understanding should not reflect only the physical reactions we see in nature around us, but also the deeply veiled eternal Act of Creation from which all our reactions, physiological or psychological, have stemmed.
All that said, I would also like to say peace be with you. I speak to you with that which is foremost in my heart, the comradery of those who have meditated on things greater than themselves.

Your Cousin in Faith,

Ryan


#6
Thanks for commenting, Ryan. It has been a long time, and it's good to hear from you.

Christianity and Buddhism may be equally reliable paths to subsuming one's imperfect ego to the intrinsic wholeness of all things existing; I wouldn't know. That isn't the end goal of Christianity, and not something which Christianity concerns itself about. The end goals of Christianity are to overcome one's rejection of God and to produce people who live as sons of God. The ego is perfected but never subsumed, and the perfection which it is patterned after is infinite but by no means "all things existing;" it is one particular Thing out of a great many which exist. Nor is Christianity particularly concerned with "religious sentiment;" it is a religion which expects the believer to carry on irregardless of the presence or absence of religious sentiment.

It is also a religion which is concerned with much more than the Act of Creation. If the Act of Creation was all there was to it, the Christians would say that there would be no need for Christianity - or rather that Christianity as a religion would be irrelevant, since all the things that accompany life in Christ would be as natural as breathing. It is only because there is more to the Big Picture than the Act of Creation - primarily the Fall - that Christianity as a religion exists. That is a cause-and-effect statement, it seems to me, and therefore I would say that Christianity does not reject cause-and-effect as something it should be concerned about.

Natalie


#7
I've been meaning to ask, Eric--what exactly does Jesus say on the subject of pantheism (the theory that everything in existence is part of the substance of God--that God = everything)?

Casey


#8
As Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, he didn't have to say much (I don't think he ever discusses it explicitly): he was talking to Jews, who reject such doctrine as blasphemous nonsense (they rejected the idea that *Jesus* is God as blasphemous nonsense; c.f. John 10:33. Note that the Greek quoting Ps. 82:6 is a little deceptive). Both the religion of the Greeks and the Achaemenid Persians before them differentiate between the divine and the rest of the world, so I wouldn't expect Jesus to talk about it very much. Everyone in his audience would have taken it as axiomatic that a rock is not God.

I have a hard time imagining that anybody would come to the Scriptures of the Jews and/or Christians and conclude that either religion regards pantheism as anything other than blasphemous nonsense, unless of course they were pantheists already. But I think it's fairly easy to detect the denial of pantheism in the way people phrase things: for instance, "My Father is greater than all" (John 10:29). Or consider John 14:16-17: "And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another helper, that he may abide with you forever - the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him." If the world was of the same stuff as the Holy Spirit there would be no problem here, any more than there is a problem for the Father to receive the Son.

Natalie


#9
Very true. I note that there is one quote attributed to Jesus that carries the vague suggestion of pantheism--"Lift the stone and you will find me, cleave the wood and I am there." But then, that was from the gospel of Thomas, which is also reported to contain a story in which a six year old Jesus uses his divine powers to smite a group of children that were making fun of him.

Casey


#10
Interesting, however, that Jesus doesn't seem to speak much to the eastern religions, such as Buddhism (which is what made me think of this). The religions that do carry the suggestion of pantheism (as Ryan refers to the "cosmic whole" below) don't really seem to get their share of explanations in Jesus' gospel. What is a Christian to say to a pantheist?

Casey


#11
I feel I should point out that one of the reasons the Gospel of Thomas was rejected from the canon (besides the fact that it was written about two hundred years after the fact) is that it doesn't jive doctrinally with the other things. But as to pantheism, I'm really not sure there's anything to say. If it isn't patently obvious to you that a rock lacks one or more of the criteria for godhood, I'm not convinced that there's any way to argue around to that point. What Christianity does offer is an alternate cosmology backed by historical verifiability. If Christianity is true then pantheism isn't, so if I were personally in the mood to debate pantheism I would prefer to talk about the verifiability of Christianity - talking about the criteria for godhood is just going to get me talking in circles.

Jesus didn't come to teach, though. If his job on Earth was primarily to dispense moral and philosophical doctrine (which wouldn't, I think, be very much use to us - we don't follow moral or philosophical doctrine and we never will no matter who gives it to us) then we might expect him to provide teachings which systematically deal with all the wrong philosophies which he, as God, would be in a position to identify. On the other hand, how does a physics teacher explain to someone that the universe is not actually composed of celestial spheres? Rather than wasting a lot of time arguing about evidence for and against celestial spheres, he's much more likely to say "look, here's the real picture of the universe" - without mentioning celestial spheres at all, probably.

Natalie


#12
Lewis puts forth a deconstruction of Pantheism in 'Miracles', if anyone's interested.

To return to your original post, E, I do not think that people regard the existence of hell as a contradiction to God, per se.

As you describe him, God is the 'I am'. Not the 'I am supposedly'; not the 'I should be according to your perception', but the 'I am'.

If we have been trained in our educations to be skeptical of accepting without careful examination, then it is perhaps natural to raise concerns over the fact that one of God's most well-known characteristics appears compromised by one of his creations.

'Take it or leave it' probably isn't the most comforting answer, because it does nothing to address the injustice that another perceives in the embodiment of justice.

It's ironic how steep a hill this question is though. Of those that I've seen, the nonchristians have oftentimes attempted to surmount it, but have stopped short. The Christians have overcome it and ran all the way down, with a peace of mind that is perhaps puzzling to those who have not submitted their wills to the One whom they yet do not trust.

The question I tend to ask when faced with a person in such a dilemma is whether they realize that they are not presently standing on neutral ground; that hell is not a destination for punishment, but rather a denial of entry to better pastures. To go to hell, as I see it, is not entry into a jail, but simply never escaping an island.

And in that sort of situation, it is not that God punishes Man, but rather that Man never finds God.

The skeptics oftentimes do actively resist God and Christianity. But there is great danger in confounding evaluatory rigor with denial...

BTW: I'm thrilled to find somebody who posts entries as long as mine. ;)
You know me as the failed Testimony Bass and dormmate of one Mr. Russell and Mr. Mues.

Jase


#13
I agree. I always thought of Hell almost as God's last gift to Christianity--a way of saying, "Alright...if you don't want to come live with me, that's alright--I'll make a place just for you. Just don't blame me if it turns out you don't like it."

Casey


#14
I think that nine times out of ten objections to damnation center go something like this: "Well, look, I'm a good man - or anyway a halfway decent one - and I want to get to heaven just like anyone else, so isn't it horribly unjust and unloving for God to even create the possibility that I might not get there? Or maybe I'm not good enough to get into heaven, but what about someone like Ghandi?"

This is a case of dissecting Christianity out of context: it is looking at the doctrine of damnation, but not at any of the context which makes damnation anything other than an absurdity. But if you look at in context - if you realize that damnation must be taken with the rest of Christianity and that the whole thing hangs together - you immediately come up against the fact that you are not a "good man." You are not even remotely a halfway decent man. You will also run up against the fact that the doctrine of salvation has nothing to do with being "good enough." The very idea of being good enough to be saved is absurd. It would be like a man saying, "I am good enough to bear children." The idea of "good enough" is a million miles away from being relevant, because however good a man I may be, I am missing something vital.

How anybody can object to something like that I don't know, short of rejecting Christianity wholesale - which is what I have been trying to get at all along. Not, that is, unless they say something like this: "Well look, okay. We'll admit that I'm a sniveling wicked little wretch of a human being who has no hope of getting into heaven. Well, isn't that where God is supposed to come in? I mean, I *want* to get into heaven! Who doesn't?"

And that of course is exactly the conundrum identified by and solved by Christianity. I think a man would be very self-deceiving if he honestly asked that question of the sky and then refused to swallow his pride and become a practicing Christian (because of course he would not have reached that point except in intellectual relation to Christianity). But the real heart of the problem I think is in the last part: "I want to get into heaven! Who doesn't?"

I find that a lot of people run into a difficulty when they think of heaven or hell as a place that you are sent to. If I were God, I think I might have phrased those parts of the Scriptures more like Lewis did: in terms of becoming either a heavenly or hellish creature. But I can see the objection to that illustration and I think the geographical one really does make more sense, if you bother to think about it. I think it is like this:

Suppose a man in Los Angeles wants to get to New York. With this sole objective in mind, he hops into the Pacific and begins to swim towards the Arctic. What are we to say to such a man? We should correct him, of course - he is not heading for New York, and in fact could overshoot the Arctic by a million miles and still not end up in New York. But suppose once we correct him he says to us, "F*ck you and your geographical bigotry! I want to get to New York, and I'm going to get there my way! If I have to follow your instructions I don't want to get there anyway!" What are we to make of such a man? Does he want to get to New York or not?

(Of course that illustration is imperfect too, since you might get to New York by way of Moscow even if you started in Los Angeles. You would be very silly, but it could be done. But that is more like getting to the Christ-life by way of a very long and convoluted route, not like getting to it by way of Hinduism.)

Anyway, I think that is at the root of peoples' suspicion that hell is a really unfair feature of the universe. They simply refuse to believe that behavior X or attitude Y is, in reality, walking away from God (it is not bigotry to point out that heading for the Arctic will not get you to New York; it is merely a consequence of reality). And it is then that we run into Twilight's point. God has (only he knows why) this fanatical devotion to letting human beings make their own decisions. If a human being spends all its life trying to get away from God it would fail, unless there was some "place" like hell where God was not - else it would be like Jonah running away from God by heading for Italy.

Natalie

Just so people know, there are comments on that last post. My comment links are showing zero for some reason, but the comments are there. So you should read them, because otherwise what's the point of commenting?

I do appreciate one thing about Heinlein's portrayal of God, though: he treats it like a real thing.

One of the things that I find most deplorable (and baffling) about the way I perceive a great portion of my peers evaluating religion is that they treat it like an idea to be accepted or rejected. I suspect that this is one of the nefarious side effects of the idea of freedom of religion. It is obvious that everybody has the right to choose their own religion (and accept the consequences thereof, which may include summary execution depending on your locale), but somewhere along the line I perceive that people have gotten this idea that religion is something made up. With surprising frequency in the past couple weeks (and for my whole thinking Christian life) I've run into the attitude that "I just can't believe God would be like that" or some inconsequential variant thereof. The nature of God is not an idea to be built; it's a truth to be discovered. Saying "I just can't believe God would be like that" is every bit as ridiculous as Einstein refusing to believe in quantum mechanics, or the Church refusing to believe Copernicus.

Interruption: "I just can't believe God would do that" is a valid criterion by which to judge events on a spiritual plane, once the nature of God has been determined to a reasonable degree.

But, on the other hand, if that is what you're looking for and refuse to acknowledge it for no better reason than "I just can't believe it" then you should at least have the decency to admit that you're deceiving yourself through denial. Take hell, for instance. I don't understand the nature of hell particularly well (nor do I intend to waste much skull sweat over it, since I do understand it well enough to know that what hell is or isn't has nothing to do with me), but it's amazing the number of times a conversation with someone who's wondering about Christianity comes to the point where Someone says, "I just can't believe in a God who would create hell." That statement betrays a fundamental unreadiness to believe in God: because you're still treating God like a picture you can customize, instead of a [metaphorically] living, breathing individual who is what he is whether you like it or not.

Now sometimes someone will say that (or an equivalent statement) and actually be trying to point to a contradiction that goes something like this:

Axiom: God is good (or loving, or merciful, or whatever alleged attribute of God you want to include).

Axiom: Hell exists.

Contradiction

The proof is oftentimes that spotty, too, since if you try to pin down the intermediate steps you usually run into a question of definitions: either "what is good?" or "what is hell?" I'm only aware of one workable definition of the former, and it's one that Someone usually finds unsatisfying (I'm sure Watson felt the same way about Holmes' "when you've eliminated all other possibilities" axiom). As for the latter, I don't know enough to answer the question very well and I doubt that many other people do either, which makes it silly to use it in an attempt to catch Christianity in a contradiction. (I'm not aware of the Christian God ever having actually been caught in a contradiction: so far as I know all anybody has on him are issues in which there is no contradiction, or issues in which there might be contradictions but nobody's really very sure. In the face of a record where all the questions we can deal with turn out in God's favor, I'm not inclined to lose sleep over the question marks.)

What really gets me about this issue is that it often seems to be the last obstacle to friends who "agree intellectually" with Christianity but can't bring themselves to "believe." I strongly suspect this to be drawing a dichotomy where none exists. What that must really mean, I think, is that someone believes Christianity but can't bring themselves to act like a Christian - or, more likely, doesn't know what acting like a Christian means. After all, there's nothing to "believe" about Christianity other than the question of "true, false, or not sure." If you "agree intellectually" with Christianity you must have checked the "true" box; you "believe" it definitionally in the same way that you "believe" in quantum mechanics.

The tragedy of it all is that people have been conditioned to think that "believing" a religion is the truly important part about it. Maybe that's true with other religions; I don't know, but that's not what Christianity is like at all - and if someone who "agrees intellectually" with it has missed that point, then his or her study of the religion leaves out a crucial point. Believing Christianity really is like believing quantum mechanics. The utility of quantum has nothing to do with its truth or falsehood; the utility is in the implications. Believing in quantum mechanics doesn't enrich your life any: seeing that quantum mechanics implies lasers (and a million other things) does. Acknowledging the theory to be true doesn't get you anywhere; you have to figure out how to apply it. Similarly, the meat of Christianity - I might almost call it the point - is in its implications for your life. Those implications depend upon acknowledging the "theory" to be true, but they are not the same thing, and the leap from Christ's death to invincible joy and contentedness (and a million other things) is about as obvious as the leap from Copenhagen to supermarket scanners. The relationship is there, it's just work - very worthwhile work - to figure it out. But people who keep looking for that relationship by asking "do I/can I believe this?" are going to be eternally frustrated. What they should be asking is "I believe this: what does it imply?"

Everybody seems to have "current reading" lists. My blog is sort of feature-impoverished, in that it has no link list, no vital stats, and no reading list, but nevertheless I do read. I'm currently reading (re-reading) Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. It's interesting this time around, since I have come to a more conscious understanding of the ways in which I process art. One of those ways - in some cases the primary way - is symbolically: the work stands for or evokes something which is only somewhat related to its nominal subject matter. In some cases I think my symbols are fairly universal: the fact that Charlie's Angel's 2 evokes a fantasy world full of life, love, friendship, and beauty is I think fairly obvious to most people who have seen the movie.

In the case of Stranger what attracts me to the book is not so much what it's about (what it's about is heartbreakingly laughable) but the little nuggets of "preach it, brother!" moments that are scattered throughout all of Heinlein's writings. Attend one such:

"Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they're almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other."

This is a truth so elementary that I was taught it in religion classes in 6th grade (and if you've seen Chaminade's religion classes, you know that something has to be pretty elementary indeed to get included in one of them). It is nevertheless the sort of thing that I wish were copied down onto large heavy tomes whose sole purpose was to whack every human being on the planet upside the head once daily in the (vain) hope that they would then take notice of it.

Of course in Stranger things tend to go in interesting directions, morally speaking. A few paragraphs later Jubal is still talking:

"If a man swore on his own Bible that he refrained from coveting his neighbor's wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any male virile enough to sire a child has coveted many women, whether he acts or not.

"Now comes Mike and says, 'There is no need to covet my wife ... love her! There's no limit to her love, we have everything to gain - and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.'"

This is a point that I happen to agree with, in a symbolic sort of way. The idea that a human being can only be in a satisfying pair-bonding relationship with one other human being seems rather silly to me. I'm not at all well-read on the relevant anthropology but I strongly suspect that the jealousy which we expect would arise in a group marriage would be a result of either cultural conditioning or (more likely) the fact that most human beings can't choose a really good mate to save their life when they're only trying to pick one. If someone like a Valentine Michael Smith really could get a group of truly mature people of character and re-write their cultural conditioning from the birthroom on up, I'd actually lay pretty good odds that he could get an honestly successful group marriage.

Except for one thing.

That one thing is the definition of a "truly mature person of character." One of the tricks I've learned about reading science fiction is that you should never assume that it takes place in your world. Even if the setting of the story is "present day" you can assume no more than the author's words allow you to infer. In the case of Stranger, even though it takes place in the early 21st century on Earth, you can't assume the existence of God. And that is the one factor that keeps this marvellous book from being a truly excellent book; it is forever a "what-if God didn't exist?" fantasy. Of course the divine is explicitly present - but it is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Peter, and Paul. When you throw that God into the equation the book's moral fantasy falls apart, as can easily be seen by the following:

Axiom: "'Love' is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." (Jubal Harshaw)

Axiom: God is grieved (== !happy) by group marriage.

Conclusion: He does not truly love who enters into group marriage.

Of course you will notice that the second axiom is up for debate, and I'm not actually positive I believe it myself. Pornography in Stranger makes for a stronger example, but I was going with marriage so I decided not to switch gears. Nevertheless I can appreciate the symbolic essence of Mike's philosophy of sex: that it is fundamentally a goodness and ought to be delighted in, and that much of what we take for granted about the morality of sex is circumstantial at best, blind prejudice at worst. The trick for the real world is figuring the actual God into the evaluations which that basic truth calls for.

I'm typing this from Rose and Shanah's apartment, on Blue Rose's nifty Dell QuietKey keyboard. This is because the QuietKey has my endorsement as the best keyboard I've ever typed on. The keys are so springy! But the reason I have access to this marvel of inputting power is that I'm staying in Rose and Shanah's apartment for the first half of the Stanford Waltz Week and Waltz Weekend. I'm currently pleasantly exhausted from the day's classes, which included a lot of pivots so my right wrist and hand were kind of sore for a while. Shanah says that I pull more than I have to when I pivot, which is true. It's a habit I've picked up from pivoting with people who don't do their half of the work, and it's kind of hard for me to change that habit when I pivot with someone who knows what she's doing. If you read this, though, I really do appreciate it when my partners do their share, even if I sometimes forget to back off.

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: I like dancing. I love the music we dance to; I love the pageantry of asking someone to dance; I love the wonderful feeling of competence; I love the social dynamic; I love the movement. (I am also not entirely unappreciative of the fact that it affords me the opportunity to dance and flirt with pretty girls.)

There is something excellent about dance that makes me smile. I've been smiling a lot up here, and I think it kinds of weirds my hostesses out, but I can't help it. One of the things I discovered this year (been discovering for a long time, like an archaeologist dusting off a find that he can already basically identify) is one of my primary motivators. This motivator is aristeia if I may use the word; excellence if I may not. I do not mean truth, although I don't think something is liable to be truly excellent if it isn't also true. But really, the fact that Rose's mouse is white ... that may be true, but it's not really excellent. Nor do I particularly mean beauty - although excellence is beautiful. Something may be beautiful (e.g., Chicago) and also not be excellent in the way that inspires me.

But excellence, now ... excellence is, if I may borrow a Victorian term, improving. Reading Honor Harrington, for instance, makes me a better person, because it illuminates a critical aspect of personhood: good character. Honor novels are entertaining and well written, but more importantly they allow me to spend time in the company of noble people (an all too rare occurrence in the real world, so I'll take it where I can find it). I mean the kind of nobility that shows you something that is not only true but grand, that inspires you to be better than who you are.

Better than who you are. I recently read Richard Bach's Illusions, and while I enjoyed the book it reminded me of one of my pet peeves: the idea that things are just as they should be right now. Maybe they are, but I'm a romantic so I refuse to believe that without a much stronger case behind it than anybody's ever presented to me. I don't want this world. I don't want this me. I'm relatively happy with the way things are, but I want something better all the same. That doesn't mean I'm unhappy right now because I don't have a better world or a better me; I've got a pretty good one of both all things considered. But good things are not the sort of things which you should ever stop wanting more of. I want to be a better me. I want to be the kind of person that brings out the best in people, and I want to be the kind of person who sees the best in people, like in the old Amy Grant song:

I may not be every mother's dream for her little girl
And my face may not grace the mind of everyone in the world
But that's all right, as long as I can have one thing, I pray:
When people look inside my life, I want to hear them say
He has his Father's eyes.

Okay, in the original it's "she has," but you get the picture. I want to be the sort of person who brings out the best in people by care, yes, but also by inspiration. It is in the nature of excellence to inspire people to great things, and I want to be an excellent person. Because it is also in the nature of excellence that excellence is a good thing, and I want good things. Rambling? Yes. But you get the picture.

I've been working more on Phoenix Earth lately, after a long period of just not thinking about it much. I'm really happy with the work that's been done recently: revamping the specialization system, making a few tweaks to the combat system, and carefully crafting my villains' character sheets. Of course I am on the one hand merely excited to be back in that world. But on the other hand I am also excited to have the dream revived. Why? At the end of Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis writes the following:

"'Anyway,' he continued, 'what we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.'"

If you are familiar with Lewis' other fiction, I think you will perceive that this is the man himself speaking. And it is an effort to which I would like to direct Phoenix Earth. There is more to it than that, of course; for my players the game certainly stands on its own (though, I should note, the world does not). I don't mean for Phoenix Earth to be an evangelistic tool, but I do hope that it is useful for the intellectual life of those who come into contact with it. I consider a childhood spent among fantasy and science fiction to be one of my humblest but most useful intellectual tools. It frees me, to a large extent, from the plausibility fallacy. That fallacy looks like this: when a historian reads an account of, say, the Red Sea crossing (or the Persians' repulsion from Delphi, or any other ancient miracle you care to name) they tend to dismiss it because such things are simply too absurd to be countenanced. That doesn't seem like a particularly good argument to me, and I find myself much less prone to it simply because such things do not seem particularly strange to me.

I should be very pleased if Phoenix Earth gives my friends the tools to consider the spiritual realm unfettered by the tendency to say, "now hold on, doesn't that strike you as ridiculous?" It's all well and good for The DM to consider that the admission of the reality of the spiritual world would demystify it - but that's precisely the problem. The virtue of the spiritual is not that it's mystic but that it's real. If that be not admitted, you're not only gutting the "mystic" system you're considering, you're still playing with mere make-believe. And why then is the "mystic" worthy of anything but our recreational time?

I've been talking with M'lakMavet and Archimedes lately about games, and their artistic potential. M'lak will have an article out on it soon, but I have a few thoughts of my own that I thought I might as well share, especially since that last post about the war has been up so long.

By way of preface, the interactive aspect of gaming doesn't invalidate it as art. Hamlet is never the same twice, and people have done some pretty wacky stuff to it (and other Shakespeare plays) over the centuries, but the fact that the end product depends so heavily on who actually executes the show doesn't invalidate theatre as art. The difference of course is that you can name examples of great theatre, but not examples of great games. Oh, you can name any number of "great games" according to the standards by which games are judged - but not according to the standards by which all other art is judged. I wager it's a safe bet that none of the games we've seen so far will be played in our children's time, let alone in five hundred years. And it doesn't count if they're played for sentimental value, or the novelty of history. People may remember Bach's music fondly, but ultimately they play it because it's phenomenal music no matter how old it is. We have no games like that.

But one day, hopefully, that will change - if game developers become artists, or artists became game developers. But still I think there are some major mental tasks to complete before we get a really great game. One of those is figuring out what the strengths of the medium as an art form actually are. Interactivity is the most obvious answer - but what does that really mean? And what about interface? Should games strive for a simple interface, as Archimedes would have it? Quite possibly - after all, the more intuitive the interface the more complete the immersion, and immersion is something that even today's poor excuses for games are fairly good at. Presumably we should seek after immersion.

But will there perhaps be a place for an art form where the interface is actually part of the experience? Before you scoff, remember how much cooler sims can be inside a cockpit pod, as at Virtual World. In some ways of course that's just a way of increasing the immersion factor: controlling a BattleMech with two sticks and foot pedals is more believable than doing it with a mouse and keyboard. But in some cases the interface is difficult for difficulty's sake (e.g., virtually every fighting game known to man). Imagine a game where you have to master the interface (which, for a large part of gaming history, was virtually the entire point) to really enjoy the game. You might scoff, but technical proficiency as the price to participate doesn't doom an art form. Else where would musicians be, or dancers, or painters, or filmmakers? Of course you can often enjoy their products passively (and so can you enjoy a game without playing it, as the Koreans have taught us with their devotion to StarCult ... er, Craft). But even passive enjoyment isn't necessary: virtually nobody who doesn't already know how to waltz enjoys watching other people do it. And yet the waltz was a viable, extremely popular form of art for decades, and social dance in general continues to be a viable popular art today. So I will not dismiss the possibility of a genre of games which are real art but require you to master their interfaces to really enjoy them. Maybe one day my son will describe such a game to me with the same glow with which I describe the waltz or lindy hop to a non-initiate, and he'll smile at my benign ignorance as I smile at so many others'.

Another hurdle is technical mastery. I think that game developers have their standards insufficiently high when it comes to the technical execution of their craft. Perhaps this seems surprising to say of an industry where graphics and system demands supercede each other so rapidly, but when it comes to game design itself the rate of progress is not nearly so fast. StarCraft's level of play balance is still exceptional, and not the rule - but why? Is it because all the RTS designers worth their salt work for Blizzard? Maybe, but I doubt it. Why is it that game designers think that a game is complete if it has a fantastic multiplayer component but a lackluster single-player, or vice versa? StarCraft makes me think that the idea of the single vs. multiplayer game ought to be more of a niche concept than it seems to be: the play balance in StarCraft is equally necessary for the single player and multiplayer (assuming you're into high standards of quality), since you play all three races against one another and the tactical problem therefore needs to have a multiplayer-like balance (unless of course you're not interested in creating an interesting tactical problem, which is deplorable in a designer of combat-based games). Granted that's probably not how Blizzard thought of it - but why not?

It occurs to me that aside from the non-acknowledgement of games as art (which is I think the root of the problem of people's perception of them) one of the problems people have with games is that they cause you to spend all your time inside, pretending ("posing," perhaps is a more accurate term), or both. Besides the fact that those objections are obviously silly (why then is acting okay?), it occurs to me that we object to anybody spending all their time in "idle" artistic activity. It's not okay to spend all your time inside at your paints or your books any more than your games (though large portions of time devoted to them may be acceptable). As for posing, I think that's a misunderstanding of what the pretending in games is actually pretending. Hint: it's more than just what's on the screen. Which is true of all good pretending. I may never be a hoplite, but I can still take my place in line of dance, raise my arm to high port, and charge ahead into the mill of Terpsichore.

The American attitude towards war generally frustrates me. As Dad said today, it's a shame that the American impatience with war actually gives the enemy a hope of defeating us - if we were Russians, the Iraqis would have no hope, because we'd never give up. As it is, Saddam has a hope (albeit a small one) of dragging this out long enough for the American public to decide the military had its chance and now it's time to give up. It reminds me of what you learn in high school about the Tet Offensive - a situation which was an overwhelming victory for our boys in uniform, turned into a defeat in the eyes of the public by the American media. God grant that my children live in an America which has confidence in its military rather than being dogged by the bogeyman of a conflict thirty years obsolete.

I don't mean to suggest that the American military should be totally divorced from the opinion of the public. My grandfather, who retired in 1988 as an Air Force major general and the highest-ranking Asian American in the Air Force, wrote to me once that one of the things he wanted me to understand about war was that it should not be undertaken without the support of the American public (which is why, I might add, I support the war). But it frustrates me that the American public gives no evidence of understanding what war is like - or perhaps I should say it frustrates me that the media is not educating them. Examples from recent reporting:

When Air Marshal Burridge gave his press conference last night, he said that he doesn't concern himself with the ground-level details of an operation. A reporter asked him in a rather nasty tone if he didn't think the British public mightn't be concerned by their overall commander saying he doesn't concern himself with "details." In case it isn't immediately obvious to you what a moronic question that is, allow me to spell it out: if the overall commander is micromanaging his campaign, that means that a). he has no faith in his subordinates to do that (details are their job), and b). nobody is taking the time to look at the big picture (because that's his job). I hope the British public is not so stupid as to be disturbed by the fact that the Air Marshal is doing his job.

On a recent CNN broadcast, a retired service officer (I can't remember if he was Army or Marine) talked about the Iraqi column headed for the 1st Marines, and said that after they'd been pounded by aircraft, helicopters, and artillery, we would "hopefully not take them head-on" and encircle them. Now, all that is true - but it makes it sound like taking them head-on would be bad for us. And that just isn't true. If we took them head-on we'd kick their @sses. But of course we want to encircle them, so that instead of beating them severely we crush them like bugs.

You may remember the reporting concerning the operation which involved that Apache setting down from mechanical failure. Reporting with that event said that most of the Apaches were hit, and had to return to base, although only the one had to set down. Now, that is all undoubtedly true. Most of the Apaches probably were hit, and they all returned to base - but anybody who knew anything about the Apache gunship would know that the Iraqis had nothing in that battle capable of doing anything more than scratching their paint. They returned to base because their mission was over.

Now, in all fairness to the American media, most of my gripes about the war coverage stem directly from the fact that the embedded reporters (not to mention the ones back here in the States) are not war correspondents per se; they're just regular old reporters. They don't understand the workings of the American military, and they certainly don't understand the capabilities of our hardware or the capabilities of the enemy's. Probably they're scared and uncertain themselves. I can understand all of that. But it leads to reporting which feeds into American uncertainty about the war, which I would say is a grave journalistic sin given that the war gives every appearance of going phenomenally well.

I don't know that there's anything to be done about the reporters' apparent lack of knowledge regarding military history. But I do think it would help them, and their viewing public, to get educated about the weapons our soldiers are using and coming up against. At least then we wouldn't get reporters talking with fear about American tanks facing Iraqi ones, or making ridiculous statements about Apache helicopters. And if the military can dredge up some charismatic spokesmen to explain what they're doing, that wouldn't hurt either. I'm sure the folks talking to the media thus far are fine soldiers and fine officers, but sometimes I think they don't understand the basic need to reassure the media - or else they don't understand how to do that.

Oh, and let's not forget the humanitarian aid situation. CNN quoted Donald Rumsfeld as saying that a cease-fire in Iraq to distribute humanitarian aid would not happen. Now, that's a shining example of making Secretary Rumsfeld sound like a sound-thinking, reasonable individual. Clearly the man cares nothing for the Iraqi people. But HELLO, when we tried to distribute aid where we could, Saddam's cutesy little secret police fired on the crowd to get them away from our soldiers handing out water and food. If we negotiate a cease-fire with Saddam, he'll say okay, and his army and Republican Guard units will get a much-needed reprieve from the unmitigated beating our boys are handing them. The Fedayeen, meanwhile, will be sabotaging our aid efforts and firing on their own people - and we'll be lucky to get a "we regret the actions of the free Iraqi people" statement out of Baghdad. No, there won't be a cease-fire. That aid will get through when we've rooted these Fedayeen vermin out of the south. But what about the American motivations here? Ask yourself the following:
1). Will the war profit America a great deal of money? Recall that Rumsfeld has asked for $75B so far, with no promises about how much more will be asked for later.
2). Will the war win America friends in the Arab world?
3). Will the war win America friends in the non-Arab world?
4). Have we demanded that Iraq become an American protectorate? Recall that the French-German plan called for Iraq to become a UN protectorate indefinitely - for Iraq to turn over the reins of government because the UN asked nicely.
The answer to all of those questions, I think you'll agree with me, is "no." So tell me: which side is out for the good of the Iraqi people?

If you read this, try to take the media's reporting with a grain of salt. And even though I know no soldiers in Iraq will read this, give 'em hell, boys.

As M'lakMavet has recently observed, the formal onset of military action against Iraq will no doubt inspire bloggers the world over to turn to their browsers in search of a forum to declaim on the situation. I admit that a certain amount of angst compels me to write this rather than turning immediately to bed - but I would say that my attitude toward the war (I know it's not a war, but let's not quibble over that; calling it a "conflict" will only insulate us from what we're actually doing) bears rather significantly on the side of me that this blog is intended to illuminate, and so declaim I shall.

I happen to agree with the legal argument that resolutions 678, 687, and 1441 give the coalition a sound legal footing for what we're doing. I don't mean to say that there's an airtight case for it, but I do think it's a very defensible one and one that a respectable person can hold. There may not be anything in the UN charter about overthrowing nations by force, but if you think that the overthrow of a nation's ruling elite is not entailed in the prosecution of war, I submit to you that you're dreaming. We can thank the Romans for bequeathing to the western way of war the idea that defeat - nay, the unqualified annihilation - of a nation's armed forces does not mean that said nation has lost the war. Nations lose wars when they give up, and not before. Which means that any time you go to war you had best be prepared for the possibility that you will have to put a gun to the collective heads of the people who make the decision. If you aren't willing to do that, should the foe's ruling elite compel you to, best admit to your fighting men and women that you aren't willing to back them to the hilt and stay home. Which means, in my opinion, that either the UN charter does implicitly allow for the violent overthrow of regimes, or else the UN charter is hopelessly out of touch with what the use of force actually means.

As I say, I happen to think we're on sound legal footing - and never mind what the nations who drafted and ratified those resolutions meant. In the first place, in the current environment it's highly unlikely that anybody's going to be objective about what we meant ten years ago (when, let's recall, Iraq was the clear bad guy). The point is, what's written is all we have to go on - and it's not exactly the coalition's fault if what was written can legitimately be construed to support a course of action the original authors no longer find attractive.

So as I say, I think we're on solid legal ground. This does not mean I think we're on sound moral ground. I will not speak in this forum one way or the other about what I think on the morality of this particular war. I will mention a few things about the certain anti-war stances which I find particularly annoying, however:

First is the Vietnam complaint. I know not many people who are very informed about the situation worry that "we might be getting into another Vietnam," but allow me to go on record expressing my frustration that Vietnam continues to be the bogeyman of the peaceniks of my generation. The Vietnam fear is ostensibly that we don't have clear objectives and will therefore get bogged down in endless, high-casualty fighting. I'm not positive about this, but I was under the impression that we do have clear objectives - destroy the Republican Guard as a fighting force, kill or apprehend Saddam Hussein, remove the current regime's weapons of mass destruction and dismantle (again) the means to construct them. If I'm wrong about that, somebody let me know. But what really bugs me about the Vietnam fear is the sense I get that what people actually fear is the sense that our fighting men will find themselves cut off, in strange territory, against a foe they cannot defeat. I suggest that Mr. Cordesman is correct in suggesting that that is not the case. Bluntly put, we're better than they are. I don't mean to suggest that the Republican Guard and even the regular Army are inconsequential foes - but the fact of the matter is that our troops have superior training, superior morale, superior equipment, superior support, the initiative - we're better than they are. By a large degree. Of course Iraq's armed forces might surprise us - but is there any reasonable basis for expecting that we will not crush them utterly?

My second frustration is what I will call the Death complaint: namely, that war causes people to die. You've probably been involved in or heard a conversation rather like this recently: the anti-war person says "war makes people die!" and the pro-war person says "that's what happens in war!" to which the anti-war person says "I know that!" I am not speaking specifically of civilian casualties or combatant casualties here - merely the sense that death in general is a great evil.

I am not suggesting that death should be avoided where possible, but I am suggesting that there are much worse things out there than death. Death, as I have argued elsewhere here, is not a particularly bad thing - oh, it's painful for the survivors, and carries the risk of damnation for the deceased. But pain is not an evil, it's just unpleasant. And damnation, while deadly serious, is a function of the individual's choice not to accept Christ (but what if the individual doesn't believe in Christianity? someone will say. Well then, say I, he has no right to complain if it turns out he's wrong). Is it not worse to stand by while injustice is wrought than to commit violence for the sake of intervening on behalf of the innocent? Or are governments not "an avenger to execute wrath on him who practises evil?" (Rom. 13:4).

Of course you may think that the death toll which warfare inflicts is not worth alleviating whatever suffering Saddam inflicts on his own people. Or you may think that absolutely that suffering should be stopped, but simply have no faith in this campaign's ability to stop it. If so, that is your prerogative - though I avail myself of my own prerogative to disagree with you.

But what I really wanted to write tonight was this: yes, the war deeply distresses me. Yes, it makes me want to cry because the world is so broken. But no, I refuse to let those emotions - emotions, I repeat - prevent my support for what we are doing. This support is based secondarily on the fact that I am willing to back my president's judgment call (and although you did not vote for him, by supporting the Constitution of the United States you affirm Mr. Bush as your president until the next election). But mostly it is based upon a conviction that the men and women who do the killing and dying are putting themselves at much more risk - morally, emotionally, physically - than I, and I do care deeply about the prospect that those men and women will kill and die. I refuse to send my fellow Americans to kill and be killed while shouting at them from the sidelines that what they're doing is wrong, that their sacrifice is in vain and the motives which moved them to pledge themselves to uphold the decisions of lawfully constituted authority were misplaced. Now that the shooting has started, my prayer is that it be over quickly - which means, as the president said, hitting with overwhelming force as hard and as fast and as accurately as we know how. Give 'em hell, boys, for our sake and for theirs.

Jenny asked me tonight if my support of our attack extended so far that I would go if drafted. The answer to that is no, I would not be drafted, but yes, I would go. If things got so bad that the service repudiated its opposition to the draft - if things were that bad and my government was still intent on pressing the campaign - I would sign up. I would sign up rather than wait to get drafted because if things were that bad (which means they would be truly horrific, given the service's current stance on conscription and the unprecedented power and prowess of the United States military) I would want some say in my fate rather than waiting to see where they stuck me. I would go (as opposed to, say, running to Canada) because I would not ask some other mother to send her son to fight and die overseas in my place. I do not go now because there is no indication that my country requires my services, and because God has not called me to join the military. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to know that my country was defended by people who were in uniform for any reason other than a compelling certainty that God had told them that was what His plan for their life was. Probably most of the military doesn't have that certainty, but I see no reason to add to that unfortunate fact.

So my prayer for the war is this: Lord Jesus, let it end as soon as it may. While the shooting lasts, deliver the foe into our hands - not that we can boast of our might, but that the suffering may end soon. May those who fight fight with courage and honor. If they may not lay down their lives for a just regime, at least grant that they lay down their lives for their friends fighting next to them. May those who must die die quickly, with little pain, and may those who may be spared be spared. Grant our boys good targets, that they may attack the soldiers of the enemy and spare those who refuse to take up arms against them. Let them fight with all their skill, tenacity, and ferocity - not out of hatred for the enemy but out of love, and a recognition that war prosecuted by half measures only prolongs the suffering.

When the shooting ends, God, may you move mightily in Iraq. Let the Iraqi regime which emerges from this war be one which fears you and is committed to rule justly and well. Let it be a regime dedicated to serving Iraq and not itself. May the good intentions of America and the world not confound your purpose there, and may the Iraqi people display a worthy courage to stand up and seize the government of their nation for themselves, rather than allowing international politics to dictate their future to them. Whatever you think of this war, Lord, I ask that you use it to display your glory. Confound the naysayers, even if they were right all along, and take this situation and bring about a lasting good from it.

One of the lamentable facts of my lifetime is the decline of American animation. Time was when you could come home from school and be regaled on a daily basis by two hours of quality cartoons during the Disney Afternoon. And there was C.O.P.S. and Swat Kats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and MASK and Dino Riders ... really, what happened to good cartoons? And that doesn't even count the fact that I was a child during the great revival of good Disney movies: Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King. After that Disney movies kind of fluctuated between okay and not-so-hot. Oh, and Tarzan, which I would say goes all the way up to "pretty good" (it's one of my favorite movies, but that doesn't make it a good movie).

I would say that Mulan comes pretty close to "pretty good" too. Its soundtrack doesn't exactly sparkle, and Eddie Murphy is no Robin Williams, but it's got a good cast of supporting characters and the army schtick is pretty fun. "I'll Make A Man Out of You" is by far the best number in the show, and not just because it's got cool accompanying animation or good voice acting ("hope he doesn't see right through me!"). The use of the army in Mulan is really clever, though in my opinion underplayed because the show isn't marketed to people who know how to analyze literature. The army is what makes the whole gender-questioning thing work: as the great manly activity, it provides a forum to show that in point of fact none of these characters is men. Interesting side-note: they become men (that is, they become "tranquil as a forest, but on fire within ... swift as the coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon, with all the strength of a raging fire, mysterious as the dark side of the moon") after triumphing over the villains. In other words, Shang's training didn't do it, and their self-confidence didn't do it: while masculinity is something which must be internalized to be held, it requires validated accomplishments to exist at all.

Anyway, the army also provides the venue for "A Girl Worth Fighting For," which is not exactly a great song but is wonderfully conceived. Well, with the exception of Mulan's line: "How about a girl who's got a brain? Who always speaks her mind?" (to which her buddies go "nah!"). That line should not be in the song, because it tries to reduce the masculine desire for "a girl worth fighting for" to some sort of chauvinistic objectification of women. In fact that is nearly the exact opposite of the truth, and it is a well-attested fact that men on campaign spend a great deal of time and emotional energy thinking about their women. Heinlein remarks in Starship Troopers that women are the ultimate reason men go to war. And I think that's true, for what symbolizes what makes life worth living more than Beauty's love?

Note that I capitalized Beauty there. I did that on purpose, because Beauty is an archetype who need not be beautiful. As the song points out, "a girl worth fighting for" has very little to do with physical attractiveness. What do the soldiers imagine their girls will have? Ling wants a girl "paler than the moon, with eyes that shine like stars," true - but he also dreams, "my manly ways and turn of phrase are sure to thrill her." Yao says, "my girl will marvel at my strength, adore my battle scars," and Chien-Po says, "I couldn't care less what she'll wear, or what she'll look like: it all depends on what she cooks like." To these wistful dreams all Mulan can say is, "huh?"

But what are they really asking for? What those lines are all saying is I want a girl who thinks I'm Somebody. Yao and Ling are looking for girls who will look at them and see something other than the pathetic losers they really are ("my girl will think I've got no faults, that I'm a major find"). Chien-Po is looking for one who understands what's important to him and thinks it's important too.

In my opinion there are other factors which make a girl Worth Fighting For, but this song touches on one of the fundamentals (besides - with that one stupid line aside - being a poignant exposition of character for the soldiers who are otherwise merely comic relief): if a girl is to be worth fighting for, she must think that you're a man worthy to fight for her. What makes Beauty beautiful is not what she looks like but the beauty she has to unveil - and the fact that you have stood at the bars of her woman's soul and been judged worthy for that beauty to be unveiled to.

My Bible study is reading a book called Wild at Heart, by John Eldredge. It falls under the category in Christian literature of "men's book," but I am going to discuss it here anyway because I think this one has some good stuff to say. Actually I suspect I'll have a great deal to say about this as I get further into it. Rose's Bible study is reading The Sacred Romance, which Eldredge co-wrote with Brent Curtis. She quoted me some excerpts from it because she said it "sounded like me" speaking. Which it did.

Eldredge's premise in Wild at Heart is that there is such a thing as the masculine soul (as distinct from, though not opposite to, the feminine) and that modern Christianity - and society at large, for that matter - has badly missed what that soul is about. I quote from his first chapter:

When all is said and done, I think most men in the church believe that God put them on the earth to be a good boy. The problem with men, we are told, is that they don't know how to keep their promises, be spiritual leaders, talk to their wives, or raise their children. But, if they will try real hard they can reach the lofty summit of becoming ... a nice guy. That's what we hold up as models of Christian maturity: Really Nice Guys. We don't smoke, drink, or swear; that's what makes us men. Now let me ask my male readers: in all your boyhood dreams growing up, did you ever dream of becoming a Nice Guy? (Ladies, was the Prince of your dreams dashing ... or merely nice?)

And again: Little boys yearn to know they are powerful, they are dangerous, they are someone to be reckoned with; and again, Adventure requires something of us, puts us to the test. Though we may fear the test, at the same time we yearn to be tested, to discover that we have what it takes; and further, The battle itself is never enough; a man yearns for romance. It's not enough to be a hero; it's that he is a hero to someone in particular, to the woman he loves. In short, Eldredge argues, "in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue."

If it isn't already painfully obvious to you why my heart resonates with this book, you have missed an essential part of my being.

I should interject a note here: Eldredge is not conceiving of the "beauty" as some sort of passive object. He is explicitly rejecting the message that the apex of womanhood is to be "tough, efficient, and independent," and I agree with him there. But he is not saying that a woman should be some sort of wilting flower trapped, helpless, in the highest tower. Instead, he proposes:

Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman yearns to be fought for. Listen to the longing of a woman's heart: she wants to be more than noticed - whe wants to be wanted.

I am not a woman, but I think that's a fair statement to make. So too:

Every woman also wants an adventure to share. ... So many men make the mistake of thinking that the woman is the adventure. But that is where the relationship immediately goes downhill. A woman doesn't want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up into something greater than herself.

And

Every woman wants to have a beauty to unveil. Not to conjure, but to unveil. Most women feel the pressure to be beautiful from very young, but that is not what I speak of. There is also a deep desire to simply and truly be the beauty, and be delighted in.

Of course Eldredge isn't a woman either. But at the very least I think he's got his finger on the essential character of masculinity, and so at the very least I think he's identified here the kind of woman that a man's soul will resonate with. The most poignant moment in all of the Song of the Lioness quartet is when Alanna (this is the Alanna who is a bazhir shaman, the finest knight in Tortall, the woman who killed Duke Roger) comes into the common room of an inn at the Roof of the World in a dress with earrings. Liam guffaws at her, and what does she say? "Sometimes I like pretty things." I believe that that scene, in one form or another, lives somewhere in the heart of every man.

There are two points I think deserve to be observed here. First off, Eldredge is not speaking in strictly metaphorical terms. I think (I haven't finished the book yet, but I think) he is speaking metaphorically, but he's also speaking literally. In other words, there is nothing wrong with the man's desire for adventure, or to be dangerous - yes, literally, to be a perilous character, capable of inflicting grievous personal injury. In fact, I think he argues (and I certainly do argue), the man who is afraid of force is a hollow shell of a man.

And here I mean all kinds of force: Are others almost afraid to challenge you in debate because they know you can back up your position and defend it ably? Do people know that throwing tantrums around you won't work, because you aren't afraid of social confrontation? Are people afraid to disappoint you because they respect you that much? Are people afraid to mess with your loved ones because they know that you won't take that lying down? And yes, are you willing to apply lethal force until rendered physically unable to do so if your moral duty demands it of you? If not, why?

All of this has given me a curious angle on video games. There are two curious facts about video games that people often find difficult to reconcile: the fact that they're violent makes them fun; and yet that does not translate into an enjoyment of violence by gamers (you will hear otherwise on the news, but as a member of the first generation of young men to grow up playing video games I will tell you the media are wrong. Anecdotes of aberrant cases will not make them right. If you want to see the real heart of the modern gamer on the subject of real violence, watch me break down and cry about Iraq in Rose's car on the way home from church. Or, if you want a thoroughly non-Christian view, I invite you to consider the views of the Penny Arcade, widely held to be representative of the geek gamer, in this news post). And I will not deny that I enjoy slicing people up with my lightsaber. Because it's just so cool.

Let's stop there and analyze that statement. What did I just say? What I did not say is that I enjoy the thought of walking out onto the Stanford campus with a lightsaber in hand and hacking up my fellow students - I wouldn't even enjoy the thought of hacking up a bunch of Dark Jedi who somehow infiltrated the Farm. I said that lightsabering people is cool. Because in Jedi Knight II it is: it gives you the feeling that you're doing stuff from the movies, that you are in control of a Jedi's weapon, that you are skilled and are a force to be reckoned with. When you take down your first saber-wielding Reborn warrior in JK II, you know you've reached it: that is the moment (to borrow another video game quote) you officially become ... badass. And because physical, dangerous badassness is a part of all the other, more "acceptable" uses of force, the whole thing is emblematic. The game affirms that yes, you have what it takes.

What about the adventure? Well, take a good long look at video games and I think you'll find that the really great ones do give you an adventure. Sure, games like Quake and Doom are little more than twitch-fests - but those are not great games. They'll be remembered for their technical innovations. TIE Fighter, now, and MechWarrior 2, and Half-Life, and Myst, and the great Blizzard titles like WarCraft II and StarCraft ... those will be remembered for the adventure, the sense that the force is being harnessed to a purpose. Those games give you a chance to be a hero, not just some gun-slinging machine. Those are the games that people will tell you are the greatest games man has yet produced.

And the beauty? What about her? Not many games give you a beauty to rescue ... but then again, some do. How many people felt just awful when they found out how Sarah Kerrigan had been betrayed - and how many people resonated with Jim Raynor's inability to save her? You spend virtually all of Jedi Knight II trying to rescue Jan Ors, desperate in the knowledge that she might be dead and you never told her how you feel. And, corny as it sounds, Blue Rose will be able to corroborate that the end of Red Alert II sent me into a wistful state of shock, because it turned out that Tanya Adams was more than Rambo in a sports bra after all. Games may not be able to harness the power of romance very effectively - but I think that's because we have never yet seen a great game. Great by the standards of games, yes. Great by the standards we apply to other art? Not even close. Give me a game like that and I'll show you how much potential there is in giving the player a beauty to rescue. These others only hint at it.

All of this leads me to suspect that the failure of the media and all those concerned friends and citizens out there to prove that video games are bad for your character is because they're trying to make a connection that isn't there. The violence and adventure in a video game affirms a man's heart, satisfies in some way the deep core longings of his being. That's what they appeal to - not some morbid desire for death and gore.

There is something peculiarly happy about listening to the Dixie Chicks' "There's Your Trouble." Maybe it's that this was the first Chicks song I ever heard. Or maybe it's just really good music. The nifty thing about the Chicks is that they have all sorts of cool instruments, and they play most all of them so they know how to use them, too.

So Rose's birthday was two days ago, and it was evidently a rousing success, which I am glad of. Other than providing the music (which wasn't even mine) I didn't have that much to do with it, so I won't give the complete blog-down to those of you who don't know where to get that yourselves. Still, I'm glad that she had a good birthday.

It's kind of amazing to me how far Rose and I have come since I started this as a way to let people see the parts of me that don't get much play at Stanford. If you check back in the archives, you can get an idea of just how far. I can still remember buying that blue glass rose with Shanah at Knott's, thinking it was the perfect gift to express how special she was to me and trying not to think about the all-too-real prospect that by the time I saw her to give it to her it would all be over. As it turns out that's exactly what happened, but I'm still glad that I got to give it to her. Even if my first uses of the Blue Rose blogname were irresponsible and immature.

The subject of my blog will have to do as a segue into what I actually intended to write about tonight: namely, fantasizing about my birthday surprise. One of the nifty things about Rose's birthday was that it brought together people from all different areas of her social existence. True, those disparate areas didn't mix very much, and there was maybe even some social tension - but she liked it, and after all it was her birthday. Now, I'm not saying that my friends could arrange for the guys to get up here, and I'm certainly not expecting anybody to try. But it would be awfully cool. I think the agenda for my ideal Stanford birthday would go something like this:

1). Play video games with guys (a little AvP action, a little Jedi Knight II, if only to show them how cool that lightsaber is). Maybe have some Smashing time.
2). Dinner out with the guys, to talk about nerdy gaming stuff.
3). Phoenix Earth session.
4). Dinner out with Shanah and Rose.
5). Movie with lots of people. Either something artsy (Moulin Rouge? Chicago?), cool (Alien Resurrection? Predator 2? Starship Troopers?), wistful (Beauty and the Beast? Tarzan?), or horrible (Dungeons & Dragons?).
6). Dancing with lots of people, including but not necessarily limited to the Ailouriskai and Alanna and Lady and Rose and Shanah and Chariessa.
7). Worship.
8). Storytime, either with something symbolically significant (Enchanted Forest? Song of the Lioness?) or that I can read really well (James and the Giant Peach?)
9). Family time, possibly combined with storytime.

Of course that's not a very practical plan, seeing as how it involves two dinners, the presence of the entire Phoenix Earth party, a Phoenix Earth session (which would require me to have a session planned in advance and would take about six hours out of the day), and a movie (which would take a minimum of ninety minutes). And not everybody on the guest list implied above would be comfortable with a worship set. And of course as much as I like dancing with Lady she'd probably feel kind of odd coming to a birthday party for me, depending on the guest list. But hey, a guy can dream.

I have figured out Dutch Schaefer (who is part of the Alien vs. Predator universe evidently because he's Arnold's character in the original Predator). I actually like Dutch more than Linn in a lot of ways. He has three great drawbacks: he can't jump (well, he can jump a little), his gun overheats after two bursts, which makes it nigh useless at long range, and he's slow. However, he has three great advantages: he has no weapon (or rather, his cybernetic arm is his weapon), so his offensive power isn't diminished when he gets knocked over, he hits harder than anybody else in the game, and he can pick up a weapon in the form of the pipe, which does massive damage and knocks people down with a single hit.

Dutch really only has two special moves, but they're pretty good. One is this kind of bull rush thing he has, which besides getting him in close where he can lay the smack down trumps most other moves in the game, including the smasher alien's charge attack. Second is his dragon punch thing, which only works when an alien is near by. That by itself isn't so great, but he falls in slow motion and you can blaze away with his smart gun while you fall, which makes it pretty cool and devastating against bosses. So it turns out that Schaefer's pretty cool after all, though I still prefer the predators.

Viennese is coming up soon, which I am very psyched about for a number of reasons. For one thing I have a wonderful date, who besides being pretty and witty and charming is one of my most favorite people to dance with. And besides Chariessa, there will be other lovely people to dance with as well, such as Rose and Shanah and Lady and lots others I'm sure except I don't remember precisely who all is going of the dancers I know. Additionally, Viennese gives me a chance to dress up and be gentlemanly, and generally have a high-class date. And I'm more or less organizing things this time around, which makes me feel competent and organized. Well, I am competent and I can be organized, but I generally don't feel that way at Stanford. So this is a nice change.

I've decided that I like playing the predator hunter more than the warrior. Linn may have more potential, but I'm not at all sure of that (though she does have a mightier gun, even if it's not as good for clearing paths as the famed predator shoulder gun). And the hunter is just so kinetic, especially once I learned that he has a higher-velocity version of Linn's "kick off of one alien and into another, then back again" move (though the hunter's version can't be repeated as often as Linn's). And this game is all about style, and the fact that everything on the screen is just so high-energy. I've even gotten used to the orange armor, and I have so mastered that Blanka-ball move he has.

I'm listening to the City of Angels soundtrack right now - have been for several days, actually. Although I think this show has some flaws in its writing, I really like some of its numbers. Stine has been added to my very short list of Characters I Would Love to Play (the others being Javert and Pontius Pilate). And of course I love to sing Stone's songs too - and I just love Gabby's songs, and Oolie/Donna's. This is music where the background is not boring (far from it, in my opinion), but isn't trying to steal the spotlight. And because the songs actually advance the action, rather than merely expanding on some point that has been made in dialogue, they really offer potential for acting, too. Ah, happy sigh.

I have a terrible feeling about this. Lord, let this cup pass from us - not to some other nation that we would pass our bloodshed to, but let the necessity pass from mankind. France is wrong. I don't like talking about politics, but France is wrong. "Iraq must answer their questions and cooperate more effectively?" No, Iraq musn't - because there is no compulsion upon them to do so. If they don't, then what? What is the "or else?"

But enough of that. I was going to blog about the great bane of my existence, The Stanford Fund, but my blogs have been very grim lately so let's have something more light-hearted. Such as a discussion of the great and august Alien vs. Predator, which it turns out you can buy in arcade machine format for a mere $240. Some day, I may do that.

In the meantime, Twilight gave me the game as part of my Christmas gift, and I've been working my attack-button-pounding skillz. Looking back on it, I think AvP was remarkable in its day (1994) for the fact that everything felt so kinetic. Older 3D-wannabe sidescrolling games feel kind of slow and wooden. Alien vs. Predator does not: stuff is flying around the screen all over the place, and you slip into this waltz-like state where you're doing stuff but not really thinking about it: just experiencing. Of course in this case you're not experiencing a dance, just the visceral thrill of watching cool stuff happen on screen - and maybe (if you're like me) screaming taunts at your exoskeletal foes without really consciously formulating the words.

AvP is an icon in my memory of all-too-brief, all-too-expensive moments in arcades (this was before arcades ceased to carry anything other than 3D polygonal fighting games, racing games, and DDR: The Really Final Mix, We Mean It This Time), when playing a video game was an emotional thrill ride. And now I own it for my very own, and have at last begun unlocking its mysteries in moments snatched from my work. I have mostly completed my analysis of three of the four characters:

Linn Kurosawa
Linn is your stereotypical cybernetic Asian gravity-defying female martial artist who totes a pistol and a katana and sports a combination of orange tiger striped pants and steel armor. For all that, she's incredibly cool. The way to play Linn is to never stick in one place. If you can get in among a bunch of aliens (placement is one of the things you learn in games like this; by "among" I actually mean on the edge of) you can whoop up pretty well, but what you really want to do is go bounding around the room kicking aliens in the face and jumping off of them to kick other aliens in the face, ad nauseum; and bound around the room stabbing aliens in the head with your katana. The martial arts skillz are really only there for when circumstances are such that you can't jump on people - or when you get behind them. Linn also has the advantage of being the only character capable of laying down sustained fire, since her pistol doesn't overheat but runs out of ammo (of which it has a lot). The downsides to Lt. Kurosawa are that her gravity-defying ways actually make it difficult to hit people sometimes (for this reason, the bigger they are, the more Linn has her way with them) - and she just has no reach whatsoever. Which is why man invented (so to speak)

The Predator Warrior
This predator (who is my favorite predator, on the basis of sheer cool good looks) totes a spear in addition to his cream-colored predator getup. It took me a long time to figure out the difference between the game's two predators, but I finally have it. The warrior is good for getting in amongst (and it really can be amongst, with him) a bunch of aliens and laying about until their acid-spouting bodies are all twitching, headless, on the floor. His melee attacks have both range, power, and speed - and he can lay about him in all directions, which is cool. The trick is that you have to know when to call the alien-bashing quits and bug out (pun intended). His aerial moves really only exist for the purpose of getting him in close with the exoskeletal baddies. This is in contrast to

The Predator Hunter
who is, as his name implies, best in a one-on-one context. The hunter is really a lot like a cross between Linn and the warrior, as evidenced by the fact that he wears orange but is, you know, a predator. He carries a double-ended glaive (except we have a katana and an Asian female in this game, so it's called a naginata) and while he can beat on aliens fairly well, he's really another bouncy character. This is because he has the capability of bowling over immense number of aliens while falling from the sky. Once they've all been properly knocked over of course you can lay into them with your naginata, but that's dangerous because he lacks the ability to cover himself from both sides in a melee as well as his warrior cousin. The hunter, I've found, is much easier to use than Linn while retaining a lot of her aerial nature - and of course he has that cool predator shoulder gun.

I still haven't figured out the fourth character, Dutch Schaefer, who's a big hulking American cyborg with a smart gun for an arm. It may be that I already know all there is to know: being a white man, he can't jump; but having a gun for an arm, he sure can beat on people. Which is all there really is to it: walk up to them and beat on them. He actually does have the most powerful gun in the game, I've noticed, and he has this dragon punch move that lets him shoot while falling in slow motion (Linn and the hunter have the same move, but without the slow-mo part). I think that mastering that move will prove to be a critical part of playing Dutch, since it would let you beat on aliens until you're surrounded, then leap out of the fray and pepper them with gunfire. But let's be honest, he's neither female nor non-human - so how cool can he be in the end?

Sometimes I wish that Blogger had a "current music" thing like Livejournal does. It seems like a lot of blog posts get inspired my music - or anyway a lot of mine. Right now for instance I should be revising a story for my fiction class, but instead I'm blogging because I'm listening to Shania Twain's Up! (specifically "Forever and For Always" and "It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing") and I feel like blogging. If someone ever writes a book about my life, I hope they take the time to seek out the girls in it. The fictional ones, of course, like Alanna and Honor and Cimorene and the Babysitters' Club that have shaped my idea of what it means to be a romantic and a man whose word is worth something. And also the real ones, like Rainbow and Princess and Thea and Shanah and Chariessa and Blue Rose and of course Maelana and Mother, and maybe the Ailouriskai and all the rest who are too many to remember. Of course there are other ways of getting at my life, but I feel like there's something special about the girls: not just that there are daughters of Eve for whom I have conceived what I hope will be a permanent affection, but that I believe God has laid out the plan of my life such that the girls are, more often than not, agents of His plan (you can tell I'm feeling profound because I bothered to capitalize the divine pronoun). How can I forget watching Star Wars I with Thea at Universal Citywalk, passing underneath that arch that proclaims that the most beautiful girls in the world pass beneath it and thinking how true it is? Will I ever visit the Commons without remembering waiting for Princess because she was late, not that it mattered once she was there? And I could say similar things about Stanford girls, but for modesty's sake I will refrain.

This is a change of topic, but I've been meaning to blog about Iraq for some time now and this is as good as time as any because Up! has switched tracks to "In My Car (I'll Be the Driver)," and while this reminds me of Thea's Explorer and driving down Valley Circle with Rose and riding in Shanah's Ginger and all sorts of other girl-related topics, it kind of breaks the wistful mood anyway. So Iraq.

I don't really have an opinion on Iraq, and I admit to some confusion as to people who do (because I don't really, deep down inside, believe that I'm a 1/300 millionth part ruler of the United States). Do I think we're going? Yes, absolutely. Do you know anybody who doesn't think we're going? Do I wish that we weren't going? Well of course I do - the thought of war with Iraq makes me sick to my stomach and makes me want to cry, actually, as I imagine it does for a great many of the fighting men and women on both sides of the Iraqi border. I understand better than most of my peers, I think, just what kind of human suffering armed combat in the modern era entails - and I'm sure I understand it infintely worse than a great many uniformed citizens who are preparing to thrust themselves and their subordinates into the teeth of what Dionysus yesterday called "the deadly lead."

Yet forward they shall go all the same when legitimate authority orders them to do so, and I think they will be right to do it. I wish, with Frodo, that none of this had ever happened - but it has happened, and the question now is what to do about it. We can sit back and hope that good comes out of Iraq, we can sit back and hope that Saddam comes out of Iraq, or we can go in and take him out. And when we do, as it looks like we shall before the next Orientation Show, I will pray that our boys be granted good targets, that they go into combat with stout hearts and no fear of death but that which is common to man (Americans home in body bags? Of course they'll come home in body bags! Are we so far degenerated that we now fear death with the rational mind?), and that those who must die die quickly. If once war is begun, in my estimation, let it be prosecuted not with the dentist's pick but the hammer. Else the valor and victory, the sacrifice, the courage of fighting men in the face of unimaginable terror means nothing. And it ought to.

All of this, you will see, ignores the propriety of toppling Saddam in the first place. As I said, I don't have an informed opinion about that. I think that Saddam's regime has twisted priorities and that the people of Iraq will be better off without him, but I have not bothered to do the research to back that opinion up. I don't see that it particularly matters, because so far as I can tell we're going in one way or another, barring act of God.

Then again, God would be no god worth my fealty if he weren't capable of averting a mere political inevitability. And if you don't think that he's capable of averting the inevitable, then I submit that you don't understand the fundamental reason why the Old Testament is included in the Christian Bible. So until we do go in, I will pray that the Lord make the fighting unnecessary - not because I believe that death is an evil that ought to be avoided (what then? Does the man who wears the helm of salvation fear to be dead? And if a man does not wear that helm, or if he refuses it, whose fault is that?), nor because I believe that the suffering of a family deprived of father or brother or son is an evil that ought to be avoided (what then, do we now declare the pain of the heart to be evil?), nor because I believe that either side's soldiers fight for an unjust cause (will they fight for politics, or for their buddies? And who will say that a man should not lay down his life for his friend?) - but I will pray that the aims of God be accomplished without war because I do believe that God is grieved by the sorrow of those who cry out to him in their affliction, and because I do know that he is a great deliverer.