Playing for Change

Some of you might of seen the video that Carl Olson posted "Stand By Me", which then distributed amongst my circles quicker than chlamydia at a drunken orgy.

It's a clip from a film, Playing for Change: Peace Through Music. Still trying to find out if it's been released and part of a cd/dvd package or is going to be. In fact, its wiki entry was deleted for this very reason.

Playing for Change seems to of started out with two guys traveling around the world recording primarily street artist with studio-quality equipment. They seem to have formed sponsored some charity performances with some of the musicians as well and have invested in helping communities with humanitarian projects.

As Mark Johnson explains in one video:

Playing for Change was born out of the idea that we have to inspire each other to come together as a human race and that music is the best way to do this...

the belief that we can do a lot more for this world if we work together, than we ever can apart.

The music is not going to bring about unification, or transcend our differences. I've seen and have participated in fetishizing music personally. Don't get me wrong, music is an important part of our human experience and is extremely powerful and transformative. The philosophy confuses though divisive surface issues for an underlying orientation to one another which is at stake.

We use anything and everything to pit ourselves against one another, including music. And sound-byte documentation of the potential and hope for music isn't a realistic response to this situation. This obviously doesn't mean we should mire ourselves in cynicism either, and that either/or seems to be what many people flip back-and-forth on. This project is doing amazing things, collaborating with organizations helping refugee relief to African arts development. Mark Johnson is producing and orchestrating something beautiful. And their project is a worthwhile project. Let's not get melodramatic though and attach a false sense of hope to it. Inspirational definitely, indeed music can allow us to see what it means to be more fully human and commit to that endeavor. That's doesn't then equate to world peace. I'm willing to bet humanity has probably been making music for longer than governments, the mentioned religious divisions, etc have existed. We need to look the underlying spirit of such sentiments and our problems, especially the nihilistic ones, in the face.

Thus far it seems they've posted 4 other similar music vids online.

• "War/No More Trouble"
  
  
• "One Love"
  
  
• "Don't Worry"
  
  
• "Chanda Mama" (Looks like they finished this one after I started the post. Thank you phone interruptions.)

They've also included a few live projects and a few missional ones. They're doing some kind of web episodes, but I've found they're easier to download on Vimeo or facebook than the main site.

The music is amazing, fusing different instrumentation and performative styles together. It's unique and highly eclectic. Despite distances around the world, the performers are having the opportunity to come together in the music, which will I'm guessing soon be more explicitly commented on in reference to the mission stance of the organization. The ones produced thus far have been uplifting and urge bonding together, lyrically and musically. As you notice musicians with headphones I believe they're hearing a base line and some other instrument (Roger Ridley?) with which they're rhythmically playing along with, hence the ability to play in unison though they're miles apart and have never met the other musicians or played with them. It started with Roger Ridley (here's him playing "Bring It On Home"), and asking if they could record his version of "Stand By Me".

Since then though, some of the musicians have been touring with each other as previously stated:


A Joni Mitchel cover by them.

PBS coverage

Not the Way It's Supposed To Be

Introduction

Précis

Plantinga began by illustrating the way annoyances, regrets, and miseries have impacted our lives, before he hit upon what he saw as the primary cause of suffering: sin. The author justified this insight with two reasons; the first reason was that sin corrupts the core of our being and character, and the second was that it underlined many of the other misseries, e.g. loneliness, restlessness, estrangement, shame and meaninglessness. Cornelius understood the relationship between sin and misery as one of give and take, or mutually affecting each other in a cyclical fashion. This was seen regardless of whether the sin was intentional or involuntarily. Even with metaphysical evils, while not morally evil, the actual event of suffering is also in part compounded by our past choices or responsive ones. Plantinga argues that the gospel narratives go to great lengths to explaining the efforts God took to defeat sin and addressing the urgency with which humanity too needs to address the issue. He explained that sin was structurally presented though the ideas of lawlessness or faithlessness and a plethora of metaphors. Before the author ended on a note about how the book could explore the issue, Cornelius stated that sin was a negative not positive force, and that it should be discussed against the backdrop of creation and redemption. The tone was more concrete than the preface, and the writing more heuristic.

Commentary

We're still in the intro, so there's obviously not that much to comment on. I do appreciate how he's going at lengths not to collapse some phenomenological distinctions, as well not oversimplify the issues that he's addressing. He's still introducing themes and concepts here that he's going to unpack later on in a multifaceted manner; however, he does state some noteworthy things which should cause us to pay attention and ruminate on rather than allow to slide by.

One was when he was addressing natural disasters, he made the statement, "Many accidents are, in retrospect, both accidental and predictable" (Plantinga 4). He then gives some examples, some of which I agree with and some I'm taking pause to ask if we agree? Yes, when climbing in nature, one should respect it and not party above the tree-line during the afternoon, and doing otherwise is not only at one's own risk, but is tantamount to stupidity. So he's implicitly laying out a relationship to the natural order that includes moral virtues like respect. He mentions shortcuts that constructors and inspectors take in the functioning of their jobs which can afterwards have "unexpected" repercussions during natural events. He also mentions though "greedy condominium development in known hurricane alleys or flood plains" (Plantinga 4). Are they merely thoughtlessly endangering humans in order to quickly turn a profit? I'm sure Plantinga would agree, but what of the complicit consumers driving the demand? Are they actually driving the demand with advertisements and brochures proliferating like bunnies, or are the developers also manipulating our desires? What struck me as odd though is not these questions, but the disregard for questions pertaining to nature attributed to the developers (which was obviously a caricature), without really questioning the assumption of whether these questions were legit. In other words, how much should our consideration for possible natural events prudently factor in, and do they deserve the characterization of sinful? Yes, he's right here that human control does factor in, but might not attributing it to human evil be a categorical mistake?

He made the comment briefly that "the main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that sin is the longest-running of human emergences" (Plantinga 5). This also caught my attention, sin is hard to remedy "even for God." I'm not sure how well that gels with my conceptions of Him, so it challenges me to rethink both the severity of sin and ask if my conceptions in this regard of God might not be trite?

One quote though I loved was that "People also suffer boredom, what Walker Percy called 'the self being stuffed with itself.'" (Plantinga 2). I see it all around me, and is a common plight with those whom I love. I wanna share two of my favorite paragraphs of all time from the intro to Theology of Hope:

Thus despair, too, presupposes hope. 'What we do not long for, can be the object neither of our hope nor of our despair' (Augustine). The pain of despair surely lies in the fact that a hope is there, but no way opens up towards its fulfillment. Thus the kindled hope turns against the one who hopes and consumes him. 'Living means burying hopes', says Fontane in one of his novels, and it is these 'dead hopes' that he portrays in it. Our hopes are bereft of faith and confidence. Hence despair would seek to preserve the soul from disappointments. 'Hope as a rule makes many a fool.' Hence we try to remain on the solid ground of reality, 'to think clearly and not hope any more' (Camus), and yet in adopting this so-called realism dictated by the facts we fall victim to the worst of all utopias - the utopia of the status quo, as R. Musil has called this kind of realism.

The despairing surrender of hope does not even need to have a desperate appearance. it can also be the mere tacit absence of meaning, prospects, future and purpose. It can wear the face of smiling resignation: bonjour tristesse!All that remains is a certain smile on the part of those who have tried out the full range of their possibilities and found nothing in them that could give cause for hope. All that remains is a taedium vitae a life that has little further interest in itself. Of all the attitudes produced by the decay of a non-eschatological, bourgeois Christianity, and then consequently found in a no longer Christian world, there is hardly any which is so general as acedia, tristesse, the cultivation and dandling manipulation of faded hopes. But where hope does not find its way to the source of new, unknown possibilities, there the trifling, ironical play with the existing possibilities ends in boredom, or in outbreaks of absurdity. (Moltmann 1993, 23-24)

Obviously, this is a place where someone like Plantinga and Wright can be brought into conversation with one another. Although Plantinga is not here treating boredom as sin, it's directly related to the notion of hope and seems to spawn on a lot of Christian's obsessive behavior with insignificant time-occupying activities due to their impoverished understanding and self-absorption. Like sin, despair is a leaching drive. The tie to being self-absorbed though, beyond the outward difficulties of boredom, is a negligence on the part of contemporaries to be sincerely committed to and interested in the other, whether God, people, or the created order. It's counter-intuitive, especially to a society that has reached a degree of decadence which is unnatural historically, and to explain that we would need to look at the modern social development since the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It gets back to some of the comments pertaining to modernity noted in the earlier post.

Beyond the boredom hinting to the possibility that we weren't created in such a way, it raises questions as to why we aren't more vulnerable to others. One such reason is pain and fear of others; another is a rejection of meaningful givens which either aren't recognized by autonomously free individuals or are only very partially grasped. This includes a concept of sin. It also God's redemptive work in the world and the role God's people play. The focus in Christian circles can often instead by on either what God has done for them personally, and vain attempts to convince themselves and others of this idolatrous focus and false reality either through legalism and a concentration on doing or not doing certain things or through attempting to grapple with the hollowness and emptiness that they experience and to which the American church answers sound meaningless. It can also result in other Christian circles in abandoning even hope of resolution and a coming to terms with just "living life" no matter what it "throws their way".

Although my treatment of the text is a little pretentious, in that what interests me is of both a personal and intellectual flavor, I relate predominately publicly via the scholastic. And the text does lend itself easily to other perspectives, but not to the degree I'm portraying it. Let me allow the author to use his own words to describe what he's trying to do:

My project in this book is to show these things, to discuss them, to look at them from several angles, and to sharpen the profile of sin by comparing it with a couple of its conceptual neighbors. In short the project is to present the nature and dynamics of sin...

The plan may look pretty academic, but the treatment will be only partly so. Or let me put it a little differently: this study has a traditional theological table setting, but the food comes not only from the Bible and St. Augustine but also from books on crime and addictions, from books by Garry Wills and William Manchester and Daniel Akst, from Newsweek, the movies, and NBC's Today show. The book is about sin, but a lot of the paragraphs are about sins. (Plantinga 5,6)

On this note, Plantinga does a brilliant job in my opinion.

Anti-Evangelical clichés

Count how many you use:

1. "Shove the gospel down one's throat." (Feel free to substitute one for people.).
   
   
2. "I think the only agenda should be to love one another." (Basically while this one has many forms, the usage of only/just and "love one another".).
   
   
3. Describing the church as "not a social club" and existing for the exclusive benefit of "non-members" or the "world".
   
   
4. "Who would Jesus kill?" ("Hate/bomb" works as well.)
   
   
5. "All the money they spend on gaudy million-dollar building projects, new sound systems, and projectors could be going to feed the poor."
   
   
6. "They go to church on Sunday, get forgiven, and the rest of the week they're like everybody else." The "Sunday morning bench warmers," who come "so they can sleep better at night," but really "Christianity isn't about looking or acting a certain way!"
   
   
7. "fundies", "the Rapture Ready", or those "holy rollers". "fun-daMENTALists".
   
   
8. "All that matters is that one's heart is right with God", "I'm not a part of an 'organized religion'", or "I'm spiritual, not religious."
   
   
9. "Christianity promotes hate, bigotry, sexism, and homophobia." Or a more academically conscious one..."American Christianity is consumeristic, materialistic, and individualistic."
   
   
10. "The god I worship wouldn't send someone to hell just for not accepting Christ."
    
    
11. "Don't have the right to tell anyone else what to believe(/think)."
    
    
12. "Nuke gay whales for Jesus!"
    
    
13. "Christians are judgmental(/intolerant)."
    
    
14. "3 chords, 7 words, repeated 11 times" or "7/11".
    
    
15. They "want to impose their own particular version of Christianity on everyone else."
    
    
16. "Christians ain't nothin' but a bunch of fuckin' hypocrites!" (Despite its place on the list, this was actually the second one I came up with.).
    
    
17. "Bash someone over the head with a Bible." Or you've described another Christian as a "Bible-thumper" or an activity as "Bible-thumping". Or you've made a comment about someone carrying a "Big, Black Book."
    
    
18. Christians are "nothing more than tools of the Republican Party."
    
    
19. "Last time I walked into a Christian bookstore, it looked like the self-help section of Barnes & Noble."
    
    
20. "I'm so sick of hearing cheap Christian clichés!" ().

So how did you fare?

0-4: You might be an Evangelical. L'Abri counseling advised.

5-9 : You might need to critically evaluate if others are making a valid critique on your religious practice and whether it lines up with the Scriptures. Unless of course, you are not a Christian or are a seeker and it contains little relevance to your life, hence the sparsity of relevant clichés.

10 - 14: You might be healthily holding in tension keeping one distinct from the religious status quo while not sliding into having created a reactionary identity. While far from complacent, you understand the need for encouragingly helping an important section of God's church to submit themselves to God's redeeming grace.

15 - 19: You might need to critically evaluate, assuming you consider yourself a Christian, if you are truly loving the Church as Jesus calls us to. May I recommend some of Derek Webb's music if you haven't tried any out thus far?

20 : Like me, you might have serious problems with the American church which might be indicative of more than merely their issues. Counseling advisable.

I could do a pithy little commentary on the call for solidarity and the divisiveness evident today. Might even follow it up with questioning the sincerity of anti-Evangelicals' so called love, as reflected in attitudes, depictions, and the demonstrable consequences of their basic orientation to not only another human being, but their Christian brethren to whom all are to be known by their "love one for another." But finishing off with a discussion about working towards healing and speculating on the issues of pain which still need to be addressed might be over the top. Words matter, and the tongue is an dangerous member of our body if left unchecked.

Trapeze Swinger

A quick post to add some regularity.

Mal sent me this via pm on facebook:



It is definitely worth listening all the way through, and possibly even reading the lyrics. They're not super-deep, and if the song ever became popular, the catchy of the words and melody are vulnerable enough to easily be parodied for purposes of mocking its fans. Still, it's a beautiful song on many fronts. Curtis while listening to it, started looking at covers and different versions, and stumbled upon this:



We didn't get through it. We stopped when he substituted the word "forget" for "fuck". Curtis' response was emphatic, with comments like "Dick," and "He get's the lamo card," and a slew of others insults.

A basic piece of advice, if you won't say the word fuck, then don't cover a song which does. Especially when the word is being used to make a point. It's not substitutable. The cover musician didn't merely change a song taking artistic, creative license, he bastardized it. "Fuck the man" is the slogan, or "stick it" to them. It was making a point in the song, and the texture of the phrase was intentionally supposed to be contrasted with "eloquent graffiti". Altering it by "Evangelicalizing" it transformed the part into an Evangelical wussified expression which the original phrasing was supposed to be speaking to at one level.

I'm not a fan of copying a song by replicating it both musically and lyrically. That's lazy in my opinion, and if a song is worth covering, it deserves creative contributions which should in some way allow the song to reinvent itself and grow. This isn't relative though, and anything does not simply go. There was a lack of faithfulness to this song, which is characteristic of many Christians' "contributions" to our culture. It reflects poorly not only on what they set their hand to, but also upon themselves. If one can't do something right (not perfect mind you), don't try to do it at all.

P.S. Curtis just said, "I'm just not a fan of substituting lyrics for an euphamisim that isn't more clever or wittier than the original." He says he ripped that off of me, but I don't remember saying anything of the sorts, but it captured what is trying to be said.

Love song to Islamic Fundamentalists (from a jew)

This song just gives me warm tingles all over.

Open Creationist

So Curtis and I are officially Open Creationist now. I'm enthusiastically one more so than him, but who's not up for a little irony?

So what's an Open Creationist? As TolkienFan has explained:

It's a rather simple position. Originally founded as Apathetic Creationism, the idea behind the position is that those who hold the view don't really concern themselves much with protology. The Open Creationist holds that it was indeed God who created all things, but they express openness (or in my case, apathy) towards exactly how long it took or how it was done. The OC holds to the idea that Christian Soteriology (an issue such as those at AiG connect with protology) can be properly maintained regardless of protological view. Hence, they don't really concern themselves much with the debate and remain open (or in my case, apathetic). As you can see, it's a very simple position with very few tenets.(Source)

Research lead me to conclude that the movement found at least initial public exposure on this thread, including acquiring its current name.

Now, obviously this belief is compatible with a number of other doctrines, including: Theistic Evolution, Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, and Intelligent Design. It seems incompatible though with a wide variety of viewpoints which would be agnostic or deny the notion of a Creator.

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you really care?

If not, sign up!

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

Preface

Précis

Plantinga explicitly pointed out in the first sentence that his project was an attempt to recreate a consciousness of an age old theme: that of sin. He began by sketching out the flippancy with which we address the issue, in contrast to the seriousness in which it was once dealt with, not without fault in its inappropriate tone or hypocritical self-righteous air, yet taken seriously nonetheless. The author wrote that people possessed both an understanding and shared communal outlook in regards to it. Plantinga noted its contemporary loss of poignancy, to which he raised the question of the purpose of a more serious treatment. He outlined two major themes of informing and reminding people as its very nature he saw requiring continual diligence. The author then notes the difficulties of such an endeavor (informing), laying it in part on the shift in our cultural backdrop. Despite this, Cornelius explained its cultural relevancy, that being the hope offered through a diagnosis of sin in the ails which engrossing us. He explained though the need for our rearticulation of this traditional theme to be responsive to contemporary problems unique to our situation. He wrote that moreover, this rearticulating was not merely for Christian audiences, but rather for society as a whole, who would then share in the value of a common understanding and awareness of a Christian outlook, even while rejecting particular features. After Plantinga mapped out a gap in our treatment, due to the inaccessibility of some tomes, fragmentary and specialized coverage, and the increasing infrequency of exposure in church institutions, he reasserted his purpose of providing an avenue of revitalizing this doctrine so that it would once again be capable of profound personal confrontation/engagement. Written slightly melodramatically and with an air of nostalgia, the preface was regardless rhetorically well-written, introducing some thematic elements of the book.

Commentary

We are in really fucked up times. Seriously. This post is coming this late cause a friend called me up, drunk, wanting to know if I would come out and talk. We talked for two hours until two at night. And what was the one word which never ushered out of either of our mouths? Sin. It wasn't from me being scared of what he might think if I brought it up or its inappropriateness to the conversation. We just had no common basis on this point for which to bring it up. This is despite amongst other things us talking a great length on the topic of sexual infatuation, a general loss of consideration for him by others, loneliness and anxiety about a lack of intimacy, and the stresses of life at age 21. Anger at religion and the bs he experienced growing up and how he had been brainwashed negatively was also a theme. I mainly listened and tried to be there for him (with frozen barefeet). Amongst other things, tried taking the time to explain to him, that when some women say they're raped, they aren't kidding. That what he's telling me is "women know what's going on and should expect", I had to gently explain leaves one of my friends crying hours everyday. We talked about a lot of things that I'm not going to share, but it left me filling empathetically frustrated. He would say things like, "I fully trust you man," to which I would respond, "No, you don't, and I don't full trust you. You trust me a lot, more than most, but at some level you're afraid I'm gonna reject you." He would agree. He would frequently say, "Freud is a genius!" to which I eventually suggested, "Freud is full of shit, but I once thought that too." Still, he knows the reality of disillusioned ideals and expectations of others and life. He knows it all too well and is heading for cynicism. He's drunk too often. People seem to oscillate between burying their heads in the sand of wishful thinking with false dogmatism and coping by conforming themselves with "straight-thinking", emulating debase practices, and accepting as the way-things-are this decadent social order we've constructed, this below-the-bar standard for what it means to be human. People should have certain expectations of others, and have not only a right but a duty to demand it of others.

What the hell? We know a lot of our ideas are bankrupt, reality shouts that at us! Our incredulity to the hope of promise is overwhelming.

Meanwhile I'm on another site, where an interlocutor is arguing against an "understand-first" culture, to which I agree is bs, but not the desire to listen and understand. I agree in other words that we suck at it. This concern with compromising "speaking the truth" to the point where we neglect a theology of suffering, and people are suffering even if it's partially self-inflicted, to which the truth can actually effectively break us out of, is a religious abuse of the gospel. The two are not necessarily opposed to one another. But how to wisely go about them being intertwined?

Ah, I'm ranting not commenting.

The book is full of examples that I'm glossing over but which really help in illustrating what he's talking about. My favorite though was:

[S]chool teachers no longer say anything as pointed as "Stop it, please! You're disturbing the class!" For these are judgmental words. Instead, to a strong-armed youth who is rattling classroom windows with his tennis ball, educationally correct teachers put a sequence of caring questions: "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How does this make you feel?"

Do we honestly believe people are going to take that crap seriously? Wake up to the real world! Making people feel immensely "cared for" in some segmented window of their existence doesn't seriously impact people's lives, it makes the "caring" people tools.

I heard a phrase in a lecture on relativism that is relevant, we've in our attempts to be loving "cut the vocal cords" of what a Biblical message has to say to ourselves and society. We forfeited our calling to be culturally subversive on both conservative and liberal fronts, participating in God's redemptive work of righting the wrongs of this world. We rather willingly participate in muddling things further, focusing on a shallow self-fulfilling of our mediocre lives. Through our bankrupt doctrines of sin, we've undercut our abilities to address social and individual injustices, settling for the pretense of concern or smugly complacent in self-absorption or both.

He's also in this part explaining the need for the books focus, commenting:

Books on sin today must meet concerns and untie knots that did not worry Augustine and Calvin. They were not worried about the flattening of human majesty in modern naturalism or of human corruption in Enlightenment humanism. They did not wonder at the Californian tendency to conflate salvation and self-esteem. Nor did they meet a widespread cultural assumption that the proper place to inquire about the root causes of human evil is a department of psychology or sociology....

Modernity has shaped the human, and even the Christian, understanding of sin in important ways, some of them welcome and some not, and any restatement of the Christian understanding of sin must pay attention to these shapings.

Modernity briefly generally refers to in most context (this included) the 19th and 20th centuries, with the advent of industrialization. There are also certain political allusions entailed, as well as a trust in science. The term though is frequently employed with a focus on huge totalizing narratives or ideologies with themes of human progress or emancipation. Modernity is typically viewed paradoxically as providing both benefits and losses, for instance technology, medicine, and human rights but a weakening of community, a loss of meaning and narcissism, and a preoccupation with instrumentality. I'll explain more later.

Again, the topic needs understanding, not just a check-list of things we know about. This understanding entails its application in reality, a reality that has shifted over time. This lack of understanding I would suggest is why impoverished Evangelicals who repeat well-rehearsed lines, seem out-of-touch with God's work.

What's devastating about [our loss of consciousness of sin and self-deception] is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performances of others. Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life. The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue. Moral beauty begins to bore us. The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.

So the broader goal of this study is to renew our memory of the integrity of creation and to sharpen our eye for the beauty of grace.

A great blog post, on this subject.

I for one look forward with anticipation to the predicted collapse of Evangelicalism, a post-God church bastardizing religious faithfulness.