How Do You Operate At Work?

I see three different ways we relate to our co-workers in the workplace.  The first two are opposite sides of a continuum and both tend toward distrust and abuse.  The last one is not only a balance between the two but looks to 1 Corinthians 12:12-26 to find a Christ-like model.

Victim (adversarial)
Constantly playing the blame game. Distrust at every corner. "No" is the default mode.

Advocate (vendor relations)
The customer is king and they are my customer.  If the customer wants it, it must be right.

Partnership (the body of Christ advancing)
They are my partner in Christ and I’m here to serve them and other members of the body in service to Christ.  While my upline peers' desires drive me, my primary motivation is for the entire body to make much of Christ.  In this kind of relationship I will provide feedback, exude a can-do attitude, be transparent, have similar motivations to those I'm serving, require humility, and have mature people skills (patience, empathy, kindness, respect, etc).

Also, in a body-of-Christ partnership there are no “blame games”.  All blame is placed on conditions and processes (things we can correct so failures don’t recur no matter who’s in what role).  We fix those conditions and processes so people can operate better.  Blame isn’t ever placed on people.  If we cut off every part of our body that ever had a problem we wouldn't make it.  When we fix the cause of the problem, the problematic body part functions fine again.

Call for Unity

We are One in The Spirit, We are One in The Lord.

And we pray that all unity may one day be restored.

We will work with each other, We will work side by side.

We will guard each man's dignity and save each man's pride.

We will walk with each other, We will walk hand in hand.

Together we'll spread the News that God is in our land.

And they'll know we are Christians by our love.

-Peter Scholte, 1966

Things to do in Nashville when you get tired of going to the movies

Cultural institutions in the Nashville area:

The Frist Center

Adventure Science Center

Belle Meade Plantation

Belmont Mansion

Belmont University Leu Art Gallery

Belmont University School of Music (Events)

Blair School of Music Concert Series

Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art

Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

David Lipscomb University Galleries

Fisk University

The Hermitage

Nashville Public Library

Parthenon

Tennessee State Museum

Tennessee State University Galleries

Vanderbilt University

(I admit, The Frist Center's web site has a list of a lot of these then I added a few of my own)

My polemic: God is not the author of evil despite verses like 1 Sam 16:14

My response to this post: http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/12/where-do-evil-spirits-come-from.html

"Now the Spirit of the Lord had left Saul, and an evil spirit sent from the Lord began to torment him" -1 Samuel 16:14

God sent an evil spirit in the same sense that He sent evil armies to capture His chosen people (Israelites) on occasion. He occasionally uses evil to punish evil. He is, however, not the author of evil (Genesis 1:31, John 1:13, 1 John 1:5, 1 Corinthians 14:33). 

As far as God being benevolent, that sounds like a strawman argument. Believers should never claim the universality of God's "benevolence" (aka, being kindly or charitable) because that's indeed not biblically accurate anyway. God is, however, universally "good". In that I mean he is always either just (in the final analysis people receive what they deserve) or gracious (people are shown favor they don't deserve). However God is never unjust. If someone sees God as not benevolent then the "fault" as it were lies with the person, not with God. God may be acting toward many different ends (refining the person through fire and punishing or judging the person's evil deeds or thoughts, are just two such examples). 

Whether you believe you or people in general are good and God if exists is evil or whether you think it is mankind who chooses evil and God who's inherently good is a if not the fundamental question at the heart of whether you are a believer or not. Your posture to that question determines your trust in God (your faith) and not the other way around.

I'll just add one other thought: the fact that we can be agents of evil doesn't make God (who created us capable of being agents of evil) held morally responsible for our evil any more than it implies we were created "flawed". Our ability to chose to rebel against God, displeasing Him at every corner, doesn't mean we're inherently created flawed rather it merely gives evidence to the fact that we were created with the ability to love. Robots don't love because they simply do the only thing they are capable of (namely to obey their creator; their programming). The fact that we can disobey and create evil is only evidence that God desired to create us with the ability to love Him. Love that is forced or coerced simply isn't love. To love means to have the ability to not love. To always have a perfect world means no one has the ability to choose evil. I think there will be a perfect world one day and all wrongs will be made right but we're not there yet. The decision is ours to choose. Not whether to be good or to be bad but merely whether to have faith that God is good or to not have that faith. As for evidence of His goodness, well that's where we find the object of that faith: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (or as we Christians refer to him: Emmanuel: God with us). Properly understood, He is all the evidence we need. He's the smoking gun that points to the goodness of God.

Two different filmmakers, two different films

I was curious how Gary Ross, director of The Hunger Games, was going to handle such a violent, disturbing book. A book which described, among many other things, a child beating another one to death with a rock, another being tortured by wild animals before mercifully being killed by the protagonist. The director handled the violence inherent to the story in a toned-downed, off-screen way, and removed a lot of the most heartless violence. He actually managed a PG-13 rating. In my view this was the lowest possible rating for any movie in which the theme is children killing children for sport. In short: the director did great, given the violent material he had to work with.

Peter Jackson's handling of The Hobbit, however, was a totally different story. Jackson not only added battles not in the original story, he added especially graphic and disturbing images of violence in those moments, and others, that were completely unnecessary, even to Jackson's remade version. Violent, realistic images in The Hobbit includes: multiple decapitations, chopping off of limbs, multiple mutilations by the sword, a stomach sliced open, someone's brain being repeatedly bashed in until he dies (the victim fights back at first then slowly and very clearly dies).

Gary Ross definitely didn't turn Hunger Games into Pollyanna but he lessened the violence. Peter Jackson definitely stepped it up a notch. The result is that Jackson made a film too slow for many adults new to the story and too violent for most children. The fact that this movie doesn't have an R rating is curious to me. The only excuse I can think of is that every gruesome victim is a computer-generating character, not a human. The "evil" creatures are portrayed as ugly, less-than human, hardly worth caring about as they are being mutilated on-screen. Still, in such a realistic portrayal I don't see that as much of an excuse.

Take my advice: Read The Hobbit to your kids, hold off on letting them see the film, and hope Jackson chills the extreme violent images in his next film so you can take them to see it.

A New Fundamentalism

This is a polemic to reactions like these regarding Tennessee's new legislation protecting teachers who allow discussions about the merits for and against evolution.

As one secularist defined "science" in a post today:

The systematic study of the nature and behavior of the material and physical universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe these facts in general terms.

This definition brought up a good point. It's a decent understanding of what science is but since science itself is just a particular philosophy for describing the world, shouldn't the philosophy of science be up for an intelligent, philosophical debate? And if ever there should be a safe place for those starting out down the wonderful road of science to discuss just what science is in the first place, shouldn't it be in the classroom?

If there is a super-natural that affects the natural, then wouldn't it stand to reason that we could observe the natural being affected?  Nothing in the secularist's definition above precludes us from observing, experimenting, and measuring natural phenomena and formulating hypothesis that involves a super-natural cause. Only secular dogma would prohibit super-natural hypotheses being used to explain natural phenomena. The secular assertion in itself is not a problem.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion as to the possibility of the existence of the supernatural.

The problem for me starts when they then flatly assert that everyone else, to be taken serious, must hold to the same secular opinion that the super-natural couldn't possibly affect the natural and therefore it's outside the realm of science. Now that's just fundamentalism of another kind I suppose.  It's simply one's personal philosophy that determines whether they believe natural phenomena can potentially have super-natural causes. And if that's the case I think super-natural causes are something worth discussing in a science classroom without getting slammed, legally, for it.  Let the discussion about the philosophy of science take place in a safe science classroom environment without the teacher having to fear that she's establishing a religion and infringing upon someone's civil rights. After all, what is science for if not to challenge our preconceived notions.

Hugo: My favorite movie of 2011 and why

[Warning: if you consider it spoiling a movie to discover the underlying theme of the movie prior to watching it, don't read this post until you've seen Hugo.  The movie revealed its theme to me only in the last few minutes.  I really enjoy that revelatory experience and consider it essential for my movie-going enjoyment.  If you agree with me on that and haven't seen the movie yet, don't read on.  just trust me when I say you won't be disappointed by Hugo.]

"I'd imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn't be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason."

 An orphan, a has-been, and a cripple. Three broken people who, more than anything else in life, just want to work correctly.  These are the central characters of Hugo, an amazing movie about one's purpose in life and about finding that purpose in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely ways.  All other characters (and robots), regardless of their screen time, are present merely to bring these 3 central characters into the right place at the right time in order to reveal that through the midst of great human brokenness, everyone was created with a purpose.

Visually I loved the film.  It had a whimsical quality to it that made you understand, before ever experiencing them, that throughout the film you were going to be exposed to some fantastic, imaginative, unrealistic things.  This was not a study in realism and we have visual cues of that from the beginning.  So when fanciful things happen the audience isn't tempted to say, "that could never happen" but rather the fantastic events just naturally flow out of the visual style of the film.  It's all the beauty of Scorsese's Gangs of New York without all the bother of horror and violence you'd expect in a movie about a sociopath.  No sociopaths to be found here, just broken people glumly pursuing what they all believe is their lot in life, with no idea how much joy awaits them by the end of the film.

While the movie was great fun to watch, the more I recall the various themes in Hugo, the more enjoyment I continue to receive from the film after-the-fact. Hugo is a movie about a fixing things.  Things that are broken. The amazing realization we discover along with the whimsical protagonist, Hugo, is that the things that he needed to fix weren't clocks and they weren't even the amazing mechanical robot that was so precious to him. In fact at the end of the film the robot is as valuable as the scrap metal from which is was built.  It's merely an object whose purpose was to fix the lives of broken people.  Ironically Hugo, one of those broken people, thought his purpose was to fix the broken robot.

The things Hugo fixed were the people's lives who he came across. Just as he eventually fixes the station inspector's broken leg brace, he also manages to fix the inspector's broken life as well (or perhaps more appropriately, his broken heart).  Hugo also manages to fix the broken life of the once-was has-been Georges Melies.  Somehow the mysterious robot in an equally mysterious way brings Hugo into Melies' life in order to fix Melies life and in the process, Hugo's life as well.  So how did the robot seem to be in all the right places at the right times?  Serendipity? Contrived movie plot device? Fate?  Providence?  Coincidence?  If you asked Hugo he'd likely respond that the robot was just one part of a big machine that's as big as the entire earth.  And like all good machines ever created, it was just fulfilling the purpose for which it was built.  It created the most unlikely friendship (Hugo and Georges), fixing both of their lives in the process.

At an emotional climax at the end of the film Georges has to remind Hugo that the robot worked perfectly.  I feel the exact same way about the film itself.