Chili redux

 So I made chili again. I followed the same recipe as last time, except I did modify the salt. Instead of a full teaspoon, I went for 3/4 teaspoons. Also, the original recipe called for some filler, specifically masa harina, which seems to be pretty standard. However, my favorite canned chili, Wolf Brand chili, uses oatmeal as filler, so I decided to try that. I only put in two teaspoons, so it didn't have much of an impact. But really, neither did the masa harina when I tried it the first time. It certain didn't ruin the recipe. It turned out good.

God is not a being

 I went to Facebook today and saw a post by Pete Enns that kind of blew me away. The Facebook post was a link to his blog post, but some of the quotes and discussion on the Facebook post were just as thought provoking as the blog.

Pete Holmes and Stuff

 I was re-watching the YouTube clip of Pete Holmes and Whitney Cummings, and for some reason I decided to Google Pete Holmes himself. As usual, I gravitated towards his Wikipedia entry first, and was surprised to find we had a lot in common. And by a lot I mean that he started out as a Christian, but his Christianity 'devolved.' I'm reading a CNN article about him now.

The interviewer asked him if he felt like he had to defend the Bible before, and he said yes. He said because of that he had to turn a blind eye to other things. Like how Jesus said "the system is a lie." My first thought was that isn't exactly true. My second is that it's overstatement. I would say that Jesus believes in the system, much in the same way progressives do. The fact that he critiqued it didn't mean he didn't believe it. In fact, he critiqued it because he believed in it. He wanted it to be better.

Which brings me to the thought that made me want to blog in the first place. We are getting to the point where some of us are very tolerant of others faults. There are still areas that promote a zero-tolerance culture, but not everyone. But we tend to have higher standards when it comes to systems. Systems can fail the same way people do. In fact, the whole thing about failure is that successful people do it all the time. How many TED talks have I heard about that? That was the main takeaway I was supposed to get from West Point. I'm going to fail, so I need to learn how to handle it. But what about systems, that are composed of fallible human beings? They are going to fail too, so where do we draw the line? And there is a line. Too much failing means that the system is in fact a failure, but where do you draw the line?

...

Oh, and somewhere there was mention of Rob Bell. I think on Wikipedia. I need to watch that documentary.

Kant and the justification of believing in god

 So I'm writing a paper about hermeneutics, and Schleiermacher is becoming a big part of it. I'm trying to start the paper off, and I'd read something (I think) about how Kant changed the way people thought about the Bible as an unquestionable source of truth. Rather than try to find that source again, I started reading Kant's Wikipedia page. I found more than I bargained for.

Kant provided a justification for believing in God, even though his existence cannot be proven. He basically says if you can't prove or disprove a thing, the question becomes whether it's in your best interest to believe it. What caught my attention is that he says it's no longer a question of whether we are deceiving ourselves or not if we take the position. I'm not trying to understand it completely right now, but what I'm getting is that he saw morality as a system but not happiness. He saw happiness as dependent upon morality. And apparently he saw morality as being intertwined with the presupposition of God, the soul, and freedom. Since God can't be proven or disproven, he's not saying that these beliefs have to be exclusive. God to Europe was the Christian God, but there could be other concepts of God that would be acceptable under this criteria, though not all.

...

But that brings me back to the idea that believing in God doesn't necessarily equate to believing in the Christian God or the Bible. You can hold to a belief that the universe was created by a supernatural being and that there are higher moral laws without holding to the Apostles' Creed.