Posted on by Abe Austin

The Air is Getting Thinner

Just Letting Go)

Sometimes I’m actively, vibrantly living with purpose. I’m trying to identify what my calling is, what God put me here for, what sort of person He wants me to be, and I’m trying to fill that measure day-by-day.

And then at other times, in many times, I just kind of give up on trying and coast. I fill my spare time with mindless media, ignore my personal health, let the house get messy, and don’t really contribute anything to the world.

I feel very disturbed by how low I can go when I just stop trying. I would have hoped that when I tried to coast I would still have a basically meaningful life, but I really don’t feel that way at all. When I stop striving I feel like I drop into a godless world, something vain and artificial and inconsequential. The only options seem to be constant striving or descending into absolute nihilism.

Worldly Decline)

And as I look around at the world, I don’t think I’m the only one this happens to. I think we are experiencing this sharp dichotomy as an entire society. Our world has become more godless and quality everywhere is in decline. Our stories are less creative, our vocabulary is diminishing, our aspirations are waning. We live for Netflix and food delivery and the latest iPhone, leaving behind community, achievement, and virtue.

I believe that we were once a more Godly, more purposeful sort of people. Even if someone tried to let go of God they would still find themselves living a relatively meaningful life because they lived in a cultural atmosphere that was richer and deeper, where the base expectations were higher. Now, though, there is so little standard left to hold you up once you let yourself go. In other words, the air is getting thinner, so you have got to have your own oxygen mask, you can’t rely on breathing what you get from the culture.

Perhaps Jesus saw this when he gave the parable of the 10 wise virgins. In the darkest part of the night we’re just not going to get by with coasting. We have to be intentional about living in connection to God and with purpose, or we will die.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Variable Offense

I have an inconsistent level of frustration in response to the annoying behaviors of other people. Sometimes I will be very gracious and dismissive, reassuring the other person that I know it was just an honest mistake. Other times I can be deeply irritated and indignant, reproving them for a grave moral sin. In fact, I might start graciously, but when I feel the effects of the inconvenience over a prolonged period, I might change to the fire-and-damnation attitude.

Which reveals to me how fickle and self-serving my judgment of others can be. If my condemnation of another person changes according to my personal situation, then that condemnation is not based upon any principle, only upon my feelings in the moment. My indictment of that person is therefore unjustified, and as the Lord has said, “there remaineth in me the greater sin,” (Doctrine and Covenants 64:9).

If someone has done something against me that is truly, genuinely offensive, then it will be offensive no matter how large or small the negative effects on my personal life. It will be offensive on its own merits, with no further consideration of my personal hardship necessary. And if it isn’t offensive in that way, then it isn’t really offensive at all.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Shame, the Unspeakable

If I were to give a personal definition of shame, it was all the things in my life that were unspeakable. Since about the age of 7 or 8 I started to collect certain things that I didn’t dare talk to anyone about, and it grew throughout the years. It was filled with deeply embarrassing things that I did, times that I hurt someone I loved for selfish reasons, and secret repulsive behaviors I engaged in.

All of these shameful things were real weights in my life, they were extremely present and significant in my mind, yet totally absent in my words and confessions. My reality was therefore twisted around things that were genuine, but treated as if they weren’t, and that twisting caused me all manner of anxiety and misery.

In the moment my conundrum seemed so incredibly complicated, yet the solution to it was ridiculously simple. If my crushing shame was all of the things that I couldn’t speak, then all I had to do was speak them aloud and they would cease to be shame, by definition. After twenty years I did eventually start divulging the things I had refused to talk about, and the relief and release that I experienced took me entirely by surprise. Only in hindsight has the logic of what transpired in those moments of confession revealed itself to me. I confessed not knowing the significance of what I was doing, but I received the full benefits of it regardless. I was speaking the unspeakable, so the shameful became unashamed.

If you have any things in your own life that are unspeakable, I urge you to look for the person and place where you can start to confess your guilt and shame. I wouldn’t say to divulge those things to just anyone, Jesus did teach us not to “cast our pearls before swine,” after all. But I would hope that you could find at least one trusted minister, or well-meaning friend, or recovery group of similarly-burdened individuals. Just find anyone who can receive that confession and offer you peace and wholeness in return. I can tell you that in my own life nothing else has given me as much healing and change of heart as this, and I pray it may be the same for you, too.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Rights and Materialism: Part Three

Thus Far)

Over the past two postsI have discussed God as a basis for our fundamental human rights, and also the natural biology of our species for a basis as well. I have explained that I believe in both foundations, but unlike a materialist/humanist, I am convinced that having the natural biology of our species as the only foundation for our rights is insufficient. In my last post I explained why, showing how from the materialist/humanist view, rights would only be an illusion invented by the species that benefits from them. We would say that humans should have a right to life, simply because if they don’t they would cease to exist, so murder is a self-destroying principle.

So long as our rights are tied only to the biology of our race, it is possible to create logical exceptions to them. I gave two examples:

  1. We could say that we are not the same race as other humans, and we only need to observe the rights of our own race, and not of others.
  2. We could say that even if the rights should be enforced by society at large, if we violate them and conceal it from society, there is no other authority that we must answer to.

Today we will consider how having our rights also based in God resolves these issues.

A New Equation)

In my previous post I gave an equation that showed the cyclical, self-contained logic of rights when based upon the natural biology of our species. I said that if we call humanity “X,” and the basic human rights “Y,” then we can say:

Y is essential for X
So X must secure Y

Now let us consider how that equation changes if we assume that God has given us our rights. We will represent God in our equation as “Z.”

Z states that Y is essential for X
So Z must secure Y for X

The rights (Y) are tethered to man (X) by God (Z). It may not seem like much of a difference, but this small alteration has massive ramifications. Introducing Z now makes X and Y reside in Z, not in each other. We no longer have a circular, isolated interdependency. The relationship between X and Y no longer collapses once we are outside of their context. Y is no longer a relative need of X, which nothing outside of X is obligated to fulfill.

Through this God-centric view, human rights are now just as universal and unchanging as mathematical truths. Just as how the Pythagorean Theorem will always be a true mathematical expression, the statement that “life and liberty are necessities for all people” will always be a true, moral principle. Even if there were no people around to observe it, the Pythagorean Theorem would still be a universal maxim between the sides of right-triangles, maintained in God, independent of man. In just the same way, even if humanity were to go extinct, it would still be a maxim in God that life and liberty are good for people and nothing would change that.

The Answer to the Problems)

Now, even if a group of people declared themselves to be a different race they would still have to answer to God if they violated the rights of other races. If individuals violated the rights of one another, and concealed it from the larger species, they would still have to answer to God. They would have to answer to God because it is He, not merely “other people,” who demand these rights for all. He demands them, and He enacts His will to see that they are secured.

And from the Christian perspective, that is exactly what has transpired throughout history. Yes, there have been long periods of various rights being violated by entire nations and individual souls, but over the years the idea of basic human rights has emerged, and in more developed countries has been applied to all, and of it has been done under the justification that “it is God’s will.”

Conclusion)

There is nothing wrong in observing the ways that our biological nature compels us to seek what is best for one another, to enshrine rules of conduct between all people, to sacrifice our own interests for the greater good. Recognizing these logical, natural realities can certainly be further evidence to help convince all people to live in moral, ethical ways.

The problem is when we try to weaponize the existence of this biological nature against the divine basis for our rights. There are those that use a new moral perspective to beat away at the very foundation that all our moral principles rest upon! How strange, when it was the perspective that God was the author of our morals that led us to implement the freedoms and rights that we have in the first place. Trying to remove that perspective is a regression, one likely to take us back to the darkest epochs humanity has ever seen, with the vast majority of the population living under all manner of oppression and suffering.

If we destroy the one, best moral grounding we have ever had, and give the next generations a flawed moral grounding instead, they will carry it to conclusions that we would never dare. And when they do, who will the sufferers take their appeal to then? The God that we abandoned?

Posted on by Abe Austin

Rights and Materialism: Part Two

In yesterday’s post we talked about God as a basis for our fundamental human rights, and also a more materialist/biological basis for them. I made the point that it is a false choice that we have to believe in only one basis or the other. We can conclude that our rights are made manifest both in the personhood of God and in the inherent nature of the human species.

I would go further, though, and say that not only can these rights be simultaneously rooted in both sources, but they need to be. The materialist/humanist may say that since the same rights can be found in our biological nature we don’t need God for our morals to exist, but that simply isn’t true. If our rights are secured in our biological nature exclusively, it is insufficient. Those rights would then be inherently weak and artificial. Today we will explore why.

Circular Dependency)

Let us quickly summarize how the materialist/humanist view might describe the origin of our rights. In essence, we are members of the human race, and the human race’s survival and flourishing depend on certain qualities for its members. For example, “life” is a quality that is essential to humanity’s survival, and “liberty” is a quality that is essential to humanity’s flourishing. Thus, “life” and “liberty” are basic human rights because they are necessary to the experience of being a human.

We can describe this as a simple equation. If we call humanity “X,” and the preservation of life “Y,” then we can say:

Y is essential for X
So X must secure Y
And if X didn’t have Y, then there would be no X to require Y
So X is also essential to Y

And perhaps the failing is starting to become evident. Y is a basic human right only because X requires it, and it also only exists as a concept because X does. The link between people and their rights is therefore circular, and rights only exist within the context of people themselves. Rights therefore have no recognition outside the orbit of people, they are not anchored in anything deeper than ourselves. If we say our rights come from some sort of “natural law,” it can only be natural within the scope of people, but no further. To the universe at large, there is no difference whether a rock is thrown into the sea, or a person. Nature doesn’t care whether these so-called rights of “life” or “liberty” are meted out to a species. The universe allows drones whose sole purpose is to serve the queen (no liberty), and it allows species to go extinct entirely (no life).

Now why is this a problem?

Removing Rights on a Large Scale)

The fact that the rights only exist within the context of humanity means that they are essentially made up, a mirage caused by the distortion of being a human. Yes, they might be important rights for people, but there is no deeper, more grounded basis for them. As such, it is easy to logically get around the authority of those rights.

Suppose that there was a subset of people that started to see themselves separate from the rest of all other people. In our above equation, they do not see themselves as “X,” they see themselves as “W.” W would then exist outside of the equation that X requires Y, and Y requires X. Therefore, it may be necessary for X to uphold Y, but there is no reason why W must uphold Y also.

And this is not just a theory. This exact behavior has happened a multitude of times throughout history. Perhaps most famously, it happened when Nazi Germany declared themselves an Aryan race, separate from the race of humanity, and therefore morally justified in torturing and killing other races as needed. And from the materialist/humanist view, this atrocity is entirely logical. Why would the Aryan have any more obligation to observe the rights of Jews, than the Jews would have any obligation to observe the rights of cattle?

And Nazi Germany was no exception. It has been the rule in all the world for thousands of years that one nation, upon defeating another, would enslave the defeated people, all because they were not part of the conquering identity. Humanity is constantly splintering itself into different collectives, viewing their group as more real, more elevated, more “human” than the others. Once you do that, then there is no reason not to enslave, or murder, or violate any rights of any outsider, because they are not the same humanity that you are, and their rights are local only to them, and your rights are local only to you.

Removing Rights on a Small Scale)

It doesn’t have to be so broad as an entire people seeing themselves as fundamentally distinct from another people, either. This separation of self from the species happens on a much more individual level.

Suppose I really do see myself as a member of the global humanity, and I really do believe that every other person and group of people also belongs to the global humanity, and I really do believe that we, as a collective, need to maintain certain rights for the betterment of us all. Could I not still carve out exceptions for myself, while still maintaining the rights for the broader humanity? I agree that X should not violate Y in general, but couldn’t I, a lower-case “x,” violate Y on a small scale? After all, poison is in opposition to the nature of a person’s life, and yet many will partake of alcohol, slightly poisoning themselves, and so long as that poison is kept beneath a certain threshold the person will still live. And in nature there are species where some of the adults will kill their own young, which is obviously in direct opposition to the continuance of that species, but if enough of the young do survive then the species can still go on.

So why can’t I permit myself to violate a human right on an individual level? Especially when it causes greater life and flourishing in me, personally? Maybe the victim of my theft will have a diminished quality of life, but mine will be increased, and so the population overall remains level. And if I kill my neighbor, what of it? So long as we don’t all kill our neighbors, the neighbor’s loss will have negligible effects on the whole.

I can even agree that society should prosecute and punish those that thwart its general human rights, that they are justified in condemning me if they catch me. But if they do not catch me, then there is no other authority that I have to answer to. Because, once again, I have violated a right that applies only to humanity, and if humanity cannot punish me for it, then there is no larger, universal law that I have to answer to.

This is why the materialist/humanist worldview by itself is insufficient. By its cyclical, self-contained nature it is easy to start making exceptions to it, creating entities that are outside of the humanity-rights circle. This view of people and their rights, taken to its logical conclusion, is nothing short of horror!

Tomorrow we will see why adding God as another basis for our rights answers all of these limitations, though, and how it does so in a way that cannot be broken.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Rights and Materialism: Part One

The Origin of Our Rights)

A society and a government often define morals based off of the “rights” of its citizens. If an action violates another person’s rights, then that action is considered immoral and faces legal or social repercussions. If something has no rights, then nothing that you inflict upon it can be immoral. Throwing a rock off a ship into the ocean is not immoral, because the rock had no rights, but throwing a person off the ship into the ocean is immoral, because the person has a right to life and bodily autonomy!

This, of course, raises the question of where do our rights come from, and how do we know what they are? In our western civilization, rights have traditionally been seen as endowed by our Creator. It was understood that God made man, and gave commandments that spelled out the rights that God gave to man. Man has a right to life, because God said “thou shalt not kill.” Man has a right to his property, because God said “thou shalt not steal.” And so on.

Alternative Basis for Rights)

Of course, not everyone believes in God, and not everyone agrees with the rights described in scripture. They therefore have the burden of providing another basis for our rights, and another method for knowing what those rights would be.

A person with a materialist, humanist worldview might argue that we do not need the dictates of God to identify basic human rights. They might observe that certain behaviors and states are necessary for the survival and flourishing of the species. Since we are members of this species, we should consider those behaviors and states to be natural rights, as to do otherwise would be paradoxical to our being.

And I would not disagree with such an observation. There are, indeed, certain biological realities that suggest the proper sort of behaviors between people. Members of the same species killing one another is obviously detrimental to the whole, so that leads us to the same “thou shalt not kill” that was also given on Mount Sinai. Furthermore, the historical record has shown that the greatest advancement and achievement of the human race has been motivated by people who had a claim to their own property and labor, and so we can again arrive at “thou shalt not steal.”

More Than One Basis)

But I, as a Christian, do not see this as an either/or situation. The fact that we can arrive at many of the same core human rights by biological examination and intelligent reasoning does not mean that God and His dictates do not also exist. Indeed, I see these as two parts of one testimony, supporting and reinforcing one another.

And, we do need both. The materialist-humanist may think that since we have the biological basis we do not need another basis in God, but this could not be further from the truth. I will explain why this is the case in tomorrow’s post.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Tended Towards Ruin

A Heavy Loss)

There was a project that I once loved very much. It was a program oriented towards connecting men with God, helping them to bring their hearts back into His light. It was small and local, humble and unpolished, but it did truly miraculous things in the lives of those who attended it. Lately, though, I’ve found myself struggling to recognize that same institution from what it has become today. At some point, after about ten years of operation, the institution became a for-profit organization, and changes started being made for the betterment of the bottom line, not for the betterment of the men it served. Several of the original founders quit, due to personal disagreement with this new direction.

This has been a heavy thing for me to come to grips with, but as I have reflected on it I’ve realized that it was always going to go something like this. The special spirit of the old program had to meet its end one way or another, because that’s just the nature of things.

Tale as Old as Time)

I am reminded of the story of the tower of Babel. In it, a nation of people decide to build a great tower, reaching all the way to heaven. Bold enough to make themselves gods, they toiled and labored on this great elevation of man until the whole thing toppled to the ground.

We do not know exactly how high they built their tower, only that it fell before they could achieve their aim. Their construction became destruction, their order became ruin, and the people were returned back to the level of the fallen earth.

This, of course, is a type for all manner of structures in the world today. And I don’t merely mean physical structures, either. Even more so it applies to structures of law, of government, of ideology, of any edifice constructed by the wisdom of man.

The Way of Things)

Every club, organization, corporation, and ideal is laid with ruin in its foundation. On the one hand, this might be because they are laid with carnal and earthly motivations, such as focus on profit or notoriety. Once making money is one of the organization’s pillars, then it is tied to the natural things of this earth, all of which decay, erode, and finally collapse. Through the years we have seen countless companies over-exploit their workers, consumers, and intellectual properties, killing the golden goose just to get a higher profit in the short term. We have seen countless governments siphon power and wealth to the highest class until they became too top-heavy and collapsed under their own weight. The compromises that were deemed necessary to make the enterprise possible eventually make its continued existence impossible.

But even without a foundation of earthly motivations, every structure of man is still doomed to fall due to our fundamentally flawed nature. Even our organizations that are built on ideal, and virtue, and purity of intention, gradually erode and eventually go wrong entirely. Even if a core principle is worthy, if it is taken slightly too far at the beginning, it will magnify and accelerate over time, eventually becoming a great evil. It is like stacking blocks to build a taller and taller tower, given enough time and distance every structure leans too far one way or the other. Given enough time and distance, every little flaw becomes a crushing error, and the whole thing will topple. So an organization founded with a focus on discipline will eventually become fascistic oppression, whereas a focus on liberty will eventually become gross hedonism. We sow the death even in the birth, it is simply our nature.

Even God’s church, once entrusted to earthly stewards, is tended toward ruin. The world was in a state of apostasy in the time of Noah, and in the time of Abraham, and in the time of Jesus. God has to refresh His word among His people repeatedly, not because His word has deteriorated, but because we people just keep losing our grasp of it. We know that even the believers today will once again be on the brink of ruin when God will have to refresh everything with the second coming.

What Lasts)

Ironically, what truly lasts is what seems most transient. Though man’s works are doomed to fail, along the way they house occasional sparks of something pure and genuine. There can be a nugget of God in the midst of all the stone. And though that nugget seems momentary and transient, it is only because we are perceiving it through a shifting lens. In actuality, each of those nuggets is anchored in something realer and truer than the structure it was found within.

There is an entity behind all those sparks, a constant certainty beneath every brief wonder. By fastening ourselves to these pearls, and following their threads to deeper things, we tie ourselves to the only thing that is actually eternal.

The man-made program I once loved may be gone, but the experiences I found within it have not. Those experiences introduced me to the One who hasn’t changed at all, and never will. In reality, I haven’t lost a thing.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Isaac and Rebekah: Soulmates

There is an interesting sentence in Genesis 26:8. This is how the verse appears in the translated English of the King James Bible:

And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw, and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.

During my regular study I observed that the word “sporting” was taken from the Greek צָחַק / tsachaq which means to laugh, to joke, to make sport. I found this interesting, because Isaac’s name (יִצְחָק / Yitschaq) also means “he laughs.” Thus, this sentence can be rendered as, “He-laughs, laughed with his wife, Rebekah.”

I found that wording, “he-laughs, laughed,” a bit amusing, but really didn’t think anything more of it at the time. I have given it some thought since, and I think it is actually a beautiful, poetic testament to the love that Isaac and Rebekah had for one another.

First, some context. Isaac and Rebekah’s union seems to have been a particularly charmed relationship. First, Abraham’s servant was led to her by a sign from God, showing that this was literally a match made in heaven. Then, for their first meeting, Rebekah was riding through the field where Isaac was meditating and we hear how they both raised their eyes, saw one another, and she hurried off her camel to go meet him. It is as close as the Bible gets to saying it was love at first sight! Then, when the two of them were married, we are simply told, “and she became his wife; and he loved her.” Unlike his father or his sons, we never hear of another wife for Isaac, Rebekah was his sole companion to the very end.

Now, let us go back to the phrase, “He-laughs, laughed with his wife, Rebekah.” Rebekah was literally fulfilling Isaac’s identity! He-laughs was laughing, and he was laughing with his wife. She was bringing out his true, authentic self, his core identity, and the fact that they were a perfect complement to one another was so obvious to the king of the Philistines, that when he saw them together in this manner he immediately intuited that they were husband and wife. The two were genuine soulmates.

The Bible has all manner of stories in its pages. Tales of tremendous sacrifice, of lives being transformed, of rousing battles, and of great teachings. Perhaps most sweetly, though, it also has stories of deep, fulfilling love, of two people perfectly complementing one another, of two becoming one.