Following is my response to my friend.

When Jeremy Rifkin mentioned “embodied experience” the first thing that popped into my mind was existentialism. But then, also, the ancient (Hebrew) conception of belief: that it must be lived. At least in modern times it is common to claim to believe something, but live in ways that contradict that — often, it seems with little self-awareness.

But this bit I would take issue with:

For the former, especially the Abrahamic faiths, the body is fallen and a source of evil.

I’ll agree that Augustinian Christians do see the body this way. Eastern Christianity (at least how I’ve experienced in, and in my reading of the Saints) sees the body as made “in the image of God”. The body is not the *source* of evil. In this way we echo the ancient Greeks who saw evil as the absence of good, rather than something of substance itself. The body isn’t evil, but when we fail to do good, we “do” evil.

So, I’d say much of this is an straw man argument, or, at least, an argument against a distortion of Christianity. If we don’t think the emotions and the body are not part of our baptism into Christ, then, sure, the argument makes some sense. But those of us who see the body and emotions as integral parts of the whole person would disagree. This may not be the common understanding of Christianity in much of the West, but it isn’t a new take on Christianity that only just appeared during the “Age of Empathy”.

Which makes this a non-question:

If empathic consciousness flows from embodied experience and is a celebration of life—our own and that of other beings—how do we square it with faith and reason, which are disembodied ways of looking at reality and steeped in the fear of death?

I think it is telling that the Enlightenment took place in Western Europe, but there wasn’t (at least as far as I know) a similar renaissance in the East. The Byzantine and then Russian Empires filled the power vacuum that the fall of the Roman Empire, along with its civilizing influence.

Which is not to say that the East is somehow purer, but that our understanding of history and philosophical development is very Euro-centric. The very notion of “Ages” seems, to me, to be part of our desire to compartmentalize. “That was then, this is now.” This is fed by our infatuation with ourselves: the idea that Humanity is advancing philosophically as well as technologically.

What period of time, wherever people had the resources to sit around and write articles like this, hasn’t seen itself as entering some grand new “age”? I’m sure, for example, American slaves didn’t see a new age coming, but their masters certainly did often enough.

None of this is to imply that we haven’t seen a dramatic technological shift in the past 100 years. But our visions of the future are just that: dreams. Our dreams of utopia or apocalypse may change, but in the end, we’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle.

Speaking of apocalypse, I just got done reading this book review.

I thought the first paragraph, which talks about how to prepare private citizens for war was good.

Then, this bit, farther down:

Mostly, though, soldiers complained of the miserable conditions of life that Russian villages offered them. “Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued.” This inevitability, ironically, seems to have escaped the notice of present-day nations. What is the use of an upper hand if you can’t spank someone with it?

After what seems like an eternal hiatus, dvfmama has written something!

God is as separate from His creation in as much as I am separate from my children. I have total sympathy for God.

While I’ve no doubt that some believers gain primarily comfort from their belief, the religion that Jesus teaches isn’t very comforting at all. “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”

And, of course, any Mennonite knows that Martyrs Mirror is filled with stories of people who endured a great deal of suffering. My own children have listened to the lives of many martyrs in the Orthodox lexicon of Saints, Nikolai Velimirovich‘s Prologue — so many that whenever they hear the Emperor Diocletian‘s name mentioned, they can tell you the end of the story.

Perhaps some people make Christianity out to be a nice bedtime story, but anyone who pays attention to what Jesus said or what Paul wrote knows that any comfort offered isn’t the whole story: we are called to live sacrificially.

Which is exactly what Mother Teresa did.

What strikes me most among discussions like this one is the idea that Mother Teresa had an obligation to announce her doubts to the world.  “She’s a public figure” the thinking goes “and she kept this from us?”

Well, no, her struggle with doubt or the lack of God’s Presence was her own and she kept it between herself and her spiritual confessors.  If she wanted to announce her doubt and be done with it, she could have done that without making her life any more uncomfortable.

Mother Teresa was doing something completely foreign to most of us.  Jack Welch was a better humanitarian.  Mother Teresa was not a humanitarian and Christopher Hitchen’s was right to discredit this notion of her.  Jesus said “You will always have the poor” and Mother Teresa understood this to mean that we should be more concerned with loving the poor and having compassion for them than with giving them a handout.

“You take care of their tomorrows, I take care of their todays,” she said.

Secularists who don’t know Mother Teresa won’t appreciate the way she chose to use her money.  Evangelicals won’t appreciate her Gospel.  Atheists see her doubts as her hypocrisy.

But there is something else going on, also.  She identified with the poor in the same way Christ identified with us.  She emulated his compassion.

And of course isn’t that the whole Problem of Evil all over again?  As Judas pointed out, the money spent on the perfume Mary poured on Jesus feet was a year’s wages — surely there was a more practical use for it.  Surely Jesus could have done more than forgive sins, couldn’t he?  He was God, after all, shouldn’t he have done more?

Mother Teresa is someone many people can admire from a distance.  Most will be repulsed by her, though, if they take a closer look.  She shows us exactly why true religion isn’t comforting.

On Monday, September 3, 2007, Steve Fossett, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling and the first person to fly around the world in a balloon went missing in Nevada. An airplane he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is. (Wikipedia article).

The Mechanical Turk project to locate Steve Fossett has been given one week for completion.

Those of you who don’t know what the Mechanical Turk is should know that it is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. That is, Amazon.com has created a way for computers to use people’s work as input.

In this case, people will scan satellite photography taken recently looking for possible places that search and rescue efforts should be focused on.

Which means, you, sitting in your living room thousands of miles away, could help rescue someone.

I’ve no idea if this will work, but, man, what a concept!