The Issue of Atheism

First, I want to humbly say I have not solved the problem.  I only want to make this observation.  From where to modern atheists derive morality?  If humanity is involved in evolution and a part of evolution is the rise and fall of species, the demise of homo sapiens sapiens at the hands of our own environmental destruction could be perceived as an evolutionary dead end.  We evolved the ability to kill ourselves, and we did (or we are).  If our species dies because of this, there is nothing wrong with that.  We, technically speaking, should die.  Still, many evolutionary biologists believe, morally, the destruction of the environment is bad.  Why?  Where did they get the notion that peoples should decide whether or not they fatally destroy themselves if their self-destruction is evolved?  I just want to know.  Is our belief to protect ourselves from ourselves a simple survival strategy?  If so, why would we evolve the capability to crush ourselves in the first place?  I have many questions that no atheists have answered yet.  Peace!

The Problem With the Modern Environmental Movement and Its Brief Moral Implications

The main concept we need to keep in mind when talking about environmentalism is that the planet will survive us, but we might not survive the planet.  The problem, then, is not terracide but suicide or, at the least, homicide.  No matter how much "damage" we do to the earth, we will only be able to relocate resources and alter geography.  What we can do by causing damage is bring about, directly or indirectly, the deaths of thousands, millions, or even billions of people.  The modern, essentially pagan, environmental movement, which demands the earth be saved for the earth's sake, puts reverence into nature at the expense of humanity.  Their critique, therefore, falls on deaf ears as a common person will never act radically and dangerously to protect plants and animals, but we can surely expect them to take to action in order to protect themselves and others.  Peace!

-ben adam

I Am Going to Colombia

At several moments in my life, G-d calls me in such a clear fashion it becomes impossible for me to avoid.  One of these moments happened about a month ago.  This is the brief story of that and the results.

A guy I know named Josh has a sister named Kait.  Kait went to Azusa Pacific University and majored in Social Work.  Following graduation, she moved to Vietnam to take a position with an Australian non-profit called AoG World Relief.  Not long ago, she visited Seattle for a little over a week during which time I discussed the details of her work and listened to many stories of her faithful undertaking.  In Vietnam, she worked doing general relief efforts while building connections with cohorts in order to begin a ministry for the liberation of women and men involved in sex trafficking.  Kait spoke with passion, excitement, and fervor while she exuded the Holy Spirit.  Her visit excited me.

More than excitement, I felt challenge.  The trouble with people practicing radical righteousness is their tendency to expose others' lack of integrity, particularly mine.  I saw in Kait a projection of everything good I wanted to do but was too afraid.  What holds me back?  Why do I stay in Seattle griping about rich, white people, working at a job I cannot stand, pretending as though one day I will be a respectable, Christian man who is known for his love for the oppressed.  Kait's visit exposed my fear.  I spent my life hesitating like those who hesitate to worship Jesus in Matthew 28 yet still receive the same command. 

Laid before me was my unwillingness to go where I feared.  I looked around at those whom I surrounded myself with.  I thought about Kevin and Marian Neuhouser specifically.  My great respect for them grew out of their experiences working among the poor and oppressed in Brazil.  Those times shaped them significantly in an extremely positive way.  My reflections revealed my need to partake in work amongst those who live beneath the heavy hand of empire.  Still, I feared.

Finally, during the first week of Lent, I prepared a sermon on Jesus' temptation in the desert in Luke.  In the sermon (which you can read below), I concluded Lent was a time in which we refuse the temptations that seem to grant us expedient relief or success and do the hard work to rid ourselves of actions that might embody these temptations.  What we give up, then, must be given up forever.  During the writing of that sermon, I felt the enunciation of Kait's challenge to my hesitant, complacent comfort manifest as G-d's ubiquitous command in the Bible, "Do not be afraid."  The command, so clear it was unavoidable, led me to sign up with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).

From May 12-25 I will be in Colombia working with a delegation on behalf of small artisan miners and small farmers in order to maintain their safety and livelihood in the face of a multinational gold-mining corporation who wants to mine on the 3 million acres of land where these people live.  Paramilitary and Colombian military roam the region.  Finally, I am stepping out.  I am going to go do what I know the L-RD requires of me.  Hopefully, this will lead to a full-time, 3-year placement with CPT.  I certainly hope it does.  In any case, I am stepping out without fear, knowing G-d will be with me.  Peace!

-ben adam

Old Wineskins or Dry Bones: Becoming Uncool

I live on Queen Anne Hill, but I work in Ballard.  When I attended SPU, I checked out bus passes in order to get to work.  I like riding the bus.  Some time ago, I began thinking about public transportation.  I appreciate it.  Public transit provides cheap mobility for those who cannot afford a car or are not physically capable of riding a bike or walking.  As I reflected on the usefulness of the bus, I donned my anarchist lens, and I saw clearly the way in which public transportation, not in principle but in practice, represents gentrification. 

In Seattle, people commonly plaster environmentalist stickers all over their cars (even gas-guzzlers like Subaru Outbacks).  They feel superior or vindicated by doing this.  They make up the Martin Luthers of environmentalism.  If they believe environmentalism is good, the earth will be saved.  The next group of snobbish people come in Priuses and bio-diesel powered Volkwagens.  This group wants to reform cars and petroleum use.  They accept the basic construct, but the answer to the problems is fully attainable without abandoning the current system.  Another group of people either ride the bus or ride their bikes.  The bussers and bikers willingly sacrifice the expediency of the automobile for frugality and longer travel times.  A few of these people do this for environmental reasons.  Some bike to be cool (fixed-gear riding hipsters), some bike to stay in shape, and everyone busses in order to save money.  Herein lies the gentrification.  The upper and middle class in Seattle longs for environmental justice.  They want the earth and its inhabitants to not suffer in the way they currently do.  However, it rests beyond their imagination that the practices expected of them within their strata actually affect the deteriorating ecologic community.  How do we go about decoupling this worldview?  How do we begin critically observing our own activity, repenting of our inconsistency, and move into a life characterized by integrity and sustainability?

I begin by advancing a new philosophy of being.  I believe this philosophy already exists but only in small pockets and never holistically.  First, we must identify the root problems: ubiquitous neo-liberalism coupled with neo-conservatism.  Liberals themselves are people devoted and committed to "social justice".  They talk about environmentalism, gay rights, women's rights, and racism.  Accordingly, they vote to increase taxes so the government can create programs to aid those who struggle through life.  Liberals flock together.  They create certain identifying markers in order to recognize each other.  They love coffee.  Finding a poorly dressed liberal is difficult.  They put "Coexist" stickers on their cars and hang Indian prayer flags on their porches.  Their homes look like Ikea ads.  Everything matches.  Everything is expensive.  Liberals and neo-liberalism meet in the liberal need to be identified as proper consumers.  Consumerism marks out the liberal identifiers.  Resources, then, require requisition in order to maintain identity.  The government obliges by increasing taxation, utilizing taxes for neo-imperial outreach, and creating welfare systems that keep a working-class population from becoming like the upper and middle classes.  Meanwhile, they woo the consuming masses to sleep with debates about foreign policy (which looks more like Middle East policy than it does foreign policy), healthcare, and the environment.  The opposite, equal reaction resides in neo-conservatism.

Conservatives represent pietism.  They do not identify social injustices as the issue at hand; personal irresponsibility causes the problem.  Neo-conservatism, therefore, simply employs a different strategy in order to attain the same ends as neo-liberalism.  First, neo-conservatism convinces its adherents that they are good, righteous people who deserve material goods and prosperity.  In order to attain this prosperity, they engage in neo-imperialistic activity through warfare and opening free trade markets for multinationals in majority world countries.  Like liberals, they carry identifying markers.  These markers mandate access to overabundance.  The neo-conservatives woo their constituents to sleep with talk about piety: anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-drug, etc.  Major divergence between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism comes in domestic policy.  Since the neo-cons are agaisnt so much, they cut taxes and devote the remainder to imperialism.  Hence, they appear more interested in wars for resource acquisition and neo-colonialism.  Neo-libs, when they enter office after the neo-cons do not alter this spending (hence, Obama's expansion of military spending); instead, they spend on social programs in complement to their imperialistic, capitalistic agendas.  This keeps socially minded folks at bay while the real damage occurs beyond their vision.

I say all this to demonstrate one thing: the ways in which we orient our lives affect policy.  The need to look hip, to own throw-away possessions such as Ikea cabinets and cell phones that last one year, to own a car, to live in a nice house causes the government and corporations to organize themselves in certain fashions.  The U.S. does not destroy entire cultures and people groups simply for the sake of greed.  Greed derives from demand.  When people supply a major demand and make boatloads of money, they cannot (or do not), like the rich young ruler in Luke, give up their wealth simply to solve the issue of injustice, especially when they believe the true injustice is that homosexuals cannot wed.  Our main source of resistance comes outside the realm of this operating system.  Why?  How?  Since the system itself demands loyal adherents defined by consumerist cravings (if it did not, how would the government maintain its strength?), we cannot expect tweaking the system to achieve the desired result.  In the end, what is most important to them, profit, will win out.  How do we resist?  We get rid of the demand.  We become uncool.

Another group exists beside the saved-by-faith-environmentalists, the hybrid-drivers, and the bikers.  We are very few.  We walk.  As we walk, we mourn the death passing us by on the roads.  Our tears are for both the people in their cars, isolated and in a hurry, and for ourselves as we breathe in the carbon monoxide expelled by them.  Our mourning is for those who are exploited, oppressed, and killed for the sake of putting so many cars into our society.  More importantly, we represent a group who knows the way to sustainability comes in social justice tied directly to personal piety.  The problem is, this is not cool.

Our society prescribes worth and value through appearance and possessions.  The result of this value-system can only be seen in melting glaciers, growing deserts, famines, and economic disparity.  The answer to this cannot come by investing more trust into a government who wants nothing but the extension of this value-system that keeps them in power.  We need a new devotion to social justice that does not expect the government to care for the vulnerable.  We need a new value-system that relies on small communities providing services organically without the desire for profit.  We must become uncool.  We must refuse to partake in the systems that make cool what it is.  I do not think my thoughts on this are over, but I will leave them here. Peace!

-ben adam

A Dirge Over the Sins of Andrew Jackson and Others

I wrote this poem last year on July 4th.  A friend of mine wanted me to post it, and I need to get back into writing poetry anyway.  Here it is:

Seattle suburbia feels like a morgue.
Yes, a morgue, not a cemetery;
this is no hallowed dead sanctuary.
It is a massacre
a genocide, and the only memorial
is the cities
named after those who died.
People say slavery was evil, inhuman,
and the grandchildren of those dragged
from Africa demand reparations.
Do not panic white folk!
We donated the desert
to the first American nations.
Land of the free; home of the brave?
By our forebear's aggression who is free?
me and you?
Those under their oppression
what can they do?
They can build casinos and make poor men rich.
They can kill deer, bear, and cougars.
They can drink alcohol
and toil on the land,
but it is hard to grow corn
when your soil is made of sand.
What have you done you liberal, white Seattlite
driving in your car
drinking coffee at the stoplight?
You practice justice by voting for light rail,
but your gentrification only builds another ghetto.
It seems the final solution was never let go
while you hate quietly inside your million-dollar condo.
Next time you wake up
remember who died
for your home's foundation:
Seattle
Tacoma
Snohomish
Issaquah
Sammamish
Tukwila
We live in an abomination.
A morgue.