This Christmas Middle Class American Struggling Along Without Extreme Luxuries

Indianapolis, Indiana

Local everyman James Reynolds is a man of modest means and modest needs, at least he was until he became aware, through technology, of literally all the lifestyles of all the people in America. Now James, whose job and lifestyle are better than 95% of the people who have ever lived upon the planet earth in the entirety of its history, is feeling a growing discontentment. Even though he does magical things every year like eat good food, travel more than 10 miles from his home, experience pleasures that most people in human history have never experienced like Belgian ale, and never struggle to merely survive, still others apparently live better than he does.

Just the other day, a social media post made it clear that some other acquaintance of James' got to go wine tasting in Tuscany. Another friend just bought a sports car. Still another got a home in Vail, another some designer clothes, and another a boat. James realized that these people's lives are clearly so far beyond his as to make him hold his many blessings in contempt, as he should! He deserves all that they do. They are no better than he is. Why should they get all these things and he should be so impoverished of human experience. What really is the difference between some poor orphan who always wanted a plushy toy for Christmas and finally is given one by some generous benefactor and poor James?

This Christmas, James feels entitled to see his life as empty and unfulfilled until he gets what he has always wanted since the last few posts of his social media friends. As a man of simpler tastes than all those materialists, all he ever wanted was a Brunello Cuccinelli cashmere sweater. Well, also a single bottle of Chateau Petrus. Okay, he is a man of simple tastes and also just wants to have one Porche in his life. Clearly compared to so many these are modest needs.

Astronomer Warns that Universal Cooling a Greater Threat than Global Warming

Glasgow, Scotland

Astronomer Dr. Edmund Sorensen led a minor break out session at this years climate summit. With multiple speakers and advocates warning that we only have a few years before the earth will be uninhabitable, all because of plastics and SUV’s and airplanes, Dr. Sorenson’s warnings seemed a bit anachronistic to most of the attendees.

"People seem to forget that while the planet is warming, and going through various fluctuations of temperature in this tiny neighborhood of our solar system, the universe is cooling!" insisted a passionate Dr. Sorensen. "It's like everyone has forgotten the second law of thermodynamics! Given a wide view, we are totally screwed! If you think a degree or two in North America is a problem, wait until the sun burns up all of its fuel. What are you going to do then? You fools are side-stepping a bike only to be smacked in the face with a bus!”

Dr. Sorensen acknowledged that it isn’t likely that this cooling, at least in our solar system, will occur in the next twelve years, like the boiling of our oceans and the demise of Venice, but it will come after all of that! And no one will survive it. In closing, Dr. Sorensen said, “All the arrogations of human intervention are futile in the grand scheme. Human reason itself is wholly accidental to the universe, a vapor, nothing! Ah, but don’t forget to recycle. Morons!”

Many of the comment cards of Dr. Sorrenson’s talk complained of him being a sad little man, and also that he was clearly a racist.

Game Plan for Winning Social Media Debates

A long time ago in a world without technology people argued face to face, and even sometimes in order to find out the truth. But as in all things technology means improvement. I have carefully researched literally thousands of social media debates and have refined them to offer you, dear reader, this authoritative list of most effective social media debate tactics. Your homework is to find the one or more of these that you find most to your liking and go out there and practice for a few hours today while you should be doing something useful for the human race.

1. Boast of credentials

People may have wandered into your debate feed through a friend of a friend. They may not have read your extensive bio that you posted. So be sure everyone knows the letters that appear after your name and where you went to school and who you know and what you know, which is more than they do. They must deal with you not based on how you argue the present point, but based on the intimidation of your credentials. Look at you! You got some degrees and awards for studying some things and they should know who they are dealing with!

2. Be insufferably smug, pedantic, condescending

Connected to one, it is important that people not only know who you are, but also who they are in comparison, which is nobody really. It may be true that anyone can argue well and intelligently press for good reasoning, but that is only because said nobody has forgotten who they are. You must remind them by saying things like, "have you even researched this?" or "I don't have time to educate everyone on every point," or "do you know doctor so and so?" and the like. Put them outside the ilk of those who should even be talking about the subject. Use phrases like, "actually, that is not what the research claims," or "let me help you on that..." or "anyone who knows anything knows..." Drop "obviously" and "clearly" and "scholarly consensus" a lot. No arguments are necessary when scholars like you think things are obvious and have already moved on from the discussion.

Show false concern. Say things like, "that argument is below you," or "I was hoping for better from you." Again, the point here is to set up the divide and not to close it through genial argument. You want to win and not persuade. 

3. Take on your token opposition in the echo chamber of your thousand clone-minded followers

Since no doubt you have carefully winnowed your followers to mostly those who agree with you, be sure to pounce on the token opposition in such a way as to grand-stand for your many loyal followers. They will crush him or her under the weight of their likes and emoji's directed at your total ownage of him or her. 

4. Don’t take on true opposition scholars

Show your chops as a thinker by never or rarely taking on opposition scholars. Your social media feed is not for that anyway. It may be true that you have never really seriously considered the opposition scholarship or never debated someone who could really beat you, but nobody is going to know that on social media. This is a place for appearances, and the person who looks impressive probably is.

5. Link long articles from scholars who might as well do your arguing for you

Now, as I said, sometimes these nobodies can get lucky and score with a question here and there. They are looking to you for your reasoning on some subject and you may not have thought about it in such a way as to be able to communicate persuasively to the masses, being elite and all, but you can always answer a hard question with a dizzying series of articles from various scholars from whom you have already stolen most of your ideas and arguments anyway. They won't read them, but you will have buried them under all the scholarship. Of course they can do the same thing to you, in which case you have not communicated with anyone and in fact have only shown each other that there is a place where a person can go find lots of articles on various subjects called "google," but they may not be as able or willing to put in the 30 seconds it takes to find an article and link it. Persistence is the key to victory.

6. Use a bevy of logical fallacies, but in a sophisticated way

People are not trained in logic, and the ones that have had a class or two have forgotten it. So few people can detect logical fallacies, so use them to your advantage. My favorites are the subtle ad hominem fallacies, the false analogies, the question begging. For example, you could say to a conservative who opposes gay marriage that he is "obviously hateful." Use well terms like "racist, misogynist, homophobe," etc. and combine this with appropriate emotionally gripping stories and outrage and you win without even having to argue a single point.

False analogies are your friends! Pepper in some Hitler analogies. The formula is always the same: Find some behavior that Hitler did that your opponent is doing, then suggest that if your opponent would do A of Hitler's behavior profile, then he or she will clearly also do B-Z.

"Hitler won the emotions of his audience. You are winning the emotions of your audience. What else like Hitler are you doing?" and the like. Just plug in the behavior you don't like about the oppositions political leaders or friends or their own behavior and find a way to connect it to Hitler as a way of suggesting that they will obviously eventually kill lots of people. It is important to appeal to Hitler because no one else can be considered evil in the secular universe.

7. Break people by the sheer power and depth of your verbosity

If the rest fails, then bore people to the point of wanting to kill themselves and always get in the last word. Draw the thing out as long as possible. It helps if you are a full time student or have lots of time on your hands, so perhaps pursue another degree to free up time in the middle of the day for your "research," which no doubt must include taking your ideas out to the plebeians on social media for their enrichment. Use long sentences, presumably like this one, and replete with a stultifying and superfluous vocabulary, subdivided by various commas, as though you were an eighteenth century British philosopher, so that, in the end, your opponents must abdicate to your clearly, obviously, superior use of the language, which also implies your superior understanding of the ideological terrain. Verbosity and elegant use of language translate to beauty; and beauty translates to truth. Thus all you need to do to win arguments is write well. Just look at Nietzsche or Kierkegaard or Voltaire or Marx. They all wrote well, and that is why they are all correct. Imagine what they could have done with social media.

White Christian Cisgendered Heterosexual Male Loses Nobel Prize After Winning It

Stockholm, Sweden

The Nobel prize awarding committee has made an enormous mistake. In its foolish enthusiasm, the committee awarded the Nobel prize for medicine to Dr. Carol Johnson, a pasty white cisgendered Christian male devil, who also happened to cure cancer. They prematurely awarded Dr. Johnson on the basis of his work alone, seeing as how curing cancer is fairly impressive. But then a heroic researcher at the organization discovered who he is, despite his girl name.

In a statement, the Nobel Prize Organization acknowledged that in the past it awarded the prestigious honor based on work that substantially advanced medical science and improved the human condition. But for too long medical science has been dominated by Euro whiteys. Just google it and you'll see staring back at you faces of oppression and privilege (with a few token exceptions).

A spokesperson for the organization said, "Curing cancer is nice and all, but advancing intersectionality is even better. We just wish cancer had been cured by a left-handed transexual paraplegic black zim/zer from Detroit. It just goes to show you how deep our prejudices go that we can't find one."

When asked whether Dr. Johnson's cure for cancer might help all people and not just his own people, whoever they might be, the spokersperson said, "That is exactly how they keep the rest of us down. They make it seem that they care about all of us, but we will no longer be duped. We must rise above this system that would make us slaves to the oppressor. We now know that while it seems Dr. Johnson is giving us a gift; in reality, he is giving us shackles of obligation that we, for far too long, have been compelled to acknowledge in our contrite aquiescence." After her statement, several voices in the background were heard to say, "Amen!" 

Woman Committed to Gluten Free and Organic Food, Eastern Meditation, Hemp Kombucha, and Lymphatic Drainage Massage Dies at 47

Sausalito, California

Lilith O’Hara led an exemplary life. She walked daily, ate only gluten free and absurdly expensive organic food. She faithfully practiced yoga and pilates and hiked the Sierra Nevada. She strutted about confidently revealing an eerily thin frame of approximately 3% body fat, utterly expunging any trace of femininity from her body. But for Lilith, this was not a problem, because she was androgynously beautiful to herself. She was still single at 47 because she intimidated men and women by her overall excellence and severe beauty.

According to authorities in Mono County, California, Lilith was out hiking on Sunday and encountered a bear and was eaten alive, the bear not being one of the California vegan bears. 

Lilith's death might be considered ironic to some with an overly inflated sense of irony, but really her death is merely a poetic demonstration of the beauty of the circle of life. 

Austinite Worried Heaven Won’t Be as Awesome as Austin

There is a city set upon a hill, a land flowing with craft beer and whisky, a utopia where Teslas abound and where the bodies and the beards are sculpted with an attention to detail that people in cities like Oklahoma City or Topeka or Fresno give to basic human survival. High paying jobs in technology abound for the deserving alphas that swarm to the farmers markets with their dogs, whose lives are immeasurably better than most of the members of the human species.

Twenty-eight year old mega-church attendee and software developer Boone Higgins boasted that Austin is the perfect city. “When I graduated from San Jose State, I was worried that I wouldn't find another place like the Bay Area. I had heard Austin was a sanctuary city for single young semi-Christians, but it turns out that this place is utopia. There is so much to do and see and buy, and there are so few unintelligent or unattractive people, and also virtually no children. I love it!"

As to Austin's reputation for materialism, Boone said, "The people here are rich, but in an authentic distressed-designer-jeans wearing kind of way. They are also environmentally conscious and spend their money in ways that love and respect the planet, like buying overpriced Yeti products. They give a generous minuscule amount to their mega-churches that don't seem to need it. They buy electric vehicles and solar panels and live on the lake, where they can commune with the divine in the simplicity and beauty of nature, sometimes on their boats. They don't build roads so that the trees can give us fresh air and hiking trails, which of course leads to miserable traffic, but who cares? I work in tech and live downtown and telecommute most days."

When asked whether Boone not only didn't want Austin to change, but that perhaps he didn't want to change to learn to appreciate something deeper and truer and better than Austin, like heaven, Boone responded by looking confused for a few seconds, and then sheepishly muttering, "that's deep," and then shuffling away to ponder this over a Thirsty Goat IPA and tacos.

Pastor Raises Un-Obliviousness to Theology in Radical Sermons

Sacramento, California

Local aspiring mega-church pastor Chad Simpson is venturing into some treacherous territory by attempting to raise un-obliviousness to theology at Expedition Church of Sacramento, California.

"Un-obliviousness" is a strange term, and when asked about why he isn't simply trying to "raise awareness" of theology rather than "un-obliviousness," pastor Chad said, "Christians today are like baby lambs, very easily spooked. We didn't want to carry on some sort of aggressively organized campaign to solve the overwhelming ignorance that exists in the church regarding the crucial doctrines of the faith. That would scare them off. We still want them happy in their relationship with Jesus and don't want to change our emotionally comforting and emotionally stimulating services. We are only occasionally, for a few subtle seconds, helping our people see that theological ideas exist out there and that some Christians find them important and even defining of the Christian faith. Think of it as an experiment. We are only taking baby steps here."

The format of this radical step is for the pastor to drop in a key theological term here and there, within the flow of the sermon, as if he were some seminary professor for a few seconds. After the term is presented and loosely tied into the flow of the sermon, the pastor will then quickly return to his normal charismatic storytelling and jokes and self-help and kitschy moralism, using the Bible as a spring board of course.

When asked why he would even bother to do this if the theological content is to be so quickly subsumed into the noise of modern life and the general demand for fluffiness, the pastor replied, "While it is true that our primary mission is evangelical, our pastoral staff wanted to try something different than simple evangelism and service projects and rock style worship. We thought we would spice things up a bit by doing some things to engage the minds of our people. Obviously it is a deep dive when we talk about things like depravity or regeneration or election or the Trinity for a few seconds--appropriately supported by visual graphics of course--but we are committed to helping our people see if the mind and the faith have anything at all to do with each other. Don't get me wrong. We aren't crazy here. We will only do this so long as it doesn't harm the numbers that fuel our tithe revenue. Our goal is modest. If we can help just one Christian become un-oblivious to theology, then that probably is a win."

Man With Metaphysical Dysphoria Identifies as The Concept of 3.141

Los Angeles, California

Discrimination against those human beings who don’t feel like human beings is a serious and growing problem, say experts. One such case is the story of Pi, who came out recently as the number 3.141. When asked why he carries his decimal point to the third place rather than the second, he said simply that he was "offended that we would assume his decimal position, and that he was non-binary.” Obviously!

“Being homo sapiens is a biological fact, but the concept of ‘humanity’ is a social construct," Pi insisted. It appears that Pi and his disciples have seen some ridiculous, fatuous, obviously disanalagous connection between the idea that gender identity is unrelated to physiological and genetic strictures and their own position that physiological and genetic strictures like homo sapiens have little to do with how we define "humanity."

When asked if he meant to be wholly conceptual and abstract, like numbers, in which case presumably he would lose his human characteristics, like motion, speech, interaction, etc, he insisted that we were again, "imposing the binary categorizations” of "number" and "humanity" on him, and that, as stated before, he was "non-binary." In short, he is both a number and a human, as he defines himself. In fact, Pi envisions a world where there are no foolish categories, like a right way to be human and the like. When we asked him if his views on these things are right and that others who hold to binaries are thinking wrongly, which of course would be an obvious contradiction, he only responded by disappearing into the silence of his purely rational numerical self. 

Progressive Church to Have Vegan, Pescatarian, Gluten-Free Pot-Luck

Bolder, Colorado

In an effort to more fully reverence the planet and create sustainable pot-lucking practices, Infinite Sustainability Church of Bolder, Colorado recently held its first "Mother Earth Potluck."

After the service, in which congregants praised various deities in various languages in various ways, like some great jazz concert to every imagined deity, including a group vowing silence in reverence to the "unknown god," the community of Infinite Sustainability joined together in feasting and pharmaceuticals. There were many dishes for the community to enjoy, but some of the favorites were:

1. Lentils on a bed of grass and julienned Lebanese cedar. This was paired with a mulled hemp wine.

2. A mini pot of CBD infused compost with succulent earthworms.

3. For the pescatarians, a live minnow stew in a seawater broth with picked kelp.

4. And for dessert, the curdled secretions of the Himalayan mountain goat, sprinkled with candied crickets over a gluten free mound of organic coconut flour.

One of the community members, Zoe Earthrider Smith, said of the event, "It is beautiful to see so many people of different races and sexual identities and religions come together to the glory and beauty and pleasure of Mother Gaia.”

Unfortunately, one of the vegans inadvertently partook of the fish stew and had to be ceremonially purged, which is something like a biological exorcism too frightening to describe here.

All in all, the event was an enormous success, so much so that planners are already excited about next month's potluck, in which they hope to double the attendance to twelve.

Man With Species Dysphoria Identifies as Endangered Sea Otter

Carmel, California

A teen formerly known as Jude Butler has announced, via social media, that he is a lovable but endangered pacific sea otter. Such an announcement would have been received in less enlightened ages past (like 20 years ago) as controversial, but now we know that this demonstration of violence against reality is only adorable.

"It all started when I was young and would always eat on my back using my torso as a table," said Jude. "To her credit my mom never demeaned me, never thought I might be confused. She just thought that I might be experimenting, that perhaps I didn’t feel inside what my genetics indicated I should feel. And I certainly didn’t! I knew inside that I was a sea otter and not a planet polluting homo sapien!” 

Since the pacific sea otter is an endangered species, and since California is an open minded and groundbreaking progressive state, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium has agreed to house and feed “Whiskers” (formerly Jude Butler) and to protect him from natural threats like conservatives or religious people or the tyranny of his own biology.

As of today, Whiskers has begun his state funded full transition into a sea otter. The process is said to require multiple stages and multiple operations, but has begun with otter fur implants and various dental procedures to enable Whiskers to eat live sea urchin.

Local Megachurch Experiments With Multiple End Times for Services

Dallas, Texas

Escalade Church of Dallas recently announced that it would experiment with various end times for its 3 services on its 6 campuses.

The martyrs may look down on Christians in America with disgust for not being able stay until the end of a simple church service, one hour out of 168 each week (which of course ends up being longer than an hour, which is why this program was developed in the first place), but the martyrs also don’t understand about the church parking lot. Escalade Church is confident it has solved this major customer service issue.

The new system will involve color coding in the seats. Blue chairs near the front are for those truly committed to staying for the whole long hugely demanding hour, or more. Red chairs in the back are for those who elect to leave during the prayer prior to the last worship set, which is a full 10 minutes prior to the final dismissal. Green chairs in the middle are for those who elect to leave at the beginning of the second song of the last worship set.

Church spokesperson Amber Bishop provided the elegant rationale for this groundbreaking innovation:

"This is a win/win for all involved! Congregants who wish to spend ten or fifteen minutes more at church are freed from the distraction of the heathens leaving for the best seats at the buffet or the sports bar, and the staggered dismissal program mitigates traffic in our already packed parking garages. Our pastors will be able to gauge the spiritual maturity of the congregants by their tier of seating, which also means that various discipleship programs can be developed to inspire those in the green and red seats to sacrifice 10 or 15 more minutes each week in deeper commitment, which is exactly what Jesus meant by 'taking up our crosses and following Him.'"

We asked Amber about all the late arrivals equipped with Starbucks cups who also wanted to be seated in the red section, to which a pensive Amber replied, "That is a great question. Hmm.... We need to have an optics meeting about that as a staff, but perhaps we can have staggered starting times as well. It is just a thought. But obviously we will need better coffee if we hope to have people actually worship the God of the universe on time."

Moral Outrage in a Philosophically Vapid Age

Everyone is outraged by something these days. Our secularist, left-leaning, and thoroughly woke friends champion three moral causes above all in our day.

Joining them are people who may not classify themselves as "secularists," but they are. They are the religious liberals, who affirm that a God of some sort exists, but language and distance have made Him wholly helpless to communicate with us. As such, we know God through various acts of interpretation. God is impotent to break through the fog of human conjecture, and so He (or Her or Zer) is lost within it. In short, religious liberals affirm the fatal flaw within Plato--namely, that there is such a thing as objective truth, but that we have no reliable tools by which to find it. As such, objective truth might as well not exist. If a pastor in a liberal church stands to speak on behalf of the Bible or God or even science, is it not still the case that he is only a man interpreting such things and could manifestly be wrong? Indeed the favorite pastime of the modern liberal Christian is pointing out to all their realist Christian friends that their understanding of God and morality and the world is "just your interpretation!" Which of course bends us back into human authority as the basis and foundation of all moral claims. In short, the Christian liberal is, at the very least, epistemologically secular (secular as it pertains to his claims to know anything). And that is what I want to discuss here for a moment.

This will be a philosophical analysis of these three moral causes in our day, championed most vociferously by secularists. I want to show again how easy it is to argue a moral position without having much epistemological right to do so. Surely this is the day and age when everyone is shouting some agenda or cause, but it seems to me that precious few know how to argue the why behind their ethics.

1. Climate Change:

Again, this is a philosophical analysis and not a scientific one. For the purpose of this short piece, I will assume that climate change is real and serious and caused by human agency.

Let us delve a level deeper, into the substructure of this matter. We have a fact of climate change, but then we also have something else. We have a moral claim. And under that we have an even deeper claim that there is no clear direction from God, because, either He doesn't exist or can't make His wishes known on the matter.

Thus, we are left with evolved primates and the ephemeral debris of their thinking, which is constrained to nothing. In a world that, according to men like Bertrand Russell, David Hume, Frederick Nietzsche and so many other secularists, is ultimately only governed by human ambitions and human plans, one is left to wonder how any singular and unifying moral system can ever be devised.

Or another way to think of this: Nature simply does things. Human beings are also only nature doing things. We create and we destroy, just like Volcanos and asteroids, and it isn't like nature cares or aims at anything. We subjectively care, but in a totally secular universe there are no patterns or plans or maps or morals that must be artificially and vainly protected. In that sense, morality in a godless universe isn't really morality. It is more like a subjective linguistic grouping mechanism. We animals are using it to survive in little animal groups while we shout at the other animal groups and even at the universe.

How is longevity a greater value than immediate pleasure? A secularist might answer that we want our children to enjoy pleasure too, but then why is their pleasure more important than mine? Surely our secular friends advocate abortion at least partially because it preserves this generation's pleasure at the expense of the next, or at the very least it staves off displeasure. Some generation will be the last. The point is that these are all just moral opinions, more ephemeral debris of subjective minds cobbled fortuitously together by a mindless process that will end with the ultimate scuttling of all things. We are in that sense wholly unanchored in our moral wanderings, interpretations, theories, conflicts.

And another point I raised elsewhere. In a godless universe why think that it matters that the global temperature is rising? Why think that the human species has some right to go on existing? As far as we can tell, thought itself is wholly ancillary to the universe, a vaporous chimera destined to disappear. Why think then that this generation has the right to a better existence than the next or vice versa? Why not think that creatures better suited to high temperatures are the most evolved on this planet and are due to replace us? But who can really care if this is a godless universe?

2. LGBTQ:

Who can help but marvel at the remarkable moral intensity of those who champion the morals of the LGBTQ community in our day, or of their success in bending the conscience of a society to their subjective moral leanings? Their success in doing so is further proof of the argument I'm advancing in this little piece. They have won the hearts of people and have done precious little to advance an argument as to why marriage and sexuality should be so radically redefined. But again, as secularists, they don't need to argue in the old classical sense of setting forth premises and conclusions. Sexuality and gender and marriage are simply what we make them to be in our experience. Passion is everything and logic is nothing!

A few years back, I tried to graciously argue the Christian position on the matter of gay marriage. How many people who disagreed with me on this matter took issue with the logic of my position and tried to argue it out with me? Of the hundreds I interacted with, I can think of two.

There have been those, like Matthew Vines and Jenn Hatmaker, who have mined liberal scholarship on the subject and tried to advance a more progressive Christian understanding of the subject. They have been decidedly unsuccessful in any attempt to square this "new" morality with the old.

But again, who really cares if they are right or wrong if in fact God's or nature's position on the subject cannot be known?

G.K. Chesterton once quipped that secularists have not destroyed religious things, but they have destroyed secular things. What he meant was that if things are reduced to mere human taste and opinion in these matters, then nothing is really sacred or meaningful in human life. Perhaps fundamentalist mormons are right on this and multiple marriage is correct. Perhaps Aldous Huxley's fictitious vision of the future where everyone belongs to everyone, and children are raised by the government in farms, is the correct vision. Perhaps my former student, who once wrote that marriage is a prison into which the oppressive ethics of Christianity would place us, is correct. Who are we to say? But surely if we cannot sort these questions out, if there is no correct way to structure human life and society as it pertains to sexuality and marriage and family, then much of the interest in life is exsanguinated from it.

The more dangerous logical reductio here is that if these matters are without any real moral guide posts, then no one can complain that the views of others are incorrect. It is the height of hubris to think that another human being is "wrong" for disagreeing with your particular view on this or any moral issue. But of course if that is true then even the most perverse ideas of human sexuality or marriage or family must all be regarded as equally legitimate. What I want to know is how on earth a person is going to take seriously a secularist's condemnation of polygamy or open marriage or prostitution or pornography or incest or serial promiscuity or bestiality or any deviant sexual practice? Animals with subjective moral leanings will do what they will do and there is an end of it! We may imprison or fine or carry on in blogs or legal documents, but that is just one animal group imposing its will against another.

3. Socialism and Student Loans and Equality:

The central moral principle here is compassion towards those with less. All the noise about white privilege in our day is clearly meant to be connected here. There are those who think that white men in particular have had their day and now deserve to be gutted, the fruits of their labor more fairly distributed to those in need.

But a secularist simply cannot carry forward such an argument with any philosophical meaning or merit. If there is no definitive set of binding moral principles or propositions, then why on earth should I care about my fellow man, except insofar as doing so disingenuously advances my own standing? I may--just may, because surely some people are set free from all economic pretense--need to appear compassionate, to play the game, but surely there is no reason to truly care about my fellow man, which is exactly why many socialist leaders throughout history lived like Donald Trump while boasting of caring for the people.

One must remember that the secularist is constrained to acknowledge that we are all gasping pathetic animals destined for annihilation. We have only our desperately brief claim to consciousness and pleasure and nothing else; or, as in the case of the Christian liberal, God surely isn't breaking through to contradict our suspicions. If that is true, then I simply cannot see any other program that makes more sense than a Nietzschean assertion of the will! If my fellow man is weak, then let him get out of the way, or find the will to fight, or go insane. In every pride there is a sickly lion. It's just bad luck.

It is fascinating to see how many poetic and passionate advocates we have of this or that cause in a philosophically meaningless world, a world filled with nothing but words. All our words echoing through the universe are meaningless writhing staccato noises. And surely that is what the universe is communicating to us. In other words, if this is a godless world (in reality or epistemologically), we are really saying nothing into the void, and the void is echoing it back to us.

But don't forget to recycle and seek justice for the oppressed. It is absolutely crucial!

Man Who Claims Humans Make Up Morality Morally Outraged by Christians

Saratoga, CA

Podcaster, Blogger, YouTuber, Entrepeneur, Motivational Speaker, Social Media Influencer, Lifestyle Expert, and public intellectual Tad Ryerson went viral recently, again. In a Ted Talk shared more than that cat video where the cat grabs the cord to the ceiling fan and is flung into the wall, Tad charismatically asserted that Christian morality is curiously inferior and "only another subjective view" of how to organize human communities.

In a passionate Jeremiad against Christian morality, Tad argued, "Christians pass themselves off as moral paragons, but their nationalism, homophobia, environmental obliviousness, and dark-ages sexual ethics are utterly ruining the spirit of equanimity and generosity required to sustain a forward-thinking and cosmopolitan society."

He continued, "The reason Christians can't see the inferiority of their view is that they think they are correct and have been running rough shod over various cultures since the inception of Christianity. If they could see that, in a diverse world, morality is ever evolving, ever changing, as we evolve and change, then they wouldn't be on the wrong side of history, stuck in the dark ages. They would help us advance women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and do other things that align with our superior morality."

We made contact with Dr. Ryerson (his doctoral degree is an honorary doctorate from George Fox University in Portland) and asked him about what he thinks of Muslim morality in America?

In reply, he wrote, "That is a great example of what I'm talking about in my Ted Talk that was shared a few million times and received with thunderous applause and which I am now sharing in a nation wide tour of college campuses. Hegemonic Christians in America are behind all this dreadful intolerance of Muslims. Muslims should be free to express their moral views as freely as anyone. They enrich the conversation. It is unfair to simply shut them down, as Christians no doubt would have us do."

Of course, we had to press a bit, and wanted to know how Dr. Ryerson could hold that the absolutist claims of Muslims in America on these topics are to be graciously heard and seen as equal to other views and that the Christian view is "inferior" and should be silenced through evolutionary "advancement" and even legislation. It seemed to us that there were at least two layers of contradiction in Dr. Ryerson's arguments.

Unfortunately Dr. Ryerson had to end our discussion, saying abruptly that he has chosen to take a different line with racists who are not "global thinkers" and wish only to "put people into oversimple compartments for ease of judgment," and also that he had to finish his research on activating chakras through CrossFit and developing these ideas into a new wellness program.

Christian Philosopher Finally Yields to Superior Argument of Pop Princesses

La Mirada, California

Dr. William Lane Craig has finally seen the emptiness of his life's work.

Like a foolish lamb led to slaughter, he walked right into an argument in which a young person simply quoted the devastating cultural genius embedded in the lyrics of a few pop princesses. He was utterly taken off guard. He was so deeply owned by the power of their ideas that no mansplaining could navigate him out of the layered depths and sophistication of their words.

In an open letter, Dr. Craig repented of his ways:

"I've spent so many years taking on the toughest unbelieving intellectuals in American life, but I never realized that Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga have so wrecked me. As soon as I read the lyrics of songs like You Need to Calm Down and Born This Way and Firework, I instantly regretted my whole career and every paper thin argument I've ever ignorantly written."

"For example, I didn't realize that people aren't sinners; they are Fireworks. I thought they needed redemption, but that song has made me realize that what they need to do is express themselves in all their depravity because sin is colorful, like the fourth of July."

"And oh boy was I wrong about gay people. I used to argue syllogisms and other foolish nonsense, like: If something works counter to teleological function, then it can be considered unnatural. Homosexuality works counter to teleological function. Therefore, homosexuality is unnatural. But now I know that that syllogism is just shade throwing. And 'shade never made anybody less gay.'"

"I surrender the argument to the probing depths of these songs and vow to throw no more shade upon my fellow human beings. And to anyone on whom my microagressive shade throwing has caused injury, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. I only was mistaken because I haven't really thought much about these things."

Charity Gala Brings in Enough to Pay for Charity Gala

Fort Worth, TX

Three months ago, Redeemer Christian School of Fort Worth announced a windfall from their 1920's Great Gatsby themed charity gala aptly titled "The Grande Affair." The event brought in a whopping 400,000, but also cost the school just over 350,000.

But The Grande Affair truly was "grande," with the e on the end of the word. It was held in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, complete with a sumptuous four course meal delightfully headlined by Lobster Thermidor. One attendee stated that the event "was a triumph," and also that she was wearing Dior. A bouncy housewife near her wearing Gucci gushed about how everyone was so generous and so beautiful and so committed to God's work at Redeemer Christian. "Events like this show you just how many people in the community love Christian education and love to show off their money to each other. It is truly moving to see how a few wealthy families can turn an entire organization into a group of groveling dependents, and how one event can display this with such clarity and beauty."

Though the event did little to advance the endowment fund due to the massive cost of the event itself, it was heralded as a true success. School president Dr. Renard O'Neil explained that "this is an investment in getting the attention of rich donors and their circle of friends. It is our effort to compete with so many other worthy events like this, where the rich can exchange services in an elegant and bibulous environment and also feel that they are supporting a worthy cause."

The headline event of the evening was, of course, the auction, where rich donors were regaled with the crackling wit of the auctioneer while offering their vacation homes and other wares to each other. The big winners of the evening at the auction purchased a week in Vail, a week in Fiji, a parking space with lighted signage for their teen, and also immunity from expulsion should their teen ever surprise the school by breaking a rule or two.

The best news of all is that since the school made so little on the event, it will need to do it again next year. Themes for next year's event are already in the works. The best ideas so far are "Water to Wine," "Raising Olympus," "Aristocratic Utopia," and "Let Them Eat Cake."

A Few Modest Suggestions for Making Your Megachurch Truly Mega!

There are so many people trapped in small or medium sized churches, where there is bad music and bad preaching and bad lighting and old people who might ask you things about your life. But thank God for the megachurch!

I've been thinking that these megachurches are not quite creative enough, or professional enough, to really bring in the mega masses. They have done some things, like abandoning doctrinal complexity, Biblical doctrines like hell and sin, intellectual depth in the faith, church discipline, accountability, real community, art, architecture, cultural engagement, Christian history, and the like, but they are perhaps not taking this thing seriously. Here then are my suggestions for making the local megachurch truly MEGA:

1. Food delivery during the service:

Clearly movie theaters have figured this one out, and there is no shame in acknowledging what people want. I know it is not like the church to rip off an idea from the secular culture, but this one could work! Jesus did after all feed the five thousand. We are only, as Sheldon puts it, "Imitating Christ." A question may come up regarding the wait staff. Since we all know that true Christian service and ministry takes place during Sunday services, then clearly expanding service opportunities only helps Christians grow. Serving sliders to the saints can be a Christian ministry! Problem solved!

2. Recliners:

This is another idea ripped off from theaters, but it is another amazing idea. No doubt recliners would be especially helpful for those rare instances when the pastor bogs the sermon down in some irrelevant theological or biblical point. The recliners could be sufficiently wide so as to keep a safe distance from all the strangers in the building, enabling each believer to experience Christian worship in solipsistic bliss.

Perhaps it would even be helpful to create multiple aisles that are only 2 recliners wide so no one has to step over anyone, and everyone has an aisle seat.

3. More technology:

Churches are always about a decade behind in technology. More people can be won to the Church if they see it is current with the times.

For example, many megachurches have, due to their mega-ness, expanded to multi-campus formats, where they have some onsite elements and some "projected" elements, such as the preaching. Churches like this have already discovered that television-addicted people love to have a jumbo-tron in their church, capturing the worship players and the pastor in various "shots" and moving from scene to scene, especially if the various players are attractive or charismatic or interesting. Why not use holographic images to capture the pastor from the remote site? Why not have a snappy dialogue between the holographic pastor and a witty side-kick at the various remote sites? We love celebrities, and it would behoove the multi-site church to do more to centralize the importance of the pastor. And holograms are awesome!

Another use of technology would be something like a video "mash-up" Sunday, where the creative director could be given freedom to produce a slick and humorous mash-up of various online videos that would inspire and encourage and entertain the faithful.

Another idea would be a partnership with Amazon.com to provide drone service to the congregants blissfully ensconced in their recliners during the service. We have busy lives, and it is difficult when one is not in church to remember to go online to purchase the pastor's latest leadership book, or the latest Hillsong album, or other church "merch," like the latest celebrity Christian's kitschy "Christian principles" book.

4. Extended daycare/Sunday school:

These megachurches, with their one whole hour of teaching the most rudimentary Christian stories and Bible passages to children, need to do more to shape our young people to be good Christians (meaning basically nice, moral people). Now one might think that parents have some responsibility in this, but they are not trained in theology, nor do they study the Bible, because it is hard and time-consuming. Megachurches could step into this problem and provide an all-day Sunday "life-on-life," "relational," "relevant" event for the young people, perhaps complete with interactive Bible-like games, and share-circles, and also taco trucks. All of this gives more church exposure to young people and gives the parents much needed rest on the Sabbath, and all for the price of their extremely generous tithe gifts to the church.

5. Music that melts your face, and your heart:

Now because you appeal to minds by grabbing emotions, the music is everything!

There absolutely must be a rock concert style of worship music, loud enough and awesome enough to crush out the sound of the amateur congregants and to make their singing (if they even try), like their recliner, totally solipsistic. And is it too much to ask for smoke machines, theatrical lighting, and good looking (or at least cool looking) people? Perhaps we can thrown in a few Abercrombie shirts, fedoras, skinny-jeans, tattoos, and sculpted beards. We want people saying they come to the church for the music because it makes them feel good and the people are relatably cool, and also accessibly cool.

Is it really so difficult? All one need do is go to a Hillsong United concert and find the musicians in the congregation most closely matching them in talent and appearance and then do that! They don't even have to write songs! In the name of all that is holy, it would be better to play videos of Hillsong than to trot out some no-talent group of homely musicians on a Sunday morning.

(Now that I think of it, this one is already mostly in place in most megachurches. Well, then, if you want a mega, then go and do likewise!)

6. Luxury boxes and helipads for big donors:

Can we be honest and face the fact that churches do a lousy job of giving proper honor to their big donors. They usually only give them seats on the board or general sheepish deference, but if churches provided them with luxury suites complete with amenities, then surely retention rates would increase.

Of course the other problem for our biggest donors is the circus that is the megachurch parking lot, or parking garage. Some of God's sheep, let's recognize the fact, are a little more sheepy than others. At the very least the church could put in preferred parking and plug-in stations for Tesla's.

7. Sponsorships:

Megachurches have exposure to multiple thousands of people each Sunday. It seems foolish for an organization that already brings in so many donor dollars to leave streams of revenue on the table. The pastor could do a brief humorous spot for Chick-Fil-A, for example. He could say something towards the end of the sermon like, "I know I've been preaching for awhile now and you must be hungry. Perhaps you should go out for a nice lunch at, say, Chick-Fil-A! Oh wait! You can't! And you know why? That's right, my flock. It's because they love Jesus!"

Or you could imagine the pastor wearing a Word Publishing tie and saying, "This sermon brought to you by Word Publishing, the Word behind the Word." It's a sentence. Still plenty of time for the pastor's self-help coaching based loosely on the Bible. No one would publish a popular blog without ad revenue. It's time to start making some real cash for your church that can be reinvested in the mission of spreading the good news of how Jesus helps us achieve our dreams.

Please remember that these are just recommendations, from someone whose seen a mega or two in my day. Not all churches will have the resources to make a go of all this, but surely steps and stages are better than business as usual. Remember the great commission, where our Lord said clearly, "Go into all the world and make casual consumers of all nations, teaching them to observe some of what I told you. And lo, I will be with you most of the time (when I'm not vacationing in Tuscany)..."

Tetelestai

Words are powerful. I am a lover of words. I was led to my present love of words by the master wordsmith C. S. Lewis. Much of my life has been an effort to be like him, to communicate with the same clarity and beauty that he did, for the sake of others, and just because it seems a worthy thing in and of itself.

It turns out that God is also a lover of words. There is one that He chose to use that has changed my life and perspective more than any other. That word is tetelestai. It is one of Jesus' sayings from the cross, a Greek perfect tense passive participle. A wooden translation would be something like: "having been accomplished it is." But that sounds a bit too much like Yoda, so most translators put simply "it is finished." 

My Greek professor loved the perfect tense, and often criticized the English language for not having it. He was effusive in his praise of the perfect tense. He would passionately impress upon us how beautiful it was that these were past actions that assure future standing consequences.

So, what does that mean in the case of tetelestai? It means nothing less than that God has decisively conquered evil. Occasionally you will hear Christians lament the dimensions of evil in this world, or in themselves. They will sometimes say things like this: "I yearn for the day when God will finally answer all this evil." But surely God has already given his answer; surely evil is utterly defeated. The cross is God's perfect justice and perfect mercy striking down into history, a past action that reverberates through history to the present, and will shape every future moment for all time, assuring final cleansing for God's children and final judgement for the enemies of the cross.

Christian, you are not waiting for God to win! He has already won. The only thing we wait for, and indeed participate in, is the unfolding glory of the magnitude of His victory. This is true of your salvation as well. You are perfected in Christ's work. His past work assures the future. When He acted, your perfection was galvanized for all eternity. It remains only for you to grow into the perfection that is already yours as wholly forgiven and adopted sons and daughters of the King.

Think about what this means. What have you gone through, or what are you presently going through, that just feels like evil is winning? Whatever the word is, be it divorce, or terrorism, or cancer, or doubt, or pain, or injustice, or enmity, or persecution, or fear; there is another word, spoken by the rider on the white horse, and the blade of this word protruding from his mouth is of such metal that it can never be broken. God has the final word, the word that vanquishes all others, and that word is Tetelestai!

Musings on Humility

Two things to say immediately about my post on humility: One, it will be the best you've ever read on the subject. And two, I am aware of the irony of writing a post boasting of my learned humility (note the pronoun "I" so frequently mentioned in a post on humility). As in all endeavors on this blog, my only hope in making it public is to learn how to communicate important things well, and to hopefully benefit one of my six readers (see, only humble people do self-deprecating wit). 

They say that you should never pray for humility. I've never been so foolish, and yet God has seen fit to teach me anyway! I'm struck by how God teaches humility. He does it through hard experience. Humiliation is his truest school room for the formation of humility, and it is no process. It is full immersion learning!

Two years ago I lived in the small California city of Bakersfield, and taught at a large Christian school there (large for Christian schools, that is). Our life there was lovely in so many ways, and I liked to believe that I was pretty amazing. Let me count up the ledger of my deluded, and, as it turns out, imminently fragile sense of glory:

1. Successful career: I was known in my small community as a good teacher, even praised fairly regularly in public in various ways. The height of this came the year I left the school, when I was given a congressional award for teaching by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. I came to believe that I was an important teacher in the lives of my students. I believed that I would always be a sought after teacher, especially in the Bible and Philosophy subject areas. I was a realist. I knew I wasn't a first-tier researcher or a creator of new Philosophy, but I thought I was pretty special as a mediator of high things to young men and women.
2. Bakersfield famous: My kids coined this term. Because of my connection with the school, I came to be known in Bakersfield and encountered people who knew me everywhere. My kids were in a small Christian school as well, and I was known there. They even told me how important they felt because everyone knew who I was.
3. The Blog: I connected my teaching at the school to this blog, where I had my first few semi-viral posts. As it turns out, there were only a few posts that got significant attention, but I made it out in my own mind that I was going to be the next C.S. Lewis as a result.
4. Family: My family life early on in Bakersfield was happy, even on the border of idyllic. My three kids were loving and gentle and compliant and joy producing. I was proud of my family and my family life.
5. Health and Appearance: I was fit, strong, able, and always knew I was a better than average looking individual.
6. Financial Stability: At the center of this financial stability was our big and beautiful home in West Bakersfield. I simply felt important when I returned after work each day to this large and beautiful home with towering Sequoia trees dotting the back yard.

All told, I really did believe that I was doing life right. More than that, I believed that there were precious few people that did it as well as I was doing it. While I resisted it through Christian effort, pride was growing in my heart.

And then it all collapsed. It began with my divorce in 2013, finalized in 2016, which of course began long before that. I convinced myself that I had not failed at the most important endeavor of my life, but the fact is that I had. And then our broken family began to impact my relationship with my oldest daughter, who made it rather clear that she wanted nothing to do with God and Church and me.

Then we moved to Austin, Texas, after my ex-wife's company moved to the city. I was confident that with my credentials I would find a position at a Christian school quickly, and in the subject area I had spent 20 years teaching. But the job never came. One school had a Junior High Bible position, which I emailed and called about numerous times, but they never returned my calls or answered my resume. There were at least six schools that passed on me and I was devastated.

I knew that it meant I would have to live off the proceeds of the sale of my beautiful home in Bakersfield until I could find work that was sufficient to support a family of four. That work never came. Financially, I had to abandon the dream of a home for my kids because the only money I could invest was the equity from the house, and it was disappearing rapidly.

On top of it all, the stresses of the situation aggravated my heart condition, multiplying the number of A-fib episodes I endured, and all without a good health care plan to address it through the surgery I knew I needed.

In short, the things I was most proud of were all systematically taken away. A few weeks into the move I realized that to this community I was a foreigner, and made often to feel that way. The suffocating traffic made me feel that way. The swarming masses at the mega-churches I attended made me feel that way. I was disappearing. There was no boasting of my excellence, even to myself. It was a hollow claim coming from a jobless and lonely man living in an apartment in a wealthy suburb of Austin where I didn't belong. Whatever the truth was, whoever I was, I felt like a nobody swallowed up in this city.

But how many theologians and Christian mentors had taught me that this is precisely where God teaches us true reliance on Him. I was fond of reminding students that God owes us nothing, that as sinners we deserve only the hell and separation from Him that our sins merit for us; that this knowledge should keep us humble. But the central truths of the Christian faith are sometimes hard to learn outside of personal experience.

The only thing I knew to do was to hold fast to Christ, pray, seek Him, keep looking for work, and, yes, begin dating again. I believed I was ready in Bakersfield, but didn't pursue anything due to the impending move. It was time. I had grieved my divorce, learned from it, and now was hopeful for the future rather than living in the past, even in the midst of so much uncertainty.

It is nearly two years now since that move to Austin, and while I would appreciate it if God would stop teaching humility, He has nevertheless provided blessings I could never have imagined, nor would have been well prepared for without my season of emptiness and need. I hold the gifts God has given the way I should hold them after so much striving and difficulty.

Indeed, God is good, even in the desert, but no desert is His final place of habitation for His children. Perhaps the best way to say where He has led me is to describe a few brief scenes from my day:

1. Made a beautiful goat cheese, sausage, sun-dried tomato, spinach, and garlic omelette for my godly and loving and true and devastatingly beautiful wife.
2. Drove through a column of brilliant blue wildflowers to my job at Stone House Vineyard near Austin, where new challenges await in an exciting new career in the winery business, and with better pay and upside than any teaching position here in Austin.
3. Watered the new garden boxes in the back yard of our humble south Austin home.
4. Played Clue with my wonderful girls, all of whom are doing well in the big public schools of the Lake Travis school district.
5. Prayed with my girls, and my wife, expressing our gratitude for the life God has given.
6. Sat downstairs and wrote this article while my wife slept because I am awake with another A-fib episode. (I await a surgery that will, God's grace permitting, allow a solution to this frustrating health problem.)

I've learned well that I am a simple man, but God has not provided simple pleasures or simple joys or simple lessons to this simple man. He pours an ocean into me every day, and I have only these hands to hold it. Indeed I've learned it is better to be taken out into the current of His ocean than to try to take it all in. And that is the secret isn't it? The prideful man insists that the universe somehow fit within himself, his desires, his plans, his needs. His instinct is to swallow it up into his infinite need. He would reduce it all to an occasion for himself. The humble man is drawn out into infinite space and discovers how great God's world, His plan, is; and because of it discovers himself truly! He can be a player in a story that is infinitely bigger, and because of it he can become bigger. The prideful man collapses everything into the narrow and vanishing world of his own ego. He becomes small by insisting on being big while the humble man becomes big by finally, painfully, truly understanding his smallness.

The End of Envy

When you know a love like mine, envy is at an end. For there are those who will boast artfully, not audaciously,  exuding elegant sophistication,  speaking blithely,  full of aggrandizing humility,  confident of having won the world,  affirmed and applauded at every turn. I pity them for making that  great uncritical assumption, for living unoriginally, for the impoverishment of riches. Let them believe they are enviable— indeed I will feign envy among them as a charity to them… Let them hope in the mastery of the ruin that is this world… Our love makes a mockery of it all— not just that they might have a comparably better experience of this life, but that comparison can be made at all.

She is incomparable among women, beauty that over-awes the glories of nature, light that outshines the starry hosts. She is soft texture and color and vibrancy and definition and sweet aromas of life, elegant, gentle, strong, deep, infinite in its expressions and impossible to hold in one’s senses or one’s mind.  There is no thing in all of God’s creative genius  more sublime than this woman! And our love is as true as any love has ever been, our union as whole, our passion as consuming and dazzling and overwhelming, rolling us in a tide of inexpressible wonder and pleasure and joy crashing down on us in wave upon wave of undeserved abundance. Our love brings an end of self,  sweet abandonment for the sake of the other, and, because of it, the truth of the unprotected self. It is impossible to envy another when you have already received such excesses of love and beauty and grace that it will take  forever to know them all. February 14, 2019

Beauty is NOT in the Eye of the Beholder

We must disabuse ourselves of the cultural wisdom that says that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It really is foolish to think so, and all one need do to expose the folly of the idea is to do a few simple thought experiments.

Consider the glories of White Sands, New Mexico, or Yosemite National Park, or a simple garden. One could say that they don't think white sand is all that beautiful, and they would be within their right of preferences to say so. My question is why on earth think that such a proclamation makes it the case that there is no beauty in the place? Surely the foolishness of thinking that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" commits us to the conviction that if someone condemns a thing as ugly, then it really is ugly. It is abominable precisely because it grounds beauty in perception alone.

The truth is that beauty is no more subjective than goodness is subjective. We can thank modern popular art and modern education for convincing many people today that both are subjective, but if they are correct then there really is no meaning to proclaiming anything good or beautiful. There would be no meaning to growth in aesthetics. A child's scribblings would have to be considered as beautiful as any masterpiece. Why do we even speak in terms of excellence in art if there is no standard of true beauty? Why do we rank music or films or wine?

As one who works in the wine industry and studies it on my own time I can see that there really is such a thing as bad art in winemaking. There are wines that are dull, flabby, thin, burnt, corked, painfully acidic, one-dimensional, past their glory, and flawed. Just because there are people who might interpret such wines as good does no more to make them good than does a fool's appreciation of folly make it wisdom. Truth makes a constant appearing in aesthetics, and when we think about it we know it to be a good thing that it does.

The odd thing is that the first reaction of most people when you start arguing for standards in beauty is to think you are a snob; that you are enshrining your own tastes as though they should be the standard by which all interpret beauty. But curiously it is the subjective beauty advocate who ends up truly enshrining human ego as the basis for all beliefs about beauty. I'm arguing that beauty is objective, which means then that anyone who is serious about finding it will be able to do so. He is arguing that beauty is a constantly moving target, and that the only way to find it is to agree with his capricious convictions about what is beautiful. But he might be one of those cranks who thinks that feces thrown against a canvas is art.

My own conviction is that while beauty is true and meaningful and objective, it is also magnificently plentiful! Why is it that we think of beauty as a scarcity? I may be wrong, but I see this problem among women. A pretty woman may encounter another pretty woman at a party and secretly believe that the other woman's beauty makes her own illegitimate. But surely when we are thinking clearly we realize that there may be two or more beautiful women in a room, and isn't that a glorious fact? Their beauty may be merely unique expressions of beauty in much the same way that a hill in Texas and a hill in California are both unique expressions of beauty, though they are different in myriad ways.

Back to wine for a moment. Why think that the beauty of one wine or one region invalidates the beauty of another? Is blue more glorious than red? Again, I'm not advocating for mere subjective preference as a foundation for beauty; nor am I suggesting that everything is beautiful. I'm saying that both red and blue are beautiful, and to prefer one over the other is fine, but it is laughable hubris for a person to think that his preference for blue makes red ugly. To say that one excellent wine that exhibits currant and blackberry notes is better than another excellent wine that exhibits truffle and earth notes is to enthrone one's ego as the final arbiter of beauty rather than allowing beauty to announce itself for what it is.

On the other hand, to suggest that simple mass produced jug wine is as good as a Duckhorn Merlot is simply incorrect! It may come from an immature pallet or arrogance or ignorance, but simply drinking easy bulk wine to extract alcohol from it is not to appreciate wine as art. This is one of the problems with young drinkers. You notice that teens rarely have wine-tasting parties, where they are studying the artistic production of quality wine in order to appreciate its complexity, subtlety, and beauty. No, they are usually drinking cheap beer and wine and hard liquor in order to alter their pubescent minds. They are moved by their passions alone.

In many ways I'm arguing that maturation assumes an end. We hope that children grow up and learn to appreciate the good, the true, and the beautiful. That assumes there are such things, and also requires allowing the suppression of the passions of youth for the emergence of reason and spirit in one's life. We hope that our young people will abandon foolish occupations and ideas as they mature, and we hope they will be compensated for their maturation with the pleasures not just of the body or the passions but of the mind as well. We hope they will be supplied with the gift of wisdom to make sense of the whole human experience. In short, we hope they learn to live truly good and truly beautiful lives.