Yes the root cause of this is that the patent system is broken. Patents are given for anything and everything and the only winners are those with enough money to fight protracted legal battles. However, the system stays moderately functional because of the Mutual Assured Destruction of patent wars. Everyone holds tons of patents that their competition no doubt infringes upon so no one sues for the danger of counter-suit. Apple wants to break all that so that they can dominate their markets.

Who wins if Apple gets its way? Apple wins. No one else. Do developers in the mobile application space win with one platform stuck on one carrier? Do consumers win with no choice and no competition? Do internet sites win with a stagnant mobile internet market? Do other smartphone manufacturers win with the fear of patent wars constantly hanging over them? The short term winners now seem to be Windows Mobile and Symbian, but its pretty clear that they are next in Apple’s scopes. Honestly nobody wins, and even Apple might lose out by effectively chilling the marketplace and pushing manufacturers and developers in different directions.

Obviously Apple is a business in a competitive marketplace and they will do anything to stay ahead, as a good business should. However as we saw in the fall of 2008, a business aggressively pushing its own dominance of the marketplace can easily take down the marketplace (AIG, Lehman Bros, etc) and we are dangerously close to that happening here.

Today there is a wonderful post on adequacy, reminding us, that though the world, and the internet in particular, is caught up in a whirlwind of superlatives and potential growth, we do not have to.  Sometimes, success means getting to the point where you are just content, rather than constantly striving for more.

via Simple Marriage.

I will not even bother to waste my time rebutting such a project other than to point out the somewhat hilarious irony of a religious movement with a worldview supposedly based upon literal adherence to the Bible, re-interpreting the Bible to fit with said worldview. The rotations per minute of such circular reasoning are off the charts.

What is more interesting to me is the way that such fringe groups color the perspective of more mainstream groups.  One sees this in liberal as well as conservative groups that such fringe groups (Greenpeace, PETA, Conservapedia, Timothy McVeigh) are used by people to establish their ‘moderate’ credentials.  On the reverse side, members of the opposite group point to such extremes as indicative of the character of the group as a whole.  So while one side looks at such fringe groups as indicative of the validity of their non-extremist beliefs, the other looks on those same groups as representative.

Frankly, we should be less concerned with the ‘extremism’ of the beliefs (which is really just a measure of their deviation form the norm) and more on whether they make sense, stand up to logical scrutiny and real world experience.

[One] can as little compare the biblical creation story and a scientific theory like that of evolution as one can compare, shall we say, an organ and a vacuum-cleaner – that there can be as little question of harmony between them as of contradiction?… The creation story deals only with the becoming of all things, and therefore with the revelation of God, which is inaccessible to science as such. The theory of evolution deals with what has become, as it appears to human observation and research and as it invites human interpretation”

The brilliance of this quote is the way that it captures the subtlety of the distinction between science and theology.  A vacuum cleaner and an organ operate according to the same physical principles of pressure and suction.  Yet their role and significance in human life is rather different from one another.  So, it is not the case (as it is often argued) that science and religion are totally distinct epistemological categories.  Rather, starting from the same world, they diverge to accomplish different epistemological goals.  In Kantian language, we could say that, starting with the same noumena, theology and science apply different manifolds of perception to reality, thereby arriving at different perceptions of the phenomena while remaining both ‘true.’

Theology derives its significance as more-than-myth by virtue of being based on fact.  The creation story as theology would bear no significance were it not based on the fact that the world did in fact come into being.  We need not look at the Bible as a science textbook, but we need not relegate its truth to the realm of merely aesthetics.  As Barth says, “…[One] should distinguish what is to be distinguished and not shut [oneself] off completely from either side.”

However it occurs, I see a deep problem in the disconnect between academic theology and the life of the Church.  The insights and ideas of professional theologians seem to be by and large utterly ignored by the vast majority of Christians and I am saddened by the ignorance that I have seen even in the clergy.  Yet oftentimes the subject matter of theology bears little insight on the interests and cares of the person in the pew and this is not helpful either.

There was a move associated with the Liberation Theology movement to focus on ‘Theopraxis’ (that is, right practice) rather than ‘Theology’ (that is, right thought).  However, the two are not alternatives but are rather dialectically interconnected.  One cannot have right practice apart from an understanding of the Gospel and one cannot fully understand the Gospel apart from living it.

Charlie Brown says that brothers and sisters can learn to get along. He says they can get along the way mature adults can get along. And he says that adults can get along the way nations get along.

At this point the analogy breaks down.

The failure of humanity to ‘get along’ ascends along the axis of size and maturity and resources.  Yet maybe the principle works in reverse as well and nations and adults must learn to get along the way children do.

If you have not read ‘The Gospel According to Peanuts’ I highly recommend it as a remarkably sophisticated and insightful exploration of theology via the Peanuts universe.  I have included a link to it in my Amazon Store.

(Image by ~MVI~ via Flickr)

I am repeatedly impressed by the posts over on to ‘the church and postmodern culture: conversation’, and the recent post ‘a phenomenology of impossible prayers’ particularly caught my attention.  The author’s focus is primarily on ‘crisis prayers’ – the crying out in situations of utter desperation and helplessness and how they express the general condition that humanity finds itself in with relation to God, who “enters philosophy in defiance of the conditions of experience.” Karl Barth described this God as ‘totally other’ to capture this idea.  God’s ‘otherness’ is no where so well captured as in the period of crisis where we are powerless to do anything and find God in a position to do anything.

The author meditates on on the formative aspects of prayer, namely those ways that prayer in crisis changes us.  It causes us to change our perspective on the world (to see it from God’s perspective where crisis is incessant) and to understand better the deeper streams of pain and angst that flow throughout cosmic history (most notably the pain of sin in the world).

I, however, wish to make a point along these lines that is in direct dialectical tension with the author’s meditation, namely, that the very impossibility of a God who nevertheless yet exists, should condition us to pray for and in the realm of impossibility.  If God’s love and power come piercing down into a human reality whose perspective would never have lifted to see the meta-reality of God, then our response to God should be similarly audacious.  What does it gain us in our walk with Christ to limit how much we ask of Him?

By this sentiment, I mean more than simply that we ought to pray for the impossible and highly improbable.  It is partly founded upon a sense that relationship with God, like any other true relationship, must be founded upon honesty and when we fail to be honest with God even in what we want of Him (for in reality, we usually do want that impossible thing or even that only he can bring about).  By faith we ask audaciously, letting the Spirit condition us and grow us to understand how to ask better and what God’s response tells us about his character. (An early lesson along these lines seems to be that God has profound respect for the laws of the universe that he has laid down).

The greatest growth that I have observed in audacious prayer, is realizing how small even my audacity is.  I may pray for the unlikely recovery of a friend in an automobile accident, but what is life in Christianity? Certainly it is far more than a functioning body.  It is a fullness of being as fulfilling the original intent in creation to commune through love with both man and God.  I might pray for a really great job, but again, the need for a fullness of life that underlies that desire for a good job is ultimately what for which I should be praying.  In all ways, we must raise our countenance as we seek to understand God’s ability to do more than we possibly could imagine.

Full of noisy, catchy phrases.

Dogs he asks for, who their noses

Deeply thrust into – Today

And there scent Eternity

— Karl Barth

This is a sentiment that echoes feelings that I have had for some time, namely that there is really an over-emphasis in modern intellectual thinking towards reductionism.  We feel that if we understand the pieces that make up a system, we have understood the system as a whole.  While this works extremely well in the physical sciences, I fear that in the behavioral sciences this approach is misguided and exists with entirely too narrow of an epistemological framework.  Noë describes this narrowness as the difference between thinking of the brain as an engine and thinking of it as a car on a road.  Engines are essential for driving but understanding ‘driving’ requires more than understanding the engine.  I think that a better example would be the difference between a computer program that sits on a hard disk as a series of magnetic charges that represent 0s and 1s and a computer program as it is executed and experienced by the user.  The understanding of what ‘the program’ is differs vastly between the two!

Noë gives philosphical reasons why this is dangerous, but I would like to suggest that this has more broad implications for the average person.  It is easy to pick up the reductionist sentiment from media and news and the perspective is much more deeply entrenched in contemporary consciousness than one might first believe and many people are reductionists without even realizing it because they are simply unaware that alternatives exist.

I think it is terribly important to understand the world in a way that is both accurate (informed by science) but that is simultaneously meaningful.  Accuracy is wonderful, but it loses its value in a world that is so informed by accuracy and science that it cannot appreciate meaning, beauty, art, religion and sentiment.