The structure of education is teaching children just as much as the content of their textbooks … it is forming their lifelong impressions of their relationship with society.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss…

Witnessing is interruption marketing.

It’s unfortunate but true – just about every method of “witnessing” to non-believers equates to human spam. To start, I’ll list just a few of the methods we all know about:

• Knocking on doors and talking to strangers about your new church / Christ / a church-related event designed to get new members
• Cold-calling people from the phone book / phone lists to invite them to your church / discuss Christ and his teachings
• Direct mail campaigns
• Holding up signs on street corners
• Walking up to strangers at Starbucks / the mall / anywhere besides your church
• Handing out literature (i.e. “Chick Tracts“)

It’s really easy to point these out as interruption marketing because… Well, they are. Honestly, they’re low-hanging fruit. Easy targets, right? Probably unfair of me to just pick those and use them to illustrate the tactics all Christians use to witness. So let’s talk about some techniques you may have employed that, to you, probably didn’t come across as brazen as the above mentioned tactics:

• Have you ever asked a co-worker to attend church with you?
• Have you ever asked a stranger to attend church with you?
• Have you ever asked either of the above about their faith in God or Jesus Christ?
• Have you ever shifted a conversation that had nothing to do with church, Christ, or God into a conversation about any of the above?

When you did any of those things, did you notice an eye roll? Did the person groan? Did they shift in their seat and, at the very least, say they would go (or research what you just said, or give the matter some thought) and then never got back to you?

These techniques probably feel natural to you. They feel like you’re sharing the good news of your faith and the joy it brings to your life, and it probably feels great to share that joy with others.

There’s another organization / concept that those involved are equally as glad to share, because it’s changed their life and they can’t wait to spread that good news. This organization thrives on new members. Each individual collection of people works diligently to get more folks into the stable, because the larger they grow, the more they thrive and the farther they can spread the word of this great, life-changing group.

Surely, you know who I’m talking about. It’s called Amway.

Now, before you get up in arms, I did NOT just compare your belief in God and Jesus to selling cleaners and credit cards and pre-paid cellphones. But I did, however, compare your technique of spreading the word about your belief to the technique of spreading the word about Amway.

Again, try to put yourself outside of your own perspective and into the shoes of your intended audience. You’re interrupting their time and space to bring them a message you feel is important. And sure, you have the right to choose your faith and the right to free speech, but as GK Chesteron said, to have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. And ultimately, “You need to hear this because I need to say it” is the ultimate in self-serving causes… And if you’re serving yourself, you certainly aren’t serving God.

So. You’re dealing with an audience that doesn’t believe that what you want to share with them even exists. They don’t need it. They don’t want to hear about it. Your attempts to share it with them are seen largely as annoying or, at the very least, an interruption in their day. And the result of these tactics is a massive swelling of the ranks of the “New Atheist Movement” (Neo-Atheism) in America and abroad; a movement that has been covered in great detail and has caused great concern within all denominations of the Christian church.

What to do, what to do…

Well, considering the facts, you’ve really only got two choices. The first is to just keep doing what you’re doing. After all, it worked in the past. Your church regularly asks you to do it. It feels good to witness, and at the very end of the day, you can justify a few “lost sheep” if you gave it your best effort, right?

Well… If you’re fine with that – if screaming your message through a megaphone and praying (literally) that someone hears you – is okay with you, well… Look forward to staying as frustrated as you are now (if not moreso). Stay persistent, right?

Well, to quote Seth Godin, quite possibly the most brilliant modern marketing guru alive today:

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

And the goal is to get people to follow the teachings of Christ and live a Christ-like life, right? Well, telling them to do so over and over again in ways that disrespect their time and personal space is nothing more than simple badgering. It might FEEL like you’re doing the right thing, but as we all know, feeling like you’re doing work, and actually getting work done are two different things. But there’s something you can do that will bring you far closer to your goal than just talking and hoping:

Become the prototype.

Live the example, and let your actions spread the message. Get people to see the merit in the life you live and adopt your practices.

Let’s follow two scenarios – one for each path you can take.

Using the traditional, human-spam model of witnessing, you use interruption-marketing techniques to spread the word about your faith. Because you are Christian, and because you are employing techniques that are unwelcome and unwanted, you communicate the following through your actions:

• Christians would rather be correct than listen to differing opinion.
• Christians do not respect the personal space (mentally and physically) of non-believers.
• Christians feel they are superior to non-believers because they have salvation.
• Christians would rather rely on faith as evidence than rely on fact.

All of these are going to lose your audience. Period.

And as I said before, if you’re fine with that – if you’re okay with the notion that saying the words and annoying or inconveniencing people with your methods of spreading what is supposed to be a message of brotherhood, unity, respect and love… Well, let’s just say that you might need to evaluate the motives behind your actions, for they couldn’t possibly be borne of love, respect or brotherhood.

via The Journal of Joe The Peacock. Yay.: How To Actually Talk To Atheists (If You’re Christian).

All studies of man, from history to linguistics and psychology, are faced with the question of whether, in the last instance, we are the product of all kinds of external factors, or if, in spite of our differences, we have something we could call a common human nature, by which we can recognise each other as human beings.

So my first question is to you Mr. Chomsky, because you often employ the concept of human nature, in which connection you even use terms like “innate ideas” and “innate structures”. Which arguments can you derive from linguistics to give such a central position to this concept of human nature?

Chomsky:

Well, let me begin in a slightly technical way.

A person who is interested in studying languages is faced with a very definite empirical problem. He’s faced with an organism, a mature, let’s say adult, speaker, who has somehow acquired an amazing range of abilities, which enable him in particular to say what he means, to understand what people say to him, to do this in a fashion that I think is proper to call highly creative … that is, much of what a person says in his normal intercourse with others is novel, much of what you hear is new, it doesn’t bear any close resemblance to anything in your experience; it’s not random novel behaviour, clearly, it’s behaviour which is in some sense which is very hard to characterise, appropriate to situations. And in fact it has many of the characteristics of what I think might very well be called creativity.

Now, the person who has acquired this intricate and highly articulated and organised collection of abilities-the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language-has been exposed to a certain experience; he has been presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language.

We can investigate the data that’s available to this person; having done so, in principle, we’re faced with a reasonably clear and well-delineated scientific problem, namely that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, that’s presented to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organised resulting knowledge that he somehow derives from these data.

Furthermore we notice that varying individuals with very varied experience in a particular language nevertheless arrive at systems which are very much congruent to one another. The systems that two speakers of English arrive at on the basis of their very different experiences are congruent in the sense that, over an overwhelming range, what one of them says, the other can understand.
Furthermore, even more remarkable, we notice that in a wide range of languages, in fact all that have been studied seriously, there are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge from the very different kinds of experiences to which people are exposed.

There is only one possible explanation, which I have to give in a rather schematic fashion, for this remarkable phenomenon, namely the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal, an overwhelming part in fact, of the general schematic structure and perhaps even of the specific content of the knowledge that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience.

A person who knows a language has acquired that knowledge because he approached the learning experience with a very explicit and detailed schematism that tells him what kind of language it is that he is being exposed to. That is, to put it rather loosely: the child must begin with the knowledge, certainly not with the knowledge that he’s hearing English or Dutch or French or something else, but he does start with the knowledge that he’s hearing a human language of a very narrow and explicit type, that permits a very small range of variation. And it is because he begins with that highly organised and very restrictive schematism, that he is able to make the huge leap from scattered and degenerate data to highly organised knowledge. And furthermore I should add that we can go a certain distance, I think a rather long distance, towards presenting the properties of this system of knowledge, that I would call innate language or instinctive knowledge, that the child brings to language learning; and also we can go a long way towards describing the system that is mentally represented when he has acquired this knowledge.

I would claim then that this instinctive knowledge, if you like, this schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data, is one fundamental constituent of human nature. In this case I think a fundamental constituent because of the role that language plays, not merely in communication, but also in expression of thought and interaction between persons; and I assume that in other domains of human intelligence, in other domains of human cognition and behaviour, something of the same sort must be true.

Well, this collection, this mass of schematisms, innate organising principles, which guides our social and intellectual and individual behaviour, that’s what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.

You still here? Finally, you owe it to yourself to watch Ali G’s interview with Noam Chomsky.

As a preliminary, it is useful to summarize the three stages (or spheres) of man that Kierkegaard discusses (through anonymous authorship) in Either/Or. He posits the aesthetic man, the ethical man, and the religious man. The essential difference between them is the way they conceive of happiness and react to suffering. The aesthetic knows happiness in a negative way, such as the absence of pain and suffering. He seeks beauty and pleasure as a means to remove pain and suffering from life. The ethical man, however, can imagine happiness in a positive sense, which causes him to despise the aesthetic man. He believes it is good to be free, to be “noble,” and to be, well, ethical. The religious man has come to understand the one and only meaning in life is to live happily in love. He knows more than the “fun” of the aesthetic man, and knows none of the sense of guilt or remorse the ethical man feels.

Kierkegaard intended these as a response to Hegelian philosophy, “which posited the famous triad: a thesis yields an antithesis, which then yields, along with the thesis, a synthesis or unity, which in turn becomes a new thesis” (Storm on Either/Or). Kierkegaard makes his “either/or” choice aesthetic or ethical on one hand, and religious on the other. Later, under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard will write Fear and Trembling, which responds to absolute systems of knowledge, such as the Hegelian system, by arguing that faith is absurd, and will not fit into such a system. The motivations for responding to Hegel are apparent in the Danish church of the time, which began adopting Hegelian philosophies. Kierkegaard saw this as jeopardizing to the church, and how the church treats topics such as faith and the divine.

Preliminaries aside, Kierkegaard’s The Point of View For My Work As An Author is a fantastic primary source for study of his work and its stages and pseudonymous nature. The strongest reading will take into account the pseudonymous authors of works, the significance of their names, what they represent, and if and how they talk about the other pseudonymous authors. The hope is that “even if a man will not follow where one endeavors to lead him, one thing it is still possible to do for him—compel him to take notice” (34). Take notice of what? “That ‘Christendom’ is a prodigious illusion” (22), and that “if real success is to attend the effort to bring a man to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find HIM where he is and begin there” (27). In other words, Kierkegaard’s authorship was a plan of attack to encounter the reader, taking great pains to avoid the problems that occur when an author is famous, or becomes associated with an idea or a movement. This plan of attack is forward-looking to modernism and postmodernism, by attempting to force the reader to focus on the content of his works, and distancing the author from them, as stated many times by Kierkegaard himself and more extensively described in his ode to “that solitary individual” – a kind of idealized reader who explores for himself and the only kind that will understand Kierkegaard’s work.

These notions echo strongly with Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author in its focus on the reader. The death of the author is “the birth of the reader” (Barthes 150). Kierkegaard cares nothing for his own name, and sometimes intentionally stirs up confusion regarding the authorship of his work to even further distance the author from the work. A strong example of this is the work Either/Or. Either/Or was ‘written’ in part by A and in part by B. A was the editor-author of Either and B of Or. The ‘editor’ of the whole work was Victor Eremita, whose name means “victorious hermit.” According to D. Anthony Storm’s online commentary on Kierkegaard, “Here [Kierkegaard] is the victorious hermit, because like a hermit he isolated himself and wrote voluminously for several years. Kierkegaard, even while he was devoting many hours everyday to writing, would visit the theatre and mull about before and after the performance so that people might think he was an idle person. His foppish appearance contributed to this effect. He was the “victorious hermit” because he managed to fool many people with this scheme” (Storm Either/Or). In this way, Either/Or was already heavily distanced from Kierkegaard’s name, yet he did more to distance himself, by publishing an article one week later under the pseudonym A. F. titled “Who is the Author of Either/Or?” In it he proposes various theories, but ends up declaring that no one really knows who wrote it.

What are the implications of this distancing and pseudonymous nature of his authorship? Why did Kierkegaard go about this process? He explains in The Point of View that his chief concern in his authorship is the illusion of Christendom that he sees in his country. He states:

“What does it mean that all these thousands and thousands call themselves Christians as a matter of course? These many, many men, of whom the greater part, so far as one can judge, live in categories quite foreign to Christianity!…People who perhaps never once enter a church, never think about God, never mention His name except in oaths!…Yet all these people, even those who assert that no God exists, are all of them Christians, call themselves Christians, are recognized as Christians by the State, are buried as Christians by the Church, are certified as Christians for eternity!” (22)

How does his authorship hope to dispel the illusion? It is through this authorial distance and focus on content as a means of finding “that solitary individual”, that ideal reader, who will search for God honestly and not arbitrarily accept the name given him by his society, that he will dispel the illusion for some while recognizing that the most he can do for a man is “compel him to take notice” (34) and can’t force someone out of the illusion.

He later describes how the nature of the illusion, the illusion that everyone is always already a Christian simply by being born in Denmark, does not respond to direct attack. One who directly stands up and objects to Christendom is ignored. “They make him a fanatic, his Christianity an exaggeration—in the end he remains the only one, or one of the few, who is not seriously a Christian (for exaggeration is surely a lack of seriousness), whereas the others are all serious Christians” (Kierkegaard, 24). Furthermore, “a direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves…” (25).

D. Anthony Storm compares Kierkegaard’s method of indirect authorship to Plato’s dialectic. This is an obvious comparison, because Kierkegaard loved Plato. Plato wrote dialogues of Socrates, and so does not act as the direct mouthpiece of Socrates (Storm Method). Kierkegaard uses pseudonyms to talk about philosophy and faith from various perspectives. It is Socratic in that he does not directly address “Christians” as “Kierkegaard” (until later in the authorship where he does write as himself), yet exists to cause the reader to think and question and evaluate their own beliefs about their faith, which isn’t really faith to Kierkegaard, but just an acknowledgement of being Danish.

The question then arises, in this age where Kierkegaard’s name is attached to every one of his works, can a reader approach his texts in the same way that one could have in the 19th century? How is Kierkegaard scholarship to approach the task of analyzing his body of work without the problems and preconceptions brought into such an analysis?

This is exactly the issue at hand in Michael Foucault’s What is an author? essay. He states, “The author’s name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description” (177). Foucault is discussing the issue of authorship, even in the case of an author who writes as “himself.” How much more applicable are his points if one is encountering pseudonymous authorship? The postmodern notion is that the difference doesn’t exist. In a sense, every act of writing is a kind of pseudonymous authorship. If Kierkegaard actually believed in something that might be called “Kierkegaard’s Truth,” then he would have written everything out as his, and stamped his name on it. But he understood that the arena where meaning is assembled, the place where activity occurs is in the reader. His authorship is an attack against the author-function as described by Foucault. It’s an attack on the effects that a name has to influence readers. Foucault notes this aspect when he mentions that “one could also question the meaning and functioning of propositions like…’Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Frater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard’” (178).

However, Kierkegaard still puts forth a strong sense of the “author” and his intentionality. In his chapter in The Point of View entitled “The ambiguity or duplicity in the whole authorship: as to whether the author is an aesthetic or a religious author” he argues for the dialectical nature of his work. Kierkegaard states:

“It remains, then, to be shown that there is such a duplicity from first to last. This is not an instance of the common case where the assumed duplicity is discovered by some one else and the person concerned is obliged to prove that it does not exist. Not that at all, but quite the contrary. In case the reader should not be sufficiently observant of the duplicity it is the business of the author to make as evident as possible the fact that it is there. That is to say, the duplicity, the ambiguity, is a conscious one, something the author knows more about than anybody else; it is the essential dialectical distinction of the whole authorship, and has therefore a deeper reason” (10). (boldface added by me)

Here Kierkegaard is arguing for the duplicity and ambiguity of his pseudonymous authorship, but not to undermine the concept of an author, but in support of the idea that he planned his authorship from the start to involve this process as an algorithm for encountering readers and dispelling illusions (as Kierkegaard saw them). This is perhaps where Kierkegaard parts ways with the postmodern notions, in his belief in a super-authorship above and behind his ambiguous and misleading pseudonymous authorship. However, given the ambiguous nature of the work, the authorship lends itself to strongly postmodern interpretations regardless. Kierkegaard said on several occasions something along the lines of “I don’t know anything about the pseudonymous authors, don’t ask me about what they say or what they mean.”

The concept of an intentionally troublesome authorship is quite forward looking to modernism in some ways. Modernist poetry, in particular, took foundations and obvious structures out of poetry to explore how a reader creates meaning. Postmodernism would later take this fractured and fragmented philosophy of reality and apply it to the act of writing itself, to the idea of a subject or author. Then not only was one’s idea of a cohesive worldview fragmented, now the concept of a self is fragmented. Kierkegaard, in a sense, fragmented his authorship to attempt to find the reader where he is and begin there. The fragmentation is the clear part, and the degree of intentionality and meaning and its significance is the arena for debate.

An important issue then is the question of how successful his method is in this endeavor. It is a question well beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate critically how effective Kierkegaard’s method is across the whole authorship, as well as comparisons to historically how his work was received in pseudonymity. A larger task for another day! However, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s authorship, as coherently (or alternatively, incoherently) as one sees it, received an enormous amount of effort and thought from Kierkegaard as he wrote it. It deserves at least an equally extensive amount of study to do it justice. At the very least, the authorship is a grand experiment that hits at the heart of what literature should be to me. Literature, to me, is an artistic endeavor that deals with meaning, with reality, and with God, and how these are related and how readers approach them and react to them. Kierkegaard thought that faith was certainly more than a logical proposition one “achieved” through logical means like Descartes or Hegel might suggest. Derrida sought to bring absolutist philosophy of that kind out of the clouds and down to earth, as we saw in the film Derrida. God, in such systems, becomes less than God, because he becomes merely a product of man’s system of knowledge.

Kierkegaard refused this idea, and left a huge puzzle for readers to explore in the process. The indirect search for the nature of faith and what a Christian is still applies to today’s world, as the category of Christian is applied very liberally to groups of people (i.e. Americans) when a closer examination of these things might shock people. Christianity is not a western religion (or rather, originally was not, argument could be waged about the current state of affairs). It does not come after the Greek tradition of logically argued truth based on dry, separated “subjects” who argue with assumptions. Rather, it deals with actual people relating to a God who is so completely other and different that language cannot suffice in describing him except to call him “He Is” (or Yahweh) and the paradoxical idea that he became human, all considered through books written by all kinds of people throughout history. This hardly sounds like dry, detached philosophy to me.

Kierkegaard explores the nature of this faith throughout his authorship on many levels. That is, both to present it to readers, and to explore it for himself. As Ezra Pound said in a letter once, “Language is exploration.” Kierkegaard’s authorship is just that: exploration.

Works Cited

Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point Of View For My Work As An Author. New York:
Harper & Row, 1962.
Storm, D. Anthony. Commentary On Kierkegaard. August 8, 2004. 13 December 2004.

This is my own experience. I cannot remove my doubts, but I cannot erase my faith. At every level, these two experiences exist together, convincing me that I am, indeed and exactly, the kind of contradiction that Luther believed all Christians were at the center: both righteous and sinful simultaneously. (Simul justus et peccator.) While these two experiences are at war over the most basic assumptions of my life, they actually blend together into a single experience that is what one person called “the awesomeness of being human.”

At a fundamental level, I cannot get past the fact that the universe exists, and it is completely unnecessary. That there is something rather than nothing overwhelms my doubts daily. No matter how many times the brevity and meaninglessness of human life plunges me into despair, I look at the world around me, at the Hubble photos, at the beauty of the mountains or of my children, and cannot explain why these things should exist, could exist, or have any possibility of existing if some being did not call all this into existence, and sustain this universe out of pure pleasure. It is not the God of deism or of Islam or Aristotle that explains this. It is the God of Colossians 1:16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. For him. There is no other explanation, no matter how contrary it all seems to the life I may experience today.

“No man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error.” [and] “But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”

- G.K. Chesterton

Our parents were(are) richer, happier, and healthier than we are(will be). So what are we doing wrong?

In reading the responses I came across this answer, which was some serious food for thought. Maybe nothing groundbreaking in terms of a criticism of today’s “plugged in” and “connected” culture, but stated very eloquently:

It’s information. Access to it, people vying for your attention with it. It infiltrates your personal space and occupies the mind like never before, particularly in the “millenium” generation.
I’m sure plenty here won’t agree with me since it’s difficult to explain and wrap your head around in a short post; but it’s the volume of information bombarding the mind and the inability to (emotionally) contend with that volume of information that is driving people nuts.

Go back to the 50’s, briefly. There’s 3 channels on television and radio shows are still a popular form of entertainment. That’s really the extent of your connection to the world. Granted, there was the whole atomic bomb scare, but even that pales in comparison to the numerous doom’s day scenarios we’re frightened with in the media on a daily basis (thanks Glen Beck).

Beyond your local radio and 3 tv stations, your worries really ended at the end of your block in your neighborhood and left more time to focus on building a better life.

Now, the average time someone spends thinking about things which have no impact on their well-being has been multiplied exponentially. It may not seem like much at first, but after years spent watching people die on youtube, debating angrily over the policies of another country, worrying about the opinions of your 300 facebook “friends,” or even getting upset about the points of your last comment, it begins to mold your personality.

All this information stays with you in ways you don’t realize, and invisibly shapes you until you look back and count how much thought you put into something that really doesn’t matter to your overall life objectives (happiness).

Now, we’re even taking all this information with us in our pocket, just to make sure our access to this maddening level of information never leaves our side.

So, what are we doing wrong? Not really questioning, regularly anyway, if what we’re spending time on is conducive to our well-being and simply reacting to vast amounts of mental junk food instead. Ask yourself if your behaviors and the information you absorb every day is useful. Ask how to use everything as a tool to make it useful.

“The mistreatment and oppression of various groups is part of the Biblical story and part of how God reveals himself in scripture, but when we come to the Gospel itself, there is a deep challenge to any idea of empowerment that is based on violence or being the victim of violence. The centrality of Christ and the cross signal a shift- for all of us, and for every group- away from our own victimization to embracing Christ as the ultimate victim through whom all of us are set free. We do not emerge from the New Testament as victimized groups.”

There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, there is no first cause…

This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control…

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced the effect? Who or what put the matter and energy in the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions.” – Robert Jastrow