Year: 2015 (Page 2 of 3)

You Gotta Read War and Peace!

October 4, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

Trixieliko / Pixabay

I just finished reading War and Peace. I knew it was long, but I didn’t know it was awesome!

If you like stories about the two lovers finally overcoming their own pride and prejudice, like you find in Jane Austen novels,
If you like stories where individuals get are overcome by forces far bigger than themselves, like you find Thomas Hardy novels,
If you like the witty critique of human foibles and foolishness, like you find in Flannery O’Connor’s stories,
If you like epic events carried out in fascinating, expansive and strange worlds like that found in Tolkien,
If you like the brilliant use of analogy in the critique of rationalism and historicism like you find in C. S. Lewis,

then you will love War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

The Godless French?

September 8, 2015 / Trent / 2 Comments

skeeze / Pixabay

I recently heard a pastor refer to France as a spiritual wasteland, and this wasn’t the first time I had heard this.

Twenty-one of our students went to France this past spring break and I asked them if they found this to be true. They agreed that French culture is very secular. Very few people in France go to church, and they don’t really talk, or even think, about God. They have beautiful churches, but the students observed large gift shops in two of the most beautiful churches they visited, Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur.

But, they also saw evidence that perhaps the French aren’t as spiritually dry as we might think, and that they are, in some ways, expressing some aspects of honouring the Creator better than we do.

French Food: Celebration of God’s Good Gifts

The most obvious example for the students was the French approach to food. The French value food, so when they eat, they take their time. A meal is not a mere biological necessity between work and an evening Bible study. The meal is one of the most important events of the day. The students said, “Even their fast food is slow.”

And meals aren’t just about the food. They are very much about the conversation that takes place over the meal. The French enjoy nothing more than great food with good friends. Here, restaurants try to maximize the number of seatings in an evening by carefully moving diners from the appetizer to the bill as quickly as possible without them feeling rushed. In France, you and your friends are expected to enjoy each other’s company for hours. If you want a bill, you have to ask for it. If you have a table, you have it for the night.

Rather than serving groceries in the same store that also sells underwear and motor oil, the French have rows of small, independently owned specialty stores. Each only sells one thing–cheese, meat, pastry, bread, fish, vegetables. The idea is that if you specialize, you can better ensure the quality of your wares, and the resultant meals will be a lot more enjoyable.

The French don’t believe in God, hence the appellation “godless,” but they treat many of his gifts with the utmost respect. They take the good gifts of God and treat them as the treasures they are.

Our culture conceived of Kraft Dinner which sells for $1.27 a box and takes less than 10 minutes to make and even less to consume even if we include the time it takes to offer a prayer acknowledging God’s gustatory providence.

I will not choose which approach is better, to love the gift but ignore the giver, or to love the giver, but disparage the gift. It seems to me that loving both would be the ideal.

This post was previously published at http://insideout.abbotsfordchristian.com/

Moral Lessons from Traffic Lights

September 3, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

We had some pretty big winds in my corner of Canada this past weekend. It really messed up the traffic lights.

My daughter suggested that the various scenarios we experienced as we navigated the streets sans traffic signals were instructive.

Various Scenarios

I went through intersections where all the lights were black. People dealt with the absence of direction in two ways. The more thoughtful treated it as a 4-way stop, as they are supposed to do, but others blasted right through. They were either oblivious to the situation, recklessly celebrating this unusual freedom, or laughing at all the fools who where stupid enough to take turns. Whatever the reason, these people were a hazard.

In some places they had another problem: I heard that when power was restored to some intersections, all the lights showed green. Apparently, with all sorts of assumption and no use of peripheral vision, there were numerous fender benders.

I went through an intersection where the lights in all directions were red, except a green left turn arrow. The 4-way stop procedure worked well until a guy in a Dodge pick-up drove down the left turn lane went with the arrow. This confused the working order of the whole intersection.

Everything seems to run a lot smoother when we all acknowledge and obey an external authority. Be that a functioning traffic light or a 4-Way Stop procedure.

Bible Altered by Homosexuals and Satan Worshipers?

July 15, 2015 / Trent / 2 Comments

I’m on summer holidays so I have the luxury to scan my Facebook feed before I get out of bed. This morning, my peace was disturbed by an incredible post. It said:

PAY ATTENTION PEOPLE!! I’m sure you know that NIV was published by Zondervan but is now OWNED by Harper Collins, who also publishes The Satanic Bible and The Joy of Gay Sex.

The NIV has now removed 64,575 words from the Bible including Jehovah, Calvary, Holy Ghost and omnipotent to name but a few…

The NIV and ESV and other versions have also now removed 45 complete verses. Most of us have the Bible on our devices and phones.

Try and find these scriptures in NIV or ESV on your computer, phone or device right now if you are in doubt:

Matthew 17:21, 18:11, 23:14; Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46; Luke 17:36, 23:17; John 5:4; Acts 8:37…you will not believe your eyes.

. . . There is a crusade geared towards altering the Bible as we know it; NIV and many more versions are affected.

I feel compelled to respond to these claims.

First: I think the church has more to worry about than Satanists and homosexuals. Enough said there.

The NIV has removed words from the Bible

“The NIV has removed . . . words from the Bible.”

From which “Bible” were these words removed? The author of the post does not make this clear. I suspect he is talking about the King James Version (KJV). The KJV is the standard of comparison at this site which uses similar numbers to make similar claims.

I did a quick comparison between the NIV and the KJV. The KJV contains 2736 uses of the word “thee,” 4599 uses of the word “thou,” and six uses of the word “pisseth.” Are these the words that the NIV has removed? Is this the evidence of the “crusade geared toward altering the Bible as we know it”?

Translations do not come from previous versions of the Bible (paraphrases do and ought to be treated accordingly). They come from materials that are as close to the original sources as possible. These are translated into some language, like Modern English, Swahili or Spanish, etc. One could accurately say that a Spanish translation of the Bible has altered 100% of the Bible, if by Bible, you meant the King James Version. Does this make the Spanish Bible less valid than the KJV? Does the translation into Swahili constitute a “crusade toward altering the Bible”?

My point is, the NIV did not add, take away, or alter any part of the King James Version of the Bible. They translated the same source material using a different philosophy of translation and wrote it is a different style. It is completely appropriate to question the materials, philosophy and style of a Bible translation, but it is completely illegitimate to criticize its differences to other translations.

Let’s look at the specific words that were identified by the Facebook poster as having been removed:

“Jehovah” accounts for 7 of the 64,575 words that have been removed from the Bible (which I am assuming to mean the KJV). It is necessary for us to understand where the name Jehovah comes from. One of the Hebrew names for God was the tetragrammaton YHWH which was Romanized to JHVH. The term “Jehovah” was likely created by cramming the vowels of another name of God, Elohim (or ELOAH), between the Latinized name for God. The God of the Bible was never referred to by anything remotely resembling Jehovah. It is no more appropriate to call Him by Jehovah than it is to refer to me by the name Annette Funicello. The NIV uses the capitalized “LORD” to designate the name YHWH and the term “Lord” for adonai. I think that these designations add clarity to the names for God and this is a good thing.

“Calvary” is the Roman name for Golgotha which is the Aramaic word for “skull.” Are we really arguing that we should use the Latin name rather than the Aramaic name for the place Jesus was crucified? How does dropping the Latin name in favour of the Aramaic name show that the newer translations of the Bible are being twisted by a malevolent homosexual agenda?

Holy Ghost was changed to Holy Spirit — is this scandalous? I imagine the change was made because the term “ghost” has different connotations that might create a lot more confusion to modern readers than the term “spirit.” Are we seriously arguing that this change is some subversive plot of Satanists?

The one time the term “omnipotent” is used in the Bible was changed to “Almighty” by the NIV. How do the forces aligned against the church benefit from this change?

NIV has removed verses from your Bible

Matthew 17:21 — Jesus has just cast out a demon that the disciples were having some trouble with and he says that “this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” The newer translations of the Bible do not include this verse because the older and better manuscripts of Matthew do not include it. In Mark 9:29 which recounts the same story, Jesus said, “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer.” It is likely that a later copyist of the book of Matthew added these words from Mark and also added the word “fasting.” The newer translations are likely closer to what Matthew actually wrote.

Matthew18:11 — The same issue as above.

Matthew23:14 — The same issue as above.

Luke 17:36 — The same issue as above.

Luke23:17 — The same issue as above, and again, the meaning of the text is not changed in the slightest.

John 5:4 — The same issue.

Acts 8:37 — The same issue.

Mark 7:16 — The same issue.

Mark 9:44 — The same issue here too, but an interesting difference. Older manuscripts have the words, “the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched,” only in verse 48, but the newer versions repeat this line in verse 44 and 46 as well. The NIV goes with the older version which only records these words one time in verse 48. Scholars believe this is more accurate.

I find myself wondering, how the suggested agenda of Harper Collins is advanced by including this phrase one time rather than three.

There is some legitimate discussion about whether or not the translation philosophy of the NIV is the right one, but the accusations leveled against the newer translations of the Bible in the Facebook post that I read this morning are completely inappropriate.

The devil is attacking the church in many different ways, but we do nothing but serve his cause if we manufacture attacks where none exist. The good people at Zondervan and the experts responsible for the development of the NIV have dedicated their lives to provide Christians with an incredibly powerful tool for understanding God’s word. That all these lifetimes of effort can be brought into question by one post, which took about 10 minutes to write and then shared on Facebook 60, 631 times, is very concerning to me. How much does the devil delight in groundless attacks on Christians by other Christians?

There is no conspiracy to alter the Bible. Harper Collins is only interested in profits–in order for that to happen all their small publishing companies need to make products people will buy. Thus, they are interested in what the NIV people are interested in–the most accurate translation of the Bible that they can produce.

If you want to post anything on Facebook, complain that no room at all for conviction in a world governed only by profits.

“If atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby.”

July 2, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

Someone commented on a blog post, “If atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby.”

To this another commenter replied,

That only applies if you don’t go to stamp collecting sites and explain why stamp collecting is stupid, produce podcasts about why stamp collecting is stupid, write books on why stamp collecting is stupid, sue because someone want to promote stamp collecting, or hold rallies to celebrate non-stamp collecting.

Is atheism a religion?

Not in the sense that it is a belief in a god or Gods. In this sense, Penn’s quip is absolutely true.

But’s this is not all that is contained in the term religion.

We might also say that a religious claim is one which rests upon unprovable truth claims.

Religion generally arise out of the search for meaning and truth. An agnostic avoids making a religious claim when she says that she doesn’t know if there is or is not a god.

The atheist, on the other hand, makes a fundamental and unprovable truth claim that there is no God. This, in the sense that it is a belief about truth and meaning around which one orients one’s life, is a religious claim.

So you can see, the original commenter is insisting on a narrow definition of the term “religion” so as to avoid the fact that his belief is not ultimately based on reason.

Atheism is a religion like not believing in stamps is a hobby.

Some notes about Hollywood Films

June 29, 2015 / Trent / 1 Comment

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

“Can’t we just watch it?!”

When watching a movie in class, many of my students complain when I stop it in order to engage in a discussion of what the movie is presenting. My response to their “Can’t we just watch it?” is always, sure. “Sure, this Friday night, in your living room.” But to be truthful, I don’t believe that we should ever “just watch” a movie.

We need to be aware of what they are presenting as truth or reality.

I’ve written about movies before: R Rated Movies, Does Movie Violence Affect the Viewer?, Language, Sex and Violence–What will we Watch?, The Demonic and the Stupid, A Negative Times a Negative Equals a Positive. Here are some notes that I don’t think I’ve yet posted:

Movies always show a hero who needs something.

What they need is often not what they think they need.
Friends, trials, even enemies help the hero to realize what they need.
In the end, the hero has an opportunity to take it.
It’s interesting to analyze movies on the basis of what the storytellers insist the hero needs.
In Hollywood, it’s almost always romantic love.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

In many Action/Adventure movies, the good guys kill people and the bad guys kill people.
Good guys protect women and children–Good guys are pro-family.
Bad guys threaten and/or exploit women and children–they are anti-family.

Masculinity, Femininity, Love, and Sex

Male heroes often have a problem with authority–they need freedom?
Masculinity in the movies is muscles, emotional restraint, dominance, aggression, sexual prowess and the capacity for violence.
Femininity in movies presents the woman as passive and finding her identity in the man. She is expected to be sexually chaste and resist the advances of the male.
Sex is a physical expression of romantic love. She was chaste until she realized that she was “in love,” and this is within the rules.
Love in Hollywood: Romantic love is passionate, irresistible and able to conquer anything, including barriers of social class, age, race and ethnicity, and personal conflicts.

Hopeful and Materialistic

We like things to wrap up nicely and leave us with a sense of hope for the future.
Hollywood films must be rational. We need a knowable, physical cause for everything.

“The White Knight”

June 29, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Where does evil come from?

We’ve got two choices: It comes either from within or from without.

How one answer this question can hinge on how one understands the relationship between Good and Evil. If we think they are completely separate, then we will tend to divide the world up into the things that are good and the things that are evil. We will likely work very hard to align ourselves with the good and avoid, or even do battle with, evil. We will distance ourselves from people who do things that we deem to be evil, for their words or deeds or views that are contrary to ours–the “good”–will show their alignment with evil. If, in fact, good and evil are absolutely distinct, living this way is essential because we will be thinking and acting in accordance with reality.

But what if this is not an accurate description of the relationship between good and evil? Then we will be getting ourselves into a lot of trouble because we are not living in with reality.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”When we assume that evil is external, we are likely to do all sorts of evil for failing to deal with the evil that resides in our own hearts. #goodandevil” quote=”When we assume that evil is external, we are likely to do all sorts of evil for failing to deal with the evil that resides in our own hearts. #goodandevil”]

The Bible begins by telling us that God made everything and that everything he made was good (Genesis 1:31). It also tells us that sin affects all people–“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and all things–“For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:22). All the things that God declared good, are still good, but they have also been distorted by evil. This truth makes it impossible to find anyone or anything that is purely good, or purely evil (and determines how one reads Philippians 4:8).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn had it right when he says,

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.

In Mark 7:15 Jesus criticizes the religious leaders for isolating themselves for those they deemed morally inferior–“evil”–pointing out that “it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” not what comes from outside of them.

The allegorical tale of the White Knight beautifully illustrates what happens when we have a too simplistic view of good and evil and, consequently, fail to attend to the evil that resides in our own hearts.

THE WHITE KNIGHT
by Eric Nicol

Once upon a time, there was a knight who lived in a little castle on the edge of the forest of Life. One day this knight looked in the mirror and saw that he was a White Knight.

“Lo!” he cried. “I am the White Knight and therefore represent good. I am the champion of virtue and honour and justice, and I must ride into the forest and slay the Black Knight, who is evil.”

So the White knight mounted his snow-white horse and rode into the forest to find the Black Knight and slay him in single combat.

Many miles he rode the first day, without so much as a glimpse of the Black Knight. The second day he rode even farther, still without sighting the ebony armour of mischief. Day after day he rode, deeper and deeper into the forest of Life, searching thicket and gulley and even the treetops. The black knight was nowhere to be seen.

Yet the White Knight found many signs of the Black Knight’s presence. Again and again, he passed a village in which the Black Knight had struck – a baker’s shop robbed, a horse stolen, an innkeepers daughter ravished. But always he just missed catching the doer of these deeds.

At last, the White Knight had spent all his gold in the cause of his search. He was tired and hungry. Feeling his strength ebbing, he was forced to steal some buns from a bake shop. His horse went lame so that he was forced to replace it, silently and by darkness, with another white horse in somebody’s stable. And when he stumbled, faint and exhausted, into an inn, the innkeeper’s daughter gave him her bed, and because he was the White Knight in shining armour, she gave him her love, and when he was strong enough to leave the inn she cried bitterly because she could not understand why he had to go and find the Black Knight and slay him.

Through many months, under the hot sun, over frosty paths, the White Knight pressed on his search, yet all the knights he met in the forest were, like himself, fairly white. They were knights of varying shades of whiteness, depending on how long they, too, had been hunting the Black Knight. Some were sparkling white. These had just started hunting that day and irritated the White Knight by innocently asking directions to the nearest Black Knight.

Others were tattle-tale grey. And still, others were so grubby, horse and rider, that the mirror in their castle would never recognize them. Yet the White Knight was shocked the day a knight of gleaming whiteness confronted him suddenly in the forest and with a wild whoop thundered towards him with leveled lance. The White Knight barely had time to draw his sword and, ducking under the deadly steel, plunge it into the attacker’s breast.

The White Knight dismounted and kneeled beside his mortally wounded assailant, whose visor had fallen back to reveal blond curls and a youthful face. He heard the words, whispered in anguish: “Is evil then triumphant?” And holding the dead knight in his arms he saw that beside the bright armour of the youth his own, besmirched by the long quest, looked black in the darkness of the forest.

His heart heavy with horror and grief, the White Knight who was white no more buried the boy, then slowly stripped off his own soiled mail, turned his grimy horse free to the forest, and stood naked and alone in the quiet dusk. Before him lay a path which he slowly took, which lead him to his castle on the edge of the forest. He went into the castle and closed the door behind him. He went to the mirror and saw that it no more gave back the White Knight, but only a middle-aged, naked man, a man who had stolen and ravished and killed in pursuit of evil.

Thereafter when he walked abroad from his castle he wore a coat of simple colour, a cheerful motley, and never looked for more than he could see. And his hair grew slowly white, as did his fine, full beard, and the people all around called him the Good White Knight.

Mad Max: Fury Road

June 17, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

I just got back from watching Mad Max: Fury Road .

[SPOILER ALERT]

It didn’t take me too long to wonder if I had made a mistake–it’s a bit over the top. The world into which we are dropped is pretty terrible–I expected it to be terrible, but not that gross. But the filmmakers are building upon so many other movies in this genre since the original post-apocalyptic Mad Max and its sequel, Road Warrior, that they obviously felt they needed to ratchet up the terribleness a notch or two. I can’t say that I ever got to the point where I felt all the dirt, defects, and disgusting were worth it, but the movie does make a pretty important and interesting religious statement.

Mad Max? Religious?

Mad Max: Fury Road–Christian Imagery

Yes, the terms hope, redemption, and salvation are uttered by the characters and the story is built upon these religious ideas.

It’s an allegory. We live in a world that’s pretty horrible–scarcity, exploitation and religious fanaticism are the order of the day.

At the top are the exploiters. Their power is maintained through a combination of withholding life-giving water, and other physical necessities, occasionally offering a meager “gift” from their bounty. The exploiters let the oppressed fight each other for these gifts and through promises of rewards in the afterlife, they buy loyalty and sacrifice in this world.

These are the basic evils that concern your average middle-class North American and, more so, the world’s poor.

Sehnsucht

Human beings long for a better world–C. S. Lewis uses the German word Sehnsucht to describe this inherent “longing,” or “yearning” that results from knowing we live in a world that we know this isn’t the way it is supposed to be.

Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, is a character of Sehnsucht; her dissatisfaction with the world comes from a childhood memory of “The Green Place”–read, The Garden of Eden. It is her mission to get back to the green place with four beautiful women who have been used as breeders for the corrupt warlord of The Citadel.

It is interesting that where the Biblical narrative moves from a garden in Genesis to a city in The Book of Revelation, the story in the new Mad Max movie moves from city to garden. This reversal is central to the religious statement at the centre of the film.

Heroic Women

One of the things I like about this movie is that the women are actually heroic rather than passive victims waiting to be rescued by a man. This is also a reflection of a positive trend in our culture. There are two men that help out a lot, but the success and fulfillment of the women does not rest solely in the hands of the male heroes.

Max and Furiosa are equally heroic and they even swap traditional gender roles; Furiosa is the better shot, where Max is the healer. The rest of the band of heroes are comprised of young and beautiful, but also capable, girls and the old, sandy, wizened, desert women which are also formidable in their fight against the exclusively male band of evil guys.

Firiosa is going to lead her crew, sans Max, across the salt flats where they hope they can find a place to begin life again and perhaps plant the invaluable seeds that they carry. They are, allegorically, going to re-establish the Garden, but, in the context of the movie, the garden is blended into the future hope of Heaven.

Max turns them from this goal toward Eden/Heaven. It’s not certain that such a place exists. What is certain is that The Citadel has enough water to begin again. They turn away from uncertainty toward certainty.

They return to The Citadel, conquer the bad guys and distribute water to the thirsty masses.

Allegory of Hope

Mad Max: Fury Road is an allegory that describes how a lot of people in our culture understand hope, redemption and salvation.

Our world has some big problems and we need salvation from the rich, powerful, or religious exploiters if we are going to have a better world. But we no longer believe our redemption will come from an afterlife–our only hope is to do it ourselves, here and now. This will take courage and sacrifice (and men and women working together), but we just might have a chance if we get out from under the control of the 1% and the religious leaders who exploit the rest of us for their own personal gain.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”In a nutshell, Mad Max: Fury Road shows that, rather than risk an uncertain Heaven, we’ll take a degraded Eden of our own making. #MadMaxFuryRoad #FuryRoad #MadMax” quote=”In a nutshell, Mad Max: Fury Road shows that, rather than risk an uncertain Heaven, we’ll take a degraded Eden of our own making. “]

Although many found this movie entertaining, I’m afraid they won’t find it satisfying. The Sehnsucht we are experiencing will not be satisfied by crawling out from under the thumbs of the exploiters. Nor will it result from a hard flight to return to the Garden.

Our true longings will only be satisfied when we live in the city for which we were made–the City described in Revelation 21.

What God taught me through the “Dark Times” (1)

June 6, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

StockSnap / Pixabay

They say that you learn the most about yourself and that God does most of his sanctifying work during the rough times. Enough time has passed for me to have done some reflecting about what God was teaching me during those years when my life was turned upside-down.

One of the things I learned was fearlessness.

I think, before, I must have been scared of a lot of things. I was scared that I would go to the doctor and be told I had only six months to live. I was scared that one of my kids would die. I was scared that my wife would leave me.

I suppose I was really hoping that I could live a charmed life and nothing bad would happen to me. If I think carefully about this attitude, I think I made an idol out of the charmed life. Deep down I didn’t trust this idol, hence the fear. When the tragedy eventually struck my idol was shown to be the fraud it was.

Consequently, I’m not nearly as fearful as I used to be because I now know that God is bigger than the things I feared before and I can trust him. He was faithful, and true to his promises.

A God Shaped Hole?

May 14, 2015 / Trent / 0 Comments

TeroVesalainen / Pixabay

Everybody asks big questions at some time or another.

Questions like “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Why is there suffering and death?” “Why bother?”

Human beings ask a lot of questions and we are strongly compelled to answer them. We cannot live without seeking answers. Seeking answers to questions asked of the material world is at the core of our sciences. But we also ask questions beyond the material using human reason. Asking questions and compulsion to seek answers and meaning is foundational to being human.

Luigi Giussani says that if we have a hundred questions and answer ninety-nine of them, the one we can’t answer drives us crazy. And the thing about the so-called “big questions,” they are not answerable. Hamlet quite correctly says,

“There are more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophies.”

As we seek answers to our questions, we come to the conclusion that we can’t answer all of our questions. This is a tough situation for us. On the one hand, we have an insatiable desire to understand and on the other hand, we are limited to what we can know. The tension created by the disparity between our ideals and our actualities suggests the existence of a source of ultimate fulfillment.

C. S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

This from Blaise Pascal in Pensées VII

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

According to Lewis and Pascal, the big questions, which seem to be foundational to human consciousness, affirm the existence of an Ultimate. We cannot answer the big questions, yet we crave and even expect an answer. This expectation suggests that there must be an Other from which we crave the affirmation of our existence that an answer would give.

Giussani says that our inability to answer these questions leaves us sad, but to deny the possibility of an answer is to disconnect man from himself because the desire for answers is structural–foundational to being human. To deny the possibility of an answer is to declare everything meaningless–this leads to the opposite of sadness–despair. As Macbeth says, it would be as if life is

“a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

There must be an answer, and a human being cannot live without seeking that answer. Giussani says that a human being can’t live five minutes without affirming “the existence of a ‘something’ which deep down makes living those five minutes worthwhile” (57).

The disparity between our questions and our inability to answer them leaves us sad. Denying the possibility of an answer leads us to despair.