Sounds like a party

It's July 4, Independence Day in the United State, a day we celebrate freedom.  

A number of years ago, when my oldest son as a student at The Citadel, he somehow was awarded the opportunity to do an internship one summer with the British Parliament. He and another Citadel student were housed in an apartment within walking distance of the seat of Great Britain’s government, and assigned to work in the office of an MP (Member of Parliament).

As July 4 approached – which, rightfully so, is just another day in England - my son and his roommate decided to throw an Independence Day party. They had shirts that represented the flag of the United States, and invited anyone and everyone, American or not. I don’t know that they could find hamburgers and hotdogs, but I’m sure they bought as “American” food as they could, along with plenty of beer, and blasted American country music from their stereo.

It attracted quite a crowd, of even the British friends they knew and worked with, who were up for a party (in spite of the fact that it celebrated a major defeat of their country). My son came upon two people standing, staring at Big Ben, the famous clock tower that stands at the north end of Westminster Palace, and asked, “Are you Americans?” The couple was embarrassed that they were so obviously tourists, but they admitted they were indeed Americans. “We’re celebrating the Fourth of July,” my son said. “Come on over.” And they did.

As I was thinking about Independence Day, I couldn’t help but marvel that, at one time, tiny Great Britian – an entire country that is basically the size of one of our American states – ruled almost the entire world. The saying went that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” because there were British colonies literally all around the world.

Just about all of those former British colonies eventually gained independence – Canada, Australia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, just to name a few - and eventually no doubt the American colonies would have gained independence as well.

But how different would this country have been? Indeed, how different would the world have been without the example of a democratic republic and the idea of “government by the people” the American founders established? The idea that natural rights come first, not where your parents were born or what language you speak or the color of your skin (although that took some time), and that power flows from We the People. Not to mention the advances that took place in America because, I believe, there was freedom to try, to innovate, to risk at a level perhaps never before seen in any other country. And there was plenty of reward for success.

I came across part of a speech given by President Calvin Coolidge in 1926, the 100^th year of the founding of this country, that are worth repeating:

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.

“No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.”

As I thought of my son on that July 4 all those years ago, boldly celebrating his American heritage in the heart of the very country that opposed what he and his roommate and friends were celebrating, I couldn’t help but think of a passage the Apostle Paul wrote in Philippians (3:20): “But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Our citizenship is in heaven. Jesus spent a lot of time talking about the Kingdom of Heaven. And one of the confusing things is that there often does not appear to be much difference between the citizens of this (or any) country and those of the Kingdom of Heaven. Much like on most days that summer my son spent in London, if you never heard him talk there would be no reason to assume he wasn’t English (but as soon as he opened his mouth and that Southern drawl started, there would be no doubt he was not of that world). No one but God knows the true difference.

I am also a citizen of the United States of America, and proudly so. As a Christian, I am told throughout scripture to pray for where I live, to uphold the laws of this country (unless they contradict God’s Word), to pray for our leaders whether I voted for them or not, and work for the betterment of my neighbors, my community, my state (for what else can it mean to “love your neighbor as yourself”?)

At the same time, we are told to live as witnesses of our heavenly kingdom, striving to be known as Children of God. Paul, again in Philippians 2 says, “Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’ Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life.”

In everything, we’re to point people to Jesus, to show how they too can become citizens of His Kingdom. As Peter wrote (1 Peter 3), “Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect …”

Be prepared to give reason for the hope that you have … but with gentleness and respect.

What does this look like? Again, Peter – writing, remember, during the Roman Empire, while in Rome, under the rule of the evil Nero who would eventually order his death – said we are not to “live (our) earthly lives for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God. For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They are surprised that you do not join them in their reckless, wild living …”

America is a country founded on ideas, and anyone who buys into those ideas – “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” – can become an American, too.

Just as anyone who recognizes Jesus as Lord, that He took on the punishment for your sin, and through his life, death and resurrection, you can have eternal life as a citizen of God’s Kingdom. It doesn’t matter where you were born, where your parents were born, your language or skin color. All that matters is your heart.

There is a great old hymn called “One Day” that has been on my mind a lot lately. The chorus says,

“Living, He loved me.

Dying, He saved me.

Buried, He carried my sins far away.

Rising, He justified freely forever

One day He’s coming, oh Glorious Day.”

That’s it, simply put. We live in anticipation of that Glorious Day.”

And like my son, inviting all to come to his party to celebrate American independence from King George III in the very heart of England, you’re invited to come to celebrate God’s Kingdom, regardless of your earthly citizenship.

I promise, there’s going to be a party.

White hats, black hats

 

How much have I missed by seeing only the color of your hat?

In the old days of black and white cowboy movies and TV shows, you could always tell the good guys from the bad guys: the good guys wore white hats, the bad guys wore black.

That changed with color TV and movies, generally speaking. But still, it made me realize that from a very early age, I was taught to judge. It wasn’t always by the color of the hat. But you could watch a movie or a TV show and generally tell who the bad guy was by appearances – Darth Vadar all in black; Javier Bardem’s haircut as Anton Chiguth in “No Country for Old Men;” Alan Rickman’s urbane sneer as Hans Gruber in “Die Hard.” Sometimes the bad guys have stubble where they haven’t shaved, or are sweaty, or carry themselves with an arrogant demeanor. It doesn’t take long in a movie or TV show to figure out who the bad guy is.

Even our cartoons – Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from Rocky and Bullwinkle; Simon Bar Sinister from Underdog; the cat in Tom and Jerry; The Creeper, who was really Mr. Carswell the bank owner, in Scooby-Doo – it was never hard to know right away who was going to cause problems. Captain Hook, Scar, Jafar … I'm showing myk age here, but you know them.

So it’s no wonder that as adults, we often make snap judgements about people based on appearances. Sometimes we just decide we either like or don’t like someone with one look. Maybe it’s their clothes, or their hair, the way they carry themselves.

I suppose people have done this from the beginning of time, but I wonder if my generation – the TV generation – hasn’t been taught this in a way unlike any previous generation.

We don’t typically like to admit we judge people, but I’m not sure we can help it. It’s not always bad. Sometimes we meet someone and after just a few minutes, a brief conversation, we decide we like them. It’s my experience that single adults looking for dates do this all the time; there are even songs about “the look,’’ or eyes meeting across a crowded room, a first innocent touch. Sometimes one look is all it takes to establish a good connection.

Of course, sometimes one look is all it takes to decide to be wary of someone, to feel uneasy around them, even decide if we will trust them.

But it got me wondering about how I look at people.

I was reading the verse (Acts 7:48) that says, “the Most High does not live in houses made by men.” Indeed, it seems Christ lives within people. “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). In Ephesians, Paul writes, “Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him.” (Ephesians 3).

There are all sorts of verses of how, as Christians, Christ lives within us, a mystery that I admit is hard to comprehend exactly what it means.

Even more, we’re told all of us bear the image of God. Not that we are God, as some would say; we are a reflection, an image of God. In Genesis 1:26 God says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” That should count for something. Afterall, in this life we are not likely to physically see God, but we do see each other.

You want to see God? Look at the people in the pews around you on Sunday morning. John (1 John 4:12) said, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us.”

I have heard it said that the church is like looking through God’s family album. Each member is a picture of the God of the Universe. Each image is seeing God from a different angle, a different mood, a different moment. Here He is as a baby; here He is as an old man; here He is as a young woman who doesn’t understand how beautiful she is because she doesn’t realize she is a reflection of God; here He is as a young man who is trying to prove himself, not understanding his place in God yet. Our personalities reflect God’s personality - although ours have been corrupted by sin. Yet all our qualities reflect to some degree the nature of God.

You never know when someone may suddenly surprise you. My wife has a wonderful trait of finding something interesting in almost everyone she meets. I am trying to be more like that – even though I have years of self-centeredness to overcome.

Each of us comes across thousands, if not millions, of people in our lifetime. You never know who may be the one that astonishes us, teaches us, reveals something we’d never seen before. I wonder what I have missed in dismissing so many people I’ve come across in my life.

You know the story of Jacob and Esau? They were twin brothers who had a falling out, and Jacob ran away in fear. Finally, he came home, but was terrified by how his brother – whom he had wronged – might react. (This is the story where Jacob meets and wrestles with God, and sees Jacob’s ladder, in Genesis).

But Esau does welcome Jacob back. And Jacob says, in Genesis 33:10, “To see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favorably.”

Jacob saw the glory of God in a human face.

How much have I missed by focusing only the color of the hat they’re wearing?

There ought to be a law

 

But then, as someone said, more laws often mean less justice

A few days ago – despite all the problems going on in this country - Senators Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced the “Protect College Sports Act,” a bill intended to bring government regulation to college sports.

Remember former President Ronald Reagan’s “nine most terrifying words in the English language”? “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But such is the complete chaos that college athletics has fallen into that NCAA presidents seem to actually want government to solve their problem (which usually is a problem in itself).

It’s true that college athletics is no longer “amateur,” by any stretch (and believe me, the definition of that word has always been stretched in college athletics).

The intent is for the power of the United States Government to lay down some rules to which all universities, and coaches, will adhere.

Yeah, sure.

Way back when the NCAA actually had a rule book and tried to enforce it, I would routinely have coaches and school administrators and boosters and fans complain about how big and complicated the NCAA rule book was (and it was).

I always pointed out however that it was their own fault. Every time some coach or “fan” did something to gain an unfair advantage over the competition and got caught (“getting caught” being the operative phrase), NCAA officials would get together and make another rule. Most of the rules were clarifications or addendums to existing rules, because people, being people, were always looking for the loopholes.

For example, there was a period when coaches contacting prospects had gotten so out of hand that the NCAA instituted a “dead period,” when coaches were not allowed to visit with prospects face-to-face. But there was nothing in the rule that said they couldn’t call prospects, and they called so often that some top prospects’ families had to get separate phone lines just to be able to make and receive routine family-related phone calls.

There was no rule against accidently running into a prospect. A coach couldn’t be penalized if he happened to be at the 7-Eleven pumping gas and the stud prospect happened to pull up at the same time. It was known as the “bump rule” – you could accidently bump into an athlete you were recruiting. Only then coaches took to “accidently” being at all sorts of places that athletes might show up. I know of a coach who hung out at the water fountain at a prospects’ local public gym, knowing the kid would at some point come get a drink.

Then there was the enterprising coach who combined the rule with the exception. He would drive to the prospects’ neighborhood, park his car across the street – so he wasn’t on the prospects’ family property – get out and call the prospect while leaning against his car. During the course of the conversation, the coach would get the prospect to look out the window where he’d see the coach. That was supposed to show how much this coach cared about this recruit.

And so, the NCAA had to keep adding more rules for every time smart coaches found a loophole. A lot of my friends said this was just coaches being smart – and it was, but these coaches also knew they were violating the spirit of the rule. They knew the intent of the law, and they figured a way around it.

I’d tell my friends in the NCAA that there really only needed to be one rule: don’t cheat. But it was just too tempting to parse what “cheat” actually meant.

Now they want the federal government to make actual federal laws to do what university presidents are afraid to do.

Some famous historian-philosopher once said, “More laws, less justice.” There is something to be said for that idea.

That got me to thinking about laws, and a remarkable phrase the Apostle Paul uses in his letter to the Galatians. He lists a series of characteristics he calls the “fruit of the Spirit” - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Then he says something interesting: “Against such things there is no law.”

I think most of us like the characteristics in Paul’s list, even if we’re not Christians. I’d say we’d all want our wives or husbands, friends, bosses or co-workers, to embody those traits (as I’m sure they’d like to see us do as well).

And who would pass a law against any of that? I don’t know any government that would outlaw patience. I can see an issue with impatience. If I’m at the bank and it’s closed, and I’m impatient so I break in and take some money – even if I leave a note saying “this is my account number; I just took what was mine” – the law is going to come after me. But not if I’m patient.

Being kind? Being gentle? Self-control? I can’t imagine who would even think to make those qualities illegal, punishable by fine or imprisonment.

Oh, you could cross a legal boundary with how you practice those traits. The Jewish Rabbis turned an already complicated 613 (more or less) Old Testament “Law of Moses” into thousands of interpretations, codicils, modifications and explanations that made it so complicated it was almost impossible to not break the law as, in their zeal, they interpreted it.

And then we have Jesus, who takes all those hundreds of words and breaks it down to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Sounds almost too simple, doesn’t it? Like “don’t cheat.” Yet, if you’ve actually tried to live that way, you realize just how difficult that can be, how we can’t help but find ourselves in situations where we say, “Yeah, but this is different.”

I recently heard about a lady in my community who is so conscious of not wanting to be even tempted to sin that she makes it a point to drive 5 miles per hour below the posted speed limit, so that she doesn’t accidently break the law.

That’s convicting. Not to say I’m going to adjust my driving, but I get her point.

And I’d hate to be stuck behind her on a one-lane road.

But in saying that, I’m showing my lack of patience. My frustration with being behind someone driving the speed limit – much less 5 mph slower – shows my lack of gentleness, kindness, goodness, maybe even of self-control … and the fruit of the spirit flies past me like a billboard on the interstate, acknowledged but only with a passing glance.

I had the pleasure of getting to spend a little time with John Paul, a successful race car driver who competed in IMSA and Trans-Am race back in the 1970s and ‘80s, winning the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring. His son, John Paul Jr., often raced with him and was successful on a variety of levels. Unfortunately, both men had serious issues outside of racing that led to well-documented trouble.

John Paul had a shop outside of Lawrenceville, Ga., where I worked at the time, where he built his race cars. One time, we got into a conversation about driving and he told me he would often drive from Lawrenceville, just north of Atlanta, to Daytona, Fla., in less than three hours, less than half the time it should take for a roughly 450-mile trip. But then, he would drive his own modified Porsche and might run 200 mph on the interstate because, he told me, “These interstates are made for high speeds and I’m qualified to drive at that speed.”

I asked him about state troopers, and he told me that when they saw what he was driving and how fast, they didn’t even try. If they did try to stop him, they couldn’t catch him.

The story reminded me of another lesson from another Paul, the Apostle, who said in 1 Corinthians, “All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable; all things are lawful, but not all things edify.”

In other words, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

But then, to paraphrase James Madison, if men were angels, no rules would be necessary. But we are not angels.

As many of us – including the NCAA - has found out, much to our chagrin.

Sounds of Silence

 

Thoughts on the Pope's reflections on AI

Pope Leo XIV – the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, the first American Pope - released what the Catholic Church calls first encyclical, entitled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

At roughly 42,300 words, the document apparently is essentially a warning of the risks and ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. I haven’t read it – I’m not Catholic, and have no particular allegiance to the Pope, and 42,300 words from him is daunting - but judging from the stories and synopsis I have read, that seems to be the main takeaway.

At first glance, talking about artificial intelligence may not seem to be exactly in the Pope – or the Church’s - wheelhouse. But I read an article recently by a lady named Avital Balwit, who is chief of staff to the CEO of Anthropic. This was published in The Free Press (thefp.com), an online site I frequent. In her article, she said there is an expression that AI (artificial intelligence) developers in California use in referring to their work: “Building God.” Balwit said the phrase is not completely serious. She writes that it “sounds wildly grandiose. No one I have met means it literally—nobody thinks they are making something supernatural or divine. To try to decode: The speaker is gesturing at how powerful this technology could become—even, eventually, functionally omniscient or omnipotent.”

So maybe the Pope should comment on the idea of “building god,” even if the phrase is not entirely serious.

It’s interesting in that this Pope took his name from Pope Leo XII, who served from 1878 to 1903, during the last half of the Industrial Revolution. World economies were going through radical changes, moving from farm to city, from handmade to machines, which led to mass migration to urban areas, and creating incredible amounts of wealth for a relative few industrialists, not to mention some radical political philosophies. Leo XII issued his own encyclical, known in English as Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. In it, like the current Leo, he addresses the fears and concerns of new technology.

Essentially, what I gather the current Pope wrote is that there is no turning back the clock on AI, but that we need to learn to use it appropriately – morally – and not let it rob us of our basic humanity.

Since he is the head of the Catholic church, it’s appropriate that he used two Biblical stories to teach from: the Tower of Babel (Genesis) and the Building of the Wall of Jerusalem (Nehemiah).

If you know the story of Babel, humans – who to this point all spoke a common language – decided to build a tower that “reaches to the heavens.” Their building was, for the time, revolutionary; the Bible says, “They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.” This tower was apparently real. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (484 – 425 BC) said the tower of Babel still stood in his day and he had seen it.

It’s not likely that they expected this tower to actually reach heaven, or else they’d have built it on a mountain, reducing the distance. Maybe they thought they could build a tower from which they could see heaven and observe what was going on, or see the whole earth.

But if you go back to the end of the story of the Flood, you see God commanded people to “increase in number and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Instead, they gathered together on a plain to build a great city, including this tower, in what would eventually become Babylon, near modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about 60 miles south of Baghdad (according to a quick Google search).

That seems to be an important part of the story, that this tower represented rebellion against God’s command to “fill the earth.”

Pope Leo compares this story of building with another construction story, that of the wall of Jerusalem. The children of Israel had been captured, years later, by the Babylonians and scattered throughout that empire. Sometime later, a group returned under the leadership of Nehemiah, and started rebuilding the wall to protect Jerusalem. While Babel is a tale of pride leading to ruin, the wall is a story of protection, of fulfilling God’s promise.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on so long about these two stories. But I think Pope Leo IV makes an interesting point.

If I remember my college class on computer programming correctly (this was the age of computer cards, or punch cards, that programmed early computers), this technology runs on language. In those days, the language was Fortran and COBOL and ALGOL. I was a journalism major, so don’t hold me to anything technical or mathematical.

Today, it seems our computers can communicate with each other across various programming languages fairly easily. We seem to have eliminated the problems of systems running on different languages that we had back in the 1970s.

The internet now has an incredible ability for humans to communicate with each other, to be in contact across oceans and continents, to send and receive messages and pictures and homemade movies with incredible speed and simplicity (if even I can do it).

It’s supposed to connect us. And certainly it does, to some extent.

It’s also entertaining us, which becomes a problem. Engineers work hard to keep us from being bored. Fly on an airplane, sit in a waiting room – shoot, observe a family riding in a car – and while you see people sitting next to each other, side-by-side, maybe even shoulders touching, they are more likely to be studying their phones that interacting with each other. They don’t talk. They don’t even sit and contemplate the world going by outside the window. They are entertained.

I know. I do it too.

Not everyone who used to sit side-by-side on airplanes or in waiting rooms or even on long car rides communicate with each other. Often these were done in silence.

But we’ve done away with silence, too. It’s as if we’re afraid of silence, of not having “anything to do.” We’re afraid of just having to think, to let our minds go wherever our minds might go, devoid of outside stimuli.

This isn’t new. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” Almost two centuries before Lewis, theologian/philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence!” 17^th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in Pensées, said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Silence is uncomfortable. As a recovering journalist, I learned that if I let the person I was interviewing finish an answer and then I didn’t say anything for a minute or so, the person would often then blurt out something imminently quotable, maybe even more truthful, because by and large humans can’t abide silence.

But we need silence. In Ecclesiastes 3, Solomon says there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak.” Research shows that even brief periods of silence can have measurable health benefits. A 2006 study published on Healthline found that a 2‑minute silence after music led to greater reductions in heart rate and blood pressure than listening to slow, relaxing music alone. According to elissagoodman.com, “Silence helps lower cortisol and adrenaline, shifting the body from “fight-or-flight” into a “rest and digest” state.” The Cleveland Clinic reported that “Calm, quiet moments can steady breathing and reduce muscle tension.” These studies are everywhere.

I grew up in a faith that stressed having a ‘’quiet time,” a time away from the distractions of life to be quiet and contemplate God. Jesus did it, frequently moving away from people – even from his disciples - who followed him. “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray’” (Matthew 26:36). “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).

But even in prayer, too often I can’t bear silence. I tend to start out talking to God, asking for things, petitioning for people, explaining what happened (Lewis writes, “the trouble is that what we call ‘asking God’s forgiveness’ very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses”) – as if God needs a daily briefing on my world and what I have done.

These days, I am trying to enter prayer by saying less. God already knows my heart. He knows what is going on. Oh, I still talk, but I want to spend a few moments being quiet, and maybe – just maybe – I’ll hear Him speak to me, reveal Himself to me.

Again, C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory admits he often approached his quiet time with a sense of timidity. As one writer put it, Lewis did so “not because he feared he wouldn’t meet God, but because he knew he would. If he wasn’t careful, God might maneuver past Lewis’s rote prayers. Then, in the silence, God might tell him to do something he’d rather not do, such as skip his extra morning cigarette, or, worse, tear up the sharply worded letter he was about to send to someone who’d been rude to him.” (How modern are Lewis’ warnings!)

Indeed, silence can change us.

But let me bring this back full circle, to the Pope and AI. Lest you think I am really smart, know I used some form of AI for this writing. I don’t know all these scripture references by heart, or all the quotes that I use. But I can simply put a phrase or idea into what I know as the “search engine,” and my research is often done for me. AI is indeed a tool we can put to use for good purpose.

The problem is if we use AI - the internet - to distract us from real life, or if we use AI or AI simulations to substitute for real flesh-and-blood relationships, it just might make us less human. But if we use new technology as a tool, it can give us more free time to actually develop real relationships, strengthen the ones we have, read and study more.

It might even make us more human.

It might even bring us closer to God.