Life Happens

Two things have happened this past week, one a source of sorrow and one a good thing.  For the first, I found out that a fellow blogger, the host of the group blog "Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization" had passed away in the last few weeks.  He had invited me to join them back in 2010, and I blogged on that site for that year, along with this blog.  I left because of family issues--it looked for a while like I would have to be taking care of my mother.  That changed, but I was busy and did not go back there.  Last year he emailed me, inviting me back.  The group was smaller--only three of us rather than the dozen or so we had in 2010.

He had emailed me in mid-January saying he and his wife both had come down with Covid--he said it was mild so far.  I checked back on the blog regularly, to see if he was back to writing--nothing.  Last week I tracked down the third remaining author, and she had just found out he had passed away.  Since he managed the postings and editing for the site, and was the owner of the URL, there probably is not much anyone can do to keep it going.  The site is still online, but probably only until the next fees come due.

I will miss our discussions.  I had been putting my posts on current politics over there.  Now I have nowhere but here for those.

The other happening was a happier event.  I was able to re-connect with an old boss and friend that I had worked for fifty years ago.  I had not seen him since the mid-'80s.  But I had done an online search and found his current address, and wrote him a letter.

At the time I met Ken, I was a senior in college, and working part-time.  I had just been laid off after Christmas from a job at a discount store in Cincinnati.  Somehow I got wind of a company hiring.  It turned out to be a new startup franchise company, cleaning office buildings at night.  I was the sixth person hired by the new company, and the second to last a full year.  After two years, I took a post as assistant manager of the Indianapolis franchise.  That did not work out--partly because of the local boss, partly because of problems in the franchise organization.

When I moved back to Cincinnati, Ken had left the organization too.  He helped me get a janitor service of my own off the ground--not with money, but with potential customers and suppliers that he knew.  I did that for twelve years, until I found my way into the home remodeling field.

But the big thing about Ken was that he modeled what it really meant to be a Christian in the business world.  It was not about having fish emblems or crosses on your vehicle or business cards.  It was not about going to the meetings of the Christian Business Mens' Committee or similar organizations.  It was about how you treated your employees and your customers.  One of my earliest posts here, from April 2007, was "Authority and Respect," about the difference between the temporary respect that comes with a position compared to the respect earned by good relations with others.  That was one of my most important lessons from Ken.  He never asked anyone to work harder than he did.  He was not afraid to get his own hands dirty.  He knew my job and could do it better than I could.  His customers respected him because his word was good.  His employees respected him because he treated them as well as he could.

He also taught me some basics about running a business.  Back then there were no cell phones, and no such thing as voice mail.  His rule was, if someone calls you on business, you get back to them within twenty-four hours.  Years later, after I moved from Cincinnati to Dearborn County, IN, it seemed I was the only contractor in the county who always returned calls.  He would not use an answering machine--he said people want to talk to a real person, not a recording.  (I still think the modern computerized phone systems are the dumbest thing American business has ever done!)

Anyway, I thought about what I had learned from him all those years ago, and how it had helped me ever since.  I managed to track down his current address, and I wrote a letter to tell him how what I learned from him had helped me, and that I still appreciated it.  I put my current email and cell phone number at the bottom.  Yesterday, he called me.  He was touched that I still appreciated what I learned from him.  We caught up on each other's families, where we are now, and other things.  I think we both enjoyed the talk.  I may find an excuse to go visit him later this year.

So, some sadness, and some joy.  Not a bad week at that.

How Much Faith Do You Have?

Recently a friend recommended a book to me--"I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist" by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek.  I managed to borrow it from the local library and read it.  Many of the arguments presented in the book were things I had seen before, but never all in one place.  I had been introduced to both C. S. Lewis and Francis A. Schaeffer when I was in Bible college, and had read other works on apologetics back then.  But I had not read much recently in that field.

One of the major problems in modern higher education is the narrow focus on a limited area.  There's an old definition of a high level scholar as someone who studies more and more about less and less until he reaches the point where he knows almost everything--about almost nothing! 

And there have been some once-major topics that have been ignored now for many years.  One principal one is Logic.  This was once taught to most students--it was considered an important part of education.  Now the only exposure to it is in math classes.   The problem with that is, while mathematics uses some logic, it does not use all of it.  And teaching only math does not prepare a student to deal with bad arguments.  Here's an example:  I was hearing the idea in high school (back in the late '60s) that our thoughts are just the results of chemical and biological reactions in our brains.  And what follows from that is that there is nothing more than that involved in our thinking.  Well, one basic principle of traditional logic is that any line of argument that undercuts the validity of human reason is automatically invalid--because you are trying to use human reason to say there is no such thing as human reason!  If what you are saying to me is only the result of random chemical reactions in your brain...why should I listen to you?

One sad truth is that the typical modern scientist does not even know the limits of his field.  Speculation about the origins of the universe used to be considered part of the field of Cosmology--and it was regarded as a part of Philosophy.  Now the scientist--including some of the big names in the field--does not even notice when he strays out of his field and into philosophy, because he never really studied any of it--it wasn't required for his science degrees!

For years there has been all sorts of speculation about life on earth being brought here by aliens--and the people saying it do not realize that is just kicking the can down the road.  So where did the aliens come from?  Who created them?

Another idea popular these days is that we live in some sort of computer simulation.  To me, that's simply another Creation myth.  If this is a simulation, then who created the computer?  In the past I have read the Creation myths of the Greeks, Vikings, Babylonians, Egyptians, and others, including some Native American stories.  The Creation story in Genesis is simpler, less extravagant, and more sensible.  If you are bothered by the Genesis account of Methuselah living 969 years, the Babylonian King Lists claimed that their earliest rulers lived for 10,000 years and more!

One of the basic principles of modern science is Uniformity of Natural Causes.  This means that the natural processes we see today have always worked throughout history in the same way, and at the same rate.  And atheistic scientists also believe the universe is a closed system, with no God to intervene.  The catch with this principle is that it is an assumption--it has never been proven; and by its very nature it cannot be proven!  There were no scientists hanging around during the Big Bang to measure the reactions and their results, and write it all down.  They can observe the reactions and rates in the present; but they have only been doing that for the last few hundred years.  They think they can trace the results of the Big Bang in the movements of stars and galaxies--but they have only been doing it for a short period of history.  The vast majority of what they say is an interpretation--what if it is a wrong interpretation?  The assumptions people take into interpreting physical events do influence their interpretations.  And sometimes they are wrong.

Here's an example from modern history, one that I am familiar with because of my being on the autism spectrum.  The first doctors in the US to notice and study autism, back in the 1940s, decided it must be caused by environmental factors.  In fact, Leo Kanner, the first doctor in the US to write about it (and name it) thought it was caused by mothers who were not affectionate enough.  That assumption of his drove most of the care and treatment of autism in this country until the 1980s--and still pops up among some psychiatrists today.  In contrast, Hans Asperger, working in Vienna in the 1940s, guessed it was genetic--because he noticed the parents of the children he was working with had some of the same traits as the children.  But Asperger's writings about his studies were not translated into English until the 1980s.  Now it is known that autism is primarily genetic--you get it from your parents!  The CDC has a section on autism on its website, that I have seen, that estimates autism is 70-80% genetic.  That seems to be the conservative estimate--I have seen mentions of an Italian study that came up at 95%!

It is worth remembering that when Charles Darwin published his book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, nothing was known about heredity and genetics in the universities in Britain or the US.  Gregor Mendl's studies about heredity were not published until later.  Microscopes were still quite primitive compared to what they are now.  Darwin had no way to know how complex even a single-celled creature is, as shown by our modern equipment.  An awful lot of his work, and of those who came after him, was based on pure assumptions, including that law of Uniformity of Natural Causes (in a Closed System) that I mentioned earlier.  Before the development of nuclear science that led to the use of Carbon-14 dating, and use of other isotopes for longer periods and other materials, the joke was that geologists used to date rock formations by the fossils found in them, and paleontologists dated fossils by the rocks they were found in!  Even to this day, there is a lot of interpretation involved in scientific work.

So remember, there is no such thing as "settled science."  It can always change, sometimes unexpectedly.  And there are some things it simply cannot account for or explain.

A Possible Cause of Church Decline

A couple of weeks ago I ended up making two comments on an opinion article at World Magazine on Populism.  I may end up making a post at Aleksandreia.com on the political aspects of that discussion.  But I want to go into some issues related to that discussion that affect the church in the US.

In recent weeks I have seen reports about a study showing that membership in religious organizations in the US has dropped below 50% for the first time since such things were recorded.  And in recent years, my own adult children have noted that the gap between blue-collar workers and white-collar workers has widened over the years, compared to when I was growing up.  And I strongly suspect that what the churches are experiencing is mostly the loss of the blue-collar people.  I also suspect strongly that the loss is the fault of the church leadership.  Let's look into that.

In 1962 my parents bought a brand-new house in a rapidly-growing suburb on the north side of Cincinnati Ohio.  I was 12 years old at the time.  We moved there from a rural area east of the city--my older sister had married a boy there and remained out there.  My parents bought that house for $16,000.  It wasn't a mansion; it would be considered small by today's standards--probably in the 1000-1200 square foot range, with a one-car attached garage.  My father was an hourly employee at a Ford Motor Co. factory less than ten miles away.

In those days, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers still largely lived in the same neighborhoods, mostly shopped at the same stores, sent their children to the same schools, and often attended the same churches.  At the Church of Christ we attended, there were both blue-collar and white-collar workers among the elders and deacons.  Even among my schoolmates and the boys in my Scout troop, if their fathers were white-collar workers, they were usually the first in their families to attend college (many of them through the GI Bill after WWII).

And those veterans and GI college grads, along with their blue-collar neighbors, had mostly grown up in a society where college was not common--in most places, the only people around them with a college education were doctors, lawyers, preachers and school teachers.  College just was not that big a thing for most people before WWII.  It was an upper-class thing, not for ordinary folks.

Even in the '70s, as I was becoming an adult, marrying, starting a family and starting a business, the gap was not that big.  In 1977, we bought our first house, a run-down place in an older Cincinnati neighborhood, for $17,000.  Two years later we had it fixed up, sold it for $25,000, and bought another run-down house in another neighborhood.  And at that time, you could still buy a brand-new house for $30,000 or less.

The inflation of the late 1970s and early '80s hit the cost of housing hard, and started a spiral of costs that continues to this day.  Mortgage rates rose.  Expectations rose, too.  Where once families mostly had one car, now they had two, and expected a two-car garage for their house--until they wanted a three-car.  One bathroom in a house was no longer enough--there had to be one bathroom for the kids, and a "master-suite" with its own bath and walk-in closet for the parents.  There was also an increase in local regulations on housing, also--both government building codes and homeowners' associations added rules that added to the cost of housing.  

In 1990 and '91 I built a house for my family.  We found a plan we liked--but I had to alter it because of the rules of the homeowner's association.  It was a two-story, 1500 square foot house, and would have a full basement.  But to get it approved we had to enlarge it--because the HOA insisted all houses had to have at least 900 square feet on the ground floor.  They would approve a 950 sq ft ranch, but not a 1500 sq ft two-story!  So I revised the plans to get it up to 928 square feet per floor.  Eight years later we sold it--for $125,000.  (Our second rehab had sold for $60,000.)

The rise in housing costs did a lot to separate the working populations.  The higher-paid people could afford the higher costs; the lower-paid, not so much.  They were stuck in the run-down sections.  Over time, that separated the blue-collar and white-collar people more and more.  Now their kids didn't go to the same schools, and often the parents did not shop at the same stores.

There was another factor in this that affected the churches.  And I have seen this even with some pastors that I knew in college.  There had always been some problems with pastors showing favoritism to the wealthier members of their congregations.  But as more and more of their congregants were college grads, that became more pronounced.  Some of the older pastors I have known were not like that.  They treated all their members the same.  But the younger pastors, of my generation and later, seemed to have more trouble relating to people who were blue-collar--and less inclination to try.

If someone was to try to analyze the decline in church membership, I suspect that they would find a large part of it is the loss of the blue-collar demographic.  I am not saying that is the only cause; but I do think it is part.  If a leader of the church is not welcoming to people he perceives as being socially inferior, sooner or later, those people will get the idea, and quit showing up.

I know there are some churches that are not so uppity.  Chris Arnade, in his book "Dignity" was impressed by the churches he saw in the run-down neighborhoods that tried to minister to the poor around them--so impressed with them, and the results he saw of their work, that during the time he wrote the book he shifted from atheist to agnostic (and since then he has returned to the Catholic church he grew up in).  But many of the churches in this country do little to reach the less affluent.

The best church I was ever part of, a Vineyard in Cincinnati, (on the north side, just a few miles east of where I grew up), made an official policy to be welcome to all.  They also spent a lot of money to minister to all, including the poorer neighborhoods.  They had the largest outreach to the poor I have ever seen in any church--not only a food pantry (a big one) but also clothing, basic medical care, some job training, and more.  But they were rare among churches.  And people flocked to their services--in twenty years they went from 35 people to 6,000, and planted more than three dozen other churches besides.

But sadly, they are an exception among modern churches.  The mainline Protestant denominatons--the so-called "Seven Sisters" (Episcopals, Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, United Church of Christ, American Baptists, Presbyterian Church USA, and Disciples of Christ) have been in decline for over 60 years.  The Episcopalians, for instance, have half the number of members they had in the 1960s--while the US population has doubled.  The rest of the Seven are not much better off.  The Methodists are looking at a liberal-conservative split in the next year or so.

But conservative denominations are mostly not much better off--their growth has slowed or even stopped.  The Southern Baptists are having to deal with the problem of sexual abuse by their pastors and other prominent members; some of the top brass are resisting, but the members are getting fed up.  Others are having problems, too.

I think the religious scene in this country is changing.  What will take shape is to be seen, and whether it will be good or bad in the long term.

I mentioned a discussion I was in on World Magazine's website in the start of this post.  In my second comment I ended with a question to the others (a question I once posed to the founder of the magazine in an email a few years ago).  Here's the question:  At the congregation you attend, on any given Sunday, are there any blue-collar people in the group?  And do you ever talk to any of them?

The truth is, there are more people in this country without college degrees than with them.  When the chips are down, there are more blue-collar workers than white-collar.  And the executives and management people are a minority, not a majority.  But if the local church leadership mostly writes off the majority of the people, it is no wonder that church attendance declines.