4S: Prophecy

Prophet

John Piper has always been one of my favorite preachers, and I find him far more winsome and honest than the likes of Craig. He has a sort of vulnerability that draws you in and makes you think he isn’t trying to sell you a line but is earnestly seeking the same way you are.

In this week’s podcast, I cover a talk he did on the subject of prophecy, where that self-deprecating vulnerability was on display. He said the one thing he could have that made me lean forward to listen to what he had to say. He admitted that he was also unsure about prophecy. Unlike a lot of people in his position who might say a thing like that just to get you on their side, I think he actually meant it. I respond positively to that sort of epistemic humility.

To be sure, he had some rather peculiar notions about prophecy. But I grant him the grace of the equally unsure. Back in my preacher days, I didn’t consider myself an expert on the subject either. My father, on the other hand, was an expert on the minor prophets. That was his major focus of study at seminary.

I read the minor prophets but never took to them like my father did. I don’t think he liked them because of anything to do with what we think of as prophecy. I think he saw them as the cowboys of the holy writ. We were very much into westerns. Those heroes had a certain brand of swagger about them. I suspect he thought the minor prophets had a bit of that flavor. For me, it never took.

While being at the deep end of the kook theological pool, I can’t help but come back to prophecy every year or so. It is perhaps the single most important subject for Christians, whether or not they realize it. That is because when it comes to explaining why anyone should consider the Bible to be a holy book, it always comes down to prophecy. There is no way to validate the Bible as a magic book of some kind or other without appeal to prophecy. They all do it eventually. So one can never be quite done with the topic.

Sure, I used to appeal to prophecy when I was a Christian just as Christians do now. But I ultimately couldn’t maintain it. There are far too many questions that the inquiring mind can’t let go. The answers to these questions are far too sparse, and when attempted, far too bad. So while I can’t understand how the thinking Christian can hold on to the idea that biblical prophecy is anything special, I at least want them to understand why I, and others like me don’t. Into the rabbit hole we go:

Too many definitions

When a word has too many definitions, the meaning of it becomes less clear. Prophecy is an overloaded word that means too much. When a word can mean everything, it no longer means anything. Here are three common ways the word is used by people of faith:

1. A predictor of future events
2. Having knowledge of things one could not have by natural means
3. One who authoritatively speaks for god

There could be more definitions than these. But these are sufficient for the point I am making. I find that believers do a lot of context switching with this word, often in the same paragraph. So it can be hard to keep up. Also, the context is different from one person to another. You cannot assume that the person you are talking to about prophecy means the same thing as the last person with whom you engaged on the matter.

If I had to guess, I would say that the most common understanding of the word is something akin to fortune telling. It is a prediction of the future. That is certainly one of the strong definitions of the word as presented by the bible. You can know that a prophet is not speaking for god if they make a prediction that doesn’t come true. Not only is that a false prophet, but one that will face retributive death.

However, the way prophecy was handled in the bible suggests something a bit less. It seems to have mostly come down to warnings rather than predictions. If you don’t straighten up and fly right, god is gonna get you! Once a prophet was established as a prophet, they could make statements like that in an authoritative way.

Verification of a prophet

That leaves the question of how they became established in the first place and who actually recognized them as authoritative. I suspect the way a prophet became established then is much the way they become established today. They do it via some kind of magic. They accurately foretell the future or they do some kind of miracle that could only come from god.

At that point, they could speak for god much the way preachers do today. Preachers get up in front of audiences and teach gods will to people. In doing so, they are speaking for god, at least informally. They are validated by their congregation, at least until the congregation decides to fire them. For Hebrew prophets, it was less clear, they were accepted as authoritative by certain communities. But it seems they all died badly. So they clearly were not considered authoritative by the people who killed them.

A historian can only say that a person was regarded as a prophet by some. They could not say that a person actually was a prophet. As an outsider, I am not sure why I should care of some handful of people from a very long time ago and a place way over there considered Isaiah some kind of oracle. That is meaningless to me.

It also doesn’t matter if he was some kind of oracle. Let’s say he spoke for a supernatural power and made some accurate predictions. I am told by that same book that such could be done by spirits. How can we determine that the Old Testament prophets were not empowered by demonic forces to lead people to a false messiah? We don’t and can’t know. When I have pointed out to people that Sathya Sai Baba raised the dead at least twice, they say that it doesn’t matter if he did because it would have been by the power of demons.

The lack of reliable a way to verify that a person is speaking for god is even worse in the New Testament and into the current age. When speaking of ancient prophets, we can wrap them in mystery and ancient documents and mythology. We can’t really do that for contemporary prophets. We need something more concrete as mythology and a cloak of mystery are not available. A prophet actually has to prove herself in some way.

How did Paul do it? We can’t be sure. Did he do magic to prove he was from god? I don’t believe that was his origin story. His power seemed to come from a powerful testimony of a changed life due to an overwhelming encounter with god. So it is today. And sure, there was also magic.

Most people who call themselves Christian prophets do not do so on the basis that they have raised dead people. It is more to do with a powerful testimony of an encounter with god. It is all about the calling, and whether or not they can get enough people to believe them. Paul was very good at getting enough people to believe his claims. He based it largely on his redefinition of what it meant to be an apostle. Paul managed to change it in such a way that he could sell people on the idea that he was one. Much the same happens today. It is more about the art of the sell.

For my part, there is simply no way for anyone to validate their claim to the title of apostle, prophet, or even pastor. There is no way to verify whether a person was called by god or called by their own desire and ambition. If I can’t determine validity for today’s prophets, there is no way I could do it for yesterday’s prophets.

Circular reasoning

John Piper outlined the differences between Old Testament prophets and New Testament prophets. To my ear, it all came down to question begging and circular reasoning. How do we know that the Bible is truly the word of god? Prophecy. How do we know that prophets are speaking the word of god? Bible. It doesn’t get more circular than that.

If Christians want to claim that the validation of a prophet is that what they say is consistent with the Bible, then they can’t claim that the Bible is validated because of prophecy. They are going to have to let one of those go. If prophecy is to be validated based on predictions being fulfilled, then there has to be a lot of clarification of that criteria.

• First, everyone who is claiming to speak for god must do so by first making a prophetic prediction that comes true. As we all know, that is simply not how it is done. Since that is not how most people gain the right to speak for god today, the criteria of accurate predictions is already dead.

• If we are continuing with the predictions model, the prediction must be intentional and clear.

• Predictions must be specific enough so that there is only one way to fulfill them. And that fulfillment must be obvious.

• Prediction fulfillment must be verifiable in the lifetime of the audience. Otherwise, that person could never be considered a prophet by the people they are prophesying to. This means that for verification purposes, prophecy must be very near-term.

Truth is not verification

As was brought up in the comments, prophecy doesn’t have to come true to be of god. This is why I described Old Testament prophecy as warnings rather than predictions. Warnings and threats never have to come to fruition to be valid. The one making the warning can always say they decided to show mercy instead, or that the warning was conditional based on changed behavior. You can never invalidate a warning because the ultimate threat was not fulfilled. That is just how warnings and threats work.

With this in mind, Piper made a grave error when he recounted the story of the woman who prophesies that his wife would die while bearing a daughter. While that didn’t happen, the prophecy cannot be invalidated even by biblical standards. It might have been a prophetic warning to accomplish the goal of getting Piper to humble himself and cry out to god. Maybe he wasn’t doing enough of that at that time. So the prophecy, indeed, brought him to his knees and he did, indeed, cry out to god. Therefore, god relented, spared Piper’s wife, and granted him with a son. You see, not a failed prophecy at all.

That is why truth (fulfillment of the prophecy) is no validation anymore than the lack of fulfillment can falsify the claim or claimant. Notice the context shift. Piper was thinking of prophecy as future-casting while the woman was thinking of it as a warning from god with an unspoken conditional. In this way, prophecy is just like all the other extraordinary Christian claims: It can never be falsified.

But they were prophets

Early in the show, Piper made a big deal about how Jesus didn’t appoint prophets, but apostles. We can see this in Luke 6. But I must push back against that notion. They were prophets in all but name. Just ask yourself what the difference was between prophets and apostles. You will find almost nothing to say.

• Prophets were chosen by god. So were apostles.

• Prophets had authority that wasn’t to be tested. So did apostles.

• Prophets occasionally made predictions. So did apostles.

• Prophets spoke for god and could give messages and warnings from god that couldn’t be validated by any means. So did apostles.

• Prophets usually came to a bad end. So did apostles.

In the same way that Jesus was called Emanuel, the apostles were prophets. It gets worse:

The office of prophet

And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers Eph. 4:11

You might be tempted to use this passage to show a distinct difference between apostle and prophet. But I believe that would be misguided. Even if there were a difference, nothing stops a person from having a dual role. It could ever be argued that the role of prophet is a subset of what it means to be an apostle. No one would argue that the apostles were not teachers because this passage separates the roles.

What makes this passage bad for prophecy is that it seems to be assuming that there were people in the church who had the gift. Based on how Paul redefined apostle, there is no need to assume that was an exclusive title either. Indeed, many church leaders today are called apostles. You can’t possibly say they aren’t.

Therefore, we have to do something with the office of prophet. It was a named office. The problem is that it is never given a description of how it operates, or a way to determine who is or is not a prophet. It is an office with a name, but is lacking anything of use. We are left to decide for ourselves what it means.

Conclusion: The Jews beg to differ

I finish where I often do when this topic comes up: The Jews would beg to differ. If you believe the Hebrew Scriptures are prophesying the Christian, triune god, I know a few rabbis who would like to have a word with you. This is going to be true for the vast majority of Jewish scholars who ever lived and who will ever live. It is one of the least controversial things I can say. For the most part, Jews don’t believe their scriptures are pointing to Jesus.

The only thing a Christian can say to this (and they have) is that the Jews neither know or understand their own scriptures. So thorough has been the Christian appropriation of Jewish text, I strongly believe that most Christians have forgotten, if they ever knew, that the fat part of their bible preceding Matthew is Hebrew Scriptures. They are the originators. We are the interlopers.

But Christians do not tend to take into account the studied opinion of religious, Jewish scholars. This might have to do with the bias of the New Testament writers, especially the gospels. Jewish scholars were the villains of the story almost from the beginning. They were the fools who rejected and ultimately killed the immortal god. It only makes sense that Christians generally couldn’t care less about what religious Jewish teachers think about messianic prophecy. The only Jewish scholars they tend to cite are those in the diminishing minority that happen to agree with them.

At some point, Paul, the former religious Jew, redefined just about everything in the Hebrew Scriptures to make his case. He had to sell it because almost no one saw it the way he did until he explained it. Even so, he had to resort to other means to convince people. It was just a matter of him pointing out the correct reading. It was also about his testimony: the fact that he convinced a lot of people that he saw god and had a conversation with him. Where Paul can’t twist a Hebrew text into the pretzel he needs, he pulls out the trump card that says, God told me in our private conversations. I received it from the lord… That sort of thing.

Prophecy works exactly the same way today. It has less to do with any real magic and more to do with how good of a story you can tell and how strong your testimony is and how many people you can get to swallow it whole. That was prophecy then and it is prophecy now. I was once in the thrall of it. But now, thankfully, I’m out.

See you in the comments…

4S: Why I hate the Santa

Why I Hate the Santa

I must have been a weird kid because I never really liked the idea of Santa Claus. I knew my parents were the ones buying the gifts and putting them on layaway and picking them up from the store and the works. I always knew that there was a limit to the gifts I could expect because there was a limit (a hard limit) to the family budget. We were kind of poor. So as a result, Santa was kind of poor. That’s life as a poor kid. Fantasies about rich Santa were a luxury we didn’t really have.

That said, I loved all the pageantry surrounding Christmas. I loved the lights, the trees, and all the decorations. I loved the wrapped presents and the hopeful anticipation of it all. I even came to love the much-needed infusion of socks and underwear that was the mainstay of our gifts. That’s not to say that we never got any nice things here and there. Every year, there was at least one thing. The rest was filler, like the summer sausage gift boxes with the one thing you really want and the rest being filler.

Thing is, I was never bitter about what I did or didn’t get. My older brothers often got nicer things. Being the youngest of three does have a few downsides. But all in all, I was pretty okay with Christmas despite the cognitive dissonance of our religion sometimes teaching that celebrating Christmas was a sin. Never mind all that. It has nothing to do with why I hate Santa. At least, I don’t think it does. Here are a few things that do:

But it’s a lie

I took my religion seriously even as a young kid. It mattered to me. I was earnest in a way that only kids can be. They have no pressing issues to eat up their time and attention. So they can super-serve an idea like no one else. So I super-served my faith. I knew how big of a deal lying was. So one of the hardest things for me to deal with was how even Christians were a part of the great collusion to lie to kids about where their gifts really come from.

Primarily, all good things come from god. Secondarily, they came from your parents, as well as friends and other members of your family. There was no Santa. And every year some kid didn’t know that was a year they would be praying to the wrong source and thanking the wrong people for their joyous occasion. How was it possible that even Christians were in on this?

Worse, I had to become a part of the lie. I wasn’t allowed to liberate children from this pernicious fantasy. On the contrary, I was expected to perpetuate it. I was probably going to hell because of that damned Santa creature. For a long time, I struggled with the idea of lying. Sometimes, it was okay. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Theologically speaking, I still can’t.

Manipulative

Once you wrap your mind around the fact that Santa is a lie, all manner of new insights open themselves to you. One of the biggest of the new insights is the discovery of why the lie is so important. What exactly is it adults are trying to do with this deception?

When you ask it that way, the answer is obvious. They are trying to manipulate you. They are controlling you by controlling what you know and believe.

He knows when you are sleeping…

How creepy is that? Who is this dude who can look into my bedroom and not just know when I’m in bed, but when I’m sleeping? What exactly is he doing with that information?

He knows when you’re awake

Maybe you wake up in the middle of the night and get away with a little mischief your parents didn’t catch. But you can’t get away from the all-seeing eye of Santa. He knows…

He knows when you’ve been bad or good. So be good…

And there it is. You might think you are getting away with something. But you aren’t. He absolutely knows when you’ve been bad. He has a list, don’t you know? He’s checking it twice, which is weird for someone with such powers. Does he think he might miss something? But at the end of the day, you had better be good, and not at all for the sake of being good, but to avoid the vague threat of what will happen if you aren’t. That is manipulation writ large.

The thing about manipulation is once it has been identified as such, it loses its power. A good manipulator has to be subtle. As in sales, it is best to let the mark (I mean customer) think the sale was his idea. You didn’t get one over on him; he got one over on you. But the moment he recognizes you tightening the screws, he’s out. And you’re out of a sale. That is a manipulation fail.

Once I realized that these stories were all about trying to scare me into good behavior, it was over. Lying to me to make me dance to your tune was the death blow of trust. Any adult that would smile at me and lie to my face to try to get me to do something was on my naughty list. I had some early trust issues. Turns out that was probably a good thing.

Too much like god

Quick question: according to the stories Christians approve of, where did Santa get his powers? You see, I found it a little unsettling that this human could wield the power of god without any reference to god. And surely it had to be god. After all, who else would have that kind of juice?

Santa’s power was equivalent to hearing and answering prayers. Who does that sound like to you? He also had the power to reward and punish (by withholding reward). Satan can’t do that. He was the master of space and time and could bend both to his will. He could talk to animals. He could fly and do the most amazing miracles, even being in multiple places at once. Did I mention that he knows when every person on Earth is sleeping and awake? Yeah, that’s god, or something a lot like god.

I remember the first time I cajoled someone into trying to answer this question about Santa’s powers. The answer was something like, he works for god. A slightly better answer is that he was not human at all, but one of god’s angels. But if that was remotely true, where is he in the Bible? Surely, he didn’t fly under the radar such that no biblical writer knew about him. Maybe he didn’t get his commission until after the Bible was finished? At that point, we’re just done. Why bother with the charade any longer?

However, it did leave me with a lingering, nagging thought: If Christians could make up one god-like figure with all of these attributes, they could make up others, including the god I still believed in. This Santa was not a helper of any god I served; he was a threat.

Santa is us

As I grew into my young adulthood, I encountered yet another issue I had with the Santa myth. I was expected to be Santa. That has got to be the worst-case scenario for anyone expecting something good from Santa. As a child, he was manipulation. As an adult, he became a guilt trip.

I got involved with churches that went all out on the Christmas nonsense and that also was involved with a lot of charities in the local work. That is something I really didn’t have a lot of experience with as a kid because that version of my denomination did not do much of that sort of thing.

But as I got older, I had the opportunity to do things with Toys for Tots and other such programs. We delivered a lot of presents to one of the local orphanages. We also did caroling and that sort of thing to bring all that Christmas cheer. I was constantly reminded that if we didn’t do this, all those kids would go without Christmas. So it somehow became my responsibility to deliver Christmas to the less fortunate.

I didn’t mind doing it, so that is not what I am complaining about. There were actually two things that gave me a very uncomfortable feeling about it all:

1. What about the kids we couldn’t visit? What about all the kids that fell through the cracks and had no charity-minded groups to bring a truckload of gifts to? They also have to fit into the Santa story. And where they fit are the kids on the naughty list. They must be naughty, otherwise, Santa would have brought them gifts. The whole tradition made naughty listers of every poor kid on the planet. If we had to pretend the Santa story is meaningful, then we also had to wrestle with that aspect of it.

2. This overflow of peace and goodwill toward men was a one-day affair. Should kids in unfortunate circumstances only get one toy (for less than $20) a year? Is that the way this works? Do we care about their miserable lives the following month? Do we follow up in any meaningful way? Or is it just for the holidays? I hated the message that we care about you today but not tomorrow.

As much as I enjoyed volunteering, I hated the Santa-wrapped bullshit that came with it. And no, I was never really in a position to help a lot of kids in difficult circumstances. And I didn’t have the resources to do any meaningful follow-up. That said, I was a foster parent once upon a time and I have also taken in random strangers into my household who were in obvious and desperate need. That sort of thing is not easy and not without risk. I never felt like I was doing enough, and still don’t. It can never be enough.

My point is that when someone like me has to become someone like Santa, the system falls apart in catastrophic ways.

Conclusion: We don’t need Santa

I’m done with fantasies about ill-defined gods and their ill-defined powers to do ill-defined harm and ill-defined goods to the people who displease or please them. What a waste of a life that seems to me. Spend your 120 years however you like. But Santa and his boss will not be able to claim much more of mine.

But it is not just that. Santa is not just a waste of time because he is potentially harmful. He is a waste because he isn’t needed, and never was. If I’m Santa, then he’s not needed. Heck! I’m not even needed. The kids in the orphanages will do better by sending their Christmas wishlist to all the local churches who are able to fill them all with a single special collection. Santa isn’t needed.

If parents want to reward their good kids with rich gifts, more power to them. Santa isn’t needed for that. And the kids can learn to thank their parents more often. If poor families want to feel bad about their lot in life without thinking they must have done something wrong, Santa isn’t needed for that either.

If parents need that kind of manipulation to keep their kids in line, I question the quality of the parenting while recognizing how hard a job it is. There is no shame in not being particularly good at it. But parents can learn better behavior just like the children they are trying their best to raise. And Santa is certainly not needed for any of that.

You know who else is not needed for any of that? Santa’s boss.

And that’s the view from the skeptic.

David Johnson

4S: Even the best Christian arguments…

4S: Nihilism and Meaning part 2

Purpose

Full disclosure: I have no idea what Christians mean when they talk about meaning. My intuition is that what they are usually talking about is having a sense of purpose. Meaning, value, purpose, and function often get conflated. But I believe that purpose is the idea most Christians are trying to convey.

As for myself, I lean toward existentialism. There is no ultimate meaning or purpose to anything or anyone. That means that we can assign our own (small p) purposes. Further, such purpose cannot be authoritatively assigned by one person for another.

If we want to be more philosophical, we might try teleology. Personally, I believe that teleology is as false and fruitless a study as godology. When you really think about it, there is no way to grant the concept of purpose without granting some kind of god or purpose-giver. If an atheist and a Christian find themselves agreeing on the subject of purpose, it is because the atheist does not actually understand what the Christian is implying by the word. That seems like a good place to begin:

Giver of purpose

For purpose to exist, someone must assign it. Purpose is not an intrinsic quality of a thing. It is an assigned quality. The giver of purpose is the one who made the thing in question. It is the essence of the thing, again, as assigned by the maker. Examples include things like knives, obviously for cutting, chairs, obviously for sitting, and boots, obviously for walking. After all, no one would mistake boots as things made for sitting or cutting.

You might recognize a resemblance to the watchmaker argument. If there is a watch, we can deduce that there must have been a watchmaker. That is because watches don’t just construct themselves. This idea is extrapolated to the universe. If a watch has a maker, the universe must have a maker. If something is so clearly made for cutting, it must have the purpose of cutting assigned by a giver of purpose.

While it is true that everyday consumable objects were made by someone for a purpose, the assigned purpose means little to the person who ends up owning the product. A gun initially made for hunting deer turns out to also be pretty good at killing school children. Depending on its size and shape, it might also be really good at pounding nails. So what is the purpose of that particular gun?

We can take the idea of purpose to another level that better shows the problem with the concept. What are the constituent components of a gun? Frankly, I have no idea. But let’s pretend they include metal made from some kind of ore, wood from some old tree, and demon’s tears. Surely, there must be demon’s tears in guns.

Can we really say that the purpose of the tree that contributed the wood was to someday produce the butt of a gun? Perhaps that tree was planted by someone as a celebration of life. How is it that something purposed for life could also be purposed for death, or the pounding of nails?

What is obvious is that the raw materials that were selected to make an item didn’t have any such ultimate purpose in mind. You would have to suggest that the entire big bang was banged in exactly the way it was so that the right molecules would be in place to form that tree that would be harvested for the butt of that gun that mowed down seven school kids. A big bang indeed.

Things go from purpose to purpose. Your body could end up being fertilizer that grows a crop that saves a life. Does that mean your ultimate purpose is to be food? If a vegetarian eats food that was grown from fertilizer that used to be meat, does that count against them? Never mind. Anyway…

The giver of a particular purpose of a particular thing does not follow the use of that thing and its materials. The one who crafted the metal baseball bat never considered the product of his hand would live most of its existence as a TV antenna. All of this is to say that the only giver of purpose that matters is the one who owns the object at the time.

Ultimate purpose

There is purpose. Then there’s ultimate purpose. When you hear this terminology from a Christian, don’t just pass it off as them being hyperbolic. It actually means something important. It is what I call capital P purpose. That is the sort of purpose in which I don’t believe. Small p purpose is the kind we give ourselves. That is the kind Christians tend to discount.

If small p purpose is the only kind that exists, then we are the ultimate purpose giver and this wouldn’t work as an apologetic. That is why only large P purpose matters to them in conversations with skeptics. They are interested in the kind of purpose that only the creator of the universe can assign. But it still leaves me wondering what they mean by ultimate purpose.

As we have already noted, a thing can have multiple purposes over the course of its existence. But can a thing have multiple ultimate purposes? The very notion seems to make a mockery out of the idea of ultimate. It would be like calling god the ultimate being, except for all those other ultimate beings. It is therefore more than a little confusing when Christians reveal our ultimate purpose, and then in the space of a few minutes, reveal a different one as if unaware of what they are saying.

It is also confusing when you listen to sermon after sermon, as I did before doing this article, and hearing different preachers deliver different ultimate purposes. You would be surprised at how many there are. Since I never see them called on this contradictory messaging, I have come to the conclusion that the actual purpose is not that important to them. What is important is that the purpose comes from god and that He is the one who ultimately provides value, meaning, and purpose.

The unbearable burden of a purposeless life

To be clear, I do acknowledge the importance of having a sense of purpose, at least to some people. The feeling of purposelessness leads to a feeling of worthlessness. And that leans into depression and oppressing darkness from which many can never escape. For them, purpose is not a speculative, philosophical consideration; it is life and death.

But that can be said of a lot of things. The fact that it is important to many humans does not mean that it is real. Some people have a yearning to be loved in such a way that, without it, they would also spiral into that inescapable darkness. Some people are driven to succeed in some way that, without it, they would also be driven into that cold, eternal night.

The conceit of the Christian is that they are in possession of the ultimate purpose, such that if tasted, would fill the most ravenous appetite and never leave one wanting. The reality, though, is that despite their incessant posturing, they still have need of the same pharmaceuticals used to stave off depression as those without that magical purpose. They suffer fear, anxiety, and self-harm just like everyone else.

I must have heard parts of at least five sermons today where preachers were decrying things like money, sex, and friends as a source of meaning and purpose. Only god could provide them with true purpose. Not one of them mentioned the suicide rate among believers. So often, those who buy into that message the most are often the ones who later deconstruct as they realize that there was no more actual purpose in their relationship with Jesus as they found at the bottom of a bottle. The Holy Spirit wasn’t any more successful at imparting purpose than the spirits of grape and barrel.

I consider myself exceedingly lucky. Or maybe I just have a mental illness. Either way, I don’t really need a larger sense of purpose than what I give myself at any given moment. I always have some reason to get out of bed at 4:00 a.m. And it is not just my barking dogs. I am a self-starter, highly motivated individual to accomplish things that almost certainly won’t matter in the long run.

To my knowledge, I don’t have a Wikipedia page, and hope I never will. I don’t need that. When I die, I will be almost immediately forgotten because those who know me will also be nearing the dying age. I will have had a good run of it. Some will be helped as a result of knowing me. Some, not so much. I would like to have a positive impact as an insignificant link in the mighty chain of progress. But if I don’t, I guess I can live with that too.

What I am trying to say is that I do not, and never have suffered from the unbearable burden of a meaningless life. I’m sure I have had some rough spells between periods of high motivation. But it has never been any kind of overwhelming burden for me. So if that is a result of mental illness, maybe that is a lucky condition after all.

That said, I get it. I know that some people need more than the purpose they can give to themselves. They end up looking for it in all the wrong places. They go from purpose to purpose, each time, certain that they have found it, only to be crushed with yet another disappointment. For them, the search is not just for purpose, but for something else:

Transcenence

Here is yet another word that is little more than philosophical meandering to me. It should not come as a shock to you that I also do not believe in transcendence. It is another one of those ill-defined words that is a pointer to something bigger, something other.

In fact, the bigger and other is probably a good way to define transcendence. It is that to which one hopes to transcend. But why would anyone want to transcend to something else? Why would anyone want there to be something else?

In many, there is this sense of smallness. And that smallness is a comforting feeling. This, I kind of understand. I’m an idiot. Every creature that is remotely like me is also an idiot. It sure would be nice if there was something in this universe higher than an idiot. We would like to think that there is something out there that is pulling the strings and calling the shots, who knows what they’re doing, because we most certainly do not.

Do you remember the moment when you realized that your parents don’t have any more idea of what’s going on than you? I do. And it rocked my world. From the time I was rudely ejected from the womb, I believed that my parents were the ones with all the answers. More fool, I.

The sinking feeling was even more disorienting when I discovered that I actually had more knowledge about some things than my all-knowing dad. He was not only wrong about things, but terribly, tragically wrong. Has your mom or dad ever asked you for advice, or called you to unload about some nonsense because they just needed someone to talk to? It’s downright weird and kind of scary.

For the believer, god is the ultimate parent who will never need your advice about anything because he knows what he’s doing. He is the one that you can always go to for advice when it becomes painfully obvious that no one on this planet knows what they are talking about. God is transcendent.

Where in this world, in this life, will you find true justice? When justice is denied and justice is what you need, who you gonna call? You call the transcendent: he who transcends injustice and is the very embodiment of justice. When you have been robbed of your retirement, your house has burned to the ground, and your health is failing, who you gonna call? You call on he who transcends all such calamities.

For some people, it is all about aliens from outer space. They are highly advanced. They have figured out space travel, universal peace, and an end to scarcity, and gift-giving. They have it all together. And they want nothing more than to come to Earth and share all that wisdom with you. They are the transcendent.

For others, it is the elven folk, the magicals, the spirits, and the angelics. We beseech them with lyrical chant and whispered incantation. We make the signs, offer the sacrifices, and open ourselves to their possession. We clearly need help and so call upon the transcendent.

I am not sure we can ever be free from this evolutionary baggage. After all, there is an evolutionary advantage to believing our parents are transcendent, at least long enough for them to keep us alive and set us up for success on our own. But needing the transcendent doesn’t make it real.

The search for ultimate purpose is also the search for transcendence since only the ultimate transcendence can assign your ultimate purpose.

Knowing purpose

Some have said that our ultimate purpose is to discover our ultimate purpose. Another way to look at it is that the purpose is less about the knowing and more about the searching. Ironically, those who make that claim are claiming to know that it is more about the search than the knowing. So we have to ask, how do they know that? Granting that they have one, how does anyone know their purpose?

For the Christian, it can only be that the Bible tells them so. You see, it says so in this old book, don’t you know. This is just another way that the sacred text is crucial to the faith. Almost everything the believer has to say about purpose is couched in terms of something written in their sacred text. But for those who might want to frame their opinion in something outside the book, let’s try to imagine how else the believer might know their purpose:

Inner witness: I suspect the top candidate is the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. That is just god by another name. It is also just another appeal to magic by another name. Wholly apart from the Scriptures, god lives inside of them and tells them things via some undefinable and unknowable method of communication. When asked how they know certain things that they cannot possibly know, this is one of their favorite go-tos.

A church leader told them: A variation on the theme is that while god didn’t tell them their purpose, He told someone else to tell them their purpose. There are various gifts of the Spirit distributed throughout the church body. Some of these magically endowed people can tell you what god intends your purpose to be. Disregard these powerful seers at your peril.

Guided by providence: Outside of being directly told what your purpose is, you discover it via the circumstances and events of your life. You have likely heard the saying, “When god closes a door, He opens a window.” There are variations on the theme. The idea is that god has a plan for you that He only reveals by closing the doors to the wrong path and opening doors to the right path. However your life is going, it is a clue to where god is leading. You become a reader of your own tea leaves.

None of these methods of knowing are worth discussing as they are trivially dismissible as bad epistemology. On some level,I believe Christians know this. That is why some find appeals to seeking more satisfying than appeals to knowing. For them, you don’t really have to know your purpose. As long as you are earnestly seeking and following the guidance you are divinely given along the way, you will always be on the right track and fulfilling your ultimate purpose.

Function

We cannot talk about purpose without saying a few words about function. One of the ways a believer might determine human purpose is to try and discern the essence of human function. They might appeal to the fact that as far back as we can look, humans have been worshippers of something. It is in our very nature to worship and seek the transcendent. It is sometimes argued that we wouldn’t seek it or crave it if it weren’t real. So the fact that we seek it is reason enough to believe that it is there to be found.

In this view, seeking is a part of the function of humans. We are made in the image of god. Therefore, part of us is always seeking to connect with that which most defines who and what we are. We are compelled to seek the god in whose image we are made.

Another function the believer might identify is compassion. I have spoken with more than a few believers who point to the fact that human compassion and empathy for the downtrodden is unexplained by evolution. They argue that helping others at your own expense is not a natural behavior and can only be explained by the one who placed that function within us.

You do not need my rebuttal for these things because yours is more than sufficient. I would just point out that if human function tells us anything about our ultimate purpose, then our purpose is to suffer and die in unique, interesting, hilarious, and tragic ways. We are the undisputed masters of suffering and dying badly. Not all of us will suffer horrendously. But we are all going to die, most of us, before reaching 90.

Another function humans have mastered is the ability to kill everything in sight. We will level the oldest rainforest if it will get us a more efficient baseball bat. We will force young children into hard labor if it will make our factory money. To get another acre of land, we will kill every Native American who stands in our way and do so in the name of god. We will kill, murder, and genocide everyone and everything that looks at us funny and wrap ourselves in a flag while we do it. We will kill the planet for political cronyism. Clearly, our function is to kill.

If we wanted to get theological, we could say that our purpose is to sin. If Christians are to be believed, there is nothing we do better or more often. We have special words for various kinds of sin. There are special penalties for certain kinds of sin. And it seems we invent new ways to sin by the day. We are so prone to sin that the book tells us there is none righteous, no, not one. Given the choice of heaven or hell, even among those who believe in such things, sin and hell is the overwhelming choice.

I could go on in this way for a long time. But I think you get the point.

Conclusion: Your life, your purpose

The Christian book teaches that we are not our own. If that is true, then we are nothing more than slaves. Paul would agree as he has no problem with a phrase like, slaves for Christ. In the same way that I have no interest in a king, I also have no interest in being anyone’s slave. You can keep it.

The only purpose of a slave is to do the bidding of their owner. So it is with Christian purpose. We are here to reflect the greatness of the owner to the glory of the owner. He is the one who asks the mirror on the wall who the greatest is of all. We are that which reflects is glory back to himself. A more ignoble purpose I cannot imagine.

If your purpose is assigned to you by another, you will be in trouble if it turns out to be something you don’t like. The objection to this is that god is all-wise and knows what is most fulfilling for you since He created you for that purpose. Those believers arguing in that way are clearly forgetting about Satan and the one-third of all angels that left with him. They were clearly unhappy with their assigned purpose, and god didn’t seem to see that coming. He thinks I should be happy being His slave. Maybe He is not so good at assigning purpose after all.

If you are not the one assigning your own purpose, then your life is not your own in any way that matters. You might actually be happy in your enslavement. But to be clear, enslaved is what you are. To be self-possessed (owning yourself), you also have to be the assigner of your purpose. The one who assigns the purpose owns that which has the purpose.

You need not be burdened with trying to come up with a single purpose for all time. You are not the same person throughout your life. You have different stages of development. The purpose you have before your brain is fully developed is not necessarily the same as the one you have as a fully mature adult.

If you assign yourself a bad purpose, you are not stuck with it. Take your learnings to heart and assign yourself a better purpose. You also do not have to be limited to one at a time. You might have multiple purposes. More power to you. There are no rules when it comes to assigning purpose.

As for me, I see no need for it at all. I have a handful of goals that change from time to time. I have one or two bucket-list items that I never take too seriously. And I have an idea of the person that I want to be and the life that I want to live. Otherwise, my value as a human is not tied up in a sense of purpose.

I do not do this show or run this site for any reasons related to purpose. It suits me to do it. When it stops suiting me, I will stop doing it. However, if you are one that needs a sense of purpose, there are far more satisfying ways of coming up with that purpose than handing yourself over as a slave to someone else’s purpose. It is your life, your purpose.

See you in the comments…

David Johnson

4S: Why am I so wrong about the Bible?